by Wally Richards

START THE NEW YEAR OFF RIGHT IN YOUR GARDEN

Firstly I wish you a happy, healthy New Year and that you enjoy Nature through your garden.

The following is an article I wrote 24 years ago in December 2001 when I was wearing a younger man’s shoes…

A chap phoned me for some information to assist him in his change to commercial organic cropping.

During our conversation he brought up a very interesting point about how scientists with their modern laser microscopes have determined that there are friendly bacteria and fungi inside plant foliage, stems, trunks and roots.

He explained that these  friends of the plant are vital to the health and well being of the plant. They work continually, gathering and converting nutrients, then conveying them to the cells of the plant.

I was taken with this and so I contacted a botany scientist to understand this aspect further. After listening to the technical talk I have sorted out a simile which I will convey to you.

If you draw a capital Y on a sheet of paper and then at the base of the Y place an inverted Y so the top looks like the bottom but upside down.

Then where your two Y  join, draw a horizontal straight line. Now this symbol becomes a plant with the top Y being the part of the plant we see above ground and the lower Y being the roots.

Now imagine that there are little people inside each part of the Y and the ones above ground are called Ectos and the ones below ground are called Endos.

The Endos create lines out from the base Y which you can add to your drawing.

These lines become an extension to the plants root system enabling the plant to receive more moisture and food from the soil as well as protecting the plant from soil borne diseases.

This can increase the plant’s effective root system by 800%!

The gathered food and water is sent up to the Ectos to assist in the conversion of this material which then they not only supply to the plant but also to their counterparts the Endos.

The Ectos also ‘power up’ from energy received from sunlight.

When this system is working in harmony or balance, the plant grows healthy and is able to defend itself against attacks of disease and pests.

If we disrupt the harmony by introducing a foreign substance such as a chemical fertiliser and chemical sprays or watering with chlorinated tap water,

many of the Endos are killed off and the reduced numbers cant supply the Ectos with enough material so they too die.

But not all is lost as both the Endos and the Ectos reproduce rapidly and after a time they will restore a balance, even if it’s a weakened one.

While this is happening the plant’s defenses have been weaken and an enemy (pathogen/disease) can invade the plant.

You notice that the plant looks poorly so you spray with a chemical fungicide. Disaster!

Chemical fungicides kills both the good (Ectos/Endos) as well as the pathogen. This further weakens the plant to attacks from pests and other diseases. Once again the Endos/Ectos try their best to re-build from a severely weakened state.

We often make the mistake at this stage by supplying further chemical foods and sprays along with chlorinated water it doesn’t need, to the plant, to assist, as we think, in helping it.

Can you see this from your own experience?

The actual names are Mycorrhizal Endo and Mycorrhizal Ecto (if I have got that right)

If you want really healthy plants then you should stop using chlorinated town tap-water; instead put a housing/filter on your outside tap and water with chlorine free filtered water.

Then with your filtered water; water in Wallys Mycorrcin and Wallys Super Liquid Fish Fertiliser into the soil every 1-3 months and ideally spray the foliage with a combination of Mycorrcin and Magic Botanic Liquid about every 14 days.

This will assist in restoring populations of Endos and Ectos and keeping them at peak numbers.

You will have happy populations of Endos & Ectos and your garden plants will look so healthy.

Your vegetables you grow in this way will be super foods and your health will greatly improve and your aging effects will slow down.

This is what nature intended in our relationship with our food chain. (Oh how we have lost sight of this vital health information.)

If a disease affects the plant then you can spray with Perkfection which introduces organic phosphates into the plant adding to the plant’s immune systems without affecting the Edos/Ectos.

If pests attack the plants use Wallys Neem Oil and Wallys Pyrethrum as this also is safe to our friends.

Looking after our Endos & Ectos you will also have far less problems with plant diseases and pest attacks.

Feed the plants only with organic or natural type foods such as compost, sheep manure pellets, Blood and bone and Wallys Super Fish Fertiliser.

For added minerals supply Wallys Ocean Solids and Wallys Unlocking your Soil to your food crops and safe money on mineral supplements.

All of these are the natural foods of plants and they will build big strong populations of Endos and Ectos.

Your added benefits will be, besides a healthy garden, fruit and vegetables with more flavor, vitamins and minerals which will keep you much healthier and younger looking.

Your flowers, roses etc, will have better leaf and flower colour, stronger fragrance, making your garden a real show piece.

”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””
Now for something different…

In conversations there is often talk about how many things have changed to how it was back in the 1950’s and 1960’s when we referred to NZ as God’s Own Country or Godzone.

We may ask why and what’s happening and what is in store for the future?

I have recently read what I found is a very interesting recent article that looks to explain it all. If you are interested in reading it yourself then e-mail me at wallyjr@gardenews.co.nz and ask.

Phone 0800 466464
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This was to an exhibitor on the Arts Trail, where we also met Basil the cat:

by Geoff Parker

Waatea News’ end-of-year lament paints 2025 as a dark age for Māori/Crown relations. But strip away the rhetoric and what remains is not evidence of oppression; it is the frustration of activist elites seeing their policy influence reduced.

The claim that Māori rights are “under serious threat” relies almost entirely on two assertions: that Māori-specific institutions and funding streams are inherently protective of Māori wellbeing, and that scaling them back constitutes discrimination. Neither claim withstands scrutiny.

Disestablishing the Māori Health Authority did not remove healthcare from Māori. Māori remain fully entitled to publicly funded health services – exactly as all New Zealanders are. What changed was the rejection of a parallel bureaucracy organised by ethnicity rather than need. Universal provision is not racism; it is the foundation of a liberal democracy.

Likewise, funding reprioritisation is being misrepresented as “cuts to Māori”. The Government has not abolished Māori language, culture, education, or housing. It has questioned whether ring-fenced ethnic programmes – many with weak accountability and mixed outcomes – are the best way to improve results. Pointing to persistent disparities while defending decades of targeted spending is an argument against the status quo, not for it.

The invocation of the United Nations adds drama, not clarity. UN committees do not govern New Zealand, nor do they determine the constitutional meaning of Te Tiriti. Their reports are advisory, often informed by activist submissions, and routinely criticised for treating race-based policy as a human right rather than a political choice. New Zealand remains one of the world’s most generous funders of Indigenous programmes – by any objective measure.

Most telling is the repeated conflation of Treaty partnership with permanent political veto. Te Tiriti guaranteed equal rights under the Crown, not separate systems of governance indefinitely insulated from democratic review. Re-examining how the so-called Treaty principles (1974/1986-87*) are applied in law is not “erasure”; it is constitutional housekeeping long overdue.

New Zealand is not at a crossroads between justice and betrayal. It is navigating a necessary correction — away from race-based administration and toward equal citizenship, transparency, and outcomes that actually work.

Disagreement is not oppression. Accountability is not hostility. The Crown’s obligation is to govern for all New Zealanders — not to preserve separatist institutions.

The state where Kamala’s running mate Tim ‘Tampon” Walz presides as Governor!

Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Frauds

“Just the tip of the iceberg” is a perfect metaphor for what’s unfolding in Minnesota—a state swamped by over $1 billion in alleged welfare and program fraud, much of it tied to networks in the Somali community.

But Omar isn’t just the tip; she’s quick to cry “racism” whenever the fraud is called out. She’s slammed scrutiny of these schemes as “disgusting” and “vile,” insisting we shouldn’t “blame the lawlessness of an individual on a whole community.”

Border Czar Tom Homan confirmed DHS is investigating her background, and GOP Rep. Randy Fine is weighing a House vote to expel her from Congress altogether. The iceberg is cracking—and Minnesota taxpayers are left holding the bill.

Will there be justice? Or will the fraud go on?

—The GrrrTeam

Read the rest at the GrrrGraphics Post!

If the Democrats were in the White House we know what the answer to that last question would be! —Eds

With water lilies (we assumed).

from tricontinental

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is the only real military bloc in the world – one whose mandate and ambitions stretch far beyond the North Atlantic and, in fact, constitute the greatest threat to world peace.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) claims that it is facing the greatest existential crisis in its nearly eighty-year history. As US President Donald Trump and his national security team have – on the surface – turned their back on Europe and said that they will no longer pay for its security, the region’s leaders scramble to raise the funds to increase their support for the war in Ukraine and build up their own military production and capacity.

Yet, there has been no concrete indication that the United States, which is the dominant force in NATO, will either withdraw from that military instrument or seek to disband it. NATO serves a wide range of purposes for the United States and has done so since it was founded in 1949. To pressure European states to pay more for their own defence is one thing; to mistake this for a broader US strategic withdrawal from Europe is another. Despite the rhetoric, what Trump is doing is not outside the ambit of the US elite’s overall approach: namely to maintain global power through instruments such as NATO and a pliant European state system, rather than isolating the United States behind the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. NATO will remain an instrument of Global North power regardless of the surface bumps that are inevitable in the period ahead.

The title of this dossier, NATO: The Most Dangerous Organisation on Earth, is in line with the judgement of political scientist Peter Gowan (1946–2009), who wrote at the time of the NATO bombardment and break-up of Yugoslavia in 1999:

We must bear in mind two unfortunate facts: first, that the NATO states have been and are hell-bent on exacerbating the inequalities of power and wealth in the world, on destroying all challenges to their overwhelming military and economic power and on subordinating almost all other considerations to these goals; and second, the NATO states are finding it extraordinarily easy to manipulate their domestic electorates into believing that these states are indeed leading the world’s population toward a more just and humane future when, in reality, they are doing no such thing.¹

NATO uses the language of human rights and collective security to conceal the underlying motivations for its birth and current existence. It would be worthwhile to set aside this rhetoric and look at the actual record of this military – not human rights – alliance.

This dossier comes in three parts. The first provides a history of NATO and an assessment of its role in the US-led imperialist system. The second focuses on how NATO, since the fall of the Soviet Union, has redefined itself as a global policeman and intervened – as the third part shows – in different ways in the Global South.

Read the rest