Is Recession Preparing a New Breed of Survivalist? [Survival Today

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A Houseplant Harvest—Tropical Trees That Really Do Fruit Indoors
Plants & Gardens News Volume 19, Number 3 | Fall/Winter 2005
by Scott D. Appell

When you live on a small tropical island, as I do, you learn quickly—à la Robinson Crusoe—that it pays to be self-sufficient. Recently, I’ve been collecting and propagating fruiting tropical shrubs and small trees on my four-acre property in Vieques, Puerto Rico, like a man with a mission. My ultimate goal is to supply my own table with a diverse mix of fresh produce year-round, grow enough surplus fruit to be able to vend to local restaurateurs, and establish a modest nursery and display garden.
Carissa macrocarpa

Carissa macrocarpa

In my former life as a New Yorker, I used to buy exotic fruits in the city’s ethnic food markets and germinate their seeds as houseplants. (This practice was nothing new; indeed, it’s a popular hobby, with its own gardening club—the Rare Pit and Plant Council—or, less formally, “The Pits.”) Avocados, mangos, litchis, star fruit, sapodillas, tamarinds, carobs, and citrus of all kinds made up my indoor orchard. They were all very decorative as foliage plants, but none flowered and bore fruit in my urban loft.

When I moved to the Caribbean a few years ago, I encountered a vast array of good-looking fruiting plants, some of them familiar to me only from books. Many were endemic to the region. After careful observation—and tasting—I compiled from their ranks a list of species that will make marvelous additions to the indoor-plant pantheon. What’s more, with proper care and a little pollinator know-how (see Indoor Pollinating Tips below), you can count on them to really fruit indoors.

Not that you’ll be filling Steuben crystal fruit bowls full of windowsill-grown goodies: The indoor harvest from these plants is small and intermittent, and the fruits themselves are not that large. But this doesn’t mean you’ll be reduced to inconsequential nibbling. Let your freezer become your new best friend. When the fruit matures, pick and store it in freezer bags until there’s enough to work with. Then let your imagination go wild! Purée the fruits as a base for ice creams, sherbets, mousses, and jams. Bake them in pies and tarts. Use them to make stewed compotes and Hungarian fruit soups. The possibilities are endless.

Here are a few of my current favorites to consider growing indoors. At least one species, Surinam cherry, has become invasive in tropical and subtropical areas around the world, but inside it is unlikely to do much harm and can be mighty tasty.
Carissa macrocarpa (Natal plum)

A familiar houseplant and indoor bonsai subject in cool climes, Carissa macrocarpa is indigenous to the coastal region of Natal, South Africa—hence the common name. A vigorous, spreading, woody shrub, it grows up to 18 feet tall, produces handsome, broad, evergreen foliage, and equips its branches with stout Y-shaped spines. Its two-inch-long tubular flowers are white and sweetly fragrant. The oval fruit of the Natal plum can grow up to two inches long and 1¼ inches wide. As it ripens, the skin turns a bright magenta red. The flesh is tender, very juicy, strawberry-colored, and flavored with flecks of milky sap. The small seeds are unobjectionable and are usually eaten. When fully ripe, the protein-rich fruit can be consumed out of hand or made into jellies, syrups, gelatin-based desserts, pies, and tarts.

The Natal plum is generally drought-resistant, but don’t allow the soil to dry out too much between waterings. Provide a sunny exposure and give your plant a summer vacation outdoors, if possible. Fertilize it regularly with any all-purpose water-soluble plant food. Cuttings are terribly difficult to root, so starting from seed is the best method of propagation.
Eugenia uniflora (Surinam cherry)
Eugenia uniflora

Eugenia uniflora

Indigenous to Surinam and French Guiana, the Surinam cherry has become naturalized throughout the Caribbean. It’s also a very popular hedging plant in southern Florida. A slender shrub or tree, it grows up to 25 feet tall and produces spreading branches with aromatic foliage. The flowers are white and long-stalked, and look like powder puffs. The thin-skinned, ¾- to 1½-inch-wide fruit has multiple ribs and matures from green to bright red and finally to a dark plum color. Its flesh is tender, very juicy, and tartly sweet to taste. It’s also high in vitamin A. There may be one fairly large seed or three smaller ones. The seeds are extremely resinous and should not be eaten. The fruit ripens quickly, often three weeks after flowering. It is generally eaten out of hand or chilled and sprinkled with sugar.

The Surinam cherry prefers a sunny location but is not particularly fussy about potting soil. Let the soil dry out between waterings. Fertilize it regularly during active growth, flowering, and fruiting—usually in late summer.
Malpighia emarginata (Barbados cherry)
Malpighia emarginata

Malpighia emarginata

Native to the Lesser Antilles from St. Croix to Trinidad, the Barbados cherry is a handsome small tree that grows up to 20 feet tall. It has an erect habit with waxy, oblong, dark green foliage. Its charming, delicate, highly decorative flowers are borne in twos and threes along the stem, and each one possesses five pink or lavender spoon-shaped, fringed petals. The plant produces three-lobed, inch-wide, tangy, bright-red berries that are wonderfully juicy and refreshing. They are also extremely high in vitamin C, second only to the rose hips of Rosa rugosa. Each berry’s three small hard seeds may be eaten or removed, depending on personal preference. Commercial plantations of Barbados cherry can be found in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Florida. One cultivar of the plant, ‘Florida Sweet’, was selected in 1956 for its larger-than-usual fruit and applelike, semisweet flavor.

Give the Barbados cherry a sunny southern or southwestern exposure, away from drafts. A fertile, well-drained potting mixture with a pH of 5.5 to 6.5 is ideal. Let the soil dry out slightly between waterings, and do not let the plant sit in a saucer of excess runoff. Employ an acidifying fertilizer during growth and flowering, generally from late winter through late summer. Propagation is usually from half-ripe tip cuttings.
Indoor Pollinating Tips

In their natural habitat, tropical fruiting plants have their own pollinators. Hummingbirds, bananaquits, butterflies, bees, beetles, ants, moths, and bats all do their job to fertilize flowers that will subsequently develop into fruit. Obviously, we lack this fauna in our urban high-rise apartments and suburban homes. Although all the plants profiled here have perfect flowers (that is, they possess both male and female organs and are self-fertile), they need a little help in the pollination department. Assist fruit set by employing a small camel’s hair paintbrush to transfer pollen from the anthers to the stigmatic surface. You don’t have to be too precise, simply jiggle the floral parts about a bit with the brush.
Myrcia floribunda (rumberry, guavaberry)

The rumberry is native to the Caribbean and southern Mexico. An attractive large shrub or small tree, it can grow up to 50 feet tall outdoors but only gets up to around 6 feet indoors. It sports reddish-brown, exfoliating bark on mature wood and glossy, dark green foliage. The flowers are small, white, powder puff-like, and borne in clusters. The dark red to near black fruit grows about half an inch in diameter and has a highly aromatic but somewhat bitter taste, reminiscent of elderberries. Generally, the fruit is enjoyed out of hand, but it’s also used to make preserves for fruit tarts. In the Caribbean, it’s a popular ingredient in numerous alcoholic beverages.

The rumberry prefers full sun and a moisture-retentive but well-drained soil. Allow the soil to remain barely moist but not soggy; a terra-cotta pot may help. The plant needs a sunny exposure and is very sensitive to winter drafts.
Pereskia aculeata (Barbados gooseberry)
Pereskia aculeata

Pereskia aculeata

Named in honor of the French scholar Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the genus Pereskia boasts the unique characteristic of being one of the few cactaceous genera to bear true leaves. Pereskia aculeata, the Barbados gooseberry, is indigenous to the West Indies, the northern coast of South America, and Panama. A clambering shrub that becomes a loosely climbing vine with age, it produces spiny, fleshy stems and elliptical, semideciduous dark green leaves. Panicles of long-lasting, lemon-scented, creamy-white flowers appear in fall. Upon pollination, one- to two-inch-wide oval or pear-shaped yellow to red fruits develop. When fully ripe, the fruits are juicy, tart, and very tasty. Their soft brown seeds are easily eaten. The fruits may be consumed fresh out of hand or stewed. They are very high in Vitamin A and calcium. The leaves and stems can also be cooked and eaten as greens.

The Barbados gooseberry requires full sun. Use a fertile, compost-enhanced but impeccably drained soil. Add plenty of coarse sand to improve drainage, and be sure to use a terra-cotta pot—the plant is very sensitive to overwatering. Feed it during active growth with your favorite water-soluble fertilizer. Propagation is easy from seeds or half-ripe stem cuttings.
Punica granatum var. nana (dwarf pomegranate)

Steeped in history, mythology, folklore, and romance, the pomegranate needs little introduction. Native from Iran to northern India, the small tree has been cultivated since ancient times throughout the Mediterranean regions of Asia, Africa, and Europe. Though the straight species can grow between 20 and 30 feet tall, the dwarf pomegranate, Punica granatum var. nana, reaches around 3 feet—but it can bloom when it’s only about a foot tall. It’s a wonderful container plant and is frequently used for indoor bonsai. The leaves are evergreen (except under extreme drought conditions), lance-shaped, and leathery in texture. Showy red, white, or pinkish flowers are borne at the ends of new growth. The rounded fruit of the dwarf pomegranate is about two inches wide and red when ripe. It contains transparent sacs of tart, flavorful, reddish pulp surrounding angular, hard seeds. Though these sacs are edible out of hand, I prefer to juice them and use the resulting liquid as a natural colorant for cream cheese and cake frosting, and as a mixer for sparkling water and cocktails. Pomegranates are high in potassium and have fair amounts of vitamin C and phosphorus.

The dwarf pomegranate is easy to cultivate indoors. It requires a semiarid climate, but keep it away from radiators and heating vents—arid is one thing, desiccating is another. Use a good-quality potting soil amended with lime, and plant in a terra-cotta container. Let the soil dry out between waterings, and don’t let the pot sit in a saucer of excess runoff. Fertilize it regularly in spring and summer. Dwarf pomegranates are easily propagated from seed and hardwood cuttings.
Nursery Sources:
The Banana Tree
715 Northampton Street
Easton, PA 18042
610-253-9589
Exotica Rare Fruit Nursery
2508-B East Vista Way
Vista, CA 92084
760-724-9093
Top Tropicals Botanical Center
11351 Orange Dr.
Davie, FL 33330
Toll-free: 1-866-897-7957
www.toptropicals.com

Scott D. Appell is former director of horticulture for the St. George Village Botanical Garden on St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. He lives, writes, gardens, and teaches horticulture and is developing his dream home and four-acre public garden, La Casa Botanica, in Vieques, Puerto Rico.

Top photo © Gerald D. Carr.
Other photos courtesy of TopTropicals.com.

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Manhattan Marmalade—Growing Citrus Indoors for Delicious Preserves
Plants & Gardens News Volume 19, Number 3 | Fall 2004/Winter 2005
by Scott D. Appell

The first time I grew a citrus tree indoors from seed was more than 30-odd years ago (a fact I rarely admit), when my grandparents brought back some freshly picked tree-ripened grapefruit from their annual midwinter pilgrimage to Florida. At first I wasn’t mightily impressed—the fruits weren’t even bright yellow like the ones from the grocery store! Rather, they were an unappetizing lime-green color (which is quite natural, incidentally—commercially grown citrus often have their skins artificially “degreened” by exposure to ethylene gas). What’s more, I had been taught by my family to be suspicious of anything “picked” (i.e., anything that hadn’t done time on a supermarket shelf).

However, at the insistence of Bubbi Irene, I tried one. And it was truly delicious. But what fascinated me most was a grapefruit seed I found already germinating inside the fruit! I immediately ran for a small terra-cotta pot and some potting soil. The rest, as they say, is history. Over the years, the resulting tree and I both grew, and I found myself devotedly lugging my surprisingly spiny and unfloriferous charge from state to state and home to home.
Citrus maxima.

Pummelo (Citrus maxima.)
Photograph courtesy of Top Tropicals.

Fast-forward to the present day. Sadly, my pet tree has departed to that big old grapefruit grove in the sky, but it has left me with a deep appreciation for citrus plants as indoor landscaping options (even for gardeners in tiny Manhattan apartments). I adore and recommend their handsome, aromatic foliage, their shapely, colorful, and tasty fruit, and their unforgettably fragrant, waxy-white flowers, which can perfume an entire home.

As we are all aware, many familiar citrus are readily available for purchase in even the most humble of groceries: Oranges (Citrus sinensis), lemons (C. limon), and grapefruits (C. x paradisi) abound. Be aware that currently limes (C. aurantifolia) are available only in seedless cultivars such as ‘Bearss’ (yes, that’s two s’s). More recently, greengrocers have begun to stock mandarin oranges (C. reticulata ‘Clementine’), Meyer lemons (C. meyeri), and pummelos (C. maxima). Specialty stores sell such citrus as the bizarre, clawlike Buddha’s hand (Citrus medica ‘Fingered’) and the bumpy-skinned etrog (Citrus medica ‘Etrog’)—a fruit held sacred in the Old Testament and enjoyed during the autumnal Jewish Feast of the Tabernacles. All of these fruits can be grown from seed into beautiful houseplants.

Citrus are easy to cultivate indoors. Plant seeds immediately upon removal from fruit—contrary to popular belief, the seeds don’t like to dry out. Start with a small pot and transplant the young plants as needed. Seedlings will need plenty of water, but don’t let them sit in a saucer of excess runoff: Citrus hate wet feet. Use a compost-rich, well-draining, slightly acidic soil (about 5.5 to 6.0 in pH). Employ an acidifying fertilizer made specifically for citrus, as these plants have particular requirements for micronutrients that most fertilizers don’t contain. A very sunny, cool window is the ideal location for cultivating your citrus.

Citrus trees grown from seed rarely flower and produce fruit. However, their fragrant leaves can be dropped into hot bathwater to impart a wonderful perfume. They can be added to stuffings, stews, and roasts or placed within the cavities of fish and fowl to add a delightful citrus flavor. Citrus leaves can be used in Thai stir-fries (leaves of the Kaffir lime, Citrus hystrix, are especially good for this). They can also be placed in the bottom of canning jars to impart a redolent tang to jams, jellies, chutneys, relishes, and marmalades.

The commercially grown citrus trees laden with fruit we observe in California and Florida are always grafted—usually on a distant Citrus cousin, the trifoliate orange (Poncirus trifoliata). However, small-statured flowering and fruiting citrus such as the Othaheite orange (Citrus x limonia) and ‘Eureka’ lemon (Citrus limon ‘Eureka’) are easily found in garden centers or can be purchased from nurseries. (A good mail-order source is Edible Landscaping, P.O. Box 77, Afton, VA 22920; 800-524-4156; www.eat-it.com.) These plants will bloom in late winter or early spring and produce harvestable fruit in about six months.
Scott’s Manhattan Marmalade

* 3 lbs. whole, unblemished homegrown or store-bought citrus, scrubbed clean
* 6 lbs. (12 cups) granulated sugar
* Cointreau or Yukon Jack liqueur
* Citrus leaves (any type), whole and unbruised

Simmer the fruit in 15 cups of water until the skin is tender and easily pierced. Remember that fruit of different sizes will become soft at different times—remove them with a slotted spoon as they become soft. Cool and halve the fruit, and remove the seeds. Reserve the cooking liquid. Put the seeds in a muslin bag used for bouquets garni and tie with string to suspend in the cooking marmalade. Pulse the citrus halves in a food processor—do not overprocess. Place the citrus back into the cooking liquid along with the sugar. Bring to a boil and cook vigorously for 10 minutes. Remove the bag of seeds. Stir in no more than 4 liquid ounces of the liqueur. Sterilize canning jars in a boiling water bath. Place a citrus leaf or two in the bottom of each hot sterilized jar, pour in the hot marmalade, and seal according to the jar manufacturer’s instructions. (For information on preserving food safely, visit Clemson University’s Cooperative Extension Service website at http://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheets/HGIC3000.htm.) The yield will vary according to jar size. The marmalade will keep for up to six months refrigerated.

Scott D. Appell is a regular contributor to BBG publications and the author of four books, Pansies, Lilies, Tulips, and Orchids. He lives and gardens on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico.

[For the wine makers on the thread....LOL, the devil made me post this one....granny]

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Hangover Helper—Herbal Remedies for the Overindulgent Holiday Maker
Plants & Gardens News | Volume 19, Number 3 | Fall 2004/Winter 2005
by Ilene Sternberg
Cheers

Illustration by Peggy Fussell.

Once again, the holiday season approaches. And once again, dark armies of honey-baked ham, roast turkey, spiced pie, mulled wine, and fancy liquor gather on the horizon to launch an assault upon “innocent” merrymakers everywhere. No doubt millions of us will consume a few too many alcoholic beverages at some point during the festivities and wake up with throbbing heads, dry mouths, sore bellies, and halfhearted resolutions to never touch another drop ever again.

But what can you do when you wake up in such a state? Is there really such a thing as an effective hangover cure? Slabs of cold pizza? Buckets of hot coffee? Boiled tripe? Bananas? A strong Bloody Mary?

The medical consensus seems to be no. There are certain preventive measures you can take—most notably drinking a lot of water before calling it a night—which will help reduce the severity of an impending hangover. (Researchers at Tulane University, in New Orleans, have just released a study claiming that an extract of prickly pear cactus, taken five hours before drinking, diminishes the nastier aftereffects.) But most “cures” simply aim to ease one or more hangover symptoms. A hangover technically won’t end until all the alcohol has been metabolized and is out of your system.

Of course, you needn’t sit and suffer while your liver and other organs get the job done. Hangover helpers abound. And if you like to grow herbs, you may already have many garden-variety antidotes close at hand. Herbal hangover remedies go back a long way—perhaps even as far as the Neanderthals (60,000 years), who appear to have collected medicinal plants and may also have discovered the distinctive pleasures of an occasional draft of fermented berry juice.
Anatomy of a Hangover

Why do hangovers occur when we drink alcohol to the point of intoxication? There’s still debate over the exact physiological mechanisms, but several factors seem to be involved. Alcohol is a diuretic, so a hangover is partly due to dehydration and the body’s loss of essential salts like potassium and magnesium. Alcohol also directly interferes with blood-sugar levels and disrupts endocrine and immune-system function. Some scientists identify acetaldehyde, a toxic metabolite of alcohol (and also a carcinogen found in cigarette smoke, car exhaust, and embalming fluid), as the chemical culprit in hangovers.

Fatigue results from alcohol’s depressant effect and acidosis, a buildup of acids in the blood. Alcohol increases blood flow to the stomach, precipitating acid secretions that may lead to an upset tummy. Acetaldehyde may also lead to flushing—and a strong desire to flush oneself down the drain.

The type of alcohol consumed matters too. Darker, sweeter libations contain more congeners—chemical byproducts of the fermentation process—additives, or impurities. So, brandy, sherry, bourbon, scotch, red wine and whiskey, as well as cheap, poorly refined spirits, are likely to trigger a worse reaction than fine white wine or a premium vodka.

Mixing an assortment of alcoholic beverages and drinking on an empty stomach will exacerbate the aftereffects (food slows down alcohol’s absorption into the bloodstream). Lack of sleep also increases hangover susceptibility, and smoking provides additional toxins and promotes dehydration.
Taking the Herbal “Cure”

When you have a hangover, there is a standard procedure to follow. Ingest copious amounts of water, take some vitamin C, eat a light meal to stabilize blood sugar (if you can stomach it), and get some sleep. Pain relievers should be used with caution. Some may further irritate the stomach, and alcohol may amplify the toxic effects of acetaminophen on the liver.

As for plant-derived panaceas, some folks soothe a hangover with apples, lemon juice in water, ginger, pineapple, or fennel. Bitter herbs prescribed include dandelion, gentian, mugwort, and angostura—the same herb used in angostura bitters, a favorite hangover helper among bartenders.

California herbalist Christopher Hobbs, author of Handbook for Herbal Healing (Botanica Press, 1997), suggests mixing two parts each of passionflower, white willow, and wood betony to one part lavender, then steeping two teaspoons of the mixture in one cup of boiling water. (I assume he means for the concoction to be swallowed, as it seems unlikely that just brewing up the stuff will take one’s mind off the wretched discomfort.)

Many folk remedies include basil, black pepper, caraway, cinnamon, cardamom, coriander, forsythia, ginger, gotu kola (Centella asiatica), honeysuckle, lavender, lemongrass, milk thistle, onion, pennyroyal, peppermint, plantain, poppy seeds, rosemary, rue, tea, wintergreen, and yarrow. Mints contain antioxidants that supposedly impede some of the cellular damage alcohol causes. Of course, hot-pepper sauce and onions also contain antioxidants; they’re tough to down, however, when you’re kneeling before the porcelain altar.

Hangover antidotes are, of course, a worldwide phenomenon. Guatemalans use juice or tea of red roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa), while other Latin Americans generally recommend a beverage made of tamarind pulp. Korean scientists claim that fructose (fruit sugar) can speed up the body’s metabolism of alcohol by 25 percent, and they advocate ginseng root as a high-fructose herbal remedy. Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) seeds contain an enzyme that speeds up alcohol metabolism and have long been served at Japanese cocktail parties to prevent inebriation and its consequences.
Kudzu to the Rescue?

The most interesting and ubiquitous herbal remedy by far is kudzu (Pueraria montana var. lobata). Imported to the U.S. around the turn of the century as an ornamental vine, erosion-control agent, and livestock food supplement, kudzu quickly became an invasive menace and is now considered “the vine that ate the South.” People in North Carolina, Georgia, and other states below the Mason-Dixon Line can confirm that this twining tyrant grows as much as a foot a day in summer and can climb a pole or cover a house before you can say, “Kudzu please pass the pruning shears.”

However, the Chinese have been using kudzu’s starchy root tubers to treat headaches, hangovers, and alcohol dependency for at least 1,300 years. The tubers contain a chemical compound, daidzin, which has proved successful in suppressing both alcohol cravings and liquor’s intoxicating payoff upon entering the bloodstream.

Sold as a root or extract, kudzu is included in a morning-after tea called xing-jiu-ling, which essentially means “sober up.” Kudzu’s appeal is in its low toxicity levels and lack of side effects. In Japan, some prepared tea mixes sold in markets contain equal parts kudzu root, umeboshi (pickled plums), and ginger root, which has an antispasmodic effect on stomach muscles.

One theory contends that kudzu causes acetaldehyde to accumulate more rapidly in the blood, so that hangover symptoms occur during drinking instead of the next day. Taking one or two capsules of dried kudzu root or flowers with the first swig makes drinking less pleasurable and helps discourage a person from imbibing to excess. (Nothing beats getting sick early in the game.)

Good news for us and great news for alcoholic hamsters: Harvard scientists, recognizing China’s success with kudzu, observed that hamsters, happily consuming the human equivalent of a case of wine a day, rapidly lost their appetite for booze when treated with kudzu extracts and voluntarily cut their intake by half. The active ingredients in kudzu, once isolated, also outperformed the drugs prescribed to treat alcoholism in American patients.
More Plant-Derived Panaceas

There are dozens of herbal hangover tonics available in health-food stores and on the Web. One, aptly called Rebound, contains succinic acid (a key component of amber, which was used as far back as 1280 for stomach and rheumatic aches), fumaric acid (a common food additive), young barley grass juice powder (mmm-mmm!), dextrose, vitamin C, a few B vitamins, and other additives. The manufacturer claims that the stuff regulates the accumulation of acetaldehyde by slowing down alcohol absorption and speeding up the liver’s enzymatic conversion of acetaldehyde into a nontoxic acid.

The latest in hangover preparations to hit the market here and in the British Isles is RU-21. It has ingredients similar to those of Rebound and is touted to be a formula used by KGB agents to ply their targets with alcohol without suffering the aftereffects of drinking themselves.

Herbal treatments are generally not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but ask your doctor if it’s okay to raid the spice shelf or herb rack. And get his or her permission before dragging yourself out on the lawn to gnaw the dandelions, chomp on the forsythia hedge, crawl around in the herb garden, or chew the honeysuckle and kudzu for relief. Or perhaps just consider resolving once again never to behave like a Neanderthal on New Year’s Eve.

Ilene Sternberg is an award-winning garden writer and the author of Best Garden Plants of Pennsylvania (Lone Pine Publishing).

http://www.bbg.org/gar2/topics/sustainable/2005sp_rainwater_harvesting.html

[Interesting photos]

Rainwater Harvesting
Plants & Gardens News Volume 20, Number 1 | Spring 2005
by Robin Simmen

Although water may seem like a boundless resource, it is far from it. Only 2.5 percent of the planet’s water is fresh, and 74 percent of that is tied up in the polar icecaps. Groundwater accounts for another 25 percent, leaving just 1 percent of freshwater to be found in lakes, rivers, soil, and air. Due to population growth, drought, and pollution, groundwater resources are seriously declining. Today the world fights over oil; tomorrow (if not already) it will fight over water.

Gardeners can play a key role in conserving freshwater by harvesting rainwater. In addition to reducing demand on our water supplies—especially important during drought and summer (when 40 percent of all water is used outdoors)—rainwater harvesting reduces water pollution. In a rainstorm, oil, pesticides, animal waste, and fertilizers from our lawns, sidewalks, driveways, and streets are washed into sewers that often overflow into rivers and estuaries, contaminating fish and other wildlife. Rainwater harvesting prevents rain from becoming polluted stormwater and puts it to use where it falls.

The quality of rainwater is unsurpassed when it comes to watering plants and landscapes. Captured rainwater is free of the salts and pollutants associated with ground and surface water. In urban areas, the natural acidity of rainwater is good for soils that have become alkaline from cement-leached lime. The natural temperature of rainwater doesn’t shock plants with cold the way tap water can. Best of all, rainwater contains no chlorine, a chemical added to drinking water that inhibits plant growth. And rainwater is free!
Reviving an Ancient Practice

Rainwater harvesting began as early as 4,000 years ago in the Middle East, where runoff was collected in ditches for crop irrigation. Ancient Romans collected rainwater in underground cisterns and interior pools, where it slowly evaporated and cooled their homes. Up until a few generations ago, municipal water didn’t really exist in America, and many folks relied on captured rainwater to meet their needs. Even today, large areas of the world, including the entire continent of Australia, still depend primarily on rainwater for their water supply.
umbrellas

Jeff Anderson and Eric Zobrist designed these upside-down umbrellas to harvest rainwater for irrigation and to shade the Papago Buttes Corporate Plaza in Tempe, Arizona. (Photo © Heather Kinkade-Lavario)

Community gardeners have been among the first to revive rainwater harvesting in the U.S. In New York City, for example, since the drought of 2002, the Water Resources Group (WRG), a collaboration of community gardening and environmental organizations, has helped build demonstration rainwater harvesting systems in more than 20 community gardens. These systems together divert around 250,000 gallons of rainwater from NYC sewers each year.

Many cities have adopted creative, low-cost ways to stop wasting rainwater. Seattle Public Utilities has sponsored wildly successful sales of residential rain barrels, and Austin offers rebates of up to $500 for installation of rainwater harvesting systems. In Canada, Toronto offers a free service to homeowners to disconnect downspouts from the sewer system and install rain barrels, available at a discount.
Designing a Rainwater Harvesting System

Regardless of how much rain your area gets or how big your landscape is, you can design a rainwater harvesting system that works for you. The most common method of capturing rainwater for irrigation involves taking rain from building gutters and storing it in an outdoor tank or rain barrel.

Lenny Librizzi, assistant director at the Council on the Environment of NYC and a founding member of the Water Resources Group, says, “It isn’t easy to come up with ‘one size fits all’ instructions for building rainwater harvesting systems because of variations in styles of roofs, downspouts, storage tanks, and garden layouts. You have to use a combination of research, common sense, ingenuity, and dumb luck to design and build your system.”

Ideally, rainwater harvesting systems for irrigation include five basic components:

* Catchment or collection area—usually a roof;
* Transport for the water, such as gutters, downspouts, and piping;
* Roof washer to intercept the first flush of rain (plus any debris or bird feces) from the roof—usually a sealed downspout next to the main downspout;
* Storage tank or barrels;
* Gravity- or pump-driven system for distributing water to the garden.

Bear in mind that only nonpotable usage of rainwater is described here; harvesting rainwater for drinking involves several levels of filtration as well as chemicals for disinfection.

The first step in designing a rooftop system is to analyze (and, if you need to, change) the roof-surface materials. Roof material affects both the amount of water collected and its quality. For example: Porous asphalt shingles and rolled roofing are less desirable than smooth steel (although all are used successfully) because rough materials absorb more water and bird feces. Roofs made of wooden shingles treated with chromated copper arsenate are not appropriate for rainwater harvesting. Zinc antimoss strips mounted on roofs also produce toxic chemicals that you want to keep out of your garden.

Most people already have gutters and downspouts attached to their roofs to transport rainwater away from the building. Ideally, the gutters should be covered with a leaf screen to keep debris from entering the system. If you want to be able to divert water from your downspout during the growing season but shunt it back down the drain off-season, you can install a downspout diverter. These simple devices usually cost less than $20 at local hardware suppliers or on the Internet (for product information in this article, see “Rainwater Harvesting Resources”).

Numerous roof washers and diverters are available, ranging in price from around $50 to over $600. For example, the Smart-Valve, from Flo True International, can be adjusted to flush away the first 10 to 60 gallons of rainwater and accommodates roofs up to 2,500 square feet. However, many small-system rainwater harvesters forgo separate roof washers and depend solely on the screens built into their barrel lids to filter out debris.
barrels

Rain barrels can be hooked together with pipe to increase storage capacity. Note how these recycled barrels have been elevated on cinder blocks for better water pressure. (Photo © Lars Chellberg)

You can store rainwater in barrels, tanks, underground cisterns, or anything that protects it from contamination. Barrels made from dark materials block sunlight and discourage the growth of algae. A good rain barrel or tank has a tight-fitting cover to prevent evaporation and mosquito breeding. Water is heavy—a 500-gallon plastic tank filled with water can weigh more than two tons—so be sure your storage unit has a proper foundation and good support.

Rain barrels range in size from 40 to 80 gallons and, fitted with spigots and screened lids, sell from $60 to $200 a piece, but you can construct your own unit using recycled plastic barrels. These are widely available, especially from companies that ship food products. Instructions for outfitting your own rain barrels are available on the Internet and from the Water Resources Group. Rain barrels can be linked with hoses or pipes to gather water from one downspout, thus expanding storage capability. Be aware, however, that every hole and pipe fitting in your system represents an opportunity for leakage, probably the biggest problem you will face.

To figure out how much water you can collect from your roof, calculate your roof size and the average rainfall for your growing season. A good rule of thumb is that one inch of rainfall on a 1,000-square-foot roof produces 600 gallons of water. Maybe this is more than you bargained for in terms of storage, so be sure to install an overflow pipe near the lid of your system to carry away excess water.

To store a lot of water, you may want to invest in a polyethylene tank that can hold up to several thousand gallons. Be prepared to spend about one dollar per gallon of storage capacity. Polyethylene bladders are another alternative. Bladders can be ordered in many shapes and sizes for insertion into hard frames. Although bladders are relatively cheap compared with barrels and tanks, they don’t last as long. Look for polyethylene bladders that are UV stabilized and 20 to 30 millimeters thick.
Gardening With Rainwater

You’ll also need to move water to the landscape. Most simple systems are gravity fed, meaning the rain barrel or storage tank is elevated above the area being watered. Many gardeners build small platforms from concrete blocks for their rain barrels and secure the barrels against building walls. More elaborate foundations with concrete footings are required to stabilize larger tanks. Consider connecting a passive drip irrigation system to your rainwater supply via the main spigot or the overflow pipe. Hand pumps can be used to draw stored rainwater up from underground tanks or to move it uphill across landscapes. Solar-powered pumps are another renewable-energy option. At the very least, plan to fit a watering can under a spigot at the bottom of your tank or barrel.
tank

In 1998, Ole Ersson received approval from the city of Portland, Oregon, to use rainwater collected in this tank.

Don’t forget to design where the overflow will go! Every rainwater system has its storage limits and should be fitted with an overflow outlet. Planting a rain garden to absorb the overflow is one of the most creative ways of using it (see Janet Marinelli’s “Rain Gardens” in Plants & Gardens News, Spring 2004, vol. 19, no. 1). Or the overflow could be used to fill a dry streambed and send water to a thirsty grove of trees. You don’t have to waste a single drop.

Although rainwater harvesting systems are low-tech, they do require minimal yearly maintenance. In the spring, clean any winter debris from your gutters and roof. Inspect and clean tank lids and barrel tops, paying special attention to their vents. Fill the system with a few inches of water to check connections for leaks. In the fall, before the weather freezes, remove drain plugs from the bottoms of barrels and open the main spigot to drain all barrels and tanks so that trapped water doesn’t freeze, expand, and damage the system.
Rainwater Harvesting Resources
Further information

The NYC Water Resource Group has fact sheets on rainwater harvesting in community gardens, as well as instructions on how to make your own rainwater harvesting system from recycled barrels. E-mail rsimmen@bbg.org with your mailing address or call 718-623-7250 for more information. A book on rainwater harvesting, Forgotten Rain, by Phoenix-based landscape designer Heather Kinkade-Levario, can be purchased online at www.forgottenrain.com or by calling 602-952-9316. Detailed information on rainwater harvesting is available online (in PDF format) from the Texas Water Development Board, www.twdb.state.tx.us/publications/pub.asp.
Rain Barrels and Cisterns

Rain barrels are widely available. Two good sources are Clean Air Gardening (214-370-0530; www.cleanairgardening.com) and www.watersavers.com. A tool kit for outfitting your own recycled barrel can be purchased from the Garden Watersaver (604-274-6630; www.gardenwatersaver.com). Large, polyethylene tanks and cisterns are available from Snyder Industries (402-467-5221; www.snydernet.com). Tanks are also available from Arid Solutions Inc.Com (www.aridsolutionsinc.com).
Diverters and Roof Washers

Flo True International (512-775-8318; www.flotrue.com) sells the Smart-Valve roof-washing diverter. The Water Filtration Company (800-733-6953; www.waterfiltrationcompany.com) manufactures a filtering roof washer. Downspout diverters can be purchased from the Gardener’s Supply Company (888-833-1412; www.gardeners.com).

Robin Simmen manages the Brooklyn GreenBridge Community Horticulture Program at BBG. She was formerly an environmental planner in western Massachusetts, where she focused on land use and source-water protection.

http://www.bbg.org/gar2/topics/sustainable/2001su_beneficialbugs.html

Beneficial Bugs—Luring Predatory Insects to the Garden with Umbelliferous Plants
Plants & Gardens News Volume 16, Number 2 | Summer 2001
by Niall Dunne

The Apiaceae or Carrot Family is a grand old clan with a new name. (Until very recently, botanists called it the Umbelliferae.) It includes such common culinary favorites as coriander, dill, fennel, parsnip, anise, cumin, carrot, and parsley. Yum yum! But it also includes a lot of other plants that wouldn’t taste so good in your soup, such as hemlock (Conium maculatum), the poisonous species famously used to execute the ill-fated Socrates.

The Carrot Family is comprised of around 3,000 species—reflecting roughly 300 different genera—of mainly herbaceous plants native to temperate regions around the globe. It has the distinction of being the first plant family ever to have been systematically studied. (A copy of Robert Morison’s pioneering monograph of 1672, Plantarum umbelliferarum distributio nova, can be found in BBG’s rare book room.)
Beneficial Bugs

Dill (Anethum graveolens) attracting an ichneumon wasp

The family tie between these plants is clearly visible in their flower clusters, which generally look like miniature, flat-topped parasols. Botanically, these marvels of inflorescence are termed umbels (from the Latin word umbellula, meaning—hold on to your hats—”umbrella”). In a typical umbel, individual flower stalks arise from the same point on a primary stalk and stretch at different lengths so that the small flowers on top are all roughly on a level plane.

Folks as far back as the ancient Chinese, Greeks, and Romans were aware of the shared floral characteristics of some of the plants in the Apiaceae. They were also aware of the plants’ rich and varied chemistry, harvesting seeds and stalks and using them not only for food, but also perfume, medicine, and (as mentioned already) poisoning troublesome philosophers.

Historically, then, umbellifers have been of enormous biological importance as crop plants. In modern times, however, they have something else going for them as well: they’re very attractive to beneficial insects—the so-called “good bugs” that act as pollinators, soil builders, or predators of pest insects in the landscape. Plants with umbels are magnets for predatory bugs in particular.

Lovage (Levisticum officinale), for instance, is beguiling to ichneumon wasps, which parasitize the larvae of herbivorous insects. Similarly, fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) attracts, among other beneficial bugs, lady beetles that prey on aphids, scale insects, thrips, mealybugs, and mites. Dill (Anethum graveolens) is very adept at luring such insects as lacewings, whose larvae are well-known aphid-devouring machines.

This kind of knowledge is very useful in an age when people are becoming increasingly concerned about pesticide use on their food, and about the health of the environment in general. The ability to attract and maintain a population of beneficial insects is very important to any large- or small-scale pest management scheme that seeks to cut down on the use of chemical sprays.
Bug Banquets

Although beneficial insects consume large numbers of pestiferous bugs, they often have to supplement their protein diets with plant pollen and nectar. Indeed, many of these insects have certain phases in their life cycles when they depend entirely on nutrients collected from plants.

In recent years, agricultural and habitat management scientists have been conducting field research to try and determine which plants offer the best nectar and pollen resources to natural enemies of insect pests. One plant family consistently comes out at, or near, the top: the Apiaceae. (Members of the Asteraceae or Aster Family and Brassicaceae or Mustard Family also have proven track records.)

In one study conducted by Oregon State University in 1997, eleven plant species were randomly arranged in small plots alongside a field of corn. Researchers then measured the feeding frequency of aphidophagous (aphid-feeding) hoverflies on each plant. It turned out that coriander (Coriandrum sativum) was the plant most visited by the hoverflies in the early growing season. Fennel became the late-season plant of choice, after coriander had stopped blooming.

What makes umbelliferous plants so appealing to beneficial insects? Dr. May Berenbaum, head of Entomology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and author of Bugs in the System (Addison Wesley, 1995), summed it up nicely for me: “Small flowers with accessible nectar and a nice landing platform.”

Although predatory insects often have custom-fitted mouthparts for eating other bugs, they are generalists when it comes to feeding on nectar and pollen. Most of them are also on the smaller side. So, invariably, they seek out diminutive, closely spaced, easy-to-land-on flowers that are shallow but brimming with exposed grub. Other factors like bloom time, flower color (usually white or yellow in the Carrot Family), shelter, and presence of prey play an important role, too.

Botanists have recorded very little specialization in umbel-pollinator interactions. Umbelliferous flowers are morphologically so uniform and their insect visitors so varied that some scientists refer to the plants as being “promiscuous.” One might normally associate “promiscuity” with waywardness or a lack of discipline, but in the case of pest management, an orgy of umbellifers can contribute, ironically, to an increase in biological control.
Triple-duty Beauties
Beneficial Bug Info

To learn more about beneficial bugs, and the plants that attract them, consult the following books: Good Bugs for Your Garden, by Allison M. Starcher (Algonquin, 1995), and Great Garden Companions: A Companion-Planting System for a Beautiful, Chemical-Free Vegetable Garden, by Sally Jean Cunningham (Rodale, 1998).

There are many online resources, too. For a general overview of biological control, visit the web site of the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Finally, in conjunction with Organic Gardening magazine, Johnny’s Selected Seeds offers a Beneficial Borders Flower Seed Collection™, consisting of seven easy-to-grow plants chosen for good color combination and the ability to attract beneficial bugs. The collection features one packet each of California poppy, bachelor’s button (leave this one out of the mix; it’s an invasive species!), alyssum, cosmos, anise hyssop, borage, and the umbelliferous blue lace flower (Trachymene coerulea). For more information, call 877-564-6697 or visit their web site.

Most of the research done on the beneficial-bug magnetism of the Apiaceae has so far focused on the culinary herbs. Gardeners looking to increase the number of predatory bugs in their vegetable patches need look no further than these plants. But what about gardeners who want to fight pest insects in the rest of the garden, too?

Well, we know that some of the culinary herbs can also make dramatic statements in purely ornamental settings. Korean angelica (Angelica gigas), for example, with its dark purple flowers and tall red stems is a great centerpiece plant for the perennial border. (It’s also good at attracting lacewings, lady beetles, and parasitic wasps.) Dill, with its thread-like, blue-green foliage and lacy, aromatic, deep-yellow umbels, can look good planted almost anywhere in the yard.

In her book, Great Garden Companions (see box), Cornell Cooperative Extension specialist Sally Jean Cunningham recommends the summer-blooming, umbelliferous sea hollies (Eryngium species) as striking plants for the front of a perennial cluster. Not only do they have, according to Sally, attractive “leathery, blue-gray, spiny foliage” and “silvery blue flower heads with dome-shaped centers and silvery leaf-like bracts,” but they also are good at attracting parasitic wasps.

As yet there just isn’t much data in on how well the more decorative members of the Carrot Family perform as insectary plants. “The science of which plants attract or maintain which insects, at which time of year, in which climate zones is at an elementary stage,” says Sally.

So this is a good opportunity for gardeners to get in on the action and study such traditionally planted ornamental genera as Astrantia (masterwort), Myrrhis (sweet Cicely), Aciphylla (speargrass), and Bupleurum (thorow-wax) for signs of beneficial insect activity. But you don’t need to stop there. The ornamental palette of the Carrot Family is broadening steadily.

In the April 2001 issue of Horticulture magazine, plantsman Daniel J. Hinkley wrote about some of his favorite lesser-known umbellifers. He recommended the spring-blooming Chaerophyllum hirsutum ‘Roseum’ for its “low spreading mounds of handsome, deeply dissected foliage” and its “lacy heads of rose-colored flowers.” He also gave special mention to Pimpinella major ‘Rosea’ (greater burnet), whose sturdy, 3-foot stems produce “lovely discs of light pink” from July to August.

I asked Dan if he had noticed any high insect activity on the specialty umbellifers that he grows at Heronswood Nursery. He couldn’t say for sure, but his interest was definitely piqued. “You know, come to think of it, there’s always a swarm of wasps flying around our angelicas.”

Niall Dunne is the editor of Plants & Gardens News.

http://www.bbg.org/gar2/topics/sustainable/handbooks/naturaldisease/primer.html

A Plant Disease Primer
by Miranda Smith

Healthy gardens teem with microorganisms: bacteria, fungi, viruses, virus-like organisms, and nematodes. The majority of these are either benign, coexisting in the soil and on plant surfaces with each other and with the plants around them, or they are beneficial, and perform such tasks as breaking down the compost pile into humus, transforming the nitrogen in the air into forms that plants can use, or preying on pest species. Only a small percentage of microorganisms are pathogenic—that is, capable of causing plant diseases. Fungi are the cause of the largest number of plant diseases, while viruses often cause those with the most severe symptoms. Many pathogens cause only cosmetic or superficial damage. But a few of the most virulent kill their hosts outright and can pose a problem in the garden for years to come.

Plants can also develop disorders. These are not brought on by pathogens, but rather by environmental conditions and stresses. Common examples include blossom end rot of tomatoes and peppers, and tip burn of lettuce, both of which are caused by a calcium deficiency in combination with fluctuating moisture conditions and fluctuating light levels, respectively. In most cases, the symptoms of disorders are confusingly similar to those resulting from pathogenic diseases.
Plant Defenses

Unlike animals, plants don’t have an immune system or disease-fighting white blood cells. Instead, they have developed other mechanisms to escape or survive the diseases that attack them. Some plants are simply genetically incompatible with, or immune to, certain diseases. A corn plant can’t host tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), a common tomato disease, for example, just as tomatoes can’t host the corn disease smut. It is also possible that a particular cultivar, variety, or even an individual plant is immune to a disease that attacks other members of its species, generally because of subtle differences in the genetic makeup of the various plants.

Resistance to diseases is another factor that protects plants. Although a resistant plant can be susceptible to a particular disease, it is less likely to become infected by it than a non-resistant plant. In some cases, plants are resistant because of a physical characteristic: for example, their cuticles may be too thick for a particular fungus to penetrate, or their stomata, small pores on the leaves, may be closed at the time of day when environmental conditions stimulate disease spores to germinate. Other types of resistance are biochemical: the plant produces enzymes and proteins that inactivate the pathogen.

A plant is described as tolerant to a particular disease if it can be infected by the disease but is unlikely to be killed or severely disabled by it. Tolerance often results from hypersensitivity: a plant may be so sensitive to a disease organism that the cells infected by the pathogen die very rapidly and the disease organism is isolated and cannot move to other areas of the plant tissue.

Plants can also escape infection. Some diseases, such as early blight of tomatoes, primarily attack plants that are young and growing vigorously, while others, such as late blight of tomatoes, attack those that are old and forming more fruit and seeds than new leaves. So plants that are older when early blight strikes have a better chance of surviving, as do those that are young when late blight attacks. Similarly, some pathogens, such as many that cause powdery mildew, slowly build to damaging populations as the season progresses, while others, such as Pythium, which can cause root rot, are at their most numerous in the early spring. That is to say, it may pay to put off planting crops susceptible to root rot, such as potatoes, until later in spring when the soil has begun to dry, and you may want to take measures to ensure that you can harvest your cucumber crop early, before powdery mildew becomes a problem. When plants do not become infected with a disease simply because of timing, they have “escaped infection.”
Disease-causing Organisms
Bacteria

Bacteria cause three types of plant disease symptoms. Some live within a plant’s vascular system, the channels through which water and nutrients move from roots to leaves and vice versa. When these organisms become numerous, they are likely to plug up the system, preventing the flow of water and nutrients. Wilts, often beginning on only one side of the plant or even on one branch, are the result.

Other bacteria cause abnormal growth in the cells they have invaded and/or in adjacent cells. These growths, known as galls, may pepper the surface of a leaf or protrude from a stem. They are usually rounded and hard to the touch.

When bacteria kill the cells they infect outright, the results can be rots, internal blights, or spots. Sometimes the spots are small and barely noticeable, but in other cases, cankers, open wounds, or lesions form on bark or soft tissue. When the infection is serious, the bacteria spread and kill the entire leaf, stem, or plant.

Most bacteria are one-celled organisms, although a few are multi-cellular. They reproduce by cell division. Because this reproduction is not sexual, bacteria cannot hybridize. However, that characteristic does not inhibit their ability to evolve; they do exchange genetic information and DNA through plasmid exchange (the exchange of small, DNA-containing elements that exist outside the chromosome), and they mutate relatively easily. Changes in their environment, including ultraviolet light levels and ambient levels of atmospheric gases, as well as subtle changes within their host, can trigger a mutation. This adaptability is responsible for the steadily increasing number of bacteria that cause disease in plants and animals—and the increasing number of bacteria that are immune to antibiotics.

When conditions such as temperature or moisture levels do not suit them, bacteria become dormant. Although many overwinter in the seeds of infected plants or inside insects (the pathogen that causes bacterial blight of cucurbits overwinters in the salivary glands of hibernating cucumber beetles, for example), most overwinter on cankers on dormant plants or in the debris of the plant they infected during the growing season. Though a few species can survive for longer than a year in a dormant state, most die after this time. Consequently, rotating crops so they don’t grow in the same area again for two to four years is usually an effective control.
Fungi

Fungi are far more complicated in both structure and reproductive style than bacteria. The fungal body, called a thallus, usually consists of microscopic, threadlike hyphae that spread througout the source of food of the fungus. Collectively, these hyphae are referred to as the mycelium.

The reproductive strategies of different species of fungi vary widely. Some form sclerotia, thickened areas of a hypha, which can break away or overwinter in place and grow into a new organism. Other fungi form spores, tiny bodies that can germinate and grow as seeds do. Some spores are formed asexually; these are usually known as summer spores because they can reproduce as soon as they find appropriate conditions. They tend to die within a few months if they do not find a hospitable environment. Other spores are formed sexually. Many of these are called resting spores because they can remain dormant but viable for months or, if necessary, for many years. Almost all fungal species produce at least two kinds of spores to guarantee their survival, but the fungal rust diseases that require two alternate hosts produce as many as five spore forms over the two years it takes to complete their entire life cycle.

Fungi mutate in the same way that bacteria do; and those that reproduce sexually have the additional advantage of being able to crossbreed. Like bacteria, fungi are capable of evolving rapidly.

Pathogenic, or disease-causing, fungi produce symptoms that are similar to those caused by bacteria: wilts, galls, rots, spots, cankers, and blights, as well as smuts (large growths filled with spores), scabs (roughened skin tissue), and mildews. These last three symptoms are characterized by the visible presence of the hyphae.

Fungi overwinter in plant debris, seeds, or the soil, as spores or sclerotia. Depending on the species, resting spores can remain viable for two to 20 years. It pays to do some research before simply assuming that a crop rotation will protect your plants from infection by a fungus.
Viruses

Viruses that attack plants are just as insidious as those that attack animals. Their physical structure is simple: just a bit of DNA or RNA and a protein covering. Rather than reproducing themselves, viruses stimulate the cell within which they are living to create more viruses. They too evolve quickly in response to changes in their environment.

Viral diseases cause malformations, stunting, and disruption or death of cells containing chlorophyll, which often results in the yellowing of plants (chlorosis). The malformations range from simple leaf curling or puckering to abnormal production of stems or branches, as in the disease called witches’ broom. Stunting can be generalized, involving the whole plant, or specific to a particular area. Mosaic diseases are characteristic of viruses that interfere with chlorophyll production. Mosaic-infected leaves are usually mottled with irregularly shaped yellow patches.

Viruses can remain in the host without being active. Many have a fairly narrow band of temperature preference; they are active between 55°F. and 85°F. but not at temperatures above or below this. This characteristic often gives gardeners the false impression that their plants suddenly “got well” from a viral disease.

Plant debris, soils, and gardeners’ tools, hands, and shoes can all transport dormant viruses from one host to the next. But viruses remain viable for so long—up to 50 years in some cases—that it is impossible to know for certain how a virus got into a planting. They can also survive the hottest temperatures a compost pile can achieve.
Nematodes

Nematodes are microscopic animals that look like slender, nonsegmented worms. There are thousands of nematode species, but only a few hundred of them cause plant diseases. These are directly responsible for a number of symptoms, including rotting tissues and abnormal growth, but they also cause diseases indirectly. They can carry viruses, injecting them into the plant as they feed. Moreover, when nematodes pierce the plant tissue to move into cells, secondary pathogenic organisms very often take advantage of the openings to invade the plant.

Nematodes reproduce both sexually and parthenogenetically—that is to say, without the benefit of males. They produce eggs, which are released into the soil around a plant or inside the plant itself. Eggs develop into juveniles, the stage at which most nematodes infect plants; juveniles can also remain dormant but viable for months without a host. Nematodes overwinter in soil or plant tissue as eggs, juveniles, or adults. Egg-to-egg life cycles usually range from three weeks to three months.
Spreading Disease

Pathogens move from host to host in a number of ways. When not seed-borne, bacteria are usually carried by animals, insects, moving water, air currents, and infected soil, or spread around the garden on tools and shoes. Bacteria move into plants through natural openings, such as stomata, or through small wounds and bruises. Once inside a susceptible, living host, their environmental needs are met.

Bacteria reproduce within a host for as long as it continues to feed them. If the bacteria are feeding on the surface of a plant or kill enough cells so that the plant tissue breaks open, they are easily moved from one host to another by wind, falling rain, insects, or even gardeners. Those that feed internally usually overwinter on the plant debris or in the soil, ready to be carried to a new host the following spring.

Fungal spores travel the same routes from host to host as bacteria, but differ in that a spore must germinate and grow before it can infect a plant. Germination is primarily dependent upon temperature and humidity levels. Most fungal species require moderate (50°F. to 90°F.) temperatures and very high humidity or a film of water on the leaves. After germination, most hyphae grow and find their way into a plant through natural openings, wounds, and bruises, but some species have an even more direct route. They form a penetration peg, a toughened tip on the end of the first hypha, that bores through the plant’s cuticle layer and into the tissue. Other species release a toxin that kills plant cells; once surface cells are dead, they move into the plant’s interior, always killing cells in advance of their spread.

While some fungi can feed only on dead material, and some can feed only on living plants, many of the plant pathogens can feed on either dead or living material. This enables them to remain active after their host is dead, as long as temperatures are tolerable for them; once the weather warms in spring, they can start feeding on the host again and produce a new crop of summer spores that are ready to infect new plants.

Viruses are usually transmitted by insect or nematode vectors—organisms that carry and transmit a disease—and gardeners’ hands and tools. Vectors generally transmit the disease by inserting it into the plant as they are feeding. Gardeners are more likely to infect a plant by touching it with dirty hands. Viruses are so small that they can be moved into wounds and bruises that are invisible to the naked eye. As long as the host is alive and susceptible to them, their environmental needs are met.

Nematodes that infect plants do so in their larval stage. If they are not carried to new hosts by moving water or on shoes or tools, they swim through the soil solution. However, due to their size, even the speediest nematode rarely travels more than a foot away from its birthplace. Again, the only requirement for infection is that a susceptible host is alive.
Diagnosing Diseases

Symptoms of various plant diseases look so similar that it’s often difficult to diagnose them correctly. However, there is a common-sense approach. Begin by trying to rule out the possibility that the plant has a disorder or non-infectious disease—an ailment caused strictly by environmental or cultural conditions—rather than a disease caused by a pathogen.

Disorders include such things as hollow heart of beets and broccoli as a consequence of a boron deficiency, cat-face of tomato as a consequence of low light levels, and sunburn of tomato or pepper as a consequence of excessive sunlight directly hitting the fruit, when the leaf canopy is lost due to pruning or disease.

In general, disorders are fairly uniform throughout a planting or a particular area: if one plant has the problem, the rest do, too, and usually to about the same degree. Diseases are likely to be less generalized. Due to pathogen movement, they may be widespread in the downwind portion of a planting, or along a path where water runs through the garden, but even then, symptoms will vary somewhat from plant to plant. With close enough observation, you may even be able to chart the movement of the pathogen from one plant to the next.

Once you have decided that the problem is caused by an infectious disease, you’ll need to try to identify it before you can develop a plan of action. Even if you are the sort of person who dislikes asking for directions when you’re lost on the road, it’s wise to ask for help in diagnosing a disease. More often than not, seasoned gardeners in your area have seen the disease and can tell you a few things about it. If this fails, get out disease identification books and start looking for likely suspects. Remember that few texts have enough space to list every single plant that a particular disease attacks, but most list the genera or families that host the disease.

Check visual clues too, preferably with a hand lens. Except in the case of spots or internal blights, visual examination with a 10-power lens usually will tell you if the problem is caused by a fungus, bacterium, virus, or nematode. For example, if lesions on the plant are oozing and slimy, chances are that you’re looking at hundreds of thousands of tiny bacteria. A mass of threadlike structures is likely to be the mycelium of a fungus, and dry specks that disperse into the air when you breathe on them are probably spores. Leaves that are curled and puckered or have yellowish patches between the veins are an indication that the plant probably has a virus. If the plant looks sickly but you can’t see anything above the ground, dig it up. It may have a root-eating pest such as a cabbage root fly maggot or root aphid, but it could also be hosting nematodes. Galls or knots on the root tissue are the sure symptom.

Finally, take a walk around the edges of your property. Look at weedy areas there and in neighbors’ yards. It could be that a weed in the same family as your plant is hosting the same disease. Very often, this kind of clue quickly leads to the culprit: a disease that is unrecognizable on your plant might be easy to identify on a weed.

Miranda Smith has been teaching organic agriculture since 1971, and has worked in many regions of the U.S. and several provinces in Canada. She is author or co-author of 11 books about horticulture, including Rodale’s Pest And Disease Problem Solver: A Chemical-Free Guide to Keeping Your Garden Healthy.

http://www.bbg.org/gar2/topics/sustainable/handbooks/naturaldisease/ninekeys.html

Nine Keys to Disease Prevention
by Jim Chatfield

Prevention is the essence of plant-disease control. This is true whether a disease is infectious (involving host-parasite relationships between plants and pathogens such as certain fungi, bacteria, or viruses) or non-infectious (involving disorders such as nutrient deficiencies or winter damage). As with human ailments, plant diseases are best stopped before they start. Even if you resort to fungicides to control disease, you are probably practicing a form of prevention because most must be applied before infectious agents arrive.

Following are nine key ways to prevent diseases before they start.

[granny note: the 9 key ways are live links on site]

* Understand the mechanism of infection
* Choose the right plants for your site
* Use disease-resistant varieties
* Keep a clean garden: roguing, rotating crops, and sanitizing tools
* Create a well-balanced soil
* Keep plants healthy: proper watering, mulching, pruning, and fertilizing.
* Don’t overwater, overmulch, etc.
* Learn to tolerate some diseases
* Remember, most fungicides are preventives, not cures

1. Understand the mechanism of infection

The first step in prevention is to have a good understanding of infectious disease. The simple but extremely useful concept of the disease triangle is fundamental to that understanding. Diseases can occur only when the following three components are present at the same time:

* A susceptible host plant
* A pathogen capable of causing disease
* An environment conducive to disease

The disease triangle is also a creative way to remind yourself of the different ways to prevent disease: break the links in the triangle at any point and disease will not occur. For example, if you plant the susceptible crabapple Malus ‘Radiant’ in an area where the apple scab fungus Venturia inaequalis is abundant, and spring is very moist, all three components of the disease triangle are in place, and the tree will likely develop significant scab disease. But if you plant a disease-resistant cultivar such as Malus ‘Prairiefire’, you don’t provide a susceptible host—and can avoid infection. Another way to break a link in the disease triangle is to exclude pathogens. Removing blighted potato tubers from the garden at the end of the season limits the amount of fungal inoculum (pathogen tissue responsible for causing infection) available for the next season. Cleaning up black-spotted rose leaves in the fall reduces the amount of black spot fungal inoculum. Or you can adopt cultural practices that make the environment less conducive to infection. If you avoid overhead watering, for example, you discourage infection by foliar pathogens that thrive on damp leaves.
2. Choose the right plants for your site
Trees

At planting time, bear in mind the size of the fully grown plant. Trees suffer from excessive shading and competition for water and minerals, leading to stressed plants that are susceptible to disease.

One of the most important things you can do to prevent disease is to select the right plant for the site—which is much easier than trying to manage a problem-plagued plant in an unsuitable site later. Proper plant selection will help prevent both non-infectious and many infectious diseases that are more likely to occur and be more severe if plants are stressed. With prevention timing is everything, so start thinking about it even before you plant.

Read the site. Learn as much as you can about the different parts of your garden before planting. What is currently growing there? What plants are thriving on nearby, similar sites? Learn what parts of your garden drain poorly. Observe the site at different times to understand the sun and wind exposures. You can learn a great deal about the general soil pH range by noting how acid-loving plants such as pachysandra, rhododendrons, and red maple fare in your garden and nearby areas.

Test the site. Soil pH is a determining factor when deciding what to plant. For failing to foot the cost of a $10 or $15 soil test, many have paid later. Some acid-loving plants will grow reasonably well for years as they reap the benefits of the soil in their root ball, but then begin to decline as they encounter more and more of the native alkaline soil. This is a very avoidable scenario. Don’t guess—soil test!

Know your plants. Don’t make assumptions about plant tolerances in general; find out how the varieties that you want to plant tolerate sun, wind, and various soil conditions. Many people say, for example, that hollies will not tolerate wet, poorly drained sites. This is indeed true of American holly (Ilex opaca) or the Meserve blue and China series hybrids (Ilex x meserveae), which are quite susceptible to black root rot disease in wet sites. It is not true of the deciduous winterberry holly (Ilex verticillata), which thrives in swampy sites.

Find out about common problems. Get a handle on the diseases of the plants you want to grow. Every plant has a profile of characteristic disease problems that develop in a particular area. Many plants are also sensitive to environmental conditions. White pine is highly sensitive to roadside salt spray, and sugar maples decline when highway salt concentrates in surrounding soils. Broad-leaved evergreens such as rhododendrons and mahonias suffer desiccation and leaf scorch when exposed to drying winter winds.

Learn how plants interact. Plants interact with each other in ways that are important to consider when planning your garden. A spectacular example of this is allelopathy, a kind of chemical warfare that can exist between plants, and can cause non-infectious diseases. Black walnuts produce a chemical called juglone, especially in their roots, that is toxic to many other plants. Tomatoes growing within the root zone of black walnuts, which can extend well beyond the drip line of the tree, are especially susceptible; they will wilt and die when exposed to juglone.

A more mundane type of plant interaction is competition for water, nutrients, and sunlight. All too often, landscape trees are planted too closely together. Over the years, this results in excessive shading, and root competition for water and minerals, leading to stressed plants and greater susceptibility to opportunistic fungal pathogens (which cause serious harm only on plants that are already stressed). Cytospora canker of spruce, for example, is more common and causes larger cankers when spruces are suffering from drought. Proper plant spacing will limit such problems and help prevent diseases in the long term.
3. Use disease-resistant varieties

Selecting plants with genetic disease resistance is the best way to prevent disease. If your crabapples get scab disease and lose much of their foliage in moist springs, start planting resistant cultivars such as ‘Bob White’ or ‘Red Jewel’, so you don’t have to spend your days spraying fungicides.

No plant will be completely disease-free—that’s a myth. But some plants have fewer major disease problems. Make use of all available information on the disease resistance of those plants that you decide to add to your garden. Check out the references at the end of this book on page 104. Ask your fellow plant-lovers which varieties work for them and if plant societies they may belong to have compiled specialized lists. Read the commentary in garden catalogs and on seed packets. Get information from your local garden center, arboreta, and botanical gardens, or the Extension Service in your state. Consult specialized publications for extensive lists of resistant cultivars.

A word of warning: lists of disease-resistant cultivars can be useful, but take them with a grain of salt. Do not assume that any list is definitive. You may find maples listed as susceptible to Verticillium wilt, but Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) is considerably more susceptible than many other maples. Lists are sometimes only locally accurate. Roses that are highly susceptible to black spot in one part of the country may be resistant in another area because the fungal pathogen may have mutated there. These mutants may in turn infect rose cultivars that were previously resistant. And they may be present in one part of the country only—at least for a while.

Lists of disease-resistant cultivars may also ignore a plant’s other good—or bad—qualities. Two lists developed by Ohio botanists rated crabapples for susceptibility to scab, as well as for overall aesthetics—flower, foliage, fruit, form, and other features. Eight of the ten most aesthetically pleasing crabapples had some scab, but not enough to affect their overall appeal; seven of the ten scab-free crabapples were in the bottom half of the overall ratings. So, take everything into account, not just disease resistance, when selecting plants.
4. Keep a clean garden: roguing, rotating crops, and sanitizing tools

Eliminating the pathogen that can cause disease is a time-honored approach to disease prevention. Late blight of potato is the fungal disease that contributed greatly to the Irish potato famine of the 1840s–50s, rotting entire crops in the field or in storage. Potato growers quickly learned the importance of cleaning up diseased potatoes at the end of the season to limit the amount of fungus in the soil the following season. Sanitation for disease control is just as important today. The fungus that causes rose black spot overwinters on black-spotted leaves from the previous season’s infestations and on infected rose canes. Remove diseased leaves and canes from the garden to keep black spot from getting a start on the new season. If disease does develop, remove the black-spotted leaves during the season to slow the repeating cycle of this disease throughout the spring and summer.

An extreme form of sanitation is called roguing: removing infested plants as soon as they are noted. This is typically done with serious diseases such as orange rust of brambles. Any plants exhibiting this rust disease, including wild brambles, should immediately be removed and destroyed before the fungus spreads to healthy plants.

You should also practice a form of roguing before purchasing plants. If you are buying containerized plants or bedding plants, gently knock the plant from its container and check the root system. Look for healthy light-colored roots. Blackish and slimy roots are a sign of poor root health and root rot disease. Check plants such as roses, stone fruits, and euonymus for bacterial crown gall, tumor-like growths on roots and crowns. Under certain circumstances, harvesting seed from your garden for future years can be risky, because you may also be saving pathogens that hitch a ride on those seeds, which will cause you problems later.

Rotating crops is another way to prevent disease. Many soilborne pathogens remain in the ground for a considerable time, often for many years. So, in order to save susceptible plants from a pathogen, you want to separate the two. For example, if you have plants that have been diagnosed with Verticillium wilt, assume that the soil is infested with Verticillium fungus. When replanting, site the plants in a different location—where the soil may not be infested with the pathogen.

Don’t forget to use common sense with your sanitation practices. When you are pruning, make cuts on healthy tissue first, and prune out diseased tissue last. When dealing with highly infectious diseases such as fire blight, sanitize tools with alcohol between pruning cuts. Clean and remove soil from tools periodically. When you have problems with soilborne diseases such as damping-off in your seedling trays, remove the potting soil from the seeding area and sanitize the surface with a bleach solution.
5. Create a well-balanced soil
soil

Add at least an inch of compost over all growing areas in spring, and work the compost into the top several inches of soil. Soils with good overall texture and drainage characteristics and good organic matter content tend to have a healthy balance of soil organisms, from earthworms to bacterial and fungal microorganisms, that cycle nutrients.

What gardeners typically see when a good plant goes bad are its scorched and discolored leaves, and twigs and branches that decline and die. More often than not these aboveground symptoms are caused by problems with the root system.

What makes for a happy root system? For many plants, the key is a moist but well-drained soil rich in organic matter. In such soils—the kind you can ball up in your hand and crumble but which does not form a ball of clay—there is both adequate air and adequate moisture for the roots to properly respire. In good soils, inorganic clay, silt, and sand particles form aggregates with organic matter, allowing optimal nutrient exchange between soil particles, the soil solution (water with dissolved minerals and associated microorganisms), and plant roots.

Soils with good texture and good organic matter content also tend to have a healthy balance of soil organisms, from earthworms to bacterial and fungal microorganisms that cycle nutrients. These will coexist with other soil microorganisms that can cause plant problems, such as disease-causing root-rotting fungi. All these organisms exist in the soil in a precarious balance, which can go haywire when major environmental stresses change the equation. The best balance will be achieved by developing soils that have good overall texture and drainage characteristics and good organic matter content, which will optimize microbial activity.

Adding compost to your soil will help you achieve these goals. Add at least an inch of compost over all growing areas before you plant in the spring, and work the compost into the top several inches of soil. Side-dress heavy-feeding crops such as squash, corn, tomatoes, and broccoli with an additional half-inch layer of compost each month during the growing season.

People in climates with prolonged sunny stretches can solarize soils, i.e. use the heat of the sun to eliminate pathogens. Cultivate the soil to a depth of at least 4 inches. Water the soil well, then cover with clear plastic at least 1.5 mm (0.0015 inch) thick and bury and anchor the edges in a trench around the bed. At least six weeks of abundant sunshine are needed for effective solarization, which kills not only pathogens, but also beneficial organisms. That’s not the only drawback. The technique will eliminate pathogens in only the top few inches of soil, probably not to the full depth of plant roots. And solarized soil is easily recontaminated. However, beneficial organisms such as Trichoderma species tend to prefer solarized soil for recolonizing, and biocontrol agents can be mixed with seeds or added to the soil when transplanting to maximize benefits.

6. Keep plants healthy: proper watering, mulching, pruning, and fertilizing.

With proper plant care, you can limit the amount of stress your plants suffer and the likelihood that they will develop certain infectious and non-infectious diseases.

Proper planting should be one of the first considerations. Be sure to plant trees and shrubs at the same grade that they were grown in the nursery or garden center. If installed too high, their root systems may dry out, but planting too low is even worse: it is the primary cause of transplant shock of many trees and shrubs in the first few years after planting. The deeper you go in the soil, the lower the concentration of oxygen, and the greater the chance of root stress. Plants already stressed by the loss of roots during the transplanting process, or by root scoring if they were grown in containers, may not be able to bear the additional stress of a too-deep planting.

Once plants are installed, proper watering is crucial. Though many people assume that watering is easy, there are no simple rules for irrigation, so this is one of the most difficult and essential green-thumb skills to develop. Plants have individual needs that depend on the species, the size of the plant, and its stage of development. Soil type and weather conditions also come into play. Too little water can stress plants, making them more susceptible to disease organisms such as canker fungi. Excessive watering results in poor overall root function and greater susceptibility to root rot diseases. And if you water in a way that keeps moisture on a plant’s leaves for long periods, you may be encouraging infection by foliar pathogens. So if you use a sprinkler or other overhead irrigation system, water early in the day when moisture is more likely to evaporate from leaf surfaces. Do not assume that plants need water. Check the soil to a depth of several inches to determine if it is still wet. For most plants, it is best to wait until the soil dries and then water deeply. Many plants, including your lawn, need about one inch of moisture per week during the growing season. Use common sense when deciding which plants might need water. For example, check seedbeds more often than sites with established plants.

Mulching is a crucial disease prevention practice. Organic mulches provide many benefits: they help cool soils and conserve and moderate moisture over long periods, which can help plants resist stress due to lack of water. Moisture and temperature modification are crucial for the roots of many plants, especially if they are a bit out of their optimal soil temperature range, such as mountain ashes, flowering dogwoods, and exotic birches in hot, open sites. Over time, organic mulches such as composted bark mulches also provide important organic matter for the soil and can help control diseases by encouraging microorganisms that may act as biological controls of plant pathogens. Mulches can also help prevent non-infectious diseases: a good 2- to 3-inch deep ring of mulch around the base of plants (but pulled away from direct contact with the trunk) will suppress weeds and keep the lawn mower at a safe distance from vulnerable plant tissue.

Pruning is another important disease preventive. When you cut away the knotted, black, gall-like growths from the stems of stone-fruit trees and ornamental plants infected with plum black knot, you are removing pathogens and the inoculum they provide for subsequent infections. Prune when you first notice the disease; if you wait too long, pruning will not be effective. Through proper pruning you can also keep a tree’s inner foliage from becoming too dense, assuring better air movement and sun penetration of the canopy. Most fungi thrive under moist conditions, and fungal spores are more likely to germinate and infect leaf tissue when leaves remain wet.

Fertilizing plants will both prevent non-infectious diseases (disorders), such as nutrient deficiencies, and help plants tolerate the damage resulting from infectious diseases. Make sure to choose the proper fertilizer for your particular plant to promote sustainable growth and plant survival. Fertilizers are not magic—and they are not “plant food.” They cannot replace the food that plants produce in their leaves, but they can provide much-needed minerals such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) and micronutrients like copper, iron, and manganese.
7. Don’t overwater, overmulch, etc.

You can overdo many good horticultural practices, and in some cases invite the very same diseases you are working to avert. Take the case of mulching. The merits of this practice are undeniable, so how can such a good thing go wrong? The answer lies in the increasingly popular habit of amassing huge mounds of mulch—sometimes to depths of 6 inches, a foot, even several feet—around the bases of trees and shrubs. This keeps too much moisture against trunks, encouraging fungal infections. It also provides perfect cover for rabbits, mice, and other rodents in the winter, little havens from which they can munch on thin-barked plants at their leisure. Excessive mulch can reduce oxygen levels in the soil, leading to poor root metabolism and increased root rot disease. Apply only 2 to 3 inches of mulch on clay soils, somewhat deeper on well-drained sandy soils. This does not mean adding 2 to 3 inches yearly; not all of it will decompose in that time. Add only enough to maintain a total depth of 2 to 3 inches.

Vigorous overwatering may be a more common trigger of plant disease than the drought conditions gardeners seek to overcome. In waterlogged soils, root function suffers because oxygen levels are low. When oxygen is scarce, certain root-rotting fungi such as the aptly named water molds, Pythium and Phytophthora, flourish. And roots stressed by oxygen deprivation are more susceptible to infection by these pathogens. Watering properly involves keen observational skills. Check the soil to the depth of several inches; in most cases, if the soil is still moist, let it dry out, then water thoroughly.

Overfertilizing is another classic case of too much of a good thing. Fertilizers provide important nutrients for the plant, but remember to use the recommended rates for each plant at the correct time of year. For example, pear trees given too much nitrogen rapidly put out shoots, and this succulent growth is more susceptible to fire blight. Many turfgrass diseases are more severe on overfertilized lawns. Roots can also suffer from overly high levels of fertilizer: they will lose water through osmosis when fertilizer salt concentrations are higher in the surrounding soil—this is how fertilizers “burn” roots.

Finally, be careful to prevent girdling when transplanting trees and shrubs. When woody plants are installed, the twine or wire holding the burlap in place often is not removed. Consequently, as the stem increases in girth over the years, the non-degradable twine or wire becomes ever tighter. Eventually it is imbedded inside of the bark in the plant’s phloem, the pipeline that brings the products of photosynthesis down the stem to the roots. In the end, the roots will starve, and the stems and leaves will die from lack of water. All for want of removing that twine.
8. Learn to tolerate some diseases

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that you don’t have to prevent all of the myriad illnesses that could descend on your garden. You could prevent tar spot of maple with fungicides, but why bother? Maples do well year after year despite the disease. Lilacs are infected by powdery mildew year after year, but it never seems to hurt the plant; you probably couldn’t kill your lilacs, even if you wanted to. There are many examples of such “harmless” diseases, from Phyllosticta leaf spot of maple, to many of the anthracnose diseases of ornamental plants. Some diseases you can—and should—learn to live with, and others you will want to concentrate on preventing.
9. Remember, most fungicides are preventives, not cures

Even when you do decide to use fungicides, prevention is still the key. All but a few fungicides must be applied before the fungus enters plant tissue to prevent infections and subsequent disease development. Timing is crucial: even with fungicides prevention—not cure—is the name of the game.

Jim Chatfield is an assistant professor and Extension specialist with the Ohio State University Extension, where he has worked for the past 12 years. He teaches and writes extensively on plant pathology, plant selection, and plant diagnostic topics.

Illustrations by Steve Buchanan.

http://www.bbg.org/gar2/topics/sustainable/handbooks/naturaldisease/leasttoxic.html

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Least-Toxic Controls of Plant Diseases
by William Quarles

The best way to control plant diseases is to make sure they don’t get a foothold in the garden in the first place. (Click here for Nine Steps to Disease Prevention) However, if they are already established, you may feel it’s necessary to resort to one of the controls described below. Most of these mentioned here have low acute toxicity to mammals, including humans, and are not toxic to beneficial insects. Some, such as baking soda, are practically non-toxic, while others, including bordeaux mixture, lime-sulfur, concentrated silicate salts, and streptomycin should be used with caution. Always follow application instructions carefully and apply only at the appropriate time in the plant’s growth cycle and at the proper time of day. Be sure to protect yourself using the proper precautions when applying these controls. It is wise to avoid inhaling any kind of pesticide spray.

1. Fungal Diseases
* Copper & Sulfur
* Salt Sprays
* Horticultural Oils
* Soaps
* Botanical Extracts
* Antitranspirants
2. Bacterial Diseases
3. Viruses
4. Nematodes
5. Using Beneficial Organisms
6. Using Combination Treatments
7. Controlling Soilborne Pathogens

Controlling Fungal Diseases

Most garden diseases are caused by fungi: more than 8,000 species are known plant pathogens and either inhabit the aboveground portions of plants or are denizens of the soil. Most of the fungicides described below are essentially preventive measures, acting as barriers between pathogenic agents and plant tissues, and must be applied before new leaves or other susceptible plant parts appear, at the first sign of disease, or when weather conditions are favorable for disease.
Least-toxic Control

* Baking Soda
* Phosphates
* Silica
* Vegetable Oils
* Mineral Oil Solution
* Neem Oil
* Soaps
* Garlic

Copper and Sulfur

Sulfur, lime-sulfur, and bordeaux mixture—a combination of copper sulfate and lime—have been used as fungicides for a hundred years or more. These are all toxic to mammals, so avoid ingesting them and wear protective clothing when applying them. bordeaux mixture is both fungicidal and bactericidal, and can be useful against diseases such as leaf spot and apple scab, among others. It contains copper sulfate, which is acidic, and lime, which is alkaline and helps neutralize the acidic salt. This mixture is a potent eye, skin, and gastrointestinal irritant and highly corrosive, and can cause nausea and vomiting if ingested. bordeaux mixture can be applied as a dust or purchased in a liquid formulation, which is easier to use, especially if larger areas are involved.

Sulfur can be used as a preventive fungicide against apple scab, brown rot, powdery mildew, rose black spot, rusts, and other diseases. You can apply sulfur as a dust or purchase it in liquid form; it is acidic and can irritate eyes and lungs. But do not use sulfur if you have applied an oil spray within the last month. Sulfur can injure plants if used when temperatures exceed 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Lime is sometimes added to sulfur to help it penetrate plant tissue, but this mixture is more caustic than sulfur on its own and can cause severe eye and skin irritation. Do not inhale or ingest and wear protective clothing and eye-wear when applying.
Sprays Containing Salts

Baking Soda: Baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) is non-toxic, readily available, and very inexpensive. It can be effective against powdery mildew and somewhat useful against black spot. If you repeatedly spray leaves with bicarbonate, though, it will eventually reach the soil below, where it can accumulate and lead to slower plant growth. Bicarbonate can form insoluble particles with calcium and magnesium ions when it concentrates in the soil, making these important nutrients unavailable to plants. High levels can also prevent plants from absorbing iron and can lead to chlorosis.

Bicarbonate is most likely to build to damaging levels in drought-stressed areas where there is little rain to flush it away. It is also likely to build up when applied in a small area, and when used in conjunction with drip-type irrigation. Garden situations are so complex that it is hard to predict the point at which you will see adverse effects. Stop applying bicarbonate sprays, however, at the first sign of plant damage or lower quality blooms.

Phosphate Salts: Foliar sprays containing potassium phosphate salts, unlike most of the non-toxic sprays, can not only prevent powdery mildew but in some instances even cure it. These salts seem to stimulate a systemic effect that builds up plant resistance to other diseases, including some forms of rust and northern leaf blight. Phosphate salts are ideal as foliar sprays because plants quickly absorb and circulate them. Other advantages are their low cost, low toxicity, and environmental safety (phosphate buffers, salt mixtures that protect against rapid changes in pH, are constructed from these salts and often used in soft drinks). Phosphate salts can even improve plant growth, as they may increase plant nutrition. Effects of added phosphate are most pronounced on plants deficient in phosphorus. Like any salt, though, these can damage plants when applied as foliar sprays. Test small areas before applying to whole plants. You can purchase phosphate salts from chemical supply houses and some horticultural nurseries. (Dibasic potassium phosphate is slightly less effective as a fungicide than the monobasic salt.)

Silica and Silicate Salts: Organic gardeners have long used sprays containing extracts of the common plant horsetail (Equisetum arvense) (which contains 15 to 40 percent natural silica) to protect against fungal diseases. Scientific experiments have recently verified this garden folklore, and show that potassium silicate solutions can protect cucumbers against damping-off, and cucumbers, grapes, and squash against powdery mildew. Sodium silicate can also protect plants against disease. How these salts act isn’t clear yet, but like the phosphate salts above, they may be absorbed by plants and act systemically; such was the case with the cucumbers in the experiments above. Spray small areas to check for phytotoxicity before general use. Sodium or potassium silicate solutions can be obtained at drugstores. Caution: be extremely careful when using silicate salts, as the concentrated solution is strongly alkaline.
Oils

Petroleum-based horticultural oils (mineral oils), essential plant oils, neem oil, vegetable seed oils, and even fatty acids can be used effectively not just to fight insect pests, but to control pathogenic fungi as well. Oil sprays protect against fungi probably by helping to repel the water that is needed for fungal growth. The best approach to protection and control may be to rotate different classes of oil. Rotation of oils minimizes possible environmental accumulation of one kind. Petroleum is the most persistent; vegetable and neem oils are more easily biodegradable.

Petroleum-based oils: These oils have a long history of use in horticulture. Before the 1970s when lighter formulations were developed, orchardists sprayed their trees in the spring, while the trees were still dormant, with heavy (”dormant”) oils to protect against insect pests. You can now purchase refined horticultural oils such as a product named SunSpray, which is effective against powdery mildew and sometimes against black spot. You can also purchase mineral oil at a drugstore and use it to make your own, less expensive, spray. Horticultural oils should not be used on drought-stressed plants or those weakened by disease, and they should not be used when temperatures exceed 85°F. With repeated use petroleum-based sprays can also build up in your soil.

Vegetable oil sprays: Cooking and salad oils are more readily available than most other oils and are probably less disruptive to the environment. Vegetable oils are biodegradable and shouldn’t cause any long-term problems in the garden. Emulsified vegetable oil sprays of sunflower, olive, canola, peanut, soybean, corn, grapeseed, or safflower can control powdery mildew on apple trees, roses, and possibly other plants, and cottonseed oil has considerable protective value against powdery mildew. However, emulsified vegetable oil can leave a greasy film on leaves, which you might find objectionable. Check for plant damage before general use, and be especially careful of blooms.

Herbal oil sprays: Essential oils such as those made from basil, fenugreek, cumin, mint, clove, and eucalyptus may be effective against a number of fungal pathogens. For instance, solutions of cumin or clove oil completely inhibit sugarcane rot, and basil oil can inhibit growth of soilborne pathogens. A commercial formulation of mint oil (Funga-Stop) is available to help control soilborne pathogens. However, these essential oils need to be researched further before they become prevalent in horticulture.

Neem oil: Neem is derived from the neem tree, a native of Myanmar (the former Burma) and India. Extracts of neem seeds are used as insecticides; they kill insects as they molt or hatch. Recently, fungicides made with neem oil have become available commercially. Neem oil appears to have better fungicidal properties than many of the oils described above, perhaps because neem contains sulfur compounds, which have their own fungicidal properties, as well as other natural pesticides. A neem-oil formulation called Trilogy has been approved by the EPA for use on foods, while Rose Defense and Triact (for control of powdery mildew, rust, black spot, Botrytis, downy mildew, and other common diseases) are designed for use on ornamentals. Make sure you buy neem with fungicidal rather than insecticidal properties.
Soaps

Like many other methods outlined here, soaps have been used for many years by organic gardeners, particularly as insecticides. Commercial formulations now include soap solutions with fungicidal properties, which show some control of powdery mildew, black spot, canker, leaf spot, and rust. You can also make your own version. All soaps can damage plants when applied improperly. Test before you spray widely.
Botanicals

Plant preparations have been used for centuries in medicine and pest control. For example, opium from the opium poppy was one of the first pain killers. Farmers in India use neem leaves to protect their stored grain from insects. Herbs and spices, such as basil and clove, have been used by many cultures to protect food from spoilage, as both have antimicrobial properties.

Milsana: The German corporation BASF capitalized on this concept in 1993 by screening a large number of plant extracts for their fungicidal properties. The most promising result was a dried extract of the giant knotweed, Reynoutria sachalinensis, which is now sold as a fungicide under the brandname Milsana. Knotweed extract has only recently become commercially available in the United States, so feedback from U.S. gardeners is sparse. Italian researchers have found that Milsana reduced powdery mildew infection on cucumber by 50 percent, and similar sprays protected roses, but these were less effective than oils, soaps, and other non-toxic products. Repeated sprays of Milsana induced a greener and glossier coloration of the leaves, but they became brittle to the touch.

Garlic: Sprays made from aqueous garlic extracts have antibiotic and antifungal properties and will suppress a number of plant diseases, including powdery mildew on cucumbers and, to some extent, black spot on roses. Activity may be due to sulfur-containing compounds such as ajoene or allicin.
Antitranspirants

Antitranspirant coatings made from very dilute mixtures of polymers and water are sometimes sprayed onto foliage to prevent water loss. Growers also use them to protect a number of different ornamental plants against diseases caused by fungi. Antitranspirants are just as effective as some chemical fungicides against downy mildew on zinnia, hydrangea, and crapemyrtle, and against powdery mildew and black spot on roses. They are available commercially under the names Wilt-Pruf and Vapor Gard, among others.
Least-toxic Control

* Antitranspirants

Antitranspirant coatings are non-toxic, biodegradable, and inexpensive, and are readily available at local nurseries in liquid form. Unlike fungicides, their action against pathogens is non-specific and so they are not likely to cause a buildup of resistance. Antitranspirants do not protect new growth, though, so the coatings have to be reapplied on a regular basis. Since leaf coatings reduce the rate of photosynthesis by about 5 percent, antitranspirants are probably better suited for sunny climates.
Controlling Bacterial Diseases

There are very few effective chemical controls for bacterial diseases. bordeaux mixture is one possible treatment for bacterial diseases occurring on stems and leaves. The active component in this mixture is copper ion, which is both fungicidal and bactericidal; it is commonly used for bacterial leaf spot. Some bacterial diseases, such as fire blight, walnut blight, and bacterial spot of tomato, can be treated with antibiotics, including streptomycin (sold as Agrimycin). Caution: Agrimycin can be extremely toxic to mammals, aquatic invertebrates, fish, bees, and beneficial insects, and can cause plant damage.
Controlling Viruses

The most effective approach to viral diseases is to control the insect vectors that often transmit them from plant to plant. For instance, successful management of thrips can help prevent the spread of tomato spotted wilt virus. Non-toxic treatments are ineffective against viruses, and in response to chemical controls, viruses easily mutate. (See Natural Insect Control: The Ecological Gardener’s Guide to Foiling Pests, 1994, Brooklyn Botanic Garden Handbook #139, for garden-safe methods for controlling insect pests.)
Controlling Nematodes

Parasitic nematodes are most often soilborne. Their effects can be minimized by rotating crops, increasing organic matter in the soil, and planting nematode-free material. Applying compost helps control nematodes because compost teems with bacteria and fungi that attack pathogens. Adding organic matter to the soil also helps create a large microbial soil population, and as these microbes feed near plant roots they form a barrier that makes nematode penetration less likely. If the problem is severe, you can combine compost and inoculations of plant roots with mycorrhizae, symbiotic fungi that help feed the plant by enhancing mineral uptake. Since mycorrhizae colonize roots, they make nematode penetration more difficult. You can also add beneficial nematodes, which can displace parasitic species.

You can add chitin—a polysaccharide complex found in both shellfish shells and nematode eggs—to the soil to help control nematodes; a commercial form called ClandoSan is available. This soil amendment stimulates the growth of soil microbes that produce chitinase, an enzyme that breaks down the chitin in nematode eggs, destroying the eggs and larvae. As chitin is metabolized, ammonia is released, which is toxic to nematodes.
Least-toxic Control

* Compost Tea

Using Beneficial Organisms

Beneficial fungi or bacteria can control garden diseases by competing with disease-causing organisms for nutrients and space, by producing antibiotics, by preying on pathogens (a process called hyperparasitism), or by inducing resistance in the host plant. Antagonists do not persist in the environment, are non-toxic, and in some cases are as effective as chemical fungicides.

Beneficial fungi are effective only when humidity is high (usually 60 to 80 percent), so their usefulness is restricted to greenhouses or to regions, such as Louisiana and other Gulf states, where humidity is always very high during the summer growing season. Beneficial bacteria are less sensitive to moisture, and so have a wider range of use.
A Beneficial Bacterium

Preliminary research shows that the beneficial bacterium Bacillus laterosporus (sold as Rose Flora) is as effective at protecting black spot-susceptible rose cultivars as some chemical fungicides. It probably protects against black spot through competition, but this agent is still relatively new and experiments detailing its mode of action have not been completed. As a ground spray, it can help control new sources of black spot infection. As a foliar spray, it seems to be more effective when mixed with the antitranspirant sold commercially as Wilt-Pruf. The powdered formulation can cause eye irritation, so use eye protection when mixing solutions and applying.
Hyperparasites

Ampelomyces quisqualis is a powdery mildew hyperparasite first described in the mid-nineteenth century. The fungus attacks a wide range of powdery mildew species and genera; it spreads naturally through the air, and acts quickly. The commercially available strain, AQ-10, can provide some control of powdery mildew on cucumber, grapes, roses, and possibly other plants. Research has shown that better results are obtained when AQ-10 is mixed with a horticultural-oil solution before spraying.
Compost Tea

Water extracts of fermented compost, or “compost teas,” are full of antibiotics, microbial products, and beneficial microbes that compete with pathogens, such as those that are responsible for powdery mildew, Botrytis gray mold, and leaf blight. The “tea” can be used as a foliar spray to help suppress plant disease. Undiluted compost may also benefit a plant’s roots, and stem, as well as the soil when applied as a thin layer of mulch around the plant.
Using Combination Treatments

You may have greater success combating plant diseases when you combine control treatments instead of employing a single control strategy. For example, baking soda is usually more effective when used with oil because both have antifungal properties. The oil may also help provide an even distribution of baking soda on plant leaves. Pathogens can also develop resistance to ingredients that are applied frequently, so a rotation of active ingredients can reduce the likelihood of pathogen resistance. Combination treatments can be applied simultaneously or sequentially, in a planned rotation. There are so many complex interactions taking place in each home garden that you will have to come up with the most effective treatment rotations through trial and error. A good rule might be to start experimenting with the least expensive and most readily available products first. To control fungal diseases, for example, it’s likely that you will have to spray weekly, especially in areas of high rainfall; so this time interval might be a good starting point to set a rotation schedule. Adjust the schedule through trial and error. You might get away with fewer applications, or you might need more frequent treatments.

Some examples of treatment rotations:

1. To prevent powdery mildew, rotate vinegar, baking soda, and vegetable oil (the least expensive and most easily available remedies). Spray plants once a week, alternating substances.
2. Black spot and rust require preventive sprays. Neem oil sprays in rotation with antitranspirants or garlic might prevent these diseases, especially on resistant species. The systemic effect of phosphate salts could be useful as well.
3. Antitranspirants can protect against mildew for up to 30 days. Foliage put out in that interval, however, is not protected. You can protect it by spraying with baking soda or another foliar spray between applications of antitranspirants.
4. As diseases and severity vary with location, you will have to experiment to find the most effective combination. With all these options, there is no longer any need to use toxic sprays, especially when resistant species and good cultural practices can help prevent the problem in the first place.

Controlling Soilborne Pathogens

Conventionally, soilborne pathogens are controlled by soil fumigation or by addition of chemical fungicides to the soil. The most commonly used soil fumigant is methyl bromide, a toxic and dangerous gas that also depletes the stratospheric ozone layer. Another common soil fungicide is Dazomet (sold under the brand name Basamid), a granular material that releases a toxic gas when it comes in contact with the water in the soil. Among the alternatives to these poisons are plants such as garlic that release fungicidal chemicals into the soil. Rotation of garlic with tomatoes, for instance, can reduce the likelihood of soilborne tomato diseases. Incorporating broccoli residues into the soil can help disinfect your soil of the fungus that causes Verticillium wilt. In areas with abundant sunlight, you can solarize the soil to disinfect it of fungi, bacteria, nematodes, and even weed seeds.

Seeds and soil can also be treated with biocontrol agents that prevent soilborne diseases. These beneficial bacteria and fungi work by competing with disease-causing organisms for nutrients and space, by producing antibiotics, by preying on pathogens, or by inducing resistance in the host plants. Biocontrol agents can help control damping-off, wilt, and a number of soilborne diseases caused by Pythium, Fusarium, Rhizoctonia, Verticillium, and other pathogens. Commercially available agents include the beneficial fungi Trichoderma harzianum (sold as Root Shield) and Gliocladium virens (SoilGard), and bacteria such as Bacillus subtilis (Kodiak), Streptomyces griseoviridis (Mycostop), and Burkholderia cepacia (Deny). These agents are non-toxic and some occur naturally in compost—but like compost, these agents are not always 100-percent effective at disease control.

William Quarles is an integrated pest management (IPM) specialist and the executive director of the Bio-Integral Resource Center (BIRC) in Berkeley, California, a non-profit organization that researches pesticide alternatives and educates the public about them.

http://www.bbg.org/gar2/topics/essays/2008su_guerrillas.html

Guerrillas of Green
Plants & Gardens News | Volume 23, Number 2 | Summer 2008
by Charles Wilson
Drawing of green guerrillas

Can planting a flower be a political act? Consider Kate Gilliam. On a crisp Sunday afternoon in late March, she is dressed in a black coat and tight black jeans and is standing behind a high chain-link fence at the corner of McKibbin and Bogart streets in Brooklyn, holding an unplanted tray of pansies. A thin woman with intelligent eyes and black hair cropped closely to her head, Gilliam plants things on land she does not own, often clandestinely. She is a guerrilla gardener, a peculiar kind of renegade, trying to fortify a community rather than tear down a government.

A little over two years ago, Gilliam founded Trees Not Trash, an organization that is trying to green up the industrial expanse of Bushwick, Brooklyn. She and her compatriots clear out rubble-strewn lots to make way for flowers. On vacant property, they throw “seed bombs”—bundles of wildflower seeds, clay, and compost. They create green space out of garbage dumps and plant trees in a neighborhood that until recently had hardly any. Even though they sometimes wear bandanas or camouflage, Gilliam and her sympathizers are armed not with weapons but with hyacinth and honeysuckle.

“When I moved to Bushwick from Vancouver in 2005, there were these old revolting tires everywhere, and I walked around in the spring by myself collecting them,” she says. “People would just dump huge amounts of industrial garbage everywhere.” Gilliam started painting the tires and planting flowers in them. She also began to recruit partners in crime by posting flyers around the neighborhood asking “Do you want to make your neighborhood green? Call me.”

As Kate began her efforts to make Bushwick greener, she knew she faced an inhospitable urban environment as well as the headwind of much stronger political forces—forces that the poet and farmer Wendell Berry said have led us to embrace the economy of money over the “economies of nature, energy, and the human spirit.” But despite it all, she has persisted. Her stubbornness ultimately leads us to an uncomfortable question: How on earth has planting flowers become countercultural?
How to Build Your
Own Seed Bombs

* 1 part seeds for plants native and noninvasive to your area
* 3 parts compost
* 5 parts dry red clay (obtainable from pottery-supply stores)
* 2 parts water

1. Mix seeds well with compost in a large bowl.
2. Blend in dry red clay until mixture is uniform throughout.
3. Add water in small increments and mix all with your hands until it reaches a doughy consistency yet is not sticky or wet to the touch.
4. Form into marble-sized spheres by rubbing small amounts of the mixture between your palms. Make sure the spheres are smooth and unbroken; cracks permit ants and pests to break into the bombs and steal your seeds.
5. Set the bombs in the sun to dry for at least 24 hours. This allows the clay to set and harden, further protecting the seeds.
6. When completely dry, seed bombs can be tossed into vacant lots. It takes about 3 to 5 inches of rainfall to break down the clay so that the seeds can sprout, so try not to launch your bombs during a drought.

Adapted from a recipe by Angie Mohr as shared on associatedcontent.com
Origins of a Movement

Gilliam’s work as a furtive horticultural agent, as unique as it may seem at first, is part of a broader movement. Thirty-five years ago, a young New York painter named Liz Christy coined the term “guerrilla gardening.” She lived on the Lower East Side at a time of suburban flight, rising crime, and fiscal crisis. New York City was dealing with the growing number of vacant and abandoned lots by simply erecting chain-link fences around them. These spaces inevitably became repositories for trash and dumping grounds for drug addicts.

Christy gathered friends to focus on a particularly forlorn 50- by 300-foot plot on the northeast corner of Bowery and Houston streets. It was strewn with bed frames, old refrigerators, trash, and car parts. Christy and her compatriots began to creep in secretly to clear the property; it took an entire year just to prepare the ground to plant trees and flowers. The volunteers relied on donated plants and were able to beg manure for fertilizer from the local police station’s horse stables.

“It is my contention that the Mayor presently has under his jurisdiction more acres of open space than any mayor since at least the turn of the century,” Christy wrote at the time. “These vast and scattered acres of wasted land, ‘lazy lots,’ acres of rubble and debris represent a tremendous opportunity to start to plan humane and vital areas for the city and its future residents.” In time, City Hall recognized the value of the admittedly illegal gardening at Houston and Bowery and granted Christy’s group—which had named itself the Green Guerrillas—an insecure lease for $1 a year.

The gardeners began to expand their efforts to other vacant lots owned by the city and encouraged others to do the same. “In those early days,” says Steve Frillmann, the current director of Green Guerrillas, “people would throw seed bombs into vacant lots or plant sunflower seeds on medians. Some of them didn’t have a vision that what they were doing would last 35 years. They were simply trying to take a pile of lemons and make lemonade.”

In time, though, it became apparent how emotionally invested residents became in their new gardens. “Rather than cowering around, people planted these gardens against all odds,” says Frillmann. “And they began to be part of the city’s renewal. They helped stabilize blocks.” In 1978, at the beginning of the Koch administration, the city acknowledged the value of expanding the garden program by offering short-term leases for abandoned properties through a new program called Operation GreenThumb. The organization, which would later became part of the city’s parks department, gave permission to garden when the city’s land-use committee could find no other immediate commercial use for the land. These leases were essentially a stopgap measure during a period of blight. Yet the validity that these leases conferred also allowed people to tend to their gardens openly, and in many cases, what began as temporary green spaces took on the semblance of permanent community gardens.

Even as guerrilla gardening has helped revitalize New York’s neighborhoods, the success of the gardens themselves has threatened their continued existence. During the economic prosperity of the 1990s, Mayor Giuliani came to view the gardens as a revenue drain—places where condominiums could potentially be built and property taxes collected. In 1998, Giuliani announced that several hundred of them would be put up for public auction. There was a swift and vehement public outcry. Lawsuits filed by then attorney general Eliot Spitzer and the Green Guerrillas sought to block the sale, and entertainer Bette Midler offered to purchase many of the threatened properties to protect them from development.

The 2002 settlement that resolved the issue was mostly a positive outcome for the gardeners. It preserved nearly 200 of the gardens by turning them over to the parks department or to land trusts, though it also granted the city the right to sell the land of more than 100 other gardens. It left the status of scores of other existing gardens undetermined. The settlement did ensure, however, that a thorough environmental review process would be in place whenever the city tried to sell a GreenThumb garden, making it more difficult for City Hall to summarily reclaim land.
Radical Roots

“New York is a microcosm of the progress of the guerrilla gardening movement as a whole,” says Richard Reynolds, the 30-year-old author of a new book called On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries (Bloomsbury). “People put blood and sweat into these gardens. And when they thrive, the fight becomes less about neglect and moves on to a fight about gentrification and control and the scarcity of land.”

Reynolds, who lives in London, was working in advertising when his career as a guerrilla gardener began in 2004. Embarrassed by the neglected flower beds outside his nondescript high-rise building, he began sneaking outside at two in the morning with lavender, red cyclamen, spiky cabbage palms, and his trowel. His efforts have since expanded to guerrilla projects throughout London, where he is often joined by dozens of other volunteers, many of whom find their way to him through his website, guerrillagardening.org. They have cleaned and brightened up scores of traffic islands in places like Hackney and on Westminster Bridge Road.

Reynolds’s book examines the guerrilla gardening movement globally, where patterns of struggle emerge between gardeners and developers. In Friedrichshain, a gritty section in Berlin that lacks green areas, residents removed trash and hauled in several tons of soil to create the Garten Rosa Rose. They began to host cookouts and outdoor film nights; but in March of this year, a redeveloper broke a chain of protesters and plowed over their hard work. In spite of such opposition, guerrilla gardeners are also planting in Amsterdam, Paris, Toronto, Dublin, and cities throughout the United States, and are nourished by a growing presence online.

In Portland, Oregon, one guerrilla gardener documented how he transformed a box hedge of the Mercedes logo outside a car dealership into a box hedge of a peace sign. (The dealership eventually changed it back.)

Reynolds sees some danger in his movement being co-opted by the mainstream establishment. The London city government recently held a daylight event that it called “guerrilla gardening,” in which it temporarily laid 20,000 feet of turf in Trafalgar Square. To Reynolds, the central premise of guerrilla gardening is that it is an act of rebellion, something that’s done without permission.

“If you want to work with the state, that’s fine, and there are situations where that is right,” Reynolds says. “But there are a lot of good reasons why it’s good to go out and do it on one’s own. If you involve the landowner, there are issues of what the land could be used for instead, who decides what the gardening could be, who funds it, who looks after maintenance. A clear answer is going to be unlikely, because it’s going to involve effort on the landowners’ part.

“Guerrilla gardeners, by doing it themselves, are going around that,” Reynolds continues. “They are essentially saying to the landowners: ‘We want nothing from you.’ When you have a garden that’s thriving, then you can go to them and say: ‘Hey, we’ve got this thriving garden, do you have a problem with it?’ Once it exists, it’s really hard to turn the momentum.”
Bringing Bushes to Bushwick

Kate Gilliam’s work in Bushwick is gaining momentum. In a city that has seen a remarkable turnaround over the past two decades, Bushwick retains the abandoned industrial feeling of the Bowery, circa 1973, just when Liz Christy’s work was starting. (Christy died in 1985 at the age of 39. The garden at Houston and Bowery that she was instrumental in creating is now a protected green space and bears her name.)

As Gilliam began to scatter more tire planters and wooden planters around her neighborhood, she set up a Trees Not Trash website and began to attract more volunteers who were eager to help. She turned her focus to a rusty fenced-in area on Bogart Street next to the Morgan Street subway entrance; it was overgrown with eight-foot-high weeds and filled with trash of all kinds—syringes, dead rats, used batteries, glass. Gilliam did not know who owned the property, but she did know that if she and her friends waded into the mess with trash bags and gave the appearance that they knew what they were doing, the cops were unlikely to disturb them.

Over several months, Gilliam’s volunteers cleared the trash and rubble, and they have since planted a lovely garden filled with cherry and maple trees, delphiniums, hostas, hydrangeas, ornamental grasses, herbs, vegetables, hollyhocks, forsythia, begonias, and butterfly bushes. Gilliam has learned that the city owns the plot, but the parks department has not protested her intervention, and a city employee recently helped set up a faucet so she won’t have to haul water in with buckets.

Gilliam has found ways to work both within the system as well as outside it. On the morning that I visited, she and her fellow gardeners were replanting some flower boxes outside the neighborhood’s only coffee shop, whose owners eagerly agreed to let her work there. She has collaborated with the parks department to encourage them to plant more trees in Bushwick as part of Mayor Bloomberg’s MillionTreesNYC initiative, which aims to install a million new street trees throughout the five boroughs by 2017. Yet she also continues to undertake projects without formal permission. Recently, she invited local kids to help her create a new green space on Jefferson Street on a derelict piece of land being used as a dumping ground. She planted in broad daylight with the children, even though she had no idea who the land belonged to. She was relieved to find later that the owner was thrilled with what they had done.

Gilliam’s work is helping to strengthen the fabric of the Bushwick community, much as Christy’s efforts and the work of the original guerrilla gardeners strengthened neighborhoods in Manhattan three decades ago. “I’m still pretty much under the radar,” she says. “I don’t advertise what I’m doing. It’s not my land. Then on the flip side, there is also a brazen element to it as well. I don’t hide it. I involve a lot of the community in it. And I tell the kids that if anything ever happens and someone approaches them about what they’re doing, you send them to me. I am happy to go to bat for planting flowers.”

[live links at url]

Resources

Green Guerrillas

GreenThumb

Liz Christy Community Garden

MillionTreesNYC

Richard Reynolds’s Blog, Guerrilla Gardening

Trees Not Trash

Charles Wilson cowrote, with Eric Schlosser, Chew on This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). He lives in New York City.

http://www.bbg.org/gar2/topics/sustainable/2008fa_seedbanking.html

Seed Banking for Survival—Saving the World,
One Seed at a Time
Plants & Gardens News | Volume 23, Number 3 | Fall 2008/Winter 2009
by Jessica Reisman
Wheat is one of 15 plant species that comprise 90 percent of all food crops.

Wheat is one of 15 plant species that comprise 90 percent of all food crops. The need for greater biodiversity drives the seed-banking movement. (Photo courtesy of Scott Bauer.)

In a 2000 animated science-fiction movie called Titan A.E., a lost spaceship called the Titan holds the key to humanity’s survival after catastrophe—our planet and all its life has been destroyed (A.E. stands for “after earth”). The Titan is a drifting repository for all the plant and animal species on Earth, stored there against the need to one day seed a new planet. The ship is in effect the mother of all gene banks.

This concept is not merely a fictional conceit. Seed banks, also known as seed archives, germplasm banks, and seed vaults, are gene banks for plants, and there are approximately 1,400 of them around the world. The projects range from small, geographically specific ones that support horticultural research and local restoration to larger, overarching projects that seek, like the fictional Titan repository, to provide the means to sustain life in the face of mass ecological catastrophe.

When the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food opened the Svalbard Global Seed Vault this past February, the facility captured the public’s attention as no seed bank before it had. Sited on a remote island just 600 miles from the North Pole, Svalbard’s surface structure juts up from the frozen landscape like a sci-fi space ark. A 410-foot tunnel within leads to three metal doors, each opening into vaults hewn from the permafrost deep underground. Here, in rooms that retain their rough permafrost walls and ceiling, warmly attired lab technicians place silvery foil packets of seeds into numbered, labeled boxes. The boxes are sealed and then stored on high metal shelves at minus four degrees Fahrenheit.

The architecturally impressive repository represents the vision of some very dedicated people. At the forefront is the scientist Carey Fowler, a native of Tennessee and the executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Fowler’s career in conservation and the promotion of crop biodiversity spans 30 years, several books, and more than 75 articles. Fowler and others had to work against myriad challenges—the fear of “biopiracy,” issues of ownership and trade, international policy, funding, and more—to create the world’s most comprehensive gene bank.

With a life span expected by Fowler to rival that of the pyramids, the Svalbard vault, ideally, will serve as a backup for all the other seed banks in the world; the seeds in Svalbard duplicate the holdings of the collections that send them. As an answer to the issues of ownership and fears of biopiracy, all of the Svalbard holdings remain the property of the original depositors. Stored in this remote, desolate location, protected against nuclear blast, natural catastrophe, and to a large extent, equipment failure and climate change, the duplicate seeds will survive conditions that might destroy the original collections.
Genetic Insurance Policies

One of the first ex situ seed banks—that is, a facility for conserving seeds separately from where they grow—was set up by Russian geneticist and botanist Nikolai Vavilov in Leningrad and exists today as the N.I. Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry (VIR), the only research institution in Russia whose activities include the collection and conservation of plant genetic material. Between 1916 and 1933, Vavilov and his helpers undertook impressive expeditions, collecting more than 250,000 plant samples from around the world. Today, with outposts from Astrakhan to Zeya, the VIR encompasses 320,000 holdings of grain crops, legumes, groat crops, industrial crops, fodder crops, potatoes, vegetables, and herbs.

The agenda of the seed bank as an insurance policy against ecological disaster has gained urgency in the last few decades. Scientists and growers have been among the first to recognize the degradation of habitat and species loss associated with both natural catastrophe and humanity’s overuse of resources. It is estimated that approximately 10 percent of seed-bearing species are currently being banked, and exchange and research projects are targeting ways to help stave off species loss.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) runs the National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS), which links together an array of seed-banking projects, such as the North American Plants Collections Consortium, a program of the American Public Garden Association, and the Center for Plant Conservation, which focuses on the preservation of rare plants native to the U.S. The NPGS holds approximately 480,000 accessions comprising 12,000 plant species. The USDA has been sending scientist “plant explorers” all over the planet to collect seeds since the late 1880s.
Economic Incentives
Staff check seed accession numbers at a Nigerian gene bank.

Staff check seed accession numbers at a Nigerian gene bank. (Photo courtesy of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.)

It’s no accident that most of the largest seed banks are operated by governmental agencies. Seed banking can be an expensive practice, and the most far-reaching programs are those fueled by economic incentives.

Booming population growth and the attendant need for stable food crops ramps up the homogeneity of plant life. The health and vigor of a plant strain, however—whether food crop, forage, or rare species—depends on diversity. But industrial agriculture, which focuses on the mass production of a single crop variety, drastically reduces genetic diversity within the plant population. While around 7,000 different plant species have been raised as food crops since the beginning of human agriculture, according to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, a mere 15 plant species now make up about 90 percent of all human food crops. Chief among these are rice, wheat, and maize, which account for two-thirds of that 90 percent.

Bred for uniform traits, agricultural monocultures become vulnerable to disease and pests. Examples include the 1970 loss of $1 billion worth of crops in the U.S. when disease killed uniform corn varieties, and the massive outbreaks of citrus canker in Florida in 1984 and Brazil in 1991, both exacerbated by the loss of traditional varieties and, thereby, genetic diversity.

Seed banks keep diversity alive in the face of intensive agriculture and genetically modified seeds. They also provide source material for plant breeders and researchers in search of genetic traits for new crop varieties—qualities such as enhanced nutritional value, higher yields, resistance to pests and diseases, and the capacity to weather climate change with its predicted intensification of both floods and drought.

Plant breeders use seed-bank stores to find cultivars that can resist things like black Sigatoka fungus, which devastated banana production in East Africa. One seed bank, the International Rice Research Institute, was able to supply the farmers of tsunami-devastated Asia with rice varieties that would grow in fields that had been inundated with saltwater.

Like natural disasters, war can quickly decimate regional agricultural systems, and stock from seed banks can be crucial to restoring crop plants. The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, located in Aleppo, Syria, holds varieties native to Afghanistan and Iraq among the 135,000 food and forage seeds in its collection. The collection has been an important source of seeds to help revitalize crop diversity damaged by war.
Banking for Biodiversity

Plants in the wild, prey to massive habitat loss, are also disappearing. Thousands of plant varieties, noncommercial crops and wild plants alike, have gone extinct. Since 1900, among agricultural crops alone, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that 75 percent of the world’s genetic diversity has been eliminated.

The Millennium Seed Bank Project (MSBP) of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, focuses on the conservation of wild plant species. Along with its global partners, MSBP is working toward securing 25 percent of the world’s plant species in safe storage by 2020. Their current project, which runs until 2010, includes the collection of seeds, specimens, and data from 24,200 wild species worldwide, preserving them both in their countries of origin and at the Millennium Seed Bank and making them available for research use and conservation in the wild.

Among the MSBP’s many wild species success stories are marsh pagoda (Mimetes hirtus), a flowering shrub found in limited regions of Africa and classified as vulnerable, and cabbage tree (Dendroseris litoralis), one of the most endangered plant species on the planet. A cabbage tree specimen flowered at the MSBP in 2004, an important milestone in bringing the plant back from the brink of extinction.

There are also many regional and community seed banks and networks that operate either in partnership with or independently of larger projects like MSBP. Organizations such as the Kusa Seed Society bank seed for the restoration of native species and the preservation of local diversity. Some, like the Seed Savers network of Australia, actively resist the dominance of the larger seed bank projects, seeing them as exclusively serving the concerns of big agriculture to the detriment of the most traditional method of preserving crop diversity—farm and community seed swapping and storing, practices that they argue have been carried on for over 10,000 years.

Closer to home, many botanic gardens do the work of seed banking for regional plant conservation, and independent efforts like the Experimental Station seed archive project in Chicago collect and lend seeds for plants used for food, medicines, and building materials.
Doomsday Is Every Day
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault entrance.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault entrance. (Photo by Mari Tefre, courtesy of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the Global Crop Diversity Trust.)

Seed banks like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault may seem less grand than Titan A.E.’s world-seeding spaceship, but they are just as impressive. In the face of war, natural catastrophe, habitat loss, climate change, and the impacts of industrial agriculture, seed banking is an essential tool not just for conservation but for survival.

According to Carey Fowler, “If we had built this vault a decade ago, we would have used it ten times already.” As backup for seed banks the world over, Svalbard stores are ready when anything from equipment failure to flooding causes a loss at the seed banks that originally placed collections with the Global Seed Vault. “Doomsday,” Fowler warns, “is every day.”
Regional and Community Seed Banks

There are many small, regional seed banks, whose mission is to preserve the diversity of those plants native to their areas, as well as projects focused on community outreach or saving particular kinds of plants. For more information, check out these organizations:

[live urls at url above]

Exchange Networks and Outreach

* Echo Seed Bank
* Experimental Station Seed Archive
* Native Seed/S-E-A-R-C-H Seed Bank
* Primal Seeds
* Seed Savers Exchange

Regional Focus

* Center for Indian Knowledge Systems Seed Bank Project
* Ozark Seed Bank
* Saving Our Seeds
* Seed Bank of New England Wild Flower Society

Species Focus

* International Carnivorous Plant Society Seed Bank
* Ornamental Plant Germplasm Center
* Rare Woody Plant Gene Bank

Jessica Reisman has written for Texas Monthly, The Austin Chronicle, and several encyclopedias and is the author of the novel The Z Radiant (www.storyrain.com).

http://www.bbg.org/gar2/topics/kitchen/2001su_breeding.html

Crop Breeding—Create Your Own Fruit and Vegetable Varieties
Plants & Gardens News Volume 16, Number 2 | Summer 2001
by Carol Deppe

Every gardener should be a plant breeder. Developing new vegetables doesn’t require a specialized education, a lot of land, or even a lot of time. It can be done on any scale. It’s enjoyable. It’s deeply rewarding. You can get useful new varieties much faster than you might suppose. And you can eat your mistakes.

There has never been a better time to get involved in amateur vegetable breeding. The seed saver exchanges that have emerged during the past decade provide a rich source of raw materials for plant breeding. The smaller seed companies, many also founded recently, are eager to help perpetuate and distribute the creations of amateurs. And the professional plant breeders are all busy elsewhere. They are engaged, almost exclusively, in developing commercial varieties of vegetables—vegetables bred for uniformity and once-over picking so they can be harvested by machines, for tough skin and hard flesh so they aren’t ruined by those machines, and for good storage and shipping characteristics so they can be transported long distances. These are not usually the qualities home gardeners need. Yet most of the new varieties that are released annually with such fanfare are commercial cultivars.

Gardeners buy only small amounts of seed compared to commercial growers, so seed of varieties that are best suited for gardeners is sold in only small amounts. Large seed companies often can’t afford to carry it. No one can make a profit developing it. So no one is. If we gardeners want good new garden varieties, we’ll have to breed them ourselves. But this is as it should be. Gardeners have been developing their own varieties for centuries. Besides, why should we let the professionals have all the fun?
Man with a Mission

Glenn Drowns was only sixteen when he started breeding plants, but he was already an experienced and enthusiastic gardener. It all started when he was two and a half, and his family planted some flower seeds. He was fascinated. By the age of four he was crawling through the fence to help his neighbor, who had a bigger garden. At eight he had a 500-square-foot garden of his own and was ordering his own seed. About then he developed a passion for vine crops. Each year he ordered every squash variety he could find. By age eleven he was selling all the produce his family didn’t need and using the money to buy seed. By age sixteen he was growing fifty different varieties of squash and ten of cucumbers. He also tried about half a dozen of the shortest-season watermelons he could find.
watermelon

More than anything else, Glenn wanted a ripe watermelon. His family lived in the extreme northern part of Idaho, where the growing season is short, cold, and unpredictable. His melons wouldn’t ripen. “I tried everything,” he recalls. “I even grew them inside little plastic tents all summer, just really baked them. But I never got a ripe melon. The only fully ripe watermelons I had ever tasted came from the stores—which didn’t count.”

Then Glenn took high school biology, and his class discussed crop improvement and hybridization. “Wow, maybe I could get a ripe melon that way,” he thought. So he tried a cross. One of the parents was probably ‘Sugar Baby’. The other was from a package of seed some friends had given him. The package was labeled “watermelon.” Glenn didn’t keep much in the way of records. He knew about record keeping, but he thought he was only playing around.

Within four years, growing no more than a dozen plants per year, Glenn Drowns produced a new stable variety—a variety that reliably produces similar plants from seed to seed and year to year. ‘Blacktail Mountain’ is a round, deep green melon with very faint stripes. The vines grow out to form a plant about 10 feet in diameter. The average melon is 8 inches across, weighs 8 to 10 pounds, and has a rind about half an inch thick. The flesh is orangish red, crisp, and very sweet. What is essential about ‘Blacktail Mountain’ is that it’s early—quite possibly the earliest watermelon ever grown. It’s about five days earlier than ‘New Hampshire Midget’, for example, one of the earliest watermelons.
Home Brew

Glenn laughs when he describes the breeding program that led to ‘Blacktail Mountain’. He hadn’t been able to find out anything at all about how to do crosses. “So I just sort of guessed,” he says.

Watermelons, like most cucurbits, have separate male and female flowers. Glenn noticed that some flowers had what looked like little fruits underneath and others didn’t. He figured the flower buds with fat bases must be females and the ones with skinny bases must be males. He made that first cross exactly the way he does watermelon and squash crosses today, twenty-four years and thousands of hand-pollinations later.

Glenn starts by taping the male and female flower buds shut with masking tape in the evening before the buds open for the first time. The timing is part convenience and part necessity. Late afternoon of the day before opening also is okay, but any earlier and the buds might still be growing fast enough to damage themselves on the tape. The following day Glenn untapes the buds. If they are ready to open that day, they will slowly expand after untaping. He plucks the male flower and uses it to sprinkle pollen onto the stigma of the female flower. (The stigma is at the top of the pistil.) Then he retapes the female flower with fresh tape and labels it. He never untapes the female flower; it just shrivels at the end of the developing fruit.

Glenn crossed the putative ‘Sugar Baby’ to the unknown watermelon. Then he saved the seed and planted it. The plants of the first generation, as he recalls, were similar to the ‘Blacktail Mountain’ of today. He self-pollinated each. “That was 1978,” Glenn remembers. “Nineteen seventy-eight was a gruesome year.” It was unusually cool, and his garden suffered a lot of deer damage. Only a few plants survived. They gave him exactly one ripe watermelon. Selecting the best watermelon from which to save seed was easy, Glenn says. “There was just one ripe melon. So I selected it.”

He planted the seed from that melon in 1979. The plants that resulted, his second generation, looked pretty similar to those of 1978. He self-pollinated each and got two or three ripe melons. He planted the seed from those in 1980, but the vines were all frozen out on August 4. Fortunately, Glenn had known better than to plant all his seed in one year. He replanted in 1981 and continued to inbreed—that is, to self-pollinate each plant. By 1982 he was offering ‘Blacktail Mountain’ through the Seed Savers Exchange. It was already stable and was basically the same variety it is today. But he grew it for a number of years before he felt confident enough in its stability to offer it to a seed company.
Happy Accidents

Part of the fun of breeding your own varieties is the surprises. Glenn had deliberately selected for a very early watermelon. Unexpectedly, ‘Blacktail Mountain’ also proved to have unusual keeping qualities. Glenn found that out completely by accident. “There are long-storage melons, the Christmas types,” Glenn says. “I’m surprised more people don’t grow them. I always do, and eat my last watermelons in February. But the storage types all seem to have that white rind. I’ve always thought of the green-skinned melons as an immediate eating thing.” Storage melons are harvested at just under ripe and finish ripening during storage. Glenn usually had no reason to harvest ‘Blacktail Mountain’ that way. But Iowa, where Glenn lives and gardens now, intervened.

In 1988 an early heat wave and drought killed all Glenn’s melon vines, so he had to replant in late June. Then, the last week in August, came the torrential rains. The melon field was in a low place. It flooded. Only the earliest half dozen varieties had melons that were mature enough to harvest. Glenn grabbed those and put them in his garage. Many were not quite ripe.

Several weeks later, Glenn opened one of his ‘Blacktail Mountain’ melons to look at the seed. To his surprise, the melon popped open. And it was just as crisp and tasty as if it had been harvested in its prime and eaten immediately. The melons from the other five varieties had long since turned to mush. Intrigued, Glenn used the rest of his melons in a storage trial. He found they kept nicely for up to two months. That’s not as long as a winter-storage type, but it’s unexpected for a standard green-skinned type, and it means that Glenn can eat his last ‘Blacktail Mountain’ watermelons on Thanksgiving.

Glenn Drowns was just a high school kid with curiosity when he made his first cross. Now he has a Masters degree in biology and teaches high school biology. He also has a farm and small farm-based seed company in Iowa, the Sand Hill Preservation Center, where he sells more than 700 varieties of heirloom seeds. His bestseller is ‘Blacktail Mountain’ watermelon, still the earliest watermelon in existence. As a leader in the seed-saving movement, a father, and a teacher, Glenn is very effectively passing along his knowledge, curiosity, and many unique varieties of fruits and vegetables.
Finding Rare Seed

Small seed companies that exclusively sell heirloom and open-pollinated seed play a unique role in plant breeding and preservation. They often rediscover and reintroduce varieties that are subsequently distributed by seed saving organizations and large seed companies. Most of them are run by single families that share a passion for farming and for the land.

Growing and selling open-pollinated seed is the least profitable part of the seed business. Those who do it are essentially operating a public service. Some have formally organized as foundations. Most have not, but still appreciate and, in some cases, survive only by virtue of the occasional unsolicited donation.

Beyond their basic similarities, these small seed companies are as individual as can be, with distinctive personalities, unique areas of specialization, and inventory lists ranging from a few loose pages to a good-sized booklet. When dealing with them, don’t expect slick catalogs, toll-free phone numbers, or instant service. If you ask for a catalog in late spring, summer, or fall, for example, you will most likely be put on a mailing list for the following year.

In addition, order fulfillment during the busy season can fall behind for weeks. This is not mega-corporate America—only individual families trying to promote and preserve values and varieties they believe in. They often have a limited amount of rare seed. So if you want something special, order early, and order well before the planting season.

Following is a selection of companies that I’ve ordered from. I personally recommend and commend them to you for your interest and support.

Abundant Life Seed Foundation
P.O. Box 772
Port Townsend, WA 98368
Phone: (360) 385-5660

Bountiful Gardens 18001 Shafer Ranch Road
Willits, CA 95490
Phone: (707) 459-6410

J.L. Hudson Star Route 2, Box 337
LaHonda, CA 94020

Native Seeds/ SEARCH 526 N. 4th Avenue
Tucson, AZ 85705
Phone: (520) 622-5561

Oregon Exotics Nursery 1065 Messinger Road
Grants Pass, OR 97527
Phone: (541) 846-7578

Peace Seeds 2385 SE Thompson St.
Corvallis, OR 97333

Peters Seed and Research 407 Maranatha Lane
Myrtle Creek, OR 97457
Phone: (541) 874-2615

Sand Hill Preservation Center 1878 230th Street
Calamus, Iowa 52729
Phone: (319) 246-2299

This article was adapted from Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener’s and Farmer’s Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving, by Carol Deppe (Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1993). For details on how to breed your own fruit and vegetable varieties, see the recently revised and expanded edition of the book. Book excerpts and reviews are available on the publisher’s web site: www.chelseagreen.com.

When Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties was published in 1993, it instantly became a classic. Author Carol Deppe was universally praised for having written a unique, authoritative, and easy-to-understand guide to plant breeding and seed saving for home gardeners and small-scale farmers. Eight years later, her book is still the definitive one on the subject. And it is now available in a revised and expanded paperback edition from Chelsea Green Publishing (ISBN 1-890132-72-1; $27.95).

Carol has a B.S. in Zoology from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard University. “At least I think I have a Ph.D. from Harvard,” she says. “But when I got the diploma it was in Latin, and I don’t read Latin, so who knows?”

Carol is a full-time plant breeder, working to develop crops for sustainable agriculture. She has written for numerous magazines and periodicals, including Horticulture, Organic Gardening, and National Gardening. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon.

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