Do weeds grow faster?

Having just spent the 4th of July weekend trying to get caught up on my garden, a common gardening question that the Phactor has been asked many times comes to mind. Do weeds just seem to grow faster than other garden plants?

No, in general weeds really do grow faster than other garden plants. Here’s why.
Weeds are plants that are adapted to disturbed habitats. In nature disturbed habitats occur wherever something messes things up, and they can be small places like the disturbance of an uprooted fallen tree or big like after fire or storm damage. Such disturbed habitats are generally short-lived patches in unpredictable locations, so weeds are speed demons of growth and reproduction because they must reach reproductive maturity in a hurry and make lots of seeds so that some of their offspring have chance of dispersing to a newly disturbed place.

OK, here’s the bad news. Gardening and agriculture are disturbances. Human activities have provided weeds with opportunities for success on a massive scale. Doesn’t that just rub your rhubarb? The more you do the more disturbances you create. And since as a biological safety precaution against unforeseen weeding, weed seeds do not all germinate at once, and this weed seed bank in your soil is ready to replace all those weeds you worked so hard to remove.

Rather than be discouraged, the Phactor recommends you come to terms with weeds on a philosophical level. Such an attitude adjustment is greatly aided by sitting back and enjoying your garden with the help of a tall, cold mojito.

Berry-go-Round #18 plant blog roundup

Thanks to Sally, here's another great roundup of plant/gardening/nature related blogs over at Foothills Fancies. (The Phactor wonders, "What are hills?" Lincolnland has overpasses; are they similar?) In particular the Phactor is greatful for having this blog called to his attention: Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog. The loss of genetic biodiversity is a very serious issue. It took nature a long time to generate all that diversity, and then it gets squandered by short-sighted humans. OK, better stop before getting carried away with the sermon/lecture.

Ask a botanist, dummy

Nobody ever has a botanist around when they need one, and nobody ever thinks they need one. Nobody ever asks a botanist for answers to botanical things. (I told the local poison control center MDs that if I ever see them thumbing through a Peterson field guide again attempting to ID a plant some kid had eaten I'd scream. Imagine what an MD would do if they found me drawing a line an someone's belly while consulting a step-by-step pictoral guide to an appendectomy! And I know more about vertebrate anatomy than they know about botany.) And very few people ever take enough botany, heck, any botany, to know even the simplest things. So here’s some botanical stupidity of the most basic sort.

A British military campaign in Afghanistan is reported to have seized “1.3 tonnes of poppy seeds destined to become part of the opium crop that generates $400m a year for the Taliban”. Now that is one heck of a lot of poppy seeds. “Major Rupert Whitelegge, the commander of the company in charge of the area, tugged at one of the enormously heavy white sacks. "They are definitely poppy seeds," he said emphatically.” But of course they weren’t poppy seeds but mung beans. This was determined after an “analysis of a sample carried out by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation in Kabul…”

Right. I don’t know how many nanoseconds it would have taken me to recognize mung beans, but it’s faster than I can say “bean”. What kind of damned analysis is necessary to identify a mung bean? “Dr Samuel Kugbei, the chief FAO technical adviser in the Afghan capital, said: "We have been waiting all day to see these dangerous materials …and now we see that they are just mung beans!" Good old Dr. Kugbei is sounding like one of those MD type doctors who avoided botany like the plague in college. And it raises the question of what kind of technical advisor working for the UN’s FAO who wouldn’t recognize mung beans? He's technical advisor on food and agriculture who doesn't recognize major crop plants?

And of course, poppy seeds themselves aren’t dangerous in any way, shape, or form, which is why we put them on rolls and bagels (yes, those poppy seeds!). You have to grow them into poppy plants, and then wound the developing fruits, and then harvest the gummy sap that oozes out (opium) before you have anything dangerous. Mung beans (an Asian native) are a fairly new crop introduction to Afghanistan, so maybe that could explain the ignorance of some government official.

This is just one more example of "military intelligence". “Well, it looked like a grenade at first, but it turned out to just be an ear of corn.” Ha, even the military can’t get away from botanical influences. Grenade is named after pomegranates and the old practice of a bride throwing the fruit on the ground to see how many seeds pop out, which divines how many children she will have.

Know your genera - Lesson 3: Magnolia

Magnolias are one of the Phactor’s favorite plants, and as a result, they sort of accumulate around his estate (7 species and counting). What is not to love about their flowers? My sweet bay magnolia is a summer flowering species (late June), and while its creamy white cup-like flowers are on the small end of the range of magnolia flower sizes, they have an exotic, almost intoxicating, floral fragrance. To have a sweet bay magnolia next to your patio, in flower, on a soft warm evening, to accompany your mint julep, served by an attractive woman in a white dress, with some Dixieland jazz in the background, is almost too much to ask for. The Phactor is not greedy and will settle for any 4 out of the five.

The flowers open around 5 pm, rather quickly, and attract beetles with their fragrance all evening. Somewhat surprisingly, this southeastern, mostly coastal species, Magnolia virginiana, will grow here in Lincolnland as far north as zone five. My present specimen survived -19F this past winter and still flowered! A previous specimen was not so hardy, so always check the nursery source of the stock to make certain you get a hardy genotype, if that may be a problem. Up here in Lincolnland sweet bay magnolia mostly grows as a large shrub; in its native range it’s a tree.

Magnolia is an honorific for Pierre Magnol, a professor of botany at Montpellier in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and he must have been well liked by Linnaeus (aka Carl von Linné) to have had such handsome plants named after him.

Long-time readers may detect a certain pattern in the know-your- genera lessons. You already know lots of scientific names, even if you were not aware you did.

Yard smart, gardener dumb?

The Phactor’s estate is without doubt an urban oasis for wildlife. Over 70 species of birds have visited in the past 10 years as well as the usual, and not so usual, assortment of small, and not so small, animals. So it was a no-brainer for when this property received Yard Smart certification. But the bucolic serenity of a balanced ecosystem remains elusive.

For several years ecology worked quite well. Red fox were common, and as a consequence, rabbits were not, a most satisfying, and extremely biological, relationship. But something has happened to these handsome canids; they have not been making their daily rounds. As a result the gardener-in-chief has had the Phactor busy conducting an interesting, and increasingly expensive, experiment in the gastronomic preferences of Sylvilagus floridanus, the eastern cottontail. The experiment is conducted thusly. The most precious, unusual, rare, or gorgeous plant in your yard gets eaten to the ground, or lower. This species gets designated the plant of 1st preference. To protect any remaining morsels that may be left, you erect protective fencing around that plant, and then record the next plant that gets eaten into oblivion. This species gets designated the plant of 2nd preference. And so on, and on, and on.

Now perhaps many people would be quite satisfied to have labored so long and so hard producing a botanical smorgasbord for little bun-buns, but the fun is seeping away. This is partly the fault of the plant purveyors who neglected to tell you that the newest, neatest addition to horticulture happens to be a rodent delicacy. Aren't they supposed to run field trials? And here are some results.

Mukdenia rossii 'Crimson Fans' does indeed grow well in the shade and it looks quite striking, but it is even preferred over Campanula takesimana ‘Korean bellflower’ previously ranked number 2. Number one, Callirhoe involucrata ‘prairie poppy mallow’, is no longer participating in the experiment (RIP).

Here foxy, foxy, foxy. Nice rabbits. If the Phactor were not so committed to ecology he might be fixing them one of Aunt Pearl's bitter pills.

Now, what preys on fox squirrels?

More ethical lapses in Lincolnland.

This comes as no surprise to long time residents of our great state, but it appears that political influence has been playing a large role in the admission process at Lincolnland U. Go, LULU, Go! Yes, it seems that students who lack the academic credentials still get admitted to LU if they have political pull, and of course, it isn’t the faculty allow this to happen. It’s the high mucky-mucks who insinuate that those dastardly faculty grade too easy. This is even worse than legacies who at least had the decency to have had well educated, and almost always well heeled parents. I mean how else do you explain W at Yale?

This all brings to mind that famous scene in Tom Cruise’s best movie ever, Risky Business. After being told his record isn’t quite up to Ivy League standards, Joel says, “Looks like it’s LULU!” Or something to that effect. But you know, this isn’t the ivy league out here in Lincolnland, so I’m not sure what the big deal is, other than it takes the edge off the idea that when you're a LULU you are part of some sort of elite student body, one which by definition is more prestigious than Some Other State U. no matter how you perform. Sorry folks, it's just a big corn college.

So what does the Phactor do about all this? Well, my approach is to even the playing field. Yes, they all end up in the same classroom, and part of my job is to set the bar high enough to figure out which ones should be entrusted with taking out our gall bladders and teaching biology to our kids, and which ones should switch majors to communications. So no matter how they were admitted, they have to go through the Phactor Philter.

Only once did a student ever try to pull rank by telling me, "My Mother is a very important person." "No kidding", says I, "then I bet she did better than this when she took biology." "What say we talk to her about your work ethic?" That student had a major league back pedal.

Global warming denial made easy

An anonymous benefactor has presented the Phytophactor with a gift, the Skeptic’s Handbook on global warming by Joanne Nova. Uh, thanks. Make no doubts about it, the Phactor is a card-carrying skeptic from way back, but Joanne No-go isn’t a skeptic, she’s a denier. And her charming little booklet is just full of misinformation (you can get your own copy online, but I’ll not promote it by providing the link). The Smog Blog as debunked the main claims in this booklet as easy as 1, 2, 3.

The Phactor is no expert on climate, but he knows enough to say that we have reason for concern because the carbon dioxide data, the temperature data, and the tree growth/mortality data coincide very closely in one of the few well done long term studies. Yes, correlation is not causation, but it strongly suggests a connection. The worrisome part is that trees are massive storehouses of carbon. If rising temperatures lead to more tree mortality, that carbon is returned to the atmosphere as the trees decay. Why would increasing temperature cause tree mortality? Well, the rate of photosynthesis increases with temperature only to a point and then the rate declines quickly. However, the rate of respiration continues to increase with temperature. So beyond a critical temperature, trees respire faster than they capture carbon dioxide in photosynthesis, literally metabolizing themselves to death. If increased carbon dioxide leads to an increase in temperature, then the whole system is off to the races. The resulting climatic impact on agricultural regions would be disastrous especially for those of our species who have been living close to the edge of starvation. So the choice is to act now, while we can, to make what changes we can, or to wait until there is more certainty, and maybe as a result of waiting, have no chance for or choice of actions. For whatever their reasons deniers are willing to gamble with everyone’s future because they advocate doing nothing. This is neither wise nor pragmatic. It's OK to be skeptical, but don't be foolish.