Friday Finds

It's been a busy week, so not much gleaned. There IS a lot going on in the garden now that the tomatoes are leaping out of the ground, the strawberries are producing, and I see today that the pie cherries are turning. Pictures to come!

A few things I've stumbled across:

• Have an iPod Touch or an iPhone? Here are 10 garden apps for you to play with, from plant encyclopedias to local eating databases.
• What do you do when your city is losing population and neighborhoods are turning into ghost towns? Does it make green sense to bulldoze vacant houses, after removing any thing recyclable, and return the land to nature? There are both pros and cons to the plan, of course, but it's interesting to see that "negative growth" doesn't have to be a dirty phrase.
• Bloggers have an ethical code? Apparently so, according to this study!
  

Earth Day Arugulence

Dahlings, haven't you heard? All this digging in the dirt... er, soil, mixing in manur... er, quality organic plant enhancements, and growing vegetab... er, hoity-toity organic produce, is so terribly faddish these days that it's only for Hollywood celebs and something us ordinary mortals can safely ignore?

Yeah, I didn't get that memo, either.

Maureen Dowd, however, in an editorial about Alice Waters, comments on a growing backlash coming from certain segments of our society against the rising popularity of backyard vegetable gardens. They're fads, you see. People falling for this silly organic stuff. The realm of both chic, elitist yuppies in search of fashionable greens and aging hippies who can't forget the 60's still piddling around in their among the weeds and the weed in their back yards.

Mere arugulence, y'see.

Strange. I grew up in a family where gardens were for saving money and for growing fresh, healthy produce that produced healthy (and sometimes fresh) kids. My parents were born during the Depression, and my grandparents gardened their way through those hard years as a means of getting by.

To dismiss gardening as a mere elitist fad, as arugulence, is a slap in the face of every frugal family that managed to feed itself by getting a little dirt under their nails.

What ever happened to the American kitchen garden? It was crushed under the oncoming steamroller of Consumerism of the 50s, which was driven by a distaste for the scrimping, saving, and doing without of the Depression and the war years. Back alleys disappeared in the new suburbs, front yards were given over to driveways and a tidy facade, and the back yard became not a service entrance and a place for the kitchen garden, but the new outdoor living area.

In recent years, several forces have contributed to the rise in vegetable gardening. One is a growing movement against lawns for ecological reasons: lawns are expensive to maintain both economically and ecologically. Another is a slight but increasing recognition that suburbs can only grow so much and farmlands shrink so much, as suburbs sprawl out over rich farmland, before there isn't enough farmland to feed all the people in those houses. It only makes sense to let some of the farmland that is now suburb give back. Another factor is the recession that we've been falling into for the last couple of years, the full brunt of which we're finally feeling.

As we hunker down for the worst, people are more and more interested in learning survival skills: gardening, spinning, knitting, and the like. Whether we need these skills for survival now isn't the issue. It's about knowing you could grow your food, raise some hens, and knit your own sweater from wool you've spun if you had to that brings a little comfort. And for some people clutching their pink slips and wondering how they'll get through until the next job turns up, that backyard veggie garden may be the means of feeding the kids and giving them something interesting to do all summer.

Arugulence? I think not.

Oh, noes! Organic gardening threatens the American Way!

Or so the Mid America Croplife Association would have it. As you've probably heard by now, Michelle Obama has taken a page out of the life story of First Families of a century ago and is having fresh produce grown on the White House grounds in an organic vegetable garden. Backyard gardeners nationwide are grinning. Vegetable gardens are back in fashion again for multiple reasons, including economics, health, environmental awareness, an interest in a locavore lifestyle, or simply because they want tomatoes that taste like tomatoes, not the flabby imitations we're greeted with all winter at the supermarket.

But wait! Not so fast! According to a letter sent from MACA to Mrs. Obama, the White House veggie garden could be the beginning of a dangerous trend! If people farm all their own food individually, well, it could be the downfall of our society! Better to let the professionals take care of the farming with their superior technology. Or something like that.

Like the only choices are "grow it all yourself on a small farm" or "grow nothing?" Let's take some of their claims apart and see what they're made of. I already posted most of this response on one of the forums on Ravelry, so a few readers may have seen this.

Many people, especially children, don't realize the extent to which their daily lives depend on America's agricultural industry. For instance, children are unaware the jeans they put on in the morning, the three meals eaten daily, the baseball with which they play and even the biofuels that power the school bus are available because of America's farmers and ranchers.

Yes! True! Absolutely true! And exactly the reason why kids should be in the backyard happily digging in their own gardens! If I had my way, the prerequisite for my biology class would be to spend a summer growing an organic garden and observing the microwildlife that inhabits it. Then we'd all have a concrete, common point to start with when we have discussions of ecology, diversity, and the like. As it is, we have students like the one who, when asked, "So why don't the cells in the onion have chloroplasts? Where does the bulb part of the onion grow?" replied, "I don't know. I've never seen an onion tree." This is a college course, mind you. We as Americans are so far removed from our food sources that the resulting ignorance about our food is appalling. Even my biology majors, when shown a stalk of broccoli and asked what part of the plant it was, couldn't recognize flower buds when they saw them -- except a couple of them who had grown broccoli in their own gardens and knew what happened if they didn't cut the head before the buds burst.

Agriculture is the largest industry in America generating 20% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. Individuals, family partnerships or family corporations operate almost 99% of U.S. farms.

And they're threatened if people grow a few tomatoes and some fresh lettuce on the back porch? Really? Wow. I think this letter says more about the industrial food complex than all of Michael Pollan's books put together.

Today, an average farmer produces enough food to feed 144 Americans who are living longer lives than many of their ancestors.

Are we hinting here that it's because of chemical-based agriculture that people are living longer? Because one doesn't necessarily follow the other -- little factors like, oh, indoor plumbing, clean municipal water supplies, and advances in medicine just might have something more to do with that.

Technology in agriculture has allowed for the development of much of what we know and use in our lives today. If Americans were still required to farm to support their family's basic food and fiber needs, would the U.S. have been leaders in the advancement of science, communication, education, medicine, transportation and the arts?

The rise in influence of American culture in these areas began well before chemical-based agriculture, when many more people were living on family farms. So what are we saying here? Pesticides make us better artists and engineers? Farmers are ignorant slobs who don't contribute to the arts and sciences so let's have fewer of them doing more with bigger tractors and more chemicals? Huh? This statement really needs to be thought through, because it doesn't flatter our American farmers at all.

We live in a very different world than that of our grandparents. Americans are juggling jobs with the needs of children and aging parents. The time needed to tend a garden is not there for the majority of our citizens, certainly not a garden of sufficient productivity to supply much of a family's year-round food needs.

Well, heavens to Betsy, so few of us can grow a garden large enough to supply all the produce we need to feed us for a year, so let's not garden at all! What a pitiful argument! It's not an either-or situation by any means. Our choices aren't limited to "grow all your own food" and "grow none of your own food." You can grow veggies in a tub on your apartment balcony and devote just a few minutes a day to the operation if you want to.

Much of the food considered not wholesome or tasty is the result of how it is stored or prepared rather than how it is grown.

This, after the whole tomato recall hysteria? And the spinach recall affair? Food handling begins in the field and does affect produce quality. This is true of both organic (what used to be "traditional") farming and "conventional" (or "chemical") farming.

There's one other factor that's not being considered here: the variety that is grown. Most commercial varieties are selected for their shipping and storing qualities, not for their flavor and "wholesomeness." Since most Americans have been raised on plastic strawberries grown out of season in Chile and shipped to the U.S., too few of us have known what a real, warm-from-the-sun, fresh-from-the-vine, peak-of-ripeness strawberry even tastes like. Waxy, flabby tomatoes in the produce section can't hold a candle to a fresh-picked (but tender-skinned) Brandywine or Cherokee Purple, but who is going to know if they don't grow their own? The heirloom varieties aren't sold in the produce section. Lucky are those with a farmer's market nearby where heirloom veggies can still be found. And as for asparagus, if it's not fresh-cut from my own garden, don't even offer it to me. I'm spoiled that way.

Fresh foods grown conventionally are wholesome and flavorful yet more economical.

More economical than what? Be specific. I hope they're not hinting that it's more expensive to grow a vegetable garden. Of course it all depends on how you go about vegetable gardening. We don't all have to grow The $64 Tomato as one book title proclaims. Some of us can exercise more sense.

Local and conventional farming is not mutually exclusive. However, a Midwest mother whose child loves strawberries, a good source of Vitamin C, appreciates the ability to offer California strawberries in March a few months before the official Mid-west season.

I won't comment twice on the quality and flavor of those berries, not when I have much better varieties in my own yard. I won't even begin the argument about eating with the season, and that there are other sources of Vitamin C besides strawberries shipped from afar and stored so long that their vitamins have already begun to degrade. All I'll say is that this is still no argument against growing a backyard garden. Think of how much more Junior would appreciate those berries if he grew them himself in a big pot on the back porch -- and how much more he would learn about where his food comes from.

Look, if putting a veggie garden in behind the White House and encouraging people to grow a little food themselves is a huge gigantic threat to the farming industry, the industry has bigger troubles than anyone realized. Nor are its issues going to be solved by discouraging people from encouraging others to garden and depend totally on supermarket produce. Michelle Obama isn't saying, "Hey, everyone should grow all their own food instead of buying food from the store." We can't all raise chickens, milk cows, and orchards, not in the fringe of grass and shrubs around your average McMansion. But for much of my life I've seen good farmland bulldozed and covered with housing developments, because as every builder knows, building on nice, flat land is easier than building on unfarmed slopes. We've lost acres and acres of prime farmland to suburban sprawl. Isn't it only fitting that at least a little of that land should give back in the form of a home vegetable garden?

Eating a species from the brink of extinction

In an article titled To Save a Species, Serve it for Dinner (free registration required to read), the New York Times reports on Gary Paul Nabhan's new book,titled Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods. Mr. Nabhan has compiled a list of over 1000 endangered American foods, comprising not only heirloom vegetables that gardeners are already keen on, but also American natives used by Native Americans and Europeans alike (pit-roasted antelope, anyone?).

The thing about preserving food species, as gardeners know, is that it isn't about protecting the species and its habitat as it is with preserving most wild species. It's about actually using the plants and animals as food. Heirloom vegetables will only stick around if someone grows them, eats them, and saves the seeds. Heirloom livestock will only exist if someone raises them and breeds them, and that will happen if there's a demand for the meat (or someone has a lot of money to spend on keeping livestock). Just keeping heirloom varieties around as a kind of living museum doesn't work, because unlike wild species, it takes a lot of work to keep them around. That Seneca hominy flint corn doesn't sow itself, ya know.

What's more, successfully preserving heirloom species also involves preserving the knowledge of how to use it. It's hard to get people to save Ny'pa (a kind of salt grass) if they have no idea what to do with it.

The good thing is that many gardeners and small farmers are keenly interested in heirlooms. Many have flavor or other qualities missing from mass-produced supermarket varieties. The tender skins of Brandywine tomatoes, for example, aren't good for shipping, but the winey flavor outshines any pale pink pseudo-tomato you can find in the produce section.

So where do you find heirloom varieties to grow? Some have made enough of a renaissance that they're available in a wide variety of seed catalogs. My two favorites, Territorial and Nichols, carry some, as does Pinetree Seeds. One Green World has a super selection of unusual fruit trees and shrubs. Then there's Heirloom Seeds, an online supplier which features varieties our parents or grandparents grew in victory gardens during the World Wars.

Not all heirlooms make it into the catalogs, though. To find really unusual varieties that haven't reached commercial production yet, turn to the seed exchanges like Seed Savers Exchange. Or ask around the neighborhood to see if gardeners in your area are harboring a local heirloom.

As for that salt grass -- you're on your own there.

Earth Day 2008

It's coming right up this Tuesday.

Of course, every day is Earth Day when you're a gardener, especially if you go organic. Beyond our own gardens, though, anyone have anything special planned?

Gotten to those roses yet?

If you haven't gotten around to pruning your roses yet -- like me -- hold on just long enough to read this article by Kym Pokorny on Oregon Live:

An Easy Way to Prune Roses

The gist of it is that traditional hard pruning methods were developed to produce larger show roses or long-stemmed roses. But simply shearing the roses actually produces more foliage and more blooms, though the blooms are smaller. If you're growing your roses for your own pleasure and not for floral shows, check it out.

(Image borrowed from The Invisible Gardener until I get a good picture of my own roses!)

And another rooftop garden - this one edible

From the Dig In with Kym blog on OregonLive.com, a post about great gardens from 2007, featuring the city's first commercial rooftop edible garden. The garden, atop the Rocket building near East Burnside in Portland, feeds the Rocket Restaurant just one floor below. Discarded kiddie pools hold enough dirt to support fresh arugula, lettuce, and other fresh foods for hungry diners.

That's a trend I would like to see spread even further -- restaurants striving for the freshest of produce by growing at least some of it themselves.

Keeping Your Resolutions, Now Easier Than Ever

Let me guess, your New Year Resolutions, if you made any, include one or more of the following:

1. Lose weight
2. Get fit
3. Save money

Good news! According to this article in The Telegraph, you can do all three at once by doing what you're already doing: gardening!

1. Lose weight: Heavy garden chores like shoveling or mowing use as much energy as jogging.
2. Get fit: Ditto, and besides, all gardening tasks involve moving your body.
3. Save money: Who needs a gym membership or expensive exercise equipment when you've got a complete workout just outside your door?

In addition, being outdoors and working in the garden often help alleviate the post-holiday blues. So your call: spend time on the treadmill down at the gym, running and running and getting nowhere, or go turn your compost heap and actually get something accomplished. Me, I know where I'm headed, and it doesn't involve running in place.

Gardening at 17 Stories

Many is the time I've been in a big city for one conference or another, and have looked across acre upon acre of black tar rooftop, thinking, "Look at all that space that could hold solar panels and help power those buildings."

Horticulturalists at Oregon State University looked across the same urban roofscape and thought, "That could be a meadow."

Rooftop gardens have been around for a long time, but those meant to be human-centered gardens, with tables and chairs and trees to shade them, generally require extra structural support to hold up all the dirt that's required. OSU researchers are investigating extensive gardens with low-growing plants, some requiring only a few inches of lightweight growing medium, which can happily co-exist with ordinary rooftop structures. Add a rainwater collection system to store water for dry summers, and you have a sustainable garden that can help mitigate runoff, clean the air, and mitigate the effects of putting concrete structures where wild nature used to be.

The full article is here: Greening the Concrete Jungle

When Corn is Not a Cure

The New York Times reported today on growing resistance to new ethanol distilleries in the midwest (requires free registration to read the whole article).

Wait -- wasn't corn-based alcohol supposed to be a cure for our nation's fuel crisis?

Readers of Michale Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, already know the problems with corn-fed industrial agriculture: changes made in the late 1970's in the way that corn farmers were compensated created a system in which the government encourages overproduction of corn instead of paying farmers to allow their land to go fallow. I visited rural Indiana this summer and saw the results. Farmers now plant every last square foot, right up to the roadsides, leaving no hedgerows for wildlife. They pack the corn in as tight as they can, and feed the corn chemical fertilizers to make it grow as fast as possible, which results in nutrient-rich runoff into streams, with a resulting upset to wildlife. Without letting the land lie fallow, which allows some humus to be restored, the land loses topsoil at an alarming rate. All that corn needs water, but there's only so much water in the aquifers, and farmers know they've pretty much reached the limit in many areas of the corn belt. Mountains of cheap corn pile up, leaving food scientists to figure out how to make the current U.S. population eat more of it than ever -- which is why your soft drinks are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup instead of real sugar. A lot of that corn gets stuffed down gullets of steers destined to be corn-fed beef, but their digestive systems aren't adapted for digesting grain, resulting in a host of health problems that would kill them if they weren't slaughtered first. Grass is a healthier diet, and involves more efficient energy conversion (plus, according to some studies, free-range grass-fed beef has a higher proportion of healthy omega-3 fats than corn-fed beef, and lots of folks think it tastes better, too).

Okay, so mountains of corn, prices falling, farmers barely getting by -- why isn't corn-based ethanol good news?

Because we still have an industrial food system plugged into corn. Farmers can't feed the system AND the distilleries just by growing more corn. They're already maxed out. When corn is shunted to distilleries, it drives up food prices for everyone.

Could we unplug from the system? Demand free-range meats? Refuse soft drinks sweetened with corn syrup? Give up breakfast cereals made from de-germed yellow corn meal? Spurn corn-based "green" plastics? Free up more corn for ethanol?

Yes, it's possible. The system is vast and its corn-based tendrils are in just about every manufactured food in the grocery store. Unplugging all at once would put a whole lot of people out of business all at once, but taking small-but-steady measures to support organic agriculture, locally-grown produce, and free-range meat production will help create a market for more sustainable agricultural practices.

Yet corn-based ethanol still has its limits, and that limit is drawn by how much water is available to corn farmers. Is it better to use farmland and aquifers to feed our people or to drive our cars? That's an ethical issue that isn't easily resolved. But it sounds like some savvy midwest farmers already have strong opinions on the issue.

Let's define "yard waste"

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a phenomenon that must be a problem in all communities with municipal composting: yard waste carts full of trash.

When curbside green carts are used as trash cans, collection companies spend time and money separating the compostable from the non-compostable. It seems that citizens have a hard time understanding what "yard waste" means. For some, "yard waste" seems to mean, "If it's in the yard and I don't want it, it must be yard waste." As a consequence, good compostable material arrives mixed with toys, garden tools, grocery bags, empty lawn chemical containers, plastic utensils tossed out with food scraps, broken bicycles, and more.

Our community recycling service uses this phrase: "If it grows, it goes!" That might spare some confusion. The main rule is that if it's something that goes in the compost bin, it can go in the yard waste cart.

Now some gardeners may be wondering why one needs a yard waste cart when one could use a compost bin. For me, grass clippings, weeds, and kitchen waste do go in the compost bin, But when I trim shrubs or rake up fallen branches, I'd rather put the woody debris in the cart. I don't have a chipper, and woody stuff piles up faster than it breaks down. Municipal composting facilities often like to get woody debris, as they frequently need wood chips to mix with the piles of grass clippings they receive. Makes for a win-win situation for me.

To dig up: potatoes, turnips, Viking treasure hoard...

From the National Geographic website: Viking Treasure Trove Discovered in Swedish Garden.

Aw, and to think that the most exciting thing I've ever dug up in my garden was a lost Koosh ball.

Now there was the time when I was in third grade, when we lived in a rental house that had been a farmhouse, and my brothers discovered a trunk buried in the garden. After much digging and soaking the hard clay soil with a hose, they finally extracted it. To their dismay and disgust, all it contained with some kind of animal skeleton, probably a large dog.

But if there are any Vikings out there wondering where to bury their treasure, I've got a lovely garden...

Rebel Gardeners Risk the Law for Forbidden Fruits (and Veggies)

From the Associated Press: Front Yard Veggies Improve Diets, Homes

This upbeat title was replaced in our local newspaper with the slightly more ominous, "Front-yard vegetables fill tables, but rile neighbors."

Used to be, in the U.S. suburbs, in the days of big front porches and convenient back alleys, that the front of the house was for show and socializing, while the back of the house was for service. That's why the kitchen garden was stuck in the back -- rows of vegetables weren't pretty, no more than rows of laundry hanging out.

Then came the post-WWII suburbs and the ranch house, with the loss of alleys for garages, garbage, and delivery. The front became the service entrance, and people moved their living spaces to the back.

Where did the vegetable garden go to? Into oblivion. Just before the turn of the century, about 30% of food was produced at home. By the post-war years, less than 10% was produced at home as people ripped out old-fashioned victory gardens and replaced them with landscaping and in-ground swimming pools. And the number continues to decline. Today less than 3% of food is in the U.S. is produced at home. (See Kitchen Gardeners International: What is KGI? for statistics -- of course, some of the perceived decline may be due to the enormous increase in agribusiness production during the 1950's.)

Now, rising gas prices and the subsequent rise in consumer prices, plus an increasing awareness of global issues and a desire to "live green" has aroused a new interest in gardening. But with urban and suburban land at a premium, and houses in modern 'burbs sit in postage-stamp-sized lots (which is nothing new -- houses in this town built during the 30's were also on tiny lots). Where do you put a veggie garden? Some folks solve the problem by ripping out the lawn, whether it is in the front or the back of the house.

But if you live in a neighborhood where covenants or municipal codes govern what you can do with your front yard, and front-yard farmers risk running afoul of the law. When people think of "vegetable gardens," they think of the old-fashioned American kitchen garden with rows of corn and peas in the summer and bare dirt all winter, not something they want to look at as they drive through suburbia. Or around here they think of little hippie houses with a mad tangle of half-neglected herbs, some of them legal.

Yet with a little inspiration from the French potagers and from the "edible landscaping" concept, people are designing beautiful front gardens with herbs, salad greens, berry bushes, and other food plants that are as nice to look at as they are to eat. What would look nicer: a French-inspired kitchen garden with neat paths, patterned beds, trained fruit trees, and clipped herbs, or a dead brown lawn? (Okay, dead brown in the winter for you folks back east, dry and brown in the summer for us folks out west.) What some front-yard gardeners are finding is that while their gardens may cause raised eyebrows, they also bring the neighbors over to talk, often for the first time.

I know my house, and some houses around here, have shrubs in front instead of lawn. I've been sneaking chard, tomatoes, and other edibles in the front landscaping for years, and this year I'm determined to take out the increasingly ugly concrete pad that the former owners used as a basketball court and replace it with raised beds. We'll see what the neighbors have to say about that!

Friday Finds

Some gardening-related goodies from across the web:

• The Bonsai Site: I've not been bit by the bonsai bug, but for anyone who has been, this is the place to visit to find out all about it.
• Organic Lawn Care for the Cheap and Lazy: Yeah, that sounds good to me. I'm not one of those lawn nuts who gets out there with manicure scissors. I just want soft, green stuff to walk barefoot in. Here's how to do it.
• Antique Seed Packets: I love it. Old seed packets -- the genuine thing, it looks like -- framed as art.
• Fork: An online gardening 'zine with a feisty 'tude. Only one issue so far. With a little support, maybe there will be more.
  
• Upside-down tomato plants: You know those expensive thingies you can buy for growing hanging tomato plants? Here's how to make them out of old plastic buckets.

Have a nice weekend, everyone!

Big, bad asbestos and your garden

As though the warnings about lavender and tea tree oil that I summarized in the last post weren't enough, the July 8 issue of Science News has this article: Dirty little secret: asbestos laces many residential soils (available online for non-subscribers). We're not talking about houses built on old waste dumps, either. Asbestos is a mined mineral, and when asbestos-containing deposits are found near the surface, disturbances (such as the housing development described in the article) can send the cancer-causing fibers flying. Though the fibers in question are larger and don't drift as far as those released from old insulation materials and other asbestos found in old buildings, they do pose a risk when they're kicked up by wind or machinery. Unfortunately, though asbestos use in construction and its removal from old buildings are highly regulated, there are no laws restricting construction on sites where veins of asbestos-containing minerals have been uncovered.

But even if your home isn't built on a tremolite vein (one common asbestos-containing mineral), concerns about asbestos contamination of vermiculite mines a few years ago had gardeners and horticulturalists up in arms. Vermiculite, of course, is the stuff put in potting mix to lighten it while helping retain water. Experienced gardeners know you can buy it by the bagful if you want to create your own potting mix. It's also mixed into fertilizers, and has dozens of commercial and industrial uses, from fireproofing to nuclear waste disposal.

So what's a gardener to do? If you use vermiculite, the EPA recommends these steps to reduce exposure to the dust:

• Use vermiculite outdoors or in a well-ventilated space (outdoors is best).
• Dampen vermiculite before using it to prevent dust from flying.
• Use purchased, moist potting mixes to reduce total vermiculite exposure.
• If using vermiculite outdoors, peel off outer layers of clothing before going inside, and wash them.

A dust mask might not be a bad idea, also.

The National Cancer Institute has more recommendations for reducing cancer risk from asbestos.

Lavender and Tea Tree Oil: Estrogen Mimics

I posted a summary of this on the You Grow Girl forums. The July 1 issue of Science News carried an article about the newly-discovered feminizing effects of lavender and tea tree oil in young boys, and appear to be responsible for a rise in breast development in pre-pubescent boys. The article is on the Science News website, but is available only to subscribers of the print magazine, so I'll summarize the findings here.

The story: Ever since 1990, Dr. Clifford Bloch, an endocrinologist in the Denver area, had been seeing a number of cases of gynecomastia in pre-pubescent boys. Gynecomastia, or breast development in boys, is unusual, and when it occurs it's usually the result of some hormonal problem. However, testing the boys for sex hormones showed a normal ratio of the various sex hormones, so it wasn't a hormone production problem. After a great deal of laborious detective work, trying to find out what these boys all had in common, the doctor traced down two possible culprits: lavender essence and tea tree oil. All the boys had been using soaps, hair gel, shampoo, and similar topical products with these two herbal ingredients. In some cases, boys had been putting pure lavender oil on their skin. When Bloch suggested they stop using these products, the condition disappeared within a few months.

But a simple correlation doesn't prove a cause, so the doctor contacted a health sciences research lab in North Carolina, and asked them to investigate. The researchers carried out an in-vitro experiment, treating human breast tissue cultures with lavender or tea tree oil. In both cases, the oils caused the cells to turn on estrogen-regulated genes and turn off androgen-regulated genes. In other words, both act as estrogen mimics, turning on genes normally controlled by estrogen, such as genes that stimulate breast tissue growth. It also turns off genes controlled by male hormones.

While Bloch's observations were on young boys, the same effect may also happen in young girls. In fact some health researchers have noted a recent rise in pre-pubescent breast development in girls. With the increased popularity of lavender as a calming aroma in aromatherapy, more people are using lavender-scented products, and users include children in the household.

The article had no report as to whether spammers will soon be pushing breast enlargement products featuring lavender and tea tree oil. It probably wouldn't work, either. Kids have such low levels of sex hormones that the small amounts of estrogen mimics in these oils may be upsetting the balance, but adults may not even notice the difference. However, women with or recovering from estrogen-related breast cancer will also want to take note of this article, and discuss it with their doctor.

Moral of the story: enjoy lavender and tea tree oil now and then, but don't overdo it. And for pity's sake, don't let your kids slather lavender oil all over themselves. Even without the hormonal problem, it's a bit much.

Urban Farmers vs. the Bulldozers of L.A.

Once upon a time on 41st and Alameda Street in South Central Los Angeles, a garden arose. Not just any garden, but a community garden, where the people in a low-income neighborhood gathered to grow food and so feed themselves. And it was good.

Until now.

It's no fairy tale, but it's turning into a horror story even now. Fourteen years ago, a 14-acre piece of land became the property of the City of Los Angeles under the laws of eminent domain. Landowners were compensated, and the city planned to build an incinerator on the site. Because of complaints of people in the surrounding neighborhood, the city abandoned the plan. However, if within 10 years the city determined that it no longer needed the land, the former owner, a large investment firm, was granted rights of first refusal. The city then set the land aside for a community garden, allowing the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank to manage it.

The garden has been a tremendous success. People from the neighborhood have been growing masses of food from the reclaimed land, which they use to reduce the cost of their own groceries, as well as helping others. The garden has become a community center, with special events, fairs, and a Farmer's Market.

But behind the scenes, the city was busy negotiating with another investment firm to sell the land. Back and forth negotiations went, with the investment firm at one point raising a lawsuit against the city for demurring on their deal. After several years of negotiating, the city finally settled with the firm and sold the land. Only then did they inform the food bank of the deal, which was the first notice that the gardeners had of their garden's impending doom. At no point was the food bank nor were the gardeners allowed to make an offer of their own. The gardeners banded together and raised a lawsuit of their own against the city for breaking the charter with the food bank, but the city claims it no longer needed the land, and that this loophole in the law took priority over the charter.

This morning, police in riot gear arrived to evict the farmers. Fire trucks were on the scene, ladder trucks to pluck protesters out of trees -- yes, trees, which shows how far this garden has come from the old vacant lot it once was. Trees planted by the gardeners themselves, and bearing fruit.

This evening, the bulldozers arrived. Tomorrow, Los Angeles' own Eden will be a dirty scar.

Cheers, L.A.

The gardeners haven't given up, however, in spite of the imminent destruction of fourteen years worth of hard labor. They're still trying to raise funds to buy the land themselves, and will return all donations if they can't buy the land. Their site is here: South Central Farmers

Long-legged Rats: Deer in Suburbia

"They're nothing but long-legged rats!" a gardener friend once said. They dine on expensive hybrid roses. They take a bite out of each of the melons on the vine, spoiling all before they move on. They'll yank the broccoli and lettuce out of the ground, and make short work of the perennial bed.

They're Bambis in Suburbia, Over the Hedge in 3-D real life, and not nearly so funny when they gobble up the plants that you've poured money and sweat into.

Within a half mile of our house is an abandoned orchard where the deer roam, and sometimes wander out into the surrounding neighborhoods. Recently the bulldozers have been at work, since someone plans to subdivide and build on the site (exactly who we don't know, nor do we know what the plans are, as they seem to change as often as Madonna's new "look"), pushing the deer out of their former home. They haven't turned up in our yard yet, but as there is an overgrown wood nearby, and a convenient back alley access, it's only a matter of time. Others in the neighborhood have not been so fortunate. Their excitement about the ooh-so-cute brown-eyed delicate-looking creatures quickly turns to rage as Bambi bites all the flowers off of the tea rose.

Why do they do it? Why do the take a bite here, a bite there, and ruin all the pumpkins or melons in the patch instead of feeding on just one? Because they're browsers, not grazers. It's the way that deer eat. They're also edge species, moving from wood to meadow and back again, and when we carve up the woods to make suburbs, we provide more edges than nature ever intended, increasing their habitat many times over. They we lay out a banquet of roses and veggies for them. What else are they going to do but belly up to the buffet and sample everything, then trot off to the woods to make more little deer?

When I was a kid, though, I grew up in the country, where deer made regular treks across the front lawn and through the garden. We tried all the "sure-fire" remedies that we'd heard recommended. We hung aluminum pie tins out where they'd rattle in the breezes. It helped a bit with the birds, but the deer were unfazed. We hung strong-smelling soap -- Lifebuoy was the supposed magic brand -- but it had so little effect, we half-suspected the deer were showering with it. We scattered human hair around, but the deer seemed so used to the presence of humans already that this barely registered with them. We tried sprinkling blood meal around. Great fertilizer, lousy deer repellant. The only "deer-proof" plants that were ever actually deer proof seemed to be the daffodils. The rest were fair game, even if they were only second choice, and the only thing left during the dry season of August and September.

Besides, by the time you apply all the usual remedies, and reapply them frequently, you'll spend all of your gardening time hanging up noisemakers and applying noxious mixtures. Who wants a smelly, noisy garden anyway?

The only thing that ever worked were physical barriers. A simple fence made of metal stakes with twine slowed them down a bit, at least in the raised bed in the turnaround where the roses were. Late in the summer when everything dried up, they'd still manage to hop over this. The electric fence that Dad strung around the vegetable garden did a better job, as did the wire mesh cages -- simple cylinders of hardware cloth -- that went up around the blueberry bushes. And a taller, more permanent fence that he built around the permanent garden, where the berries and grapes were, managed to protect those plantings reasonably well.

I think it's a cycle that all gardeners go through. First you try what amounts to little folk charms because someone swears they'll work and they're cheap -- cheap that is until you lose that expensive perennial that you've been nursing along. Eventually you realize that "cheap" means spending the money to do things right in the first place. Up goes the fence, and the deer move on.

Since the configuration of our yard doesn't make it easy to fence, I'm hoping that the deer never discover us. But if they do -- well, I'd better start setting something aside against that day, because fencing everything in isn't going to be cheap. Either that, or build wire mesh covers, though I don't fancy keeping a cage farm.

The Washington Post has more on the subject, here: Not Yours to Munch, Deer.

Save Gas -- Grow Food

Every couple of years our family takes a road trip back to Indiana to see my mother-in-law. We often get off the freeway and see the sights, or just enjoy the scenery as we go.

As a gardener, of course I'm interested in what other people have in their gardens. One thing that has often struck me as we pass through ranch country and then Midwest farm country is the decided lack of visible vegetable gardens.

Maybe it's just the areas we pass through. Or maybe the farmers and ranchers are incredibly busy people. Or maybe it's an unfortunate trend. But when I see a house sitting in the middle of the sagebrush with nothing around it but a patch of lawn and no hint anywhere of food growing up around it, I have to wonder why. Is it really cost-effective to drive all the way to the nearest store, which looks to be an hour or so away at least, to get everything that the ranchers and their help eat? Having not been raised on a South Dakota ranch, I'm in no position to make a definitive statement on that. But I have to wonder, especially now with rising gas prices.

My grandmother spent part of her formative years on a potato farm in the bustling town of Tule Lake, California (just across the Oregon border from Klamath Falls). She grew up with gardening as a part of her life, and every year up until her 90's, she planted a vegetable garden. My parents grew up with victory gardens, during the war years when growing and preserving food was a patriotic act. When I was a kid, my parents grew and preserved corn, tomatoes, blueberries, raspberries, and lots of other produce, and we went to orchards to pick fruit for canning. This was such an integral part of my life that it seemed odd to me as I grew up to find that there were other people in the world who didn't grow so much as a parsley sprig or a strawberry that's worth eating.

We've gotten so used to perfect produce shipped from thousands of miles away that it no longer seems strange to see seasonal produce in the supermarkets all year long. But as gas prices continue to skyrocket, transportation costs for imported produce are increasing, which means the cost of the produce will increase along with it.

But it doesn't take a lot of gas and money to put fresh produce on our tables, not for people who have even a small patch of sunny earth to call their own. Along with other gardeners, I'm wondering if increases in fuel prices and resulting increases in food costs will spur a new gardening revival. So long as people are sensible about their gardening practices, and don't go to the extremes described in The $64 Tomato, growing some of your own food can help offset the rising grocery bill.

If you don't have a suitable spot for a vegetable patch, or don't have the time for a vegetable garden, buying locally-grown produce is a great alternative. Check out the 100 mile diet site, a terrific resource for people who want to buy their food from local growers and producers. The idea is to buy food that is grown within 100 miles of your home. That may sound like a long distance, but it's a whole lot better than the of 1,500 miles that the average food item travels from farm to plate -- and produce imported in the winter travels a whole lot farther than that.

How easy it is to go on the 100 mile diet may depend on where people live. Where I live there are lots of fruit farms and a handful of independent meat markets, as well as lots of fruit stands. It's not hard to find peaches, pears, cherries, blueberries, and other fruit for freezing and canning, and locally-grown meats at reasonable prices. Big cities often have farmer's markets where city folk can find farm-fresh produce. But while my mother-in-law can buy fresh corn in season in her area of Indiana, fruit farms are far scarcer than they are where I live.

If we all do what we can -- grow what we can, and buy what we can locally -- we can all make a contribution to fuel conservation.

Live Leopards -- as Garden Decor?!?!

There has to be one in every community, doesn't there? You know, the person who thinks "neighborly" is for weenies and can't understand why the neighbors are upset with the rifle range or stock car track or whatever bit of macho memorabilia that's appeared in his back yard.

In a neighborhood south of London, it's a fellow -- claiming all the while to be an avid conservationist -- who wants to keep live leopards in 12 foot cages in his back yard. The neighbors are upset, but the magistrates have allowed it after a vet declared the cages "adequate" to house the cats.

Doesn't look like anyone asked the leopards if a 12 foot cage is truly "adequate." Read the story on the BBC website: Man Can Keep Leopards in Garden.