From The Old Farmer's Almanac.
From The Old Farmer's Almanac.
Mountain lions have been spotted in parks in the middle of suburbs. Displaced by the back country fires, and hungry and cross, they prowl city parks looking for dinner. We should be kind to the wildlife, whether they lost their homes in the fires, or whether they have always lived among us in our backyard gardens and wood piles. The mountain lions are tranquilized, treated as necessary, fed and released back in the unburned mountains.The personal phone call hasn’t come just yet. But it will. When they realize they need my help. Idaho Gardener. Yes, I can garden the entire state if someone would just ask me. No job too small. We need 2 MILLION pounds of sagebrush seeds. They are “smaller than cracked pepper.”
According to the Idaho Statesman, “over 4000 square miles of the Great Basin went up in flames last year, 1000 square miles of that in the Murphy Complex fires, the biggest fires in Idaho in 97 years.”
My beloved botanist Ann DeBolt, tells me my hillside is a place to start. I have artemisia tridentata tridentata (big basin sage) growing right across the lawn and a gazillion acres of it across the street. And one particular plant (”unofficially and federally protected” [ read: MA has a shotgun]) is growing in a crevice in the middle of my sandstone patio.
OK, that is not my lawn. But I wish it was. Credit goes to Gary Monroe, who copyrighted this photo for the USDA Plants Database.
And for those of you not in love with the sagebrush steppes and desert of the Great Basin……we planned it that way. Stay where you are.
The term ‘freeze to death’ is a pretty common part of our human lexicon, particularly if one resides in Canada. It’s a little grim to think about, but I suppose we bandy that phrase about because we know that anyone left outside to freeze in January isn’t likely to have a miraculous resurrection upon thawing. So if our cold winters are that hard on us, shouldn’t the same dire outlook apply to soil-borne diseases that freeze in our gardens and on our tools? Unfortunately, the answer is a firm no.
Although we have several million years of evolution on the African savanna to thank for transforming us into cold wimps, soil-borne diseases were evolved in some pretty tough environments. Of course, it’s not all a winter vacation for them; their activity does come to a grinding halt once the ground freezes, but soil diseases are incredibly patient and are able to slumber through the winter none the worse for wear. If, for example, the temperature in your yard drops down to -20 C, the little clumps of diseased soil clinging to the trowel that you left on your deck will also drop to -20 C. The difference, however, is that although the diseases won’t escape suffering a freezing, they will avoid suffering freeze damage. How they do that is by preventing the insides of their cells from developing ice crystals. The science bit is actually quite simple: ice crystals cause cell walls to burst, which allows the critical cell material to leak. Leakage equals cell death. Therefore, in order to prevent such a scenario, some disease organisms do two things: increase the concentration of antifreeze-like compounds within their cells and boot out any superfluous water within those cells. In either case, the result is a rather languid and tranquil winter rest for the diseases we hate.
So if freezing isn’t the answer to eliminating disease, what is? Well, when it comes to winning the battle, cleanliness is intricately linked to victory.
The first step on the path to defeating soil-borne diseases is to sanitize any dirty tools, trays or pots prior to use. It’s fine to leave dirt-smeared trowels on your deck over the winter, but they must be cleaned prior to digging into next year’s potting soil. That involves removing all of the visible dirt with a simple water rinse. Your next job is to eliminate the invisible dirt that hiding out in the tiniest of cracks and crevices. In the greenhouse industry, the standard method is to dip the equipment into a 10 per cent solution of bleach and water. Just remember that although bleach is an excellent sanitizer, it’s also rather corrosive to metal, so don’t soak your tools for more than a few seconds and then rinse them thoroughly with clean water, and be sure to dry & oil them.
That’s all there really is to it. Of course, I know it would be wonderful if every last plant disease would freeze to death during a January cold snap, but perhaps being out maneuvered by organisms that are lower than us on the food chain is Mother Nature’s way of showing us that the environmental niche we occupy is a lot more fragile than we think. Then again, maybe she’s just decided she’s too old and busy to clean up after grownups who like playing in the dirt.
From The Old Farmer's Almanac.
