The next time you visit your local library to check out a book, perhaps you’ll leave with some basil, butterfly weed, or sweet pea seeds in your pocket. Seed-lending programs, operating out of public libraries, are taking root.

The concept is simple: Seed libraries allow patrons to “check out” seeds and grow them on their own land. In exchange, the gardener or farmer is asked to donate seeds to the library at harvest time. These will be used by fellow library-goers in the next growing season. “Unlike a seed bank, the libraries are living collections that change every time a gardener returns seeds,” Organic Gardening writes. 

The Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library, housed in the Richmond Public Library near Berkeley, California, celebrated its one-year anniversary this month and has nearly 400 users. Carefully cataloged by type—herb, flower, or edible—and degree of growing difficulty, the seeds are a small but powerful force in bringing fresh food to all members the community, says Mother Earth News. The free program “provid[es] access to fresh, healthy food in communities where it may not otherwise be available and teach[es] everyone how much fun growing your own food can be.” 

In addition to the seed-lending libraries spreading up and down California—at Alameda Free Library and San Francisco Public Library’s Potrero branch, for example—they are beginning to sprout elsewhere, such as at the Fairfield Public Library’s Fairfield Woods branch in Connecticut, reports American Libraries.

To start a seed-lending library in your area, visit Richmond Grows for tips and resources.

Source: Organic Gardening(article not available online), Mother Earth News, American Libraries, Richmond Grows 

Image by mathteacher..., licensed under Creative Commons.

A man, naked except for a tiny black Speedo, is shouting at his followers: “You, Miss Teeny-Weeny Bikini! Spread your legs! You, Mr. Masturbation! Until I say ‘Change,’ you do not move a muscle!”

This is Bikram Choudhury, 64-year-old founder of Bikram Yoga, an intense, heated version of the ancient practice. Choudhury is in high demand in the United States, leading rigorous, 105-degree classes packed wall-to-wall with sweaty women and men hoping to become certified Bikram instructors, reports Clancy Martin in Details.

Choudhury claims to have crafted a perfect workout, healed professional athletes and celebrities, and enlivened the sex lives of countless disciples (“For good sex you want eagle pose! With this one you are fucking until you are 90!”). He has also managed to rake in $5 million a year since legally patenting his sequence of 26 yoga postures and two breathing exercises. But is there any spiritual component in Choudhury’s program? Martin writes:

Yoga is thought to date back 5,000 years, and for Hindus, claiming it as intellectual property is akin in Christian terms to copyrighting the Lord’s Prayer. “Call it exercise. Call it a good workout. Call it what you like,” says Dr. Aseem Shukla, cofounder of the Hindu American Foundation. “But don’t call it yoga. It’s a cynical appropriation of Hinduism.”

Even Choudhury himself doesn’t claim to take Americans on a sacred journey, Martin finds:

I ask whether Bikram Yoga promotes spiritual growth.

“You Westerners are like spiritual babies,” Choudhury says. “You were born in the wrong country, with the wrong skin color, in the wrong culture. You can never be spiritual! It is not your fault. I’m sorry about that. If you can even get the body right, that much is good enough for you!”

So there isn’t any religious aspect to Bikram Yoga?

“Religion is the biggest piece of shit created in all time!”

Source: Details 

Image by yanivnord, licensed under Creative Commons.