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Biodiversity, Flowers and Vegetable Gardens

I’ve been interested for a while in finding ways to make use of flowers to increase the biodiversity in my vegetable garden.  To be honest, I’m a complete novice when it comes to flowers, and I don’t really have an interest in them unless they serve some clear purpose.

Some years ago, when the Seed Ambassadors visited Europe, I got some of Alan Kapuler’s tagetes seeds from them.  As I recall, there weren’t many seeds left by the time it was my turn to take some, and of the few seeds I got only one or two germinated.  I don’t remember what happened to those…

Alan Kapuler is known for tagetes.  When placing an order with him a few years ago for some other things, I also ordered some more of these too.  They’ve been sitting around, and now this year I had a couple of goals to accomplish.

  • The first was to provide some flowers suitable for bees and other pollinators to collect pollen, and for this I chose borage.
  • I also have some perennial weed issues in my garden, and I was hoping to address this by somehow solving underlying problems, or with companion planting or biodiversity.

Last year I had some bindweed in my garden, slowly encroaching on a neighbor’s garden.  With some apologies, I explained the situation to her and said I would do what I could, but expected some of it would come into her garden anyway.  Without saying a word to me, she planted some Tagetes minuta, a wild plant in our area, along our fence.  The result was quite impressive.  All the bindweed within about a meter of the fence died.

I’ve since read some things about using tagetes to kill bindweed, but to be honest the information available is a little conflicting and vague.  Some sources say particular species of tagetes are more effective than others.  Almost all sources mention that no benefit is achieved until the plant has been growing in the same place for at least 3 months.  Anyway, it seemed a good year to grow some of Alan Kapuler’s varieties and put them to the test.  He offers T. patula and T. erecta.  Several of them were planted in places very infested with bindweed.

T. patula

T. erecta

Borage

The tagetes haven’t been in place for a full 3 months yet, so it’s probably a little early for conclusions, but not much seems to be happening yet.  I did notice none of the tagetes are becoming engulfed in the bindweed, as if the bindweed instinctively knows not to grow near them.

Does anyone have any experience with tagetes and bindweed or tagetes and anything else?

Does anyone have other suggestions or ideas for combining flowers and vegetable gardens, for purposes of making use of biodiversity?

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Asparagus Seedlings

They weren’t being very photogenic, small green things on a grey background, but most of the asparagus I posted about a few days ago are in the garden.  Wow, 30 varieties!

The germination rate of the seeds was phenomenal!   Nearly 100% for most accessions.  I wonder if the folks at GRIN use magic pixy dust or something.  I’ve never had that good a rate of germination from asparagus before.  It’s not unusual to get a rate of 0%, maybe more often I spend a lot of money for a package of 10 seeds, and 2 germinate.  These packages were labelled 50 seeds, and the very worst yielded 8 plants in the end, which is enough.

One company I bought asparagus seeds from this year had 10 seeds per packet.  I figured I would order 3 packets for about 3 euros a package, just in case of low germination, and none of them germinated.  I was very annoyed.

Well you can do the math — 30 packages of 50 seeds, with a say 90% germination rate gives 1350 asparagus seedlings.  Needless to say I didn’t have space for them all.  It was more than I expected, and had to change gardening plans a bit to find space for about half of them.  It’s a problem of luxury we gardeners have sometimes.  After the first year I should have crowns to transplant, and I’ll probably be able to do some initial selections then.  I probably don’t have enough space for 30 different varieties…

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Dutch Government Firmly in the Hands of Big Tobacco

I’m really disgusted at recent news the Dutch government is planning to raise the drinking age from 16 to 18.  This is an issue that’s been coming and going ever since the public smoking ban came into effect a little over a year ago.

The idea of raising the drinking age is a very unpopular one.  Tolerance to drugs like alcohol and marijuana is widely seen as the reason we have escaped many of the social problems of places like the US, with less tolerance towards recreational drug use and much more of a hard drug problem.

Quite simply the tobacco companies want their product the only legally available drug for young people.  I can imagine soon the smoking age will also go up to 18, but then it will be because they want young people to have had an interest in using legal drugs for a period before they are allowed to drink and smoke, to make smoking more appealing.

Having a drinking age, and a smoking age equal or less, it simply allows young people to compare the relative safety of these products.

Caretaker Government

Our government coalition recently collapsed, and we now have a caretaker government preparing for elections.  In theory this means no ‘controversial’ issues will be considered until after the election, but an increase in drinking age looks set to go through now anyway.

Why is this?  For some time now the right wing parties have all been bought off by the tobacco lobby.  Not to be left out in the days leading up to the election, the left wing parties have also fallen prey.  Now big tobacco has a clear majority in parliament, and feels this is the best time to push it through.

It’s also the summer holidays, and so not many people are paying attention to politics.  This is colloquially known here as cucumber time, when the news is so slow there’s nothing to do but watch the cucumbers grow.

Criminalized

One of the things passed through the government the last year or two is criminalizing the possession of alcohol by someone under-age.  This is a very controversial thing here, as it technically subjects a 15 year old (or younger) to the criminal justice system.  It means the possibility of getting a criminal record, as well as being punished as a criminal.

Many people here feel no activity by someone of that age should be criminalized, under any circumstances, not the very least having a beer in their hand.

Young People’s Brains are Still Developing

Yes, I’ve heard this one too.  Alcohol damages young people’s brains.

We’ve now had decades of a higher drinking age in the US and a lower one in Europe.  Does anyone really believe the brains of Europeans are underdeveloped because of drinking as a youth?  What we’ve seen are developing social problems in the US, increasing hard drug and prescription drug abuse, and a civil war in Mexico.  Could these be related to the higher drinking age?

In any case, anyone seriously concerned about the health of young people would be putting more effort into making smoking less attractive to them.  There’s still lots of work to be done on this.  How about forbidding the display of cigarette packages, banning vending machines and prohibiting sale in supermarkets, bars, snack bars, post offices and other high traffic public places?  Limiting the hours they can legally be sold?

How about making our public smoking ban a little more credible?

Young People are Drinking More, and Becoming Hospitalized More for Alcohol Poisoning

This is in the news here a lot.  No one is quite sure where are these drunk young people are, as they aren’t visible on the streets or anything.

The argument used to be that with a good economy young people had more money to spend, and so were more likely to spend it on alcohol.  Now that the economy has gone down, young people have much less money.  Many young people can’t afford their first house, or to buy a car.  Now this argument has changed into young people are getting hospitalized more with alcohol poisoning.

Just what does this mean and what does it prove?  Does it mean they are changing the way they are keeping statistics for this kind of thing?  Does this mean adults are quicker to take drunk kids to the doctor?

This sort of claim is not in any way credible, and it’s only an emotional statement.

People are getting tired of being manipulated with arguments like this!