The Value of a Hoe

A funny thing happened on facebook recently. Generally, my online personality is reticent; I rarely make a peep. But I was so proud of myself for repairing my washing machine that I wanted to shout it to the world. My exact phrasing was: 

“Guess what I did today? Replaced the drainage pump on my 25-year-old Maytag (all by myself, with a little phone coaching from Jeff Schultz of Schultz Electric on Rt100/29). Go Maytag!” 

Thirty-five (that’s 20%!) of my “friends” had something to say about the comment.

This blew my mind.

To what do I owe the ability and fortitude that allowed me to pull off this amazing feat? Well … (blush) at this time I’d like to thank my father, who made me stick with a task until I got it done, and my partner, who gives me unending and outrageously extravagant emotional support, and the ladies of my book club, who offer me the very best of bragging arenas. And Maytag and Jeff Schultz and my internet provider and god and my country and the angels above. And my agent … wait, I don’t have an agent.

Oh, and my garden. Most of all, my garden. Why my garden, you ask?

Grasshoppers jumped from Cowpea cover crop to tomatoes. How convenient!

If you are a gardener, you probably don’t need to ask. 

Cabbage aphids require cunning. Strategy.

It is my garden that challenges me with problem after problem, day after day. My garden has taught me that the answers are never simple, and they are never the same as they were last time. It has taught me perseverance, creativity, confidence. What do you do when grasshoppers take little bites out of all of your beautiful tomatoes? You try your hardest to think like a grasshopper, and make the situation a little less pleasant for the hopping marauding tribe. You cut down the immediate weeds where they like to perch. What about when dense colonies of cabbage aphids cover the stalks of your kale? You blast them with a sharp spray of water. You squish them with your fingers. You bring in the ladybugs. 

Ladybugs in the greenhouse. Yes!

You make a plan for next year’s garden, and site the kale in a distant plot of land. You do all of the above. 

Vermin? Follow the trails of their destruction to the holes from whence they emerge. Drop in a few mothballs. Or you get a dog. Or a very secure fence set 8 inches into the soil. Or you acquire a trap, and prop it open for a couple of days until the groundhog is deceived into comfortably waddling in and out of the metal mesh cage, and then … GOTCHA! Then you come up with a plan to transport it 10 miles in your car and release it (surreptitiously, sneakily, when no one’s watching) where you think, you hope, it won’t eat someone else’s garden. And if it does, well, it’s not your garden. You gotta be tough. 

You gotta be smart.

Groundhog trails lead to groundhog holes.

Tomatoes come with a complicated collection of conundrums. How do you keep them upright late in the season when the vines are weighed down with fruits and green? How can you spot a tomato hornworm before it strips half the plant? Is there a way to keep last year’s fungal spores from splashing up onto this year’s foliage? And what do you do about the stinkbugs that stipple your perfect fruits with sunken lesions that look bad and taste awful? Each problem calls for diagnostic skills and intricate solutions far more elaborate than those required in taking a pump out and put a new one in.

The pump. Not so hard to replace. Really.

Even so, it felt great to be discussing the ins and outs of soapy water with Jeff Schultz—talkin’ pumps and hoses and belts. I’ve never felt the power of having a gun in my hand (and never plan to) but I wonder: might my feeling of triumphant power on fixing my machine (which, by the way, is still functioning) be similar? Might the feat of a successful vegetable garden make us less likely to seek power in one of the destructive means that are all too common in our society? 

These are things I will never know. One thing I do know is this: we thrive on feelings of power. Our emotional health depends on sensing that we are in control. The garden helps us to achieve this status. In fact, there is empirical evidence that this is true. Dr. Jill Litt of the University of Colorado has determined that “community gardeners (and in some instances home gardeners) had statistically higher ratings of all psychological, social and health measures, after adjusting for age, educational attainment and neighborhood socioeconomic status.” (1)

So there you go. I have no illusions that I’ll convince others that, based on studies, and life experience, gardening is one of the pursuits that makes life worth living. 

Still, it’s true. 

I know, and my Maytag knows.

(1) http://artsandsciences.colorado.edu/magazine/2011/08/gardens-improve-personal-and-neighborhood-health-team-finds/

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.

Spring. Boing!

You have to look closely, gently jostle aside a few leaves. It is happening.

Spring. 

Energy, tense and coiled.

Helleborus bud

The discarded bottles and scraps of plastic stand out discordantly in the fawny beiges of late winter. But it is happening, cell by cell, buds expanding, their waxy protective scales ready to fold back and reveal … spring. 

Boing!

Mountain laurel in early March

Sedums wear intense colors. Mosses are greener, succulents getting plumper by the day. Moss phlox is becoming itself again. Beneath last year’s dried and tired hydrangea clusters, buds are evident on opposite sides of stems.

Moss phlox

Promises, promises.

Spring keeps us on edge. Waiting, watching.

It makes us all a little more alive. It makes us want to prepare to celebrate … life.

It helps us, a little, to forgive death.

Sedum 'Angelina'

The Beet Germination

Note the hole. Note the position of the hole.

At first I wasn’t sure what was happening to my beet seeds. After planting and planting again I had only a handful of seedlings to show for it. Were the seeds carried away by ants? Ruined by humidity? Eaten by rodents? But then mouse-sized holes with no evident bottoms opened up, coincidentally, in my beet bed. A more obvious clue was the chewed open ‘Merlin’ beet seed package in the plastic box with the cracked top. That together with the empty seed shells that littered the box’s bottom and the ground around the scene, plus the scattered mouse droppings, clinched it. Sure enough, according to A. Phillip Draycott’s Sugar Beet, “Using its sense of smell, the field mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus) is able to detect the exact location of ungerminated beet seeds at a depth of at least 3 cm. shortly after they have been sown.” How very clever of them.

Beet seeds are encased in a hard shell. Mice take the seeds, and leave the shell.

Compared to mice, we are woefully deficient in the olfactory department. Mice have approximately 1,300 olfactory receptor genes, of which some 1,100 are functional, whereas we have only about 350 functional genes out of 1000.  (Shepherd, 2004)

But wait. It turns out that, even if 80% of its apparatus is removed, a mouse is still an accurate smeller. Our 350 genes should be at least equal to a mouse at 20% sniffing capacity. But smell, it appears, is not as cut-and-dried as the gene count makes it appear; it is tied to evolution. We (having lifted our noses up from the dirt … mostly) are attuned to the aromas of garlic roasted in butter, bread baking, and apple pies crusting with cinnamony lusciousness. A mouse’s specialty is, apparently, beet seeds.

As regular readers may remember, I have a trio of young cats that are being raised, ostensibly, to patrol the area. They are named, appropriately, after hurricanes: Sandy, Irene, and Ivan. But, as readers may also recall, these lovelies would be more likely to compound the problem than solve it if I were to allow them to blow through greenhouse number 2 (where I grow, among other things, delicate microgreens) which I will not, at least until they settle down into a hunting, sleeping, pooping outdoors routine rather than the one they practice now: racing after each other at top speed, taking naps in my tatsoi, and ignoring my attempts to “litter train” them by inserting their cat turds anywhere they please.

Hurricane Irene

By the way, a cat's olfactory membrane, at about 14 sq. cm., is about four times the size of ours, so they have us beat in the smell sense as well. For comparison, the human olfactory membrane is a mere 4 sq. cm. But a mouse will smell a cat long before a cat will smell a mouse. (A sudden inspiration has just occurred to me, but more on that later)

Ever since I cracked the case of the pilfered seeds, I have refrained from planting beets in the catless greenhouse. But, complicating the problem is an ancillary predicament: carrots are unsuitable for that greenhouse also, due to the nasturtiums (you remember, the nasturtiums that harbor the whiteflies?), so carrots get priority in the catted space. Therefore, I am determined to find a way to get beet seeds to survive the mice until they germinate.

The long and the short of it is, I planted beets today—my third try since the number of daylight hours topped the magic 10. I planted 3 rows of 2 varieties of beet. On top of the bed I placed 5 mousetraps of 2 types. One is a standard, wooden, snap your finger off type, the other a newfangled white-shark-jaws-of-death plastic affair. Consider it a mousetrap trial, for the mice will surely rush to the scene. There is no doubt in my mind that they go to sleep after a hard night of plundering my beds dreaming of the next rich cache of beet seeds that I will so kindly provide for them. I can hardly wait until tomorrow to see if I, with my deficient sense of smell and my hard-hearted gardener’s sensibility, have prevailed in game of cat, mouse, and beet. Will they prefer the smell of cheddar, or the alluring perfume of beet seed? Soon, I will know.

And if my bed still comes up empty, I have a clever back up plan that might work. Would a mouse be deceived by its own olfactory prowess if I were to strategically transplant clumps lifted from a lightly used litter box?

It's a little scary to find oneself thinking like a mouse. 

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.  

Gardening in Winter

"Why don’t we have baby carrots?” This is the question Chef Robert is asking me, in late January. Baby carrots are a staple of the beautifully designed gourmet plates that Robert sends out from the kitchen and in to the elegant dining room night after night. This is serious.

I would have carrots, I tell him, if it weren’t for the cats. And the nasturtiums. 

Robert looks at me sideways, with annoyance.

Two cats: double trouble

I had a whole bed of carrots in the top greenhouse—Rainbow, Nelson, Yellow Sun—but the kittens chose that bed for their playground. They trampled the greens and, just for fun (you know how kittens like to have fun) pulled out the roots, leaving little tiny premature carrots lying all over the ground. But you’ve seen my beautiful baby turnips, haven’t you?

“Yeah I’ve seen them. They’re white.”

Hakurei turnips, in January!

I had another two beds of carrots in the second greenhouse – you know, the one we keep warm. But the nasturtiums self-seeded and I let them climb the tables and now they’re draped all over the screened tabletops in a gorgeous jumble. You should see them! Gary says it reminds him of the Caribbean! I’ve been harvesting about 3 dozen flowers a week for garnish … and they’re orange and coral colored.

“And that has what to do with the carrots?” he asks. Impatiently. 

Acrobatic nasturtiums

 Well, the nasturtiums became infested with whiteflies. I can still harvest the flowers, and even the leaves are clean—at least the small ones are. But the whiteflies spread to the carrots and they sucked all the life out of the green tops. So the tops stopped growing and the roots stopped growing and … well … the carrots are not really worth harvesting.

“So,” (voice clipped) “ … when will we have carrots?” 

Cat atop the carrot seedlings.

I planted more carrots – two beds more, in fact – in the top greenhouse about a month ago, but the days are so short that they took forever to germinate. And the kittens keep scratching in the beds. I have chicken wire and plant trays all over the carrot rows but the cats get under the wire and toss the trays around. They make a game of it, hiding and chasing each other out and up and over the chicken wire. And so my seedlings are still tiny, and most of them aren’t doing too well. 

Are we carrots yet?

Robert sighs. “Ok so no carrots. What happened to the parsley?”

Well, I was picking bunches of it until a week ago … remember? But parsley is related to carrots so when the whiteflies got into the carrots they ruined the parsley too, and I figure that you can order parsley pretty cheaply this time of year, so …

At least somebody's enjoying the parsley.

Silence. 

I stand up and head for the door. Just as I’m about to make a clean exit, I hear,

“And kale?” He looks up at me. Grimly.

Oh. Kale. 

Remember the hurricane, I ask?

“That was 3 months ago.” Robert’s voice is flat. Irritated. 

Yes, well, I planted the kale in the top garden because of the groundhogs—they’re not quite as bad up there. But when the hoophouse blew down and the sheep got out and ate every head of cauliflower they ate the kale too. My plan was to harvest the kale growing outside through December and then start harvesting what I planted in the upper greenhouse. But I had to start harvesting the greenhouse kale early so it’s pretty picked over. Plus the gray aphids that jumped onto the kale from the savoy cabbage are getting a little out of hand. I tried to start some more kale in the fall but the week I transplanted them we had no sun, no sun at all!  So all but five of them rotted. But the five are growing well! In another three weeks or so …

Robert rolls his eyes. 

Too beautiful to eat?

But the collards are looking great, don’t you think? I can bring you at least three big bunches a week. And the chard is beautiful too.

“Kale is trendy right now; collards are not cool. And I hate chard.”

Case closed.

What I’d like to say, and what Robert would not like to hear, is this. 

So here’s the thing: January, in Pennsylvania, is a challenge. It’s not one of those other J-months when fat heads of broccoli and tight, red-ribbed rounds of radicchio make heroes out of farmers, when exponentially growing tomato plants are laden with plump green promise, when the grasshoppers and stink bugs are still too tiny to do damage. In those other J-months, plants want to grow. In January, the greenhouse is the only place in town for aphids and whiteflies to suck plant juices and for kittens to dig holes and deposit their doodoo. It’s not fair to judge me by January’s skinny roots. And, by the way, who else do you know that’s producing beautiful heads of lettuce in January?!

Photo taken January 25th. No lie!

But the truth is, I’m equally disappointed with the carrots, the kale, and the parsley … not to mention the arugula.

This week, I planted three rows of red-ribbed chicory. It’s colorful, and it’s trendy. It likes cool weather and it’s not related to carrots. I have high hopes for red-ribbed chicory. It’s Italian. It will remind Robert of Tuscany, or Venice.

Ladybugs to the rescue.

But it is still January. I’ve released 1500 ladybugs and a vial of lacewing eggs. I’ve cut an entire roll of chickenwire into garden-bed-sized pieces and introduced the cats to a litterbox filled with nice, loose kitty litter. Every day I wet down the beds so that they will be a little less diggable—for cats, that is. I stick dandelion diggers and trowels and wooden stakes in the beds—anything that might serve as a kitty impediment. And yet, one thing I know is true: I might solve the problems of now, but something else, something unpredictable, is bound to happen. Last year, rabbits created fur-lined birthing beds in the carrot greens, and mice eviscerated the beet seeds before they had a chance to germinate. Maria, the rambunctious Great Pyrenees pup trampled the lettuce. The outdoor wood furnace malfunctioned causing the ceiling-mounted heating elements to drip icicles and the chard to freeze. We brought in kerosene heaters, which spewed a coating of black dust over every, and I mean every, green leaf. Superstorms, deep freezes, equipment malfunctions, and animal invasions are facts of life. Especially in January.

On the bright side, there are no groundhogs in January. They are, it seems, smarter than us. They know better than to look for baby carrots when the ground is frozen.   

True Confession 1: Robert’s name is not really Robert.

True Confession 2: The real chef (whose name is not Robert) is nicer than Robert and would never say those things. 

But I know he thinks them.

Spinach: the gritty truth

You may remember when supermarket spinach was a recognizable plant, with leaves attached to stems. You dunked and swished it in a basin of water and the grit would fall from the crinkled leaves. You would separate the leaves from the stems, tossing the tough, fibrous stalks into the garbage and chopping the not-so-tough stems for cooking. A second dunking and swishing followed and maybe even a third. But still, a grain or two of grit would sometimes spoil the sensory feel of eating the soft green leaves, steamed for only the number of seconds it took for them to wilt.  

I always supposed that spinach was grown in sandy soil, and that the grit that clung tenaciously to the savoyed leaves was sand that resisted my dunking and swishing. But now, as I harvest spinach leaf by leaf throughout the winter months, I have reason to doubt that assumption. The first leaves of fall are rounded and tender—the same as the baby greens pre-washed and packed in 5-ounce bags and shipped from California (but they hold their freshness for days longer … without irradiation). As the weeks pass the leaves change their shape; they acquire waves and ridges, and develop a more substantial feel. At some point in their maturation, I begin to feel a grittiness on the backs of the leaves, even though my soil is not at all sandy. When I examine the leaves very closely I see constellations of crystals concentrated on the leaf veins, and spreading outward. Spontaneous eruptions of salt.

Do you see the crystals?

I now suspect that some of that grit I was unable to wash off came from the spinach leaves themselves.

Spinach is renowned for its health benefits—its vitamin A content is through the roof, and B₉, C, and K amounts are more than respectable. But there’s one nutrient spinach does not offer us, even though it has plenty of it, and that is calcium. The calcium robber—otherwise known as the antinutrient—is oxalate, an organic acid contained in fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, chocolate, and even in our own bodies. 

(Our cells produce it and it’s in chocolate. How bad can it be?)

In the spinach plant, and in many other plants as well, the oxalate binds with the calcium to make crystals, effectively seizing the calcium for the plants’ own functions. These crystals are the salt-like particles I feel on the backs of the leaves. Nobody’s exactly sure what good the calcium-oxalate crystals do for the plant. After all, we don’t know everything. But one theory is that they deter chewing insects. 

Now you see them!

Even though, as I mentioned, our bodies always contain oxalates (our cells routinely convert Vitamin C to oxalates) this antinutrient has gotten a bad reputation in some circles. It is blamed for kidney stones, though this has not been proven. In one recent study of about 250,000 men and women the researchers concluded that “data do not support the contention that dietary oxalate is a major risk factor for incident kidney stones.”(1) Instead, other complex factors are at work, which I cannot pretend to understand. The Harvard Health letter recommends drinking plenty of fluids to keep mineral concentrations lower, eating calcium-rich foods to bind oxalates that might otherwise cause trouble, and avoiding calcium supplements. Calcium in food and calcium in pills apparently act differently, proving that we have a lot to learn about calcium and our bodies. And spinach, no doubt.

There is one more twist—if you’re still with me. Here is the plot so far: A green plant chemically holds back its calcium from animals for reasons of its own. We (humans, that is) would like the calcium to benefit our bones and teeth, and are a little leery of the plant’s materials and methods. We don’t trust oxalate. At all. We fear that it will cause us pain, and whether or not the plant is at fault is not all that important. The plant contains the antinutrient, the calcium robber.

So what do we do?

We take back the calcium!  

That’s right. Researchers are looking into genetically manipulating the oxalate levels in plants. Natural mutants that lack crystals, they say, grow just as well. And if we eliminate the oxalates, our teeth and bones will get the calcium.

Here is my message for those researchers:

I humbly submit that there’s a better idea. We should recognize that we’re not that smart. We should remember that we don’t know everything. Maybe, just maybe, spinach has a good reason for making calcium oxalate crystals. And, the truth is, we can have our spinach (and its vitamins A, B₉, C, and K) and our calcium too if we just eat more kale, and carrots, and bok choy, and turnip greens. And drink more milk.   

And, by the way, don’t even think about messing with chocolate.

(1)Taylor, E., Curhan, G. 2007. Oxalate Intake and the Risk for Nephrolithiasis. JASN 18:7