Garden News and Doug’s Take On It

So here I sit trying to make some sense of the world. You read this stuff and see if you can make sense of it.

Rabbit Genes

For example, researchers have inserted rabbit genes into the genes of Poplar trees (maybe we’ll get leaves shaped like bunny ears) in order to create a pollution sucking tree. And it worked. Apparently the trees absorb significant amounts of an industrial degreasing chemical called trichloroethylene when it is put in their feed-water. The thinking is you can genetically engineer trees to suck up a wider variety of pollutants. Insert the genes of a rabbit for degreaser, the genes of a cow for tannins used in leather making, the genes of a politician for excess hot air.

I’m not kidding on the last one, it could be done. Japanese researchers combined human dna with rice crops so the rice would degrade herbicides quicker. Yeah, teach our genes how to kill herbicides so we don’t have to stop using them.

Scotts Polluting Yet Again

Now I didn’t report on this in December but it turns out that The Scotts Company (the largest garden chemical producer) was fined a mere $500,000 dollars for releasing and making mistakes with a genetically modified weed grass. They’re working on creeping bentgrass to make it more resistant to glyphosate so golf courses can use this material on their greens. This grass is one of the largest weeds in regular lawns and pernicious in agricultural crops so you can imagine how excited we all should be to learn that Scotts is breeding the darn stuff to be tougher. Apparently they moved seed around and didn’t really get around to killing off the research plots properly. Not only did Scotts have to pay a paltry fine but they had to act as foxes in the henhouse by running seminars telling other bio-tech firms how to properly run research trials.

Petrified Trees – 6 million years old

On the never-compost-this front, I note that Hungarian scientists have discovered 16 tree trunks that are reputed to be some 6-8 million years old. While the wood forests around them turned to coal, these trunks of Cypress (found at the very bottom of the coal mine) were surrounded by sand (possibly from a sand storm) and were preserved as wood. The stumps are some ten feet in diameter and nineteen feet tall. The problem of course is now that the protective layer has been removed, these ancient chunks of wood might just turn to dust if touched or moved the wrong way. Kind of like what happens in scary movies when the bad guy gets his.

Colored Potatoes

And then this breaking news from the USDA points out that coloured potatoes may be better for us than regularly potatoes. Not that eating potatoes of any kind is good given the carb levels but coloured ones, beside being pretty, may have extra anti-oxidants in the plant dyes that are good for us. The breeders are working to increase these beneficial components and making prettier potatoes as a result. Will that be purple or pink fries with that ma’am?

Bury Me Not on the Lonesome Prairie

The Polk City Cemetery in Wisconsin has worked for many years to make a prairie section in their cemetery grounds. This area is too dry for regular garden plants or lawns so these specialized plants were installed and a great many volunteers worked to create it. Seems this late fall the cemetery staff decided they needed more places to bury the dead so they bush-hogged the place. It’s going to be a very exclusive burial grounds; people are just dying to get in there.

Bio-Accumulation

And speaking of burials, it seems that when we bury minerals like nickel by pollution, plants will mine it back for us. Researchers at the U.S. Agricultural Research Services in Texas have been identifying and breeding plants to be more efficient at “hyperaccumulating” soil minerals. Turns out the best plants are grass-like and once harvested and burned (for energy we trust) the resulting ash is high in nickel and worth about $3000/acre. So instead of mining for the darn stuff and creating huge holes in the ground, we can simply grow plants and do it. It won’t happen in Scotland though as I’m told by the usual reliable source that most Scots still have the first nickel they ever made.

Big Ain’t Better

And here’s a bit of news for that competitive vegetable grower in your family. According to research done at the University of Texas, as food/vegetables are bred for size the nutritional value disappears You get more in the basket but less in the body. So while farmers and market gardeners try to grow the biggest varieties they can so you’ll be impressed, and they’ll make more money, the consumer is actually getting less nutrition for their buck. Bigger tomatoes have lower concentrations of lycopene, the natural anti-cancer chemicals that make tomatoes red; not only that but there’s less Vitamin C and beta carotene. Milk from higher producing cows tends to have lower concentrations of fat and protein while potatoes and sweet corn show declines in iron, zinc and calcium that reach the double digits. Bottom line, bigger food now is less nutritional than the smaller varieties of 20 years ago.

Botanists Learn to Duck

And finally from the files, I see that botanists down in Arizona are giving up their research jobs on native plants. It seems that they’re allergic to having guns pointed at their heads by smugglers coming in from Mexico. It seems this wild country is a major pipeline for drug smuggling and it simply isn’t safe any more to wander about that back country looking at plants. The park service makes folks sign a waver before letting them wander off. Different kinds of growers look for different kinds of weed I guess.

And that’s all for today folks. Back to our regularly scheduled gardening information when I recover from winter.