Garden Rant

True Confession: I gave up on worm composting

To recap the history here, I researched worm bins, saw a vermicomposting demo, and was psyched!  So I bought a compost bin and some worms from The Worm Girl and was on my way.  Or so I thought.

First, the big bin took up a lot of space and the spot I gave it was (apparently) too cold for these fussy critters over the winter.  Moving the bin into my living room worked, but Lord, who wants a worm bin in their living room?  And worse, when it came to harvesting the castings I had to manually separate the worms from the decaying food from the worm poop - not my idea of a fun time.

So I switched to a small multi-layer homemade bin and tucked it under my kitchen sink.  Surely the worms, food and poop would sort themselves out without my micro-managing the process, I thought, but that didn't pan out.  And the bin was either too wet or too dry, had not enough food or too much, and I worried about failing at my worm-keeping duties.  After all, these red wigglers are out of their element here and would freeze to death next winter if I just released them to my back yard.  So honestly, I felt burdened by their care, inadequate to the job, and frankly, turned off by the whole operation.  (Hmm, is there a pattern here?  In my defense, I manage to keep three cats alive and happy.)

Lucky for me and the worms, my friend PamJ loves worms, and even has a blog - My Lovely Worms - devoted to their worship care.  Aspiring worm composters find her and she mentors them to worm-composting bliss (one assumes).  She agreed to take my worms and do something with them -  I don't really care but I'm sure she'll fuss over them, truly appreciate their special qualities, and eventually find them a good home.  A far better home than my own.

In this video you see Pam examining and assessing my worms and their bin, then the contents of her own worm bin - with cat.

Making the case for wildlife in the garden, kinda

In this article, garden writer/garden designer Joel Lerner does a great job of encouraging us to plant a variety of wildlife-feeding plants, provide water, and building materials, and even reduce the size of our lawns.  He covers birds, bees, toads, frogs, and the mosquito-eating capacity of bats.  And sure, chipmunks can be pests but they're so cute.  Even snakes Lerner assures us aren't poisonous in this part of the world.

But here's how the article ends.

Rabbits and chipmunks also can dig up the garden. Raccoons can be destructive. Foxes are beautiful, as long as they don't have rabies. If these animals are approaching you, especially in daytime, acting aggressive or strangely, call animal control in your local jurisdiction.

Is it just me or is that a total buzz kill?

Photo credit.

Worm composting in New York City: "It's disgusting and you're absolutely crazy"

In today's New York Times you'll find the most unlikely of articles - about worm composting right there in the Big Apple - and that quote refers to the practice of keeping a vermicomposting bin under one's bed.  Which I can kind of relate to - the disgusting part, that is.

Here's what was news to me:

Food accounts for about 13 percent of the nation’s trash — it is the third largest component after paper and yard trimmings — and about 16 percent of New York’s.

And this:

But keeping food discards out of landfills does more than twice the good of keeping mixed paper out, E.P.A. officials said, because decomposing food that is buried and cut off from air releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas, at higher rates than paper. (The ventilation in composting prevents methane creation.)

Photo: Proud worm composter at the Studio School in Washington, D.C.

World Famous Lawn Rangers in Inaugural Spotlight

In case you missed this important inauguration-related story, chosen from among the thousands of groups applying for the privilege to march in the parade that day were the self-styled World Famous Lawn Rangers of Amazing Arcola, Illinois.  Motto: "You're only young once but you can always be immature." 

And what are they famous FOR?  Dave Barry, a veteran member of the group himself, describes their schtick as performing "highly sophisticated, semi-synchronized maneuvers with lawnmowers, brooms and toilet plungers."  This post about them on the Inauguration Blog proudly counts them among the "incredible talents" chosen to perform. 

Finally, this newspaper article fills in the back story - about their having entertained people across the Midwest for some 28 years and, for Chicago's 2003 St. Patrick's Day Parade, having been joined by this toilet-plunger-wielding state senator.

Green Gardener Guides Go to...

When Joe Lamp'l told us why he wrote his Green Gardener's Guide and offered a freebie to someone who needs it, you all nominated yourselves or your clueless neighbors, and I randomly chose JEN from that bunch.  We hope she'll read it and then carry the message by sticking it in a neighbor's mailbox.

But you guys  had some things to say about whether the average homeowner could ever be reached with this message and if so, how.  So a book also goes to GINNY STIBOLT, because she offered to take it on the road with her when she tours to promote Sustainable Gardening for Florida.  And another copy goes to FOY somewhere in rural Panama, who'll donate it to the Peace Corps library there.  (We have Foy's address, so just need for Ginny and Jen to send their mailing addresses to SusanATSustainable-GardeningDOTcom.)

But how CAN the message get through to nongardening homeowners?  Besides putting Joe himself on the road to talk to every civic group in the world, that is.

Seen from the garden - winter cyclists

By Guest Essayist Ed Cullen, from the collection "Letter in a Woodpile."  Here's the link to Ed's very own (very Southern) reading of the piece on All Things Considered.

Girls on new bicycles approach in late afternoon winter light. The riders are oblivious to the pale wash of blue sky, cool air and patches of still-green grass. The girls are fixed on the gear shifters inside the handlebar grips on their Christmas bikes.

"I'm in gears 3 and 7," a rider says.

"Try 1 and 4," says the girl on her wingtip. "That's where I am."

The bicyclists glide by as I turn compost and dirt into beds for romaine lettuce, arugula and mustard greens. I pause to listen to the cockpit chatter.

The girls cruise in squadrons of three or four. Children on the verge of young womanhood, they are beyond the pull of parental gravity when they ride bicycles. They have graduated from piloting machines with foot brakes and one gear to mountain bikes with cantilevered brakes controlled by hand and 21 speeds.

That's 20 more speeds than bicycle riders in Baton Rouge need.

There are no hills in Baton Rouge, only small rises from land to higher land. At 30 feet above sea level, increased pedal pressure conquers most elevations. The riders passing my front yard garden are feminine Chuck Yeagers, girls drawling that test pilot talk. Try 2 and 4."

"Four's too easy. Go to 6."

The girls move by, their wrists sending messages to derailleurs, chains slackening to tighten again in new configurations. My shovel's blade exposes white grubs to the buttery sun as I follow the girls' progress down our dead-end street.

A few minutes later, back they come. The girls are riding faster now. They've found just the right gears. Up the street they go, leaning into the wind, hair flying, ears tuned to a private frequency.

They are free – until suppertime.

Birdcam!

Oh, I once scoffed at the notion of a birdcam - until I followed the link to a new commenter and found this photo.  And cam-owners John and Liza in New Hampshire say it's easy to set up, even if the temp hovers around zero (I say easy for them).  Here's the link.

Wishing I could take Dr. T's classes

I want to go back to college.  But this time not to some liberal arts enclave in the Midwest but to Texas Tech University's honors program of interdisciplinary studies in the natural world - so I can to take classes from Dr. T, known to Rant readers as Susan Tomlinson.  

ABOUT LANDSCAPE
First I want to take her class on landscapes, "which can include anything from a truck stop to a cemetery to mountain wilderness.  They do a lot of drawing," she writes.  Her guest post about loving an ugly landscape gave us a hint of what's going on here - it's not about waterfalls and sunsets.

READING NATURE
Then there's Dr. T's class teaching students to read nature like a text. These kids also do a lot of drawing - of flora and fauna - and learn basic surveying skills.  From "Pentimento":  "The students work at learning about wildflowers and jackrabbit signs and other secrets of the prairie.  I know from experience that many of them are also learning to love this place."

One class outing was to the Prairie Chicken Festival to watch lesser prairie chickens.

The LPC is an uncommon, indigenous bird, seldom seen even by long-term human residents of this region. None of the students had ever seen one, and this was an optional trip in the middle of a busy semester. Even so, over half the class made the weekend trip, rose well before sunrise, and froze for two hours in an unheated van, just to watch the craziness of bird hormones at work.

The students volunteered to mark barbed wire fences so the birds wouldn't get caught in them, and Dr. T wrote that "I was proud of my students that day."

I happened to hear on "60 Minutes" this week that Texas Tech, with its 28,000 students, is craaaazy for football.  Nice to see it's also a place for kids who are crazy for nature.

Photo:  student Matt McEwen protecting lesser prairie chickens from barbed wire.

Where do you keep your gardening gloves?

Fun winter project for gardeners?  Collect all the gardening gloves you can find and survey the sorry scene they create.  Here you see:

• Stiff leather things I'll never use again
• Versatile work gloves, though all too large
• Waterproof gloves, regular length and extra length - useful for hundreds of jobs
• Shown in the photo below, the workhorses of my gardening life - covered in mud, riddled with fingertip holes, and stretched beyond fitting.  To be trashed.
• A very promising pair of West Country recycled ones - in purple - that I'm eager to try and review.
• Some pink Atlas gloves at $7/pair, yet to be tested.
• And not in the photo (coz they were in my office - go figure!) some Womenwork stretch gloves, all high-tech with "micro suede", Velcro, you name it.

Reviews of all of them are coming soon but first - where to hang 'em?  Anybody got the perfect way to store your gloves - so they''ll dry out, and you can see what you've got?  Because the "system" of stack of gloves in various places, indoors and out, is simply not working for me. 

To love an ugly landscape

By Guest Ranter Susan Leigh Tomlinson.  In this excerpt from "Pentimento", published in the literary journal Isotope, Susan describes her complicated relationship with the land around Lubbock, Texas, known locally as the Llano.

Normally this is the place where I would have an epiphany of sorts and come to realize that the beauty is indeed there, but hidden. But if you'll permit me, I'm going to swing a little wide of the standard paean to the comeliness of nature. Because except for the brief moments I see this pentimento and I can convince myself that this landscape is visually pleasing, the rest of the time I have to own up to the bald-faced truth: The place I call home is, by most standards, butt-ugly. That fact simply will not go away, no matter how hard I try to stuff it in a Sunday suit and take it to the dance.

And it is beauty that we value, not the lack of it. I'm no different from anyone else in this. It takes grit to love an ugly landscape. Some days I feel I have it, and some days I don't. But what is love anyway but a relationship that has its ups and downs? What is it but commitment? Real love, in a sense, transcends the simple emotions that are the result of aesthetic appeal. It has to, or the first time a spouse or child was less than beautiful or likeable (and it's going to happen) we'd walk away.

Maybe it is more accurate to say that I don't always find the Llano especially attractive, but I have decided to love it. And god help me, a place this ugly needs someone to love it.  And that's the other side of the story, isn't it? Suppose I did live in a place that was easy to love? It might even have that mountain range, or seascape, or burbling brook. I could look out my window every morning, sip my tea, and say, "My, isn't nature a pip?" And that would be a very nice life. I will not lie to you, if someone offered me the opportunity this very minute, I'd be hard pressed to turn my back on it.

It is easy—natural, even—to desire that which is beautiful. Beauty takes hardly any grit a'tall. But the unlovely place is like the odd girl in the schoolyard, with the bad haircut and the wrong clothes, to whom nobody ever talks. Perhaps it is a measure of character to choose to overlook these shortcomings. Perhaps we would be surprised at what we find beneath the surface. Perhaps I am sympathetic to the unlovely landscape because I was that girl in the schoolyard. I know what it feels like to be overlooked. I know what a mistake it is.

Some people should stick to plastic plants

by Guest Blogger Wendy Tweten, who's shown herself to be a garden writer willing to jump in her car in search of just one more gorgeous Portland garden - during which adventure I learned there's an inner ranter behind her friendly face. Garden coach Sue Goetz was riding shotgun that afternoon. Susan

The time has come for me to put down the trowel, emerge from my herbaceous border, and throw down the gauntlet. Once again I’ve been listening to my favorite radio gardening shows, and once again I’m amazed at the spray-first-ask-questions-later mentality of so many of the callers. But what has finally set me to ranting and waving the secateurs are the namby-pamby replies of the experts on the other end of the line.

Pruned your cherry tree down to nubbins? That’s okay. Sprayed your fruit trees with Orthene when the bees were out? Don’t fret. Whether on radio, TV, or in the newspaper, the typical gardening guru responds to all questions – no matter how inane – with an understanding smile and a pat on the head. Enough, I say. What some people need is more of a swift pat on the fanny.

Consider the woman who said she’d recently noticed a strange, scaly growth on her azaleas. Without hesitation – and without bothering to do anything as boring as read a pesticide label – she grabbed the first chemical that came to hand and sprayed her entire garden with Malathion.

Now let’s break this down. First of all, the strange, scaly growth was no doubt lichen, nature’s benign and interesting little tree decoration. Lichen is a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and (usually) algae. It exists to photosynthesize, not to kill the shrubbery. In any case, the lichen didn’t deserve to die, so it’s fortunate Malathion doesn’t kill it. This insecticide is, however, great at snuffing out honeybees. I live in hope the Malathion will cause the lichen to mutate into a big, fanged freak of nature that feeds upon homeowners who don’t read pesticide labels. Feed me, Seymour, indeed.

Think people: if the baby develops a rash, we don’t rush to the cleaning cupboard to douse him in Lysol (at least I hope not). Here’s the drill: 1) find out what you’re dealing with, 2) find out if it’s hurting anything, 3) if forced to take action, choose the least toxic control, and 4) follow label directions.

Anyway, we haven’t yet finished with “Miss Malathion.” When the lichen survived the toxic assault, she snapped on her gloves and proceeded to peel it from the branches (I suspect it also bothers her that her garden is full of dirt). “There,” she’ll say when her beloved azaleas – now devoid of lichen – go to that great compost heap in the sky. “I told you that scaly stuff would kill my plants.” Of course, the poor plants will have died from having their bark skinned away with the tightly adhering lichen.

Perhaps it’s time for all serious and sustainable gardeners to trade the hori hori knife for a cutlass in the teeth. The moral is this: when dealing with certain people, as with certain plants, we must apply a bit of acid if we are ever to help them go green. Also, some people should stick to plastic plants.

Hummingbird feeders? I can't handle the commitment

I've been reading up on hummingbird feeders and have learned that there's a RIGHT way to use them:

• Mix one part sugar with 4 parts water, boil to dissolve.  Or use baker's sugar, which dissolves in cold water.  (Is that the same as confectioner's?)
• Or you can buy "instant nectar," which comes in flavors.  (But why?)
• Clean really well, before using, with Qtip and vinegar-water.
• Replace and clean every 2-3 days or more, depending on how hot it is.
• To remove black mold spots, advice ranges from special cleaning concoctions to doing something with sand that made no sense to me.
• Use an ant guard AND a bee guard to keep them from - I don't know, but I'm sure it's bad.
• Hang them in partial shade so the nectar doesn't ooze out, which attracts ants, which we've established is bad.
• Not much action?  Add a red ribbon to feeder, though some people say any color will do.

Here's what NOT to do:

• Do NOT use food coloring or honey - bad for the  birds
• Do NOT use honey - it ferments, and that's bad for the birds.
• Do NOT use artificial sweetener - it has no nutritional value.

Replace and clean as often as every other day?  Only for my cats would I go to that much trouble.

OR how about just growing a few colorful plants and maybe adding some water?  I'm lusting for some bloomers to climb up the pillars of my front porch - crossvine and American honeysuckle, and maybe the tropical annual tacoma I'm hearing good things about. 

Reading up, I've seen a few plants I already grow recommended as attractants, but I've never seen hummers feeding from them - petunia, columbine, azaleas, butterfly bush, and weigela.  Y'all have any luck with them?  What plants work for you?

I love this video, though I can't help worrying that the little guy might be slurping up red food coloring, which we know by now is a no-no.  But guess what - he's not drinking this stuff by sucking.  I found out that hummers are actually LICKING.  Really, really fast. 

 

These folks seem to know how to do it - with a red pipe-cleaner wrapped around a solution-filled tube.

Once I started watching, I couldn't stop.  This next one shows one feeding its babies.

Photo credit: University of Alberta.

Is this how the Left sees gardeners?

I stumbled upon a leftie website called Irregular Times, which has a section on "Gardening from the Underground," titled Irregular Growth. I suppose that's a good thing, but read the introduction: 

Gardening - when one hears the word one thinks of old people: retired couples with nothing to do, aged devotees of Martha Stewart, or rich, matriarchal wives jealously guarding access to their garden and gossip clubs. Like so many other traditional domestic activities, gardening often feels like a relic, a holdover from a past of little relevance to the electronic, simulated, placeless world of today.

The gardens that we see on television and read about in newspapers and magazines reflect the ludicrous mismatch between the literal earthiness of gardening and the desires for perfection that have emerged as a part of our virtual culture. These gardens might as well be experienced on a computer monitor. They are completely managed, with no surprises. They are without depth, texture, and odor, separated from the environment around them. They are to nature what the Epcot Center is to culture.

Irregular Growth rejects the idea of gardens as museums. In a world in which consumerism is equated with virtue, gardening has the potential to become a subversive art. These pages are centered around the effort to realize that potential, reacquainting people with their humanity through a symbolic immersion in the natural world.

Come grow with us.

Where to start!  Maybe with the description of gardeners, with "old", "retired, "aged" and "gossip" all in the same sentence.  And is YOUR garden ludicrous, perfect, completely managed, with no surprises,  without depth, texture and odor, an Epcot Center Museum?

And turning to the articles themselves, it's a weird little collection that I read so you don't have to.  Just one quote, though, on weeds:

Weeds help a garden seem integrated into the landscape that surrounds it. Weeds remind a garden viewer that a flower bed is located in a particular place with a natural community of plants. Unlike the artificially perfect curves of the trendy mulched flower beds, the curves created by weeds make sense within a landscape. Weeds follow the terrain, living in great sweeps with borders defined by the rise and fall of the land and the natural distribution of nutrients and soil texture. Weeds always make sense where they grow. Their appearance is never contrived.

Yeah, down with trendy mulched flower beds!

The obvious question is who ARE these people, so I wrote to ask- there being no About page - and was told that "Some of the people who post to our site don't want to have their political writings interfere with their day jobs (which unfortunately can happen)."

Wow, if people are being fired for their positions on flower beds, we want to know!  We're bloggers, after all, risking our livelihoods every day to take positions on these defining issues.

Photo by Michael Krinkle via iStock, where it's filed with the tag "active senior".

Getting geeky at the National Ag Library

My plant geek friend John Peter Thompson offered to arrange a tour for me of the National Agricultural Library's super Special Collection, so how could I say no?  I've written about the Library previously, and so has Barbara Damrosch, because their funding is in such grave danger (after years of flat-lining).  I think my snarky title for that earlier post was "U.S. sees no need to teach people to grow food," and that applies especially to poor farmers in developing countries with no Internet access. With budget cuts, the library will stop mailing how-to-grow-food pamphlets to them, as they once did to Eliot Coleman when he was a gardening newbie.

So in the chilly, hermetically sealed confines of the Special Collection, with its 15,000 rare books, 200,000 catalogs, and posters, I feasted my eyes on some of those catalogs and posters, plus wax fruit, fiber samples and some big ole' books.  When we stopped to see the 1509 "Tract on the Benefits of Herbs," John Peter stepped up to translate the Latin for us (yes, he's THAT geeky).  We saw the first known illustration of corn, from 1541, in the photo left.  My point is it was very cool stuff, even to this non-history buff.

So I asked the staff what else the Special Collection is good for, besides cool tours and history books, and here's a sampling of their many examples:

• Finding heirloom fruits that will do well today.  There used to be thousands of varieties of apples grown in the U.S., not the handful in the stores today. The Pomological Watercolor Collection has helped researchers of heirloom fruits, and the seed catalogs provide illustrations of heirloom fruit and vegetables.

• The Animal Parasite Collection spans 100 years of animal parasitology research, including original line drawings and photographic records of animal parasites with descriptive indexes.  Kinda helpful in researching food safety issues.

• And across the street at the Ag Research Center they're researching rice that will thrive in this new era of increased CO2.  Germplasm stored there dates back 150 years.

Abraham Lincoln started the the National Agricultural Library in 1862, in middle of Civil War, coz he thought food was important.  Isn't it still?!

Lawns and lawn mowers in the news

Here's a curious juxtaposition.

A terrific New Yorker* piece about the anti-lawn movement by Elizabeth Kolbert.  It's an exhaustive history, starting with Rachel Carson, taking us through the Wild Ones, Sara Stein, Michael Pollan, Ted Steinberg, Food not Lawns author Heather Flores, Fritz Haeg, and several others I'd never heard of.  Kolbert concludes with some pretty big ideas: "The American lawn now represents a serious civic problem" and "This is perhaps the final stage of the American lawn." 

And in the same week, a Washington Post article about lawnmowers titled "Deere John: It's Been Good Knowing You; Lawn Behemoths are Going out to Pasture."  It reports that the "riding mower industry is 'deeply troubled by the decline in housing starts'" that's caused a slowdown in sales of these $6-11,000 man-toys.  But guess what - not a word about the growing anti-lawn movement.  Not a word about the public starting to grasp the environmental consequences of all the lawn grown in the U.S. Toxic pesticides, water pollution, waste of water, loss of habitat, or the pollutants spewing from the mowers themselves - you'd think SOME of those would have caught the attention of the writer.

Or am I the only one who's even surprised by this?

Photo sources:  top, PetersPhoto on MorgueFile; lower from the John Deere website.

*By the way, did any of you New Yorker subscribers out there even receive the latest issue, the now notorious one with the  Obama cartoon on the cover? Mine never came and two out of three friends I asked didn't get theirs, either.  What's happening?

The Footprint in Your Garden, Part 1

Guest Post by Michael Johnsen (a/k/a DJ Monet)

With all the talk of being “carbon neutral,” I'm often asked, usually by friends strolling through my garden, how much carbon dioxide my plants are absorbing, storing, and generally combating global warming.  But the simple question: “How much CO2 does my garden absorb?” is actually more complicated than the typical sound bite can handle. 

Different plants in different soils absorb CO2 at different rates.  Even the same plants in the same soils will absorb at different rates depending on every factor that affects plants, from available water to disease.  The impacts are real, however, and some scientists believe the effects of climate change are offset by the re-growth of the forests in the Eastern U.S.  But before I even get into all that, let me back up and look at the big picture.

The overall CO2 level in the earth's atmosphere at the start of the Industrial Revolution was around 280 parts per million (ppm) and increased to about 379 ppm by 2005¹. That's most but not all the CO2 released from fossil fuels²; some is absorbed by the oceans (making them more acidic, but that’s for the aquaculture column) and the rest is absorbed by plants and soils (yes, there’s lots of carbon in soil- well, in good, organic-rich soil).

OK.  So we've established that plants and soils - what our gardens are all comprised of (sans gnomes) - absorb some of this fossil-fuel CO2 we’re releasing. Plants use the carbon they pull from the atmosphere to build their cells and structure.  Determining what plants absorb the most CO2 is a bit trickier and really depends on where your garden is.  A tree’s dry-wood is widely accepted to be around 50% carbon, but newer research (not much has been done) shows that trees can differ, from about 50 percent for maples to over 55% in the very old heartwood of Sequoias³.

Yet another factor is how many different species of plants you grow in your garden.  Scientists at Brown University, in research plots on the steppes of Patagonia, found that biodiversity makes a big difference in the amount of organic matter a system produces. The scientists found that patches of diverse planting produced more organic matter than patches of single species even with equal rain, nitrogen and sunlight⁴. 

And it's exactly the amount of organic matter or biomass produced that determines how "productive" scientists consider whole ecosystems to be.  While the amount of carbon differs between plant types, that biomass is made up of carbon.  As you might guess, a tropical rain forest is gangbusters with a score of 2,200 grams per square meter per year⁵.  A temperate evergreen forest clocks in at 1,600 and a temperate deciduous forest at 1,200⁶.  Thus a picture starts to emerge as to the effects of different plant choices. 

The next big question is: Where are you PUTTING all of that biomass in your garden?  Before overrunning your garden with a bunch of kudzu, Norway Maples, and pokeweed, think about where it all ends up.  Meaning, what do you do at the end of the season when you cut your garden back?  Do you compost those stems, branches, and weeds?  Send it to a landfill or incinerator?⁷.  These options for disposal all release some (or most, in the case of incineration) of that carbon back into the atmosphere, so letting it grow and NOT cutting back keeps it out of the atmosphere.  But compost is returned to your soil and because soils lock away carbon - until the soils are disturbed - composting stores the carbon long-term.

Bottom Line
So, to store lots of carbon in your garden and keep it there, grow big trees and lots of biomass with woody stems, make sure these plants live a long time, and compost all your yard waste.  Wood is the key, whether it's in canopy trees, understory trees or shrubs.  So, while your trees are slowing capturing the carbon you emitted 10 years ago flying to Las Vegas⁸, compost all your garden wastes on site or in your community to lock most of that carbon up in the soil  for long-term storage.   

Part 2 will cover composting and soil CO2.  Footnotes to Part 1 are below the fold.

My friend Michael Johnsen studied Natural Resource Management as an undergraduate before receiving an M.S. in Environmental Policy and Science at Johns Hopkins.  He's been an environmental professional for 20 years now, working in the private, public and non-profit sectors .  He often ponders environmental issues while working in his garden.  Susan

Notes on the Google

GOOGLE READER
I used to be one of those blog-writing slackers who rarely remembers to visit and comment on other gardening blogs.  Then Elizabeth mentioned that she uses Google Reader... and it changed my life.  I just use the feed symbol in my Firefox browser, clicking on it to subscribe to each blog I want to follow.  Then it's SUCH fun visiting my Google Reader page and seeing who's posted something new - like finding little gifts here and there.  I even pop in on a few nongardening blogs, like the family friend who got me into blogging back in 2005. (And guess what HER score was on the Cuss-o-meter?  A whopping 45.9 percent! That should put GardenRant's prim 4 percent in perspective.)

So, sorry about my slacker behavior these last 3 years, everyone.  I was waiting for this feed thing to get super-duper-easy, and it has.

GOOGLE IMAGE TO IDENTIFY PLANTS
Okay, this only works if you have some leads as to what a plant's name might be.  But if someone gives you something that could be X or Y, just put X and Y into Google's Image search and voila!  Of course you can't just grab those photos for your blog, but for any other purpose - like your own garden records - it's cool.  While you're at it, Google-Image yourself - it's fun!

FOR LOCAL GARDENING INFO
Now all of YOU GUYS know this but just in case someone ELSE is reading this, here's a comment that was left on my 3-year-old post about HGTV's Gardener Guy Paul James:

Paul, My wife and I are moving from Malibu, CA to Montreal, Canada, (long story don't ask, ha, ha ,ha).  What are the growing zones in Montreal, and what are the best shrubs, flowering plants, and herbs/vegetable plants to grow in the region?  And, yes, loooong winter is also correct there too.  Looking for advise for my wife, hope you can help.

Sincerely, Desperate Husband Keeping Relocating Wife Happy

What are the odds this desperate husband is going to make his wife happy by writing to some TV guy in TULSA, OKLAHOMA to ask about growing conditions in Montreal?  Honestly.  If only he'd found the Regional Garden Gurus' Upper Midwest page, huh?  But this guy simply didn't try very hard  because a quick Google search for "gardening Montreal" would have sent him to this meaty-looking site by the Montreal Botanic Garden.  How hard was that?

Support our Gardening Troops in Iraq

by Susan 
I'm not kidding.  A Logistics Specialist over there recently left this comment on an old article about HGTV's Paul James:

I am presently stationed in the Kuwait/Iraq region and miss watching "Gardening by the Yard". I was told of a tree called a Bulb Willow. I seen pictures of the tree but I have never heard of that type of Willow. Can you help?
Also, are there DVDs of "Gardening by the Yard"?
Thanks from the sandbox!!

My gawd!  Can you imagine what being in that world would do to YOUR gardener's soul?  Of course I shudder at the whole thing but I'd sure like to help this gardener from St. Louis see his damn gardening shows.  What with him serving in such a hell-hole and all. 

So I checked with HGTV and there are a few Paul James videos on their site. (Just put his name in the search on this page.) And YouTube has exactly one of Paul - plugging nurseries.   

So come on, Gardenrant readers, is there some way we can help out Norman Bullerdick, a passionate gardener who's needs a gardening fix bad? Can anyone make DVDs from their TV?  Or maybe he can use old-fashioned videotapes?

If you're thinking of Netflix, here's their offering of gardening DVDs.  Here and here are raves about our favorite garden-related movies, and here's Google results for "gardening DVDs".

And what the heck is a bulb willow?  I Googled it and got bupkis!

THE PAUL JAMES REPORT
Now if I did the sensible thing and took my  now-inactive old blog offline I'd save 90 bucks a year but you know, I'd miss hearing from Paul's fans, like the 81 other commenters there with Norman.  Maybe they'd just find this other post about Paul here on GardenRant and join the 66 other fans who've left comments on it - in the vain hope of actually reaching him or his bosses at HGTV - but I'd hate to miss any of their passionate messages.

So Paul, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'll always be here for you.  I'll take your messages and cheer on your fans as best I can, because I'm as ridiculous about your show as they are.  Norman speaks for us all. 

Photo credit - the U.S. Department of Defense.

UPDATE:  Gloria at Pollinators Welcome sent me this link to a photo of a bird - in a bulb willow tree.  We're closing in!

The "Mouse and Trowels", and the Power of Awards

by Susan

Remember last year when Colleen first announced the Mouse and Trowel Awards to honor online gardening and we all knew instantly it was a great idea?  Then almost 500 of us voted and the happy winners got to put little badges on their sites and blogs and call their endeavors "award-winning".  And the whole enterprise brought attention to our community.  In a fit of pompous proclamation worthy of cable TV, I called Colleen "blogosphere-changing," something I just assumed must be true and see no evidence to the contrary so that settles it.  Anyway, online gardeners are indebted to her for going to a LOT of trouble not in hopes of winning awards herself but just to promote good garden writing on the Web.

2008
Well, it's that season again.  Bloggers are asking their readers to nominate them, because who doesn't want to be nominated?  Lord knows WE do, so we humbly suggest you give us a nod.  And don't forget our individual blogs if they've amused or enlightened you over the past year.   Here's the link to the nomination form.

BLOG CATEGORIES
There are lots of cool blog categories to choose from again this year and even 2 new ones:

• Best New Blog, a category many of us lobbied for and I can't wait to see the nominees.
• Blog Post of the Year, which is a bit more challenging but the results will surely be worth it.  I'm more of a skimmer than a reader elsewhere on the Web but here on the Rant I read every word so I'll be nominating: Michele's "The Commencement Speech No One's Invited Me to Deliver",  Amy's "Confessions of a Fake Memorist," and Elizabeth's "Welcome to my Nightmare".

WEBSITE CATEGORIES
Beyond the blogosphere, the categories are pretty discouraging.  There's no Best New Website category, and these three categories from last year have been discontinued: Best Informational Gardening Site, Best Plant/Seed Source, and Best Gardening Magazine Site. Seems that there was low participation by us voters, and there's a perception that they don't fit in with the other awards.  So gardening websites are down to Best Forum and Website of the Year.

Bummer! See, I get excited about promoting good gardening information websites, making it easier for the public to FIND them.  Instead of the crawlers that steal from us all.  Instead of the income-dominated sites that have more ads than content.  Instead of the corporate sites that are filled with products we're supposed to buy.  And instead of sites that require payment in order to read them.  A few of us webmaster types interested in offering high-quality alternatives to all the crap online have banded together to help Googlers find the content-oriented sites, but we're few and far between.  Whole regions of online gardening information are still missing.

So readers, how about voting for that little band of webmasters as a way to encourage others to start content-oriented sites, too?  By nominating Regional Garden Gurus you nominate all of us and more to come, plus all the other good sites we link to.  (Of course you're invited to peruse our individual sites for possible nominations, too.) "Website of the Year" sounds awfully grand and we thought we had a better shot at "Best New Website" - but enough whining from me.  Start nominating right here.

GARDEN WRITERS ASSOCIATION AWARDS
Of course we're HOPING that the blogging community rallies this year and goes nuts nominating sites for the two remaining website categories so that the website Mousies make a comeback next year but just in case, I did a little lobbying of the GWA Awards Committee on behalf of the electronic world.  You may remember they have zillions of categories for writing, editing and photography in PRINT, and scant mention of "electronic" efforts, a category that includes everything on the Web, plus DVDs, podcasts and television.  Well, I recently ran into the Washington Post's Scott Aker - he's the guy responsible for these awards - and asked if new categories would be created, at least one for each unique medium that falls into that supercategory, and his response was superdiscouraging.  Oh well.  Their entrance fees would inhibit participation by most of us anyway.  (GWA awards are a fundraiser for the association.)  Here are their 2007 winners.

So bloggers, until something else comes along, it's up to us to encourage and reward websites in our chosen niche, so let's go for it.

Beneath the term locavore lies...confusion

by Susan
Did anyone catch "Big Foot," the recent New Yorker article by Michael Specter about carbon footprints?  It's long (of course), so here are my favorite bits.

It seems that England's grocery chain Tesco has declared its intention to drastically reduce the number of products they sell that are shipped by air - to 1 percent - and the lonely 1 percent will be labeled as such.  Trouble is, they've since discovered that "green" isn't exactly synonymous with "local", or even "air-travel-free."