Inside Urban Green

Kaboom!...Exploading Peat Moss

Who knew that peat moss exploded to propagate? Now we need to answer the question is it sustainable? Coir as a substitute for peat moss is a great horticultural product but it's a long way to Sri Lanka.

via Science Friday

The Secretly Speedy Life Of Plants. Plants have a reputation for staying put. But some plants are moving so quickly, we can't see their motions. Biologist Joan Edwards and physicist Dwight Whitaker broke out the high-speed cameras to capture the story of exploding peat moss. The research was published in the journal Science.

Idaho Junior H.S. » EarthBoxes Help Teach Science and Nutrition

You may pay a bit more for an EarthBox but you should feel good about doing it.

There is no company in the business of marketing sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) that does what EarthBox does through the efforts of their education department led by Molly Quinn Philbin.

Her group in partnership with The Growing Connection -TGC (a UN Organization) deserves far more recognition then it gets. All of the people involved in Molly's department and TGC make a very significant contribution to elevating the quality of public school plant science and nutrition.

It is a very serious omission that the White House garden and the so-called "People's Gardens" of the USDA do not include EarthBoxes as a standard alternative to in-ground growing. There are too many staffers in the USDA who did not read the memo announcing that we have become an urban society and will become more-so in the future.

Read more from the recent EarthBox newsletter.

Top Prize Candidate » The Floating Garden of Bubble-On

Lillith Bulawa poses with her invention "The Floating Garden of Bubble-On". Bulawa is hoping that her invention is good enough to win a trip to New York City and possibly win $10,000 in the Bubble Wrap Competition for Young Inventors.

Looks and sounds like a form of simplified or raft hydroponics used extensively around the world by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Maybe we can get Lillith to come downstate from Rome to the Big Apple and teach others that there is in fact "life beyond dirt".

Edit. note: Lillith got it right, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are also known as floating gardens. The Tower of Babel (Babylon) is a different story.

Excerpts:

“To go to New York would be very exciting for me,” Bulawa said. “I have worked very hard, I have made it this far and I would really love to visit New York City again.”

Bulawa’s invention is called the “Floating Tower of Bubble-On”. Wittingly named after the famed Tower of Babylon, this invention does not go down in an inferno of flame but rather grows skyward in the form of green vegetation.

Bulawa invented a garden that floats on top of water with the aid of Bubble Wrap® cushioning. This self-watering garden that sits in a box atop a raft, which is made buoyant by Bubble Wrap® material, is designed to help save crops in flood zones. Water is brought to the plants via capillary action through the raft. This novel idea brought many challenges with it, a fact the panel of Sealed Air engineers judging the projects held in mind.

via www.romeobserver.com

Edmonton, Canada » Permaculture Program Teaches Students Sustainability Sensibly

Sheldon Showarth plants Kentucky Wonder beans in EarthBoxes in a physics lab. Jasper Place High School has a greenhouse project where they are developing a permaculture garden. Photographs by: Shaughn Butts, edmontonjournal.com

Rhiannon Arcand works on assembling the Aquaponic system in the greenhouse. The top tanks will be home to fish and the overflow will water plants.

It is good to see permaculture and plastics occupying the same space in an article about plant science and growing food plants.

A goodly number of "urban farming" activists I have encountered here in New York have managed to distort the meaning of the permaculture concept.

Many have a cult-like fervor on the level of religious zealotry about gardening in the ground only. In their often sanctimonious view, the only acceptable way to grow food is in the dirt, never mind that urban soil is often contaminated with toxic heavy metals. Also never mind that most urbanite in-ground gardening is less productive and uses more water.

Plastic »Too Good to Throw Away

My research on the subject of "urban agriculture", which I prefer to call urban food production, all to often leads me into a community with rather extremist views. One of these unbalanced views is about plastics. It is a toss-up whether plastic or Monsanto is the most hated demon for many in this group.

A NYTimes opinion piece does a good job of painting a more balanced picture of plastics that doesn't evoke imagery of the Monsanto logo.

Excerpt:

Shunning plastic may seem key to the ethic of living lightly, but the environmental reality is more complex.

More Environmentally Friendly Plastics Through Science

Following are two articles from ScienceDaily about the potential of more environmentally friendly plastics under developement in scientific research.

There are those who fantasize about a world without plastics. Dream on.

Plastics are here to stay but will be produced in many new ways thanks to science and technology.

via www.sciencedaily.com

In a scientific advance literally plucked from the waste heap, scientists have described a key step toward using the billions of pounds of waste chicken feathers produced each year to make one of the more important kinds of plastic. They described the new method at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, being held in Anaheim, California the week of March 28.

"Others have tried to develop thermoplastics from feathers," said Yiqi Yang, Ph.D., who reported on the research. "But none of them perform well when wet. Using this technique, we believe we're the first to demonstrate that we can make chicken-feather-based thermoplastics stable in water while still maintaining strong mechanical properties."

New Tool to Measure Indoor Air Pollutants

Will a new instrument that measures indoor air pollutants help to convert a popular field of junk science into real science?

Junk science says that all indoor plants clean the air, including those managing to survive in top-watered clay pots. A logical mind would know that this could not be true.

Unfortunately, legions of garden writers with shallow science education have helped to spread this propaganda.

The widespread urban myth that all houseplants have air-cleaning power started back in the 1980’s when retired NASA scientist Dr. Bill Wolverton partnered with an interior plantscaping industry marketing campaign called “Plants for Clean Air”.

The most important fact always omitted by the media is that Wolverton based his conclusions on the use of sub-irrigated soil media or clay pebble hydroculture. He clearly states this in his 1997 book How to Grow Fresh Air: 50 House Plants that Purify Your Home or Office.  

From the Center for Urban Greenscaping (CuGreen)

photo: NYCEDC

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Recycled Soda Bottle Hydroponics: Science Experiments for Kids

The return on investment for you and your kid’s education is phenomenal with this idea. The bottle planters are more than free because you help the environment when you convert them to science education tools instead of tossing them into a recycle bin or the trash.

A fashionable belief is that every school needs a dirt garden, a throwback to a bygone time of so-called “victory gardens”. What an extravagant and often wasteful idea.

The no-cost bottle planters you make (along with other SIP variants) have the potential to teach your children more about science, the scientific method, botany, biology, physics, chemistry, nutrition and the environment that any dirt garden ever will.

These bottle planters should be in every classroom in America. Every teacher (and parent) should know how to use them. Not just science teachers.

Unfortunately, few teachers know about them and their educational potential. We can thank the USDA, the National Gardening Association, our land grant institutions and botanical gardens (aka collectively as “big dirt”) for that.

The big question is whether you are motivated to do anything about it? 

Comments:

Growing plants in "artificial soil" in sub-irrigated planter systems (SIPs) is really a simplified form of hydroponics. Few understand that an EarthBox is really a hydroponic planter.

Look at this Flickr photo set. The design I advocate has a larger plant section and smaller reservoir than the design in the photos above.

Pothos is a more low-light tolerant, durable plant than Swedish Ivy. It is what I would use.

via hydroponicsdictionary.com

This experiment is meant as a fun introduction to hydroponics (or SIPs). We suggest that anybody new to hydroponics start with this experiment.

You will learn (that) what you feed a plant matters more than what the plant grows in.

Plant for all experiments:
We suggest Swedish Ivy /Creeping Charlie. This plant seems to grow no matter what – we even rooted this one in a coconut pound cake ! The roots will set from the nodes. Put the cuttings in a glass of water and wait for roots to appear (aprox 2-3 weeks).

‘Shopping’ list.
Empty 2 liter soda bottle, wick, fertilizer, plant, lemon or lemon juice, baking soda. Optional: pH test kit or litmus paper, straw, Lego blocks, shredded fabric, shredded paper.

Plant And Animal Similarities

This is interesting research about plant "foraging" but remember that plants have no brains or physiology that will allow them to stop drinking water.

"Self-watering" works for animal pets but it is a bogus term for plants. Those who use it, identify themselves as not understanding plant science and capillary action.

via www.sciencedaily.com

A University of Alberta research team has discovered that a plant's strategy to capture nutrients in the soil is the result of integration of different types of information.

U of A ecologist J.C. Cahill says the plant's strategy mirrors the daily risk-versus-reward dilemmas that animals experience in their quest for food.

Biologists established long ago that an animal uses information about both the location of a food supply and potential competitors to determine an optimal foraging strategy. Its subsequent behavioral response is based on whether the food supply is rich enough to accept the risks associated with engaging in competition with other animals.