I will not use human urine on plants.
Corn needs a lot of nitrogen to grow in my region’s clay soil.
I tried before, and it just is not worth it.
Tomatoes however do better.
i don’t either but i put it on my compost pile to heat things up! 
I don’t want to hijack, but this line of logic bothers me immensely. GMOs don’t put anything “magical” into these plants, they borrow genes from other organisms. It isn’t like the DNA is unique or has special powers, and the same holds for the proteins it makes, or carbohydrates. It isn’t like folks were deathly allergic to the source organisms (soil bacteria, “weed species,” etc…) before, or now.
There’s plenty of valid reasons for concern about GMO organisms, including them further enabling monoculture, posing a risk of gene transfer and/or encouraging “superweeds” by natural selection, etc., but the idea GMOs made corn an allergen is just not all that scientifically founded; in terms of concept it is sketchy and in terms of actual data it is up there with autism-by-vaccination…a few anecdotes doth not a science make, to quote Shakespeare.
Now I DO believe allergies are on the rise, but there are a lot of other potential causes with significantly more evidence to back them up, including the simple fact we live in grossly over-sterilized environments for our ever-inquisitive immune systems, the environmental burden of a host of pollutants and toxins, etc…but the GMO thing (and even the others to varying degrees) draws a lot of allergy hysteria from folks failing to separate cause and correlation.
Put it this way: a friend of mine likes to refer to the “cat-rub cure”: If you get a cold, and once you know you have a cold, you can take a live cat and rub it on your head. Your cold will resolve in 3-5 days or so, every single time.
Of course, it isn’t because of the cat, its because your immune system eventually recognized, overwhelmed, and eradicated the cold.
You could build a correlation between rubbing a cat on your head and getting rid of your cold. But you would be extremely hard-pressed to find any causal relationship.
On the same note, I grew up in the 80s/90s…when Nancy was imploring us all to Just Say No and marijuana was the devil-weed. Marijuana was, in fact, so evil that if you smoked marijuana you were 4x more likely to try other, harder drugs, and this was held up as clear, irrefutable proof Marijuana was a gateway that caused you to throw your life into a tailspin, likely to seduce you into smoking crack and shooting heroin.
What those severely paraphrased facts never bothered to address was that marijuana was the most readily available and cheapest “drug of abuse” and therefore one of the easiest for someone to get their hands on for a bit of experimentation…and that anyone who smoked marijuana likely already had a certain affinity for rebellion, experimentation, and risk-seeking behavior. So marijuana use did in fact have a correlative link with abusing other drugs later in life, but this correlation was twisted into causal proof: Smoke dope, and get ready to become a full-on drug addict.
its bad science, and in this current world where actual science has gotten toxic to half the country (both sides, from folks sharing youtube clips of Jim Inhofe holding a snowball with a “sick burn, bro” moron’s grin to anti-vaxxers who point to a very questionable 1:10,000 autism risk from measles vaccination and ignore the far greater than 1:10,000 actual FATALITY rate from an actual infection), bad science is a pet peeve of mine
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@alan, I agree about all the plastics used in the vegetable starts. I do keep all of them (at least the ones in decent shape) and have started to use them to plant out my own seedlings. It worked great this year, starting cukes, zucchinis, and sugar snap peas. Of course, after they grew big enough and I put them out in the garden, the dogs dug up all the cukes and zucchinis. A very big bummer.
But there is always next year!
Another alternative source to buy plant starts from is local universities. Just last week I picked up four sun sugar tomato plants for seventy five cents at my old college.
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Now that’s a deal! At a local nursery I go to I paid six dollars for one tomato plant. Living on an island isn’t inexpensive! 5.99 per plant. Four inch pot.
I was at my local Agway today and found that they have Bonnie plants in 6 packs for $3.99 and they’re running a B2G1 sale. The employee says that he thinks this is something new from them. Home Depot and Lowe’s are still selling the one packs.
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Im sure monsanto just passed this law to legally exonerate them because there is no chance what there doing is going to cause harm since it is all bad science?
Its not as if this company has sued any farmers made them declare bankruptcy and then had other corporate farms which they possibly own by there land. They care about farmers
sarcasm duly noted…but unless you just enjoy straw-men, let’s back it up:
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I loathe Monsanto. Full stop. If you NEED more, I loathe them for their overly-aggressive litigation. I loathe monopolies. I loathe big fish who strangle small fish. And I loathe any strategy that becomes sort of akin to “global chemotherapy” in it’s scorched-earth-by-chemistry approach to controlling the environment, which roundup plus GMO roundup-resistant crops essentially is. Cancer evolves and evades, you mostly just lay waste to the host. Ditto weeds…
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My comments were about the notion GMO is responsible for allergies. I don’t believe it is, the genes “were out there.”
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My issue was, and is, with the notion correlation somehow equals causation. THAT is bad science, simply because it is bad logic.
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Is Monsanto covering their backsides? Absolutely. See point #1. Do I agree with it? No. Science generally encourages review and data-gathering. My issue (again, see point 3) is that garbage data is garbage data. Erroneous conclusions, or conclusions which don’t actually reflect the data that was used in drawing them, are erroneous conclusions.
Don’t eat GMO…as I said, I can think of lots of entirely valid reasons.
Blaming them for corn allergies isn’t one of them.
Allergies were on the rise well before we figured how to commercially profit from gene-jockeying, and yes, honestly I’m not a fan of it as science, although I also understand the need for it (do you know they make GMO rice that expresses either Vitamin A or E, forgot which and on my way out to build a bog filter, and it stands to prevent thousands, or more cases of blindness every year?)….but again, my point is corn allergies isn’t one of those reasons.
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What if you’re allergic to cats?
I’m trying to get people to move conversation about other things than Bonnie veg starts to the lounge, where the current direction of comments belongs.
Thank you.
I was on the hunt for a ‘Lemon Boy’’ tomato. You’d think they would be everywhere, kind of like marigolds! Not even, Bonnie had them. So I found another company ‘Savor’ that sold the single plants in peat pots covered in plastic. GMO was not mentioned that I recall. I just like the tomato for its color.
Oh Alan!!! I just about stood up and cheered when I read this!!! (I missed it 21 days ago) Pretty much ALL the stores here, even Ace Hardware, has gone to selling all their plants as individual starters. I never have bought one like that and I never will. I know for a fact (because looked at them just yesterday) that our Ace Hardware store here sells them for $3.48 each. And we aren’t talking about those really large tomato and pepper plants than most stores have always offered as singles. No, just as with the ones you are talking about, the individuals they sell now are no bigger than the plants they have always sold as 6-packs all my life. So now, the same 6 plants I used to pay about $3.99 for would cost me $ 21 !!! I used to buy multiple, whole “Trays” of 6 packs, which would now cost literally HUNDREDS of dollars.
Like the rest of you, I’m going to have to do ALL my own starters now. It has always been the cheapest route and I’ve always done some this way, but it was also so convenient to just pick up a 6 pack if it was getting late in spring, or it was something that I didn’t always grow but wanted to add on a whim. All that is over now. $21 for 6 tomato plants!!! What on earth is the world coming to–really!
@wdingus Your photo also hit home with me and I literally laughed out loud when I saw and read it. The reason it was so entertaining to me is that JUST YESTERDAY when I was looking at the overpriced singles at Ace, I too saw a 4-pack of corn and just couldn’t believe my eyes!!! haha
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luckily our local nursery in town grows seedlings of all types, in trays for real cheap. i can get 6 cucs for $1.50. i still usually grow out my own starts in my grow room but in a pinch i know where to go.