From my spring orders, the most unusual: Errinerung an Brod (rambler) Inermis Morletii (rambler) Umbra (gallica hybridized by Paul Barden) Incantation (small shrub rose, also by Barden) Geschwind's Orden (shrub) Norland Rose (climber) Break o'Day (Brownell HT) Andrewsii (spinossisima) Alika (gallica) Prairie Flower (Buck) Sweet Fragrance (Grandiflora by Ping Lim) Omphale (gallica) Daphne' (gallica) Heinrich Karsch (polyantha) And for every one of these (plus the other seven I haven't listed because I see them talked about all the time) I must find a rose already in the garden to remove, pot up and give away. No expansion, that's my self-imposed new rule and that will make planting twice the work, I think! Oh well, a good number of these will be small bands that may not go in the ground yet this year. We'll see how they do in pots for a while. :-) Anne

Can gentically engineered foods help feed the hungry? Are anti-GMO activists and over-zealous environmentalists standing in the way of the hungry being fed? The hope that GMO foods might bring solutions to malnutrition and world hunger was never more dramatically illustrated than when Time magazine ran a cover story titled "Grains of Hope." The article joyfully announced the development of a genetically engineered "golden rice." This new strain of GM rice has genes from viruses and daffodils spliced into its genetic instructions. The result is a form of rice that is a golden-yellow color (much like daffodil flowers), and that produces beta-carotene, which the human body normally converts into Vitamin A. Nearly a million children die every year because they are weakened by Vitamin A deficiencies and an additional 350,000 go blind. Golden rice, said Time, will be a godsend for the half of humanity that depends on rice for its major staple. Merely eating this rice could prevent blindness and death. The development of golden rice was, it seemed, compelling and inspiring evidence that GM crops are the answer to malnutrition and hunger. Time quoted former U.S. President Jimmy Carter: "Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy, starvation is." Shortly after the Time cover story, Monsanto and other biotechnology companies launched a $50 million marketing campaign, including $32 million in TV and print advertising. The ads, complete with soft focus fields and smiling children, said that "biotech foods could help end world hunger." Other ad campaigns have followed. One Monsanto ad tells the public: "Biotechnology is one of tomorrow's tools in our hands today. Slowing its acceptance is a luxury our hungry world cannot afford." Within a few months, the biotech industry had spent far more on these ads than it had on developing golden rice. Their purpose? "Unless I'm missing something," wrote Michael Pollan in The New York Times Magazine, "the aim of this audacious new advertising campaign is to impale people like me -- well-off first-worlders dubious about genetically engineered food -- on the horns of a moral dilemma ... If we don't get over our queasiness about eating genetically modified food, kids in the third world will go blind." The implication of the ads is that lifesaving food is being held hostage by anti-science activists. In the years since Time proclaimed the promises of golden rice, however, we've learned a few things. For one thing, we've learned that golden rice will not grow in the kinds of soil that it must to be of value to the world's hungry. To grow properly, it requires heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides -- expensive inputs unaffordable to the very people that the variety is supposed to help. And we've also learned that golden rice requires large amounts of water -- water that might not be available in precisely those areas where Vitamin A deficiency is a problem, and where farmers cannot afford costly irrigation projects. And one more thing -- it turns out that golden rice doesn't work, even in theory. Malnourished people are not able to absorb Vitamin A in this form. And even if they could, they'd have to eat an awful lot of the stuff. An 11-year-old boy would have to eat 27 bowls of golden rice a day in order to satisfy his minimum requirement for the vitamin. I'm sure that given enough time and enough money, some viable genetically modified (GM) crops could be developed that contain more nutrients or have higher yields. But I'm not sure that even if that were to happen, it would actually benefit the world's poor. Monsanto and the other biotech companies aren't developing these seeds with the intention of giving them away. If people can't afford to buy GM seeds, or if they can't afford the fertilizers, pesticides and water the seeds require, they'll be left out. Poverty is at the root of the problem of hunger. As Peter Rosset, director of Food First, reminds us, "People do not have Vitamin A deficiency because rice contains too little Vitamin A, but because their diet has been reduced to rice and almost nothing else." And what, pray tell, has reduced these people to such poverty and their diets to such meager fare? In the words of the British writer George Monbiot: The world has a surplus of food, but still people go hungry. They go hungry because they cannot afford to buy it. They cannot afford to buy it because the sources of wealth and the means of production have been captured and in some cases monopolized by landowners and corporations. The purpose of the biotech industry is to capture and monopolize the sources of wealth and the means of production ... GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything we eat is owned by them. They can patent the seeds and the processes which give rise to them. They can make sure that crops can't be grown without their patented chemicals. They can prevent seeds from reproducing themselves. By buying up competing seed companies and closing them down, they can capture the food market, the biggest and most diverse market of all. No one in her right mind would welcome this, so the corporations must persuade us to focus on something else ... We are told that ... by refusing to eat GM products, we are threatening the developing world with starvation, an argument that is, shall we say, imaginative ... With rare exceptions, genetically engineered crops are being created not because they're productive or because they address real human needs, but because they're patentable. The biotech companies have invested billions of dollars because they sense in this technology the potential for enormous profit and the means to gain control over the world's food supply. Their goal is not to help subsistence farmers feed themselves. Their goal is maximum profit. While Monsanto would like us to believe they are seeking to alleviate world hunger, there is actually a very dark side to the company's efforts. For countless centuries farmers have fed humanity by saving the seed from one years crop to plant the following year. But Monsanto, the company that claims its motives are to help feed the hungry, has developed what it calls a "Technology Protection System" that renders seeds sterile. Commonly known as "terminator technology" and developed with taxpayer funding by the USDA and Delta & Pine Land Company (an affiliate of Monsanto), the process genetically alters seeds so that their offspring will be sterile for all time. If employed, this technology would ensure that farmers cannot save their own seeds, but would have to come back to Monsanto year after year to purchase new ones. Critics refer to these genetically engineered seeds as suicide seeds. "By peddling suicide seeds, the biotechnology multinationals will lock the world's poorest farmers into a new form of genetic serfdom," says Emma Must of the World Development Movement. "Currently 80 percent of crops in developing countries are grown using farm-saved seed. Being unable to save seeds from sterile crops could mean the difference between surviving and going under." To Monsanto and other GMO companies, the terminator and other seed sterilizing technologies are simply business ventures that are designed to enhance profits. In this case, there is not even the implication of benefit to consumers. I wish I could speak more highly of GM foods and their potential. But the technology is now held tightly in the hands of corporations whose motives are, I'm afraid, very different from what they would have us believe. Despite the PR, Monsanto's goal is not to make hunger history. It's to control the staple crops that feed the world. Will GMOs help end world hunger? I don't think so. John Robbins is the author of many bestsellers including "The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World," the classic "Diet For A New America" and "The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less." He is the recipient of the Rachel Carson Award, the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award, the Peace Abbey's Courage of Conscience Award and Green America's Lifetime Achievement Award. To learn more about his work, visit www.johnrobbins.info This Blogger's Books from The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less by John Robbins Food Revolution, The: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World by John Robbins Many supporters of GMO seeds, are Monsanto supporters. Who is in charge of the USDA-Agricultural Research Service ? I believe it was Tom Vilsack,who is now a member of the cabnit our current Secretary.Who is Tom Vilsack?Google him and find out. Our Supreme Court Justice,Clarence Thomas,,,Used to Work for who> Monsanto.and several top positions in the Food and Drug Administration,and the Department of Agriculture,all filled with former Monsanto Lobbyist, do you really want to believe any thing these people say? I can post more articall s,but I will not, enough has been said,if you are interested at all, in what you, your children,and grandchildren are eating, do your research,,make up your own mind,in the mean time,keep saving your seeds.You might want to google, how many seed saving banks are left here in the U.S., compared to how many there used to be, and why. cAROL

Overall I like the fridge placement, it is in a good location for getting out items and putting them on the island for cooking/prep and for refilling drinks, etc. from the eating area. We do not have a cabinet in between the fridge and dw so it is possible to bang our fridge door into the dw when it is cracked open, looks like you probably have enough space so that this will not be a concern. The biggest annoyance in our kitchen is when the kids come in to eat and want to use the kitchen sink to wash up, we just do not have enough room to be getting stuff ready around the island and pulling stuff out of the fridge when the kids are walking through. We have two other sinks close by so it is really more of an issue of getting the kids to use them without having to be reminded.

Thank you, ladies. We all have different roads to travel. Until I was 17 I'd never travelled over 30 miles from home ... then my Dad, who had bronchitis and incipient asthma and felt that his farming days were numbered in our location ... ... moved 1,600 miles to the Prairies in Saskatchewan, where he share-cropped for a while, then bought his own farm - and had 40 years of good health. And we react to the experiences of our lives in different ways. I was away to Univ. when Dad remarried, and we got a ready-made (pretty, vivacious) sister in that deal, a bit younger than we three boys. We didn't get along too well with stepmother (but sister, who became a school-teacher, didn't like her very well, either). She loved Dad - said that he never treated her any differently than the boys. Spent several years helping some refugees with nothing get their lives operational again, just after the Korean War. Met a somewhat younger woman from Iowa at Cornell Univ., married in Korea, and son, who was born there, later needed eye care, so we settled in Canada and I became a clergyperson. Later Sue, who became head of food service in the Psych. Hosp. where my Mom had been incarcerated 30 years earlier, felt that she needed to live on her own and we scarcely spoke for 35 years - something of a shame: life's too short for that. That caused disruption of my career - clergy didn't do that, almost 40 years ago! When, over 20 years later, they talked of closing her establishment or another a few miles away, she took early retirement, had a happy 10 years of life doing various things, including spending winters between FL and TX (later also AZ when our daughter lived there for a time) in her RV. Contracted colon cancer, died at 66, just under 3 years ago ... kids said that in the ordinary course, Mom would have retired "last year" ... and I added that she'd have been sick for most of that year. I'm very thankful, as I approach 80, to be enjoying good health. Dad said that he wanted to leave his farm better than he found it - he felt that way about his community, also, though I never heard him say so. Though I am thankful, proud and happy to be Canadian, I also consider myself something of a citizen of the world, as well ... and I hope that I can leave it better than I found it. And here I am ... hijacking a "Mother's Day discussion" thread! Sorry, folks. ole joyful