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Tuesday, January 28, 2020

January 28, 2020 midwinter musing


Hi Gardeners
 
Akebia flower
Since the weather has been wet and gloomy, I’ve been finding things to do inside. I get a lot of magazines; the mailperson must hate me even though it’s job security. Some of those magazines are garden magazines, or at least they claim to be garden magazines. Many of them should be classified as catalogs for fancy garden supplies with a few words sandwiched between them.

I get one magazine called Flower. It does have a few flowers in the photos of fancy homes here and there. And it always gives you directions for creating a very fancy floral arrangement in each issue. But mostly it features outlandishly expensive floral wallpaper or a crystal vase with gold inlay that you can buy for only $600. It may show you the home of a famous person and look, there on the mantel is a bouget of roses, in an unusual shade that just matches everything in the room so perfectly.

Guns and Roses is a similar magazine. Not much about guns or roses, but a lot about expensive patio chairs.  Better Homes and Gardens occasionally has a very general article about gardening but it’s mostly about homes, although it’s not quite as boring as the others. I get a lot of these magazines free or at very low cost, and after looking through them, I’d never subscribe at the regular price.

I also get Martha Stewart Living. It doesn’t claim to be a gardening magazine, so I can’t complain about that. This month’s issue promised to talk about Martha’s gardens. Martha has 4 gardens actually, at 4 different homes scattered around the country. Some of them have relatively small acreage some are large estates. Martha is seen in pictures planting bulbs or walking along a path in some of the garden pictures. 

But there is no mention anywhere about the gardeners who must maintain these gardens of Martha. Because she surely doesn’t, even though the article makes it sound like Martha is the sole caretaker. She’s not even at some of the homes more than a couple weeks a year. And besides, she has all that glitter to glue on place cards and cupcakes to decorate.

It’s no wonder new gardeners often feel frustrated and overwhelmed when they look at gardens like Martha’s, professionally designed, planted and maintained and then at their garden. They wonder why they don’t have a green thumb and why they can’t manage their time better. Because they haven’t been gardening long, they don’t realize the extent of the help those gardens like Martha’s have.

I don’t think it’s wrong for gardeners to hire help, if you can afford to and want to. Many people make a good living being someone else’s gardener. I also enjoy looking at those beautiful professionally designed and meticulously groomed gardens. I just wish when people like Martha show off their gardens, they would acknowledge the work that someone else, or many someone else’s do.

Would it hurt Martha to mention the hard work of this or that person? Would it hurt to explain the labor and time involved in some of those gardens? If Martha really wants to instruct and inspire people, she should be honest about her own gardening involvement and what it truly takes to have gardens like hers.  And telling us about the real gardeners would be an interesting story, at least to me.

Don’t even get me started on AARP Magazine, which mentioned in a column this month that people should grow lavender in their bedroom to help them relax. Not put lavender in their bedroom but grow it. Lavender doesn’t grow well indoors. There were some other silly suggestions about herbal plants too. I guess I need to write a letter. Okay, I’ll move on from my rant about magazines.

What do you have blooming inside? I have holiday cactus, pomegranate, hibiscus, begonias, gerbera daisy and geraniums. My amaryllis blooms have faded but another pot is putting out shoots so I will have more blooms in about a month. Having blooming plants inside in the winter makes everything seem more cheerful.

It’s a good time to shop for houseplants and there are many houseplants that can provide you with blooms. African violets, orchids, the “holiday cacti”, anthuriums, azaleas, bromeliads, cyclamen, gloxinia, and kalanchoe are common blooming plants sold at this time of the year.

Food plants lost in time

When we picture early people living in North America growing food, we often think about corn, sunflowers, beans and squash. But before North American people began growing corn or maize, which was domesticated in South or Central America and worked its way north, they were growing at least 5 other types of plants that we classify as grain crops.

Over 4 thousand years ago the archeological record shows us that people in North America were growing crops that provided them with seeds (grain) that could be stored. These crops allowed many cultures that practiced agriculture to flourish and establish larger villages and towns.

Ethno-botanists have proven that at least 4 of these grain crops were selected over time or domesticated, to produce larger seeds and more productive plants. Unfortunately, the domesticated versions of these crops have been lost to time. Once corn became widespread in agricultural societies and especially after European grains arrived, these crops were no longer grown.

Although these plants are no longer grown as crops, you probably know some of them. Indeed, you may consider them weeds in your garden. And researchers are studying these ancient grains to see if they could once again feed people in a changing climate. You might want to experiment with them yourself, or forage some of them.

Goosefoot, or Lambsquarters (Chenopodium album) will probably be the plant most familiar to gardeners across the US and in many other places of the world. It’s a common annual garden weed. Known as wild spinach, the young leaves and plant tops are still eaten by foragers. While it is thought that early indigenous people may also have eaten it as a green, they also grew it for its seeds. They developed several domesticated varieties with larger and more nutritious seeds. There are several species of Chenopodium and species may have crossbred to form the domesticated varieties.

Lambsquarter flowering

Lambsquarters gets its Latin name album, meaning white, because it’s young leaves and seed heads appear to be dusted in white. It produces seeds in mid to late summer. Some plants produce a later fall crop also. Seeds range from round and black to brown and more oval in shape. The seeds found in archaeological sites are larger than the seeds of wild varieties.

Lambsquarter seeds were boiled, roasted or dried and ground into a flour that was used to thicken stews or make primitive breads. They are a good source of carbohydrates and a minor source of fat and protein. About 50-90% of seeds found stored in early archeological sites were from Chenopodium seeds. This plant probably has the best chance to once again become domesticated as a grain crop.

The second most important and most often grown plant in early indigenous cultures was Polygonum erectum or erect knotweed. Gardeners may know several species of knotweed as weeds, although the species once domesticated for grain P. erectum is not as common as other species. There are also knotweeds that have been turned into ornamental plants.

Knotweeds are known for their “knotted” stem nodes, which are often red or purple shaded. The flowers on a “wand” at the top of the plant also look somewhat like knots, or balls. They can be pink, red, green or yellow. The seeds of P.erectum are produced throughout summer and are variable in shape and color.

The domesticated knotweed of earlier times produced smoother and larger seeds than the wild type and it was thought that they were selected to produce a more concentrated harvest time in late summer. Early people used the seeds as a starchy grain in the same way as Chenopodium seeds. The seeds and plants also had medicinal uses, they were used as a dye, and some species of knotweed may have been smoked.

This is a knotweed planted in my yard that is supposed to be
P. erectum.  Since ID is difficult I won't swear that it is.

A recent study published in the Journal of Ethnobiology, found that when lambsquarters and knotweed were grown together the yield of both was improved. They produced as much food value as a crop of maize of similar size grown in that time would have produced. Since the seeds are often found together at archeological sites this may be how they were grown.

The other plants that were grown for their grain by early Americans were maygrass, little barley and sumpweed. Researchers have had a hard time growing these as crops in our time, but the plants do still exist in the wild.

Maygrass, Phalaris caroliniana is an annual grass that produces starchy seeds in late spring- early summer when other food is scarce.  It is very similar to Canary Reed Grass, a weedy grass of crop fields that is more common now than maygrass. It has more protein than many other grains and is high in vitamins and minerals. It was quite commonly grown in the central Mississippi River valley by the Cahokia culture. It will grow in moist and flooded areas.
 
Maygrass


Sumpweed, or Marshelder (Iva annua var. macrocarpa) was another plant that grew in floodplains. The domesticated species no longer exists but there is a wild species left in some places. The plant has seeds similar to wheat. The extinct domesticated species had seeds 1000 times larger than seeds on modern wild types.

Sumpweed matures in fall. The seeds are oily and high in protein, calcium, iron, phosphorus, potassium, thiamine, niacin, and B-complex vitamins. They would have provided a good, concentrated nutritional food source. However, sumpweed has some draw backs. Like a relative, ragweed, sumpweed is highly allergenic. It also has an odor, which at least to people today, is unpleasant. It may have been harder to process and use than other grains. It was probably the first early grain crop to be lost when corn was introduced into its growing areas.
 
Sumpweed


The last of the ancient grains, little barley Hordeum pusillum causes some dissention among archeologists. Some believe it was not domesticated but just foraged and stored. Others believe it would have to be cultivated in concentrated plots to be worth gathering, since the seeds were small. Like Maygrass it forms seeds in late spring when food is scarce. It was nutritious and would have been an important food source. 
While a few differences have been found in seeds recovered at archeological sites compared to today’s wild grown seeds, the differences do not seem large or consistent. In the wild today dense stands of this plant can be found so it’s possible this plant was just foraged.
 
Little Barley
University of Missouri photo
We can’t know for sure how the earliest farmers and gardeners in North America grew these grain crops, since there is no written record. And when corn and then European grains were introduced into North America, these crops were slowly abandoned, and we have no surviving cultures growing them. Were the new crops easier to grow? More productive? Tastier? We have no way to know.

It is interesting that to think that we have food crops growing all around us that we might be able to utilize as the environment changes. Gardeners may look at weeds a bit differently when you think of them as domesticated crops gone wild.

More reading









Should soy oil should be taken off the market?

I am of the age when I remember margarine as something fairly new to the public. It was being touted as preventing heart disease and I remember my mother nagging my grandparents to give up butter and lard and use margarine and shortening. Those products were being made from soy oil and corn oil. Early margarines were white, and you mixed in a little tube of yellow food coloring when you bought it. They also did not taste like butter. I grew up eating margarine and had to reeducate my taste when I found out how unhealthy margarine was.

What is alarming is that we now know margarine is not better for us than butter, and we know that soy oil is widely suspected to be a contributor to, perhaps even a cause of, several deadly diseases. Research has linked soy oil products to obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and now genetic changes in the brain. Research is pointing to a conclusion that humans should not consume soy oil.  Yet soy oil is still in American diets.

Five years or so ago several research reports linked soybean oil to metabolic syndrome, diabetes, obesity and fatty liver disease. We also know that people who are around soybean oil being used to fry foods have a higher risk of lung cancer and restaurants are no longer allowed to deep fry with it.  Now new research has found that consumption of soy oil cause changes to the genes in the brains of animals, changes that in humans correspond to Alzheimer’s Disease, autism, Parkinson’s disease and even anxiety and depression.

Research done at UC Riverside, California and published in the journal Endocrinology, found that mice fed a diet high in soybean oil had the functioning of over 100 genes in the hypothalamus changed. The changes did not occur when mice were fed diets high in other fats, like coconut oil.

The hypothalamus is a part of the brain that controls many important brain and nervous system functions, and the reproductive system. It regulates metabolism, growth, body temperature, reproductive hormones, the body’s reaction to stress, and a number of other things. The changes in gene functioning corresponded to changes researchers find in human conditions such as autism, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other conditions related to stress and anxiety.

Researchers are trying to find out what chemicals in soy oil are responsible for the gene damage. They know it isn’t linoleic acid, the chemical in soy oil found to be what causes metabolic syndrome and diabetes. Since those early findings came out crop researchers developed low linoleic acid soy varieties. But when researchers used those varieties in a study they found no difference in how the brain was affected than when normal soy oil was used.

Researchers can’t say definitively yet that soy oil consumption causes autism, Alzheimer’s and so on, but the suspicion is strong that it is at least a contributing cause to those brain disorders. More research studies are being done. Anytime something that is consumed alters genetic expression it is of great concern.  Soy oil may be genetically modifying you.

Researchers say they believe tofu and fermented soy sauce would be safe to consume, although no research confirms that. But they urge people to consume as little soy oil as possible. It is especially unwise to consume soy oil in the first 3 months of pregnancy when genes are more easily damaged in the fetus. Drinks made from soy, frequently called soy “milk”, have not been tested yet to see if they could contribute to disease.

Soy oil is the most common oil sold in the US.  It’s a highly refined product, you can’t just squeeze the beans, they have to be heated and chemically treated. Soybean oil was first manufactured to be a lubricant, not an edible oil. It was a new cash crop for farmers and supply outstripped demand, so clever people did things like add flavoring to hardened soy oil and sell it to us as margarine. They told us to take the lubricant and fry our potatoes in it.

But while research in the last 10 years is pointing to the fact that soy oil has harmful effects on the human body it’s still in all kinds of food products, in things you wouldn’t even expect oil was needed. It’s cheap and plentiful, especially now that the foreign market for soybeans has been drastically reduced because of the trade war. Even if you don’t use soy oil in your kitchen, you are probably still eating it every day.

Try finding a salad dressing without soy oil. You may get lucky but unless you make your own, most salad dressings contain soy oil. Soy oil is used to roast peanuts and put in peanut butter. It’s still used to fry chips and other snack foods. It’s in bakery items, condiments, frozen dinners, even some canned goods. Read the labels on things in your cupboards and refrigerator, you’ll be amazed. I just found soy oil listed as an ingredient in a cocoa mix.

I think it’s time the government regulates the use of soy, banning it from most food products.  Nutritional research is tricky, you don’t want to feed people things that will harm them, and outside a lab it’s really hard to control what people eat in long term studies. If there’s scientific evidence that soy oil may be causing or contributing to metabolic disorders and modifying genes in the brain, even just in animal studies, we should ban the product from the market until independent studies prove that it isn’t harming humans.

I think soy oil is more harmful to humans than trace amounts of pesticides on food that people get worked up over. I avoid soy oil containing products as much as possible, and you may want to do the same. It may be too late for a generation that grew up consuming tons of it, but we may be able to reduce its damage to future generations. What do you think?

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Cruising through the catalogs  

Korean Angelica Angelica gigas

Korean Angelica
Photo by White Flower farm
Here’s another plant that can liven up pollinator or native grass gardens.  Pollinators of all sorts are highly attracted to it. Korean angelica has 6 feet tall stems with a purple tinge, and large umbels of deep purple flowers. It is quite impressive in the back of perennial borders too. It’s also an herb garden subject, because the plant has many herbal uses also.

This plant is a biennial, it makes a rosette of foliage the first year and produces the tall bloom stems in the second. For that reason and because it can be tricky to germinate the seeds gardeners may want to start with plants. It will reseed in the garden. This plant will even bloom in partial shade.  The seed heads are attractive when dried. It’s hardy in zones 5-9 and deer resistant.

You can get this plant at these places




Mexican Sour Gherkin Melothria scabra

This plant also has the cute common name of Mouse melon. It could be an interesting and tasty addition to your veggie garden. It’s a vining plant with small leaves and is grown much like a cucumber. It produces loads of small striped, melon like fruits which are picked when they are the size of a large grape. They can be eaten fresh or pickled. The taste is like a sour, slightly salty cucumber.

Mexican Sour Gherkins can be easily grown in containers with a trellis and kids will find them interesting and easy to grow. Seeds should be started indoors a month before the last frost and transplanted outside.

You can find the seeds at;


Mexican Sour Gherkin
Photo by Baker Creek

Hummingbird Trumpet, Zauschneria canum var. arizonica 'Sky Island Orange'

This is a cultivated selection of a western wildflower also known as California Fuchsia, or Fire Chalice. It grows about 3 feet high and in late fall is covered with tubular bright orange flowers that hummingbirds adore. It’s a great plant to help feed hummingbirds just before they migrate. It also brightens up the fall landscape.

This plant should not be confused with trumpet vine. This is not a vining plant. Hummingbird Trumpet is a perennial plant hardy in zones 5-8. It will sucker to form patches of color and is often used as a ground cover or a filler. It prefers well drained soil in full sun. Plants do like shady feet and their tops in the sun. If you like hummingbirds this plant is a great addition to the garden.

You can get plants at;


Zauschneria
Photo by High Country Gardens


Echium wildpretii,  "Tower of Jewels"

Okay, this is not a hardy plant for most of the country, it’s only hardy in zones 9-10. It’s native to the Canary islands. But if you are the person who likes the truly unusual and who adores succulent type plants you may want to try this in a large container on the patio or sunk into the garden. It’s a biannual plant, the first year it forms a 30-inch-wide clump of narrow leaved, silvery green foliage that is attractive in its own right. But the second year is when it will wow you.  Echium wildpretii forms a huge cone of clustered rosy pink flowers up to 8 feet high. The flowers attract hummingbirds and other pollinators.

To get it to bloom in northern zones you’ll need to overwinter first year plants inside. Echium makes a decent houseplant, it needs strong light inside. Outside it needs well drained soil or containers and full sun. It’s drought tolerant and deer resistant. I would keep it in a container the first summer and inside the first winter, then plant in ground the second summer for bloom. After bloom, it will die, but seeds can be collected, and new plants started. (In Zone 9 and higher it reseeds in the garden.) It’s well worth at least one try in colder zones.

Find this plant at;

 

Echium wildpretii,
Photo by Annies Annuals



Sauced Meatballs

Here’s a recipe from my book, Beer, A Cookbook.  It’s a good and easy to prepare recipe for a Superbowl feast or for any party.

Ingredients

1 ½ cups grape jelly
1 cup chili sauce
¾ cup beer, preferably a chili pepper or Mexican style beer
1 package McCormick Jalapeno and onion taco seasoning
2 pounds of prepared, cooked meatballs, thawed if frozen

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Put all the ingredients except meatballs in a large pot.

Arrange the meatballs 1 layer thick in a large shallow pan.

Bring the sauce mixture to boil on the stove top. Stir continuously until the jelly melts.

Pour the hot mixture over the meatballs.

With a spoon, turn over each meatball so all sides are covered in sauce.

Put in the oven and cook about 20 minutes. The inside of the meatballs should be hot.

Serve meatballs by putting a toothpick in each one.  Makes about 50-60 meatballs.

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"Bare branches of each tree
on this chilly January morn
look so cold so forlorn.
Gray skies dip ever so low
left from yesterday's dusting of snow.
Yet in the heart of each tree
waiting for each who wait to see
new life as warm sun and breeze will blow,
like magic, unlock springs sap to flow,
buds, new leaves, then blooms will grow."

-  Nelda Hartmann, January Morn  

Kim Willis
All parts of this blog are copyrighted and may not be used without permission.

And So On….

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