One of the things I noticed while putting this garden together is that we had picked up some organic seeds from OSC (Ontario Seed Company)

Personally I’m not convinced of the necessity for organic seeds. I’m not even sure what that means. I suspect it’s got some requirement that the products grown from it can be certified as organic. Personally, not something I care about for this. We’ll get all the ‘organic’ we need because we’re growing it ourselves and are thus in control of what’s going onto and into the plants and the ground. Keeping the inputs to the garden clean has more IMO to do with getting out better vegetables than starting with an organic seed. So, not to swipe organic seeds, but for a home gardener I think it’s more of a curiosity.

I did read a claim somewhere that genetically modified seeds (and I don’t know that organic precludes GM, I bet it doesn’t) have lower nutritional value because the nutritional value has been bred out. There’s something else I found doubtful. I don’t think that it follows that breeding plants for some genetic trait necessarily lowers the nutritional value or changes other traits. I suspect this is just a bit of GM hysteria. We don’t have to like everything, but let’s not let our dislike blind us from facts or lead us to drawing spurious conclusions :) .

One thing I DO detest about GM seeds, from what little bit I know (and that’s just about nothing) is the fact that for farmers much of their GM seeds are ‘mules’.  Grow corn from a GM seed and you can’t use that corn as seed for next year.  Farmers have to buy new corn seed from the GM seed companies next year.  That’s bad for the environment, bad for crops, and bad for consumers.  It keeps prices high and limits competition.  All bad things.  But I digress :) .