I have a yard!

I spent the day moving the first of my stuff into the new house I'm renting. I'm very excited to finally be somewhere besides a one bedroom apartment. The yard's pretty shady but presents some interesting gardening opportunities that I'm working over in my head.

First! (to harvest garden sweet corn)

Well, it's not from the garden, per se. It's from the greenhouse.

When I got the keys to my greenhouse space, one of the first things I did was sow a bunch of field crop seeds. I didn't know if there would be a need for me to grow them in the greenhouse, but I did know that it can be a tricky proposition. Better to sketch out a quick SOP now than wait till I need one and then add a 6 month delay to the project as I figure it out on the fly...

Weed Seedling ID

I've spent the past hour reacquainting myself with the likely weeds I'll find in my plot, which ones are useful and what they look like.

While pulling up some chenopods among other weed seedlings, it occurred to me that some of these "volunteers" would be worth sparing. I went through my "Wild Plants to Eat" book along with a mess of extremely helpful extension weed seedling ID websites and came to the conclusion that I'll spare the two little dicotyledonous pseudograin weeds: amaranth and quinoa. 

Opportunistic Gardening

It's amazing what you can accomplish with some reckless enthusiasm and an emergency shovel.

I've been out of grad school/postdoc for half a year now but have been slow to acclimate to my new budget. After spending 75 bucks to rent my garden plot, I couldn't help but balk at the idea of spending hundreds more on tools, containers, plants and fencing - so I started cutting corners.

Warning: irrational frugality will be a theme here...

Craziest Landscape Tree Pruning Ever

It's how the Dutch do it.

A couple people told me it's common to see trees pruned like this out in rural areas - particularly willows. I assume the traditional purpose is to coppice for fuel and baskets - and here it's nostalgia for the countryside.

Weekend Short Stories

Some pretty cool links for your weekend:

Jurassic Park beer:

Fossil Fuels Brewing Co. makes beer with an Eocene-era yeast, formerly encased in a 45 million year old chunk of amber! Incredible, but apparently true. Viable Bacillus spores were discovered first in 25-40 million year old amber by Raul Cano (these spores are so tough you can't kill them with an autoclave). He then founded a startup (Ambergene) with the hopes of discovering ancient antibiotics (this was back during the natural products craze - when pharma companies sent explorers to coral reefs, rainforests and geothermal hot pools to find new biologically-active chemicals. Now, most just do combinatorial synthetic chemistry). The company failed, but when you can't make money, make beer!    h/t: AncientFoods

Living off the land:

The Resilient Gardener teaches us how to be subsistence farmers in a temperate climate: corn, potatoes, beans, squash and eggs.   h/t: Living the Frugal Life

A reason to like kale:

Organisms can optimize their fitness by reproducing early when times are good and holding back and focusing on survival when times are bad (if your population is about to experience an involuntary bottleneck, offspring born afterwards will contribute proportionally more genes to the population). This Week in Evolution discusses the reproductive advantages that an organism would accrue if it could delay reproduction specifically in times of environmental stress.* In PLoS one, Will Ratcliff cites examples of creatures from yeast to rats showing increased longevity (and delayed reproduction) when exposed to minor environmental stresses (calorie restriction, temperature stresses, low dose toxins).** They hypothesize that the consumption of "famine foods" (e.g. low calorie and nutrition and moderate toxicity) would be an effective cue for an organism to switch to survival mode.

"Plants high in insect-repelling toxins might be an example of such "famine foods", even if some modern humans have developed a taste for kale, coffee, or hot peppers. These plant toxins might have small negative effects on our health. But, if our bodies respond to the information carried by those toxins -- famine! population decline likely! delay reproduction! -- then those negative effects may be outweighed by the health benefits of setting our hormone levels etc. to values optimized for longevity rather than reproduction."

and Maps!

The U.S. by last names, but why no Italians?***
An incredible morphing cartogram displays everything
The world according to Americans
Intriguing, yet almost impenetrable

* Not to be confused with my long-favorite, TWIS.

** Whom I played in a band with out of the very-Davis J St Coop

*** I assume this map is more biased by the redundancy by which different cultures reuse the same names than the spatial scale at which the immigrant populations currently dominate. 


Ratcliff, W., Hawthorne, P., Travisano, M., & Denison, R. (2009). When Stress Predicts a Shrinking Gene Pool, Trading Early Reproduction for Longevity Can Increase Fitness, Even with Lower Fecundity PLoS ONE, 4 (6) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0006055
Cano, R., & Borucki, M. (1995). Revival and identification of bacterial spores in 25- to 40-million-year-old Dominican amber Science, 268 (5213), 1060-1064 DOI: 10.1126/science.7538699

We(eat)ding

The dominance of weeds in our community garden plots is truly unbelievable. You'd be forgiven for mistaking the whole thing for a crop of oilseed rape. Although several of the plots are well-tended and fenced (can you see the fences?), the majority of the field is completely yellow with Brassica flowers.

Farming on Luck

Well, we got our green beans harvested last Friday. I was in the corn fields at the time, but I heard they were able to pick up about 1,300 lbs of beans from a total yield of about 1,800 lbs.

A fair number of plants were heavy with recent rain and sagged under the reach of the harvester. We could have waited for the field to dry some, but thanks to weather forecasting we didn't - more rain was on its way over the weekend. The next chance we could get into the field, we'd likely have found the beans woody and inedible.

Still, not a bad donation to the food bank!

The People's Garden: part II

Well, all the plants are in the ground in our food bank garden.

It was pretty fun listening to all the real horticulturalists hash out the details to our plan, with frequent reference to the classic Knott's Handbook, which is definitely now on my wishlist. Those guys really know production ag - especially through their professional and familial ties to our local upstate farmers.

So here's our acre: It was winter cover-cropped in rye, the farm crew tilled it in, built up beds and lay plastic mulch (picture 2 x 200' strips of black plastic garbage bags) over granular fertilizer. We decided to take our chances and skip the irrigation tape. The whole thing was split into four blocks - each containing the appropriate number and width of rows to allow a tractor with 20' booms to reach everything. Each block needed to be limited to one crop family in case we need to spray pesticides later (which are regulated by crop family).

Best Atrium Ever

The entrance to the research institute I work at has a really nice integration of work space and the natural world.

They rotate different flowers and trees between indoor soil beds and a greenhouse to keep them fresh. Occasionally they have to cut down trees when they get big enough for their roots to damage the foundation. There's a bubbling fountain under the cement steps and some kind of vine covers all four walls up to the second story skylights.

The orchids are my favorite (though this may change if they replace that palm with a banana!). The greenhouse is packed with bark-mounted orchids of all sizes, which are continually rotated when blooming to various hooks dangling from ceilings and mounted on walls. The more fragrant species manage to perfume the entire first floor of the building.

It's pretty awesome.

Gardening a Forest

I grew up (mostly) in an old farmhouse in Delaware. The three foot thick stone walls that make up the core of the house are probably 200+ years old, and from the basement, you can see that the main floor is supported by whole, rough-hewn tree trunks. The farmland was bought up and developed before I was born, but field stone walls and small building foundations are still present, scattered in the surrounding acres of private and state land.

Mirroring a century-long trend that has occurred throughout the Eastern U.S., the original farm was abandoned and now-maturing secondary forests grew up in its place. The U.S. now has more forest than anytime since European colonies were established.

The forest on and around my parents' property is in decline. The suburbanites have been neatening up the woodlots that snake between all their plots, cutting down ugly and dangerous trees and preventing the re-establishment of many seedlings. Many of the largest trees are falling now. The pro arborists say the giant boulders half-hidden in the soil compromise the trees' hold, and I imagine the loss of their neighbors increases windthrow.

The Garden Plan!

My 20' x 20' community garden plot is up and running. This picture was taken last Thursday - note that our trees still aren't leafed out completely. It actually snowed as recently as this past Sunday.


North Neighbor was planting onions with his son when I dropped sweet corn in dual rows along the North and South borders (I'll be hand-pollinating them). Our frost free date isn't for another week yet, but the weather when I planted was consistently hot - though of course now they're forecasting hard frosts for tonight and maybe tomorrow, so we'll see what happens. I sowed peas a few days before the corn, but hopefully they won't emerge for another 2 days. My salad greens and carrots were sowed two weeks ago, when I raised the deer netting. I'm not too worried about them though - I had dropped some seed in my deck planters nearly a month ago, and all have survived several frosts so far.

I didn't take West Neighbor seriously when she said that weeds would become a big problem. I know a lot of people will abandon their plots to chest-high weeds later in the summer, seeding the rest of us - but I don't plan on having any bare soil by then. In another few weeks I'll transplant in fall broccoli and warm weather stuff - beans, locally-adapted melons and a panel of tomatoes from an amateur breeding project.

Stopping by after the first post-till rain last week, the problem became more obvious. The whole field had a slight green sheen of millions of tiny sprouts. It won't be much of a problem when I transplant in larger plants, but the carrot and salad subplot I sowed two weeks ago is an emerging nightmare. I'm gonna have to take my own advice to properly identify my salad greens. Maybe this is why other people built up raised mounds of compost and dirt to plant in.

Good thing I actually planted in furrows for once...

Hybrid Heirlooms?

Seed companies are now selling modern:heirloom hybrid tomatoes that are pest-resistant and generally easy to grow, while maintaining much of the flavor and general weirdness of old fashioned varieties.

The article quotes some serious gardener/farmers crying foul of the bastardized, not-true-to-seed hybrids, but I'm all for it!

Hybrid heirlooms are a gateway seed to a more engaged relationship with food. Beginner gardeners tend to give up if they don't get some good success right away, but an easy entry into more sophisticated fruits could tempt them to try growing the real thing.

h/t: Plant Breeding Forum listserv, Luigi Guarino

Nut Tree Cultivation

My boss posted an announcement for the spring meeting of the New York Nut Growers meeting next weekend in Delhi (apparently pronounced "Del-High). It sounds pretty interesting - with talks on the science, agronomy and agroforestry of various nut trees (and paw paws!). They'll be giving out nuts samples to eat and to plant. I was planning on going but MapQuest says it's more than 2 hours from here...

At least they have some nice summaries of the cultural requirements of these crops on their website.

Someday I'll have an orchard...


* btw, those paw paw seeds I stuck in my fridge in the fall are now in soil. They had some fungal growth on them and I'm pretty sure they're done for, but you never know...

Wanted: JOB

The job search hasn't been going great so far. I'm lucky that the agricultural economy never really cooled off these past few years and there've been lots of open positions. Unfortunately, despite that I could do many of these jobs in my sleep, pretty much all my applications so far have disappeared into the black hole of corporate websites. I don't know what kind of competition is out there right now, but I expect at least part of my problem is that the initial HR screeners (understandably) have no clue who actually is qualified for these positions.

I'm gonna have to tweak my cover letter or something - cause so far demonstrated expertise in diverse statistics, field design and molecular biology isn't getting me through the front door for any of these molecular genetics positions. I guess if you don't know what a QTL is, you can't judge whether someone can deal with them unless they specifically say they've done it in the past. It's the reality of the job market and I'll just need to find a way to adapt to it.

At any rate, no matter how my current leads turn out, it looks like I'll be in NY through the summer! I figure I'll just rent out a room in someone's house when my lease runs out. It'll be easy and a little extra cash is always nice.

I'm gonna go ahead and rent a plot at our community gardens this summer. It's a pretty good deal: 25 bucks buys water and compost (though not fencing to keep out 2 and 4-legged thieves). It'll be nice to get out in the dirt on the weekends, though I probably won't bother ordering exciting seeds from Seed Savers. I have plenty of home and research seeds lying around anyway and it doesn't seem worth it to buy seeds when I have no idea how good the plots are.

I'll start drawing up some plans this weekend. I had good luck with last year's salad mix and carrots so I'll direct seed them. I'll start some tomatoes and poblano peppers in the greenhouse. Hank, Black Plum and Ailsa Craig are probably the best of our research tomato seeds from last year and I also have Joseph's experimental Wild Cherry x Black Krim F2, which will be interesting. Maybe I'll see if I can get some of my boss' leftover sweet corn seeds too.

Well, I think I'll head off to my band's show to blow off some steam. Hopefully we'll have a decent turnout and I'll earn some deer fence money!*


* Hopefully the venue's on the groundfloor too. It's bad enough carrying hundreds of pounds of gear down and back to our attic practice space. Half our shows seem to be 2-3 stories up without an elevator...

Window Farming

While sitting bored at work, waiting for a computer alignment to run, I came across this on the NPR website.

It's an organization that's working to promote the collaborative design and construction of urban hydroponic vegetable gardens grown in plastic water bottles that hang in front of windows like curtains.
Hence, "window farming."

I'm pretty skeptical that the light that trickles through most windows will produce a crop that justifies the effort and expense of such a system. As someone who's spent many hours making Hoagland's, I can say that hydroponic systems are a real pain and, unless you could somehow feed them with worm compost tea, this system is a little too open-loop for my gardening aesthetics.* It's telling that the plants in all their pictures are pretty spindly. It's a lot more difficult to produce robust, good tasting food with hydroponics than with dirt and sunshine.

It looks pretty cool and I definitely get it from an art perspective, but it seems pretty gimmicky from a food perspective. I'm sure winter herbs could be grown just as well in pots on the sill.

At any rate, their primary focus seems to be developing an interactive and supportive online community around the practice, which is outstanding. I'd love to see more internet-based collaborations built around other forms of amateur farming too.**

We'll see if they prove me wrong about growing useful amounts of food though.


* oh wait! connect your hydroponics to your aquarium and you'll have most of your plant nutrition! On further inspection of the website, they're working on that too.
** hint hint, plant breeding

No-Till vs. Organic Soil Management

I just came across a cool USDA study on the impacts of various minimum tillage cultivation schemes on grain yields in the Mid-Atlantic. They compared a range of minimal-till farming systems from conventional to organic with different combinations of cover crops, living mulches and different levels of herbicide and nitrogen input.

"After nine years, corn yields were similar in the standard no-tillage and cover crop systems but were 12% lower in the crownvetch system and 28% lower in the organic farming system than in the standard no-tillage system."

The shockingly poor yield of organic grain here was due to a massive proliferation of weeds - which are extremely difficult to control without herbicide.

They also measured yield of corn that was grown conventionally on fields that had been in either conventional or organic production for the previous 9 years. Conventionally-grown corn yields were 18% higher when grown on fields that were historically managed organically.

Organic management (in this system) really improved the soil - mostly through increased nitrogen levels, probably. The catch though is that the organic fields were overwhelmed with weeds!

Sounds like a good opportunity to combine the best of both approaches.

How to Raise a Spider Army

Scientists at the USDA-ARS subtropical research station in Weslaco, TX are doing some really cool work developing spiders for biocontrol of ag pests.

They're working with cursorial spiders, which spend their nights running around on plants and their days in improvised silk bivouacs.

These spiders are voracious predators of bug eggs and larvae and can really knock out pests when they reach decent population levels. The scientists found that spiders seemed more deadly on cotton than on maize or soybeans (relative to other predators, such as ants) - and hypothesized that this may be due to the presence of extrafloral nectaries on cotton.

To make a fascinating story short, these spiders drink nectar from flowers and extrafloral nectaries to supplement their buggy diet! They also probably eat yeast (which grows naturally in leaking plant sap and nectar). The availability of these "non-prey foods" allow these spiders to mature faster, live longer and produce more spiderlings when their insect prey is limited. Furthermore, they can respond to the smell of nectar and can even learn to associate novel scents with a sugary reward!

They specifically mentioned that they found spiders associated with coriander, buckwheat and alyssum flowers, but they probably can drink nectar from all kinds of plants. Next, they're gonna try spraying crops with a sugary or yeasty scented spider chow to see if they can attract and maintain populations to help control pests. It's definitely a long shot, as any ecologically-based biocontrol strategy has all the complications and limitations inherent in ecology, but I'll be excited to see what happens.

In the meantime, it's an example of the type of interactions that you hope to take advantage of by planting a diverse, mixed garden surrounded by native plants.

Pancake Patch

Gene Logsdon has been pushing the idea of grains as a garden crop for some time - a "pancake patch." For a gardener in the pursuit of extreme, high intensity gardening projects, this was immediately appealing - and I say ranks up there with growing bananas in Ohio.

I put his book, Small-Scale Grain Raising, on my library que some months ago, but some local dummy is sitting on his borrowed copy (there's no excuse, it's a very short book). I'll probably just buy a copy when I get some money.

The wind was knocked from my sails this past week however, when my boss pointed out a problem with my plan. He was on a homemade bread tangent when I started asking questions about the logistics of getting usable flour from raw grain. This led him to an anecdote about a local mill that was trying to sell some variety of "local, organic" bread flour. Shortly after it appeared on the shelves, the co-op was inundated with complaints regarding the poor baking quality of the flour.

The fruit quality of grasses, like any plant, is heavily impacted by the environment. Mills routinely test and mix different batches of grain to assure that the final flour product has appropriate levels of gluten, etc. This little local mill, which was only able to buy grain from one farmer its first year, was unable to correct quality imbalances and was forced to sell an inferior product. They hope to recruit additional farms in the new year.

I suppose this isn't a deal breaker - it just means that cereals aren't completely foolproof.

Hmm...
I bet a dwarf wheat variety would make a nice front "yard."

Organic Crop Rotations

Crop Rotation on Organic Farms: A Planning Manual (Mohler and Johnson, free download here) is the result of an organized effort to capture local knowledge of popularly-nominated expert organic vegetable growers in the Northeast.

It was interesting to listen to the seminar speaker describe the impetus and main findings of this study. Textbook descriptions of crop rotation apparently tend to be rigid and idealistic - so the authors made an attempt to describe them in a more intuitive fashion that will facilitate on-the-fly rotations that allow for unpredictable weather and markets.

Crop rotations are key to preventing the buildup of host-specific pests and pathogens, while evening out soil nutrition when chemical applications aren't an option. Completely stripped down, they basically recommend that you keep a given plant family (e.g. tomatoes-potatoes-peppers-eggplants, legumes or melons-squash-cucumbers) in a given plot for only 1 in every 4 years. Grasses can be cycled more quickly since our local pests and pathogens here tend to be specific at the Genus instead of Family level. They also give common sense advice on how to prioritize which crops should go in the best fields.

I was shocked to hear that these farmers have virtually NO weeds in their fields. Apparently they pull this off with zero-tolerance for weed seed contamination in crop seed or compost and summer fallows (e.g. no bare dirt), finished off with hand pulling. On most farms, weeds are the No. 1 problem - so this is pretty impressive management!

I was also impressed by the extensive use of intercropping.

During the Q&A, we learned that overcomposting is a major problem (that doesn't help keep weeds down and is at times absurdly unsustainable). I guess being surrounded by horse farms looking to get rid of tons of manure is tempting towards overuse...

These farmers don't rotate animals onto their fields since they don't want the soil (that they work so hard to fluff up) to get compacted. They may occasionally bring in chickens or ducks (to eat slugs), but having to deal with fences to keep the animals in and predators out is rarely worth the effort.

One audience member asked if today's expert organic farmers are any better than their counterparts in the Middle Ages. The speaker mused that since all of this knowledge simply arose from lifetimes of local observation, that they probably aren't.

(Outside of new technologies of course!)