Martha Teichner gets Tangled in Weeds on CBS Sunday Morning

From CBS, via press release:

Martha Teichner with weed-eating goats.

To some, weeds are the scourge of the earth, killing precious crops along the way. To others, however, weeds are a source of food. On this weekends broadcast, CBS SUNDAY MORNING correspondent Martha Teichner gets to the root of the love-hate relationship people have with weeds, and the various ways folks have learned to live with them or try to put them out of existence.

This is an absolute enemy of the state, no question whatsoever, weed scientist Stanley Culpepper of the University of Georgia tells Teichner of Palmer amaranth, also known as pigweed. Pigweed has destroyed cotton and soybean crops in the south.

If you go to the beach and you shouldnt have, this plant will beat you, so it is war, and its a war of survival because this plant will put you out of business, Culpepper says.

Some places are using goats to keep the weeds down, while others are relying on chemicals to fight back.

On the other end of the spectrum, though, are folks like New Jerseys Tama Matsuoka Wong, who supplies edible weeds to a couple of the fanciest restaurants on the East Coast. Grabbing a weed, Matsuoka Wong says, its very nutritious and its really good as long as youre picking it the right way and cooking it.

Teichners piece will air August 19 on CBS SUNDAY MORNING WITH CHARLES OSGOOD (9:00-10:30 AM, ET).

Show spokesman Richard Huff added in an email that its a fun piece. Fun for whom Martha, the goats? Well just have to tune in to find out.

Via: Martha Teichner gets Tangled in Weeds on CBS Sunday Morning

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No Babysitting Required

A fine mess

Ive been away on vacation for most of the last few weeks, and as is typically true in August, have returned to ridiculous explosions of food, weeds, and crabgrass.

Youll notice that one of the explosions, at least, is positive: food. So many tomatoes that sauce-making is the only option. Endless eggplants and pattypan squashes. Tomatillos littering the walkway. Pole beans hanging by the hundreds from their vines like prisms off a big tacky chandelier.

I love the basic self-sufficiency of my summer vegetable garden. Unlike the lawn and the perennial beds, which currently look like hell, the vegetable garden is an attractive riot. Because I mulched heavily with leaves last fall, there arent a lot of weeds. Thanks to that mulch, which conserves soil moisture, I can trust the skies to do the watering for me when Im away. Admittedly, however, I live in the Northeast, where a week with no rain is unusual.

My personal vegetable garden is not the only one Ive neglected, either. Also receiving no care from me since late July at least are the Lake Avenue Elementary school garden and a community garden plot I took so I could grow more potatoes. But all is nonetheless well.

Vegetable gardens are really a great deal: Work hard to assemble the pieces in Maypaths, mulch, cropsand then bestir oneself for the rest of the summer only to harvest a windfall and scatter seed for the fall. Why doesnt everybody do this?

Via: No Babysitting Required

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Keep Your Garden Out of My Face

Guest Rant by Billy Goodnick

It was a dark and foggy summer night. Biff the Wonder Spaniel and I set out for our last neighborhood stroll, green poopy bag at the ready. Its a good thing I didnt have my nose buried in my iPhone, catching up on the four games of Words With Friends that Lin and I usually have running. If I had been distracted, Id probably be sporting stitches, or worse yet, a ripped cornea.

Through the mist, I realized I was one step away from facial lacerations from a thorny rose branch arching across the sidewalk at eye level. Thats what can happen when someone plants a Cecile Brunner climbing rose on a picket fence that butts up against the sidewalk.Seems to me, youd have to be either stupid or heartless to think you can plant a 25-foot climber a couple of inches from your property line and then let it run wild. Good thing poison oak isnt an ornamental.

Thorny plants are the worst-case scenario, but it seems everywhere I look, somebodys fuzzy bush is in my face. Ive got no beef with a property owner planting this stuff along their own walkways, but when half of a public sidewalk is blocked by some thoughtless, lazy gardeners weekend project, I get pissed off.

One block from my house theres a wall of ivy climbing something (its so dense I cant tell if its an old chain link fence or remnants of an ancient civilization) and taking up more than half the sidewalk. A few blocks away, crimson bougainvillea sporting inch-long spiky thorns spills out from a raised wall. Pretty? Yes. Neighborly? Hardly. Legal? No way. Arrogant and lazy? In the words of Sarah Palin, You betcha.

Assuming that the owners of these properties are aware their plants are blocking public right of way, I can only assume that they rationalize with I can get past, so why ruin my weekend doing chores?

What about a mom with a stroller? What about someone like my dad who uses a walker and is legally blind?

The image above show this weeks Two for the Price of One Special: Brazilian skyflower (Duranta species) in the parkway some varieties reach 20-feet high and wide and rosemary creeping in from the garden. Great for an Olympic slalom run, but vexing for someone with mobility problems.

Two blocks away on one of the main Santa Barbara thoroughfares, where Im sure curbside parking is at a premium, some numbnut who wont clean out their garage left their big fat tail end blocking the walk. All thats missing is a middle-finger decal over the wheel.

Bonnie Elliott is a friend who spends much of her waking days in a power wheel chair. Shes also been active on the City of Santa Barbaras Access AdvisoryCommittee, reviewing submittals that go through the Planning Commission and offering recommendations to make new projects safer and more livable for a wider cross-section of the community.

That overgrown crap shouldnt be there, Bonnie told me, as we sipped ice teas and devoured divine pistachio macarons on a warm afternoon at a local patisserie. Some hedges make it impossible for drivers to see anyone on the sidewalk when they pull out of their driveways. You cant see them and they cant see you. Theres no way you can achieve escape velocity when a car suddenly appears.

As long as were talking about public sidewalks, what about those trash/recycling/green-waste cans? This morning, I hauled one filled with brush and bamboo, plus a blue recycling bin, off the sideway, left there, no doubt, by an indifferent, hasty homeowner. Sometimes the bins are empty, meaning that an in-a-hurry trash collector picked up the load, dumped it in the truck and ignored the company policy laid out for me by Tito Escarcega, supervisor for the local service: We hammer the guys: do not leave the cans near mailboxes, near driveways, or on sidewalks. But Id be lying if I said that a few of our boys dont slip up once in a while. I know these guys are generally on top of it and do awesome, back-breaking work, but there are a few slouches who need to appreciate the bigger picture.

If youre in a wheelchair and theres no way around an obstacle, many times the alternative is a detour down a sloping driveway and out into the street. Bonnie recounted a recent incident when she was almost hit, the driver slamming on the brakes just in time.

While Im at it, what about sprinklers that go out of whack, showering passing pedestrians (and hydrophobic cocker spaniels)? Its bad enough all that water is missing its target and flowing to the gutter, but no one should need a snorkel to take their exercise stroll.

Am I getting through? I love gardens. I make my living designing, teaching, writing, and ranting about them. But your right to grow a garden ends at your property line. Any time you buy a shrub you intend to plant near public walkways or streets, it comes with a duty to know its potential size and either give it plenty of room to do its thing, or be conscious and considerate enough to keep it the hell out of everyones way. If that means giving up a few hours on the weekend, or increasing your gardeners hours, bite the bullet.

If youre as fed up as I am with this stuff, do as I do and rat out your neighbor. I dont start by calling out the big guns. In the case of the errant rose bush, I left a note on their door (including my phone number Im straight up about it) and the next day I got an apologetic phone call and the rose was pruned. Encroachments into public right of way can usually be reported to the zoning division for your town.

But Im making one exception. Around the corner from a friends house is a magnificent specimen of Australian Tea Tree (Leptospermum laevigatum) slithering across the sidewalk in all its muscular glory. Although theres no way around it, the City Arborist fought to have it preserved. So the thoughtful owners have constructed a stairway leading down to the street so neighbors can get around. Im cool with that.

Billys garden design book,Yards: Turn Any Outdoor Space Into the Garden of Your Dreams, will be published March 2013. Visit his website, billygoodnick.com, for a preview and pre-ordering links.

Via: Keep Your Garden Out of My Face

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Wildcraftedreally?

Can you eat any of the plants in this picture? Really? How do you know?

This post from the always excellent Rowleys Whiskey Forge got me thinking about this. He posts a really cool recipe for a liqueur called mistela de chimaj. I couldnt resistI had to go look up the plant. But more about that in a minute.

First, some background: So the foraging/wildcrafting movement has met the craft distilling movement and the result is that people want to go out into the wilderness, or into a vacant lot, or into the woods, and pull a plant out of the ground and drop it into some high-proof spirits and extract some flavor from it. You know, dandelion bitters, honeysuckle liqueur, whatever.

Its a nice ideamostly. There are just a couple of problems with taking plants from uncultivated spacesmeaning, spaces that arent farms or gardens. The first is that some wild plants are kind of scarce, and pulling a few out of the ground to make a batch of bitters might actually hurt the plant populationor the wildlife population that depends upon it.

And the second reason is that unless you are really, really sure about what youre doing, you might actually be extracting poisons when you infuse your plants in alcohol. Alcohol is a very good method for extracting poisons from plants. And keep in mind that plants generally dont want to be eaten, which is why they manufacture poisons in the first place. Ive heard people who are really into foraging say things like, Oh, I eat everything I pick, and Ive never been poisoned, as if not getting poisoned is all about being down with the plants, or being a true believer. Thats a foolish statement that overlooks the fact that nature is powerful, and that it is in a plants nature to manufacture poisons that punish anyone who tries to eat it. If you were a plant, isnt that what you would do?

Okay, so back to mistela de chimaj. The name chimaj refers to a number of plants in the genus Cymopterus. They are broadly called spring parsley. Theyre a member of the carrot family, Apiaceae. The long taproot is whats used to make the liqueur.

That right there should be enough to really, really slow you down. Because the carrot family is one of those nefarious plant families with lots of criminal relations. Hemlock, the plant that killed Socrates. Aconite, or monkshood, which has killed many people who mistook it for parsley. Giant hogweed, a nasty creature with vile, caustic sap. If a plant has a long taproot and finely cut, lacy foliage, its probably in the carrot family. And if its in the carrot family, you need to proceed with caution. And if it has a taproot, you need to remember that plants tend to concentrate their poisons in the taproot as a form of defense.

So what do we know about Cymopterus? We know that one species, C. watsonii, causes severe photosensitive reactions in livestock that eat it. This can include everything from mild sunburn to really nasty blisters. The always reliable Jepson manual also notes that some species are toxic to livestock. One of the few reliable papers on edible species like C. montanus notes at the end that they still need to be tested for toxicity.

Soif you go out foraging for spring parsley, which species are you planning to harvest? Can you tell them apart? Can you even tell Cymopterus from other, more distant relations in the carrot family? And given that botanists themselves dont know for sure what a toxic dose would be for humansdo you?

My vote? Skip it. Leave the spring parsley in the field. I dont dispute the notion that there is an edible variety, or that the cool recipe that Matthew Rowley turned up on his blog is in fact something that people once made and enjoyed. But I could spend a lifetime working my way through the plants that I know to be edible and safe before I ever got bored enough to start tinkering around with wild, untested, and possibly dangerous herbs.

Want to try this out with an edible substitution? How about bitter dandelion root? Ora close relationcilantro root?

What are your thoughts on wild harvesting?

Via: Wildcraftedreally?

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Melons, Squash, and Cash

Thats NPRs headline, not mine. My husband switched the radio on yesterday morning just in time for me to hear this story about Amy Goldman, who as Im sure you know is an author, artist, and heirloom seed advocate. Weve written about her incredible bronze casts of heirloom vegetables here, and a squabble over seeds here, and her recent nuptials to a person involved in said squabbles here. You may also know her beautiful books The Heirloom Tomato and The Compleat Squash. And New York gardeners know that her family has supported botanical gardensincluding NYBG and BBG.

And now shes on NPR for contributing to left-leaning superPACs, as part of a series profiling people who do such things. SowellIm glad to hear that heirloom vegetable gardeners are getting heard in the political process, somewhere, somehow.

If any other squash or tomato-related news arises during the campaign, you can be sure well stay on top of it!

Via: Melons, Squash, and Cash

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Lawns in the News, and Flower-Arranging Comes to PBS

TV Show about Lawns in Development

Weve been ranting for years now about the dearth of gardening shows on TV, so imagine my surprise to hear theres a new show about lawns coming from Country Music Television! Yeah, Id never heard of them, either, but Im told theyre the producers of Cupcake Wars. So, Lawn Wars?

Close! Heres the working title: Redneck Lawn Wars. Seriously. I couldnt possibly make that up.

This news came to me via email from a staffer looking for over-the-top creative lawns that are sort of the mouthpiece for owners and show off their obsession with their favorite sport, beer, musician, hobby, etclike a team mascot cut or spray painted into their lawn. The attached flyer gives these examples:

You love Elvisyour shrubs are shaped like Elvis.

Youre a fan of Nascaryou have a mini-Talladega shaved into your lawn, with your shrubs shaped like Kyle Buschs M&M car.

You go to every Bluegrass festival; your grass is blue, with images of fiddles, banjos & mandolins worked into it.

You consider yourself to be Hugh HefnerYou have a 10-foot Playboy bunny symbol etched into your lawn. your bushes are shaped aswell, bushes.

Its enough to make me miss even the stupidest of instant garden make-overs on HGTV.

Scotts Miracle-Gro donates to Romney

The donation itself comes as no surprise, but this article does include some tidbits about the company that I wouldnt have predicted.

• Instead of hiding behind a PAC, Scotts took the unusual step of donating in the light of day and suffering any potential blowback from customers. Sure enough, the Washington Post reporter found a few disgruntled fertilizer shoppers in D.C.
• Scotts chairman and CEO James Hagedorn has taken controversial stands before, like firing workers who refused to quit smoking. Would not have predicted that, but hey, it sure helps the bottom line to eliminate smokers from the health insurance pool.
• And Hagedorns practically a wild card politically, having supported Democrat Ted Strickland in his successful bid to be governor of Ohio.

New Flower-Arranging Show Launches

Finally, a bit of good news for us flower-lovers the launch on the new public television show Flower Empowered featuring floral designerSarah von Pollaro. Her approach is floral design for anyone, on a budget. Sounds good to me.

Via: Lawns in the News, and Flower-Arranging Comes to PBS

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Gas and land

East Pond, at Gateway National Refuge Area. Photo courtesy of NPS.

U.S. athletes triumphed during the recent Olympiadloved watching it! I wish I could say the same about our triumphant leadership in other fields, especially when it comes to breaking away from dependence on fossil fuels. Where I live, this issue has acquired new urgencyNew York hovers on the brink of allowing shale gas drillingin parts of the state. (A refreshershale gas drilling/hydrofracking is the high-pressure injection of water, sand, and chemicals in order to extract natural gas from underground shale formations.)

As in neighboring Pennsylvania, the fracking fields will mainly be in the rural countryside; so far, it looks like an area in central NY (Broome, Chemung, Chenango, Steuben and Tioga counties) will host the first permitted wells. The issues are many, and include possible watershed contamination, the problem of wastewater and its treatment, radically increased road use, and how the practice will change the look of the rural countryside. A recent letter to the Buffalo News from a former resident of a fracking area of PA described the mise en scene of fracking this way:

Fracking wells are not small; they are huge and can take up an acre or more (look up Fracking Hollenbeck Gas Site on youtube).
They are very loud, lit all night, stink and run 24/7. They are everywhere. The ground shakes. Traffic has increased. Water transport trucks are on the roads at all hours. Small-town county roads werent made for these constant heavy loads and have quickly worn down, resulting in continuous construction and increased traffic problems.

Judging from the images of fracking fields Ive seen, this description is not out of bounds. Hard to imagine this being the scene in any part of the Finger Lakes Ive visited. And this is not even to discuss the deeper environmental impacts.

Does any of this have to do with gardening? Sure. My gardening takes place in a larger context of the parks, reserves, and other natural areas that exist in my area of the world. By creating a garden in my little urban corner, Im basically trying to emulate, in some small way, the natural beauty I seek in such unspoiled countryside that remains.

Although Western New York does not, as of yet, stand in much risk of being a shale gas source, we all potentially stand to be affected by some sort of fuel development. Recently, I received an email from a community gardener in New York City who is fighting a natural gas pipeline and accompanying facilities scheduled to be installed under the Gateway National Recreation Area and Jacob Riis Beach. Its not fracking but it is opening up a national park to industrial use. Like me, Karen Orlandothe gardener who, among many others, opposes this projectis an urbanite who cherishes such wild sites that can exist in densely populated areas. The precedent of allowing pipelines and industrial facilities in New Yorks Gateway opens the door to the same in a refuge like Tifft Nature Preserve in Buffalo.

Its all connected. And as much as I rejoice in our superiority in water polo, I could wish that we showed a similar determination to excel in finding energy alternatives. For the sake of gardens everywherein all the different forms a garden can take.

Via: Gas and land

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