Tag: garden

Even in the wildest corner of your yard (or prairie) mice will run on wheels

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Yes, I know this is a couple years old. But, I somehow missed it first time round.

In 2009, neurophysiologist Johanna Meijer set up an unusual experiment in her backyard. In an ivy-tangled corner of her garden, she and her colleagues at Leiden University in the Netherlands placed a rodent running wheel inside an open cage and trained a motion-detecting infrared camera on the scene. Then they put out a dish of food pellets and chocolate crumbs to attract animals to the wheel and waited.

Wild house mice discovered the food in short order, then scampered into the wheel and started to run. Rats, shrews, and even frogs found their way to the wheel—more than 200,000 animals over 3 years. The creatures seemed to relish the feeling of running without going anywhere.

The study “puts a nail in the coffin” of the debate over whether mice and rats will run on wheels in a natural setting, says Ted Garland, an evolutionary physiologist at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the work. More importantly, he says, the findings suggest that like (some) humans, mice and other animals may simply exercise because they like to. Figuring out why certain strains of mice are more sedentary than others could help shed light on genetic differences between more active and sedentary people…

On average, the backyard mice she and colleagues observed ran in 1 to 2 minute stints, roughly the same duration as that seen in lab mice, they reported online…in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The team also set up a second wheel in a nearby nature preserve of grassy dunes and attracted a similar crowd of enthusiasts.

Looks like Shakespeare was smoking homegrown?

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Now, what rhymes with “ganja”?

Residue from early 17th century clay pipes found in the playwright’s garden, and elsewhere in Stratford-Upon-Avon, were analysed in Pretoria using a sophisticated technique called gas chromatography mass spectrometry…

Of the 24 fragments of pipe loaned from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to University of the Witwatersrand, cannabis was found in eight samples, four of which came from Shakespeare’s property.

There was also evidence of cocaine in two pipes, but neither of them hailed from the playwright’s garden.

Shakespeare’s sonnets suggest he was familiar with the effects of both drugs.

In Sonnet 76, he writes about “invention in a noted weed”, which could be interpreted to mean that Shakespeare was willing to use “weed”, or cannabis, while he was writing.

The article seems a bit of a stretch trying to include cocaine – though opium certainly wasn’t unknown in England BITD.

Whatever. Smoking a little weed obviously didn’t harm his creative juices – as anyone with a modicum of good sense already knows.

Warm little bubbles for your back garden

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Those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere may be mourning the end of summer, and with it the diminishing prospects of enjoying much warmth until next year. However, the Invisible Garden House, by Danish designer Simon Hjermind Jensen, may offer an opportunity to receive a regular dose of Vitamin D, even well into the colder seasons.

The Invisible Garden House was installed in the home of a Danish family who wished to extend their time spent outdoors into the fall. Essentially a large greenhouse comprising three interconnected domes, the structure is heated by the sun and ventilated naturally with adjustable holes.

The largest middle dome functions as a garden house with wooden floor, while the two smaller connecting domes are used to grow vegetables and flowers.

The domes…are constructed from polycarbonate – said to offer a degree of UV protection. All the necessary parts are designed on computer, then milled with a CNC router, and assembled with metal bolts.

Jensen reports that the project is easily reproduced in different shapes and sizes to suit, and that in addition to residential use, he reckons the Invisible Garden House practicable for public and semi-public use too – perhaps as urban gardening plots.

Dimensions and costs are in the article. Click the link. Remember this was done as a one-off. If the design catches on, they should get cheaper.

Wee greenhouses are popular throughout northern climes, from Alaska down to southerly high altitudes. One of these years I’m going to figure out how to redo our workshop – no longer used as such and on the west side of our compound – into a place where I can keep fresh tomatoes and lettuce going through the winter.

Here’s a real garden in a bottle

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This miniature ecosystem has been thriving in an almost completely isolated state for more than forty years. It has been watered just once in that time.

The original single spiderwort plant has grown and multiplied, putting out seedlings. As it has access to light, it continues to photosynthesize. The water builds up on the inside of the bottle and then rains back down on the plants in a miniature version of the water cycle. As leaves die, they fall off and rot at the bottom producing the carbon dioxide and nutrients required for more plants to grow.

Thanks, Ursarodinia

Turning lawns into gardens

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Jason and Jennifer Helvenston’s front yard garden in Orlando, Floriduh

The seed catalogs have arrived, and for the roughly 15 percent of Americans who appreciate the joys and rewards of growing some of their own crops, this is a more encouraging sign than Groundhog Day or even the reporting of pitchers and catchers to spring training.

Yet several times a year we hear of a situation like the one in Orlando, where the mayor claims to be striving to make his city green while his city harasses homeowners like Jason and Jennifer Helvenston for planting vegetables in their front yard, threatening to fine them $500 a day — for gardening. The battle has been raging for months, and the city’s latest proposal is to allow no more than 25 percent of a homeowner’s front yard to be planted in fruits and vegetables…

But when it comes to the eye of the beholder, weeds are the same thing as beauty: to a gardener, grass is a weed; a row of lettuce surrounded by dark, grassless soil a thing of beauty. To some gardeners, including me, dandelions are a crop.

The situation, then, is not black-and-white. A yard is not either unproductive and “beautiful” — as a lawn — or, as a garden, productive and “ugly.” Many of us can thrill to the look of dead stalks, and even enjoy watching them rot. This is a matter of taste, not regulation.

And small-scale suburban and urban gardening has incredible potential. Using widely available data, Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International estimates that converting 10 percent of our nation’s lawns to vegetable gardens “could meet about a third of our fresh vegetable needs at current consumption rates.”

Ten percent is optimistic; even 1 percent would be a terrific start, because there is a lot of lawn in this country. In fact it’s our biggest crop, three times as big as corn, according to research done using a variety of data, much of it from satellites. That’s around a trillion square feet — 50,000 square miles — and, since an average gardener can produce something like a half-pound of food per square foot (you garden 100 square feet, you produce 50 pounds of food), without getting too geeky you can imagine that Doiron’s estimates are rational.

Gardening may be private or a community activity; people garden together on common land, and most gardeners I know share the bounty freely. (In parts of England and France, people grow vegetables in their front yards and encourage their neighbors to take them.)

…I recognize that turning lawns into gardens isn’t a panacea, but I also recognize that hounding people for growing vegetables in their front yards is hardly the American way.

Florida seems to be out to achieve special leadership in the “dumb as a hoe handle” school of reactionary politics. I posted about some other stupidity earlier today. In fact, one of the blogs I contribute to has a special graphic header just to illustrate “wacky news from Florida” – originally contributed by one of our editors who lived in Florida.

Top winners in the Royal Horticultural Society’s photo competition

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This image of an olive tree and tulips has won the Royal Horticultural Society’s annual photographic competition. It was snapped by Josie Elias, from Sherborne, Dorset, who said she stumbled on the garden in Marnes, Spain, by chance.

John Cocks’s leaping mouse was commended in the Wildlife in the Garden category.

Delightful. Reflective, almost pensive beauty – and an athletic rodent. Bravo!

Killer plant caught on camera eating blue tit

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Nurseryman Nigel Hewitt-Cooper, from West Pennard, was inspecting his tropical garden when he discovered one of his pitcher plants had trapped the bird.

He said he was “absolutely staggered” to find it had caught the creature.

It is believed to be only the second time such a carnivorous plant has been documented eating a bird anywhere in the world.

“I’ve got a friend who’s studied these particular plants extensively in the wild and he’s never found evidence of any of them having caught birds,” said Mr Hewitt-Cooper…

“The larger ones frequently take frogs, lizards and mice, and the biggest ones have been found with rats in them, but to find a bird in one is pretty unusual…”

Mr Hewitt-Cooper said he thought the blue tit had been attracted to the plant on Saturday by the insects and landed on its leaf.

“I think it must have leant in to pluck out an insect that was floating on the fluid inside, tipped in too far and become wedged and unable to get out.”

Nature is the ultimate opportunist. Mindless, reactionary in the physical sense.

My only problem with opportunism is hypocrites who think they turn it into ideological virtue.

Growing your own

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Several varieties of lettuce
 

Our inevitable onion patch

Doing some grillin’ and chillin’ today – some of the Italian sausage I talk the butchers at Whole Foods into making for me – ready in a few minutes to toss with home-made basil pesto and rigatoni. And I noticed the garden is getting to just about peak productivity and took a few photos to send on to family members who aren’t visiting, right now. To let them know what they’re missing.

Har.

Darwin award candidate

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A Russian man died after burying himself alive in a friend’s garden in the Far Eastern city of Blagoveshchensk in an endurance test that went wrong, according to investigators.

The 35-year-old man wanted to test his endurance and asked his friend to help him spend the night buried, according to Alexei Lubinsky, a senior aide to the region’s chief investigator.

The two men dug a hole in the garden and put inside an improvised coffin with holes for air pipes. The man also took a blanket, a bottle of water and a mobile phone.

The victim’s friend told investigators he covered the hole with planks and earth to a depth of around eight inches and then went home, after receiving a phone call from his friend telling him he was fine. The next morning, he found his friend dead.

Investigators speculated that a rainstorm overnight could have blocked the air supply to the coffin.

“We know that the victim was a computer programmer and that he has a small child,” Mr Lubinsky said, adding that he probably was influenced by reading stories about self-burial on the internet.

I’m honestly dismayed by the number of truly stupid risks people take with their lives after reading about inane behavior on the Web. If I strolled around town handing out leaflets suggesting idiotic life-threatening stunts for people to try I’d probably be locked away as a menace.

Deservedly so.

The Good Book: A Secular Bible – an interview with the author

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A.C.Grayling says his book…doesn’t attack religion, it’s a positive book, there’s nothing negative in it. People may think it’s against religion – but it isn’t.” But then he says, with a mischievous twinkle: “Of course, what would really help the book a lot in America is if somebody tries to shoot me.”

With any luck it shouldn’t come to that, but Grayling is almost certainly going to upset a lot of Christians, for what he has written is a secular bible. The Good Book mirrors the Bible in both form and language, and is, as its author says, “ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who’ve really experienced life, and thought about it”. Drawing on classical secular texts from east and west, Grayling has “done just what the Bible makers did with the sacred texts”, reworking them into a “great treasury of insight and consolation and inspiration and uplift and understanding in the great non-religious traditions of the world”. He has been working on his opus for several decades, and the result is an extravagantly erudite manifesto for rational thought…

Who does he think will read The Good Book? “Well, I’m hoping absolutely every human being on the planet.” He’s sure that a lot of people will wonder just who he thinks he is, to have written a bible, but doesn’t appear particularly troubled by this prospect. “The truth is that the book is very modestly done. My wife did give me a card,” he giggles, “that said, ‘I used to be an atheist until I realised I am God’. And I know that on Monty Pythonesque grounds there’s a good likelihood that in five centuries time I will be one, as a result of this.” He lets out another little chuckle. “But I certainly don’t feel like one now, that’s for sure.”

The little jokes and kindly bearing can make Grayling sound quite benignly jovial about religion at times, as he chuckles away about “men in dresses” and “believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden”, and throws out playfully mocking asides such as, “You can see we no longer really believe in God, because of all the CCTV cameras keeping watch on us.” But when I suggest that he sounds less enraged than amused by religion, he says quickly: “Well, it does make me angry, because it causes a great deal of harm and unhappiness…”

… We have to try to persuade society as a whole to recognise that religious groups are self-constituted interest groups; they exist to promote their point of view. Now, in a liberal democracy they have every right to do so. But they have no greater right than anybody else, any political party or Women’s Institute or trade union. But for historical reasons they have massively overinflated influence – faith-based schools, religious broadcasting, bishops in the House of Lords, the presence of religion at every public event. We’ve got to push it back to its right size.”

Atheists, according to Grayling, divide into three broad categories. There are those for whom this secular objection to the privileged status of religion in public life is the driving force of their concern. Then there are those, “like my chum Richard Dawkins”, who are principally concerned with the metaphysical question of God’s existence. “And I would certainly say there is an intrinsic problem about belief in falsehood.” In other words, even if a person’s faith did no harm to anybody, Grayling still wouldn’t like it. “But the third point is about our ethics – how we live, how we treat one another, what the good life is. And that’s the question that really concerns me the most.”

Exactly the same round robin of reflection I encountered and resolved when still a teenager. The atheist part came first and easiest. Studying materialist philosophy – especially as a dialectic, a mirror of physical processes in science – took a bit more work and brought an enormous amount of satisfaction in knowledge.

A study habit I’ve never lost and never will.