Johann (Gregor) Mendel

About 47 years ago I was heavily into Mendel and his work. Botany was about the only subject at school that interested me (Biology came later!). In part, I don't quite understand the outrage over everything "GM" - Gene Manipulation.

Man has always been trying to improve the quality/quantity of plants, whether for pleasure (eg roses) or food (eg grain) and indeed the same applies to animals.

Yes, there are limits where the benefit is outweighed by the disadvantages.  Bavaria's dream of producing an animal with rabbits head, squirrel body, with deer horns and pheasant wings will hopefully remain as the fabled "Wolperdinger"..

Shortly after Mendel was doing his pea experiments, the Scots started work on developing a cereal with the quality of wheat and the robustness of rye. The result was a plant called "Triticale" which sounds more like something out of the Monsanto catalogue than a "natural" product., the name being taken from parts of the Latin names for the parent cereals.

Triticale has never fully reached the hopes of researchers but has found a bit of a revival in recent years with the boom in "Bio-Gas" units, as an addition to the mainly used maize. Here in Germany, it is also called "GPS" - Ganz Pflanzen Silage (Whole Plant Silage) by farmers who add it in with normal their grass and maize silage. Often legumes (peas/beans) are sowed with the grain. In the photo of the plants, one can just make out a very dried out pea plant.

Today Farmer Franz harvested his crop. He let it be done by a local contractor who cut the crop with a Krone Big X 500 forage harvester, accompanied by a Fendt 712 and tipper.which dumped the chopped forage on to the silage clamp (the brown stuff in the foreground is grass from May) and finally a very heavy loader drives up and down to compress (remove air) the crop before it is covered again in plastic and can start the process of fermentation.

Earlier this morning I had been to see the Internist in Memmingen to discuss the results of MRT/MRI from Monday. My luck, some of the critical footage was not in focus so need to do some more tests but the doc has started some very conservative medication while waiting for more results. The blood tests have confirmed that I am low on every vitamin and mineral known to be of any use, so will have to restart the programme of iron and vitamin B jabs as well as try to find a way of getting the others to be reabsorbed by the innards.

I took the first step on the way home by stopping off at the local dairy. I went in saying "Hopefully Lent is over at last" - luckily the answer was positive. They have their "Chester/Cheddar" back on sale after weeks and assure me they will be more careful with the production plan.