I think hybrids are evil.

Not hybrid cars, mind you. I’m all for those.

I’m talking about a kind of hybrids that most people are in contact with on a daily basis: Man-made hybrid food plants and their seeds.

“So, why are they evil, Thomas?” I hear the hecklers say. “Plants aren’t really capable of being evil, are they? Don’t you have to think to be evil?”

Yes, yes. Of course. But that’s nitpicking.

The fact of the matter is that the existence and common use of these so-called first-generation hybrids in food production is degrading your diet, increasing the gap between rich and poor, killing biodiversity and increasing the chance of famine.

Sound extreme? It sure is. Luckily, you can help alleviate all of these problems without any major inconvenience.

What exactly are first-generation hybrids?

The super-short explanation is that first-generation (F1 for short) hybrids are basically inbred plants that have been artificially fertilized by humans.

The slightly more detailed explanation is that two different plant types – say, two types of tomatoes – are inbred separately for ten or more generations, and then crossed with each other. This results in large batches of seeds that produce plants that are genetically very similar.

These plants will produce a large yield of fruit and other edible parts that look the same, taste the same and are of the same size and shape. All the fruit will also ripen at the same time.

This makes F1 hybrids popular in industrial agriculture. The uniform size and shape makes them easy to harvest, handle and pack by machine. Because of this, most fruit and vegetables you buy in a supermarket are F1 hybrids.

Why F1 hybrids are bad

• Less variation in your diet
  Variety is the key to a healthy diet. With the tomato you bought yesterday being genetically the same as the one you’ll buy today, next week and next month, you’ll get exactly the same nutrients every day.
• Farmers have to buy new, expensive seeds every year
  While first-generation hybrids yield a lot the first season, their seeds are usually sterile or produce weak plants. Therefore, farmers have to buy new, expensive seeds every year. This is a serious problem for farmers in poor countries.
• Hybrids are squeezing traditional varieties out of the market
  With industrial farms growing exclusively hybrids, traditional varieties of plants are squeezed out of the market and marginalized. This threatens biodiversity – pollinators and other animal life included.
• Increased danger of famine
  The lower diversity that hybrids lead to, makes our food supply vulnerable. If a popular hybrid is vulnerable to a particular blight that turns up, it will wipe out all or most of the existing population of that hybrid.
  
  That’s what happened during the Irish potato famine in 1840s. Irish farmers were reliant on one particular kind of potato. This kind of potato proved to be vulnerable to a fungus that grew during a damp spell. This wiped out Ireland’s main source of food for years, until a potato resistant to the fungus was found in Peru.
  
  Modern, industrial farmers sort of get around this issue by using an ever increasing amount of herbicides and pesticides. Apart from all the other negatives of spraying poison on our food, this is only a temporary fix. Fungus, bacteria and pests are developing resistance and immunity to these chemicals.

What to do about it

Whenever possible, buy so-called heirloom fruit and vegetables.

Heirloom varieties are simply traditional varieties that have cross-bred with other varieties and managed to survive for centuries, enduring drought, freezing and blights with their natural defenses.

Heirlooms taste better, contain more varied nutrients and come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and colors. Their seeds can be harvested and used for new plants next year. And the more heirloom varieties grown in the same area, the smaller the risk of a blight wiping them all out.

To find heirlooms, buy your fruits and veggies from local farmers and gardeners. In a farmer’s market, you can often find several types of any given fruit or vegetable. If you’re having trouble finding them, ask the farmers for them. They’ll be more inclined to grow them if they know there’s a market.

Alternately, you can grow them yourself. Search for “heirloom seeds” on any website selling seeds – for example Burpee’s site.

Related posts:

1. Are hybrid cars pointless?
2. Happy pollinator week 2009!
3. Growing your own food – small scale

Quickly, what’s your favorite pastime?

Oh, I know: Mowing the lawn, right?

No? You don’t like it?

Time to celebrate, then: You can do a lot less of it than you might think – with a clear conscience!

Let your lawn grow a decent hairdo

If you’re mowing your lawn too often, you ensure the following:

• You will be bored/annoyed/worn out more often than you need to be
  Mowing the lawn is a drag, best kept to a minimum.
• Weeds will have a better chance of outgrowing your grass
  If you crew cut your grass, any quickly growing weed will have better access to light and space, thus allowing it to speed past your grass.
• Your lawn will dry out and die more easily
  Short grass straws cast less shadow. This lets the sun bake the soil and evaporates water quicker.

Let your lawn maintain a decent height instead. Never go shorter than two inches (five cm) and let it grow to at least three inches (eight cm) before getting the mower out.

This will counteract the annoyances above and gain these extra advantages:

• Your lawn won’t be a Yawn Lawn
  A big, monoculture-like mat of grass isn’t just yawn-inducingly boring, it’s also bad for biodiversity. If you let your lawn grow, a greater variety of plants and other beneficial organisms will move in and thrive.

  Clovers fixate nitrogen in your soil, providing your grass with easy access nutrition. Bumblebees and other pollinators go crazy, making your flowers bloom and your fruits and veggies grow. Shortly put, your garden starts living, instead of just pretending to live.

• Your lawn gets more comfy
  Longer grass equals a better cushion. Walk barefeet, lie down in it and enjoy

As a final note, when you do mow the lawn: don’t bother raking the grass clippings into a tidy pile. Just distribute them more or less evenly across the lawn. They’ll help with fertilization.

Related posts:

1. 10 ways to help pollinators survive and thrive
2. How to build a bumblebee nest – part 2
3. Growing your own food – small scale

All pictures in this post by Renewables At Home – copyright info

In yesterday’s post, I detailed the first part of building a bumblebee nest from an old flower pot. Read that part before this one, or you’ll soon be scratching your head

Today, we’ll venture out and find a good site for placing and assembling the remaining pieces of the nest.

As for tools and materials, we don’t need a lot today:

• Nesting material
• A shovel
• Optionally a pair of garden gloves

The nesting material is the stuff the bumblebee queen will arrange to her liking and start breeding her family in.

Good candidates are dried moss or grass clippings, hamster bedding from a pet shop or upholsterer’s cotton. Avoid cotton wool and fibre glass insulation – the fibres are too fine and might act as bumblebee traps.

Location, location, location…

Bumblebee nests should be placed in a location that gets little or no sun – we don’t want to overheat the little buzzers. Try to keep it sheltered from the wind, too.

Hedge bottoms, raised banks, along solid fences and under garden sheds are all typically good candidate sites. Most species prefer an entrance at ground level.

Keep in mind that bumblebees need access to flowers, so find a location with a good selection of them within a kilometer (about two thirds of a mile).

You can find more details on good flowers for bumblebees on bumblebeeconservation.org’s Gardening for bumblebees page.

My apartment doesn’t have a proper garden, so I decided to look around in my neighbourhood for a good spot. I found one a minute’s walk away:

Draining the trenches

The nest should be partially buried, so I started out by digging a small and shallow trench, just long enough for the flower pot and the length of hose next to each other.

As mentioned yesterday, it’s important that the nesting material is kept dry. Our chickenwire cradle should go a long way towards that, but a layer of pebbles under it will provide a bit of extra drainage help.

Put the pebbles towards one end of the trench, like I’ve done in the picture below. I’ve also put the entrance hose in. Make sure you point the nail-pierced end of the hose away from the pebbles.

Cradle of moss

The next thing to go in, is the chickenwire cradle. Push it into the dirt and pebbles so it’s not easily dislodged, but keep the top above the dirt.
Next up is the nesting material. Place a loose, fluffed up ball of it on top of the cradle, about the size of a tennis ball.

If you like, you can make things bleeding obvious to the queen by thumbing a small depression in the ball and facing this depression towards the entrance.

Going potty

Now it’s time for the most important thing: The modified flower pot. The pot will function as the actual nest.

Place it upside down, with the rim covering the end of the entrance hose. Make sure the hose isn’t blocked by dirt.

A proper burial

Put dirt all around the flower pot, blocking all entrances but the hose. Put dirt over the hose, too, but leave a short section jutting out. Again, make sure you don’t get dirt inside the hose.

Natural bumblebee nests are often in abandoned mouse nests. To make your artificial nest look more like this, you can scrape away any grass and other plants immediately surrounding the entrance.

Rain cover

The final step is providing some rain cover for the bumblebees. Lay a few small pebbles on top of the pot and then place the tray on top of the whole shebang, upside down. The pebbles help air circulation.
Weigh the tray down with a few rocks to lessen the chances of investigative animals knocking it off.

All done

That’s it, we’re done!

Now just sit back and hope the bumblebee queen will deem your creation worthy of her residency.

Resist the urge to inspect the nest too closely – especially for the first few weeks – if you disturb the queen while she’s establishing herself, she’ll probably move on to somewhere else.

Don’t get too disappointed if no-one moves in (if it hasn’t happened by the end of July, it probably won’t happen this side of winter).

The nest should survive the winter just fine. With any luck, a mouse will nest in it, and increase the chances of a bumblebee queen finding it to her liking when the spring comes.

Related posts:

1. How to build a bumblebee nest – part 1
2. I like bumblebees
3. 10 ways to help pollinators survive and thrive

All pictures in this post by Renewables At Home – copyright info

As duly noted in my recent ode to bumblebees, bumblebees are my favorite pollinators and deserve a helping hand. So, in an attempt to practice what I preach, I’ve built a bumblebee nest based on an old flower pot. In this post, I’m documenting the process in glorious technicolor and inspiring prose

It’s a fun project – should be perfect for doing with the kids. If you want other ways to help the bumblebees and other pollinators, take a look at my list of 10 ways to help pollinators survive and thrive.

In order to keep download times manageable, this mini-project will span two posts. In the one you’re reading now, we’ll take a look at how I built the bumblebee nest and prepared for placing it. In the next post, we’ll venture out and find a good location.

Tools and materials

We need a few basic tools and materials for building the nest. Nothing fancy, though:
The materials – impersonating a happy and slightly deranged robot in the picture above – are as follows:

• A terracotta flower pot with a diameter of 20 cm/8 inches (you can use a bigger one, but a smaller one won’t work)
• A matching tray for the pot – this will be a rain cover for the finished nest
• A square of chickenwire (the light gray part of the deranged robot’s nose)
• Some mosquito netting (any fine mesh plastic netting will work)
• Something for fixing the netting to the inside of the flower pot (my mosquito netting came with self adhesive velcro strips, glue will also work)
• A 30 cm. (about a foot) long length of garden hose – this has to have an inside diameter of at least 18 mm. (0.71 inches)
• A nail slightly longer than the garden hose’s outside diameter

Next, the tools list:

• Tin shears (or something else for cutting chicken wire)
• Glue
• Pair of pliers
• Scissors
• A drill with a reasonably large masonry drill bit (or something else that will pierce terracotta without breaking it)
• A hammer (not pictured)
• An awl (not pictured) or some other sharp tool for making holes through the garden hose

Bumblebee nest ventilation

Like most other animals, bumblebees don’t get much done if they’re too hot.

To make sure the nest doesn’t overheat, we have to provide at least two, preferrably three ventilation holes. Most terracotta flower pots will already have one in the bottom:
We don’t have to make two more that big – as long as air can pass easily through the holes, we’re okay.

So, grab your drill and make two holes on opposite sides of the flower pot. Keep them near the bottom of the pot (this will be the top of the nest), about 1,25 centimeters (half an inch) up.

Keep the flower pot steady while you drill. Start out carefully – the drill will slip easily at first. Don’t push hard; it increases the chances of the pot cracking up. Let the drill bit do its thing. Oh, and turn any hammer action your drill might have off.

Ants begone!

Right, holes are done. We can’t leave them as is, though. If any roving ants pass by, they’ll enter the nest through the holes and wreak havoc on the bumblebee colony.

This is where the mosquito netting comes in. Provided it’s finely meshed, it will let air through but block ants.

Cut out a few pieces of netting and fix them to the inside of the pot, covering the holes completely. I used the velcro strips that came with my mosquito netting and a few drops of glue for this, but using just glue on its own should work fine, too.
Hey presto, ants are kept out! Plus it makes the flower pot look kind of like a loudspeaker ;-D

Chickenwire cradle

Next up is a cradle for the nesting material we’ll put in the nest later.

It’s important that the nesting material doesn’t get wet, or mold and other bumblebee-bothering unpleasantness may show up. Keeping the nesting material above ground with a chickenwire cradle is a good way to keep things dry.

Cut out a square of chickenwire that will almost cover the wide end of the flower pot (see photo below).
Use the pliers to bend the corners of the square. The corners should work as feet for the cradle. Also bend any sharp wire points inwards, below the cradle. I don’t know if bumblebees are particularly vulnerable to sharp points, but we might as well be careful.
When you’re done bending the corners, set the cradle down and make a dimple in the middle. The end product should look something like this:

The nest entrance

Bumblebees aren’t the most demanding in terms of grand entryways. As long as it’s an obvious tunnel that ends somewhere dry and cozy, they’re happy. Which means our length of garden hose fits the requirements quite nicely

To make sure the nest and the entrance tunnel is kept dry when it rains, we have to make some drainage holes in the hose.

Make several holes near the middle of the hose length, along the outside curve.

Run a bit of water through the hose to make sure the holes are big enough to work as drainage.
The final step before finding somewhere to place the bumblebee nest, is keeping another unwanted guest out: Slugs.

Slugs won’t attack or harass the bumblebees directly, but they might crawl into the nest’s entrance and die. The bumblebees won’t be able to get it out of the way.

To keep slugs out, we run the nail through the garden hose, close to one of the ends. Make sure you run it through slightly off-center. This should work as a discouraging roadblock for slugs, while still letting the bumblebees pass.

The great outdoors

The bumblebee nest parts should now be ready to be taken outside and set up in a good location.

In the picture below, the parts for my nest look happy at the prospects of getting some fresh air
That’s it for this part – continue on to How to build a bumblebee nest – part 2 to see how we find a good site for our nest.

Related posts:

1. How to build a bumblebee nest – part 2
2. I like bumblebees
3. 10 ways to help pollinators survive and thrive

Bumblebees are cool. They’re my favorite pollinators.

They buzz around somewhat clumsily on their pollen-and-nectar gathering field trips, openly defying anyone claiming they can’t fly.

They help big time with the pollination of our food plants.

And they’re generally so docile that you’ll have to step on them or try to eat them to make them sting you.

True story: When she was little, my girlfriend didn’t know bumblebees could sting. And she thought they looked all cute and furry and pettable, so she did a couple of times. Pet them, that is. And they didn’t sting her.

This may have been slightly sleepy bumblebee queens that had just emerged from their nests in the springtime. But still.

3 interesting facts about bumblebees

• Bumblebees are endothermic. This means they can, and do, adjust their own body temperature by deliberately burning fat and nectar and by using their large wing muscles. An active bumblebee’s body temperature may swing between 30 and 43 degrees Celcius (86 to 109 degrees Fahrenheit).
• If the temperature in a bumblebee nest drops too low, the bumblebees start brooding on their eggs and larvas. This makes them burn nectar and produce heat. If the nest gets too hot, worker bees flutter their wings inside and around the nest to increase air circulation.
• There are cuckoo bumblebee species. A cuckoo bumblebee queen will force her way into the nest of a regular/social bumblebee queen and kill or evict the existing queen. She will then take over the workers and use them to rear her own offspring.

Building a bumblebee nesting site

Having done a bit of pollinator advocacy in Happy pollinator week 2009 and 10 ways to help pollinators survive and thrive, I think the next logical step for me is to give building a bumblebee nesting site a shot.

As their natural habitats are increasingly being suppressed by urbanization and modern farming practices, finding natural nesting sites are getting harder for bumblebee queens.

There are commercial bumblebee nest boxes available, but I’m far too impatient to wait for that. So I’m going to build a flowerpot based nesting site.

I’ll build and find a suitable site as a weekend project. If all goes well, I’ll do a post about it next week.

I wish everyone a nice weekend – I’m off to rummage through my gardening supplies for a suitable flower pot!

Related posts:

1. How to build a bumblebee nest – part 2
2. 10 ways to help pollinators survive and thrive
3. How to build a bumblebee nest – part 1

As a follow-up to yesterday’s Happy pollinator week 2009 post, here’s a list of things you can do to help pollinators – and the plants we depend on – survive and thrive:

• Sign Gotham City Honey Co-Op’s petition to legalize beekeeping in New York City.
• Plant and care for pollen-bearing plants, preferrably several different types. Bees need plants that bloom and provide pollen at different times through the season.
• In the same spirit as the above point, leave a few weeds every here and there. Many weeds provide pollen. As an added bonus, you can cite a good reason if someone criticizes your (lack of) weeding efforts.
• Don’t mow the lawn so often. Leaving it unmowed will allow proper growth of white clovers and other pollinator yummy treats. If the neighbours complain, tell them why you’re not mowing every week anymore and convince them to follow your example.
• Don’t dig in the ground if you don’t have to. Some pollinators need undisturbed soil to procreate.
• Stay the heck away from pesticides. Really, I mean it. They’re horrible and pointless. Not only will they kill off pollinators and other beneficial insects left and right, but they’ll cause all kinds of havoc elsewhere, too – but that’s the subject of a future post.
• If honey bees set up shop somewhere too close for comfort, have beekeepers remove them live instead of killing them.
• Leave bumblebees alone, even if they nest in your walls – they won’t wreck your insulation and are so docile and gentle that they won’t sting unless you’re actively hurting them.
• Consider keeping honey bees.
• Provide a home or two for pollinators: mason beehives, nest boxes for bumblebees, bird houses and bat houses.

You can read more about what you can do to help pollinators at Pollinator Partnership’s website.

Related posts:

1. Happy pollinator week 2009!
2. I like bumblebees
3. Want a healthy lawn? Be lazy!

Buzz. Bzzzzz. Buzz!

Don’t worry. I’m not going crazy.

I’m just making a few celebratory sounds in honor of pollinators worldwide.

We are, after all, in the middle of Pollinator Week 2009.

Oh yeah? Who you callin’ pollinators?

Pollinators are all kinds of animals that help move pollen by rummaging in, on or near flowers.

The most well-known pollinator is the honey bee, but there are many others. Most of them are insects, like bumblebees, mason bees and sweat bees or different types of flies, beetles, moths and butterflies.

Not all of them are insects, though. Also deserving some credit are various birds, bats and furry animals that make a habit of frolicking in flowery meadows.

So why are we celebrating these pollinators?

By moving pollen between flowers of the same species, pollinators help ensure that the flowers can produce fertile seeds and fruit. Without proper pollination, the seeds produced won’t germinate and fruit prospects will be dismal, to say the least.

Although some plants will self-pollinate, pollinators and their rummaging are crucial for no less than one third of our food and drink supply. Fibers and various medicines are also derived from plants that are popular among pollinators. And so are more than half of the fats and oils used in diets worldwide.

Ok, but do we really need a whole week dedicated to them?

Yes. Pollinators are in trouble – some are extinct already, many endangered.

And this is – perhaps unsurprisingly – mainly a problem created by humans. Pesticides, the spread of disease through global trade and the steadily shrinking land area available for their habitats are all taking their toll on pollinators’ survival chances.

So, I certainly think a week dedicated to raising awareness of the problem and proposing solutions is in order.

That latter part – encouraging solutions – is what I’ll give a shot in my next post. As always, my focus will be on stuff individuals, families and other small groups can do.

In the meantime, you might want to help out by signing the Gotham City Honey Co-Op’s petition to legalize beekeeping in New York City.

Related posts:

1. 10 ways to help pollinators survive and thrive
2. I like bumblebees
3. Why you should avoid hybrids