Here in Pennsylvania, we have had an unexpectedly warm winter this year. Despite the absence of snow and ice, I know that countless salt trucks are anxiously waiting to defend us against these frozen foes. In 1941, New Hampshire was the first highway department to start using salt as a…
I’m a bit of a map enthusiast having worked with some amazing digital cartographers at Penn State for almost a decade. Latitude, longitude, altitude make a big difference in the potentials of your landscape! In fact, I spend a good deal of time each day looking at maps to answer your…
Road verges, boulevard medians, abandoned parking lots and highway ramps are favorite targets for urban gardeners. It’s nice to think of these brown and gray areas becoming green again, or even festively bright with flowers, fruits, and vegetables. This is definitely a brilliant goal, and it’s well worth pursuit, but there are…
and the little seed that could. I had one class in graduate school that changed my perception of the world. Soil Science. It turned my world upside down, literally. Professor Martin Jurgensen, recently retired from teaching, but still conducting research, set the soil on fire. He did study the effects…
Rhizobium Plants need nitrogen, and have to get it from the soil. Unfortunately, many soils don’t have a lot of nitrogen available for plants, and that can limit their growth. But many legumes evolved a symbiosis with a certain genus of bacteria, Rhizobium. The relationship between legumes and Rhizobia is…
Lactobacillus and electrons [click images to see a larger version] There’s a lot of discussion about what color clay to use for seed balls. We discuss some of the theory behind that here, but thought it would be a good idea to put some of that to the test. I…
