Got Dead Basil? Give African Blue Basil a Try
- On August 06, 2019
- By Meleah
- In Annuals, Container Gardening, Herbs, Uncategorized
0
Right about this time last year I wrote a column talking about how sad it is that everyone’s favorite Genovese basil, which used to grow so nicely until late summer, is now being decimated early in the season by a fairly new disease called basil downy mildew. A mold that loves warmth and humidity, this disease starts out slowly with just a few yellow leaves and before you know it, the whole plant is a gross mess of yellow and brownish black splotches.
Yellow splotches often signal that basil downy mildew has started.
I offered several tips in that column for potentially avoiding basil downy mildew— or at least putting it off until you can make a couple of pizzas or something. And then about a week after the column came out, all of my basil plants got it and died. So, ha! What do I know, right? Well, seriously, it is nearly impossible to avoid this basil plague. But I’m not giving up on Genovese basil, and you probably don’t want to either. So let me offer another strategy that I’ve been trying this year that is so far going well.
Genovese basil is a favorite for making pesto.
In addition to planting about five Genovese basil seedlings, like I always do, I also planted African Blue basil, which is not susceptible to the disease. At this point in late July, I’ve only had to toss one diseased Genovese into the garbage. The other four are doing all right—fingers crossed. I’d never heard of African Blue basil until last year when a fellow gardener told me about it. He said he’d tried it and, though the leaves are a bit tougher than Genovese, the flavor is very similar and the plants have done really well in his garden. I planted two of them in early June, and I agree with him on all counts. I’ve made some really great pesto out of this new basil, and because it grows super quickly and doesn’t bolt, I’m be making a lot more.
African Blue basil flowers don’t go to seed, so it’s fine to leave them on the plant.
For those who’ve never heard of African Blue basil either, let me explain a bit about it. A hybrid variety created by crossing camphor basil and ‘Dark Opal’ basil, it is grown as a perennial in climates much warmer than ours. But even in Minnesota, plants can easily grow to 3 feet tall over the summer. The foliage is a pretty blend of dark green and purple, and plants produce loads of purplish-pink flowers that don’t need to be removed because, unlike most basils, they don’t go to seed because African Blue basil is sterile. Pollinators LOVE the purple flowers, and I’ve found that they are just as tasty as the leaves and can be used in pesto, salads, pasta, cocktails or anywhere else you’d use basil.
Even if you don’t like the taste of African Blue basil, it’s a great plant to add to sunny perennial gardens because it’s quite striking and you’ll attract plenty of bees and butterflies. African Blue basil is also said to grow more easily indoors, so I’m going to try putting one in a sunny window this winter. If all goes well, perhaps I can plant it outside once the weather warms up next season. The one hitch with this type of basil is, since they don’t go to seed, you have to buy new plants each year and they are a few more dollars than the typical varieties of basil we are all used to planting.
Or, to save a few bucks, you could try propagating new plants yourself by rooting cuttings in water and then transplanting them into small pots until they grow big enough to be transplanted into the garden. I can see this working well in warm climates, but I’m not sure how successful we’d be using this strategy since we would need to overwinter the plants indoors for several long, cold months. I think I’ll give it a try this winter and let you know how that turns out.
Happy gardening. And may all of your basil be free of mildew.
The Family Fern
- On June 17, 2019
- By Meleah
- In Uncategorized
- 1
Four years ago, on a cool June day, my mother-in-law, Nancy, died after a mercifully short period of intense suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Though she had a small garden at the family cabin years ago, Nancy was never a big gardener. But she did like having a few houseplants around. And she took great care of them, including the African violets, which just about everybody kills.
She had only one special plant, a rabbit’s-foot fern (Davallia fejeensis), that had belonged to her mother. Native to Fiji, the odd-looking fern gets its name from its long, furry rhizomes, which grow out across the soil until they hang over the edge of the pot, at first like a cute little rabbit’s foot. And later like the legs of a spooky giant spider. You couldn’t help but notice this plant, and yet we realize now that it was trying to tell us that Nancy was ill long before we understood her memory was deteriorating.
Rabbit’s-foot fern gets its name from its fuzzy feet.
Researchers are increasingly reporting the various ways plants communicate with each other. Sending messages through the soil, they warn of things like pest attacks and overcrowding. Communicating with humans is not so symbiotic. But plants tell us things as best they can. The rabbit’s-foot fern’s alert was subtle. Situated for years on a little table in front of the French doors that led out onto Nancy’s small patio, the fern was always lovingly watered and tended.
And then one afternoon I noticed that the fern’s foliage was drooping, and a lot of those little furry rabbit’s feet were drying up and shriveling. Some had even fallen off and were scattered on the normally scrupulously vacuumed white carpet. I felt the soil—bone dry. So I grabbed the watering can and gave the plant a drink, not understanding what the dire state of that family fern meant—Nancy could no longer take care of it herself.
Mike and Nancy enjoying a lunchtime beer.
But the slow-moving disease soon picked up speed. And in a handful of months, my feisty, beautiful mother in-law, who loved beer and bloody Mary’s, NASCAR and Willie Nelson, forgot how to make the family’s favorite salad dressing, a staple atop iceberg lettuce at every dinner she served. That Christmas, when she asked what she could bring for the holiday meal, Nancy’s face went blank when we suggested blonde brownies, a treat she’d been making regularly since my husband, Mike, was a boy.
“What are blonde brownies?” she asked, before insisting that she’d never made them in her life. Desperate, we showed her the grease-stained blonde brownie recipe card she always kept in the cupboard beside the stove. Seeing it only seemed to strengthen her unwavering insistence that she was “FINE.”
There were falls and other indignities that no one should ever have to suffer, and then we had to move Nancy into a memory care unit where she could get round-the-clock care. We moved the fern with her. Perched awkwardly on top of a dresser in the small room she shared with a roommate, it was there when she no longer recognized it or anyone else except Mike, who visited her nearly every day. When she stopped talking and began refusing food and water, the nurse told us she had seen this many before and it meant that “Nancy has decided she wants to die.” We understood. She never liked being bossed around. We stayed by her side, grateful to nurses who eased her suffering with morphine and ours with cookies and coffee.
Nancy had a big personality right up to the end.
When she was gone, the rabbit’s-foot fern came home to live with us. Having been neglected for many months, it was in bad shape and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to save it. Four years on, though, it’s looking pretty good, with lots of new leaves and a whole bunch of those little rabbit’s feet poking out everywhere. The trick, I’ve learned, is to spritz those feet with a little water every other week or so. I think of Nancy every time I do it. The long-lived fern isn’t as lush in my hands, and I imagine it misses her. If I could, I would ask it to tell me her secrets. I’m sure it remembers them.
Snapping Turtles Soon Will Start Laying Eggs
- On May 27, 2019
- By Meleah
- In Critters, Natural Wonders, Uncategorized
- 1
In June, snapping turtles will once again start coming up onto the sand on Lake Harriet’s north beach to lay their eggs. If you’ve never had the good fortune to see this happening, walk over there this year and see this wondrous event for yourself. My husband, Mike, and I were lucky enough to see the turtles last summer. I wrote a column about what it was like to watch all those mama turtles, laying there eggs in the middle of the public beach, covering them with a little sand and then returning to the water
I wanted to share the experience, but I was also hoping to get some people together to help me do something to protect those delicate eggs. Mama snapping turtles don’t watch over their eggs once they’re deposited in the sand, and the lifeguards on the beach told us that every year many of those carefully laid eggs get eaten by hungry critters and/or crushed by people on the beach who don’t know they are there. I was hoping there could be a way to rope off at least some of those eggs, and I got several emails from people offering to help.
Baby snapping turtle—iStock
Knowing the beach is managed by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (MPRB), I called to ask for their thoughts, or maybe assistance. I talked with Debra Pilger, MPRB’s director of environmental management. She told me that people contact them every year wanting to know whether something can be done to protect turtle eggs that have been laid someplace perilous. In fact, people call them a lot, trying to help all sorts of creatures. There are times when the park board does intervene, like when the rope off areas to protect nesting owls from thoughtless humans who climb up trees to take pictures of them.
But in the case of snapping turtle eggs, they aren’t going to take any action and they don’t want the public to either. “We feel the best protection is to leave the eggs alone,” Pilger says, explaining that putting up fencing or ropes might attract people and critters who might otherwise have left the eggs alone. It’s a fair point. But putting up some kind of barrier to protect even a portion of the eggs could also be a great way to positively engage the public with nature. Call me Pollyanna, but I believe most people would be thrilled to get the chance to be citizen scientists, keeping watch over baby turtle eggs until they hatched, and the little guys made their way to the water. Sign me up!
That said, Pilger made some good points. Snapping turtles are not endangered, so letting nature take its course in this case will not lead to the end of these animals. Also, snapping turtles lay between 25 and 80 eggs at one time. Moving eggs once they’ve been buried is ill-advised. But leaving them on the beach is also problematic because, depending on the weather, they can take two to three months, or even longer, to hatch. That’s a lot of eggs to try to enclose in some way on a small public beach at a very busy lake.
Snapping turtles don’t return to their eggs after laying them.—iStock
So what now? Do we accept that nature needs to take its course in this instance? Or might there be more we could do if we thought about this differently? I don’t have the answer, but I would love to hear what others think and you can email me at livinthing.com. Perhaps there is some way to work with the park board on this in the future. How about a citizen science project? For now, I plan to go down to the beach as often as I can this summer to see the mama turtles laying eggs, and to try to see what happens to them over time. Maybe I’ll even get to watch some of those babies hatch and make it to the water. Maybe I’ll see you there too.
Fertilizer 101
- On May 09, 2019
- By Meleah
- In Annuals, Fertilizer, Seeds, Uncategorized
- 0
It’s been a long time since I wrote about fertilizer so I’m going to do that today because people are always asking about what to feed their plants. First, though, it’s finally time for seed sharing and I’ve got the Little Free Seed Library outside my house all stocked up. As always, the top shelf of our Little Free Library is reserved for seeds in the spring and fall. If you’d like to pick up or drop off some seeds, the library is located on our boulevard on the corner of 45th Street and Washburn Ave. S. in Linden Hills.
Coin-size envelopes are in there so you can package up seeds to take home. If you have seeds to share, please bring them in their original packets or label them in envelopes or baggies in some way so people can clearly see what’s available.
Please bring seeds to share if you have extra!
Fertilizing Basics—Now, let’s talk plant food. People often ask me why their plants look spindly and sad when mine are so lush and happy. The answer is simple: I feed them. All living things need sustenance, and plants are no exception. LOTS of people who tell me they don’t have a green thumb would find that the opposite is true if they added food to their plants’ usual diet of plain old water. This is especially true for plants in containers in which soil nutrients are quickly depleted and not replenished as they are in gardens with healthy soil.
If you’re new to fertilizing, here’s a quick tutorial. On every package you will find three numbers such as 5-5-5 or 10-5-5. Those numbers are always in the same order and the represent the percentage of three nutrients. The first is nitrogen (N), which promotes green, lush growth. The second is phosphorous (P), which is good for developing healthy roots and is important for flower and fruit development. The last is potassium (K), which plants need for healthy overall growth.
Synthetic fertilizers give plants a boost, but don’t help support beneficial soil microbes.
People used to advise gardeners to always use a “balanced” fertilizer, meaning all three numbers would be the same, like 10-10-10. But newer research has shown that balanced fertilizers often provide far more phosphorous and potassium than plants really need. Instead, look for products with numbers more like 5-1-2 or 5-1-3. That way, you’ll avoid having too much P and K build up in your soil. And you’ll also help protect the environment from those excess nutrients, which often leach or run into nearby waterways where they promote the growth of algae and harm fish and other creatures.
Organic or Synthetic?
When you shop for fertilizer, you’ll find two types to choose from—organic and synthetic. Organic options are derived from ground-up rocks, animal waste, plant parts and other organic matter. A few examples include green sand, blood and bone meals, cottonseed meal, fish emulsion, seaweed extracts, compost and manures. Synthetic fertilizers are made of synthesized nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium through processes that rely on some kind of chemical reaction involving non-renewable resources (synthetic nitrogen is produced using natural gas).
I like this brand of fish fertilizer. You can get it with or without seaweed.
I use organic fertilizers on my plants because they are generally a more sustainable choice—exceptions include rock phosphate, which is strip-mined, and bat guano (poo), which is harvested from caves at bats’ expense. Organic fertilizers also help foster a healthy environment for beneficial microbes in the soil. And, while they usually contain smaller amounts of N-P-K than synthetic fertilizers do, organic options can be more nourishing to plants because they are taken up slowly as needed where synthetic fertilizers are slurped up fast, like a human gulps down a Coke.
It’s not always easy to find a good selection of organic fertilizers. So I’d like to give a shout out to Midwest Supplies. Located in Minneapolis, this fine little store has a wide array of choices and knowledgeable staff to answer any questions you may have. As I wrote in a column a few years back, my organic concoction of choice is a mix of fish emulsion and blackstrap molasses. I got the idea from Dean Engelmann, co-owner of Tangletown Gardens, who uses the mixture himself.
Unsulfered blackstrap molasses is commonly used in organic horticulture. The sugars in it feed beneficial microbes, helping to boost soil and plant health. Dean recommends combining the two at a 1:1 ratio. I use a 5-gallon bucket for this, first adding fish emulsion with the amount of water recommended for the area I’m feeding (read the label). Then, add the same amount of molasses as you did fish emulsion, and give the mixture a good stir because the molasses gets blobby.
Like people, plants need more than water to thrive.
It’s not a great idea to let this stinky brew sit around, so make only what you need at one time. To use, just dip a plastic pitcher or whatever into the bucket and pour the liquid fertilizer wherever you need it. I mostly use it on container plants and vegetables, but if something else in the garden looks like it could use a good meal, go for it. One thing: do your best not to spill this stuff on your shoes. They will smell like dead fish forever.
Inside the Minds of Plants
Last June when Koko the gorilla was found dead in her sleep at the age of 46, the Gorilla Foundation in California, where she lived, released a statement saying that the western lowland gorilla would be “deeply missed.” For those who didn’t know who she was, they explained: “Koko touched the lives of millions as an ambassador for all gorillas and an icon for interspecies communication and empathy.”
Koko and her kitten. Credit: Creative Commons
It was a loving tribute, but it no doubt upset those who have long been troubled by the humanizing of Koko. Born on the fourth of July in 1971 at the San Francisco Zoo, the infant gorilla soon became the subject of a controversial language research project being conducted by psychologist Francine “Penny” Patterson. Over the years, Patterson taught Koko to use over 1,000 words of modified American Sign Language and the gorilla became famous for, among other things, her emotional expressiveness, love of cats and ability to enchant just about everyone, including celebrities like Robin Williams and Mr. Rogers.
But was Koko really capable of communicating in the way Patterson and others claimed she was? Some skeptical scientists have long said no, arguing that apes simply don’t possess the emotional and mental capacity to communicate on such a complex level. To them, Koko’s perceived abilities were nothing more than a textbook case of anthropomorphism. And if there is one thing scientists of that sort disdain, it is people going about attributing human traits to non-human lifeforms.
Holed up in places that clearly must not allow any pets for them to observe and interact with, these scientists are undaunted in their quests to prove human superiority despite decades of research demonstrating the intelligence and emotions of many living creatures—octopuses, chimps, dolphins, elephants and crows to name a few.
Fortunately, there are also scientists out there who get that humans are great and all, but other living things, including plants, can also do amazing things. Monica Gagliano is one of those scientists. An evolutionary ecologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she studies plants as few other do by exploring questions about their behavior, learning and memory. I heard about Gagliano’s work while listening to an episode of Radiolab’s podcast called Smarty Plants.
Sensitive plants close their leaves, like butterflies fold their wings together, when touched. Credit: iStock
Co-hosts Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad were jostling with the question: Do you really need a brain to sense the world around you? To remember? Or even learn? Krulwich thought not, but Abumrad disagreed and the episode unpacked the idea, primarily zeroing in on Gagliano’s work with sensitive plants, Mimosa pudica, which she chose because they can be counted on to respond to stimuli by dramatically closing up their leaves.
Run out and buy Monica Gagliano’s book Thus Spoke the Plant.
For her first tests, examining plants’ ability to learn, Gagliano constructed what amounted to a tiny carnival ride that hoisted the sensitive plants up a short ways before dropping them onto a soft, cushy surface. Over and over, dozens and dozens of times, the plants were dropped and each time they closed their leaves until finally, they stopped. Because “the plants realized that was not necessary,” she says, explaining that the plants had learned something.(Watch her interview with TheScientist here.)
Krulwich was amazed, but Abumrad wondered aloud whether the plants had simply run out of energy to close up. Gagliano had thought of that too, and she’d tested the theory by shaking the plants that were no longer closing up their leaves from side to side rather than dropping them. The plants responded by quickly closing up, so it was not exhaustion they were exhibiting.
Three days later Gagliano returned to the lab and started dropping the plants again. This time, they stopped closing their leaves almost immediately, indicating that they hadn’t just learned something, they had also remembered it. Gagliano waited a few more days, and the plants still remembered. A few more days: same thing. At last, she waited 28 days before dropping them again. The result? Galiano believes those mimosa plants somehow remembered what had happened and did not close up on the way down.
At the very least, her research makes clear that plants, like animals, are capable of much more than we give them credit for. It makes you think, right? What do plants feel or sense or know when our shovels bite into the soil around them? I shudder to think about what might be going on with them when they somehow sense that pruners, or worse—an electric trimmer is nearby. Gagliano may not yet understand how plants are learning and remembering, but she is showing the world that they are doing those things. It’s thrilling to imagine what else may be discovered.
A version of this essay appeared in a 2018 issue of Northern Gardener.
