All things green

Many years ago, when I was just a kid, I learned from my Dad that all things being equal, the darker color a soil appears, the more fertile it is.  I thought about that for awhile. In my young brain I thought, ‘well then why not color the soil using coal or something like that, after all isn’t coal just really old, compressed trees and plants’ ?  That idea was dismissed later by someone I knew as being  just an over-simplified childish idea.

As it turns out, 100’s of years ago in the Amazon River area, the people living there were actually using a similar technique to improve the soil.  They were burning wood in such a way to make charcoal. This charcoal was then added to the soil as a “fertilizer”.

The charcoal added some minerals, such as potash and the like. Its main function was to improved the soil texture and retain  plant nutrients to make them available for growing crops.

Archaeologists have discovered that the remains of these ancient gardens treated with charcoal are much more fertile that the surrounding areas, even after all of those centuries have passed. Plus, the carbon that was created from that process is still pretty much in tact.

Fast forward to the present day. Scientists have told us that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels released into the atmosphere has built up to a point where it is affecting our weather and we need to do something about it.

A major problem with carbon dioxide is that it is a gas and as such is hard to keep from being released into the air. So scientists have developed a few schemes to deal with this gas, such as pumping it into underground caverns, or trying to chemically combine it with calcium to make calcium carbonate.

Another problem with carbon dioxide is that as CO2 it contains 2 oxygen molecules for every 1 carbon molecule, so it is not “pure carbon”.

Charcoal, on the other hand, is nearly 100% carbon, no oxygen. It is also a solid, so it will not escape into the air…ever. In the soil it will very,very slowly release carbon. It is not poisonous and as was pointed out earlier, it actually is a beneficial substance.

A tree is also a solid and holds carbon. The difference with a tree is that even though it absorbs carbon dioxide from the air and holds it in the form of wood, the tree will eventually die, decompose and re-release all of that carbon back into the atmosphere. It may take a couple of hundred years but it will happen.

Charcoal is made from burning wood or other plant material in the absence of oxygen. The ancient  South American  Indians produced their charcoal in specially designed pits.  Now days, we can use a more controlled process to produce our charcoal. By manipulating combustion temperatures, the charcoal produced can be converted into a more refined product called “biochar”.

Our modern biochar process produces other gases that can be siphoned off and used to fuel the charcoal making process itself plus still have enough surplus gases left over to produce  bio-fuel for powering electrical generators.

Where do we get the raw materials for biochar?  Some proponents of biochar propose that we harvest trees to use as the raw material. I saw an estimate somewhere that in order to remove the amount of CO2 we produce in a year, we would need to cut down around 4% of our trees annually. That is a huge amount of trees, we would need to form an entire new industry just to cut trees and re-plant them. That would certainly help with our unemployment situation.

Others in the biochar industry feel that farmers could be paid for their unused plant materials such as corn stalks or wheat stubble and use that as the material for biochar. The farmers would then need to purchase the processed biochar as a soil amendment to replenish the carbon in their soil lost during crop production.

Biochar seems to be as close to a “magic silver bullet” as anything out there for reducing carbon dioxide. If you add soil replenishment and new jobs, you get a three for one deal.

Maybe this is that “Green Industry” that Governor Grandholm has been looking for.

Bob

In southern Arizona, the cities of  Phoenix, Tempe and Scottsdale encircle an area of the Sonoran Desert known as Papago Park.  Within the Park , surrounded by red sandstone geological formations, is the Desert Botanical Garden.

I visited the Garden last week and was delighted by the setting of the 50 acre garden.  It’s collection includes over 20,000 plants, 139 of them being rare, endangered or threatened desert plant species from around the world.  For someone who was born and raised in the Great Lakes area, such as myself,  the desert landscape is quite a contrast.

A red sandstone butte in the distance

One of the things that caught my eye was the large number of different agave and aloe plants that were planted along the walkways. I did not have time to study all of the sometimes subtle characteristics of each specie.

Walkways and handrails make it east to get around

Speaking of walkways, all of the major walkways are paved and are easy to negotiate.  There’s also plenty of architectural features as well as artistic sculptures  to keep  non-botanists from getting their eyes glazed over from the desert landscape.

Arched Structures and sculpture add visual interest

The arched structures have an assortment of desert plants that you can view close up, ranging from the relatively common Saguaro and Prickly Pear Cactus…

The arched structures provide a feeling of enclosed space.

…to the more exotic looking Creeping Devil Cactus…

They look like they're about to come after you!

…and Cristata Cactus:

The shy Cristata Cactus huddle together

You can enter the Desert Botanical Garden for free if you are a member of The U of M Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor, otherwise adult entry fee was $15 per adult when I visited Arizona last week.

Bob

Here we are, it’s the last day of November and I just got our garlic in the ground a few days ago.

Regular readers  of this blog already know that fall is the time of year that you plant garlic.  Garlic can be planted in the spring, however you will end up with bulbs half the size of those planted in the fall.

I think there is still some time to get your garlic planted, I wouldn’t wait too much longer though.

If you have a helper in the garden, decide who is going to go out and find some garlic cloves to plant while the other stays behind and prepares the area to be planted.  If you are by yourself,well then, you’ll have to do both.

Check the garden centers for garlic cloves, if they are out, a farmer’s market stand may have some that can be used for planting. The garlic purchased in a grocery store produce department will most likely have been treated with a sprout inhibitor and will not be good for planting. Sprouting is what we want. I used my garlic that I saved from this years crop.

Your garlic spot must be free of all weeds and kept that way during the growing season because garlic does not compete well against weeds. If you are planning on amending your soil with compost or peat, now’s the time to do so.

Break apart the garlic bulbs into individual cloves just as you do in the kitchen, only this time you won’t be running them through the garlic press.

Plant the cloves into the soil about 2 inches deep and about 6 inches apart. Place the root end down. You can just push them down into the soil with your finger or dig a furrow like I did here.

Planting garlic into a 2'' deep furrow

Cover them up with soil and let them  go until the soil freezes.  During this period, the cloves will grow roots.  Hopefully we will have a mild December which will allow our late planted garlic some time to develop those roots. No fertilizer is needed for now, we’ll apply that in the spring.

Garlic cloves ready to be covered

Once the ground freezes, cover the bed with straw, compost or other type of mulch.  It’s much better for the garlic if the soil is kept at a consistently cold temperature (which the mulch will provide) than to be freezing and thawing over and over through the winter.

In the spring we will remove our mulch and add fertilizer, garlic is a crop that needs a lot of plant food.

We’ll revisit this project again at mulching time and fertilizing time.

Bob

So far it has been a good November to be working outside.  This has given us a lot of time to catch up on fall gardening chores.

One of those fall chores is cutting back your “Fall Raspberries”.  By fall raspberries I mean varieties that have been specially selected to bear fruit from September until the first hard frost.

Years ago, raspberries were only available in the summer.  We still see summer raspberries offered for sale, but the labor involved has made them quite a bit more expensive to grow. They had to be pruned at just the right time and  were often trained to a wire system, much like grapes. The canes produced fruit only on the second year’s growth, then they died shortly afterward. So you had to get into the patch and cut out the old canes one at a time while leaving the new canes to grow for next year’s crop.

Which brings us to the topic of today’s discussion: cutting back your fall bearing raspberries.  All you need to do is simply, cut off the canes, pick them up and dispose of them. That’s all there is to it. No critical timing, no trying onto wires…see how much easier they are than the older summer raspberries. This method can, however reduce your total crop yield by 25% or more.

If you have just a small patch, you can use your hand pruners to do the job like I’m preparing to do here:

If your patch is too big to do by hand, a weed-whacker with a metal brush-cutting blade works great.

A patch of fall raspberries, if not cut back in the fall will revert to an ever-bearing habit of growth. That is to say, they will begin bearing fruit in the summer and continue again in the  fall.  Some gardeners prefer to pick raspberries earlier in the season rather than waiting to pick their crop in the fall.

Cut off the canes near ground level.

If you have a place to do it, burn the cut-offs, they can harbor disease which may infect next season’s growth.

One last thing, if you can’t get to them right now, they can be cut down any time during their dormant season…all the way up until March.

Bob

Have you ever seen a flower with two colors on one blossom? Yes, of course you have.

Have you ever seen a flower with two colors on one blossom where the colors are divided exactly down the middle? Now that’s a little more rare.

How this occurs is an interesting process.

Let’s briefly review how a flower is formed.  Think back to your high school biology. Plants are made up of small, microscopic structures called cells.  The cells grow and divide over and over again until you have a fully formed plant.

Inside of the growing tip of a bud (called a meristem) there are many many cells dividing like crazy in order to get a flower to form and blossom in one growing season. Each time they divide, they pass on a blueprint of how the flower is to be built. This is called genetics.

All of those millions of cells start out as just one cell. That one cell divides into two cells.  At this very early stage, something happened to one of those two cells.  The genetic blueprint didn’t get copied exactly right, the blueprint says it is supposed to be a Mum blossom but instead of painting it yellow, it specifies pink as the color.

All of the descendants  from that one pink cell “thinks” the flower should be pink, while all the descendants from the yellow cell know it is supposed to be yellow because it is a yellow Mum.

Those darn pink cells are stubborn and continue with their pink idea until the flower is completely built.  And guess what? Exactly half of the flower is pink and the other half is the color it is supposed to be…yellow.

In the horticulture trade this is called a chimera.  This is one way how different varieties are begun.

An observant grower will notice something unusual happening with a single plant, often just a single stem on a plant. If it looks promising, he will reproduce it and hopefully turn it into a new variety.  If he has a crew of farm hands helping and he doesn’t go to check his crop, this small detail will more than likely go unnoticed and the opportunity to create something new will be lost.

Chimeras don’t always reproduce themselves very well. They are unstable, which is how they became chimeras in the first place.

A couple examples of chimeras include thornless raspberries and different colors of Poinsettias.

So, will I make a million dollars producing pink and yellow Mums?….probably not.

Bob

A couple of weeks ago I had an early morning visitor to the garden. Actually I believe he stayed over night until I found him in the morning.

He reminded me that gardening can have many pleasent surprises.  Sometimes, things come  your way unexpectedly.

It was still pretty chilly out, the sun wasn’t very high in the sky, so he was still resting on one of the potted Mums we are growing.

I knew he would be leaving as soon as he could so, I hurried in to the garden shed to grab my camera.

The visitor was a dragonfly covered with so many droplets of dew that he looked like he was encrusted with jewels.

I know I’m not the only person to be delighted by this sight. The American Society of Jewelry Historians has a brooch in their collection made of gold, platinum, demantoid, ruby and diamond. It was made by Emmanuel Gattle & Company way back in 1900. I’m sure the designer was inspired by a dragonfly he saw.

I imagine him being given an assignment by his boss to come up with an idea for a new piece of jewelry. He was probably unable to sleep all night and got up before breakfast to take a walk in the garden. He looked over and saw… well, we know the result of what he saw.

Recent international politics have been influenced by dew covered dragonflies and other insects.

Former US Secretary of State and Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright owns at least seven dragonfly brooches  that she has worn  during diplomatic visits to  foreign countries.

Here she is wearing a brooch in the shape of a bee during talks with Yasser Arafat…who knows where she wore the Dragonfly!

These unexpected sights in the garden can really get you thinking of things. I better stop this “stream of consciousness” right here.

Madeleine Albright’s book Read My Pins became available in book stores just last week.

Bob

Now that we are at the end of the summer gardening season, at lot of us will begin pulling out  old and worn out plants and tossing them in the compost pile.

I found this root attached to a sweet potato plant:

Notice the knobby, bumpy nodules.  This is not normal for a sweet potato root. The abnormal growth is caused by a nearly microscopic worm-like creature called a nematode.

Nematodes are the bane  of sweet potato farmers in the southern states where sweet potatoes or other vegetables are grown year after year in the same spot.  In addition to gnarled roots, nematodes also cause reduced yields.  Often the damage shows up as black spots under the skin of the tuber that are not seen until the root is peeled leaving an unusable potato.

This nematode damage can occur on almost any common vegetable plant.  If you find a root that resembles the one in the photo, destroy it and don’t attempt to compost it, otherwise you risk spreading the pests to other parts of your garden.

There is no method of control for nematodes in the garden except rotating your crops.  You must rotate to a grass-related crop such as sweet corn in order to break the life cycle of the nematodes. “Regular” garden crops will support nematodes in the soil.

Knobby roots on legume plants such as peas and beans are  normal and not caused by nematodes, so don’t dispose of  them.  Beans and peas have nodules on their roots that harbor beneficial bacteria. In this case the bacteria  are beneficial to the plant and actually produce fertilizer in the form of nitrogen that the beans use to grow.

Chances are you won’t see these symptoms in a new garden because the nematodes have not had enough time to multiply.

Happy Composting,

Bob

Here’s a nice flower combination that was quite successful for us this year.

The purple flowers are  Gomphrena ‘Purple’.  The orange flowers are Zinnia ‘Profusion Orange’.

Both Orange Profusion and Purple Gomphrena are about 14″-16″ in height. I used them here all by themselves in a sloping bed which really showed them off.

The two colors go well together and the blossom shapes compliment one another as well.  Also, the blooms  held up nicely  all season. You can see  that they are still going strong.

Make a note of it in your garden notebook to look for these varieties next spring.

Bob

I came across this horn worm on our grapes this morning. There were over 2 dozen white objects attached to its body.

It had been parasitized by another insect, most likely some species of wasp.

These types of wasps reproduce by depositing their eggs with their stinger into a host insect.  In this case the unsuspecting insect is a horn worm.

The eggs soon hatch inside the caterpillar’s body. The newly released wasp larvae then begin to feed on the “innards” of the host insect while it’s still alive.

When the young wasp larvae have grown to sufficient size, they form”cocoons”, those white structures you see on the back of the caterpillar. The wasp larvae undergo a transformation inside the cocoons and emerge as fully developed wasps.

You can see by the size of the cocoons that these wasps are tiny compared to the paper wasps or hornets we normally see buzzing around the picnic table.

Let the balance of nature help you in your garden. When you see a caterpillar that looks like this, don’t squash or spray it, let the new wasps be “born”.  They will soon be flying around looking for more caterpillars in your garden to parasitize.

By the way, this type of wasp does not sting or disturb people.

Bob

If you didn’t make it out to fair yesterday (Wednesday), you’re too late!

The Monroe Evening News hosted a “Meet the Bloggers” evening in their County Fair booth.  It was a good chance for readers and bloggers to talk to each other face to face.

So, if you missed us, plan on catching us next year.

In the meantime, there’s still plenty of time left to enjoy the fair.  Stop in and see the folks at the News anyway. Their booth is just a couple of spaces away from the historic flowing water faucet in the MBT Expo Center.

Bob