Gather Light

gather light
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

I've been thinking about the ethics of being a consumer of energy, in the ecological sense. I feel like we are, or at least I was, taught that there is a hierarchy of life. Animals are the 'most evolved', whatever that means, and then there are plants, and fungus, and then there are all those microscopic swimmy things (many of which are actually animals and plants, or plants and fungus, or some combination of the two), but . Despite the best efforts of biology professors to quash this notion (as you can see if you take a look at wikipedia's history of the phylogenetic tree ) it still gets betrayed by phrases like "top carnivore" (referring to those animals that eat everything else). And obviously, we are the top top carnivore. Not only can we kill off lots of top carnivores, but we can even afford not to eat them.
The concept of trophic levels*", the way that ecologists look at energy dynamics in an ecosystem, is more helpful. Trophic levels describe the energy efficiency of an organism in relation to available energy (unless you are a deep-sea vent microbe, this is defined as the amount of solar energy hitting the earth). Every step in the food chain is about 10% efficient.
Now, most of us know that more or less all of the Earth's available energy is made available by plants. Ecologists talk about Foundation Species, usually some ecosystem-altering dominant tree, kelp, etc. It now seems astonishing to me that I've never really seen anyone, even the most edgy scifi writer, describe Earth as being essentially a plants' world. Le Guin edges towards it at times, especially in The Word for World is Forest, a novel about a forest culture who's consiousness is linked somehow to the forest?(which I now think I should go re-read) and "Vaster than Empires," a short story about a planet with a single plant-based consiousness, (and whose title is taken from an excellent line in an obnoxious poem, "To His Coy Mistress": "our vegetable love would grow / vaster than empires, and more slow." )

Of course, there are always the folks who came up with the World Tree. A bit more sensible.

But where does that leave us, as far as organizing idea systems go? I could talk about entropy, which is probably pointless and which I will probably get wrong anyway, and about deforestation and civilization, fossil fuels and global warming, and all the other ideas about ethics and energy and loss which are spinning in my head. Its not that I want to idealize plants, either. Every plant out there is pretty much constantly engaged in all out chemical warfare with all of its neighbors.
I wish I could photosynthesize. Maybe some day I'll be able to approximate it with solar panels. But there is still a lot we can learn from plants. Persistence. Dormancy. Exuberant growth. I like to think of us as being like invasive species like ivy and blackberry, doing our best to make the world uniform and predictable, and maybe we can learn from that in a different way, as we try to eradicate it. Endless variety--every flower more absurd and beautiful than the last.
The thing I keep coming back to, though, is that if there is a good way to model your life, it is to try to be like a tree. To subtly alter your environment, to create shade, sugar, shelter. To transform the energy that comes your way not just for your own use, but in a way that can benefit the rest of the world.

*Wikipedia totally failed me on the trophic level thing. Their entry was AWFUL. One of these days I need to get a wikipedia account...

Solstice

beansetc
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

Another rainy/sunny, hot and cold day, and another dark photograph. It is just only getting to be really dark now, at 9:30. I like this photo because there are five edible plants in it, more or less harmoniously cohabitating. Can you find them? The feature plant is a purple bush bean, which I eat fresh or steamed. Some time I'll try to figure out what makes it purple--something deliciously healthy for you, I'm sure.
I like to take a little time on the solar holidays to think about the turning of the seasons, time's passage and various other organizing metaphors of life. I have felt somewhat less need to go out of my way to celebrate these holidays, giving how much of my life I've been spending outside for the last few years, and I didn't manage to do much today either.

I seem to think about writing in this thing primarily on gross rainy days. Therefore I won't foist another set of gray pictures on you. Instead, I will talk about something I don't have a good enough camera to capture anyway; pests.

Slugs: The slug rings seem to work okay on the things I've put them on, which is a very small portion. They love strawberries. Heat spells seem to be the best thing for keeping slug populations down. Its turned rainy here again, of course, and they are a problem again. To my disappointment, the chickens don't seem to find them delicious. Every time I try to feed them one, they peck at them and then go around wiping their beaks on things in a grossed-out way.

Aphids: Not a huge problem yet. There was a pretty bad case on one of my kales, which I cut back and gave to the chickens. This was a hit. I was given the advice last year that aphids are a good sign that a plant is getting past its prime and its time to pull it out. I have changed this tactic slightly with kale and have started cutting it back severely. Kale is pretty tough and will come back from the stem several times in a year. I gave the buggy leaves to the chickens, which was a hit once they figured it out.

Ants: This one is kind of weird. It is normal to get aphids 'ranched' by ants, who move them around and feed on their sugary poop. However this year they have cut the middleman and have been attacking my potatoes and one of my sunflowers, sucking the sap out like little six-legged vampires. I haven't been able to find a reference for this happening online. I think it is the same species of ant that farms aphids and gets into houses. And holy crap, are there a lot of them this year. There is at least one nest in almost every garden bed, though only the potatoes in the one bed are getting hit. I'm not trying to do anything about it on the theory that a) these particular potatoes are volunteers from ones I planted two or three years ago, and b)I would much rather let them eat things I don't care for much than get into my other food, or, gods forfend, into the house.

Caterpillars: I think these are kind of cute, and there aren't enough of them to be a serious problem. Anyway, the chickens like them. I gave Medulla one yesterday, and they all played a prolonged game of Chicken Tag, over under and through every obstacle in the coop. It was hilarious.

In other entomological news, our compost bins are supporting several sparrow families this year. There are always at least three sparrows hanging out in or off the sides of the compost cage, mining grubs.

cobra lily

cobra lily
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

I have a little bit of an obsession with carnivorous plants. This guy is a hybrid cobra lily. When I got it, I understand as much about hybrids or know that there's an Oregon native, or I would have gotten the wild type, which also look awesome. But I like the red frills on this guy.

Carnivory has evolved many times in plants, all in plants that grow in very nutrient-poor soil, usually highly acidic bogs. They get their energy from photosynthesis but their nitrogen etc. from bugs, or frogs, or whatever they can catch.

Cobra lilies, unlike many carnivorous plants, don't have their own enzymes to dissolve critters, and instead rely on mutualisms with microbes to break down their food.

This guy has grown a TON already this year.

I have shamefully neglected this blog--but fortunately not my garden! The last couple of months have been both full and stressful, with fun things, family emergencies, new housemates and schoolwork. I have therefore been indulging in "horticulture therapy," which is apparently a Thing, according to some guy in my Urban Planning course. In the oh-god-almost-2-months since I last posted all the green things have shot up. In the first image all that is in that squiggly bed is kale, shallots and strawberries. In the second image, which I took this morning, the kale is about a foot and a half tall, and has already been heavily picked. Also in this bed, from left to right, are lettuce and chives, purple bush beans, sunflowers, spinach, and strawberries along the back wall, then mustard greens and pinto beans, and basil, chard, cucumber and chamomile on the in the curved bit. Yes we still have a Steve Novick sign in the yard.

Also noteworthy--I dragged the bricks over from the free pile Kailash Ecovillage. Last year they changed the sign from "The Cabana" and brought in a whole load of wood chips that sat there for months, which we thought was hilarious. Eventually they got a pretty good garden going, though. I have to approve even though I suspect it is at least 70% greenwashing.

The bush beans and garbanzos are starting to flower now. My summer beans, the Tuscan Wonders, are all sprouted next to many of my corn plants and sunflowers. They have proven their wonderfulness yet again by resprouting after slugs had eaten every bit of cotyledon and leaf off of two of them. These are two of the sunflowers/beans growing in my front bed. Also in this picture is chard, volunteer potatoes that I thought I'd pulled out all of two years ago, an empty beer trap for slugs (which seem to have been pretty well foiled by the dry hot weather we've been having here) and a ton of detritus from the flowering and kind of sick rhododendron above this bed. Last year I had a bunch of crookneck squash in this bed, which did okay for the early part of the summer, and then got a really awful case of the white powder fungus, about a month earlier than anything else did. We're pretty sure the rhodie harbors it.

This year I planted all my squash in Three Friends bed, with my corn and the surviving Tuscan Wonder Beans. The bean associated with this corn never made it out of the ground--its cotyledons got eaten before the first true leaves even came out. The corn seed these came from were mixed red, yellow and blue, and I had thought that they all came from the same plant. I wonder, though, since the corn plants themselves are distinctly different colors. This red one is the most precocious, already having a tassel and baby corns sprouting on the sides. In the background you can see some of my squash. My housemate gave me some copper flashing she had around, and I made them into rings to repel slugs. They seem to have worked so far, assuming that the slugs have been out and about much since I put them in. I don't remember where I heard that copper is a good barrier, or if the explanation, that copper reacts with the mucus layer, causing an electric charge is accurate. Next year I'll try it earlier in the spring and see how it does then.


I planted my artichokes three years ago. They were kind of scrawny and pathetic the first year, and pretty respectable last year. This year they are ginormous and gorgeous. They also produced about eight buds overnight. They almost didn't make it through the winter, but an aggressive mulch of rat bedding insulated them enough to make it. On the left edge of the image is the huge lavender bush, which attracts an unbelievable number of honey- and bumblebees.


And, lastly, our awesome new urban farming acquisition! We got three baby chickens last Monday. Left to right: Philomena Peepington, a Gold Sex-link, Sativa, an Ameraucana, and Medulla, an Australorp.
They are about five weeks old now. It will be a while before they lay, but in the mean time the are super cut and hilarious to watch. They have also gotten significantly bigger in the last week.
I also made them a rockin' house out of an old cupboard we found in the basement, some extra plywood, hinges I stole from a kitchen demo project a while ago, and a piece of very heavy black plastic that may very well have just blown into our yard. It worked out pretty well, but the chickies haven't quite figured out what to do with it, besides sit under it, and chase each other through the cinderblocks that are holding it up. Someday they will get big and then one of them will get stuck.

Okay, that was an epically long post. I'm going to do my level best to post in here more often, and with better pictures. Once again the day I pick to take all these photos is very overcast. I'll be taking a botanical illustration course this summer, so that should result in lots of pictures. Other things post soon: a catalog of my carnivorous plant collection, and one of my dozens of volunteer tomato plants, a rundown of the rad job I almost certainly didn't get but is still cool enough to post about, adventures in gardening for other people.

I'm really pleased with how my garden is shaping up. Only one total loss so far--my chinese cabbage bolted IMMEDIATELY after I put it in the ground. My cumin isn't doing so hot either, but I just put the two surviving sprouts in the ground, and hopefully they will get going. We're only really eating off the , cilantro, and last years onions so far, but the first few strawberries are ripe, the lettuce is about big enough for real salads, the peas are coming in, the basil is maybe a couple of weeks out from being edible-sized. It's exciting! and delicious!