Mowing the Leaves

After the first serious frost the mulberry leaves on the tortured tree in my back yard—the one that is destined for the woodpile any day now—rain down. This happens all in one gusty hour. In that very same hour, just around the block, the yellow leaves of a neighboring gingko go from dangling adornments to brilliant golden carpet. Meanwhile, the Ebenezer Scrooge in front of my house obstinately grips its green. Even as all of its fellows lighten their loads, my badly topped, misshapen silver maple insists on photosynthesizing, as if to say, “Hate me if you will, but I command you to marvel at my genetics.”

My silver maple: still photosynthesizing in November.

When Bob and I moved into the house on Cherokee street with the silver maple and the hacked and bleeding mulberry three and a half years ago, we made a deal. Phil comes, too. Every week or two Phil pulls up in his white van, gets the gas mower out, and cuts our modest lawn, as he did Bob’s lawn on Evergreen Street for many years. I do the gardens. In my last house, I succeeded in reducing the lawn to a 5-minute mow, and I’m slowly doing the same here, but until that time, there’s Phil. He edges too, not because we’ve ever asked him to, but because that’s the way things are done in our neat little town. My mower hides out in the shed until after the hour of raining mulberry leaves.

So yesterday, I dragged the 100-foot cord to the patio outlet, plugged in the mower, and gave it its first annual workout. Across the street, a man in a tractor was dragging a huge tarp filled with leaves to the curb. He raked, he piled, he pulled. My chopped mulberry leaves fell between blades of grass and disappeared behind the path of my electric mower. I’m not saying my way is the best way, but … he raked, he piled, he pulled. For hours.

Feeding the worms

Every October, Phil would rake the leaves of Bob’s sycamore trees on Evergreen Street into big piles along the curb. He never, to his credit, used a noisy leaf blower to blast every single messy leaf onto public land, but, just the same, Bob’s lawn was perfectly devoid of anything that might spoil the neatness when the job was done. And then a big vacuum truck would come along and steal the piles. Criminal.

No thank you, I tell Phil, I will take care of the leaves on Cherokee Street. Meaning, I will keep every one of my leaves thank-you-very-much. Now, I could say that I was thinking about worms and other helpful soil animals as I monotonously mowed my mulberry leaves, and how they would churn the leaf bits into lawn fertilizer with their digestive system. But that would be a lie. I was thinking that, with a fractured rib, walking behind a mower was so much more possible that raking and piling and lifting. I gave the front lawn a cursory pass. The curled maple leaves—those that had in spite of their best efforts to hang on come loose in the wind—crumbled under the blades. Striving for perfection would be a thankless waste of effort at this point.

It’s a messy time of year. The leaves of my once handsome castor bean plant hang limp and ugly on the suddenly awkward frame. It disturbs me. I would like to say that I am comfortable with my garden going to ruins. But, again, I would be lying. It’s not like in high summer, when the coreopsis is in glorious disarray and annual ageratums and petunias fill the garden gaps leaving no room for weeds or discontent. In the throes of the growing season, I revel in a manageable measure of messiness.

Stewartia leaves on 'Lavender Stream' sweet, and still fragrant, alyssum.

In a week, or a month, I’ll be mowing the leaves again. It’s a job I would happily turn over to Phil, but he would look at me funny. He would be thinking (or maybe this is my paranoia talking), “but that’s not the way we do things around here.” If I did not watch over him he would empty the bag at the curb and my leaves would be stolen, sucked up by the big vacuum truck. My leaves. Of course, my version of fall order is equally dogmatic and, in the scheme of things, just as quirky as Phil’s. On a large and small scale, we all manage our messes, continuously. That’s what we do. 

And if they get away from us, nature manages them for us.

Splat!

In one of the last episodes of “Sex and the City,” the writers slipped a sardonic chuckle into an otherwise serious story. Momentous life decisions are made, a snowfall creates a magical city scene, a party queen falls to her death from an upper story window. Oops. 

The title of the episode: “Splat!”

And I have a large hand.

This is one of the many thoughts that passes through my mind as I approach the corner of Iroquois and Keystone Streets on a late October day. Warty chartreuse softballs line the road on both sides, but none survive where the wheel treads trail. Instead, roughly circular blots mark the asphalt. Splat!  If you are unlucky enough to intercept the hefty fruits as they drop from the tree, the sound on the car rooftop is more of a “Bang!”

All this useless beauty.

Rounding the corner to Wenner Street, I see that osage oranges have been neatly staged in cannonball-style pyramids all round the bend. Is this an artistic statement, I wonder each time I drive by?  Three days later, my question is answered. A cardboard sign reads, “FREE! 4 Spiders.” And another comical image enters my mind. But no, the helpful homeowner is not expecting expect giant arachnids to carry the fleshy balls home to their young. The fruits have a reputation—unearned as it turns out—for repelling spiders.

One by one, balls disappear from the piles, presumably to take their places under the beds of arachnophobes. A few sideliners are squished—by errant wheels, by curious kids, by squirrels. The once battle-ready order takes on the same disheveled look as the natural fruit-fall on the other side of the road. Apparently there is not much demand for osage oranges among local raccoons and deer. This makes the giant fruits something of an anomaly: they seem to have lost their function. Too big for most animals, osage oranges, also known as hedge apples, have been known to cause death among ruminants by lodging in the esophagus. The great majority of the fleshy fruits rot beneath the canopies of the trees from which they drop, which makes no sense. Why would a tree waste energy creating a pulpy fruit when it has nothing to gain? Other fruit-bearing trees have partners—birds, bats, deer, bear, or for that matter humans—that disperse their seeds and spread the species over large areas, keeping them fit and vigorous and adaptable. Why should the osage orange be an exception to this evolutionary rule?  

Osage orange flesh is unpalatable to most animals.

Ecologist Dan Janzen calls this “the riddle of the rotting fruit.” And he has a theory. Some eleven thousand years ago the great mammoths and mastodons disappeared from the Western hemisphere; whether they were hunted to extinction or victims of an abrupt change in climate is a matter of debate. There is evidence that many of the giants were forest browsers, rather than plains grazers, and so it is entirely possible that they are the key to the riddle or, as Connie Barlow puts it in the title of her book about this and other ecological curiosities, “the ghosts of evolution.” In their absence the fallen osage oranges are sometimes picked through by squirrels and made viable, but seldom does the tree species migrate far from the spot where the fruits first bounced onto the ground.

Big thorns make good fences.

There was a time when humans took over the role of dispersal agent by planting miles and miles of living fences to keep their livestock from roaming. Pruned to fence height, the osage orange tree sends up multiple suckers and becomes "horse high, bull-strong, and hog-tight" in four years. It is estimated that at the height of its popularity, a quarter million miles of osage orange hedge grew in this country. (1)

The late 19^th century introduction of barbed wire put an end to this practice but vestiges of the living fences remain in areas that were once farmed, and continue to produce suckers long after the mother plants are gone. The wood is now prized for fence posts. Archers value it also, as they have for centuries. In the early 1800s a well-made osage orange bow was said to be worth a horse and a blanket, or a “comely young squaw” in trade. Tribal wars were fought for possession of lands with generous supplies of osage orange trees.

The curious rind of the osage orange

Useless pulp lies smashed on the road. Splat! Trees that once functioned as living fences are chopped down and made into dead fences. Strong curved bows of osage orange wood may conceivably have contributed to the extinction of the animals that once kept it strong. The osage orange saga, full of twists and ironies, continues, with handmade signs pleading with anonymous passersby to take these warty green balls and give them a function—under a bed, or along a basement wall, or anywhere. Just take them.

Splat!

Centuries of history go by; a tree’s stock rises and falls. Tire treads mark the intersections of Iroquois and Keystone, of ancient mastodon and modern transportation.

Splat!

Bales S. 2007. Natural Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley

The Social Perils of Gardening

If you are smart, and sensitive to social ramifications of putting your obsessions on display for all the “normal” world to see, you will say “No, but thank you!” to social invitations that come your way during spring, when the natural world is full of exuberance and your gardening spirit has not yet been beaten down by explosions of bugs and infestations of holey foliage. 

“Why” you ask? 

Why??

Fava bean in flower!

Realize that you are all too likely to speak your mind. And your mind is, shall we say, differently attuned, than most? Without thinking you may say something like, 

“I’m so excited about my favas!”

Yes, I know, vegetable gardening has become the new “in” thing to do. Still, in the real world, your listener will more than likely reply, 

“…Favas? What’s that?”

“Favas are big beans. Some people call them broad beans!”

“So what do you plan to do with these beans?”

“I’m not really sure … this is the first time I’ve grown them. And they’re absolutely beautiful! Big, sturdy plants standing in handsome rows! Ants have been crawling all over them. You see, the plants have extra-floral nectaries tucked beneath their leaves, which draw the ants, which then keep away other leaf-eating insects … theoretically. It’s like watching a science project!”

Ants and favas. Perfect together?

“Extra what?”

“Extra-floral nectaries. Plant parts that are not flowers that produce nectar!”

“For the ants.”

Ladybugs to the rescue!

“Yes! I don’t think the ants have much to do with the black aphids that congregate on the tops of a lot of the plants, but they might. There’s a lot of research on that but I haven’t found any conclusions. I’m starting to see ladybugs on some plants, which is an exciting development! They’ll help control the aphids. I’ve found that spraying aphids never works. You need the ladybugs.”

At about this time you may notice (or you may not) your listener’s attention straying, and his or her eyes looking around the room for a reason to make a polite escape.

“Aphids, huh.”

“Black aphids. They’re different from the aphids on lettuce, which are usually green, or on tomatoes, which are sometimes pink. Isn’t that absolutely fascinating, how the color of aphids sometimes matches the plant they feed on?”

“Umm, yeah. Hey, I think I see my friend over there …”

“Now the fava flowers are beginning to turn black—that’s what’s supposed to happen—and I’m just starting to see the beans form. I’m wondering if they’ll get as big as they’re supposed to get. The thing about favas is … my son the farmer told me this … it doesn’t even matter that much if you get a big harvest. They’re worth the trouble just for their value as a cover crop! … oh … ok … we’ll catch up later.”

But, no.

The “bore” label has attached itself to you. Like a black aphid on a fava bean plant. Maybe staying home, gardening until dark, and after dark delving into the mysteries that have thrust themselves into your psyche, would have been a better choice.

But there must be a way that we can convert the masses into seeing the fascination, locking in to the mystery.

We need to get them outside.

It’s impossible to describe, in an inside conversation, the thrill of discovering connections, the excitement of getting a glimpse into how it all works. The kick lies in seeing for yourself the adaptations plants make for reasons we are only beginning to understand; becoming conscious of the complex interactions that go on outside the door every minute of every day. They set the mind spinning and exploring and looking for answers that only lead to more questions.

On second thought, say yes.

Because, you just never know.

I just have to tell you about the tiniest little grasshoppers I spotted on my tomato leaves today—they were smaller than my little fingernail. They must have been first instar. Did you know that grasshoppers molt five times before reaching full size? Oh, you have to go? Ok, we’ll talk later …won't we?

Dutchman's Breeches, still in flower!

It is April 23rd. Teeny while flags fly inches above the soil; clumps of dissected leaves cling effortlessly to the steep east-facing slopes of the Delaware River basin. The Dutchman’s Breeches occupy spaces too hazardous even for garlic mustard. They share space with mosses, last year’s fern fronds, and leaves of dogtooth violet. Skinny chestnut oaks and teenage seedlings of callery pears perch on the rocks above, leaning over the road I travel at precarious 10 percent angles. Root tips probe the cracks of the rocks, thickening, and exploring the depths of the crevices, holding the ever-increasing mass of the leaning towers in place. One day an ice storm will load them up with too many pounds of frozen weight for the clamps to hold. Rocks will pull free; towers will tumble. Still the Breeches will return to greet the spring bumblebees, their reason for being. They will widen their area of occupation, they will fly their flags.

Why do I find this harbinger so inspiring?  Maybe it demonstrates that to be tough, we need not be showy. To survive we need not be pugilistic. We just need to find our space and our time, and quietly exert the force within us. We need only discover our niche and fly our perky white flags. When the time is right the buzz will intensify. Pollination will happen.

The Trash Theory

“Does the world seem dirtier?” a fellow garden blogger asked. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Man was referring to the plastic bottles and candy wrappers that litter the roadsides, and are especially evident when the world is colored in beiges and browns. Yes. The world seems dirtier. It may indeed be dirtier. There is implied blame. People are inconsiderate. They are so uncaring, we think, as we shake our heads reprovingly at their garbage. It is never our garbage.

There are some universal truths at work here. First there is the nostalgia filter: When-I-was-Young-the-Roadsides-were-Always-Spotless. We are absolutely sure of this, fifty years (plus or minus a handful) later. If this were a group conversation I might break in right about now with another nostalgic tidbit about how, as children, we would collect bottles from the roadsides and wash them in the gas station bathroom and then redeem them for pennies apiece—a story that would be intended to show that the roadsides were indeed litter-free (thanks to us) but in fact testifies to the opposite. Without organized soccer leagues, we had time for such entrepreneurial exploits (unlike today’s children ... or is that my nostalgia filter talking?) but the fact remains that the sheer poundage of glass that we would sneak into the restroom made it worth our while to do so. Even at pennies apiece. The roadsides were, it seems, far from litter-free.

But in defense of people, at least when it comes to in-your-face littering, I offer a universal theory of change. I call it “The Trash Theory.” It could just as easily be named “The Kleenex Theory” or the “Band-Aid Theory,” and it has, in fact, a given name: “Punctuated equilibrium” was coined by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in 1972.

It goes like this:

Suburbia carries on, predictably and neatly, day-by-day, the sweet smell of grass clippings clinging to the Saturday morning air, roadsides green with garlic mustard and goldenrod. On Thursday evenings residents place their trashcans by the curb. 

And then it happens. 

A Thursday night storm blows limbs from trees … and upends just a small percentage of the curbed cans. Maybe yours is among them. By morning, Wegmans carryout containers and empty Pure Life Purified Water bottles are caught up in the tall stems of roadside goldenrod. Not along your property, but along those Adopt-A-Highway sections where organizations take on the feel-good job of cleaning up the trash of other people—inconsiderate type people—so the world can be a neater nicer place.

The universality of this dynamic is undeniable. We putter along, happy for a time, until a ferocious wind, or rhinovirus, or hangnail, or social revolution causes a sudden upset in some previously stable system. Tectonic plates slip. Updrafts and downdrafts create a feedback loop. Before we know it the world is a different place. The Kleenex box that sat nearly untouched for months is empty.

In “The Beak of the Finch” Jonathan Weiner told the story of how a weather disaster can affect the birds’ food supply, and so the very physiology of finches can change in a single generation! His tale is a hard, compressed truth of nature that involves catastrophic loss of life in a species where a generational length is a fraction of ours. It is also a very scary universal reality.

“Does the world seem dirtier?” If this seems true, we might blame climate change and the more frequent gusts it is said to trigger. It’s much simpler, of course, to picture careless teens dropping empty cigarettes packs from car windows. We can do something about that—launch a public relations campaign, or post notices of stiff fines along the highways. We can call the public to action to fix the obvious mess. Predicting and preventing are a whole different matter.

But enough of dire predictions. 

Rhubarb tip, poised for exponential growth

Today, March 20^th, is the vernal equinox! At 7:02 a.m. (here in the northeast U.S.) the sun crossed the celestial equator. We are on our way to a positive feedback loop, as plants are stimulated out of dormancy by extravagant sunlight. Before we know it the world will be a different place, lush, green, bounteous.

Hang onto your hat. The season begins.

Pay attention. Treasure the experience. Enjoy the ride.

The more we value and understand the nature of nature, the more we will be capable of comprehending the big picture. We need to understand the big picture.

“I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.” Henry David Thoreau.

Invasive Plants: Accepting Globalization

Call me irresponsible. When I heard about yet another “Invasive Plants in the Landscape” conference, my first thought was “How depressing.”

And it’s not that I don’t care that our fields and forests are being ravaged by garlic mustard and knapweed, I tried to explain to my friends the other evening at dinner. But, one insisted, we make the natural world a better place by reclaiming patches in backyards all over the region. True. But … Let me see if I can do a better job.

Garlic mustard, by the way, is edible!

I am, in fact, a tackle-any-job kind of girl. For years I’ve pulled garlic mustard and greater celandine at the optimum time, and hacked English ivy from tree trunks before it had a chance to become a bearer of berries. I’ve refrained from planting burning bush even though its brilliant and long-lasting color is unmatched by more responsible choices. I still do these things in my own garden, because I know what will happen if I don’t. For years I have cared, fretted, and educated myself about the seed-spreading cycles and eco-niches of culprits like stilt grass and purple loosestrife. But the realization that has crept over me and overtaken my zeal is this: I could pull invasive plants from roadsides gone wild every Saturday all year long, and they would proliferate as soon as I took a break. Inevitably, we fall behind. As Emma Marris put it in her book, Rambunctious Garden, "A historically faithful ecosystem is necessarily a heavily managed ecosystem." Creating a native landscape can be seen as a way that we busy ourselves to further an impossible goal: putting the natural world to rights.

As we toil away, making little patches better places for pollinators and symbiotic organisms, corn fields and deciduous forests alike continue to be transformed into commercial and industrial districts by those who think of soil as something to be moved out of the way so concrete can be poured. We must “spur the economy;” we must “speed up economic growth,” we are told daily by politicians. Growth has saved us in the past. Growth will make us happy. The U.S. GDP rose a remarkable 3.4% a year for 100 years—up until 1980. Thus, the American Dream. All we need to do is produce more—more natural gas, more refined oil, more corn—and we will be saved again (with no new taxes!). 

Polllinators love native plants, and foxglove, too.

It’s time we wrap our heads around an ecological truth: perpetual growth is impossible. When the deer populations exceed the carrying capacity of the land, we moan about the effect on forest regeneration. When mosquitoes flourish we spray the infestation. When garlic mustard rosettes stretch into flowering stalks, and spit out their copious seeds, we fund studies that determine the survival percentages of ginseng. And yet, we exclude our own species from the rules that the science of ecology has established, and on those infrequent occasions when we act to limit our impacts on other species, it is with the stipulation that economic growth will continue unimpeded. Always and forever.

Despite all good intentions of leading a meaningful and intentional life, we are spending increasing amounts of time in climate-controlled boxes, and packing them with more and “better” stuff. We work and work, for if we take a break, the bills will proliferate. We will fall behind. We spend less and less time in nature, and more on electronic devices. We (and I include myself in this) are hopelessly goal-oriented—which seems, more and more as I grow older and (hopefully) wiser, a path to inevitable dissatisfaction. 

There is one benefit to pulling garlic mustard, so long as we have no illusions that we can permanently repair the so-called damage, and that is that it gets us outside. Every time a rosette is yanked out by the roots, someone has to stoop, and observe the forest floor. It’s likely that the puller may look up, and watch the way the wispy clouds move across the blue sky, and listen to the singing of the robin or the popping of peppergrass seedpods, and think, I am doing something good for the environment, and I feel good. But the truth is, the best thing that is being done for the environment is that people are being given a reason to leave their climate-controlled boxes, a reason to step outside, a reason to care. 

Face it: Life is messy. Globalization is a done deal. We are going to have to learn, somehow, to love our neighbors. The wild things will work it out for themselves with little or no help from us, thank-you-very-much. They’ll have to. 

And there are, I believe, better ways to spend Saturday mornings than acting as judge and executioner of aliens that have crept into our country, our wild spaces—better for the earth and better for us. I would rather see people thrill to the sight of thousands of butterflies sipping nectar from purple loosestrife than look at the scene with consternation and a sense of duty. I would rather see them step into the whirl and become enveloped by the buzzing of bees, notice the astonishing diversity that is to be found on a single plant. If people, young and old, were to spend time joyfully learning the world outside their boxes and truly feeling the life in the soil that lies beneath the soles of their shoes, they might experience a kinship with the other organisms that we share our space with. Maybe they will see that a little goal-free time offers rewards that can’t be gained from the accumulation of stuff. Maybe they will grow up to be politicians. Maybe they will understand that never-ending economic growth is not the path to happiness—or even a desirable thing.  

Did you know Japanese hops causes dermatitis when you pull it?

So yes, I’m done wringing my hands over the presence of Japanese hops and European garlic mustard in the wilds—and it’s not because I don’t care that natives are losing their niches. I care a lot. But my American Dream has taken on a different perspective. I believe that if we can succeed in getting Inside People out, into nature, we might, as a culture, stand a chance of remembering that More (to paraphrase Bill McKibben) is not what we need. We need to value the joy that comes from getting to know the non-human world. Some things are beyond our control. Others, starting with our relationship with nature in this period of our species’ “progress,” are fixable.  

Crabby Creek Revisited

The big, gracious beech with its carved initials—the one that created its own clearing midway down the steep hill, the one that offered us strong horizontal branches for easy climbing—is gone. No trace remains. Some of the hearts and letters, not all, had been our doing; other climbers had defaced the smooth bark long before we discovered it. A short distance from the void where (we believe) the beech had once stood—much closer, in truth, than in my memory—the challenging cliffs that once served as our wild wild west overlook the creek. Fifty years later, they are still impressive.

The whole of our childhood playground—the cliffs, the creek, the salamanders, the pollywogs—is now a township park, with a sign and all. The fact is, it was always public property, being too rugged for fast-buck developers to easily plop houses upon. But now it is official. With a sign and all. 

The bridges that had made the stream banks accessible to vehicles in the years before we claimed them as our own have crumbled and crashed. That remarkable “road” was probably built between 1935 and 1943, when the United States government provided jobs for eight million men. Back then it’s very possible that humble structures built of oak stood along the banks of the Crabby. Structures that housed families with children. Children who climbed trees and carved hearts in their smooth bark. If so, no surface signs remain. Any trash heaps that may have existed are buried under many layers of forest debris. 

One thing is certain: the dirt road that gave us access to crayfish and adventure predated Green Road, the winding street where our post World War II childhood home still stands overlooking the wooded ridge. 

“You take the low road and I’ll take the high road…,” we used to sing, sometimes walking the low trail by the creek and other times the upper (WPA?) lane as we made our way to the small man-made pond by the railroad tracks. The pond too is gone, a victim of the cul-de-sac built for the convenience of two extravagant houses that replaced our road. The dirt had to go somewhere. 

Why the pond and its associated dam were there in the first place is another question. They were positioned just south of a freight line that was built sometime after the mid 19^th century. Was there a practical connection between the two? Maybe not. The pond may have been constructed for the convenience of a wealthy pre-Depression Philadelphian who desired a fishing hole. We do like to control our environment. 

At any rate, the pond is absent and the dam is a useless slab of concrete. Harmless remnants of the past, layered with leaves. I want to walk up the hill to see if blueberries still grow near the house we lived in, or if the deer have changed the plant community that left an indelible impression in my consciousness, but grownup restraint holds me back.


The curved banks of the Crabby have been undercut, in some spots, by waters rushing down hills foolishly cleared of their oaks and beeches. But the surrounding forest is wonderfully alive. Papery beech leaves cling to juvenile trees, and every shade of dirty blonde is represented in the rustle beneath our feet. We see brilliant orange orb weavers, multiple signs of woodpeckers, prints from the cloven hooves of deer. 

Tires lay on the ground near the defunct dam, posed in a distinct pattern, arranged, we guess—we hope—by kids who spend their summer days looking under rocks for salamanders. On hot summer days, we imagine, they “help” the waters of Crabby Creek flow in channels built of stones and sticks, and prod crayfish out of their crevices.

 Maybe they find slim trees that some stunt of nature has caused to bend down, and up, and then down again, and ride them like camels. And maybe, hopefully, they will grow up to know the difference between a white oak and a chestnut oak, and recognize that beeches flaunt their papery leaves far into the winter months, and that dead trees are hotbeds of life. 

They will see white waxy Indian pipes rising from the dark earth, and weave the ghostly images into stories that will play and replay in their minds throughout their lives, triggered by the sweet smell of decaying oak leaves, the rippling waters of a small creek, or the always thrilling sight of the nodding translucent flowers of the elusive saprophyte.

Crabby Creek will live on in their minds as they travel their lives, its steady flow defying attempts to dam or reroute it with sticks and stones. Their future dealings with the natural world—we hope—will be measured by its clarity and its promise. 

This is our best hope.

Culinary Trends: microgreens vs. the macro-scene

My microgreens are giving me trouble. For months the routine was, well, routine. Fill seed trays with soil mix; sprinkle seeds liberally; cover with a dusting of soil mix; spray. But for the past couple of weeks, seeds have been germinating in fits and starts, or not at all. Cress seedlings turn yellow and fade away, or just lay down and die. What has changed?

Here are my hypotheses:

1)  Allelopathy. Because I reuse the soil it now contains bits of seedlings and roots. These body parts may inhibit germination.

2)  Soil mix: I have been supplementing reused soil with peat moss, perlite, and sand. This may affect growth.

3)  Temperature: Days are getting warmer. This may be activating pathogens that cause damping off.

I sow a new tray of cress using a sanitary mix, with no recycled ingredients. The results are dismal. Cross off hypothesis #1. 

Cornell produced a very informative video that shows a New York farmer sensuously stroking abundant trays of green, and cutting the thousands of tiny seedlings with amazing efficiency. I am clearly not performing at an optimum level. 

And so I change my methods. I adopt parallel-ridge-type trays and employ a cup to tap the seeds proficiently into the channels. I do NOT cover the seeds with soil mix, but instead cover the trays. 

A couple of days later, two trays of cress seeds are full of skinny white threads topped with split shells and bleached leaves! I place them in the cooler of two greenhouses, take off the covers, and wait to see if they will falter or flourish. 

The fact that I am putting energy into solving this puzzle is itself a puzzle. What drives us to want to sow seed thickly in a shallow tray so that it has no chance to develop more that a single set of true leaves, and then snip its life short? The novelty of using these mini-greens to decorate a lone Diver scallop or dress up a serving of meatloaf to create a stark (and very deliberate) juxtaposition of comfort and pretentiousness is, or should I say was, the “next new thing.” At a recent Farming for the Future conference I had two very different conversations about the future of microgreens. A Washington state farmer was interested in knowing about the difficulty of producing this specialty and, more to the point, the profitability. A New York farmer remarked, with an air of superiority, “You’re still growing microgreens?!” 

The parade of culinary fads that occupies our chefs is a reflection of our consumer society. Laminate kitchen countertops will not do; they must be granite. Honeysuckle is out. Tangerine Tango is in. We need microgreens and foraged ramps and chocolate martini ice cream. When all else fails, we go back in time and (virtuously) preserve our heritage. And when the bill comes due, we crave comfort. Meat loaf and chicken soup. Or grilled cheese sandwiches. At Beecher’s on Broadway you can order a grilled cheese martini for the ultimate in comfort food. It is surely no coincidence that culinary fads trend in the opposite direction from the likely future of agriculture. 

Some food trends restore order to the madness of the “Top Chef” mentality. Slow Food was a fast hit with many who rejected the golden arches when they took on the parenting role. Leading an “authentic” life by eating “real food” resonates strongly, particularly with eaters who have never competed with slugs for their salad greens. When we forage for wild plants or pay more for eggs because the chickens were free to eat bugs, we evoke the past. We grasp for a simpler life as the present becomes more and more complex. Much thought has been given to the question of how we can meet future food demands without further degrading natural resources. The answers, say a group of experts, lie in shifting diets, reducing waste, and increasing efficiencies. Crop genetics will surely play a big part. This is a trend we would rather not think about. 

Increasing efficiency is the conventional approach to the future of food. Arne Hendriks, a Dutch artist, speculates about a novel scheme with a far different ending. It starts with zebra fish genetically modified to contain large amounts of Somatostatin, a natural hormone. As people consume the fish, their appetites are suppressed and their growth is arrested. Fast forward a few generations. The average human being is only 18 inches tall. Outdoor balconies that once served as open-air seating spaces are now filled with speed-crops of microgreens; vacant parks within urban ruins serve as subsistence farms. 

Hendriks’ whimsical plan points to an undeniable truth: the changes we have caused are out of proportion to our size. If we could shrink ourselves to the height of a chicken, a skinny seedling of cress would be a meal, or at least a portion of one. Our needs would be reduced to 200 calories a day maximum from the roughly 2700 the average American consumes now. But this is probably not the most logical way to solve global food problems. We need a realistic way to lessen our footprint—without shrinking our shoe size. 

Maybe, by virtue of their absurdity, micro-trends make us pay attention to the macro-picture. This, I believe, is Arne Hendrik’s point. 

Gary Paul Nabhan went to the Sierra Madre to relearn how little he was able to fathom of life. I need only go to the greenhouse to be humbled by nature. The truth according to microgreens reads something like this: 

Each individual has a mysterious set of preferences. 

By the time I get it right the fad will have passed.

Hydroponics have made my struggles irrelevant. 

And yet, 

Micro-seedlings are tiny pleasures. 

My cress seedlings have stretched to about an inch. And they are green! I hold one tray at a precarious angle and slice through the slender stems. 

It chafes against my nature.

My flagstone patio!

For two months I’ve been meaning to post this photo of my beautiful new flagstone patio, built by my son Kevin of 14-acre Farm. But distractions diverted my energies. First it was the head-to-head with groundhogs (more on that to come), followed by the Forest Ecology class with a wonderful, young, conscientious, you-must-toil-for-these-3-credits professor. Now, a thousand pounds of tomatoes and a trip to Santa Fe later, I am enjoying the Caryopteris and begonias spilling onto Kevin’s geometric patterns. This is the challenge I presented: Use my circular piece of flagstone as a focal point, and connect the utilitarian concrete slab that was poured (without a thought to aesthetics) behind my house many years ago to the part of the lawn that enjoys morning shade. 

Graciously. 

Plus, I want more garden space. 

To be honest, the part about garden space was implicit. Kevin knows that I always want more garden space. Which brings me to the point of this post, that is, addiction. Harmonious, unrepentant addiction. Are we not so very fortunate to be afflicted with the need to dig holes and scuff up the earth around petunias rather than, say, plunk our paycheck into a slot machine? A recurring mental image comes to me each time I see a person in mental dis-ease. It is a line, in the dirt or in the sand, take your pick—or, (apologies) shovel. One step over the line takes me from the garden to the dark side, where addiction is not tolerated by the same society that delights in colorful and textural displays, the creation of which occupy my mind when I drive, shop, live. We addicts are cut from the same cloth. Positively, it is called passion. Negatively—mania, compulsion. Our saving grace is that the world we manipulate in our obsession is endlessly fascinating. We dig, we learn. We strive to understand. We teach. Three-year-old Chloe, visiting from New Jersey, held a sowbug last Sunday and watched it roll into a pill. She stroked a swallowtail butterfly larva that was eating my parsley and laughed when out poked its putrid-smelling retractable orange antennae. She showed her mom. She learned, she taught. How many more can we lure over the line with the force of our passion? 

It feels, sometimes, like a race against time.

Pennycress: Superhero or Salad?

When is a weed no longer a weed? 

When it becomes the best option for making diesel fuel, say researchers in Peoria. We can thank the Agricultural Research Service for discovering that a pesky little mustard-family spring weed commonly known as field pennycress, or, not so commonly, as Thlaspi arvense, produces seeds that are 36% oil and can make truck engines rev and oil furnaces rumble.

Who knew?

And isn’t it convenient that when corn and soybeans are growing, pennycress is sleeping … and vice versa. 

I wish I could tell you that this pervasive garden pest offers the answer to the current economic slump and our dependence on the tenuous good will of our global neighbors in the Middle East. We could potentially grow 8 billion gallons of biodiesel without plowing any additional acreage. This is more than a drop in the bucket … it’s closer to a splash in the pail. In other words, even though pennycress can be grown in the off-season, even though it can be efficiently aerial-seeded leaving behind neither tractor ridges nor clouds of dust, even though it grows “like a weed” with no assistance from herbicides or pesticides, it is not the answer. It’s an answer for a biofuel industry that is struggling to meet the EPA’s required Renewable Fuels Standard without bumping up the prices of corn and soybeans and, in turn, everything else. Best case scenario: pennycress will help diesel fuel blends go from 1-5% bio- up to 20% bio-diesel, and greenhouse gas emissions will hold steady. As will the price of soda. But we’ll just consider that an adverse reaction.

But ... we need to do better than hold steady. In our stuff-stuffed world, where gadgets and fashions must travel from China to the freight depots to the diesel-fueled tractor-trailers to the Walmarts to our closets and rented storage facilities, we need to think about reaching that inner place where enough stuff is enough. 

So when is a weed no longer a weed? Turns out field pennycress is edible, as is another pesky little mustard-family spring weed commonly known as bittercress, or, not so commonly, as Cardamine hirsuta. 

There’s no down side to free salad!

Climate Change and You

Would you put a solar water heater in your home if you knew it would pay for itself in ten years? What about five years? Three? It is my guess that the tipping point for most is three years. More and more, I suspect that a key to quick progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions is making it possible and desirable for masses of people to retrofit their lives. Products that curb carbon emissions are available for those that want them and can afford the up-front costs. The challenge to getting them into popular use is two-fold: creating the impetus, and making conversion pay. 

The brilliant idea of exploiting the three-year payback period came to me as I was driving the 63-mile route between Allentown and Princeton in my 2008 Honda Fit. I did some mental math. At 14,000 miles a year and 35 m.p.g., with gas costing $3 a gallon, I spend $100 a month, or $1200 a year (more or less) on gas. So a car that got about 100 m.p.g. would save me two-thirds of that, or $800. My three-year savings would be $2400. Add the trade-in value of my Fit, and I have about $17,000 to spend on a 100 m.p.g. car that would start saving me money after three years. 

One problem: there is no 100 m.p.g. car. A 50 m.p.g. Prius would bring my three-year savings down to about $1000 and my budget to about $15,600. Sadly, the cost of a 2008 Prius is $2000 more than my allowance. Not only does buying the Prius stretch the payback time to nine years, the small amount of pocket money after payback makes it not worth my trouble. For the calculation to work, the trade-in vehicle needs to guzzle more gas than my Fit, or someone needs to get to work mass-producing a 100 m.p.g. car. 

So how do we address the price gap between higher-cost low-emission and lower-cost high-emission products. One way is with the government’s oft-tried tax rebate, which only works with those who have the financial acuity to follow through, and the resources to wait six months or more for their reward. Another tactic is to simply raise the price of gas, oil, and electricity with taxation, making improved efficiency increasingly rewarding. A third possibility involves government subsidies that support technological innovation and production, which could bring the cost of clean-air vehicles down to within the three-year-savings magic number. None of these options is high on the government’s to-do list at the moment. 

This is where the fantasy non-profit, Three Year Solution, comes in. Funded by well-intentioned (and well-endowed) foundations, its mission is to close the gap on energy-efficient purchases by providing buyer subsidies. Let’s look at that solar water heater, which costs about $4000 more than an electric water heater to install, and saves about $275 a year. Until the electric/solar cost gap is reduced, solar water heaters will continue to be found only in the homes of the extremely far-sighted or the exceedingly ethical—or capable do-it-yourselfers. A subsidy of $3200 would make a solar water heater pay for itself in three years, and would encourage all those with a concern for the environment (or with a broken electric water heater) to at least look at the solar option. 

As with any brilliant idea, there are complications. Maintenance of newer technologies requires specialized technicians, which may raise the cost of keeping the new stuff up and running, stretching the three-year payback to a disappointing five or more. Getting rid of that serviceable but inefficient electric water heater will mean more waste. A glut of used products may make them very cheap to buy, increasing the price gap. The biggest dilemma of all, and the most difficult, is the problem that points directly to its need: People, even environmentally conscientious people, are suspicious of change. It makes us feel that we are losing control of our lives. This is precisely why we all need a push that will help us to be the change, and an incentive that will remove the barriers to change, both perceived and real. If people literally “buy in” to a climate change solution, it will be difficult for them to dismiss the problem … one would think. All I need to get threeyearsolution.org up and running are:

·      A financial expert

·      A plan for getting subsidies to sellers, rather than buyers (so the sticker price reflects the three-year payback)

·      A list of energy-efficient products, along with a list of corresponding standard products, with prices and energy costs

·      A very smart publicity campaign

·      A few billion dollars

At the end of three years will ideas about personal responsibility for the carbon in the air have changed? Will electric water heaters and gas-guzzling automobiles be on their way to obsolescence? Will our political representatives have seen the light? Because this is a fantasy, I will tell you that all of this will have happened, and that the U.S., as a result, will have become a more hopeful place. 

But … back in the real world where Congress bickers about taxes while the world warms and the U.S. government shuffles a glut of subsidized corn to ethanol factories while doling out a pittance for soar and wind technologies, 191 governments met in Cancun and agreed that something should be done about global warming. Actual details about what and how are sketchy. There is an information gap and a perception gap between climate science and the way we live, along with the very real price gap that delays the retrofitting of our kitchens and commutes. Only in a fantasy world can we fix the problems caused by our emissions in three years, but those in charge need to know that we’re willing. “A word after a word after a word is power,” wrote Margaret Atwood. We must start letting policy-makers know by our words and actions that they should take off the blinders. We need to tell them that we are not as stupid or as shortsighted as they think we are. 

We just need a little help.