Sunday, October 13, 2013

Food for a week

Hello nobody!

After being inspired by this article about how the world eats (THIS text is a LINK to the actual story but it blends in so well with the rest of the text that you would NEVER KNOW) I have decided to post what I eat in a week. 

Food for a week!

This picture does exclude a few things, like condiments (mustard, kimchee, ranch, nutella) and herbs/spices (fish sauce, soy sauce, thai seasoning, salt, sugar, jerk seasoning) and a head of tasty red lettuce that I forgot to get at the store this week. It also does not include beverages (2 cups of coffee per day, 3 glasses of water per day on average, 5 cups of a variety of teas per week). In case you are wondering, the baby plants in the plastic container are microgreens (a spicy mix of kale, broccoli, mustards, and other tasty baby plants). I eat about a container of those a week, mixed into salads. You generally eat them 5-10 days after germination and they have 3-5x the nutritional compounds found in mature leaves of these leafy crops.

Microgreens!


I make my own yogurt and bread (which I highly recommend). If you have the income to invest in a bread machine or yogurt maker, it certainly takes the guess work out of the process.

Also, the windowfarm is coming along nicely. After getting off to a bumpy, but educational start, I have now stabilized the surviving baby plants I received in the mail and they are happily producing new leaves. 

Kale!

Lettuce!
I have also started some seedlings to for the farm and successfully transplanted them.

Lettuce!

Kale!

Blurry Rainbow Chard!
The lime basil is also coming along. The thyme is giving me a little trouble. It wants to be much drier than everything else. I might just grow it in pots. Also the spinach didn't germinate well; will try again next week. 

Reggie chillin' next to his battle platform/ giant margarita glass.
Alright nobody, that's all for now. Remember to eat real food and drink good tea. Life is too short to feel terrible. 

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Apartment Gardening!

Hello nobody!

Its been a pretty serious chunk of time since my last post. Since my last post I have:

1. Graduated from NC State with a MS in Horticultural Science!
2. Gotten an amazing job in PA with GardenGenetics as a research assistant!
3. Moved to PA!

I still owe updates for the trip to China. However I would like to reread my travel diary as I update that so stay tuned!

This is an apartment gardening update! I am now the proud owner of a four column Windowfarm!

Check out the Windowfarm system!

Windowfarms are hydroponics systems designed for indoor, often residential operations.

Why hydroponics? Well these systems are great for producing leafy greens (which are the largest part of my grocery bill believe it or not), and are able to produce comparable yields to traditional growing that use less than 1/10 of the water or nutrients.

It is a great idea for urban living.

That being said, hydroponics systems can be a bit tricky to get off the ground. Instead of growing plants in pots with soil, my plant babies will be grown in soil-less clay pellets and be pretty much constantly exposed to moving water(that contains plant essential nutrients) which circulates through the system via a small pump. If not managed carefully, this sort of an environment can make plants unhappy.

So wish me luck!

Interested in a windowfarm, but don't want to pay the big bucks? Check out the windowfarm DIY page for ideas and tips for making your own!'

Here is a photo of the current set up. The plants should arrive tomorrow. I will hopefully have a happy update with plants in a week or so.



Adventure is out there

Sunday, December 2, 2012

The Reggie Update

Hello Nobody!

Here is the long promised Reggie update.

You are probably wondering" what is a reggie?"

Reggie is the absolute MESSER turtle that dominates my life and wicks away all/any tiny bits of extra income.


He is also the great love of my life.

Reggie is a musk turtle [Sternotherus odoratus]. Musk turtles are small, aquatic turtles native to North America. They are highly aquatic, spending most of their time in the water. They are also called stink-pots because of their recognizable defensive technique of releasing stinky odors from musk glands when they feel threatened. I don't know if it is because Reggie has pretty much always lived in captivity or because he is just a cool dude, but I have never had any problems with musking, and he only tries to bite people he doesn't recognize.

Stinkpots are a great size for aquaria; they only get between 2-5.5 inches long. They are meat eaters and will readily eat frozen shrimp, earthworms, crickets, and ghost shrimp when they can catch them, as well as carrion.

Reggie was discovered in July of 2011 as a tiny hatchling in the parking lot of the Mountain Horticultural Crops Research Center in Mills River, NC. And he was way small. Like the one of the smallest non-insect things I had ever seen.

Reggie in July 2011:



Reggie with a NICKEL for size:


Musk turtles give birth to some of the smallest turtle babies, and Reggie was no exception. Over the course of a year and a half, he has easily quintupled in size, and grew from a tiny, timid hatchling to a tiny kraken of his freshwater tank that he currently shares with a bunch of other critters I've accumulated along the way.

Here is Reggie today [with a nickel for scale!]




What a handsome boy. 


Reggie with one of his moss balls [actually a type of algae from Japan]



This is Reggie's complete tank.

The living things: two moss balls, a rose sword, an anubias, some floating plants whose name I will look up, 5 guppies, 5 rasboras, 2 snails, 3 ghost shrimp, and 4 rescued rummy nose tetras.

The non-living things: a filter, a heater, a reggie platform, a tube light, a special UVB light for reggie, filters that are replaced weekly, water testing strips, buckets for water changes, food for all the critters [frozen brine shrimp, frozen bloodworms, frozen shrimp, spirulina flakes].

I know what you're thinking! Waaay to much in a tank, but this set-up only has to hold for about 2 more weeks, when I move Reggie and the critters to their new homes, a 30 tall and a 20 long [for the fish--the rasboras and the rummy noses need some more individuals to fill out their ranks].

Reggie is a fascinating pet. Growing up, my father always kept snakes and I had assumed that Reggie would be as boring as a snake, but he is a totally different personality altogether. He is constantly roaming around the tank, has clearly come to recognize the people who feed him, and looks at you with the most intelligent little eyes.

He is very active, is a lot of fun to watch eat, and, despite being a carnivore, is more than willing to tolerate tank mates. The fish do not appear to be stressed by him and he doesn't appear to bother them [even though the addition of the rummy-nosed tetras was clearly beyond the capacity of the tank, they are great canaries for water quality and predator stress as their little red noses will pale to clear and their noses have stayed a nice cherry red].

People also seem to really like Reggie, especially watching the crazy poses he makes when hanging from the plants all matrix-y-like.

Fair warning though, freshwater tanks can be addictive. Here is Ryan's newt tank [this is my first attempt at using the iphone panorama so it looks a little funny, but it is probably the best newt tank in the city]:




Those little blue ceramic pieces were made by the amazing Heather, who makes all kinds of cool dishware and random requests for things like aquaria and terraria.

Adventure is out there.


China Part I: The Mountains

Hello nobody!
 
As many of you know, this past summer I hopped on a plane and went to China and participated in a month-long study abroad course that focused on systematics, plant biogeography, ethnobotany, plant identification in the field, and an introduction to the culture of Eastern China.
 
Before I left on this trip, my greatest fear was that the plane would crash over the Pacific and we would all die fiery, free-fall-y deaths of incredible awfulness.
 
Good news, though. Flying to China has cured me of my fear of dying on a plane! It is MUCH WORSE to be stuck in a tiny chair, in the dark, surrounded by a thousand people for 15 hours and then awake to a week of bizarre, mind-fog.
 
But I digress.
 
So there is a lot to say about the China trip. I have divided my journey into five parts: Mountains, Cities, Gardens, Plants, and Culture.
 
Here is a sneak peak of the Mountains blog [I will be finishing these in about 2 weeks when I have access to the diary I kept while abroad].
 
Please enjoy these photos, and read the Reggie blog if you're bored.
 
Adventure is out there.   
 
 






























Saturday, December 1, 2012

Gregory Bald or The Adventure Hat discovers Azaleas

Whoops.

I was wandering around the internet a while ago and suddenly realized that I haven't posted anything in months and months and months and months, and that my poor little blog that nobody reads has slowly been starving to death.

The fish on the sidebar can't feed themselves.

So.
 
This post is called Gregory Bald or the Adventure Hat Discovers Azaleas
 
But first, you are probably wondering "What is Gregory Bald?"
 

[photo credit: Wikipedia]

It is a bald located in the Great Smoky Mountains on the NC/TN border [between Blount and Swain County]. It has an elevation of almost 5,000 feet, and you will climb 3,000 of those feet when you start from the access point at Cades Cove.

It is categorized as a "grassy bald" which is a grassy mountain top that is easily recognized by its lack of trees, instead colonized by native grasses and scrubby shrubs. This makes it different from the "heath balds" which are characterized by scrubby evergreen rhododendrons and mountain laurels (among others). Balds are beautiful and mysterious, and I highly recommending finding one and hiking it. It remains a bit of a mystery as to how these balds, which often contain rare and relic plants, are ecologically maintained, but it appears that the grazing of the megaherbivores [which went extinct after the last ice age-thanks humans and climate change] were critical to keeping the balds free of trees.

Gregory bald, despite being a gorgeous bald in its own right, is also home to a rather miraculous collection of deciduous azaleas that are referred to by the people who know about them as a natural hybrid swarm.  

 
There are at least 4 native deciduous azaleas located on the bald:
  • Rhododendron arborescens [the sweet azalea]: white to blush petals with distinctive red stamens and a strong, pleasant fragrance; often with a yellow spotch 

  • R. viscosum: white to pale pink petals with a narrow tube covered in [extremely] sticky glandular trichomes [hairs]


  • R. cumberlandense [the Cumberland azalea]: orange petals, lacking fragrance, with a relatively small geographic distribution

  • R. calendulaceum [the flame azalea] extreme variation in flower color, ranging from red to yellow, most often a brilliant orange, with large flowers; one of the true gems of the Appalachian Mountains


[photo credits for the native azalea images: American Rhododendron Society]
For more information please visit the East Coast Native Azaleas Page run by the Middle Atlantic Chapter of the American Rhododendron Society
 
 You may be wondering: "What is the adventure hat?"
 
 
Bingo.
 
And probably you are also wondering: "When will Irene buy photo editing software?" [update: fear not, my dedicated blog readers, as of October 2012, I have indeed invested in LightRoom]
 
Anyway.
 
So there is there are lots of different azaleas on this bald, potentially hybridizing and creating an absolutely gorgeous flower show, ranging from whites and pinks, through vibrant oranges, to deep reds.
 
Want to see some of the natural variation?
 
The Mountain Crop Improvement Lab, with help from the American Rhododendron Society, became interested in trying to determine exactly what sorts of hybridization is occurring on this bald. So we hiked the 5.5 miles (straight up) with plant presses and GPS units to collect living specimens to analyze their ploidy (the number of sets of DNA associated with a plant, and a quick and dirty way to detect who is hybridizing with who) and create dried examples of the diversity of the bald to store in herbaria.
 
 
 
Here is some science happening. 
 
 


Variation!

The look of the bald was grassy, punctuated with azaleas.

These next few pictures are some of the many azaleas in bloom on the bald:




 
 
 
 

 
 Long story short: 4 hour hike up, lunch, collecting and pressing for 3 hours, 4 hour hike down.

In retrospect, I should have named this post: Irene (the wimp) vs the long, hard hike to azalea awesomeness that was totally worth it.

Adventure is out there.