Welcome to the Sugarbush

Brian stops to tap a maple tree on his way up the hill

As you may know, I recently started working at Bear Cobble Sugarworks, which operates a sugarbush (the more-than-apt term for a syrup-producing piece of forest) in Starksboro, Vermont. It's gorgeous up here, especially with snow plastered to all the trees from a recent storm, and the work has been wonderful so far. It's pretty difficult, I spend much of my time hiking through snow, brush, and trees, but I've always loved the feeling of satisfied exhaustion I have after a day of difficult, outdoor work. I'll be doing a few posts about the things I'm learning while I'm here so that you all can get a taste of what it's like to make maple syrup. For this post, I'll be talking about a typical day of tapping trees.

The owner of Bear Cobble is a client of my landscaping company, and the company forester, Brendan, runs the show all year round. He lives up the road and does forestry consulting throughout the area when he's not making improvements to the sugarbush's infrastructure. For this season, we have a regular crew of 5 - Brendan, Jennifer, Brian, Sarah, and me, with help from the owner and a weekend worker called Eric - to get some 30,000 taps in and to make sure the lines are airtight for the sake of the vacuum pumps by the end of February or so.

That means we're pretty busy! We figure we've done about 9,000 taps so far. With any luck, we'll finish the full run and check all the lines for leaks at least once by the time the weather consistently gets above freezing during the day, which could be anytime between the end of February and the end of March. When the nights are below freezing, and the days are sunny and above freezing, sap runs the best. We've actually had a bit of warm weather since I got here, which gave us a chance to run the pumps and flush old sap out of the lines, but I'm getting a bit off topic. I'll talk more about how sap works in another post.

On any given day, I get up around 6:30 and prepare for the day, which involves putting on long johns, track pants, snow pants, and 2 or 3 jackets. At 8:00, I make my commute downstairs - I'm living in an apartment above the vacuum pumps in the sugarhouse, which is a pretty large, modern building - and meet with the crew about what we're going to do that morning. Unless it's too cold out, we'll be tapping trees. So we'll take a look at the map to decide where to start working:

This map shows the older (meaning the trees have been tapped before) and larger of the two sections of the woods we're working in. The brown lines are called wet/dry lines or conductors: they're sets of large pipes that carry vacuum pressure up to the woods and carry all the sap from the woods to the sugarhouse. The yellow squares signify vacuum boosters, which divide each larger system into sections. The faint, gray lines are called main lines, and, they run from a conductor or from a booster up into the woods in rows about 100 feet apart. They can be anywhere from 500 to 1,500 feet long. All the blue lines on the map are main lines which we have completed by walking along them and tapping all the trees that feed into them. Coming off of each main line are lengths of tubing which lead to individual trees, with 1-5 trees feeding into each tube. Each tree feeds into the tube by way of a drop, which is just a length of the same tubing spliced into the main tube that fits onto the end of the spouts that we put into each tree. We mark this map every day with the lines we've completed and any problems we couldn't fix in the field, like a tree that has fallen on a main line and needs to be cut up to be moved.

The author and his technicolor snowsuit on a Polaris 4-wheeler with tread wheels

Once we know where we're going and what we're doing, we can fill our bright, orange vests with spouts, extra tubing, and other tools and parts we might need, pack up our drills, and start up the 4-wheelers. We drive up into the woods, which can take up to 15 or 20 minutes, and park near the main lines we're going to be working. Before we start hiking, we each have to strap a special drill and a mallet on. The drills have an attachment on the front that helps us drill straight into a tree perpendicular to it's grain, and also stops us from drilling too far, like a tiny drill press. They get slung over our shoulders. The mallets have plastic heads to drive in taps without breaking them, and they dangle from our wrists.

Green tubing comes and a main line

Once we're fully equipped, we begin to work up a main line in pairs, each person tapping the trees on one side of the line or the other. This is mostly for convenience, it means we usually don't have to duck under the main line to work trees on the other side. It's also good to have a partner in case you run out of taps, need help with a repair, or fall into an icy, glacial chasm, which are pretty rare in Vermont, but you never know. This is the meat-n-pataters part of the work. You hike uphill looking for green tubing coming off the main line, which you can kinda see in the picture at right. Then, you approach the first (or last) tree on that piece of tubing and start examining it. You're looking for defects - dead trees, rotten spots, burs and galls, scars where branches used to be, and old tap holes. Any damage done to a tree will cause the tree to grow a bunch of scar tissue around it, effectively cordoning it off from the rest of the organism. This scar tissue does not conduct sap, which helps prevent pathogens from spreading throughout the tree, but it also means we wouldn't get much or any sap if we tapped into it. The picture below shows a piece of maple wood cut from just inside the bark of a maple tree, with four tap holes in it. The dark area around each hole is scar tissue that formed after the holes were drilled. Notice how the scarred area is only barely wider than each hole, but is much, much longer. That's because the grain of the tree, which is a series of long, thin fibers, runs in the long direction, and it takes a lot more scar tissue to stop sap from moving parallel to the grain than perpendicular to it.

This wood is actually the seat of a bench outside the sugarhouse. The underside of the seat is the tree's bark.

So, you scan the tree looking for a spot free of defects and as far away as possible from old tap holes and such. Then, you pick up your drill, square it up against the tree, and drill as deeply as the attachment will allow you, smoothly and carefully so that the hole is as even and uniform as possible. Again, roughness and defects in the hole will cause extra scarring, affect the health of the tree over time, and may even inhibit sap flow this season. Then, you reach into your vest pocket and pull out a tap, which is basically a plastic tube with a nubbin on it for you to hit with your hammer. You line up the tap with the hole, and pound it in until it doesn't sound hollow anymore, which is how you know it went in deep enough. Finally, you attach the drop tubing to the tap, and you can move on to the next tree!

As you work up the line, you have to climb over rocks and fallen trees and through brush. Sometimes, it's steep enough that I've had to pull myself up by holding onto beech saplings. This past week, the weather has been pretty nice: in the teens and twenties and sunny. Sometimes, I have to contend with falling snow, which fogs up my glasses and makes it hard to see. Other times, it can be very cold, especially in the morning, which tends to wear on the spirit. The good part about hiking uphill is that it keeps you warm, but it can be very tiring. Coming down is noticeably colder, but much easier and faster.

You'll spend the whole morning doing this, with light conversation sprinkled here and there. Sometimes you'll have to repair a piece of tubing or tighten a tube. If the tubing gets loose and sags, sap can get trapped in the low section and cause a buildup of bacteria or prevent the vacuum from acting on a particular tree. That's another interesting thing: the vast majority of these tubes and pipes run downhill. we're using vacuum, but only to help gravity. Vacuum will not pull sap very much against gravity, especially spread across a huge system of pipes.

The sun starting to set on the sugarbush

Then, around noon, we get on the 4-wheelers and head to the sugarhouse for lunch. The afternoon is much the same. We work until it's too dark to do a good job. Before we finish up, we update the map, replace the drill batteries, check the drill bits' tightness, and set up what we can for the next day. By this point, I'm exhausted from hiking all day, and usually head up to my apartment for a shower, some dinner, and a little TV before I zonk out. I've been trying to write blog posts at night, but I've been too tired to motivate myself. Oh well, it means that I sleep like a rock.

Now you know about what we do, so in later posts I'll be able to talk about why we do it, and how this whole, huge operation results in silky sweet maple syrup. Until then, I remain

The Regular Farmer

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All photos were taken by Ryan Heisler and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Weird Fruit of the Undefined Period of Time #2 - Pachysandra terminalis

You might recognize the name 'pachysandra.' It's a common landscape plant, although few people give it much heed. Well, except my partner's stepmother, Peggy, who hates it as though it is the root of all evil. It's roots are a bit fiendish if you're trying to remove it; it spreads primarily by thick, fleshy underground stems called rhizomes*. Under a bed full of pachysandra you will find a crowded network of rhizomes. Difficult as this network is to fully eradicate, pachysandra plants are unique, useful, and as it turns out, delicious.

Pachysandra is a genus containing several species. The most common up here in Boston is called Pachysandra terminalis, which has shiny, jaggedly-toothed leaves. I see other species on occasion, including P. procumbens, which is apparently native to the American South. P. terminalis is native to China, Korea, and Japan, and tends to be very aggressive in North America.

Mountain spurge, Pachysandra procumbens

The word 'pachysandra' itself means 'thick stamens', which are the male flower parts. Also, pachysandra is in the Buxaceae family of plants, which includes boxwoods. There is a fungal disease called boxwood blight that we're trying to stop from spreading here in New England. While pachysandra rarely shows symptoms, it can harbor the disease. If someone's boxwoods all die from blight, they may try to plant new ones, only to lose them as well, because the disease was lurking in the pachysandra patch. Any epidemiologists out there might be interested to know that in this case, pathologists recommend having only one of the two plants on your property to minimize the risk of spreading the disease.

P. terminalis - click to zoom and get a close look at those thick, fleshy stamens, the white things with red ends

Now that we've gotten through the dry part, let's get to the juicy story. A couple of weeks ago around the middle of October, I was blowing leaves like I do all day every day from October through the end of november. The property I was working on has a large bed of pachysandra, maybe 1000 square feet or so. As the stream of air from my blower moved through the leaves, I noticed something white I'd never seen before. I bent down to look more closely and found little fruits! About the size of a raspberry, they were all white, though translucent enough to show hints of the dark seeds inside. They also had two small, sharp, darker protrusions at the top of the fruit - remnants of where the style attached to the ovary. Collectively, they reminded me of a termite's or ant's head, but they were beautiful, so I took some home with me.

LtoR: Human finger, seed, translucent fruit, opaque (under-ripe?) fruit

As I was removing the seeds (as a present for Peggy, I know she'll love them), I was thinking about whether this fruit was edible. "Clearly not," I decided, "White fruit from a landscape plant, definitely poisonous." Landscape plants tend to be beautiful and toxic. Well, as you may have guessed by now, some internet research convinced me I could eat the fruits no problem. I was still a little worried, but I decided to taste a small piece and see how I felt.

I ended up eating them all! Once I got past the mental barrier of trying a new food that looked like a bug's head, I found quite a subtle and pleasant flavor. It was a very juicy fruit, wet like a grape but a bit less firm. The primary flavor reminded me of cucurbits in general (melons and squashes). It was mild with a hint of sweetness, somewhere between cucumber and honeydew melon. That flavor was tempered with a strong, dry, tannin-like flavor, just like the skin of a really good plum: bitter and sour in the very best way possible.

I only had a few, so I wasn't able to experiment with them or try to incorporate them in a prepared food, but next October, look for a follow-up post in which I will make pachysandra jam, pachysandra flambée, and duck a la pachysandra.

Keep them eyes peeled for the bounty,
The Regular Farmer

Have you tried a weird fruit that you want to share with The Regular Farmer? Put it in the comments and I might write about it!

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*Rhizomes grow perpendicular to the force of gravity, and as stems, they have many nodes, where buds form. They appear to be roots, because they are usually white and found underground, but the presence of nodes indicates that they are stems. From each node, roots and new shoots may sprout, and once established, may be separated from the mother plant without killing either.

First photo of P. procumbens: By James Henderson, Golden Delight Honey, Bugwood.org [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AFr%C3%BChbl%C3%BChender_Bodendecker.JPG

Second photo of P. terminalis: By 4028mdk09 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3APachysandra_procumbens_1241237.jpg

Third photo and blog post by Ryan Heisler are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Aloe Vera Part 2

Well, it turns out that we did our aloe harvest a little prematurely. I didn't do all the reading I should have done before we started hacking and slashing at our plant. The best way to propagate aloe is to remove and plant the pups that grow off the mother plant, but you have to do it after they have their own root systems. I saw the pups and thought it would be fine to just take them off and plant them. I did just that, and not three weeks later, they had both fallen over from rot. One had a single root while the other had none, which means they were left detached from their mother plant without a way to take in water. Their own energy reserves were just not enough to fight off the bacteria in the soil while establishing root systems

Original pups with one and no roots. Not mature enough to plant on their own.

That was a tough blow. We've had the aloe plant almost since we moved in together, and before that, it belonged to a mentor and friend of Etta's for like, 8 years, and was on its third or fourth generation. Luckily, we also saved several of the smaller leaves, because I read you can propagate an aloe plant from a leaf cutting, like you would with jade. When we harvested the aloe, I cut the bases of the leaves we were saving with a sterilized razor blade to minimize risk of rot, and left them on a wood surface under a white cloth for 3 weeks to allow the cuts to close up and scab over. If you just stuck a fresh wound into the soil, the leaf would rot in no time.

When they healed over, I decided to run a test. I treated half the cut ends with a hormone powder that encourages root formation, and the other half with honey. Honey doesn't encourage root growth, but it will fend off pathogens while the leaf is working on new roots. After I planted the cut ends in the soil about 1 inch, I watered the soil and placed the pot up on a shelf in our bedroom (since it's usually warm and not too bright in there). The idea is to get the soil wet to encourage roots to come out, but to keep the soil warm and dry after that to discourage rot-causing pathogens. I don't know why you don't want to put the cutting in sunlight, but I think it's because the sunlight might make the leaf photosynthesize, which would cause some water loss and the sugars that were made would have nowhere to go since they're normally stored in the roots.

When you plant a leaf cutting, you have to be very patient. If you try to do too much to help the plant, like watering, you could end up killing it. So I waited two weeks before I did anything. At that point, I gave each leaf a little tug to see if they could resist the upward force. If they did, that would mean roots had started to grow. Alas, none did, and when I pulled them out, they were all turning brown and rotting.

Rotted ends after a failed rooting attempt. This was from my final round of 3 leaves

Another blow, and I was starting to get anxious. I didn't want to kill Etta's plant for good, so I threw out the dead leaves and started over. I sterilized a blade, cut off the brown parts and left the leaves to heal over again. I also got rid of the soil, because it had a lot of whatever bacteria caused the rot in it. I did virtually all the same things, and once again, all of the leaves started to rot rather than root.

This time it was serious. I only had three viable leaves left, so it was basically my last try. I went online and did more reading, and made my procedures a bit more specific. This time, I cut the leaves at a 45° angle, which is supposed to help them form roots better. I used only honey to treat the leaves once they scabbed over, and I planted them in fresh soil. The soil I'm using is made for cacti plus a bit of perlite, which is expanded volcanic glass that is sterile and allows greater air and water penetration to the soil. I watered each leaf with distilled water so as not to add pathogens to the mix, and finally put the pots on a heat mat in a window with a cheesecloth over the glass to let in some light, but nothing intense.

And I'm happy to report that it worked! For one of the leaves. That's like a 7% success rate across all the attempts I made. I'm still pretty nervous about it, but the healthy one definitely resists my tugs, so I think it'll be okay. The other two rotted just like all the others. I don't even know what's going to happen next - whether it will make pups that will grow into plants (this is what jade leaves do) or somehow turn part of itself into a stem and grow more leaves. I'm betting on pups coming up, but not after a good long while for it to get its roots established first.

The final, healthy, rooted leaf!

I guess all of this is to say that if you're going to harvest your aloe, don't do it until it has pups that are fairly substantial. Try to dig around a little bit and see if they have roots before you go cutting them off and sticking them in the soil on their own.

The Regular Farmer

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All photos copyright 2014 Ryan Heisler

How To Persuade a Tomato Plant to Give you Lotsa Fruit

My friend and regular Regular Farmer reader Simona recently received some little tomato plants as gifts, and asked for my advice on how to take care of them. Instead of writing her an email, I thought I'd share what I know about tomatoes with all of you. Tomatoes are pretty easy to grow, even in your backyard or on the porch. They're quite hardy in a lot of ways, and with a minimum of work, they'll give you lots of very nice fruits.

First, a little history: Tomatoes evolved in western South America and Central America, where the small, likely-yellow ancestors of modern fruits were part of the cuisine of the peoples of those regions. Evidence suggests that cultivation of tomato plants began as early as 500 BC! Europeans were initially skeptical that tomato fruits wouldn't poison them, because they belong to the Solanaceae (Nightshade) family of plants, some of which have poisonous fruit (horsenettle in this post is solanaceous). However, they soon embraced tomatoes as some weird new kind of eggplant (also solanaceous, but originating in India) and we've been eating pizza ever since.*

Because tomatoes came from such a warm area of the world, they like warm weather (surprise!). It's not out of the question to grow them in the cooler parts of the US, but you have to be timely about it. Getting seedlings from a farmer probably means your plants have had a good, early start. If you want to grow from seed, sow them to have your plants ready for transplanting in the ground (or setting outside) once temperatures stay pretty consistently in the 60s and 70s, even at night. That means something like mid to late June here in Boston.

To start, you need to choose your tomato variety (here's an incomplete list, just to show you how different they can be from your run-of-the-mill red-ripe tomato). Size, color, flavor, etc. are all up to your taste, but one important quality I think y'all should know about is whether a plant is determinate or indeterminate. Like the word implies, a determinate tomato (AKA bush tomato) puts out all of its fruit at once, so one day, you'll have a flush of ripe fruits, and that'll be that. Plants of a determinate variety tend to grow to the same height and produce approximately the same number of fruits.

Indeterminate plants, on the other hand, will grow as long as conditions will allow, and will continually produce new sets of fruit off of new growth. They take more management, but I prefer them because you can get a lot of fruit spaced out at manageable intervals each season. This post is more relevant to indeterminate tomatoes than determinate ones.

1. Basic germination and care of seedlings: If you're growing your tomato from seed (check out Seed Savers Exchange and High Mowing Seeds), you'll want to keep your soil warm (~75 degrees F) while your seed is germinating. I use a heat mat for germinating most seeds, especially in the spring when the space next to the window is only 50 degrees F. Once the seeds have sprouted, you can forgo the mat unless your plants are in a cool space like mine. Since my window doesn't face south, I also augment my seedlings' light exposure with one warm-spectrum and one cool-spectrum fluorescent bulb, which I keep on the plants a good 16 hours per day. Finally, I try to keep my sown seeds and young seedlings enclosed in a plastic container so as to keep the moisture in. A good way to do this is to tent plastic bags or saran wrap over pots or trays.

Seedlings in soil blocks with grow lights and reflective foil

2. Potting up: Of course, a setup like the one above is a hassle. It's much easier and more cost effective to buy tomato seedlings from your local farmer at the first market of the year. They'll only cost you four or five dollars, and they'll give you much more than that in fruit, so it's well worth it. When you go to buy, have an idea of what you want in a tomato, and the farmers will help you choose the variety that's best suited to your needs.

If you're planning to plant your tomato in your garden, you can do that at any time after about Memorial Day, as long as choose a spot that gets full sun (at least 10ish hours a day. More like 12 to 14 is good. Afternoon sun is better, if you have to choose) and is well drained. This means that the soil should contain enough sand and compost that it doesn't stay damp for more than a few days after a rain. As long as the spot isn't regularly wet, it should be okay.

A warning for my city-dwelling readers: City soils, and soils near older houses tend to contain unsafe levels of lead from old paint chips. If a soil testing lab confirms you don't have lead, go ahead and use your soil. Otherwise, use pots or build a raised bed with a mat underneath to prevent your plants from absorbing lead. NEVER FEED A CHILD FOOD THAT WAS GROWN IN LEAD-LADEN SOILS.

When you transplant your tomato, it's not a bad idea to bury a third of the plant below the new soil line. Tomatoes are good at producing roots out of their stems - if you leave a plant laying on the ground for a week or two, it will root itself to the spot. By burying the stem, you ensure that the plant has a sturdy base and a lot of roots to drink through. On a related note, tomatoes heal wounds well, too. If you ever snap the growing tip off your plant, just duct tape it in place and there's a good chance it'll reattach and heal.

Planted deep to encourage lots of roots

If you're going to grow the thing in a pot or bucket its whole life, you can put it in its final pot when it's about a foot tall or larger. I raised the tomato above in 3 containers before the final bucket. First was the little egg cup that I seeded it in, then a pint-sized cup, and then a 2-quart pot.

The life and times of Tom Ato

3. Maintenance and Monitoring: This is the key to getting a lot of good-sized fruit out of your indeterminate tomato. Indeterminates don't have an off switch, so to speak. They'll grow as long as conditions allow them to. My old employer starts hers in a heated greenhouse in January, and by September they're a good 12 to 15 feet long!

You should inspect your plant at least once a week, if not more. During the hot part of the summer, you'll need to water a potted plant on any day that it's going to be hot and sunny, so you can do a quick check at morning watering time. When you do, look for the following:

 - The first part of maintaining an indeterminate is suckering - removing suckers as they arise. A sucker is an offshoot that grows out of a node - where a leaf meets the stem. On a tomato, a leaf is composed of several leaflets and the petiole, or leaf stem, that comes directly off the main stem of the plant. Suckers will grow out of just about every node. They're basically a genetic copy of the plant that are there to act as a backup in case the main stem breaks. Having a lot of them virtually guarantees that the plant will be able to pass on its DNA.

 

The problem is that suckers take a lot of energy to grow. If you let your indeterminate tomato grow all of them, chances are the fruits will be small and not too sweet, because the tomato will have spent all its energy on vegetative growth. To encourage your plant to grow big fruits, it is best to grow only the main stem, or only one sucker in addition. Each stem is called a "leader." The tomato above had two leaders, as you can see in the following photo:

My 2012 plant had 2 leaders

The second leader is nice to have, because it will mature later than the main stem, so you'll get fruit from it a bit later in the season. It also acts as insurance in case you kill the main leader somehow. If you'd like 2 leaders, allow the lowest sucker on the plant to grow and remove the rest. Look very carefully for suckers; they can grow quite large without your knowledge if you don't inspect carefully for them. When you find one, either snap it off at the base with your fingers or use a sharp knife to cut it close to the stem.

- As indeterminate tomato plants grow, they tend to flop over under their own weight, so you'll need to stake your plant to keep it growing vertically. When you transplant your tomato into the bucket, put a pair of 6 to 8 foot wooden stakes at the edge of the bucket opposite each other. When your plant gets to be about 18 to 24 inches tall, tie a length of twine to one of the stakes about 12 inches up, wrap it around the other stake, then tie it off on the original stake. You'll end up with twine sandwiching your plant's stem, holding it upright. Repeat this every time the plant gets more than a foot taller than the last bit of twine.

I used four stakes for this plant because they were flimsy, but you get the idea.

- Pests are not common on tomato plants because of the solanum toxin they contain. However, tomato and tobacco hornworms, which are the caterpillars of two species of hawkmoth, can eat the leaves, and they do so with great relish. Just a few specimens can defoliate an entire plant. If you're squeamish, they may be tough to handle because they get huge stuffing themselves with tomato leaves. Check it out:

They can get even larger than that, too. You'll find them dangling engorged from the underside of a leaf stem. You can see how closely they match in color to the plant, so again, look very carefully. If you find one, pull it off and smoosh it. Probably don't feed it to a chicken (as fun as that is) because the toxins in the tomato leaves might make it sick. Tomato hornworms won't sting or bit you; the 'horn' at the back end is useless.

- Tomatoes like well-drained soil, but they need water, too. If yours is in the ground, you'll need to water it less than if it's in a bucket. In either case, check your plant on hot, sunny days, especially if it hasn't rained in a few days. I would water mine every day if it's hot and sunny, skipping cloudy or rainy days.

- If your plant starts to look sick or malnourished, you could have either pest or nutrient problems. Look all over the plant for signs that a bug or animal has damaged the plant. If you can't find any, it's probably a nutrient deficiency. Search the symptoms online to verify or send me photos and I'll see if I can figure out what's wrong. In general, it won't hurt to sprinkle an organic, general or tomato fertilizer in the pot two or three times per season.

4. Harvesting and Storing: A few quick notes on harvesting: You can tell a tomato is ready to harvest when the shoulders (the area around the stem) are no longer hard. Try to leave the stem and calyx attached to the fruit when you harvest to increase shelf life. To harvest a fruit, grip the crook in the stem between two fingers and bend, the stem should snap easily. Once you've harvested, store your whole fruits at room temperature, stem-side down. Be careful to follow safe practices when canning - home-stored tomatoes easily go bad.

That, my friends, is all you need to know to get some sweet tomaters out of your garden this year! I'm putting a list of supplies at the bottom of the page. Good luck and enjoy your fruits!

The Regular Farmer

Supplies:
- 3 to 5 gallon bucket per plant
- 0.5 cubic feet of soil per bucket 
- 2 Garden Stakes per bucket
- Twine
- Watering Can
- Sharp Knife
- Trowel or Small Shovel

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*Come to think of it, what made Europeans think tomatoes were poison when eggplants were fine? Probably racism, if I had to guess. They didn't like potatoes either. Another New World solanaceous food, potatoes only caught on in Ireland because they grow really well in poor soil and provide almost all the nutrients humans need. Europeans sure loved tobacco, though! And that contains another toxin: nicotine. I guess their society was as fickle and trendy as ours is.

All photos mine except:
- Tomato Hornworm in Hand - By George Bredehoft (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The Aloe Harvest

Etta processing some of the aloe leaves

Long about September of 2012, Etta and I were given an Aloe vera plant by one of Etta's friends. Aloe is a succulent, which means it has thick, fleshy parts (leaves, in aloe's case) full of water. They tend to come from arid places and need less water that other plants, but there are many examples of succulent plants that evolved in temperate areas of the world, including some sedums. Many succulents reproduce asexually by growing clones of themselves (called "pups" by aloe growers) off of some portion of the stem. Each pup will eventually produce its own roots, remain there after the 'mother' part of the plant dies, and produce its own pups when it gets big enough.

We used it as a Christmas Tree that first year

We're pretty sure the plant we received was an offshoot of an offshoot of a plant Etta's friend Will received when he started college in 2001 or so, and it was a monster. We had to stake it to keep it from leaning over and snapping, and it grew much more quickly than any other potted plant I've ever had.

The open end of the leaf where it was attached to the plant

A couple of weeks ago, I walked into the bedroom to tend the potted plants in the window, and I was surprised to find two pups coming up off of our aloe! Until then, we weren't sure how we'd keep it alive when we harvested the leaves, but we knew we'd have to cut it down soon because of how tall and heavy it was getting. Thankfully, the pups came up just in time, so today we harvested and processed the leaves, and prepared the pups for transplanting.

A cross section of the leaf, showing gel and veins

To get the gooey insides out of each leaf, you basically have to cut off the green parts without taking too much of the gel inside. The green parts of the leaf contain the photosynthesizing cells, a little waste storage, and the waxy cuticle protecting the leaf from direct contact with the environment. Between the outside layers are loads and loads of cortex cells which have relatively huge areas to store water as well as sugars, minerals (vitamins), amino acids, and other chemicals (including salicylic acid, lignins, and saponins). A lot of these chemicals are great for our skin and for our bodies when eaten, which is why aloe has been cultivated for thousands of years. There are also veins (called vascular bundles in botany) running the length of each leaf used to carry water and nutrients up from the roots, and sugars out of the leaf to the rest of the plant.

The author holding a piece of gel.

We started processing each leaf by slicing off the sharp edges. Then, pressing the leaf flat, you can run a sharp knife under the skin of about a third of the convex part of the leaf. Once the first cut is made, it's easy to cut the rest of the skin off the rounded side, leaving the gel attached to the bottom. If you press the leaf very flat, you can then slip the knife under the gel and get most of it off. Inevitably, you cut through some of the cortical cells that store the water and chemicals, so the whole table gets covered in a mucus-y goo. However, it's held together as one unit by the veins and the bonds between the remaining cells. We're going to make the gel into several products for ourselves - skin ointments, conditioners, maybe even slip a little into some food (although it didn't smell terribly appetizing). We're not quite ready to use the gel yet, so we sliced it into chunks and placed it on a cookie tray in the freezer. Once it froze, we broke the chunks apart and stored them in a plastic bag in the freezer, ready to use when we need them.
 
 So what did we do with the pups, and how are we going to keep growing them? Well to start with, I cut the whole big aloe plant off at the soil line. Then, I peeled each leaf off the stem until there were about four left. I read that you can keep the few uppermost leaves and get them to root and keep growing as well. Unfortunately, they snapped off the stem a little too high, so I'm not sure they'll survive, but I'm going to try anyway.

The two pups along with the top of the mother plant, left out to form callouses before transplanting.

Once I was done with that, I carefully wiggled the remaining stem, the roots, and the attached pups out of the soil. The pups were attached to the bottom of the mother's stem by small, underground stems of their own. One of them already has one root coming off of it, while the other does not. To get them to root, first you have to leave them exposed to the air in a dark place for a day or two. In that time, they'll secret some of the chemicals stored in the leaves to form a callous over the wound. Once the callous has formed, you can transplant them without fear that they'll rot. Generally, you don't want to water transplanted succulents until a root system as formed to discourage rot, but you should mist their soil with a little water to encourage them to send roots out. Once they have roots, you can water as normal, which for aloe, is not very often.

We've really enjoyed having this plant; it's very easy to care for and it provides a wonderful material for our health, so we'll be careful to raise the pups to maturity. I'd strongly encourage anyone reading this to get one for their desk or a window sill at home. Check back soon for my upcoming post about jade (another succulent) and the other plants I've got growing in my window!

The Regular Farmer

Spit!

Have you ever been working in a garden, strolling through the woods, or looking at plants in a greenhouse when you noticed what looked like a wad of spit on a leaf or in the crotch of a plant? Perhaps, in a lapse of judgment, you touched the spit and noticed it was both oily and slippery, and kind of sticky at the same time. If you were so brave, and you kept a very sharp eye, you may have seen one of these guys jump or crawl out of the stuff you left on the plant:


Aptly called the "spittlebug", as well as the "froghopper", this insect belongs to the same order as cicadas and aphids. The cute green ones like our friend up there are the nymph of the species, meaning they haven't yet reached sexual maturity, and have to molt one more time before they're adults. You'll only ever find the nymphs in foam - the adults don't usually make foam, although they have the same diet as their younger brethren. They are more often the ones called froghoppers, because they look like really tiny frogs, and because they can jump huge distances. The first time I saw one, it was on a strawberry leaf until I went to catch it and it leapt off. I started hootin' and hollerin' to the rest of the crew because I thought I had found a tiny frog and I wanted to show them!


So you're probably wondering what the foam actually is. Not if you're smart, you're not! Skipping the rest of this post would behoove those readers with weak constitutions. Insects don't have salivary glands, so it's obviously not actually spittle. To figure this 'mist'-ery out, we need to look at what the spittlebug nymph eats. They survive by drinking plant sap and eating the xylem, one of the two types of tissues that transports nutrients through plants. Specifically, it transports water and nutrients from the roots to the leaves (the other type, phloem, carries sugars from the leaf, where they are produced, to the rest of the plant).

Most of their nutrients come from the xylem itself, but they drink a great deal of the sap as well. There are conflicting theories about how they form the spittle. One says they mix the sap with air in little organs inside their bodies, while the other says they do a little dance to create the foam as it runs down their legs. Either way, it passes through their systems and out of their anuses on its way to becoming foam.


Okay, that was a little gross. I apologize, but I wanted to get it out there before I go any further. Also, now you know one of the many reasons to wash your local food - even berries - before you eat it. We clean most of our crops a little, but I can't guarantee that strawberry you're eating never had an insect's excretions on it. As much as we may squirm at that idea, the foam performs a number of functions for the spittlebug. It keeps them moist and cool on hot, sunny days, and protects them from predators. Even if a bird or larger insect knows to look inside the collections of spit to find these guys, the stuff is really slippery, as I said before. I've accidentally brushed the spit a few times, and the spittlebug inside was always left there, looking around before it hopped away to find a new place to feed.

The foam also serves a useful purpose for us humans! I can't back this up with any website or evidence, just an anecdote. I was picking strawberries one day when I brushed my hand against a nettle, or something similar. After finding the plant and ripping it out with my multi-tool, I was left with an itchy red patch on my finger. Normally, I can put up with the discomforts of my job, but this one was really bugging me. I couldn't cure it by swimming in a cold pool like I did when I got stung at age ten, so I thought, "What would Bear Grylls do?" Realizing he would probably find something in his immediate vicinity and use it to treat the nettle sting, I looked at what I had with me. After preliminarily eliminating strawberry juice as a treatment, I went looking for a little pocket of spit, and found one handily. Two topical applications, spaced about 15 minutes apart cleared it right up! So if you're out in the woods and you run into a patch of nettles, look to the pine trees, the spittlebug's favorite food, for help.

These insects are still pests, cute or not. Feeding on the xylem hinders the plant's ability to transport water from the root to the stalk and the leaves. One individual won't do much damage by itself, but a swarm of these guys can lower a crop's yield. Don't panic if you find them, though! Panicking leads to nasty things like insecticide, and that's never good for your plants. I'm happy to report that all you need to get rid of these expectorating nuisances is a hose or even a watering can, which will do your plants some good anyway.

Squishily,
The Regular Farmer

The Great Cannellini Experiment of 2013

I'm finally done with my experiments, and now we can talk about seeds. We don't interact with seeds much, except when we eat them, but I think people rarely ponder what a seed really is while they're chewing them to bits. Corn, beans, oats, wheat, coconuts, and even the peanuts I'm eating right now are seeds. They come in all shapes and sizes, but they all allow plants pass their genes on to a new generation, sometimes across vast stretches of time and space. They can survive much more extreme weather than their parent plants, and they pack enough nutrition to grow a baby plant's stalk and roots until it can start making its own food. How do they do this? Take a look at a dissected cannellini bean:

Well Howdy-do!

You may have just exclaimed, "Hey! That's a whole friggin' plant right there!" in which case you should apologize to anyone around you who was trying to work or study. Good? Good. You're right though, that is a plant, or rather, a plant embryo inside the bean. That's the whole point of seeds, to protect an already-developed embryo while it waits for environmental conditions that will allow it to grow successfully. Every slice of 12-seed bread you eat is covered in little baby plants.

That bean is in the process of germination, which occurs when that little plant goes through to break out of the seed and start growing. Seeds germinate when they have the right amount moisture and oxygen around them. Sometimes, they require other environmental qualities, like exposure to red light (which only reaches the ground when the tree leaf canopy is gone) or a long period of cold followed by warming soil (which would happen to a seed that fell in the fall). Basically, when the environment is right for the plant in the seed, it sets off a chain reaction that gives the embryo access to the energy stored in the seed so it can start to grow. Beans are pretty easy to please, and will germinate in a wet paper towel left in a dark, warm spot for a few days.

These beans have all germinated, as you can see by the roots sticking out of the seed casings. The roots are the first to grow, and reach down deep into the soil to secure a source of water for the embryo before the stalk starts to grow. These seeds were all oriented differently in the paper towel, so their roots are growing in different directions. If I had been able to take a picture of them without moving them first, all the roots would be pointing downward. Gravity affects hormones in the embryo which cause the root to grow downward and the shoot to grow upward.

We all know that plants make their own food to power their growth from sunlight, so how do the embryos grow if they're buried in the soil? The cotyledon (caht-uh-lee-dun) is packed full of food energy, which the plant stored in the seed before it fell off. A lot of plant seeds - like those of beans, tomatoes, squash, cherry, apple, and walnuts - have two cotyledons. In a bean, the cotyledons are the fleshy part of the seed - everything besides the embryo. Other plants have just one cotyledon, although some of those have an extra source of food inside as well, called the endosperm. Common monocots (plants with seeds with one cotyledon) include corn, all grasses, coconut, bamboo, date palms, sugarcane, and pineapple. Monocots usually have different qualities than dicots (two cotyledons). For example, they tend to be much more flexible, and stand up to wind better than dicots of the same size. 

After examining the beans after a few days in the paper towel, I sowed the ones that had germinated in a pot and left them on the window sill to grow. This photo shows the next stage in their development: emergence of the stalk from the soil. The stalk starts to grow toward the surface using energy from the cotyledons. They grow curved like that at first to protect the apical meristem (the point of growth at the tip of the stalk) from injury in the soil. As soon as sunlight hits the stalk, it starts to photosynthesize food to supplement that in the cotyledons, hence these stalks have turned green with chlorophyll. On each of these plants you can see a stalk and one or two distinct cotyledons, halves of the bean I planted days before. These will remain attached to the plant until their food energy is gone. You can also see the seed coats, thrown off almost like egg shells next to each plant. Fun Fact: At this point, the stalks were less than an inch tall, but the roots were starting to grown out the bottom of the 4-inch pot already!

Once the cotyledons are fully aboveground, the stalk starts to straighten up and we can see the embryonic leaves come out. These leaves are considered part of the cotyledons, since they were present in the embryo. True leaves usually look much different, as you'll see, and only grow after the plant has germinated. Embryonic leaves are usually very large to collect as much sunlight as possible to fuel the growth of true leaves. 

Here are some pictures I took in the last few days to show the difference between embryonic leaves and true leaves. The plants are about 2 weeks old, that is, since they emerged from the soil. On the left, you can see the embryonic leaves have grown very large. If you look closely, it's clear that there are two embryonic leaves growing directly across from one another on each stem, each of these corresponds to a cotyledon.The leaves are very broad and spade shaped. On the right is the first true leaf to emerge from the stem. Bean leaves of this species have three leaflets on each leaf, so what you're seeing there is just one leaf. The apical meristem is within the small structure at the base of the leaf. The stalk will continue to grow from there, and send off another leaf higher up. This second true leaf won't be directly across from the first one, either, but something like 137 Degrees around the stem. The third one will be 137 degrees from the second and so on, and thus create a whorled pattern if viewed from above. This pattern lets the leaves absorb lots of sunlight without shading each other out.

And finally, here's what happens to the cotyledons as they get older. They still look like beans, don't they? I personally think it's amazing that they can become so green and soft after being dried out for so long. As their food energy gets used up, they shrivel because the starches are being broken down and transported to the roots for use. What's left of them is mostly structural cells, but they can still photosynthesize a little bit. In the next few days they'll shrivel more, the stem will form a sort of scab between them and itself, and they'll fall off and get consumed by bacteria in the soil, which will make even more of their nutrients available to the roots.

In addition to protecting plant embryos from harm, part of what makes seeds so valuable is their ability to lie dormant for long periods of time while waiting for the exact right conditions. This is why weeds are so difficult to get rid of, and why a forest that burns in a fire is so quick to recover. There are millions of seeds biding their time in any given plot of land, not germinating until they have the space and nutrients to survive. For weeds, this usually means that with every cultivation of a field, new seeds are circulated to the ideal soil depth and can then compete with the crop plants. An interesting idea to think about is how seed dormancy this affects the gene pool of a given species. Many plants can reproduce asexually - that is, clone themselves - if they are not pollinated before the season ends. This allows plants that fail to reproduce sexually in one time and place to try again potentially miles away and years down the line. More on that when I write about plant reproduction.

Of course, the longer a seed lies dormant, the less likely it will be to germinate successfully, although that varies from species to species. Some seeds can't last two years before they lose viability, others can survive hundreds to thousands of years in the right conditions. For example, I just read about a Judean Date Palm, which has been extinct as a species for since about 200 C.E., successfully germinating in 2005. The seed was apparently preserved in a very dry environment from about 45 B.C.E. until the 1960s, when it was discovered. This tree, Methuselah, was the only one to germinate out of all the specimens they found, but it flowered in 2008 and is therefore capable of reproduction. They plan to cross it with an Egyptian date palm species and harvest the first fruit around 2022. Crossing it with another species won't propagate it as a unique species, but it will reintroduce its genes into the date palm gene pool. The Judean Date Palm was widely used for medicinal purposes, which is probably why it went extinct. By letting Methuselah reproduce, we will be able to see what, if any, useful qualities this species has and hopefully create a hybrid species that can carry those qualities into the future.

I want to mention again before I sign off that it's only been 21 days since I started to germinate the cannellini beans. In that time, the embryos they contained have grown to hundreds of times their original size, and they're just getting started. The full bean plants will be 2 to 3 feet tall and have hundreds of leaves and hundreds of new seeds if they get pollinated. Take these banana seeds on the left here as another example. They'll grow into trees over ten feet tall! Whenever I spend time seeding crops, I marvel at the power of seeds to preserve their species. They contain all the genetic information needed to make a whole, new living organism, all inside a minuscule, near-indestructible pod. Next time you have one in your hand, take a good, hard look at it, and see if you can fathom that. You might be surprised at what you learn.

Thanks for Reading,
The Regular Farmer

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-All photos except those of Methuselah the Judean Date Palm and the Measured Banana Seeds are by Ryan Heisler and may be used and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

-Photo Methuselah the Judean Date Palm: Author: Benjitheijneb at Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License
-Photo Measured Banana Seeds: Author: Firetwister at Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License