Hairspray, GMOs and the Road to Perdition -- a Philosophical Gardening Primer

“Ecology is a dirty seven-letter word to many people. They are like heavy sleepers refusing to be aroused. ‘Leave me alone! It's not time to get up yet!’”

--Frank Herbert

The most egregious failures of humanity to deal with our unhealthy relationship to the world around us take place under our very noses.  We remember encountering stories in 1970s about the effect of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone layer, and overnight the use of aerosol spray cans (most notably for hair spray) became taboo items… yet to get that ever desirable feathered hair look every guy and gal in the 70s and 80s (no longer able to slather aerosol-fueled-hairspray in a guilt-free manner) instead used liberal amounts of pump-spray hair products, and never thought once (let alone twice) about the idea that just because the aerosol problem was solved did not mean there were no other petrochemical evils invoked by our vanity.

And, of course, no one wears their hair that way any more anyway, so what did we really gain by this behavior?  Not much, other than a few more baby steps toward ecological perdition.  We avoided adding pollutants to the stratosphere by cutting back on one kind of chemical, but we kept right on truckin’ with adding petrochemicals to our water supply, not to mention all the environmental harm caused in the manufacturing process for both hairspray and the plastic containers it came in.

We are not going to spend much time beating this particular dead horse, however.  Overuse of manufactured goods and services (particularly the petrochemical variety) has become obvious to all but the most obtuse observers – we know we use too much, we know we need to kick the oil habit, yes, yes, Myrtle, we hear you, you’ve been standing in that particular bully pulpit, squawking into the same old bullhorn, for long enough.

Instead, we would like to suggest today that there are other stories to which we do not pay much attention, but which have every bit as much environmental significance as our abuse of the natural world in the form of pollution and neglect.  And we’re not talking about an ad hoc, line-item review of human behavior; we are talking about a review of how we think about what we do.  Essentially, by ignoring the nature of Nature, by not realizing that it is an interconnected system, or, rather, a series of interconnected systems, we have allowed unimaginable degrees of vulnerability to develop all around us.  Our basic philosophy of how we fit into the world, and how we relate to it, is, to be blunt, messed up.

We were reminded of this idea recently by seeing a story oft repeated in the Facebook feeds of many of our friends in the skeptic community – a story on the science behind the health effects of GMO (genetically modified organism) crops.  The science, these stories report (and many of our skeptic friends believe as a consequence) suggests that there are no deleterious health effects to consuming GMO crops.

This is, on its face, a ludicrous idea, but not for the reason most folk who discuss GMOs (either as advocates or as antagonists) would think.

Eating a GMO crop is not particularly unhealthy, in general.  As a generic concept, a GMO crop is not especially different from a crop whose genetic makeup has been altered via the cultivation process.  When it comes right down to it, all corn (maize to our non-U.S. readers) is “genetically modified” – there is no “natural” maize.  Proto-Mayan farmers in the dawn of time tended and teased a grassy grain in Central America until it became corn.  It would not exist without human intervention.  And outside of an extreme allergic reaction, we cannot imagine any reason why eating it would be any more dangerous than eating any other cereal crop.  It would be possible through genetic manipulation in a lab, one would suppose, to create a poisonous variety of corn… but then, a patient farmer with time on his hands for this dubious enterprise could undoubtedly do the same thing through selective breeding.

So, eating an ear of corn with a modified genetic makeup is not, in and of itself, unhealthy.  However, the act of eating is not an isolated event.  It happens as part of a system.  And it is here that GMO crops are not only unhealthy, they are downright perverse and deadly.

The point behind the vast majority of genetic modifications to crops is seldom to increase the nutritional value of the plant or animal being modified.  No, most GMOs are so-modified because the engineers involved are attempting to increase productive yield – in the case of GMO corn or vegetables, by decreasing the amount of crop loss from insects and drought, or by changing the natural timeline for fruit set (making tomatoes which require less sunlight, or changing the temperature requirements for either fruit set or for ripening, for example).

We have already mentioned one of the problems with this approach in a previous posting about the effects of neonicotinoid poisons which some GMOs have allowed plants to create on their own – essentially, some GMO crops kill any insects who encounter them, including not only the grasshoppers, aphids, etc. who have been the bane of farmers since farming began in roughly 10-15,000 B.C.E., but also beneficial insects like bees, without whom all of agriculture (and, by extension, all civilization) would pretty much come to a halt.

Even without singling out one particular GMO, though, the entire approach can be called to task for a fundamental philosophical failing.  Increasing production sounds like a good idea, but… it is actually a catastrophe waiting to happen.  Growth for the sake of growth is the ethic of the cancer cell, and that is more or less what agriculture has become – an ecological cancer. 

Large scale agribusiness has created huge swaths of land which are monocropped, and we have seen time and again that uncontrollable large scale destruction is the inevitable result.  One would think that the devastation wrought by the Dust Bowl years would have given us pause to think about the entire approach we were taking to the question of how to feed ourselves… but the lesson we learned from that specific

catastrophe was that specific conditions could be controlled.  Farmers did not stop planting acre after acre of the same kind of crop (which was the real problem); instead, they changed tillage methods, which only solved a symptom.

And GMOs are much the same:  the problem is that large scale agriculture creates systemic failures, as it replaces natural ecosystems with unnatural ecosystems of limited biodiversity and tremendous vulnerability to the slightest entropic change.  Instead of treating this disease (ecological cancer), GMOs treat symptoms.  Just like chemical fertilizers do.  Just like overpumping slow-charging aquifers… just like building dams on low-flow river systems… just like applying indiscriminate pesticides… just like hundreds and thousands of other engineered adaptations to ecological failures, GMOs are not bad because they are in and of themselves bad, they are bad because they are part of a cancerous philosophy.

Like teenagers trying to imitate the hair styles of Farrah Fawcett or a young John Travolta (because, let’s get real, even John Travolta doesn’t want to be like old John Travolta), corporate farmers pay attention to form and not to substance.  The overapplication of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and excessively pumped

water are all problems of which agribusiness is well aware… and to their credit, much like fashion-conscious teenagers of yesteryear, they are doing what they can to throw out those things which have been proven to be bad.  Unfortunately, just like teenagers who switched from one bad cosmetic to another, agribusiness is merely shifting from one kind of bad behavior to another.

The real problem is vanity.  We are, as a species, mired in the same self-absorption we so easily see on every teenager’s bathroom counter.  We think of increased production as “the end result”, without realizing that there is no “end” result.  There is no “end” – we are part of a series of cycles, part of an endless flow of systems, everything we do, everything we are, everything we take, everything we discard, comes from someplace and goes someplace.  And, on a closed planet with a strong gravitational pull, all those someplaces are connected with each other.

Instead of thinking about problems in production as “problems” or even as “in production”, we should think about what is happening in the context of how natural systems are attempting to balance themselves.  A useful way to visualize this is with a reexamination of the concept of entropy.  The 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics essentially posits that systems move from any state lacking thermodynamic equilibrium to a state in which there is equilibrium. This is often mischaracterized as moving from “less chaos to more chaos” or “less randomness to more randomness” – which is often true, but it really misses the point.  The point is, any system moves from a state in which small changes in one variable cause big changes in all the other variables to a state in which  even small changes to any variable are not likely.

Put still another way, things tend to change a lot until they naturally progress towards a state in which they don’t change much.  Every time humans try to control nature, we have to relearn this lesson – as children, we try damming rivulets of rainwater runoff coming out of a puddle, only to discover that our little dams made of mud are vulnerable to erosion, and eventually wash away.  As grownups we discover that the gutters we put on our roofs to direct rainwater runoff get clogged by leaves and other debris, and if we do not constantly intervene, the natural state of the universe slowly but inexorably adds “roof damage” to the list of reasons our houses – which we foolishly think of as “permanent” structures – will be reduced by the sands of time to rubble.

I am Ozymandias, King of Kings

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

 This way of thinking sounds pessimistic to some; those people are probably no fun at parties, is our guess.  There is nothing dour about recognizing how things work.  In fact, it’s quite the reverse.  To give an agricultural example… when there is an infestation of insects on your tomatoes, the cynical approach of the last century has been to think of some way to poison the bugs without poisoning ourselves – sometimes unsuccessfully, but… as we have suggested all along, maybe even the “successes” should be viewed as “failures” because, let’s be honest, they are.

So… just let the bugs eat my tomatoes?  Myrtle, you’re nuts!

Au contraire.  The problem isn’t the bugs.  The problem is that the system is out of balance.  Putting it back in balance means taking the tomatoes out of isolation, where they are vulnerable to the implicit dynamic inequilibrium of monocropping.  In plain English, plant some flowers, you fool.  Nasturtiums, sunflowers, marigolds, a few herbs like basil, catnip, mint… create a more vibrant, biodiverse ecosystem in your garden and… Presto!  Your heirloom tomatoes are every bit as healthy as your neighbors’ GMO tomatoes are, and they are prettier, to boot.  And you will be much more prepared to deal with the next scenario of inequilibrium, whatever it may happen to be, because you have treated the cause not the symptom.

Trust us, it’s much more fun to be smug than depressed.  Ozymandias was a schmuck.  So is John Travolta, when it comes down to it.

Happy farming!

The Pie of a Thousand Grapes Begins With a Single Vine

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

We are looking at a bumper crop of muscadine grapes this year. Every bit of literature you will ever find on the wild grape of Texas will tell you that they do not bunch – the fruit hang singly, not in clusters. Well, judge for yourself from the photo evidence; these may not be traditional clusters like you will see from table grapes or champagne grapes… but that, my friends, is a boatload of “singly” hanging grapes.

These grapes are on a trellis on our back porch; they come from a vine which volunteered from a huge cluster of vines in the part of our yard we have historically referred to as “The Faerie Ring”, though it is now known as “The Bee Yard” (more on bees in a future installment, we promise!)

For the first three years in which we got serious about the business of growing grapes, our harvests have consisted of a few fistfuls of fruit – delicious, to be sure, but not particularly prodigious. We blamed drought and birds, but the truth was something far more mundane – impatience. We simply hadn’t allowed for the necessity of the two key ingredients to a long-term project: the amount of utterly mind-numbing maintenance necessary for success, and the passing of time.

We have not trained our vines the way vintners do; rather than limiting ourselves to two branches on a T-shaped vine with a limited height, we have “limited” ourselves to a more fantastical assortment of four or five branches, some of which go overhead to form a living roof over our pseudo-porch. Instead of the wooden deck we had originally envisioned, we have opted for a living, breathing space where wooden benches define the area as “useful”, but green grass at our feet, and wild tangles of grapes above our heads and all around us serve as walls.

Decorative, yes. But we did it this way because it’s less work. And because the vines absorb summer sunlight which would otherwise hit our windows, and since it’s a southern exposure, and this is Texas… that is kind of a big deal.

Meanwhile, this is the fourth year in which we’ve been scratching and clawing to get a grape harvest. And it looks like the first time we will be able to brag about having done so. This leads to our favorite pastime – self-reflection. Philosophical navel-lint-picking would be another way to describe it. However one chooses to characterize our musings, though, this whole journey-of-a-thousand-grapes-starting-with-a-single-vine thing is right up our alley.

There are all sorts of other projects at Big Myrtle’s place which either have taken a long time to come to fruition, or are taking a long time. Our rainwater collection pond took three years to reach its current depth of 8 feet; our second such pond will probably take two more years to get there.

We have been building our privacy fencing in piecemeal fashion, and it will be six more months before we are done. Our raised bed vegetable garden is only about half installed, with ten beds at present; we will probably take another year to get the rest put in. Our pomegranates may produce fruit this year; our olives might produce fruit in another year or two. We are going to plant a good 15-20 more fruit trees (plums, apricots, almonds, huckleberries), all of which will take a good 2-3 years minimum to start giving us a return on our investment.

And then there’s the bees. We installed a package of buckfast bees from R. Weaver apiaries this past weekend. Mr. Myrtle Maintenance may have messed up the queen cage by damaging the bottom cork – we won’t know for sure for another week or so – but even if he blew the curve and completely messed up the installation, it won’t really matter, long term. Our decision is firm: we are going to build more top bar hives, and buy more bees, and we are going to produce honey. This year? Probably. Next year? Definitely!

Successes are welcome; mistakes? They are nothing more than another squashed grape in the must. And you can’t make muscadine pie without squashing a lot of grapes. Whatever mistakes we make with the bees will fall into the same category as all the mistakes we have made with the grapes… the veggies… the herbs… the chickens… And we will keep right on keeping on, because we can’t think of anything else we’d rather be doing.

Happy farming!

True Grime... er, Grit... Oh, Never Mind. Just Garden!

"Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars."
--Gwendolyn Brooks, 'Song for Winnie'

“If it comes from a plant, eat it.  If it’s made in a plant, don’t.”
--Michael Pollan

The amount of gloom-and-doom available in whatever may be your media of choice is almost limitless.  Likewise, the amount of doom-and-gloom conceivably constructed from one’s own observations of the world around them is limited only by one’s own imagination.

We try to avoid despair and negativity at all costs – not because we don’t want to know about what is wrong with the world, but because we would rather have problems presented to us as challenges instead of as insurmountable obstacles.  We may not be able to solve every global crisis by playing in our garden or spending a meditative morning watching our chickens be the bird-brains they are… but we like to entertain the notion that playing in our garden and musing with our chickens are helpful things, and that pleasant notion is never more at hand than it is with the coming of Spring.

We have begun our full-on assault on the lassitude of Winter in the last couple of weeks, and hope to completely reinvent our garden by the time tender vegetables go in the ground some time in the next couple of weeks (depending on the long-range forecast).  With this in mind, we would like to express our hope that the truth-telling Gwendolyn Brooks speaks about as a goad toward unhealthy self-medication can be somewhat assuaged by growing and eating healthy and tasty plants in our very own backyard.  The news (however acquired) is much less noisesome through this lens, even when it is entirely unpalatable.

As an example, January 2013 is officially the 2nd hottest January in the records dating back to the mid-19th century for the contiguous United States, and ninth highest for the planet as a whole.  Global warming is real, anthropogenic, unavoidable, and increasing.  While petrochemical robber barons choose to bury their heads in the tar-sand, the rest of us (who opt to be honest with ourselves) know that things will never again be the same, and that some of the consequences of this change will be devastating and catastrophic.

However….

On the bright side, “planting season” comes earlier and earlier each Spring.  Of course, we put quotes around this phrase for a reason – every season is time to plant something.  Still, Spring is the time people traditionally think about when discussing the first part of the cycle of life for garden vegetables.  Mention that you have a vegetable garden, and Texans immediately think of tomatoes, peppers, corn and squash.  Even carnivores and junk food addicts recognize these foods as basic staples, with perhaps a smattering of other favorites thrown in (cucumbers, melons, etc.), and know – more or less – that a Texas gardener should start think about putting these plants in the ground some time in March.

What they may not realize, if they do not themselves have their hands in the dirt every year, is that it isn’t really “March” which marks the beginning of the time to plant these crops.  Instead, it is the onset of warmer weather and in particular warmer soil which determines when these tender vegetables should be planted. 

There are various tables and charts available if you do enough research showing the warmth the soil needs to reach before certain crops can go out safely, and depending on what you want to plant you may wish to google this information.  It will certainly be more accurate than relying on the “When to plant” chart on the back of most commercially available seed packets. 

We have seen suggestions, as a “fer instance,” that Spinach ought to be planted in April in Texas, and we wonder what planet the seed company executive who signed off on that ridiculous suggestion might have been living on… We suppose if you want to harvest precooked spinach in May and June, you could plant it in April…  but for most of Texas, spinach is a Fall and Winter crop, which is harvested from November through April.  If it comes from Texas anywhere from May through October, you can be sure it was grown in an air-conditioned greenhouse.

Be that as it may, even when the timetable oriented charts are relatively accurate (meaning the actual temperature requirements of the plants really do coincide with the suggested planting dates), the dates are getting earlier and earlier.  Some plants have higher success rates than others outside of their comfort zones, and can be planted at earlier dates than other plants sharing the same optimal range – as a consequence, things like cucumbers and some kinds of squash can survive at slightly lower temperatures than other tender veggies like maize or nightshades, or even hot weather herbs like basil or lavender. 

And the only way to know for sure what category things really fall in is to experiment, which we at Myrtle’s place are far more than happy to do.

We have discovered, for example, that amaranth (one of our favorite all time crops) will not thrive unless the soil is at least 70° when the seed sprouts.  As it turns out, in the Brazos Valley, that can happen as early as the middle of March, or as late as the middle of April.  We have also discovered, much to our pleasure, that if we put the seed out in early March, most of it won’t actually sprout until nighttime air temperatures are in the low 60°s… and looking at the long-range forecast this February, we have decided we can go ahead and seed our amaranth beds now. 

We have better-than-even odds of not having any more freezing weather, and better-than-even odds of having soil temperatures in the 70°s as soon as mid-March, a full month earlier than the suggestions in planting guides written back in the dawn of time by experts who thought the climate was less variable.

This means there’s nothing wrong with pushing up the planting dates for a whole host of different veggies – cucumbers, summer squash, amaranth, etc.  One doesn’t usually find these crops going in alongside things like leeks, onions, garlic, spinach or broccoli, but that is exactly what is happening this year, and is likely to happen on a more regular basis as the years go by and the planet heats up.

We don’t pretend that putting in raised beds for our vegetables to give us more control over drainage and soil temperature, and planting crops earlier and earlier each year thanks to warmer soil and air, and a host of other adaptations we are making in our garden to environmental changes we observe through the cycle of each season, are in any way “solutions” to the crises presented by global climate change.

What we are suggesting, however, is that our individual adaptations can and should be part of a global chain of cumulative adaptations, none of them individually making much of a splash, but all of them together making a tidal wave of evolutionary change in the fate of our species (and hopefully the fate of some of our fellow species, as well).

Ultimately, this approach is simply an equal and opposite reaction to the initial chain of unhealthy actions which got us into this mess in the first place.

The heating up of the global climate, after all, is not due to a few isolated decisions made in the course of human history – or even just a few decisions made since the onset of the industrial revolution.  Reading the daily headlines it would be easy to demonize the petrochemical industry and the internal combustion engine, for example, since those are the two greatest contributors to greenhouse emissions over the past 150 years.  But the story actually goes back much further than that.

The Anthropocene (the geologic era demarcated by the time when human inhabitants of planet Earth first started changing our climate) is generally granted to have started at the end of the last great glacial ice age, some 10,000 years ago.  Truth be told, the invention of agriculture, which began shortly after the ice retreated, was in and of itself humanity’s most invasive and consequential attack on the natural world; Gaia has been on the ropes ever since we first started tilling the ground.

Learning to be more gentle and cooperative in our attempts to coax nutrition from the soil is the choice we need to now make, one backyard, porch, windowsill and vacant lot at a time.  We will undoubtedly assault the agribusiness paradigm more fully in the future, dear reader, as we believe the large scale farm to be the cause of hunger and malnutrition throughout the world, not a potential cure for those maladies, but for now we wish to extol the local virtue, not the global vice. 

No one individual family in Bryan/College Station, Texas, nor in Macon, Georgia, nor in Baden-Baden, Germany, nor in the Faroe Islands or in Sri Lanka, can by themselves reverse the harm we have done to the environment over the last ten millennia, but then, we can’t collectively solve our global problems without the contributions of each of those individual families, either.

Only by each of us as individuals deciding to take care of that part of the environment within reach of our own arms can we collectively hope to one day say “Insurmountable problem – mounted!”  As such, we invite all those who find themselves overwhelmed by stories about rising oceans, and dropping water tables, and e-coli infestations on the produce in markets worldwide, and all the other ills inundating our senses every day, to turn off the television, step away from the computer, put the cellphone on idle, and go get dirty.  Put your hands in the soil, smell it, sift it, get to know it.  Listen to and watch all the critters, whether no-, two-, four-, six- or eight-legged who call it home.  Do your own experiments.

And, a little less stressed and a little more hopeful, eat the results.

Happy farming!

When less is more, do more with less

Versatility is king for small operators.  “It slices, it dices, it juliennes!”  Every tool on a half-acre homestead has to do more than one thing, including the plants.  Our grape vines, for example, produce grapes, but they also provide shade in summer, cutting our cooling costs by soaking up the sun before it has a chance to hit our western exposures.  Our blackberry vines provide copious quantities of fruit, and also provide a thorny border demarcating our property line – an important consideration in a neighborhood which used to treat our property as a pedestrian highway.

There are all sorts of other multi-functional plants, many of which we have in our garden.  Legumes (beans and peas) provided tasty meals, but also bind nitrogen to the soil for following crops in future seasons; amaranth provides grain, but it also chokes out the grass which is the natural enemy of our anti-turf family.  Sunflowers provide seeds, and they also feed our native bee population; we are putting in bees this year, which will provide us with honey, and will also pollinate many of our plants.

January means seed-catalog time, and we have spent our fair share of time going over heirloom seed catalogs with a fine-toothed comb, looking for just the right combination of productivity, versatility, health and vitality on the part of those things we are going to add to our garden this year.

The major addition, of course, will be several varieties of amaranth, which we have spoken about at length for many months now.  A couple of other interesting new crops, however, we have only mentioned in passing, and we did not find either in our catalogs.  We have had to special order mucuna pruriens, better known as velvet beans, or cow itch.  We are also planting cyclanthera pedata, better known as caigua in Peru, or lady’s slipper in Britain.

Neither of these delectable veggies is a mainstream crop in this country yet, but we hope to change that one seed at a time.

Velvet beans will serve several important functions in our garden.  First and foremost, this plant has historically been a significant ground-cover in the Florida tomato industry, only having lost favor in the last several decades as a caterpillar specifically attracted to the mucuna vine gained prominence, and then began attacking several other cash crops in Florida.  Having reviewed the literature, we believe the risk of pests was overstated, exaggerated by the tendency to monocrop, rely on pesticides, and just generally mess with Mother Nature.

On the other hand, using a vigorous leguminous vine like mucuna not only adds nitrogen to the soil, it chokes out unwanted weeds, provides groundcover to hold topsoil in place, regulates soil temperature, nourishes beneficial soil microbes, chokes out harmful soil microbes, and gives shade to tender leafy vegetables during the harshest times of day during the hottest parts of the growing season.

In addition to all of these agricultural benefits, mucuna has the advantage of being a tasty source of protein and several essential nutrients, in addition to being useful as a medicinal herb.  Mucuna seeds contain from 20-35% crude protein.  The ‘itch’ from ‘cow itch’ comes from the hairy seedpods (which are also where the ‘velvet’ in ‘velvet bean’ comes from).  These hairy seedpods are high in serotonin and mucanain, which, in addition to being neurologically significant, also cause a mild allergic reaction – in fact, itching powder used to be manufactured with velvet bean seed pods.

The beans themselves also contain high concentrations of levodopa (L-DOPA), a direct precursor of the neurotransmitter dopamine.  This makes velvet beans a potentially important part of the diet for anyone battling depression, parkinson’s disease, erectile dysfunction, low libido, or anxiety disorders.  Lucid dreamers have also recently taken a fancy to mucuna, which complicated our search for seeds greatly – most of the mucuna for sale on the market is not in seed form, it is in herbal supplement form, which does a gardener no good whatsoever.

Caigua is another vine we will be growing this year, and it has a lot to offer, as well.  Curcurbits do very well in southeast Texas, and Caigua is essentially just another cucumber, so we expect it to flourish.  What makes caigua special, however, is its potent blend of phytochemicals – peptin, galacturonic acid, dihydroxitriptamine, pierine, resins, phosphorous, thiamine, ascorbic acid, lipoproteins, systosterol and 3 beta D glucoside, low density lipoproteins, and God only knows what all else.

Inca-period pottery and artwork often depicts caigua; it has been an important vegetable for a long, long time.  Taken in conjunction with the herbal supplement Hercampuri, caigua reduces blood cholesterol levels, rejuvenates skin, and reduces cellulite.

What makes caigua less popular outside of Latin America is uncertain, although it is a little unusual as a cucumber – the closer it gets to being ripe, the more “hollowed-out” the fruit becomes.  The seeds end up clinging to an internal membrane that looks suspiciously like that of a bell pepper.  And by a remarkable coincidence, that is basically what caigua tastes like.  In fact, one of the more popular ways of serving this vegetable is in the form of a caigua rellena – similar to the tex-mex dish chili rellenos.

We think there will probably be a lot of other things we can do with it, however, limited only by our imaginations.  After all, vegetable gardeners in England have recently fallen all over themselves acquiring cyclanthera pedata seeds, and if an English cook can think of something to do with it, surely anyone can do so.  Finding seed, in fact, was fairly easy because even though caigua has not yet hit the market in the U.S. in any major way, enough growers worldwide are interested in this vegetable that we found a variety of sources to order from.

We will be curious how it grows, though, because scouring the web for samples, we encountered several distinct varieties.  Some look benign enough, like small squash leaves on a trellised vine.  Some, however, have sharp multi-folate leaves that look… um…. well… a little ‘irie’, if Jah know what we mean…

Which brings us to the plant we will not be growing in our garden any time soon, though it has many multifunctional qualities which leave every other plant we have ever heard about completely in the dust.  In our collective shortsightedness, our society has demonized this plant, which has the potential to singlehandedly resolve our national debt crisis, close the trade deficit, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, sequester many tons of carbon, improve nutrition, save forests by providing a cheap new source of paper, give new life to the domestic textile industry, and a whole host of other beneficial things.

We are talking, of course, about cannabis.  There are actually three different species of plants which could be called ‘marijuana’ – cannabis sativa, cannabis indica, and cannabis ruderalis.  All three contain some amount of the psychoactive substance tetrahydrocannabinol, or “THC”.  However, while this has become the focal point for how this plant is utilized by humans, it is really the tip of the iceberg.

By attempting to legislate the plant out of existence, though, most nations of the world have instead merely incentivized the breeding of plants with higher and higher concentrations of the very substance which they were attempting to outlaw.  Even so, as the graph you see here shows, there are plenty of substances both more addictive and more dangerous than marijuana – many of them are legal.  Can you say “hypocrisy”?

In colonial America, virtually every significant farming operation involved the production of massive quantities of cannabis, typically just called “hemp”, for industrial use.  Highly adaptable as a material to make rope, cloth, and even bricks, pressboard, and other construction materials, cannabis was in part quite literally responsible for the making of our nation.  Thomas Jefferson’s plantation owed much of its profitability to this plant, as did the farms of many of our other founding fathers.

We wonder, in addition to the many industrial and pharmacological uses of this plant, what might be done with it in the kitchen, if only it weren’t illegal and therefore too expensive to use.

Cannabis sativa has both sweet and savory overtones which, we think, would make it great in salads, in addition to being a pretty good seasoning.  It would unquestionably provide good silage for livestock.  It grows densely, but without being too demanding on the soil.  It is not a water hog; it provides plenty of shade, and is an excellent groundcover.

And legalizing it would turn a lot of criminals into gardeners.  We can’t think of any single measure that would be more beneficial to our society than removing pot from the category of ‘gateway to violent criminal school’ into ‘introduction to the wonderful world of backyard farming’.

Ah, well.

We’ll stick to the weird plants you don’t get in trouble for growing.

Happy farming!