Monthly Archives: July 2009

July Linkages

Avatar photo
Miscellaneous
1 Comment
Mrs. Homegrown seen creating a “hyperlink” in between gardening and food preservation duties.

Over at Small Measure, author Ashley English is hosting a contest and giving away a jar of “lip-smacking Peach & Lavender Butter” to promote her upcoming series of homesteading books. Look for a new contest each month. English’s “Canning & Preserving”, published by Lark Books, will be available April 2010. The third and fourth books in the series, “Home Dairy” and “Beekeeping”, will be available in April 2011. Hopefully we’ll be having English on our new Homegrown Evolution Podcast that will debut when we can get our computer, seen above, to record audio.

A few blog posts ago we answered a question about soil testing. Visiting journalist Michael Tortorello tipped us off to the University of Minnesota’s Soil Testing Laboratory that will test out of state samples for their regular (low) fee. Their submission forms are located here. Also, readers of this blog will enjoy Tortorello’s articles, especially “The Return of the Root Cellar”.

Community building is something we consider essential for this, as of now, no-named movement. And yet, it seems we are better at meeting online than in person. Danah Boyd has an interesting article, “Why Youth Heart Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” (26 page pdf) about why kids flock to social networking sites. Hint: they don’t have anywhere else to meet.

Lastly, nothing says DIY like prison improvised escape tools.

On the Many Frustrations of Gardening: Pierce’s Disease

Avatar photo
Gardening, Mistakes
17 Comments
Damn Pierce’s Disease!

I really wish that glossy gardening magazines would, every once in a while, devote some space to capturing some of the soul-crushing disappointments of tending plants. Can we please have a cover of Sunset Magazine featuring an aphid and slug infested cabbage? Frustrations are compounded when a beloved perennial plant you’ve been growing for years comes down with a fatal disease. Such was the case when my flame seedless grapevine, which was planted to cover our backyard arbor, contracted Pierce’s disease, caused by an incurable bacteria (Xylella fastidiosa) spread by an insect called the sharpshooter. Pierce’s was discovered in 1892 in Anaheim and is basically the reason we no longer have many vineyards in Southern California. Once a vine gets Pierce’s it will die within a few years. You have to admit failure and rip it out, which I plan to do soon.

“Wood on new canes matures irregularly, producing patches of green, surrounded by mature brown bark.”

To confirm that my vine had Pierce’s I called Jerry Turney, plant pathologist at the Los Angeles County Agricultural Commissioner’s Office. When I described the symptoms, Turney agreed that it sounded like Pierce’s. The signs of Pierce’s, as described in UC’s pest management guide, are:

“(1) leaves become slightly yellow or red along margins in white and red varieties, respectively, and eventually leaf margins dry or die in concentric zones; (2) fruit clusters shrivel or raisin; (3) dried leaves fall leaving the petiole (leaf stem) attached to the cane; and (4) wood on new canes matures irregularly, producing patches of green, surrounded by mature brown bark.”

“Fruit clusters shrivel or raisin.”

Turney described the life cycle of the sparpshooter, one of the main carriers of Pierce’s, who spread the diesase by feeding off the sap of infected plants. Sharpshooters live in riparian areas and when a stream goes dry they fly off in search of irrigated plants to feed on. Sharpshooters also like to spend the winter in citrus groves which, while not susceptible to Pierce’s, provide habitat. Our hot dry summers, which dry out local streams and rivers, and abundant citrus trees, make inland Southern California an especially bad place to try to grow grapes. Why nurseries continue to sell vines suseptable to Pierce’s here is a mystery to me.

In the 1990s Pierce’s disease wiped out 40% of the vines in Temecula’s vineyards. Northern California’s vineyards have experienced what Turney described as an “edge effect”, with Pierce’s claiming the vines on the outside of vineyards. The only way to prevent the spread of the sharpshooter is frequent application of pesticides (on both grapes and citrus), not practical for the home gardener and we’re organic around the Homegrown compound anyways. In fact, one of the pesticides used to control shapshooters is Imidacloprid, implicated by many in the recent disappearance of honey bees.
Pierce disease resistant Vitus californica attacking our house.

The only hope for long term control, as Turney sees it, is by breeding hybrid grape varieties resistant to Pierce’s. Turney strongly advised against trying to grow wine or table grapes in Southern California. After losing three table grape vines in ten years, I can attest to the wisdom of Turney’s advice. To grow grapes in the warm southern parts of the U.S., you simply have to plant Pierce resistant varieites such as the native Vitus californica or muscadine grapes. The contrast between our flame seedless and our Vitus californica vine, in fact, is stunning. The flame is stunted and diseased, while our Vitus californica is so vigorous that I have to beat it back on a daily basis to prevent it from subsuming our house and the neighbor’s.

And while we’re working on resistant grapes we may need to start hybridizing citrus as well. While the strain of Pierce’s that took down my grape vine is harmless to citrus, there is a variant of the bacteria that is currently ravaging the citrus of Brazil and Argentina which causes a disease called Citrus Variegated Chlorosis. It’s also fatal and has the potential to spread to North America via the shipment of infected trees. With a global economy and porous borders it’s bound to show up someday. Might as well get ready.

Gardening is a humbling lesson in evolutionary biology. It’s all about survival of the fittest. Work with evolution by selecting for immunity to pests and disease and you’ll harvest the rewards. Resistance is futile.

More info at piercesdisease.org.

If any of you readers know of a comprehensive list of resistant varieites for California please leave a link in the comments! So far I’ve been able to find lists for Florida and Texas.

Update 7/6/09: Reader Anduhrew sends an amazing link about a home remedy involving injecting antibiotics into an infected vine.

And here’s another article on possible cures.

Mullein (Verbascum thapsus)

Avatar photo
Herbal Medicine, Herbs
10 Comments


Every time we visit the nice folks at Petaluma Urban Homestead they send us home with some strange plant. Thanks to PUH, who are busy actually doing things as opposed to blogging about doing things, we now have a beautiful flowering mullein plant (Verbascum thapsus).

Verbascum thapsus is one of those plants that most people think of as a weed. Native to Europe and Asia, Verbascum thapsus was introduced to North America because of its many medicinal uses, almost too many to list. Most commonly used for respiratory problems, it also makes both green and yellow dyes and doubles as a fish poison! Tradition holds that it also wards off evil spirits,with some sources saying it’s the herb Ulysses took with him to deal with the treacherous sorcerer Circe.

It’s a useful, striking and beautiful plant. It’s also classified as an invasive. The Plant Conservation Alliance (PCA), a consortium of ten federal government agencies and 260 mostly non-profit organizations, has Verbascum thapsus in its cross hairs. How the non-profit “cooperators”, as the PCA terms the many native plant organizations in the PCA consortium, can get behind a program that suggests spraying glyphosate (e.g., Roundup®) and triclopyr (Garlon) in wilderness areas is a great mystery to me. The PCA is also pondering the release of non-native biological controls for mullein such as the mullein moth (Cucullia verbasci). So, it seems, some non-native species are o.k. while others are not? Shouldn’t we be concerned about what else the mullein moth will munch on? Better, I think, to learn to get along. The non-natives are here and we ain’t going to get rid of them. Let’s find their uses rather than spray herbicides. We humans, after all, are notoriously invasive, a moral I’m reminded of as I read the narrative of Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca. If Monsanto marketed a Conquistador control I’m sure the Indians would have spayed an ocean of it, but they only would have created pesticide resistant super-Conquistadors.

While I’d hesitate to plant this stuff if I lived on the edge of a wilderness area, I see no problem growing it in the city. A mix of edibles, natives, ornamentals, medicinals and especially some useful “weeds” makes for a more robust garden. So in the interest of getting along:

Read more about the medicinal properties of Verbascum thapsus on Alternative Nature Online Herbal.
More on the magical properties of Verbascum thapsus at alchemy-works.com.