Honeyberry

aka haskap, grows nicely here. We've had some in the front yard for several years now. I've only eaten about 3 or 4 of the berries, though.

The way that you know that the berries are ripe is to look at the bush. If the robins are busily eating all the berries, they're ripe.

FWIW, we also planted strawberries in a 4x4 raised bed. They never produced much, so we yanked them out and planted flowers and fennel (don't do that) and whatnot. However we missed a few runners, and the strawberries spread, escaping the baleful shade of the coneflowers and forming a perimeter about the central garden, that actually produces strawberries. We usually get a few (mice get more), which is fine for a no-maintenance/no-expectation plant.

It took about 25 years for the grapevine to start producing significant quantities, and by then all the kids were grown, but grandkids learned how to harvest them anyway. We squeeze a lot of plants in a tiny city lot. You can't feed a crowd off them, but that wasn't the point.

Grafting

Discussing Romans 11 this morning we noticed how Paul uses the reverse of normal grafting to emphasize that his Gentile audience shouldn't get swelled heads: grafting wild grapes onto a cultivated vine.

Grafting is weird -- who thought of it? How could you guess you weren't going to just kill the scion?

People started doing it somewhere between the Middle East and China, and it slowly spread from those places. Apparently more observant people noticed naturally occurring "inosculation" where branches or roots grow together on contact. I've not seen this with branches, but I have with tree roots -- I just never made the connection. Somebody did, played around with the process, and came up with other possibilities.

Lots of other possibilities.

Voodoo lily

One of our daughters gave us a few bulbs. Last year they grew in a pot on the deck, and provided an exotic complement to the other flowers there.

This year one of the bulbs started sprouting early after the winter-over, so my wife potted it and set it up in the kitchen window. (We don't get a lot of direct sunlight in the house.)

It grew nicely, and started to flower.

I spent some time emptying cabinets trying to find the dead mouse until I realized where the smell was actually coming from. Turns out the voodoo lily is related to the infamous titan arum.

It is now in the garage with a plastic bag over it to keep it warm. When it is done blossoming it can come back inside, or if the weather warms up return to the deck...

Blame the ELF's

While doing research for a story, I ran across more detailed information about Project ELF (alternative link) than the news ever carried. Part of the technology is apparently still secret, but it looks like they were trying to use granite bedrock as part of the antenna. It wasted a lot of power, but it worked. At these frequencies (76Hz) people's claims of hearing a "hum" seem plausible. I don't know about claims of harm -- I generally discount those unless there's a clear physical model to connect them -- but this was curious:

On the other hand, faculty and researchers at the Michigan Technological University (MTU) School of Forestry and Wood Products have found that the Project ELF’s antenna grid makes the trees grow faster. MTU foresters have been studying the effects ever since the system became operational ten years ago.

The forester's final report says "subtle EM effect to the cambial and stemwood growth of some tree species but not to any other parameter". They claimed a relationship between "diameter growth and magnetic flux density" for aspen and red maple, and "annual height growth and magnetic flux density" for red pine.

That looked like an increase when the field was O(2-3mG), dropping off to "normal" for higher exposures. My first guess when seeing something that only effects a few species is a "look-elsewhere effect", but there's enough similarity that maybe it's worth looking at in more detail. I wonder what the conductivity of the sap is in the different species.

Squirrel!

Yes, I know there can be confounding factors, like distance from a cleared area (they look at that) or herbicides

Mold and radiation

You probably read about the study cultivating Cladosporium sphaerospermum on the ISS to see how this radiation-hardy--nay, radiation-using--mold would handle radiation in space.

OK, backing up. You probably read the reports that a species of black mold was happily growing in a radiation area in the Chernobyl reactor building. It not only wasn't getting (obviously) killed, it seemed to thrive better. "Melanotic fungi migrate toward radioactive sources, which appear to enhance their growth."

That led to a lot of studies of melanin and radiation. In vitro studies suggest that melanin is capable of harvesting electromagnetic energy similarly to, but less efficiently than, chlorophyll--and apparently at higher energies than chlorophyll (which absobs in red and blue bands: roughly 1.8eV and 2.8eV).

Interesting. So the experimenters put together a sealed pair of test chambers (and a duplicate to run on Earth), with two scintillators, one for each chamber, to detect radiation. (Their sensitivity peaked at about 50KeV energy deposited in some unspecified time.) Above these were petri dishes, one of which had been innoculated with mold spores. They kept them cold so the mold wouldn't start growing until they got into space, and once in space every 35 seconds they measured the temperature and the amount of the surface that turned dark with mold. The mold grew just fine. They looked at the difference between the "counts" (number of scintillator signals) in the control side and the moldy side, and found that the difference started at about 0 and grew as the mold did.

Now the difference isn't huge: about 2.6%, which, since the "shielding" was only one-sided you could double to get what the effect would be if you were surrounded by this in your spacecraft. 5% reduction would be nice, but not really worth the glowing headlines. And you can see the error bars on this. But there does seem to be an effect. The dotted lines at about 20 and 200 hours represent times when they estimated that mold had achieved 50% and 100% surface coverage. They had a camera and an algorithm...

Now even medium energy particles are going to do some damage going through creatures. I don't have any idea how a chemical could harvest medium energy photons and electrons resulting from the initial particle going through at some random angle, and suspect it isn't possible.

Low energy photons and electrons would be another matter. We have, in chlorophyll, a proof of principle that if you go low enough in energy harvesting is quite feasible. Even electrons knocked loose with low energy won't go far. But how do we get from here (e.g. MeV protons) to there (10's to 100's of eV photons)?

Researching that was a bit frustrating. The concepts are easy enough, but illustrating with examples, not so much.

At high energies, a photon interacting with matter loses energy by kicking loose electrons, and pair-producing electrons and positrons. Each of these is typically high enough energy to do the same in turn, and you get an exponentially growing number of particles up until their energies drop below the threshold for such fun and games. (And yes, the positrons eventually annihilate and produce photons.) This is all well understood, and well modeled, and I'd hoped to show the rest of the story. Unfortunately, the old standbys of Geant and EGS don't try to follow the showers all the way down.

Once you get below about 1KeV, molecular differences have a very strong effect on the outcome, and just modeling a shower in a nice uniform material like iron gets very complicated. The difference between interacting with an inner shell and an outer shell electron isn't negligible anymore.

So while I could show the cascades that happen from high or medium energy to fairly low energy, I cannot illustrate how the rest of the shower goes, as a (e.g.) 10KeV photon produces weaker photons and electrons which in turn produce less energetic ones.

Near the end of the low energy shower, an electron or photon of a few eV can excite, or perhaps even ionize, a molecule of the scintillator. When the excited electron returns to its original state the molecule produces a photon in the visible spectrum. It'll go some random direction, but if you have enough excited molecules (meaning more energy dumped into the scintillator by the incoming particles), enough of them will head in the direction of the light-sensing part to produce a signal. In really sensitive systems, all you need is one, but your noise rate goes way up, so typically you'll set your signal threshold a bit higher.

Two or three of these visible-light photons hitting your phototube (or equivalent detector) at about the same time will make a little electrical signal that you can amplify, and count if it is bigger than your threshold setting.

FWIW, layering scintillator and stuff to stimulate showers (like iron, lead, what have you), produces showers that produce amounts of light roughly proportional to the energy of the initial particle--which is very handy. Calorimetry. Anyhow, this experiment was just using scintillator in counting mode.

I'd be interested in seeing what photon energies these molds are capable of harvesting. Experiments like this subject them to a broad spectrum of energies. It's probably pretty hard to do--the tunable x-ray systems I know about are designed for radiation doses that would probably toast the molds (you can give plants too much light too).

More as I learn more...

Tree frog bedding

Canoe Plants

Polynesians brought along plants on their explorations, so that wherever they might land, they could produce the foods and tools and medicines they would need to survive, and perhaps travel onward from there. The link lists 24 plants taken to Hawaii, many of them serving multiple purposes. One plant might just be used to make rope, and another produce food, medicine, materials for clothing and for building.

Of the 24, 11 were used for food, 1 for an intoxicant, 12 for building materials and tools, 8 for clothing and beauty, 15 for medicine, and 3 had religious use as well.

They varied from tall trees to small garden plants. Some went wild as invasives, and others required careful cultivation and, in Hawaii, are almost gone.

Potato research

The Max Planck Institute anounced that they've sequenced the potato genome. This was tricker than usual, because the potato is tetraploid, with two pairs of genes coming from each parent. "efforts to breed new varieties with higher yields have remained largely unsuccessful to the current day. ... four copies of each chromosome also mean four copies of each gene, and this makes it highly challenging and time-consuming to generate new varieties that harbour a desired combination of individual properties"

Some unknown breeders managed long ago. "Today you can find over 4,000 varieties of native potatoes grown in the Andean highlands of Peru." I don't know how many of these are bred varieties, but it suggests that a little field work might help introduce some of the genetic variety the MPI is worried about.

Coppicing

When watching a video about ancient forest management in England, I got to wondering if the Chippewa (Anishinaabe) had gone in for coppicing. They used a lot of small branches, and that would seem like a good way to make sure you got a good stock of the right size.

But... The population density around here wasn't that high, so maybe forraging was easy enough. And how would they cut the trees without metal tools? Pounding the bejabbers out of a trunk with a stone axe seems like a way to induce rot, not new growth, in the stump. So maybe they didn't.

But reading around tells me that it was done in central America, and in California they had "Fire, Pruning, and Coppice Management of Temperate Ecosystems for Basketry Material".

I hadn't thought of fire, but that could work. So maybe they did. I'll ask if somebody knows.

Along the way I found Plants Used by the Bois Fort Chippewa Indians, which describes food, medicinal herbs, intoxicating herbs, and a revolting recipe for seasoning wild rice: though some of us buy kopi luwak and Black Ivory Coffee.

One finds the strangest rabbit holes sometimes. About hazel: "If you have never tasted a hazelnut, there is no way I can describe it.... Softly erotic, it's like making love in a sauna, heated by burning birch." Maybe the hazelnuts I ate weren't the special ones.

Laying hedges

The Internet lets me chase rabbits longer and farther. I went to look up more about cubits, and found a beautiful engineer's ruler from 3300 years ago:

That promptly led to hedgelaying.. (They apparently use the "cubit" to describe an elbow-to-finger measurement.)

I remember Tolkien writing about elves creating things out of living plants--like homes out of trees--and was pleased at his imagination.

It looks like he was expanding on familiar practices from the English countryside. You cut and bend stems of young trees to grow horizontally so they can be woven together to make a sturdy live fence. "The theory behind laying a hedge is easy. The practice is much harder, requiring skill and experience."

If you don't maintain them, they eventually grow into a messy line of trees.

There are some nice how-to pictures here.

Want to get involved? Oops, it's in the UK. Some US suggestions include: "American Hazel, Black Chokecherry, Chokeberry, and fragrant Sumac"