Algae Blooms, Red Tides, and Dead Zones--another reason to go organic

Yesterday's post on the environmental impact of synthetic fertilizers got so long I split this part off to post separately. One of the articles published in Science was about the effect of fertilizers once they reach the ocean, and the description I read in the Economist mentioned the stuff listed above--algae blooms, red tides and dead zones. I’d heard of each of these, but hadn’t been clear on the definitions or connections  till I poked around a bit for this post. Here’s what I found:

Dead zones in the ocean are just what they sound like—areas where nothing lives, because fertilizer has been washed to the sea, often by spring melts and floodwaters. The fertilizer doesn’t directly kill anything; instead, it causes algae blooms as oceanic plants are stimulated to sudden growth by nitrogen in the fertilizer. All fine and good—but the plants also need oxygen, and somehow they seem to be more aggressive and successful in getting it than anything else around. The result? Fish, clams, mussels, crabs, shrimp, all die.

You’ve probably heard of red tides, especially if you live on the Atlantic or the Gulf coasts, where they shut down fisheries and beaches on a near-annual basis. They’re famous for poisoning shellfish, and for the dramatic red tint they lend the ocean.

However, red tides are not always red, and not always toxic. (The one pictured here--which I lifted from the Woods Hole Harmful Algae home page--is indeed red, but non-toxic.) They’re caused by the release of chemicals produced by algae—minute forms of algae, not the big strands of seaweed you find on the sand. During algae blooms, those chemicals are sometimes visible as red washes in the ocean. If they’re toxic, then during blooms they are present in concentrations great enough to threaten both marine life and humans.

Apparently algae blooms have always been part of the ocean world, but according to a Woods Hole site (and Woods Hole is one of THE premier oceanographic institutes in the US, the other being Scrips) they have increased in severity and dispersion:

Over the last several decades, the United States has experienced an escalating and worrisome trend in the incidence of problems associated with harmful and toxic algae (commonly called "red tides"). Formerly only a few regions were affected, but now virtually every coastal state is threatened, in many cases over large geographic areas and by more than one harmful or toxic species. Impacts include mass mortalities of wild and farmed fish and shellfish, human illness and death from contaminated shellfish or fish, death of marine mammals, seabirds and other animals, and alterations of marine habitats or trophic structure.

There's a similar statement about the extraordinary expansion of algae blooms worldwide, accompanied by a couple of frightening maps, reproduced here.

So that’s how it works, apparently: nitrates from fertilizer promote algae blooms, which cause both the sometimes red, sometimes toxic, red tides and the lethal dead zones.

News Flash: Synthetic Fertilizers Contribute to Global Warming--another reason to go organic

You heard it here first.

All right, if you read a newspaper today or listened to the radio or did anything except stick your head in the sand (or dig in your garden all day) then you probably heard it somewhere else first, but it’s still breaking news: two articles in the prestigious journal Science suggest that nitrogen, much of it from synthetic fertilizers, is doing far more damage to our oceans, our air, and our health than has been previously recognized.

Synthetic ammonia and urea, staples of synthetic fertilizer, break down into nitrogen oxides, which are just all around bad news, environmentally speaking. When they are released into the atmosphere through microbial action, they contribute to ozone formation, which in turn causes or exacerbates a long list of respiratory problems. (Ozone is one of the key ingredients in L.A.’s notorious smog.) When nitrogen oxides descend to earth again, they do so as acid rain. When they are leached out of the ground and into waterways, they promote algae blooms, red tides and "dead zones". When they escape the ocean back into the atmosphere again, they do so as nitrous oxides, which contribute to global warming.

The real shocker, to me at least, is how much fertilizer ends up in our waterways and how little actually gets into the plants it’s intended to boost. The US EPA page on Sustainable Landscaping has estimated that only forty to sixty percent of the fertilizer applied to lawns ends up in grass—the rest washes away. The Economist article "Dead Zones," reporting on the new articles in Science, had an even grimmer estimate: only 10-15% of the nitrogen compounds produced as fertilizer get incorporated into food; the rest ends up in the environment.

The problem isn’t the gaseous nitrogen in the air, but anthropogenic reactive nitrogen compounds: to wit, synthetic or man-made (anthropogenic) chemicals that include nitrogen along with other elements (nitrogen compounds) that are likely to react with other chemicals, forming new compounds (reactive). And many of those new compounds are dangerous.

Reactive nitrogen, primarily nitrogen oxides, is produced whenever we burn fossil fuels and whenever synthetic fertilizers containing urea and ammonia (which means most synthetic fertilizers) start to break down, which they will do, both in air an water, unless they are taken up by plants.

The AP story was carried in the NY Times and just about everywhere, but a more thorough article ran in The Economist. The picture above came from the home page of the Woods Hole site on Harmful Algae. It shows a massive fish kill in Texas.

Just for a laugh, check it out

It's a rare thing, and a fine one, to find a site that celebrates "the great, the good and the slightly unhinged."

Call it a cop-out, but all I'm going to do today is tell everyone who by whatever chance or mischance of wind or weather ends up here to go elsewhere forthwith, namely to The Garden Monkey to read up on the internationally acclaimed (not) Fork'n Monkey Awards, because merely the descriptions of said awards--categories include "Green Fingers, Inky Fingers" (for best written blogs), "The Proud Parent" (for best seeding photos), the" "Jeeves Award for Worst-Dressed Celebrity Gardener," and, as they say, many many more--the descriptions alone, as I said, will gladden the heart, lift the spirit, bring a smile to the old face, and generally give you the impression that life might in fact be worth living after all, what?

Do it. Do it now. You can even vote.

While the gardener's away, the cats will play

This poor bedraggled thing is a pasque flower, and the culprit in its uprooting is this cat. (Does he look contrite to you? Me neither.)

I was already sad about this flower before it got uprooted, and now I'm devastated. Downright distraught.

Pasque flowers are the most lovely of wild flowers here in Montana, and I cannot seem to grow them! I've had one in a flower border for years; it sprouts each spring, but never flowers. Last fall I bought two more, one of which I put into the lovely earth in the new raised bed which stayed covered all winter. By the time I opened it in late April, the thing had already bloomed and gone to seed, and was well on its way to dying of thirst.

And then the cat dug it up. Perhaps I am, as Shakespeare said, Kate the cursed, at least as regards pasque flowers.

Has anyone else figured out how to keep cats out of newly prepared beds? I'm pulling row covers over mine, after finding cat poop in one. Grrr.

Palimpsest: spring poem

I have been inspired. I'm going to start including poetry here. Nancy Bond can do it; so can I.

Nancy Bond, a writer poet photographer in Nova Scotia (where I spent a month the summer I was sixteen--Oh!) boldly puts the word "poetry" into the heading of her blog Soliloquy which I encountered on Blotanical, a forum for blogging gardeners, and the first post I saw on her second blog, All Nature, My Garden, began with a Robert Frost poem. So as I say, she inspired me to include poems from time to time, including some of my own. Here's one that I've got to include soon or not at all this year.

A palimpsest, by the way, is a piece of parchment that's been used numerous times--written on, scraped, written on, scraped--but never, probably, scraped quite clean (just as it's almost impossible to erase pencil completely) so that traces of the earlier writings remain, and the parchment becomes a layered history of its many messages.

Palimpsest

Spring’s first smell’s the smell of rot,
last fall’s unfinished business
done, quick, before the grass grows.
No: not death first, then life, in orderly progression;
leaf to soil, soil for seed, now all together, sprout!
This slate’s never wiped quite clean.
Whose obsession is that?

It’s grass itself, and fungi, that finish autumn off.
Those first pale greens
spear the dead damp hearts
of blackened leaves and lift them skyward,
an inch or two.

Tut, Nature, tut;
this is how they told us
nothing would get done.

--Kate Gardner
theManicGardener

In the interests of full disclosure, I'll mention that this was published eons ago in The Hamline Review: A Faculty Annual (V.20, spring 1996). I doubt they'll ever know, or care, and I don't think they're in the business of running around pursuing copywrite privileges, but there it is. (It's not as though this poem is a major money-maker for them or for me, more's the pity.)

Of Snow, Global Warming, and Bears

AND now it's snowing, and I've got the shoes to prove it. That's the mud from yesterday's marathon session on the outside of the clogs, and the snow from today on the inside. If you're wondering why my shoes are outside rather than inside, then you didn't read my last post. For shame.

What's up with your weather?

It appears that I'm not the only one seeing snow in May. Amy of High and Dry commented on my last post that snow's only just giving way to rain for her. Of course, if you check the maps on Blotanical, you'll find that she's stuck herself way north in British Columbia, so what does she expect? (It looks to me as if she's the furthest north of all on that garden forum.) (Being born there is no excuse.)

And truth to tell, snow in May, in Montana? It happens. (And I moved here on purpose, so I definitely have no excuse.)

But jodi DeLong (that's how she writes her name folks, so take it up with her, not me) of bloomingwriter in Nova Scotia, one of the most temperate spots in Canada, started a post yesterday by asking plaintively, " Is anyone else having a May like this?" This, below a photo of flowers (primroses?) in the snow. (They look lovely.)

Even odder, a week ago or so I saw a comment by a blogger in Texas (I don't remember who) exclaiming over their late, cold spring. Not to mention the horrific tornadoes in Missouri and Oklahoma. Aren't they supposed to come in August?

It's enough to make you wonder.

A guy I know here in Montana, fed up with April (and May) snow showers, claims he's going to start a group called Montanans for global warming. He's trying to get my goat, or course. I think I'll join, to get his.

Of course, global warming might not "help" us anyway. That's the weirdest thing about it, to my mind: it doesn't just warm everything up. It plays havoc with the weather.

Melting ice in the Arctic might not only threaten polar bears, but also disrupt the Gulf Stream, the massive Atlantic current that sweeps north along North America, turns east, and flows south, warming Europe. If it's disrupted, scientists predict colder weather in Europe.

Here in Montana, and up and down the Rockies, warmer winters mean that the pine beetle, which is killed off by the cold, is  laying waste to forests. When the trees die and decay, the carbon dioxide they've sequestered is released back into the atmosphere. The problem is most serious in Canada's western province of British Columbia; so bad, it might worsen global warming. Talk about a tightening spiral: global warming leads to the death of trees, which worsens global warming. The top figure here (produced by Natural Resources Canada) shows the extent of the infestation in 2006; the bottom one (produced by Canada's Ministry of Forest and Range) shows the situation one year later, in 2007. The unreadably tiny legend says that the gray area is "overrun."

Even closer to home--as close as my back yard--the pine beetle infestation means that bears can't feed on the cones as they once could, so they're more inclined to go into campgrounds and (yes) city streets. It's very romantic to have had a mother bear and two cubs spend the night in our trees as they did a couple of autumns back, but it doesn't bode well for bears, forests, or humans. (I was a little worried about one of my neighbors, too; more than slightly inebriated, he  wanted to shake the tree and call the bears down.)

Does anyone else see changes that might--for no one knows for sure--be caused by global warming?

Time's winged chariot drawing near

More than one poet has bemoaned the quick passage of time, and more than one gardener has observed that it is not only lovers who have reason to join in that plaint. Just this weekend, another blogger at Hoe and Shovel titled a post,  "The Garden Waits for No Man," to which I can only say, Right on, dude.

So, having been away two weeks of the past four (as anyone who's been reading here already knows), I am BEHIND. This weekend, I vowed to catch at least part of the way up. (Now, if that's not an awkward phrase, I don't know what is. Oh yes, I do. Ask, and I might tell. Anyone else out there have a favorite awkward phrase?)

I'd prepped some of the beds last fall, but not all. On Saturday, between having my mother-in-law to brunch, going to a party for a friend who just earned her MA in plant pathology (more on that later), and an evening movie with another friend (whose parents, horror of horrors, have never seen Star Wars, so she and her husband are rectifying that wrong), I somehow managed to dig amendments into one four-by-four plot and even get potatoes planted.  When they sprout, I'll push the soil around those little hollows over them.

Sunday was not so easy. Sunday I tackled the worst of the worst, the heaviest, most densely packed, least yielding, ugliest, meanest plot of them all. It took me four hours. As I left the house in my rain jacket to get started, I glanced at the grey clouds and said to my son, "When do you think it's going to start raining?"

"It's not going to rain."

"Ah, you're wrong there, J., because it surely will someday."

About fifteen minutes after I went out, I felt the first drops. An hour later, I was wheeling a barrow full of horrible clayey earth towards a dumping spot and passed J., lifting weights in the yard.

"Not gonna rain, huh?"

"It's not raining!" he cried, face dripping. "Call this rain? This isn't rain."

"Huh." I struggled on, not having breath for more.

I suspect even he would have conceded that it was raining, had he stayed out as long as I did. When I finally raked the top-soil smooth, put my tools away and staggered inside, my shoes were so muddy I didn't want to defile even our porch with them, but left them outside, and my toes were so cold they stayed purple and white until nearly the end of my bath.

But the alley plots were ready plant.

Spring has sprung?

Yesterday I went about the garden taking pictures of buds and young plants, and of course of the new lettuce in a little greenhouse on the alley. Well, here's that greenhouse today:

Yes, the white stuff on top of the white cloth is snow. It's after ten-thirty in the morning now, and it is just changing to rain.

Welcome to Montana.

Spring has Sprung in the Organic Greenhouse

I just got back from a trip to Minneapolis, the second week away in a month--and at planting time! No more.

This morning I pulled the covers off the only "greenhouses" that actually made it through the winter without major damage, and here's what I found:

The tiny lettuce (yeah!) are in a bed on the alley that I kept protected all winter because when I did that last year, I pulled off the plastic and row-covers in the spring to find that young chard was already growing.

This year when I removed the covers I had nothing save one incipient spinach and some very dry dirt. I'm speculating (why not?) that this is one situation in which one does want to wet the bed, and that I didn't do so sufficiently.

I'd prepped the soil last fall, so a couple of weeks ago between trips I planted alternating rows of lettuce and finger carrots. The plan (there's actually a plan) is to harvest all this stuff in late June and plant out tomatoes that I've kept until then in pots.

I try to rotate crops, and it's this bed's turn to take on tomatoes. The big pine(s) east of it (you can see their trunks at the top of the first photo) keep it from getting sun until afternoon, but as the sun moves south at the end of summer this area gets more light, longer, than just about any other part of my garden. So the tomatoes should do okay, I think.

The square bed above is one I also kept covered all winter, more successfully. Those taller things with the white tips are leeks about to flower (I think), and there's creeping flox already in flower, and the bushier greer things featured on the right are something that I'm not quite sure about. They resemble stock, though it's so long since I've seen stock that I could be seriously mistaken. I suspect it's a weed whose small white flowers really don't compensate for its size.

Any bets out there?

Vindicated Again: Protecting Seeded Areas with Row Covers

All right, so it's probably a testimony to my inexperience and hubris that I thought this my idea, but I did think it so, and it turns out it's not, because here and there in Minneapolis where I was helping out an old friend who'd just had heart surgery were wide white swatches on lawns where newly re-seeded places had been covered with row-covers or something indistinguishable from them. (Take a breath, Kate, or as that friend used to say when we were roommates in college several decades ago, "Du calme, du calme." She was a French major.)

The row-cover idea came to me several years back when I wanted to overseed in the heat of summer. (Why then? Beats me.) The technique -- combined with top-dressing and frequent watering -- worked surprisingly well, so I've incorporated it into my lawn gardening web-site article.

In all the reading I did for that article, I never once saw mention of such a technique. (Well, maybe once, where someone suggested mulching with straw.) Yet there they were, as I say, in Minneapolis, the white rectangles on upper-class lawns, usually on slopes, so the idea may have been more to prevent seed from washing away than to provide shade and reduce the need for watering.

It's odd; I feel vindicated, but I also feel let down, almost ripped off. That was my idea! Mine, all mine! We hates them, Precious, yesss, we does...