Cornell Cooperative Extension Community Horticulture

News from National Gardening Association:

http://garden.org/articles/articles.php?q=show&id=2750

If you give this one a try don’t forget to rate it along with your other favorite or least favorite at Cornell’s Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners

Your gardening education projects are cutting edge!

This excerpt from an article in WORLDWATCH magazine describes a new paradigm in learning called place-based/community-based education. It advocates the need for more of this type of learning and provides gardening projects as an avenue for achieving this.

Grounding Learning in Place

Gregory Smith – February 14, 2007 – 10:45am

A new paradigm in learning represents an emerging approach to curriculum development called place—or community-based education, which seeks to link classrooms more tightly to their communities and regions. These programs have helped encourage teachers to document local art and history, to work with students to create new businesses, and to strengthen the teaching of science through the development of aquaculture and gardening projects. Place-based education works to cultivate students’ knowledge of the unique characteristics of their home communities and to engage them in meaningful and authentic work. It begins with the belief that young people will be more likely to invest their time and energy in the care and support of the places where they live if they are familiar with local assets and come to see themselves as valued contributors to the common life of their families and neighbors.

Humanity faces major global challenges, and it is becoming increasingly clear that neither nation states nor transnational corporations display much willingness to invest the energy or resources needed to seriously address issues such as climate change, the peaking of oil production, or the dislocations caused by economic globalization. Major cultural and social adaptations will be required in coming decades if the wellbeing of human populations and the integrity of natural systems are to be protected and improved. It is not surprising that those who have the most at stake in the status quo are reluctant to embark upon a transformational agenda that could threaten their privilege and power. This means that meaningful change must take place outside the centers of current political and economic authority—and those places include the neighborhoods and communities where most citizens lead their lives…

The full article is available for sale from http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4910
And staff should be able to get it for free via the Cornell Mann Library Gateway. Seach for World Watch. http://campusgw.library.cornell.edu/

Two pieces of good news reported in World Poultry:

No avian flu in Canadian wild bird survey

14 Feb 2007

Zero out of over 12,000 birds have tested positive for highly pathogenic strains of avian influenza, as shown by the results of Canada’s second annual Wild Bird Survey for Avian Influenza.

Samples were taken from birds across Canada and Iceland – live and dead, migratory and resident.
Various avian flu subtypes were evident in the survey, including H5 subtypes, however, only low pathogenic strains, which is not uncommon in wild birds.

Humans may be immune to bird flu

14 Feb 2007
Ever since an outbreak of bird flu in south east Asia spread to neighbouring regions in 2004, scientists have been concerned that the H5N1 strain of avian influenza could signal a new pandemic among humans.

Research on mice and humans found natural resistance to flu strains that people are typically exposed to could be translated into immunity against bird flu itself.
Researchers from the St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital say that due to the fact seasonal human flu (H1N1) and bird flu contain a closely related neuraminidase (N1) , a disease spreading agent, many people immune to the former could have a similar resistance to the latter.
Researchers tested blood samples from 38 human volunteers and their ability to inactivate neuraminidase from the human N1 virus and two H5N1 viruses. Most of the samples were active against the protein from the human flu virus, with eight of nine inhibiting the protein from both H5N1 strains.
The conclusion was that many people may be naturally immune to the effects of avian influenza.
The US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has dubbed the research a “tantalising suggestion”, but cautions that further work is needed to demonstrate there is actual protection in humans against avian flu.

http://www.human.cornell.edu/che/HD/Outreach_extension/newsletter.cfm
This new e-News is part of a larger project in the Department of Human Development to utilize the internet to disseminate educational tools, relevant research, and other resources. The goal is to provide easy access to research-based information for county educators and many other interested groups, which they can in turn use in a host of educational programs. The project will produce a quarterly electronic newsletter, at least four webcasts, supporting fact sheets, PowerPoint presentations, and other resources which will be available on the HD Outreach and Extension web site. The project is led by Valerie Reyna, Human Development Professor and Department Extension Leader. For more information, visit the project website or contact Karene Booker, (607) 255-7735; ktb1@cornell.edu.

Check out this new web resource/article on Cornell’s Garden-based Learning website.

It aims to help those new gardeners think about where to begin :

http://www.hort.cornell.edu/gbl/gettingstarted/index.html

This web page on Cornell Gardening Resources web site can help you local some of our publications:

http://www.gardening.cornell.edu/pubs.html

Steve VanderMark a CCE educator in St. Lawrence who has work in this area shares some findings:

Our experience was that sugar content of sap was generally decreased the season following major FTC defoliation. Such sap requires more boiling to produce syrup of the proper density. That requires more fuel, fossil or renewable, raising cost of energy input. A longer dwell time for boiling sap in the evaporator often means darker syrup, considered usually of lower grade. Thus returns may be lowered in volume, grade, and dollars. Reverse osmosis (RO) sap processing will concentrate sap before boiling, but it can’t add sugar content to increase syrup volume; it just removes some of the water. RO units are attractive as fuel savers and “dwell-reducers” and may help those producers choosing to tap. They can be fairly expensive though. Steve Childs can no doubt further explain RO’s. So some of our producers said the sap was hardly worth boiling and others decided not to even tap. The latter were usually experiencing heavy defoliation the season before and heeded suggestions referenced from prior outbreaks.

One specific source was Prof. Doug Allen’s article ‘Forest Owners Must Adjust to Tent Caterpillar Defoliation’ in “The New York Forest Owner”, Vol. 42: No.4, July /Aug. ‘04, pg. 16, (member magazine of the NY Forest Owners Assoc.), which recommended avoiding summer silvicultural activity during heavy defoliation and tapping the following Spring. Up to them. Contact www.nyfoa.org for a copy of this article.

A CCE Staff Preparedness/Curriculum Development Resource Guide for Tent Caterpillar (Forest & Eastern) Outbreak Programming is also available. Contact Steve (sfv1@cornell.edu) for a pdf version.

Gateway to Cornell Maple Production Resources: http://maple.dnr.cornell.edu/

News from National Gardening Association:

http://garden.org/articles/articles.php?q=show&id=2745

If you give this one a try don’t forget to rate it along with your other favorite or least favorite at Cornell’s Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners

Although a spending proposal in Congress would ax all earmarked projects for the remainder of this year, the plan unveiled this week would actually preserve for universities almost all of the $185-million set aside in last year’s appropriations for agricultural-research earmarks. That and other details about the proposal, including its effect on National Institutes of Health grants and earmarks in other agencies, emerged on Tuesday.

As for the NIH, the plan’s call for a 2-percent increase, to $28.9-billion, would help the agency expand the number of research-project grants awarded this year by nearly 10 percent, to roughly 10,000. That would reverse a decline in recent years.

Over all, higher-education officials were jubilant about the proposal, House Joint Resolution 20, unveiled by Congress’s Democratic leadership on Monday (The Chronicle, January 30). The measure would increase spending for Pell Grants and scientific research for the rest of the 2007 fiscal year, which ends September 30. The House of Representatives is expected to approve the bill in a vote today and the Senate to do so in February.

But higher-education leaders were also bracing for the effect of the earmark moratorium. To pay for other priorities, appropriations-committee leaders raided some of the money set aside in 2006 for earmarks, the controversial, noncompetitive awards directed by members of Congress to universities and other constituents.

In the case of agricultural research, though, what the plan would take with one hand, it would give with the other.

The Democrats would remove $185-million in earmarks in the Department of Agriculture’s Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service. But, following sustained lobbying by land-grant universities, the appropriations committees agreed to keep that money within that agency in 2007, but to shift it to other, nonearmarked accounts. Over all, the service’s budget would get no increase over 2006.

Most of the redistributed money would go to the service’s Hatch Act program, which distributes funds to land-grant institutions according to a population-based formula. The Hatch program’s budget would nearly double, to $322.6-million. Some of the shifted money, $9-million, would go to increasing to $190-million the budget for the National Research Initiative, the service’s principal program of competitively awarded research grants.

However, some land-grant universities will be winners under this plan, while others will lose, said Ian L. Maw, vice president for food, agriculture and natural resources at the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges. The losers will include institutions that got more money through earmarks in 2006 than from other department programs like the Hatch Act funds, he said.

“I think that it will be a tough row to hoe, but some of them will finds ways in their own budgets and using state money to keep these projects going” in 2007, he said.

Small Farms Update is intended as a resource for farmers and agricultural service providers in New York, and is provided to you by Cornell’s Small Farms Program. Their mission is to foster the sustainability of diverse, thriving small farms that contribute to food security, healthy rural communities, and the environment.

This update summarizes announcements, information resources, opportunities and upcoming events relevant to small farms.

Please visit www.smallfarms.cornell.edu/pages/news/ to navigate and read the Update.