June 2015

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Planters Punchlines

Men’s Garden Club of Wethersfield

June 2015

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ANNUAL PICNIC - MONDAY June 1st, 5:30 -8:00 p.m. at the SOLOMON WELLES HOUSE 220 Hartford Ave. Wethersfield.  Wives, dates, guests, potential members are cordially invited.  The club will supply hot dogs, hamburgers, etc., beer, wine & soda. 

You are asked to please bring a dessert if your name comes alphabetically between Sey Adil and Fred Odell – an appetizer, salad or side dish if you are between Charlie Officer and Don Williams. Please bring your own lawn chairs.   Seating on the porch in case of rain.  Call Tony ASAP @ (860) 529-3257 to let him know how many people & what you are bringing.  

A brief business meeting will be held before we dine to elect the 2015-16 club officers and to discuss possible July/August activities.The following will be nominated at the picnic: President: Tony Sanders,  Secretary: James Sulzen, Treasurer: Richard Prentice.  No V.P. is proposed.  The V.P.’s function is to get speakers.   It was felt that without a V.P the club found speakers this past year and we will rely on the same system next year.

Rose Garden:  Individual Plots for maintenance were signed up for at the May picnic-meeting.  May 30 at 8:00 am the garden will be mulched.  Everyone is invited.

Compostable Matter

By Jim Meehan

Okay, so why do we hate dandelions so much?  (I say we because I think there are at least a few others that share my hostility.)  Mars suggested that perhaps if I understood the “Taraxacum officinal’s” role in the ecology of our planet I might find a reason to feel less bitter towards these malevolent yellow monsters that keep desecrating my lawn.  Maybe, for example, they are like bees.  Bees pollinate plants – everybody loves bees, except when we are under attack by a swarm of them.

             

Or, more similarly, perhaps clover.

             

Google-search for the purpose of clover and you will be overrun with adulatory articles about this low-growing herbaceous plant.  It sucks nitrogen from the atmosphere and “fixes’ it on its roots from where it is transferred to the soil; improves soil tilth and creates root channels; provides better forage quality and increased yield (if you like tilth you’ve gotta love forage); and (everybody’s favorite) furnishes pollen and nectar for honeybees and tends to increase the population of beneficial predatory insects.

             

Plus clover does all these things modestly without calling hardly any attention to itself.

             

So what about dandelions?  Since they announce their presence so loudly you would think they must have much, much more to contribute.

             

Here is what I found in online in the google.com “backyard-nature” group:

“The plant can be used to make wine, as a diuretic, and a source of vitamins and minerals. The root can be ground to make dandelion coffee. The head can be battered

and fried, and the leaves can be blanched and eaten fresh or cooked. Apparently they're not just useless weeds!”

             

To which I say, “Meh”.

             

But (drum roll please) “dandelion nectar and pollen is important to bees, and the nectar is food for the Pearl-bordered Fritillary.”  The what??  (It’s a tiny butterfly, orange with black spots.)

             

Apparently “honey bees flock to dandelions both in the early spring and in times of dearth when little else is in bloom.”  But, like we Irish and our potatoes, bees cannot live on dandelions alone.  Dandelions do not have some of the amino acids that are needed to produce protein – and all you exercisers know the importance of your post workout protein shakes.  And, even worse, there is what I would call the “Viagra effect”.

             

“Researchers have found that honey bees fed dandelion pollen alone have low success at raising brood. In fact, some researchers found that that honey bees fail to raise any brood when fed dandelion pollen alone.”

             

Maybe apian colony collapse disorder (CCD) is really just bee ED.

             

So, having tasted both dandelion leaves and dandelion wine somewhere back in my past when I most likely didn’t have any choice, and having too much respect for honey bees to give them false hope, or worse – I am now opting to permanently exclude these flamboyant intruders from my property.

             

Dandelions didn’t bother me that much back when I was working and had less time to deal with such things.  Actually before she went back into the workforce Marsha quietly dispensed of these noxious weeds with a device called a “Killer Cane” – also remembered on the “straight dope” website as “a green tube with a cap at one end and a push pump at the other. You filled it with weed killer and went around the yard pushing the pump down on the crowns of weeds. Great product, you could do the yard in a few minutes, but since it probably used Paraquat or Agent Orange you can't find it anymore.”

            

 Then we both began working all week and the dandelions fell off of our radar.

             

In retirement however I now have time for Daily Dandelion Patrol with my trusty fork-tongued weed tool – thirty minutes a day of fresh air, sunshine, and a modicum of exercise.   And my yard is yellow-free for at least twelve hours. 

             

If I happen to spot a Pearl-bordered Fritillary in search of protein-free nectar I gently carry it to the open field across the street.  It gives me an ecological purpose.

Heirloom Vegetables - Practical and Aesthetic Reasons

for Growing America’s Heritage Vegetables (excerpt)

By Bill Kohlhaase, Planet Natural

When it comes to heirloom vegetables, what’s in a name?

             

Plenty when it’s the historic Caseknife Pole Bean, a hardy runner that was the most common bean grown in Civil War-era gardens. Its pods, as you can guess, resemble a knife sheath. Or take the Sutton’s Harbinger Pea, introduced in England by the Sutton Seed Company in 1898 and winner of a Royal Horticultural Merit Award in 1901. One of the earliest peas, then and now, Harbinger lives up to its name by giving the first harvests of the gardening season’s bounty. Then there’s the flavorful Dr. Wyche’s Yellow Tomato, developed by an Oklahoma-based circus owner, Dr. John Wyche, who fertilized his garden with elephant and tiger manure.

             

Heirloom TomatoesThe most famous story connected to an heirloom vegetable’s name has to be that of the Mortgage Lifter Tomato. The Mortgage Lifter was developed during the Great Depression by a guy named “Radiator Charlie.” When his West Virginia radiator business suffered because of the economic calamity, Charlie took to his garden and in a few years, through careful cross-pollination, had developed a huge, meaty tomato that bred true. He sold starts of these tomatoes for $1.00. In a few years, he sold enough tomato plants to pay off his largest debt: a $6,000 mortgage.

            

 Stories of heirloom vegetables’ origins are a large part of their charm. But heirlooms, because of their hardiness and disease and pest resistance, are more than just charming. They play a valuable role in organic gardens. As the number of varieties offered by commercial seed companies shrinks, it’s encouraging to know that heirlooms are becoming as popular as they were in Radiator Charlie’s day.

             

Raising heirloom vegetables has become something of a cause, even a revolution, in the last few years. Reasons for the rising popularity of heirlooms are as diverse as the heirlooms themselves. Not only does the growing of heirloom vegetables and the saving of its seed preserve and enhance biodiversity, it makes available flavorful, condition-specific, disease-resistant vegetables that might otherwise be lost to the harsh economics of seed marketing and the even harsher practices of industrial agriculture. Growing heirlooms is a direct link to our heritage, making a connection to generations of gardeners that came before us and extending that link to our children, grandchildren and beyond.

           

Let’s Stop Calling Them “Heirloom” Tomatoes

By L.V. Anderson

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat

Following up on a series of tongue-in-cheek yet educational books by contributing editor David Kamp, Vanity Fair began releasing short video entries from “The Snob’s Dictionary” earlier this summer. After putting out an episode on American International Pictures for film snobs and one on Nick Drake for rock snobs, the magazine has finally produced a video for food snobs. The subject? Heirloom tomatoes.

             

In spite of its snarky tone and cheesy double entendres, the video is fairly informative, offering a decent definition of heirloom tomatoes: “irregularly shaped, vividly colored fruits grown from the seeds of non-hybridized tomato plants, thereby standing apart from the drab supermarket tomatoes, which are uniformly orange and spheroid.” Unlike the plants favored in industrialized agriculture, which are cross-bred for traits like hardiness and visual appeal, heirloom breeds are varieties that were pollinated without human meddling and that have reproduced for decades or centuries. Heirloom tomatoes often look weirder than conventional tomatoes, and they tend to be way more fragile, but many heirloom varieties have a superior flavor and texture. Plus, the genetic diversity of heirloom plants acts as insurance against blights that could hypothetically wipe out genetically homogeneous crops to devastating effect.

             

But as the very existence of a “Snob’s Dictionary” entry on heirloom tomatoes implies, such plants project a certain rarefied image. As the Vanity Fair video puts it, their perpetuation “has been helped along recently by beardy young neo-rustics who are only too happy to try their hand at cultivating antique produce.” Interest in heirloom varieties among the modish set is undeniable, but heirloom varieties aren’t really much like antiques—their value is in their genetics and their fertility, not their age, appearance, or collectability. Yet the very name “heirloom” perpetuates the idea that these old, non-hybridized cultivars are just kept around by rich people for their cachet.

             

Heirloom vegetables need a brand makeover. The food movement has enough of a class problem already; it doesn’t need misleading monikers making it look even more elitist. “Heritage vegetables,” as they’re sometimes called in other English-speaking countries, is a little bit better than “heirloom vegetables,” but “heritage” still gives off a whiff of aristocratic privilege. A much better label, in my opinion, would be “traditional vegetables,” which gives some sense of the definition of these plants without any caste connotations.

             

Or, better still, since it’s hard to convey the meaning and importance of so-called heirloom vegetables in a single word, why not get rid of the umbrella term altogether and let each individual variety speak for itself? One great thing about non-hybridized vegetables is that there are so many kinds of them with so many different traits and histories. Consider the Blaby Special tomato, an English wartime favorite that was thought to have died out until a scientist tracked down its seeds in 2006, or the Cream Saskatchewan watermelon, a Russian variety with ghostly white flesh. Lumping thousands of traditional vegetable varieties together in a single category—for the sake of distinguishing them from standardized conventional crops—is a tad ironic.

             

Can you think of a better name for heirloom vegetables?

oldest of heirlooms in native seeds/search’s catalog and seed bank

http://awaytogarden.com

SOME PEOPLE ASSERT AN HEIRLOOM VARIETY must date to pre-1951ish (around when hybrids became popular); others claim 100 years old as the cutoff.  At Native Seeds/SEARCH in Tucson, Arizona—whose seed catalog includes the motto “Ancient Seeds for Modern Needs”—such heirlooms would be mere pups. Learn about some of America’s longest-cultivated seed varieties in my interview with Bill McDorman, then-executive director of Native Seeds/SEARCH, where I bought seed for my very first oddball winter squash decades ago.

             

Native Seeds/SEARCH (NS/S) is a different kind of seed catalog. It’s a non-profit seed bank focused on conservation, and offers many things you won’t see anywhere else–some of them varieties that have been cultivated for thousands of years by America’s native peoples. Through its traveling seed school and other efforts, NS/S serves as a model for other organizations that want to do seed stewardship.

             

And in a shifting climate, its collection of Desert Southwest varieties are proving to have a common trait–drought-tolerance–that looks increasingly appealing as the planet changes rapidly.

            

 “There will be larger areas where these crops will be adapted to growing,” said Bill during our recent conversation on my radio show, which is highlighted below.

oldest of heirlooms in native seeds/search’s catalog and seed bank

             

Q. Let’s start with a brief background, Bill—and also can you explain the acronym SEARCH that’s part of Native Seeds’ name?

             

A. The acronym in Native Seeds/SEARCH stands for the Southwest Arid Lands Research Clearinghouse.

             

It basically just symbolized that we were searching for what was left.

             

The organization got started 30 years ago, because of fears we were going to lose much of the diversity that had made up our agriculture. There was no longer a reason for people to pay attention to the small, niche varieties of things that were left growing in the Southwest for thousands of years. We were moving to big agriculture—and all we needed were the new hybrids.

             

A group of visionaries here said, “You know, it’s probably a good idea to scurry around and save what’s left before it all disappears.”

             

It was out of that thought, in the late 70s-early 80s, that we were born. [Read the whole history of NS/S. That’s part of their Conservation Farm in the landspace photos above.]

             

Q. Though the NS/S collection centers on the Desert Southwest, it doesn’t just appeal to Arizona gardeners, does it? I know even living in New York State, I’ve ordered to see if I can coax some of those old beauties into performing in my garden.

             

A. I think there’s a really important concept here that gardeners are just now starting to become familiar with, and that is:

             

There are differences in the amount of diversity still left in the varieties of the crops that some gardeners are growing.

             

So if you buy new, modern industrial hybrids, the diversity’s been bred out: They’ll be more uniform. We can predict more exactly what they are going to do in specific conditions.

             

And those were bred from varieties that were either landraces or had been around for awhile. If you follow it all the way back to what Native Seeds/SEARCH tapped into—which was the oldest agriculture on the continent–you start getting back into varieties that were the basis for almost everything that we grow and eat in North America, at least from the New World foods, the ones that were native here.

             

So the farther back you go in time, there’s probably more diversity left in those varieties.  And one of the expressions of that is that it has the adaptability to grow almost anywhere.

             

So if you buy some of our seeds in New York, and you get them to grow and save seeds from those, you’ve adapted them to your climate. You’ve take the inherent diversity that is still in them, and you’re starting to express it in your own area.

             

And that’s the process that we like to promote: creating new diversity in our agriculture, instead of watching it disappear.

             

Q. Because of your focus, you sort of define the word “heirloom” to the extreme. Tell us about some of the oldies in your care.

             

A. The oldest evidence of agriculture within the boundaries of the continental United State is just outside of Tucson here. It’s a more-than-4,000-year-old archaeological site.

             

There’s evidence of a corn there, it’s a Chapalote corn [photo above], and we have what we think are the ancestors from that corn in our collection.

             

Of course corn goes back between 8,000 and maybe 10,000 years south of us here in Central Mexico.

             

And we have over 500 varieties of corn, from 50 tribes in the Desert Southwest, and we don’t know how far they go back. As one of the tribal leaders said to me once: They don’t try to define the number of years. They just know it goes back a long, long way, and we have the children of these crops. In a sense we have inherited all the care that all those people gave to those crops, by saving them where they lived—saving the ones they liked best.

             

And it was that simple ritual that was ending in the late 70s. Grandparents were finding no place to pass their seeds.

             

Q. Five-hundred kinds of corn?

             

A. Yes, I think we have 564 varieties, in every color of the rainbow.

             

Q. There was one that went viral this year, wasn’t there (to put an ancient crop in a modern perspective)? ‘Glass Gem’ corn?

             

A. I’ve had personal experiences where opening up corn cobs brought tears to my eyes.

             

A Cherokee man spent about 20 years breeding corn for beauty. He wanted to unlock all the colors and all the beauty he could find—using traditional breeding techniques.

             

After 20 years he started hitting on some spectacular cobs of corn. And during those 20 years the internet was invented, and we can pass pictures around at the speed of light, so:

             

Ancient breeding to find new beauty meets new medium—and ‘Glass Gem’ corn [photo above] took off.

             

Last year [2013] was the first time we had quantities so we could sell it, and about August we started getting photos back from people who grew it from all over the world.

             

Things with fluorescent green and pink in them—where did that come from? One person called it “Crayola corn.” So we had a contest, and picked the best photos to create a 2014 calendar. This has become the poster child for all those people who are worried about genetically modified crops, because this is the opposite.  ‘Glass Gem’ even has a Facebook page.

            . 

What are other “signature” crops of NS/S, besides corn?

             

A. We’ve famous for tepary beans [photo above]. They were here when the first Spanish colonists got to Arizona; the Pima Indians grew these beans in a sort of monsoonal agriculture along the rivers here.

             

Apparently they were wild here, but the beans were very tiny, so they just saved seeds from ones that were bigger and eventually bred this crop to be almost the size of regular beans.

             

They’re probably the best beans I’ve tasted for use in my soups.

             

Q. I know you have squash, too! Some very unique creatures, including one of the first unusual winter squash I ever saw, or grew. I think it was ‘Magdalena Big Cheese.’

             

A. Yes, with corn and beans, it’s part of the traditional Three Sisters of food crops. I’m curious as to which one you bought all those years ago? ‘Magdalena Big Cheese’ is one of our most popular varieties, and we’ve had it since the beginning.

            

Q. Way beyond these three crops, it’s a giant list of seeds at NS/S, isn’t it?

             

A. The number of names of things you’ve never heard of before, when you first open the catalog, is amazing. We have almost 2,000 accessions in our collection. We are a world-class seed bank now, and we are charged with taking care of these things. Five years ago we completed a capital campaign, and we are now in a $1.4 million state-of-the-art facility [above, part of the storage facility].

             

But we can’t just put them in a freezer, and leave them forever. We have to take them out, and keep them alive. To do that we grow them out, and do very careful data collection around them. And then the surplus of those seeds from our grow-outs is what we make available in our catalog.

             

Q. We can’t finish our conversation without some mention of chiles!

             

A. Again, they go way, way back. But at the base of it all—and many gardeners don’t know this—all chilis evolved from one plant, what we call chiltepins [above photo]. It’s a wild chili that grows wild here in Arizona. They’re tiny fruits, like little round things, and they are very hot. And they are packed with diversity.

             

All the different sizes and shapes and colors, and all the different ranges of heat in chili peppers that we have today all came out of this plant.

             

So you have tremendous power when you start growing chiltepins, to select for something that you really like.

             

The power to do this is what has been largely taken away from us in the 20th and early 21st century. That’s the crime. We forgot that we’re the ones who created all this food in the first place-and we still have the power.

That's quite a side salad: The world's largest tomato

By Thomas Burrows for MailOnline

It took the best part of 20 years to come to fruition.

             

But plant breeders have finally launched a collection of super-sized tomatoes that can feed an entire family.  The new tomato plants, called Gigantomo, can grow enormous fruits up to 10 inches wide and as heavy as 3lbs - about 12 times the size of an average salad tomato.  The super-sized tomatoes are so large one tomato alone can serve up to four people and grow up to 6ft tall

             

The revolutionary tomatoes have now gone on sale in Britain just in time for gardeners to buy them before spring arrives.  Each plant can grow to 6ft tall and yield as many as 11 tomatoes but must be supported to prevent it buckling under the weight of the fruit.

             

The new variety is the result of almost two decades of research and development by breeders in the UK and the US.  Simon Crawford, one of the UK's leading plant breeders, was called in five years ago to finish the work of late American grower Paul Thomas, who spent 15 years trying to breed the huge tomato.  Mr Thomas passed away before he saw his tomatoes hit the market, but Mr Crawford was able to complete the breeding programme to ensure there would be enough seed to sell commercially.

             

The new tomato plants, called Gigantomo, can grow fruits up to 10 inches wide and as heavy as 3lbs.  They were launched in the US last year by seed company Burpee and sold under the name SteakHouse. The huge tomatoes were such a hit that they have now been brought across the Atlantic but EU chiefs ruled the name unacceptable so it was changed to Gigantomo.

            

 Gigantomo tomatoes can only be bought from Lincolnshire seed seller Van Meuwen, which has launched them in their spring 2015 plant collection. Simon Crawford who helped develop the tomato plants said he was hopeful it would lead to a world record sized tomato

             

The company has even stumped up a £5,000 jackpot for anyone who can grow a Gigantomo tomato that breaks the world record of 7lbs 12oz.  The plants will be sold as plugs - seedlings that have already been grown for a short time so they can be put directly into pots - costing £14.99 for a pack of five. It can also be bought as seed, with six costing £3.99.

             

Gigantomo is a variation of the beefsteak tomato but its exact heritage is unknown as Mr Thomas did not keep details of which tomatoes he had cross-bred during his years of trials.   Mr Crawford, who is based in Spalding, Lincolnshire, said: 'Put simply, Gigantomo is the world's largest commercially-available tomato. 'Each plant will yield nine to 11 fruits, and each tomato is so big it will feed a family of four. The fruits are so heavy that the plants need support to stop them falling over.

             

'Although the beefsteak tomato is not a hugely popular line in the UK, growing a really big tomato that tastes great is something a large majority of gardeners would like to do.  Gigantomo is an incredibly interesting variety that grows very well in the UK, and it won an Royal Horticultural Society award of garden merit following growing trials last year.  It's got to be greenhouse grown because otherwise it would fruit too late, but provided that happens it will grow well pretty much anywhere in Britain. With the right kind of care we think it would be possible to grow a tomato that could break the world record.'

             

The creation of super-sized tomatoes comes a month after Mr Crawford helped develop the world's first blight-resistant tomato.   The revolutionary tomatoes were the result of eight years of research and development between breeder Simon Crawford and Bangor University PhD student James Stroud.   Mr Crawford initially stumbled across the disease-resistant genes while carrying out trials at his farm in Yorkshire in 2006.  While most of his varieties were duly wiped out by blight, one was untouched by the deadly bug. 

             

Together with Mr Stoud, whose PhD was about tomato and potato blight, and using that variety the pair embarked on a complicated breeding programme using the strain.  By cross-breeding the variety they were able to create the first ever tomato to boast the PH2 and PH3 genes, which are resistant to the pathogen Phytopthera infestans, the Latin name for blight.

             

The tomatoes, called Crimson Crush, are being mass-grown at a nursery in East Yorkshire and are available to purchase from Devon-based Suttons Seeds.

Horti-Culture Corner

Tomato Haiku by John Egerton

Forced to choose between

True love and ripe tomatoes –

Don't push me that far.

(More Tomato Haikus at http://www.chapter16.org/content/17-tomato-haiku-1)

May 2015

Planters Punchlines

Men’s Garden Club of Wethersfield

May 2014

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NEXT MEETING – PLEASE NOTE SPECIAL DATE, TIME AND LOCATION

Monday May 11, 5:30 pm @ Tony Sanders house @ 281 Garden Street, Wethersfield.  (Rain Date – if Plant Sale is rain delayed, then this is rescheduled  for May 18)  Reminisce about sale.  Pick from the leftovers for your own use or as a really cheap belated Mother’s Day present.  Hot dogs, beer & soda will be available.

Donate some perennials from your personal collection to the Plant Sale

Plants should be split and potted ASAP to look good for the sale. Please label all plants.  Contact Fred Odell (860.529.6064) for official pots and plant labels.

Plant Sale Saturday May 9th (Rain Date May 16th)

7:00 - 9:00 Set Up       Deliver homegrowns, unload plants, price plants, set up tables

9:00 - 1:00 Sell  Help customers, total up sales, answer questions

1:00 - 2:00 Close Clean up, break down tables, pack up leftover plants

Volunteer!        Contribute your own “homegrowns” 

President Tony Sanders will make the “go or no go” rain decision and get the word out.

                 

Weston Rose Garden

The Rose Garden was opened on April 15.  Tim, Tim, Howard, John, James, Fred, Ernie, Richard & Jim weeded and cut deadwood.  This year each club member is asked to volunteer to maintain one of the small plots on their own schedule.  A plan of the garden will be at the plant sale & May meeting for signing up.  More volunteers mean less work for each one.  This is the club’s major civic volunteer effort – please participate!

Annual Picnic

The annual Club Picnic will be held on Monday, June 1st, on the grounds (and porch) of The Solomon Welles House, from 5:30 until 8:00 pm.  More to come.

Compostable Matter

By Jim Meehan

     

The trouble with Creeping Charlie is that it doesn't really creep, like e.g. fog moving in onto the marshland. Instead it seems to randomly hop around, landing here in the midst of a hosta bed, there along the edge of a newly formed perennial garden, and there again winding through a pile of leftover paving stones stacked in the backyard.

      

 If it acted more like a well brought up ground cover and less like fast-moving guerilla greenery then maybe, just maybe, it might be thought as more of a flower and less of a weed.

       

Taxonomically it is known as "Glechoma hederacea". But like most criminals this aromatic, perennial, evergreen creeper of the mint family goes under a series of aliases many of them representing attempts to pose as a law-abiding, tax-paying, contributing member of plant society.

      

 It was called Alehoof or Tunhoof while being used by the early Saxons to clarify their beers. "The plant also acquired the name of Gill from the French guiller (to ferment beer), but as Gill also meant 'a girl,' it came also to be called 'Hedgemaids'".

       

Because of the shape and size of its leaf it is a.k.a. as "catsfoot". And, for no apparent reason, it is also called "Creeping Jenny".

       

But most gardeners simply know it as ground ivy and expend a lot of time, energy, and an occasional shot of "Roundup" to eradicate it from their landscape. Mars and I have spent the past several years working with an organic lawn care company to eliminate it from the lawn portion of our property. It is in fact the principal reason that we began to do more for our grass that simply mowing it.

       

A representative of the business had spoken at garden club about the dangers and downsides of chemical landscaping (which we did not do), and the benefits to both the grass and the environment of an organic approach (which was what I pretended I was doing by doing nothing).

       

At about the same time Mars noticed that portions of the lawn were no longer lawn, but instead medium-sized carpets of irregular green leaves and funnel shaped flowers -- not quite wall-to-wall, but getting there. A Master Gardener friend of ours identified it as ground ivy in a tone of voice that I interpreted as a horticultural death knell.

      

Now, after numerous applications of corn meals, glutens, foul-smelling fish byproducts, and mysterious "teas", "Charlie" has crept out of the grass and rejuvenated itself along the edges of and inside each of our perennial beds.

    

There, because of the density and vigor of its competition, it is no longer able to establish a carpet, or even a small area rug. Instead, like Al-Qaeda, it pops up in a seemingly random series of isolated pockets of resistance. And, like that organization, the elimination of one terrorist cell has utterly no effect on the rest.

       

It is a never-ending, ground-based, hand-to-hand struggle.

      

It is why I love gardening so much.

‘Seed libraries’ try to save the world’s plants

By Kevin Hartnett bostonglobe.com

     

A basic principle of any library is that you return what you take out. By that standard, the new scheme at Hampshire College’s library is a roll of the dice. Since last November, librarians have been lending out packets of seeds, allowing people to plant them, and checking them back in if—and only if—the borrower manages to grow thriving plants in the meantime.

       

The Hampshire College project is part of a small but growing group of “seed libraries” across the country, local centers that aim to promote heirloom gardening and revive a more grass-roots approach to seed breeding.

     

 The circulating-library model might seem like a strange fit with gardening. When you check out books and DVDs, you’re supposed to bring them back so others can use them, but with seeds, there’s a strong chance nothing will come back at all. And, in a world where fruit and vegetable seeds are available for just a few dollars a packet, free seeds aren’t a pressing need most places.

       

But libraries have another goal as well, archiving and preserving knowledge. On this front, seed libraries see themselves as an important part of a bigger movement, to bring the issue of global plant diversity down to the community level, where many believe it belongs.

       

The agribusiness model has given the world cheap, abundant food, but it has also reduced the variety of crops we eat to a handful of massively grow-able varieties. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 75 percent of plant genetic diversity has been lost over the last century as farmers have moved to high-yielding, genetically modified seeds. This dependence on a few kinds of plants leaves our food supply not only genetically impoverished, but also more vulnerable to blight. (Peru, which grew many varieties of potatoes, survived the potato blight much better than Ireland, which grew only one.)

       

The mission of cataloging and saving seeds has fallen mainly to big seed banks and academic researchers. There are 7.4 million seed samples conserved in professionally managed seed vaults worldwide; the biggest—the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean—holds seeds for more than 770,000 distinct plants.

       

But those seeds are locked away, not reproducing, waiting for plant scientists or a planetary food emergency to call them into action. This is why, to their proponents, seed libraries occupy an important (if still small) role in that bigger story: They actually bring plants into circulation, town by town, encouraging local variety and even potentially developing new strains.

       

“The more seeds you can get out into the field, the broader the base of conservation,” says Stephen Brush, a retired ecologist at the University of California Davis. “In the gene bank, evolution is frozen, there’s no more natural crossing. Seed [libraries] aren’t meant to replace the gene bank, but to complement it, and one of their advantages is they contribute to ongoing evolution.”

       

A few years ago, there were only a handful of seed banks around the country, including Richmond Grows in California, which is regarded as the unofficial spiritual center of the movement. Now there are more than 200, including libraries in Concord, Groton, and Littleton. They’re often housed in public libraries, but also sometimes attached to farms, greenhouses, or other local institutions.

       

The Hampshire College seed library developed out of a senior project by Hannah Haskell, who graduated last May. Just before leaving Hampshire, she delivered two boxes containing 250 kinds of seeds to the library, including many varieties of beets, broccoli, radishes, and pumpkins. College librarians began lending the seeds the following November.

       

They started slowly, with 12 of the easiest kinds of seeds to grow and return packaged in small coin envelopes affixed with the same kind of barcodes you find on library books. The library is still sorting out its lending policy, and in particular whether borrowers need first to take a class in plant propagation. The Hampshire librarians know that they’ll lose inventory along the way, and they’re prepared to live with that. But seeds present another challenge to librarians: They can come back, but different.

       

“Self-pollinating” plants like beans, peas, tomatoes, and lettuce have both male and female parts in the same flower, so they tend to predictably produce seeds that grow the exact same kind of plant. But “open-pollinating” plants like squashes and corn require pollen to travel from one plant to another—and there’s a significant chance that pollen from some other variety of plant, borne by wind or insect, will get in and create an unwanted hybrid. Katie Campbell-Nelson, vegetable extension educator at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says that one year she planted kale too close to collard greens. She saved seeds from that year’s harvest, and, “The kale I got next year was just this bitter horrible cross.”

       

At the Concord Seed Lending Library, which opened last year, “We only asked people to return seed on ‘selfers’,” says cofounder Enid Boasberg. Even so, the record wasn’t great. “Maybe five people [out of around 270] returned seed. This year hopefully we’ll get more.”

       

Aside from helping neighbors grow new varieties of plants, seed libraries can also help preserve local strains. Rebecca Newburn of Richamond Grows says that her neighbor had been growing his own variety of Italian heirloom beans for 23 years, and gave some of his seeds to the library after it opened. Similarly, Boasberg cites what she calls the “Polish Lady Tomato,” whose seeds, she wrote in an e-mail, had been in the possession of “an elderly Polish lady who had brought them from the Old Country.” The seeds are now being planted all over Concord.

       

Seed libraries may not shift the trajectory of American agriculture, but over time, boosters hope, they’ll allow communities to refine seed lines tailored to their regions. “Through the generations, we’re going to get seeds that are more locally adapted to grow and thrive in our area,” says Thea Atwood, who runs the Hampshire College seed library.

       

Brush acknowledges that seed libraries are “whimsical,” and unlikely on their own to reverse the long trends in commercial agriculture. But when it comes to expanding agricultural diversity, there’s a sense in which every little bit helps. “The more exchange you get, the more people who have their hands on that seed,” he says, “the better the seed becomes.”

       

Kevin Hartnett writes the Brainiac blog for Ideas. He can be reached at kshartnett18@gmail.com.

Seed-Sharing Snafu

An editorial from MOTHER EARTH NEWS

     

       

Some states have made it illegal for gardeners and seed libraries to share seeds without a permit. Rather than imposing laws that uproot the age-old practice of seed sharing, governments should be nurturing the free exchange of locally adapted seeds.    Seed sharing is an age-old practice that preserves seed diversity.

       

Did you know that in some states informally sharing seeds with your fellow gardeners is illegal? Hard to believe, but it’s true.

       

To ensure that seeds sold to farmers and gardeners are of good quality, every state has laws that require people who sell seeds to buy a permit and label their seeds with the variety name, germination percentage, presence of weed seeds, name and address of supplier, and more. Sounds OK, right? You’ve seen all of that information on the seed packets you buy. But in some states, seed-labeling laws define “sell” to include give away, transport, and even “possess with intent to … give away, or transport.” That’s right — you need a permit from the state to legally give away seeds.

       

Minnesota’s seed law, for example, is so broad that it basically prohibits gardeners from sharing or giving away seeds unless they buy an annual permit, have the germination of each seed lot tested, and attach a detailed label to each seed packet. This law is enforced by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, which has recently told seed libraries that they can’t distribute free seeds to gardeners unless they buy a permit and provide detailed labeling, even though the libraries aren’t selling the seeds. (The penalty for violating this law, by the way, is a fine of up to $7,500 per day!)

      

 The creation of seed libraries to facilitate seed sharing and preserve seed diversity has been spreading, with an estimated 300 libraries now operating nationally. Officials in several other states are now saying that the libraries can’t give away or exchange seeds unless they first obtain a permit and comply with the numerous requirements of the seed-labeling law. Needless to say, these actions have upset many gardeners who know the value of saving and sharing seeds that are highly adapted to their local conditions. Regulating seeds that are sold commercially is one thing, but applying such laws to seeds that are swapped or given away defies logic, history and common sense.

      

 Neil Thapar, staff attorney at the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), has reviewed the laws in more than 30 states so far, and he reports that about 30 percent of them specify that sharing seeds without a permit is illegal. Almost all the laws contain vague language that needs to be clarified to explicitly exempt noncommercial seed-sharing activities, he says.

       

A national group, the Association of American Seed Control Officials (AASCO), has produced what's called the Recommended Uniform State Seed Law. Even this model legislation appears to require permits for any seeds “transported” within a state, however.

       

Saving and sharing seeds is an age-old practice that should be encouraged. Given the challenges we face from climate change, we need to promote — not impede — the distribution of locally adapted farm and garden seeds. This issue may not seem like a big deal to seed-control officials, but it is a very big deal to thousands of home gardeners. AASCO should move quickly to revise its model law to exempt all forms of noncommercial seed sharing and distribution, and should take the lead in pressing for amendments in each state. In addition, other states should follow Alabama’s lead — its seed-control law explicitly allows farmer-to-farmer direct sales of up to $3,000 worth of seeds annually without a permit.

       

Hats off to the librarians and activists who are working to untangle this unfortunate mess.

Saving Seed with Oxiclean

tomatoaddict.blogspot.com

     

       

Most old time growers still save their tomato seeds using the old-fashioned method of fermenting them. The negatives to this is the amount of time it takes (days) and the smell. If you have ever had the pleasure of smelling a rotten tomato than you know what I'm talking about.

       

I use the Oxiclean method. Totally safe for the seeds, does not effect germination rates and takes about 40 minutes. As simple as it gets.

1. Cut your tomatoes and squeeze seeds into a marked plastic container or cup.

2. Add about equal amound of water.

3. Add 2 Tble. of Oxiclean and stir.

4. Allow to sit for 30 minutes.

5. Before straining stir then pour into fine mesh sieve.

6. Rinse well. Put back into container and fill with water again. Let sit for 5 min.

7. Pour into sieve again and rinse.

8. Put seed on labled paper plate and allow to dry for 1 week or more. Until dry. Store in jar.

20 Ways You Know You Are Addicted To Vegetable Gardening

www.veggiegardener.com

     

      I will be the first to admit that I am addicted to vegetable gardening. Over the last few years, I have caught myself doing things or saying things that has confirmed that I am a gardening junkie. There are many ways that you can be classified as a vegetable gardening addict. Here are 20 ways you know you are addicted to vegetable gardening:

1. You have a stack of seed catalogs on the back of your toilet.

2. You are confused and feel sorry for someone that does not garden.

3. You go to stores like Wal Mart or Lowe’s and browse the garden section in the dead of winter – even when it’s empty.

4. You buy three times as many seedlings than you have room for.

5. When you drive by an empty lot, you say, “That would make one nice garden”.

6. While at the nursery, you discover a variety of tomatoes that you have never seen and buy it because you got to have it.

7. You look for excuses to miss family functions because you just want to garden.

8. The only channel you ever watch on TV is HGTV.

9. The only websites that you have bookmarked in your Favorites are gardening sites.

10. You name your pets 'Brandywine' or 'Cajun Delight'.

11. You desperately want to hop over the fence and work in your neighbor’s garden.

12. You dig through the neighbor's trash to find anything you can compost.

13. You ask for a new cultivator and floating row covers for Christmas.

14. You spend more than four hours a day looking at gardening websites.

15. The only books in your bookcase are gardening books.

16. You carry a copy of The Farmer’s Almanac everywhere you go.

17. When you are looking at new homes the first thing you ask the realtor is, “Can we see the backyard?”.

18. You own more gardening gloves than you do socks.

19. While doing laundry you realize your clothes are dirtier than your kids' clothes.

20. You call your gardening fork your “pride and joy”.

Horti-Culture Corner

By Robert Louis Stevenson

“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”

The OCD Gardener

BY MARI LANE GEWECKE – journalstar.com

     

       

From my dining area window, I can see directly into the trunk and branches of an old silver maple tree. This is the prime location from which any of the neighboring squirrels taunt my dogs. The dogs are not the only ones who are taunted. Dangling from one of the branches, just a few feet from the window glass, is the cocoon from a bagworm.

       

The cocoon has been hanging on the branch for a couple of years, its bagworm inhabitant gone long ago. Too high to be picked and inaccessible from a window that does not open, the cocoon mocks me through the glass. Through wind advisories, through snowstorms, it hangs on.

       

While the bagworm cocoon does not occupy all of my waking hours, every time I look out that window, my eyes land on it, a reminder of a bug that got away. That I care enough to notice, and be bothered, indicates a tendency toward obsessing about my garden.

       

Some might argue that most gardeners are, to a certain degree, obsessive-compulsive personalities. While a stereotypical OCD action might be straightening crooked pictures on the wall – in someone else’s house, at a restaurant, in a conference facility – an OCD gardener is defined by the Urban Dictionary as:

       

“That one person at the end of your block, usually retired, who spends anywhere from 20 to 9,000 hours a week gardening. Symptoms include crying over your begonias, mowing the lawn 20 hours a week and sneering at the potted plant garden in your office.”

       

I know any number of gardeners who are more than happy to let plants (including plants that I consider weeds) grow willy nilly in their garden. But I probably know quite a few more gardeners with a tendency to obsess.

       

Signs that you, too, could be an OCD gardener include:

      • You have created a database of all the plants in your garden, including their location and watering needs.

      • During the winter, magazines and books gather dust, while seed catalogs become dog-eared from frequent browsing.

      • At April’s Spring Affair preview party, you don’t eat the dinner you paid for because you are too busy snapping up all the rare plants before somebody else can get them.

      • On the way to the door of an office building during the summer, you stop to pull weeds.

      • You also pull weeds from the joints of driveways and sidewalks … not necessarily YOUR driveway or sidewalk.

      • When mulch and grass clippings clutter the brick edging of your garden bed, you get out the broom and sweep it off.

      • After telling your spouse that you are stepping outside for a few minutes to water the container pots, you end up spending two hours weeding and transplanting.

       

We can all find ourselves somewhere in that list. Or is it just me?

      

 Mari Lane Gewecke is a Master Gardener volunteer, affiliated with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus program, and a self-employed consultant who was inspired to write this column after seeing a t-shirt that says, “I have CDO. It is like OCD, but the letters are in alphabetical order like they should be.”

Eight Things to Consider When Saving Vegetable Seeds

rootsimple.com

      

 The directions for seed saving in our last book, Making It, almost got cut. Perhaps we should have just changed those directions to “Why it’s OK to buy seeds.” The fact is that it’s not easy to save the seeds of many vegetables thanks to the hard work of our bee friends.

       

That being said, Shannon Carmody of Seed Saver’s Exchange gave a lecture at this year’s Heirloom Exposition with some tips for ambitious gardeners who want to take up seed saving. Here’s some of her suggestions:

       

1. Maintaining varietal purity Is the vegetable open pollinated or hybrid? Hybrid seeds don’t produce true to type. You can’t save and regrow the seeds of hybrids, at least not without a lot of complicated multi-generational outcrossing in order to create a new variety that produces true to type. [I’ll note that I’m not anti-hybrid. The increased vigor of hybrids can be advantageous if you’re having trouble in your garden.]

       

2. Know how the vegetable is pollinated It’s much easier to save the seeds of self-pollinating vegetables such as beans, peas and tomatoes. Remember that bees can fly for miles–anything pollinated by insects have to be isolated or caged to prevent cross-pollination. And many vegetables have weedy cousins. Try to save the seeds of carrots without caging and you may get a carrot/Queen Anne’s lace hybrid that won’t taste good. And some supposedly self-pollinating plants such as tomatoes have rogue varieties that can be cross pollinated by insects.

       

3. Consider your climate Bienneals require two years of growth in order to set seeds. If you live in a cold climate that could be a problem.

       

4. Population size Serious plant breeders often plant a minimum of sixty plants so that they can choose the most vigorous for seed saving. And they’ll often plant just one variety to reduce the risk of crossing. One way around the population size requirement is to crowd source the problem and get a bunch of friends to grow the same vegetable.

       

5. Space requirements   Some biennials get really big in the second year. You’ll need to make sure they have space and won’t shade out other plants.

      

 6. When to harvest Fruits harvested for seed may need to stay on the plant for a long time. For example, eggplants that you want to save seed from need to be harvested well past when they’re still edible.

       

7. Prepping seeds In general, seeds harvested when dry, such as lettuce need to be air dried before storing. Seeds harvested wet, such as watermelons, need to be washed with water before drying and storing. Tomato seeds need to be fermented in water for a few days before drying.

       

8. Storage Moisture is the enemy of seed storage. Those packs of desiccant that come with electronic gadgets can be recycled and used in your seed storage boxes.

There’s no shame in buying seeds

      

 If you want more information about seed saving the bible of the subject is Suzanne Ashworth’s book Seed to Seed.