#@%*! Deer Damage

Today is a nice sunny, winter day. It's been nice to not have to deal with snow removal (at work or home) for the past week or so. There's still plenty of snow out in the gardens which has added another 12-15" of "reach" for our resident herd of starving deer. I took a tour of the gardens with Jerry today and the damage is significant, particularly to our Eastern arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis). Interesting that the Western arborvitae (Thuja plicata) is advertised as deer proof or deer resistant. That apparently doesn't hold true when starvation is a reality for these deer. They've decimated (and redecimated) many plant specimens despite our barriers and repellants. Not much we can do at this point though. Nice to see Jim H. and Janice today as well.

I took the picture above this morning. Dr. Gredler and Bill have been organizing these seeds and preparing labels for our growers. They also are bagging up extra vegetable seeds that we'll give to kids during Earth Week in April. It's nice to be able to order and buy prepackaged seed of just about anything. However, the art of seed collecting (particularly vegetables) seems to be a lost art. The reason heirloom varieties still exist is due to the diligence of amateur seed collectors that liked what they grew and wanted to perpetuate the variety. The Seed Savers Exchange (www.seedsavers.org/) has been instrumental in not only preserving our heritage but promoting the continued utilization and perpetuation of these varieties. Pop quiz. What has 2 billion seeds representing 4.5 million samples and has the nickname of "The Doomsday Vault"? The answer is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. I've been reading about this facility (completed in 2007) that is preserving seeds with the intent of protecting seed biodiversity because of the potential effects on the world food supply because of global disasters (weather, wars, etc.). Read more about this interesting facility below or see http://www.croptrust.org/main/arctic.php?itemid=211. See the bottom photo for a neat view of an annual bed that Olbrich (Madison, WI) did a couple years ago. Nice use of dark basil in a swirling composition.

The world's seed collections are vulnerable to a wide range of threats - civil strife, war, natural catastrophes, and more routinely but no less damagingly, poor management, lack of adequate funding, and equipment failures. Unique varieties of our most important crops are lost whenever any such disaster strikes, and therefore securing duplicates of all collections in a global facility provides an insurance policy for the world’s food supply.The seed vault is an answer to a call from the international community to provide the best possible assurance of safety for the world’s crop diversity, and in fact the idea for such a facility dates back to the 1980s. However, it was only with the coming into force of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, and an agreed international legal framework for conserving and accessing crop diversity, that the seed vault became a practical possibility. The vault is being dug into a mountainside near the village of Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Construction is due to be completed in September 2007. Svalbard is a group of islands nearly a thousand kilometres north of mainland Norway. Remote by any standards, Svalbard’s airport is in fact the northernmost point in the world to be serviced by scheduled flights – usually one a day. For nearly four months a year the islands are enveloped in total darkness. It is here that the Norwegian government has built the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, to provide this ultimate safety net for the world’s seeds. Permafrost and thick rock will ensure that even without electricity, the samples will remain frozen. The vault’s construction has been funded by the Norwegian government as a service to the world community. The Global Crop Diversity Trust considers the vault an essential component of a rational and secure global system for conserving the diversity of all our crops. The Trust is therefore committed to supporting ongoing operational costs, and is assisting developing countries with preparing, packaging and transporting their representative seeds to the Arctic.