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The Oddities of Google

Google seems to be a popular blogging topic. Mostly because Google seems to be quite broken right now, but also there are always people around amused at the search terms people use to find their blog or other strange things about Google.

Robin of Bumblebee Blog had a good idea. She suggested her readers post some of the the search terms people use to find their blogs, then she would then make a post linking to them after December 5th, so we could all compare. Here’s my contribution. I’ve been meaning to post about this anyway.

Of course people find us for the ‘right’ reasons, by searching on topics relating to this blog, but I’m going to give some examples here of some unexpected things.

The first thing to realize is Google has really changed a lot over the last few years, and search terms people were finding us with before are not the same as now, with one exception. Before and now, the single most common term people use to find this blog is ‘weed burner’. I made a post about weed burners very early on, and I seem to have become the main Internet information resource for weed burners.

As a result of using the word ‘weed’ in a popular post, and posting a little later about cannabis, we also have no end of people who find us wanting information on this:

pics of weed

weed

cheap weed

…

I also made a post about my 325 year old wooden house foundation needing to be repaired, and a lot of people started finding us looking for information on foundations:

Why is my house sinking?

sinking house foundation

How do I know if my foundation is bad?

What does a bad foundation look like?

For a long time, people were finding us searching on information about carrots:

Can you grow carrots in a bottle?

What do carrots look like when they are underground?

What types of carrots are there?

history of carrots

pictures of carrots

how do I grow carrots

To be clear, I’ve never particularly posted much here about carrots.

For a while a number of people were finding us searching for missing bees and Colony Collapse Disorder. The popularity of the topic led me to write a number of followup articles afterwards.

A number of people have found us recently looking for pictures of different kinds of garlic. This was part of the reason for posting the pictures recently, because there aren’t many pictures of garlic on the Internet.

By far in a way the biggest ‘Google event’ happened when Steph made this post on Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

For those of you not familiar with this beer, in recent years it’s probably become the most popular ‘alternative’ beer in the US, and it’s particularly popular among students. When Steph and I were students in Chico, California, where the brewery is located, we went on a tour of the brewery while it was still in a garage. A few days ago we bought our first bottle in Amsterdam! It still tastes the same after all these years. At 15 euros (about US$21) for six bottles it’s not going to become our daily beer again anytime soon, but it was still a nice treat.

Anyway, after Steph made this post people started ‘borrowing’ the picture by linking to it within blog posts, forums, myspace pages and so on. It’s all over the Internet now, and a search on Google images shows it’s now the most popular image above even those released by the brewery itself! The picture itself is probably the single largest source of Internet traffic for our domain, I think more than everything else combined.

Like I said, Google is broken now, but until recently it was including all of these links in our page rankings. I like to think I’m popular for other reasons, but surely this has had the greatest impact on our Google rankings!

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Choices of Potting Soil

We’ve just been discussing potted plants on A Spot With Pots and I thought rather than leave a very long comment I would post about it here instead. I’ve talked about this before in a post a few months ago, and other bloggers have certainly discussed this too.

Peat Moss

Almost all soil products available for purchase are based on peat moss, and this is not without controversy.

Peat covers about 3% of the earth’s surface, and to date only about 7% of this has been mined. In addition, it can be mined sustainably, but this doesn’t usually happen. You don’t have to look very hard or far to find pristine landscapes ruined by peat mining in Ireland, England, Holland, Canada and many other countries.

Peat is a huge and important natural resource, but like many other things we don’t seem to be able to reconcile commercial and environmental issues with it’s use.

The majority of peat seems to be used by industry. Finland generates 2.6% of their electricity by burning peat. Nearly all flower bulbs grown in Holland are covered with a layer of peat to protect them from winter weather. Peat is used commercially in many other ways.

Peat is also important to many indigenous communities. For example, I was in Estonia a few years ago, where I was shown what I was told was a sustainable mining operation for peat used both for heating homes in the winter and for export. I was also told that the operation was very important economically for the region.

Lack of environmental sensitivity in the industry prompts a lot of people to speak out against using it in the garden, but as gardeners what’s really the best thing for us to do?

Commercial Peat Alternatives

Quick to capitalize on the fear people have that using peat damages the environment, peat alternatives have become more available. This is the same logic that people who are afraid of sugar should drink diet Coke, or if you are afraid of getting killed in a traffic accident you should drive a safer vehicle like an SUV.

I’m not going to deny there is environmental damage from mining peat, or that you may prevent some of this damage by using a peat alternative, but I think there are few real reasons to think expensive alternatives are any better.

One of the most common peat alternatives is called coir (pronounced koy-er), a patented byproduct of the coconut industry. There’s little doubt the coconut industry generates a lot of pollution from improperly disposed of coconut shells. Will you do any favors for the environment by paying for a very small percentage of this waste to be processed into a peat alternative, then shipped from Sri Lanka where it is made all the way to your garden? Is there some reason the coconut industry can’t process and dispose of it properly locally? It’s a choice everyone has to make for themselves, but I suggest putting the matter into some perspective.

Compost is often available for purchase as a peat alternative, and is worth considering, but the quality of this is often much lower than what you make yourself. Purchased compost is often made with waste collected by local municipalities (councils), often containing a lot of contaminants. Purchased compost is usually best used for flowers instead of vegetables.

Homemade Peat Alternatives

One of the best peat alternatives is homemade compost, zero airmiles and it’s your own recycled waste.

There are three common problems with using compost. The first is many people don’t consider compost clean enough for indoor use. I don’t have any problems with it personally, but it is an issue for many people. The second problem is compost contains a lot of microorganisms, and young seedlings may be killed by these. This is called ‘damping off’. For this reason homemade compost shouldn’t be used as a seed starting mix. The third problem is it’s often not possible to make enough.

I personally use a combination of homemade compost and purchased peat. As little as 25% compost is usually sufficient to ensure there are enough nutrients in the mix, but more is better and I try to use 100% compost if I have enough available. This often results in a mixture that is too acidic for many plants, and requires the addition of some lime.

Being a Good Consumer

Regardless if you buy peat or peat alternatives, remember you are buying a natural resource that shouldn’t be wasted. Like any other agricultural product, try to buy locally and as direct from the producer as possible. If you are buying it from the garden center, you probably won’t have any choice in this. Above all consider alternatives you may already have, like normal dirt or homemade compost. Also try to reuse or recycle potting soil when possible.

Always keep in mind there is more profit for any store if you buy a processed product, and this is what they will always try to sell you. Peat based potting soil is a perfect example of this. There are not enough nutrients for plants in plain peat moss, but by taking plain peat moss and adding a few cents of chemical fertilizer and a fancy label with a brand name, it can be sold at a huge markup. This is exactly what nearly all commercial potting soil is. Some have sand, compost or other things added, but by reading the list of ingredients on the label you can almost always buy the individual ingredients and make it yourself for much less money. If you are an organic gardener make sure any commercial potting soil you buy is clearly labeled organic! Making it yourself is the best way to make sure it only has what you want in it.

I often have the problem here in Amsterdam that I can’t buy plain peat moss in the right season. Garden centers know they are competing with people making their own mixes with homemade compost, so they just don’t sell plain peat moss in the spring and summer. Since it is used by gardeners growing flower bulbs, it’s often available in the fall, so I usually have to buy it out of season and store it.

Peat moss is an important natural resource for gardeners, but it’s cheap and unpatented, putting a lot of pressure on retail outlets to wean us off and onto more expensive and patented alternatives like potting soil mixes and peat alternatives. For this reason, the day may come where plain peat moss is simply no longer available for purchase.

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Ewa in the Garden

There is a new organic gardening blog, Ewa in the Garden.  Ewa recently left a comment here, which prompted me to have a look at her blog.  Located near Warsaw, it makes her the first Gardening blog I recall coming across from Poland.

She’s built a great looking pond in her yard, something I’ve often thought about doing and don’t recall seeing anyone blog about before.

From her recent posts I see she is an excellent photographer, and likes the international aspects of blogging.

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Organic Guide

Several weeks ago I was contacted by the people behind a new gardening/food blog and website called Organic Guide. The reason for contacting me was to ask me to consider adding them to my blogroll.

I must admit, I was a little apprehensive at first. While I am very much an organic gardener, I don’t often say this because I feel the term has been a bit hijacked recently by corporate interests. Regular readers of this blog will know I have said some unkind things in the past about ‘certified’ foods, including such things as organic or Fairtrade. How could I be against such good things as certified organic or Fairtrade foods? It’s not so much that I am against them, but rather they are only a very small start and many people use them as an excuse to ignore larger issues. I feel I can do a lot more good by making purchases as directly as possible from the people who produce the goods, locally where possible, and based on personal knowledge. I have always felt this was a better approach than buying certified mass market products.

Another thing fresh in my mind was some recent attempts by newspapers or magazines to create their own gardening blogs. Many of these have been at best uninteresting, and in some cases bordering on arrogant.

While I might have expected Organic Guide might turn into a blog run by mainstream journalists, full of banner ads for mass market organic products and articles promoting the health benefits of Omega-3 and oily fish — nothing could have been further from the truth!

In recent days they have published some really outstanding articles, some touching on things I’ve mentioned in the past:

Preserving the cultural value of food

Interview with Sandra Slack from Garden Organic

Public unaware that most milk, dairy and pork from GM

These last two are probably of more interest to Europeans. These are also just a few of the best articles, there’s lots of other good stuff there to read.

While the people behind the blog are professional journalists for sure, they are also bloggers and very much aware of the issues facing biodiversity, gardening and food production. Their definition of organic goes far beyond supermarket certified foods.

This is definitely a site worth paying attention to. They are also looking for input from their readers, as well as guest writers.

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Seed Saving: Dehybridization

If you have a plant that’s a result of a cross between at least two other plants and you want to create a new stable variety from this plant, you must go through a process called dehybridization.

You can dehybridize a simple F1 hybrid variety (two plants crossed), but you can do the same thing with a grex (more than two plants crossed) as well.

I’ve mentioned in recent posts how important is is to start with the right kind of seeds when seed saving and breeding plants. Some people may be wondering why you couldn’t dehybridize a commercial F1 hybrid variety the same way you could an F1 hybrid created in your garden.

The issue is usually if you want the genes contained in a commercial variety in your garden. For example many commercial tomato varieties are bred to have tough skins or be suitable for transporting long distances. Many varieties of other plants are genetically programmed to produce their harvest all at the same time (often called ‘all at once’ types), which is handy if you are a farmer harvesting with a tractor but most gardeners would rather have a sustained harvest over a longer period. There are many other traits that exist in commercial hybrid varieties that aren’t necessarily desirable in a home garden.

If however you come across a commercial plant variety that you really want to keep and dehybridize, it’s often possible. For example, there have been a number of efforts recently to dehybridize the very popular commercial Sun Gold variety tomato. There have been a number of similar efforts made with commercial varieties in the past, and some of these efforts have been more successful than others.

The Process

As I’ve mentioned before, when two different stable varieties of plants are crossed, an F1 hybrid is created. If seeds from this generation are saved and replanted, the result is an F2 hybrid followed by an F3 and so on.

The F1 generation is distinct. That is if you grow more than one plant from this generation, they will all be the same. If you create more seeds by making a new cross from the same parent plant varieties, these seeds will also produce more of the same identical plants.

When starting with hybrid, the F2 generation the plants will start to show genetic instability, and the plants will all be different. In fact, the F2 generation will be the most unstable. It’s a good idea to grow a large number of plants in the F2 generation and save seeds only from those that have the most desirable traits, in order to take advantage of the large number of differences.

At this point it’s a matter of growing the next generation from previously saved seeds and continuing to select the most desirable plants. If you come across a generation without plants with desirable traits, it can sometimes be necessary to replant the previous generation, so it’s a good idea to save seeds from earlier plantings. If you are dehybridizing an inbreeding plant and end up with more than one plant with different desirable traits, it may be necessary to cross pollinate these plants so the desirable traits are combined. If you are working with outbreeding plants they will probably be cross-pollinating on their own anyway, making good rouging practices very important.

If you decide along the way new genetic material is needed, you can also introduce the genetics of other plants by cross-pollinating with them. Consider that the more complex and varied you make the genetics, the longer it will take to dehybridize and stabilize the variety.

After a number of generations of saving seeds from desirable plants, and rouging undesirable plants, the genetics of the new variety will begin to stabilize and you will seed fewer differences between the plants. Eventually, you will have a new stable open pollinated variety. Different plants take longer or shorter times to stabilize, ranging from a couple of years to as many as 10-15.