Category: Reflections

  • The Beauty of Growing Produce

    Growing vegetables and fruits is like living in an art museum. Every time I step out into the vegetable patches to weed, thin, and pick vegetables, there is more beauty than I can possibly absorb.

    AppleBlossom140430A
    AppleBlossom140430B
    RosemaryBlossom140430
    Salad140430A
    Salad140430B
    Salad140430C

    There are many artists who are known for the flowers they draw. Where are the artists painting growing salad greens or blooming herbs?

  • Dandelions

    Biking home from the post office this afternoon, I had to stop and take some photos of a field full of dandelions.

    image
    image
    image
    image
    image
    image
    image

    Look closely at each dandelion, and you quickly realize that it would take hours and hours for a person to make one flower. Each of the hundreds of seeds on a single flower has a fine stem. At the end of these stems are 30 to 40 fine threads attached which form the parachute the seeds use to fly away.

    How long would it take to make one parachute and attach it to one seed? How long would it take to make the hundreds required for one flower? How about making the tens of thousands to decorate a single field?

    And yet, no one has to lift a finger to make a field of dandelions so beautiful you just have to stop to take a look.

  • The Continuing Evolution of Genes

    Carl Zimmer writes today in the New York Times in The Continuing Evolution of Genes that scientists used to believe that the some 20,000 genes we all have, came from our parents, which came from their parents, and on backwards to the very first forms of life. And that the genes all organisms have, can be traced back to these original genes.

    The thinking was that at first there were just a few genes, and at times when they duplicated, making two copies of the same genes, which over time evolved into different genes, hence the increasing number and complexity of genes we now find.

    With new genes evolving from earlier ones, it would be possible to compare the genes and see which genes came from which genes.

    But when scientists gained the ability to read DNA sequences, they discovered that though most genes were duplicated versions of earlier ones, there were also a number of genes which were unique to a species. They called these orphan genes de novo genes. Unlike most genes which have been passed down through the generations for billions of years, de novo genes came into being much later.

    Carl Zimmer’s article explains how these orphan genes came into existence, and the role they play in evolution. The article is worth a read. It also has a podcast with a segment describing the origin of genes.

    One thing I am trying to find is a scientist who is researching how instinct is encoded in DNA. The first time one of my hens hatched and raised a clutch of chicks, it made me wonder how she knew how to that. She was a hatchery chick and raised without a mother. So how did she know that if she sat on an egg for 21 days that they would hatch. And all of the hens I’ve observed, use the same calls for danger, here’s good food, be quiet, etc. And all the chicks know from birth what these calls mean.

    So how is all that complex behavior inscribed on DNA? I’ve come up with many scientists researching genetic behavior and trying to determine what behavior is genetic and what is learned. And scientists knocking out genes in organisms like flies to see how those genes affect fly behavior and the like. But I’ve yet to find the scientists looking at the GATC letters of specific DNA to tease out how complex behavior is carried by DNA from generation to generation. I’m sure it is extremely complicated, but hopefully there is a scientist out there who is studying this and can explain how nature does this amazing feat.

  • First Trillium

    While clearing one of the forest trails, I saw two trilliums in bloom, the first of the year. It won’t be long before the forest floor is wall to wall trillium blossoms. It’s a luxury being able to leave the house and be in the forest in a few steps. In twenty years, this forest may be gone and this trail a parking lot of a mall. It seems impossible now, but every mall and strip mall within a hundred miles of here was at one time a thick forest where trilliums bloomed each April.

    The next time you drive to a mall, park and step onto the asphalt, stop and imagine what used to be there: giant cedars, vine maples, alders, lush mosses, a doe with her fawn, fresh air. Could it possibly be that again?

    Maybe when this lot is paved over, there will be plaque mentioning how in the past, a man raised chickens here, chickens who got to see trilliums blooming in the forest.

    If you’ve never seen trilliums blooming in a forest, don’t wait. Venture into the woods. Find some trilliums and enjoy how peacefully they bob their graceful white or purple heads above their green skirts. Someday the forests may be gone and you will have missed your chance.

    FirstTrillium2014
    TrilliumsA
    FallenBranch
    LichenOnBranch
    SkunkCabbage20140427

    Where Chickens Like to Live

  • Mothers making baby food – a pernicious trend?

    Sometimes I wonder if some corporate executives ever stop to think what their words sound like. I was reading an article in the New York Times yesterday, As Parents Make Their Own Baby Food, Industry Tries to Adapt, by Stephanie Strom. Evidently sales of prepared baby food are falling because more parents are making their own baby food. Doesn’t that sound like a good thing? Instead of relying on the factory kitchens of large corporations, parents are making fresh food for their babies. Great! Right?

    But it’s not a good thing if you are a corporation relying on sales of baby food for your profits. According to Jeff Boutelle, chief executive of Beech-Nut Nutrition (owned by Hero Group of Switzerland), mothers making their own baby food at home is a pernicious trend! This is the quote in the article:

    “Underlying our problem, there was a silent, pernicious trend going on that no one was really paying much attention to,” he [Jeff Boutelle] said — mothers making their own food at home.
    “Today, moms are 50 times more busy and don’t have the cooking skills that women did when we introduced baby food 80 years ago,” Mr. Boutelle said. “But the category is so bad that they’re going to the grocery and spending an afternoon boiling and cooking and filling jars and sealing them because they don’t like what’s on the shelf.”

    Well, hopefully this pernicious trend of parents making their babies’ food will continue, and as far as the women not having the cooking skills of moms from yesteryear, if that is the case, the solution is teaching those skills, not reducing them by offering even more processed foods.

    pernicious – having a harmful effect, esp. in a gradual or subtle way: the pernicious influences of the mass media.