Mad Bioneer

Epiphytes – On a Stick!

2011-12-12T23:36:00.000-07:00

Life has been crazy lately, leaving me with little time to do what I love. So when an opportunity, well, need really, presented itself, I jumped on it with gusto. I recently moved to a new house, with different window configurations and different layout. I suddenly found myself with one great window to put plants in. It got better sun than what I had before, but it only really had room for one big plant. We have a great porch right now as well, with lots of room and good sun exposure, but winter has set in, leaving all my tropicals inside. Add to that the overgrown nature of my dragonfruit seedlings and something needed to be done.

The obvious choice for occupancy in the window was my Meyer lemon tree. I mean, the thing is actually producing lemons for me and I have a prominent place set aside for it in my future greenhouse. I have great plans for it, including its job as a future scaffolding for my dragonfruit cactus and possible grafting to produce a citrus fruit salad tree. Anyway, the survival of this tree was paramount. But it was living in a pot that was big enough for some friends, so I saw the opportunity for a project.

As I have mentioned previously on this blog, I sprouted a large number of dragonfruit cactus about a year ago and the germination rate surprised me. My estimates were that the three pots held around 90 cactus seedlings. Eventually I need only two. I had repotted one of the pots and some of the relocated plants got very large very quickly. So I had about 60 small seedlings and about 5 large ones. I really only needed to save a couple and get rid of the rest. They were beginning to sprawl. Again, an opportunity for a project.

So I cut a 5’ branch from an elm tree and stripped the branches. Then I got some coir (coconut fiber) fabric from the local pet store and cut it into strips. I wrapped the coir in a spiral strip up the log, nailing it into place at the end of one strip and the beginning of the other. Then I chose the two best dragonfruit seedlings and planted them at the base of the stick. I did my best to train them up the stick, holding them in place with fishing line. Eventually the dragonfruit will begin to produce aerial roots and the coir will provide the perfect substrate for them to grow onto, attaching firmly to the stick.

After I got all that done, I noticed that the spiral wrap of the coir left me some space between the coir and the stick. Of course, if I had thought of this at the outset, I probably wouldn’t have wound it as tightly as I possibly could. It occurred to me that I had a couple of epiphytes that were also in need of a new home.

Years ago I created a very large mushroom log and loaded it up with epiphytes, the concept being that as I misted the epiphytes, I would also be misting the log. Some of the epiphytes have since been moved to soil, where they are happier. Others have died. The log has stopped producing mushrooms. I was down to two lonely Tillandsias, a Tillandsia bulbosa and a Tillandsia caput-medusae, and two tiny strands of Spanish moss (which, coincidentally, are Tillandsias as well) and all had seen better days. Tillandsias like bright light and I knew that they wouldn’t do well in their new home far from a bright window, so I decided to move them to the stick.

With a little tugging and pulling, I was able to make enough space to put my epiphytes on the log. Both Tillandsias fit nicely, but hardly filled all the space. So I took the opportunity to break off a few pseudobulbs from my Encyclia bractens orchid, a happy epiphyte, even in my dry climate, and attached them as well.

The end result is my new happy place. That my new project happens to be in a sunny window next to a comfortable chair is a great boon to me. I can sit there after a hard day, or even at the beginning of a hard day, and feel some calm. I really need that right about now. It has been sorely lacking in my life.

Now to find time for the next project: that old spent mushroom log needs some work. I think I am going to take a dremel tool and hollow out the wood on the top until I get to the soft, pulpy wood inside. Then I’ll fill it with soil and plant something in there. Maybe a little water access to the middle will encourage bits of fungi still living in the center of the log to come back to life and I’ll get a few more mushrooms from it. Or not. That would be fine too.

Balancing an Aquatic Ecosystem - Animals

2011-09-05T09:47:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been planning out how to balance the aquatic ecosystem in my future aquaculture greenhouse. It is a tricky concept to try to produce a significant amount of food out of a tank that is somewhere between 1100 and 2500 gallons and still have a self-regulating system. The important part is to set up a stable food web.

The thing to remember about food webs is that the base, your plants (in this case phytoplankton and duckweed), is limited by the input of nutrients and the size of the system. It can only get so big. From there on up the food web, each successive level gets smaller . If you have too many levels and you eat from the top, you don’t get much food, so the ideal food fish is capable of filter feeding on the phytoplankton. It just so happens that tilapia are just such a fish. However, I never can leave well enough alone, so I don’t want a simple system. I want an elegant, interesting system.

Currently I am considering a combination of three larger species in the tank: mosquitofish, crawdads (or as some people call them, crayfish), and tilapia. I am thinking that the three will probably work pretty well together in there.

The tilapia will obviously be the star of the show. Blue tilapia are omnivores and eat a mixture of plant and animal material. They will primarily feed on the algae and duckweed or other plant material I drop in there from the garden, but are also known to occasionally eat small fish (like mosquitofish), small invertebrates (perhaps juvenile crawdads), mosquito larvae, and other zooplankton. Since the whole system is designed to support these fish, I obviously don’t want to seriously endanger them with predators. However, considering how prolific tilapia are as breeders, many commercial producers introduce predators to keep the population at a manageable level. Crawdads are known to occasionally take small fish and often eat eggs. However, the tilapia brood their eggs in their mouths for protection, so I am not too worried about the eggs. I think that a few fry lost to crawdads wouldn’t be a problem.

Crawdads will be the cleanup crew. They mostly eat rotting vegetation and animal matter. So if a fish dies, the crawdads will probably eat it, meaning I won’t have to clean it up. I still need to do a little more research on that one to make sure it is the case. Plus, crawdads are edible, so they make another, smaller food source. Many crawdads climb up on banks to reproduce and I don’t have banks, only walls. That means they not reproduce, which may be a problem. If it is the case, I have an ample supply of invasive crawdads in the lakes and streams in my area. I’ll just need a trap. The biggest problem with crawdads, in my mind, is getting rid of them if I find out they are harmful to the ecosystem I have set up. Even if I drain the whole pond and leave it dry for a few weeks and start over, it may not completely get rid of them. The pond isn’t designed to drain completely and the plants above will be constantly leaking water into the pond area as I water them.

The mosquitofish are relatives of guppies, only much, much tougher. They do very well surviving high water temperatures, low oxygen content, and poor water quality. They are also prolific breeders and will probably fill the pond pretty quickly. Their diet consists mainly of insects, insect larvae (like mosquito larvae), and zooplankton. There is a bit of overlap between the diets of the tilapia and the mosquitofish, so I am a bit worried that there will be more competition for food going on there than I want. However, the baby mosquitofish, which are born live, will serve as a food source for the tilapias, so it probably won’t be a problem. I am not sure if the tilapias will eat the adult mosquitofish or not. The crawdads almost certainly will, though, and that means that a lot of the little fish that the crawdads take from the water would actually be mosquitofish rather than baby tilapia, which will help give a little school protection to the baby tilapia. Ultimately, the mosquitofish would serve more as another food source for the tilapia than mosquito protection, though that benefit would be good as well.

The mosquitofish and crawdads are probably pretty unnecessary to the operation of the greenhouse, overall. The only necessary function they perform is as cleanup crew of dead fish. That and an opportunity to allow me to watch and tune a functioning aquatic ecosystem right inside my greenhouse.

Aquaculture Greenhouse: The Sand Filter

2011-08-29T23:30:00.001-07:00

I recently found out that a new coworker is something of an expert on setting up large aquariums and their filtration systems. This is something of a boon to me, since I don’t know a lot about it and am currently doing lots of research to fill the cavernous gaps in my knowledge. I only got to talk to Mike for about 5 minutes on the subject, but he already found a big flaw in my plan. Fortunately, I think it is one I can fix.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am planning on flooding the lower two feet of my future greenhouse and growing fish under the path between beds. The goal is to create a balanced aquatic ecosystem. Ideally, the organic compounds that leach out of the soil or come from the greywater will be enough to feed the phytoplankton in the water, which will then become the base of the food chain in my tank.

The problem Mike found is in my soil. My garden beds, which will extend 3’ above the water level, will be made entirely of organic matter, with minor amounts of sand and pea gravel thrown in for soil structure. Organic matter that is below the water line can be a problem, though, as it will undergo anaerobic decomposition and pollute the water with toxic chemicals. My solution was to fill the area under the soil with sand.

According to Mike, any sort of filter for biologically alive water will quickly fill with a sort of slime. It is a good thing, as it really helps filter the water. However, it will grow to fill the pore spaces to the point where no water will get through and the water will back up and drown my plants. The only way to stop this from happening is to stir the sand every couple of months to break it up. This is obviously not an option as the sand will be underneath 3’ of productive garden soil.

My first thought was to come up with some sort of tray system. The weight of the soil above makes horizontal trays too cumbersome to deal with, so I thought vertical trays every few feet might solve that problem. That still requires a structure around it to enable me to pull it out and there are lots of ways that could go wrong.

Another option would be to just put drains every few feet just above water level. That way, when it plugs, there is an overflow drain that would continue to function. This is still a very viable option, but I really don’t like it much. When the sand is completely plugged, it becomes not only unusable space under the soil, but also stagnant and anaerobic. I am not fond of that plan.

Then it occurred to me that the primary purpose of the sand was not as a filter, but as a spacer, keeping organic soil above the water line. What if I used something else as a spacer instead. The soil will still do most of the filtering necessary, so the sand isn’t really needed. The product that comes to mind most quickly is a system of grids that are used for rainwater retention systems. They are made of a stiff plastic and are designed to hold a lot of weight while still having a lot of open volume for water storage. If I could put those in there and a layer of landscape fabric on the top, I would have something that would most likely not plug and would increase the amount of water I could hold in there considerably. Of course, there are other structural features I could use. I could go all Roman aqueduct on it and use stone arches. That would be pretty cool and would last forever. It would probably be cheaper as well. Stacked cinderblocks would probably also work, but wouldn’t leave as much room for water.

So far, the open water solution is my best. It increases the volume of water for the fish to swim in from 1100 gallons to around 2500 gallons. But that leaves me with a new dilemma. What organisms do I allow to access that area. It will be very difficult to get in there to do any kind of maintenance, so anything that dies in there stays in there. Also, if I decide that a particular organism is a pest, I will really never be able to clean it out of the system without draining the pond and starting over. The cavern also gives the fish a good hiding place, which may or may not be a good thing.

I love this process.

Aquatic Systems of Life

2011-08-25T09:00:00.003-07:00

Ever since I was a kid, my hobby has been creating terrestrial systems of life. The trick with creating good ones is to balance the cycling of nutrients through the system such that the beneficial organisms out compete the disease-causing organisms. In terrestrial systems, you have a plant to cycle water and oxygen and provide a centerpiece. In larger systems it can also provide food. You have a fungus to decompose decaying plant material. I prefer mushrooms because they also provide food, even in small systems. Earthworms till the soil and decompose vegetative and fungal matter. Beneficial bacteria take up most of the rest of the niches. In order to keep the system healthy, a regular infusion of organic matter is about all that is required. Without the mushrooms and earthworms, disease and pest organisms, such as gnats and disease-causing bacteria and fungus can get in and dominate the system, reducing the health.

After my big idea of creating a stock tank with tilapia in it a few months ago, I am considering a foray into the creation of aquatic systems of life. First of all, let me say that I don't know a lot about it. Yet. I do need to find two good books. The first needs to be on aquaculture. The second will need to be on how to create and balance aquatic systems of life. If any of you have any good suggestions, I would certainly appreciate them.

The basic need of aquatic systems is going to be the same as in terrestrial systems. The flow of nutrients through the system is going to be crucial. However, in aquatic systems, the balancing of this system is much more important than it is in terrestrial systems. Water is a much more robust system for life to flourish in, so algal or bacterial blooms that could potentially be harmful can happen in a matter of days rather than weeks like they would in soil. First of all, fungal allies are out of the picture, so other players need to be introduced to do a lot of the decomposition quick enough that the harmful bacteria don't get to it.

Right now, I am thinking that the first step to creating the pond at the bottom of the greenhouse will be to create a robust system with players that are either really tough or pretty easily disposable. For the first year or so, I will be actively building soil in the garden beds above the pond. This will involve the addition of lots of organic matter that will need to decompose into healthy soil. As the grey water from the house filters through the decomposing organic matter and down into the pond, it will carry a lot of nutrients with it. I need organisms in there that will filter out those nutrients in a way that is healthy for the aquatic ecosystem.

Those organisms can balance the system until the tilapia arrive, with many of them providing food for the tilapia once they get there. I am sure that the cast of players will change as I do further research and give it more thought, but here is the cast of characters I am currently considering:

1) Water from a real pond - I will find a healthy pond and collect a gallon or so of the water from it. Ideally, it will be a clear pond without obvious signs of pollution or algae blooms or the like. I think I have just the source. This water will carry with it the necessary bacteria, algae, and other microorganisms for treating my water and making it healthy. It will also form the base level of the aquatic food chain, the food chain that will feed off of the nutrients in the water and feed my larger forms of life.

2) Snails - I need to be careful about this one, but I am thinking that aquatic snails will serve as grand decomposers, helping to fill the niche that earthworms take up in soil. They will burrow through and consume the layer of muck that ends up on the bottom of the pond. I just need to make sure that I find a species that is aquatic only and won’t climb the walls at night and eat my plants.

3) Duckweed. From what I understand, duckweed will meet two major needs. It will filter nutrients from the water, cleaning the water. It will also serve as an eventual food source for the tilapia. It reproduces rapidly, so a solid colony of duckweed in place when the tilapia arrive would be a very good thing. There are probably other aquatic plants that I could put in to serve a similar purpose.

4) Crawdads (crayfish) - They are not native to my area, but are very common in the lakes and streams around here. As such, local wildlife managers want rid of them as much as possible, so I have a nearly endless supply. Crawdads will also help consume dead and dying matter, especially animal matter, like dead fish. I am hoping that they will also act as a food source for the tilapia. I’ll have to look into that one. The one note of caution is that crawdads eat fish eggs. Too many, and my tilapia won’t be able to reproduce. That is, unless they can eat the crawdads. It might be a self-balancing system.

5) Guppies - One of my wife’s worries about the tank is mosquitoes. There is a little fish called a mosquito fish that lives almost exclusively on mosquito larvae. Guppies are a close relative and are readily available and inexpensive. They also consume mosquito larvae. Additionally, they are prolific breeders and stay small. There is a good chance that if I got a really healthy population going, they would serve as a good initial food source for the tilapia.

6) Catfish -. This is probably more of a hope than a reality. My real hope is that I can get a system in place such that I don’t have to buy food for the fish. I suspect that if I include catfish in the pond, I’ll probably have to buy food to keep them going. But I know that tilapia eat catfish waste and I know that catfish are bottom feeders, consuming organic matter on the bottom of the pond. So there is hope. Again, research.

7) Plecostomus - I figure one of these will be enough, especially if I can find a big one. He will definitely have to be big enough to not get eaten once the tilapia are introduced. But this guy, along with a little help from the snails, would have the job of keeping the algae down on the sides of the tank and keeping everything clean.

I am sure that there are plenty of other players needed. I will probably need something that will act as an intermediate step between the plankton and the guppies. The food web needs to be complete for the system to function as a whole. I think that even after the soil is complete, there will be enough nutrients washing through the soil to keep the system fed and active.

Once the tilapia are introduced, they should have enough food in the tank to begin reproducing rapidly and producing more fish. Ideally, the tank ecosystem will provide most to all of the food they need. As they get more numerous, I will supplement with black soldier flies, but that is another post.

As a first test of how well such systems might work, I introduced 8 guppies, 4 feeder goldfish, about a dozen tiny snails, and about 4 cone snails to a 55 gallon rain barrel I have on the side of the house. 2 of the feeder goldfish and 1 of the guppies died within the first 48 hours of being introduced to the system. However, the rest of them seem to be thriving despite the fact that I don't feed them. Actually, I do occasionally drop bugs in there to see what the guppies eat. They particularly liked the weed covered in aphids. But I definitely haven’t given them enough to eat that they would survive if they weren’t finding something in the water to eat. The guppies have even reproduced already. I know the tiny snails have as well, because they are already all over the place in there. So I will watch that system for a while and see what I can learn.

Testing the Soil

2011-07-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

As I have mentioned here before, I currently garden in containers. One of the challenges of container gardening is that the reservoir of available nutrients is much smaller than it is in the ground. If you have mycorrhizal fungus in your in-ground garden, it will search out far and wide for available nutrients to gather for your plants. In a container, the plants and mycorrhizae alike are limited to what is in the container’s soil.

When I made the soil, I used good quality compost. As the plants were growing, I added good fertilizer. I specifically looked for fertilizer that had rock phosphate and greensand. Both are hard to find, but both are rock-based sources of potassium and phosphorus. They should have good lasting power in the soil. There is no such thing as a rock-based source of nitrogen, though, so I had to look for other solutions. Last summer, when I was fertilizing the soil, I made extra care to add blood meal in addition to the general purpose fertilizer. Blood meal is a great source of nitrogen, even though it doesn’t necessarily have much lasting power in the soil.

Last fall I began noticing a little slower growth in my plants. This spring, it almost slowed to a crawl. My seedlings were slow to sprout, slow to come up, and glacial in their growth. All but the peas, that is. Peas, along with the bacteria they culture on their roots, have the ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen on their own. It seemed a sure sign that my soil was lacking something, probably nitrogen. It was time to break out the soil test kit.

I got a Rapitest kit that tests for pH, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Testing each pot for all 4 numbers took a while, but it was well worth it for the information gained. For those of you who haven’t used chemical soil tests, the use is pretty easy, and not too time consuming. You dig down about 3-4 inches in your soil and get about a cup of soil, sometimes mixing from a couple of different places if you are testing a larger area. Then you mix the soil with distilled water (I used filtered, which might have thrown off my results a little, but not much.) per the package directions and shake really, really well. Then you let the soil settle out, which usually takes 10-30 minutes unless you have clay soil, which might take a couple of hours. Then you dump the powder for the test you are about to perform into the provided vial and fill to the line with your test water. Shake for a few seconds and then let it sit for about 30 seconds. Then you just compare to the colors on the vial to see how much of each nutrient you have.

As expected, every single one of my containers tested as depleted or nearly depleted in nitrogen. Oddly enough, though, each one had more than adequate, even excessive, amounts of phosphorus and potassium. They also tested in the general range of neutral in pH. A couple were slightly alkaline and a couple were slightly acidic, but all were pretty close to neutral.

Now all I need to do is get some nitrogen in there so my plants can grow with wild abandon!

GeekDad: The Best Garden Supplement Is as Natural as Your Plants

2011-07-08T09:09:00.000-07:00

I have a new blog post up at GeekDad this morning. It is all about mycorrhizal fungus. You can check it out here.

Hugelkultur

2011-07-07T09:00:00.001-07:00

I have grown many mushroom logs over the years and, like any good composter, hate to throw them away when they are spent. It is still a good source of carbon and minerals and not to be wasted. I usually chop them up roughly and throw them in the compost bin, where they tumble for some time, very slowly getting smaller. When I redo one of the containers in my garden, I find I am often short on soil (due in large part to my dislike of store-bought potting soil), so I throw a chunk or two of the decomposing log into the bottom of the pot to fill space. I figure the log will slowly decompose over several years time. During that time, it will feed the soil and provide a reservoir of nutrients.

Recently, I came upon a method of soil-building called hugelkultur. The basic premise is that decaying wood harbors a great diversity of life. If you see a fallen log in the forest, it is covered with different organisms. The older the wood, the more life there is. So, according to hugelkultur, when building soil, you bury wood in the soil. The wood provides both shelter and food source for a wide variety of life. Over the course of several years, the wood will break down into a rich soil that is full of organic matter and many nutrients.

When a mushroom log is good and spent, the interior is spongy and soft. They are easily chopped up into smaller chunks with a large knife. When putting together a new pot full of soil, I like to put a layer of well-draining material on the bottom, like sand or rocks, and then a layer of roughly chopped spent mushroom logs on top of that. I mix it in well with some good compost and then make sure I have three to six inches of dirt on top of the wood. This gives new plants plenty of room to spread their roots without running into wood immediately. While a plant can push its roots through mostly rotted wood, it may have difficulty with some of the harder portions or if you use fresher wood.

Thus far, I have only found two difficulties with hugelkultur. The first is that rotting wood is low in nitrogen. This means that your soil will most likely be low in nitrogen, too, so other sources, such as blood meal, compost, and nitrogen-fixing plants are a good idea as your soil matures, especially if you are going to be growing plants that need lots of nitrogen, like fruits and vegetables.

The second problem is that wood is high in carbon, which mostly gets converted to carbon dioxide as it decomposes. This is good for your plants, providing a slow, steady supply right where they need it. However, that carbon all takes up space. This means that the level of your soil will slowly drop as time passes, sometimes by several inches. This is great for annual plants, as it gives you lots of room to add compost. However, it can be bad for perennials as they slowly get buried in the compost you have to add.

Overall, though, I really like it as a method for bulking up soil in a new bed or container. I especially recommend it for mushroom growers, like me, who have lots of spent logs laying around that they don’t want to throw away.

Amazing Nature: Lobster Mushrooms

2011-06-27T23:50:00.000-07:00

Most people think of mushrooms in terms of “poisonous” and “edible.” There, is, however, a much larger third category that can best be called “inedible.” Inedible mushrooms are not poisonous, but still cannot be eaten because they are too small, too fragile, too tough, or just unpalatable. They just have no culinary value at all.

This is where the lobster mushroom comes in. It is not actually a mushroom at all. It is a parasitic mold. As an inedible mushroom (often members of the Lactarius or Russula family) reaches maturity, the red mold infects the mushroom. It takes over the mushroom’s functions and uses them for its own functions, covering the entire outside of the mushroom, turning it red like a lobster. Most interestingly, the process turns a normally inedible mushroom into a choice edible.

Photo courtesy Joe Mabel via Wikipedia licensed under a Gnu Free Documentation License.

GeekDad: Better Pest Control Through Biology

2011-06-24T06:29:00.000-07:00

I have another blog post up on GeekDad. This one talks about Paul Stamets' use of, and patent for, the use of cordyceps mushrooms as an in-home alternative to traditional pest control. You can check it out here: http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/06/better-pest-control-through-biology/

Maker Faire

2011-05-18T12:41:00.000-07:00

I will be at the Maker Faire in the Bay Area this weekend, so if any of you are there, look me up. I will be spending most of my time at the GeekDad booth, so come talk to me!

New Ideas for the Future Greenhouse

2011-04-14T12:36:00.000-07:00

For those of you who haven't seen my previous posts on the design of my future greenhouse, I recommend you check them out here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Several months ago, I found the website http://gardenpool.org/ and it has me thinking. The way they integrated all those systems into such a small space to get such a productive system is truly inspiring. I had long planned on having a small tank in the corner of my future greenhouse to store water and help work as a thermal mass to mitigate temperature swings. I really liked their idea with the tilapia, but didn't think I had enough space to have my own.

This morning I thought of a new way to do it, and not only does it allow me to have tilapia, but it may actually give me more space to grow my plants and even solve some of the problems I have been struggling with.

The original plan was to pour a concrete slab and seal it. Then I would build cinderblock walls. The problem with this is it doesn't (in my opinion) adequately protect the subsoil from the constant moisture of the floor of my greenhouse. In my area, expansive clays are the norm, and introducing water to expansive clays under your foundation is a recipe for disaster.

Instead of that I would have a contractor come build a swimming pool with some modifications. This would keep the water in very effectively. There would be a drain with a closed valve at the bottom of the "pool" and another with an open valve at two feet up. Also, unlike most pools, the corners would all be square. Then I would build interior walls out of cinderblock with mortar missing from the vertical joints in the bottom course. That would allow water to flow freely from one side of the wall to the other. The interior of the walls, where the plants would eventually go, would be filled with clean sand up to the two foot mark where the water level would be. I would make my growing soil above that. Too much organic soil beneath the water line would cause anaerobic conditions that are not only not healthy, but might actually harm the fish as the water continually flushes from the beds into the pond.

Then I would build a grate two feet up over the path. It would be able to be lifted in sections for maintenance or harvesting of fish. The section under the grate would then be filled with water as a habitat for tilapia. The fish would provide me with a constant source of fresh fish that I could harvest whenever I wanted.

There are several nice things about this. The only space I lose was designated for growing ground cover and mushroom logs. The ground cover, if necessary, could be grown elsewhere. The mushroom logs could, likewise, be grown elsewhere. It frees up the tank I was going to put in the corner for more planting area. It also eliminates most of the rainwater storage tanks I was going to locate elsewhere on the property. It provides a much greater thermal mass, allowing the greenhouse to avoid the huge temperature swings most greenhouses have. It won't get so hot in the summer and it won't get so cold in the winter.

Watering the greenhouse becomes a bit easier. Most of the water would come from greywater that has been filtered through a wetland system elsewhere in the greenhouse and then through the soil. I could also put a pump on a solar panel that would run all day, pumping water out of the pond and cycling it through the soil via a trench irrigation system. This would allow the fish waste to be removed from the fish and used for the benefit of the plants. Also, because the water would be in the lower sand level in the garden, the perennial plants, and even some of the annuals, could put their roots down into the water and get water directly. In effect, it would create a water table about 3' below the surface of the garden.

As I said, I just had this idea this morning, so there are lots of ideas to work out. My wife, ever the devil's advocate, has already provided an extensive list. Will there be mosquitoes? Will it get too hot in the summer and then heat up our attached house, keeping us from being able to cool it adequately? The list goes on. I also have plenty of my own questions and a good start would be to find a good book on how to raise tilapia. Then I need to think on it for a while and make sure I can't come up with any reasons why it won't work.

"As Soon As The Soil Can Be Worked" for the Southwest

2011-03-17T11:51:00.000-07:00

Note the worn leaves being replaced by dark green ones.

Well, spring is upon us again, and it is time to plant the spring garden. For those of you who live back east, just follow the directions on the seed package: “As soon as the soil can be worked.” Quite simply, that means that once the snow has melted, the ground has thawed out and the extra moisture from the snow has drained off, you can plant. Working in muddy ground destroys the structure of the soil and should be avoided.

I, however, live in the mountains of Arizona. I garden in Zone 7, so I still have distinct winters. Before living here, I lived in Boulder, Colorado. In both areas, winters are fairly inconsistent. Some days are bitterly cold while others are warm and mild. I have at least several days, if not weeks at a time, all through the winter when the soil can be worked. It is not uncommon to have days in December or January where you only need a light jacket. Here in Arizona, there are only a handful of days a year when the temperatures don’t get above freezing. That certainly doesn’t mean I can plant my spring garden in the fall or early winter, though.

Through the coldest part of the winter, the temperatures will often get down into the low 20s every night with occasional dips into the teens or lower. Highs in the 40s during the day don’t make up for this daily cold snap and even the hardiest plants go dormant during this period.

So, if the “as soon as the soil can be worked” that the seed packets usually tell us doesn’t work for my climate, how do I know when I can plant my spring crops? Well, there is usually a turn in the weather in late winter. Suddenly there are warm days, days when you don’t even need a coat. While nights are below freezing, they rarely get down into the range of a hard freeze. While there will be many more freezing nights, and even a couple more hard freezes, your spring plants can usually handle this weather.

So, what are some signs you can look for to tell when it is safe to plant your first vegetables? Personally, I use spinach as an indicator plant. Every single time I have planted it, it lives through the winter, even in Colorado. But it does so in a sort of dormant state. When the first warm weather of spring hits, it springs to life and starts growing rapidly. There are also plenty of other indicators, though. Daffodils come up at the first sign of spring. Irises grow. Coats are shed. Trees begin to bud. These are all signs that the coldest nights are past and spring is coming. So plant away. Your spring veggies are so named because they can handle a little frost when they are young.

Just don’t let the warm weather fool you. Frost-intolerant summer crops, like tomatoes and squash, still have a couple of months before they can safely be planted outside.

Wood Chip Mushroom Spawn

2011-03-14T10:52:00.001-07:00

If you buy any kind of mushroom kit online, except portabella, it will most likely come in the form of a 5lb block of wood chips grown through with mycelium. The reason for this is simple. Wood chips are easy to colonize for mushrooms, a nutritious food source, and a convenient medium for transfer. One of the best things about growing mushrooms on wood chips is that they can be fruited up to three times and then used to transfer mushrooms to a new substrate. In fact, it really doesn’t matter (for most mushrooms, that is*) whether you bought the block for transferring mycelium to a new medium or for producing mushrooms. It can first be fruited and then broken up and used as spawn.

Growing mushrooms on wood chips is pretty easy. First you need to match the wood with the preferences of the mushroom. Then you need to get the wood into the right form. Sawdust tends to be to fine and packs a bit too tightly for optimal mushroom growth. Large wood chips tend to have too much air flow for the mushrooms to grow well from one to the next. A good mixture of the two (about 20% chips to 80% sawdust or fine wood chips works best. If you have a chipper that grinds them fairly small but not quite sawdust, like I have, it works well as is. Just don’t use wood shavings from your pal’s wood shop. Even if they use the right kind of wood, the curled shape keeps the shavings from packing very well and the mushrooms don’t grow well on it.

The next step is to pasteurize the wood chips. You want to get the wood chips up to about 180 degrees F and leave them there for an hour to kill pathogens. Then you need to get mushrooms growing on it. Other wood chip spawn works quite well. You can also use stem butts or even plug spawn. Then grow it like you would any mushroom block. When it is ready, you fruit the block a few times and then break it up onto your next substrate. That can even be more wood chips.

Just realize that every time you transfer mycelium, you run the risk of contamination.

*Notable exceptions are Coprinus comatus (shaggy manes) and Stropharia rugoso-annulata (king stropharia), which require a casing layer to produce mushrooms, Polyporus tuberaster (stone mushroom), which forms a sclerotium, and Morchella species (morels), which are just weird.

GeekDad!

2011-02-25T11:56:00.001-07:00

Today I officially became a part of the GeekDad team over at Wired. This gives me the opportunity to flesh out the geek side of my garden geek nature. Check out my first post on using physics to snap off the woody end of an asparagus stem while keeping as much of the tender part as possible. I will still keep posting here so this blog isn't going anywhere.

Spore Mass Slurry

2011-02-03T09:00:00.003-07:00

Wood chips 2 weeks after addition of spore mass slurry

Nature seeks equilibrium. This is a concept that can be seen throughout natural systems, but nowhere more evidently than in reproductive rates. Ideally, a natural system, in its most natural state, is in perfect equilibrium. Each individual in the system seeks to replace itself, no more, no less. Sure, all organisms would like to increase their numbers and increase their success, but gone unchecked, this is the path to starvation and disease. Averaged across a population and over centuries, a population in balance with the rest of its environment will average one successful (in this case successful means “grows to adulthood and reproduces”) offspring per mature individual.

Looking at a species’ reproductive strategy can tell you a lot about their place in the ecosystem. Top predators, like wolves and big cats most directly reproduce one to one. Sure, many offspring are produced, but accidents and disease are taken into account and not much else. Rabbits are prey animals. They can produce dozens of offspring in a single year and hundreds in a lifetime. They pay a heavy price to predation, and this must be taken into account in the reproductive strategy. An oak tree can live for hundreds of years. Once it reaches maturity, it can produce thousands of acorns every year. Its reproductive strategy takes into account the squirrels (who plant the acorns) eating most of each year’s crop as well as mortality of oak seedlings.

Mushrooms have among the worst reproductive success out there. A mushroom with a decent source of food can live for 10 years, sometimes much, much more. Each year it can produce dozens of mushrooms. Each mushroom is capable of producing billions (yes, that big number is plural) of spores. Only two spores are needed to reproduce; they must land near each other on a food source, germinate, and then mate to produce a healthy mycelium. How is it that each individual must produce literally trillions of spores to simply replace itself in the ecosystem? Personally I think it speaks to the inefficiency of spores as a reproductive strategy. There is a reason plants moved away from spores and towards seeds as a reproductive device. Spores are just not very effective or very efficient at producing offspring.

Often when I speak to friends about growing mushrooms, their first question is “where do you get the spores?” I have to explain to them that nearly all mushroom cultivation is done by the direct transfer of mycelium from one medium to the next. This is because it is so difficult to successfully and reliably achieve reproduction from spores. However, there are times when spores are available and a good medium for what you are trying to achieve. It is for those times that it is useful to have a method for utilizing the spores that gives them the greatest chance for success. That is when we use a spore mass slurry. A spore mass slurry was a method developed by mycologist Paul Stamets as a way to spread spores over a wide area in a way that helps give them a head start.

The first step is to acquire spores, and that is the hard part. Usually, the best way to acquire spores is from a spore print. If the spore print is taken on glass, the spores can be dried, scraped off, and stored. If the spore print is on paper, the paper can be dried, folded, and stored. You can also add the mushroom directly to the liquid once it has cooled, letting it soak, gills (or pores) down for 4 hours, letting it release its spores directly into the liquid. I have gotten lucky recently and have come across some Coprinus comatus (shaggy mane mushroom) spores. Normally, when shaggy mane mushrooms come up, they quickly deliquesce into an inky, gooey mess, and are gone. Here in Arizona, the exterior of the mushroom dries before the process can complete. The interior still deliquesces, though, only to dry on the inside of the cap. The hollow mushroom that results can be stored. When the spores are needed, it can be immersed. Once wet, the mushroom will deliquesce the rest of the way and the spores will disperse into the surrounding liquid with ease.

Water with molasses and salt added and mushrooms to be added

The actual recipe for a spore mass slurry is quite simple. Take one gallon of rainwater (filtered tap water or distilled water will also be fine, but beware of water straight from the tap as it has too much chlorine here in the US) and bring it to a boil. Add one tablespoon of molasses and one quarter teaspoon of salt. The salt helps inhibit the growth of bacteria that would normally happily consume the protein-rich spores. The molasses gives the spores a little sugar and other nutrients and entices them to begin germinating. Once the mixture is complete, boil for 10 minutes. Then take off heat and cool until it has reached room temperature.

Spore mass slurry after 48 hours

Once the liquid is cool enough, you can add your spores. Let the liquid sit in a cool corner of your house for 24-48 hours. Once it has sat long enough to begin germinating, pour the slurry directly on your substrate. Don't leave the slurry in its liquid form for much more than 48 hours, though, as oxygen and nutrients run out. Also consider that mycelium is a terrestrial organism, not an aquatic organism. It likes the liquid to get started, but it really needs wood or soil to grow properly.

Personally, I prefer the use of a spore mass slurry over a mushroom kit for more dispersed growing. For example, many mushrooms are great additions to the garden or compost bin. A spore mass slurry is a good way to spray germinating spores across a wide area and, provided you have access to spores. It can also be a lot less expensive and easier than inoculating with wood chip spawn. You just have to take failure rates into consideration.

Cardboard Mushroom Spawn

2011-01-31T23:20:00.002-07:00

One of the great things about growing mushrooms is that growing materials are often free. Sometimes they even save you from throwing things away. Using cardboard as mushroom spawn is one such example. Cardboard is made of raw, unbleached paper, which is a good growing material for mushrooms and the corrugations are held together with a glue that is also very digestible by mushrooms. The channels in corrugated cardboard give the mycelium an easy channel to run down and travel quickly.

Personally, I find that mushrooms produced on cardboard tend to be kind of anemic. The open structure, while ideal for travelling mycelium, isn’t really dense enough to produce lots of mushrooms. However, the sheet form that cardboard comes in makes for easy transfer from one medium to another. If you are making a wood chip mushroom bed, you just lay down a layer of wood chips, then cover it with your cardboard spawn and then add another layer of wood chips, for a total of about 6” thick. You can use cardboard spawn for making mushroom logs as well. You take a chainsaw and cut a wedge in the log, line it with your cardboard spawn and hammer the wedge back in. When making a mushroom block out of wood chips or coffee grounds, you can just tear up the cardboard and mix it in. It will spread from the cardboard.

Making cardboard spawn is really easy. The first thing to do is find a good source of cardboard. Something that has already been through the mail is fine, as long as it isn’t covered in grease or other such toxic or unidentifiable chemicals. Cardboard spawn is best grown rolled up, so a container that will fit a roll of cardboard, like a glass jar or a bucket, works nicely. Then cut the cardboard to fit your container.

The next step is to clean the cardboard to remove potential contaminants. The nice thing about cardboard is that it is a pretty hostile environment, so you don’t need to worry about too many contaminants unless it has bee sitting outside for a long time. The biggest thing you need to worry about is mold spores. You will need to get rid of those. There are two basic ways to do that. The first is with boiling water. Put your cardboard in its container and fill it with boiling water and put on a lid if it has one. Let it sit about an hour. That will kill almost all mold and bacteria. The problem is, it also dissolves the glues, destroying the structure of the cardboard. Fortunately, there is a second method involving hydrogen peroxide.

As many mushrooms grow, they naturally want to claim territory that they occupy as their own. One major source of possible competitors is spores of other fungi. Most mushrooms produce various peroxidase compounds as they grow. These compounds destroy the spores without harming the mycelium. Hydrogen peroxide is a very similar compound to what the mycelium produces and has much the same effect. So I will put some hydrogen peroxide in a spray bottle (or just transfer the spray nozzle to the peroxide bottle) and spray the cardboard down. I don’t dilute or anything. The hydrogen peroxide will break down into water pretty quickly and won’t harm the mycelium in small amounts.

Once the cardboard is treated, you can just layer your previous spawn on top. Wood chips from a spent mushroom block is a good medium of transfer. I also find stem butts particularly effective for transfer onto cardboard. Either way, you lay it on top and then roll it up as tightly as you can. Then put it somewhere and keep it moist. It is ready to transfer when the entire surface is covered with white, cottony mycelium and it no longer smells like wet cardboard.

Oh, and when you are finished transferring it to its new home, consider setting aside one sheet of cardboard. You can roll it in a fresh sheet of cardboard to make all new cardboard spawn.

Coffee Ground Mushroom Spawn

2011-01-06T23:41:00.000-07:00

There is a fine line between a medium that is used for mushroom spawn (that is, to transfer to another medium) and one that is used as a growing medium. Some, like cardboard, are more structurally suited to transfer and may not have enough nutrition to take the mycelium all the way to a bountiful flush of mushrooms. Others, like straw, which is messy and difficult to fully sterilize, are more suited to fruiting and less good for production of spawn. Coffee grounds is one that is good for both. The granular nature of the grounds makes for quick and easily colonization by the mycelium. The process of making coffee out of the grounds conveniently sterilizes the growth media, limiting the opportunities for contaminants. The woody nature of the seed pod of the coffee bean also provides good woody material as well as abundant nutrition for the mycelium. Another nice feature is that most coffee filters are made of paper, which is also readily digestible by mycelium.

The first trick is to find a suitable mushroom to grow on coffee grounds. I have had great luck with both Pleurotus ostreatus (pearl oyster mushrooms) and Hypsizygus ulmarius (elm oyster mushrooms). I am currently attempting it with Agrocybe aegerita (pioppino/black poplar mushrooms), but my stem butt was small and it hasn’t made much progress yet. I suspect that there are other mushrooms that would do well in this medium as well, but not being a coffee drinker, I don’t have too much opportunity to try out new combinations. Also, I prefer to start my coffee ground cultures with stem butts from fresh mushrooms. If you are a one-pot-a-day household, this method works really well.

The method for growing mushrooms on coffee grounds is really easy. Wait until your coffee grounds are cool enough that they are no longer steaming, but not quite cold and put one pot worth of grounds, including the filter, in a bag or jar. Nestle the stem butt (or a little sawdust spawn, or whatever spawn you are using) into the center of the coffee grounds. In about two days, the spawn will recover from the transfer and will have visible signs of growth, in the form of a white, fuzzy coating. From there, you can add more coffee grounds at the rate of about one pot a day. Again, the coffee grounds should still be warm, but not warm enough to burn your hand. You add coffee grounds as the mushroom grows. If you start to get too far ahead of the mushrooms, as evidenced by a lot of uncolonized grounds in your container, stop adding for a few days until the mycelium catches up. The mycelium should more or less colonize the grounds after they have been in there just a day or two. If it takes much more than that, contamination can become a problem.

Moisture is another issue. Often coffee grounds have residual liquid in them. Mycelium can’t really colonize substrate that is under water. If I am using a gallon Ziploc bag, I will just pour the liquid out as it accumulates. In a glass jar, however, the liquid can be used for another purpose. Glass jars have less air flow than a bag that can be fully opened. When the jar is full, you can get fresh air down to the mushrooms if there is a little liquid in the bottom by just turning it upside down. As the liquid travels through, the pores in the material will be filled with air, which naturally has to be drawn from other areas. Just open the jar to get a little fresh air in the top, then turn it over and let it sit a few hours. Then turn it over again. Just don't do this before the jar is full as it will disturb the mushroom too much.

Overall, the container should be opened once a day to give the growing mushrooms a source of air. Usually this is accomplished when you open it to add the coffee grounds for the day. You can also give the mushrooms air flow by using a canning jar and replacing the sealing portion of the lid with a coffee filter (unused) or a piece of fabric.

Just keep the jar in a cool, dry location while it is growing. Once the jar is full and the mycelium has fully colonized it, as evidenced by the fact that it is all cottony-white and no longer smells like coffee, it can be used as spawn to transfer to another medium or it can be just fruited. To fruit it, give it another week or so to grow, and then open up the jar. Put it out in the light, but don’t put it in direct sun. Put a plastic bag over it as a tent, but punch a few holes in it for air flow. Then spray it a couple of times a day. Personally, I know a lot of people like to try to force the process, but I like to let the mushroom tell me when it is time. When, in the process of your daily airings, you see primordia, tiny baby mushrooms that look like pinheads, you will know it is time to fruit the mushrooms. You should get two or maybe three good fruitings out of a jar and maybe more out of a bucket.

Once the medium is done fruiting, you can still use it as spawn to start another kit. You can mix it with more coffee grounds, or just compost it again and start with another stem butt.

Propagating Mushrooms

2010-12-30T11:09:00.000-07:00

Mushrooms are hardy organisms. The mycelium of a mushroom producing fungus is capable of living for hundreds of years, perhaps more. For example, there is a patch of Armillaria mushrooms in Oregon that is believed to be over 2,000 years old. However, most of these magnificent organisms rarely live more than a few years. This is because of fungus’s way of eating. It grows into its food source and lives there until the food is gone. Unless it has another nearby source of food to grow into, it will starve to death and die. The art of propagating mushrooms is primarily the art of transferring the mycelium from one food source to another to keep it going as long as possible.

There are several ways to propagate mushrooms. In commercial production, they work under sterile conditions and take a sample of mycelium, either from the center of a fresh mushroom or a stored mycelium, and grow it onto agar in a petri dish. Then they transfer it onto sterilized rye grains (sometimes more than once) and then transfer it to pasteurized straw or wood chips for the final production of mushrooms*. However, in most people’s homes, mine included, sterile conditions are a bit hard to come by. So I will talk a bit about methods you can use that don’t require sterile conditions.

What we are going to be making is called spawn. Spawn is a growing medium for mushrooms that is used to expand a sample taken from living mycelium in preparation for making something larger for producing mushrooms. There are many kinds of mushroom spawn, and selection of such depends on what you have on hand and what you are hoping to transfer mushrooms onto. For example, mushrooms that are going to be transferred onto a log might be cultivated in a different form than mushrooms that are going to be transferred to a wood chip bed. Below are some common kinds of mushroom spawn out there and a brief description. I will cover some of them in detail later in individual posts.

Plug spawn – Plug spawn is made from wooden dowels that are grown through with mushrooms and then hammered into logs.

Coffee ground spawn – Coffee ground spawn takes advantage of the fact that coffee grounds are small, easily colonized and pre-sterilized.

Cardboard spawn – Cardboard spawn makes a nice surface to sandwich between two layers and makes an ideal growth medium for mushrooms.

Bunker spawn – A large mass of myceliated material covered in a protective cloth coating is good for helping mushrooms leap off in less-than-ideal conditions.

Wood chip spawn – Wood chips give an easy medium on which to grow and expand mushrooms.

*Note that this is how most gourmet mushrooms, such as oyster and shiitake, are grown. Button mushrooms have different requirements and are grown on composted, pasteurized steer manure.

A Strategy for Growing Mushrooms

2010-12-27T23:13:00.000-07:00

Imagine, if you will, a huge table in the forest. On this table, Mother Nature has laid out every kind of food you can possibly imagine. Meats, fruits, and vegetables of all kinds are all laid out and waiting to be eaten. Plants make their own food, so they have no need to come to the table. Animals have the great advantage of mobility and are the first to arrive at the feast. The animals hit the easy to digest, high energy foods, like fruits and meats, first. But they also take most of the vegetables and just about everything that is readily digestible. By the time the animals have finished, all that is left is scraps. The bacteria and the molds come next. Actually, they were always there as they are always everywhere in nature. They have limited abilities of movement, but their real advantage is their ability to multiply rapidly. However, by the time they reach sufficient numbers, the table is all but clean. No matter, the bacteria move in and consume the scraps left by the animals.

The very last diner to the table is the fungi perfecti, the mushroom producing fungus. They come in blown by the wind or they grow to the table through the soil. Either way, it takes them a week or more to get to the table and amass any appreciable size where they can really take advantage of the food. By this time, though, even the scraps are gone. This doesn’t really bug the mushrooms, though. They just settle right in and eat the table.

This mental image is what drives my designs for mushroom habitats. When growing a plant, you want to create the optimum conditions for that plant to grow, thrive, and out-compete whatever competition it will have. The same thing goes for growing mushrooms, remembering that their principal competition will be bacteria and molds. To do that, you need to control some key environmental factors to give the mushrooms the competitive edge.

Temperature

Bacteria typically grow best in warm conditions. That is why your refrigerator is cold. It inhibits the growth of bacteria. The same goes for molds. Tropical mushrooms, like pink oyster and paddy straw mushrooms need warm conditions to grow properly as well. However, most temperate mushrooms are well adapted for cooler temperatures. In nature, they live on the cool forest floor. Many, especially the enoki mushroom (Flamulina velutipes) are so well adapted to the cold that they will continue to grow in any temperature short of actually frozen. It is a strategy that serves them well. Mushrooms that can continue to grow in cooler temperatures can continue to grow and survive when their principal competition has gone dormant. Growing your mushrooms in cooler conditions (though not actually in the fridge) can help them out-compete bacteria and molds.

Moisture

One of the advantages of being a multi-cellular organism is the ability to transport nutrients from where you have them to where you need them. Now fungus isn’t as good at this as us vascular animals, but it can transport water small distances. It can also survive through fairly dry conditions (though complete desiccation will probably kill it) and come back to life when water is again available. Keeping your mushroom just a little damp, but not overly wet, will allow the fungus to grow without giving the bacteria the upper hand.

Food Sources

This is the area where you can really stack the deck in favor of the mushrooms. Many of the best gourmet mushrooms are primary decomposers of wood. That means that they will move into a solid log and consume it. Raw, unprocessed wood is a complete food for mushrooms. Now you could probably get better and faster growth by adding all kinds of additives. Mushrooms like sugar as much as the next organism. However, the more other stuff you add to give it more energy, the more you open the door to other organisms to move in and compete. Keeping the meal as hard to digest as possible gives the mushroom the advantage.

Surface Area

Controlling the surface area of your food source is another way to cut down on contamination in your mushroom cultures. Consider a log vs. a pile of sawdust. The sawdust is much more accessible to the mycelium. The mycelium can grow through it in just a few days and then begin digestion in earnest. On the other hand, the bacteria and molds around can also do that. A fresh log, on the other hand, is a solid block of hard material. The mycelium uses a combination of digestion and hydrostatic pressure to push its way through, but doesn’t leave much room for others to slide in behind it. It may take 6 months for the mycelium to colonize the whole log, but provided it wasn’t contaminated to begin with, you have a good chance it won’t become so in that period of time.

So just consider the various factors that are within your control when you are setting up the growing conditions for your mushrooms. A little tweaking of the conditions could mean the difference between a successful culture and lots of yummy mushrooms and a contaminated failure that is only good for the compost bin.

Growing Mushrooms vs. Growing Plants

2010-12-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

Someone once described war as “long periods of boredom punctuated by brief periods of terror.” Change “terror” in that sentence with “excitement” and you have a pretty good description of growing mushrooms. With a plant, the seed sprouts and then gets a little bigger every day until it reaches maturity. With a little careful observation and an eye for detail, you can see the daily difference. You get a little satisfaction every day.

Growing mushrooms is quite different. When you start a culture, say with a stem butt, it sits for a day or two. Then it gets a little fuzzy. After a few days of the fuzz getting a little longer, all of a sudden it starts growing rapidly. It covers the surface of the substrate in long strands at a rate of an inch or more a day under ideal conditions. Then, behind the leading edge, the webbing starts to fill out, claiming everything as its own. In just a few days, the surface is covered with a white blanket. Then it sinks in.

After the initial push, the white sort of goes away; it is like it dives down into the substrate to eat. At this point, nothing really happens for weeks to years at a time. If it is a log, it will take 6 months to a year or more before anything else happens. If it is something like sawdust spawn or coffee grounds, it will only take a month or so. During that period, it won’t change a bit. You can look at it all you want, but you won’t see any change.

Then, one day, something new appears. They are called primordia and they look like little pinheads on the surface. They show up overnight, sometimes by the dozens and start to grow. They expand in size and get taller. When they get about a quarter of an inch tall, they stop growing and dry up. I liken this step with testing the water. Maybe the first batch didn’t have the right mixture to survive in this environment, but in my experience, the first flush of primordia almost always abort. A day or maybe two later, a second batch will show up. This one has the right conditions. Pretty soon the primordia have grown into buttons and the buttons have grown into full grown mushrooms. The whole process, from primordia to full grown mushrooms usually takes about 5 days, sometimes less, occasionally more for large or woody mushrooms. It is very exciting. Sometimes you can come back and see noticeable growth after just a few hours. Talk about instant gratification! And when the process is done, you get to eat the results. You just can’t beat that.

A Compost Project

2010-12-06T14:06:00.000-07:00

In addition to a trash dumpster and an oversized recycling bin, my neighborhood has a compost bin. It has two large bins that are big enough that one can be composting while the other handles waste from the entire neighborhood. It also has a central section with a roof that is used to store bales of straw that are to be mixed in with the kitchen waste to achieve the right mixture. It has slats on the front for easy extraction of finished compost and a sturdy wire mesh all the way around to keep the varmints out. All in all, it is a fantastic addition to the neighborhood. But it lacks one thing: maintenance. The neighbor who built it also takes care of it. The problem is that he lives elsewhere all summer, not arriving in town until mid-fall and leaving again mid-spring. That means that all summer, when the compost should be cooking like crazy, it never gets turned and rarely gets watered. In addition, the straw, which should get added when the compost gets smelly, gets added liberally with almost every addition of compost. So in addition to not getting enough oxygen or water, it has too much brown material. It seems to me that this is a problem I can fix. Since this is a blog about engineering with biology, we will tackle this as an engineering problem.

Problem Definition

The first step is to clearly define your problem. In this case, we will define it thusly: The compost bin only gets watered in the winter, has too much brown material and never gets turned.

Parameters

The next thing you look at are the parameters of your problem. Cost is nearly always one of the parameters. For example, those 14’ long giant worms from Australia might be just the thing for this problem (but probably not), but it wouldn’t be reasonable (or legal for that matter) to import a few of them. We need to spend little to no money and use local materials as much as possible. The second parameter has already been mentioned: we will be using biological organisms to solve this problem. The third parameter is a request from the person who built the bins: “I’d rather not modify them any more than I have to; I like them the way they are.” And I agree with him.

Options

The next thing we want to consider is our options. The usual composting organisms sound like a good place to start.

Thermophilic bacteria are the biggest composters out there. They work quickly and could turn that entire pile into black gold in about two months. There is a big problem though, they need a steady supply of oxygen (usually supplied by turning the pile), lots of moisture (only available during the winter), and warm temperatures (not available during the winter).

Redworms are the second biggest composters out there. They also work quickly and would turn that pile into black gold in about 2 or 3 months, if added in sufficient quantities. If worms are added to a dry pile, they will seek moisture deeper in the soil, even if it means leaving a huge source of food behind. They are also slow to eat brown material and they tend to go dormant in the winter, retreating to the bottom of the pile and slowing down their metabolism. Now the pile is in a sunny location, so it will probably not freeze solid during the winter and it probably will thaw all the way out most days, but it will still be too cold to keep worms active.

Mushrooms are another organism that can be used in compost bins, but isn’t used frequently. The problem with mushrooms in compost is that they don’t like to be turned frequently, they prefer a mixture that is heavier on the brown material and lighter on the green material, and they are damaged by high heat. See where I am going with this? Mushrooms will work slower than bacteria or worms, but will do an excellent job of breaking down the brown material. They also have limited ability to transport things like oxygen and can continue to grow a little deeper in the pile than the aerobic bacteria. In addition, they are typically better adapted to cool conditions and can continue to grow in just about anything above freezing. In fact, many mushrooms use winter as an opportunity to get a leg up on the competition, expanding their range and collecting nutrients while the bacteria are dormant.

Choosing a Specific Material

Engineering is all about specifics. Saying mushrooms will work is not good enough. You need to select a mushroom. As I mentioned, cost is certainly an issue, so I will work with the mushrooms I already have access to and see if any of those will be acceptable.

It turns out that I have access to four different kinds of mushrooms: 3 that I am growing and one that I harvested wild from nearby recently.

The first candidate is the elm oyster mushroom (Hypsizygus ulmarius) which I am cultivating on a couple of logs. It might be a suitable mushroom, but neither log has fruited recently, so I have no access to stem butts to make spawn.

The second candidate is the black poplar mushroom (Agrocybe aegerita), which I am also growing on logs and fruited recently. I am attempting to propagate this mushroom currently. However, this mushroom has proven difficult for me to grow. It is a primary decomposer, so it prefers raw wood (not so available in the compost bin) and it has had some difficulty with my dry Arizona climate. I don’t think this is a suitable candidate.

The third candidate is the pearl oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus). I also have this growing on logs, and it also fruited recently. The pearl oyster mushroom is a primary decomposer, but it is also an aggressive decomposer of all things that used to be plants. It grows well on paper, straw, cloth, wood chips, and much more, including compost. It would rapidly decompose much of the compost, but wouldn’t break it down very far. It would also die out when it ran out of nutrients.

The fourth candidate is the shaggy mane mushroom (Coprinus comatus) I recently found a fresh wild fruiting of this mushroom and harvested both dried mushrooms (they dry quickly in our dry air) and stem butts, which I am currently trying to grow on cardboard. Shaggy manes are tertiary decomposers, meaning they live in dirt. They are also great restorers of disturbed land. They are adapted to decompose anything from sawdust and straw to manure and yes, they do well in compost. They will probably work more slowly on the compost than the oyster mushrooms, but they have the added benefit that they are native to this area. They are also a great addition to garden soil and would get added to the soil with the compost.

At this point, I am trying to decide between the oyster mushrooms and the shaggy mane mushrooms. I think that a sequencing of both mushrooms would probably be best in the long run, with oyster mushrooms added first, followed by shaggy manes a month or two later.. Also, adding worms in the spring would help the compost finish quickly, especially if the mushrooms have pre-digested much of the compost.

Over the next month, I will be propagating and expanding the mushrooms I have before putting them in the compost bin. I will be posting several articles on the different propagation methods I use for the mushrooms. I will also keep you all up to date on further details of my compost remediation project. Also, sometime in January I will be teaching an informal class on how to propagate mushrooms, using the mushrooms I have, so if you live in the Prescott, Arizona area and are interested, let me know.

Best Garden Blogs

2010-12-05T23:31:00.000-07:00

For those of you who haven't heard of it, there is a site called Best Garden Blogs that collects and links to the Best Gardening Blogs on the internet. I highly recommend you check it out as they have found some really great blogs. I am also happy to announce that they consider my blog worth including in their list.

Dragonfruit

2010-11-29T20:57:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been a big fan of epiphytes for a long time. In my research, I found that there is an entire family of epiphytic cactuses native to the tropics of Central and South America. Naturally, I had to find one and add it to my growing collection of epiphytes. In particular there is one species that produces a large pink fruit with green scales called dragonfruit, or pitaya. Thus began a many-year search for either a plant to grow or a fruit to try. A few months ago, my wait paid off and I found a fruit at my local grocery store. It was a bit past its prime, but it was still quite tasty. The flavor was mild and sweet. I thought the closest flavor was pear. The texture was much more like kiwi, though, with firm flesh and crunchy seeds throughout.

The best part of finding a fresh fruit was that I was able to harvest over a hundred seeds from a quarter of the fruit. I promptly planted my first set of seeds in pots and they had a really good germination rate. I am not looking forward to thinning these precious darlings.

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that cactus would count some epiphytes among its number. After all, if you put a dry-adapted plant in a wet environment, it probably would try to colonize the sunniest, driest environment available, which is what you get out on a tree branch. As with many epiphytes, it starts its growth cycle in the ground and then grows up the tree, producing aerial roots that help it cling to the bark. While many epiphytes eventually lose their connection with the ground, I am not sure if dragonfruits do. In cultivation, they are kept in soil, which helps get them the nutrients they need to produce fruit. For directions on growing these plants, I recommend looking up the Texas Triffid Ranch’s dragonfruit care sheet.

As for my precious seedlings, I need two to produce fruit, and they won’t begin to do so until the weight of the plant is greater than ten pounds. So I will probably keep them in a pot and trim them to keep them small until I can get my greenhouse built and enclosed. Then the plan is to plant them at the base of a Meyer lemon tree or, if I can get one, a citrus fruit salad tree*. Then the dragonfruit can grow up the tree and I can get lots of interesting fruit from one cool clump of vegetation.

*A fruit salad tree is a tree that has branches from different kinds of trees from the same family grafted on. So you can do a peach tree that also has plums, pluots, almonds, and nectarines. You can also do one with many kinds of apples and pears. I am hoping for a citrus fruit salad tree, though, with branches containing Meyer lemon, kumquat, Key lime, blood orange, and pink grapefruit.

Picture of dragonfruit fruit courtesy of Brenden Gebhart.

Epiphytes

2010-11-04T08:25:00.000-07:00

When I first started growing plants as a teenager, I quickly grew tired of the plain, old, boring plants that everyone else grew. I have never had a spider plant and never plan to grow one. As I learned more about different types of plants, certain types quickly rose to the top of my favorites list. The first was carnivorous plants. Succulents then became a favorite. But really, one of my longest running loves is with epiphytes.

“Epiphyte” is another word for “air plant.” They are a class of plants that grow up in trees, often with little to no contact to the soil below the tree. They are also not parasitic to the tree they live on, getting their nutrients from the air itself or what little else they can find on the branch, such as bird droppings. Epiphytes are common to tropical environments and somewhat less so in subtropical environments. While some kinds of epiphytes, such as tillandsias (which are a subgroup of bromeliads), are capable of surviving with literally no soil, most require a little. In the wild, plants firmly anchored to tree limbs attract debris and droppings, which break down into a sort of soil that collects on tree limbs. In fact, some of this soil has been found to be fertile enough that the trees grow roots out of their limbs to take advantage of the nutrients. However, the “soil” is always thin and light and drains well.

In cultivation, most epiphytes are grown wired or glued to a log or piece of bark with a little sphagnum moss packed around their roots. Some are grown in pots, but the soil is often loose and well-draining. Orchid bark is a good example of soil that is specifically designed for epiphytes, as most orchids are epiphytes. As for watering, a light mist two to four times a week will do for most species and nearly all prefer to dry out between waterings. Despite growing in wet climates, their soil is so thin that they are more adapted to dry conditions than many of their neighbors. Also many do not require any fertilizer at all. Many also prefer dappled light since they tend to have a canopy over their heads in the wild. All of these things make many epiphytes great houseplants and there are many varieties available. Below are some of the different types of epiphytes out there.

Orchids

Most orchids (with the notable exception of Paphiopedilums) are epiphytes. I had a Phalaenopsis and an Encyclia that I grew epiphytically on a log in a dry climate for over a year. While both survived, neither flowered, probably due to the fact that I rarely fertilized them and watered them all too infrequently. Some orchids do better than others in that sort of situation, but most will die if planted in soil. Plus, the amazing blooms of these plants make them worth a try.

Bromeliads

Bromeliads are probably the most famous of the air plants. While there are terrestrial bromeliads (pineapple is one), many are very epiphytic. I have three different Tillandsias that have been living without so much as a little sphagnum moss around their roots for over 4 years now. I suspect that if I was in a humid climate, I probably wouldn’t even have to spray them. If you look a little deeper than your local grocery store, you can find some bromeliads with really fascinating foliage. With proper care, they flower every 2 years or so, producing blooms that rival orchids. As a bonus, when the blooms fade, the parent plant produces pups, which are miniature plants. When those get to about half the size of the parent plant, they can be removed and planted elsewhere.

Cactus

There are actually several varieties of vining, epiphytic cacti. Their adaptation to dry climates must have made this a natural move. I can only imagine that a dry-adapted plant moving into a moist environment would cause them to evolve to take advantage of the driest microclimate available. I am just starting to grow my first epiphytic cactus, but they are still just seedlings. I’ll talk more about that in my next post.

Nepenthes

Nepenthes are commonly called “tropical pitcher plants.” They are a family of plants that start on the forest floor and then climb up the nearest tree. As with many tropical plants, they have a drip tip on the end of their leaves. Only in Nepenthes, the dip tip has become highly evolved. As the plant gets bigger and feels the lack of nutrients in its chosen home, the drip tip enlarges into a little pitcher that is used to capture and digest prey, thereby giving the plant the nutrients that growing on a tree lacks. The pitchers of nepenthes tend to be more elaborate than terrestrial pitcher plants and quite beautiful. In fact, some of the largest pitchers in the world belong to Nepenthes. Nepenthes rajah is reported to have pitchers big enough to capture a rat.

Ferns

There are a couple of kinds of epiphytic ferns. The white rabbit foot fern has white, fuzzy aerial roots that sort of look like rabbits’ feet. However, by far the most fascinating of the epiphytic ferns are the staghorn ferns. A staghorn fern starts on the side of a tree and grows two kinds of fronds. The basal fronds grow short and round and cover the root ball, protecting and enlarging it over time. The fertile fronds are what the plant is named for. They grow long and wide and sort of resemble the antlers of a moose. Mature staghorn ferns can be several feet across and are absolutely majestic plants. Thus far my attempts to grow any epiphytic ferns have been unsuccessful as they don’t tolerate the lack of humidity in my climate.

Ant Plants

While I have never grown an ant plant, and probably never will, I still find them fascinating. In addition to the usual complement of leaves, ant plants grow an enlarged, bulbous base that is riddled with tunnels. In the wild, ants move in and inhabit the tunnels, allowing the plant to take advantage of their waste.

If you are interested in possibly growing any of these epiphytes, I strongly recommend giving Black Jungle Terrarium Supply a visit. They specialize in supplies for making terrariums for poison dart frogs and have an amazing variety of epiphytic plants.

Wood Pellet Fuel

2010-11-01T10:34:00.000-07:00

A wood pellet stove is a kind of heater that burns small amounts of wood pellets at a time with excellent air flow to produce a lot of heat without nearly as much smoke and pollution as a wood burning fireplace. It is also one of the cheaper ways to heat your home in the winter. Every winter, I stock up on several bags of wood pellet fuel, even though I don’t own a wood pellet stove. I also hold on to it until summer. So, what do I do with it, you ask?

Well, first of all, it is worth noting that I am always careful to buy the bags that say 100% organic, which means that they are composed completely of sawdust. Wood pellet fuel is made of sawdust that is dried and pressed into little pellets. When you add water to them, they swell and fall apart into sawdust. It is also worth noting that a 40 pound bag of wood pellet fuel costs about $4.

Where else are you going to get such a wonderful garden supplement for so cheap? I use wood pellet fuel as a mulch, I mix it in to soil to build organic content, and I use it as a compost amendment. For mulch, you scatter a little on the ground and then water. Be careful about how much you put down. A solid layer one pellet thick will give you about 2 inches of mulch once it has been watered, so they do swell up quite a lot. I have smothered many seedlings because I mulched too heavily with wood pellet fuel. For mixing into soil, add a few handfuls here and there to the soil as you are working it. It will add to the organic content of the soil and give the organisms in the soil something to feed off of. Again, too much is bad as large concentrations of sawdust will rob nitrogen from your soil, which isn’t good for your plants. For a compost amendment, you just throw a couple of good handfuls in the compost as needed, usually when the compost starts getting smelly. I added a small bucket of wood pellet fuel to my tumble composter this summer and almost immediately, it started to heat up, finally achieving the mix it needed to really cook. Three weeks later, it cooled off and a week after that, the compost was done and ready to use.

Consider checking out your local supply of wood pellet fuel and maybe you can put some of that precious carbon in your soil instead of putting it in the air.

Oh, and it is worth mentioning that wood pellet fuel doesn't work very well as a medium for growing mushrooms. Most mushrooms are pretty specific about whether they prefer to grow on hardwoods or softwoods. I have yet to find any wood pellet fuel that tells you what its composition is. This means that it could be 100% hardwood, 100% softwood, or, more likely, some combination of the two.

This Year's Mistakes

2010-10-28T22:02:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, my friend over at The Yarden did a blog post on her mistakes for the year. I think this is a fabulous idea. There is no such thing as a perfect garden or a perfect gardener. Every year you learn from your mistakes and the next year you hope to compensate and do better. Sometimes you succeed. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you overcompensate and make exactly the opposite mistake. Either way, gardening is as much about learning what to do as it is about doing it. So I am going to follow The Yarden’s example and help you guys learn from my mistakes. It is also worth noting that I currently garden exclusively in containers, so many of my mistakes are related to that.

1) The Succession Garden

I am a big fan of succession gardening. The concept is simple: your spring veggies make way for your summer veggies, which make way for your fall veggies. There is just one problem: I tried to do that in every single container. So I had to pull up my peas before they were completely finished just to plant my tomatoes late. Then I had to pull up the tomatoes before they were completely finished just to plant my fall greens late. It shortened the season of everything and reduced yields. Next year I plan on more carefully sequencing my succession crops, only trying the method in a couple of pots. More likely, I will have a couple of pots that have spring crops and then fall crops, with no summer crops at all.

2) Not Testing My Soil

I bought a soil test kit several years ago and have managed to lose it. I still have it, I just don’t know what box it is in. I am also reluctant to buy a new one since money is a little tight. So I don’t know how good my soil is. I added a fair amount of organic fertilizer last year, but this year’s compost didn’t come in until September. Container gardens are limited by the nutrients in them. I need to either find the test kit or buy a new one by spring so I know what my soil needs.

3) Not Enough Swiss Chard

Last year, I grew a good fall crop of Swiss chard. As usual, it over-wintered just fine. Swiss chard comes back pretty anemically the second year, so I pulled most of it out, leaving one to produce seed. However, I never planted more. I got some from the leftovers, but for some reason, it never occurred to me to plant more. So I went the summer without my favorite vegetable.

4) Growing Tomatoes

I took my two biggest pots and put sunberries in one and ground cherries in the other. For some stupid reason I thought I could also grow cherry tomatoes in those pots and get a good crop of both. I also planted a cherry tomato plant in another of my large pots. The tomatoes got huge quickly, stealing all the sun from the other plants in the pots with them, yet somehow producing little to no fruit. I got an average of about 3 cherry tomatoes a day off of 3 huge plants. That was way too much wasted space and resources for my small garden.

So for next year, I will be planting a single, solitary ground cherry (well, maybe two…) and the rest will be greens and herbs, preferably with lots of Swiss chard.

Reasons to Garden

2010-10-04T11:48:00.000-07:00

Take a look at the picture to the left. Note that the packaging says that the enclosed cherry tomatoes were “vine ripened.” Now take a look at the enclosed tomatoes. Still pretty green, eh? Not only were these tomatoes picked so green that they weren’t red by the time they made it to my kitchen, but they were actually picked so green that they never really made it all the way to red. Most of the tomatoes never fully ripened.

So if you can’t trust the suppliers of your food to be truthful on the stuff they ARE telling you, how can you trust them to be honorable about the things they aren’t telling you? To be honest, I tend to think the best of people. I think that most people out there really are trying to do their best and produce something they can be proud of. But I am not naïve enough to think that there aren’t still plenty of people out there who just want to make the most money with the least effort and not care who they screw over in the process.

“You are what you eat.” Remember that one? My mother drilled it into my head as a child. Now that I am an adult, I pay attention to research, more and more of which is saying that this old saying is absolutely true. So, if your most precious and important possession, your body, is composed entirely of what you put into it, wouldn’t you want to put the best into it? After all, you want your body to last you as long as possible and function at optimum the whole time.

Here is another of my mother’s sayings: “You either spend the money at the grocery store, or you spend it at the doctor’s office.” While I agree with this, I would like to offer a third alternative: You spend the time in the garden. By growing your own food, you have ultimate control over what you put into it. You have control over what nutrients you add and what varieties you select. You can watch your plants and make sure they stay healthy. In the process you get exercise, which is also good for your body. And in the process, you can trust that you are putting the best food in your body.

Ground Cherries and Sunberries

2010-09-30T09:58:00.000-07:00

As I was planning out the summer version of my container garden this year, I asked myself the question “how can I have FRUIT?” I plant lots of greens in the spring and fall, and I always have plenty of aromatics, but my family is particularly fond of fruit, and summer is the season for lots of fruit. The problem for me, constrained to a container garden as I am, is that most fruit takes up lots of space. Make a list of all of the fruit you can possibly grow in a temperate climate, and you will find that a very large percentage grows on trees (apples, peaches,etc.), bushes (blueberries, raspberries, etc.), or vines (grapes, kiwi, etc.). All of these are perennials and take lots of space and time. Then you have the cucurbits (melon, cucumber, squash). Those are annuals that produce lots of fruit, but with the exception of a few cultivars specially bred for containers, most are sprawling vines that take lots and lots of space. At my house, anything that ventures beyond the safe confines of the actual container gets eaten by the local wildlife.

The problem comes from the energy expenditure required to make fruit. Sunlight is used to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugar, and that is done in the leaves. The more fruit you have, the more sugar you need, the more leaf surface area you need. So fruit-producing plants tend to be large.

I decided this year to try something new and see if I could find a fruit that was an annual but didn’t take up too much space, and the deadly nightshade family seemed a good place to start. After all, the nightshades are known for medium-sized plants that produce an abundance of fruit. The only problem is that the majority of the plants in the nightshade family produce fruit that, botanically speaking, is fruit, but culinarily speaking is considered a vegetable. Tomatoes, eggplant, tomatillos, and peppers are all nightshades. Potatoes are also nightshades, but the little green berries are poisonous, so I am not going to try them and see if they are sweet or not.

A little research revealed two likely candidates: ground cherries and sunberries. Ground cherries are a close relative of tomatillos, but are eaten more like berries, They are described as being about the size of cherries, but with a papery husk like a tomatillo and a flavor that is sweet. Sunberries are small, dark blue berries somewhat resembling blueberries. The descriptions I was able to find ranked anywhere from “kind of bland raw, but delicious cooked” to “incredibly delicious and addicting.” I figured both would be worth a try and I ordered some from Seed Savers Exchange, which is a really good site for hard-to-find seeds. Unfortunately, I didn’t order them until late May, so planting in pots and transplanting after frost wasn’t really an option. No matter, I just wanted enough to try them, and I saved enough seeds to grow them next year.

Both plants started off well and needed to be thinned by the middle of July. Shortly thereafter, they started setting fruit, despite each sharing a pot with a particularly exuberant cherry tomato that got huge but produced little fruit. I did at least manage to prune the tomatoes somewhat so that my ground cherries and sunberries could get a little sun.

The final results were mixed. I have to say that both types of plants produced lots fruit for the size they got. The sunberries were rather bland. To me they tasted like a kind of bland, earthy tomato. They were low on tartness, sweetness, and flavor. I never got enough at once to try actually cooking them, but I wasn’t really looking for something that needed lots of flavor added to be good anyway. I am glad I tried them, but I won’t grow them again (anyone want the rest of my seeds?). The ground cherries, on the other hand, were an instant hit. I got Aunt Molly cultivar, which were described as having a citrus flavor. I’d say it was a pretty accurate description. When you bite in, you get a burst of sweetness and a little citrus flavor. As you chew, though, the sweetness gives way a little to something a little more savory. My friend Robert called it buttery, which I suppose is about as accurate a description as I can come up with. At any rate, it has a depth of flavor that I particularly enjoyed. I will definitely be growing ground cherries in the future. The nice thing is that supposedly, given and early start and plenty of sun, it is supposed to grow into a bush about 3’ tall and similarly wide. If the density of fruit on that plant is similar to my smaller bush, one bush should produce plenty for snacking.

A Bioneer's Greenhouse Part 6 - Ideas

2010-09-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

This is Part 6 in a series. Feel free to check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, or Part 5.

So once I get this greenhouse built, what would I do with it other than grow vegetables? Well, it will still be several years before I get it up and operational, so I have plenty of time to work out the details, but here are a few of my ideas:

Growing Mushroom Logs

In Arizona, the key to growing mushroom logs seems to be 3 things: 1) lots of moisture, 2) keeping them out of the sun, and 3) protecting them at least a little from earthworms. In the greenhouse, I am planning a living path to walk on, with plants growing on it. The water from the beds will drain straight into the soil here, so it should be almost constantly moist, but still have good drainage. It will also be at the base of a 3’ high wall, so it will not get much sun. I can line mushroom logs along the wall and it should be near perfect growing conditions. All I would have to do is bury them about halfway in the soil and leave them alone. It will give me an opportunity to replenish my supplies of a couple of kinds of medicinal mushrooms, grow some new kinds, and grow lots of my favorite edibles. I will also have a lot of great soil for growing some of the types of mushrooms that grow well in soils, such as shaggy manes. I might even be able to get king stropharia mushrooms to grow. That would be quite a coup.

Maintain a Small Ecosystem

My vision has always been to have a complete ecosystem in my greenhouse. Obviously I will have lots of plants and plenty of living bacteria in the soil. I will also put a lot of beneficial fungus in there, from saprophytic fungi making me mushrooms to eat and improving the soil, to mycorrhizal fungi that helps the plants to thrive. But I also want an animal component. I need insects to pollinate my flowers. Windows without screens should do that pretty well. I also need beneficial insects to eat the pest insects that find their way in. That isn’t too hard, though. There is an easy source of vast quantities of ladybugs nearby that I can collect every fall. There are plenty of praying mantis about that I can capture and release in the greenhouse as well.

I also want larger animals in there, though, but what to do? Lizards are easy. I could do anoles, a childhood favorite (but how do I keep them inside?), or I could go the easy way and go with the local whiptails and fence lizards. An iguana, basilisk, or water dragon would be cool as well. Turtles would be cool, but I think I will have too much vertical relief and they don’t really climb. There are also birds. A parrot (I favor macaws) or a small group of bobwhite quail as pets would be cool. Chickens produce eggs. The big problem with birds is that two of the windows to the greenhouse will be my bedroom windows, so noisy birds are pretty much out. There are also some neat mammals that would go well in a greenhouse. Rabbits would produce large amounts of fertilizer, but would have to be kept in a cage if I have any hope of growing anything. The cage could go over the compost pile, though, and add a constant stream of extra nutrients to the greywater headed out to the beds. A sugar glider or flying squirrel would be so cool in there. I just haven’t come to any decisions yet on that. I just want SOMETHING in there.

Water Feature

As I mentioned before, I am going to have some sort of water feature. It won’t be very big, though. Should I make it just a sterile tank, a holding place for rainwater, or should it be a living system? How much room do you need to grow tilapia for food? Maybe I could get native frogs and toads to come in and breed there. Maybe I just have turtles or catfish. There are so many options on this one.

A Wetland Water Filter

I have mentioned before that I plan on using compost to filter my greywater before it heads out to the plants. When I originally planned that one, it was to double as a compost bin for everything but the kitchen scraps. However, I now have a tumble composter that does a really good job of handling just about everything I can throw at it. I don’t necessarily need the extra compost space, so it will be extra effort to keep it full and functional. Wetlands have been used for years to filter water. They are excellent at filtering a large number of impurities from water. It also happens to be an ecosystem that I know next to nothing about but have been very curious about for some time, so it would give me an opportunity to learn and experiment. It also might take less space since the compost bin was supposed to be 2 bins. If I could make the water filtration area smaller, I would have more room to grow more plants.

Carnivorous Plants

I have been a big fan of carnivorous plants since I was a child. The problem is that Arizona is just too dry. Even sitting in a puddle of water, the plants dry out quicker than they can absorb water. A greenhouse might just keep the humidity high enough that they would survive. That would give me an opportunity to grow some of the larger American pitcher plants as well as a variety of sundews and maybe even a Venus flytrap or two. The trick is to keep the water level up. I think I can manage that by putting them in a floating bed on the water feature. I could put it on runners and situate the floats so that it floats at the right height to keep the water level just right. As the water in the tank drops, so does the bed. If I decide not to have any sort of aquatic life in there, this bed could be the entire top of the water feature.

Vertical Gardening

A 10’x20’ space is barely enough to grow everything I want to grow, and sprawling, vining plants, like melons, are just too much for the space. However, if I can create some trellises and arbors, I just might be able to get some of those plants to grow vertically. In addition to saving space, it must might help shade the walls of the house in the summer as well.

Epiphytic Plants

Epiphytes, or air plants, have been another of my loves over the years. Epiphytes grow on other plants, needing no soil. I currently have several epiphytic orchids and bromeliads and would love to expand the collection. In particular, I would love to grow a vanilla orchid, which I hear get very large, and I MUST HAVE a dragonfruit cactus. An epiphytic cactus that produces fruit is just too awesome. Actually, I would love to have a Meyer lemon tree and grow the dragonfruit up the lemon tree. I also really want a staghorn fern. Those are amazing, majestic epiphytic ferns.

Anyway, those are a few of my ideas. As you can see, this greenhouse won’t be so much a greenhouse for me as a bioneering laboratory.

A Bioneer's Greenhouse Part 5 - Solar

2010-09-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

This is Part 5 in a series. Feel free to check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, or Part 4.

Sunlight is going to be an interesting concern in my greenhouse. Immediately to the east, I will have a screened porch. That means that I won’t get much sun first thing in the morning. Immediately to the west, I have a large juniper tree. That will steal a lot of my evening sun. Since I am facing 22 degrees west of due south, though, I think I should get some really good sun through the rest of the day.

Due to cost considerations, I will most likely have to forego installing the glazing for several years. When I do, though, I have a new set of concerns. I have specifically designed the house for passive solar design. In the summer, I am protecting the house from the sun as much as possible by providing as much overhang and shading as I can to the southern wall. In fact, if you notice, on the house itself, the second floor hangs 2’ over the lower floor. In addition to that, I have a set of wooden slats that give additional shading. During the winter, the sun comes in at a much lower angle, allowing the sun to come in the windows and warm the house. Once I get the glazing up for the greenhouse, I have another source of heat: the greenhouse itself. In the winter, the sun will warm up the greenhouse, producing heat. I will open the upper and lower windows from the house into the greenhouse. As the air heats up, I will rise and enter the upper windows. That will pull air in from the lower windows. This creates a convection current that heats the house. I will also have high and low windows on the glazing for the greenhouse so that I can use the same convection current to dissipate heat to the outside in the summer.

Thermal mass is another big consideration in my greenhouse. Thermal mass is a large, dense structure, such as a body of water or masonry that has the ability to absorb heat. As the day heats up, the thermal mass slowly absorbs the heat, tempering just how hot it can get. By the end of the day, the thermal mass is warm, but the outside temperature starts to cool down. The thermal mass will slowly release that warmth back out. In a house, a thermal mass is stored in the exterior walls, absorbing the heat from the outside and releasing it back to the outside in the summer. Sometimes thermal masses are used on the inside of houses in the form of concrete floors or walls, usually set back enough that they get little to no summer sun, but lots of winter sun.

I will be taking advantage of a high thermal mass in the greenhouse. My raised beds will be constructed of cinderblock. I am also considering using river rock and mortar to create a more aesthetically pleasing façade to the cinderblock. All of this creates a good thermal mass to help the greenhouse hold its heat on cold winter nights. I will also have the water feature in the corner that will provide a lot of thermal mass. I probably won’t want to let the greenhouse suck the heat out of the house on winter nights, so it will need to have a way to keep itself warm. A good thermal mass should do that, releasing the heat close to the plants. I must say, though, that I will be seeing how well this works before putting any temperature sensitive tropical plants in there. In the summertime, I need to find a way to keep the thermal mass from becoming a liability. I am hoping that I can use vines for this. The soil in the path will allow me to grow peas or pole beans or something similar and let it grow up the walls, thereby shading the walls from the sun. Cucurbits growing on top and cascading over the walls would also work. This should help limit the thermal gain in the summer. Also, the sun will be striking the walls at a more oblique angle, which should also help. I will probably use some sort of trellis to protect the side of the house as well.

All in all, I think that the greenhouse will use its sun efficiently and help keep my house warm in the winter. My only worry is that it will also help keep it warm in the summer. I need to prove to myself (and more importantly, my wife) that it will work as needed to keep things from getting too hot in the summer. I think I will probably end up installing an evaporative cooler on the side of the greenhouse as a backup plan. I have also considered having some sort of system that will allow me to have roll-up blinds that I can use to shade the inside of the greenhouse at certain times, or even partially shade it more often. If I get something that is cloth, it could be used as a shade to keep heat out during the summer days and a blanket to keep heat in on winter nights.

A Bioneer's Greenhouse Part 4 - Soil

2010-09-20T09:00:00.001-07:00

This is Part 4. Feel free to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 as well.

So now I have talked about how I am going to lay it out and how I am going to get water into and out of the greenhouse. Next I am going to have to have something to grow all that wonderful produce in, some sort of wonderful soil. Now, I could just buy a load of topsoil and hit the ground running. But that would be cheating. For someone who engineers with biology, the soil is by baseline, my starting point, my most important factor. Yes, I need good, fertile soil. But more importantly, I need living soil. For that, I want soil that is almost 100% compost.

I am fortunate to live in the neighborhood I live in. I have a nearly inexhaustible supply of organic material right out my back door. The ecology of my back yard is chaparral, a dry, scrubby landscape dominated by scrub oak. And yes, scrub oak really is oak. It stays small and twiggy and is easily chipped up in my little electric wood chipper. It also grows really densely. I could go out daily and maintain trails, reduce fire danger by removing brush that’s too close to houses, and take it from dense patches. Then I bring the trimmings back to the house and chip them up. Between the sheer amount of scrub oak and how fast it grows, I doubt anyone would ever notice that it was gone. And those that did would probably appreciate my maintenance work. I certainly wouldn’t be clear-cutting anything.

Once home, the chips would be pasteurized and inoculated with culinary mushrooms. Many of the best culinary mushrooms really grow well on oak. So I could grow some in pots or even in the beds themselves. If I can get several blocks completely inoculated with mushroom mycelium, I could create a bed with fresh chips and then break up the blocks and use them to inoculate the bed. With any luck, I would have many pounds of tasty mushrooms as the first crop from my garden. When the mushrooms have gotten what they want out of the wood chips, they get fed to the worms, who will finish them off to make high quality compost in just a month or two.

Now, I have to say that the prospect of harvesting and chipping about 10 cubic yards of scrub oak is seriously daunting. Fortunately, I have a few cheats that allow me to get a quick start. First of all, there is straw. It is a little less dense than wood chips, but it is also readily consumed by a wide variety of culinary mushrooms. A bale is only about $4, so I can get them in bulk pretty easily. So that will probably be my starter method. For my second cheat, I have another readily available resource. During monsoon season, my neighbors and the neighborhood in general spend a considerable effort cutting and removing weeds, especially tumbleweeds. I can just walk around the neighborhood pulling weeds. The green matter will help with the composting as well as improve the nitrogen content of the soil. The best part is that I can use all weeds, regardless of whether they have gone to seed or not. As the raw materials compost, the level of the top of the beds will drop considerably, which means that I will have to keep adding more and more material until the decomposition has slowed down. Assuming I fill it with weeds fairly early in the process, any seeds in the mix will end up so far underground that they will have no chance of pushing to the surface once they sprout.

Once I have gotten the beds a little over half full, I need to start paying attention to the makeup of the soil. I will test it and start looking for amendments. Most of the best soil in the world has one thing in common: it contains large quantities of mechanically weathered rock. The fine rock particles have lots of minerals in them that are readily available to plants. They also have good staying power in the soil. So I will do a lot of looking around at this point and see if I can find a good source of greensand and rock phosphate to supply the potassium and phosphorus I need in my soil. I don’t know of a good rock-based source of nitrogen, so I will probably have to get some blood meal. I will certainly be using lots of compost, which should help. I have some friends with chickens, too, so chicken manure will be added. I will also have to start taking drainage into account around this time. If my soil doesn’t drain well, I will start adding sand or pea gravel to the mix. If it drains too well, I might just add a little unused clumping kitty litter, which will help plug some of the holes and retain water. Clumping kitty litter is made from expansive clay. Caution is recommended with this method, though, as a little goes a long way.

Once I have a fairly decent level of soil that has composted well enough to support plants, I can also plant green manures. Something like alfalfa or hairy vetch would add lots of nitrogen to the soil. I could also begin selectively planting food crops at this point. The greywater distribution system would probably not be fully buried in the soil yet, so any crops that grow food on the ground or in the ground, like zucchini or carrots would be out. However, crops like corn, sunflowers and pole beans that raise their crops well above ground would be a good choice. In addition, these crops produce lots of compost when they are done.

Eventually the final soil level will be reached and will be fairly stable. I fully expect this to take 2-3 years at least. It isn’t until this point that I can consider planting perennials. Any time before that the constant sinking soil level and constant addition of more mulch and compost would be death to anything that would be around a long time.

A Bioneer's Greenhouse Part 3 - Drainage

2010-09-16T13:39:00.000-07:00

This is Part 3 in a series. Feel free to read Part 1 and Part 2 first.

In my last entry, I covered how to get water into my greenhouse, but not how to get it out. To be honest, I have put almost as much thought into draining the greenhouse as I have in watering it.

Obviously, the water hits the soil first, so soil is a significant consideration in drainage. I suspect that I will have to do some serious adjusting to my soil mixture for drainage purposes. If I make it drain too well, it will pass the water straight through before the plants have a chance to get any, and no amount of water will be enough. If I make it too dense, it won’t drain fast enough and will always be a puddle, which would kill the plants. They say that if you have clay soil and need better drainage, add organic matter. They also say that if you have sandy soil and need better water retention, add organic matter. It loosens stiff soil so water can penetrate it and it helps absorb water passing through sandy soil to improve retention. Based on this, I am intending on making my own soil almost entirely out of organic matter. I may adjust it a little this way or that with some pea gravel or clay kitty litter if it needs some help.

From there, the water drains down to the bottom of the beds. My plan is to make the floor of the greenhouse concrete. I just don’t want all that water draining right under my foundation. I also don’t want local trees to put some roots up in my greenhouse to steal all my water and possibly damage my beds. So concrete bottom it is. The beds, which will be about 3’ high, will be made of cinder block. On the bottom course of the interior walls, I will leave the mortar out of the vertical joints. This will allow the water to drain from the beds into the pathway. The pathway will also have soil on it, about 8” deep. There will be a perforated pipe inside a sleeve of landscape fabric running the length of the walkway. I will put a cinderblock block with chunks knocked out every 2’ or so along the length of the pipe, straddling the pipe. I will then mortar a stepping stone of some sort to the tops of the cinderblocks. The rest of the walkway will be filled with soil with some sort of shade and moisture tolerant creeping ground cover. Personally, I am hoping for Corsican mint, but to date my attempts to grow Corsican mint have been considerably less than successful. I am also hoping to put some mushroom logs in the pathway there as the shade and moisture will be perfect for them.

So the water trickles down through the soil and then drains to the center of the greenhouse, where it encounters more soil. From there, it drains into a pipe that will take the excess water off to the natural area behind my house. Depending on how much water I have there, and what I can convince the neighborhood of, I might just put in another distribution system and a little orchard of fruit trees. We’ll see.

A Bioneer's Greenhouse Part 2 - Water

2010-09-13T09:06:00.000-07:00

This is part 2 of my design for my greenhouse. Part 1 is here.

When I had a nice big garden at my last house, water was a serious source of contention between my wife and me. Though we never did the math, her contention (probably rightly so) was that we spent more money on water than we got in benefit from food. It is just too dry here in Arizona. So in my design for my greenhouse the design of water was crucial. Now it is not to say that I am going to have a low water greenhouse. If that were the case, I would only be growing cactus and such and I really don’t want to do that. No, in this case, the concepts we are going for are wise use of water and a distribution system that reuses water wherever possible. For this, I have a two-pronged approach to water. Yes, I will have a spigot in the greenhouse, but it is my sincere hope that I will almost never have to use it. The vast majority of my water will come from either greywater or rain water.

1) Greywater

Here in Arizona, we have a blanket permit for using greywater. That means that, as an individual homeowner, I have the right to use my greywater without getting an individual permit. I am expecting some friction from the local municipality since they like to use the treated water to recharge the aquifer, but I am a strong believer that it is better to not pull it out and treat it in the first place than it is to pull out twice as much as you need and then put half of it back. Most people I have talked to seem to think I can squeak it through.

There is one problem, though, that becomes a major design concern. The blanket permit has a few stipulations. The one that really affects my design is that you cannot surface irrigate food crops with greywater. Honestly, this just makes sense. Whatever dirt you just washed off your hands shouldn’t end up back on your food. So I am taking a two-pronged approach to this problem. The first prong is to filter the water to get as much out as possible before it waters my plants. That should get rid of the hair and dirt and a lot of the soap before it gets distributed to the plants. To do this, I am going to use compost to filter it. The exit of the greywater system will be right next to the back door. The line will run under the sidewalk and dump straight into the compost. The compost bins will be fairly shallow and despite not being shown this way in the drawing (one level of detail I didn’t feel like doing), will be a little above the rest of the beds.

There will be two compost bins with a filter cloth of some sort between them. The water will flow into the first bin, flooding it, and then trickle into the second bin. From there it will trickle into a filtered tub in the corner where it will enter the distribution system. Since I have a dog and don’t want the greenhouse to be smelly anyway, the compost used for filtration will be strictly a repository of wood chips and plant waste from the greenhouse, with no food waste in it. I’ll try to put living mushroom mycelium in there to help with filtration, but I anticipate difficulties keeping it alive for very long. This will mean a non-smelly compost that has lots of microorganisms in it to help grab the nutrients out of the water. It will also mean that the water leaving the compost bins will be a sort of weak compost tea that will be composed of very little leachate.

The distribution bin will have two outlets, one that goes to the central bed and one that goes to the outer beds. From there, the pipe will run along the inside of the wall of the bed that is next to the path, about 6” below the surface of the dirt. There will be an outlet with a valve every two feet or so along the edge. That should give me a fairly even distribution of the water. If I have an area that is not planted or getting too much water, I can turn off zones as I need to.

One of the problems I have struggled with is the even distribution of water. If each outlet was at the same elevation, the dirt at the beginning of the system would get most of the water and the end of the line would get almost none. I plan to remedy this problem by having an inch or two rise between the bottom of the distribution pipe and the outlet of each outlet pipe. That way the pipe fills up before it starts to distribute water, so it should distribute fairly evenly.

The distribution system for the central bed will be similar to the one for the outer bed.

2) Rain Water

I am going to do my best to capture as much rain water as I can for the greenhouse. I am hoping to bury some sort of tank on the northwest side of the house that captures rain from at least half of the roof of the house. 300 to 400 gallons would be good, though I am going to try for as much as I can. I am also planning on putting some sort of water feature on the northwest corner of the greenhouse, though I haven’t decided what form that will take yet (just a big tank or a living system?). The overflow of the large house tank will go to the greenhouse tank to make sure it is full. From there, the overflow of the greenhouse tank will dump into a terracotta channel mounted along the edge of the outer raised bed wall. This terracotta channel will be grouted to the wall and tilted towards the soil. Assuming I can get it all level, it will fill up and then spill over into the dirt, acting sort of like a trench irrigation system without using any of my precious growing space.

A rainwater source and distribution system will be crucial to this working. Since I can’t surface irrigate with greywater, I need a way to water seedlings and other plants whose roots don’t go deep enough to take advantage of the greywater. The water feature will also have a spigot on the side for filling a watering tank. Then I can just top off the greenhouse tank with water from the house tank.

Ideally the combination of the two systems will serve to keep the greenhouse watered without too much effort from me and almost no use of additional city water. In fact, I did some research on how much the average household produces a day, and they say about 35 gallons of greywater per day per adult. Now we are pretty water conscious, so I’d say we are under that. However, with two adults and two kids, we’ll probably still generate about 50 gallons of greywater a day. That is probably more than I need. I might just have to turn the valve off half of the time and give the City its recharge water back.

A Bioneer's Greenhouse Part 1 - Overview

2010-09-09T08:21:00.000-07:00

As a teenager, I discovered the joys of making terrariums. I started out trying to make a comfortable habitat for my pets, but it quickly became more about the habitat and less about the pets. That was the beginning of my love of engineering biological systems. As an adult, I realized that a greenhouse would be a terrarium for me and it became a goal to have one of my very own. But I didn’t want just any greenhouse. I wanted something intricately designed, efficient, self-sufficient wherever possible, and above all else, customizable. It would be a place where I could try out new ideas, tinker, and change things to make them work better.

A few years ago my wife and I bought a lot with the intent of building a house on it. Now that we are living in a rental unit on the lot next to our house and finally have our old house rented out, it is time to work towards building the new house. Naturally, the new house will include a greenhouse, though I suspect that the actual glazing will probably come along later. In the meantime, it will be a raised bed garden.

In the interest of making this a blog post and not a book, I’ll break up my design and intention for the greenhouse into parts. For starters, though, I’ll talk about the site layout.

The lot is kind of what we in Prescott call a “billygoat lot.” It is on a fairly steep hill and only covers 0.06 acres. Yes, I have the decimal point in the right place. The neighborhood is laid out with lots of open space and very small lots. That suits me just fine. As luck would have it, the lot slopes down to the south and the road is on the north side. I have about 15’ of fall from the front of the lot to the back. That means that when you walk in the front door off the street you are in the upper floor of the lot. Going down a floor and walking out the back still leaves you three to four feet above ground, just enough that I can put in a raised bed garden and still water it with greywater from the house. It also puts it in a good place to collect rainwater from the roof.

The greenhouse will be located on the southwest corner of my house and will be 10’ deep and 20’ wide. There will be a door into the house on the northeast corner of the greenhouse and the path into the greenhouse will start there with steps. There will be a 3’ wide bed all the way around the outside of the greenhouse, with a 2.5’ path next to it. On the inside will be a wider, deeper bed. There will be room for a bench as well.

Over the next several posts, I will cover the features of my future greenhouse, starting with water and drainage, then covering soil production and solar features, and finally ending with a discussion of some of the living systems I am hoping to build into the greenhouse once I get it fully built, glazed, and operational.

Fall Gardening

2010-09-02T22:49:00.000-07:00

It is September now, time to plant the fall garden in my area. The question is, what to plant. In order to determine that, first you need to realize how a fall garden is different from a spring or summer garden.

1) You plant when it is still hot, but the plant matures and is ready for harvest when it is cold. That means that plants that like to sprout in cold soil, like peas, are ill suited to a fall garden. It also means that plants that are frost intolerant, like tomatoes, are also out.

2) A fall garden is best suited to plants that mature quickly. When you consider “growing season” for your crops, it refers to the time between last freeze and first freeze. Many crops can take almost that entire time to grow, set fruit, and then ripen fruit. So crops that mature in just a few months are better suited to a fall garden. This often means vegetables instead of fruit (realize I am talking botanically speaking, which means if it has seeds, it is fruit).

3) If you have mild winters in your area (as I have in my Zone 7 garden), it works well to consider plants that may survive the winter. In some cases they will produce all winter long. In other cases, they will produce until winter throws too much at them. In still other cases, they will go dormant when it gets too cold, only to revive when the first warm weather of spring hits, giving you an early crop. Just remember that winter weather can be unpredictable, so you can’t necessarily count on that winter garden. But then again, summers can deliver hail and locusts as well…

Here are a few examples of crops to try in your fall garden:

Spinach – Spinach has been the star of my fall garden for many years. So far every time I tried it, it went dormant when the weather got too cold and then exploded into growth in the spring. It handles the cold like a champion. Most importantly, it stores whatever energy it can and grows explosively when spring hits. I often find myself trying to find a way to work spinach into every meal around the time everyone else is considering planting their garden.

Kale – All members of the cabbage family are known for their use of sugar as an antifreeze. Once the first freeze hits, they get a lot sweeter. I am particularly fond of Red Russian kale. It is a thinner, more tender kale that can be eaten in salads. However, during hot weather, it is bitter. It isn’t until the first frost that it becomes delicious. For me, this is ONLY a fall crop. Collards also fall into this category.

Broccoli – I once had a broccoli plant that had a rough summer and didn’t start producing until fall. When winter hit, it was undeterred by the cold and kept producing a head of broccoli once or twice a week until a particularly nasty cold snap around January finished it off.

Swiss Chard – This is another tough plant. It matures quickly, is very frost tolerant, and usually lives through the winter. The downfall of this one is that it comes back pretty anemically in the spring. After the winter, it is gearing up to produce seed. So come spring, pull out all but one of your Swiss chard plants, leaving the one so you have more seed.

Garlic – I have had great luck planting garlic in the fall and letting it grow through the winter. It will be ready for harvest around May or June.

Lettuce – Here is another plant that matures rapidly and is frost tolerant.

Cilantro – Cilantro bolts quickly in the heat, but it matures quickly, making it well suited to a spring or fall garden. Cilantro was another plant that surprisingly made it through the winter, only to resume growth in the spring.

Bok Choy – This is another member of the cabbage family that should be good for a fall garden, being both cold tolerant and fast to mature. I tried it for the first time last year and for some reason the plants got about 5” tall and went straight to seed. Not sure why. I plan to try it again this fall, though.

I have also had some failures in the fall garden. You may notice that a sizeable portion of the list above are greens. Anything that needs time to form fruit, big roots, a head, or some other part that isn’t just leaves may not have time to do so before winter sets in. I tried peas last year. They refused to sprout in warm summer soil, so the seeds took a full month to sprout. When they finally did, there wasn’t enough time to flower and grow pods before winter set in. The same thing happened with carrots and beets. I suspect it would be the case with cabbage as well.

Despite my suggestions, I would strongly recommend you experiment. It really is the best way to find out what works best for you and in your area. Even with mixed results you will extend your harvest through the fall and get to garden that much longer.

Ambush Bug

2010-08-30T10:48:00.001-07:00

I have a spearmint plant that is currently flowering. The massive profusion of flowers attract a wide variety of pollinators including wasps, butterflies, bees, hoverflies, beetles, and even hummingbirds. I stepped out of the house the other day and was delighted to see a painted lady butterfly flapping in the wind as she fed from the flowers. As I got closer, though, I noticed that not only were her feet not touching the flower, they weren’t even moving. The butterfly seemed to have gotten her head stuck in the flower and died. Naturally, I took a closer look. What I saw was a small insect holding on to the head of the butterfly and feeding on it. The insect looked so much like the flower it sat on that it was difficult to see, even though I knew where to look and what to look for. What particularly impressed me was the size of the insect. Its body length was less than a third the body length of the butterfly and overall mass was probably a fifth or less that of the butterfly. Despite the saddening loss of a butterfly, I still found the whole spectacle fascinating.

The next step was to identify the predator. My first thought was that it was an assassin bug. Assassin bugs are very effective predators that I would be proud to have in my garden. They lie in wait, often with excellent camouflage. Lacking jaws, they stab their prey with sucking mouthparts, quickly killing them and then sucking out the innards. They are nearly as voracious as the more famous ladybugs and praying mantis, but smaller (usually) and harder to spot. Nonetheless, they are exceptionally beneficial for the garden. However, upon doing a little research, I found that the blocky head and praying-mantis-like grasping forelegs of my little guy didn’t fit the description of an assassin bug. A little more research showed it to be a close relative of assassin bugs, an ambush bug. Just like their cousins, ambush bugs are voracious predators that lie in wait, often on flowers, to grab passing prey. The article I found said that they can routinely handle prey ten times their own size. That’s about like a house cat taking down and killing a small wild pig.

Once I knew what I was looking for, I looked around for more and quickly found 6 or 7 more hiding among the flowers. I also found some eggs laid on the branches that I can only hope are ambush bug eggs. I must say that I will keep an eye out for these guys in the future. Maybe it is their fault that I have had little to no pest problems this summer. Or maybe it is the fault of the one praying mantis I have seen lurking about. It is probably a combination. Either way, they are a treasure.

Photos courtesy Jenny Williams

Swiss Chard

2010-08-26T21:56:00.000-07:00

Personally, I am a big fan of spinach. I could eat a few pounds of it a week. As a gardener, though, it is kind of a pain. I can get it to grow all winter long. I can get it to grow in the fall and I can make an abundance in the spring. But it just won’t grow in the summer. At the first sign of heat, it goes straight to seed and dies. So for my greens, I have another favorite, Swiss chard. Flavor-wise, it is very similar to spinach, though I find it to be a little tastier. Texture-wise, it is a little tougher. Raw leaves are not as palatable as spinach unless they are picked very young, though I still enjoy them on burgers and tacos. They just don’t make a very good salad. Make no doubt, though, Swiss chard packs the same nutritional punch as spinach.

The best part, though, is that chard is a biennial, meaning that it grows one year, storing energy all summer, and then goes to seed the next year. You just have to let one plant go to seed and you will have enough seeds to keep you and your friends stocked in Swiss chard seeds for years to come. It is also very cold tolerant. In my area (Zone 7 in Arizona), I can sometimes coax it to stay active all winter long. It is also a big plant, with leaves on mature plants sometimes reaching a foot long. Leaves can be harvested individually and the plant will keep putting up more. I also like growing it myself because a bunch at the grocery store often sells for $3 or so, which seems quite high considering how easy it is to grow. If you pick the right cultivar, like ‘Rhubarb’ or ‘Bright Lights,’ you can even plant them in the landscape beds for a bit of edible landscaping.

No that it is late August, it is time to consider what to plant for the fall garden. Might I suggest a little Swiss chard?

A Little Compost Math

2010-08-02T21:27:00.000-07:00

I have been noticing lately that my homemade tumble composter has been getting harder and harder to turn, even though it has remained about the same level of full since I made it. One of the constants of compost is reduction. Assuming you do it right, it will continue to shrink in volume. Part of this is because the raw materials have so much space in them and they pack down as they decompose. However, a bigger part is that a very large amount of the mass, around 50% is converted to carbon dioxide or other gasses as a part of the decomposition process. As the carbon is lost, the minerals and nutrients get distilled down to a concentrated, nutritious form.

It occurred to me that I have been constantly filling this single 55 gallon drum since January. I started it with enough dry leaves to fill it one and a half times. I actually had to fill it and then wait to cram the rest in. I have added at least three baskets full of weeds, each a third to a half the volume of the compost bin. I added the remains of a previous compost pile that weren’t quite done cooking. Then there is the constant supply of kitchen waste. So I decided to do a little math to see just how much kitchen waste I have generated.

First of all, there is my kitchen compost bin. It is 11”x6.5”x10”, which gives me a total volume of about 0.41 cubic feet. I assume it was an average of about ¾ full when I took it out, so three trips would be a cubic foot. I figure I took it out about three times a week on average, so I generated about one cubic foot of compost a week. My compost bin is 55 gallons, which converts to about 7.5 cubic feet. That means I generated enough kitchen waste to fill it completely every 2 months or so, and have done so since January, so the kitchen waste alone has been enough to fill it about 3.5 times. Add to that the one and a half full worth of dry leaves and another filling or so for weeds and other materials, and I have filled it with enough material to fill it completely about 6 times. Yet it remains only about three quarters full, just as it has almost constantly since I put the first load of leaves in and wetted them down.

My compost is now getting heavy, which means it is getting dense. Perhaps it is time to stop filling it and let it finish cooking so my garden can have an infusion of nutrients and biological activity. I know I am itching to make some compost tea for sure.

And yes, I do this for fun. Did I mention I am a garden geek?

Spring Fats vs. Fall Fats

2010-07-26T20:40:00.000-07:00

I read an article recently that has me thinking. The article contends that our bodies evolved in a natural cycle with the seasons. Omega 3 fatty acids are prevalent in green, leafy vegetables. Omega 6 fatty acids are prevalent in seeds and grains. In spring, greens are prevalent and make up the bulk of a hunter-gatherer’s diet. In fall, seeds dominate the diet. As a survival mechanism, the Omega 6 fatty acids trigger our metabolisms to prepare for lean months ahead and they make us fat, causing heart disease and other such problems in the process. But when spring comes around, the Omega 3 fatty acids trigger our metabolism to revert to a more active state, repairing the damage done over the winter. We in modern society have a problem. We live off of an industrialized food system , which means that our diet is grain based all year long. Worse, those leafy greens that we should be eating lots of are largely absent from our diets. The average American gets about a tenth of a serving of green leafy vegetables a week.

I typically grow a lot of greens in the garden, particularly purslane, which is really loaded with Omega 3s. Looks like I need to keep up the trend.

Herbivores vs. Vegetarians

2010-07-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, here's today's random thought: Are vegetarians the largest true herbivore ever to walk the earth? Sure, we have had lots and lots of really large herbivores that have walked the earth, but how many of the big ones really have a 100% vegetable diet? Let me put it to you this way: have you ever gotten a bug on your vegetables? Now think about how meticulously we wash them and look them over before eating them. Cows barely look before taking a mouthful. There is even a parasite whose life cycle depends on the fact that large herbivores don't look before eating. It invades an ant's body and takes over its mind, causing it to climb as high as it can on grass to hopefully be eaten by whatever is eating the grass.

So, what nutritional benefit do large herbivores get from the bugs they inevitably eat and, more importantly, is it a source of protein they rely on, or is it just incidental to their diet?

Wasps: Friend or Foe?

2010-07-19T15:53:00.001-07:00

A few years ago I had a thriving crop of broccoli in my garden. Then the leaves started getting holes. The holes got bigger. I looked for the culprit and found little green caterpillars, probably cabbage loopers. I picked off as many as I could find. I continued to do so for 2 or 3 weeks and didn’t really seem to make any headway. They reproduced faster than I could remove them and removed foliage as fast as it grew. Then one day I noticed that I had finally gotten ahead of the caterpillars. The damage seemed to be abating and I couldn’t find a single one. As I looked over my plants, trying to find any of the little green caterpillars I may have missed, I noticed I was not the only one. A wasp came to the plant and flew over each leaf in what was obviously a search pattern. It occurred to me right then that I probably had nothing to do with the lack of pests while the wasp had everything to do with it.

Wasps are voracious predators of a wide variety of garden pests. While the adults eat a varied diet, consisting mostly of pollen, nectar, and insects, the young are a bit more specialized. They eat insects. Many wasp larvae are actually parasitic, meaning that they live inside the bodies of larger insects, eventually killing them when the wasp matures. This means the adult wasps, many of which are good parents, go out and find large insects to feed to their young, often choosing ones that damage our gardens. An active wasp nest can seriously deplete your pest population in a hurry.

So what is a gardener to do? Well, first of all, if you are allergic to wasp stings, I strongly recommend not taking the chance. I am not allergic, so I let them be, mostly. Most wasps spend a little time on the plants, do their stuff, and then move on. I let those be. I do swat the ones that take a special interest in me, my children, or my food, though.

Let me leave you with one last wasp story. When I was about 15 years old, I got my first pitcher plant, a carnivore that needed a steady supply of insects. It was small, with only 3 or 4 traps and only an inch and a half tall or so. So I put the whole terrarium outside for the summer. I wanted to attract insects, so I put a little piece of peach in the terrarium with it, thinking it would attract fruit flies. I got a few fruit flies, but the fruit was dominated by wasps, which mostly scared the fruit flies away. I was pretty upset about it, but didn’t know what to do. I thought about it for a few days and then looked again. One of my tiny traps had a wasp abdomen sticking out of it. I was sure the wasp would rot and kill the trap, but it didn’t. I soon stopped providing fruit and the pitcher plant did just fine attracting the wasps itself, catching 2 or 3 a week all summer. By the end of the summer my pitcher plant was 3 or 4 inches tall and had 15 to 20 traps on it.

Job Search

2010-07-08T08:53:00.000-07:00

I have made it a point to not beg forgiveness when I am behind on posts. It is boring to read. Besides, it is my blog, dammit, and I'll put up a post when I darn well feel like it. But this time is a little different. Posts have been sporadic for the month or so because I am looking for a new job. So if any of you know anyone who might be interested in hiring a registered professional civil engineer with experience in both design and project management, and who knows about all the things I talk about in this blog, let me know. I would prefer to stay in Arizona.

Image is an example of a 416 foot long 10 food diameter pipe I designed pipe being constructed.

Growing Bricks

2010-06-21T07:49:00.000-07:00

I recently came across an article about a professor who has come up with a novel way to make bricks. Concrete in general and bricks in specific require a lot of energy to produce. The raw materials have to be heated to very high temperatures to achieve the right chemical reactions. All that energy costs money and has a high environmental impact. Professor Ginger Dosier has come up with a possible solution. She fills a mold with sand and introduces a special bacteria and a solution containing urea, a common waste product. Over the next four to seven days, the bacteria consumes the urea and produces calcium carbonate, locking the sand particles together and creating a sort of synthetic sandstone. All this happens biologically at room temperature.

Of course, I am a bit of a chemistry geek and happen to know that urea ((NH2)2CO) and sand (usually SiO2) don’t contain any calcium, which makes the formation of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) a little tricky. However, I am willing to assume that there is some sort of nutrient broth introduced that the article above failed to mention. If any of you out there have any further details on this, I’d love to hear them.

I find this technology promising as concrete production is responsible for about 5-8% of greenhouse gas production worldwide. Most of those gasses are produced as a result of the heating of the raw materials used in concrete, but the chemical reactions that produce concrete also produce carbon dioxide. Fortunately, there are others tackling this problem as well. In England, engineers have come up with a type of concrete that is based on magnesium silicates instead of calcium carbonate. The interesting thing about this concrete is that it not only uses less heat to produce, but it actually consumes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as it cures, making it carbon-negative.

Of course, it may be years before these products become widely available as materials like this need to undergo extensive testing in order to develop standards for mix design and production. Then those standards need to be adopted by regulatory agencies. That all takes time. However, the Italians have discovered a kind of concrete that actually scrubs the pollutants from the air. The benefit of this is that it is only a minor modification of existing concrete and thus doesn’t need extensive testing. They discovered that when titanium dioxide, which is a white dye often used in foods, is mixed in with the concrete, it reacts with the sunlight, producing a catalytic reaction that breaks down carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere. While it isn’t a cure for carbon dioxide emissions, it can help with air quality.

Combating Desertification

2010-06-17T08:01:00.000-07:00

Humans use up soil. It is a sad fact, but it is true. The very basis of our food system is a substance that gets depleted but rarely replenished. Part of the problem is in how we think and how we view soil. Most people think of soil as a reserve of nutrients for plants to take from as they grow. In return, we put nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium back, thinking that it replenishes what we took out. It doesn’t. Soil is a living organism that is fed by a continuous input of organic material, mostly in the form of dead plant material and animal waste. When nutrients, including organic material, are removed from the soil without properly returning it, the organisms in the soil starve and eventually die. Healthy soil has several inches of organic matter that act like a sponge when it rains, soaking up moisture quickly when it rains and reducing runoff. As the soil dies, it also loses the ability to store water, eventually leading to a process called desertification. By some estimates, 38,000 square kilometers of arable land are lost per year to desertification.

Biologist Allan Savory, who won this year’s Buckminster Fuller Challenge, set about tackling the problem of desertification decades ago. In his native country of Zimbabwe, this process has been turning grasslands and savannahs into deserts. In addition to poor farming practices, desertification is achieved by overgrazing the land to the point that it cannot recover and is left a dry, parched landscape. The new landscape is no longer productive from a human standpoint, but is also detrimental from a climate change standpoint, as it is much more prone to fire and no longer sequesters carbon in the soil. He began with a holistic approach, studying how natural grasslands support vast herds of ungulates. He assumed that the grasslands evolved with their herd animals as part of the same ecosystem. Then he looked at the difference between how natural herd animals graze the land and how domesticated animals graze the land. What he found was counter-intuitive.

In the wild, animals used to travel in vast herds, much like the wildebeests do today in Africa. The bison herds in America were equally massive. What the wild herds DON’T do, though, is stay in one place and continually graze the same grasses over and over. The grasses need time to recover between grazings. He also found that huge herds of ungulates till up the ground as they walk on it, distributing and trampling in the organic material they are depositing. He set out to emulate this method of grazing by increasing herd sizes and more closely managing how they migrate across the land as they feed. Grass keeps a reserve of energy in its roots. When it is grazed to the ground, it uses those reserves to put up more leaves. When the large wild herds graze, they eat the old vegetation until it is depleted and then move on to find more food. The grass puts up new leaves a few days later, after the herd has left. When a cow grazes in one area, it prefers to eat the tender young leaves. By doing so, it hinders the ability of the plant to recover fully.

Savory started helping cattle ranchers increase the size of their herds, a process that nearly no one thought would work. Then he helped them manage how the herds roamed across the land, fully grazing one area out and then not returning to the same area until it was fully recovered. The grasslands recovered and the grasses started growing back in, creating a healthy ecosystem. Eventually, the water retention of the soil increased and springs started to develop. Stream flows increased and the whole desertification process was reversed.

Biomimicry

2010-06-14T10:45:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has spent any time truly studying nature has probably noticed that for nearly every piece of technology we have, there is an analog in nature. The interesting thing is that the analogs in nature often accomplish what we are trying to accomplish more elegantly, simply, and at a lower resource cost than what we humans can seem to manage. Some of the examples are pretty interesting. We came up with air conditioning; termites in Africa managed to achieve a constant temperature and humidity with very little energy input, using architecture. In our current world, the lack of availability of fresh water is a growing problem worldwide. There is only so much to go around. However, there is a nearly limitless supply of water in the oceans, if only there was a way to remove the salt. Desalinization plants are costly to build and operate. However, your own body has a solution. The salinity of blood is very similar to the salinity of seawater, and we can’t afford to lose all that salt. So kidneys filter the blood and remove excess water and impurities while leaving most of the salt behind. In fact, the efficiency of this process is why we can’t drink seawater. The salt would just build up in our bodies. The examples go on and on.

More and more scientists and engineers are now working together to study biological systems in nature and how they work. Most importantly, they are trying to find ways to emulate those processes through a process called biomimicry. Biomimicry is the study of nature with an intent to copy nature’s solutions and apply them to human problems. One recent high-profile example is gecko tape. Scientists have studied how geckos use the tiny hairs on their feet to stick to slippery surfaces, like glass, and used this to make a tape that is incredibly strong but doesn’t use adhesives. Instead, it uses millions of tiny hairs. Each hair attracts surfaces through a force called Van der Waals forces, which are actually very weak forces. However, by having millions of hairs, the forces add up to a very strong attraction. The result is tape that will hold huge forces, even in wet conditions, without leaving a sticky residue. For more information on the promise of biomimicry, I highly recommend watching Janine Benyus’ two talks to TED on the subject here and here. Biomimicry offers new and exciting ways of solving humanity’s problems.

A Tumble Composter

2010-05-31T09:07:00.000-07:00

Several months ago, I saw a smallish tumble composter at the local Costco for just under $100. For those of you who haven’t priced one, that is a pretty good deal. However, with times being tight, I assumed it wasn’t really an option and it was over a week later before I thought to mention it to my wife. To my surprise, she actually thought it was a fantastic idea. I really needed a place nearby to put kitchen scraps and my garden, small though it is, needs a good supply of quality compost, but my attempts to date have not proven the match of the javelinas and my dog. The neighborhood has a wonderful compost bin, but all the proceeds go to the community garden. A tumble composter seemed like the perfect solution. So I rushed out to the store. To my chagrin, they were no longer available.

Over the next week or so, I mourned the missed opportunity and realized just how perfect it would actually be for my situation. Then I started researching other inexpensive compost tumbler options. I happened across one that was made from a 55 gallon plastic barrel. It just so happens that my local Coca-Cola bottler gives those things out when they are done with them, and I had two just sitting there waiting to be made into a pair of rain barrels. I hadn’t really worked out the best way to install them in series, so I hadn’t built the barrels. A few days of planning out the best way to do it and I was off to the store.

I thought of all kinds of complicated, awesome ways to do it, but opted instead for simple. I bought a 1” galvanized steel pipe, a kit to make a clamp-style sawhorse and 2x4s for the legs, a pair of hinges and a pair of latches. I drilled a 1” hole (1 ¼”, actually, I couldn’t find the 1” bit) in the center of the top and the bottom of the barrel and then used a jigsaw to cut a panel out of the side for the door. I installed the hinges and latches and threaded the pipe through the holes. Then I installed the legs to the saw horses and put it all together. The whole project cost me about $50 in materials (the barrel itself was free, after all) and took me about 2 hours start to finish.

Last fall I raked up the leaves at my old house and bagged them up. Not wanting to throw them away, they had been sitting on my back patio waiting for a big enough compost bin. I had to stuff and moisten and stuff some more, but I got them all in, along with the compost from my little previous bin. That was late winter, and the volume has been slowly decreasing, despite a steady stream of kitchen waste and weeds. I have a number of worms that came with the original compost and they have been working diligently on the pile. I’ve been pulling them out as much as I can since the compost will eventually heat up and kill what’s left. So far I have probably harvested a pound or two of worms from the bin and there’s still no shortage.

The point of a tumble composter is to make hot composting easier. A hot compost pile needs to get up to about 150 degrees F to really do its work. In order to do that, it needs a steady supply of oxygen. That is a tall order in a stationary bin. It involves a lot of work turning it. There are all kinds of tricks and tools, but they each have their own limitations and many still require lots of work. With a tumble composter, you just give it a few spins and the pile is fully aerated. The only problem with mine was that between the cold weather this spring and the high carbon content of the pile, it wasn’t heating at all. This weekend that finally changed. I did a little maintenance on the bin last Saturday and found a pocket of heat. Sunday nearly the whole bin was warm. From here on out, all I need to do is spin it every couple of days to keep it oxygenated. In another month or two, I’ll be ready to start using compost. I can’t wait.

Note: The composter currently lacks lateral stability. There is really nothing keeping the pipe in the sawhorse clamps but gravity. A good shove on the side will send it right over. I bought a chain to install in an X pattern between the legs. That will provide the support it needs to not fall over should something happen. I just haven’t gotten it done yet.

Chaparral

2010-05-19T22:31:00.000-07:00

My home of Prescott, Arizona is a really interesting place. At over a mile high and sporting a hodge-podge of geological features, including at least two extinct volcanoes, mountains and numerous outcroppings of granite boulders, Prescott hosts a number of very different environs. We have Prescott National Forest, a conifer forest comprised mostly of towering ponderosa pines which often reach over a hundred feet tall. We have grasslands that sport herds of pronghorn sometimes a hundred strong. In low areas and around creeks we have lush riparian areas that are home to cottonwood trees that are often more than ten feet wide at the base. Granite Dells is a couple of square miles of bare granite boulders. But one of the most interesting and unique is the chaparral.

Chaparral is dry, scrubby landscape. Trees are more prevalent than on the plains, but certainly not prevalent enough to call it a forest. The most common trees are juniper, pinion pine and various species of oak. Elderly specimens of these trees sometimes reach 30 feet high, but most are shorter than 15 feet. The ground sports a little grass and a few forbs and cactus, but is mostly bare dirt. The most prevalent vegetation in the area is the brush. The chaparral sports a number of tough, woody bushes that often form an impenetrable barrier. Manzanita is the most beautiful, with smooth, glossy, mahogany colored bark. Mountain mahogany and three-leaf sumac with their sour berries are also common. The dominant bush, though, at least in my area, is the scrub oak.

I have always found scrub oak a terribly interesting species. Well, there are actually several species of scrub oak. I grew up back east and am accustomed to the towering, majestic oak trees back there. While scrub oak is certainly a member of the Quercus family, it is virtually unrecognizable as an oak compared to its loftier cousins. About the only familiar feature is the acorns. Instead of deep green, lobed leaves, they have small, gray, thorny leaves. Instead of a single majestic trunk, most bushes have multiple stems that rarely get over a few inches in diameter. A few of the older specimens will grow multiple trunks that get about 10’ high and 4” in diameter. As I mentioned before, there are many different species of oaks native to this area and I am still learning about them. Some grow into something that is clearly a tree while some stay as bushes less than 4’ tall. And, of course, there is everything in between.

As someone who engineers with biology, I am particularly fascinated by the number and biomass of oaks in the chaparral, and most of that biomass is in the form of sticks less that 1” in diameter. Chaparral is also really prone to fires, and oak burns hot. So the local scrub oak is adapted to periodically having all of its above ground vegetation burned off without dying. So you can completely cut the top off of a scrub oak and it’ll just grow back. They grow massive root balls underground and are well adapted to living in really adverse conditions.

As anyone who has tried to grow mushrooms has probably noticed, nearly all of the culinary mushrooms readily available really like to grow on oak. While the chaparral looks really unforgiving to most, I just see all that available oak. To me it just looks like an endless, sustainable source of food. My neighborhood has about 8.5 acres of mostly undisturbed chaparral, with 7.5 acres in one chunk just outside my back door. Some areas of this are unreachable and impassable due to the density of brush. If I harvest just a tiny percentage of this, I could chip it up and keep producing healthy, delicious mushrooms for the rest of my life, all without significantly impacting the scrub oaks.

Shaggy Manes!

2010-05-17T09:23:00.001-07:00

As I was walking through the neighborhood yesterday morning, I came across a lovely sight. I found a wild shaggy mane mushroom growing in a landscaped bed. I happen to know that this bed is free of pesticides, so I took the liberty of harvesting the mushroom. A few hundred feet up the road, I found another, larger specimen.

Shaggy manes are prized edible mushrooms that are found in all of the 48 contiguous states. They are also fairly easy to grow as well, but despite their ubiquitous nature, you’ll never find them at your local grocery store. Shaggy manes (Coprinus comatus) have a unique way of dispersing their spores. While most mushrooms open up and let the spores drop into the breeze, shaggy manes deliquesce. In other words, the entirety of the cap of the mushroom dissolves into a gooey, inky mess that is rich in spores. From the ripening (or picking) of the mushroom to completion, this whole process takes about 24 hours or less. They have NO shelf life. You must use them right away. Even freezing them won’t stop it.

One of the reasons shaggy manes are a favorite of mushroom hunters, other than the flavor, is the fact that they are easy to identify. They look like a goose egg on a stick. The surface of the mushroom comes up a little as well, giving them a slightly shaggy texture. While there are many similar looking mushrooms, none of them are poisonous and certainly none are toxic.

I have been trying to grow shaggy manes for years now, with several unsuccessful starts. I think that part of the problem is that the shaggy manes I get online are from the Pacific Northwest, which has a markedly different climate than I have here in northern Arizona. Finding native shaggy manes gives me hope that I can get them to grow here. Fortunately, when I harvested the shaggy manes, I also managed to get a sizable stem butt (the part with dirt on it) with each mushroom. I cut those off and planted them in my containers in the hope that they will leap off and grow into the soil, eventually giving me some shaggy manes of my own. As I mentioned previously, a stem butt is a vigorous lump of mycelial life force. Given the right conditions, such as soil that is rich in organic matter, it may begin growing again and spread, eventually producing more mushrooms. That’s the hope anyway.

As for the mushrooms, they were delicious sautéed in a little butter.

Disclaimer: Collecting and consuming wild mushrooms is risky and should never be attempted without first consulting an expert, and I am certainly not an expert. The risk of eating any wild mushroom rests with the individual and Mad Bioneer does not accept any responsibility for consequences that may arise from the action of anyone eating wild mushrooms.

Harvesting the Weeds

2010-05-13T14:01:00.000-07:00

Most composting instructions tell you not to put weeds in the compost bin, and for good reason. Weeds often have seed heads that won't break down during the composting process unless you are doing some serious hot composting. The resulting compost will inoculate your garden with a lovely infusion of weeds. To make matters worse, the weeds are guaranteed to show up right where you applied the compost, meaning that they have lots of good nutrition to help them grow big and strong.

However, with careful observation and judicious selection, you can select weeds that get quite large before going to seed. As long as you get them before they go to seed, you can collect a nice infusion of green material for your compost.

Here in Arizona we had a really wet winter and early spring. Right now the weeds are plentiful and growing quickly. I particularly favor tumbleweeds for compost fodder as they can get a foot or two tall and nearly as big around before they go to seed. Yes, the cute little critters pictured above will grow up to be tumbleweeds. So around this time of year, and for the next month or so, I like to travel the neighborhood and harvest the weeds, using them to bulk up my compost. In just a few weeks, they break down and really make some lovely black gold for my garden.

Diatomaceous Earth – Razor Wire for Your Garden

2010-05-11T07:39:00.000-07:00

Lately my compost has been overrun with fruit flies. I have a tumble composter, so I suspect that it will eventually reach a point where it is hot composting (perhaps after the nights stop being so cold) and that will probably burn them off. But in the meantime, it is pretty uncomfortable to even look in there. You get a face full of fruit flies for your trouble. I tried beneficial nematodes, but it’s been almost a month since application and the flies are still a problem. I have thought about spraying neem oil or some other pesticide, but that bothers me from two different angles. The first is that I don’t really like the idea of putting pesticide in my compost, even if the pesticide is organic. The second is that it would kill the adults while it is the larvae that really need killing, so new applications would be needed every few days to have any effect. I also tried sealing up the compost and letting the lack of oxygen kill the fruit flies, but there are too many holes and hinges and such to get a good seal. So I decided to go with physical controls.

A diatom is a type of single-celled algae that is common in all the oceans and has been for millions of years. Diatoms have a unique cell wall that is composed of silica. Interestingly, each species of diatom has unique physiology and can be identified by the shape of the silica “shells” called frustules they leave behind. This knowledge is often used as an easy way to identify the approximate age of marine sediments.

In some areas there are sediments that are composted almost entirely of diatoms, called diatomaceous earth. These sediments are easily crumbled into a fine white powder and sold at garden centers everywhere. When diatomaceous earth is applied to the garden, those microscopic spikes form a sort of razor wire over your soil. When insects walk over them, they produce tiny cuts in the insect’s exoskeleton, which allows the insect’s bodily fluids to leak out, leading to dehydration and death. When applied to compost, it should kill the fruit fly larvae and might kill adults as well. When applied to the garden, it will kill a number of different pest species, especially ones who drag their bellies on the ground. Eventually, the silica breaks down and is incorporated into the soil. It is worth mentioning that it doesn’t seem to have any deleterious effect on humans or larger animals, including earthworms, as our skin is too thick to be cut by the tiny spines. I have also heard that they make a medical grade diatomaceous earth that you can swallow to kill intestinal parasites.

Caring For Your Mushroom Log

2010-05-06T22:33:00.001-07:00

Okay, let’s say that you have followed my directions from previous posts and you selected the mushroom you wanted to grow and started growing a mushroom log. How do you take care of it? If you live in a humid climate that gets regular rain, that is actually pretty easy. Just put it on the north side of your house where it can catch the rain and rarely gets direct sun. Also, limit exposure to the ground to help keep out the bugs and other forms of contamination. Leaning it against the house or stacking on some cinder blocks works well for this.

If, like me, you live in an arid climate, or you want to keep the log inside, things get a little more tricky. You still want to protect the logs from the sun as much as you can, but you now have the added difficulty of keeping them wet normally. The first method is probably the easiest and works for all mushrooms that are happy growing from vertical surfaces. Get a pot that is slightly larger than the log and as tall as a third to a half of the log. Put in the log and fill it with either pasteurized wood chips or sand. Wood chips will give the log a little more nutrition, but you’ll have to inoculate them as well. I have actually inoculated the chips and let them inoculate the log and it has worked pretty well. From there, you just water the pot, pretty much like you would water a plant. Actually, more like you would water a cactus. Since the mushrooms are growing inside the log and have no leaves, they lose much less water to evaporation than plants. So watering them once a month or so is plenty. Another consideration is whether the pot has a drain in it or not. If you do have a drain, it can be difficult to get enough of the water to soak into the log. If you don’t have a drain, the water in the bottom can stagnate and get smelly. Personally, I prefer no drain, but I have done it both ways successfully.

If you want to up the stakes a little, you can make an ecosystem out of it. Once the mushrooms have had a month or two to work, I like to add a handful of worms to the wood chips and a few plants. The worms will break the wood chips down into a rich compost, which helps the plants grow. The plants will help pull water out of the bottom of the pot. They also make a nice indicator. If the plant is wilted, your mushroom probably also needs water. The plant and mushroom are also complimentary on gasses produced. The mushroom produces a slow, steady stream of carbon dioxide as it breaks down the log, which provides a perfect source of food for the plant. The plant provides a slow, steady supply of oxygen, which is perfect for the mushroom. It all makes for a lovely harmonious system, just like nature intended.

Another way of taking care of your log is to just mist it regularly. A regular, thorough misting will soak into the log and help keep it hydrated. Again, I tend to use plants to help with this process. Epiphytes are plants whose roots prefer to never touch soil, instead living up in trees. They aren’t parasites, though. They get all of their moisture from humidity and rain (or regular mistings in the home) and all of their nutrients come from the air. I particularly like epiphytes in the home because I figure (don’t really have any evidence, but it makes sense to me) that if they get all their nutrients from the air, they are probably pretty good at pulling all kinds of noxious gasses from the air. Most kinds of orchids, most kinds of bromeliads (especially tillandsias), and several kinds of ferns are all epiphytes. You can either glue them to your mushroom log or tie them down with wire. Since both orchids and bromeliads have beautiful flowers and often have wonderful forms, they actually make lovely arrangements, especially if you picked a log with branches to nestle the plants in. By regularly misting your plants, you are also regularly misting the log.

So, to recap, the only hard part about caring for a mushroom log is keeping it watered, but not too soggy. It really won’t have any visible signs of life, so you just need to remember to keep it happy until it is ready to produce fruit. I’ll talk about fruiting your log soon.

Cleaning Oil Spills with Hair and Mushrooms

2010-05-03T09:24:00.000-07:00

As you may have noticed by now, this blog is about using natural systems and organisms to solve human problems. As you may have also noticed, Paul Stamets is my hero, mostly because he has shown great creativity in doing just that. Well, he’s at it again. Human hair has an incredible affinity for oil. It naturally soaks up the oil our skin produces. It also works very well for soaking up crude oil like you would find in an oil spill. It is also an abundant waste product and is produced in great abundance at barber shops across the country. So various people have been working with those barber shops to collect hair and make it into mats that can be used to clean up oil spills.

But then what do you do with them? That’s where Stamets comes in. He has “trained” a strain of oyster mushrooms to metabolize crude oil. Yes, that’s right, it just eats crude. And when it is done, the area is clean and safe. They are pretty sure you could even eat the mushrooms produced, though I doubt anyone is in a rush to try it out. Well, it also turns out that oyster mushrooms are also quite fond of digesting hair. Stamets and his team can take the oil-soaked hair mats and grow oyster mushrooms on them, with the end result being compost that is safe for use in your garden. I love elegant solutions like this. We need more solutions like these.

For more information, check out these articles:

http://inhabitat.com/2007/11/19/cleaning-up-an-oil-spill-with-hair-and-mushrooms/

http://www.fungi.com/mycotech/mycova.html

Rainwater Harvesting

2010-04-29T17:33:00.000-07:00

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Brad Lancaster, a rainwater harvesting expert. Brad has a background in permaculture, which is the practice of designing human systems to mimic natural systems with the goal of increasing efficiency, with the ultimate goal of making our practices fully sustainable. Brad, who also has a blog, makes the point that we, as a society, are pretty thoroughly water-phobic and do our best to shed water away from our structures and properties as quickly as possible. He encourages us to treat water as a precious resource and harvest it with our landscapes. By doing this himself, he was able to transform his own lot in Tucson, Arizona, USA from a dry, dead landscape with a few of the toughest desert plants to an urban oasis with lush vegetation and abundant fruit, all with little or no additional water. He did this by collecting as much water as he could, mostly by grading the dirt to retain water and by covering the dirt with organic material, which helps the dirt act like a sponge, soaking up rainwater. He also collected rainwater from his roof and the street* in front of his house. All of this means that the runoff from his property is very minimal, as is the water he uses from his tap to water his plants.

As a civil engineer, I think his observation that we are water-phobic is a little extreme, but not too far off base. As engineers, we sometimes get sued over our designs. 90% of the lawsuits against civil engineers are because of drainage or traffic. Water can be very damaging and must be handled carefully. However, our caution of the damage it can do locally has created other, wider problems, opening the door to more damage by water. In a natural system, dirt absorbs water and ground cover, like plants, slow down the flow of water. During rainstorms in natural environment, the water levels in creeks and streams rise slowly to a peak flow and then subside back to normal flow. In urbanized areas, surfaces don’t absorb and are designed to get water out of the way as quickly as possible. That means that for the same amount of rainfall, more water runs off and it runs off more quickly. So the flood stage in the local streams occurs quicker than with a natural system and the water level is higher. Municipalities have begun trying to alleviate this problem with detention and retention basins (detention basins detain water while retention basins retain water). By collecting and slowing the water, we can help to restore the water to a more natural runoff rate. However, I believe that Brad’s way is better yet. By treating water as a resource, he takes extra steps to allow the water to seep into the ground, replenishing aquifers and decreasing our reliance on irrigation. It also increases plant cover, especially for arid climates, which improves our air quality.

So I really agree with Brad, and as an engineer, I think we can do better. But a lot of times we have to convince others. I can help a little with that. When faced with an intractable city engineer, put it in terms they can understand. Tell them that you are exceeding the requirements for retention on your site.

For more information, I highly recommend Brad’s two books: Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands (Vol. 1): Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain into Your Life And Landscape and Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond (Vol. 2): Water-Harvesting Earthworks

* As a civil engineer, collecting water from the street makes me a bit nervous, for two reasons. The first is that the curbs and ditches in front of your house usually belong to the city and modifying them can get you in trouble. Secondly, a street is an engineered system. Just cutting holes in the curbs modifies the engineering. It would be like cracking open your computer and soldering on a few more wires. 90% of the time it would be fine, but the other 10% of the time you are potentially opening yourself up for flooding or other problems. Talk to your local city or county engineer before attempting this. Again, use arguments that explain how you will be increasing retention.

Earth Day

2010-04-22T14:11:00.000-07:00

Today is Earth Day! As people all over the country (and world, so I hear) attend rallies and listen to music, how can we, the garden geeks, the biology geeks, the bioneers, help. First, remember what Earth Day is all about. It isn’t a day to worry about this great big ball of rock and iron orbiting the sun. We needn’t worry about the core or the mantle (unless, perhaps you live in Iceland). It IS a day to worry about Earth’s surface infection we call life and the interwoven relationships that they create, collectively called the ecosystem. The ecosystem, combined with physical factors such as weather, tides, soil chemistry, seawater chemistry, and much, much more make up the environment. Earth Day is a day to remember how important the environment is to all of us. It is a day to reflect on what has gotten us where we are and, more importantly, where we need to go from here and how can we get there. So what can we do to make a difference? I have taken the liberty of making a list.

1) Recognize the importance of science. The first thing to remember is what science is. It is not a belief system, a dogma. It is, quite simply, a method, a tool. As a great man said, “You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.” The entire purpose of science is to study and discover the truth, the actual, unbiased, complete truth. There are those out there who say that it is science that got us into this mess in the first place. Well, yes and no. True, without science we wouldn’t have nearly the problems with pollution and global warming and all the other stuff. But we would also still be riding horses and watching our children die of horrible diseases for lack of medicine and starving to death because we can’t grow enough food to feed everyone. Science has improved every quality of life. Yes, we have problems, but the problems weren’t caused by science, they were caused by INCOMPLETE science. We didn’t do enough science early along to realize what effect our technologies have on the world around us. Science helped not only discover that we have new problems, but also helped identify the sources of the problems. And it is science that will get us out of this mess. So, please, do what you can for science. Teach it. Encourage it. Fund it. We need science.

2) Did I mention that we should recognize the importance of science?

3) Seek to understand the various roles of organisms in our environment. Generally speaking (REALLY generally), animals consume oxygen and plant or animal material and secrete carbon dioxide and waste material that is high in nutrients. Plants consume carbon dioxide and nutrients from the soil to produce oxygen and their own body mass, which either sequesters carbon or is consumed by animals. Fungi and bacteria consume oxygen and secrete carbon dioxide (mostly) and feed by cleaning up waste material, including dead organisms, and turning it into soil. With this in mind, think about what you want to accomplish. If you want to remove carbon dioxide and other pollutants from the air, plants are your best bet. The faster a plant grows, the faster it will pull carbon from the air. The longer the plant lives, the longer it will hold on to that carbon. Trees are always a good bet for this. If you want to clean up pollutants in the soil or the water, fungus and bacteria do a good job for this. Give them the conditions they need to grow, especially oxygen and do your best to pick the right organism for the job.

4) Think globally, act locally. Do something. Here are a few ideas:

Plant a Garden

A garden is actually a huge help. By growing plants, you are removing carbon dioxide from the air. By producing food a few feet from where you eat it, you are reducing the fuel it takes to get it to you plate, thus reducing carbon used. Also consider that burning that carbon costs money and you, the end user, get to pay for it. If you don’t have lots of time to take care of a garden, go for perennials. Fruit trees especially do a good job of sequestering carbon while continuing to produce low-maintenance food every year. Blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, asparagus and rhubarb, among many, many others, are also lower maintenance than annuals and will continue to grow for years.

Compost

If everyone composted their organic waste, it would remove a really significant portion of the trash stream. In addition, compost builds the soil, increases moisture retention of the soil, and increases the health of plants, allowing them to do their job better.

Harvest Rainwater

Taking advantage of all the free water falling from the sky is really beneficial to your pocketbook as well as our aquifers.

There is plenty more you can do, but these are really easy ones. They are also beneficial to you as well as the planet.

Myceliating the Compost

2010-03-29T19:32:00.000-07:00

A month or so ago, I built myself a compost tumbler out of a 55 gallon plastic barrel. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you how in an upcoming post. The new composter gave me a place to put the bags of fall leaves that had not yet found a home. It took some doing, but I managed to get them all in there and there was just enough room to keep putting in kitchen scraps. However, spring has just barely sprung here and we are still in the grip of cold nights. So after a month of being full and being turned every few days, I have thoroughly moistened leaves that are a little more crumbled. No noticeable decomposition has occurred. Even the kitchen scraps are still green and mostly undecomposed. They actually look like they would if they were slowly going bad in the refrigerator.

I decided I didn’t want to wait that long for finished compost, so I decided something needed to be done. But how do you get it moving? A very high carbon content and negligible nitrogen content combined with low temperatures means that I have no chance of getting the thermophilic bacteria to start doing some serious cooking for me. I ended up with some worms in there due to transferring other compost in, but it is even too cold for them to do much work. However, there is another organism that can and will thrive in such conditions. Mushrooms make a living by competing in environments that other organisms cannot. They eat what few else can. Their main competitor is bacteria, so many of them evolved the ability to keep growing and digesting even when the temperatures are so low that the bacteria are all dormant. In doing so, they use the winter to gain a competitive edge. The enoki mushroom, also called the winter mushroom, is particularly good at this. You can grow them outdoors in the cold of winter and even fruit them (get them to produce mushrooms) in your refrigerator. I didn’t happen to have any enoki mushrooms growing, and even if I did, I am not sure they can survive on leaves in the compost bin. However, I did have oyster mushrooms growing on a roll of toilet paper as an experiment I did with the kids. Oyster mushrooms are relatively cold tolerant. More importantly, they will decompose just about anything with a high carbon content and do really well in compost bins.

So I decided to make a mycelial bomb for the compost bin. The most important consideration in this was protecting the mushrooms from the bacteria and earthworms already in the compost bin. Once disturbed, the mushrooms will take a few days to recover and begin growth. When they do begin growing, they will do so vigorously, but during that recovery period, they are vulnerable to bacterial competition and especially vulnerable to the worms. I have dumped mushroom spawn directly into soil or compost where worms are present only to have them disappear in a day or two because the worms ate them. So I decided to give the mushrooms a protective casing. I had saved an old worn out pair of 100% cotton pants for just such an occasion. I cut one of the legs off of the pants and tied one end of the leg shut with cotton string. Then I took some of the drier leaves from the compost and made sure there weren’t any worms in them and stuffed them in first. I followed that with the myceliated toilet paper roll, cut in half to increase surface area. Finally, I stuffed in more leaves and tied the other end shut. The fabric of the pants will keep the worms out long enough for the mushrooms to get a foothold inside the pant leg and then use it as a platform to leap off into the compost. The mycelium will have no trouble growing right through the fabric and out into the compost. In the process it will digest the pants and string, which will just become part of the compost.

Now I just have one little problem. Since last year, fruit flies and fungus gnats have been a major problem in my compost. They take up residence and swarm when I come by, making it unpleasant to work around the compost. They also get in the house and drive my wife nuts. I was going to get me some beneficial nematodes and let them take care of the fruit flies and gnats for me. The problem is, oyster mushrooms eat nematodes. So I guess I need to find some and get them and let them do their job before the mushrooms completely take over.

An Abundance of Spinach

2010-03-25T17:20:00.000-07:00

About 10 years ago I was living in Boulder, Colorado and had my first rental with a yard big enough to have a small garden and was eager to do so. However, I didn't get started until late summer. Normally that's when you end gardening, but I was eager to get started and knew a little about fall gardening. So I planted a 3' x 4' patch of spinach in late September. I did the math and figured I should get a crop of baby spinach around Thanksgiving, before the really brutal winter weather set in. Sure enough, I harvested enough the day after Thanksgiving to make something nice. After that, I just wrote the spinach off as lost. Winter hit and my thriving spinach became pathetic, sad, wilted spinach. It endured freezing temps nearly every night. It was covered with snow, thawed, and covered again, many times over, in fact. I never really noticed that it remained green. I just figured the cold was keeping it from rotting properly.

Then, as it so often does in Colorado, spring hit with a bang. The weather warmed up, flowers started popping up, and the bugs came out. To my surprise, the spinach also revived, and it did so with a vengeance. Within a matter of a week or so I had 3' x 4' of spinach, about 6" deep. Since I had scattered the seeds rather than a neat sowing in rows, there was no space whatsoever between plants. I suddenly found myself trying to find ways to eat spinach for every meal.

Spinach is one of my favorite veggies. It can be cooked in many wonderful ways. It can be eaten raw as a lettuce substitute, either by itself or on burgers and tacos. It is also amazingly nutritious. It is rich in vitamins and minerals and antioxidants. So ever since that first garden, I try to have a little spinach in the ground come winter. So far it has never failed me and has always come back in spring.

Hacking the Potato

2010-03-22T16:41:00.000-07:00

Every now and then you can find an unexpected feature of an organism that gives you an opening, an opportunity, for doing something a little different. It is sort of like “hacking” into the biology of that organism in order to get it to do what you want. The potato has such a “back door” as they are often called in computer circles. You see, the potato plant can be almost completely buried while it is growing without killing it. In fact, the leaves that are buried will just die and the stems will sprout roots and the plant will send more growth upwards. Incredibly, this can be done many times over the course of the growing season. Even more incredibly, the potato plants grows potatoes off of an underground stem of sorts. So if you bury its above ground stem, it becomes an underground stem and thus a place to grow potatoes. I have heard of people getting as much as 100 pounds of potatoes off of just four square feet of potato bed (your mileage may vary). The best part is that it is pretty easy to do.

First of all, you pick a nice spot and plant your potatoes in the spring, just like you normally would do. But don’t dig them too deeply, maybe 4-6 inches. While they start growing, build yourself a frame. It really can be made out of just about anything, as long as it can be installed in sections. If you put something too tall around your potatoes, they won’t be able to get enough light to grow and will die. So you want to go up a foot or so at a time up to about 3 or 4 feet. Wooden frames work, compost bins, even old tires can be used. Also start stockpiling some dirt. Compost is ideal since it gives lots of nutrients to the growing potatoes. I have heard of people using spoiled straw as well. Just realize that you’ll have to go digging through this at some point, so don’t use fresh manure or heavy clay.

When the plant gets up to a reasonable sized bush, put on the first section and fill it with dirt, making sure not to bury more than two thirds of the plant. Then let it sit until it has a good sized bush and do it again. Make sure you are done adding sections by the middle of the growing season or so to let it have enough time to make lots of potatoes.

At the end of the season, pull off the frame and go digging for potatoes. With any luck, you will be eating potatoes all winter.

No-Till Gardening

2010-03-19T13:09:00.000-07:00

Spring is here. The weather is warming up. It is time to dig the garden and get it ready for planting, right? Well, not necessarily. There is a school of thought out there, one that I increasingly adhere to, called no-dig gardening. The principle is basically this: soil is a living thing and, generally speaking, living things do their best if they are left alone. On the good side, turning the soil buries weed seeds and mixes fertilizer and organic matter deep into the soil. It also aerates the soil, providing more pores for better air flow to the roots and easier penetration of the roots through the soil. The only thing is that worms do most of that work themselves. They aerate the soil, they consume the organic matter on the surface of the soil, process and distribute it. As for the weed seeds, a good layer of mulch will suffocate most of them and judicious weeding (also called healthy exercise) will get the rest.

But there are many other processes at work in healthy soil. Plant roots push aside soil as they grow. When the plant dies, bacteria and fungus in the soil decompose the root, adding organic matter to the soil and leaving the space the root once occupied as pore space in the soil. Mycorrhizal fungus thrives in the soil, providing water and nutrients to the plants in exchange for sugars. The fungus will live from year to year, helping out this year’s new plant growth just as it did last year. It helps break down old roots as well as organic matter on the surface of the soil. Those nutrients, combined with the sugars it gets from the plants, make more organic, living material in the soil. Those in turn break down when they die. This is the cycle of life in nearly all healthy soil around the world. This is the environment plants evolved to grown and it helps them thrive. Healthy soil makes for healthy plants.

When you till the soil, you kill mycorrhizal fungus. You kill some worms by chopping them up and others by smothering them with soil. Overall, you disturb the web of life that has grown into your soil. Sure, it will recover, but that takes time. The new roots of your plants are coming soon and they do best if they have a thriving ecosystem to connect with.

So is there ever a time to till your garden? Certainly. Observe your soil. If you are creating a new garden bed, it might be a good time to till. Tilling does a very good job of doing what it was originally intended for. It loosens compacted soil and it buries the weed seeds too deep to sprout viably. But when you do till, do what you can to restore the life to the soil. Compost is very important in this process. Mycorrhizal fungus is also important, though, and tilling kills it completely. So you will want to add it back in. Just evaluate your soil again next year, and if you don’t have to till, don’t.

Bioneered Air Filtration

2010-03-15T20:56:00.000-07:00

Many people are bothered by the all the crap in the air. Industrial society throws up a lot of air pollution. There are particulates, soot, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, and the list goes on. Unfortunately some people are really sensitive to all this and end up being sick all the time, spending a fortune on air cleaning products, or moving to the middle of nowhere. It is those products I want to focus on. HEPA filters remove particulate matter from the air, down to some seriously tiny stuff. However, it does nothing to remove harmful gasses. Some people use carbon filters, which will remove some of the gasses and especially smells from the air. There are all kinds of ionizing filters out there that use magnetic charges to remove the junk from the air. I have even seen devices that dump ozone into the air to help oxidize the chemicals in the air and change them into something inert. I really have an issue with those. There is a reason the EPA classifies ozone as a pollutant. It is really bad for your lungs. Keep it in the upper atmosphere where it belongs!

So what is a good way to get really clean air without having to buy all that expensive equipment? Well, let’s look at that third option up there: moving to the middle of nowhere. Ever wonder why the air in the middle of nowhere is so fresh and clean? Is it the lack of sources of pollution? Personally, I think that is only half of the issue. I think that the other half is the plants that are scrubbing all the gunk from the air and using it as food. Houseplants have also been shown to do a really good job of cleaning harmful gasses from the air. There are two problems with plants, though. First of all, they work pretty passively, only filtering the air that drifts past them, and secondly, they don’t really do much for particulates. Then I saw this device. I love this thing. According to the technical details, it uses a fan to draw air over the leaves of a living plant, allowing the plant to draw the chemicals out of the air. Then it draws the air down through the soil of the plant and then through the water reservoir in the bottom, thereby reducing the majority of the particulate matter. That is the kind of bioneering I like: including life in the technology to make the whole thing work better. So, how can we take this great product and make it better? Here are a few of my thoughts:

1) Glue a few air plants to the plastic shield. It means you’ll have to open it up and mist it every few days, but it’ll probably add to the efficiency. Air plants do not grow in soil, so they get everything they need from the air. That means that they are really good at filtering the air to get the nutrients they need.

2) Careful plant selection to pick the best plants for the job. The device says that you can use any house plant, but I suspect that certain plants do a better job of filtering the air than others. Anyone out there found any research to this effect?

3) Design the soil. Smaller pore space would help ensure that more particles are captured. Living soil would also introduce microbes to the mix that might help snatch some of the crap out of the air. Also, fungal mycelium forms a network that looks suspiciously like a net and has been used quite successfully to filter water. It is quite possible that it would also filter air. The only problem is that you can’t really get saprophytic mushrooms to live in that pot for long enough to do any real good. It is just too small. But a mycorhyzzal fungus growing with the plant just might do the trick.

Oh, and as a bonus, here is another product that also uses plants to filter the air. However, the article is a bit low on details, so it is sort of hard to get excited about it.

The Nitrogen Fixers

2010-03-11T09:58:00.000-07:00

In high school, a classmate asked my chemistry teacher if nitrogen gas was poisonous. She took a deep breath, held it a second, and let it out, only then saying simply “no.” Her point is well taken. We live our lives awash in a sea of nitrogen gas. It makes up 80% of every breath you take. Yet this vital element is largely unobtainable to most life. Plants need nitrogen to make green leaves. We need it as it is a vital part of many nutrients, most notably protein. So how does it get converted to a usable form? Well, lightning helps a bit. However, most of the real work is done by bacteria. Some of these bacteria live in the soil, producing tiny amounts of biologically available nitrogen as they need it. But the real workhorses get a little help. You see, legumes have formed a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria. The legumes form nodules on their roots that create an ideal habitat for the bacteria, which usually lives in the soil, to move in, multiply, and start fixing large amounts of nitrogen.

So, what are these mysterious legumes, how do you get them, and do you really need them? First of all, yes you need them. It really is one of the best ways to get lots of nitrogen in your soil without resorting to buying large bags of fertilizer. Many food crops, such as corn and squash are heavy feeders and steal large amounts of nitrogen from your soil. Legumes form a vital step in crop rotation, replenishing the nitrogen content of the soil.

So what are legumes? Legumes are a family of plants that include peas, beans, peanuts, clover, alfalfa, and hairy vetch, among many, many others. Clover and vetch make great green manures, alfalfa makes great feed for livestock and, of course, peas, peanuts and beans make food for us. I’ll cover green manure in a future post.

There is one important thing to remember, though. Each species of legume forms a symbiotic relationship with one specific species of bacteria. If you have ever grown that kind of legume in that soil, the bacteria is present in the soil. If not, you should spend a few dollars and inoculate the soil.

Stem Butts

2010-03-08T14:54:00.000-07:00

Have you ever gotten a mushroom at the grocery store and noticed that it had fine filaments on the bottom, sort of like roots? Many people think that mushrooms can be compared to plants, with a similar stem and a cap instead of leaves. The problem is, this is not the case. A mushroom is a fruiting body, and is more analogous to an apple on an apple tree than the whole tree. Also, mushrooms are very temporary features while the mycelium, the body of the mushroom, can live in the soil on inside logs for years or even decades. So when you have those root-like things attached to the bottom of a mushroom, it is actually a piece of the body of the mushroom, called mycelium. That part, along with the bottom half-inch to an inch of the stem is called the “stem butt” and carries some pretty powerful life force with it.

You see, a growing individual mushroom has certain cycles to its life, just like you and I. First of all, it tries to find the limits of its food. It will grow for weeks or years without fruiting to grab as much of the food source it is growing on as possible for itself. As soon as it reaches the limit of its food, or the boundary between itself and a competitor, it will stop growing and make some mushrooms. During this time, it puts all its energy into mushroom production. As soon as the mushrooms are spent, it begins growing again. The mycelium will look for more sources of food and will further seek to grow into and digest what it has claimed as its own. When it has enough energy stored up and the conditions are right, it ill make more mushrooms. When that is complete, it will leap off again into vigorous growth, on and on until the food is spent and the mycelium dies.

Perhaps you can see where I am going with this. The most vigorous growth in the life cycle of mycelium is right after it has finished producing mushrooms. When you have a fresh stem butt, you have a little piece of that vigorous growth that is ready to go. If you put that stem butt on a suitable growing medium, it can burst into life and be used to further propagate your mushrooms. My personal favorite is coffee grounds. I have used stem butts to make coffee ground spawn with a half dozen or so different kinds of mushrooms. I currently have a toilet paper roll growing with oyster mushrooms and all I did is put a stem butt down in the center. They also grow well onto wood sawdust to make sawdust spawn or wooden dowels to make plug spawn.

So next time you harvest fresh mushrooms, think about what you can do with the stem butts instead of tossing them in the compost. Or maybe the compost is a place they can really grow well!

Starting a Mushroom Log

2010-03-04T14:17:00.000-07:00

Starting a mushroom log is a pretty simple process. All you do is introduce the mycelium to the wood and give it the right conditions to grow. The process can be done with spores, but it is extremely unreliable. Therefore, it is much better to use living mycelium. There are many different methods for doing this, and I will cover two here, the first for using plug spawn and the second for using sawdust spawn. But before you try this make sure you have read my post on matching type of wood to type of mushroom.

Plug Spawn

Plug spawn is mycelium grown onto small wooden dowels that is then pounded into a hole drilled in a log. They are available online or can be made yourself, which I will cover in a future blog post. The advantage to plug spawn is that they are relatively inexpensive ($15 or so for enough to inoculate about 3 logs last time I checked) and really easy. You just drill a hole in the log, making sure to go deep enough that the plug can be fully inserted in the log and preferably sunk deep enough to be inside the bark. Once the plugs are inserted in the log, the fungus leaps off from the plugs and quickly colonizes the log.

For this method, all you do is drill a hole that is just a tiny bit bigger than the plug and hammer in a plug. Too little space and the plug won’t go in, while too much space doesn’t give enough contact or protection for the mycelium. A snug fit ensures that nothing can get between the plug and the log to disturb your mycelium. Plugs should be spaced every 3”-6” and placed in a diamond pattern around the log. The closer together you put the plugs and the more plugs you put in a log, the faster the mycelium will colonize the log.

Living in a dry climate, keeping my logs moist is a major consideration. I like to get a large pot, the kind you would put a plant in, and put the log upright in the pot, making sure one half to one third of the log is down in the pot. Then I fill the pot with pasteurized wood chips or sawdust. A few plugs scattered into the sawdust helps the mushrooms colonize the sawdust. Once it has, it just moves into the log faster. Personally, I don’t like the look of all the holes drilled in the log, so I only plug the log below the sawdust line. It hasn’t been a problem yet. I probably wait a little longer for my mushrooms, though.

There are also several steps that are not necessary but are helpful. Beeswax is a great help to the process. If you pour melted beeswax on the cut faces of the log, it helps retain moisture and prevent spores from competing mushrooms get a foothold. Also, you can fill the holes with beeswax after you have inserted the plug. This also helps retain moisture and thwarts bugs and worms that like to get in there and eat the mycelium. Another step I like to do just to be safe is to spray the outside of the log with hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide is toxic to fungal spores that may have landed on the bark and are sitting there waiting for conditions to be right (just like you are about to do to your log). Adding the plugs instead of sprouting from spores gives your mushrooms a clear advantage, but I prefer to be safe anyway.

Sawdust Spawn

Sawdust spawn is mushroom mycelium growing on sawdust. It can be purchased as sawdust spawn or it can actually be a spent mushroom kit. It is a little trickier than plug spawn. It can’t exactly be hammered into a hole. Plus, it is kind of messy. One common method of making mushroom logs with sawdust spawn is called the wedge technique. You use a chainsaw to cut wedges out of the log, alternating sides up the log. Then you pack the cut with sawdust spawn and nail the wedges back in. I have two problems with this method: 1) I don’t own a chainsaw (I know, bad Mad Bioneer), and 2) the aforementioned dryness problem. So I modify the method a bit for my situation. I still cut the wedges, but I use an axe instead. Also, just like with plug spawn, I put the log upright in a pot and fill it with pasteurized wood chips and sawdust. I take the wood chips that I cut out of the log in the first place and mix them with some more wood chips and pasteurize them. Then I mix the sawdust with it and pack it around the log in the pot. The mycelium will rapidly colonize the sawdust and then use the surface area of the wedge to colonize the log.

Coming soon: Care and Feeding of Your Mushroom Log

Amazing Nature: Ladybug Weathermen

2010-02-02T16:55:00.000-07:00

Here's one for Groundhog Day: In England, scientists have discovered that a particular variety of ladybug is actually really really good at long-term predictions of winter weather. When they hibernate for the winter, they choose their location based on how severe the weather is going to be. If it is going to be a mild winter, they pick a relatively unprotected location. If it is going to be a harsh winter, they pick a secure location deep in some sort of protective structure. Since scientists have noticed this behavior, the little beetles have never been wrong. If we can just figure out how they are doing it, maybe it will give us a few hints on how to improve our long term forecasting techniques.

Amazing Nature: Defending Against the Japanese Giant Hornet

2010-02-01T10:52:00.000-07:00

The Japanese giant hornet is a fearsome predator. At nearly 2 inches long and built like an insect body builder, it is a force to be reckoned with. Let's put it this way: yellow jacket:Japanese giant hornet::Hugh Jackman:Andre the Giant. It is also a picky eater and will kill thousands of bees just so it can eat the tastiest bits of each bee. In fact, it is the bane of beekeepers in Japan. A coordinated attack of 2 dozen or so hornets will descend on a hive of European honey bees and destroy it in a matter of hours. The bee stings can't penetrate the hornet's armor and the hornets are quite capable of simply biting the bees in half. When the battle is over, the hornets take some of the honey and whatever tasty bits they feel like and go home. The hive usually doesn't recover.

For some reason, though, this isn't really a problem for the native honey bees. This is because the native honey bees have evolved an ingenious defense. They know two crucial facts about how the hornets opperate: 1) the raiding party is always preceeded by a scout that returns to the hornet colony with information about the location of the hive and 2) the hornets die of thermal death at 115 degrees F, while honey bees can survive to 118 degrees. So when the scout shows up looking for a likely target, hundreds of bees pounce on the intruder and hold it down. While they are doing this, they frantically vibrate their wings, generating heat. The heat in the pile builds up to 117 degrees or so, killing the hornet. The bees then stumble off to cool down, having saved the colony.

An Unexpected Benefit of Container Gardening

2010-01-31T17:42:00.000-07:00

A little over a year ago, we switched from a stable existence in a house with a large back yard to one in transition, with no appreciable back yard. It'll still be a year or so before I can move back to a real house and start gardening in earnest again. The problem is, I just can't go that long without gardening. Last summer I set myself up with a container garden on the back of the apartment I am renting. Despite getting a really late start, it was a wonderfully productive garden that provided much produce. As is usually my habit, I grew a fall garden. I typically plant a little lettuce and a bunch of spinach. Combined with the swiss chard I usually grow all summer, I get fresh greens until things get really cold and shut everything down for the season.

One benefit of growing spinach as a late season crop is that it survives the winter. Even in my Zone 5 garden up in Colorado, it survived all winter one year, perhaps because it had a nice bed of snow almost the whole time. But here in my Zone 7 garden in Arizona, it consistently survives the winter. (FYI, I have also had cilantro and snapdragons survive all winter, perking up in the spring). The spinach just turns a little pathetic looking after Thanksgiving or so and shuts down for the season. After that, you don't really get any more produce. However, once things warm up in the spring, it is ready to explode into life. It already has a root system in place and will grow rapidly and produce huge amounts at the first hint of spring. In my garden in Colorado, I found myself trying to find a way to eat spinach at every single meal.

Since my garden is in a container this year, I found a new benefit. The soil is up out of the ground and sitting in full sun with a lovely southern exposure. It is next to the house so the heat from the house helps as well. This year my spinach never shut down. It isn't as if it hasn't been a cold winter. Morning temps have been mostly in the 20s for a month and a half or so. We have gotten a total of about 2 feet of snow. Of course, this being the high desert, daytime temps do get over freezing nearly every day. I am sure that helps. I have just been surprised that not only is it still big and healthy looking, but it is still growing. I still harvest a little spinach when I have tacos or a burger. What I take grows back in a week or so.

And it isn't just the spinach. Swiss chard is a biennial. It shuts down even more than the spinach. When it comes back the next year, it is putting energy towards the production of seeds, so the greens are of low quality, usually small and tough. So, typically, swiss chard isn't worth having after winter really sets in. Today (January 31) I decided to clean up my containers and get them ready for spring planting. That involved pulling out the rest of the swiss chard. Once I sorted it and washed what was still worth eating, I filled a gallon bag with beautiful, healthy swiss chard.

I think next year I'll have to plan my winter garden a little better.

Piggie Wars: The Saga Continues

2010-01-30T09:15:00.000-07:00

Last summer I began container gardening in an unprotected area on the back of my house. I quickly found that the area is the nocturnal javelina (pronounced hav-e-LIN-a) highway. These native relatives of the pig are not terribly picky eaters and can be quite destructive and I quickly got into an arms race with them. As the summer went on and more attempts were made on my garden, I upgraded my defenses. I started out with a ring of chicken wire. Then they bent and crushed that, so I put rebar stakes in, each pounded a full foot into the ground. Then I added zip ties to keep the chicken wire in place on the stakes. I thought I had finally won.

This morning they proved me wrong. For the winter I turned one of my larger containers into a compost bin. While it will give me lots of valuable compost, it also proved a tempting target, surviving a number of attacks from both the javelinas and my dog. However, it seems I have underestimated the tenacity of an animal whose head is designed to push through some of the toughest bramble in the world. This morning, there was a giant hole in my chicken wire where, presumably, the javelinas just pushed right through.

Alas. Now I have to engineer a tougher barrier. Sounds like fun.

When the Disease Is More Valuable Than The Tree

2010-01-27T22:22:00.001-07:00

I received an e-mail from a friend recently containing some pictures of rather shockingly large mushrooms that grew from the base of one of his stately oak trees following a large rainstorm. He wanted to know what kind of mushroom they were and, perhaps more importantly, if they are harmful to the tree. As you may imagine, the tree adds considerable value to his property. First off, let me tell everyone out there that when it comes to mushroom identification, I am no expert, and you should always seek the advice of an EXPERT before eating any mushroom that you are not sure of. The results of a poor choice in this area can range from gastric unrest to a horrible death. That said, I am can usually come up with a good guess. In this case, the mushroom bears an uncanny resemblance to a mushroom that is known to favor dead and diseased oak trees. It is a mushroom called Grifola frondosa, or Hen of the Woods. In Japanese (and many health food stores), it is called maitake.

There is good news and bad news about maitake mushrooms. The bad news is that it is definitely a facultative parasite. That means that it won’t usually attack a healthy tree, but it will happily move in to a sick tree and help hasten it to the grave. It is probably better than some other parasites, though, because it isn’t in any rush to finish off the tree. You see, maitake mushrooms are really good at fending off competition. They have even been known to push an established mushroom out of wood that the maitake is growing in to. Once the tree dies, the mushroom will continue to fend off competition and produce mushrooms from the stump for decades.

The good news about maitake mushrooms is that they are a prized mushroom, both as an edible and as a medicinal. Their ability to fend off bacterial and mycological competition for so long means that they boast a wide array of anti-bacterial and anti-fungal compounds that could have value to medicine. I have seen these mushrooms at a specialty grocery store twice. Once it cost $20 a pound, and the other time it was going for $30 a pound. Now, I don’t know how much each cluster in the wheelbarrow above weighed, but I’ll take a stab in the dark at 10 pounds. My friend did say that they were heavier than they look. So 4 clusters at 10 pounds times $20/pound. I get $800 worth of mushrooms that went in the compost. That is, of course, assuming my guess as to the variety is correct. It might not be.

But here is the thing: a mushroom is capable of turning each pound of dry wood into approximately a pound of mushrooms. That includes the roots. While this was certainly a bumper crop, this tree will likely produce smaller clusters of this mushroom several times a year for several decades. At what point is the disease worth more than the tree?

*Photo: Scott Shepherd

Amazing Nature: Lobster Mushroom

2010-01-22T11:30:00.000-07:00

I am going to start a new series on some of the amazing stuff in nature. Nature is founded on the evolutionary principle of “find something that works and exploit the hell out of it.” The thing is, beyond this simple principle, there really are no rules. Thus, every organism out there is looking for a niche, a hole to fill, an angle to play. With billions of different species exploring this concept every day (whether they realize it or not), nature comes up with some seriously amazing stuff. I’ll start off with the lobster mushroom.

Most of us think of mushrooms in two categories: poisonous and edible. However, there are a large number of mushrooms that are neither. While eating them won’t kill you, they are either too tough and fibrous to eat or taste simply awful. Some of those are even nice and big and meaty and would make a great meal if you could stomach them. That’s where the lobster mushroom comes in. You see, the lobster mushroom isn’t actually a mushroom at all. It is a mold. When spores from the lobster mushroom mold land on a mushroom, typically of the Russula or Lactarius genera, they quickly colonize the mushroom, covering the exterior in a reddish coating, which is about the same color as the shell of a cooked lobster. This renders the original mushroom unidentifiable, but more importantly, turns an inedible mushroom into a choice edible.

Benefits of Growing Mushrooms on a Log

2010-01-08T15:11:00.001-07:00

Growing mushrooms on a log may very well be the oldest form of mushroom cultivation. After all, it wouldn’t take much for a stone age person to bring home a log that was producing tasty mushrooms. More recently, the Japanese have been growing shiitake mushrooms on logs for hundreds of years, longer than we have been growing button mushrooms on pasteurized, composted steer manure. Their method was actually quite simple. Put fresh logs next to fruiting logs. When the log produces mushrooms, if it makes the right kind, you keep it. If not, you don’t. When it comes time to coax it to produce mushrooms, you soak it for a day in a lake and then smack it with a wooden mallet. I am not sure what the mallet is supposed to do, though.

Many of the best gourmet and medicinal mushrooms are primary decomposers. This means that they prefer to grow on fresh wood. Many mushrooms growers today will chip the wood and grow the mycelium on wood chips. This increases permeability and surface area, thus increasing the speed that mycelium can colonize the wood, thus increasing the speed of mushroom production. However, for the home grower, growing on wood chips can mean more potential for problems and more maintenance. Obviously, a greater surface area also increases potential opportunities for contamination. Also, wood chip blocks must be fruited on a more regular basis and are used up more quickly. A mushroom log will last for several years and requires less maintenance than a house plant.

Actually making a mushroom log is relatively easy. There are many methods for making a log and I will highlight two of those in an upcoming post. However, the first step is pairing the right mushroom with the right kind of wood. Some mushrooms tend to be pretty specific about what kind of wood they prefer. Here are a few likely candidates and the woods they prefer:

Lentinula edodes (Shiitake Mushrooms)
Shiitake is probably the most common commercially available mushroom log out there. It is also one of the more commonly available gourmet mushrooms out there. It is easy to grow. As for logs, it actually prefers shii trees. In fact, that is what it is named after. Shii is the tree and take (pronounced tak-ay) means mushroom in Japanese. However, we don’t have many shii trees here, so oaks do nicely. It will, however, grow on a number of other hardwoods, such as poplar, willow, cottonwood, and birch, among others.

Pleurotus ostreatus (Pearl Oyster Mushrooms)
Oyster mushrooms are another ubiquitous favorite of the gourmet mushroom aisle at your specialty store. They also happen to be one of the most aggressive and easy to grow mushrooms. They will grow on most kinds of hardwoods and adept at turning the mass of the log into a serious mass of mushrooms. However, they also have a problem. Oyster mushrooms put out a LOT of spores. So if you are prone to mold spore allergies, this may not be the mushroom for you. It is perhaps worth noting that my wife is prone to these allergies and it doesn’t seem to bother her, though. Nonetheless, I tend to do my best to keep the fruiting bodies out of her way and pick the mushrooms as young as I reasonably can. Also, there is a closely related species called Pleurotus pulmonarius that favors conifers, especially fir and spruce.

Hypsizygus ulmarius (Elm Oyster or Garden Oyster Mushrooms)
This one is a good substitute for Pearl Oyster Mushrooms. It is very close in flavor and appearance to Pearl Oyster mushrooms, though some say the Elm Oyster is tastier. However, it is not as aggressive, and it produces far fewer spores. Elm Oyster Mushrooms prefer elms (of course), but also like cottonwoods, maples, oaks, and willows.

Hericium erinaceus (Lion’s Mane Mushroom or Pom Pom Mushroom)
All of the mushrooms above are very mild in flavor. I included Lion’s Mane Mushrooms on this list because they are not. They have a very strong flavor. Some say they taste like lobster. I disagree. They also have a very interesting form. They do not have a cap or a stem or gills. They are more like a fuzzy ball. Well, maybe not fuzzy, as the protrusions coming off the mushrooms are not like hairs at all, but more like teeth. Pom Pom is a good description. They like to grow on oak, maple and walnut. Hericium abietis (Conifer Coral Mushrooms) are a good substitute if you have spruce logs to grow on, though it forms more of a coral shape than a ball.

Ganoderma lucidium (Reishi Mushrooms)
Reishi Mushrooms are not edible mushrooms. It would be like chewing on wood. They, are, however, prized medicinal mushrooms. They are full of antioxidants and are renowned for boosting the immune system. Reishi mushrooms also have a beautiful dark red color on top and creamy color on bottom that bruises a darker color when fresh. I carved my daughter's name in one and she loves it as a name plate. Reishi mushrooms love to grow on most varieties of broad-leaf hardwoods.

Trametes versicolor (Turkey Tail Mushrooms)
Turkey tails are another medicinal mushrooms. While they provide some of the same benefits as Reishi Mushrooms, they are particularly renowned for their cancer fighting properties. They are also lovely, growing in a shelf like shape with multi-colored stripes. The advantage of Turkey Tail Mushrooms is that they will grow on just about anything but cedar and redwood.

There is one last thing to remember about log selection: the size of the log. Your log should be between 4" and 12" in diameter. If you get too much bigger, it will take a really long time for the log to produce mushrooms. The fungus won't go about producing fruit until it has colonized the whole log. If the log is too small, it will produce relatively few mushrooms. Length is another consideration, and that has a lot to do with where you are storing the logs. If you live in a humid, relatively rainy area, you can store them on the north side of a building, out of direct sunlight and let nature do most of the work. For that, logs 4-5' long work well. If, like me, you live in a dry climate where the mushrooms will need additional help retaining moisture, keeping the mushroom in a pot is a good alternative. You can then fill the rest of the pot with sawdust (more food for the fungus) or just potting soil and water it like a plant. If you do that, a log that is 2-3' long would work best, depending on your pot and your space. If you try to make it much longer, it tends to get top heavy. Also, the pot only really retains moisture for the area it covers and maybe 6" higher. The tops of tall logs will still dry out. If you get much shorter than 12" or so, you start to reduce your potential harvest.

Coming up: How to make a mushroom log.

Organic Stump Removal

2009-12-28T21:06:00.000-07:00

If you have ever had to have a stump removed, you know it is a long, difficult, often arduous or expensive process. There are many methods. You can use harsh chemicals, which slowly dissolve the stump over 4-6 weeks, while you try to keep the kids and pets at bay. Oh, and you will probably need to let the stump sit around for a year after you cut the tree down before this one will work. There are stump grinders, which are expensive and noisy, but produce a handy pile of wood shavings. Then there is the fun way: dynamite. It is kind of dangerous, though, and you had better have a hired expert and all kinds of permits.

If you aren’t in a big rush, though, you could just eat the stump. How’s that, you say? Well, it turns out that most trees have 1/3 to ½ of their total body mass under ground. Think about how much wood there is down there. It shouldn’t be too hard if you just cut up the top part of the tree. We are talking about hundreds or even thousands of pounds of wood. Now you and I can’t really get at all that wood, but there are other things that can. Many of the tastier gourmet mushrooms excel at stump removal. They will get in there and decompose that stump over several years, all while producing periodic clusters of tasty mushrooms. When they are done, any wood that is left over will be well decomposed and easy to dig out or bury. All that wood that is left over underground just gets turned into soil.

First, the cautions. There are two main difficulties with growing edible mushrooms on a stump. The first is contamination. You can put whatever edible mushroom on there that you want, but if some other mushroom beat you to it, you are just out of luck. Sometimes a wild mushroom will act like a mycorrhizal mushroom for the life of the tree. In doing so, it will grow its fibers throughout the wood of the tree. When the tree dies, it switches to saprophytic mode and begins decomposing the tree. When this is the case, it can be hard to supplant the original mushroom with the one you want growing there. Ditto with a parasitic mushroom that either killed the tree or was working on it when you cut it down. Also, tree roots have a LOT of surface area. That is their purpose. They contact the soil to get what they need out of it. That same soil can also have a lot of decomposers in it. When the tree dies and stops resisting the rot, it is just about guaranteed that something is waiting in the wings to move in, and there are lots of contact points for it do just that.

The second difficulty is related to the first. When you put an edible mushroom on your stump, you need to be able to identify it when it comes out of the ground. You need to know what it looks like and key features that distinguish it from other similar mushrooms. It is also an extremely good idea to be familiar with similar mushrooms and know which are poisonous. Joining a local mycological society is a good idea, or even finding a mycologist at your local university (assuming they are friendly and willing to help). Whatever you do, don't just eat whatever pops up on your stump. It is better to ignore the mushrooms and just have your stump removed than to get poisoned.

The first and most important step to stump removal with mushrooms is to pick the right mushroom for the job. The first thing to remember is that each species of mushroom has certain preferences for what types of wood it decomposes. If you put the wrong kind of mushroom on your stump, it will either fail to grow or not grow strong and be prone to competition from other kinds of mushrooms. The second thing to remember is that while certain types of mushrooms, such as shiitake and oyster, grow very well on logs, they may not be the best suited for growing on stumps. A stump is a unique and highly competitive environment. You are better off to pick a stump specialist. The third thing to consider is that, all else being equal, pick the mushroom that doesn't have any poisonous look-alikes. It will make identification easier.

Here are a few likely candidates:

Agrocybe aegerita (Black Poplar Mushroom or Pioppino Mushroom)
Flavor-wise, this is my personal favorite, being both mild and complex. It tends to prefer warmer, more humid environments and is native to the southeastern United States. It has a strong preference for members of the poplar family, so stumps of poplar, cottonwood, and aspen are good bets. It will also work nicely on willows and maples.

Hypholoma sublateritium (Brick Top Mushroom or Cinnamon Cap Mushroom)
This aggressive decomposer of wood can be pretty productive. I got a mushroom kit with this one on it several years ago and it has the distinction of having exceeded the theoretical maximum for mushroom production. The flavor is strong, but it made the best cream of mushroom soup I have ever had. Be careful, though, as there are look-alikes that are poisonous. It tends to prefer oak and chestnut stumps, but can probably be grown on many others.

Grifola frondosa (Hen-of-the-Woods Mushroom or Maitake)
G. frondosa is a strange one. It seems to be particularly good at not only keeping competitors at bay, but actually pushing out previous inhabitants of stumps it desires. It then seems to take its time in decomposing the stump. There are stories of majestic oaks whose stumps will produce seasonal clumps of these mushrooms for decades. It is a wonderful edible mushroom as well as a powerful medicinal mushroom and I have seen it selling at specialty stores for as much as $30/pound when fresh. It prefers oaks, but can also be grown on elms, honey locust, maples, and beech.

Laetiporus sulphureus (Chicken-of-the-Woods Mushroom or Sulphur Tuft Mushroom)
This orange mushroom is called the Chicken of the Woods because it supposedly has a texture and flavor so similar to chicken that it can be substituted for chicken in recipes. This mushroom is a bit less picky than some of the others and can be grown on a wide variety of woods, though it tends to prefer oaks. There is a closely related sister species called L. conifericola that prefers conifer trees, particularly hemlocks.

Trametes versicolor (Turkey Tail Mushroom)
This one isn't actually an edible mushroom, being too tough to chew. It is, however, a powerful medicinal mushroom, being the source of at least one of our common cancer fighting drugs. It makes a lovely and refreshing tea. I add this one to the list because it is the least picky of all of the types of mushrooms here. It can be grown on any type of hardwood and most kinds of conifers, including juniper, pine, fir, and spruce.

As far as method, it is actually pretty easy. The easiest way to inoculate a stump is with mushroom plug spawn. In essence, it is a small wooden dowel that has the particular mushroom you are looking for growing on it. You drill a hole in the log and pound it in, sealing the hole with wax when you are done. The more plugs you put in, the better, so one every few inches, especially in the outer rim of the wood, just inside the bark. A single stump can take over a hundred plugs. If you don't have access to plug spawn, you can also drill a larger hole and pack in some sawdust spawn. It becomes harder to protect, though, as many critters will get in and munch on your spawn. Earthworms and pillbugs particularly enjoy mushroom spawn. Another method is to cut off a round of the stump (assuming it is tall enough) and pack an inch or so of spawn on the open cut. Then nail the round back on top. A little burlap or wax around the edge should provide enough protection until the mushroom can become established.

The Rational Method

2009-12-26T19:57:00.001-07:00

Okay, let’s say that my method for calculating average monthly rainfall in my previous post just isn’t good enough for you. You are too detail-oriented for that little amount of information to be satisfying. You want to know how to calculate how much rain you are getting in a particular storm. Well, this post is for you. For the rest of you who came here looking for some interesting gardening information: may I show you to another lovely post? Just keep it in mind as a reference. At any rate, I’ll have another post up shortly. It is gonna get pretty math-y pretty quickly here.

The Rational Method is an old method that civil engineers use to determine how much water a particular storm even is going to deliver. So, if you are designing a culvert to carry the water from a 100 year storm, this one will do it. As technology and science have improved our accuracy for calculating runoff, the Rational Method hasn’t really gotten left behind. It is still considered pretty accurate up to about 600 acres or so and is often used as a check when more complex methods are used.

The beauty of the Rational Method is its simplicity. Here it is:

Q=CiA

Where:
Q is the runoff in cubic feet per second (cfs)
C is the runoff coefficient
i is the rainfall intensity in inches/hour, and
A is the drainage basin area in acres

Starting with the easier ones, A is pretty easy to calculate. The only tricky part is measuring it. If you have a small area, you might be able to get it with a measuring tape or similar measuring device. If you have a larger drainage area, you might need to go to the USGS and find yourself a topo map of your area. Remember: water always flows perpendicular to the contour lines, so trace perpendicular to the contour lines until you can find the ridgeline. Then measure off and calculate your area. It is easiest for this sort of thing, unless you happen to have a planimeter, to just break it up into simple geometric shapes and calculate the areas individually. Then convert by the scale factor of the drawing and then convert to acres.

Your value for C is going to be based on observation. Take a look at the area that you are draining from. C gives you the percentage of water that is actually draining off. So impervious surfaces will give you a higher C value than a soft, fluffy forest floor. Here are some sample C values:

Paved areas, roof areas, impermeable areas: 0.95
Bare ground: 0.25
Lawn area: 0.20
Suburban areas: 0.35
Steep terrain: 0.70

The value for i is the tricky one. Basically, shorter storms tend to be more intense. However, when a drop of rain falls on the farthest reaches of your drainage basin, it takes a certain amount of time to reach your concentration point. If it takes 30 minutes for your raindrop to reach your concentration point and you calculate for the 10 minute storm, the storm will be over before the entire area is contributing to the runoff at the same time. However, for most areas that a homeowner would be dealing with, i.e. under a few acres, 10 minutes is a reasonable assumption, so use the 10 minute storm. To actually get the values for your area (in the United States), go to the NOAA site and get an intensity-duration-frequency chart for your area and use the column for a 10 minute storm. Just make sure that the final number you plug into the Rational Method is in inches/hour. If not, be sure to convert it beforehand.

Then you just plug the numbers in and calculate your flow. You can use that to tell you how quickly your basin will fill up in a particular storm, or multiply by the length of your storm to figure how much rain you will get.

I will offer one caution, though. A lot of what is involved in accurately determining the numbers to plug into the formula relies on expertise. If you don’t have the expertise, it is called guessing. If you really need this calculated accurately, which you will if you have flooding issues, or you are building it near your or anyone else’s building, or if you have a large drainage area near your house, to name a few, you should really have this calculation done professionally by a civil engineer.

To say it another way: The calculation above is for entertainment purposes only and should not be attempted by non-professionals for any purpose other than idle curiosity.

Collecting Rainwater Through Grading

2009-11-20T16:11:00.001-07:00

Grading is the process of moving and shaping dirt. It is usually done for aesthetics, but it can certainly be used to catch rainwater. The concept is actually pretty simple: You shape the earth so that runoff is captured and held in place by a berm long enough that it will soak in. This method works particularly well on a hillside. You can create a system of berms in a sort of fish scale pattern down the hill. Each area collects a certain amount of water and then spills over to the next basin below.

The methodology is actually pretty simple. The first and most important step is to observe your particular situation. Walk around and look at the grades. If you are on the top of a hill, this won't work as there is nowhere for water to come from. If you are in the middle of a large drainageway, it probably won't work as well because the large volume of water will wash away your berms or flood your plantings. It is particularly helpful to walk around during a rain. Sometimes visually inspecting slopes can be tricky, but flowing water never lies. Look for places where water collects, how far it comes from, and what sort of surface is picking up water. If you have a large area draining to your basin, it may affect how big you make it. Also beware of picking up water off of parking lots or other possible sources of pollution.

The next step is to build a berm (which is a mound of earth) in a line on the downhill side of your basin. This will hold the water in. Remember that water will always find its level, so the top of the berm needs to be level all the way around. If you mound it up on the downhill side and leave it low on the sides, the water will just flow around your berm.

There are also a few construction methods to use when building your berm. First of all, be sure to leave a low spot in your berm where you want the excess water to overflow and make sure that you protect that with some rock. You might be surprised how fast moving water can remove dirt. Secondly, you will want some degree of compaction in your dirt. Walking on the berm as you build it up works pretty well. Mechanical compactors work better. The compaction does several things for your berm. It reduces pores and keeps the water from flowing through your berm, it protects your berm from erosion and failure, and it ensures that as your berm compacts naturally over time, it maintains the elevation you built it at.

Now for the big question: how do you determine how tall to build your berm? Well, first we'll state the obvious. Your berm can't be taller than the spot where water is entering your basin, or the water will never get in. Other than that, the trick is to balance two factors: how much water you are getting, and how fast it will soak in. If you provide too little storage, it won't soak in before it runs off. If you provide too much storage, it will drown your plants.

To determine how much water you are getting, you will need to do a quick calculation. The hard part will be determining how big of an area is draining to your bed. Again, this comes down to observation. Do your best to determine the square footage of the area (A) draining to your basin. Rough numbers will do as this is far from an exact calculation, though better numbers are, well, better. Measuring is better than eyeballing. Next, look up your local monthly rainfall averages (R). The weather channel is a good place to look for this information. You will probably going to want to do this for each month as it will help you fill out your water budget. The last number you need is the runoff coefficient (C). This number explains how much of the water that fell from the sky actually ran off as opposed to what soaked in. Here are a couple of sample numbers:

Paved areas, roof areas, impermeable areas: 0.95

Bare ground: 0.25

Lawn area: 0.20

Suburban areas: 0.35

Steep terrain: 0.70

Obviously there are a lot more numbers to this table, but I don't want to overwhelm you. For more information, look up C values for use in the Rational Method.

Next you will calculate how much water (W) you are getting. To determine how much water you are getting in an average month, multiply the amount of rain that falls in that month (R) with the area it is running off of (A) and the runoff coefficient (C), or

W=R*A*C

Now take this number and divide it by the area of your basin. This will give you how many inches of water you are collecting in your basin for that month. Compare that with the numbers from your water budget.

To determine how quickly your water absorbs into the soil, you need to know a little about your soil. The bigger the particle size, the quicker it will absorb. Water flows through sand very quickly, while it flows through clay very slowly. The best way to test this is to do a perc (short for percolation) test. A basic perc test can be done pretty easily. Dig a hole at least 1' deep and as big around as you care to dig. Fill it with water and let it drain. Then fill it again and time how long it takes to drain. If it drains within a few minutes, you can make your basin as big as you want. If it takes a few hours, the basin should probably be a foot or two deep. If it takes over 24 hours, make a shallow basin, say 6" to a foot deep, unless you live in an arid environment.

Now for the tricky part: adjusting your system. Unless you hire an engineer to really calculate this exactly, or you are particularly good at this sort of calculation yourself, it is going to be difficult to size it exactly just by doing the math. Let's just say that I left out a lot of details to simplify the calculation. The fine tuning can be done pretty easily in the field. As I mentioned previously, you will want an overflow in your berm. By adjusting this overflow up or down, you can adjust how much water your basin will collect. If it is too soggy, lower your overflow. If it is too dry and too much water is running off, raise the overflow and/or the entire berm.

Finally, a little disclaimer: Always check with your local municipality before doing something like this. Different areas have different laws regulating this sort of activity. Also remember never to change the direction that water flows across your property. The place where water enters your property and leaves your property must remain unchanged throughout this process, or you may open yourself up to liability. Good luck!

Ask Mad Bioneer - November 2009

2009-11-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

I have seen many of the search terms that have been used to get to my blog and I really think I can answer some of the questions that have that led people here. So here is your chance. Post your questions in the comments below and I will do my best to answer them. First, though, a few caveats: 1) Please keep them relevant to the types of topics I covered on my blog, 2) As much as I write about mushrooms, I am more into growing them than hunting them and I am not very good at identifying wild mushrooms, and 3) You experts out there, please weigh in if I get something wrong. While I do have a great passion for this subject, I don't know everything and I am here to learn as much as I am to teach. I look forward to your questions!

Making a Water Budget

2009-10-30T17:04:00.000-07:00

Okay, so you have decided to take a good, hard look at how much water you are using on your garden or landscaping and see if there is a better way to do it. The first step is to figure out how much you are getting and how much you are going to need. If it is starting to sound like basic budgeting, you are right. It is time to make a water budget. My city, Prescott, Arizona, USA, has a really good worked example for the locals here (link downloads a .pdf file). The basics are actually very simple.

First, you need to separate your planted areas by water requirements. Are they xeriscape, garden, turf, or native landscape plants? Garden and lawn take the most water and are generally considered oasis areas. Non-native landscape plants and fruit trees typically take less water than an oasis area, but more than native vegetation. Native plants and xeriscape plants usually need additional water only in a drought. Then you need to figure how much water you are going to need for each area. Prescott's numbers are probably pretty good as a starting point. Prescott is above 5,000 feet in elevation in Arizona, so it doesn't get excessively hot here (typically 5 or so days a year over 100 degrees F), but it is very dry, typically in the 10-30% humidity range. We do also get normal winters, being in USDA Zone 7. So you may have to adjust water requirements just a little to fit your area: up for hotter, down for cooler, down for more humid. It may take some trial and error. For Prescott, oasis areas require 8" of water a month during the growing season and 1" per month during the dormant season. Trees require 45 gallons a month during the growing season and 4.5 gallons a month during the dormant season.

Secondly, you will want to look up your rainfall data. I get mine from the Weather Channel page, which has monthly averages. Given the nature of climates, much more accurate data than that isn't actually going to be more accurate.

Lastly, you just calculate how many inches of rain you are going to need for your landscape in a given month and subtract from that how many inches you are likely to get. The difference between the two is the amount you have to add to your garden or landscaping to keep it alive and allow it to thrive. That water can come from your tap, gray water, or from captured rainwater.

There really isn't much to say about tap water. You turn on the faucet and it comes out. It is super easy and reasonably cheap, but not necessarily the best solution. If you are in an area that is short on water, and most are these days, it drains the local supply and increases shortages. Also, while water doesn't cost too much, neither do vegetables. How much water does it take in your garden before you are paying more for the water to grow your veggies than it would have cost to get them at the store?

Gray water involves double using SOME of the water from your house. I will cover that in detail in a future post.

Capturing rainwater is another good way to get water and there are two basic ways to do it. The first is to shape your land so that it collects water and the second is to collect rainwater off of the roof of your house. I'll also cover those in upcoming posts.

Finally, remember that just because you get more water than you need in a given month, it doesn't mean that it will arrive when you need it. Tap water is a really great backup system.

Mmm...Antifreeze

2009-10-28T11:57:00.000-07:00

The first freeze has hit with a vengence here in my area and it is finally time to harvest some of the fall veggies. There are certain vegetables, like kale (especially red russian), collards and jerusalem artichokes that really shouldn't be harvested before the first freeze. Freezing temperatures actually sweeten the vegetables, making them much tastier after the frost than before.

But why is this? Well, it usually happens with veggies that are capable of keeping green leaves going well past the first several light frosts. In the case of jerusalem artichokes, they are adapted to northern climates and keep their tubers above the frost depth, which can be several feet in parts of their habitat. In both cases, the plants need a natural antifreeze in their flesh that keeps the ice crystals from forming as long as possible.

Now, the antifreeze in your car is seriously dangerous stuff. It is loaded with different kinds of sugars that keep the water from freezing, but it also has pump lubricants that help all the machinery running. The sugars make it taste yummy to animals and children while the lubricants kill them.

Plants basically use the same system to keep themselves from freezing, without the toxic side effects. By upping the concentration of sugar in their flesh, they keep the damaging ice crystals at bay. In the process, they make themselves sweeter and thus tastier.

Raised Bed Garden or Sunken Bed Garden

2009-10-16T00:39:00.000-07:00

When starting a garden, the goal is to maximize your advantages while minimizing your disadvantages. A raised bed garden is a good way to do this. By building a raised bed, you give your garden great drainage. You don't have to worry about poor native soil, either. You need to fill up the raised bed anyway, so you might as well fill it with the good stuff. A raised bed garden also helps bad backs by making it so that you don't have to bend over so far to get to your garden. In addition, there are other minor benefits, such as getting the garden up high enough that certain pests, like rabbits, can't get to it. If slugs are a problem in your area, a simple strip of copper ringing the raised bed will keep them out. Slugs and snails won't cross copper.

When I started my first garden at my first house here in Arizona, my goal was to create a raised bed. Materials were expensive and I didn't have a lot of money, so it was a long term goal. But after a few years, I discovered that a raised bed garden would not necessarily be a good thing here. In the arid southwest, good drainage is a bad thing. The more water you let drain away, the more you have to supply. All of our water here comes from the ground. The more you use, the more you pump out. The more you pump out, the less there is to go around. So conserving the water you have is a very good idea. In addition, we get close to enough rain to water everything. It just doesn't always come down when you need it. So the real way to make that work is to store as much water as you can when it does come and use it for the dry periods. A rain barrel makes for a good storage device, but it can become cost-prohibitive to buy enough to fully meet your needs. What you really need is a way to keep the water that hits your garden, a way to store the water in the ground.

A sunken bed garden does just that. It keeps the water from flowing away long enough that it can soak in. You then have the water stored in the soil itself, which will help the plants last longer between waterings, which means less water used overall. If your terrain allows, you can even shape the earth so that your sunken bed catches runoff from elsewhere. I will cover methods for doing that in a future post.

Another advantage for sunken bed gardening here lies in the soil itself. There isn't as much sand in Arizona as you might think. In fact, there is a lot of clay, and lots of that is expansive. Expansive clay works much like water-grabber crystals. When they are exposed to water, the microscopic particles expand and hold on to the water. In its natural state, this is a bad thing, and not just for your building foundations. During a rain event, the clay particles on the surface swell and seal off the pores in the soil. This means that the water can't really penetrate deep into the soil and just runs off, wasted. A sunken bed will help the water sit long enough for it to soak in. It still may just sink in a few inches, just enough to saturate the surface and cause troubles for the plants that don't like wet feet. To really take advantage of the water-holding properties of the soil, you need to amend the soil. When you first create the garden dig down a foot or more and amend with organic material, preferably composted wood chips. The wood will have some lasting power in the soil. Ideally you'll have as much as 50% of the volume of the soil as organic material. This will open up the pores of the clay and let the water soak in deep. The clay particles will still swell and hold the water, but now more of them can do the work, delivering it slower and holding it over a greater area. Also, if you treat the soil with a mycorrhizal fungus, the fungus will travel through the organic material, better surviving than in a soil that is poor in organic material. It will then send its filaments throughout the soil and grab the moisture that the plants can't reach and deliver it to the plants.

So, how do you design one of these? I'll cover that in a future post as well, so stay tuned. For now I'll just say that factors like local rainfall, soil and what you are planting all come into play. I will also say that this sort of design is ideally suited for landscaping and will give you a lower-maintenance landscape. It is a little trickier for vegetable gardening.

Mulch

2009-10-14T11:44:00.000-07:00

Mulch is amazing stuff, and probably my biggest area for improvement in the garden would be to be more judicious about using it. Mulch has so many uses in the garden and landscape. It cools the soil. It holds moisture long enough for more of it to penetrate than bare soil. It allows moisture to penetrate deeper into the soil and keeps it from evaporating as fast. It smothers weeds thus reducing weed problems in your landscape. Most importantly, it feeds the soil by providing a slow, constant source of organic matter to feed the micro- and macro-organisms in the soil.

It is worth noting that I am almost exclusively talking about organic mulches. There are also inorganic mulches, such as plastic liner, gravel, decomposed granite, river rock, and landscape fabric. Plastic barriers do a great job of keeping out weeds and keeping in warmth, but they smother the soil, preventing oxygen and moisture from reaching the soil. If you remember that soil is a living organism, you might see how smothering the soil is a bad thing. I also don't particularly like rock mulches since leaves and weeds have to be removed regularly or they look bad. It is a lot more work maintaining rock mulches in an attractive fashion than it is to maintain organic mulches. I will say, though, that mulches made of large rocks can create a useful micro-climate where needed. The rocks absorb heat to help heat-loving plants in cool climates and can act as a thermal mass, protecting tender plants from some of the harshness of cold nights.

As far as organic mulches go, there are a number of different kinds, each with their own benefits and disadvantages:

Compost
Yes, compost can be considered a mulch. It shades the soil and helps water penetrate. In addition, it provides a phenomenal benefit of nutrients and beneficial bacteria and fungus to the soil. As for disadvantages, it may not prevent weeds as well as other materials and it doesn't give that neat, clean, landscaped look that other mulches provide. It just looks like black dirt. Also, if you are making your own, it is really difficult to produce enough to provide enough that it actually counts as mulch.

Straw
This one is really nice for the veggie garden. You usually want to apply it a little thicker than other mulches to get the same weed protection. It does break down rapidly, though, and it makes a great soil amendment.

Wood Chips
This is one of the easier mulches to come by. Wood chips make your landscaping look nice and neat. They also take a long time to break down, giving them lasting power in your landscape. Conventional wisdom is that woodchips also bind nitrogen in the soil, holding on to it until they are broken down. This can be a good thing and a bad thing. On the bad side, they can rob your plants of nitrogen and stunt their growth. On the good side, they do the same thing to weeds.

Fallen Leaves
When the leaves fall off your trees in the autumn, they usually get thrown in the compost bin (or, heaven forbid, go out with the trash). But they can also be used as a mulch. One of the big advantages is that if you have enough moisture, the two dimensional nature of the leaves comes into play and they stick together to make a dense mat. It can be so dense that if left on a lawn, just a few inches can kill your lawn. The grass can't penetrate it, and neither will weed seedlings. It is also great food for the fungus and worms in your soil.

Cocoa Bean Hulls
I am still looking for this mythical mulch. A neighbor had some a few years ago and it made her whole garden smell like brownies. It also looked pretty nice. The only problem is that some dogs find it irresistible. The chemicals in chocolate, including the hulls, can kill a dog. So use this one with care.

Grass Clippings
Fresh grass clippings are very high in nitrogen and moisture. If you put a big pile of them on your landscaping, they will get smelly. However, if you spread them out to dry or just put a thin layer on your landscaping or garden, they will dry out pretty quickly and add a little nitrogen to your soil.

Wood Pellet Fuel
Wood pellets are made specifically for pellet stoves. They are sawdust that is dried and compressed to make pellets. The nice thing about them is that when you add water, they swell to several times their original size. Plus, a 40 pound bag sells for about $4.50 in my area. The resulting mulch is a bit finer than I usually like, but it really is pretty nice. I will offer a caution, though. I haven't found much information about what is in them, so I always look for one that says "100% Organic" or "100% Wood" or something of the sort on it. I don't think they put additives in it to help it burn, but it'd be good to know for sure. Also, it is generally only available in winter.

Cardboard and Newspaper
Cardboard and newspaper work in much the same way as landscape fabric or plastic sheeting with the added benefits that they are cheap or free and will biodegrade over time. Few organic mulches are better for weed control than a nice layer of cardboard or newspaper. In my experience, these usually work best with wood chips or some other material on top. You need something to hold them down or the wind will pick them up and put them somewhere else.

In-Situ Composting

2009-10-11T20:54:00.000-07:00

I am nearing the end of my first season of gardening in my biologically active container garden and that means it is time to assess successes and failures. Successes are pretty simple. The swiss chard and turnip pot was wildly successful and still is. The varmint protection systems had to be upgraded a few times, but ultimately held against some pretty determined varmints. Finally, my multi-layered pot, with beets in front, dill and cilantro in the middle and okra in the back, fared very well and provided a solid wall of green all summer long.

Failures were pretty easy to assess as well. I tried to grow marigolds and nasturtium as companion plants and both grew quicker than the plants they were supposed to help and took over. So next year the flowers go in the ground, not the pots. Eggplants, beets, tomatoes, beans, chervil, onions and gourds all failed to reach their potential, though of those the beets fared the best.

The biggest issue, though, was the soil. My starter soil was the leftovers from a myco-vermicomposting experiment I had done several years before. The soil was black, fine and a little sticky. My plants absolutely loved it. The problem was, there wasn't enough to go around. So I spread it out and thinned it out with composted and partially composted remnants I had around. Then I bought some composted wood chips from the local nursery. A few pots had several inches of this stuff on top. To all of this I added blood meal, bone meal, and an organic mixed fertilizer containing rock phosphate and greensand, among other things. A few plants seemed to lack nitrogen, but otherwise nutrients seemed to be fine. The plants in the pots that were primarily my homemade soil did just fine. The store-bought compost, however, was problematic. It was too chunky and made for excellent drainage. So excellent, in fact, that the plants couldn't manage to collect the water before it drained away. Seedlings would sprout and then dry out, despite being watered twice a day. The plants that made it floundered and failed to grow much.

In an attempt to get some well-needed soil amendment, I am going to be trying something a little new. I have previously tried composting at my house, but without some draconian measures, it has proven difficult to keep the javelinas out of my compost. They break into my container, break the container, and either eat or make a mess of the contents. For the last several months I have been giving my compost to the neighborhood bins. However, this weekend I was able to fully put one of the pots to bed for the winter, harvesting what remained of the beets and pulling up everything else. Since this bin has already proven itself javelina-proof, I pulled the soil out from the middle and pushed it up the sides, giving me a good place to put all of my scraps and trimmings. I also encountered a number of worms while digging, which means that they are there and ready to do my composting for me. With any luck, some or even most of it will be composted and ready to use by spring. Then I can use it to boost my soil for better nutrients, better biological activity, more worms, and better water-holding capability.

Geeky Gardening

2009-09-18T21:47:00.000-07:00

I have mentioned several times in this blog that I am a total biology geek and that gardening is my expression of those tendencies. But this definition bothers me. My wife and I are proud geeks, but is gardening really geeky? I mean, it is usually done outdoors. There's sun out there! Geeks aren't usually known for their deep tans.

However, there are certain aspects of gardening that are intensely geeky. As John Hodgman said, "We are geeks. We are defined by our passions and our enthusiasms." There are few pastimes that inspire passion and enthusiasm in so many people as gardening. Gardening can make normal people talk about, and even research, things like chemistry, botany, zoology, microbiology and even mycology. It can make a seemingly normal person keep a thousand red worms as pets, fussing over their enclosure, their health and the quality of their bowel movements. I typically observe the status of my gardens at least 4 times a day. And yes, I can tell the difference, thank you. If that doesn't qualify as passion and enthusiasm, I don't know what does. So if you think that the statement "Can't see the forest for the trees" should be revised to say "Can't see the forest for those yellow spots on the leaves. Dammit! What is that, blight? I am going to have check my gardening books and spray now..." then perhaps you should check your habits against the list below. It might just give you some ideas.

1) Garden Schedule
Gardener: Knows when first and last frost dates are and plants accordingly.
Geeky Gardener: Knows exact planting dates of all seeds relative to first and last frost and keeps records.
Über Geeky Gardener: Enters all of those dates into a calendar program with a "repeat yearly" option.

2) Soil Chemistry
Gardener: Understands that there are nutrients in the soil that are essential to the growth of plants and adds fertilizer to make sure there are enough of each.
Geeky Gardener: Owns a soil test kit and several electronic gadgets and knows the exact soil composition in any given location because he tests it regularly.
Über Geeky Gardener: Created a raised bed garden and made all of his own soil so he could have exact control.

3) Tools
Gardener: Has a set of tools that he keeps in good working order.
Geeky Gardener: Has all the best tools and they are kept razor sharp, well oiled, and hung on pegboard, complete with outlined shapes so the unkempt masses don't put the tools where they don't belong.
Über Geeky Gardener: “What, they don't make WiFi moisture meters and networked programmable automatic watering systems? I guess I'll have to make my own...”

4) Latin Names
Gardener: What's a Latin name?
Geeky Gardener: Knows Latin names and family groups for most of his plants.
Über Geeky Gardener: Knows exact Latin name, including genus and species, of every plant is his garden, including cultivar names and refuses to call them by anything else.

5) Weather
Gardener: Understands basics of seasons in his area.
Geeky Gardener: Has a weather station and records rainfall and temperature highs and lows.
Über Geeky Gardener: Maintains a weather station for NOAA.

6) Garden Planning
Gardener: Knows where they planted each plant.
Geeky Gardener: Will painstakingly plan out their garden, developing diagrams (probably in AutoCAD) of what was planted where and keep them for posterity to help with crop rotation.
Über Geeky Gardener: Will plan it all out, just like the geeky gardener, but will also take companion plants, beneficial insect habitats, sun angles, plant light requirements, soil that has been previously innoculated for legumes and light exposure into consideration. He will also specially plan out and design microclimates for his perennials and slow-growing annuals.

7) Garden Biology
Gardener: Understands that the different organisms in the garden interact and that those interactions are important.
Geeky Gardener: Seeks to understand as many organisms as possible and to control garden health through the use of careful applications of organic matter, organic fertilizer, companion plants, beneficial insects and more.
Über Geeky Gardener: Does all the same things as the geeky gardener and then blogs about it.

Purslane: Noxious Weed or Superfood?

2009-09-14T19:12:00.000-07:00

Some years ago I was flipping through my new book on gardening and found an odd vegetable that I had never heard of called purslane. Oddly enough, it looked just like the noxious weed that was completely taking over my parents' garden. So I grabbed a sprig and took it to the nearest garden center where they confirmed that yes, indeed, it was purslane.

Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) is a fleshy succulent, preferring to grow in hot, dry weather. It has a low growth habit and produces thousands of tiny seeds all summer long, giving it its reputation as a noxious weed. It can be hard to eradicate from your garden. However, it is also a prime edible, with a crunchy texture and wonderful flavor. While the flavor is sort of generically "green," some of them, usually the bigger leaves, have a distinct lemon flavor. In addition, they are one of the highest known vegetative sources of omega-3 fatty acids. It is also full of vitamins and minerals. Its dietary benefits are enough that some have gone so far as to call it a superfood.

So where can you get some seeds from this wonderful plant? I have yet to see any offered at seed catalogs, but it is pretty easy to score a little seed factory in many areas. Purslane uses its fleshy stems, which are also edible, as a water and nutrient storage device. After you have pulled the weed, it will continue to produce flowers and manufacture seeds as long as it can. I pulled one particularly healthy plant a few months ago. It was still producing flowers after a month of sitting in the sun. In Arizona. In July. So find the biggest plant you can find and pluck it. Then put it wherever you want the plants to take over. It will likely produce hundreds of seeds before it perishes. Unless the javelinas eat it first .

Now go eat your weeds.

Begun, The Piggie Wars Have

2009-09-09T14:04:00.000-07:00

Back in December, I moved from a house to a rental unit. At the house, I had a full fence and no mammalian herbivores larger than a mouse. I was able to garden with nary a worry about keeping the varmints off of my produce. At the new place, this is very much not the case. I have seen rabbits, ground squirrels, deer, and javelinas, and who knows what else lurks at night. Ringtails, skunks and porcupine are certain to inhabit the area as well. Of all of those, javelinas are the worst threat. Javelina (pronounced hav-a-LEEN-a) is a local name for a collared peccary, which is sort of like a wild pig. Gangs of two to 15 or more roam my neighborhood at night, and occasionally during the day. Not only are they eaters of all things vegetable, but they are also known to be ornery and cantankerous, digging up plants they don't eat for just the heck of it and doing damage randomly for no reason. I have heard that if you do something that makes them mad, they will make a point to swing by and tear up your landscaping just to get even.

So when I decided to garden in containers at the new place, I knew some protection would be required. I encircled each container with a cylinder of chicken wire 3' tall. Some cylinders were better than others. The one around my greens was a bit loose and I suspected that they wouldn't have too much trouble getting under it. I was right, and round one went to the piggies. They also did some damage to my tomato plant, which had taken it upon itself to grow outside its protective barrier.

For round two, I raised the greens up, putting the shallow metal tub that they were in on cinderblocks. Javelinas are short and won't usually bother with things that are too tall. Plus, the extra height inside the chicken wire made it extremely difficult to get under the chicken wire and get anything useful. Well, it didn't work. They figured out how to push my chicken wire down, making an accordion out of it. They also finished off my greens, eating everything that was over 2" off the ground. In the same raid, they managed do much the same thing to my tomato plant, doing enough damage that the plant had to be removed. They also made a play for my beets. However, the chicken wire around that pot, a whiskey barrel, fit much tighter and while they were able to push it flat, they couldn't get any of my plants through it. Round two went to the piggies.

This past weekend I bought some 3/8" rebar, 4' long. Each of the central pots got 3 pieces of rebar, with each woven through the holes in the chicken wire on the way down and then pounded 1' into the ground. The ones on the edges got a 4th piece of rebar to protect the sides. This stiffens the chicken wire, making it a lot harder for the javelinas to flatten the cages. It also makes it harder to push the containers around because they are more firmly rooted to the ground.

As phase two of round three, I bought some garlic and hot chili powder. When I get a chance, I will crush two or three garlic cloves and mix them with a few cups of water. Then I'll add a tablespoon or two of the chili powder and a few tablespoons of vinegar. The vinegar will help the capsaicins from the chili dissolve in the water. Then I'll stir well and strain and spray on the pots and some of the plants. Yes, it is chemical warfare just the way Mother Nature intended.

In addition, when I planted the rest of my fall garden this week, I generously planted garlic in among the fall veggies. Not only will the garlic grow all winter, giving me a spring crop, but it will also provide an additional layer of living chemical protection from the critters.

While I was disappointed at the damage the javelinas caused to my garden, I must say I am enjoying the challenge they are giving me. We'll see how round three goes.

Compost Tea

2009-08-28T22:04:00.000-07:00

Compost is wonderful stuff. It increases the health and vitality of your soil, thereby increasing the health of your plants. It does this primarily by feeding the beneficial microbes in the soil. When they become active, they make all kinds of good things. Add to this all of the major and minor nutrients that compost contains and it is practically the perfect supplement for your plants. There’s just one problem. Compost takes a long time to make. Okay, two problems. For every pound of raw material you put in, you only get a few ounces of finished compost. So you work hard all summer collecting table scraps, lawn clippings, and garden trimmings and you work hard all fall collecting all those fallen leaves. You fill the compost bin several times over, yet somehow by spring you only have enough to provide a sparse top dressing to your garden. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to make some sort of “compost concentrate” that you could apply or even get something that you can apply weekly? Well, it turns out that you can. It’s called compost tea.

Compost tea is a liquid version of compost that you spray on your plants as a foliar spray as well as pour on the soil around the plants. It is full of both beneficial nutrients and beneficial bacteria. Compost tea increases overall health of the plant and increases the thickness of the cuticle of the leaf, helping the plant better resist fungal and bacterial diseases. It also helps the plant better fend off insect predators. Best of all, it’s easier to make than you might think. There are many recipes out there, but after some research and experimentation, I have come up with my version that seems to work quite well for me.

First of all, you need materials:

Hardware
5 Gallon Bucket
Aquarium air pump with hose and diffuser
Filter (I use knee-high nylons)

Software
Water (Rainwater or filtered tap water. Chlorine=Bad)
Finished Compost
A few tablespoons of molasses

Procedure
Fill the bucket with the water. Fill the nylon with compost. I don’t have a hard-and-fast rule about how much, but a cup of compost per gallon of water is probably a good rule of thumb. Put the compost filled sock in the bucket and add the molasses. Hook up your pump, put the diffuser in the bucket and turn it on. After a half hour or so, you will start getting some foam on the top. This is a good thing. Soil-borne bacteria produce all kinds of by-products that act as a glue to hold the soil together. My guess is that these compounds are what is causing the foam. At any rate, it is a sign that you have good microbial action going on. Let it sit and brew for about 24 hours. A little more or a little less is fine, but I would let it brew at least 12 hours and probably no more than 48 hours. When it is done, spray it on your happy plants. The used compost can go back in the compost bin or straight on the soil.

There is one very important thing to remember about compost tea, though. It’s alive! If you let it sit around more than about 24 hours, the good bacteria might die and the bad ones might take over, so use it quickly.

For the sufficiently advanced bioneer, compost tea seems like an ideal medium for applying other supplements, like maybe a little garlic to help fend off herbivores. I haven’t begun experimentation of this yet, but it is on the docket. Stay tuned!

Try, Try Again

2009-08-17T13:11:00.001-07:00

I recently moved from a home with a big back yard to an apartment with almost no yard at all. As a result, I went from having a third of an acre that was landscaped mostly with edible landscaping and a 2,000 square foot garden to a container garden. At the old house, which I am still trying to sell, I have a very healthy raspberry patch which keeps trying to claim the strawberry patch next to it. When I put together my container garden, I dug up a couple of those errant raspberry canes and planted them and the strawberry plants that came with them in my new container garden. My assumption was that a combination of excellent soil, mycorrhizal fungus and abundant water would be enough to protect my canes while they tried to grow a new set of roots. In full sun. In Arizona. In late June. I was wrong. It was apparently good enough for the strawberries, though, as about two-thirds lived. My raspberries, though, withered and died.

Humbled by my earlier failure, I decided to try again. I grabbed several more raspberry canes plus an errant blackberry vine that survived an earlier cull. Again, I have given them excellent soil, mycorrhizal fungus and abundant water, but this time I did a few extra things to help. For the plants that lost most of their roots, I treated what was left with rooting hormone. I also put them in temporary pots and placed them on my patio in a place that gets little to no direct sun and trimmed off all but a foot of the cane, thereby reducing leaf surface available for evapotranspiration. Only time will tell if my efforts were successful. If they aren't, I'll just try again, and again, for as long as I still own the house.

I often read comments by people who really want to start a garden but don't know where to start and are afraid they will fail. To those people I say this: Yep, you probably will fail. And you'll probably do it more than once. But you will also succeed. A garden is a big thing. There will be some failures and some successes. You learn more from the failures. But if you don't try, you'll never learn and you'll never succeed. So get out there and try!

Dibs!

2009-08-14T11:56:00.000-07:00

Often in nature the line between saprophytic (decomposing) fungus and parasitic fungus is blurred, with some mushrooms being classified as "facultative parasites," which means that they will move in on a sickly tree and finish it off. They will kill the tree and then decompose it.

However, the line between saprophytic fungus and mycorrhizal fungus is also often blurred. Many species of mushroom are endophytic, which means that they actually live within the tissues of the tree, helping it survive. Some of those are also decomposing mushrooms. Elm oyster mushrooms (Hypsizygus ulmarius) have been shown to increase the growth of garden vegetables that they are growing with, even though they are primarily a decomposing mushroom.

Maybe that's just nature's way of calling dibs.

Making a Spore Print

2009-08-02T11:25:00.000-07:00

Identification of wild mushrooms is tricky business. As mushrooms grow and mature they change in size, shape and often color. While some change color from brown to buff or dark yellow to light yellow, some turn from blue to brown or red to buff, changing completely and making accurate identification tricky.

So you are thumbing through the field guide and have narrowed the search to two or three mushrooms, but can’t really decide for sure which one it is. The only thing left is a spore print. According to the book, one mushroom has a white spore print, while the other has a green spore print. Sounds easy enough, right, but what is a spore print? A spore print is a mass of spores deposited on a surface, usually a piece of paper. Having millions to billions of spores in one place allows you to determine overall characteristics of the usually microscopic spores, such as color. As a bonus, making them is easy and fun to do with the kids.

First of all, select a mushroom, preferrably one that is mature enough to be producing spores. In other words, if you can’t see the gills yet, you won’t get any spores. If it is a polypore mushroom (little holes on the bottom instead of gills all lined up), the pores should be open. Lay the mushroom with the gills or pores down on a piece of glass or a piece of paper. If the field guide says the spore print is white, you won’t be able to see it on white paper, so pick a different color of paper. Then just cover it with a bowl to keep air flow out. Any moving air in the room will carry the spores off. Then just let it sit for somewhere between 2 and 24 hours. The longer you let it sit, the more spores you will get, and the darker it will be. You can pick it up and check it periodically if you want, but that will ruin the cool pattern you will get from the gills of the mushroom. That’s it. you have made a spore print.

If it turns out to be a mushroom you want to keep around, you can let the spore print fully dry and then fold it up and keep it. The spores will remain viable for 3 years or so.

Some mushroom hunters will make spore prints of choice edibles on tops and brims of their favorite hiking hats. That way the spores will be spread from their hat by the breeze as they hike, helping spread the tasty mushrooms.

Passing It On

2009-07-30T23:33:00.000-07:00

As a child I always loved wandering around out in the wild with my father. It always impressed me that he could identify pretty much every tree in central Illinois by leaf, bark, or wood grain. There is something special about knowing something about the nature you pass through. It all takes on so much more meaning if you know what it is. If all that green stuff around you gets mentally categorized simply as “plants,” you are really missing a lot. You SEE so much more when you know what the plants are, and more importantly what they do. Some plants are edible, some produce berries at certain times of the year, some have thorns, some produce dazzling flowers, and some are poisonous.

But the natural world is so much more than plants. My father would help us catch grasshoppers so we could put them in spider webs and see the wonder that is a spider trussing up its prey. We would sneak up to trees and he would lift me up to see baby robins hatching from their beautiful blue eggs. We would catch stick insects, toads, snakes, moles, and much more, just to observe them and learn about what makes them work and how they live. My father helped me become the biology geek I am today.

Now that I have children of my own, I am passing along to them the wonder of the natural world around us. About eight months ago my family and I moved to a new apartment in a neighborhood that values open space. Now I have seven acres of virgin chaparral right out my back door to explore and learn about. The proximity to wilderness has also provided a wealth of wildlife to observe. Recently, a spider moved in to our back porch and it spins a large spiral web right by the light every night. Soon thereafter, we found a mortally wounded wasp and took it as an opportunity to feed the spider. So I gathered the kids around and tossed the dying wasp into the spider web. The spider pounced on it, securing it with a line of string, and then jumped back and waited a few seconds. When it didn’t get out, the spider jumped in again and quickly wrapped the head and then the wings with silk. Then it began turning the wasp and wrapping it fully. Once that was done, the spider bit the wasp and then retreated again. When the wasp stopped moving, the spider moved in to feed. The kids were fascinated and barely talked except to say “COOL!” during the whole process.

My community also has a community garden. While I have gardened with my kids before, I haven’t had my own garden for a few years now. My daughter particularly appreciates wandering the garden and has learned to identify many plants. She has picked up my habit of grazing on the plants as she walks through the garden, her favorites being purslane, mint, swiss chard, and basil. I took my daughter to the neighborhood’s community garden a few weeks ago and selected a plant that looked ready to harvest. I asked her what it was. She correctly guessed that it is related to cilantro, but couldn’t identify it. The surprised delight on her face when I pulled it out of the ground to reveal a carrot was an emotional jewel I will carry with me a long time. The fact that she got to eat it was an extra bonus.

Recent monsoon rains have brought the local flora to life. On my way home through the community garden I noticed some mushrooms. Then I noticed some different ones growing up in the community lawn area, so I collected a couple of each kind and brought them home. I explained to the kids how there are different kinds of mushrooms and suggested we try to identify them. So I pulled out the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms and we started comparing features. Once we were fairly certain that we had the right identifications, we took a spore print of each mushroom to verify our identification. In the end we were pretty sure that the yellow one was a deadly lawn galerina, a deadly toxic mushroom, and the large white mushroom was a spring agaricus, a choice edible. No, we didn’t eat it. I don’t trust my identification abilities that much, plus it was full of worms.

A few evenings ago we spent nearly an hour observing a tarantula that came to our back patio to hunt. We initially caught him in our bug cage, which has a large magnifying glass for a lid, so we could look at him up close. Once we had looked at him enough, we let him go. To our delight, he didn’t run, but instead continued up the wall to hunt near our patio lights. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see him catch anything. Nonetheless, my daughter remarked the next day that that experience was “awesome.”

So take your kids out and show them, hands-on, about the world around them. Teach them what you know. Show them the wonder, beauty, joy, and flavor of the life around them. I hear so many people these days complaining that our children don’t know where food comes from. How can they, if we don’t teach them?

Green Insulation

2009-07-21T16:22:00.000-07:00

There's a new green insulation product out there called Greensulate. It is designed to replace both styrofoam and fiberglass insulation and is cheap to make, easy to make locally just about wherever you are, light, strong, has a good R value and is very fire resistant. When you are done with it, it is biodegradable. It can be insulation in your walls, firewalls in your home, or packing material in your boxes. Here's the cool part: you don't make it, you grow it. They fill molds with a mixture of water, minerals, starch, and hydrogen peroxide and then introduce mushroom mycelium. When the mycelium have grown through the substrate, they are removed from the mold and dehydrated, killing the mycelium.

As an engineer, I'd love to see specifications on strength, durability, longevity, and R-value of this stuff. As a bioneer, I'd love to know what kind of mushrooms they are using. I'd also love to know what they are using as a food source for the mycelium to grow on. There are so many agricultural waste products that would be great for this.

I'm totally geeking out over here.

Living Soil

2009-07-06T21:54:00.000-07:00

Most gardeners see their job as one of taking care of the plants. You water them when they get dry, fertilize them as needed and deal with pests and diseases. But how does this process work in nature? Nature takes care of the plants. So why doesn't it take care of the plants in our garden? Nobody fertilizes that beautiful meadow you hike through on your weekend hike, so how does it look so lush? Nobody sprays it for fungal diseases and pests, so why do the plants there only have minimal damage despite a lack of intervention?

Despite what we like to tell ourselves, a garden is a very un-natural place. Nature is subverted at every turn. A fully natural garden would look like a meadow and the Home Owners' Association would show up and cite us for not removing weeds.

So what is it about those natural environments that nurtures the plants and keeps them healthy so effortlessly, and more importantly, how can we mimic that environment without invoking the ire of the neighbors? The key is living soil. Soil is not just some foundation beneath our feet, a stable medium for plants and a source of important minerals. It is very much alive, or at least it should be. Soil is it own ecosystem, it just exists on a microscopic scale. It is filled with bacteria, fungus, insects, worms and much more, all living in harmony. Each player has a niche to fill, a job to do, and is an important part of the whole. Nearly half of each plant exists immersed in this ecosystem and has evolved specifically to live in that environment.

Healthy soil nourishes the plant and increases its health. Healthy plants don't need outside intervention to prevent pests and diseases. They have an immune system, just like you and I. Plants grown in healthy soil are healthy and have the ability to fight disease. They also grow faster, get bigger and are able to produce more sugars.

So how do you make healthy, alive soil? As always, we take our cues from nature. What soil amendments does nature add? Dead plants and insects are returned to the soil to decompose and occasional doses of manure are added. That's pretty much it. It needs regular doses of organic material.

But dead plants laying all over the ground is unsightly. How do we fix that? Well, that’s where bioneering comes in. Compost is bioneered soil. By composting our organic material, we create the ideal soil ammendment, the perfect food for our living soil. Also, regular applications of organic mulch, such as wood chips and straw help a great deal. Those ammendments feed the soil, which in turn cares for our plants.

So remember to feed your soil!

Oh, and synthetic fertilizers are like junk food for your soil. It doesn’t create lasting health, especially if you don’t also give it the healthy food.

A Tip on Using Compost in Containers

2009-06-29T16:44:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me that in my previous post I suggested using living, active soil in containers. I failed to mention that those containers are outside.

If finished compost is the most wonderful soil there is, why not use it to fill the pots for your houseplants, or at least amend the soil in the pots? Well, one simple reason: bugs. Lots and lots of bugs. Big ones, little ones, benign ones and biting ones. Compost is home to lots and lots of bugs, which is only natural. After all, they do a lot of the breaking down of the material. They even become part of the material after they die. But you don't want them in your house. So if you are going to use the compost, you need to process it.

Now, you can bake, steam or boil it, but that kills ALL the life in the compost, not just the bugs. Part of the reason compost is so great is that it is so very alive. Plants thrive in a living soil. So how do you kill the bugs without harming all the beneficial fungus and bacteria? Use the metabolic rate of animals against them. Bacteria and fungus can survive in extremely low oxygen environments for extended periods of time without any serious detrimental side-effects. Bugs cannot. So put your compost in a ziploc-type (sorry, don't know the non-name brand term for those bags) bag or some other container that you know will be ABSOLUTELY air-tight and put it in a warm, dark place and make sure it is moist, but not soggy. Let it sit for a minimum of 3 days. A full week without air would be better. The active compost in the container will quickly use up the little oxygen that is there and kill off almost all of the bugs.

A Bioneered Container Garden

2009-06-28T19:56:00.000-07:00

Two years ago I decided that an outdoor mushroom log just wasn't going to work in Arizona without serious irrigation, so I decided to try to grow them in pots indoors. I filled the pots around the logs with wood chips, which gave more nutrients for the mushrooms to consume. I put plants in the pots to pull the water out of the bottom of those pots before it stagnated. The plants also utilized the carbon dioxide the logs gave off as they decomposed. I put worms in the pot to help the mushrooms break the wood chips down into a rich compost for the plants. The experiment worked beautifully. I got many mushrooms off of the logs, one or two of which have completed their life cycles. The wood chips have long since been turned into black soil and the worms continue to thrive. The plants were a mixed bag. One died, but that was more the cat’s fault. The rest thrived, one so much that it got way too big for the space and had to be thrown out.

Recently my family and I moved to an apartment that doesn't have room outside for a garden. What's a bioneer to do? Improvise, of course. In addition to the four pots with logs in them, I also had a large metal tub that I had filled with the plants I intended to take with me from the old house and a whiskey barrel that I bought to be a rain barrel before we decided to sell the house and move. Cut in half, it made two big pots for planting. The metal tub was completely overgrown with irises, who apparently love the rich compost created from yet another batch of decomposed wood chips, and needed to be transplanted.

It seemed to me that I had a perfect opportunity. Not only did I have work that needed to be done, but I also had the necessary components needed for a container and a perfect chance to take my living soil to the next stage in its life cycle.

Wood decomposing mushrooms are called primary decomposers. Those that decompose partially decomposed wood and compost are called secondary decomposers. Mushrooms that live in the soil, finishing off the decomposition process are called tertiary decomposers. Shaggy mane mushrooms lie somewhere between secondary and tertiary decomposers, preferring to live in rich soils. They are a favorite of mushroom hunters, being easy to recognize and quite tasty. They are also relatively easy to grow, but will never be found in your grocery store due to a shelf life of only about 24 hours. They seemed a good choice for my container garden.

The first task was to move the irises into the ground (I do have a little land behind the current apartment, but not enough for a real garden) and all of the plants that were in the four pots into one pot. The largest pot with the largest log was the obvious recipient. It was a tight fit, but they all fit nicely. Then I had to re-mix the soil. The black, sticky compost was great for plants, but wouldn't offer long term nutrition for the mushrooms. I also didn't have anywhere enough to fill all my pots. So I added some fresh wood chips, some compost from the hardware store, and, begrudgingly, some potting soil. Then I built a varmint screen for each pot to try to keep the critters out.

Finally, I seeded the pots. I actually seeded them very heavily because my seeds were old. As seeds age, they lose viability, so a larger percentage of them will fail to sprout. So with seeds over three years old or so, you seed heavily and then thin as needed.

So now the wait is on. Will the seeds sprout? Will the shaggy manes take hold and find enough nutrition to produce mushrooms? Will the mushrooms also eat my wooden pots? Did I start too late in the season? Will the varmint screens work, or will my plants pay the ultimate price?

Only time will tell.

The Decision Making Process

2009-06-24T09:52:00.000-07:00

I want to delve just a little into philosophy. This may seem out of place, but this particular concept very much drives how I see nature and especially the relationships between organisms.

We as humans put great stock in our conscious mind. Some animals have been shown to have a sense of self. Others do not. But thus far no animal has been shown definitively to be conscious. We know that we are. So that sets us above the animals, right? Certainly the conscious decision is the highest form of decision and the most powerful of all the possible decision making processes, right? Let's look at a few of your daily decisions.

What did you decide to wear when you got dressed today? Well, it depended on your plan, what you were going to do today, so I'd say that one was definitely conscious.

How did you decide what route to take to work today? Well, if you have been at the job more than a few months, it was probably based on habit. But habit is really a shortcut, right? You made the same conscious decision so many times that you don't really need to make it again. It becomes habit. So that one qualifies as a conscious decision.

What about when you said yes when that oh-so-attractive person asked you out? That was a conscious decision, right? Well, first of all, we should look at why you would go out with ANYONE. Relationships can be complicated, right? You have to let them in, trust them, risk rejection and pain and, worst of all, share your stuff. So the CONSCIOUS decision seems to be pointing to not having a relationship at all. What's that? Loneliness, you say? Good point. So there is something inside of you telling you that you won't be happy unless you have that special someone in your life. It won't LET you be happy. It is making the decision for you. That would be the hormones. They make the decision for you that you want to be with another person, and enforce the decision through emotions like desire and unhappiness. But why would the hormones make this decision for you? Well, that comes down to evolution. There is a need to make more people and a push is necessary. So evolution is capable of making decisions as well, too, and the decisions that evolution makes drive our hormones, which drive our emotions, which drive our decisions.

Okay, so we've answered why we decided to date at all, but why did we say yes to THAT person. Well, because he's interesting, intelligent and shares many of the same views that you have, leading you to believe that intellectual compatibility is a very real possibility, right? Well, given those qualities in a short, dumpy, shapeless person whose nose happens to be on the side of his head for some odd reason and NONE of those qualities in a person who is smoking hot and dreamy, nearly everyone out there would pick the latter. But why? A misplaced nose would make kissing easier, right? This is where instinct comes in. Instinct tells us what is attractive. It lays down the guidelines of symmetry and proportions. It also tells us which traits, like confidence, are important to success in life. Take the ubiquitous example of the "bad boy," the guy preferred by most women. This preference is so strong, in fact, that calling a man who considers you a love interest "nice" is about the worst thing you can call him. So you look at a man and it is obvious that he will make your life very interesting, probably by cheating on you, walking out on you, and hurting you emotionally and maybe physically. The conscious mind is screaming "NO", right along with your parents and all of your friends. Yet those calls go completely unheeded in the hormonal rush that says "YES, for the love of God, YES." In this case, instinct has used hormones to make the decision for you. Consciousness didn't stand a chance. Sure, your conscious mind could manage to speak up and override the decision, but instinct has its thugs and will enforce the decision through a few things called "misery" and "regret." So why does instinct want us to seek out this type of person? Again, it comes down to evolution. Evolution has determined that this type of person is most likely to make us successful. But will they make us happy? Evolution doesn't care about happy. It uses happy as a tool. It cares about success. Success is defined by continued existence of your species.

Yes, I know, I am anthropomorphizing evolution. Just go with it, okay?

Let's move on to another decision you might think you make. What did you decide to have for dinner last night? First of all, let's go back to why you decided to have dinner last night. That could come down to habit (because it's dinnerTIME, duh), which is a conscious decision, or hunger, which is a hormonal impulse. But why is it dinnertime? Well, that habit is born of necessity. "Because that's when I get hungry." Again, back to hormones.

So what are our options? How about a lovely plate of hay? Maybe a yummy dead animal that has been sitting out in the sun for three days? How about if we chew on some branches? These are all things that other animals, mammals even, look for when they are hungry. Why don't they make our list? Have you ever given your dog a plate of hay, or your pet rabbit a nice, juicy steak? They don't recognize what is offered as food. That all comes down to taste. We eat what tastes good. Do we get to decide what tastes good? Not really. That one is pre-programmed. We evolved to exploit a certain food source, just like every other animal out there. Vegetables taste good. Fruit tastes better. Meat tastes better yet. Why would this be? Just a guess here, but I'd guess that when our tastes in what constitutes acceptable food evolved, vegetables were our primary food source. Occasionally some meat or fruit became available. These food sources have a higher energy density, so we need to exploit them. So evolution made those taste better. Once upon a time, success was determined by your ability to locate and digest high energy food. Those who found the good stuff good tasting succeeded and passed on their genes. Those same genes that guided that pre-historic person in his quest for food drove your choices for dinner last night.

So, in my viewpoint, the hierarchy of decision making power looks something like this:

consciousness < hormones < instinct < evolution

Evolution makes decisions about what is good for a species over hundreds or thousands of generations. The decision to exploit a new food source requires modifications that only evolution can provide. The decision to fill a new niche requires an evolutionary decision. Mere individuals cannot make those decisions ourselves. It would be great to have a third arm or be able to eat and enjoy wood or be immune to all kinds of disease. But that isn't up to me. That's up to evolution.

In future posts, I'll explain just how this colors my vision of the natural world and some of the implications it has on natural relationships. In the meantime, I'd like to say that this is a concept that I am still working out the details on and would love to hear your thoughts.