Category Archives: Horticulture

Compost vs. Arsenic: And the winner is–compost!

January 21, 2009 by The Manic Gardener

Several posts back I mentioned in passing that compost can help fix arsenic in soil, and it seems reasonable to explain what the hell I was on about there. To "fix" arsenic is get it to bond with other, stable molecules so that it can neither leach from the soil into the water supply, nor migrate into your vegetables, and thence into you.

I got onto this originally because the news articles about the great Tennessee coal ash spill of '08 kept mentioning arsenic. Arsenic, I learned, occurs in several different forms, but the one that turns up most commonly in coal ash is arsenate(V), the same form that leaches into soil from telephone poles and fences treated with copper chromate arsenate (CCA).

And yes, at least one recent study conducted at the University of Florida found that when carrots and lettuce are grown in soil that's contaminated by CCA, both vegetables absorbed less arsenic when the soil received plentiful treatments of compost.

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Posted in Composting, Environment, Organic Gardening, Research Spin-off, Soil & Amendments

Er–coal ash as a soil amendment?

January 19, 2009 by The Manic Gardener

I always knew the Brits were crazy.

Given the justifiable panic over the Tennessee fly ash spill here in the States, it’s almost impossible to believe that people might put anything remotely resembling coal by-products in their gardens on purpose, but they do.

Sounds nuts, I know, but experiments have been ongoing in experiments have been conducted in India, Australia, China, and the United States, Poland, Thailand, and who knows, maybe the North Pole, growing vegetables (or in China, trees) in soil amended with bottom ash. Since ash is almost always quite alkaline (pH>9), this only makes sense in soils that have low pHs, but in those it can raise pH, improve water retention, improve mineralization, and increase nutrient availability. And at normal agricultural application rates (20 tons or more (!) or so on each hectare, which is about 2.5 acres) virtually all of experiments I’ve looked at show that these unlikely amendments are not accumulating at dangerous levels in plants.

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Posted in Environment, Organic Gardening, Research Spin-off, Soil & Amendments

Coal ash in the garden?

January 15, 2009 by The Manic Gardener

Coal ash has been coming at me from all directions; by an odd coincidence, a recent commenter on last summer’s wood ash in the garden posts wrote about coal ash, even as I worked on the post about the great ash spill at the Tennessee power plant.

Jacqueline had been putting her ashes from wood and solid fuel on her vegetable garden for a couple of years, though she did the responsible person’s internet search first, finding only sites touting the benefits of ashes in general. Then, just a week or two ago, a response to a letter in the Guardian cited the smokeless fuel folks as saying that these ashes should under no circumstances be put in gardens.

Gulp. So—how bad is this bad news?

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Posted in Environment, Organic Gardening, Soil & Amendments

A play starring—the potato?

January 7, 2009 by The Manic Gardener

(Had a few technical glitches getting this image to appear as intended–sorry. Half the text was cut off when it posted this morning. That's the problem with a program that won't let you preview a post as it will actually appear. (ARE YOU LISTENING, TYPEPAD?) I must remember not to set something to post automatically when I'm trying anything new. I dumped the original and reposted this version.)

Dedicated gardeners know that vegetables rule, but even we’d probably be surprised to find the potato cast as the evil demon in an off-Broadway play. Of course after Attack of the Killer Tomatoes anything became possible, but still…

Apparently Sybil Kempson refuses to let such things stand in her way, for she has potatoes plotting a revolt against humanity in her play “Potatoes of August.” At least, that’s how the two wives in the play see it, though the husbands have a different view. Or rather, that’s how the NYTimes review represents the wives as seeing it, though according to it, the husbands think their wives have lost it.

If you hurry, you can decide for yourself, since it will run for another week of so.

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Posted in Vegetables

Aphid Alert! Indoor tomatoes–again.

December 7, 2008 by The Manic Gardener

BREAKING NEWS
Near the end of last winter the blogger known as the Manic Gardener, (a rather obvious play on her own name, Kate Gardner) wrote not one, but TWO posts about problems with growing tomatoes indoors and how she was never going to make that mistake again: she had learned her lesson, she had seen the light, she was a reformed person, a cured addict: “tomatoes belong outdoors, not in.”

Yet the aphids pictured above are on a tomato leaf, and the photo was taken today, in the home of the aforementioned Manic Gardener. What conclusions can we draw?

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Posted in Indoor Gardening, Organic Gardening, Vegetables