"Industry has allowed us to manipulate and eventually reinvent the human food chain, from the synthetic fertility of soil to the microwaveable can of soup designed to fit into a car's cup holder." Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma

One of the few commonly prescribed perennial herbs for attracting beneficial insects to your garden is known as anise hyssop. Anise grows up to 4 feet tall and 3 feet wide, so give it some room. It's baby purple flowers and leaves have a hint of licorice taste; the leaves make a nice winter tea (it's well-documented natural decongestant), and the blooms sauté with well mushrooms. For a edible landscaping masterpiece, pair the light-purple anise hyssop with silvery sage and deep purple eggplant. Oh yea, and mark the grave in Winter because it's a late bloomer in Spring.

Believe it or not, there's an herb out there that smells just like your favorite spiny citrus fruit from Thailand! Pineapple sage grows hearty in Virginia and it cherished for it's fragrant leaves and tangy blossoms. Mix them with mint and lemon in an iced summer tea, toss it in a fruit salad, or puree it into a pesto for a tropical tang! Pineapple sage grows hearty in Virginia; by September you'll have a 5-foot tall bush exploding with neon red blossoms (which attract hummingbirds).  This herb may fall victim to extreme winter cold, so cut the bush to the ground after Fall blooming and stick a few stems in moist potting soil. After a winter of growth indoors, you'll have a new generation ready to join last year's plant (P.S. it matches well with peppers!). 

Who knows how he got them all to cooperate, but an ecologist from the University of Illinois named V.E. Shelford recently took a census of wildlife in the eastern Appalachian forest.  This is what he found: a typical 10 sq. mile block of forest holds almost 300,000 registered mammals--220,000 scurrying mice and other small rodents, 63,000 springy squirrels and chipmunks, 470 shy deer, 30 wily foxes, and 5 jolly bears. I'm curious about the margin of error on those adjectives, but Shelford observed that families described themselves as "always competing" and  often "just scraping by," not to mention astonishingly-low literacy rates. 

"Chlorophyll, dude," is the easy and obvious answer. But let's take a closer look at the mechanics of the color green.

Chlorophyll is photosynthesis, that fundamental process by which plants manufacture high-energy sugar compounds out of water from soil, C02 from the air, and light rays from the Sun. This is cooler and infinitely more important than you, ye prideful homo sapien (as one elegant scholar put it, "You cannot stand out under the rays of the sun and get fat, but a plant can and does"). Photosynthesis is life on the Green Planet as we know it.

But why green? Good question. To start, let us note that red wavelengths are long, blue wavelengths are short, and green wavelengths are somewhere in between. For some unknown reason, green wavelengths are (almost) useless for plants as energy. All green is reflected, and all red and blue is absorbed. Apparently chlorophyll was a revolutionary plant adaptation a 450 million years ago, but everything curiously stopped at green. Plant evolution never reached black, the most superior color for light-absorption. 

The biologist John Berman posed the that black is simply harder to discover. Evolution is not engineering, he observed. Organisms can't simply choose what's best for them. So even if black leaves were better, evolution's limitations can prevent species from climbing to the absolute "highest peak on the fitness landscape". Still, the verdict is out. Any ideas?

Many of Virginia’s trees have their own unique problems—ashes suffer from ash yellows, beeches from beech bark disease, and cherries from cherry scallops—and your diagnosis becomes infinitely complex if you’ve got one of the zillion cultivars planted in Virginia soil. That said, don’t be afraid to type your problems into Google—at least when it comes to tree diseases.

Narrowing our focus to native species, however, we can identify several common diseases. One such is anthracnose, a chlorophyll-loving fungus that attacks the leaves of hardwood trees such as sycamores, white oaks, dogwoods, and black walnuts. It's spores spread by wind and germinate by moisture, so after long periods of wind and rain you might start seeing blotched and dusty white leaves (leaf blight) that eventually die (defoliation). Anthracnose will never directly kill your tree, but it will weaken and expose it to other deadly diseases. Another cause for dusty white-colored leaves is powdery mildew. This spore-spreading fungus spreads on young tissue, distorts leaves, flowers, and shoots, leaving them powdery white and eventually brittle and brown. Other non-lethal leaf woes include rusts, scabs, and spots.

If the trunk of your tree has sores, it’s most likely cankers. Cankers inhabit wounded branches and bark tissue, especially on young trees, on suppressed low vigor trees, or on trees at poor sites. Most are perennial, so if you don’t take care of them they’ll come back.

 If you notice holes or any other bark irregularities, your tree probably is victim to any number of borers. The larvae of many beetles and moths develop within the tree itself, and they emerge in one to two years by cutting a hole in the bark. Some feed on leaves, pollen, and tender bark, but this rarely causes significant injury to the tree.

Armillaria root disease attacks the root systems of hardwoods across the continent. You may notice a dieback of twigs and branches, premature fall coloration, or mushrooms around the base of the tree. This disease often attacks already-vulnerable trees, so treat with fertilization, wider spacing, and stump-top chemicals.

Yesterday I found the fruit of the Agaricus arvensis species, or what is colloquially known as a horse mushroom. It has a large cap at 6"-12" diameter, free and dark-colored gills, and firm stalk. Don't get it mixed up with its smaller brother, pasture mushroom (A. campestris), which seldom grows larger than 6" in diameter. You are most likely to find both species in September and November. I'm going to eat these ones little by little, just in case it's poisonous. A large horse mushroom cap can be used as the "dough" for pizza, says one website: "I put pizza sauce or salsa on the cap and other meat, vegetables, cheese, etc." but be careful because "light sauces such as béchamel, alfredo, mornay will be darkned or discolored by the dark brown juices given off by a large horse mushroom cap."  Is someone a shroom-hunting chef?

Seed saving has been one of the fundamentals strategies for survival since 5,000 B.C., back when you couldn't just buy them by the packet from local hardware store. You wouldn't guess it, but 'Keeper of the Seed' is one of the most revered roles in many third-world communities. As for the ritual itself, each seed has its own story so you can't treat them all the same. Speaking generally, however, standard and heirloom fruits and veggies contain seeds which germinate the best (as opposed to the plump-yet-poorly-germinating hybrids found in most Wal-Mart or Food Lion produce).

How to save? Keep your eye out for good looking produce at the Farmer's Market or in you your backyard garden. Set them aside and, when they begin to decompose, cut them open and pick out the seeds. Dry and throw them in labeled baggies for freezer storage. These are the instructions apply only to "wet" seeds, which include tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and squash. If you're going to "dry" seeds, you'll need to find some flowering beans, onions, carrots, corn, or herbs. After the petals drop and, after the stalk looks brittle and dead, crumble the husks and pick out the seeds. Easy right? Not exactly. Seeds don't germinate with 100% success, so many avid gardeners say it's not worth the pain. At any rate, it's good to know the ritual. Better saved than sorry!

Next time someone tells you your plant is "indeterminate", they're warning you: this one will grow into a fruit-bearing jungle if left unkempt. At least that's what happened to our cherry tomato plant, which just kept growing when everything else paled in the late summer heat (photo right).

There are two types of plants: the one's that boom-and-bust and the one's that just keep growing until something stops them (a.k.a. Fall frost). Horticulturists call the boom-and-bust variety "determinate," meaning the plant's fate is determined by a fixed number of blossoms. The whole plant blossoms at the same time, fruits at the same time, and expires in the same way. 

On the other hand, you have this bush in the photo above. It's got full-sized fruit, green babies, pretty flowers, and bulbs about to bloom...all at the same time. Horticulturists call this variety "indeterminate," because it will grow for an indeterminable period of time and, as we will witness, only stop when the growing season ends. If it doesn't stop, we'll have a most wonderful problem on our hands.

It good place to start in installing a home garden is a soil test. Brigid and I skipped that step, and as a result our tomatoes are all deformed from calcium deficiency. Your best bet is taking a handful of soil from corners of the garden, mix them up, and ship them in a box to a nearby soil lab. It costs about $10.

At any rate, here's a fun and easy way to learn about soil types and find which makes up your garden. It's called a soil fractional analysis, and it reveals basically the components of your soil, nothing more.

First, take a cup of dry, pulverized  soil from four corners of the garden. Add a teaspoon of non-sudsing dishwasher detergent. Mix both into a big mason jar. Fill 2/3 up with water, seal, shake for 15 minutes, and put in the cupboard. Several days later, take it out. You should see four layers of soil. Label the top layer "A," the middle "B," and the bottom "C."  Measure each layer in inches. Plug those measurements into the following equations: % of sand = A x 100 / (A+B+C); % of silt = B x 100 / (A+B+C); % of clay = C x 100/ (A+B+C). Apply those percentages to the chart below. Easy enough, right?