Episode 132 - Jeff Lowenfels has the longest running garden column in the U.S. - His articles revealed climate change in real time.
0:00:00 - Eva Monheim
This podcast is being recorded on April 21st, 2023. Jeff Lowenfels is a humorous and entertaining lecturer. He is a Reformed Lawyer and Author of Timber Press' award-winning and best-selling books Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web, and Teaming with Nutrients: The Organic Gardener's Guide to Optimizing Plant Nutrition, and completing the trilogy, Teaming with Fungi: The Organic Grower's Guide to Mycorrhizae. Another book he wrote is Teaming with Bacteria: The Organic Gardener's Guide to Endophytic Bacterium.
Welcome to The Planet Trillion Trees Podcast, Jeff, we're delighted you could be with us today.
0:00:45 - Jeff Lowenfels
Well, it's awfully good to be here. Nice to see you after all these years of COVID absences.
0:00:50 - Eva Monheim
Absolutely. It's just a delight, and I want to jump right in here with the article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine on July 28th, 2021. (See websites at the end of this transcript.) And if anybody that's listening would like to take a look at that article when you have a chance, you're going to see that it says he wrote a gardening column. He ended up documenting climate change. Wow, I get goosebumps every time I read that title. Jeff, can you give us a little bit about the articles that you write for the Anchorage newspaper?
0:01:26 - Jeff Lowenfels
Sure, yeah, I write for the Anchorage Daily News. I call myself America's longest running garden columnist because I've been doing it for I think I'm on 47 years now and I don't miss a week, because if they put a picture in the paper and they say he's on vacation and to me that always means rob his house he's not home. So I always have a column and they're weekly columns and they're basically what you should be doing in your garden. Now you know me. Obviously, a lot of this stuff is laced with heavy-duty science soil-food-web kvetching about Miracle Grow, you know that kind of stuff. So I'm an extremely organic gardener and I'm dragging all of Alaska with me because I'm really the only garden columnist here. And the columns have been very useful to me as well as, obviously, to Alaskans.
And one day a guy calls me up and says you know; I’ve been reading your columns all my life. My mother is a big fan. Can I come over and get some of your old articles tonight? And I'm like take them all. I gave him a whole box. He took them off to some place on the East Coast. And two years later there was that article. I mean, and it was just like a shocker, but it makes sense to me for a simple reason. If you're writing a garden column about what you should be doing every week, invariably you run into phenology, the biological processes that happen every year basically at the same time. Sometimes you can compare one biological process to the occurrence with the arrival of another biological process.
So, for example, in Alaska we know that when the birch leaves reach the size of a squirrel's ear, we will not get any more frost until the fall, and that's a phenology kind of thing, and I always mention that. Oh look, the birch leaves are out, it's time. So there's always a connection to climate, to really into what people should be doing every week.
0:03:22 - Eva Monheim
I like that squirrel's ear analogy. That’s great!
0:03:24 - Jeff Lowenfels
I’m hoping it's in my obituary when I die. He's the guy because I'll go around to people and they'll say to me, “Oh, I noticed that the leaves are the size of a squirrel's ear. Did you know you can plant now.” Hey, I invented that phrase.
0:03:40 - Eva Monheim
That's exactly right.
0:03:42 - Hal Rosner
So, Jeff, let me ask you this. We were chatting prior to going live here and also reading your background that there came a point when you were writing these columns where, I guess, an epiphany of sorts of whoa chemicals have to go away. We need to embrace organic approaches. And, yeah, let's talk about that.
0:04:04 - Jeff Lowenfels
Sure. Well, even though you know. But I have a long association with Miracle Grow. My father and grandfather hired this young man out of University of Pennsylvania to be his advertising, their advertising executive. And he instantly took a dislike to selling butter because it's all the same. And he spent his weekends looking for places to clear his mind. And he ran into the guy that had the Miracle Grow formula. He went into business with him and came into my father and grandfather and he said I love you guys, but I don't like the butter business. I'm going to go sell Miracle Grow and of course the rest is history. What people don't realize is that he put my picture on my family's butter and margarine package. Happy Boy Margarine. You can look it up (See the website at the end of this transcript). It's still on it, if you believe it. We don't own the company anymore.
But I became quite the disciple of Miracle Grow because my father had a great relationship with this guy And I remember distinctly meeting him at the garden writers. He came and recognized that I was a Lowenfels. And he apologized for telling the story about how he got into Miracle Grow. And we became great friends and he would come up to Anchorage and he would run ads and commercials and would play them on the Super Bowl. And you know I go, it's my property there. It was kinda fun.
And then one day I ran into Dr. Elaine Ingham's work and discovered the soil food web and realized that I was wrong. Horace was wrong. These chemicals are not good. And that was the beginning of a journey that continues today. Just yesterday, I read a phenomenal article about glyphosate and how it impacts something that I've been writing about bacteria and rhizophagia. And it's a constant education because we are constantly studying these terrible chemicals that we force ourselves to use.
0:05:48 - Hal Rosner
Yeah, I think I had the same exciting awakening with Dr. Ingham myself. And as best I could as an arborist, to try to apply the principles of soil food web to caring for large trees, and some fun innovations with it. So yeah.
0:06:07 - Jeff Lowenfels
So I went completely organic, and I dragged my readers with me. And in Anchorage, Alaska, there used to be maybe a little small shelf of organic products at the nurseries. Now it's two aisles long. You can hardly find the chemical stuff. It's really been quite the change. And I don't take the credit for it. I mean, this has been a big organic wave washing across our country, particularly among gardeners, but it's really quite astonishing and very, very important.
0:06:36 - Eva Monheim
Plants don't discern the difference between the actual elemental, the elements of what they're pulling up, but they do discern the difference between what happens around the root system. And that is where the big problem comes in. And by upsetting that mycorrhiza and that association with bacteria and mycorrhiza, you actually hurt the plant. Sure, and I want to point that out because there might be some pushback here, but I think that we have gone so far that we do know so much and we can't ignore it anymore.
0:07:14 - Jeff Lowenfels
There's no pushback anymore. I mean, this is just craziness. It’s not right To suggest that somebody should be putting food in their system that contains chemicals, that was grown with chemicals. We've got lower density of nutrients in our food because of the chemicals that we use. And, most important, the soil structure is being completely destroyed around the world as a result of it, and so we need to be doing stuff properly. And not with chemicals clearly. And anybody can argue with me all you want. I'll fight with you to the death. They are not what we should be using, particularly as gardeners. I mean, it's just completely foolish. Every time you spray something, the drift is two or three miles. Even dandelions, frankly, have won the war, as far as I'm concerned. Let them be. There's nothing you can do, and the fact that you have to apply those pesticides and herbicides every single spring should indicate to you that you've lost the war. Why are we always fighting? You know they don't go away.
0:08:12 - Eva Monheim
Just yesterday I was reading in a little article from our colleague, Doug Oster, in Pittsburgh, and he said don't kill off your dandelions. He said, I used to pull them out. Now I say, once they're done and ready to throw out their seed, cut off the top and let them spring back. And that's when the leaves are the best for eating, because they're so delicious and they're not that bitter. They don't have that bitter taste like when they are in bloom. So I thought to myself oh, this is great, this is great information. You have to eat them.
0:08:43 - Jeff Lowenfels
I've eaten a lot of them, though I've got eight acres. You know I've only got a lot of lawn, but the deal is, and I've noticed incidentally, when we had our last Garden Writer's conference most of us, if the lawn was completely green with no weeds, we wouldn't walk on it. I mean, it's just that simple. We no longer have at our garden writer meetings the chemical companies, because we weren't visiting them when they came the last time, and so it's really been a sea change. But, more importantly, you end up, when you use the soil food web, being a better gardener, and it's easier. It's easier once you apply the soil food web because the microbes end up doing the work. And we're learning again so much more. We've advanced so far beyond what Dr. Elaine taught us because of new microscopy and because people are using new staining techniques, and so now we've got a whole new branch of the soil food web that nobody even knew about. That enables gardeners to utilize it in a way to make themselves better gardeners. So you know, when you use a chemical, most people don't read the labels. They're not used properly; they're hurting themselves as well as the soil and the plants. Soil food web it's just such a nice, simple, safe way to go.
0:09:56 - Hal Rosner
Jeff, what's your opinion? I think the last time I was in a workshop with Dr. Ingham she was thumbs down on bottled you know biostimulants, bottled kelp and such. She felt like they weren't going to be able to deliver enough living organisms, and that was several years ago. So I'm wondering if you have an opinion on that.
0:10:16 - Jeff Lowenfels
Yeah, I do. I mean, it depends on what product it is. And what I do is I use this very simple test called a micro biometer test. If your listeners want to go to www.microbiometer.com, this is a very interesting kit developed by a woman who had a background in filtering and testing blood, and she figured out a way that you can use your cell phone and, for five bucks, shake a little reagent that comes in her kit with a little soil in it and it'll give you your biomass reading. Biomass - how much biology basically, the microbes are in your soil. If the number is at a certain level, you don't really need to feed them. If it goes up after you make an application, then you know that product is teaming with microbes. If it stays the same, then you don't need it. or maybe it's not working one or the other. So I test. And there are a lot of products out there that you think this must be great. Then you look at the label and it's got very little in it. Or you put it into your pale of water and it dilutes it so much that it couldn't possibly help. but you got to test. That's basically the bottom line.
0:11:25 - Hal Rosner
That's good advice. I want to ask real quick is it worth asking about AL (A Lowenfels – Jeff’s grandfather who owned the butter business)? He sounds like he was quite the influencer on you garden wise.
0:11:35 - Jeff Lowenfels
Yeah, it was both my father and my grandfather, AL the butterman, Albert Lowenfels, my grandfather. He lived on 12 acres in White Plains, New York, and I think in order to pay the taxes, he sold tomato plants every spring. He was a gardener's gardener, and he grew everything on his property. Oh my God my grandmother would tell these stories about him. Oh my God, my friend just got put in jail for a weekend for speeding. If only that could happen to me. I wouldn't have to have the water boiling before the corn is picked. So my father, of course, picked up all of this stuff and we lived on an eight acre gentleman's farm and my father would come home from New York City, put his old shoes on and we would garden, and if you wanted to be around my father, you'd garden. And I picked that up from him. So gardening is one of those immortal things that you can pass on. And I'll see a plant. I'll think of my grandmother, you know, I'll stick my hand in the soil. I'll think of my grandfather. It's just a terrific, wonderful thing.
0:12:33 - Hal Rosner
Lovely.
0:12:34 - Eva Monheim
There were three articles that you wrote that seemed to change how we think and move through the environment, and you were right on the global warming issue early on. I think, probably earlier than many, many, many people out there, if not one of the first, and it was on December 6, 2002, we could adopt a new state motto in place of North to the Future, substituting global warming. It's our turn now. And I thought that was stunning. That was stunning to think about what was happening up in Alaska at that time, and another one on November 14, 2003. What a treat to see potentilla, pansies and even petunias in bloom. These have not been bad replacements for snow at the end of October. I mean already we know it's getting warmer and you're not getting your first frost until much later, which is so crazy. And then the last one I want to read, and then I would like to hear your comments. July 21, 2005. Even if you are not a gardener, surely you have noticed that the fireweed traditionally at mid to late August bloomer is almost spent, and it's only the third week of July. It's global warming and it's our turn now. At least you will have a nice green lawn, right?
0:14:06 - Jeff Lowenfels
Yeah Well, I can't take credit for that phrase. That's my business partner, Wayne Lewis. But boy, oh boy, it is true when you live in Alaska. Alaska's noted to be the canary in the coal mine. In the coal mine, we are clearly getting warmer. When they first started to take records in Taquita, Alaska, which is about an hour away from Anchorage, an hour and a half away, they had, I think, about a 60 or 65 day growing season. This was in the 1870s. Today our growing season is well over 130 days. I mean, you can say anything you want about global warming. That is the bottom line. We've more than doubled our growing season.
That's global warming, folks, and whether it's caused by man or whether it's caused by nature, it doesn't make a minute difference. The plants recognize it, and it causes some problems. On the other hand, as an Alaskan, wow, it can be really a joy to have a fluke warm day in the middle of the winter where people go out and actually mow their lawn. That's happened once or twice On Christmas Day. We've had temperatures warmer than Hawaii some days. I mean it's really been an unbelievable thing. Now don't get me wrong. This was the worst winter I've ever lived through. We had snow that just stayed on the ground the entire time, so we've got these extremes, but it's definitely trending much warmer.
0:15:28 - Eva Monheim
So it's nice that you have been the chronologist in this whole process for Alaska since you started your column and have an example for the community that, yes, we have changed, and we are continuing to change.
0:15:44 - Jeff Lowenfels
Yeah, well, there's one other reason why that happened, and that is because I used to drive my kids to school, and I would make them write down the weather and a little comment. So my son would say Lisa's a jerk, it's 52 degrees today. I mean, Lisa’s his sister. But so I have all of these calendars with the temperatures and whatnot. And it's really just an amazing thing. And I should say that AL the butterman was a weather guy. He had all these weather instruments, barometers and moisture meters and everything else, and so weather is something I just sort of naturally like anyway, and I think most gardeners pay attention to the weather anyway.
0:16:25 - Eva Monheim
Absolutely.
0:16:26 - Hal Rosner
So let's talk about trees. Tell us everything you know about tree culture in Alaska. I see that you have been talking about spruce. What kind of spruce, and how's it doing up there?
0:16:38 - Jeff Lowenfels
Yeah, we have a black spruce that, basically, is the core tree. All of our forests are spruce trees. And it has been going through cycles as a result of attacks by bark beetles. And the thought is, that's what's happening is we are getting earlier thaws. Now we still have a thaw and then a frost, thaw, frost. So we have these freeze, thaw cycles, but they're beginning earlier and they're longer. The thaw, so the plant comes alive, the roots start doing their thing and then it freezes again. And so you get a little bit of root pruning. You know, the trees begin to suffer. And low and behold, we've been there about 47, 48 years. We've had at least two big cycles of deaths of trees. Now, originally it was out in the forests outside of where people lived. This last one, is going on right now and it's hitting the big spruce trees that are in the residential neighborhoods. And it is causing quite the stir.
You know we talk about global warming and people can react to global warming, but when it hits a tree, that has been blocking your view from the neighbor and you've got to cut that tree down because its dead - instead it impacts you in a way like you've never been impacted, and so we're having that problem in Anchorage, and these are big trees. We're talking 50, 60 foot trees with maybe three, four feet diameter some of them, and so it's very upsetting. I went to a friend's house been going to this guy's house literally for 45 years. And we, first time ever, sat outside in his backyard and had a picnic. Couldn't ever do it before. It was too shady. The tree limbs were everywhere. No trees in this yard anymore, wow.
So the question has become what do we do? We've got a problem. How do we deal with this problem in a sensible way? And it's been a really interesting education. We had a meeting. We called in all of the state and federal experts worked for the government agencies, we called in all of the landscaping people, anybody who had any touch in this area, and we debated the question do we find a new tree and introduce it, or do we use the same tree to replace them? Because the young trees don't get hit, it's the older trees that get hit. And would we be making a mistake in not replacing the existing spruce with new spruce that, A may have adapted better, Or B are going to live 30, 40 years anyway, maybe. So we're just sort of in that phase right now. But the advice is put the spruce back, and that's what we're doing. We're very leery about bringing in invasive trees. We want to be very careful.
0:19:38 - Eva Monheim
Well, I know that here in our region we have a real issue with spruce as well. I was taking a walk just yesterday and I walked past at least 10 houses that had skeletal spruce trees. There was nothing left on them, just standing there bare, and there were three different types. It was, you know, the Colorado spruce, the red spruce and there was some white spruce, and they were all needless.
0:20:08 - Jeff Lowenfels
Let me stop you right there. Before they got their needles, you can bet many of those homeowners sprayed those trees, injected those trees and tried to kill off the beetle. And that's another debate that we had should we be trying to eradicate the beetle or should we avoid these chemicals and just let nature do its thing? It was a very heated debate.
0:20:29 - Eva Monheim
And I think you're right. We don't have the beetle problem as much as we have needle cast disease and that is something that people are treating for and one of my clients has hers being treated for needle cast. But the idea of losing so many different species in our area. We have moved up other species from the south to replace more vulnerable species up into our area as assisted migration. We're not getting the evergreens, we're getting other types of plants altogether, but we're trying to replace these holes in the landscape.
0:21:05 - Jeff Lowenfels
Well, we're so far away I mean, literally we're closer to Tokyo in Anchorage then we are Washington DC, you know you have to jump such a long distance. We're very, very leery about bringing in new trees in. In fact, the guy that wrote that Article for the New York Times wrote a book about this whole issue of moving trees and what goes on. We've got a real problem. We got to figure it all out and put the pieces together. But in Anchorage right now we're sort of treading water. We're putting in the old trees, the young ones don't get hit, and we're keeping our fingers crossed that maybe there'll be some great adaptation, either with the beetle or with the, you know, the trees themselves. The whole process is fascinating, again from a soil food web perspective. These beetles may be bringing in fungus into the tree, helping the fungus grow. The whole thing is just Incredible stuff. So it's at least of curiosity and science. Nature is, it's got something.
0:22:05 - Eva Monheim
You might also find that the beetle becomes a food for something that hasn't eaten it yet. You know that will become delectable to a specific bird or other animal that may find it to be a good protein.
0:22:19 - Jeff Lowenfels
With our luck it could be a bear, they'll be bearish.
0:22:22 - Hal Rosner
Yeah well, in the conversation that you're having, Jeff, with other forestry and arborist professionals, is their opposition to bringing in species a hundred or two hundred miles south of you throughout Canada.
0:22:38 - Jeff Lowenfels
The problem is you go there and it's the same species. Yeah, that's the problem. I mean we'd have to go a thousand miles. So it's the same species.
We've had some real disasters. We brought in some trees that have spread and taken over riparian areas and so we're very careful about it. We want to be, we want to make sure that it makes sense and the government agencies are paying a lot of attention to it. I always like to tell people you know, you have a cooperative extension service. This is one of the great uses of your tax dollars and we're getting good use of our tax dollar with the people studying this particular problem and the areas, all the areas have been mapped, etc., etc, etc. We do worry about fire, which of course is the ultimate cleanser. We'll all be gardening differently if there's a gigantic fire in the acreage area, that's for sure. But we got our fingers crossed and we're removing the trees. It's been quite a cultural change. The tree companies have proliferated. They've got different equipment because these are different kinds of things than they would normally dealing with. It's not cheap to drop a big tree. You know, it can cost a thousand bucks to get it hauled away with all the branches and everything else. We've discovered that if you advertise on Facebook, there are any number of people who will run over to your house with their gigantic chainsaws and cut the wood for themselves because they're burning the wood. I'm not sure that's a good thing either, all winter long and having wood smoke everywhere. But it's been a fascinating, unifying conversation where everybody has one of these dead trees, everybody talks to each other about it, how we're gonna deal with it. I think it's elevated the science mentality in Alaska a little bit.
0:24:15 - Eva Monheim
Are you using many of those dead trees, for urban wood, as we are here in southeastern Pennsylvania?
0:24:23 - Jeff Lowenfels
Yeah, you know some people that have particular trees, yeah, some people are using - making lumber out of it. Some people are doing hugelkultur, you know. Yeah a lot of work. A lot of work with a big tree. Let me just put it that way. Yeah, but you know a lot of it is just riddled. And you know it takes a rare person who wants to cut it up and make flooring out of it with all the little markings from the beetles and whatnot. But I'm sure they're doing it.
0:24:52 - Eva Monheim
You have also a lot of books that you've written on mycorrhiza and rhizophagy, and you've actually been put on the global stage because of it and you know how. How did you actually kind of get that first book out there? And, we know that you're involved in organics, but really what took you to that place?
0:25:17 - Jeff Lowenfels
Well, what took me to that place was Dr. Elaine Ingham. Obviously I mean right, really her story. I wrote the book. I submitted it to Timber Press. I wrote it as sort of a cartoon book because I thought, well, gee, that's how people will understand microbes. And I gave it to the guy at Timber at the Garden Writers Conference, and he read it in front of me and he said to me you know, you dumbed this down. We don't do that with our books. We smart them up. So if you smart this off, we'll publish it. So I rewrote it. They published the book and it was called A Organic Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web, because they'd never heard of it, they didn't know whether it was really truthful. They made me get validation from an independent academic authority. And then they called it A Organic Gardener. I was the gardener. Six months later, when they were on there you know ump teeth printing all of a sudden they changed the title to The Organic Gardener’s Guide and that was the beginning of The Teaming Series and the book was really fun to write because I wrote it for myself.
I had no idea. You know how to really understand the soil food web. I had to. I'm an attorney, so I'm not that intelligent. I had to dumb it down to my level and apparently my level was about the same as everybody else's level, and so the book sold like crazy. It introduced the soil food web. I remember being at the Garden Writers. I remember asking garden writers whether any, how many knew what a mycorrhizal fungi was at a meeting in Bellevue, Washington, and not one Garden Writer knew what a mycorrhizal fungi was. Today you know again. I think today everybody's organic in our organization. I mean, it's just amazing what has happened. Not me, it wasn't because of me, it's just the science was there and it was just. It's like geometry, it just fits together, it's irrefutable, and if you don't believe it there's something wrong with you.
0:27:16 - Hal Rosner
Yeah, it's interesting on the flip side, or at least in another sector of horticulture Jeff, is where I'm coming from as a commercial arborist, although recently retired. And so when we're up against emerald ash borer, which has been from the Mississippi and moving east for the past decade we did have to
Jeff Lowenfels
And moving west too, I might add.
Hal Rosner
I'm sure it is Then we do fall back on traditional heavy chemicals. Now the only upside which I was comfortable doing was it was trunk injection technology, but we didn't really have too many other options. We didn't have options organically to treat emerald ash borer. So I did, even though I went through a training and got to work with Elaine and got this credential from the Northeastern Organic Farmers Association as an accredited land care professional, Iknew that I was never gonna be 100% organic.
0:28:18 - Jeff Lowenfels
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, obviously we have to be. I guess we have to be tolerant. I won't yell at you, but ultimately that beetle is gonna win.
I hate to say it, ultimately it's gonna win. And we don't like to admit that. I mean, particularly as gardeners, we think we're in control, we don't think the plants in control. And in fact if you're a soil food web gardener, you let the plant be in control and it really can do some amazing things. Which is why you know. So the original book, Teaming With Microbes, was how the soil food web works. Photosynthesis you get, exudate, strip out of the roots, the roots attract bacteria and fungi. The bacteria and fungi attract protozoa, which you studied in high school paramecium, amoebas, nematodes, which are true worms. They eat the bacteria and fungi poop out the excess, which turns out to be nutrients in plant usable form. They have the right charge on them so that they can go into the plant. So the second book I wrote was gee, okay, now we know where the nutrients come from, how do they get into the plant? How do plants eat? I really sort of blew my mind. Nobody asked for that book. I wrote it called Teaming With Nutrients you know. And what happens to these nutrients when they get inside I mean, it is inside the cells is simply incredible. And then mycorrhizal fungi came along and, as a popular thing, we were able to start to produce them in a lab and you could sell them, and so that added another branch to the soil food web, because some of the fungi that's attracted by the exudate goes into the plant. In between the cells transfers, for those exudates nutrients that it brings in from the soil. All right. So that was an interesting addition to the soil food web. And you could see it with a normal microscopy, you could see it with Elaine's microscopy, Dr. Michael Amaranthus and whatnot. You could see them. And of course, we learned a lot about my carousel fungi, which are important in some situations. They're pretty ubiquitous, but if you're like an Alaskan and you're growing stuff indoors to start it and then move it outdoors, adding mycorrhizal fungi at that stage, boy, it makes so much sense.
And then I was introduced to this new concept called rhizophagy, which was discovered in Australia around 2010. The people who were doing the study on it they saw bacteria going into root cells and they called it rhizophagy root eating, and they ran out of funding. The studies were picked up by a gentleman named Dr. James White at Rutgers University. And he has developed with his students the model of rhizophagy, which is sort of the analog for bacteria of the mycorrhizal fungi that don't get eaten but instead form these mycorrhizae. So what happens is some of the bacteria, they're attached to the rhizosphere, to the roots, and they move into the plant, allows them to move into the plant meristem cells at the root. The best way to think about this is to think of a standard tofu package. You've got that white plastic outside. That's the plant meristem cell wall. It's very thin and you've got bacteria that break through that cell wall and end up in the periplasmic space in the cell. That's the water area around the tofu itself. And they're in this periplasmic space and they're multiplying every 20 minutes. But when they move in, the plant goes hmm and sprays them with something called a ROS, a reactive oxygen series, ROS, and the ROS strips off the bacterial cell wall and the nutrients that are in that bacterial cell wall are internally absorbed by the plant root and feed the plant. That's the beginning of the rhizophagy cycle. They're multiplying every 20 minutes. They don't have a cell wall. They're probably multiplying even faster. And in order to weaken the spray that removed their cell wall, the bacteria spray back and they produce two phytohormones. They produce ethylene which causes the cell to stretch. So they're moving around, and the cell is stretching because the ethylene is being cycled around. And eventually they also produce nitrite, which gets converted to nitrate in order to weaken the ROS. And this is also feeding the plant.
It's actually nitrogen fixation occurring by these bacteria inside that little water space in the tofu package. They're fixing nitrogen. They don't need to form a nodule like rhizobia do. These are just rhizophagy bacteria, endophytic bacteria. They're inside, so they multiply, multiply. They're fixing nitrogen. They've been stripped out, they're feeding the plant and then they get too many of them And they back up against the cell wall, the plant cell wall, and the ethylene causes a bulge, a tube to form from that cell wall and the tube forms. And if you and I were looking at that tube and we didn't know what we were looking at, we'd say, oh, there's the root hairs. Sure enough, these bacteria cause root hairs to form. If you have a plant that doesn't have bacteria, you don't get root hairs. What? Wow? Anyway, they form this little tube and they're pushed into it by a little tidal wave of cytoplasmic energy and they pushed into it and they continue to multiply and they blow out of the tip of the root hair as it's growing, maybe two or three or four times, returning these wall-less bacteria back into the soil where they grow back their cell wall and then, two or three days later, go back in and repeat the cycle again in a new meristem root cell.
Wow, so Elaine Engim’s version of the soil food web the plant was a farmer. Put the extra needs out, raised the crop, harvested the crop, took it in under Dr. White's addition. The plant is also a rancher. It takes in the sheep, takes off the wool, maybe eats a lamb chop or two, puts the sheep back out into the pasture, they regrow their wall and they come back in again and repeat the process. It's just a beautiful thing. And since you're a tree, it's not just little plants, trees, any plant that has a root hair is undergoing rhizophagy. Now you may hear it pronounced differently, and the reason you hear it pronounced differently, I believe, is because you're hearing an Australian pronunciation. We pronounce it rhizophagy, and it is absolutely fascinating.
And it caused me to write a fourth book Teaming With Bacteria, because these rhizophagy bacteria can supply up to 40% and maybe even more of the nitrogen that your plant uses. Wow, and we didn't even know about it. And then, even more important, they're endophytic bacteria. They're living inside plants. They're living inside algae. Some algae ends up inside and the plant will strip off the bacteria from the algae and use that for nutrients.
But there are endophytic bacteria that sneak into the plant in other areas, like through a crack in a root. When a root forms comes off the main root, you get these little cracks, and the bacteria can move in there. Sometimes they move even in through stomata, and these bacteria produce phytohormones, And so they help the plant, do lots of things, and they've evolved with the plant. It's not normal for a plant to take in a bacterium. Usually they fight them off, but they've evolved to let certain ones in because they are mutually helpful. They help the plant and in return the bacterium gets a place where it doesn't have as much competition. Maybe it has nutrients available, and so it's a mutually satisfying relationship. And eventually these bacteria get caught up in the flower and then in the seed itself, and so the seed contains these endophytic bacteria.
And when you put the seed in the ground and it germinates, the bacteria help the germination process, they hop off the seed and they populate the soil with the right kind of bacteria for that particular plant. So if you take a 400-year-old strain of corn and plant that strain of corn today. It has the same bacteria that it had 400 years ago And it's not the same bacteria that a 200-year-old strain of corn has. It's unique. So it's a whole new area of soil, food, web science that we're trying to figure out. How do we use? And so there's certain bacteria that you can add into the system that end up as rhizophagy bacteria. You can add in these algae products that you can buy. Some of them are actually medicinal for humans and the plant will strip the bacteria off of that. It's just. It's really cool and exciting, and the photographs because it's a new kind of microscopy blow my mind. And they'll blow your mind too, and the staining is incredible. I highly encourage people to take a look at rhizophagy.
0:37:49 - Eva Monheim
Years ago I was working with a company that was they were the one of the very first to sell liquid compost tea to spray on the surface of the leaves on a plant to protect it from disease. I mean, a lot of people poo pooed it, poo pooed it. And what they discovered was that there was something in the compost tea that was helping the plant to fight diseases. And when you said a bacteria can go into the stomata, that made perfect sense, because there's going to be bacteria in compost tea. And definitely, maybe not necessarily that bacteria for that particular plant, but if the right bacteria is in the mix then it could really make a difference for that plant.
0:38:37 - Jeff Lowenfels
Or if the right bacteria is already on the plant and you put the mix in and it contains food. Compost tea is very controversial. You know I maintained that I converted my lawn, which was rock hard, never had a worm and I never saw a bird on it. In one season, using compost tea every week it became spongy and soft. And the soil started to fill up with worms and I got birds, and I would do experiments and I would grow controls without compost tea, etc. There have been very few experiments because of the nature of compost. You know it's very biodiverse.
There have been very few studies that have really proven the worth of compost tea. What we do know is that the foods that you feed, work quite well. So the humic acids and etc. And people are beginning to take a look at compost extracts as opposed to compost tea, where they take the compost, they put it into a bag and squeeze it for 15 minutes in water and that's. That may be a little better than compost tea. I don't know. I still like compost tea, but I recognize there is a dearth of scientific validation for it, even though I think it works. How crazy is that?
0:39:48 - Eva Monheim
I kind of walk by the stream every day and that stream, when the fall comes, the leaves fall in it. And the color of the stream changes from a clear to a dark brown. And you can't tell me that that's not compost tea, because it is. And it's going downstream and they were saying that certain bivalves need leaves to help them at the entrances of of bays, in bay areas. And I thought that well, that's really interesting that our leaves are very important for that in this in the water. But all of this is interconnected and we may ignore something. But I don't think things are here just for naught.
0:40:35 – Jeff Lowenfels
They're not here just for.
0:40:37 - Eva Monheim
You know, just for fun, because nature is not that way you know?
0:40:41 - Jeff Lowenfels
No, it's not. And what falls down from a tree is supposed to fall down from a tree. That's that's you know. What happens is that's the law of return. We come along and we take the apples off the tree, we rake the leaves up and then we wonder why the tree is not looking that healthy, because it's you know. Then we wonder why we have to feed the tree. Yeah, you know, we're not really feeding the tree, we're feeding the microbes. Under my system, they in turn feed the tree. But you know, we break the law of return, and so we should be using mulches. And whether we believe in compost tea or not, compost clearly works. Compost has all of the fertilizer bags, the, the bacteria and the fungi and the spreaders, nemotods and proteas that you could ever possibly want, and so using compost is the answer for anybody's real problems Is, you know, compost tea is great, maybe, but compost is great definitely. No question about hundreds of hundreds of studies.
0:41:39 - Eva Monheim
I wanted to find out, now We talked about all this, and do you encourage your, your readers, to plant trees and do you have any methodology behind encouraging your readers and connecting that with the mycorrhizae that you're talking about?
0:41:55 - Jeff Lowenfels
Yeah. I do. I tell people in Alaska that we should be planting native trees. Our spruce is the one, but the other one is birch. We have a tremendous number of birch trees And so so far we haven't had a real big problem with birches and other than aphids, and so people definitely, definitely plant trees. Our neighborhoods are very much like other suburban, new suburban neighborhoods where the contractor comes in, takes the top soil off, you know, maybe plants one tree, mistakenly, stakes that tree up with three wires, you know, so that it can adjust to the wind. So people have to plant trees. We need trees and we need trees, if for no other reason, because we need the birds and we want the moose and all the wildlife that come along associated with it.
Generally, I tell people to use mycorrhizal fungi when they're transplanting. You probably don't need to add mycorrhizal fungi when you plant a tree. There is the ectomycorrhizal and the endomycorrhizal that that particular tree will need in the soil. It doesn't hurt, it's not that expensive and it certainly can help. But if you're growing something from seed again and transplant it and you add the mycorrhizal fungi, there's no reason why we shouldn't be doing the same thing with the trees as well. So, and I tell people, if they go to a nursery and they can't find mycorrhizal fungi, go to a different nursery. Just the one you're going to is outdated.
0:43:19 - Eva Monheim
Yes, yes, yes, yes, i know they're even recommending the bacteria like bumper crop. There's a, there's a product called bumper crop that one of the garden centers around here says if you don't buy a bumper crop with the plants that you're buying, we can't, we won't guarantee it, because it has a really good mix in it. So I think that's pretty telling too.
0:43:43 - Jeff Lowenfels
So yeah, it is. It is that. And nurseries are beginning, yeah, around the country and visit nurseries wherever I go and they're they're all becoming very heavy organic, if not fully organic. They have a little organic section. Heck, our, our botanical garden, the Alaska Botanical Garden. We're an organic botanical garden. We're the first one in the country. People don't even wear bug spray. We go in. You can't, you're not supposed to spray bug spray. That's how organic we're trying to be and it's and it's purposeful. We live in a place, Alaska, that's as pristine as it's going to get. Not every stream in Alaska has RoundUp in it, yet glyphosate hasn't appeared everywhere. Incidentally, that glyphosate Let me return back to rhizophasy for a second.
Glyphosate really messes up that rhizophasy cycle. The process which glyphosate attacks the I try to remember is the Ciskey Cycle. Anyway, we don't have that cycle. That's why they say it's safe for us to be around it, to be exposed to it. But bacteria have the exact same cycle and it disrupts the bacterial cycle just like it kills the plant cycle by killing the plant, and so you end up with a 40% less nitrogen, for example, in the so as a result of destroying those rhizophage bacteria. And if you're destroying the rhizophage bacteria, you're also destroying those endophytic bacteria that are not endophytic but will become endophytic once they move into the plant. So there's really a very interesting series of studies that was just completed really downs on glyphosate.
0:45:16 - Eva Monheim
Well, that makes perfect sense, because if people are spraying it, if they breathe it in by accident, their bacteria is going to be affected as well. Oh, they're physical bodies back here, or if?
0:45:28 - Jeff Lowenfels
or if you eat it.
0:45:30 - Eva Monheim
It's yeah.
0:45:30 - Jeff Lowenfels
So what happens when you eat wheat?
0:45:32 - Eva Monheim
that has it. Yeah, because effects.
0:45:34 - Jeff Lowenfels
It's dry.
0:45:35 - Eva Monheim
You're. You're human biome of the bacteria on your
Jeff Lowenfels
Hello crones
Eva Monheim
Yeah. Wow, but everything's interconnected.
0:45:44 - Jeff Lowenfels
Yeah, so it's a wow, it isn't interconnected in, of course. You know, trees and gardening are the base of it all, so It's fun. It's fun though It's great stuff. We, you know, incidentally, we started a podcast just a couple of three, four weeks ago. It's called teaming with microbes and we're gonna really just push on just the science, if we can.
I don't know if you read a book called - boy, I'm getting way off the subject - Lessons in Chemistry. It's about a woman chemist who, basically, is discriminated against even though she's a terrific chemist because she's a woman. You know, scientists don't. They treated her terribly. She ended up with a television show teaching cooking, but she taught it from a chemistry perspective. And wisened it up instead of dumbing it down. That's what we're gonna try to do in this podcast. This is all stuff people need to know and in our country we're told what we need to know by academics and sometimes it's not what we really need to know. We don't need to know about dinosaurs, you know. We need to know about microbes. Little kids can tell you the name of every single dinosaur. They can spell words that I can't even be in the pronounce, and yet they couldn't tell you what E.coli or what a fungi Look like or anything else, would forget the dinosaurs. Let's start studying something that's useful, like microbes, and then we'll make people healthier and better gardeners.
0:47:00 - Hal Rosner
The one thing we want to leave a little time to talk to you about such a great concept and Initiative on your part is your Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry, and it's been a mission of yours for years. Tell us about the inspiration and how that's working out.
0:47:18 - Jeff Lowenfels
I choke up. I used to be the head of a big company that had to go to Washington D.C. and do a lot of lobbying. And II was down in Washington D.C. one particular week where it was the coldest week they'd ever had in Washington D.C. They shut the airport down. It was so cold, restaurants were only open for non-residents. You know, it was just this crazy thing. And it was really cold.
And I remember one night going to dinner with my hands in my pocket because it was so cold, wrapped around a bunch of coins in my pocket, and a guy came up to me and he said I'm really hungry, can you give me some money for food? And they tell you in Washington D.C. there's posters everywhere that say don't give money. We feed people, we take care of them. Don't you give them pain-handling money. And so I didn't and I continued on. I went to the Red Sage restaurant. I had an expense account meal with one of my local Washington lawyers and a bottle wine. You know, I went back and the guy was still out there and he said I really want to eat. Come, you can come and watch me eat. And I didn't give him the money and I went back to my fancy room at the Willard Hotel had been going so many times. I had a sweet and I didn't have a little candy on my pillow. I had a box of candy, a fruit basket, wine and I did not sleep that night. Oh, it was Scrooge. You know, my dad came and said you piece of crap, what are you thinking? I mean, you know, my mother came to visit me. I mean, it was awful. And so the next morning I got up and I tried to find the guy. I ran all over the place. It was freezing out, I and, and that afternoon they opened the airport and I got out.
I'm sitting up in first class and I'm eating steak and zucchini, and I got to write a column because I'm America's longest running garden columnist. I never missed a column. And so I'm thinking I'll write. I'll write about the joke, about. You know, you leave zucchini in your car and you're not supposed to do that at night in Wisconsin, because if you do, they break your. Oh, you're not supposed to leave your car out on the street in Wisconsin at night, because if you do they'll, they'll fill it up with zucchini. You know that's, that's the joke, so so, but but it occurred to me because I really hadn't slept and I was just so upset at myself for being so inhuman that maybe I would ask my readers to help, to help assuage my conscience and with and I told the story and I asked them to donate food that they grew to Beans Cafe, our local soup kitchen, and it was a very successful program and eventually the Garden Writers came up and I mentioned the program to the Garden Writers and We adopted it as a national program. Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry - and the way it works is you grow the food. You, the gardener, take that food to where it's going to be used a food bank, a church, a synagogue, a neighbor, wherever it's going to be used. You don't have any government money. Nothing slips from the lip to the cup or from the cup to the lip or whatever it is. It's just a person to person effort and we used to keep track of the numbers at the Garden Writers. People would report how much they collected and it's just one of those things that everybody can do. It's so easy to do. Lots of people do it. And I'm hoping, anybody that's listening to this show - Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry. It doesn't make a difference if you don't grow vegetables and fruits and whatnot to give away. You know There's nothing wrong with flowers for the spirit, but plant one row to feed the hungry and we could help take care of a problem that we know exists. We know how many millions and millions and millions of people are going to bed hungry every night, and they don't need to. We can be growing food So. So people are using this program in tackle gardens, soup kitchens of established gardens, prisons of established gardens. One of my favorite fish, a wildlife office in Washington D.C., set up a PAR garden. They got work at lunchtime. It's really. It's really a terrific thing, and some nurseries have set up as centers where you can bring your food in. They will then make sure that it gets distributed to the right people and it's become an integral part of their nursery programs because the employees just take to it. You know it's just one of those great win-win things. Everybody wins and you feel good about it because you're doing something good.
0:51:40 - Hal Rosner
What a great story.
Yeah, thank you.
0:51:41 - Eva Monheim
And something good came out of something bad.
0:51:43 - Jeff Lowenfels
Something good always comes out of something bad. And you know it's just one of those things that in this country, and in Canada too, they've adopted into Canada. I've gotten efforts from Australia, England, you know people, people look at this program and it's, you know again, so easy to do. So easy to do and doesn't cost anything. But of course it helps to have a little platform and I can write my column and tell people they need to do it.
0:52:08 - Hal Rosner
So well, i need to ask one more time, as we kind of close out our time with you, Jeff. Am I understanding it correctly, that Anchorage, or Metropolitan Anchorage, has a little bit of a monoculture and it's birch and it's spruce?
0:52:26 - Jeff Lowenfels
Yes, wow, okay, monoculture, birch - spruce. We have cottonwood. We only have about four or five trees that really are proliferate all over the place. Cottonwoods are a terrible tree. They are weak and they drop branches and, oh my god, the cotton that they could drop is phenomenal, very, flammable.
0:52:47 - Hal Rosner
I love them. By the way, can I go on record as saying I love cottonwoods?
0:52:53 - Jeff Lowenfels
They're interesting because they they people use them to make cellos and violins. And what we do in Anchorage is the cotton. The cotton gets so thick. I have a very long driveway and it accumulates at the edges of the driveway and I'll have my son up at the top of the driveway and I'll light it. And it goes right up. They used it during the Civil War, as you know, for bâton (bâton a feu – fire stick). I guess for for artillery and bullets and whatnot. So interesting, interesting that cottonwoods up. Oh god, do we have it everywhere. But yeah, we have a monoculture. You know, I think a lot of places that are in the higher latitudes, you know, the ends of the earth, have a monoculture. Part of that has to do with succession and It's it's, it's really quite different than it is, say, in New York or, you know, Illinois.
Hal Rosner
The lower 48.
Jeff Lowenfels
Yeah, hundreds of miles, they've got a tree.
0:53:50 - Eva Monheim
So how do we ask you What is your favorite tree?
0:53:54 - Jeff Lowenfels
Yeah, you know, i is this where I say an artificial Christmas tree, i don't.
0:54:00 - Hal Rosner
No we would accept it.
0:54:03 - Jeff Lowenfels
I mean, they're my favorite tree. I love Magnolia, I love Metasequoia. There you go. My father had one of the first Metasequoias. He got from the New York Botanical Garden.
That's a story and people have tried to grow them in Anchorage. They last for a little while, it's so. So yeah, i mean I think about introducing trees all the time, but I don't. I don't often do it. A nutt tree here and there I might want to try, just to see what happens. But again it's a big worry about whether these things spread and cause some kind of a problem. I don't want to be responsible for that.
0:54:33 - Eva Monheim
Sure well, we certainly appreciate you for all that you have done and for you being on our podcast this week. We value your work and your continued work and your long-running column - the longest in our country. And we continue to wish you much success, Jeff, because you deserve it. You have done so much for not only our Garden Communicators Organization, but also globally for gardeners in in their in their home gardens, so we appreciate that.
Jeff Lowenfels
You're too good a friend, you're too kind, but I, but I thank you
Hal Rosner
Thank you so much, Jeff.
0:55:18 - Hal Rosner
Good luck with the podcast as well.
0:55:20 - Jeff Lowenfels
Yeah, yeah indeed, and I'll be watching and listening to yours, that's for sure. Take care, bye, bye, all right, thank you, bye, bye, bye, you.
Transcribed by https://podium.page
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/magazine/gardening-column-climate-change.html
https://www.nytimes.com/issue/magazine/2021/07/30/8121-issue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6MtvCM4JI8
https://www.boybutter.com/blogs/news/18099663-happy-boy-margarine