Growing, Older

Just last Saturday, I walked into a Half-Price Books and walked out several minutes later and $70 poorer with two sacks of printed pleasure.  Thank God that the greater world has not realized the real value of the written word on paper and the vast majority of tomes have never yet reached the price of rubies and diamonds.

Foremost among the jacket blurbs that I thought would be intriguing was this book, Growing, Older, by Jane Dye Gussow.  I'm happy to report that its 200+ pages lasted only one plane trip, with only ten pages left over to finish after the last plane pulled up to the gate. The memoir, subtitled "A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables," is a series of thoughts and essays that begin with the story of the unexpected and rapid loss of Dr. Gussow's husband, Alan, to pancreatic cancer, which occurred in 1997.  Briefly glancing at the text in the bookstore, I was captured by her surprise to find that, after 40 years of marriage, she didn't really miss her husband, as she detailed her resultant guilt over moving on.  She found herself happily skipping down a street only a few weeks later and realized that while she would describe her long marriage as a good one, and would never have considered leaving it, she also recognized that an enormous amount of her energy and efforts went into the care of a socially awkward and dependent husband.

Those thoughts were the textual equivalent of "click-bait" to draw me into the book, but most of the memoirs are actually about gardening and living in the smaller space on the banks of the Hudson River, where she and Alan had downsized only a few years before his death.   Finally, here, I found a kindred soul with at least as many gardening trials and tribulations as I often whine about.  Dr. Gussow's garden floods several times a year and she is beset with muskrats, skunks, and other pests, all while she tries to raise the majority of her diet on the small plot of land.

I keep referring to her as Dr. Gussow because the now quite elderly lady is an accomplished professor of nutritional ecology, who still teaches an active university course every year while living what she teaches.  She was a pioneer in the local and regional food movement, perhaps THE pioneer as recognized by Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, and, throughout this book, she drops a multitude of facts about the real cost of food production into her conversations.  Well into her 80's, she still actively gardens, living mostly off her own produce, although what she terms "2-person and 3-person rocks" now require more help to move out of her garden than in previous years.

Dr. Gussow has another previous text, This Organic Life, that I've run across, but never read.  You can be sure that I'll be searching for it in the dusty bookstores of my life until I find a decent hardcopy to keep next to Growing, Older.

Postscript:  In Growing, Older I found a quote that I really like:  "As long as one has a garden, one has a future.  As long as one has a future, one is alive."  Gussow attributes it to Frances Hodgson Burnett.  I like it enough I may replace the Thomas Jefferson quote at the top of my blog.  What do you think?

Katydid Quandary

What is the Katydid doing?

It really is not fair;  the depth and   numbers of challenges presented daily to organic gardeners (or to those, like myself, who strive to garden organically but run screaming for the pesticides when minor nuisances become invasions).  It is hard enough to know the important facts of growing even one plant to full glory, let alone the knowledge necessary to supervise the growth of hundreds of species in the average medium-size garden.  Soil pH requirements and lighting requirements, common pests and fungal diseases, cultivar differences and watering preferences; sometimes I think it would be easier to get a PhD in Physics than to become an authority on, say, Sweet Corn.  In fact, since I've failed to grow ear-worm-less Sweet Corn on multiple occasions, perhaps I should give Physics a shot.  I can't do any worse.

Just take, for example, the questions evoked by finding the above insect on your 'Prairie Harvest' rose, as I did recently.   The knowledgeable gardeners among you may identify it as some sort of Katydid, or, if you're from the British Isles, a Bushcricket.  But is it friend or foe?  Predator or flower glutton? If I leave it there, on the rose, will it consume the rose and then make lots of little katydids to devour the rest of my roses?  Alternatively, if I leave it there, on the rose, will it reward me by consuming the first scouts of the Japanese Beetles that I expect will reach my garden shortly?  From my contacts with Katydids in childhood, I think they're harmless to myself and perhaps to plants, but I simply don't know enough.

And quick simple research, it seems, even in these days of instant information, isn't enough to do anything more than cloud the issue. To answer the question I've posed, I think one would need to be an entomologist with a lifetime spent specifically in research regarding this insect family. Even then there might not be a definitive answer.  Katydids are in the family Tettigoniidae, which contains more than 6400 species.  They are closely related to crickets, and the diet of some of them includes leaves, flowers, bark and seeds, but many speces are exclusively predatory on insects or snails.  Some are considered pests by commercial crop growers according to one source, but that source doesn't mention which crops are affected.  You can find lots of information about the wierd oral sex practices of the Katydids, but there is little written about their effects on garden plants. Is this yet another example of human voyeurism distracting us from the real issues at hand?  It does me little good, and only leaves me feeling inadequate, to know that the Tuberous Bushcricket (Platycleis affinis) has the largest testicles in proportion to body mass (14%) of any recorded animal.

Which leaves me with what to do about my little friend here?  I don't know.  If it was on another rose than my beloved 'Prairie Harvest', for instance if it was on 'Sally Holmes' or perhaps on 'Knockout', I might worry about it less.  I suppose as long as I find only one or two Katydids, I'll turn the other flower bud and allow them a chance to prove themselves.  A few thousand Katydids would, however, overwhelm my good nature in the way that one Hun is seen as an interesting visitor, while a few thousand Huns is a marauding horde.  Perhaps alongside that thought lies the answer; a properly maintained organic garden should display a balance: a little of this, and a little of that, but never too many of a hungry-looking contingent of Huns.

Corn Gluten Hub-bub-i-cide

Since the 1990's, corn gluten meal (CGM) has taken the gardening world by storm.  CGM is the protein by-product of milling corn, and this high-nitrogen compound was discovered by researchers at Iowa State University to be an effective pre-emergent herbicide, reducing seed germination by inhibiting root development.  Organic gardening and farming communities have quickly adopted this natural miracle substance as a method of weed control.

Continued research, however, is showing that CGM is, in fact, far from a natural cures-all for organic gardening.  It does not adversely affect existing weeds.  To the contrary, the nitrogen in CGM (about 10%) benefits existing weeds as much as the desired plants we're trying to help.  It's not a selective product, nor is it effective as a pre-emergent against all weeds.  Most importantly, it is failing to reach an important milestone to recommend its continued use; it seems unable to make the leap from greenhouse to the field.  While greenhouse trials demonstrated efficacy, field trials in the same locations have been unsuccessful.  Washington State University and Iowa State researchers found no differences in weed control on field-grown strawberries using CGM.  Researchers in California found that the use of mulch alone in containerized plants was more effective in controlling weeds than CGM.  California and Oregon researchers found no control of turf grass weeds by CGM, although the turf itself responded to the nitrogen in the CGM. The truth is that moisture, light, and warmth all affect seed germination and these factors are all much harder to control in natural environments than in the laboratory. Since CGM inhibits seed germination primarily by desiccating soil and denying moisture to seeds, it's no wonder that it does not work well in areas of the country with abundant moisture in the spring (most of America).  Linda Chalker-Scott, in The Informed Gardener Blooms Again, concludes that corn gluten meal may act adequately as a pre-emergent herbicide in the Midwestern US, but that it's not effective for western climates or for climates with abundant pre-spring moisture.

There are many lessons in the continuing saga of CGM. I've seen the step from laboratory efficacy to field efficacy fail often in pharmaceutical trials and surgical procedure trials in my chosen profession of veterinary medicine.  There are a couple of hidden messages here to gardeners as well, though:  First, organic gardening principles are great in theory, but it's obvious that weeding is so much of a chore that even organic gardeners will seize on any chance to reduce the work involved. So just who is kidding who?  Second, just because a substance is natural does not mean it's a miracle cure or that it is economical to use. We're going to be driving the price of corn high enough with all our driving around on the ethanol we derive from corn; we shouldn't throw our gardening budgets out of whack by using up even more corn as a partially-effective pre-emergent herbicide.  And if it is not useful as a herbicide, but we use it anyway as an organic fertilizer, somebody out there had better be doing some calculation on whether we use more inorganic fertilizer on Iowa and other Midwestern fields to grow the corn for a bag of CGM than the bag of CGM provides us back as organic fertilizer.  As the grandson of Indiana crop farmers, I guarantee you that no dirt farmer is growing 200 bushel/acre field corn without artificial nitrogen and herbicides.  Is CGM really "organic" or is it organized hype?