Gardening

World’s Skinniest Farm Planted in Brookline, MA

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Gardening
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From 200footgarden.blogspot.com:

“The 200 Foot Garden is a community garden/art project, to create a commuter garden in Brookline, Massachusetts. Our hope is to add some beauty and delight to a very everyday stretch of sidewalk and chain-link fence. It’s also our hope to remind people that healthy vegetables can be grown in all sorts of environments, not just farms or big yards or community garden plots. The 200 Foot Garden is also a way to bring together neighbors in a project designed to share good things with the people around us.

The project is headed by Patrick and Tracy Gabridge. In our everyday lives, Patrick is a novelist and playwright, and Tracy is a librarian.”

Humanure Dry Toilet Made From a Milk Crate

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Composting, Design, How-to, Humanure
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Modern toilets take two valuable resources, water and nitrogen rich human waste, and combine the two to create a problem: sewage. In a dry or “humanure” toilet, you cover your deposits with a layer of non-toxic sawdust. Once the toilet is full you dump the contents into your outdoor humanure pile and compost the waste at high temperatures for at least a year. You can then use that compost as fertilizer for plants. The ubiquitous five gallon bucket is the most commonly used humanure receptacle. Most humanure toilet designs I’ve seen such as the ones on Joseph Jenkin’s website make use of wood which I’m not crazy about in the wet environment of a bathroom. Even with a coat of paint wood gets grungy. Alternatively, you can buy plastic camping toilet seats that will clamp on to a five gallon bucket but they have, in my opinion, an unacceptable wobble when you sit on them. For these reasons I designed a sturdy dry toilet making use of a scavenged milk crate. Even if the idea of humanure grosses you out (and it’s definitely the most controversial subject in our book), our milk crate toilet would be great for camping, emergencies or your remote cabin.

Putting this toilet together takes just a few minutes. First, find a milk or beer crate and a five gallon bucket. Make sure that the crate you use is large enough to accommodate the bucket. And note, I know of someone arrested for scavenging beer crates behind a strip club, of all places, so be discreet or ask for permission. Incidentally, when the police finished booking the beer crate scavenger the officer placed the paperwork in . . . a scavenged beer crate doubling as an in box!

Attaching the Toilet Seat to the Crate

Next, find a toilet seat. Forage one or pick up a cheap seat at your local hardware store. In an emergency situation, you could also use the one on your regular toilet and simply bolt it back on when the zombie threat has passed and the sewage pipes are flowing again. To attach the seat to the milk crate simply position the plastic bolts and nuts that come with the lid in the center and on the short end of the bottom of the crate. Don’t over tighten.

Cutting Out a Hole in the Crate

Place the bucket so that it will be appropriately positioned under the seat. Mark the outline of the bucket on the crate with a knife and cut out a circle with a jigsaw or keyhole saw so that the bucket will fit through the former bottom of the crate.

Attaching Legs to the Crate with Cable Ties

Cut four pieces of scrap wood (we found some old table legs for a more finished look), and attach them to each corner of the crate so that the bucket projects about a 1/2-inch above the level of the crate. The legs will be approximately 13 1/2-inches. Make sure that the toilet seat will fit snugly against the top of the bucket. We attached the legs with cable ties, but you could also use screws or bolts.

Moving the Spacer

The last step is to move the spacer on the bottom of the lid, so that it does not hit the top of the bucket. Pop it out with a knife or chisel, drill another hole, and reposition.

Your humanure toilet is now done and ready for use. Simply lift the crate off the bucket when it comes time to empty the contents. Follow the detailed instructions on Joseph Jenkin’s website to learn how to properly compost human waste.


This toilet is simple to make, easy to clean, and is made of readily available materials. I think this particular design will be useful in emergencies and, when combined with Jenkin’s excellent humanure methods, would prevent the dangerous raw sewage nightmares of the sort we saw in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. There is a creative commons licence on all the text and photos on this website so feel free to translate and disseminate this post widely. We’re “open source” here at Root Simple. If you make an improvement in the design please let us know.

Behold the Glassy Winged Sharpshooter (Homalodisca coagulata)

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Pests
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I finally spotted my first glassy winged sharpshooter (Homalodisca coagulata or GWS for short) sinking its vampire like feeding tube into one of my hops vines. The GWS transmits Pierce’s disease, fatal to many grape varieties including my flame seedless, a gardening frustration I blogged about last week. For your enjoyment I captured a 1/2-inch GWS specimen and scanned it. Note that the GWS was harmed in the process, for which I’m unapologetic.

While there are many varieties of native sharpshooters in California, the GWS is an interloper from the Southeast US and is much more mobile. The native varieties tend to hang out in riparian areas while the GWS enjoys jumping around backyards, citrus groves and vineyards, spreading a host of nasty plant diseases including almond leaf scorch and Citrus Variegated Chlorosis. The GWS is also responsible for spreading oleander leaf scorch. Astonishingly, 20% of home gardens in California contain oleander and 2,000 miles of highways in the state are landscaped with it. The University of California estimates that oleander leaf scorch could cause over $52 million in damage.

Dig the GWS’s built-in hypodermic syringe!

The discovery of a GWS in our yard has solved a mystery that has puzzled us for years. When sitting under the grape vine covering our arbor we’ve often felt little droplets of water, highly unusual in a place where it never rains past April. Turns out it was sharpshooter pee. Sharpshooters feed on the xylem, the water bearing veins of plants. As the xylem contains mostly water, the sharpshooter must process large quantities of material in order to survive. Excess water is puffed out their rear ends, a fascinating thing to see close up. The constant water puffing combined with their fast side to side movements make GWS seem more like machines than insects. Perhaps we could “monetize” this blog by teaming up with Hasbro and Michael Bay to create a line of glassy winged sharpshooter toys, video games and action movies.

Barring a GWS blockbuster we can instead offer our fellow plant and insect geeks an industrial film from the University of California that delves into the GWS in pornographic detail. Nice retro voiceover talent on that video UCTV (one of Mr. Homegrown’s former employers, fyi)!

If you like that video, you’ll also enjoy UCTV’s 90 minute Home Vineyard lecture. I’ll add one point to that talk: if you’ve got GWS, grow muscadine or native grape varieties. Don’t bother with table or wine grapes until the bright folks at UC figure out how to breed Pierce disease resistant vines.

On the Many Frustrations of Gardening: Pierce’s Disease

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Gardening, Mistakes
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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)

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Herbal Medicine, Herbs
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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.