Monthly Archives: September 2015

The Peripatetic Gardener Visits a Hospital by Catherine Feldman

Uncategorized

The Peripatetic Gardener Visits a Hospital by Catherine Feldman

In San Francisco this month the Peripatetic Gardener sat through three seemingly endless visits to one emergency room. Great gratitude was due to the medical staff who so graciously and effectively attended the Gardener’s elderly parents.

Dear Demeter, though, how different a hospital was from a garden! “Where is the greenery to provide fresh oxygen to the stuffy rooms?” asked the Gardener. She longed for sunshine to help dispel the known and unknown diseases that contaminated the air and surfaces. While it made sense to her that a 92-year-old man would have a severe vitamin D deficiency, it was an eye opener to learn that so do many of the young interns and residents.  Much has been said about the need to improve the food in hospitals; she called now for a discussion of how to make the environment in hospitals more comfortable and healthful for patients, visitors and staff: that is, more like a garden.

hospital room

Science by the People: Lisa Rainsong, Citizen Scientist

GENERAL INTEREST

Science by the People: the 2015 Conservation Symposium at the

Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Elsa Johnson

Snowy Tree Cricket
Snowy Tree Cricket

What kind of person jumps into her car after work to drive to Erie, Pennsylvania to listen to and record the nighttime songs of crickets and katydids  ….for fun….!

…whose ‘real’ life work is teaching music and making her own songs…

…and who gets invited to give a talk about her unusual and enchanting hobby at a prestigious institution of the natural sciences…. ?

…Meet Dr. Lisa Rainsong, whose name, vocation, and avocation so serendipitously mix.

Rainsong, who is a resident of Cleveland Heights, a Professor of Music Theory at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and a recorder extraordinaire of the songs of crickets and katydids, gave a power-point lecture — punctuated by cricket song – on the results of her cricket recording activity to this year’s symposium audience.

 

Rainsong’s familiarity with recording equipment allowed her to take recording of multitudinous mixed summer insect sounds and then separate out the individual songs of specific cricket species – even the hard for the human ear to hear katydid species. 

Black-legged MK singing mostly visible nice OHills 8-23-013
Black-legged Meadow Katydid

By doing this she has been able to verify for professional scientists the existence of certain crickets and katydids where they were thought not to exist. It seems to be a mostly northward migration, possibly due to climate change, but in the case of one cricket, Rainsong hypothesizes that the specific species had been there all along. 

Rainsong spoke with clarity, affection, and humor about her extra-curricular passion. For this writer her presentation was the highlight of this year’s symposium.

You may link to Rainsong’s blog  Listening in Nature. The Songs of Insects is a wonderful online field guide for identification.

Four-spotted TC singing at Linda's4 8-18-13
Four-spotted Tree Cricket

 

Common True Katydid sings from low perch1 ELC 8-21-13
Common True Katydid

Is it Ripe Yet?……………. by Ann McCulloh

GENERAL INTEREST, PRACTICE

Is It Ripe Yet?

Ann McCulloh

Sensory clues to help decide if it’s time to harvest your produce.
Ann McCulloh

You’ve tended the garden since spring. Improved the soil, planted carefully, weeded, watered, fed, staked, pinched and pruned! Finally it’s time to enjoy the fruits of your labors. How do you know when all that home-grown goodness is at its peak? Ready, but not over-the-hill? In a word: ripe?

Judging ripeness is all about the evidence of the senses. There’s certainly science involved: fruits and vegetables can be measured for sugar and water content, acidity and density. But recognizing ripeness is really a learned skill, a dance of anticipation and experience. Here’s where four of our senses (touch, smell, sight and hearing) come into play, before the ultimate test of taste.

Apple: Look for a background skin color skin more yellow than green. Cut into the heart and look for dark brown seeds and cream-colored flesh.

Canteloupe: Look for a yellow tinted skin, a light fragrance, slight softness at the stem end when pressed, and shake to hear seeds sloshing gently inside.

Corn: The silk turns brown, and the kernels are plump.

Dry Beans: Outer shell looks dry, yellow and leathery. Beans slide out easily with the swipe of a thumb and feel hard to the touch.

Eggplant: Firm and rounded, heavy for its size and skin still shiny

Green Beans: Pods should still be slim and smooth, not bumpy

Tomato: Pick when just fully colored and finish ripening indoors in a paper bag. Don’t chill!

Watermelon: Should be heavy for its size, with skin more dull than shiny and a creamy yellow bottom side. A thumped melon should yield a hollow sound.

Winter Squash: The rind will be too hard to puncture with a fingernail, the skin will be dull not glossy.

Zucchini: The smaller the better! Dull skin = hard seeds and spongy texture.

The best advice will take you only so far. Look, feel, sniff, listen, and observe. Then take a bite. Your taste buds will be your best teacher.


Is It Ripe Yet?

Pears

A sensory investigation

Thump a melon for its sound

Feel the cabbage fill and round

Sniff the peach for its perfume

Rub the grape, dispel its bloom

Heft a gourd and tug it loose

Bite the apple, savor juice…

_Ann McCulloh 2010

cucumbers

The Aging Gardener Laments September

POETRY, PRACTICE

elsa messy garden

The Aging Gardener Laments September

Lord   Lord   What a mess the garden is   There is not

a modicum of order here   (and me …supposed to

set a good example )  I’ve hacked back that

promiscuous bitch ‘Pamina’   all her skirt

foliage I’ve ripped away   (and some of her

children too )   (Murderer!)   I’ve beaten into

submission the overly exuberant ‘Rozanne’

(Back… back! You beast! )  Goldfinch lay waste

the ripe sunflowers   A dozen different insects

are pillaging sedum   agastache   and anything

else that dares remain in bloom    A few beans still

hang from utterly leafless plants   like limp tinsel or

draped dregs from a party that’s gone on too long…

none of us straggling home in good shape

elsa messy 2

New Series: One Thing I Learned This Year by Peggy Spaeth

Uncategorized

One Several Important Thing(s) I Learned This Year

The official Ohio state flower is the carnation (a Mediterannean native!) but the official Ohio state wildflower is our native trillium.  This past spring I visited Garden in the Woods and the horticulturist mentioned that white trillium petals turned pink after the flower has been pollinated.   (I didn’t know that!)  Since this is the first year I’ve had trillium in my garden it was the perfect opportunity to observe this beautiful spring ephemeral daily.  These photos track the buds through flowering and setting seed.  Observing the seed case I thought there would be one big seed inside.  I was surprised when it burst open and scattered a whole bunch of shiny brown seeds on the ground. (I didn’t know that!)  I learned it takes up to seven years for trillium rhizomes to produce a flowering plant.  (I didn’t know that!)  If you want to learn more about trillium seed development here is a fascinating article and another about propagation.  Wouldn’t it be great if there was a plant nursery in NE Ohio that propagated our native woodland ephemerals so everyone could enjoy them in their garden?

Trillium, white 2015.05.12 Essex
Trillium, white 2015.05.12 Essex

More photos are here.

 

The Peripatetic Gardener Visits the Cloisters in NYC

BEAUTY, GENERAL INTEREST, PERIPATETIC, PERMACULTURE

A Visit to The Cloisters in New York City 

Meanwhile — Sloth in the cloister would not have been deemed desirable. You could think of a monastery garden as an early form of permaculture. The Cloisters in Manhattan has three cloistered gardens open to the sun and air. Only one is planted with plants that would have grown in such a place in Medieval times. A monastery garden grew its own food, but also grew plants for other purposes, and some of these plants were dangerous – poisons that were medicinally useful, like foxglove (digitalis)… or just plain simply poisonous, like castor bean plant (ricin — for which there is no antidote), and datura (tropane alkaloids). These plants would have been grouped together in their own quadrant of the garden.

Another quadrant held plants used for culinary purposes… thyme and sage to flavor foods , hops (to flavor weak ale, which was commonly consumed instead of water), comfrey (a mineral accumulator, also used medicinally). Another quadrant grew vegetables (not tomatoes, which would come from the new world when it was ‘discovered’), some of which we would not recognize today, like skirret (tastes something like sweet potatoes, but is a bit more trouble to dig and use; (See Tom Gibson’s recent post) and stinging nettle (a pot herb that loses its sting when cooked). Both of these are important permaculture plants today.

Ignorance can be a form of sloth. An ignorant gardener would not have been long tolerated. He or she would have posed a danger to the community. While a natural landscape like a park may benefit from some form of benign sloth, true sloth would never have been tolerated in a cloister garden.

Plants We Like: Pycnanthemum or Mountain Mint

BEAUTY, PERMACULTURE, POLLINATION, PRACTICE

DETA-246

Pycnanthemum muticum or mountain mint is one of my new favorite perennial plants. Not only does it have a sweet white-pink flower, the leaves and stems have an almost icy appearance. It is lighting up one of the darker spots of a shady forest area in my front yard. I am planning to add lots more of it (plant gluttony, again) throughout that area. Although it is not supposed to do well in deep shade, rather preferring full sun to part shade, I am going to experiment a bit to see how deep into the shade it will thrive. Already now, on the edge of sun and shade, it is doing a good job of lighting up the area. It is native to the US in zones 4-8. It’s height and spread is from 1-3 feet. It blooms from July to September. It tolerates some dryness and attracts butterflies and bees. It is not bothered by insects or deer. It can be used to make tea and may be used as insect repellant when rubbed on the skin. So many virtues!DETA-246

Permaculture Success…and Failure

PERMACULTURE, PRACTICE

Permaculture Success….and Failure

Three years ago, I and five other permaculturists (including GARDENOPOLIS Cleveland co-editor Ann McCulloh) built a Hugelkultur in my back yard. The name comes from the German “Hügelkultur” or “hill culture” and consists of a 5-foot+ pile of logs and branches covered with soil. Ideally, over time, a Hugelkultur evolves like this:

HugelkulturRaisedBed

In theory, Hugelkulturs offer gardeners multiple benefits. One can simultaneously (1) recycle logs from downed trees; (2) increase gardening surface area; (3) create a sun trap to extend the growing season; and (4) extract water and nutrients from the decaying trees and, thus, eliminate the need for watering.

I’ve had to make adjustments to my Hugelkultur. My first installation of (conventional) top soil contained too much sand. Rain and snow melt quickly eroded much of it away. I then replaced the soil with a sturdier mixture of clay fill and compost, which has stayed in place.

And some plants seem to love their whole Hugelkultur experience!  Here’s an exuberant horse radish that seems to be burrowing deep into the decaying wood’s nutrients and water.


 IMG_2329

But I’ve had failures, too. Here’s a dried out (and barely recognizable) kale plant that couldn’t survive the drought and my three week absence from Cleveland.  

IMG_2317

Maybe its root didn’t go deep enough to tap the underlying moisture or maybe, as Ann suggests, it, like all brassicas, just didn’t relate to the heavily fungal soil created by decaying wood.  Since my basil (of course, a non-brassica) did well —-just a few feet away, not especially deep-rooted–I’m inclined to accept the latter explanation.