From Cleveland to … Africa?

One great thing about having so many volunteers in the Eleanor Armstrong Smith Glasshouse is that I have the chance to work with numerous individuals and learn from the varied experiences they bring to the Garden.  So I was delighted this past spring when I was asked to host another volunteer looking for specific training.

Miranda was looking for training that would prepare her for the kind of farming she thought she would be doing in the Peace Corps. Since it was still winter at that time, we figured she would start in the Glasshouse and end up working with Green Corps, our urban agricultural work/study program, as they began their season. Lucky for Miranda (and me and the Garden), she continued to work with me for the duration; as long as I kept her supplied with fruity jellybeans in the morning, she was raring to go. 

You might ask how you translate farming from the Glasshouse’s Madagascar desert garden.  Actually, very simply, as all plants have similar needs and requirements. So that’s where we started. Keeping in mind she was planning on a tropical place, we would go back and forth with the differences and similarities between them. Little did Miranda know that the baobabs and moringas surrounding her by would soon be her permanent landscape for the next 27 months to come.

Now that you know a little bit about Miranda and how much fun it can be volunteering at the Garden, my next blog will take you into her "home" village in Mali.  Miranda has sent me many updates so far, so I am going to share some of the culture of Mali.  From the Peuhl women, food, and music, you, too, will hear the tribal bells ringing in my next blog.  Stay tuned! 
 

Posted by Joe Mehalik

Blooms of the Drought

Adaptations of plants are fascinating.  At times when we would least expect a plant to bloom, some species will be full of blooms.  So, why is that?

In the Garden’s Madagascar biome, we stopped watering as of October, and many of the plants have begun to lose their leaves and go dormant.  During this period, the Madagascar plants stop all growth until the spring rains return or, in our case, the spring sprinkler. The plants go dormant to conserve their stored water and nutrients; the best way to help them go into dormancy is to stop watering and fertilizing.  Do not overwater succulents or cacti at this time because most of the roots have shriveled up or are absorbing minute amounts of water. 

Why would a plant subject itself to the extra stress of producing blooms? Blooming is an aggressive act of reproduction. For those plants that do bloom during this otherwise dormant period, their flowers become a limited resource for insects and, therefore, they have a better chance of being pollinated. Blooming now also gives them a jump on the other species of plants in the spring. By being pollinated during the drought, these plants’ seeds are formed in time for the spring rains.  When the other plants are flowering, the seeds of these plants will already be rooting. These crazy plants aren’t so crazy after all.

"Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations."  Ralph Waldo Emerson

‘Tis the time of year for cider, pumpkins, turkeys and, apparently, leaf blowing.  It never ceases to amaze me the number of obsessive leaf pickers/gatherers there are.  I was stunned and amazed the other day driving by a woman in the street picking up each leaf along the curb and dropping it in the pile next to the apron of her drive.  She apparently didn’t look at her neighbors’ yards, which were covered with leaves.  I assume she would do it all over again when the next big gust of wind came along.

I haven’t raked or bagged leaves in years and I do not understand this fall obsession of making big curb piles.  Why give all that nutritious material to the big city, leaf-sucking machine?  I have a mulcher mower that chops all of my leaves and to incorporate into the lawn.  Doing this gives the nutrients to the grass and back to the trees from which they came. My yard has lots of leaves from a silver maple and red oak – both 50+ in age — and some other new and old trees.  Adding to those are more from the neighbors and from the golf course behind me, plenty for the mower to greedily munch.  Why should the city pay (your tax dollars) to have leaves picked up that you could have benefit your property or compost rather than having a company compost them and sell them back to you?  And think about all the petroleum byproducts and plastic debris that are inadvertently picked up in it.  Do you really want to add that to your veggie garden?  And the environment suffers from the additional gas and fumes from all the equipment used to gather them up.  My mother actually rakes her neighbors’ leaves from their lawns and also takes those already in piles and grinds them up for garden compost. 

So if you are one of those leaf pilers out there, I would love to hear the explanation of why you do this; otherwise, think before you pile and just leaf it there for the mower.

Posted by Joe Mehalik

A botanical garden is in many ways a living museum – a museum of plants. Part of a garden’s mission is to aid the protection and preservation of rare and endangered plants. Botanical gardens also educate and inspire.  I recently came across an article  on Madagascar and found it rather disturbing.

It is always amazing how quickly things can be destroyed and yet how long it takes for them to recover — if they even can. Extinct is forever.  Madagacar had a growing ecotourism base under that country’s last president.  Now that has all changed.  We should consider ourselves lucky to have such an intact slide of Madgascar here in Cleveland. The five native Madagascar baobab trees are a poignant reminder that these striking trees may not exist forever in their homeland. Hopefully, with good care, we’ll at least be able to keep ours for future generations to enjoy and appreciate.

Posted by Joe Mehalik

Winter Sucs!

Overwintering Your Cacti and Succulents

It’s time to start thinking about winter. I not a fan of winter, but knowing what to do with your cacti and succulents during this time is imperative. So many questions: Do I let them go dormant? Should I water them over the winter? Do they need artificial light? When do I bring them inside?  Let me tell you right now that you shouldn’t let them go dormant.

Temperature: I do not allow my tropicals/succulents to go below 40 degrees. Freezing/frost is 35 degrees and lower. Some plants like the Century plant (Agave americana) can tolerate a high to low 20’s, but you need to check the species. Once you get into the later months of October and November, your weather station should be on hourly. I will leave most of my succulents outside until November unless we get an early cold snap. In Cleveland, the weather can change quickly so you need to be prepared at any time to bring them in.

Water: Once we get into the fall, the wet cool rains usually persist. If you have already allowed the succulents and cactus to go dormant or leaves are yellow and falling off, you cannot leave them wet. I let my plants keep growing no matter how slowly until it is time to bring them in. The plants can tolerate the damp as long as they are not dormant. If the plant is dormant and you leave it wet, it will rot and die. This is because the roots have shut down and the plant is no longer processing any materials.  They simply drown in their own pot. Once inside I shut my plants down (dry them out) completely and only water them if they show signs of desiccation. I only will give them enough water to swell back up to normal, not enough to grow or rot them. If you have a greenhouse, you can keep some growing throughout the winter; but in order for most succulents/cactus to bloom some kind of a dormancy period is required.

Light: Getting to know your plant is the key to its survival. A coworker calls my house’s storage area "the basement of torture" for plants.  I leave my plants in the dark, in the cool, without water until I say otherwise. You cannot do this with all plants. Some species of succulents are winter growers; others do not really go dormant and will get very stretched out growth or a limp look. So knowing what your plant’s exact requirements are is very important.  Knowing what they need leads to knowing what you don’t have to give them and, therefore, my basement of no light works out for what I grow. Fluorescent lighting can be very beneficial and give you an edge in keeping them alive over our long, dark winters. Just because I may not use fluorescent lighting at home does not mean it is incorrect for you. The best motto to live by is, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

I hope you have found these tidbits helpful. They also give you a sense of plant care strategies we use to keep the Garden’s desert plant collection in the Madagascar biome flourishing through the winter months. Just because we have plants in a glasshouse doesn’t mean we can change the rules either. So just hang in there and wait until the snow melts. Just like the Cleveland Browns — there is always next year!

   Working for Peanuts
When you work in the Eleanor Armstrong Smith Glasshouse’s Costa Rica biome (as I do), a place populated by so many different animals and creatures, well, you inevitably become friends with a few of them.  You become atuned to the animals’ moods — or you’re gratified that they at least acknowledge your existence.  From the aloofness of our three radiated tortoises to the predatory, beady-eyed glare of our chameleons, subtle relationships are being formed and renewed every day.  Now some of these denizens of our Glasshouse become almost like pets; we interact.  Like most pets, the best way to get to know them is during feeding time.  Most animals (birds especially) reliably show up at the food cart in the morning.  It’s as if they’re telling me to hurry up.  If I so much as turn my back, a quick and sneaky finch will raid the food cart. 

The Ruddy Quail-dove (Geotrygon montana) is a ground bird. It walks up to the food cart and waits to be fed.  Over the last six years, we have gotten to know each other very well. I’m exactly not sure who has who trained. He’s spoiled by the shelled half peanuts or pine nuts that I dig out of the seed mix for him. He’s become quite a pudgy, happy bird.  Almost every time I bring out the cart, there he is.  When he’s not there, I’m now programmed to look for him. I’m used to his irritated wing-flapping when I try to leave him to attend to the other animals. "Little ingrate," I mutter to myself.

I suspect he has my number — he has me trained –  and he has me working for peanuts. 

The Lush-est Desert in Cleveland!

Lush and desert are two words not normally together. If you haven’t seen the Madagascar exhibit at the Botanical Garden lately, you are missing out. Over the last 5 years of growth, a few care adjustments and many new plant additions have produced a biome filled with succulents.

The Spiny Desert is actually a scrub forest. Succulent plants and trees stretch above grasses and lower shrubs creating a tangled web of branch and vine. Madagascar may seem very different to a Clevelander, but in many ways it performs and acts like a forest here. Instead of snow the desert has drought. Same effect though. Plants lose their leaves, stop growing and wait for the return of rain, or in our case, the snow to melt. Once spring arrives, the plants can "grow like weeds." People believe it takes a tremendous amount of time for succulents to grow. This may be true of some species, but add lots of heat and water and you can achieve substantial growth in a short period of time.

How does this happen in the Madagascar biome? The answer is Monsoon Joe. October represents the end of the growing cycle in the Glasshouse. I stop watering plants until April. Come April/May I act like the monsoons that drench the island of Madagascar. The array of hoses, sprinklers and watering cans soak the forest for weeks. Dry soil (our mix is coir, pine fines and Hydrocks) actually repels water, so it takes a tremendous amount of water to re-saturate it. It takes over a month to get the soil moist to a proper depth in the garden after the dry winter. Plants, such as the Uncarinas, can grow over three feet in a season during this time, and the rain brings on a whole host of blooms. The plants have many ways of dealing with this change from water to drought. Underground tubers, lack of leaves, spines, and water-retaining stems help them to survive the harsh desert regions of Madagascar. So, I hope everyone, especially my fellow succulent growers, stop by and see the lush flush.

Enjoy the garden

Hay! It’s a Garden…Sort of.
 
I have always been interested in plants as is my mother (grandfather, too).  It’s in the genes.  My parents have benefited (most of the time) from my enthusiasm, as I became known as a "plant collector," resurrecting dead and dying plants from neighbors’ refuse on trash day, not missing an opportunity to extend my "grabby hands" when friends offer to share, and pulling out my wallet when I leaf through spring catalogs and walk through local and non-local garden centers.  So, before I left my childhood home five years ago, I had landscaped most of the yard.

My folks have a large vegetable garden about 20′ x 12′ in the backyard where they grow on average 25 tomato plants and 10 pepper plants.  Between the garden, the landscaped perennial beds, and the 17′ pond is a putting-green-size space of lawn in the middle of the yard.  So, this year my parents told me they were putting in a raised bed to grow carrots and to try gardening a new way.  I didn’t think much of it, figuring it was going to be within the established garden itself.  (Every spring I often hear "weeding and mulching" complaints about how much time the maintenance takes and didn’t think they might make more work for themselves.)  To my surprise I discovered straw bales on the lawn (or what was lawn) in the shape of a mattress with headboard.  "Isn’t it cool?  It’s literally a raised ‘bed,’ " they said.  And, in my usual way of expressing disbelief, my hands went to my face and "Oy, what are you doing?" spurted out of my mouth.
 
And so the hay (I mean straw…hay is not recommended) bale garden experiment began.  I had not heard much about this type of gardening.  Apparently, while trying to decide what materials to use, my Mom consulted our horticulturist friend and several Internet sites.  Two of the articles were "Organic Straw Bale Gardening" by Jamie McIntosh (December 22, 2008) and "Straw Bale Culture Technique" by Kirk Gordon (August 30, 2005).  The idea is to plant seeds in the bales in addition to planting in the soil within the enclosure the bales make.  So in April they laid out the straw bales and filled the center with their own mixture of "gardeners’ gold" compost from their bins, and bagged peat, topsoil and manure purchased from garden centers.  Ideally, you need to wet down the bales even a year before you plant, letting them overwinter.  This, however, wasn’t done and after just a month of bale watering, seeds were purchased and the experiment began.  Drilling holes into the bales and filling the holes with soil was the original idea, but after trying that with four different drill bits, it was obvious it wouldn’t work.  The bits just twirled with straw strands and no holes were even obvious after the drilling. 

So, on the headboard (the only section where the bales were positioned "cut side up,") soil was smashed into the straw.  Carrot, spinach and lettuce seeds were planted in that section and the germination process went well.  Soybeans also were planted in that section and inside the borders, too.  Strawberry plants, spinach, four different varieties of carrots, two pepper plants, romaine lettuce and one yellow, crooked neck squash.  What appeared to be a lovely green, fluffy "blanket" soon covered the "bed."  But then other things began to happen. Happy green shoots (wheat seed passengers within the bales) grew up all over in addition to lots of mushrooms with slimy, black, inky tops.  And the deer found they didn’t have to bend all the way down to the ground to feast on half the spinach crop, the tender tops of some soy beans, and half the strawberry plants.  The deer also pulled out one pepper plant from this new dinner table.  The poor little lettuce seeds shriveled up and so did some of the carrots.  The bed is in full sun and it was impossible to keep the seedlings planted IN the bales from drying out.  The actual "raised bed" inside the border continues to produce fine crops, so that part of the experiment is a success.  My parents have already eaten the first planting of spinach and planted more seeds.  So it appears that they and the deer might be able to share the harvest from this experience.
 
If anyone out there has tried one of these straw bale gardens, please drop us a note.  Now that my parents have tried this, it looks like the beds might just stay there over winter for next year.  I hope some of you try this little experiment on your own or maybe just encourage a neighbor to do so.  Hopefully it won’t be a straw-n out process for you.

Sticking with Geckos

 
We have just purchased a pair of Mossy Tailed Leaf Geckos (Uroplatus sikorae) for our expanding collection of reptiles.  At Cleveland Botanical Garden we keep a number of animals and insects behind the scenes to rotate with animals already on display.  When we find something of interest that benefits our biomes, like the geckos, we try to acquire them.  Matt Edwards, our Animal Care Specialist, found a pair and they arrived this week. You can look for them to be on periodic display after they have adjusted to their new surroundings.  Residents of the rainforest in Madagascar, these nocturnal geckos like high humidity and full spectrum light.  These carnivorous tree dwellers will be dining on a main course of crickets and super worms, sometimes with a calcium dusting.  Yum!

Be sure to look for their adapted feet that can cling to almost any surface. They can do this because of millions of tiny hairs called setae that branch into thousands of nanoscale tips called spatulae. These spatulae are only 200 billionths of a meter wide.  The combined adhesive ability of four gecko feet is about 90 pounds. Scientists continue to create new ways to apply the design of gecko feet using what is known as geckomimetic adhesives. The benefits are far reaching since gecko feet work under water and on most surfaces. This technology could replace glue or even screws at some point in the future. So forget that insurance gecko in the commercial and “stick” with the power of science.

Baobabs Could Be in Quite a Jam!

This blog’s heading refers not to the baobab’s ecological plight but rather to its culinary potential. A recent New York Times Op Ed by Dawn Starin mentioned, among other things, a jam made from Baobab fruits.  Yes, it’s true.  I had to see it for myself, but there it was on the web.  My Glasshouse volunteer passed along a copy of this article and I was amazed to read that baobab jam is now on the market.  Apparently, it is a tasty jam and I plan on purchasing some –  especially because we have species of baobabs here at Cleveland Botanical Garden.

This jam is made from Andansonia digitata,  the African species. (It isn’t the exact  same species we have at the Garden.)  According to The Times, it is available in Europe and I am currently looking for a source in the US.  If anyone has seen it or tried it, please let us know.  (The FDA hasn’t approved it yet.)  I did find it on this site, which also sells Baobab skincare products as well as other oddities, including elephant pepper! Even Kiehl’s, the trendy New York-based skincare company, features an anti-aging Baobab facial preparation in their new men’s skin care line.

What implications do you foresee if African baobabs were to become more commercially important plants?