The Lowdown WSU Spokane County Extension Master Gardeners December 2016 The Lowdown Inside this issue: Foundation News 2 Book Review 4 Fact Sheet Updates 9 Self-study Quiz 10 Upcoming Events 12 Extension Information Dr. Jeremy Cowan 477-2145 Regional Horticulture Specialist [email protected]Tim Kohlhauff 477-2172 Horticulture Program Coordinator [email protected]Anna Kestell 477-2195 Food Preservation/Safety [email protected]Jackie Sykes 477-2193 Clinic Coordinator [email protected]Master Gardener County Site http://extension.wsu.edu/spokane/ master-gardener-program Master Gardener Foundation of Spo- kane County http://www.mgfsc.org/ WSU Master Gardener Site http://mastergardener.wsu.edu/ HortSense Fact Sheets http://hortsense.cahnrs.wsu.edu/Home/ HortsenseHome.aspx On Line Timelog Reporting: hp://ext.wsu.edu/Volunteers/logon.aspx The Nitrogen Cycle International Year of the Pulses (#iyp2016) Can You Hear Earth’s Heartbeat When You Eat Your Lentils? (Part V) By Kathy Callum Earth is the real master recycler. Catastrophic system failure and shortages would occur if nature did not conserve its significant natural resources through recycling. Among the more critical of Earth’s natural resources are car- bon (C) and nitrogen (N), on which all life depends. Carbon is the material building block of life. Carbon also serves as Earth’s thermostat. Nitrogen, which is converted into an available form, is responsible for the energy transference in living cells that makes all life possible. This energy transference is called meta- bolic (living body) energy. (continued on page 3)
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International Year of the Pulses · 2016-12-12 · Montgomery, author of Dirt: Erosion of Civilizations, writes that the U.S. Soil Bureau’s “Whitney conceived of the soil as a
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The Lowdown
WSU Spokane County Extension Master Gardeners December 2016 The Lowdown
Can You Hear Earth’s Heartbeat When You Eat Your Lentils?
(Part V)
By Kathy Callum
Earth is the real master recycler. Catastrophic system failure and
shortages would occur if nature did not conserve its significant natural resources
through recycling. Among the more critical of Earth’s natural resources are car-
bon (C) and nitrogen (N), on which all life depends. Carbon is the mater ial
building block of life. Carbon also serves as Earth’s thermostat. Nitrogen, which
is converted into an available form, is responsible for the energy transference in
living cells that makes all life possible. This energy transference is called meta-
bolic (living body) energy.
(continued on page 3)
The Lowdown Page 2
FOUNDATION NEWS
Still basking in the glow of a fantastic Fall Banquet!
The Lowdown Page 3
(continued from page 1)
Because of the symbiotic bacteria in nodules at their roots, pulses,
along with the other legumes, play an essential role in converting inert
atmospheric nitrogen to plant available nitrogen by “fixing”. This is a
crucial part of Earth’s natural cycle because it removes nitrogen from
the atmosphere and effectively “fixes” it, so it can be used by living
entities. Carbon and nitrogen molecules hang out in the atmosphere,
are animated when they become part of living beings, take up residen-
cy in the earth when the living beings die, and eventually return to the
air, thus completing the natural Earth’s natural cycles. Any perturba-
tion of this natural system wreaks havoc on Earth’s fragile balancing act.
Essentially, you could think of pulses, other legumes, and all nitrogen-fixing
plants (and their symbiotic bacteria) as Earth’s sanitation workers, who we’ve
been shortsightedly downsizing in favor of mechanization and outsourcing. The
amount of available nitrogen effectively regulates Earth’s carbon cycle. “The
supply of [available] nitrogen is a key factor controlling the nature and diversi-
ty of plant life, the population dynamics of both grazing animals and their pred-
ators, and vital ecological processes such as plant productivity and the cycling
of carbon and soil minerals. This is true not only in wild or unmanaged systems
but in most croplands and forestry plantations as well” according to Peter M.
Vitousek. Increase the pool of available nitrogen unleashed from its bonds, and
that increases the pool of carbon mined from the soil and catapulted into our atmosphere. Vitousek goes on
to explain that “Excessive nitrogen additions can pollute ecosystems and alter both their ecological function-
ing and the living communities they support.”
Peter Viousek reports that “Until human activities began to alter the natural cycle, however, nitrogen was
only scantily available to much of the biological world. The scanty amount of reactive nitrogen was limiting
factor that controlled the dynamics, biodiversity, and functioning of many ecosystems.” Development of the
Haber-Bosch process allowed humans to bypass natural nitrogen limitations. Humans could now con-
vert atmospheric nitrogen and mined fossil fuels into ammonia fertilizer, creating an anthropogenic pool of
biologically reactive nitrogen.
The rise in the use of fossil fuel in mechanized agriculture throughout our
modern world to produce food resulted in a global nitrogen cycle, that to par-
aphrase Fields (2004), has “cycled out of control.” Too much nitrogen in our
waters creates dead zones (eutrophication) in the oceans from commercial
fertilizer run off. Too much nitrogen in our air creates harmful acid rain,
makes it difficult to breathe, decreases biodiversity and has triggered disas-
trous global climate change.
(continued on page 6)
The Lowdown Page 4
A Book Review by Susan Mulvihill
Late Bloomer: How to Garden with Comfort, Ease and Simplicity
in the Second Half of Life
by Jan Coppola Bills (St. Lynn’s Press, 2016, 143 pages, $18.95)
As soon as I saw the title, I knew I had to read this book! And even if you aren’t in the second half of
your life, Late Bloomer will enhance your enjoyment of your garden immensely.
Late Bloomer is hot off the presses, having just been released last month. In it, author Jan Coppola
Bills shares her secrets to making smart decisions so you won’t feel overwhelmed every time you slip on your garden gloves.
I’ve been a Master Gardener for 14 years now so the majority of her suggestions are things I know all too well. And yet, I have to admit I’ve made many mistakes over the years and have created a fairly labor-intensive garden as a result. So you can believe I was taking copious notes while reading this book!
Bills’ #1 rule, which is repeated throughout the book is “Right plant, right place.” How many times have we heard that? And yet so many gardeners choose plants for their gardens because they appeal on a gut level to them, rather than doing a little research ahead of time. The author explains the most important attributes to look for, such as zone, light and moisture requirements, and mature size.
She strongly believes in gardening sustainably by avoiding the use of pesticides and being willing to share some of her garden bounty with insects and wildlife. She knows the importance of attracting wildlife and pollinators and tells us how to accomplish this. And she advocates not tidying up our gar-dens or removing fallen leaves since they benefit wildlife and the soil.
Bills promotes the idea of being active and stretching before gardening activities so we can all enjoy our favorite pastime. She also shares several tools that will make tasks easier while keeping us com-fortable.
The author explains what hardiness zones are and why they’re so important. After all, what’s the point of buying a plant that’s unsuitable for your zone, including the fact that it might need unneces-sary coddling? Those of us who live in colder climates should especially be checking the zone first when plant-shopping.
In her chapter on “Garden Styling,” Bills shares important design tips to make our plantings appeal to us. This involves choosing the right types of plants (such as annuals, perenni-als and evergreens) based on the look we’re hoping to
achieve. One huge tip was to put plants where their growth habits can be embraced rather than our need-ing to cut them back frequently to fit the space we gave them. And, of course, we should select bloom col-ors that appeal us and add garden art to express ourselves.
As I read this book, my mind kept thinking about ways to cut back in my own garden. Several of the au-thor’s suggestions might seem like no-brainers, and yet, what do we gardeners do? We landscape in a way that’s more labor-intensive and we frequently engage in “zonal denial,” thinking certain plants will grow just fine in our colder zones!
I enjoyed Bills’ “Small Garden Abundance” chapter where she explained that, with a good design, it’s possi-ble to have a small, yet fulfilling garden that speaks to you and reflects who you are. She recommends planting beds thickly so they’ll shade and out-compete weeds. That said, remember to place plants based on their mature size.
Throughout the book, the author gives examples of the situations some of her clients have and how their garden design solves problems while meeting their goals and desires.
Now, I don’t want to give away all of Jan Coppola Bills’ secrets, but you will find tips on growing ornamen-tal trees and shrubs, when to water and how to conserve this precious resource, ways to cut down on the amount of work your garden requires, how to keep weeding to a minimum, an easy way to decrease the size of your lawn, and how to grow vegetables and fruits.
In her final chapter, “Perfectly Imperfect,” she implores us to stop trying to aim for perfection! Now, wouldn’t that make our time in the garden much more enjoyable?
Jan Coppola Bills has an easy-to-read writing style, where you feel like you’re sitting across from her at a kitchen table while she’s letting you in on her se-
crets. Late Bloomer is well worth reading no matter what your age. Once
you’ve finished it, I can guarantee you’ll be looking at your garden with a criti-cal eye and making a list of the things that will return the joy to your favorite passion!
The Lowdown Page 6
(continued from page 3)
In the 1900s, largely due to the consequences of Justus von Liebig’s research,
people started regarding the soil as a giant factory, rather than as complex ecosys-
tems. Such a soil factory merely required sufficient inputs of nitrogen (N), phos-
phate (P), and potassium (K) to make it an efficient producer of our food. David
Montgomery, author of Dirt: Erosion of Civilizations, writes that the U.S. Soil
Bureau’s “Whitney conceived of the soil as a machine that required tuning in or-
der to sustain high crop yields.” Whitney’s challenge to American agriculture in
1901 was that, “we can unquestionably force the fertility far beyond the natural
limit and far beyond the ordinary limits of crop production.” A professor named
Fritz Haber first demonstrated the synthesis of ammonia from nitrogen and hy-
drogen in 1909. Carl Bosch quickly “translated” his discovery into a commercial
process known as the Haber-Bosch process. Commercial consumption of fossil-
fuel derived synthetic fertilizer rapidly accelerated after World War II.
A professor named Vaclav Smil argues in Enriching the Earth that over 6 billion
people on Earth would not exist without the significant technical discovery that
ammonia (NH3) could be synthesized from fossil fuels. He argues that this
historical transformation of humanity’s food supply was more significant than
the invention of space flight, television, the airplane or nuclear energy. Today,
we have globalized the use of “130 million tonnes” of ammonia, of which most
is used as synthetic fertilizer to force the soil to grow food. Smil points out that
consequently there’s a lot of nitrogen tied up in the 6 billion of us now on the
planet. Smil, oddly enough, doesn’t highlight the sheer wastefulness of humani-
ty’s current approach to manufacture and application of synthetic fertilizer, nor
its disastrous perturbation of the global carbon cycle. Yet plants uptake only 2%-
10% of any synthetic nitrogen fertilizer applied to soil. The remainder (90%-98%) dumps straight into
our waters and air as a pollutant. We must also acknowledge there’s a lot of carbon tied up in our teem-
ing mass of humanity. Climate change disasters are the most pressing consequence of bypassing the
natural cycle of biological nitrogen fixation.
Professor Vaclav Smil predicts that social disasters, like energy crises, will
overtake us long before the natural disasters that are a consequence of global
warming. Smil also authored Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty
Years. This cranky and pessimistic book argues that in the face of anthropo-
genic global warming, humanity has more to fear from social disasters like the
promotion of biofuel, mismanagement of national economies and demographic
change, than it does from the direct effect of rising greenhouse gases. Smil ap-
pears to have an ultra-conservative dislike of the notion of “peak oil”, doubts
that human’s transition to viable renewable energy can be rapid and is quite
dismissive of traditional cropping systems reliant on biological nitrogen fixa-
tion. Smil calculates that all our changes in diet (less food and meat in particu-
lar), the most “assiduous recycling of all organic wastes,” and “the widest practical planting of leg-
umes” would still completely fail to supply sufficient nitrogen for Earth’s human population’s needs.
20. Each of you are wished a Happy Holiday season!!!
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