Residents of a parallel universe

 kw: see list at the end

Consider what these creatures might be:

They "live within their own universe...a universe that is both dazzling and complicated. Its existence is within a different time scale than ours, visible only on close inspection by those interested enough to look. [They] live their lives just as we do, surrounded by loved ones, competitors, and enemies, seeking to find harmony and health; and hoping to leave behind a legacy of well-adjusted progeny capable of carrying on after their demise."

Consider a time scale between 100 and 10,000 times slower than ours. Depending on species, "they" may reach maturity in a year or less, as many familiar animals do, or it may take many centuries. Communication is nearly always soundless, and it is slow. To converse with one would entail waiting hours to days between, "How are you?" and "I can't complain." For most, communication is chemical, via air-wafted molecules or waterborne ones. Each "word" is synthesized on-the-spot.

We are used to animals, including ourselves, that move at the speed of gravity, or a little faster at times. To reach out, or to throw something, is done in fractions of a second. "They" make motions that take hours to months to complete. Usually: some can grasp or throw even more quickly than we can, under the right conditions*. But usually not.

What are "they"? Plants. A central theme of the textbook for gardeners, The Nature of Plants: An Introduction to How Plants Work by Craig N. Huegel, is that plants are as complex as animals, and do nearly everything animals do except move from place to place (usually!), but on slower time scales (usually!!), and typically in different ways.

The Nature of Plants is not a book of stories, it is a compendium of facts, ranged in subjects from Light, Water and Soil to Reproduction, Hormones and Communication. The quote in the first paragraph above is from the Conclusion. 

The book has one tremendous lack: a Glossary. One needs a good memory to read more than a page or two into the book, because one will learn new botanical and chemical terms on nearly every page. Perhaps you are familiar with xylem and phloem, the fluid-bearing tissues that, respectively, bring water (and its contents) from the roots, and transport "processed water" throughout the plant to supply sugar and nutrients. It's less likely that most folks know what is a prothallus (the sexual generation of a fern; the fronded plants we see are asexual), or the cell types parenchyma, collenchyma and sclerenchyma that make up all the tissues of plants. Then the parts of a flower: receptacle, sepals, petals (the flower's "clothing"), stigma, style, ovary, ovules (female parts), stamen, anther, and filament (male parts). Those aren't too bad, but then for ferns (the asexual spore-bearing generation), analogous parts are indusia, sporangia and sori. And on and on it goes. I felt lucky that I studied botany early in my college years; still I learned several new terms. If you intend to keep the book, take notes: Make your own index of terms and concepts you want to remember; the book's index is sketchy.

As I said, this is a book for gardeners, written as a textbook to make us aware of all the needs a plant has. For example: When buying a shrub or tree for your yard, do you know how to check if it is root bound? If the roots are growing in spirals, around and around the pot, and you plant it in the ground without doing a little spreading and even root pruning (carefully!), then as the plant grows and the roots increase in diameter, that clot of spiraling roots will become a roadblock to growth beyond a few years. Perhaps that is okay if you got a dwarf tree in the first place, but it will be less healthy than a dwarf tree that didn't spend very long in the pot before being planted out.

Do plants think? There is some research that indicates they do have something similar to nerve impulses, even electrical communication within (an electric signal is used in the leaf of the Venus flytrap, for example). Some scientists think the roots are the "brain". If we learn to communicate with them (very slowly), perhaps they will tell us.

To repeat: plants do everything we do except move about the landscape. I read in a different book, years ago, that a shrub or tree is analogous to a colony of tiny animals, with the growing tips of the twigs being the "animals". Over time, the growing, branching tips gain genetic differences, similar to the way successive generations of animals are genetically different from their ancestors. There are also some vining plants that do move slowly about, by growing into new territory, and rooting periodically, and when the oldest roots die the plant has actually moved to a new place. Over long spans of time, the vine can migrate surprisingly long distances. But these are not mentioned in this book, which is for gardeners. We have trouble enough with English ivy and Virginia creeper and even Kudzu; they may not abandon old roots, but any of them can fill a yard if we let them, as can Wisteria (There is a Wisteria plant in Sierra Madre, California that has destroyed the house it grew all over, and covers the entire one-acre building lot).

This book is worth reading through once, and then keeping on hand to look up helpful things. It deals in principles, not in advice about specific plants. With that in mind, it's worth having.

*The Venus flytrap has leaves that can close on a small insect in a tenth of a second. A number of plants have seed pods that build up tension as they dry, and then erupt to throw the seeds several feet away from the parent plant. The leaves of the Sensitive Mimosa close in less than a second after being touched.

kw: book reviews, botany, gardening

How big a harvest?

kw: gardening

I braved the 95 degree (35 C) heat to harvest this afternoon. The heat wave, plus a rainstorm right in the middle, has the tomatoes going wild! on prior days, I could pick a bowl of tomatoes every second day. This is in accord with past years. Today I got three bowls of four varieties.

Besides the extra heat (and we're keeping the plants watered, but letting the lawn brown over), there is one added element this year. Right after the plants were established, about early June, I found a bag (one lb, or .45 kg) of Miracle Gro fertilizer. Fortunately it had directions for a hose-end sprayer, so I used about a third of it on the garden. It got blue stains all over my hands when I was mixing it up, but they washed out. I have a very high section of rabbit fence along one side, and they've reached the top, about nine feet (2.8m).

In the picture, the small ones are Sweet 100, our favorite cherry tomato variety. The medium ones at the right are Early Girl, which began producing about ten days ago. The largest ones at the left are Better Boy, the most fungus resistant of the beefsteak varieties. In with them is one cluster of Roma, an oval shaped tomato that is the best for cooking. Sitting atop the cherry tomatoes are three purple sweet peppers. So far, of three plants (all different), this is the only one to produce anything.

I weighed this harvest: twelve pounds (5.5 kg). We can get tomatoes right through September, so we stand a good chance of a 300-pound (135 kg) year. It's a good thing we have lots of friends who like tomatoes!

More oil on the hedge

kw: gardening, hedges, pests

As I reported last May, I sprayed our hedge with horticultural oil spray to control privet rust mites. The trouble with them is, by the time you discover they are there, they've already done most of the damage they are going to do this season. So here it is, June, and I ought to have re-sprayed a month ago. The spraying last year reduced the problem a lot, but not completely. I spent a couple hours Sunday afternoon spraying, in hopes it would do some good this year.

I noticed on the back of some affected leaves, larger critters, barely big enough to see without magnification, and faster moving. Further digging at horticultural web sites got me an identification: privet thrips. Fortunately, they are also susceptible to oil spraying, but a heavier dose is recommended. As it happens, I did use a heavier dose this time.

We decided to put this on our calendar for next year, in early May: spray again and see what arises in June.

The spade and the fork

kw: local events, gardening, folk songs

Yesterday and today were laboring days. We have a compost pile, and a smallish vegetable garden (~20 sq m), and both needed work. One thing we grow it tomatoes, and we favor a variety that can grow up a fence twice my height, and back to the ground, "Sweet 100", a cherry tomato variety. We also grow, typically, two or more other varieties that grow larger fruit, whatever is fungus resistant.

Side quibble: Many tomato growers aren't putting designations like VFNT on the tags any more. One has to know beforehand which variety is resistant, or try a variety and hope for a lucky break. It seems the varieties also change from year to year, because this year's Sweet 100 vines only survived a month after setting fruit, then were all dead of fungus infections. We had to rely on some volunteers from a grape tomato we grew last year for small-fruiting tomatoes in August and later.

We also grow other stuff, but this post is about the ending of the season. Some volunteer tomatoes grew so heavily that they pulled one fence half over. Saturday morning's task was to harvest the rest of the vegetables (in addition to tomatoes, we had sweet peppers and broccoli still growing. The cucumbers grew for only half the season, then collapsed. Probably another fungus), then fix the fences. We have rabbit fence four feet high (1.2 m) all around, except for a removable gate, and also the section on the North side is over ten feet high (3+ m), for climbing vines.

Then we tackled the compost pile. It is almost four feet wide (~1.1 m), more than six feet long (1.9 m), and was about 2.5 feet deep (0.7 m). It has been a-building for about six years, since the last time we harvested finished compost. Finished compost has a density about half that of water, so the harvest required moving about a ton of material. While clearing the garden, I'd uprooted and chopped all the plants, so I had quite a pile of plant matter set aside ready to restart the compost pile.

The upper part of the pile contained a lot of lawn clippings. I use a mulching mower most of the time, but I put some lawn clippings on the compost pile as a nitrogen source. The rest is fallen leaves and some of the kitchen garbage. Nothing goes down our garbage disposal (The only reason we have one is so the house can be sold some day). We had a tree removed three years ago, and a quarter of the pile was the shredded stump. I used a pitchfork to move the clippings and the shreds, and a shovel for the rest. As I worked on it, I remembered the old song, "Lavender's Green". Its first two verses go:

Lavender's green, dilly dilly, Lavender's blue.
Angels above, dilly dilly, know I love you.
Lavender's blue, dilly dilly, Lavender's green.
When I am king, dilly dilly, you'll be my queen.

Call up the men, dilly dilly, set them to work,
Some with the spade, dilly dilly, some with the fork.
Some in the field, dilly dilly, some on the farm,
Whilst you and I, dilly dilly, keep ourselves warm.

So I did both the spade work and the fork work, for this little task. Once I had the unfinished material forked off into a pile, I began moving the rest to the garden, using a wheel barrow. My wife did some of the spade work as well. Nightfall found us 3/4 done. This afternoon we finished. The entire garden is now about eight inches (20 cm) deep in loamy compost, and it is a sort of raised bed, compared to the past few years.

We put the freshest plant material on the bottom in the compost area, mixed the wood shreds and grass clippings, and put it on top. I'll put a couple of pounds of fertilizer on the garden and let the minerals spread through the winter. Now it's a hot shower (and maybe some liniment) for me. Glad that's done!

Oil down that hedge

kw: gardening, hedges, pests

This little mite, seen here in an image from Branching Out at Cornell, bedevils privet, camellia and similar plants. It takes a strong magnifier or microscope just to see them; they are less than a quarter of a millimeter long (about 1/100 inch). Eryophyid mites are unusual in having only four legs. They crawl very slowly and some call them "worm mites", but they are smaller than even the tiny C. Elegans nematode.

I have about 400 feet of privet hedge, and though I sprayed with oil last fall, I see signs of privet rust mite damage. So I bought two quarts of horticultural oil today, and I plan to spray both sides of all the hedge plants tomorrow. Fortunately, this oil is not toxic, just a bit messy. It smothers the little critters.

Last fall, shortly after spraying, I cut back the hedge on one side where it fronts a sidewalk, that it was overlapping rather seriously. The open side is beginning to fill in with new growth, so this is the perfect time to spray through the hedge to the back side of the leaves on the other side.