The Lowdown

WSU Spokane County Extension Master Gardeners December 2016 The Lowdown

Inside this issue:

Foundation News 2

Book Review 4

Fact Sheet Updates 9

Self-study Quiz 10

Upcoming Events 12

Extension Information

Dr. Jeremy Cowan 477-2145

Regional Horticulture Specialist

jeremy.cowan.@wsu.edu

Tim Kohlhauff 477-2172

Horticulture Program Coordinator

tkohlhauff@spokanecounty.org

Anna Kestell 477-2195

Food Preservation/Safety

akestell@spokanecounty.org

Jackie Sykes 477-2193

Clinic Coordinator

jsykes@spokanecounty.org

Master Gardener County Site

http://extension.wsu.edu/spokane/

master-gardener-program

Master Gardener Foundation of Spo-

kane County

http://www.mgfsc.org/

WSU Master Gardener Site

http://mastergardener.wsu.edu/

HortSense Fact Sheets

http://hortsense.cahnrs.wsu.edu/Home/

HortsenseHome.aspx

On Line Timelog Reporting:

http://ext.wsu.edu/Volunteers/logon.aspx

The Nitrogen Cycle

International Year of the Pulses

(#iyp2016)

Can You Hear Earth’s Heartbeat When You Eat Your Lentils?

(Part V)

By Kathy Callum

Earth is the real master recycler. Catastrophic system failure and

shortages would occur if nature did not conserve its significant natural resources

through recycling. Among the more critical of Earth’s natural resources are car-

bon (C) and nitrogen (N), on which all life depends. Carbon is the mater ial

building block of life. Carbon also serves as Earth’s thermostat. Nitrogen, which

is converted into an available form, is responsible for the energy transference in

living cells that makes all life possible. This energy transference is called meta-

bolic (living body) energy.

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FOUNDATION NEWS

Still basking in the glow of a fantastic Fall Banquet!

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Because of the symbiotic bacteria in nodules at their roots, pulses,

along with the other legumes, play an essential role in converting inert

atmospheric nitrogen to plant available nitrogen by “fixing”. This is a

crucial part of Earth’s natural cycle because it removes nitrogen from

the atmosphere and effectively “fixes” it, so it can be used by living

entities. Carbon and nitrogen molecules hang out in the atmosphere,

are animated when they become part of living beings, take up residen-

cy in the earth when the living beings die, and eventually return to the

air, thus completing the natural Earth’s natural cycles. Any perturba-

tion of this natural system wreaks havoc on Earth’s fragile balancing act.

Essentially, you could think of pulses, other legumes, and all nitrogen-fixing

plants (and their symbiotic bacteria) as Earth’s sanitation workers, who we’ve

been shortsightedly downsizing in favor of mechanization and outsourcing. The

amount of available nitrogen effectively regulates Earth’s carbon cycle. “The

supply of [available] nitrogen is a key factor controlling the nature and diversi-

ty of plant life, the population dynamics of both grazing animals and their pred-

ators, and vital ecological processes such as plant productivity and the cycling

of carbon and soil minerals. This is true not only in wild or unmanaged systems

but in most croplands and forestry plantations as well” according to Peter M.

Vitousek. Increase the pool of available nitrogen unleashed from its bonds, and

that increases the pool of carbon mined from the soil and catapulted into our atmosphere. Vitousek goes on

to explain that “Excessive nitrogen additions can pollute ecosystems and alter both their ecological function-

ing and the living communities they support.”

Peter Viousek reports that “Until human activities began to alter the natural cycle, however, nitrogen was

only scantily available to much of the biological world. The scanty amount of reactive nitrogen was limiting

factor that controlled the dynamics, biodiversity, and functioning of many ecosystems.” Development of the

Haber-Bosch process allowed humans to bypass natural nitrogen limitations. Humans could now con-

vert atmospheric nitrogen and mined fossil fuels into ammonia fertilizer, creating an anthropogenic pool of

biologically reactive nitrogen.

The rise in the use of fossil fuel in mechanized agriculture throughout our

modern world to produce food resulted in a global nitrogen cycle, that to par-

aphrase Fields (2004), has “cycled out of control.” Too much nitrogen in our

waters creates dead zones (eutrophication) in the oceans from commercial

fertilizer run off. Too much nitrogen in our air creates harmful acid rain,

makes it difficult to breathe, decreases biodiversity and has triggered disas-

trous global climate change.

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A Book Review by Susan Mulvihill

Late Bloomer: How to Garden with Comfort, Ease and Simplicity

in the Second Half of Life

by Jan Coppola Bills (St. Lynn’s Press, 2016, 143 pages, $18.95)

As soon as I saw the title, I knew I had to read this book! And even if you aren’t in the second half of

your life, Late Bloomer will enhance your enjoyment of your garden immensely.

Late Bloomer is hot off the presses, having just been released last month. In it, author Jan Coppola

Bills shares her secrets to making smart decisions so you won’t feel overwhelmed every time you slip on your garden gloves.

I’ve been a Master Gardener for 14 years now so the majority of her suggestions are things I know all too well. And yet, I have to admit I’ve made many mistakes over the years and have created a fairly labor-intensive garden as a result. So you can believe I was taking copious notes while reading this book!

Bills’ #1 rule, which is repeated throughout the book is “Right plant, right place.” How many times have we heard that? And yet so many gardeners choose plants for their gardens because they appeal on a gut level to them, rather than doing a little research ahead of time. The author explains the most important attributes to look for, such as zone, light and moisture requirements, and mature size.

She strongly believes in gardening sustainably by avoiding the use of pesticides and being willing to share some of her garden bounty with insects and wildlife. She knows the importance of attracting wildlife and pollinators and tells us how to accomplish this. And she advocates not tidying up our gar-dens or removing fallen leaves since they benefit wildlife and the soil.

Bills promotes the idea of being active and stretching before gardening activities so we can all enjoy our favorite pastime. She also shares several tools that will make tasks easier while keeping us com-fortable.

The author explains what hardiness zones are and why they’re so important. After all, what’s the point of buying a plant that’s unsuitable for your zone, including the fact that it might need unneces-sary coddling? Those of us who live in colder climates should especially be checking the zone first when plant-shopping.

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In her chapter on “Garden Styling,” Bills shares important design tips to make our plantings appeal to us. This involves choosing the right types of plants (such as annuals, perenni-als and evergreens) based on the look we’re hoping to

achieve. One huge tip was to put plants where their growth habits can be embraced rather than our need-ing to cut them back frequently to fit the space we gave them. And, of course, we should select bloom col-ors that appeal us and add garden art to express ourselves.

As I read this book, my mind kept thinking about ways to cut back in my own garden. Several of the au-thor’s suggestions might seem like no-brainers, and yet, what do we gardeners do? We landscape in a way that’s more labor-intensive and we frequently engage in “zonal denial,” thinking certain plants will grow just fine in our colder zones!

I enjoyed Bills’ “Small Garden Abundance” chapter where she explained that, with a good design, it’s possi-ble to have a small, yet fulfilling garden that speaks to you and reflects who you are. She recommends planting beds thickly so they’ll shade and out-compete weeds. That said, remember to place plants based on their mature size.

Throughout the book, the author gives examples of the situations some of her clients have and how their garden design solves problems while meeting their goals and desires.

Now, I don’t want to give away all of Jan Coppola Bills’ secrets, but you will find tips on growing ornamen-tal trees and shrubs, when to water and how to conserve this precious resource, ways to cut down on the amount of work your garden requires, how to keep weeding to a minimum, an easy way to decrease the size of your lawn, and how to grow vegetables and fruits.

In her final chapter, “Perfectly Imperfect,” she implores us to stop trying to aim for perfection! Now, wouldn’t that make our time in the garden much more enjoyable?

Jan Coppola Bills has an easy-to-read writing style, where you feel like you’re sitting across from her at a kitchen table while she’s letting you in on her se-

crets. Late Bloomer is well worth reading no matter what your age. Once

you’ve finished it, I can guarantee you’ll be looking at your garden with a criti-cal eye and making a list of the things that will return the joy to your favorite passion!

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In the 1900s, largely due to the consequences of Justus von Liebig’s research,

people started regarding the soil as a giant factory, rather than as complex ecosys-

tems. Such a soil factory merely required sufficient inputs of nitrogen (N), phos-

phate (P), and potassium (K) to make it an efficient producer of our food. David

Montgomery, author of Dirt: Erosion of Civilizations, writes that the U.S. Soil

Bureau’s “Whitney conceived of the soil as a machine that required tuning in or-

der to sustain high crop yields.” Whitney’s challenge to American agriculture in

1901 was that, “we can unquestionably force the fertility far beyond the natural

limit and far beyond the ordinary limits of crop production.” A professor named

Fritz Haber first demonstrated the synthesis of ammonia from nitrogen and hy-

drogen in 1909. Carl Bosch quickly “translated” his discovery into a commercial

process known as the Haber-Bosch process. Commercial consumption of fossil-

fuel derived synthetic fertilizer rapidly accelerated after World War II.

A professor named Vaclav Smil argues in Enriching the Earth that over 6 billion

people on Earth would not exist without the significant technical discovery that

ammonia (NH3) could be synthesized from fossil fuels. He argues that this

historical transformation of humanity’s food supply was more significant than

the invention of space flight, television, the airplane or nuclear energy. Today,

we have globalized the use of “130 million tonnes” of ammonia, of which most

is used as synthetic fertilizer to force the soil to grow food. Smil points out that

consequently there’s a lot of nitrogen tied up in the 6 billion of us now on the

planet. Smil, oddly enough, doesn’t highlight the sheer wastefulness of humani-

ty’s current approach to manufacture and application of synthetic fertilizer, nor

its disastrous perturbation of the global carbon cycle. Yet plants uptake only 2%-

10% of any synthetic nitrogen fertilizer applied to soil. The remainder (90%-98%) dumps straight into

our waters and air as a pollutant. We must also acknowledge there’s a lot of carbon tied up in our teem-

ing mass of humanity. Climate change disasters are the most pressing consequence of bypassing the

natural cycle of biological nitrogen fixation.

Professor Vaclav Smil predicts that social disasters, like energy crises, will

overtake us long before the natural disasters that are a consequence of global

warming. Smil also authored Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty

Years. This cranky and pessimistic book argues that in the face of anthropo-

genic global warming, humanity has more to fear from social disasters like the

promotion of biofuel, mismanagement of national economies and demographic

change, than it does from the direct effect of rising greenhouse gases. Smil ap-

pears to have an ultra-conservative dislike of the notion of “peak oil”, doubts

that human’s transition to viable renewable energy can be rapid and is quite

dismissive of traditional cropping systems reliant on biological nitrogen fixa-

tion. Smil calculates that all our changes in diet (less food and meat in particu-

lar), the most “assiduous recycling of all organic wastes,” and “the widest practical planting of leg-

umes” would still completely fail to supply sufficient nitrogen for Earth’s human population’s needs.

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Many research and applied scientists from all walks of life, including me, do not agree with many of Smil’s

vociferous opinions about climate change and the ways to address it in Enriching the Earth and other works.

However, his meticulously argued read about nitrogen (N) does provide baseline perspective on this globally

critical element for those of us interested in food, agriculture and climate change … which no doubt includes

everyone that lives on Earth.

The documentary “Symphony of the Soil” and many, many others (hence the

2015/2016 Paris Agreement) observed that Ear th is already reaping the effects of

both climate disasters as well as the social disasters tied climate change due to our per-

turbation of the global nitrogen cycle through fossil fuel mining and mechanization of

the Haber-Bosch process. Hopefulness for humanity and the future here on Earth is

why the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has designat-

ed 2016 as “International Year of the Pulses” (#iyp2016). So, why not “give peas a

chance” in your garden and on your table in the effor t help our natural planet sys-

tems repair their broken global nitrogen and carbon cycles? Can’t you just hear Earth’s

heart beat when you eat those lentils?

A good thing gone awry? Nitrogen fertilizers make the differ-

ence between an adequate diet and malnutrition for much of the

world population, but an excess of reactive nitrogen compounds

in the air, water, and soil wreaks havoc on fragile ecosystems.

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Maggie Smith 7-Dec

Mary Himley 14-Dec

Jennifer Hamilton 18-Dec

Richard Smith 18-Dec

Pamela Graham 20-Dec

Frances Kinkade 25-Dec

Jennifer Tiegs 26-Dec

Sandy Baker 28-Dec

Phyllis Ward 28-Dec

Dorene Wade 31-Dec

We are so glad you are with us!

Holiday thanks to each

Master Gardener

for a very successful

2016!

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Fact Sheet Update

There are some great new fact sheets available for you and our clients to use in the garden! Let’s get right

to them.

County Fact sheets available soon on our web page:

C048 Geraniums: Thanks to Sue Malm for revising and updating this fact sheet which now includes live

links to the Hortsense webpages for pest control information.

C049 Gladiolus: This fact sheet has also been updated to include a live link to Hortsense for pest control.

C094 Poisonous Plants and Your Pets: Thank you Lynn Myer and Bruce Dentler

for updating this fact sheet and providing links to more information

C130 Soil Amendments: Thank you Laren Sunde for researching and updating this fact sheet. It now in-

cludes Coconut fiber/coir and explains why we no longer recommend peat moss. Thank you Laren!

C181 Soil Erosion by Water: Thank you Mary Beth Shinn for updating this fact

sheet and pointing out we are missing wind erosion in our COPUBS. If you are in-

terested in taking on Wind Erosion of Soil, please contact Tim!

C188 Seasonal Jobs in the Garden: Thank you Master Gardeners for researching and revising this fact

sheet, just in time!

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DECEMBER 2016 QUIZ

1. 2016 is the International Year of the ________.

2. All life on earth depends on which two elements?

3. Which element also serves as earth’s thermostat?

4. What are earth’s sanitation workers?

5. What is causing eutrophication in the oceans?

6. Who first demonstrated the synthesis of ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen?

7. Which soil amendment can be synthesized from fossil fuels?

8. How much of the synthetic fertilizer that is applied to crop soils is able to be taken up by plants?

9. Which professor/author disagrees that humans can make much difference in climate change?

10. Where do excess nitrogen compounds applied to crops end up?

11. What is Jan Coppola Bills’ #1 rule?

12. If you choose to avoid pesticide use, with whom must you be willing to share your garden pro-

duce?

13. You should place plants where you can embrace their growth habit. True or False?

14. According to Jan Bills, by planting gardens thickly you can keep what from growing in your gar-

den?

15. To what does the final chapter of Late Bloomer encourage us to aim for in our gardens?

16. Where can you find an explanation of why MGs no longer recommend the use of peat moss?

17. If you would like to update the fact sheet on Soil Erosion by wind, who should you contact?

18. Which newly updated fact sheets contain live links to Hortsense?

19. If you need information about plants poisonous to pets, where

would you look?

20. Who is wished a very Happy Holiday season by Kris M-H (editor)?

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NOVEMBER 2016 QUIZ ANSWERS

1. All of the Master Gardeners in Spokane County.

2. Connie Curtain, Susan Purdon

3. You have your own answer. Do you know a company with which we can partner?

4. On our website.

5. It is older than five years and has not been checked.

6. Saturday, April 29, 2017 in the Extension parking lot

7. 3 R’s

8. Tim Stiess

9. Major toxicity

10. 800-222-1222

11. False

12. Sambucus cerulean, Blue Elderberry

13. False

14. Microgreens

15. Sprouts start in dark, moist conditions where harmful bacteria are a potential problem.

16. Yes

17. Light, temperature, water, humidity, potting media, fertilizer

18. The origins of the plant.

19. What’s Wrong with My Houseplant?

20. Each of you are wished a Happy Holiday season!!!

Extension programs and policies are consistent with federal and state laws and regulations on nondiscrimination regarding race, sex, religion, age, color, creed, national or ethnic origin; physical, mental, or sensory disability; marital status, sexual orientation, or status as a Vietnam-era or disabled veteran. Evidence of noncompliance may be reported through your local Extension office.

Calendar of Events

Wednesday 7 Pearl Harbor Day

Tuesday 13 MG Advisory Board Mtg 4 p.m. Extension conference room

Wednesday 21 Winter Begins

Sunday 25 Christmas

Monday 26 Kwanzaa

Saturday 31 New Year’s Eve

Sunday 1 New Year’s Day

Thursday 5 MG Trainees Orientation 9 a.m.— 2 p.m. Extension class rooms

Monday 9 MG Foundation Meeting 10 a.m. Extension conference room

Thursday 12 MG Training/Hort. Class series 9 a.m.— 3 p.m. (Botany)

Thursday 19 MG Training/Hort. Class series 9 a.m.— 3 p.m. (Soils)

Thursday 26 MG Training/Hort. Class series 9 a.m.— 3 p.m. (Urban Forestry & Firewise)