Gardening

Using the Google Search App for Plant Identification

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Gardening
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Over the past few months Kelly and I have been testing Google’s search app, which lets you use your phone’s camera to do a kind of reverse image search, to identify weeds and trees. It’s surprisingly accurate and even when it doesn’t get you to the exact plant it usually shows results close enough to make a good guess with a little more research.

To do an image search you click on the colorful square next to the microphone and allow the app to access your phone’s camera. It seems to work both with long distance shots, for instance a picture of an entire mature tree, or closeups of leaves.

There are other plant identification apps out there that I have tested over the years but none have worked as well as Google’s search app. Google is sitting on way more data than any small-time app maker. Which leads to my disclaimer . . .

While this search ability is amazing, I find Google creepy. Why? Let me list just a few reasons.

  • When you use Google for a search they track your location data. What exactly are they doing with this location data? Yes, you can turn this off but you loose functionality.
  • They gather publicly accessible information about you and hoard it like the Nibelungen hoard their gold.
  • They have monopolized and monetized search.
  • Google’s Director of Engineering is Singularity nutjob Ray Kurzweil who believes we will, someday, be raptured up to the cloud in a perverse, secular form of millenarianism.
  • Google confuses data accumulation with wisdom.
  • See Adam Curtis’ three part series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (Part I, PartII, Part III) to see where the nightmarish world Google’s belief in cybernetics will take us.

Enough ranting. You will all have to help still my urge to take a sledgehammer to the whole interwebs.

To that end if any of you know a plant search alternative that works as well as Google please leave a comment. Or perhaps we should all just take our kids for a walk and show them some plants . . .

Backyard in Progress

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Garden Design, Gardening
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This morning I thought I’d update progress on the garden. A crew from Haynes Landscaping worked hard over the past week to clean up our backyard and install the hardscaping for a rain garden fed by the downspout from the back end of our house. The rain garden will fill out a problematic area we’ve struggled with over the years.

When we moved into this house in 1998 the spot was occupied by a dead tree. A few years ago we used the area to mine clay for our adobe oven. This left a shallow depression that I filled in with compost and routed the downspout towards via an unsightly pipe. Lacking definition and choked with weeds, the area never looked good.

Our landscaper Laramee proposed digging the depression out by about a foot and adding river rock and a little dry stream fed by the downspout. I made a bridge so that when it rains water will flow under the path that leads to our shed. This is why you hire an outsider expert: Kelly and I would never have thought of this rain garden or the idea of running the flow under the path.

Yes, one of these days I’ll remove the bar code from that pipe!

We plan on planting this area with native plants in the fall. Laramee and his crew also hauled up some rock to better define the paths in our yard that lead to the bees and the chicken coop.

Laramee also proposed something else we never would have thought of: 12-volt lighting. He placed the lights sparingly along the paths in our backyard. For the sake of wildlife, I don’t believe in having outdoor lighting on all the time, so I rigged up a remote control switch to turn the lighting on as needed, such as when heading to the shed in the evening.

On top of the importance of seeking outside advice, the other lesson is not to accumulate crap such as building materials or duplicate tools. I had a lot of “failed project” detritus hidden behind the shed and tucked into corners of the yard. It feels good to have that junk gone and have a space that brings solace rather than “I’ve-got-so-much-to-do” chore anxiety.

Stop Digging! The Benefits of No-Till and Cover Crops

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Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
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Consider this research as one more nail in the coffin of tilling and double digging. Scientists at UC Davis took a look at how no-till practices combined with cover crops foster a diverse fungi community that “play important roles in nutrient mobilization, organic matter decomposition, carbon cycling and creation of soil structure.” While their research looked at commercial agriculture I think it’s safe to extrapolate their results to home vegetable gardens. The latest issue of California Agriculture sums up the study,

Symbiotrophic fungi expand the surface area of roots, allowing roots greater access to water and nutrients (in exchange for carbon). Fungi, however, are more sensitive than other microorganisms to physical disturbance. Adopting no-till as a conservation management practice eliminates or greatly reduces both disruption of fungal hyphal networks and redistribution of organisms and nutrients in the soil profile. Use of cover crops, meanwhile, provides more abundant and varied sources of organic carbon.

Let me just add that we really regret promoting double-digging in one of our books! The science it pretty clear about the benefits of the relationship between fungi and roots and the damage that tilling can cause to plant/fungi cooperation.

The complete study, “Cover cropping and no-till increase diversity and symbiotroph:saprotroph ratios of soil fungal communities” (behind a pay wall) can be found here.

There is Something Beyond the Straw Bale

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Fruit Trees, Garden Design, Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
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Fig tree off the front porch.

As usual, when I blog about our small vegetable garden as I did on Wednesday, I neglect to put that small part of the food growing efforts at the Root Simple compound in context. To correct this unfortunate tendency, I’m thinking of hanging a framed portrait of Jacques Derrida, the patron saint of 90s nerd boys like me, over my computer to remind me that nothing exists outside of a greater context. What applies to literature also applies to vegetable gardening. You can’t grow vegetables without also considering their relationship to other plants, creatures and human beings.

Bale, pomegranate tree and mess I need to clean up. Please note the raccoon poop zone on the slightly subterranean garage roof.

Our vegetable garden right now is just one straw bale in the process of conditioning and our philosophy has always been that vegetable gardens need to be surrounded by a native “hedge row” that supports beneficial wildlife. We’re also fans of hardy and climate appropriate perennial fruits and vegetables–beyond that solitary straw bale we have a lot of edible perennial plants and a bunch of work to do to straighten out the yard after years of other priorities.

Site of future seasonal rain garden.

Towards that end, our landscaper, Laramee Haynes and crew are coming next week to clean things up, install a kind of seasonal rain garden fed by a downspout, fix the paths in the backyard, and install some sprinklers and a few path lights. In short, to do all the things we couldn’t do when I was taking care of my mom and when Kelly was recovering from open heart surgery. The end goal is to have a yard consisting mostly of native plants, alongside our mature fruit trees and a tiny vegetable garden that will consist of either a small raised bed or a straw bale or an alternation of both bed and bale.

The fruit trees, for those keeping score, consist of a fig, pomegranate, avocado and olive as well as a few stone fruit trees that we will likely remove since the squirrels get every single fruit. In the perennial vegetable catagory, there’s also a few artichokes that pop up here and there, prickly pear cactus and an indestructible stand of New Zealand spinach. When Laramee is done we’ll install a bust of Derrida made out of pre-chewed termite infested wood that will slowly be colonized and deconstructed by Los Angeles’ endangered carpenter bees.

Lastly, please enjoy this completely gratuitous kitten photo that has nothing to do with this blog post, vegetable gardening or Derrida unless all internet cat photos do, in fact, have everything to do with Derrida. Let’s skip that speculation for now and note that this kitten, currently being fostered by our neighbor Lora, is up for adoption and looking for a home in which to snuggle next to you while you read impenetrable tomes in your reading socks. Email us if you want to bring this grey cutie home.

Why I’m Growing Vegetables in a Straw Bale

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Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
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before and after: straw bale garden

The straw bale garden I planted in 2013: before and after.

I suspect we’re not alone in having tried just about every way to grow a vegetables garden. In the lifelong quest for decent home grown vegetables we’ve tried the methods of every gardening guru with a book: biointensive, biodynamic, raised beds, pots, self-watering containers, straw bales and just plain old by-the-book science-based, extension service advice. Results have ranged from moderately successful to moderately tragic–mostly moderately tragic.

Over the years, our vegetable garden has shrunk from ambitious proportions to a tiny 3-foot by 8-foot raised bed filled with tired and expensive potting soil. This past winter (our best season for veggies here in Southern California) I didn’t even bother to plant anything as I was busy working on the inside of the house. Last summer we tried, unsuccessfully, to grow tomatoes (due to disease problems built up in the soil over the years).

So when it came time to ponder planting something for the summer I reviewed past efforts to figure out what gardening method was most successful. Surprisingly, the two best gardens I’ve planted in the past were either biodynamic or straw bale gardens. I think Rudolf Steiner’s quirky biodynamic technique works not because of any material benefit from his witchy potions, but simply because his philosophy demands that you to focus intent on the garden, thus making the act of gardening a kind of sacred duty. But, this winter, I’ve still got a lot of tasks to complete and don’t have time to develop either a biodynamic compost pile or, gasp, thoughtstyle my way to some new, alternative method of sacramental gardening.

So I decided to try straw bale gardening again. My last attempt, that I blogged about and even did a video of, worked great. If you’ve never tried it, the process is simple. You get straw bales, water them, add nitrogen in the form of either blood meal (organic) or urea (conventional) for a few days and then let them sit for a month while keeping them moist. For the details, download Washington Statue University’s instructions. Growing in straw bales is also a great solution for folks, like us, with lead contaminated soil.

The drawbacks of straw bale gardening are mainly environmental. You have to buy bales and nitrogen and import them in a CO2 spewing vehicle, unless you have a generously sized cargo bicycle. And in my last straw bale garden some of the tomato plants showed signs (a lot of leaves and not a lot of fruit) of too much nitrogen. On the other side of that equation I grew some truly monstrous winter squash, enough to feed all the inhabitants of a generously sized cult compound.

This time around I’m trying an inorganic approach, substituting the blood meal I used last time for urea. I’m curious to see if I notice any difference other than price (urea is a lot cheaper). Should I try it again, I’m thinking of building some simple wooden boxes to hold the bales and keep them moist in our hot and dry summer season.

My previous success with straw bale gardening is perhaps a lesson in the simple fact that there is no one-size-fits-all formula for growing vegetables. Given that we have limited space, contaminated soil and other priorities right now, straw bales make for an easy way to grow a few summer vegetables with a high chance of success.

When figuring out where and how to plant a vegetable garden we’ve got to include both biological and social considerations, i.e. we’ve have to consider both plants and people. If you’ve got more space, time to compost and healthy soil roll with that. If you’re in an apartment grow some herbs in a pot on your windowsill. If you’re a dilettante appropriate technology blogger with limited time for gardening and a long list of chores, a straw bale and a bag of urea might be the best way to keep the kitchen knee deep in pesto.

If you’d like to try straw bale gardening see Washington Statue University’s instructions. Michael Tortorello also wrote a great article about straw bale gardening, “Grasping at Straw” for the New York Times.