Category Archives: Horticulture

Hot compost anyone? Read it and weep

November 30, 2008 by The Manic Gardener

Here’s a photograph, taken on Friday, Nov. 28:

That, folks, is a thermometer. It’s the thermometer in my compost. It reads (in case you can’t see it) a hundred and twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. (123°F.)

Others may be grateful for family, friends, turkey, jobs, whatever; I’m grateful for the compost heap (which I mis-typed as “heat,” a serendipitous error).

I built this heap on Tuesday the 18th, the day before surgery, and in the days just after, husband Steve brought me progress reports: 120° on Thursday, 140° on Friday. On Saturday I hobbled out to see for myself: 140°.

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Posted in Composting, Organic Gardening, Soil & Amendments

Pesticide “Inert” Ingredients–Not so much.

November 16, 2008 by The Manic Gardener

Second in a series.

The Curious Case of the Missing Information

Here’s one of the oddest, and to my mind most outrageous things I learned while working on the organic lawn article. It’s one of those things I’d heard rumored, and once I started working, it was something that turned up again and again in various documents I consulted: the claim that “inert” ingredients on a pesticide label weren’t necessarily inert.

Pick up any pesticide, and somewhere the label will say “Active ingredients” (and then the name of a chemical, and a percentage, often under 10%) and then “Inert ingredients” and a percentage. These inert ingredients are not named, but no worries; if it can’t react with other chemicals, it can’t harm us. It’s chemically inactive. That’s what inert means, right?

Wrong.

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Posted in Organic Gardening, Pests and Pesticides

Tangled in the Web: Pesticide Research

November 14, 2008 by The Manic Gardener

First in a series.

I’ve been working on a single, simple (ha) post for the past three days. This hunt makes me feel a bit like Theseus in the maze, playing out a thread behind him so he’d be able to find his way back—except it seems sometimes that the thread has broken, and I’ll be lost in cyberspace forever, adrift like the unfortunate astronaut in 2001, A Space Odyssey, when the wayward computer Hal snapped his umbilical cord leading back to the mother ship. (A bit of a mixed analogy there. Sorry.)

The topic of the moment is “inert” ingredients in pesticides—you know, the ones that aren’t active. When I try to trace the citations in a paper by Caroline Cox and Michael Surgan (“Unidentified Inert Ingredients in Pesticides: Implications for Human and Environmental Health” –with a name like that it had better be true, because it sure ain’t beautiful.) I find that those sections in the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations are either “reserved” (which apparently means unavailable, censored, you know, the old need-to-know-basis thing) or simply missing—absent, gone, etc.

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Posted in Organic Gardening, Pests and Pesticides

And you thought YOU were putting on weight–

October 25, 2008 by The Manic Gardener

Okay, all you pumpkin growers, with your little gourds weighing in at ten, twenty, even thirty pounds, that's nothing. Get a load of this–but be careful, because it'll crush you if you're not. Apparently these babies can put on forty (that's 40) pounds per day (that's every day).

Image from NPR.

That, folks, is a pumpkin, grown by one Steve Connolly of Warren, R.I., briefly the record-holder world's heaviest pumpkin, at 1568 pounds, until a previously undiscovered crack disqualified him. As a member of the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers, it sounds like he's found his niche, but is it big enough for him and that pumpkin?

Go to the NPR page, and you can see a whole row of monster pumpkins awaiting the weigh-off, and listen to clips including information about exploding pumpkins. I greet this "information" with some skepticism, having been taken in by NPR's story about exploding maple-sugar trees a couple of years ago. Of course, that story did run on April 1st…. And yeah, I do know that "gullible" isn't in the dictionary.

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Posted in News flash!, Vegetables

Potato Harvest in a Teacup

October 20, 2008 by The Manic Gardener

I dug up the last of the potatoes a couple of days ago.

These are the ones I actually stuck a shovel through; the rest I'll wash only just before eating. It was beautiful out—in the sixties right into dusk, with that warm, low, autumnal sunshine striking through the trees.

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Posted in Vegetables