One little, two little, three little Vorlons...

I'm at the point that I'm counting the tomato sprouts in my light rack twice a day.

It's a good thing I've grown all but one of these eleven varieties before... otherwise I'd be worried about the fact that Kellogg's Breakfast hasn't shown any activity at all, while every single one of my Black Krim seeds is up, and I have one Sudduth Brandywine sprout out of six seeds. After a few years of this, I know that 1) Black Krim is very eager, 2) Kellogg's Breakfast comes up late with weak seedlings susceptible to leaf crud, and 3) Sudduth is irregular but ultimately fairly dependable at germination. It'll all work out.

The commercial seedling mix packs down a little too much for my taste, but I do seem to be keeping it moist enough: no sticktight seed coats yet this time. Trying to ease the coat off the leaves without beheading the whole thing is always tough.

Four out of five Vorlons so far. It gets to compete with Woman's Name Starting With A for which one gives me the first slicing tomato. The race is on...

Down with HFCS

Even though the whole corn-based ethanol craze has people coming up with pie-in-the-sky predictions and groundless optimism, before it all comes crashing down (and it will), it has at least done a couple of good things:

It's brought the selling price of corn up from its stagnant level of four decades, where it didn't even budge for inflation -- that's good for farmers, and

The spike in price -- it's doubled in the last five years -- has made corn syrup immensely less attractive to food manufacturers. Add that to the organic movement, where cane is not only easier to grow organically but not potentially tainted with GMOs, and we're starting to shake loose the ubiquitous presence of high fructose corn syrup.

On a personal note, I've found that corn syrup has increasingly had a "thickening" effect in my throat, to the point that I end up feeling thirstier after I've drunk a soda with HFCS, and I cough more. As a result, I've started avoiding soda (not easy when you can't drink the water most places). I brew my own, but only when I have time and energy. So I've begun looking for cane-sugar soda... and found that, in addition to good old Hansen's, Whole Foods' own brand uses cane sugar, and (what do you know) so does Jones, which I had never looked twice at before. Safeway hasn't started making standard soda with cane sugar yet, but their organic line of sparkling lemonade/fruit juices is cane-sugar sweetened, and their cranberry juice cocktail is too. I hope that other companies will start joining in as the price of corn continues to rise -- most of my friends prefer cane sugar in their soda anyway, if they don't do diet, so it may sell fairly well.

If nothing else, other processed foods may start quietly getting more beet and cane sugar. One downside is the rising cost of wheat as more farmers grow corn, but that will stabilize soon enough.