April 6, 2021 planting pansies

 Hi gardeners

Today is a beautiful warm day here but just last Thursday we had six inches of snow. What an awful April Fools day joke mother nature played on us. It was all gone in a couple days however and the frogs are back out singing away.

Even though they were buried last week the crocus survived and are back to blooming beautifully. Many daffodils are now in bloom and corydalis, and some anemones (windflowers) and Glory of the snow are in bloom. Both grape hyacinths and the larger hyacinths are starting to bloom. Tiny perky violas are popping up in the lawn.

My roses and clematis are leafing out and I see some hostas peeking out of the ground. There are big buds on the maples. Chickweed is blooming. The lilacs are showing green. I didn’t see any dandelions in bloom here, but saw them blooming in town, and if this warm weather continues, they’ll be blooming soon here.

The grass is greening up and soon it will be time to mow. There is a shortage of mower parts this year so get out those mowers and get them running, in case you need something you’ll have a chance to get it before the grass is too deep.

Get out those hummingbird and oriole feeders and put up any new bird houses. The birds will soon be here if they aren’t already. Many birds are already nesting.

Start your dahlia and canna bulbs inside now in zones 6 and lower. You can plant them in the garden in zone 7 and above.

I am busy working on the veggie garden this week.  I’ll have lettuce and spinach planted sometime this week. But for you new gardeners- patience, patience, patience. In zones 6 and lower there is still a chance for frost. Be careful still on what you plant outside.

The busy season has started. From now until late June I’ll be outside and working very chance I can. (And a lot of time after that too.) But I am looking forward to it.

 

 

April 1 at my house

April almanac

The full moon in April is a super moon as it coincides with the moon perigee, the closest point the month is to the earth each month. It makes the moon look larger and increases the tides. This will occur on the 26^th and 27^th this month. The moon apogee, farthest point from the earth, is April 14^th.

April’s full moon is known as the Pink moon, egg moon or grass moon. It’s known as the pink moon because it is when the pink wild creeping phlox usually blooms. The Lyrid Meteor shower peaks on April 22^nd but the moon will still be nearly full, and it may be hard to see them this year.  You will have a better chance to view the May 5th, Eta Aquarids Meteor Shower.

Holidays in April are Golfer’s day the 10^th, National Pecan Day 14^th, National Garlic Day 19^th, Christian Easter 21^st, Earth Day 22^nd, Executive Administrative day and Zucchini bread day the 23^rd, Arbor day 25^th, and International Astronomy Day.  Easter was April 4^th this year.

April is National Lawn and Garden Month as well as Keep America Beautiful month.  It’s also National Humor month, National Pecan month and National Poetry month.  April’s birthstone is the diamond, and the birth flower is the sweet pea.  In the language of flowers, the sweet pea means either goodbye or blissful love, depending on who’s translating, I guess.

Garden chores for April include seeding lawns, planting trees and shrubs, getting seeds and bulbs started indoors in zones 5-6 and maybe planting lettuce and peas outside and putting some pretty pansies in pots for color.  In warmer zones you may be planting more crops outside like onions, carrots and even tomatoes and peppers and planting those annual bedding plants and containers.

April is a good month to divide perennials and move plants you want to relocate. And get those mowers tuned up and ready to go, most areas of the country will mow at least once in April. 

Get out those oriole and hummingbird feeders by mid-month in zones 6 and lower and right now in zones 7 and higher. These birds have started their migration north already.

Here’s a link to learn about growing sweet peas.

http://gardeninggrannysgardenpages.blogspot.com/p/sweet-peas.html

Sweet Peas

                                 

Resetting the Table: Straight Talk About the Food We Grow and Eat  - By Robert L. Paarlberg

A Book Review

This is the book I have been waiting to read about modern food production, from a person who has experience with modern agriculture and who can give an informed opinion about the direction in which our food production should head. Much that has been written lately is strongly pro-organic, pro small farm, with an emotional, nostalgic appeal to people. But when you read these “let’s go back to the way we used to be” books and you do know a little about modern agriculture, you can see the bias quite clearly and you can also see faulty reasoning and incorrect assumptions touted as facts.   

Back on March 2, 2021 I wrote a review of Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal by Mark Bittman.  Bittman is a food writer, with no agricultural knowledge, whose book was interesting but deeply flawed in spots because he refuses to see a place for the good parts of modern, large agriculture and the progress being made to make modern ag more sustainable and earth friendly.

The truth is as Paarlberg points out in his new book, while organic ag and small family farms are great, we cannot feed the world with them. And if we tried, we would do far more harm to the environment and global food security than we would do good. Even though organic food and buying from small farmers is popular with middle- and upper-income families in developed countries, it still makes up less than 5% of the sales of food products in those countries.

In your home garden, and for small market gardeners, organic food production is both feasible and a healthy goal. But when it comes to producing food for the majority of the world’s population modern, large scale, precision type agriculture for plant-based foods is the best hope for sustainable, environment sparing agriculture. (The production of meat is another topic I’ll discuss later.)

Things you may learn from this book-

Did you know that pesticide use on commercial crops peaked in the 80’s and has been going down ever since? The pesticides used on crops today are actually safer for humans and the environment than those used even 30 years ago.  And with precision agriculture, those pesticides are applied only when and where they are needed, meaning that millions of gallons of pesticides are no longer applied to crops when they aren’t needed and no longer wash off into our surface water, and seep into ground water.

You don’t hear about this though. Instead, you hear about how bad certain pesticides are for pollinators, how pesticides are poisoning us even though the food supply is safer and cleaner than it’s ever been, at least in the last 100 years.  

(One of the biggest users of pesticides today, and the area where pesticides are far more likely to impact helpful insects and the environment than in crop fields, is the “kill the invasive plants” movement. But you don’t hear much about that. https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2664.12711 )

GMO crops, while greatly vilified, are part of the reason we use less pesticides. By now people should have realized that GMO modified crops are harmless. We’ve been eating them for 20 years and there is no science-based proof they are harmful. You may think you aren’t eating GMO foods, but unless you grow all of your own food, including grains and oils, you are.

While organic agriculture uses different pesticides, those pesticides can be just as harmful to pollinators and humans as modern “chemical” pesticides. And in many cases, much more of them are used to combat pests, since many are not as effective as modern pesticides and have to applied more frequently. Pests develop resistance to organic pesticides just as frequently as they do to modern pesticides.

Even most organic producers now agree that banning chemical fertilizers in organic production was probably a mistake. As I have mentioned many times plants don’t care how they get their nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.  Manure and other organic fertilizers are awfully hard to manage so that plants get what they need without polluting the environment with excess nutrients. And manure applied to fruits and vegetable crops introduces the risk of food born disease like salmonella and listeria.

Modern agriculture actually saves land

One of the that the reasons farms have gotten larger is because using modern technology is expensive. If you are going to buy a precision pesticide applicator, one that identifies a weed, then applies a tiny bit of pesticide directly to it, you need to produce a lot of crops to pay for it. This technology is now available and will lessen pesticide use even further.  

When we boost production from each acre with modern technology, we can retire marginal lands from production. Much of it goes into conservation easements. Large farms are willing to allow pollinator strips or edges, smaller farms feel compelled to plant from road to road. In the last 20 years technology has allowed us to grow more food on less land, and we now have removed thousands of acres from food production.

Other modern farming practices include no till, which prevents erosion and aids in keeping soil microbiomes healthy. Complex drip irrigation systems conserve water. Drones and satellites evaluate fields to see where problems are and water, fertilizers and pesticides are applied only where needed. Technology is the future of agriculture and it shouldn’t be looked at in a negative manner.  

The world needs more modern agriculture

One reason many developing nations can’t produce enough food is because farmers cannot afford modern fertilizers. They have access to manure but since animals are often poorly fed in these countries the manure is often not enough to substantially boost crop production. And animals are most often on pasture- and their manure hard to gather.

There are other factors- like water availability and politics that effect production but if many countries had access to affordable modern fertilizer’s they could greatly improve food production and reduce starvation and nutritional deficiencies. Poor countries also need access to better seeds and modern technology like drip irrigation.

There’s a movement now to tell these poor farmers that farming in the traditional way is good and they shouldn’t give up their traditions. While there may be some truth in that, much of it is romantic bs. It’s not ok for people in developed countries to continue to use all the modern technology at their disposal and produce far more food than they need, while the poor people of the world are told they should farm like their ancestors did and just buy food from more advanced countries or live with food shortages and malnutrition.

The healthy diet recommendations and human exploitation

The recommendation for a healthy diet in developed countries calls for lots of fruit and vegetables. But many fruits and vegetables still need a lot of hand labor and in the US and other developed countries, it isn’t the citizens of the countries that do much of that hand labor. Instead, it’s poor people from underdeveloped countries that come in to do the work, often illegally. This leads to abuse and exploitation of these vulnerable people.

Even though agricultural wages have risen, the work is still hard and often dangerous. Farmers will tell you they can’t find enough US citizens willing to do the work. It’s harder to mechanize this part of agriculture. So as long as US citizens expect to have fresh fruits and vegetables available all year at reasonable prices people are going to suffer to make that happen. It may happen in their own countries, where they are producing food for US citizens at the expense of a good diet for their own citizens. Or it may happen here where farmers happily take advantage of illegal workers.

We need to rethink how we obtain those “healthy” fruits and vegetables, where we grow them, how we transport them, who has access to them. Are we really healthier if we have fresh strawberries or lettuce in January? Or could we be just as healthy with berries frozen last June and cabbage kept in cold storage?

Fruits and vegetables are the foods most often wasted in modern countries. They are the foods transported long distances and utilizing lots of resources to clean and store.  Should we continue to support the production of foods that exploit poor people and cause environmental harm for the benefit of the middle and upper class?

Animals in Agriculture

Most people recognize that the way we produce meat, eggs and milk is not always humane and that changes need to be made in that sector of agriculture. But just like crop production, the way we raise animals cannot go back to the past if we intend to feed the most humans at the least cost to the environment.

Saying that people need to eat a plant-based diet and give up meat is one thing, getting people to do that is another. Vegans and vegetarians comprise less than 5 % of the population and are unlikely to ever become more than 10% unless meat just isn’t available.

Confined production of animals is here to stay and in some ways it’s probably better for animals like chickens than free range. But we must do it more humanely. Many countries have set standards for confined production and a few US States have also legislated better standards, but more is needed.

The majority of eggs produced in this country are now produced cage free, but hens are still too crowded in production buildings. We need to give hens more floor space, good ventilation and climate control, natural lighting and things like litter to scratch in. Turning them loose to free range exposes birds to disease and predators and takes more birds to produce the same amount of eggs. It’s not the answer. Free range is for birds you raise at home, and even then, a lot of chicken owners will tell you those birds face a lot of risks.

In the Netherlands standards for confined hog production require natural lighting, lots of room, climate control and cleanliness, good ventilation, bedding to root in and even what is called enhanced environments- which means things like toys to occupy the pigs. Farrowing crates are banned.  They produce a lot of pork at only a slightly higher cost than we do here.

An experiment with dairy cattle found that when cows were offered pasture or a choice of a clean, climate-controlled building with a deep straw bedding for comfort, most choose the building. Most US farmers shun bedding because it takes more work to keep things clean, but it could be mandated.

Confined but happy animals are healthier and require less medication for disease or to promote growth. Bio-security is easier in buildings and keeping animal diseases from becoming human diseases is important. But we must find ways to use less antibiotics and growth hormones in the animals we raise.

Raising an animal in comfortable conditions and treating them kindly and then killing them quickly and humanely is not evil. Most people say they are willing to pay more for meat raised in this way. It’s the way we must treat animals until we transfer to real meat grown in labs at a reasonable cost, which is still a long way off.

The artificial meats we now have are highly processed foods, requiring just as much water and land to produce the ingredients as traditional meat. We don’t even know how safe these foods are and many of the products contain more fat and salt than we should be consuming. They will never become popular unless the price can be lowered much more than real meat.  They aren’t the answer to feeding the planet.

We should encourage eating less meat. We should encourage buying locally and seasonally raised produce when it’s possible. We should grow some of our own food, but also recognize that some people just can’t do that. Using less pesticides and less land to produce crops should be the goal, and we should embrace technology to help us do that. 

We should help all countries to embrace modern agriculture and become more food secure, rather than expecting them to continue to use old farming methods because some well-fed people in the modern world think that’s what would be ideal for them. The green revolution worked for first world countries, and it will work for poor countries if we just let it.

Agriculture has changed -improved- dramatically in the centuries people have practiced it. Despite doomsayers in every era, we continue to produce enough food in this world to feed every person on the planet- even though that food is often not distributed equally, and people still starve.

We are able to do this because agriculture keeps improving. Now is not the time to regress and move backwards in some romantic notion of how things were better in an earlier time. Technology is what will keep us fed in the future.

And we should realize that it isn’t farmers, no matter how big or small, that are making us fat or ruining our health with their crops. It’s the middlemen between farmers and eaters that do that, turning perfectly healthy food into products full of sugar, salt and fat that make us all less healthy. Don’t blame farmers for your health problems, and don’t blame them for our environmental problems.

Read the book – no matter how biased you are towards organic agriculture and the old-fashioned way of farming. You may gain a different perspective.

 

Planting Pansies

Picking some pretty pansies this spring should be on every gardeners to do list.  Who doesn’t like pansies? When you just want to see pretty flowers but know it’s too cold to plant most annuals, think of pansies. They make cool weather colorful and give gardeners an easy to grow option when they just need to plant something. Pansies are heavily promoted to keep gardeners buying plants in the cooler months. They are so pretty it’s hard to resist them, and if you venture into garden stores when it’s cool, you are almost certain to return home with pansies.

In garden stores you may also find violas for sale in early spring. Botanically there is no difference between pansies and violas, although some species of viola are short-lived perennials in the garden, as are most violets, another relative. Modern hybrid pansies usually have larger flowers than violas and they are less likely to retain any fragrance. You can use violas just like pansies. Violas are more likely to reseed themselves in the garden and pop up in unexpected places.

In the garden pansies can be used hide the dying foliage of early spring blooming bulbs. Pansies are excellent in containers to add a bit of color to porches or decks in cool weather. Children love the “faces” on pansies, so they are excellent choices for a child’s garden. Pansies are edible and can be used to decorate cakes or added to salads. Pansies make good cut flowers and they are charming when dried and used in crafts. And the bees will love you for providing them flowers to feed on when there is little else in bloom.

Pansy growing tips

Pansies are planted in early spring or late fall. Pansies do not like heat, some varieties are more heat tolerant than others are, but few pansies will bloom in hot weather. There are some varieties of pansies that will put on a show in the fall until covered with snow, and then when the snow melts in spring they resume blooming as if nothing has happened.

Pansies are generally removed and replaced with warm weather annuals after the last frost in the spring.  A good idea is to plant your pansies in something that will fit inside patio containers or window boxes and then zip the pots of pansies away to a cooler spot when it’s time to plant the petunias or other warm weather plants in that location.  Find a shady spot for the pansies to rest in. Cut them back to a few inches and keep them well watered. If you are lucky, they will survive the hot weather and be ready to bring back into the sun in cooler fall weather to resume blooming.

If the pansies are planted in the ground, you can dig them out and pot them and remove them to a shady resting place as above or you can cut them back and hope to see them in the fall. And since pansies are inexpensive you may just want to remove them to the compost pile when the heat comes and they stop blooming.

Pansies like full sun in the spring and fall although they may tolerate some light shade. They need to be kept moist, but make sure they never sit in waterlogged soil. A slow-release fertilizer mixed into the soil at planting will aid flowering, especially in areas where pansies will be blooming for many months.

Pansies are annuals; they live for about a year. Some fall planted pansies will return in spring. Keep the dead flowers picked off so they don’t go to seed to prolong bloom. If you do let a few go to seed in the garden they may pop up on their own next year.

Pansies can also be started from seed indoors. Pansy seed germinates well, and plants are fairly easy to grow. They like to be started in a cool area, with daytime temperatures in the 60’s and nighttime temperatures in low 50’s - high 40’s. Pansies need a sunny area or good supplemental lighting to develop into sturdy plants. They will need to be started about 10 weeks before you want to plant them outside.

Some pansy varieties

There are hundreds of pansy varieties on the market. There are large flowered varieties and small flowered pansies. There is every color pansy in the rainbow, some solid colored, some with the traditional “cat’s face”.  There are ruffled and frilled varieties. Medium and small flowered pansies hold up better in rain and snow than the larger flowered pansies.

Tags on pansies sold in stores may just say “pansy hybrid, mixed colors. That’s because most people choose pansies by the color and markings that appeal to them. Here are a few named varieties. “Crystal Bowl Supreme” series features 12 solid colored, small flowered pansies. “ Majestic Giants” is an old series with large flowers, many colors and markings. “Bolero” hybrids have large, ruffled double blooms in a wide range of colors. “Pink Panther” series features medium sized flowers in shades of pink, wine and lilac.

 

A flower blossoms for its own joy.”

– Oscar Wilde

 

Kim Willis

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And So On….

 

Find Michigan garden events/classes here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/118847598146598/

(This is the Lapeer County Gardeners facebook page)

 

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