Winter Limits

Snow on Locust Hill

The world beyond my window is a vision of white.  It's been a really tough winter, hasn't it?  I can't get to the compost pile, my sheep can't get out of the barn, I had gutters that blew away in the wind, leaks in  the
master bedroom, plus a chimney fire.  But you've got to admit this year's New England winter has been     spectacularly beautiful.  It's a little hard to think about gardening, however.  My solution has been to get     out my Idea File which is full of newspaper clippings, jotted down thoughts that never germinated and a lot of little informative nuggets on a par with string too short to save.  I think of them as balloons too small to blow up into full sized columns.   
, 

                    

For instance, did you know you could turn your flower garden into a clock?  There's a flower that opens at just about every hour of the day.  These time-keeping mechanisms are known as circadian rhythms, from the Latin circa diem     which means "about a day."  We start with the Scarlet Pimpernel whose blossom unfolds each morning at 8 AM.  By   9AM the dandelion shakes out its shaggy yellow head and at 10 the morning glory tells us the time.     At 11 the water lily opens, followed at noon by the goatrsbeard.  Now we're up to 1PM when Califormnnia poppies spread their petals, but only on sunny days.  Chicory tells us when it's t 2PM, but when we skip to 4PM and - you guessed it - the 4 l'clocks open their flowers. Next it's the evening primrase...  OK, you get the idea.  I'm chucking that article into the wastebasket. 

Let's see what else is in my file. Here's an article titled "Doggedness pays off" about a Florida gardener who spreads

dry kibble, cat litter and alfalfa pellets on her garden, covering this unusual combination with cardboard and hay.  The dogfood is full of vitamins and trace minerals.  The alfalfa pellets provide potassium and beneficial bacteria as well as releasing nitrogen and phosphorus.  The clay in the cat litter helps to hold water in the garden's sandy Florida soil and the topping of cardboard and hay deters raccoons                                                                                                                     

Here’s a newspaper clipping I probably should have already thrown away.. “David Kurt of Pennsylvania State U. says that nude gardeners pick up 16 more pesticides on their bodies than gardeners wearing normal clothing.” Daughter Trum sent me this ages ago because I happen to live at the end of a dead-end road without a neighbor in sight, and used to enjoy sitting on a car mat in the nude when weeding the garden. Then I began wearing a Walkman while I weeded and decided if I was going to wear earphones while gardening, I’d better also wear clothing. OK, that’s crumpled up and thrown away.  I doubt if I could turn it into a full length column.

How about this one -  “What the Trees Really Say”  No one has discovered what Longfellow’s murmuring pines and hemlocks are talking about, thank goodness, but biologists have evidence that when Sitka willow trees are attacked by insects they communicate their distress to other trees by sending chemical signals.  Trees attacked by tent caterpillars exude a chemical called ethylene, a caustic compound present in wood tar, which when introduced into the tree leaves, makes them less appetizing to insects.  Nearby trees, even though not yet under attack, obviously get the word and begin producing this defensive chemical as well.

I always like to include something useful in my columns and I'm afraid my Idea File has failed in that respect.  Just this week, however, I  received an article on the affects of weather on the world’s food supply. that is well worth reading. I’m not a great believer in Global Warming since the temperatures on Locust Hill have already been below zero three times this month, but there’s no question that our climate gets crazier every day. So whether we’re headed for years of roasting heat or another Ice Age, our food supply will be in trouble. I hope you’ll go to http://tracking.etapestry.com/t/15336973/697217843/53995403/0/, click on “Food Fight”  to the right and read the article.  And when you finish, I hope you'll start planning where you’ll put your vegetable garden come spring.                                                                                                              

Here's one more little balloon in the form of a light-hearted poem  given to me by a biology teacher whose name I’ve forgotten.                                                                                                                  .

There should be no monotony

In studying your botany.

It helps to train and spurs the brain

Unless you haven’t gotany.

It teaches you – does botany –

To know the plants and spotany

And learn just why they live and die

In case you plant or potany.

You learn from reading botany

Of wooly plants and cottony

That grow on earth, and what they’re worth

And why some spots of notany.

.

Caribbean Palm Trees

          Let's leave all this cold weather behind and  head for the Caribbean in a little Memory Vacation our family took in 1972. The first palm trees I ever saw were on the island of Grenada as our airplane settled down among a few stray goats on the primitive dirt runway. Driven through the night at breakneck speed, we gaped at the surrounding jungle as we careened around and around hair-pin turns and dodging dogs and people through tiny villages until we reached St. George and the tiny cottage we'd rented.

        Grenada's beaches are pristine, and back in 1972 we had them all to ourselves.  Our vacation included a dozen adventures - a visit to the prison to buy sandals made by the convicts;  a luncheon invitation and a game of cricket with the Briggs, a family who'd befriended us; listening to a steel band playing classical music every afternoon; New Year's Eve at the Berian Bible church.  But best of all was climbing  Qua Qua, the only mountain on the island.

        Guided by Albert, a towering native Grenadian in immaculate white pants and shirt, we headed up a muddy track through the steamy jungle, surrounded by a tangle of vines and giant palms and exotic blossoms. The sounds of chattering monkeys and squawking, rainbow-hued birds filled the humid air.  Tiny striped lizards darted across our path as we squelched our way up the soggy trail.  A breath-taking view greeted us at the top as we looked down on the Grand E'Tang, a crater lake far below.

           After we'd consumed the lunch Albert  provided, we headed back down the mountain.  Our barefooted guide led the way, marching along with ease and remaining upright and unblemished by a single mud spatter.  The Taylors, on the other hand, slipped and slid from one tree trunk to another on the chocolate pudding path,  more often landing on our behinds than our feet.  When it came time for a break, we just flopped uncaring into the mud.



A very muddy family, plus an immaculate Albert

                 

        While we rested, Albert, his mouth pinched from trying not to laugh at the five mud pies in his care, pointed to a coconut palm  beside the trail. It's the easiest palm tree to identify as  it always has a few conspicuous coconuts hanging among its feathery leaves. That's because it knows no season and produces its flowers and fruits all through the year.  The blooms look like  exotic, upside-down trees, queerly jointed miniatures made of polished ivory, but they quickly turn brown on exposure to the light.  These clusters of flowers produce 10 to 20 full-sized nuts in six months, which will be fully ripe in less than a year's time.        

        A coconut, with its buoyant husk and leathery skin, can take ocean voyages that last for months.  Tossed by a wave onto a new beach that is suitable, the nut will send out a sprout from its soft eye.  One end of this sprout digs its sharp point down into the sand to start a root system, then sends a spear upward, the new baby palm tree.  Until it produces its first leaf, it gathers nourishment from the spongy tissue that fills the cavity inside the nut.  This edible custard is supposed to be ambrosial, but Albert couldn't find us a ripe nut on the mountain.

         Another distinguishing feature of the coconut palm is the fact that unlike most palm trees, it is rarely cluttered with the rat's nest of hanging dead leaves.  As the old leaves die, they break off, leaving a permanent scar on the trunk.  These scars are what enable the natives to climb up a coconut palm as if the trunk were a ladder. We watched as Albert got out his machete and did just that.  Then, making sure we were not in the way, he whacked off the top four feet of the trunk with his machete.  What he was after was a thirst-quenching treat, heart of palm.  

         Located at the top of the trunk, just below where new leaves begin to sprout, this succulent white vegetable is as thick and long as a man's leg if taken from a good-sized tree and is called "Millionaire's Salad" in many Caribbean hotels.  The children were pretty skeptical, but we all had a taste.  I can't remember whether it was good or bad, but definitely juicy and I think we were all happy when we reached civilization and got to wash off not just the mud but the sticky juice.

          The most elegant species of palms is the Royal palm.  It has a straight, smooth-ringed gray trunk. These regal palms are planted in stately rows leading up to government offices on most Caribbean islands.  It turns out that it was not called royal because of its elegant growth habits, however, but to honor General Roy Stone, an American engineer in Puerto Rico.

        An amazing looking palm species  called a cohune,  grows to a height of 100 feet.  I saw a grove of them in Belize, some of their plume-like fronds as long as 30 feet.  Unlike those of most palms, they point skyward, only flopping over when they die and are replaced by new ones.  There are more than 1,500 species of palms in the world, and at this moment I'd much rather be studying some in the flesh than in a book.  I can picture one of those powered sugar beaches in Grenada, ringed with swaybacked coconut palms, and remember basking in a tropical sun so hot it would evaporate raindrops, making them feel like tiny prickles on your skin.  Ah, well, time to put another log in the wood stove. 

Why have a Vegetable Garden?

          

           When the frost king has iced up the windows,

            And the wind has turned noses all numb.        

            When the snowstorms are here it’s the time of the year

            When those lovely seed catalogs come.

    Oh, it’s rubicund beets and tomatoes,

    It’s corpulent carrots and corn .          

            It’s lush little peas that bring summer’s sweet breeze

            To a winter that’s bleak and forlorn.

            Then I get out my gardening notebook;

            I lay out my plot with a rule.

            No trowel do I need to plant my fresh seed.

    A pencil’s my gardening tool..

    My garden is lush and prolific.

    In my mind all the seeds are soon sown.

    My potatoes and beans and my various greens

    Are the finest that ever were grown

    I know, for experience teaches,

    Come summer it won’t be the same,

    But I’m knee-deep in snow so my garden can grow

    Just the way that those catalogs claim.

This poem that I put to music for my Vegetable Program was written by Cedric Adams. I haven’t a clue who Mr. Adams is, or was, except that he obviously was a great gardener, and his poem is so appropriate for this column I had to use it.

I can think of dozens of reasons to have a vegetable garden besides the joy of brousing the seed catalogs when you're snowed in. It doesn't require the sort of talent or training needed by an artist or a musician.  Trying to sing in the choir when you don't have an "ear" can be as painful as trying to do your income tax without a calculator.  But the gardener doesn't need expertise to try his hand at growing thing.  Green thumbs are a fallacy - all thumbs get brown in the garden.
Vegetable gardening is a hobby that entails no red tape.  Think  of that! No forms to fill out, no need for a permit, no reason to stand in line, and nopthing to declare on your income tax.  What other hobby can you say that about?  Even a simple fisherman has to get a license or he'll have the game warden breathing down his neck.

Nnowadays there’s a very special reason to have a vegetable garden.  With our nation’s frightening obesity problems,  being able to offer your kids or grandkids fresh  and tasty vegetables for snacks is one way to keep then thin.  I"m  sure my mother's vegetable garden began my love affair with rabbit food,  what Mom called raw edibles.  Getting the kids to help plant, weed, mulch, harvest and do all the other jobs involved in a garden is another way to help keep them thin.

My three daughters learned how vegetables grow as soon as they could toddle out to the garden and help pick the beans, but I can remember one summer when I had the pleasure of introducing a city child to the miracles of the vegetable garden.  Tommy was about four at the time and his blue eyes grew as big as morning glories when we went out to pick a ripe tomato for lunch.  After all, tomatoes are supposed to be wrapped in cellophane, not hanging like red rubber balls on green vines.

Tom was as delighted as a kid at a magic show as I showed him around the garden, and I must admit I felt a bit like Houdini as I pulled aside the leaves of a squash plant to reveal the tiny golden sausages just starting life, and one fatter than the biceps of a weight lifter that I’d neglected to pick when it was young. I untied the leaves protecting the just beginning fruit of a cauliflower plant, relishing Tommy’s laughter as he discovered the little golf ball tucked inside.

We walked the new carrot row, thinning a few so that Tommy could see the magic of pulling a bright orange carrot from the dirt. The bush beans were ready for picking so I went to get a basket, and what with the phone ringing and a few other interruptions, it was a while before I got back to the garden. Sweet little Tommy had turned into a magician himself.  He’d pulled the entire row of inch-long carrots out of the hat so to speak. At least he seemed to enjoy eating quite a few of them at lunch.

The difference between vegetables fresh from the garden and ones bought at the supermarket is like comparing Beethoven’s 5^th symphony to a child’s rendition of chopsticks. And  as Cedric Adams points out, browsing through the seed catalogs is  a great way to spend a snowy afternoon.  But before you make your list of the seeds you plan to order, you might do well to check out last year’s leftover seed packets. If, like me, you’ve left your unused seeds  scattered around so they get wet or moldy or overheated,  very few will germinate. However, if you’re one of those conscientious people who puts her tools away at the end of the day and her seed packets in a cool dry place,  preferably in a coffee can so the mice can't get them, you can assume all of the 2010 packets will be viable this year.

The two books I have that describe how to test for seed viability make it sound more complicated than a pregnancy test, and more work than just planting the seeds and hoping.  More helpful are their lists of the life expectancy of various vegetables seeds.  Some, like tomatoes, cucumbers, melons and beets can last for six years or more.  The weaklings, viable for less than two years, include corn, leeks and onions, parsnips and parsley.  All other vegetables fall in the middle, living anywhere from two to five years.

I hope I’ve convinced you all to have a vegetables garden this year, or at least a few containers for a tomato plant or two.  I am still addicted to rabbit food, and in summer  I like nothing better than a heaping plate of whatever is ripe in the garden every day – snap peas, asparagus, radishes, carrots, peppers, cherry tomatoes, cauliflower.    In winter, even though they’re from the supermarket, I cut up a pile of  raw vegetables including celery  or cauliflower with a dip to dunk them in. I don’t carefully arrange my veggies on a platter, but I bothered to do so for their photo. 

My Favorite Houseplant

          I’m no authority on raising houseplants, but that doesn’t stop me from having plenty of them. Houseplants help me keep my sanity during the winter as much as my cat does. Both need food and water and sometimes bring unwanted creatures into the house, be it white fly and red spider mites or dead moles or baby birds, but when Jack Frost covers my gardens in a blanket of white and I hear the deer mice scurrying around in my attic, I’m glad to have both houseplants and my cat.


        My favorite houseplant is the creeping fig, Ficus pumila. I first became acquainted with it at the age of 12 when I saw one growing in my great aunt’s house. She had allowed it to escape from the confines of her conservatory and wander at will. Its dainty creeping branches, which cling by tiny aerial rootlets, had traveled across the livingroom ceiling to the hall and were gracefully making their way upstairs.


        It was more than thirty years before I saw another creeping fig and thought to raise one of my own. That year I topped my Christmas Wish list with a Ficus pumila. Not many nurseries carried them back then, and I think Hank probably went to half a dozen before he found one at Whiting's in West Hartford. It was a scrawny looking specimen, but I set it in a sunny window and taped its two drooping branches to the window frame. Two months later they had still made no attempt to cling to anything.


       Finally in late March two new shoots appeared and before I’d even taped them, they had put out stickers of their own and begun to creep up the window frame. By June one had almost reached the ceiling. If I’d done a little research, I would have saved myself a lot of agony. It turns out that the creeping fig has both male and female branches. The males are sterile and they refuse to cling to anything. The females are fertile fruiting branches, the ones that latch onto whatever’s close at hand and start to climb.


       Being an advocate of Women’s Lib, I won’t stop to make any analogy of all this. Suffice it to say that it is the fertile branches that produce babies and climb the walls. Of course a ficus raised as a houseplant does not produce fruit, but in the wilds of Asia, its native habitat, it does have small edible figs. Like its close relatives, the weeping fig and the rubber plant, it is undemanding and disease free when grown as a houseplant, but it must never be allowed to dry out. The one that sat in a south window died of thirst one hot summer day when I’d forgotten to give it a drink.

       In fact I killed several ficus plants that way before Hank

began building me containers that insured my fig plants  plants

would never die of thirst. The first was the wooden planter
lined with plastic.  As you can see, it stands almost 3 feet tall,
so that once a plant’s roots get established they can reach
down deep to where they can always get water, provided I
give the soil a good soaking once in a while.                             

That was a nice solution, but the next planter Hank designed was even better as it provided a plant's roots with an endless supply of fresh water.

       Using a bread tin as a container, Hank punched a hole in the bottom for the roots to go through and fitted the tin  into a nice mahogany board that sat, and still sits, on top of the toilet tank. How’s that for clever? The ficus in that planter was so happy it soon covered the walls and the ceiling . Eventually, however, I re-papered the bathroom and had to pull it down. Apparently it considered this treatment so traumatic that it has been reluctant to start climbing again.

                                                                                         This ficus lives in my bedroom.  For two whole years it just sat and sulked, but finally this past spring several fertile branches appeared and began to climb the wall.        
        So don't be discouraged if you buy a creeping fig that doesn't want to creep right away.  Provided you give it plenty of water, new shoots will appear and  their heart-shaped little leaves will start to make a tracery of greenery as they climb.                                                                         I do have other houseplants, but I find none of them to be as interesting as my creeping figs.

New Year Resolutions for 2011

          
        

It’s really hard to stick to one’s New Year’s resolutions, don’t you think? I’ve learned not to reveal my own in my columns as it’s painful to see them in print long after they’ve been abandoned. When I was at the impressionable age of 17, my minister preached a sermon on positive resolutions for the New Year – taking up a good habit instead of quitting a bad one. It’s a constructive idea, but one not many people follow. Almost everyone I know takes the negative route, trying to give up something – cigarettes, booze, chocolate.

If you’re a chocoholic who’s contemplating eliminating candy bars and Hershey kisses from your life in 2011, you can still safely read this column as I’m going to be talking about cacao’s horticultural life, not its final products.


No, you cannot grow a chocolate tree in your back yard. It requires a tropical climate, and must be raised within 20 degrees of the equator. Since it would be nice to be enjoying the balmy breezes of Brazil instead of the blustery blizzards of the Berkshires, let’s pretend we’re in South America right now tending our cacao orchard.


The cacao tree is medium-sized, similar in shape to a cherry tree, with cinnamon-colored bark and bright green leaves that are lance-shaped and smooth. Its wood is white and very fragile. The tiny pin, white or yellow blossoms are odorless and do not appear until the tree is 4 or 5 years old.


Our orchard here in Brazil is very tidy compared to those on the Ivory Coast where most cacao is grown. We plant in rows and keep the ground beneath free of brush and weeds. Aren’t the fruits weird? They look like orange footballs, sometimes striped with red, and grow right from the trunks of the trees as well as on the branches.


These gourd-like fruits take six months to ripen, but since blossoms appear year-round, they can be harvested continually. Cutting the pods from the trunks with a machete is relatively easy, but the ones growing high up in the trees must be cut with a cacao hook, as climbing among the delicate branches causes too much breakage.


The pods are soft compared to a coconut. An experienced worker can open about 25 in a minute. Inside there are as many as 40 ivory-colored seeds the size of olives, growing in uniformed rows. When a pond is first opened it looks just like a skull full of the bad teeth of a chocoholic, but once out in the air the beans acquire a purple tinge.

In three or four days the beans begin to ferment and begin to look and even smell a little like chocolate. Then they’re dried, bagged and shipped to the chocolate factory where Willy Wonka turns them into scrumptious delights – but not without a lot of work. First the beans must be washed and roasted, then hulled (the shells are ground up for cattle food,) and the “nibs,” as the inside kernels are called, are ground between heavy steel disks, resulting in a semi-liquid paste known as chocolate liquor.


There were no chocolate candies back in the 1700’s when Carl Linnaeus, the father of Taxonomy, chose to name the chocolate tree Theobromaw which means “food of the gods.” If you’re a chocoholic, why don’t you take up a good habit as your New Year’s resolution instead of giving up chocolate? What a shame to be deprived of something known as the food of the gods.                           


                              Happy New Year!

Christmas Gifts for Gardeners



A few garden gifts - a snickersnee, a kneeler, a Quick-connect and a clipper

 Those of you who are regular readers of Weeds and Wisdom are undoubtedly aware of how politically incorrect I am, so don't feel insulted if I talk about Christmas as if none of you were Buddhists or Jews or Muslims or Atheists. It's that time of year when I like to write a column about what to get your gardening friends for Christmas.


I’m a gardener who loves to weed, but I suspect most of your gardening friends find weeding a pain in the… back, so a container of Preen would make an ideal gift. Preen's little yellow pellets prevent weed seeds from germinating. The first time I bought Preen, I got a very small container, not trusting the advertisement. It worked beautifully. I filled all the cracks between my flagstones and they remained weed-free for the whole summer. What a treat! Preen really works, not on weeds that are already there, but on the weed seeds that want to pop up in undesirable places. That's a comforting thought when you know that a single dandelion can let 15,000 seeds fly through the air or that when lambs quarters grow into pigweeds they produces over 72,000 seeds. The second time I bought Preen I bought a VERY LARGE container. You can find this product in the gardening section of hardware stores or buy it online at www.preen.com.


I can’t live without my favorite ratchet tools, the small clipper, the medium clipper and the Maxi lopper. They’re all made by Florian Pruning tools. (1-800-2753618 www.floriantools.com). Florian holds the patent on the Ratchet Cut action, which is far superior to the ratchet tools made by other companies that may cost half as much, but don't even do half the job.


Hank gave me my giant snickersnee (his name for a lopper) about 30 years ago. It enables even old women like me to cut through really large branches. In case you're unfamiliar with the ratchet mechanism, let me explain how it works. Cut into a branch that's too big, move the lopper's green handle (there's one red, one green) back and the ratchet falls into another notch, allowing you to take a second bite, then if necessary, a third, and you find yourself cutting through a branch as big as your arm. Well, not quite, but you get the idea.


I used that lopper so much that it finally stopped ratcheting, so I sent it back to Florian this past August and then forgot about it until I needed to cut down this year’s Christmas tree, a small cedar growing in the lower sheep pasture. Having not heard from the company, I sent an email and got a nice email back saying yes, they had the lopper but didn’t know how to reach me. Sad to say, they also informed me that it was irreparable, but could be replaced for $94.50. I guess that’s a bargain since it retails for $130 and mine had held up for 30 years!


OOPS! I just realized that my Florian catalog was ancient so I went on the Internet to check Florian’s prices. The Maxi lopper (not included in the photo above) now costs $188.95. Well, you’re probably not as penny-pinching as I am, and that lopper is a bargain at any price. The mini lopper only costs $88.95 and the small pruner just $32.50 Either one would make a great gift. I plan to get my big lopper repaired in the spring, so I cut down my little cedar with a saw.


Another item I can't live without which has a very reasonable price is a kneeler, a waterproof foam pad. I am fortunate that although I have a bad back I have excellent knees. They're a must (good knees) for weeding, harvesting vegetables, opening bottom drawers, even making beds. All the garden catalogs have kneelers. I think even hardware stores carry them.


If you're looking for stocking stuffers, there's nothing quite as handy as the Quick Connect. These brass hose connections don't cost a lot, so get at least two so you can "mix and match" so to speak. Screw one end of a Quick Connect into your hose and the other end into a faucet or the sprinkler or another hose and you'll never have to screw around again as the Quick Connect needs just a little pull or push to attach or disattach.


A good garden book is always a treat for the holidays. My favorites are so old I thought they might be out of print so I went to Amazon and was delighted to find GARDEN SECRETS by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent and Diane E. Bilderback. This is by far the best book on raising vegetables so if your garden friends have vegetable gardens they will love this down-to-earth guide on planting, growing and harvesting them. It is chuck full of unusual facts and great suggestions. .


Amazon didn’t have my other favorite book, GREEN THOUGHTS by Eleanor Perenyi, an absolutely delightful writer, but they did have a newer version of GREEN THOUGHTS written not only by Ms. Perenyi, but also by Michael Pollen and Allen Lacy. These two authors are both fine writers but I don’t think they could possibly improve on Ms. Perenyi’s engaging style and humor.


Obviously I have to mention WEEDS AND WISDOM and MOTHER NATURE’S WIT AND WISDOM by yours truly which can be ordered on my Web Log (my preferred name for a blog) and selling for $15.00 each including shipping.


Have a Merry Christmas everyone!

Plant Evolution

                                 

            What incredible improvements have been made by plant breeders since the first brave caveman – possibly the adjective hungry would be better – nibbled on the bitter branching root of a wild carrot, or had the imagination to try eating a young thistle, the ancestor of our artichoke.

            Today’s vegetables have been derived from every single organ in the plant world.  Not just from roots and fruits, but from rhizomes, stalks, leaves, buds and blossoms.  Now you and I might have been bright enough to try eating leaves like lettuce and spinach, or fruits such as beans or squash, but would we have thought to chomp down on a stem, the part of a plant we eat in celery, leeks or asparagus?

We all know that the underground tuber of a potato plant is edible, but I bet quite a few folks died from thinking the potato’s  poisonous clusters of green fruits would make a tasty treat.   It must have been quite a while before they thought to try the knobby tubers hidden beneath the soil.  We can thank some innovative primitive for opening up a cantaloupe, peeling an onion to cook, or taste the immature flower of a broccoli plant.

The ancestors of today’s vegetables contained toxic substances needed to protect them from insects and foraging animals.  It wasn’t until plants were raised in cultivation that these toxins were no longer needed for survival and man could begin to eliminate them.

Actually it was undoubtedly man’s better half who bothered to plant the first seeds in her back yard.  She may have done it by mistake, dumping seeds along with the dinner leftovers, but when they sprouted, she had the smarts to nurture them.   She weeded and watered them, maybe even fertilized them.  All these efforts improved their quality, but even more important, it allowed her to save the seeds from the very best plants so they could be sown the next year.

The great debate over whether heredity or environment is more influential in forming a human being’s character may never be solved, and the same can be said about plant life.  I always thought environment was more important until the gene-splicers started manipulating flowers and vegetables faster than you can eat a fuzzless peach or peel a tearless onion.  Still, environment plays a large part in the changes occurring in nature.

Darwin’s theory – the survival of the fittest – couldn’t work without the effects of the environment as well as heredity.  The moth that avoids being spotted by a bird because her wings are camouflaged to look like the bark of a tree lives to pass along that gene to the next generation in the eggs she lays.  The flower that adapts itself to pollination by a different species of bee when its regular pollinator has died out, passes that trait on in its seeds.

One of the best examples of the changes created in the plant kingdom by both heredity and environment is found in Brassica oleracea.  It may seem hard to believe, but this single species has evolved into nine variations – broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, collards, cauliflower, kohlrabi and three different cabbages – savoy, red and green.  The cabbage family is not a family, not even a genus, but a species that has produced nine subspecies.

When you stop to think about the infinite variety of delicious vegetables available nowadays, say a little thank you, not just to the horticulturalists, but to Mr. and Mrs. Neanderthal.