Drpught, dry, dry, dry, cracked earth, and hot temperatures

What a great time to be a gardener, it gives us something to do that is pretty low risk for us senior citizens.  Our gardens need water, lots of water, and the lily pond too.  Oh, things that can be easily watered are doing well enough like boxed, caged tomatoes.  But the Phactors do not waste water on lawn, which is on its own.  Everything is wilting to some degree, and if it doesn't recover over night then it really needs to be watered the next day.  Plants like the big-leafed Magnolias have a lot of surface area and can lose a lot of water.  And other things are rather new and as yet don't have extensive root systems, like our newest plum yew and an Abelia, and a white snake root.  So a good deal of TPP's daily activity is pulling hoses around to ward off the worst on the drought. Gave an older hose and a soaker hose to the F1 because her whole garden is new.  Even now a timer is telling TPP to get going and move the sprinkler to a new area in an attempt to rejuvenate a double-file Viburnum, that is trying to recover from a winter die-back. Already lost a dwarf  Metasequoia from the Japanese garden; it has never been a happy camper, so no surprise really.  In a real surprise, the prairie nursery TPP has inherieted had some bunchflower blooming (Melanthium virginicum), which TPP has never seen before. Quite handsome.  Hope to propagate some more this coming year.

Fracking threatens - wait for it - quality beer!

OK, the possibility of polluting the environment doesn't seem to arouse public officials into action to strictly regulate fracking, but German beer makers, serious beer makers and consumers, worry about what fracking will do to the main ingredient of beer, water.  German beer is brewed according to the oldest food purity law, the "Beer Purity Law" (Reinheitsgebot) of 1516, and according to this law, high quality water sources are to be protected.  Allowing fracking has the potential to violate this law.  Now it would seem that in terms of what matters in life, beer should always be a higher priority than energy production because if you've been drinking you shouldn't be driving anyways. Unfortunately here in Lincolnland, TPP guesses that most of our state legislators think Bud Lite is pretty good beer.  Sigh.  In a way it makes sense, light beer will ruin the environment!  Will the quality beer brewers here in Lincolnland get going on the anti-fracking program?  Bring this up when in your local brew-pub.

Water, water everywhere?

We, i.e., most residents of N. America & Europe, tend to take water for granted and use it with abandon.  It’s only when on occasion we have too little water that we briefly take it seriously.  Indeed, if you do not understand this, TPP would be happy to demonstrate by letting you pay his water bill for the past two months (yikes!); can’t retire yet.  So this graphic may help (although it's sort of ironically funny where the water bubble is located!) where all the water has been gathered into one drop.  It doesn't seem right does it?  Earth is considered a “water planet” (Ever see the remarkably silly movie Ice Pirates?  Some pretty famous actors would like to forget this one.) what with 2/3s of its surface covered by oceans.  And then there’s the polar ice caps, although Arctic ice melting this summer set a new record.  It really, really seems like a lot, so it's hard to think of water as a very limited, and widely squandered resourse, especially when seeing a real tropical downpour or the tailend of Issac.   So want to see how much water there is?  The total amount?  Well, there it is, that little blue marble is the total amount of water that the Earth has, the difference between Earth and Mars, between being a planet luxuriant with life and being desolate and (nearly?) lifeless.  Remember too that most of this water is not usable for human needs because of its salt content.  Fortunately the water cycle continues to distill ocean water and dump fresh water upon the land,  where we wantonly waste it with hardly ever a thought about sustainability.  Most people have trouble understanding the fact that one of the world’s most limited resources is water.  And if you are farming or your city relies on an aquafer, it's even worse; mostly it's not a matter of if, but simply when it will be pumped dry.  When are people going to wake up and pay attention? 

Dry, dry, dry

Some things are meant to be dry: wine, towels, gin, martinis, gun powder, humor.  Gardens are not in that category, and now the early heat, the lack of seasonal rain, and the minimal winter precipitation are all combining to make the end of May way too dry, and it's a deep dry.  Advice: water the crap out of any newly plantings if you have any hope of having them survive. Think of it as insurance to protect your investment.  Water the crap out of any trees or shrubs you planted last year too.  Trees that were under watered last year are basically toast; some are already going down for the count.  A further note to inexperienced waterers: long and slow is the way to go.  Once you think you've actually watered something adequately, dig a plug and see just how deeply you watering penetrated.  You may be in for a big surprise at how superficial your watering is, and this is doubly bad because you leave with the impression that you have watered.  The combination of near drought conditions and political rhetoric, which can dessicate your brain, bode badly for the summer months. 

Homeopathic water - thanks for the memories.

Sometimes, just sometimes, it takes a philosopher to figure out why non-scientific treatments appeal to so many people.  Damon Young's brief essay on homeopathy gets right to the point, although what is the solution?  Have a read.  

Don't drink water - green Lake Erie edition

Now the term "algae" is not very precise; it refers to any number of small green aquatic organisms, members of several clades (kingdoms), both prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms. Under the right conditions unicellular green organisms can multiply at a remarkable rate (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, keep going for a few hours) resulting in algal blooms, vast population explosions of tiny green organisms. Blooms are not usually good things. Here's a great picture of an incredibly massive algal bloom in the shallow western basin of Lake Erie. That end of the lake is the warmest and it gets a lot of nitrogen laden runoff via a river from agricultural lands. The organism in question is Microcystis, a blue-green algae or more accurately a cyanobacterium, what my old phycology professor used to call "itty-bitty blue-green cells" in a Texas drawl. The number of cells it takes to turn a big lake green such that it can be seen from Earth orbit boggles the mind. Now here's the problem: it's toxic. Don't drink it; don't touch it. Don't let your dopey Lab lap it up. Now stop and think about how many people rely on Lake Erie for their drinking water. If what comes out of the tap looks like what's in this glass, that's a warning. Actually water purification plants do a pretty good job and you really have to concentrate a fantastic number of these tiny cells to get that much green, but you get the idea. These algal blooms are nothing new, but a warming climate will make such algal blooms larger, longer, and more frequent, something to get excited about. And to top it off, then human activities add fertilizer!

Stoopid! Dilution works!

Apparently the city of Portland Oregon thinks homeopathy works. After a security camera caught some fellow taking a piss into the city's reservoir, they flushed 8 million gallons of water down the drain. Now let's suppose this fellow really needed to go, and deposited 8 oz of urine into the city water supply. That comes out to something like a few millionths of a percent. In common parlance, that amounts to nothing, unless of course you think water has a memory and no amount of dilution matters, the basic premise of homeopathy. This is the problem when people can't think. Here's a demonstration of the problem that's totally appropriate to the problem, ah, but bet they didn't shake the reservoir to invoke the magic of water. The correct solution is to tell everyone you drained the water, and then just not do it because no one can ever tell the difference. Although in a very counter intuitive thought experiment, if you throw a glass of water into the reservoir, and it disperses evenly, what are your chances of getting at least one molecule of your original water back if you dipped in your glass?

Earth Day – 1970 and 2010

Well, it’s been 40 years since my first Earth Day which I attended in my senior year in college. Unfortunately the impact of Earth Day was over shadowed by political events, the anti-war demonstrations culminating in the Kent State shootings and wide-spread student strikes at colleges and universities, including mine. As a graduating senior, I was more concerned about 1. graduating because that was a bit uncertain given the strike and crossing student picket lines to finish biology courses needed for graduate school that fall (having just been accepted), and 2. getting drafted and shipped off to Vietnam in the interim was a real possibility even though the Phactor was a “winner” in the 1st draft lottery by having a fairly high number assigned to my birthday. It had been a decade of considerable turmoil for people my age. At the height of the cold war this teenager helped friends build a bomb shelter in their basement and had my Father explain why that wouldn’t matter if the Russians dropped the big one. That was followed by involvement in social justice and integration straining race relations and landing me in the middle, quite by chance, of one of the race riots that left a city burning. Then fast forward to the Vietnam War and the loss of too many friends. For some reason a good grade in English literature (and many other subjects) just didn’t seem all that important.
And now Earth Day doesn’t seem as important any more either, and it's not because things have gotten a whole lot better, although many things have gotten worse much slower, and a few things like wild turkeys and the like are more common than they were. A lot of green-washing is going on; everyone is trying to cash in, our capitalist system at work, but the type of big changes needed do not seem to be in the offing. The average citizen, the type mesmerized by simple-minded rhetoric and easy-to-shout slogans, truly fails to recognize the types of changes and the magnitude of changes really needed to preserve our environment. It isn't plastic bags and water bottles that will make a difference, although they may be symbolic of the type of thinking needed. Most people wouldn’t think of water as our biggest resource problem, but it probably is, and we continue to waste it blightly in spite of rain barrels becoming a bit more common. And if people really understood the concept of a tipping point, climate change would scare the crap out of them because by the time to can convince the nay-sayers and politicians, it will be too late.
But mostly I'm reminded of a poster from 40 years ago that still speaks volumes. To quote Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” (Earth Day Poster, 1970)

Dialing for drinks

Ring! Ring! Hello. Who’s this? Phil. Phil who? Philodendron.
Do I really want my house plants calling me to say they need watering? The Phactor is not overly fond of cell phones (doesn’t have one) and other invasive, pervasive, persuasive, wa-disturbing technologies. The general vegetative state of house plants is one of the reasons plants are never as annoying as cats, who can get your attention at 4 AM (must be breakfast time somewhere) without a cell phone. Cats with cell phones! That's too horrible to contemplate!

HT to GL.