Category: Gardening

Iowa, 2007: glyphosate detected in 10 of 14 samples — about 71%
Iowa, 2008: 15 of 24 — about 63%
Mississippi, 2007: 8 of 11 — about 73%
Mississippi, 2008: 13 of 19 — about 68%
Indiana, 2004: 11 of 12 — about 92%

Well this is inconvenient!

Chopped up banana peels pulled lead straight out of polluted river water in a Brazilian lab test.

Chemists in Brazil dried and minced banana peels, then ran polluted river water through them.

The metals stuck to the peel within about ten minutes, and the same filter worked for eleven reuses.

Banana peels are free food waste doing a job that usually needs costly, sometimes toxic filters.

The banana peel isn’t chemically “destroying” the lead. It is adsorbing it — essentially binding the metal ions to functional groups on the peel’s surface.

The resulting banana peel is now contaminated with concentrated lead. You can’t simply put the used peel on the compost heap or use it as fertiliser. The captured lead has to go somewhere safe.

Sources: Sao Paulo State University

See sustainable farms doing more with less near you on Localize.

(Tom: I do not endorse the advertiser who posted the story – I have no data on them other than one person’s comment that the seeds come from China and another that they are a reported scam and I did not receive an answer to my email to them – but I do endorse the principle espoused!

Here is my attempt to help you succeed at this endeavour:
Cultivating Life: Growing Food Sustainably
https://www.seedtotable.com.au )

My mum kept a Dig for Victory garden through the war. She kept it going for sixty years after. And what she told me when I was seven years old is the reason I’m writing this right now.

I asked her why she still grew so much food when the supermarket was right down the road. She didn’t look up. She kept her hands in the dirt. And then she said something that didn’t make sense to me until I was standing in an empty supermarket aisle fifty years later.

She said, “Because once you’ve seen the shelves go empty, love, you don’t ever quite trust them to be full again.”

I was seven. I didn’t understand. The supermarket was always full. That was like telling me the sky might turn green.

But she knew something I didn’t. Something that took me thirty four years of teaching Australian history to fully understand. And something that is about to matter to you more than almost anything else you’ll read this week.

Here’s what she knew.

The food system in this country has broken three times in a little over a hundred years. And every single time, the families who had food growing before the shelves became a problem were in a very different position from the families trying to start after.

Not after. Before.

The first time was 1917. World War One. Australia relied heavily on imported garden seed, and when war tore the old supply routes apart, seed became harder to get and food became more expensive. Families started looking at the patch of dirt behind the house differently.

The second time was 1942. World War Two. Food shortages were hitting the Australian home front. Farm labour was short. Drought was biting. Imported seed stock and fertiliser were in short supply. Tea, sugar, butter and meat were rationed. Prime Minister John Curtin launched Dig for Victory and urged Australian families to grow their own vegetables. Backyards. Front yards. Community plots. Whatever useful ground they had.

My mum did exactly that. 2020

She grew tomatoes, beans, peas, carrots, pumpkin and greens. And when the season finished, she didn’t pull everything out and start from zero the next year. She saved seed from her best plants, dried it, stored it, and planted it again when the season came around.

Same tomato. Same quality. Same taste. Year after year. Decade after decade. One seed line. A lifetime of gardens.

Both times, growing food at home and maintaining access to seed suddenly mattered a lot more than people had expected.

Then came the third time.

And this is where it starts to affect you directly.

Supermarket shelves went empty. Not in a history book. In your supermarket. The one you drive to every week. Rice and pasta disappearing. Meat shelves stripped. Limits on ordinary groceries. People looking at each other with that look, the one that says something is wrong and nobody knows exactly how long it will last.

And this time there was no Dig for Victory campaign. No national planting guide landing in Australian homes. No seed programme. No system being handed to ordinary families.

Millions of Australians had the same thought at roughly the same time.

I need to grow some of my own food.

Then they went looking for seeds.

And they couldn’t get them.

Nurseries were stripped. Vegetable seedlings disappeared. Australians who had never grown food before suddenly wanted to start, and seed suppliers were overwhelmed. Some stopped taking new orders. Others sold through stock faster than they could replace it.

The seeds were disappearing before most people had even worked out what they wanted to plant.

Now here’s the part that should make your stomach drop.

The same pattern is forming again.

Right now. While you’re reading this.

I started reading what our own Government is saying about the next few years, and I wish I hadn’t recognised the language.

Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy describes our strategic circumstances as dangerous and unpredictable. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being directed into defence capability, national resilience and Australian self reliance. Missiles are being manufactured here. Domestic rocket motor production is being built. New manufacturing capacity is being created because the Government itself says Australia needs to be less vulnerable when conflict or global disruption breaks the supply chains we depend on.

You don’t need to be a defence expert to understand what that means.

The people whose job is to plan for disruption are planning for disruption.

And you are no more prepared today than you were in March of 2020.

Be honest with yourself about that. Because what I’m about to tell you next makes it even worse.

Even if you went out tomorrow and bought seeds, even if you decided right now that you were going to start a garden and take control of more of your own food, the seeds they’re selling you at the shop may not do what you think they’ll do.

This is the part that made me angry. And I taught history for thirty four years, so I don’t get angry easily.

But this made me angry.

And it should make you angry too.

The seeds my mum planted in her wartime garden could reproduce. She’d plant tomatoes, save the seeds from her best fruit, dry them, store them in a jar, and plant them again the next season. Same tomato. Same quality. Same taste. Year after year. Decade after decade.

That was the whole point.

Not going back to the shop every spring and buying the garden again.

Saving what you grew and planting it again.

The seeds on the rack at your hardware store right now are different.

Most of them are hybrids. They grow one season. One harvest. But save those seeds and plant them the following year and the second generation can come back stunted, weak, inconsistent, completely different from the parent plant, or sometimes barely useful at all.

Scientists call it F2 breakdown.

And here’s what you need to understand.

That’s not a defect. That’s the design.

A seed that doesn’t reproduce true is a seed you have to buy again. Every spring. Every year. Another packet. Another charge. Another season where you’re completely dependent on whatever happens to be sitting on the rack when you need it.

They turned your garden into a subscription.

And you didn’t even know it was happening.

Four companies now control more than 60 percent of the world’s seed supply. Every one sells hybrids. Every one profits when growers come back for more seed the following season.

A seed that comes back is a customer that doesn’t.

Meanwhile, there is a Global Seed Vault built inside an Arctic mountain near the North Pole, designed to protect the world’s crop diversity against catastrophic loss.

Think about that for a second.

The world considers seed diversity important enough to protect inside a frozen mountain.

Yet most ordinary families don’t have a single season of saved seed sitting in a jar.

Let me be very clear about where that leaves you right now.

Australia still depends on overseas supply chains for things we use every day, including agricultural inputs and large quantities of vegetable seed. Our own Government is openly spending hundreds of billions strengthening Australian self reliance because it knows global disruption can travel through a supply chain and end up in an ordinary Australian household.

If demand surges the way it did in 2020, you cannot magically create a mature garden that morning.

You either have seed.

Or you’re trying to buy it with everybody else.

My great grandmother never had that problem. My mum never had that problem.

But most of us do.

Not because we’re less capable than they were.

Because they changed what was on the shelf while nobody was paying attention.

My mum understood this sixty years ago. She saved seeds her entire life because she knew one thing most people alive today have forgotten.

A woman with seed in a jar has a future no matter what happens next.

A woman without one is standing in an empty aisle hoping someone restocks the shelf before her family needs what isn’t there.

Which one are you right now?

Here’s the truth I spent thirty four years teaching in classrooms, then watched become real for my own generation in 2020.

By the time you see the crisis on your television, it is too late to start planting for that crisis.

The families with food already growing are the families who started before the shelves went empty.

Not after. Before.

That is not an opinion.

That is the lesson history keeps repeating.

If I’m wrong about what I’m seeing right now, if this pattern breaks and the shelves stay full, you lose nothing. You have a beautiful garden and tomatoes that taste like real food. You learn how to save seed. You start a seed line you can keep building on season after season.

If I’m right, you’ll be the family with seed already in your hands while everybody else is standing in an empty aisle wondering what happened.

I would rather be the woman with the jars.

P.S. My mum kept her wartime garden for sixty years because once she had seen empty shelves, she never completely trusted them to stay full again.

She was right.

2020 proved it.

And the thing she understood that took me fifty years to understand is this:

Buying seeds isn’t the same as owning a repeatable seed supply.

47,000+ families already have theirs.

P.P.S. If you’re still reading this, remember what happened last time.

The shelves emptied. Australians rushed to grow. Seed suppliers were overwhelmed.

There won’t be a fourth warning. Just a morning when it matters whether you started before you needed to.

Don’t be the family in the empty aisle!

MY MUM WAS RIGHT!

Nitrogen makes up 78% of the air you’re breathing right now. Plants can’t touch it. That single inconvenience is why the world spends fortunes on fertiliser.

Synthetic nitrogen fertiliser is one of the reasons eight billion people can eat. It’s also enormously energy-intensive to produce, expensive for farmers, and a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution when it runs off fields.

But there’s a workaround, and it’s been sitting in the soil the whole time.

Certain bacteria — rhizobia — form nodules on the roots of legumes and convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form plants can actually absorb, in exchange for energy from the plant. It’s called biological nitrogen fixation.

The question was whether you could make it work reliably, at industrial scale, in tropical soils.

When Mariangela Hungria started, almost nobody thought you could.

She’s a microbiologist from São Paulo who studied under Dr Johanna Döbereiner, an early champion of using microorganisms in tropical agriculture. In 1991 Hungria moved to Londrina, in Paraná state, to start a soil microbiology laboratory at Embrapa’s National Soybean Center.

There was essentially no existing research on biological nitrogen fixation for soybeans in the tropics. She built the programme from scratch.

The work was painstaking. Selecting elite strains of rhizobia. Testing what happened when you introduced them to plants. Establishing how environmental stress affected performance. Identifying plant genotypes that partnered well with the bacteria. Then convincing farmers to re-inoculate their seed every single year — which she demonstrated could increase yields by up to eight percent compared with relying on synthetic fertiliser alone.

She also became the first to isolate strains of Azospirillum brasilense suitable for use with non-legume crops, which opened the same approach up to maize, wheat, rice and pasture grasses.

Over a forty-year career she and her group developed more than thirty microbial technologies.

The results are on a scale that’s difficult to hold in your head.

Her products have been used across more than 40 million hectares in Brazil. The World Food Prize Foundation estimates they save Brazilian farmers around $25 billion a year in input costs and prevent the release of 230 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions annually.

And over the same four decades, Brazilian soybean production rose from 15 million tonnes in 1979 to an anticipated 173 million tonnes. Brazil became the world’s leading soybean producer and the global leader in the commercial use of biological inoculants.

In May 2025 she was named the World Food Prize Laureate, receiving the $500,000 award. Gebisa Ejeta, who chairs the selection committee, cited extraordinary scientific achievements in biological nitrogen fixation that transformed the sustainability of agriculture in South America.

Her own reaction was less formal: “I can’t quite believe I am now receiving the World Food Prize.”

This year she was named to the TIME100.

She has also supervised more than a hundred masters and doctoral students — which, given where she started, may end up mattering as much as the bacteria did. Döbereiner taught Hungria. Hungria taught a hundred more.

There’s a version of the future where feeding people means more chemistry, more energy, more inputs. Her entire career is an argument for a different one: that a great deal of what we’re paying for is already happening, for free, underneath us — and the job is to understand it well enough to get out of its way.

Forty years on one invisible thing.