Wednesday Links

I'm giving this top billing this week, because I think it is pretty important (normally these links are simply on the order I find them during the week): Do go check out the blog biofortified. It is written by a team of graduate students (and their mascot: Fank N. Foodie) studying genetic engineering. They're also environmentalists, advocates of local food, and generally all-around-cool. If you are looking to move past the silly and pointless debate over if GMOs are good or bad, and on to reading real, thoughtful discussion of what we should and shouldn't be doing with the technology, start here. It is high on my Must Read list from now on.

By way of the always excellent Scientist Gardener, plans for what is being billed as the world's largest urban farm in Detroit.Which is cool. I was in Detroit recently, and the city is spectacular -- spectacularly depressing, that is. We drove through entire neighborhoods of lovely victorian homes where only one or two houses WEREN'T boarded up. So I'm super excited about the growing urban agriculture movement in Detroit these days.

This was posted, like, 6 months ago, but I just found it, and feel like linking to it: James and the Giant Corn explains why pineapples are awesome.

Carol provides translation for what house plants are really saying. I hope she's not right... her plants sound pretty demanding. And do they really WANT to be deadheaded? I always thought having your half-developed offspring chopped off would be pretty traumatic. Though not as bad as what the poor hyacinths have waiting for them.

Apparently, in New Zealand they are seeing a shift in gardening trends: A move away from grasses and foliage and back to a more traditional flower centric look. I'm not sure if this is true in the US (here it seem to be all about vegetables at the moment), and if it is, I'm not sure what I think about it. I love growing all of the above, but I do think flowers are more fun to breed, and plant breeding is my favorite part of gardening.

Garden Rant has a great piece on native and non-native plants -- a great summing up of what sounds like a spectacularly sane chapter on the same topic by Linda Chalker-Scott of The Garden Professors.

Germi goes gaga for Aloes. Well, she's BEEN gaga for aloes, but seriously, she's taking it to another level. I should warn you, this post induced SEVERE zone envy, and anyone else in a cold climate might want to wait until spring to view it.


One scientist finds trees growing two to four times faster than usual, apparently due to the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I'm not surprised that it increases growth rate -- CO2 supplementation has been showed to do that before -- I AM surprised at the numbers. Two to four TIMES faster? I'll have to track down the actual paper and read it in detail. (I'll pretend this is part of studying for my up-coming comprehensive exams...)