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.”

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.