Thoreau and tomatoes

Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit – Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau’s creed would serve us well in this age of  industrial agriculture. If he lived in modern times, he’d likely be a locavore.

Not so long ago, we ate what we could grow and what we could preserve & store for colder months. Now we can buy just about anything any time of year. But what are we buying?

Food that is grown far away, picked before ripening and bred to transport well.  All these factors not only affect the taste, but also the nutritional value. Fruits and vegetables eaten in season have been found to have a higher phytochemical content and contain more nutrients.

Listen to an interview with the author of  Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit on Fresh Air, read a NY Times article here, buy the book here.

And although I’ve said it before, ain’t nothing in the world like home grown tomatoes. Brandywine, Juliet and my personal favorite Black Krim.

 

Invasives in the holy land

Invasives, not invaders. On a walkabout in the port city of  Jaffa in Israel, I noticed an invasive tree commonly seen in DC – that’s the Ailanthus altissima, also known as the stinking sumac tree.

Ailanthus was introduced in Israel in the 1920s by the British and was used extensively in urban gardening because it grew rapidly. What made it popular – rapid growth – also made it invasive.  It grows everywhere, crowding out native species and causing damage to infrastructure such as roads and sidewalks.

Although the ailanthus has 43 fans on Facebook, it’s still a stinker.

 

Reduce, reuse, recycle – Peace Corps Guatemala style

What do you do if you live in a community where discarded plastic bottles abound and new school classrooms are needed?

If you’re a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV), you might come up with a plan to use the bottles, stuffed with trash, to construct school walls.

Mobilizing her rural Guatemalan community to collect over 6,000 used plastic drink bottles from ditches, gutters and trash piles,  PCV Laura Kutner helped reuse and recycle these bottles and other plastic trash into something that benefited the community.

Her project is being featured at this year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival along with other innovative Peace Corps projects including a bicycle powered cell phone charger/maize sheller and a solar dryer from Zambia.

More about the bottle project can be found here.

 

Bike share, Tel Aviv style

The popularity of DC’s new bike sharing program means that bike racks are often empty. This is particularly true for the morning commute from NW to the downtown area. And bike racks downtown quickly fill up in the morning so bike riders sometimes have difficulty finding a place to return the bike.

A recent post on the Prince of Petworth blog pointed to the challenges in making the still-new system work efficiently.

It’s not just a problem in DC.  During a recent trip to Tel Aviv, a bike friendly city, many of the bike racks I passed were empty. Beautiful weather and proximity to the sea may have played a role~

                        

 

Recycling, Tel Aviv style

Going green in Tel Aviv is encouraged by the availability of  recycling containers on street corners.

 

Invasive plant or urban colonizer?

There are two invasive weeds we pull while walking through our neighborhood. One is bindweed, the other Ailanthus altissima (tree of heaven).

Ailanthus grows everywhere – under porches, in sidewalk cracks, just about anywhere it can put down it’s long taproot. And if you let it grow too tall, it’s almost impossible to eradicate.

In a recent WPost article however, Harvard biologist Peter Del Tridici defended a tree with very few fans. Del Tridici points to the the benefits this tree provides – shade, fixing carbon, producing oxygen and some greenery in blighted areas.  They are not invasive, he writes, but rather “spontaneous.”

Granted, some of the services provided by this tree are beneficial. But on the “ailanthus as invasive” side, ailanthus:

• is allelopathic – leaks toxins into the soil that prevent other species from growing nearby
• crowds out other species
• rightfully deserves the name “stinking sumac”
• has an aggressive root system that can damage pavement, foundations and water system

So although Ailanthus  has nine fans on Facebook (plus Del Tridici) we will continue to be stealth weeders of this noxious weed.

 

Bugs and plants make the world go ’round

The importance of native bees,  the sexual orientation of plants, soils of the Piedmont, designing with native mosses and the reason that bugs and plants make the world go ’round [and more] will all be discussed at the 20th annual Native Plants in the Landscape Conference in Millersville, PA.

Native plants and books about native plants [and more] will also be sold at the conference.

The conference runs from June 2-5, register on line here.

 

Ban the bag

What if plastic bags were banned altogether? Not a novel concept – traveling through Brussels recently, we noted a sign informing travelers to Rwanda of the ban on plastic bags.

Called the “national flower” in some countries (bags adorn trees, fences, bushes, etc), plastic bags deplete natural resources, create litter, consume energy to manufacture, add to landfill waste and harm marine life. All good reasons to cut down on plastic bag consumption.

Along with Rwanda, countries that ban or restrict the use of plastic bags include Bangladesh, Italy, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and Taiwan. China’s 2008 ban on free plastic bags  has lead to a 66% reduction in consumption within one year.

What are the chances that US states will follow suit?

 

Organic Gardening roots

We came across WTOP’s gardening column recently written by none other than Mike McGrath. You gardeners might remember Mike as the former editor-in-chief of Organic Gardening magazine.

First published by J. Rodale in 1942 as Organic Gardening and Farming, Organic Gardening taught people how to grow better food by cultivating healthier soil using natural techniques. Rodale might be called the father of the organic movement in the US.

Nice to find Mike again. He also hosts “You Bet Your Garden” on WHYY – well worth a listen.

 

Eat your greens, your purples and blues too

We knew that violets were edible, pansies and violas as well. We grow nasturtiums because their flowers and leaves are tasty. Dandelions greens are good, the flowers can be eaten as well.

Although Doris Day says “Please don’t eat the daisies,” the petals of the English daisy (Bellis perennis) in fact are edible.

Calendula, carnation and chamomile all go into our salad bowl, along with chives and cornflower.

But we didn’t know we could eat the flowers of Cercis canadensis (redbud tree) – this was a fun fact we learned from our friends over at the Prince of Petworth blog.

You can find a good list of edible flowers here as well as some important cautions. Go ahead – eat the [English] daisies!