Category: Amusing Facts

New weekend feature: “what I learned from my garden”

While in Connecticut a few weeks ago I met Henry Young (a former horticulture extension agent), who did a guest post on the blog this past week about the important of “negative” results.  He also had another interesting idea for the blog that I’m going to initiate this weekend – the “What I learned from my garden” feature.

I did one of these back in July of 2010, when I worked water into a clay loam soil the same way you might work it into potting mix – with disastrous results.  So to kick off our new weekend feature, here’s another story from my “oops” collection:

Nearly every place we’ve lived we’ve had a wisteria vine – carefully trained and maintained so it wouldn’t get under the shingles and other places it wasn’t welcome.  In Buffalo, we had a second-story open porch off our bedroom with decorative iron fencework around the edge.  How lovely it would be if we planted a wisteria below and trained it along the fence, so that we’d have purple clusters dripping from the black ironwork in the spring!

We got the vine planted and it quickly reached the second story, twining its way around the fencework.  All we did was keep the wild hairs pruned off and waited eagerly for the floral show.

Well, it never bloomed in the four years we had left in that house.  But it did grow vigorously.  The slender vines thickened into bloated things that grasped and pulled at the fencework, pulling it off-kilter in its eagerness to take over the south side of our house.  The fence and the wisteria were becoming one.

Fortunately, we moved before I had to take an ax to the thing, and to this day I have no idea what the new owners did with that unholy alliance of metal and plant.

We learned – our current wisteria is restricted to a sturdy wooden trellis that laughs at its attempts of herbal domination.  But it still hasn’t bloomed…I assume it’s sulking.


Wisteria on the right, along with indestructible trellils

This feature will succeed if YOU contribute!  Send me your stories, with photos if possible, and I’ll post them on weekends.  We’ll all laugh and learn together.

There are papers out there on almost everything!

It amazes me how much information is out there if you really look for it.  This morning I was having a discussion with a couple of friends about how and why asparagus affects the odor of urine (I might or might not be able to let you know why next week — after my administrators decide how much potty humor they’ll let me get away with).  Anyway, I decided to see what I could actually find out about it and found a remarkable number of papers on the topic including this recent one on odor perception.  In a nutshell it says that there are actually differences in the way we produce and smell that characteristic scent that asparagus gives urine.  The introduction is quite interesting — I even pulled this nugget out “Proust wrote more favorably that asparagus “as in a Shakespeare fairy-story transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume” “.  Hmmmm.  Participants in the study had to smell other peoples urine to grade its odor level.  In fact, here’s another quote from the article:  “Some subjects were unable to complete some parts of the testing. For instance, some people could not complete the smelling phase because of unanticipated aversions to urine.” Interesting.  These people had, presumably, been around urine all their life.  Probably even produced some themselves.  How could they not know they were averse to it till now?

Here’s what I want to know:  Is there a market for asparagus that doesn’t result in the odor, and, if so, is it even possible to breed this trait out or is the flavor of asparagus intimately tied to this mildly unpleasant side-effect?  Now there’s a problem for a breeder!

Our visiting professor weighs in on potatoes

According to the FAO (and their “year of the potato” campaign from 2008), 2008 was the year of the potato.  Did you all notice?  I may not have, except for the year-long display in the horticulture building at the University of Minnesota.  What I recently became curious about was how much garden space it would take for a person to grow enough potatoes to satisfy their annual average consumption.  But if you make it past that math in this blog entry, you’ll read about recent congressional action on the tasty tuber.  The government is not telling us how many rows of potatoes to plant in our backyard, but they’re discussing how many potatoes our kids can eat.


"La Ratte" fingerling potatoes

But first, how much space do you need for your annual potato need? OK, I’ll skip the math, but we need to assume what yield we can expect.  If we can get (on the low end) 100 pounds of potatoes per 100-foot row, we’d need a 35-foot row to get 35 pounds of potatoes.  And 35 pounds of potatoes is what the average American eats per year (not including pre-processed chips and fries and instant flakes, etc).  If we can get 150 pounds per 100-foot row, we’d only need a 24-foot row for 35 pounds of potatoes.  Imagine that this way: take 8 to 12 big-sized steps in a sunny spot in your yard.  Now imagine that area meeting or exceeding an average American’s (fresh) potato needs for the year.  Seem reasonable?  Why not try it next year?

But were this your typical blog, authored by enthusiasts or hobbyists, you’d be satisfied learning that much.  But no, this horticulture blog is rooted in science and current issues.  So by now, you’re pining for some research to sink your teeth into.  Some scientific debate or controversy, or even recent policy news, pertaining to potatoes.  So with that, I present to you: the Senate Agriculture Appropriations Bill for FY 2012.  This juicy piece of legislation (passed on Nov. 1) has a potato provision, a tuber maneuver, to bypass the USDA, which wanted to limit the amount of ‘starchy’ vegetables served in school lunches to 1 cup (2 servings) per week.  Their list of starchy vegetables also includes lima beans, peas, and sweet corn.  Two senators from potato-rich states (Colorado and Maine) put the amendment in, effectively blocking the power of the USDA to implement such a rule.  The reasoning given is that the rule would be a burden to school districts, which would have to find a way to meet nutritional guidelines with more ‘nutritional’ vegetables.   A conference committee merged the House version (with no amendment to limit the USDA’s power) with the Senate version on November 15, and the full legislation does indeed contain the Senate’s provision to protect potato producers.


Harvesting beets.  (Not sure why this is here.  Maybe because beets are better for you than potatoes?  Maybe just to see how darn cute Charlie’s son is?)

So what do you think?  Should kids not be allowed to eat more than a cup of lima beans, potatoes, corn, and peas in school each week?  Should it depend on how they’re prepared (French fries, for example)?  Can we grow enough broccoli to replace the potatoes that kids aren’t eating?  Would your kids eat kale and squash at school if peas and sweet corn were taken away?  Are you more like the average Russian, who eats about 286 pounds of fresh potatoes per year?  Discuss.

Today in Cucurbit News…

Cucumbers are one of the most widely-grown vegetables in the world.  Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (a great place to buy unusual and international veggie seeds) lists 51 varieties from North America, Southeast Asia, China, India, Mexico, and Europe.  Dark green ones seem to be in the minority – yellow, white, orange and red skins in shapes round to elongated dominate.

Cukes traditionally have a few nutrients including some Vitamin A from carotenoids and beta carotene, but have never had the reputation as nutritional power house. Watery and gas-inducing, yes.

Researchers with the USDA have recently released a cucumber high in beta carotene.  No "frankencuke" this; all the crossing was done by traditionally breeding methods (including bees and self-pollination).  Lots and lots of crosses with a warty, round-ish chinese cuke (Cucumis sativus var. xishuangbannanesis) and some standard pickling cukes has resulted in a stable cultivar that has the smoother skin and proper proportions of marketable pickling cucumbers (there are lots of marketing standards associated with most fruits and veggies).  But the big news is the orange interior, specifically the endocarp (the jelly-like stuff around the seeds) and the mesocarp (the fleshy part that is the whole point). It’s orange because it’s full of beta carotene  (mesocarp is 2.7 micrograms per gram of fresh fruit compared to 0.02 micrograms per gram with a traditional white-fleshed variety.  Even more impressive is the jump in endocarp beta carotene – from 0.16 micrograms per gram to 7.5 micrograms per gram).  I don’t believe the USDA is going to release this particular line directly to the public, rather they’re offering the genetics (two recessive genes control the beta carotene content) to other breeders.  This means other breeders can use it in their own breeding program to bring more nutritional value to their specific lines, at which point varieties will become available to growers/gardeners. Orange tzatziki!!!

from Staub, J.E., P.W. Simon, and H.E. Cuevas.  2011. USDA, ARS EOM 402-10 High β-Carotene Cucumber. HortScience 46:1426-1427.

(Linked, but my guess it won’t work if you don’t have a HortScience subscription or institutional access, sorry) 

A little about bugs

I’m not much of an entomologist.  (Okay, I’ve never had a single bug-related class.)  But I do appreciate insects in all of their bewildering shapes and behaviors.  And after this weekend I’ve become a little more entomologically educated.

I spent the weekend in Prescott, Arizona at the annual MG conference.  Besides meeting lots of great Master Gardeners (and Extension educators) in that state, I also met Dr. Whitney Cranshaw from Colorado State University.  He gave a keynote talk called “Gardening for Insects – or not!”  This was a seminar that presented positive and negative aspects of gardening for butterflies, honeybees, and other favorite insects.

Here are just a few of the nifty things Whitney had us consider:

  • Not all butterflies are nectar feeders; some prefer rotting fruit or dung.  Hmmm.  I might have to limit my varieties.
  • The caterpillars of some striking butterflies might need you to share some garden greens.  Larvae of black swallowtail butterflies eat parsley, fennel, and dill, for example.  Accepting damage on these plants will ensure a healthy population of adults for your viewing pleasure.
  • It’s best to accept some degree of pest insect presence, like aphids, to provide food for beneficial insects.  Insecticides are not part of a successful garden for insects.
  • The first bumblebees of the season are always small; they’re produced by overwintering queens whose resources are limited.  These new workers help gather more food, so that those produced later are larger.

Whitney has a fantastic collection of photos of insects, up close and personal.  Some of these are also in his book Garden Insects of North America (Princeton Press). It’s over 600 pages of full-color photos and engaging text.  Instead of being organized by family, it’s organized by feeding habit, so you can quickly look up and identify whatever weird bug you’ve found snacking on your snapdragons. There are sections on how to manage pest insects, and a chapter dedicated to beneficial bugs. 

 

Amazingly, this book is only $29.95.  I bought one.   

Finally, I have to recognize Dr. Cranshaw as one of an unusual breed of faculty.  He is passionate about educating adult audiences like Master Gardeners, and indeed his book is dedicated to entomology educators and the nationwide Extension system.  What a great resource for gardeners everywhere!

Sugar and Spice and Misnomers

At a lively hobnob with friends and colleagues, the discussion ranged from critique of the Virginia Tech offensive line to the logic/mystery behind commercial carbon offsets.  Someone mentioned Domino Sugar’s efforts in that direction. Apparently their product has been certified “carbon free” by a business carbon offsets program that they pay a fee to. This led to hoots and snorts as to their selection of terminology since it involves a molecule (sucrose) that is 27% carbon.


From the fascinating thus time-eating www.exploratorium.edu. Serously, don’t click the image unless you’ve got an hour to burn.

I’d forgotten all about it until I saw a post (on ESPN.com of all places) that also brought it up.  The product in question:

Now I can appreciate that the point of this branding/certification is not to advertise a dearth of carbon; rather their good intentions,  as it is Carbonfree, not carbon free.  But the marketing staff perhaps need to be reminded that in addition to the inorganic carbon gases that are of major concern, carbon is a part of all organic life…and essential to both sweet tea and the suffering of Biochem students everywhere.

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). 

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!