Another podcast to chew on along with Thanksgiving leftovers

While our US readers enjoy the Thanksgiving holidays, you can all enjoy this week’s podcast, entitled “Leftovers.”  We discuss good leftovers (transforming orange peels into useful chemicals) and bad leftovers (fertilizer runoff), and then take a trip to an innovative company (Recovery 1) that recycles building demolition materials:


Huge piles of wood, wallboard, and other materials left over from demolition.

The initial sorting process – metals like nails are pulled out, wallboard is separated into components, and wood continues…

…to the end, where it’s chipped into different sizes to create a recycled mulch product.… Continue reading this article “Another podcast to chew on along with Thanksgiving leftovers”

Just a nice photo…

…of late fall in our meadow at the Hahn Horticulture Garden, Virginia Tech.  

To our U.S. readers, happy Thanksgiving!  Pleasant weather here in Virginia means I’ll get to putter in the ol’ home garden (only to find some squishy brown things I probably should have dug up last month and now will need to replace. Oh well, that’s what great nurseries and garden centers are for). 

People let me tell you ’bout my best friend…

So far a mild fall has lingered here in mid-Michigan.  With temps in the mid-50’s I was able make much more headway on my fall clean-up than usual.  Typically we get enough early snows or cold-damp November gales that I don’t get to the last of the leaves and frosted hostas until spring.  Leaves are especially challenging here at Daisy Hill farm.  We have about dozen hardwood trees, mainly oaks and hickories, that drop a sizable load of leaves each fall.… Continue reading this article “People let me tell you ’bout my best friend…”

You say horticulturalist, I say horticulturist

Keith Hansen, an Extension agent in Texas, has proposed a fun discussion topic:  horticulturist or horticulturalist?  We both prefer the former, though he points out that the introduction to my podcast uses the term "horticulturalist" instead.  Both terms recognized as real words and seem to be more or less interchangeable.

But I don’t really think they are interchangeable, and I don’t think Keith does, either.  Horticulture is a noun and horticultural is an adjective.  Specialty titles, like economist, botanist, or chemist, are based on nouns, not adjectives. … Continue reading this article “You say horticulturalist, I say horticulturist”

A Thanksgiving Podcast

Round two of Season 2 is up and running!  In keeping with the season, this episode is called “Real Turkeys.”  I talk about some of my least favorite garden products and why they’re on my “turkey” list.

We’ve also brought back Riz Reyes, who’s wearing his horticultural consultant hat in advising my podcasting engineer Shelli at Sky Nursery.  Riz has some great ideas for container gardens that look great during the winter and keep performing the rest of the year, too.… Continue reading this article “A Thanksgiving Podcast”

Jeff Ball

Back in 2006, when I first started garden writing, I was invited to give a talk in Michigan.  It was really exciting to get this kind of invitation so early in my writing career and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to an audience that wasn’t composed primarily of students or academics. 

Looking back at those talks…well…they weren’t particularly good.  Sure, there was good information, but I wasn’t particularly comfortable giving talks at that stage and so I’m not sure I got my information across nearly as well as I should have.… Continue reading this article “Jeff Ball”

So we’ll just guess from now on…

First, the news:

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NASS Reduces Agricultural Estimation Programs

Issued October 17, 2011 by the Agricultural Statistics Board of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). For more information, contact Sue duPont, 202-690-8122.

In light of funding reductions in fiscal year (FY) 2011 and the likelihood of additional reductions in FY 2012, NASS conducted deliberate reviews of all programs against mission- and user-based criteria, aimed at finding cost savings and forward-thinking business efficiencies so that key timely, accurate and useful data remains available in service to agriculture.… Continue reading this article “So we’ll just guess from now on…”

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. … Continue reading this article “Our visiting professor weighs in on potatoes”

Podcast Season 2 is here!

My abject apologies for being late in posting this week.  I’ve been in Angel’s Camp, California since Tuesday – a lovely, wonderful place – but without anything above 2G wifi.  Needless to say, posting on the blog was impossible.  So I’m in the Sacramento airport, enjoying a glass of wine and a crab Louis before I leave for Seattle, and finally able to access a 4G connection!

In any case, here’s the beginning of Season 2’s podcasts. … Continue reading this article “Podcast Season 2 is here!”

Looking for answers

“Stealing an idea from one source is plagiarism; stealing from many sources is research.”  This quote has been attributed to so many people I won’t bother trying to list them here.  But the point is a lot of what we do as professors is spend our time digging into the literature to look for substantiating or conflicting evidence for the ideas were interested in testing.  As a grad student back in the 1980’s, a time-honored tradition was to spend the afternoon at the library combing the stacks for journal articles, loading volume after volume onto a cart and then schlepping off the library copy center.… Continue reading this article “Looking for answers”