jeffgillman003

Beer and 1984

1984. That’s the year that the last professor here at the University of Minnesota published a paper about peanuts. He had tested a number of different varieties, some of which we’re testing now, and found that they do quite well in Minnesota. Then for the next 26 years there was a lull. And now? We have peanuts! Boiled peanuts and man are they good. But…will we end up in 1984 again? How do we make sure that our peanuts don’t disappear into academic oblivion? We’ve got to find a restaurant, a bar, a gas station, something, who wants to try something new – we need demand. Maybe the state fair? We’ll see.

I give a lot of talks throughout the US. It’s something that I enjoy, but, honestly, a year or two after I give a talk in a location I usually forget many of the specifics – they bleed together. Sure, I remember that I gave a talk in Green Bay (for example) – and I remember the people and the botanical garden (both of which were great) – but I don’t really remember the talk itself. Well, this past Tuesday night I gave a talk that I’ll remember forever. There’s a bar in Minneapolis called Bryant Lake Bowl which is connected to a bowling alley and a theatre. Our University Museum, called the Bell Museum, hosts a monthly scientific talk there called Café Scientifique. The audience, about 90, is waited on by the bar staff during the talk and so everyone is quite comfortable. The speaker may also partake if he or she so desires (how could I resist – after all, it was the only compensation I received). So I had a pint of Surly – on an empty stomach – during the talk! I’m a lightweight, so let’s just say I was relaxed. It was about an hour presentation followed by almost an hour of questions. I don’t think it was my best talk ever, but I don’t know that I’ve ever had a better time giving a talk (The title, by the way, was The Truth About Organics). It was an audience largely composed of a demographic I rarely get to talk to out side of my classes – young (20-30 yr old) people who were very curious about where food comes from and who really hadn’t spent much time thinking about it before.

My Thoughts on 2,4 D

My sister, who lives in the Pittsburgh area, just gave me a call. She and her husband have two kids and a lawn and she wanted to know my feelings about using herbicides to keep the grass free of weeds. When we were growing up our parents had a large lawn (and lots of fruit trees) and it took two of us two hours to mow the whole thing. It kind of turned her off to grass. The truth of the matter is that she doesn’t even want the lawn she currently has, but her husband wants it – and he wants it weed free. So she called me giving me the “you’re supposed to know about this stuff” line and asked me what she should do. My response was that the herbicide her husband would be applying (trimec) wasn’t on my list of super bad things to apply, but that, in my opinion too many people want their lawn too free of weeds. I don’t see anything wrong with applying an herbicide once a year – it won’t keep a lawn pristine, but it will knock out most of what most people want knocked out. Why do people insist on having spotless yards – applying herbicides from three to six times per lawn per year? It’s insane. Not so much for the safety of humans, but for the good of the lawn ecosystem. It’s good to have a mix of different plants – it’s healthy. Using an herbicide really cuts down on you biodiversity, and can affect the safety of dogs too. You see, 2,4 D, probably the most used pesticide on lawns in the US (and a component of trimec), isn’t rapidly excreted by dogs. If we are exposed to 2,4 D we just pee it out – our kidneys process it rapidly and out it goes. In a dog’s system this chemical sits and sits. It is for this reason that 2,4 D is considered particularly bad for dogs and is suspected of potentially causing cancer.

One more note about dogs. The reason that lawns get dog spots is because of the amount of nitrogen in the dogs urine – it kills plants – it IS NOT because of the pH of the urine.

Bambara

This past summer I had the chance to talk with an old friend of mine, Hamado Tapsoba, who I hadn’t seen in 15 years. We had gone to graduate school together, but after graduation he headed back to Burkina Faso, and I headed up to Minnesota. Anyway, while we were talking I told him that we were growing peanuts at the University (yes, I tell everybody — peanut news needs to be shared!). When I told him some of the problems that we had with shorter seasons he asked why we weren’t growing Bambara groundnuts. The answer was that I didn’t know what the heck Bambara groundnuts were. Well, it turns out that these nuts are native to Western Africa and grow under the surface of the soil just like peanuts. The reason Hamado recommended them to me was that they can have a growing cycle shorter than peanuts. They can also be cooked like peanuts and have a flavor somewhat similar to chickpeas (or so I’m told). I’ve had an incredible amount of difficulty finding Bambara in the US though I know that at one time they were grown here. We have found a researcher in Burkina Faso who is willing to work with us, but that will probably take some time to get going. Does anyone out there know about Bambara? Especially where to buy plants or seed?) It sounds like an exciting plant to work with.

Odds and Ends and Scrapple

School starts next week and so time is short, but I have a few quick thoughts to share with you before I get back to setting up class for next semester:

1. A class called Plant Production appears to be more attractive to students than a class called Nursery Management and Production — even though the concepts taught are essentially the same.

2. One of the greatest movies of all time, Caddyshack, includes a scene with milorganite. I won’t tell you which scene so that you can discover for yourself!

3. Yes, that is what I did during my vacation — watched Caddyshack.

4. The paint company Sherwin Williams used to sell insecticides in the early 1900s and late 1800s — things like lead arsinate and Paris green — and they used the same logo to advertise these insecticides that they use for their paints today — go ahead, look it up — and then tell me, if you were a PR person for a pesticide firm would you use that logo?

5. The peanuts are so close to being ripe I can almost taste them!

6. There’s nothing quite as good as eating Dunkin Donuts and scrapple for breakfast (I spent the past week in Southeast PA — my hometown — and one of the few places that you can find scrapple).

Striking a Balance

About two weeks ago a reader (Julie) e-mailed me about some young gardeners/farmers and how they believed in a natural balance. The e-mail read: “Would you mind devoting a blog or two to the philosophy that nature is perfectly balanced and will find a solution to whatever ails it and therefore we do not need to use any chemicals or poisons to fight pests and disease?”

I thought this was a good question, and here’s my quick answer (followed, naturally, by a more long and drawn out answer). Yes, I do believe that nature will strike its own balance. Unfortunately this balance won’t always be great for humans.

The more in-depth explanation…..Organisms like diseases, plants and animals do what they have evolved to do. The plants grow, the insects feed on them, the insect poo goes back into the ground. The insects get eaten by an animal and then that animal’s poo goes back into the ground – the tree uses the poo as fertilizer — it’s all a big cycle and it works. If any particular plant or insect gets out of hand then invariably something that eats it will eventually show up and go gangbusters — and all of it goes back to the ground.

For humans who “live off the land” this balance works fine. They’re not looking for huge yields of food per acre, and they’re willing to forgo certain foods if that food happens to be in short stock in a particular forest in a particular year because of an insect or disease or whatever. And so insect or disease losses will usually leave them plenty of food to eat. But modern agriculture is based on large yields per unit area. That means that the whole balance thing goes out the window. Likewise, because humans prefer non-blemished food, the whole balance thing gets screwed up too. So, in the end, we usually end up doing something to get rid of pests.

And then there’s fertility to consider — When we grow crops on a piece of land we take whatever is produced and then eat it or sell it – but rarely do we put our waste back on that land. What that means is that we’re fighting the balance. By not recycling our waste we’re taking from the land without returning what we took from it back to it. So, after a few years, we end up having to fertilize because the land just can’t make up for what we’ve taken and not returned.

Balance is great – I just think that it’s tough to strike a balance with modern agriculture and still feed ourselves.

So, there you have it – my two cents on balance.

So…How Much Pesticide Is Actually In Our Fruits and Veggies?

We have discussed the dirty dozen here before – those foods which a group called The Environmental Working Group (wow—fancy name – everything they say must be true!) has established contain more residues of different pesticides than other foods. I’ve already stated my concerns about selecting organic foods instead of conventionally grown ones because of a fear of pesticides so I won’t restate that here. Instead what I want to call your attention to an article sent to me by our visiting professor, Charlie Rowher. This article runs down the amounts of pesticides that are actually in the dirty dozen. And the thing is….there just isn’t much pesticide of any sort on most foods and there is no evidence at all that eating these levels of pesticides would be bad for us in any way – even if we ate them in copious amounts day after day.

To be honest I think the authors of this article go a little too far – I do think that there is some potential for damage even from the ultra-small pesticide doses that we find on our foods. But their points are well taken – the amount of pesticides in food is miniscule and less likely to be damaging to us than a great host of other things. I’m much more concerned about certain segments of our population suffering malnutrition from avoiding conventionally grown fruits and veggies than I am about the larger portion of our population getting cancer from eating them.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Is this title too extreme? I’ll leave that up to you.

Most of you are aware of the frog controversy that surrounds Round-up. A few years ago a professor from Pittsburgh showed that this chemical can kill aquatic creatures if it gets into a pond. Particularly tadpoles. Not that Round-up is intended to be used around water, but still, it is a concern and I don’t want to minimize it. Nor do I want people to forget that other supposedly safer products have their own set of dangers.

This past Sunday I was in the back yard pulling weeds (there is the possibility that my post last week led to this fate…but I’m not going to examine that here). One of the places where I pulled weeds was under the deck at the back of our house. This area is covered with rock mulch and hasn’t been weeded all year. I started out pulling the large weeds, which took about 15 minutes, and then I started pulling the smaller weeds. After another 15 minutes I realized there was no way that I was going to be able to pull all of the small weeds in what I considered a reasonable time. So I went to the garage where I found a bottle of 20% acetic acid – that super strong weed killing vinegar spray that I’ve mentioned before. I knew the stuff was too strong and not a great choice — I had been planning to take it in to school and use it for some experiments there, but I figured what the heck, it ought to do some damage to the little weeds, even if it doesn’t completely wipe them out. So I started spraying.

The first things I noticed were things that I’ve had to cope with before when using this trigger-spray bottle. The spray misted onto my hand and hit a small cut making further spraying uncomfortable – but I pressed on (At this point you should all be screaming at me PUT SOME DAMN GLOVES ON – You’re right this was a stupid move on my part) and the smell was almost overwhelming. But I expected these things, so I figured I’d finish. Then, out of the corner of my eye I saw something coming from an area that I’d just sprayed — moving across the gravel and approaching fast. It was a small toad, no doubt there to eat slugs. He was hopping all over the place with no apparent direction. Random leaps here and there. I picked him up – and noticed that his eyes were glazed. I called for my wife to bring a bowl of water – which she did. I washed him off, but he had already stopped moving. A few minutes later it was no better – just random twitches and nothing else. His eyes seemed covered by a fine film – almost like cataracts. I put him in a cool moist shady spot hoping that he might get better, but I didn’t have the heart to check on him. The vinegar did him in.

I kill insects and other critters all the time and I’m no vegetarian — so why should I whine about this little guy? Because it’s always a shame when a life is lost without a purpose. This guy was helping me out underneath that deck and I killed him because I made a stupid decision by using a pesticide which I knew was a bad choice. If I’d used Round-up (which I have accidentally sprayed a small amount of on adult toads without apparent effect)– or better yet taken the time to pull the weeds by hand I would have avoided this whole situation and I could have done a better job killing the weeds too.

Being Lazy Has Its Advantages

I am just about the laziest gardener you’d ever want to meet. Around my field plots at the school things tend to look good –but that’s part of my job. Around my home, well, I probably water my plants once or twice a year, I fertilize every few years. I almost never use herbicides or any other weed control methods besides pulling – again, that happens once or twice a year. And I only mulch about once every two years or so (sorry Linda!). My yard does end up being a great place for my experiments on slugs, weeds, and odd methods of insect control, but it’s far from the pride of the neighborhood. Generally I plant things and let them either live or fail and just don’t worry about it that much if they can’t make it. That said, I think that I would fare better if I just accepted weeds as an integral part of my yard. It has already happened in my lawn. This year the clover has finally started to take hold. I’m happy about this because it will mean less fertilizer. In the back yard I’ve knocked out most of the thistle (hand pulling and a little bit of Round-Up), and now daisies are popping up. Sometimes they’re in spots where I’d prefer to have a lilac or rose – but hey, they’re not bad. It almost looks like I planted them on purpose.

My laziness recently however, reached a new level (my wife isn’t particularly pleased about it, but so far the summer has been busy enough that I’ve been able to find lots of excuses). On our back porch we usually grow some tomatoes or cabbage, or something in a container. This year we didn’t bother and so the container started to grow weeds. Specifically purslane. At first this seemed like a bad thing, but then it started looking … good. It filled out the container. It didn’t need any watering, and, by golly, it actually tasted good! Now tasting random weeds from your backyard (or uncared for container) is not something that I encourage. And even if you want to taste purslane have an expert (such as a botanist) confirm that it’s purslane before you go chomping on it. But that said, I tasted this stuff after I found out it was edible and now we have a new leafy veggie for our salads. Then I started figuring out all of the weeds in the yard, both front and back, that are edible. I already love clover flowers and I’m OK with young dandelion leaves. Shoot. I’m starting to think that if I could take my laziness to yet another level my family and I could eat salad all year without ever buying lettuce at the supermarket.

Helium Makes Kudzu Float Away

As promised — some happy news: There’s this kid in Valdosta, GA (close to Tifton where I spent a few years as a graduate assistant), who has been experimenting with ways to kill kudzu. Here’s the video.

To see this kid work on something like this at such a young age is fantastic and gives me hope for the future. I wish the kid were here so he could come to the University of Minnesota – I think he has a lot to offer and he makes me slightly more optimistic about where horticulture ends up.

For those of you who choose not to view the video, what this kid does is to inject helium into the soil around the root system of a kudzu plant. After the injection the plant apparently dies. The exact reason why isn’t known, but one person who was interviewed said he suspected that the helium smothers the plants roots thus killing it.

I’m a little bit suspicious about that explanation, and I’m also a little bit skeptical about how much more economically feasible it would be to use the helium instead of more standard herbicides. I’m also very interested in any other gasses that he might have tried to kill the kudzu – I wonder, for example, if he tried propane? It might work, but I’d say it was too dangerous to try.

I’m suspicious about the helium smothering the root system of kudzu because kudzu has such an extensive root system and because the helium should dissipate pretty quickly, especially in sandy soils like they have in Southern Georgia. It’s also very unlikely that the helium itself is acting as a poison because helium is an inert gas. It just doesn’t react with anything. What I think is more likely is that, by finding the site where the kudzu’s stem enters the ground, this kid has found a “weak spot” on the kudzu which is susceptible to damage. Then I think that the helium acts a refrigerant when it is released and actually freezes the stem of the kudzu. However it works though, it’s a neat trick!

A Nice Museum

I’ve been to Chicago before, but mostly on business. It always seemed nice though, so, last week I went with my family and, for the first time, I had the chance to look at some of the sights. Navy Pier – overrated. Shedd aquarium – met expectations. Chicago style pizza from Giordanos – so much better than I expected. Chicago hotdogs – damn good, but not equal to Chicago pizza. The Field Museum – TERRIBLY UNDERRATED. I just loved the Field museum. There were all kinds of fantastic displays on everything from whales to evolution. There was also a great display on plants. The information in the display was spot on, but this was definitely one of the simpler displays at the museum. In fact, to be honest, it seemed a little bit like the display cases were made in the 1950s or 60s. That said, there was a lot of room for the display to spread out across, after all, this is, supposedly, a major attraction for the museum.

The thing is, no one was there. It was freaky. My wife was taking the kids to another display hall (one more suited to younger kids where they could actually play with stuff), and so I went to the plant display by myself. My feet echoed across the halls as I walked down the corridor. When I turned around to look at the direction from whence I came it felt like a movie where I was walking in a hallway from the fifties and everyone outside was hustling and bustling in the 21^st century. When I turned a corner in the hall there was a guy apparently passed out over his laptop. This was the only living person that I saw while visiting the display — and he obviously had no interest in plants – at least not when I saw him (Truth is, for all I know he was dead. The next day I felt guilty for not checking his pulse to make sure he was really alive). And, based on this photo from someone on flickr, I’m not the only one who has seen this exhibit empty.

Is this the interest that people have in plants today? How sad. No wonder we’re losing horticulture departments. But on a livelier note, I’ve been such a downer the last few posts that I promise I’ll provide something a little happier next week!