Lost in the Farmers Market

Welcome to the LITFM weekly blog. This blog is a text-based complement to the LITFM YouTube channel and covers the forage food side of gardening. It is my goal to make gardening and forage food accessible for all while promoting good land stewardship and sustainable practices by providing honest and balanced information backed by verifiable scientific fact. Since this blog now focuses on wild plants or ‘weeds’ we will be taking an objective look at them and their uses. Thank you for reading.

Sunday, August 25, 2019

Stellar Garden Performances

Welcome back to another episode of Lost in the Farmers Market. I know this episode was supposed to be posted on Friday the 23^rd, but recent events have pushed it back a day or two and I will be covering that series of events after I cover the main topic. This week’s topic is another plant family that never gets enough credit. The family I am talking about has family members used as medicine, food, oils, pesticides, biochemicals and many members that are just there for good looks. This week I am taking a look at the Aster Family, known in Latin as Asteraceae. The word Asteraceae is from the Latin word Aster which means star. This is a clear reference to the shape of its flowers and their round array of petals. The flowers are of note because when we see a Daisy, we think that the whole flower head is the flower, when biologically the petals are just modified leaves and the actual center of the daisy flower (aka the disk) is actually a tightly packed group of tiny individual flowers each with their own tiny petals. This feature is critical to identifying aster family members regardless of what country you are in. Literally there is a aster for every hardiness zone which makes these plants flexible as hell.

Tagetes erecta - American Marigold

I know what you are thinking, ‘Ok, what about those uses you mentioned?” Well that’s easy there are groups of asters you see all the time at the grocery store as food. The easy cop-out there is to mention Sunflower seeds, but did you know that Lettuce, Escarole, Endive, Chicory, Dandelion greens and, Frisee are all in the aster family and sitting right there in the salad aisle. Additionally, there is the edible tubers of Jarusalem Artichoke to consider as they are also in the aster family. As for herbs the aster family is well represented with plants like Santolina, Coneflower, Arnica, Burdock, Calendula, German Chamomile, Roman Chamomile, Costmary, Elecampane, Feverfew, Tansy, Goldenrod, Mugwort, Tarragon, Wormwood, Safflower, Southernwood and, Yarrow. So yes, the Asters are heavily represented in the herbal/culinary seasoning department. As for oil extraction Sunflowers and Calendulas are both primary sources of cooking oil. In terms of bio-chemicals such as medicine, and pesticides The Painted Daisy and the Pyrethrum Daisy are both sources of the insecticide Pyrethrum, while Extracts from the Narrow-leaf Coneflower are used as a memory enhancer…provided you remember to take them.

Echinacea purpurea 'Cheyenne Red' - Coneflower.

Interestingly, in terms of good looks there’s an aster to suit your fancy. Asters come in virtually any color imaginable; if you want blues and purples, Stoke’s aster, Pincushin flower and purple coneflower are your best bet. If you want reds and pinks, Chrysanthemums, Coneflowers, Gaillardia, Cosmos and, Zinnias are a good call. Yellows and oranges are easy also as you can pick and choose between Sunflowers, Tithonia, Gazinia, Marigolds, Calendula, Rudbeckia, Coreopsis, Echibeckia, Zinnias (again) and, Cosmos. Green flowers are not off limits thanks to strange coneflower breeds like ‘Green Twister’, ‘Irish Eyes’ Rudbeckia, ‘Green Envy’ Zinnias and a few others. White blooming asters are incredibly easy to find but here are a few not previously listed, Oxeye Daisy, Shasta Daisy, Chamomile and, Cape Daisy.

Rudbeckia lacinata - Cutleaf Coneflower

As an interesting cultural note, members of the Aster family thrive in most soil conditions, while things like Coneflowers, Pyrethrum Daisies and Gazinia prefer well-drained soil with good organic content and regular water, plants like Helianthis angustifolius or Rudbeckia lacinata Swamp sunflower and Cutleaf Coneflower respectively will grow right beside a stream and don’t mind wet roots. Plants like Tithonia diversifolia (Mexican sunflower), Helenium autumnale (Sneezeweed) can handle sandy dry soils but do their best with extra water and enriched soil. Zinnias, Marigolds and Coreopsis all once established need little to no assistance to survive. So, your options are wide open when it comes to the aster family, as there is a specimen for all your needs, heck you might discover something about one of them that could make you a fortune.

Rudbeckia maxima - Giant Coneflower

Now with the topic of asters covered let us move on to why this post was delayed. In the middle of last week, I was sent a photograph via text by Marsha Howe from Sustainable Neighbors of a mysterious plant that needed identification. At a first glance I thought it to be a member of the hibiscus family due to the growth rate and unique leaves. For those who don’t know, certain species of hibiscus such as Okra, Cotton, Roselle, South Sea Salad Tree and the swamp mallows can grow several feet in a growing season easily so rapid growth is expected. Additionally, a lot of Hibiscus family members have large exaggerated palmate shaped leaves. As fluke would have it something told me I should look up a specific species of tropical fruits and much to my surprise the plant pictured below was precisely identified.

Carica papaya ‘Maradol’ – Maridol Papaya

Well it turns out the plant was a papaya, and was the largest specimen out of about two-dozen volunteer seedlings and plants. Now I know what you might be thinking, how the heck did Papaya plants get there, those shouldn’t be growing in our climate at all! This is true however Marsha told me that she had added some of her kitchen scraps to the compost at the site and that she had some Papaya leftovers from eating the fruit in there. The seeds germinated within the last month or two and thus all the volunteers. So I asked if it was ok to rescue some of the volunteers and try to grow the plants and see if something special could be done. Marsha was ok with this, and we met on Thursday afternoon so I could see the site and collect a few Papaya volunteers. A bit later I ended up with eight plants of varied sizes as you can see below.

The largest one is in a half-gallon nursery pot.

Growing a papaya isn’t exactly easy as the plants are recommended for zones 10 and 11 according to the USDA. In zones 8b (Fayetteville) and 9, they are recommended as being grown as ornamental plants. This is because cold temperatures below 59 F can prevent the tree from properly flowering or forming fruit. Temperatures below 32 F can cause heavy damage to plants while overnight freezes can kill plants outright. As if this were not enough, they are prone to spider mites when kept indoors and need a loamy well drained soil and may require a 21-0-0 or nitrogen heavy fertilizer during the first few months after planting or transplanting. They also according to numerous sources start stressing when the temperature peaks above 90 F so they have an upper limit on the level of heat they will accept. As a last note it is suggested that for optimum fruit formation Papayas need 4” of rain per month after fruit as formed. Either way, I’m hoping the eight specimens I have do well enough, though I admittedly don’t exactly have a complete plan for them yet. You can bet there will be updates as the Great Papaya Trial continues.

With all that garden goodness covered this is the part of the blog where I have to advertise for the Fayetteville City Market. Now I know you readers probably don’t much like advertisements, but by booth at the City Market helps to cover the costs of running the test garden and literally maintains the Research & Development budget that is used to bring you the information that has made up the backbone of this blog. Also, as of the start of 2019, my booth can now process credit or debit cards thanks to the acquisition of s a Square reader so your payment options have doubled. With that said, if you want to get some GMO-free, Organic vegetables, herbs and fruiting shrubs come on down to the Fayetteville City Market on 325 Maxwell Street in downtown Fayetteville between the Hours of 9:00 am and 1:00 pm on Saturdays. Even in bad weather the market goes on though you might have to look for me under the ‘arches’ of the Transportation Museum’s front entryway.

Plants & Stuff Available Now:

Herbs:

Rue, Marbled 3” - $4.00

Sage, Common 3”: - $3.00

Santolina, Etruscan: 5” - $6.00

Santolina, Etruscan: 3” - $4.00

Valerian: 3” - $3.00

Flowers:

Butterfly Weed: 4” - $4.00

Common Mallow ‘Zebrina’: 3” – $4.00

Coneflower, Feeling Pink: 3” - $4.00

Coneflower, Pow Wow White: 3” – $4.00

Coneflower ‘Green Twister’: 3” – $4.00

Coral Bells, ‘Marvelous Marble’ 4.5” - $5.00

Foxglove, Camelot Lavender: 3” – $3.00

Foxglove, Camelot Rose: 3” – $3.00

Rose Mallow ‘Luna Red’: 3” – $4.00

Rose Mallow ‘Disco Belle Pink’: 3” – $3.00

Rose Mallow ‘Disco Belle White’: 3” – $3.00

Salvia, New Dimension Blue: 5” - $6.00

Fruits & Vegetables:

Peppers, Ornamental ‘Black Magic’: 4” - $4.00

Peppers, Ghost: 4”- $3.00

Coming Soon:

[TBA]

These days I am generally at Leclair’s General Store once a week, for the weekly Sustainable Neighbors meeting at 5:30pm through 7:00 pm. If you have questions then I will be there to answer your questions. Since our meetings have an open-door policy you don’t need to sign up for anything or join anything, you can come on in ask for us and join the meetings. If not, you can always send me questions through this blog or visit the farmer’s market or pay attention to what Sustainable Neighbors is doing at the link below.

https://www.meetup.com/SustainableNeighbors/

This brings to a close the seventeenth LITFM post of the year, stay tuned the next episode which should be posted on the 6^th of September. There will be more garden updates and other cool stuff.

Sunday, August 11, 2019

The History of Cotton

Welcome back to another episode of Lost in the Farmers Market. This post was scheduled for Friday the 9^th but I had to do some additional research on the topic in question. Today’s post will cover a specific species of plant that has changed the world, some of its history is bad and some of it is good much like a number of well-known commercial crops worldwide. Let me start by saying that this is a plant I had for sale at the market up until the week before last and most visitors seemed uninterested in it. This could be because it doesn’t have the flash and flare of a lot of plant species or perhaps it was just a bit too agricultural. The plant I am talking about is Cotton, Gossypium hirsutum. The variety I was offering was called Mississippi Brown which is a brown lint cotton that was grown by African-American slaves before 1860, the seed for the plants originates from a plantation near Natchez Mississippi via a seed saver named John Coykendall. I purchased the seed through a seed catalog called Southern Exposure Seed Exchange who offer a number of non-white lint cotton varieties.

http://www.southernexposure.com/flowers-cotton-c-11_19.html?zenid=YcYkHiUlgMAdVeFy6PrrW3

Mississippi brown in bloom, the white blooms fade to pink and are reddish when the petals fall off.

Now to understand cotton we need to start with the name, Gossypium hirsuitum, which is a very specific botanical Latin name. Gossypium likely comes in part or whole from the word Gossypinus which literally means cottony. Hirsuitum is easier to pin down as it originates from either Hirsuites which means a rough hair covering or Hirsuitus which means something is hirsuite, and covered with fairly coarse and stiff long erect or ascending straight hairs. Either way you look at it, cotton is known for producing hairy fuzzy stuff via its cotton bolls. For note the word boll specifically refers to the rounded seed capsule of plants such as cotton or flax.

Mississippi Brown Cotton as seen in the crescent bed

Cotton is a member of the Malvaceae family which are better known as the Mallows, the most famous of the mallows in the garden is the Hollyhock (Alcea sp.). The mallow family includes the plant from which the original marshmellows were made by the Egyptians using the sap of a Type of mallow as far back as 2000 BCE. The most famous member of the family of course are the Hibiscus branch of the family which are best exemplified in southern gardens by Cotton-Rose (Hibiscus mutabilis), Swamp Rose Mallow (H. moscheutos) and,

Hibisucus moscheutos 'Fireball'- this one was newly planted in the crescent bed last week.

Scarlet Rose Mallow (H. coccineus). Typically, large vibrant hibiscus blooms are thought of as the exclusive purview of the tropics but if you are clever you can have all that and not have to move to Hawaii. I should note that the most common example of the Hibiscus family in the eastern side of the United States is likely to be the Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus) which is a very commonly available perennial deciduous shrub used in the landscape.

Rose of Sharon in this case is pure white, but is available in blue, lilac and shades of pink as well as bicolor forms.

As for food, believe it or not, the Okra family are also in the Mallow family, the Okra we can buy at the store is all Abelmoschus esculentum. For reference, since the word Moschus and similar versions have come up a lot in the last paragraph, it likely originates from the word moschatus which means musky or musky scented. The other big word in the name, Esculentum means edible.

Abelmoschus esculentum 'Red Burgundy' - this is an African-American heritage variety of Okra

Recently I found out that there are species of okra that get big enough to literally be a tree and I have a specimen of one which is pictured below.

Abelmoschus manihot 'Cheif Kubo's Prize' - South Sea Salad tree

There is one family of distant relatives that is known in the bonsai trade, and is a fairly uncommon sight in the garden center trade. The common names for this cousin of Cotton are Indian Mallow and Flowering Maple, but its scientific name is Callianthe megapotamica, though it used to be known as Abutilon megapotamica. A prime specimen in the test gardens is pictured below.

Callianthe megapotamica 'Orange Hot Lava' - this species of Abutilon is hardy to zone 7b so it should do ok in the ground in Fayetteville NC.

Now, if you really want to get crazy about how amazingly large the Mallow clan is, the worlds stinkiest fruit, the Durian (Durio kutjensis) is a member of the mallow family. The durian is one of those fruits that is baffling as to how and any anyone would just opt to eat something that smells and tastes horrible and takes considerable effort to extract food from. Its popularity is a mystery to me but before anyone gives me grief about judging another culture, I have eaten a durian before, and below you will see a picture of the shard of the spiky shell I kept from the “Great Durian escapade of 1997” as proof. If you the reader want to hear the complete story, I’ll gladly post it here but for now, lets get back to cotton.

I kept this shell shard around since the late 90's as proof I suffered through an actual durian fruit. Stangely enough, I noticed then, that in the first Super Mario Brothers game, theres a flying character called Laiktu who throws what looks like durans at you. Coincidence? I think not!

We know that two varieties of cotton were cultivated in Asia before the 1^st century the two varieties cultivated were Levant Cotton (Gossypium herbaceum) and Tree Cotton (Gossypium arboretum). The first examples of cotton were introduced to Europe by Arab Traders via Italy and Spain. Europeans at the time actually thought for some time that cotton which similar then in texture to wool came from a plant called the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. Yes, this is a thing, they even drew pictures of what it might look like at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable_Lamb_of_Tartary

This misconception was because Europeans were seeing the cotton product but had no idea what the plant it came from looked like. Little did they know cotton would become a major world product and would be part of the foundation for the rise of a superpower, one of the causations of a civil war, and a critical aspect of international politics for several centuries. Cotton didn’t really come into its own as a commercial product in Europe at least until the end of the 16^th century when it had been spread to the Americas, and new varieties were introduced in Africa in the 18^th century. As we know the Atlantic slave trade occurred from about 1445 until one of several dates in history. You could say the start of the American Civil war (April 12^th, 1861) and the Anaconda plan ended it in the largest nation that utilized African slave labor, there is the Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln on January 1^st 1863 or the end of the civil war on April 9^TH 1865. No matter what date you use as the landmark moment when the slave trade ended, it is still fair to say that the crops of cotton in the new world were certainly fertilized with the blood and misery of the enslaved. You cannot discuss cotton as a crop, until you look into one of its greatest myths, Eli Whitney did not invent the cotton gin. Hand held roller type cotton gins were being used in India as far back as 500 CE. There is also solid evidence of the existence of the ‘Indian worm-gear roller gin’ dating back to the 16^th century which also disproves the idea that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin wholesale. The fact is that you cannot invent what already existed, only improve upon it and this is what Eli Whitney did in 1793 with his patent being recognized in 1794. There is some contention on if or if not he even improved on the design as some historians have reason to believe that it was actually slaves who designed Whitney’s gin and since African-Americans were not counted as people at the time and could not get a patent, Whitney by some means got possession of the gin and went on to proliferate the design and make a profit off it.


Mississippi Brown Cotton with unopened Bolls.

Historical implications aside, the species of Cotton I sold this year was Gossypium hirsuitum which is known commonly as Upland or Mexican Cotton. It called Mexican cotton because there is suggestive evidence indicating that it was cultivated in the Tehuacan Valley in what is Mexico today as far back as 3500 BCE. Tracking down where it was first domesticated however has proven elusive but, it is still the earliest proof of cotton cultivation in the Americas. This also suggests that either the species was already here when people crossed the Alaskan land bridge or it was brought here and through genetic selection became its own species. The use of cotton was certainly not lost on the Meso-Americans and Native Americans as it is known that the Zuni whom are Native American Pueblo peoples use Upland Cotton in their ceremonial garments which cements the fact that cotton was here in the Americas long before Europeans showed up. It also suggests that a historical theory that the Americas had contact with Africa and Asia long before Europeans located the ‘New World’ is factual to some degree. The Olmec Colossal Heads which have some definite African facial features have long suggested that Meso-American cultures had contact with Africa somehow.

Seed Capsule taken from Hibiscus moscheutos 'Texas Star' note the pod has split five ways, this is normal for a lot of the Mallow family, this particular cut also resembles how a wheel of cheese is cut which has lead to the nickname 'Cheeses' in reference to some Members of the mallow family.

Gossypium hirsuitum 'Nankeen' - Another brown lint cotton with a history and a role in the American civil war, the seed are int he lower left and the cotton fiber is in the upper right. Nankeen is known for getting brighter once washed and processed, also did you know cotton fiber provides more cellulose (90%) per pound than hemp (57%) and wood (40-50%).

This of course is not the end of the story, a recent archaeological study using modern technology including gene sequencing methods suggests that cotton was cultivated in Egypt possibly as early as the first century of the Common Era.

A Futurity article about it

https://www.futurity.org/ancient-egypt-used-local-cotton-crops/

the original study:

https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/29/8/2031/1043502

The study verifies that Gossypium herbaceium, which is called African cotton in the study was cultivated there but also Gossypium hirsuitum, may have originated in the upper Nile region as well. What is really interesting is that the same study seems to indicate the existence and or involvement of another species of cotton, Gossypium barbadense or South American cotton. All of that does support the long-held theory that Africa had contact with the Americas before the Europeans did. Regardless of where it originated and whom did what, Cotton is one of the most significant domesticated crops in the world, wars have been fought over it, entire populations and cultures have been uplifted and downtrodden because of it and few other crops have such a bloody history.

Going back to where I started with this article, I chose to sell cotton plants this year because they have a good historical story behind them. Maybe the plants aren’t as flashy as other garden annuals, and perhaps most are turned off by what they consider a boring agricultural plant. As you can see even with my abbreviated telling of the origin of the species, the details on the wide variety of plants in the family. I ended up planting the bulk of the unsold Mississippi Brown Cotton plants that failed to sell at the market and honestly, I found out that they are quite pretty unlike the bulk grown cotton you see in fields by the roadside. As a final note, if you bought any of these cotton plants and you see ants on them, this is normal, as it turns out Upland Cotton has just one unique feature. Upland cotton has what’s called ‘extrafloral nectar glands’ which produce nectar to attract ants which defend the plant against insects that would otherwise eat the plant’s foliage or seed. This means that for the most part short of disease this type of cotton probably won’t require insecticides.

A Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly, Papilio glaucus.

Thses are the actual flowers of the Castor Bean (Ricinus communis), the spiky parts contain the ovaries and form the protective covers for the seeds.

Castor bean seed pods are more impressive than the flowers.

Echinacea purpurea, possibly Pow Wow Wild berry, but this one plant has decided to have crazy swirly petals.