111. Dragon Fruits, Lichen, and the Most Important Plant Thing- Summer 2024 Q&A

What's up Plant People?? It's been a minute since our last Q&A episode, and I have some good ones for you today! Thanks to @marahw1999, @honukaimi, and Shannon Perry (oz9podcast)  for the outstanding questions!

Be sure to check out the Lubbock Arts Alliance on Instagram and their other socials to learn more about Delightful Fantasy Flowers and enter for a chance to win some cool swag!

Oh, and if you'd like to watch a cool time lapse of a dragon fruit blooming, you can find that on my Instagram!

Chapters

• 0:00 Exploring Dragon Fruit Cultivation
• 13:44 Understanding the Environmental Impact of Lichens
• 25:40 Adapting Gardens to Climate Change
• 35:30 Planting Hope

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

What is up? Plant people it's time once more for the Plantthropology Podcast, the show where we dive into the lives and careers of some very cool plant people to figure out why they do what they do and what keeps them coming back for more. I'm Vikram Baliga, your host and your humble guide in this journey through the sciences. And, as always, my friends, I am so excited to be with you today. It's time for Q&A episode. Yes, my friends, it's been a minute like a lot of minutes. I don't know what's that. What's that play rent where they talk about how many minutes are in a year? I don't remember. It's a big number. It's been more than a year since we've done a Q&A and I thought that would be a good way, as summer vacations are wrapping up for a lot of people and just to kick off a fall semester and a fall time, I thought it would be fun to do a fall summer Q&A. So, as always, I asked for questions online through social media. I got questions through TikTok and threads and different places that's mostly where I am today is threads, instagram and TikTok I still use the other outlets a little bit, but mostly those and I got some really interesting ones. So I picked four questions that I thought it would be great to go over, and some of these are more my opinions about things than yes, of course, we're going to cover science and talk about actual science, but there are interesting concepts that I thought would be fun to discuss. This won't be a super long episode, but I did want to get to a few of your questions, as we are in the heart of summer and summer vacations wrapping up and all of that once again. So let's get right into it. Let's talk about a few of your questions. So Okie dokie. So this first one is not a specific or one specific question, I guess from a listener or from a social media follower. It's actually sort of an aggregate of a whole lot of questions I have been asked over the past few weeks.

Speaker 1: 2:16

So if you've been following along with my social media, you'll know that I've had a dragon fruit in the greenhouse that was blooming, and dragon fruits are just such fascinating plants that along the way I got quite a few various questions about it, from how does this grow, what are the growing conditions, how do you pollinate it, etc. And I thought that would be a great place to start. So instead of picking one of those specifically. I kind of wanted to give a overview of how dragon fruits work and how cultivation of dragon fruits work and all of that. So we'll jump into it. We'll talk a little bit about what they are, how they grow, what you can do with them if you have some, and we'll go from there.

Speaker 1: 2:58

So, first off, if you have not seen a dragon fruit before, they're really strange, really wild looking fruits and I think they get their name because they kind of look like dragon eggs or the fruits themselves do. They have these interesting kind of scaly, peely skins. Usually they're sort of like a bright fuchsia red, or sometimes they are yellow. The flesh inside can either be white or red, sort of a I say red, sort of like a deep, powerful, vehement purple, and sometimes they can be some combination or some area in there between the two there are small black seeds, very similar in structure and appearance and sort of the way we approach them, as a kiwi seed. Now, if you've eaten a kiwi you know they've got little black seeds in them, and dragon fruits have those as well, except that the seeds are more distributed throughout the flesh of the fruit, the flesh of the fruit as we're speaking of. It is kind of custardy in texture, right it's not very firm. In texture, right it's not very firm. Usually it's chopped into little chunks and eaten that way, or it's eaten with a spoon or something similar.

Speaker 1: 4:15

Now, a lot of people don't love dragon fruit and I kind of get it, especially some of the white fleshed varieties. Their flavor is really subdued. They're sweet but they don't necessarily get a lot of the tanginess again that you would expect with something like a kiwi. And that's okay. You know it is again a very specific taste, but some of the red or purple fleshed ones actually have a lot of interesting flavors. Now, of course this is subjective, but out of the three I personally think the ones that are yellow on the outside kind of taste the best. They have an interesting sort of combination of flavors and I think a lot of times they are the most I don't know complex when you eat them. In a lot of ways.

Speaker 1: 4:58

Now there are three main varieties that are cultivated. They're all in the Hylicerius genus and as such they are night blooming cactus. We'll talk about that more in a second. Probably the most common one that you get is a red skinned fruit sort of again, red is maybe underselling it, it's really like hot pink, but we can call it red and has white flesh, and this is hylicerius and dotus. The red fleshed fruit which also has sort of a hot pink outside is Hylocereus costarricensis, or sometimes you'll see that as Hylocereus polyrysis, and then the yellow-skinned and white-fleshed fruit is Hylocereus megalanthus. Now, all of these grow similarly. They have similar growth habits, similar cultivation requirements and all of that they are native to different parts of Central and South America, but generally they can be grown interchangeably.

Speaker 1: 5:53

Now, what does a dragon fruit look like? Have you ever seen, when you go to the garden center, lowe's, home Depot, wherever, those grafted moon cactus? So they're usually like a bright red sort of bulb looking thing, or sometimes they're yellow or orange or different colors and they're grafted on top of a green sort of stalk of a cactus that's a hylacerius, the one on the bottom, and they grow quickly, they grow aggressively, they are sort of triangular in form, but this is a large, sprawling and climbing plant. Out in nature it would either sort of sprawl on the ground, but more commonly would climb dozens of feet. In some cases of trees. Now they're heavy, they can cause shading and so they can actually damage your trees. So in cultivation, heavy, they can cause shading and so they can actually damage your trees. So in cultivation they're usually grown on poles People will use either like a four by four pole or a six by six pole, usually somewhere between eight and 10, 12 feet tall, and they're grown up that pole and then sort of pruned into a tree. It's really interesting. So you'll see lots of no, they're not vines, but lots of stock coming up the pole and then they sort of fan out at the top to kind of look like the canopy on a tree.

Speaker 1: 7:12

The flowers form usually on the margins or sometimes the ends of these pads, of these cactus pads. They're called cladophils. This plant again is a cactus, doesn't have leaves, does have thorns. You want to be careful about that. But a lot of times in cultivation the flowers along the sort of main body of these cladophils are removed and the ones at the end of the stems are left so that it kind of looks good.

Speaker 1: 7:40

You ever seen the Simpsons? You know Sideshow Bob. Think about Sideshow Bob. That's kind of what these plants look like. And imagine if Sideshow Bob had big, hot pink dragon egg shaped fruits at the end of his hair and you've kind of of reasons for this. But what I was mentioning earlier is we had one in the greenhouse that I have worked on a little bit this summer to get it trained up and over this little trellis structure we have, and we actually got three blooms at the same time off of it, which was super cool.

Speaker 1: 8:17

Now, these blooms, if you've seen a night blooming cactus, are probably not a huge surprise, but they are always just so incredible to look at. They are usually somewhere about 20 centimeters in diameter. If you were to put your hand up to it it'd be, you know, as big or sometimes even larger than the palm of your hand with the fingers splayed out. They are sort of bright white with yellow on the outside. The buds are sort of long and scaly looking and those scales peel back and they're the sepals that form the base of the flower. The flower has a long pistil, which is again the female reproductive structure, and multiple anthers producing pollen, or multiple stamens producing pollen.

Speaker 1: 9:01

Now, these have a heavy pollen load and I would describe the smell and they're very fragrant, very fragrant. It's kind of hard to describe. I would think if you've ever smelled a lily and if you've ever smelled a jasmine. The smell is kind of somewhere in between. It's very floral, but it's kind of sweet in nature as well. If the pollen, if you're allergic to, like lilies and other plants like that, it can cause a little bit of allergy problems and they produce a lot of pollen.

Speaker 1: 9:32

Now some varieties of dragon fruit are self-fertile and they can self-pollinate. You can usually tell this is the case if the pistil is about the same length as all of the stamens. So if the stigma, which is the place on the pistil, is about the same length as all of the stamens, so if the stigma, which is the place on the pistil where pollen is deposited, is about the same distance from the base of the flower as all the pollen, that kind of makes sense, right? If everything is there in the same spot, that flower can self-pollinate. Now these are co-sexual flowers, so they have both male and female reproductive structures, a lot of varieties and the variety that we have in the greenhouse I believe we are. It's never fruited, so I'm not 100% sure, but I believe we have the hylacerias and doddus, the red outside, white inside. So on ours the pistil is longer than the stamens, so that means that the plant is not so fertile or the flowers are not so fertile Now in some cases, and our success rate is pretty low with this if you pollinate one of these varieties with a different flower on the same plant, sometimes, sometimes you'll get pollination, and I posted a video on my social media of me doing exactly that.

Speaker 1: 10:41

I went up there in the middle of the night and it's a night-blooming cactus and I pollinated it myself. None of them took. None of the three took. Now I would really need a second plant, which is something I'm going to kind of work on, so that maybe we can get fruit one day so I could cross pollinate. The challenging thing sometimes is I can't just necessarily take a pad from one of my dragon fruits and make a second one, because that's a clone, right, the genetics are the same. So even cross pollinating, that usually does not have a really high success rate. So I'm probably going to try to get some seeds. Either I'll buy a fruit or something. I'll germinate some, I'll grow some off and then maybe next summer summer after I may be able to get some cross pollination.

Speaker 1: 11:21

I digress they are night-blooming cactus, which means they are generally pollinated by things like moths and bats other animals that are active at night and it's really cool to watch as the flower is developing you'll start to see these floral nectaries sort of go into overdrive. So on the outside of the flower bud you get little drops of nectar that form, and that really makes some sense evolutionarily because if they're going to put all of their effort, all of their energy into blooming each flower once at night, they want as many pollinators present at that time as possible. So they produce this nectar to try to get moths and bats and again other animals in the area. They want them around when they finally bloom and then when they do bloom again they're fragrant, they are large and white to reflect moonlight and they have large nectaries so that any animals coming to feed on them have a really good chance of pollinating them. Now, if you read a lot of guides, they actually recommend and it's really really interesting that you go right as the flower opens and collect pollen and then keep it and then wait till later in the night or early in the morning to actually deposit that pollen on the stigma, which is interesting. That may be another safeguard in some of these varieties against self pollination so that, if you know, there's a little bit of lag time between pollen production and pollen drop and the time that the female reproductive system is really active, so that it gives time for animals insects to go collect a lot of pollen and move on to another flower a little bit later. Now I've also read stuff that says that you can just do it right away and it's fine as long as you're cross-poll. So again, I unfortunately didn't have any success pollinating it, but it was fun.

Speaker 1: 13:10

I posted some pictures in the time lapse that I will link in the show notes of this episode. So if you'd like to go watch it, you certainly can. I would encourage you to and I would love it if you did. But yeah, there's such cool plants, there's such cool plants, they're such cool plants. A couple of caveats. They're big plants, they're cool and they're very big. So, like I said, they can grow dozens of feet up a tree. Ours is on an eight to nine foot trellis structure and it easily grows up that they'll put on a couple of inches of growth a day in some cases.

Speaker 1: 13:44

So if you're going to get a dragon fruit some things you want to keep in mind you need a well-drained, relatively sandy soil. A cactus mix works well, something with a lot of perlite or gravel works really well. Heavy clay content in your soil or in your potting media is not necessarily recommended, but you can get away with it if you can add gypsum and some other things to it. You want to water thoroughly when you do water, but you don't want to keep it soggy all the time again. It likes a well-drained soil.

Speaker 1: 14:11

Now, this is a tropical or semi-tropical plant, so you do need to water it and it likes some humidity, but overall it is also still a cactus right and you need room for it to sprawl. Now this plant does have a fairly shallow root, again like a lot of cacti, and not an extensive root system. The nice thing about that is you can keep it in a large pot. As a tropical plant, it would need to come in in the winter. It does not tolerate anything even close to a frost. Ok, so anything below about 10 Celsius can kill the plant. It can definitely slow it down and reduce flowering and fruit production all that. So it's a cool plant. It is easy to propagate, either through seed or through cutting up the pads. There's a lot of options with it and I just I think it's something so cool and so if you live somewhere where it's really hot in the summer, it likes hot weather. If you've got a bright porch, you could put it on a large pot, maybe something to trellis it on. I think it's a great option. No-transcript, but yeah, dragon fruits are great. Go watch the video, let me know what you think, and I hope this gave you a little bit of information about them.

Speaker 1: 15:36

Okay, so the second question for today is a really interesting one. That came from Threads and I'll, by the way, give credit to all the question askers down in the show notes. But this person asked what is the environmental impact of lichens? And I thought about this for a while and I was like, is there one? I mean, of course there is. It's a living thing on this planet. We all have an impact on the environment. Everything that's alive on this impact on this planet impacts the environment. So I thought, sure, let's look into it. Lichens are fascinating, fascinating, and it turns out I really didn't know much about them.

Speaker 1: 16:15

Now I want to preface this in saying lichens are not really plants. They're not really not plants. They live in sort of their own little weird gray area. Ok, lichens are very strange. They're also not really a single organism. Every individual lichen is made up of two different organisms, which is such a just a weird thing to think about. So they are a symbiotic colony between a species of fungi and a species of algae, between a species of fungi and a species of algae. Now, there are thousands of different what we would call species of lichen or lichens all over the world, thousands in North America, thousands of different climates. They're on, I believe, every continent except Antarctica, and that I'm even not sure about.

Speaker 1: 17:01

Now, again, I don't know a ton about lichens. So if you're a lichen expert, please call me, shoot me an email. I would love to talk to you on the show and take corrections for all the stuff that I'm sure I'm about to mess up. I researched, I read several articles about lichens and I am beginning to think that I'm more confused now than when I started. But I'm going to take a run at this because they're so fascinating. So again, what we call lichen or species of lichen is a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an algae, and there are thousands of species of both, and some of them live in dry climates. Some of them live in wet climates dry climates. Some of them live in wet climates. Some of them live in hot and cold or really wet or really hot or really cold, rainforests and deserts, and all over the place. In fact, we read a statistic that lichens are actually a dominant life form in like 7% of our ecosystems. They're a keystone species all over the world.

Speaker 1: 18:02

Now, if you've never seen a lichen, I bet you have. I bet you just never thought about it. So if you're in the woods hiking and there's this rock that looks like it's covered in moss, it may be moss, but odds are good that it could be a lichen. Lichens are a variety of colors. You'll see them in yellows and oranges, reds and greens and whites and all kinds of colors, but a lot of times will be a little white fringe around the outside with some kind of color in the middle. So a lot of times what we consider oh, that's a mossy rock is actually a rock with lichen on it.

Speaker 1: 18:34

Now, a lichen is essentially a fungus that is acting as sort of a habitat or a superstructure that a different kind of algae lives on. So the lichen provides a place for the algae to grow, the algae photosynthesizes and then feeds the fungus and you get this symbiotic, really fascinating relationship. Now a lot of different animals eat lichen, from reindeer to mice and birds and other herbivores. It's a huge food source for a lot of different things. It also helps in soil creation, which I just thought was so fascinating.

Speaker 1: 19:15

So all the soil out there and just for a quick soils lesson. Soil is made of sand, silt and clay. The difference between sand, silt and clay is the size of the particle Sand is biggest, silt is in the middle and clay is the smallest. Now, these come from different types of parent materials, but we call it a soil if it has those three things basically in them, and the biggest differences are sizes. So all of our soil comes from rocks, from mountains, through erosion whether that's wind erosion, sun freezing, cracking water, all kinds of things they break rocks down into smaller particles that become the soil that's deposited elsewhere. Lichen also play a big role in this. So as the lichen grows on rocks, the fungi mines between particles in the rocks and breaks off little bits and over time this creates soil deposition. So without lichens we would actually have a lot less soil.

Speaker 1: 20:14

They have played a major role in creating soil on this planet, also because they are essentially made of algae. Algae photosynthesizes. Photosynthesis makes oxygen. So, in addition to all the trees and grasses and plants and waterborne algae and everything else, lichens are producing oxygen on this planet. They are photosynthetic organisms and it's really cool, really cool. But one of the major things that we as humans kind of look at lichen for are diagnostic tools. So they get all their food from the air, right, they pull their nutrients essentially directly from the air. They don't have roots, they're not plants, they're plant adjacent, but they're not plants. Okay, algae is a photosynthetic organism and so it turns sunlight and carbon dioxide and water and other things into sugars. Those sugars are used to run all the processes in that organism. So as they're growing they are absorbing air.

Speaker 1: 21:18

It turns out that lichen adapt relatively slowly to their environment. Now, that's not true of all of them, but a lot of them take time to adapt and maybe it's because of the symbiotic relationship. There's a lot of moving parts there, so to speak. They don't move really. That's maybe beyond the scope of this. They're complicated and because of that complexity I think a lot of times they evolve relatively slowly and they're adapted to a specific environment, right, because it's a specific species of fungi that's endemic to an area and a specific species of algae that's also endemic to that area. So they are very dependent on the environment.

Speaker 1: 21:57

Scientists kind of look at them like a canary in a coal mine. Right, when the lichen start suffering or we get a big population explosion in a specific kind of lichen, it tells us a lot about the air they're essentially consuming. Is there more nitrogen in the air? Are they able to produce more of themselves? Is there more carbon in the air? Can they photosynthesize at a higher rate? Are oxygen rates lower? So we can use lichens as a diagnostic tool for what the air is doing, for what the climate's doing. They're going to be sensitive to water. They're going to be sensitive to heat, wind speeds, nitrogen or let's call it air content, all the things that go into making something like that grow. Little tweaks in that can cause big differences. So by actually looking at different species of lichens we can tell oh, this one really likes nitrogen and the population is exploding. We probably have more nitrogen either in our rainfall or in our air. Oh, but this one doesn't like nitrogen. So same answer, or vice versa. We can tell a lot about the environment by what the lichen is doing. So to answer the question, lichen has enormous, enormous environmental impacts, both on the way the environment functions as part of the trophic system, as part of the whole thing that things eat and the energy transfer from the sun to everything else, but also, again, as scientists who are trying to monitor the environment and figure out what's going on. They are such an important diagnostic tool, such an important diagnostic tool.

Speaker 1: 23:45

I am going to have to like find books on lichen now. I don't need another degree. In fact, I've been told by my wife that I should not get another degree, but I would love to study them more. So, again, if you are a what a lichenologist, a someone who studies lichen I actually don't even know what that would be Hit me up, I would love to talk to you, I would love to interview you on the show. If you know someone who is one of those as well, send them my way. But you can be sure I'm going to be reading about these weird little creatures a lot moving forward.

Speaker 1: 24:16

I'm going to take a quick break, do some mid-roll stuff. I've got some stuff to tell you and then we'll be back, and I've got two more questions to answer. Well, hey there, welcome to the mid-roll. I hope you're enjoying these questions and their answers. I always have fun doing these. They're really interesting episodes for me. I get to do some research, I get to learn some new things and I get to share them with you. So if you have questions you'd like for me to answer on the show, I plan on doing a few more of these this year, hopefully, and I would love to answer your question. But until then, tell your houseplants I said hello, that I miss them, that I hope they're well. I hope you're well too.

Speaker 1: 24:51

Thanks for listening to Plantthropology and being a part of what happens here through inconsistent scheduling and long droughts between episodes and just me rambling on this podcast. It means a lot that you're still here and I do this because I enjoy getting to talk to you. I enjoy getting to talk to really cool plant people and just explore this world and learn more about it. I enjoy learning more. If you would like to connect with Plantthropology, look me up on social media. We are either like to connect with Plantthropology. Look me up on social media. We are either Plantthropology or PlantthropologyPod all over the place. You can get me personally at ThePlantProf and you can send me an email at PlantthropologyPod at gmailcom If you've got suggestions for guests. If you would like to be a guest, if you want to just give me some feedback, I would love so much to hear from you. If you want to just give me some feedback, I would love so much to hear from you.

Speaker 1: 25:40

Thanks to the Texas Tech Department of Plain Soil Science for letting me do the show and supporting the show. Thanks to the Davis College of Agricultural Science and Natural Resources for the same, and thanks mostly to you, the listener, for being a part of it. If you want to support planthropology in other ways, the best way to do that is to tell someone about the show. Tell a friend. Word of mouth is still the best way to get the word out about the show. If you want to leave me a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or anywhere else, it would mean the world to me if you did that. If you do it and send me to my email or my social media a screenshot of the review, I'll send you some stickers and stuff, because I'm getting new stickers and I have a whole bunch I need to get rid of that are already here. And if you want to financially support the show, you can go to planthropologypodcastcom and snag some merch, or you can go to buymeacoffeecom slash planthropology and for the price of a cup of coffee you can buy me a cup of coffee and some show hosting and production costs and all of that.

Speaker 1: 26:42

A couple of other things I wanted to talk about. I wrote a book last year it's been out over a year which is bonkers to me. It's called Plants to the Rescue. It's about climate change and how plants and science can help us deal with that issue, and if you haven't picked one up yet, if you haven't seen it, I would encourage you to do that. Go, check out a local bookshop, go to the library, and I would just. It would mean the world to me and if you have read it, drop me a review for that as well.

Speaker 1: 27:09

Also, it has been my pleasure this summer to get to partner with the Lubbock Arts Alliance to promote one of their new citywide art exhibits called Delightful Fantasy Flowers by artist Glory Hartsfield. Now these are spread out all over the city. There are four installations along our highways. It's a collaboration with Lubbock Arts Alliance, the Tornado Industrial Arts, the artist herself and the Texas Department of Transportation. Now, when I say that these are big metal flower sculptures, I'm not underselling it. They are 13 feet tall. They're brightly colorful. They represent a lot of composite flowers you might find in your landscape. We're actually doing a video series right now talking about plants that resemble them, that you could use in your own yard. So go check out the Lubbock Arts Alliance. If you're in Lubbock, texas, go drive around town and look at the delightful fantasy flowers installations. They're so cool. You can see them from your car just driving by. You can see them from a long way off. I'll post an image with the show notes or a link to the image in the show notes where you can see the locations of all of them. They're such cool exhibits. I was thrilled when I was asked to be a part of it because I love the Limit Guards Alliance, I love supporting community art and I love supporting education about plants.

Speaker 1: 28:22

Okay, now time to answer some more questions. Let's do it. So the third and fourth question I got are sort of related. They go hand in hand in some ways and I'm going to take them one at a time, but I hope you can see how they sort of work together. Someone asked is someone studying how backyard gardeners have to shift their growing seasons or crops due to changing climates, due to climate change, and the answer is a big yes, a huge, massive, incredibly large yes. There is so much work going into what's going to happen with our crops. What plants can we grow based on a change in climate and based on changing seasons and seasonal variations and patterns and longer growing seasons, which sounds like maybe that would be a good thing? I don't know, it's a mixed bag, right? Maybe the things that would bloom at a certain time of year and be done before it's cold may not do that, or they may bloom too early and get hit by a late freeze. There's so much that goes into it. If you've been sort of following these kinds of things the past few months, the past year or so, you may know that the USDA, the US Department of Agriculture, unveiled its new plant hardiness zone map and in that pretty much all the hardiness zones in the US shifted higher. We're in higher zones than we used to be.

Speaker 1: 29:44

Now this is an interesting metric and it doesn't necessarily mean what a lot of people think it means, so I wanted to talk about that for just a second. This is a measure of a 30 year average of the average annual lowest temperature on that year, the annual lowest temperature on that year. They take 30 years of data and aggregate them, and there's usually a two or three year lag between the current year and when all the data is processed. So we're looking at data from at this point, 2020, 2021, 22 and there. So it is not an average temperature.

Speaker 1: 30:18

It doesn't tell you anything about how hot average temperature. It doesn't tell you anything about how hot it gets. It doesn't tell you anything about how long it stays cold during the winter. All it tells you is in this given location, what is the coldest it got. Okay, so I'm in zone 7A, now 7B. We actually just got bumped up, which means that our average annual coldest temperature is between zero and 10 degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty cold. It's pretty cold here. That does not tell you that it will get to 114 degrees in the summer and it does not tell you that it will be 40, 50 degrees most of the winter, with some freezing temperatures at night, really pretty mild.

Speaker 1: 30:56

So this is a useful tool, but it should not be the only thing we look at when we think about oh, everything is warmer, everything is warmer. These have been a couple, three of our hottest summers on record. It seems like we break a new record just about every day. That's not great, but the USDA hardiness zone map is not the be-all end-all as far as that goes. What that does tell us. If we look at the big picture, though, is that we're warming up right, and if you look at weather data climate data we can see that our growing times, our growing seasons, have absolutely shifted, and that means a couple of things. It means that, maybe, things that we have grown, you know, historically in the southern US, we are going to either be able to, or maybe have to, push a little bit farther north, so we have to think about okay, how do we address this? When can we plant? How do we go about it? It's going to get harder and harder to grow certain crops in hotter climates, and crops that maybe need more chilling in the winter, like a lot of our tree fruits, a lot of our tree crops. It may get harder to grow in cooler climates or just in general. So, yes, there is a lot of research that goes into this.

Speaker 1: 32:15

Pa published some data through 2023, looking at the average length of growing season in the contiguous 48 states the lower 48. Okay, and the long term average and we see some large deviations from our long term average. And if you look at, you know 100 years of data, 130 years of data. Here there are some dips. In the early 1900s there was a dip in our growing season about seven days shorter than the long-term average. Between 1930 and about 1990, we've been hovering right around zero or right around the long-term average number of growing days. Now, this is not a hard number, right, because this is an average of lots of different climates or lots of different regions. But starting in about 1990, we see this huge spike in the number of growing days in a season and we're up nearly two weeks. Our growing season on average across the continental US is up nearly two weeks.

Speaker 1: 33:18

Now that may sound like a good thing and again, in some cases I guess it could be right. We have longer to grow crops, but that also changes when we plant. It also changes how we plant. What also that doesn't capture is the amount of carbon in the air, the amount of carbon dioxide out there. Yes, plants like that to a point, but it also creates more heat, right, we have hotter summer days. That makes it harder to grow certain things. So as a backyard gardener. That's actually something we really have to be paying attention to and there's a lot of science that goes into it. Now most of the research is being done in more commercial operations because that's easier to study and easier to quantify. But if you think of the impacts that we're going to see in the agricultural setting in open fields, that's probably going to be amplified in city environments. We get urban heat island effects, we get heat domes, we get increased carbon dioxide output in maybe carbon dioxide in the air from exhausts, we get more pollution, we get water problems. So as we see some of these climate growing season issues in our ag settings, we're absolutely going to see them in our home gardens.

Speaker 1: 34:33

I think some things that a lot of home gardeners probably need to do is think about how do we add shade. How do we in certain places right, this is not true everywhere, but if you live in a place where the sun is super intense, where your humidity is low, maybe you get a lot of solar intensity. Where it's really hot, we get long days. Probably thinking about how do we provide some afternoon shade to our garden plants is not a bad idea. When we say full sun, we're talking six, eight, 10 hours of direct sunlight in normal conditions, and then much more than that, we start to run into problems. So we need to think about that. We need to think about making sure we can provide enough water and nutrients and everything else to our plants, and we need to make sure that we are growing things that are well acclimated to our area, to where we're trying to grow. So that might mean having to shift our practices a little bit, having to think differently about what we grow and when we grow it and how we grow it.

Speaker 1: 35:30

There's a lot that goes into this y'all. So, yeah, there is a lot of research going into how this is going to affect backyard gardeners, but I think we need to be looking at it on a global scale as well, on an agricultural and just societal food supply scale as well, because that's kind of scary scary to me. But this was not. This is and I hope you understand like my intent is never to be like doom and gloom, because there are very smart people out there working on it. Right, and, yes, maybe it's an uphill battle, but if you go back and listen to Dr Catherine Hayhoe's episode from from earlier in the year, she is someone who is in this every day. Right, she's a climate scientist who is in this every day and she's hopeful. She presents these issues not as a oh, we're doomed. She's not a doomerist at all. She's hopeful about what we can do and if we're able to work together, if we're able to be I don't know cooperative and open-minded and all of that, we can still steer the ship back in the right direction. But that's something that's going to take all of us to do for sure.

Speaker 1: 36:41

So my last question actually came from my friend, shannon Perry, who is the writer, producer, brain behind the Oz nine podcast, which, if you go listen to episode 100 of the Oz nine podcast, I actually got to be a voice actor and it was so much fun and I played myself in that. I was, I was me. So I don't know if that means that the Oz nine exists in our universe or if I exist in their universe. I don't know which one of those is more concerning to me. Don't just go listen to episode 100. It won't make any sense. You should go and catch up. I know full well that y'all are out here listening to like 30 hour long audio books. These are 20 minute episodes. 20 minute episodes, you can catch up. It won't take you that long, Okay, uh, if you've listened to the Lord of the Rings on audio books, if you listen to Brandon Sanderson, you can definitely go catch up on Oz nine, and I think you definitely should, and then tell me what you think about episode 100. It was so much fun.

Speaker 1: 37:39

Anyway, shannon asks what is the single best plant related thing I can do to help the environment, and that is such a good question and I wish I had some really scientific, really well thought out, really well researched answer to this. And I kind of don't, because there's never going to be just one thing, right, there's never going to be just one thing, one action, one silver bullet, so to speak, one bandaid that's going to fix this big problem that it took 8 billion of us and 120, 150 years to create. So when I think about what is the best thing that someone can do to help the environment, it is to just start, to just start. And in plant-related things, just grow something. Just start growing something. Start educating a friend about what you've learned about plants, just start Audrey Hepburn, who is an actor but also a humanitarian, and what a lot of people don't know she was an avid gardener an avid gardener and she talked a lot about how she used her garden to escape everything else in her life.

Speaker 1: 38:56

But Audrey Hepburn once said to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow, and I think in our fight against climate change, in our fight to save us and save our environment, hope is our best and strongest and, in some ways, most radical weapon. So plant a garden, whether that is you planting a peach tree or tomato plants or whatever in your backyard, or growing some herbs in your kitchen in little pots, or doing some stuff on your patio. Maybe you've got an old bathtub that you put plants in. Whatever it is, and however it is that you do, it, just start, just start. We a lot of times let our fear and our anxiety about the future immobilize and it makes us stress and worry and have anxiety. But hoping is a radical act. It is a radical act and it is a powerful act. There I cannot overstate in my own mind and in my own life how powerful hope is and how much it can do.

Speaker 1: 40:18

So plant a garden, grow a plant, water something. Be better about making sure you're planting well adapted species. Don't spread invasives. Cut down your Bradford pear tree and plant something better. Use a local farmers market, whatever it is. That is the place that you can start.

Speaker 1: 40:38

Do that, do that and planting a garden doesn't have to be literally planting a garden. It can be sowing the seeds of all of these different things. Taking your kid to the library to find information about the environment, teaching them to value the plants around them a little bit more, fight plant blindness, all of that. There is so much. We can do so many little things that seem insignificant, but it turns out. All of that. There is so much. We can do so many little things that seem insignificant, but it turns out that all of us together are not insignificant, right, and if we all do one little thing, one little thing, if we all just start, we can do so much, we can accomplish so much and we can save ourselves, we can save this environment and and I think that that is incredible and I think that is powerful. So that is my non-scientific, philosophical answer to what is the best plant thing we can do to help the environment. Um, again, if you want to learn more about environment like dealing with the environment, fighting climate change.

Speaker 1: 41:37

Go listen to Dr Hayhoe's episode I believe that was 102. And there's so many good things out there, so many things you can listen to, so much you can learn, and I hope that we never stop learning. So thanks for listening, thanks for being a part of this, thanks for sending your questions. I really these are, I think, as far as like solo episodes that I do, these are by far my favorite this summer. I'll probably have one more solo episode coming out right around the start of the semester in a couple of weeks, and then I have some great guests lined up for the fall. So lots more plant anthropology coming.

Speaker 1: 42:11

Send me your questions, send me your thoughts, send me your comments. Follow along on social media. Thanks again to you for listening. It means the world to me. It really, really genuinely does, and it gives me hope, which is something that I carry with me as I go through my day. So you know I love you, you know I think you're the best. Be kind to one another. If you have not been kind to one another so far, give that a shot. It's pretty cool, good way to be. Keep being really cool. Plant people and I will talk to you next time. Thank you.