posted on Jan, 14 2008 @ 01:02 PM
Hi Pavil, another of my expert subjects ( sorry in advance ) I have been a keen gardener since I was 3 years old and have always been organic. I am
college trained and taught Horticulture and practical food production for almost 20 years, as well as other things. Storage of vegetables is a large
factor in their keeping ability, you say that it is winter, well that helps for longer storage, local produce has had less time to lose moisture so
would preserve the turgidity ( pumped up with water ). The big secret is to pick either early morning ( after watering well the night before ) or
early evening on a day that has not been too warm. There is absolutly no doubt that the flavour of veg is affected by what you feed them, chemical
fertiliser is worse tasting in things with a high water content. Pesticides are a chemical cocktail of poisons, some things like lettuce are sprayed
for the last time the day before picking with pesticide, with full knowledge that the spray would take about 14 days to leave the plants system if it
were still growing. With organic farming you feed the SOIL, and it then goes on to feed the plant in a process known as base exchange. With chemical
feed it goes directly to the plant causing sporadic growth spurts and in some cases susceptibility to disease as the plant has grown too soft, so they
then spray to avoid the very risk which they have caused. The moral to the story is as has already been mentioned on this thread, buy local if
possible, buy from sources you can trust, expect to pay more, when you can grow your own do , swap your excess with neighbours and they will share
with you, hopefully they will be organic as well. Enjoy the taste of fresh organic vegetables and hopefully live longer! I would just go on to agree
with previous comments about organic meat, who wants to eat anything pumped full of antibiotics, we are already immune to all but one or two
antibiotics, I wonder why? Perhaps because everytime we eat meat, we are immunising ourselves against the antibiotics. I fully agree with Doc Moreau,
Hydroponics will eventually be the only practical way forward, when we can`t afford to let a single drop of water evaporate, this is the least
wasteful of water, if we could then trap the water lost by transpiration and feed that back into the system, add solar power to pump the water, we
should be a long way forward.
[edit on 14-1-2008 by Qwenn]