What’s the difference between a house and a home? We all know the answer instinctively: articulating it is trickier. The architect Le Corbusier famously—and chillingly—described the house as “a machine for living in.” But “home,” surely, is not about mechanics. But when we are at home, where are we?

First the house. Built to shelter a family or individuals from the elements, a habitation where we eat, rest, educate and amuse ourselves, the house includes appurtenances for preparing food, sleeping, reposing, keeping warm and bathing. Here you have the requisite machine for living in, but not, alas, a home.

The anthropologist Mircea Eliade found that, in traditional societies, the home is regarded as the center of the world. The home represents “the heart of the real,” the vantage point that allows people to make sense of their world. The home is a refuge from the “unreal”—the ever-present threats posed by the unknown and unforeseen.

For our hunter-gatherer cousins, the home is situated at the junction of two intersecting lines. The vertical line locates the home between heaven and the underworld. The horizontal line places the home, as the art critic John Berger writes, as the “starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys.” When we say we’re going home, we are referring to just one place: our place.

Beginning in the 1980s, the American home came under a self-inflicted siege. No money down, low interest loans and a steady climb in house values gave rise to McMansions, supersized houses measuring 7500 square feet or more, which planted their big “footprints” in U.S. suburbs.

These dream houses, while very much in the spirit of high-flying 80s and 90s, were incommensurate with the shrinking American family. Since 1950, the average American home has more than doubled in size, while the average household is 20 percent smaller, reduced from 3.35 people to 2.63 people inclined to living large.

“Starter castles” embody what realtors call “curb appeal”—you certainly can see them from the curb. However, their giant “footprints” leave little room on the lot for play or recreation. Furthermore, many homeowners associations prohibit vegetable gardens—in America, no less, one of the ideal places to grow a summer vegetable garden. One wonders what Washington, Jefferson and the other First Farmers would think.

Today, Americans are looking for smaller houses. The mortgage market is tight, and hefty deposits are mandated. Add to that the uncertain economy, flat lining real estate values, and rising fuel prices and small is beautiful once again.

People now want homes that fit them like gloves. The new American house will soon be a marvel of balance, proportion and craftsmanship. Nevertheless, a house, however fine the exterior, is static and inexpressive. On its own, the structure sits mutely and forlornly on the landscape, the windows blankly staring into the middle distance. The times, I believe, call for a new American garden to serve as an equal partner in the new American home.

Now let me tell you about my table trick, a feat of legerdemain that never fails to dazzle houseguests. At the dinner table I ask my visitors to look away, as I stealthily whisk away the vase of flowers.

Now, I ask my guests to look at the table. Anything different? Yes, they will say, something important is missing, but what? At this point I replace the vase on the table to a collective “Aha!”

The impact of the flowers is a revelation to all. The table becomes alive, the room becomes alive, the flowers’ colorful blooms illuminate the guests, and sparkle in their gazes. Gardens have precisely this effect on a home.

Garland your property with flowers, herbs, fruits and vegetables and you will experience this magic. Flowers, their form, color and fragrance, represent the summit of natural beauty. You cannot find fresher, more flavorful fruits, herbs and vegetables than those you grow at home.

In keeping with Eliade’s vertical axis of home, the garden connects us to the earth and sun. From our media-drenched, high-tech dystopia, the garden provides a sanctuary for the senses: a pageant of color, scent, shape, texture and flavor.

A family that works together in the garden shares in one of mankind’s oldest and most cherished rituals. Begin your garden and you’ll witness an extraordinary transformation, as your house grows into a home.

We Baby Boomers may not be called the “greatest generation”—that’s you, Mom and Dad!—but we certainly are the biggest. A veritable demographic juggernaut, the generation of Americans born between 1946 and 1964 is proceeding into post-middle age.

On January 1st, 2011, the oldest Baby Boomers celebrated their 65th birthday. On every day since, and every day for the next 18 years, 10,000 Boomers will have turned age 65. By 2030, 18% of the country will be 65 or over, and by 2050 there will be more than 4 million centenarians. We’ll break out the champagne.

As the Sixties Generation turns 60, Boomers are set to reinvent how it looks and feels to be elderly in America. Since we are the first to grow up in an entirely branded world, it’s only fitting that our collective old age get a makeover.

The existing terms used to describe us are, well, bummers: senior citizens, the elderly, older Americans, golden agers. Just hearing them makes one’s joints ache. They reflect the viewpoint of a clinician wielding pincers over a gurney. Who would proudly proclaim himself a “senior citizen”?

Indeed, the very notion of “old” has gotten old. A study by the Pew Charitable Trust reveals that just a third of respondents 75 or older regard themselves as “old”, while a third of adults 65 to 74 feel 10 to 19 years younger than their years, with a frisky sixth feeling 20 years younger. The post-young era is a time for happy reflection: a mere one percent of Pew’s respondents say their lives turned out worse than expected.

So what does this new old age hold for Boomers? What will we do in the coming third of our life? The aging Boomer can regard retirement not as an impending dark ages, but rather as a renaissance in the making—the perfect opportunity to renew, discover, and express oneself and find new meaning in this life business.

This is not your father’s retirement. Our restless generation will continue its quest for new challenges and new discoveries. In our old age we seek meaning. Experience has taught us that life’s greatest, most enduring pleasures are simple ones. By now we know immediate gratification isn’t gratifying, and that material things do not add up to happiness or fulfillment. Older and wiser, we want what money can’t buy.

I suggest one way to fulfill these wants, as well as fill the emptiness retirement often presents. Since ancient times, those of humankind who could do so, retired to the country. But now, in this still-affluent age, the country can be found mere steps from your door.

The garden provides the essential ingredients for post-youngsters to stay physically, socially and mentally active, curious and relatively stress-free. Plus, vegetable gardening not only saves money, but also introduces you to flavors and colors you’ve neither tasted nor seen. Starting over, indeed.

Unlike golf, tennis, bridge and travel, gardening offers a rich and varied narrative—one calling for planning, caring and resourcefulness. The home garden is a sacred realm, a world apart from the babble of media and hum of technology. We are linked to the sun, the earth and the elements. Caring for plants, we ourselves are nurtured and nourished. And, farther afield, community gardens enable post-youngsters to help build neighborhoods and create a healthful and sustainable legacy for decades to come—an age-old, old-age concern.

In both private and public gardens, the generation that gave new meaning to “green” can find a continuing source of stimulation, serenity and fulfillment. Baby Boomers become Baby Bloomers. Joni Mitchell put it best: “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get back to the garden.

At this time of year, just as my thoughts turn to Easter, I think of gardening, and as soon as I think of gardening, I’m reminded of Easter, and then I’m back to gardening, and then back to Easter, and so forth. If my toing and froing sounds like spring fever, well, it is.

After all, let’s remember that Easter, spring and the garden are inextricably linked, together forming a richly wrought tapestry interwoven with deep, ancient historical, symbolic and religious meanings.

Spring is the season of salvation. The dead of winter, is, metaphorically, the death of our souls; the time when plants die, and animals go into hibernation. Life is on its knees. Even our thoughts change from active to reflective. Sometimes in winter, when our light-deprived selves have exhausted our psychic pantry of serotonin, the death can seem actual rather than metaphorical. By winter’s end we haven’t just taken stock of our situation, we’ve used most of it up.

Thus, Easter, spring and the garden represent thresholds: moving from a suspended state to new beginnings. In Easter, we transition from sinning humankind to a future of salvation; with spring, we emerge from a still, slumbering, gray season of scarcity to a season when nature takes on vibrant new colors, textures and sounds. With the garden, we experience the shift from poverty to plenty.

Now is the time we look away from the past and turn our focus to the future. Easter lets us look forward to salvation, spring to summer, the garden to what we must do to sustain ourselves. The passage from Phillipians comes to mind, where St. Paul speaks of, “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead.”

Whether gardeners or not, religionists or not, at this time of year we all feel the renewal of life: new hope, illumination, the uplifted spirit. We revel in the longer days, the marvels awaiting us out of doors: the pageant of colors, the cantatas of birdsongs, the elixir of fragrance in the air.

Easter is not the only link between religion and the garden. The roots of religion are universally agricultural. Mankind’s earliest writings were, in one sense, agricultural manuals, in another books of religious instruction, so entwined were the two concerns.

The garden is not merely a great metaphor—it is the first metaphor. From a biblical perspective, we all began in the garden. You might recall Adam, Eve and the awkward matter of the apple of temptation, humankind’s original and greatest sin. Disobeying their Creator’s strict instructions, Adam and Eve partook of the apple offered by their serpentine interlocutor.

God promptly exiled the couple from the paradisiacal Garden of Eden, and sentenced the pair, their descendents, and all mankind—to what? Gardening! Yes, the never-ending punishment for our greatest sin is to become a gardener. By casting out Adam and Eve, the Creator gave his children the responsibility to create their own lives. Rather than lolling about the paradisiacal garden, we’ve been working in our own earthly gardens ever since.

Though our worldly realm may have its cares and woes, diseases and pests, lives and deaths, we get to do it ourselves. And when reason fails us, or fate strikes a stunning blow, we don’t so much pray to God as we do talk to God. This is because it is God who asks the questions, who challenges us every year in the spring.

Original sin was the beginning of reason. The point of reason is that mortals are, in effect, never saved. One has to save oneself with God looking on—which is how he helps. And after saving yourself — just like in the airline oxygen mask instruction—you turn to help the weak and defenseless, aka your fellow human beings. Nowhere is this spirit more eloquently expressed than in the garden—home, community or public. Brother helping brother; neighbor helping neighbor — what a miracle!

As Henry David Thoreau, that American original, once observed, “Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

Happy Easter.

Metaphors bloom all around us as Spring approaches. It occurs to me how frequently gardening and agricultural images spring up in the language of business. Just the other day I read a headline on the Wall Street Journal site that Berkshire Hathaway and partners will “Plow $4 Billion into Copper Mines.” Keep your hand on that plow, Mr. Buffett!

Other examples abound. One’s profession is one’s “field.” We call factories “plants;” startup capital is “seed money,” and corporate expansion is “growth.” A risk-taking investment outfit is a “hedge fund.” Indeed, the terms “market” and “stocks” are of agricultural origin. (The great English novelist Muriel Spark amusingly describes the emergence of these terms in The Takeover, a comic novel about a 1970s Diana goddess cult.)

Symbols and metaphors function as psychic shorthand. We bundle ideas and emotions into a single message that’s instantly processed by its audience. Symbols skip past the brain’s sentries of logic and analysis, and once lodged in the brain, are hard to displace.

Recently we have seen how popular symbols can catch on, quickly outgrow their usefulness, and become catalysts of misunderstanding. Now, in the spirit of spring and renewal, I’d like to clear away the debris of two worn-out, bone-dry metaphors, and propose fresh new ones to take their place.

Over the last six months, “Wall Street” has snowballed into a catchall term encompassing the stock market, banking, hedge funds, speculators, venture capital, the Federal Reserve and your ATM. So inflated is this unit of cultural currency, it’s next to worthless. As Sam Goldwyn said of oral contracts: it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.

Then there’s “Main Street”—enshrined as the hometown antidote to Wall Street. Here’s another metaphor that now rings hollow, its glory days as a vibrant symbol for local economies long past. The main drag is … a drag. Cruise down a town’s Main Street nowadays and you might find a bank and a few retail stores, often branches of large national chains—hardly a proud showcase for local commerce.

The true address for American commerce is not Main Street, but just around the corner, on the Great American Side Street. For it is in corporate parks and office buildings located on Side Street U.S.A. where the business of the country’s business is percolating.

Side Street is home to startups, entrepreneurs, inventors, and emerging businesses. Suburban garages located on side streets have been the incubator of our greatest corporate success stories, including HP, Apple, Amazon and Google.

I champion the “Side Streets” because they best represent the diversity—in kind, size, shape and location—of American businesses. Business in the U.S. doesn’t fit into a cubbyhole called Wall Street or Main Street: it’s ecologically decentralized.

As for Wall Street, the term has become a platitude, wrapped in a stereotype, inside a cliché. It is a metaphorical dead-end street—the furthest thing from a true representation of the American marketplace.

To better convey the country’s true market, let’s put Wall Street’s bulls and bears out to pasture. I propose we reach back into the garden of metaphors and look for one that fits. Why there it is! The garden itself!

The Great American Garden is comprised of tens of thousands of retailers, small and large manufacturers, service companies and producers of raw materials. They vary as gloriously as plants in sophisticated botanical gardens. Our dazzling array of businesses is spread across the land, each inflected as well as nurtured by its unique region, climate and local culture—much like garden plants. The fruits of this national garden comprise the country’s vast and varied marketplace. Let’s put the “eco” back in “economy”.

As the first day of spring approaches, let’s also note the signs of promise and prosperity that are all around us. Too often our use of outmoded symbols blinds us to fresh and positive developments.

Look at the cities of Seattle, San Jose, Chicago and Houston; all are booming—and blooming—with stable property values and high job growth. Why pundits keep overlooking these national success stories I can only ascribe to spring fever.

So, how do you get to the Great American Garden? Simple. Take a Side Street.

Most of the country has had a mild winter this year. This often means more insects and pests during the growing season. Maybe as a harbinger, a brown marmorated stink bug has been seen already at Fordhook Farm, home of W. Atlee Burpee.

I think that we in temperate climates (most of North America) are blessed. In the tropics, consistent warmth and moisture and an endless summer relentlessly spawn generation after generation of insects and pests.

Consider the great 19th century English linguist and explorer Sir Richard Burton. Burton, who was nominally a Christian, is well known for making a pilgrimage to Mecca, Islam’s most holy site, disguised as a Pashtun chieftain. He was the first European to explore Central Africa where he located Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria. In Africa, Burton was so sick from insect-borne tropical diseases, that he was unable to walk for much of the trip. And trips were much longer in those days. His colleague, John Hanning Speke, whom he hated as much as Speke hated him, was temporarily blinded by disease and was deaf in one ear from an infection caused by a botched attempt to remove a beetle from his ear. It was Speke, whom Burton—too sick to move—sent off to be rid of, who discovered the long-sought source of the Nile.

For us, it seems that every year brings a cleansing winter that kills off insects and other pests. There’s truth to that, but it’s an overly simplistic view. Winter kills many insects and limits the number of generations possible in a year, but our temperate-climate insects have plenty of ways to cope with cold weather.

In fall, for instance, Monarch butterflies from all over North America leave cold weather behind and go south. They gather in huge groups and overwinter in trees in Mexico and southern California. In the spring, when the temperatures warm again, they fly home.

Insects do not control their temperature the way we do. They are at the mercy of their environment. But at the same time, they have no need to eat constantly to maintain a stable body temperature. When it gets cold, many of them burrow into the soil and enter a state of temperature-induced low metabolic activity that they can maintain as long as necessary. Soil temperatures remain relatively stable throughout winter; snow acts as an additional insulating cover. Unusually bitter or early cold or years without snowfall may kill these insects but not usually and not all of them.

Insects in very cold areas freeze solid—more or less. The insect’s cells do not actually freeze, but water in its interior does. This internal ice draws water out of the cells, increasing the cellular concentration of sugars and proteins (mostly) within insect cells, which further lowers their freezing point. Delicate cell membranes are not injured, and when the weather warms, the ice melts and the insect comes back to life.

Insects that live in mildly cold areas that cannot tolerate freezing protect themselves with antifreeze. They synthesize compounds (polyhydroxy alcohols) that allow them to “supercool” and survive (without freezing) temperatures well below 32° F. Among these compounds is ethylene glycol, the same that we use in cars. They’re out of luck, though, if temperatures drop below the point where their antifreeze works.

But what about this year? Will we have a scourge of insects this year? It’s too early to tell really. It’s true that more insects than normal will survive the mild winter. But spring is twelve days away, and the possibility for winter weather remains. Insects that normally would have remained quiescent longer may have been coaxed out by the unusually mild conditions. Temperature fluctuations could kill them. Then there are the parasites, predators, and diseases of insect adults, larvae, and eggs that may also be active earlier than normal and may cut insect numbers.

Nevertheless, without further winter weather and all else being equal, insects and other pests will get an early start this spring. In Pennsylvania, the brown marmorated stink bug (late of Asia) has a single generation in a year. Under a longer, warm spring and summer, it could manage two or three generations; four to six generations per year have been recorded in parts of China where it’s native.

Aphids overwinter as eggs and hatch in spring when temperatures warm. Most aphid species go through numerous generations during the growing season. This year more eggs may have survived and, combined with earlier hatching, there could be earlier, more severe infestations. These will cause wilt and yellowing or distorted and stunted plant growth. And aphids transmit viruses to many plants.

Buckle up because there may be more mosquitoes, fleas and ticks this year too. Mosquitoes overwinter as adults and are always out in early spring. They lay their eggs in standing water and complete the cycle from egg to biting, adult mosquitoes in a few weeks. In a warm, moist spring, mosquito populations explode. While our mosquitoes don’t carry the typically nasty diseases for which they’re known in the tropics, they still spread La Crosse encephalitis, West Nile Virus, and (for your dog) heartworm. Additionally, there’s their high annoyance factor.

Fleas could get in extra generations this year and could be a full-blown problem by summer. They like warm, humid conditions, and in the humid days of summer, your house will tend to be humid too. They’ll love your carpets—and possibly your socks, from which they’ll attack your ankles. Watch your pets and vacuum their sleeping areas regularly to remove flea eggs and suppress subsequent generations.

Then there are ticks (arachnids, not insects). Mild winters may or may not affect their populations. But nice weather draws people to tick territory where most cases of Lyme disease are contracted from the tiny nymphs that are most active in spring and early summer. Watch where you go outdoors and check your body over at the end of each day.

In the meantime, enjoy these last days of winter.

If you’re like most people, you missed the release in late January of the USDA’s new plant hardiness zone map. You probably didn’t even know an update was in the works. This new version replaces the 1990 release, and that one replaced the 1965 and 1960 releases.

The plant hardiness zone map is probably most familiar to people from perennial seed and plant catalogs. I remember seeing it for years without thinking much about it or taking the time to figure out what it was good for—if you’re mostly growing vegetables or annual bedding plants, who cares? As a review, what is it and what are the basic assumptions behind it, and is this new version an improvement?

The intent of the hardiness zone map has always been as a guide to gardeners. In a general way, it allows us to standardize how we think and talk about plant hardiness. So it’s also useful to other plant growers and researchers, and it serves as a basis for the USDA Risk Management Agency’s crop insurance standards program. This most recent version was jointly developed by USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and Oregon State University’s PRISM Climate Group. It’s available at http://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb/# for access.

The map is characterized by a series of colorful bands that cross the country from east to west. These represent temperature “zones” that differ in10° F increments; each zone is further subdivided into two 5° F temperature increments (designated “a” and “b”, with “a” being cooler than “b”). These incremental temperature zones represent average annual minimum temperatures. They do not indicate the coldest temperature ever recorded or that will ever occur in an area.

Survival of perennial plants over winter is considered, in this scheme, to be the most critical factor in plant adaptation to an environment, and plants are empirically assigned to a hardiness zone largely on that basis. But survival alone is not the whole story. Lots of things affect plant adaptability. Wind, soil type, soil moisture, humidity, snow, and winter sunshine are all important, as are cultural factors such as plant size and health. Under the plant hardiness zone scheme, zone ratings are intended to indicate “excellent” adaptability. A plant assigned to Zone 5a, for instance, should do more than just survive in that zone; it ought to thrive.

In the new map, zone average annual minimum temperature is computed from 30 years of data (1976–2005), whereas the previous version used only 13 years of data (1974–1986). Here, more is surely better. USDA says that the new map is generally a half-zone warmer (that is 5° F) than the previous map throughout much of the USA. But in the same paragraph, USDA says that the additional years of data do not make a significant difference in defining the zones. Oh? Maybe I’m wrong, but that half-zone temperature shift sure sounds significant to me.

What else is new? The mapping technique algorithms are more sophisticated, allowing more precision in interpolating temperature readings between weather stations. More weather stations were used; so this too adds greater precision and detail to the new map. And the vicinity of large bodies of water and variation in terrain and elevation were taken into account for the first time. USDA notes that these additions are improvements and may be most important for people in mountainous areas. No doubt that’s true, but my guess is that you if you live on a mountain, you already know that it’s generally cooler up there than in the valley below.

Two new zones have been added: Zones 12 (50–60° F) and 13 (60–70° F). These are included on the maps of Puerto Rico and Hawaii only.

In the past, a large printed zone map could be ordered from USDA. This option is no longer available. The new map is strictly internet based, but high resolution versions (of the entire USA and individual states) can be downloaded and printed. In addition to the printable “static” map(s), an interactive, GIS-based map is available. This map allows you to zoom in and see roads and other land features and click on them to determine the hardiness zones and where they’re located. If you’ve ever used Google Maps or weather.com maps (which may be the same technology) to check the condition of the shingles on your roof or to see if your neighbor down the street ever moved his boat, you may be underwhelmed by the resolution of the interactive zone map. It’s good enough. You can infer where your neighborhood is from the larger roads that show up, but you won’t see your garden plot unless it’s a section or more. I don’t think for most people that this is any better than the hardiness zone–zip code function that is still available and was part of the 1990 map.

You say you ordered seeds and plants in December before the release of this new hardiness zone map? No need to worry. This may be “the most sophisticated Plant Hardiness Zone Map yet for the United States”, as the USDA press release says, but in a practical sense, the improvements over the 1990 version are insignificant. And the resolution on the interactive map is a big disappointment.

Long before the ancestors of modern flowering plants diverged from their ancestors, ancient plants developed means that allowed them to tell time by the Sun, to sense the lengths of day and night. This told them when to grow and when to flower and when to rest. At that time, the climate was much warmer, and the present configuration of continents did not exist. There was only the single supercontinent Pangaea where the freezing temperatures that characterize Earth’s contemporary temperate zones, such as most of North America, were not a worry for those plants.

More recently (on a geological time scale), a couple hundred million years ago the supercontinent began to break apart, and flowering plants emerged. Continental drift along with a changing climate and altered radiation patterns promoted the diversification in these plants that led to modern flowering plants. In this new world, the ability to sense chilling temperatures and adapt to them had value. Those groups that adapted and coordinated their life cycles with the changing seasons thrived. Among these were the flowering plants, which make up close to 90% of all plant species on Earth and dominate every terrestrial environment except the northern coniferous forests.

Nobody knows for sure quite how plants sense cold. But what is known is that cold perception occurs in the bud, the shoot apical meristem, and that there are several distinct but related ways that flowering plants use cold to synchronize flowering with the seasons. Vernalization and breaking of bud dormancy are two of these. Vernalization is seen in the cereals such as wheat and barley and winter annuals such as beet, and breaking bud dormancy is seen in temperate fruits and nuts. Both occur after sufficiently long periods of low but above-freezing temperatures. And both enable plants to remain dormant and conserve energy during the colder months of the year and to begin flowering when it’s safe to do so.

Mechanistically and physiologically the two are quite different. Vernalization does not trigger flowering; it renders plants capable of producing flowers. Breaking bud dormancy occurs in already developed flower buds and allows flowering to proceed. In both, though, what finally initiates flowering is the more ancient machinery centered in plant leaves that perceives lengthening or shortening days and signals the flower buds that the time for reproductive growth has arrived.

If you live in any region with recognizable winter weather, Minneapolis–St. Paul (USDA growing zones 3b–4b) or even Atlanta (zone 7), the chances are pretty good that you don’t consider whether your plants are getting enough cold weather. You’re far more likely to worry about them freezing. But in some regions of the country, particularly where the climate is subtropical, too little cold weather is a genuine concern, particularly if you want to grow temperate fruits.

I have an on-going vernalization experiment with beet and chard. Both are winter annuals (or biennials); they are, in fact, the same plant that has been bred for different edible parts. Winter annuals complete their life cycle over two growing seasons with an intervening cold period (winter). To flower, they rely on a sufficiently long period of cold to help them coordinate flowering with the growing season and prevent flowering before spring has actually arrived.

I initially planted them not as an experiment but as dinner. I didn’t harvest them all, and after a winter on California’s central coast (which is subtropical), I expected the survivors to bolt and flower as soon as the days grew longer and warmer. They did not. I puzzled over it for awhile before realizing that the cold period had not long enough for vernalization to occur. They still don’t know that winter has come and gone, twice. They are eternally young.

Except by chance, as with my beets, most people will not encounter an example of vernalization as clear as this. But in temperate fruits and nuts (including, but not limited to, apple, pear, apricot, nectarine, peach, plum, and many berries—Rubus and Ribes, for instance, as well as almond, filbert, and pistachio), it’s all too easy in warmer climates to stumble upon plants that have not had a sufficient period of cold (or “chilling hours”).

Temperate fruits and nuts need between 100 to 1400 chilling hours to grow normally. Exactly what determines a “chilling hour” is not clear, but there are a number of empirical models that are used to calculate chilling hours (see for example click here). The basic idea is that flower bud dormancy is broken when a plant is subjected to sufficient increments of temperature between freezing and 45°F during November through mid-February; cool temperatures in December and January seem to be most important. Chilling hours are cumulative. Temperatures below freezing do not add to cumulative chilling hours, and daytime temperatures >60°F reduce them. After the minimum chill requirement has been met, the plant is released from bud dormancy, although it may not begin to grow actively until temperatures warm up later in spring.

Minimum chill requirement is genetically determined and varies with species as well as with cultivar (lots of research money is devoted to breeding low-chill cultivars). Without sufficient chilling, flowering is delayed and haphazard. Leaves may not emerge normally or fully and may grow in whorls at the tips of branches, leaving the rest of the stem bare. Lower buds may eventually flower, but fruit set may be reduced or nonexistent. When the plant should senesce, it may retain its leaves and struggle on. Buds for the next year’s fruit may be weak and limited. Fruit quality and quantity will be reduced.

At the end of the day, as with any worthwhile endeavor, anticipation and planning are fundamental in horticulture. In areas where insufficient chilling hours are of concern (USDA zones 9 and 10 for certain), be mindful of your plantings and be sure that what you plant will meet its minimum chill requirement. Nurseries in these areas generally provide this information; but if not, it’s easily found online. Be aware that even small residential yards have microclimates, and that some places will be cooler than others. Cold air sinks while warm air rises. A wall that receives afternoon sun will retain and radiate heat. Next to it is a poor choice for planting a fruit tree with a high chilling hour requirement.

The value of a college or university education is a frequent topic in today’s news. “Is higher education worth the cost?” “Is higher education worth any cost?” Much jargon is used in these discussions. Words like “formation” and “socialization”. (Is “deformation” a result of a lack of “formal” education? Are uneducated people “anti-social”?) Often I wonder what professional educators are saying. Like an episode of “Twilight Zone”.

Correct information, and the basic skill of how to use it, is essential to success in human life. Evolution created our large brains. The price for splitting off from the rest of the animals is domestication. For that we have needed to solve many problems that used to be “programmed” when we were wild or “non-domesticated”. Solving problems—and being good at it—is as important to our individual survival as it is to our species.

Problem solving is eternal. Consider farming, carpentry, fishing, chess. Even gardening, photography, knitting, cooking. Can’t fake a bad meal.

Acquired at a young age, these measurable skills are essential to a college education. Young people should learn language and numeracy in high school. But “the three Rs” are warmups. Problem solving is the game of education, whether institutional or self-taught.

Take computers. People design and build them, others design and develop operating systems and still others “write” software. All done by problem solving. Many of the leaders in the development of this industry were college drop-outs. Only a couple were PhDs.

Even further, context is paramount. Computer innovations are created in real life. People program and apply the software to a particular business—steps, processes, operations—and, finally, operators use computers as tools, every bit like a carpenter uses a blueprint, saw, hammer and nails. Make a mistake, things fall apart.

Want to learn these information technology skills? Do them. Take a computer, read the instructions, discover what the machine can do for you, decide what you want to do with it—and do it.

From then on, your “education” consists of solving problems. Just as a camera extends your eye—or more exactly your mind’s eye—a computer extends your brain. It is a robot; it works by taking your instructions. You work by understanding its possibilities and limitations as well as the context in which it’s used. It is not intelligent—you are.

As in gardening (What do you want to grow?), or photography (What do you want to shoot?), you must know how to solve the problems that present themselves. Tools don’t work—you do.

Is college or university going to teach you, your child or grandchild problem solving? Maybe. But if you answer, “Absolutely yes”, you are deluding yourself. It may be that the opposite is true. Perhaps it is best to attend “The College of Hard Knocks”, as they call it.

A good example is learning a foreign language. Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur are a waste of time. Go to the country for two to three months, enroll in a part-time immersion course in any given town or city. They are everywhere. The rest of the day, work a part-time job and stay clear of everyone who speaks English. With the exception of Asian languages (4 to 6 months required), and with a strong desire and a natural gift for attentive talking and listening, you will return to the US with the ability to speak the language.

Cost? With the airline industry deregulated long ago, international travel is dirt-cheap. Ask any business traveler over 50. A safe residential hotel that caters to such as you can be had for little in most countries. Family-stays are even better.

College? Even “foreign language abroad” programs are generally ineffective. First, they are filled with Americans. Unless you are extremely bull-headed, you will acquire little skill in the foreign language.

If fluency in a foreign language is gold, skill at solving problems is pure platinum. It runs deeper than language, extends out into the world of material things and, if you are lucky, you can become an electrical engineer or molecular biologist. However, they share a snow-balling effect. Learn one language and the next is less daunting. Develop the first skill at solving a set of problems—a computer, for instance—and you can approach any problem and at least tackle it. It sharpens the way you look at reality.

Schools, colleges and universities that teach the hard sciences, the social sciences that involve metrics, basic industries, professions, engineering—they have great value, especially those that emphasize apprenticeship and “work out” programs. These institutions are worth attending. Many offer great benefits, related to their costs. One fine example is the University of Missouri-Rolla.

But nothing beats a job. An entry-level position at a well-run company of any size is the quickest and cheapest way for young adults to learn problem solving. Or do what many of our parents and grandparents did: work your way through school.

Despite its prosaic descriptive term, problem solving is the mother of intuition, the heart of innovation, and the core of craft. In contrast, and despite its abstruse lingo, most higher education attempts to turn life into art: a futile, tragic exercise. The true romance of humanity is the opposite: to bring the arts—particularly problem solving—to life.

I have a good Argentinean friend who was a wife of a top executive of a major, multinational industrial company. She also has great taste.

Once, many years ago, she and her husband spent several days as a guest of a wealthy client of her husband’s company at his home in Martinique, a former French colony in the West Indies. Even in the 1960s it was still renowned for its great charm and beauty, as well as its unique cuisine—a blend of French, Creole, African and even East Indian styles, using fresh fish, shellfish, local fruits, vegetables and herbs. In a word, fantastic.

One day she noticed how especially delicious the host’s meal had been—the rice was particularly tasty and of a unique quality she’d never experienced. She was amazed! The next day she was served an omelette, and later on a luncheon dish, both of which included a special cheese she’d not tasted before. She described it to me as “luxurious”. This was someone who had been fortunate to enjoy fine food the world over.

On the last day of her stay, she couldn’t help herself to ask her host if she might know the identity of the rice and cheese. The owner asked his cook to talk to my friend, and being “fellow cooks”, the two ladies met later and got into it, as they say.

The cook presented my friend with a box of rice called “Uncle Ben’s”. My friend wasn’t familiar with it, having not yet lived in the US. She made a special note of it, and the orange-colored box with the handsome portrait of the African-American gentleman on the top. She was mystified. In fact, she was more surprised that it was not a special variety from India or China, than that it was from the US. She recalls being impressed that the Americans had produced such a delicious rice.

Then she asked about the cheese. She didn’t know it—or anything about it. It was a completely new experience. It was so exotic to her that she had never tasted anything even remotely like it. The cook presented her with a square chunk in a silver wrapper. Later the host told her that he had it brought in by friends who visited him from the US. He said they’d keep it cold and then put a couple of little bricks in their bags when they flew in. “Philadelphia Cream Cheese”. The host was proud that my friend had enjoyed his food. He was French; he knew what she talking about when she was describing how uniquely delicious the rice and cheese were.

Later my friend and her husband were transferred from their home in Argentina to the US. She has never forgotten the bemused expressions of the other wives, mostly American, when she told her story about the phenomenal discoveries she had made in Martinique. Of course, they did not quite “get it”. But when my friend had them over for dinner at her home, they marveled at the dishes she cooked with these ingredients.

This story reminded me of a similar experience I had in Costa Rica in the early 1980s. I was on an extended stay—several weeks—and, whenever I was “free” (translation: lonely), I would stop off at a high-end hamburger joint (San Jose was full of them in those days, and they were very good. Americans had not yet streamed in to the country in masses and ruined them). I would relieve my boredom with a drink called “Jungle Fever”, if I remember correctly, or something like that. It was extraordinarily delicious and I had never tasted anything quite like it. I’d sit on the patio overlooking the lights of the city and forget my blues, mostly work-related, fortunately. “This is wrong, that is wrong.” But soon the beauty of the view, and the uncanny concoction of the lime and whatever else would make me “mellow”, as people used to call it in those days. Jungle Fever would arrive at the table before, during and even after the large, juicy hamburger. It was a long stay.

On one of my last visits, I went over to the long bar (Costa Ricans have splendid bars, even in rural cantinas). I asked the bartender about my, by then, good old companion, “Jungle Fever”. He presented me with a bottle of Southern Comfort. My friend was a combination of bourbon, peach liqueur and a copious amount of the local lime juice, freshly squeezed. Very well chilled and in a chilled glass over large ice cubes. I couldn’t believe it. In my mind, Southern Comfort was a rather low-end alcoholic beverage. No more! “God, I love this country,” I thought to myself, referring to the US.

The question, in the case of both my Argentinean friend and me, is whether we had fallen into a sort of “Alice In Wonderland” version of a blind taste test. I have heard of this happening before. Symphony orchestras use curtains when they audition new musicians. Blind wine tastings produce often surprising results, the most famous being the 1976 tasting in Paris of French versus Napa Valley wines, which the latter won, hands down.

Somewhat related, I should mention—and I don’t want to make a big point of it—that we hosted for lunch five editors from Organic Gardening magazine in 2004. We included a blind taste test: “Brandywine” versus “Brandy Boy”, new for that year. “Brandy Boy” triumphed, 4 to 1.

The most interesting moment of the day was how upset I got—for just a couple of minutes or so—that “Brandy Boy” hadn’t won 5 to 0. I kept it to myself, of course. It lasted only briefly, but my disappointment surprised me. I thought, “Why am I so upset? We won!”

Such is life. Such is the sin of ambition, more precisely. As soon as you get something good, you turn it into something bad. “I want it all !”

Finally, thank you very much for your patronage of Heronswood.

Happy New Year !

For More information please see:
Uncle Ben’s
Philadelphia Cream Cheese
Southern Comfort

The great thing about reaching middle age in our current society is that one does so, more or less, healthy. Until very recently in the history of civilizations, middle age did not exist for most people.

Of course, health includes mental health – the most important of all. In my case I am lucky to be able to review my past life, as most of my age do, and “inherit”, while still alive the knowledge I have learned. Due to our civilization’s excellent nutrition and medicine, masses of us can do this now. Should be interesting and it certainly makes life a very satisfying experience.

I mention this because, recently while I was cleaning out a closet, I picked up an old copy of a magazine which had an interview with Buckminster Fuller. At one point he was a cultural hero. The 1960s was his great moment. He was, and remains, a remarkable visionary. He makes today’s so-called futurists seem mediocre and trite.

In the interview he speculates that the ancient Polynesians, who were prodigious navigators on one hand and, by virtue of that, absolute geniuses at astronomical observation on the other hand, knew the stars like we know sports and television personalities. It is a sickening thought but there it is.

This cultural feature wasn’t religious or mythological, but purely scientific. They were, in a sense, astronauts. Even today a simple fisherman in a wooden sailboat from the South Pacific Islands can find his way back to his tiny island home after being blown off-course a hundred miles. Happens all the time. Our brains are too small to even imagine such an ability.

Fuller wondered about what had made the ancient Polynesians so unique. He wondered further what made everyone else so much less unique. He had trouble explaining to himself how it was that the Polynesians, who never went anywhere farther than 10 or 20 miles from home, could know astronomy so well. Better than the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Vikings, and Chinese — the lot. But soon they all caught up with the Polynesians.

Might this Polynesian star knowledge have been shared? He guessed that bands of Polynesians sailed the world in a systematic manner. Somehow they determined that they had learned things that all others on earth had not. Since the ancient Polynesians knew “the earth” by an advanced and almost perfect understanding of the position of the night-time stars, they simply traveled the earth and told everyone who would listen. Fuller thought also that they may have been compensated in some way. Intriguing!

But it gets better: the primary reason the Polynesians knew the night skies so well is because, in effect, they never moved. They didn’t travel far or often for very long periods of time like others did. They studied the stars in minute detail, since small changes meant life or death in their island-hopping culture. They had islands like the skies had stars. Trade, war, treaties: all depended on making small voyages, not long ones. “Better get the angles right.” Then, when they accumulated a database of how the stars moved, they became accidental savants, so to speak. Fuller said no one came even remotely close to the Polynesians in celestial navigation, on the basis of his studies. They made a quantum leap.

A quantum leap in a collection of magazines in one of my mother’s old storage boxes. She liked to amass magazines. She’d read them all at once in marathons. Or not. I was in boarding school. What a great gift to me!

I did not so much reach late middle age as washed up on its shore. Honestly, I do not know sometimes why I am here. I like to tell people every once in a while that I have never lived before. It is, of course, literally true. But it is a kind of pun or play on words that never fails to startle people. Very enjoyable. I get to explain it. And explaining something is always amusing.

President Obama cribbed an old Hopi sacred proverb when he famously stated, “We are the people we have been waiting for.” Or words to that effect. It was more impressive as a political image than, “It takes a village to raise a child”, which I believe First Lady Hilary Clinton cribbed from a West African proverb. Plus, it does not hurt that President Obama has a great voice. But why can’t they come up with their own proverbs?

Personally, I think the Hopis were referring to the happiness and satisfaction of middle age. All that walking up and down ridges and river basins and up on to a mesa every once in a while. Keeps you fit. Many members of Native American tribes—so long as they stay on the reservations—live a very long and physically active time. Walking and swimming are the healthiest activities.

I am walking to Arizona someday! Or I shall swim to Polynesia. Rather like the young athletes do, with a boat behind them.

“This is the shore we have been swimming to.”