The Milwaukee Post

16 • Milwaukee County Post • January 27, 2017 709 W. Oklahoma Ave. 481-8170 Accepting Blue Cross, Anthem, TRICARE, Express Scripts and more... Health Tip of the Week Registered Pharmacist Bob Stresing and the Serv-U Team 253952048 February is Heart Month Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S. The American Heart Association says taking the following steps toward improving your health can help prevent cardiovascular disease. They call the steps "Life's Simple 7." They are: get active, eat better, lose weight if you need to, stop smoking, control your cholesterol numbers, manage your blood pressure and reduce your blood sugar levels. These changes are inexpensive and are possible for everyone. Start with one or two steps at first, then work toward accomplishing the others. Please Call if you M O V E D ! at 414-744-6370 Leave a Message Name • Phone # Old Address & New Address & Apt. # or Lot # We Love Our Readers Thank You Milwaukee Co. Post HOME Gardeners can plant the seeds from hybrid plants, such as these Bush Early Girl tomatoes, but the result may resemble the parents more than the hybridized variety. Genetic labels might sound confusing but they're easily explained Builder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes went down two points to a level of 67 from a downwardly revised December reading of 69 on the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index. "Builders begin the year optimistic that a new Congress and administration will help create a better business climate for small busi- nesses, particularly as it relates to streamlin- ing and reforming the regulatory process," said NAHB Chairman Granger MacDonald. There is a lot of confusion about what is going on in the vegetable plant industry today when it comes to genetics. A lot of us are getting the wrong information and the rest are simply confused. So let's try to clarify this before the 2017 gardening season arrives. The term "heirloom vegetable" is used to describe any type of vegetable seed that has been saved and grown for a period of years and is passed down by the gardener that preserved it. It has a provenance, of sorts. To be capable of being saved, all heir- loom seed must be open-pollinated. Open- pollinated plants are simply varieties that are capable of producing seeds that will produce seedlings just like the parent plant. Not all plants do this. Hybrids and GMOs (genetically modi- fied organisms) are the same. Hybrids are GMOs, either done by human hands, or nature. Plants are cross-bred with com- patible types of plants in an effort to cre- ate a plant with the best features of both parents. While plants can cross-pollinate in nature, by bees and other pollinators, and hybrids repeatedly selected and grown may eventually stabilize, many hybrid seeds are relatively new crosses and seed from these hybrids will not produce plants with identical qualities. There is little intervention by human hands here except for maybe the use of a cotton swab. This is used to pollinate the two varieties one wishes to cross and then the plant isolated by itself so no other pollen from a different variety can invade. There is no use of a Petri dish, a micro- scope or a needle to inject genes from one plant to another. So a hybrid plant can also be GMO-free as labeled in the store. For example, each year new hybrids of tomatoes and peppers are offered. You may see them labeled as hybrids. These may eventually stabilize, but for the moment a tomato like the popular Bush Early Girl does not produce seeds that reliably have the features you expect in a Bush Early Girl tomato. Seed from hybridized plants tends to revert to the qualities of the parents, so tomatoes grown from seeds saved from your Bush Early Girl tomatoes might still be tasty, but not so small and bushy or even early. Hybrids and GMOs should not be con- fused with genetically engineered organ- isms, or GEOs, which can be any plant, animal or microorganism which can be genetically altered using molecular genet- ics techniques such as gene cloning and protein engineering. Plants like corn that have the pesticide Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) engineered into its genetic makeup to make it resistant to certain pests are GEO crops. Bt is a natural pesticide, but it would never naturally find its way into corn seed. Other examples would be corn and soybeans, which are resistant to chemical sprays, through genetic engineering, like Roundup. That would never be found nat- urally in any seed. GEO plants are those that would never occur naturally in nature. It takes a human to go down to the molecular level and splice a gene in the DNA of a plant and replace it with one that would never itself ever end up there. These are the foods we need to be concerned about. This is my attempt to get the right ter- minology out to gardeners and consumers who have been taught that GMOs are bad. Tell that to the bees, they've been doing it forever. So hopefully this clears things up a little. (Michael Timm is a horticulturalist with Ebert's Greenhouse Village, Ixonia.) MICHAEL TIMM A lesson on heirlooms, hybrids, GMOs, GEOs Builder confidence takes a dip

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