When Plants Attack: Glassing grass

The arrival of some ulluco (Ulluco tuberosus) tubers from Incredible Vegetables left me pondering how best to store them until it’s time to plant them out (after the risk of frost has passed, in spring). Given that I also have mashua and oca tubers kicking around the kitchen, and that everyone will soon be receiving seed potatoes (if they haven’t already), then I thought it might be nice to have a general round-up of how to store tubers for planting. A lot of the advice will be relevant to all kinds of tubers, but each species is likely to have its own quirks. If you have advice, details for new species, or queries, then leave them in the comments – I can update this post later.

I received an interesting press release on Monday, about grass growing in space. The grass seed used in the experiment was Gro-Sure, and they’re trumpeting that the success of the experiment confirms their ‘Grow With Certainty’ promise.

Yesterday I read that Trump adviser Myron Ebell, a climate change denier, thinks that the green movement is the greatest threat to freedom.

The English obsession with grass came into being in the 17th century, when the close cut lawn was a status symbol of the rich. Only they could afford to take land out of production for purely aesthetic purposes, and maintaining a lawn before the invention of the mower was a highly skilled and labour-intensive process. The middle classes started growing lawns from the 1860s onwards, and the Victorian popularity for outdoor sports led to their proliferation. Grass species from the Old World were taken to America during this period, and the lawn took there over in the early 20th century. In 2005, NASA published research suggesting that lawns (including residential and commercial lawns and golf courses) were the single largest irrigated ‘crop’ in America, covering about 128,000 square kilometres. In 2013 there were upwards of 15 millions lawns in Britain, costing us £54 million in fertilisers and £127 million on lawn mowers.

It has been a difficult spring for gardeners, and their plants, here in the UK. If you’re lucky enough to have the space (and funds) for a greenhouse or a polytunnel then that goes a long way to protecting plants from the vagaries of the weather, but for everyone else cloches are a good solution to the problems it brings.

Gayla Trail over at You Grow Girl has been blogging recently about an illness that has kept her from gardening this year, and how that makes her feel, and as a result she has rebooted her Grow Write Guild series of writing prompts by asking gardeners to write about a time when they were unable to garden, for whatever reason.

Today is the first day of National Plants at Work Week, which aims to promote the use and benefits of indoor plants. You may have been eyeing up the windowsills in your office with a view to growing your own chillies or sweet peppers, but did you know that you can grow your own fresh air too?

I’m not a chemist, but I do find plant chemistry (and the links and patterns between different plants) to be a fascinating topic. Fortunately there are chemists out there who can bring these to our attention, and Compound Interest includes some great plant-related infographics amongst a wider spread of chemical topics.

After the paving was finished on Tuesday, Ryan and I moved the planters into the front garden, to their new home on the path. Ryan then filled them 2/3 full with leftover topsoil from the garden – which makes them so heavy that they can’t be lifted, so they should be safe enough now.

Companion planting is the catch-all term for exploiting the many ways in which plants interact with each other. Companion planting is often portrayed as a simple matter of which plants grow well together, but the small amount of scientific research that has been done suggests that this is not the case.

Everywhere I go lately, I seem to be tripping over the idea of allelopathy. The amaranths in the picture above might look like pretty, harmless and useful plants – but they’re hiding a darker secret. During our class field trip to the Eden Project in December I discovered that they produce chemicals that can inhibit the growth of other plants nearby. This is allelopathy – chemical warfare that gives plants a competitive edge over their neighbours.

This year is the first I have ever planted my potatoes on the traditional planting day of Good Friday! They almost got the traditional addition of comfrey leaves in the planting holeas (which would have been another first!), but in the end I decided to leave the comfrey flowering for the bees. They need food more than my spuds do, at this time of year. Although, in the end, the spuds got something better…