GardenWalk Cleveland Heights featured a successful pilot project: 11 36 sq.ft. pollinator pocket gardens on Langton Road. The gardens combine a steady flow of blooms, low maintenance, (relative!) deer resistance, and attractiveness to pollinating insects. The goal was to enhance both immediate neighborhood attractiveness and community spirit.
Those goals appear to have been realized. Madeleine Macklin, the Langton resident who helped lead the effort, conducted an informal survey of those homeowners who participated. She reported: “Many of the people walking in the neighborhood often stop to chat about the beauty of our street. Some just give ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs.’ But I am often told that their stress, depression, anxiety levels have gone down from sharing, and experiencing the beautiful flowering plants on our street.”
The design component of this project: each homeowner had a voice in individual site selection. The challenge was, for the sake of visual unification, to find a not too broad range of mostly native plants that were adaptable to a quite broad range of growing conditions, and were visually showy. Almost everyone received one or more hibiscus moscheutos, with its spectacular dinner plate style blooms.
The next step will be to raise enough additional funding to extend the pollinator pocket project to other streets in the Noble Neighborhood. Green Paradigm Partners, which conceived and executed the project, is discussing expansion of the project with key scientific partners and foundations.
Photos are courtesy of Laura Dempsey. More of Laura’s work can be found on her website, ldempsey.com. She is open to new clients and opportunities.
Avid gardeners are ordering seeds and planning new beds for the coming growing season. How about adding actual selling to those plans?
That’s a message from Noble Neighbors, a neighborhood organization based in Cleveland Heights, which is launching a Gardener’s Market to begin Saturday, July 20 and continue every Saturday through September 21. According to Brenda May, a Noble Neighbors leader, “We think the time is ripe for a venue strictly for home gardeners and community garden members who want to generate additional income and participate in the broader community.”
The market will be the region’s first market in which only backyard and community garden growers (no professional farmers) can sell extra fruits, vegetables and flowers. Initially, the market won’t be offering any kind of processed food.
Noble Neighbors tested the concept last summer with several “pilot” garden market Saturdays. The location of the market was (and will be) a small park belonging to the City of Cleveland Heights along the major thoroughfare of Noble Road at Roanoke Road (a block north of Monticello) and is the site of both significant foot and auto traffic. “We experienced strong interest from customers and potential customers,” says May. “We’re confident that a larger market with more offerings will be a success.”
Noble Gardeners’ Market organizers hope to attract a variety of gardeners from local communities beyond the immediate neighborhood. “We think the opportunity to offer home produce at no space-rental charge is unique to the region,” May says. “Our goal is both to allow gardeners to make money and to increase the feeling of neighborliness in the area.”
Sellers must bring their own table or ground cloth, be prepared to make change for their customers and provide their own weather protection.
Further information will be posted on the Noble Neighbors website www.nobleneighbors.com. Send inquiries to NobleNeighbors@gmail.com
That’s right. A Gardeners’ Market, not a farmers’ market. August 2019 will see the launch of what its founders believe will be the region’s first market in which only home and community gardeners, and cooks (and no professional farmers) can sell extra produce and flowers, as well as certain “cottage” products like baked goods that pass muster by the Ohio Dept. of Agriculture.
The Noble Gardeners’ Market, as it has been named, is tentatively scheduled to run for 8 to 10 weeks into early fall and take place on a mini-park at the corner of Roanoke and Noble Roads in the Noble neighborhood of Cleveland Heights. (See www.nobleneighbors.com for continuing updates.)
The inspiration for the market came to Brenda May, a leader of the Noble Neighbors community group from a small market she encountered in Wilmore, Kentucky, just south of Lexington, the state capital. “This market had only about 8 sellers,” she says, “but people came and stayed for hours.”
Some people came with just 20 tomatoes to sell from backyard gardens and one woman sold herb cuttings for a dime a piece. Some of the sellers wanted to make a few extra dollars, but others simply wanted to connect with the community.
Recalls May: “It was clear that the herb seller might not earn three dollars that day. So why was she there? It was about connecting with people, exchanging information, checking up on each other. That’s where I had the “aha” moment about community building and about not needing to have box loads of produce to make a successful market.”
To test the idea, May and a half dozen other members of Noble Neighbors tested the idea in late summer on three successive Saturdays from 10 AM to noon. The response was strong. Said Jill Tatum, one of the Noble Neighbors participants: “We learned that there was tremendous interest among buyers, that people loved to stay and chat with each other, and that our two-hour market time is perfect for both buyers and sellers.”
Although the Wilmore example started initial thinking, May and her Noble Neighbors colleagues are actually aiming higher. They are looking not only for participants whose highest priority is community connection, but also for home producers who want to use their skills to make extra money.
They are also looking for participants across the region, not just Cleveland Heights. So far, growers in South Euclid and Cleveland’s Hough Neighborhood have indicated interest.
“We need sellers,” says May. “The more sellers we have, the more customers we’ll be able to attract.”
Sellers will need to bring their own tables or ground cloth and must be able to make change for their customers.
“Right now,” she says, “we want potential sellers to start thinking. Since we know that gardeners start planning their gardens during the dark, snowy days of winter, we hope they will be thinking about the Noble Gardeners’ Market. How much they plant next spring will determine how much extra they will have to sell in late summer.”
The gardeners’ market has the enthusiastic support of the City of Cleveland Heights. Mayor Carol Roe says, “This idea for a community market is just the latest in a series of creative ideas from Noble Neighborhood that bring people together by ‘thinking green.’ We have high hopes that this market will become a landmark for the region.”
A new gardening/earthskills resource has taken root in Northeast Ohio. Called Reeds & Roots Skillshare, the weekend event covering August 17-19 drew 215 people and probably just as many plaudits. Its organizers believe they can repeat and expand their success in the years to come.
The event is modeled on the Whipoorwill Festival held annually in Kentucky and which one of that event’s organizers, Stephanie Blessing, passionately determined to transplant here. Taking stock, she sees “tons of support for future years. We are getting offers of other venues and more teachers and all kinds of excitement for future years.”
The skills shared ran the gamut from earthbuilding to fermentation to tree care. One of the attendees, Margy Weinberg of Cleveland Heights, commented that “one teacher was better than the next.” She attended the fermentation class and also ones of reflexology, herbal foot baths, and leather bookbinding.
I attended classes on edible mushroom identification and tree care. I learned from both and am already applying to my own yard several of the ideas I got from Diana Sette, an arborist at Holden Arboretum. See the full offering at https://reedsandroots.org/
The gathering was highly intergenerational, relaxed and from across the region (not only Cleveland, but Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Columbus, and even eastern Tennessee).
Above all, the event was exceptionally well organized—everything from signage to food. If you want to be on next year’s mailing list, contact the organizers at reedsandroots@gmail,com. Here are some pictures.
This strange spring–just above freezing for much of April and early May and then, wham!, summer—has my back yard food forest proliferating in unexpected ways.
The big burst has been berries. Service berries, spice berries, currants, black raspberries, elderberries are almost doubling their output. I speculate that the cool-but-above-freezing weather kept early flowers at their pollen producing peak far longer than usual. The most delicate are definitely the very early spice berry blooms, which typically get frozen dead almost immediately upon opening by the next day’s cold snap.
These green berries will turn red in the fall and are great and-all-spicey cooked with apples.
Another surprise has been my pawpaws. As longtime readers of Gardenopolis Cleveland may remember, I have had to hand-pollinate the flowers to get fruit production. The pawpaw co-evolved, not with the non-native honey bee or even the native bumblebee, but with blow flies and other insects who are attracted to blooms offering the gentle smell of poop. Thus the need to get out my little water color brush and agitate pawpaw blossoms like a nectar-hungry blow fly.
But this spring’s long cool and sudden warm caught me too busy to respond. I was able to give my water color brush only a few outings. I was resigned to a lackluster harvest. And I was especially resigned to getting no harvest from branches any higher than 8 feet. I just could not bring myself to haul out a ladder—even with the above-average number of purple blooms—and go into the treetops agitating pistils and stamens with my brush.
Then the surprise: fruit that formed where it has never formed before, high up in the trees.
I can only speculate that the number of blooms reached a critical mass producing enough scent to attract blow flies.
But that leaves a question: How will I harvest them? Pawpaw harvest is almost as labor-intensive as pollination and why pawpaw production is best suited to the obsessive home gardener. Typically, I squeeze each fruit to see whether it is soft enough to ripen on its own inside on a window sill (thus avoiding competition from possums and other critters). Now I’ll have to wait until they fall.
This spring also brought an ugly surprise: the predations of the four-lined plant bug (Poecilocapus lineatus). They usually spend a short time in my garden, sucking chlorophyll, and leaving brown spots. But then they disappear. I typically ignore them and the plants resume their green growth.
I’m regretting not trying to remove them early on with organic soap.
I’m tempted to trim off the brown-speckled leaves, but am resisting that impulse for fruit-bearing plants. As shriveled and ugly as the leaves appear, they still seem to be doing their main job of producing sugars that give the plant enough strength to produce fruit. See this goji berry flower and its ragged leaves.
If I cut the leaves, I’ll eliminate the fruit!
Any similar garden experiences you have had, dear readers, with our unusual spring?
Can concentrations of pocket gardens help rejuvenate neighborhoods? That’s the question a coalition of Cleveland Heights partners is trying to answer. They are working with neighbors on Langton Road, just off Quilliams Road in the Noble neighborhood, to install 10 pocket gardens this spring. The gardens will consist of either native perennials or a tree surrounded by Russian comfrey and other plants that suppress weeds and provide extra fertility.
“We want to provide sustainable beauty,” said Barbara Sosnowski, who heads the beautification committee of Noble Neighbors, a local activist group. “That means that any garden we plant should look as attractive after four years as it does after one.”
Sandy Thompson, Mani Pierce and Tom Gibson plant a plum tree in the Oxford Community Garden. [photo by Barbara Morgan]If the effort succeeds, the group intends to take the Langton Road model and apply it elsewhere in the neighborhood. “The exciting thing about this project,” Sosnowski added, “is that it is intended to be scalable. If we succeed with 10 private residences, we can succeed with 50, and so on.”
Noble Neighbors’ partners in the effort include the Home Repair Resource Center (HRRC), Cleveland Heights High School, Rust Belt Riders and Green Paradigm Partners. HRRC will provide classroom space and instruction for the Langton Road neighbors, high school students will provide paid help with construction of the garden plots, Rust Belt Riders will provide specialized compost, and Green Paradigm Partners will provide landscape design and community organizing help. Funding will come from grants and crowd funding via IOBY Cleveland. Look for the Noble Neighborhood pocket garden project at www.ioby.org/campaign/cleveland.
To address the problem of long-term maintenance, the group has devised a three-pronged plan. At the horticultural level, the group has selected plants that grow well in Northeast Ohio. It will test soils for mineral deficiencies that attract noxious, high-maintenance weeds, such as bindweed, and then add mineral amendments to correct those deficiencies. Compost with high fungal content, which reduces the need for watering during droughts, will be applied.
At the immediate neighborhood level, the beautification group is asking homeowners to take a two-session course at HRRC on plant selection and care. The intention is to bring immediate neighbors together on a common project and create a greater sense of neighborhood spirit and purpose.
At the broader neighborhood level, the support and participation of Noble Neighbors and Heights High, among others, is intended to raise the project’s community profile and foster its success. “We are employing a number of approaches to community revitalization,” said Brenda May, a leader of Noble Neighbors. “We see this project as one way to make pocket gardens a signature of the neighborhood, thereby enhancing both local identity and property values.”
The effort has attracted wide support. Cleveland Heights Mayor Carol Roe, herself a Noble resident, called the effort “an innovative approach to building community spirit that comes at just the right moment of upswing in the Noble neighborhood.” Kay Carlson, president and chief executive officer of the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes, said, “We find the project’s combination of cutting-edge biology and creative community involvement promising and likely to have much wider application.”
Watch for more information as the project progresses.
What could possibly interest a driver through the landscape west of Toledo? Flat corn and soy bean fields stretch to the horizon—green in summer, gray-brown in winter. That’s the way it’s been for the nearly 25 years my wife and I have been traveling to Chicago to visit our daughter.
In the last three years, though, we’ve noticed a change. Instead of bare, tilled soil in winter, the majority of farmland we observe remains untilled and is filled with corn and other crop stubble. Although colors remain pretty much the same gray-brown, what we are seeing is revolutionary. Conventional farmers, who have been growing crops in the best agri-chemical, paint-by-numbers style—so many pounds of artificial nitrogen, phosphorous, etc. per acre–, are now consciously prioritizing growing life in their soil.
Tilled field and…
No till. Still brown, but much more beautiful.
We’re not the only ones to notice this change. Two years ago it even made the New York Times.
Now a book has come out that puts the shift into a worldwide context. It’s called Growing A Revolution by David Montgomery. Montgomery is a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington; author of previous popular books, most notably “Dirt,” and a winner of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” award.
Montgomery’s thesis is that a consensus is emerging in all corners of agriculture and horticulture—from conventional to organic—that the only path toward resilient food production must include an interlocking trio of practices that fall under the rubric of “conservation agriculture.” These are: No till soil management, cover crops, and crop rotation.
As obvious as these three practices will sound to Gardenopolis Cleveland’s cutting edge gardeners, the abiding wonder of this book is how often humanity has gotten this apparently straightforward mix wrong. The Mesopotamians messed up the (once) Fertile Crescent. Thomas Jefferson experimented with cover crops and crop rotation, but also invented and promoted the mold-board plow—that great destroyer of mycorrhizal fungi and their nutrient-gathering capability– and thus managed to undo much of the good of his other innovations. In the 1970s, a young researcher named Rattan Lal, now one of Ohio State University’s most distinguished professors, vastly improved small farm productivity in African test plots with a version of conservation agriculture. But a few short years after his departure, all his good work had been overgrown with trees. Only the small-scale farmers of China and Japan appear to have been able maintain consistently healthy soil over centuries (aided enormously by their techniques for safely recycling both animal and human waste).
The main contributing factor to humanity’s soil-building failures has been a combination of population growth and an impatience with gradualism. As Europe’s much-plowed soils were running out of fertility, European colonialists replaced it with the Peruvian seabird waste known as guano. As guano supplies diminished, German chemists developed the Haber-Bosch process to produce artificial nitrogen fertilizer. Artificial fertilizers also became one of the pillars of the so-called “Green Revolution” of the 1960s, that temporarily rescued farmers worldwide from depleted soils and diminished harvests.
You know the rest of the story: monocultures, fertilizer runoff, Monsanto, glycosophate, herbicide-resistant “superweeds,” and a steady decrease in soil fertility that all of the ministrations of Big Ag have only made worse (requiring still more artificial inputs).
What Montgomery has discovered, however, is that we seem to have reached a genuine tipping point that is taking us back to soil and its neglected life-giving potential. One of my favorite moments in the book occurs when Montgomery, the bearded “Left Coast” professor is invited to speak to a group of Kansas farmers.
Did he look like this? More gardeners ought to wear overalls. They’re both comfortable and practical. Just be careful not to walk into the Stone Oven coffee house like this!
“As I ended my talk I looked out on a sea of baseball hats. One elderly fellow in the middle stood up, stuffed his hands down into his pockets, and said he’d taken one look at me and didn’t think I could possibly say anything worth listening to. I braced myself for what was to come. But then he surprised me. He said the more I talked, the more sense I had made. He’d seen what I was talking about on his farm. It no longer had the rich fertile topsoil his grandfather had plowed. Something needed to change if his own grandchildren were going to prosper working his land.”
What has also changed is soil science. Mycorrhizal fungi were only named and their function thoroughly described by German scientist A.B. Frank in 1885. Frank contended that mycorrhizal fungi and plants worked in a vital system of symbiosis, with plants trading sugars made via their unique process of photosynthesis for minerals which fungi’s chemical exudates were uniquely able to mine. Frank’s findings flew in the face of conventional wisdom and went through waves of acceptance and dismissal throughout the following century. Yet today we recognize the plant/fungal relationship as the most fundamental to life on land. Neither biological domain could exist on earth without the other (let alone us animals!).
Sara Wright in her lab.
The power of the plant/fungal relationship has only really come into focus in the last 20+ years. In 1996 Sara F. Wright, a U.S.D.A. scientist, first identified glomalin, the mycorrhizal exudate that gives good soil its crumbly texture and, at a micro-level, allows bacteria and fungi to perform their most soil-enhancing functions. (Why hasn’t Sara Wright won a Nobel Prize!)
At the same time, scientists’ recent ability to decode genomes has revealed a vast, previously unknown realm of microbiological life. To soil scientists the soil microbiome is still, literally, terra incognita. We know enough, however, to understand why the trio of conservation agriculture practices that Montgomery describes work so powerfully together.
No or minimal tillage allows mycorrhizal fungi to extend their appendages called hyphae. These hyphae, in turn, mine rock and other geological formations for otherwise inaccessible minerals. They also merge with other like fungi and thus create a vast underground network that, sensing some plant’s need for phosphorous, can both mine and deliver it.
Vetch fixes nitrogen and is a great cover crop.
Cover crops supply their own package of nutrients, including nitrogen (e.g. vetch) and phosphorous (e.g. buckwheat). Harvesting them off above the root, moreover, leaves carbon compounds in the soil to feed all the fungi and other microbiota.
Rotation of multiple crops, the third component of conservation agriculture, follows the lesson that almost every veteran tomato grower knows: One crop in place year after year eventually attracts more natural enemies than it can handle. The more varied crops, the safer they all become. Moreover, different crops access different mycorrhizal species and networks, as well different minerals. (E.g. sunflowers, which draw up zinc and make it available to the other crops around them).
The lesson: in diversity there is redundancy and strength. All three practices conserve carbon and build soil. In fact, Montgomery cites a 2014 Rodale Institute that estimates that complete worldwide conversion to conservation agriculture could offset almost three-quarters of then current global emissions. This might not be as pie-in-sky as a realist might imagine. Montgomery emphasizes throughout how profitable regenerative conservation agriculture can be for farmers (not, however, for suppliers of agri-chemicals!).
Montgomery has clearly written this book for the next potential generation of farmer converts to conservation agriculture and to their potential policymaker supporters. But the predominantly gardener readers of Gardenopolis Cleveland will find the book a useful mirror by which to judge their own practices and act as even more informed consumers. The book is accessible in a comfortable journalistic way, but the reader is always aware that, when required, Montgomery can draw on his deep scientific training to summarize, accept and/or dismiss scientific studies as appropriate.
Some other tidbits/insights:
–Montgomery notes that many “organic” farmers fall short—and their crops suffer- -when it comes to implementing conservation agriculture. The more enlightened seem to be adopting some of the techniques of conventional agriculture—like every once-in-while application of a fungicide—to get their conservation agriculture trio of practices into proper balance. Despite my description above, soil and circumstances vary, and there seems to be a emerging productive middle ground, albeit still with very low chemical inputs.
–The two biggest obstacles to widespread adoption of conservation agriculture in the U.S.? The first, predictably, is Big Ag, the complex of seed, agri-chemicals, equipment producers, and food distributors. These companies dominate U.S. agricultural research and educational funding not to mention the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. They are also the only entities to consistently profit off the current system. The second, more surprisingly, is crop insurance. The ability of make money even through crop failure keeps our present destructive system in place. Montgomery seems to take special pleasure in describing how well off financially the new conservation agriculture farmers—who pay exponentially less for chemical and other inputs—have become–to the point of fancy wine cellars!. Most are so profitable they don’t bother with crop insurance, even if it is federally subsidized.
–Smaller really is beautiful. Conservation agriculture with its multiplicity of crops tends to lend itself to much smaller farms than the as-far-as-the-eye-can-see, massive monoculture systems. Because the former are more profitable, they may also make room for more -farmers and more prosperous small towns to serve them. Check out this video to see what can happen.
Could a more prosperous rural America close our current rural/urban political divide?
–Finally, a special point of pride for Ohioans. Rattan Lal, whom I’ve mentioned on this blog before, and David Brandt, a farmer near Columbus, emerge as towering heroes of this book. After reading this book, you’ll appreciate these two state treasures even more.
(This is the inaugural installment of what we at Gardenopolis Cleveland hope will become an ongoing series. Have you read something in a gardening book or blog or article that made you want to try something new? How did it work out for you? We’re looking for short, pithy articles not only from editors, but from you, the reader.)
Garden Experiment #1: Sorghum-Sudan Grass
One of the garden “stars” in Michael Phillips’ book Mycorrhizal Planet is Sorghum-Sudan grass (sorghum sudanese). This annual grows up to 12 feet tall very rapidly, especially in hot weather, thus creating lots of compostable biomass. But it has two other special virtues: 1) Its roots can provide habitat for up to 50 species of mycorrhizal fungi. And 2) when mowed, the plant responds by expanding its root mass, sometimes by a factor of two. That means lots of carbon for microflora to feast on during the next growing season.
If ever soil needed more carbon, it was the garden plot I inherited at the Oxford Community Garden in Cleveland Heights. Light tan in color, it was clearly more dirt than soil. Weeds like thistle (that thrive in calcium-and phosphorous-deficient soil) loved it. Although I reserved one strip of my plot for an attempt at tomatoes (aided by some calcium sulfate and worm castings), I seeded the rest in July with sorghum-sudan grass along with a multi-species, mycorrhizal-based fertilizer with the brand name of Dr. Earth. I bought the latter at Home Depot, something that would have been impossible just a few years ago before mycorrhizal additives started to go mainstream.
The seed (5 lbs. that I bought online at seedranch.com for just $15) was easy to sow, though it required coverage from bird-proof netting. (Flocks of birds flew away as I approached the garden after my initial broadcast planting!) The seed germinated right away and quickly dominated the plot.
Then, in early October, I trimmed the grass with hedge clippers. The cut grass should be no less than six inches high, Phillips says, for the best post-trimming root expansion. Next spring is when I’ll take a mulching mower to the process. Then I plan to plant right into the plant-stubbled soil. I’ll let you know what results.
This idea comes from the far corners of the Web, where hairy counterculturists congregate. (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7TJwh5nu9Y and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD4kDo0Z7Y4). These videos drew me in because stinging nettle has become one of my favorite garden vegetables. It’s great with garlic and eggs for breakfast and in evening meal main courses such as stinging nettle lasagna. And, as permaculturists know, stinging nettle offers twice the nutritional value of even vitamin-and-mineral-rich mainstream vegetables such as spinach. (I tell my permaculture classes that nettles have developed a sting for the same reason that banks install alarms: to protect valuables stored inside! Fortunately, deer don’t wear gloves or know how to steam the leaves to neutralize the formic acid sting, so stinging nettle offers the added benefit of being herbivore-free!)
Stinging nettle seed is just as rich in nutrients as the leaves. This year, with regular rains extending into July, my stinging nettle seed crop was exceptionally robust. How much effort, I asked myself, would it take to collect the seed and was it worth the effort?
I was feeling pressed for time, so, as a test, I just cut the six longest stalks and dumped them top first into a refuse bag. There they sat drying (until I remembered them!) for almost two months. Then I cut off the little bunches of seed pods and pressed them into a colander. Voila! Tiny black seeds emerged on the other side. We then roasted them with a little salt and oil. The result: nutty and crunchy.
Critically, the roasted nettle seeds pass the all-important “wife test.” They added a nice crunchy texture to the rice and veggie lunch we prepared. We thought, however, they might stand out best on simpler dishes such as scrambled eggs or plain rice.
In terms of future garden productivity, the newly-discovered edibility of stinging nettle seed extends the harvest season of what has become, for us, a staple crop. The leaves are at their best from May through June, but become less digestible when plants start to flower in July. (One of the visual pleasures of a breezy July day is to watch wind-borne clouds of nettle pollen drift past their neighbors.) Now we can harvest seed in quantity, roast it, and enjoy it during the winter months.
It is common knowledge, both among scientists and educated consumers, that food is less nutritious than it used to be.Here’s a chart that shows how great mineral loss was between 1950 and 1999:
Later studies confirm that the situation has only worsened. One familiar culprit is the need by our modern industrial food system to require “efficiencies:”synthetic fertilizers, plant breeds that withstand long distance shipping, feed-lot-fattened meat, etc.Less familiar, is humanities’ fatal dietary flaw, its sweet tooth that can’t resist anything sugary.As Jo Robinson relates in her great book, Eating on the Wild Side, even blueberries, those alleged carriers of anti-cancer, anti-everything-bad nutrition, have lost much of their natural potency through over-breeding to accommodate humanity’s too-sweet palates. The more sour the blueberries, the better they are for you.(Robinson recommends the semi-wild “Rubel” variety. Sour, but good for you.
Two recent developments that shed new light on the nutrition issue, however, caught my eye.First, the bad news:Declining nutritive value may well also be a consequence of the general rise in CO₂ concentration in Earth’s atmosphere.Carbon dioxide not only causes global warming, it also speeds photosynthesis and, with it, plant metabolism.Multiple scientific studies now show that this process weakens uptake of vital mineral nutrients like zinc.The most convincing evidence of causality is that even non-crops like goldenrod, samples of which have been collected and preserved since the 19th Century, have also lost nutritional content.The only variable, apparently, affecting goldenrod has been rising CO₂ concentration.
Please Don’t Eat the Goldenrod
This is especially depressing news since it identifies a variable that impossible for individuals to correct on their own. Even if you work to balance micro-nutrients in your own garden, global conditions will always be tugging in the opposite direction.
But don’t give up hope. The second item I noticed (the good news) gives us at least some chance to take better nutrition, quite literally, into our own hands.It’s a prospective I-Phone app—a Bionutrient Meter– that will allow you to perform an instant spectroscopic analysis on fruits and vegetables in grocery bins.Does that spinach at Whole Foods contain the iron you want it to?Or does the farmer’s market offering outperform it? Just point and click. And the larger question: Will a small army of consumers demanding better nutrition put enough pressure on suppliers to change their standards?
*I’m ignoring here the far worse role played by manufacturers of highly processed food scientifically formulated to create junk food addictions among naïve populations.For a truly depressing, but well-reported article that includes a quote from Cleveland’s (and Switzerland’s) own Nestle Corporation, see https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/16/health/brazil-obesity-nestle.html?_r=0
** (bionutrient.org.Note that “bionutrient” is not plural.Adding an “s” will take you to the wrong website.)
Nutrient News (You Can Use) II
It may be news to you that many good elderberry recipes exist.Although American use of these tiny, astringent black fruits is pretty much limited to elderberry jelly and elderberry wine, European cooks take them much more seriously.This is a good thing, since elderberries are off the charts in their nutritional value—double, for example, the anti-oxidant power of even the most nutritious blueberry. (Sorry, Rubel blueberries! See above.)
Sambucus Nigra, a European variety, though we also use the North American Sambucus Canadensis*
The best sources for many of these recipes are online and often not in English. But don’t let that stop you! All you have to do is look up the foreign word for the fruit you contemplate cooking, enter that and the foreign word for recipe, and you’ll get an extraordinary variety of good ideas. Just right-click on any given recipe, and it will appear in English. It’s really that simple, with only a mental barrier to stop you.
In the case of elderberry, several years ago I looked up its German translation, “Holunder” and the German word for recipe, “Rezept.” The resulting search led to a fruit compote that has become a family favorite.The genius of this particular dish is that it takes the “bass note” astringency of elderberries and lemon peel and matches them with the treble notes of sweeter pears and plums.The result is an unusual symphony of fruit flavor that we like on ice cream and on cereal.
Here’s a free adaptation of the recipe:
8 firm pears
1 liter water
1 lemon, juice and zest
1.5 Kg of Italian prune plums, de-stoned
1 Kg of elderberries
400 g sugar(yes, the best flavor requires some additional refined sugar sweetness!)
Core the pears and chop into bite-sized chunks, add water and lemon zest, then cook until almost tender.Add the plum halves, elderberries, sugar, and lemon juice and bring to a boil.Reduce to a simmer for 30 minutes. We pour into jelly jars and freeze.
*The elderberry bush is an especially useful permaculture shrub since it allows easy “function stacking”—the permaculture term for getting multiple benefits out of the same piece of land.In our case, we grow tasty king stropharia mushrooms in wood chips in the shaded soil beneath the elderberry bushes, which, in turn, benefit from the decomposed-wood-chip soil.We also grow groundnuts, a frequently-found-in-nature companion plant to elderberries. The groundnuts vines curl up the elderberry bush branches, even as its roots fix nitrogen and feed the plants around them.Three foods in one patch of ground, ever better soil, more nitrogen, plus a privacy hedge between us and our neighbors.Now that’s function stacking! (Though it’s taken more time than I thought it would.)
The story begins with well-intentioned advice from an expert horticulturist friend who suggested Canadian anemone for my backyard Food Forest.“Yes, it’s a little invasive, but it’s such a great plant for wildlife!” (As I remember her comment.)
And her assessment has proven at least partially true.Not only do the white blossoms attract diverse insect pollinators, but the roots provide an unusually hospitable home to worms, millipedes, and, no doubt, trillions of other creatures (food to the aforementioned invertebrates) visible only via a microscope.
( Canadian anemone looking innocent)
I observed some of this soil life cornucopia as I tried to pull out proliferating Canadian anemone, which wants to pop up everywhere it’s moist.When it can, it tries to squeeze out any competitors with a thick, fine matt of roots that covers every millimeter of soil surface; with a Cape Cod scraper it comes off like a soil-infused, hairy human scalp.The moist root mass and regular root die-off probably explains the thriving microbe-to-worm food chain.So, while I was aggravated by the plant’s aggressive spread, I was delighted by the rich soil it left behind.Talk about tilth!
( What’s left after weeding Canadian anemone: beautiful soil)
Remembering the permaculture mantra “The Problem is the Solution”, I resolved to keep some Canadian anemone and use it as a nutrient factory for a deeper-rooted plant—the goji berry bush. The roots don’t compete and the anemone root nutrients would trickle down. And, in fact, the combination planting caused an explosion of goji berry production.When lecturing our various permaculture classes, I liked to pull out this home-developed solution to illustrate permaculture principles in action.
Goji Berries with Canadian Anemone
Alas, even permaculture principles have their limits.I never found enough time to keep my Canadian anemone under control.My Food Forest floor was overrun.It was either get rid of Canadian anemone once and for all or sacrifice too much space to a non-edible, aggressive invader.(I’ll have to find some other productive ground cover for my goji berries.)
That’s what I’m doing this August. Elimination, of course, requires multiple passes as the Canadian anemone rhizomes refuse to die off.But, by September, I think they’ll be gone or, at most, require occasional plucking.
( Canadian anemone returning for a second try.They’ll be gone soon!)
One silver lining:the beautiful soil they’ve left appears ideal for planting shade-loving salad greens.Witness my happy new komatsuma sprouts.
Stinging Nettle: A Potential Frenemy Becomes a Generous Friend.
I’ve had better luck with stinging nettle.It could have become annoyingly aggressive, but has pretty much stayed along the south edge of my raspberry patch.There it accumulates calcium and magnesium, among other minerals, which become more easily available to other neighboring plants.Thus, its frequent inclusion in lists of superior companion plants.
But stinging nettle is good for us, too. According to Martin Crawford, author of Creating an Edible Forest Garden, stinging nettle contains approximately double the nutrients of even our most nutritious annuals like spinach.It is also tasty when cooked. (That’s when it also, conveniently, loses its chemical sting.)
(Stinging nettle and mushroom omelet)
In growing it, I’ve discovered one other benefit: cutting the fresh young tip—the sweetest and most edible– causes the plant to respond with three more of the same! Production triples and, with further cuttings, sometimes even more.
(a second flush of stinging nettle leaves)
Unlike my Canadian anemone experiment: a clear winner!
