Blog Action Day

Bloggers all over the world are posting environmental messages today as part of Blog Action Day. It's fundamental for the earth's stability and the long-term survival of humans as a species that we, as part of the world community, commit our hearts, minds, and actions to living as lightly as we can on Earth. When there were many fewer of us (humans), resource exploitation and extraction was sustainable. Now that there are 6 billion plus of us, and we all want stuff, electricity, water on demand, and bigger houses, we've got a big problem.

When I was a graduate student, I read Limits to Growth, a visionary book about how we'd run out of essential resources if the world population kept growing, and everyone kept consuming (like Americans). Unfortunately, their predications were delayed by technological innovation, and folks who don't understand the limits of the ecological capacities of our planet started to talk about how we'd be able to invent our way out of the negative impacts of population growth, energy consumption, etc.

Today we're at a critical point. I was teaching a course called People and the Environment in 1990, when PBS aired an excellent series about 'Race to Save the Planet.' We were hopeful then, but I'm less hopeful now (but I'm a bit gloomy by nature anyway). Each one of us in the developed world needs to reduce our consumption of stuff, from electricity to water to goods and services. We need to help folks in the developing world to raise their standard of living without making the same mistakes we made in the U.S.

A recent NY Times piece focused on an environmental crisis in a lake in China, where pollution had created a toxic blue-green algal bloom (I might be wrong about the algae since I read the story quickly). I was in the 5th grade when I reported to my class that a young boy had died from typhoid because he ate a watermelon floating in the Hudson River. Uh, hello?

We had Love Canal, Three Mile Island, and countless other wake-up calls about the impact of human-created pollutants on humans and the rest of the natural world.

My husband and I heard Al Gore years ago at a Georgia Conservancy meeting talking about how many signs did we did to have until the (environmental) message was clear. He was powerful in his message then, and thank goodness he's continued along that road. His book, Earth in the Balance, was one that more of us should have paid attention to.

I'm always trying, not always successfully, to reduce my impact and use of resources -- recycling everything that we use, choosing products that are recyclable or biodegradable, and produced from renewal sources, conserving energy, composting, etc, and gardening naturally and restoring habitat in our garden -- it's a positive step that provides me with hope that we can turn things around, starting with our homes, actions, yards, and communities.

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Gardener's Bloom Day

Tomorrow is GBD, but I know I'm going to be too busy to post. So here goes, five hours early.


My pride and joy this month are my asters. I've had this plant for about three years, but every September it gets hit by white mould, and I end up having to cut it back before it blooms. This year I sprayed preventively and it's given me the best display so far.





Also beautiful are these chrysanths, but I'm less proud of them as they were bought recently. My own seemed to have succumbed to something - the top leaves are still fine, but the majority have browned and died. A watering problem? A fungus? I'm not sure. They have a lot of buds, but the plants as a whole look tatty.





That's the autumn stuff, but we've had a really warm October this year - we were out in T-shirts today and it must have been around 80° at mid-day. So a lot of the summer annuals are still blooming happily. In particular, my white surfinia were really coming on - but as they trail over the balcony, they were badly damaged by a couple of days of monsonic rain which we had about ten days ago. The plumbago was also hit, but it's bounced back.





Everything else though is doing fine, with a lot of things blooming again for the second time. These little antirrhinums, unlike most of their friends, have escaped the caterpillar plague, as has the white alyssum. The purple alyssum was too badly hit to warrant a photo here, though.

The four o'clocks are still blooming, though I'm starting to collect the seeds as well. And I've put in some cyclamen and some pansies for the winter and spring. But I'll save them for future posts.

PS : I've now got a lot of links for the Garden Bloggers' Retro Carnival, and thank you to everyone who's sent them. There's still time if you haven't sent in a link yet. The carnival starts the first week of November.

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Fall color is coming

Leaves are finally beginning to show signs of fall color (My picture is a few years ago, however). The early reds of the sourwoods seem to have been muted by drought, although the drought seems to have encouraged early leaf color in maples, probably as leaves have shut down production of chlorophyll early this year. My sister in Texas sent me an e-mail asking about what really triggered the change in color in leaves - temperature, daylength, moisture, or a combination. Her dog park group wanted to know!

Well, what are sisters for, after all, especially if she's a botanist and garden educator? I had some fun reviewing the details and look forward to seeing how it will play out here, with the severe and continuing drought, and until today, unreasonably hot (for October) weather.

Basically, our fall colors in the Eastern U.S. are revealed as chlorophyll production slows down, cued by the shortening days and lengthening nights. The interplay of pigments in leaves determines the fall colors of different species, with the temperature and moisture determining color intensities. As the chlorophyll (which provides the overriding green color of leaves) breaks down, the other pigments in the leaves become evident. The carotenoids produce the yellow and oranges and anthocynanins produce the purple and reds. Anthocynanins are actively produced as a reaction between sugars and proteins - in the watery vacuoles of leaf cells, and their colors are influenced by acidity. They start showing up as the chlorophyll breaks down, and corky deposits start blocking the downward flow of sugars between leaves and stems.

Different trees have different combinations of the basic pigments, and here in Eastern North America, we have the largest diversity of species of trees that exhibit fall color, so many of our natives are prized in Europe for fall color -- our sweetgums and tulip poplars for example.

Some of the trees that are shades of oranges, reds, and purples include the red, white, and scarlet oaks, persimmon, sassafras, dogwood, sweetgum, as well as the maples. Hickories, River Birch, Redbud, Tulip Poplar, and Sycamore turn yellow and gold.

Beech leaves also accumulate tannin, adding a bronze color to the underlying yellows. The fall weather plays a key factor in whether it's a particularly good year for color, especially in the reds and purples. Day and night temperature and general moisture levels are important. Warm sunny days (with lots of sugar production) with cool crisp nights produce the best reddish and purple colors – the anthocynanin pigments. at the time chlorophyll production is declining, generally affects how bright the colors are.

Yellows are fairly consistent from year to year, since the carotenoids Overly dry weather will produce more brownish leaves and early leaf drop, with washed-out colors in general.

So no two falls are alike!

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Garlic, woodchucks, and fall flowers

I planted garlic yesterday in the satellite garden. I'm quite confident our trap-lining woodchuck (I think that s/he roams around the neighborhood looking for tasty tidbits) isn't interested in onions or garlic, at least the Welsh onions haven't been bothered. I can't say the same for newly planted collards, chard, or red cabbage, clearly favorites. Amazingly, s/he/they nibbled the perennial Italian dandelion in the main garden down to nubbins (actually a chicory) recently. Those leaves are so bitter that they require par-boiling prior to cooking to be edible. Worrisome, however, that s/he is now becoming brave enough to visit the main vegetable garden next to the house. I put Mocha out today on 'woodchuck' patrol. He'd much rather lounge around inside where it's cool, but I told him "Woodchucks, No." Ha! He slept on the shaded side porch all morning, so hardly was any deterrent.

Fall flowers are lovely -- the swamp sunflower is in its full glory in one of the perennial beds, and I've enjoyed this volunteer Blue Ageratum (Eupatorium coelestinum, now Conoclinum coelestinum) near the old metal wheelbarrow.

I also sowed more flats of fall and winter lettuce and some extremely hardy lettuce varieties called 'North Pole' and 'Arctic King' that have sailed through our last winters here without damage. Check out the Cook's Garden catalog for seed!

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Hooked on Succulents ...

First of all, thank you to everyone who has sent links for the Garden Bloggers' Retro Carnival. People have sent in some really nice posts, including some with stupendous photos. But don't worry if you're still thinking about it - there's time yet. Just leave me a comment with the link to the post you want to nominate.


The BBC seems to be hooked on succulents at the moment. Every time I go into their Science and nature news site there seems to be an article on some cactus bursting into flower. A couple of days ago I found this feature about a Hoodia plant, which has flowered for the first time ever at the Eden Project. It's native to South Africa and has always been eaten by bushmen in the Kalahari desert to ward off hunger. Research is currently being done to see if it can be used to fight obesity - hopefully it's not the flowers which they need to use.

But at least at the Eden Project they don't have the problem caused by an Agave Americana at the University of Wales in Bangor. If you have one yourself, don't plant it in your greenhouse ...

A friend of mine gave me the mother plant of the succulents in the picture (I've forgotten their name). These are cuttings I took a year or so ago. They've grown at a rate of knots, but they haven't flowered yet. Should I be worried?

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Brown thrashers and garden toads

Yesterday, I surprised a rather large garden toad next to the hose faucet in the back. I was surprised myself. We had a toad living in the basement a few years back (the basement is bare floored and unfinished), but I hadn't seen one outside for sometime.

This evening, I saw a brown thrasher getting dinner through the kitchen window. She/he was very vigorously poking through the straw mulch into the recently clipped radicchio bed. Interestingly, when I did a web search about the diet of brown thrashers, I found out that they're prodigious insect-eaters and eaters of all sorts of garden critters bad and good -- insects of all sorts, from beetles to grubs and earthworms, etc. They also eat fruits, but insects are over half their diet. One source, I'm not sure how reliable, suggested that a single thrasher ate over 6000 insects a day (this sounds like a lot to me, even for birds with a high metabolism). Brown thrashers build big twiggy nests, and sing beautifully in spring. We've had a nesting pair in the large Ternstromia hedge along the vegetable garden for the last two years. They're also fun when they visit the ground-level saucer and have a bath, vigorously cleaning all their feathers and fluffing up.

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Let's Have a Garden Bloggers Carnival!

About a month ago, in connection with my other blog, I received an invitation to participate in a "blog carnival". The idea is that bloggers who are writing on the same topic send a link to one of their posts to the carnival organiser, who then publishes them with a brief description of what the post contains.




I thought it was a great idea, and wondered if we could do the same for garden blogs. But given we've got Garden Voices which does the same thing every day (thank you GV!), there didn't seem much point.

Then about a week ago, I was looking for an old photo which I remembered posting last year, and came across a post which I'd completely forgotten writing but which, on rereading, seemed really good. And it occurred to me that we all must have posts sitting in our archives which deserve another outing.

So here's the idea - send me a link to a post you wrote some time ago, which by now everyone will have forgotten about, but which you think is worth re-reading - or which you'd like new readers to see. Use the comments box - I won't publish the messages but will collect up the links. Then, during November when life in the garden calms down (at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere), I'll publish a series of posts including all of them. We'll call it the Garden Bloggers' Retro Carnival. Just to get you in the mood, the photos on today's post are all from 2006 to early 2007 - spring, summer, autumn and winter.

Anyone's welcome to participate, so by all means pass the message on to other bloggers you're in contact with. And if you haven't been blogging long and don't have any old posts, don't worry. Send a link to a recent post and we'll have a newbies section.

If you'd like to see what a blog carnival looks like, have a look at this one which focuses on books and reading .

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