Every year now, for the last few seasons, Japanese beetles have made their appearance right around the first week of June. This is also the time of year when many of my garden vegetable groupings are young, succulent and the most susceptible to insect attacks. One of these will be a large planting of pole and bush beans, which by June are normally just getting ready to produce bean pods. Turns out they are also a favorite food of this beetle.

Known scientifically as popilla japonica, these pests originally arrived on our east coast sometime in the early 1900’s and have been spreading westward ever since. These days, you can find scattered throughout much of the Midwest. The beetle that is about 15 millimeters (0.6 in) long and 10 millimeters (0.4 in) wide, with iridescent copper-colored elytra and green thorax and head. It’s not very destructive in Japan, where it is controlled by natural enemies, but in America it is a serious pest of over 200 species of plants, including; rose bushes, grapes, hops, canna, crape myrtles and beans of course.

I have literally had an entire crop reduced to stubble in just a few days after a horde of beetles descended upon them. And while most insecticides will work on them, who wants to spray poison on their plants? Hand picking is another option, but it’s a pain. So, what else is there?  Plant early and cover!

By planting your beans as soon as the soil hits about fifty five degrees, you can get an earlier than normal start on a bean crop before the beetles even awake from their winter slumber. That way, by the time they are out and about, you have a healthy group of plants that can endure a lot in the way of damage. But, as they say in the commercials, that’s not all! I also like to use a very thin material called reemay to cover all my crops, not just the beans. This material is so light and transparent that it does not impede growth, but which is a very effective barrier to all sorts of nasty insects. It’s also relatively inexpensive, so I use it to also cover just about everything I can. By the end of June, the beetles are gone and so off come the covers.

Last year, when I did this, I was able to enjoy great production with everything I planted excepting the tomatoes. Those guys have always been a challenge for me to grow well.

The directions on the package stated that they needed to be soaked in water for twenty-four hour prior to planting. I decided to place two seeds in between some layers of paper towel that was then soaked with water and placed into a baggie unsealed. After a day, the seeds were then placed, one each, into two peat pots that also have Miracle Gro potting mix in them. I noticed the mix was a little dry when I originally placed it into the pots so I also soaked these in a tray of water for seven hours prior to planting. As per the package instructions, the seeds were planted to a depth of about and inch and were then placed in a larger baggie that was also left slightly open. (I think it best to refrain from sealing the seeds when attempting seed germination to avoid problems with molds and fungi). This whole deal was then parked over my TV set which is warm when the set is on (most always) and which also` allows me to keep an eye on them.

So, now I will have to wait to see what happens. If and when I get germination, I will plant a couple more. I received ten seeds for $4 so I sure do not want to waste any. If they do germinate, I have a dual bulb florescent fixture in the kitchen area that should supply more than enough light early on.

Hopefully, my next blog on this subject will be to talk about two small Moringa plants!

7 times the vitamin C in oranges

4 times the calcium in milk

4 times the vitamin A in carrots

2 times the protein in milk

3 times the potassium in bananas

Just imagine, if you will, a tree growing on your property that will meet all your nutritional needs, take care of you medicinally, and which can purify your water! Enter the Moringa tree. A plant that can also grow fifteen feet in just one year.

Known for centuries in countries like India and parts of Africa, Moringa oleifera has been called the ‘clarifer’ tree, the horseradish tree and the drumstick tree. It is unique in the sense that every part can be used for something. The pods are the most widely sought as they are extremely nutritious and contain all nine of the essential amino acids need to sustain life. As you can see above, both the pods and the leaves are chocked full of vitamins. Even the flowers are edible and when cooked taste a little like mushrooms.

For my part, it is the young pods and the powder that can be made from the leaves that is of most interest. When cooked, the young  green pods are said to taste like asparagus. Cool! The leaves themselves, which grow profusely on the mature plant, can be dried and then ground into a powder to use as a supplement to other dishes.

I’ll comment more on this most interesting plant early next year when I have had a chance to grow a few from seed.

I recently received a note from two gardening bloggers named Minji and Keith. They maintain a great blog called ‘Thyme to Garden Now’. Apparently these folks originated in California and have relocated to Indianapolis, IN. They are now in their first year of what I hope becomes a life long hobby.

The blog itself is very informative with looks full of useful information. I was impressed at the creativeness of the indoor grow box they made from an Armoire. (I think my ancestors would turn over in their graves at the though of such a fine piece of furniture being used in this manner). Yet, I have to admit that it is one beautiful grow box.

Please, stop over at their site and check them out.

I will admit that I am a salad junkie! Have been for as long as I can remember and it’s not unusual for me to have a salad with most every meal. But, since economic times have gone down hill and what with the job market all but non-existent, I’ve really had to watch my spending patterns. Trying to save is most felt when I shop for food these days. Not so long ago, a can of corn was under fifty cents. Now you can spend over a dollar. Vegetables were downright cheap and I can remember friends asking me why I even bothered to garden. I would always come back with the fact that my produce was at least pesticide free. Now, in 2010, I don’t have to use that excuse any longer.

So, how do I save money? If you look closely at the picture for this blog you will see that I have a pretty happy salad going here. There’s lettuce, romaine, parsley, celery, radishes, green onion and even a little bit of ham mixed with leftover peas going on in this dish. Because about half the ingredients came from my garden, the cost of this great diet meal is under a quarter! (At my last visit to a restaurant a small dinner salad was $2.50). Also, by creatively using leftovers from other meals, I am making use of ever bit of purchased food while enjoying the benefits of fresh produce from the garden. Now that’s a great way to save. You can see more on gardening in my blog ‘DanO’s Garden‘.

So, as of this date (April 10^th) in the year 2010, I  have the following crops growing in my two four by eight foot raised beds; Little Caesar romaine lettuce, Cherry Belle radishes, white onion sets, bush beans, Kennebec potatoes, spinach and parsley. Also, in growing trays I have some plants grown from seed including; Thai Hot peppers, Bananarama peppers, more Little Caesar romaine lettuce and a just seeded tray containing Early Girl and Brandywine tomatoes. Wow! I can hardly wait for those beauties. I have a special place in my heart for freshly grown tomatoes. One of the greatest pleasures of gardening in the spring is the harvests you realize in the summer.

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One plant I am tracking this year are the seeds of Great Northern Beans I sowed from a package I purchased at a local store. I have planted them in a couple of spots and will be most interested in seeing if I can produce some dried beans at the end of the growing cycle. I am intrigued as to what kind of production I will realize per plant. Bean, if you have followed some of my earlier blogs are one of just two veggies that can provide all the essential amino acids we need to survive. The other is rice. Combine these two and you have a combination that can allow for survival during hard times. Not that I’m really worried that the United States is headed for dark times. I really believe that our 121 trillion dollar debt will be repaid (with interest) and that everyone will greatly prosper in the years ahead…I also believe firmly in the possibility of pigs flying.

You can see more on gardening in my blog ‘DanO’s Garden‘.

I’m also pushing the season for these guys, a bit, when we are still not past the last average frost date of April the 15th. But, since I was experimenting with Great Northern Beans (purchased at a local grocery), I figured what the heck. My recent experiment involved using a wet paper towel, onto which I had  placed ten beans, to see if they would germinate. After just 48 hours they all did and rather than throw them out, I elected to plant them out into one of my small raised bed. Well, as you can see, they are actually growing. Encouraged by this, now I hope to raise them to maturity to see if they are a pole or bush variety. If they turn out to be bush beans, I also plan to sow more later this spring directly into a four foot square area. I should be able to produce about 36 plants spaced equally about six inches apart. I want to get a feel for how many dried beans I can produce and what they would weigh. From that information, I could formulate how many bean plants would need to be grown to meet the needs of one person for one year. That is assuming that this hypothetical person also has a supply of rice or other foods to combine with the beans.

Great northern Beans are a nutrient dense food that, I feel, belongs in any Survival Garden plan. When combined with rice, a person could easily survive on eating just these two foods (along with a supply of water of course). That’s because, between the two of them, they supply the nine essential amino acids that the body cannot make it self out of the twenty one it needs to be able to survive.

You can see more on gardening in my blog ‘DanO’s Garden‘.

Other than the taste, which I love, beans have a lot going for them. They belong to the Fabaceae family which are legumes and have had a very long history of human consumption. As far back as six thousand years ago they were grown regularly and eaten when meat was in short supply. When you combine beans with rice you are getting all the essential amino acids (see my article on this) that are needed to sustain life. The protein is considered a great substitute for meat.

Beans also supply a large dose of dietary fiber. A cup of cooked navy beans provides 46.6% of the recommended daily intake for fiber. Soluble fiber forms a gel-like substance in the digestive tract that combines with bile (which contains cholesterol) and ferries it out of the body. Beans are also able to help moderate blood glucose levels which can be important for anyone with this concern.

In a very interesting study that examined food intake patterns and risk of death from coronary heart disease, researchers followed more than 16,000 middle-aged men in the U.S., Finland, The Netherlands, Italy, former Yugoslavia, Greece and Japan for 25 years. Typical food patterns were: higher consumption of dairy products in Northern Europe; higher consumption of meat in the U.S.; higher consumption of vegetables, legumes, fish, and wine in Southern Europe; and higher consumption of cereals, soy products, and fish in Japan. When researchers analyzed this data in relation to the risk of death from heart disease, they found that higher legume consumption was associated with a whopping 82% reduction in heart attack risk!

This year I will be planting Great Northern Beans for the first time in my garden as part of an experiment to see just how productive they are. I plan to include them in my book concerning Survival Gardens that will be coming out next year. This book will be dedicated to things the average person can do to grow their own food and survive in times of global collapse.

Plants require certain types of soil to grow in if they are to prosper. Plain dirt dug up in the back yard may or may not cover all the bases, so let’s take a look at some of the key characteristics to look for in a good as opposed a poor soil. Let’s start by taking a look at what makes a soil suitable for growing crops. Soil that is of the right composition or mix is termed a soil that has good tilth. Let’s explore some characteristics of tilth.

Basic Soil Composition

In the most general of terms, a soil can be broken down into two components: solids and spaces. The solids would be composed of things like minerals, sand and organics while the spaces would contain air and water. Now, about ninety percent of the solids could be further broken down into three classes or types; sand, silt and or clay (which are really just rocky minerals divided up according to their size). The remaining ten percent (10%) is composed of organic material and it is this material that is vitally important to the future health of your plants. It’s also the one thing about soil that you can easily do something about! Included in the organic part are literally billions of soil microbes that directly participate in the breakdown or decomposition of organics and which then often aid in the transport of nutrients to the plant roots. We call decomposed organic material ‘humus’ and it is the health of the tiny microbes that live in close association with humus that make all the difference. Good microbial populations equal healthy plants. The presence of humus in a soil is what gives it that great smell when you hold a handful up to your nose. Someone once said, the nose knows and once you sense the smell of a good soil, you’ll never forget it!

Air spaces constitute or make up about 50% of the volume of a healthy soil so they are very

important also. In these spaces, you will find both air and water. Yes, roots require air to breath and if the spaces become compacted such as is seen from over tillage, you will get terrible results. The plants will die for lack of air and water. The moral of this story is that once you get your soil in good condition, please don’t ever walk on it or do anything to compact it!

A Closer Look

Now that we see that soil is both spaces and solids, lets take a little closer look at how the solid part can be put together. Remember when I used the word tilth? Well, good tilth depends on the overall mix of soil texture, structure (or aggregation), density, drainage and water holding ability. This is influenced greatly by the exact proportion of clay, sand and silt that make it up. To the right is a chart of how different soils are made from varying the composition of these three basic ingredients. When you first look at it, you might be a little confused. So, what’s the best soil? Well, the answer is not to think so much as what is best as it is to think in terms of avoiding any extremes. So, if your soil is somewhere in the middle of the chart that’s good. If it’s tending towards one of the corners, then you might want to consider some soil management techniques that could apply depending on your circumstance. If you have small raised beds like I do, then you can always buy bags of different kinds of soil to alter the structure. If, on the other hand, you have a large backyard garden, this might not be a viable alternative. The good news is that almost any soil can be improved by the addition of compost. That will be subject of a future blog.

Update: I reworked this post a bit more in October 2011 and there still exists areas that need to be redone. Hopefully, my readers get the point that a good growing soil is a biologically active (alive) soil and that any over application of anything not ‘natural’ may disturb the natural order that exists to help feed and nurture any crops that grow in it.

Here is a piece of information concerning lettuce seed germination I came across some time ago.

In related research, plant physiologists wondered why people have trouble with seed germination of lettuce in their vegetable gardens. They knew that seed germination was very high in Petri dishes in the laboratory.

It turns out that in lettuce seeds, unlike barley, a critical step in triggering seed germination is photo-activation. The seeds need to be exposed to light in order to germinate. I hope you are wondering, immediately, how germination responds to photon flux and wavelength of light!

Lettuce responds well to very low photon fluxes…it is not a photosynthetic process!

The wavelength of light is critical. The seeds germinate well in white light, but also to single “colors”…particularly red light (660 nm). On the other hand, far-red light (730 nm) strongly reduces lettuce germination.

It took a long time to identify, isolate, and characterize the photoreceptor. It is called phytochrome. Phytochrome exists in two different chemical forms: Pr and Pfr. Phytochrome in its Pr form absorbs light maximally in red wavelengths…hence Pr. Phytochrome in its Pfr form absorbs light maximally in far-red wavelengths…hence Pfr. The name of the form of phytochrome is determined by the color of light it absorbs maximally. What made characterizing phytochrome difficult was the fact that the two forms interconvert. As Pfr absorbs far-red light, it changes chemically into Pr! Similarly, Pr absorbs red light and changes chemically into Pfr.

If you think about how you might analyze a pigment (as you have done several times in lab!), you generally put an extract into a spectrophotometer and measure the absorbency of a wavelength at which the pigment maximally absorbs light. With phytochrome, this is almost impossible…the light you would use to measure it, causes it to change to the other form! It is elusive!

Back to the lettuce, obviously the garden problem is planting the seeds too deep (in the dark!). Without light to photo-activate seed germination, the seeds fail to germinate to their potential. In the dark, the ratio of Pfr to Pr determines whether each seed will germinate. If exposed to red light, the phytochrome is all converted into Pfr and the seeds germinate. When the seeds are exposed to far-red light, the phytochrome is all converted into Pr and the seeds fail to germinate. Obviously the active form of phytochrome is Pfr.