Last summer I became sandwiched between two political issues that appear sympathetic, but on close scrutiny show a profound and dissonant contradiction deep in the fertile soil of community gardening.

Recently, First Lady Michelle Obama boldly proclaimed that the urban poor were at serious risk of deprivation of fresh produce. The so called “food deserts” stretch from border to border in the poor and underprivileged sections of every major American city. One of the ways the First Lady proposed to solve this problem is to expand the size and number of community gardens.

However, there is also a trendy, stylish and even sexy movement in contemporary gardening that preaches the use of old fashioned or “heirloom” vegetables that were popular in our grandparents’ day. In community gardens everywhere, I see tall, rangy, low-yielding and romantically named heirloom varieties made popular by environmental activists over the last twenty years.

But there is trouble in this garden paradise. While the often lovely and uniquely flavored heirloom vegetables befit an upper middle class suburban vegetable plot, they fail to meet the urgent nutritional needs of the urban poor. In fact, old fashioned varieties, with their poor yields, late harvests and floppy plants, present logistical challenges that most community gardeners cannot meet. In contrast, modern hybrids— looked down on by today’s gardening elite—supply not only the requisite large quantity of vegetables that the poor need but also a nutritionally high quality of fruit, since they are loaded with greater amounts of vitamins and minerals than their distant ancestors.

Over the past several years, contemporary plant breeders have introduced nearly a dozen new cultivars of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and lettuce that record up to twice the amount of nutrients than ordinary store bought vegetables. While they don’t have the romantic or seductive names and stories behind them, such as “Mortgage Lifter” tomato, these new hybrids deliver vastly more antioxidants and vitamins C and D.

Further ironies abound. According to their zealous advocates, heirloom vegetables have the virtue of being able to be self-propagated, via do-it-yourself seed-saving techniques. The argument goes that self-perpetuating heirlooms provide low income families with an inexpensive means of sustaining themselves.

However, this virtue is not what it seems. Saving seeds can be just as tricky and time consuming as growing the vegetable garden itself. Seed must be collected, extracted, cleaned and put into dry storage. Paradoxically, the purveyors of heirloom seeds are at the elbow of community gardeners every year with new seeds to sell them.

Therefore, the poor and unemployed in the underprivileged communities of America are expected to spend more than twice the time and effort for less than half the benefits compared to hybrid seeds—especially the newest, nutrient rich varieties. But no one should underestimate the poor and unemployed—they know value when they harvest it. Give them more!

In addition, the swelling ranks of our nation’s unemployed include many potential gardeners. Recent news of the challenges facing food banks across the country suggests that community gardens are coming soon to many middle class neighborhoods. Perhaps we are not all out of work, or living in a food desert, but we should be mindful of those who are.

Although today’s hybrid vegetables, loaded with delicious fruit, are not today’s “flavor of the week” among gardening pundits, they address the food security needs of the urban poor more effectively than any hundred-year-old variety ever could.

As seen in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Much of the country is now experiencing winter weather. Recently, snow closed the better part of Interstate 40 in New Mexico, and Hayward, WI, was 2° F a night or two ago. But here on California’s central coast, many plants are still growing and flowering (a little slowly perhaps, given the short days). But some of them, those adapted to more temperate, northern climes, are confused. The day length tells them that it’s time to pack it in for the year, but 70° F temperatures tell them to be fruitful and multiply.

Despite mixed environmental messages, most plants here are not fooled. Common deciduous trees (sycamores, maples, alders) and some perennials (wisteria and roses, for instance) are looking a little wan, losing their color, and dropping their leaves. They are senescing.

It appears to be so passive, senescence. In the annuals, the entire plant simply shrivels and dies. Trees and shrubs may briefly flash brilliant orange, red or yellow, but then their leaves fall to the ground after a weekend of rain. Or your once vibrant perennial garden gradually fades to dull colors like a photograph left in the sun. It all seems so effortless.

But senescence is anything but passive or effortless. It is another stage in plant development and is a tightly regulated and genetically programmed developmental process. In a sense, it is opposite other major plant developmental events that mostly involve cell division, differentiation and growth—but not quite. Senescence is not only death or quiescence; senescence also ensures continued life either in the next generation or the next growing season.

Senescence is initiated by a number of factors. Among these are environmental cues such as temperature extremes, day length, drought, nutrient deficiency, pathogen infestation, wounding and shading; a plant’s age, reproductive state and phytohormone levels also play a role. Once initiated, senescence is a complex, sequential process of “programmed cell death” that leads to the destruction of leaf cells and the recycling of nutrients and the energy that was captured from the Sun during the growing season and that was incorporated into cellular building blocks of the leaves.

Senescence is a little like dismantling a house from the inside out. The valuable interior parts are taken out and stored away and finally the structural elements are removed. New gene expression is required for orderly self destruction of the cell and recycling its nutrients, so the cellular machinery of gene expression must be maintained while the cell dismantles itself and transports its valuable nutrients to a storage site in the stem, roots or wherever. The destruction begins with the chloroplast, the site of photosynthesis, where much of the nitrogen in the leaf cell is located. As the green pigment disappears, the other pigments in the leaf become visible, hence “fall color”. Amyloplasts (starch bodies), simpler carbohydrates, and various fats and proteins are broken down and translocated out of the cell. But only late in the process is the nucleus, the genetic “framework” of the cell, broken down.

Senescence may be initiated and influenced by many factors, but we know from experiments with the water plant Elodea that senescence, and chloroplast senescence specifically, is directly under the control of the nucleus. When Elodea leaves are exposed to a high-salt solution, some protoplasts split into two more or less equal parts. There are many chloroplasts in a cell but only one nucleus, so both halves have chloroplasts but only one half has a nucleus. Those halves without a nucleus remain green and continue to photosynthesize, but those with a nucleus senesce on schedule.

There are lots of good, practical economic reasons to study senescence too. Senescence has a big impact on agriculture. With the onset of senescence, brought on by drought, pathogen infestation—whatever, photosynthesis drops off sharply in the senescing leaves. And these leaves are the main photosynthesizing organ in plants, so reduced photosynthesis means reduced crop yields and reduced biomass production. Also nutritional components such as proteins and antioxidants can be degraded in fruits and vegetables produced by senescing plants, both before and after harvest, thus reducing nutritional quality. Furthermore, senescing tissues are more susceptible to pathogen infestation and postharvest decay. Each year lots of research dollars are devoted to efforts to understand and manipulate senescence better.

Remarkable, isn’t it? What seems like an afterthought to one growing season is really the prelude to the next. It is not an end but an interlude in plant life.

The winter blues have never been a problem in my life, as they have for many friends who speak often about their generalized or indistinct feelings of depression at this time of year. They swear it’s not family-related and I believe them.

I went to a college-preparatory boarding school for four years, located in northern Arizona at about 2,700 feet in the northeast edge of the enormous Sonoran Desert that stretches from central western Mexico near Culiacan, up across the border to Palm Springs in the west, and in the east to about where my converted turkey coop stood—all 6 feet high of it. I had room to walk in, turn around and walk out. I sat at a desk or laid on a bed. The space between me and the desert was about an inch and a half, and it was divided mostly by two large screen windows with canvas flap awnings. It was heaven. Mainly because I had died before going there.

The climate was, more or less, dry and sunny. The sunrises and especially sunsets were uniformly spectacular all the time. Day was a giant carapace of light, either shaded blue or marble white with a yellowish dot struggling through the high pressure atmosphere. In other words, Oz. At no time and under no circumstances did I ever feel sad or blue. It was like a dream I never woke up from for the better part of four solid years.

Therefore, going home for Christmas was like entering a meat locker with a busted light. It was shocking that I had so quickly forgotten the happy days of living in a pair of ice skates all winter without much to worry about except being punished for skipping meals. Again, a dome of light hung over me all day and in the evening a string of lights crowned the darkness, as if we kids were being decorated for honors. It was beautiful and there wasn’t even a hint of sadness. I dropped into bed exhausted every night.

As a teenager, however, speed skating was a league sport and I was out of the community and literally out of my league. The girls and boys were different too—strangers now in space and time, no matter that I knew their names. Out of sight, out of mind. So as soon as possible I contrived to return to Arizona where it was crystal clear all day and the heavens actually opened up at night. I had never seen anything like the winter night sky in Arizona. I was told it was the same in the summer but I never saw it then. Summer might have been more hazy.

In the summertime I was back in the jungle that is Illinois. No such thing as the blues there, except what they played in the night clubs my friends and I snuck into on the south side. That wasn’t a sad experience, either. It was electrifying.

But now I understand the winter blues. The angles, rays and sidearm tosses of light, as if it was a stage set being rearranged or “struck”. Blows, like we had in the Midwest when I was little, vast winter storms that raged for weeks, as if punishing the inhabitants of the Great Plains. Indeed, I sometimes thought it was nuts to live there in the winter. But the jungle of summer explains everything. The richest soil in the world nurtures domesticated crops in such quantity and quality the world has never seen. Why go anywhere?

This seasonal train of thought began at a staff meeting where we were discussing our holiday wreaths. “They’ll sell okay for Christmas—then drop off” was the consensus. I found it odd. Wreaths should sell all winter and not because I am especially greedy. They represent the spirit of summer—“everlasting”. They are a keeper of the vital flame of life, and this isn’t an exaggeration. Dolls began as the same type of object, a holder or even vessel of the animating force of life, in this case to amuse children who get bored indoors.

I enjoy the various festivals. They all seem to bunch together in the winter, more or less. Halloween to Easter. Like the wreaths and dolls, they grasp at the spirits of summer to “over-winter” the forces of life. (What true festivals occur in the summer?) Maybe festivals were the virtual realities of the prehistoric world. Certainly of the ancient civilizations. Folks often went crazy from partying through the long nights. Summer, oddly enough, was down time. Too busy to celebrate!

I see the flares of brilliance and intelligence of fiery youths. Young people burn brightest in winter. They’re bored so they become even more inventive than in summer. They flock around and roam the sidewalks, in luminous ensembles or flying solo. They are human “Grow Lights”. You can raise seedlings by them. Thank God for that. Winter would be boring without the young.

We all await reemergence and rebloom.

Why are most people right-handed and so few left-handed? The short answer is that nobody knows. But left-handers are present in all cultures, and there are always significantly fewer of them than right-handers. In western cultures, 10 to 13% of the population is left-handed; in some archaic people (the Eipo in West Papua, New Guinea, for example), the frequency is as high as 27%.

Handedness is an ancient hominid characteristic. Artifacts from the middle (425,000–180,000 years ago) and early upper Pleistocene (180,000–10,000 years ago) indicate that our Homo neanderthalensis cousins were right or left-handed. Evidence in our own species of right-left-handedness comes from studies of stone tools, hole making rotational scratches in wood, and wear marks on tools. Most intriguing is that the frequency of right-left handedness of our prehistoric ancestors can be inferred from upper Paleolithic (35,000–10,000 years ago) “paintings” of hands on cave walls in Spain and France. These images were produced by blowing pigment through a tube held in one hand to define the outlines of the other hand on the cave wall. The proportion of left to right-handers in these cave paintings is the same as it is in French university students today.

Lots of things influence and seem to effect handedness. Social customs, for instance, have a strong impact on hand preference. Western culture (and most other cultures too) has traditionally viewed left-handedness negatively. Left-handedness has been equated with evil, misfortune, awkwardness, criminality and stupidity. The bias is thoroughly embedded in our languages. Consider the Latin words for left (sinister) and right (dexter) and the words that we derive from them. Or there’s the insult disguised as a compliment—“left-handed complement”. In Europe and North America during the first half of the 20th century, use of the left-hand was discouraged in children, who were taught to write with their right-hands even when they showed a clear preference for the left-hand. This practice changed in the last half of that century, and as estimated by hand preference for such things as writing and tennis playing, the frequency of left-handers in the population rose.

People use one hand over the other for different tasks for their own reasons too. Computer mice are designed for and intended to be used by the right-hand. Go to Best Buy; all the mice are placed to the right side of the model computers. But I use a computer mouse with my left-hand, leaving my right-hand (my dominant hand) free for other things.

And obviously human physiology plays a role in handedness. Its role is seen in the structure and function of the human brain. But our understanding of the human brain function is far from complete. Much of what we do know is gleaned from inferential studies not of healthy individuals but of individuals with brain injuries or brain diseases; for the most part, direct experimentation on the human brain is not practical because it is too invasive.

We know the brain is divided into two halves that are not exactly alike (“lateralization”). Each half of the brain (hemisphere) has specialized functions whose mechanisms are localized primarily in one-half of the brain. One of the brain’s specialized functions is speech and language. More than 150 years ago, the left hemisphere was identified as the primary seat of speech and language. At about the same time, neurologists suggested that a person’s handedness was opposite from the speech-specialized hemisphere—so right-handed people usually have left-hemispheric language specialization. But this is an oversimplification. We know now that almost all people (maybe as high as 95%) seem to have left-hemispheric brain specialization for language.

Where different specialization exists (right-hemispheric brain language specialization or little or no lateralized specialization, as examples), sex hormones such as estrogen and testosterone have been implicated in differentially affecting prenatal brain development. Stresses at the time of birth such as breech birth, premature birth, and oxygen deprivation may also condition left- handedness.

Genetic background is a strong determinant of hand preference—left-handedness certainly runs in families. Right-handed parents produce left-handed children only 10% of the time. But if the father is left-handed and the mother right-handed, 17% of their children will be left-handed; if the mother is left-handed, 22% of their children will be left-handed; if both are left-handed, the frequency of left-handed children rises to 24%. In all of these combinations, there will be slightly more left-handed boys than girls. This alone does not prove that hand preference is a heritable trait; parents after all provide an environment for their children as well as a genetic background. But fraternal (dizygotic) and identical (monozygotic) twin studies have been used to tease out the relative contribution of genetics and the environment, and these show that indeed there is significant heritability of hand preference.

But how handedness is passed on is unclear; the genetic models proposed to explain handedness do not adequately fit the inheritance data. Mendel, in his 1866 paper, demonstrated the transmission patterns of simply inherited traits in pea. His experiments could be repeated (with a little luck) by most gardeners today. But unlike the traits that Mendel characterized in pea, handedness is almost certainly not a simply inherited trait, and probably does not result from a single gene, as did Mendel’s pea traits. Handedness is a more complex trait that is likely determined by several genes—and several genes in conjunction with multiple environmental and/or biological interactions, some of which in some cases may be pathological.

As a heritable trait, handedness is subject to evolutionary selection. Any trait in a population of organisms that confers an advantage over another individual who does not possess the trait would be expected to increase in the population (that trait is said to increase “fitness”); the frequency of a trait that reduces fitness in an individual (or confers a disadvantage) would be expected to decline in that population.

Left-handedness is linked to characteristics that should reduce the left-handed person’s fitness. These include reduced life expectancy, shorter stature and lower body weight, and increased susceptibility to neurological disorders and autoimmune diseases such as allergies. Yet left-handedness persists in all human populations and at a frequency that apparently has remained unchanged for some 10,000 years. This suggests that in some way left-handedness confers some fitness advantages that offset these fitness costs.

A hypothesis that explains the stable persistence of left-handedness has been proposed by evolutionary geneticists Michel Raymond and colleagues. They speculate that left-handedness is maintained by “negative frequency-dependent selection” whereby the advantages of the trait are greater when the trait’s frequency is low, and that success in aggressive interactions is tilted toward the left-hander precisely because left-handedness is a rare trait and a right-handed opponent will “not know what hit him” and thus be at a disadvantage. This is the “fighting hypothesis”.

To test their hypothesis, Raymond and his colleagues reasoned that interactive sports (tennis, baseball, fencing, boxing) in modern societies require many of the same aptitudes and skills as do individual fighting and traditional combat. When they compared the proportion of left-handers in interactive sports with the proportion in noninteractive sports (gymnastics, swimming, bowling), they found the overall mean percentage of left-handers was 32% in interactive sports compared with only 11% for noninteractive sports. They also compared the frequency of left-handedness with homicide rates in such traditional societies as the Dioula in Burkina Faso (West Africa) and the Eipo in West Papua, New Guinea. In those cultures, left-handedness was strongly and positively correlated with homicide rates; the proportion of left-handers ranged from 3% in the most peaceful to 27% in the most violent and warlike groups. So these results are entirely consistent with a frequency-dependent selection mechanism maintaining left-handedness at a low but constant level. And since males are more likely to be involved in violent or aggressive activities, it also explains why there are slightly more left-handed males.

The validity of this hypothesis is a discussion for another day; it’s quite possible that it’s correct. It’s also quite possible that it’s incomplete or that other dynamics entirely determine left-handedness. But whatever, it brings us back to my original short answer. Despite the time and efforts that have been spent, we still don’t really know why most people are right-handed and so few left-handed.

I’ll never forget learning about sunflowers. During a few days in 1987 spent with the genius raconteur, plant breeder and seed impresario, Cees Sahin, I traveled through space and time (especially the latter) on the Starship Helianthus. Cees told me the little-known fact that the epicenter of sunflower cultivation was not the US Midwest—no, no!—but the Soviet Union. The Russian Orthodox churches celebrate Lent very strictly, as well as several other “fasts” throughout the year. Cees said the Bible prohibits all sorts of fats and oils. Thus, particularly if you are a poor peasant in starvation-wracked Russia, you run afoul of God Almighty unless you happen to know about sunflowers. Therefore, the native North American cultivar found itself a second and much larger home in the endless river valleys of Russia and the Ukraine.

Happily too, sunflower oil is very good for you, even compared to olive oil, although it tastes less well. Personally, I can handle butter in a very thin layer on toast, and I have long given up fasting, so I enjoy the sunflower exclusively for its great appeal in the garden.

Its virtues are, like the plant itself, plenty in number and profound in meaning. Take height: a standard tall type reaches 8 to 12 feet in less than two months. By season’s end less than three months later the tallest will reach 14 feet and make a trunk at the base that, cut and dried, resembles a Louisville Slugger—you can seriously hurt someone with it. Indeed, sunflowers are being studied for application in cardboard manufacture, which uses wood. Yet the “giant sunflower” produces a bone-crushing bat in 75-80 days, versus 25-30 years, as does a Loblolly Pine.

There’s more: the reason I call this blog entry “Starship Helianthus” is because tall sunflowers produce large disc-shaped flower heads that, for the life of me, look just like the spaceships of 1960s science fiction movies that filled my head when I was a child. (All I wanted was to hop on the next one and get the hell out of Dodge.)

The “spaceship” blasts out of the seed (as a tiny, 1/8″ embryo) and launches itself straight up until it reaches 8 feet or so, all while it is transforming into a full-blown space vessel. At about 10 feet the mature composite flower begins literally tracking the movement of the earth around the sun. It does this to capture the greatest amount of heat and light possible in order to reproduce itself into about 1,500 carbon copies (so to speak).

Science-fiction, indeed. An expensive, computer-based, motor-driven telescope doesn’t work as well as an ordinary sunflower to track our nearest star.

Plus, the sunflower—not too surprisingly—looks like the sun, except at season’s end when it has finished reproducing its multitudinous progeny. Then, at its tallest height, with all its seed fastened to the deck of the spaceship, it bows its magnificent head and seems to sleep, or even to die. However, it is only a biological phase; the sunflower lives at least another month as it dries and slowly ripens its seed. This is when the birds come to feed, hanging upside down or literally eating on the fly.

I am always deeply moved by the sunflowers in my garden in their short but spectacular final act. I slow myself down and then stop—a natural form of “time travel”. Sometimes I get a ladder to climb and inspect the spaceships, see how they managed through their journey. Sunflowers remind me how much my garden is tuned to the movement of the seasons, especially of the earth around the sun. No plant is more cosmically rewarding.

Don’t tell a soil scientist about the “dirt” in your garden, and don’t call the dust of Mars “soil”, as NASA press briefings generally do. The soil scientist’s outrage may be feigned, but the point will be that soil is much more than something you sweep from your kitchen floor or wash from your hands, and it’s not simply eroded planetary crust.

In a very real sense, soil is alive and evolves—biologically, chemically and physically. It is always changing; it is always growing. It is essential for all terrestrial plant life, and without the food, feed, fiber, and, of course, oxygen that we derive from plants, we and the rest of the animals could not live.

Soil is the home of a vast array of life forms that function in concert with each other and contribute to the functionality and health of soil. In addition to plants, there are a plethora of animals—mostly invertebrates, various arthropods and worms—and there are fungi and bacteria. The number of bacterial cells alone estimated to inhabit the Earth’s soils is staggering—2.6 x 10²⁹. If you’ve forgotten scientific notation, that’s the number 26 followed by 28 zeros. In terms of cellular mass (fixed organic carbon), this is estimated to be about equal the mass of all plants on Earth. All these creatures add to soil and change it through interactions with each other cycling nutrients through complex food webs and directly with soil in chemical and physical ways.

Soil is formed over time through interactions among the parent material (planetary crust, rock), climate, topography (surface shape and features), and biological activity. Soil is a mixture of four different elements—minerals, organic matter, water, and air; minerals and organic matter are solid and comprise about half of a soil’s volume.

Soil has texture. Texture (in part) controls how water moves in soil, affects chemical reactivity and nutrient availability, and plays a role in the potential for erosion of a soil. Texture is determined by the relative proportions of three soil components—sand (2–0.05 mm), silt (0.05–0.002 mm), and clay (<0.002 mm). Sands, silts, and clays are as varied as the parent material from which they come.

Three basic soil types exist: sands, clays and loams. Sandy soils have more than 70% sand and do not retain water or nutrients well; clay soils have 25 to 35% clay and will retain nutrients but drain poorly. Loam soils have the good features of both sands and clays (and also contain silt). The ideal garden (or agricultural) soil is a loam composed of roughly equal amounts of sand, silt and clay. You can determine the texture of your soil and, by inference, its characteristics through the USDA Soil Texture Calculator (see http://soils.usda.gov/technical/aids/investigations/texture/) or by feel (see http://soils.usda.gov/education/resources/lessons/texture/).

Soil has structure. Soil structure is the arrangement and size of the solid particles of the soil and the pore spaces between them. Soil structure too is influenced by the parent material from which the soil developed, and physical–chemical and biological processes are involved in its formation.

Positively charged ions (cations) such as calcium, magnesium, and aluminum initiate binding soil particles together (“flocculation”) into aggregates. Clay particles (platelets) have lots of negative charges and begin to aggregate into microscopic clumps called “floccules” as cations collect between platelet surfaces and bind them together.

Burrowing worms, plant roots, and fungal hyphae create spaces between aggregates; their secretions and exudates further bind those aggregates together. Fungi and other microorganisms also deposit storage materials in the soil that act as organic glues. These along with plants, animals, and their waste and decay products comprise the organic material in soil. Fully decomposed organic matter is called humus. Humus also contributes to binding soil particles together and provides nutrients for plants and the other soil organisms that are essential for healthy soil.

Given sufficient time, most soils will develop stratified layers or “horizons”. Horizons result from chemical weathering, break down of organic matter, and the movement and deposition of humus, mineral particles, and other chemical substances from the upper layers of a soil to the lower layers as water moves through the soil profile. In agricultural fields, the layer familiar to most people makes up the “top soil”, which is brought to the surface and mixed with upper soil layers by plowing. Most soils have a distinct profile or sequence of horizontal layers that can be seen in road cuts or washed out gullies.

Soil health is fundamental to the productivity of your garden. The basis of the idea of soil health is that soil is a living, complex and dynamic environment that does more than hold up your plants (the soil scientist’s refrain). A healthy soil has the capacity to infiltrate water and cycle nutrients to feed growing plants. The more diverse its fauna and flora, the more fully functioning and productive the soil is. There are lots of relatively simple things you can do to manage and improve the health of your soil to increase its productivity.

First, the less you do to disturb the soil, the happier it will be. You often need to work or till soil in your garden (distribute fertilizer or work in soil amendments, suppress weeds, whatever), but too much tillage is a bad thing. Tillage disrupts soil structure and soil organisms. Tillage and too much traffic over soil can compact it. In compacted soil, water infiltration is reduced, runoff (and erosion) is increased, and as a result productivity is decreased.

Consider also that soil is populated by plants and organisms that evolved there together. Long ago they adapted efficient and sophisticated ways of working together to produce and cycle nutrients (food webs). In an ideal state, it is a functioning and self-regulating system. But no system is at equilibrium for long, and occasional inputs of fertilizer or pesticide may be necessary to maximize plant growth and health. But excessive inputs can disturb or entirely disrupt food webs, and this reduces the health of your soil and hence its productivity. Before you fertilize, determine whether your garden (or lawn) needs it. There are soil testers on the market for less than $20 that will give you a good guess about your soil’s nutrient status (https://www.burpee.com/gardening-supplies/garden-growers/electronic-soil-tester-prod001200.html); alternatively, your local county ag agent can advise you on where to get your soil tested professionally.

As much as possible, keep your soil covered. Mulch is a good way to do this. Mulch insulates the soil, reducing rapid temperature changes. It protects soil from the effects of raindrops, which breakup soil aggregate structure, and it retains moisture and reduces water loss. Mulch suppresses weed growth (reducing the need for tillage) and provides habitat for members of the soil food webs. Its breakdown products (ultimately humus) enrich the soil. For your plants themselves, mulch reduces freeze–thaw cycles, frost heaving, and the like. Many municipalities convert their green waste to mulch and deliver the finished product for a nominal charge. Garden stores sell it too.

Cover crops (or green manure) have many of the same benefits as mulch, but in addition they actively encourage and support soil microorganisms. In natural environments, many soil organisms exist in a near-starvation state or go through boom–bust cycles that follow the seasons. Live roots growing throughout the year support and maintain stable populations of soil organisms that utilize the sugars secreted by plant roots and return the favor by translocating minerals and water to plants. At the end of the season, the cover crop can be worked into the soil to provide additional biomass that will be broken down and recycled.

Even in the Northeast, hit last weekend by a snow storm, it’s not too late to plant a cover crop. Burpee has several cover crop mixtures tailored to different growing zones.

The key to improving soil health (and the productivity of your garden) is to remember that soil is a living, changing system that you manage with a light hand. Increase your garden soil’s above- and below-ground diversity with mulches and green manures and as many different kinds plants as makes sense. With time, this will create a more fully functioning and resilient soil that will be reflected by the plants in your garden.

Jay Gatsby famously says in The Great Gatsby “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” He’s a larger than life character in a novel, of course, and (of course) he’s wrong anyway. But in good times or bad, most people would turn back the clock if they could. The past often shines more brightly than the future; it’s fixed and known, and though we can’t relive it, we look for reassurance in connections with it.

These connections take many forms. Some people find them in genealogy, some through country dancing, Civil War reenactments, or whatever. I have friends who grow heirloom tomatoes, in part (I believe), to find this connection with the past. They say that heirloom tomatoes have unique qualities (and histories) not found in “modern” tomatoes and that they taste so much better than the grocery store ones. All true, I suppose; I have grown heirloom tomatoes myself, and almost anything that you grow in your own backyard tastes better than what you buy at the grocery store.

Heirloom crops, tomatoes in particular, are very popular. Seed Savers Exchange offers 4713 varieties of tomato heirlooms alone. So called “heirlooms” are traditional varieties or landraces that were originally selected, grown and passed down within families or local regions. There are literally thousands upon thousands of heirloom tomatoes that are largely unique and distinct from one another from around the world.

Tomato was probably domesticated in Mexico from wild Peruvian stock with fruit similar to what we think of as “cherry” tomato. The first record of cultivated tomato comes from the Spanish who found it consumed at the time of the conquest of Mexico in the early 16th century in a limited area from Central America north to Mexico City. When tomato came into cultivation is unknown, but large fruit types had already developed by the time the Spanish appeared in Mexico and possibly before domestication.

The cultivated tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is a member of the Solanaceae family. Solanaceae contains around 3000 species of both the Old and New World origin, many agriculturally important; worth mentioning are eggplant, from China, and tomato, potato, and pepper, from Central and South America. All wild tomatoes, with the exception of one species found on the Galapagos Islands, are native to mainland South America in a region of the Andes that includes parts of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Bolivia.

All forms of cultivated tomato are self-fertile and exclusively inbreeders—barring human intervention or other extraordinary circumstances, individual tomato flowers do not cross pollinate each other. Wild tomato species, in contrast, are both self-fertile and self-infertile. With human aid, most of the wild species (thirteen or seventeen, depending on the classification scheme) can interbreed with cultivated tomato.

Domestication of tomato was brought about by inbreeding and intensive selection for desirable traits, in both Mexico and Europe, but this imposed genetic uniformity on cultivated tomato. And if, indeed, the large-fruit types arose before domestication, those large-fruit plants would certainly have been chosen as the progenitor of cultivated tomato. When these plants, which would have been few and possibly genetically identical, were taken from the Andes to Mexico and then to Europe, tomato was isolated from its source of genetic diversity and what evolutionary biologists call a “genetic bottleneck” resulted. Despite the obvious variety in fruit shape and size, flavor, local adaptation, color and aroma, traditional cultivated tomatoes are genetically impoverished with less than 5% of the genetic potential of their wild cousin. Different varietal names may have been applied to genetically very similar lines. Thus, the proliferation and increase in number of heirlooms over time. The variation that exists in these heirloom tomatoes today is mostly the result of rare spontaneously occurring mutations, such as those that induced the large-fruit types.

Tomato was brought back to Europe by the Spanish and was first consumed in Spain and southern Italy in the mid 16th century (this we know from tomato recipes and shopping lists). By the end of that century, tomato had spread to most of the rest of the Mediterranean region and England and much of the rest of continental Europe. By the 17th century, the Spanish had introduced tomato to their North American outposts in Florida, Texas and California. From there, it gradually found its way to Colonial America, which also received different varieties with the floods of immigrants from Europe. In Colonial America, tomato was eaten rarely in the mid 18th century and commonly by the mid 19th century. Since its arrival in Spain nearly 500 years ago, human selection of desirable and valuable traits in all the regions where tomato was grown has produced an array of varietal types adapted to local climates and incorporated into local cuisines.

While heirloom tomatoes represent a fantastic source of valuable traits, there are distinct advantages to hybrid plants, where the aim is to combine the best characteristics of two inbred lines (one of which is perhaps an heirloom). And in the early part of the 20th century, universities and later private companies began formal tomato hybrid breeding programs. Hybrid tomatoes are tailored specifically for uniformity of such traits as yield, type of desired fruit (canning vs. fresh market), shelf life, disease resistance and climate. Because there’s more work involved in producing hybrid seed, the seed is more expensive. And, unlike inbred heirloom seed, hybrid seed does not breed true and must be replenished each year. But despite the additional expense of hybrid seed, the advantages have led most growers, especially commercial growers, to choose hybrid tomatoes over inbred lines like the heirlooms. The first really successful hybrid tomato was Burpee’s ‘Big Boy’, introduced in 1949 and still popular today.

In contrast to traditional, heirloom tomatoes, wild tomatoes exhibit a tremendous amount of genetic diversity. This is especially true of some of strictly self-incompatible species (obligate outbreeders). Wild tomatoes carry a wealth of genes. Within the next 10 years or so, the complete sequence of the tomato genome will have been determined. And as our knowledge of the structure and function of tomato genes increases, it will become progressively easier for tomato breeders to “design” new cultivars that combine traits of traditional, inbred tomatoes with wild-species traits such as resistances to pathogens, pests, and environmental conditions as well as elevated nutrient content, a current breeding goal.

If like my friends, you enjoy growing heirloom tomatoes (for whatever reason), by all means continue to treat yourself. But don’t overlook the great hybrid tomatoes that are currently on the market. And look to the future because the best tomato varieties are yet to come.

Call me Dagwood. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—I read the funny papers in the Sunday newspaper. I was a child but not a child of the 1930s. Still Blondie, the 1930s comic strip featuring Dagwood Bumstead, engaged me, though I didn’t want it to, other unlikely comics less so. I remember Mary Worth, who reminded me of Folgers Coffee ads with Mrs. Olson who counseled despairing young women on how to make coffee for their new, unappreciative husbands. If the truth be known, like most people, I read them all in a half-hearted way, always as an afterthought. But of Blondie I took special notice because it made me wince.

The house where we’re staying is located on California’s central coast, not more than a mile or so from the Pacific Ocean. When we first came here in a damp, drizzly November, we were struck by the thoughtlessness and illogic of the landscaping. To the front of the house, behind a faded, gray fence and before the grass of the yard started, were stray patches of African daisy. Not the beautiful new African daisy cultivars available today, these were the straggly, common white kind that fades to purple with age. There were bird of paradise plants, placed, by their look, at random, and a patch of oleander. By the side door, two right angled columns of Pittosporum tenuifolium were placed so that they obscured the view and impeded entry and egress, as a building engineer might say. Immediately, before the house was a confluent swath of blue agapanthus. They were pretty enough but looked tired and like 1970 all over again.

Most puzzling though, were three trees growing immediately behind the fence. One remains unidentified; the other two were sweet pittosporum and coastal live oak—both nice enough trees. They appeared to have simply sprung up where their seeds had fallen. And all three had been topped at about 5 feet above the ground and had masses of dense, straggly branches growing to about 15 feet. My best guess was that this had been done in a mostly failed attempt to shelter the front of the west-facing house from the hot evening sun.

The backyard was more of the same: two old and over grown palm trees towered above a patch of sickly looking red bougainvillea, threatening to drop widow-making spaethes, and several yellowish small citrus trees planted in the shade of a large oak slowly declined. Even after the rains stopped, the sprinkler system kept the lawn so wet that it squished under foot, until we turned it off. How come, we wondered?

As a trained plant scientist, landscaping this property was clearly within my purview; my wife had other duties and responsibilities. All began well. I relocated plants and removed others—the pittosporums (including the large topped one by the fence), the unidentified tree, and the oleander. I dug up all the agapanthus plants and put them by the side of the road with a “FREE” sign beside them; they were gone in 30 minutes. Outside the fence, I planted a hedge of native ceanothus and toyon that I reasoned would require little care or no water and would grow up to dampen road noise. Finally, I pruned the topped oak to promote growth in three of its stronger branches.

The trouble began in surveying the holes and bare spots that I had created. I sensibly thought low-water and low-maintenance plants such as local chaparral plants should dominate our yard. My wife thought otherwise. She required exotic plants that wanted lots of water and care—and roses, which she had not been able to grow at home because of Japanese beetles and cold.

At first, we compromised, but quarreled about it. Our plantings coexisted. She planted her plants and I mine. But the yard became a mish-mash of conflicting influences—rose and begonia here, manzanita and woolly blue curl there. It made no sense. We were recreating what we had found when we first arrived. So I began moving my plants to a part of the backyard—“The California Corner”, I ruefully called it. Dagwood would have done no less.

In Blondie, Dagwood seems to be a fool. He eats giant sandwiches late at night, hides from his wife, collides with the mailman, and falls asleep at work. And he always gives in to his wife. He is almost painful to watch. The other characters are no different. But the comic strip is still popular after 81 years. What accounts for this incredible run? Well, Blondie reminds us of ourselves, but ourselves at a distance. It is the very triviality and goofiness of the characters that allow us to see them and the interplay of their strengths and weaknesses aloofly and not distinguish too much of ourselves. But look carefully, and there you are.

As my wife expanded her domain in the front yard, it gradually took on a more coherent and pleasant form; it began to look like a garden, which is what we’d wanted in the first place. Dagwood may give in to his wife, but ultimately it’s on his own terms and often with a catch. My interest, I realized, had never been to create a unified, diversified whole for its own sake—a garden. That’s my wife’s concern. I wanted to grow plants I’d never grown before, keeping them in pots and watching them until they’d reached some stature or state that satisfied my curiosity. At which point, I’d plant them in the ground and forget them until some later time when they caught my attention again.

Today, you may be surprised to learn, is the first day of Fall. Fall, you may feel, commenced weeks ago—just in time for the football season, innumerable Fall sales, and references to Fall in news reports. “Here Comes Fall Weather,” announced the Washington Post on September 15th. New York Magazine published its Fall Fashion issue in mid-August, when the city was basking, if not baking, in 80-degree temperatures.

Premature or no, I don’t care much for Fall; Autumn, on the other hand, I’m mad for. The word “Fall” comes freighted with glum connotations of descent, decline and peril. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Falling in battle. The fall of Icarus. The fall before which pride proverbially goeth. A hip-shattering fall down the stairs. Yes, one does fall in love, but love too comes with pitfalls.

The reason I am so crotchety about the “Fall” (the word derived from the falling of leaves) is that the term conveys none of the fertile vitality that is such a feature of this dimension of the year.

So join me in bidding adieu to both newly-departed Summer and ill-named Fall, and herald the first day of awesome Autumn. Together let us welcome what John Keats describes as the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” in his ode “To Autumn,” perhaps the English language’s best-loved poem.

The existentialist writer Albert Camus—no Pollyanna he!—was likewise partial to this parturient season, writing “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” The title of his novel, “The Fall” (“La Chute”), by contrast, refers to mankind’s fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, a fall from which we’re still trying to get up.

Like Spring, Autumn offers the gardeners among us (hear us grow) a new beginning, and the prospect of a bountiful and varied harvest. The season is the ideal planting and growing time for lettuce, spinach, kale, cabbage, turnips, and Brussels sprouts.

This particular year the second gardening season is particularly welcome. This just-past summer’s record-shattering heat wave wreaked havoc on tender annuals like peppers and tomatoes.

When crops encounter a jolt of harsh weather (blast-furnace heat, or the unseasonable and unreasonable cold snap) they do something very sensible: they shut down. Unable to flee climactic extremes, plants over the last few million years developed the survival technique of withdrawing their metabolisms from exposure. They steadfastly refuse to flower, fruit, or ripen until the extreme heat or cold passes; only then do they agree to resume normal growth.

In much of the U.S., the extreme heat sizzled on for six weeks, right in the heart of summer. Autumn—“green autumn” as I think of it—offers a reprieve from the summer’s ill-behaved temperatures and diminished harvest.

“Second summer” is now in full swing, offering gardeners the chance to reap the autumnal bounty. In northern states, gardens will flourish until mid-October, and even late October, if you’re near the Atlantic coast. Gardeners in the South will carry on gardening into late November, and as late as mid-December in the Deep South and Southwest (South Texas, Southern New Mexico and Arizona, and Southern California).

Gardeners in the South’s balmier climes can enjoy a harvest both longer and broader, which includes collard greens and broadleaf mustard. One shortcoming of second summer gardening are the shorter days, which affect a few temperate (Northern) annuals, but are tolerated by crops and flowers in most of the country.

In autumn, forward-looking gardeners—avant-gardeners!—will be planning and planting ahead. Numerous crops can be planted now for overwintering, so you can enjoy them in both spring and summer next year.

And then there is the “dream dimension” of fall gardening. Autumn is the right time to plant 2012-bearing garlic, fruits (blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, grapes, blueberries), ornamental plants (hydrangea), spring-flowering bulbs (tulips, daffodils, hyacinth), pansies, echinacea, and hellebores. Next spring and summer your garden will be lovelier and sweeter for your efforts.

My fellow American gardeners, grab your hats, pull on your wellingtons, and let us return to our gardens for our second summer. Let us rejoice in the poignant and flavorful rewards of green autumn, the “ Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”

This article appeared in The Providence Journal on September 22, 2011.

On my way to the last Heronswood Nursery west coast open house for 2011, I paused at a red light and waited to turn left. Coming from the opposite direction, I saw a motorcycle. It was very early morning, Saturday. There were few other vehicles on the road. The motorcycle was coming fast, accelerating hard down a hill, maybe a quarter mile away. Even at that distance I could see that it was a sport bike with the driver practically lying on the seat.

Virtually all motorcycles are quick these days. Generally, they go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in about 4 seconds. The fast ones do it in less than 3 seconds. And unless they are large cruisers, most will do a quarter mile at well over 120 mph. This particular one was hitting the mid 120s. For a moment, I thought he wouldn’t be able to stop before the light. Then I remembered how light the bike must be and what great brakes it no doubt had.

The driver began slowing. I imagined the satisfying feeling of force shoving him forward as the brakes caught and held and him bracing against the handle bars and gripping the seat with his knees. As he approached the stop light, there was a dip in the road, and from my perspective all but the top part of the driver and the bike’s wind screen disappeared. Then that too was gone. Like slowed frames of film, I saw for an instant his legs in the air and then maybe the bike’s wheels as it flew up and over. It all happened lightning fast and seemed rather like the ultimate goal of his unconscious mind: instant death. “I do not like my life; please remove it immediately.”

I drove a motorcycle when I was 20. It was a well-used 1967 BMW R69S—a fine machine. I weighed about 110 lbs; it weighed 450 lbs, so we were a bit mismatched. There was a rhythm to getting it on its kick stand. I perfected that because not to do so conflicted with my image of myself at that time. Once or twice, on soft ground, the bike fell over. It was a struggle to get it up again. Once I ran out of gas late at night; I couldn’t very well leave the bike by the side of the road, and I was far from a gas station. So I pushed. While pushing up a long, steep hill, I had to lean into the bike and move it little more than 20 feet at a time before breaking and resting. After the hill, it was easier, but I pushed most of the night.

That bike made me feel exceedingly hip and cool. It was very fast and powerful. Of course, by today’s standards, it was a dog with a maximum speed of only 110 or so. Who knows what its 0-to-60 statistic was? But speed wasn’t entirely the point—it was smooth, comfortable, and easy to ride. In one 24-hour period, I rode it over 1000 miles. A mythological creature. But I drove that bike for half a year only before I wrecked it as I was approaching an interstate entrance.

I still don’t know what I did. I was going maybe 50, my attention wavered, and then I simply drove off a gentle curve in the road. “Ride it out,” I thought. But the bike hit the ditch, went sideways, and down and over. I was hurled off. My helmet had deep gouges on one side, and one of the bike’s valve covers was torn off. I was otherwise unhurt, although I had a stiff neck for a month afterwards. It all happened so fast.

I don’t know what caused this kid last week to crash. But before he crashed, the bike had almost stopped; then it violently pitched up to its right and over, its driver catapulted and flipped over onto the ditch. Mechanical failure is not likely; maybe he caught a right-side foot peg on the concrete of the curb. If so, there should be tell-tale scratches on the curb. I meant to go back and look, but I never did.

I could see him getting up, and by the time the light had turned green, two cars had stopped. Their drivers had already reached the kid and his wrecked motorcycle. He was on his feet now, standing still and maybe trying to figure out what had happened. For him too, it had all happened so fast. I wanted to stop to see if he was OK, but with the other drivers there, I figured I could do nothing more than they had already done, so I drove on to Heronswood and the Garden Conservancy-sponsored open house.

In gardens, the world is controlled. It seems nothing “happens so fast”. You know, more or less, what to expect. Time in a garden is almost time outside of time. Gardens hold the security of the past and the promise of the future. You proceed with certain thoughts or impulses, and only later are you certain where you were headed. In gardens, we overlook motorcycle wrecks, the gyrations of the stock market, and the intractability of society.

Sure, the sense of control and timelessness are an illusion. Precipitous things happen all the time in the garden. Small or large, calamity strikes: vermin, deer, disease—you name it. All damage or take plants and fruits before you can stop them or even know enough to try. Certainty and control are not assured. Plants fail to thrive or die often for reasons unknown. And there’s weather—wind, heat or cold, floods, hail. But for us, these are not life and death issues.

The gardens at Heronswood are a fine example of a controlled world that can seem outside of time. Unique patterns or combinations of plants in different stages of growth appear fixed and controlled—like three-dimensional snapshots in time. But, simultaneously, Heronswood is changing, always different, from week to week and year to year. Currently, fall is coming on, and things look a little drab; chlorophyll is breaking down and other pigments showing: some brighter, most duller. The summer composites are in full display, and a few of the small fall blooming plants such as cyclamen are showing. A few of the hydrangeas are absolutely spectacular, while others look a little faded.

It has been a treat for me to attend these open houses at Heronswood and to see the progression of the seasons through the lens of the plants at Heronswood. If you missed them this year, watch the website for coming events in spring, and enjoy your fall.

End of the day. Heronswood parking lot ringed by Douglas fir.

Giant Gunnera.

Australian tree fern at bog.

Stachyurus ‘Magpie’

Cyclamen

Crocosmia

Ferns and cyclamen.

Hydrangea aspera

Hydrangea paniculata ‘Grandiflora’

Hydrangea paniculata ‘Grandiflora’ panicle

Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Taube’

Impatiens omeiana from western China.

Phlox paniculata

Daphniphyllum macropodum subsp. himalayense leaf cluster.

Blue Aster

Fuchsia ‘Rose of Castile Improved’

Kitchen garden in morning.

King slaw hybrid cabbage

Cardoon

Teddy Bear sunflower

Heliopsis scrabra