By George! - A Blog!

There are two kinds of cold that affect gardening. The first is obvious because we are daily reminded by the radio and the T-V. of air temperatures. The second is often overlooked and that is soil temperature. At this time of year we need to know what is happening in both cases and to take steps to avoid damage to our plants.

Location determines the onset of cold temperatures, gardens that are on the edges of washes ( as with our garden at Sabino Vista) collect cold temperatures because cold air moves downhill, just as water does. If it collects there because there is no outlet, such as a wall, our plants will be sure to freeze. Cold air that is moving is less damaging than stagnant cold air. Gardens that are situated on sloping ground that allows air drainage are less likely to have frost damage. South facing slopes are better than northern ones because the sun strikes the soil at a better angle and, of course, gardens in the shade are lnot likely to warm up during the day.

Cold winds from the north bring in freezing temperatures and there’s not much we can do about that except to be ready for them. Listen to the weather reports, have sheets ready to cover sensitive trees like citrus and if the weather is going to be cold and long-lasting have a heat source to put under the trees. A 60 watt bulb in a bucket with a complete covering of the tree with a sheet will protect fruit and leaves. For ground vegetables a covering of a sheet, a frost blanket (from nurseries) or even layers of newspaper will trap the previous day’s warmth from sunshine. These coverings should be taken off during the day and put back on before the sun goes down. It’s a chore that few of us enjoy doing, but bear in mind that one night of frost can destroy weeks of good gardening.

The dangerous situation to look out for is several days of cloudy weather followed by clear night skies. Heat from the earth radiates up in our clear desert skies but if the nights are cloudy it’s not likely to be a frosty night

We want the soil to be warmed as much as possible during the day and that’s why we should abandon the use of summertime mulches that stopped our soils getting too hot.

A way to preserve our plants from air cold and soil cold is easily done by creating a miniature greenhouse over our garden plot. Several gardeners are doing this with wonderful results. You need some pliable wire hoops and some clear plastic. See pages 15 and 257 of my book which have pictures for you to help you get the idea. You may need to open the ends of the tunnel on hot days to dry out the atmosphere inside. Otherwise you’re creating a good environment for aphids and fungi. Humidity inside a tunnel condenses on the cold plastic and falls down to the soil saving water from the drip irrigation, which sometimes needs to be turned off.

All this hazardous cold weather comes to an end in mid-March when seed sowing and planting out can be resumed. However, don’t be in a hurry but wait for the soil to be properly warmed. Look at the chart on page 172 that tells you the optimum soil temperatures for the start of your springtime activity. Soil thermometers are cheap and available at hardware stores and nurseries. They make a good post Christmas gift for the Gardener You Forgot..

Some gardeners have been misled by the Newsletter’s Planting Guide when it says to sow seeds of tomatoes in January. Sorry about that, but what is intended is to get you to sow seeds indoors, ready for setting out plants in your garden in March

Last week, when we began to get night temperatures in the fifties, our citrus trees transformed themselves. They suddenly showed us how much fruit they carried. Of course, the fruit was there all summer but it was as green as the leaves and we had to look closely to find it. Not all came out in the same intensity of color–Tangeloes and Navel oranges are still largely green and grapefruit area pale yellow but the tangerines show the brightest change.

This color change is due more to cooler temperatures than to ripeness and from a calendar point of view the change is a little late this year. It seems to me that all fruit especially the tangerines was brighter by the time Thanksgiving arrived and, thankfully, they were sometimes ripe enough to eat. Those of us who are of a worrying kind can attribute this to global warming, and perhaps we are right.

The Thanksgiving table is brightened by a bowl of tangerines and the palate is stimulated by the smell of the skin when we peel it and the tongue gets its share too. But this year we may have missed the chance. By all means pick some fruit for appearances but be careful of its taste and flavor. Relatives coming from colder places for a family get together don’t need to leave with a sour taste in their mouths.

The only way to enjoy a ripe citrus fruit is to wait until it is sweet and juicy. You need to do a taste test on a few of the outermost fruit. Tangerines are the first to be ready but they don’t last longer than six or eight weeks so you need to gorge on them or share them with friends and neighbors. Navels and tangeloes come next and because they are a little slow to ripen they seem to last longer. Grapefruit come much later in spite of the color change and are really at their sweetest in May or June. This is a surprise for people new to citrus growng because they like to have grapefruit for Christmas and will be reaching for the sugar bowl because of their haste.

Somewhat contradictory to this progressive ripening time are the lemons and limes. They can be ripe and juicy while they are still green, so it’s best to do a taste test quite early to find out what you’ve got.

In passing you may have noticed that some citrus in the stores is quite green and you wonder why unripe fruit is being sold. These fruit most likely came from warmer Mexico where the local people eat green ripe oranges all the time and think nothing of it. And if you’ve taken a cruise in the Carribean and scouted the markets you might have wondered why the local people are buying green “unripe” oranges and enjoying them. It’s a temperature thing again.

Here’s some more trivia for you, though its not trivial to growers and traders and processors of citrus. Florida fruit can’t compete with California fruit in appearance and customer appeal because it is green (because of their climate) whereas California fruit is chilled by cold air coming from the Sierras and therefore has good color. Because of this fruit from Florida ends up in the markets as juice, at a lower price per orange. I think that California politicians have somehow got mixed up in this fact of geography by imposing tariffs on green fruit.

Eat up your tangerines first (after a taste test, of course) and then start on the Navels and tangeloes, leaving the grapefruit for last. You should be able to eat some kind of citrus fruit for half the year. With the posible exception of tangerines, leave the fruit on the tree rather than pick the lot as if they were apples or cherries. Citrus fruit stores best on the tree so get your daily does of vitamin C every day by picking every day until they are all gone.

If you have a bumper crop and can’t eat it all, remember that all kinds of citrus fruit makes good marmalade. All you need is a lot of sugar and a stick to stir it with.

November in the desert is onion planting time.

This comes as a surprise to many people because of our approaching winter. However, onions are cool-season plants and are seldom damaged by frost. The fact that they ripen and are harvested in June or July makes people think that onions are summertime plants.

Our Steering Committee volunteers look into the financial statement in October and wonder whether to spend money on buying young plants for our gardeners as a Thanksgiving gift. Every gardener (and we have many more than we had last year) will get fifty little plants in November. This is a double success story because, first, we can afford it because we are frugal minders of our resources and, secondly, we have chosen a good variety (Contessa) for our area that gardeners like. .

We get our plants from Dixondale Farms in Carrizo Springs in Texas and if you want to raise your own from seed you are late in starting. Seeds should have been sown some ten weeks ago. This probably means that you will buy seedlings from a nursery near you. Onions are day length sensitive plants and you should buy only “short-day” kinds if you want big hamburger type bulbs. If the nurseries don’t know what they are selling, you’ll be a loser. “Short-day” types include Contessa, Southern Bell Red, Texas Supersweet 1015Y, Yellow Granex, and White Bermuda.

Onions do well in a rich soil with plenty of organic matter. Give them a boost of ammonium sulfate when they start to flower. Cut off the flower stalks in order to direct energy into bulb development. Harvest the bulbs in June after the leaves have turned brown and dry. Lift the bulbs and store them out of the sun, otherwise they’ll blister and spoil.

Meanwhile, when the seedlings arrive don’t worry if they are a little “pooped”. It’s surprising how they quickly recover if you plant them in moist soil. Avoid deep planting, try to get just the roots in soil, An onion crop efficiently uses garden space because you can plant five or six in a square foot of garden–even closer if you harvest half of them as “spring onions” after a month or two of growth, leaving the other half to grow six inches apart at maturity. Our gardeners have found that Contessa is a good mild onion that keeps well. In fact, only now are stored bulbs starting to sprout (telling us it’s onion-planting time!). One gardener, at least, hangs last years onions in old nylons inside her grapefruit tree where its shady and airy.

There are other types worthy of your attention. The Tohono O”Odom bunching onion allows you to pick small green onions from the bunch any time you need an onion. The remaining bunch continues to grow and produce a harvest all through the summer and into Fall. There are Shallots, and “spring onions” and there’s an Egyptian Onion that additionally makes little pungent bulbs on the ends of its stalks.

All are nutritious, contain a lot of sulfur, and are said to retard cancerous growths if you eat half a cup of chopped onions three times a week.

Become a healthy onion grower this year!!

Our Community Gardeners are busy sowing seeds of cool-season vegetables. Some like to grow flowers but growing them from seed is a waste of time because there are so many young plants available in the nurseries and you can see what you are getting. If you have special seeds of certain flowers you collected from a vacation trip or from relatives, it’s another story but you’ll have to wait a long time before you get flowery results.

The same arguments apply to the leafy vegetables. You’ll get faster results from bought plants but there’s a snag to this apparent advantage–you often don’t know what variety you’re getting.

This week I cleaned out the summer residues in my greenhouse and made it ready for new plantings. I was desperate for strawberry plants and I’d exhausted the kindness of our gardeners who had given me spares when they thinned out crowded plots. Although this is the best time for starting a strawberry bed there aren’t any reasonably-priced plants in the nurseries. By a stroke of luck I found what I was looking for and bought eighteen little plants of the right size. I was looking for the variety called Sequoia, one which I know is a good producer here in the desert. The label informed that I was buying strawberry and they should be planted in full sun and would be producing in thirty to forty days.

I think I have a pig in a poke, and I’m ready to be a bit adventurous but I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for forty days.

Back, then, to the choice of buying plants or seeds. You may not get the variety you want when you wait for the nurseries to stock up with cool-season plants but you have a wider choice through the catalogs that sell seed packets.

In the case of the cool-season root vegetables you have to use seed because you direct-sow, being unable to transplant radish, beets, turnip, carrots or the other ‘rooty” vegetables.

Old-time advice was to make a long straight drill with the corner edge of a hoe, and sow seed in the furrow. What often happened was that the seeds tumbled down to the bottom in a crowded heap and the struggling competitive seedlings were weak and drawn out. Then the gardener would hoe out most of those seedlings to make room for strong growth.

Here’s another way to sow seeds. Set aside a small square part of your garden and scratch the soil to make a rough seedbed. Scatter seed from the packet all over this square patch. You can control the delivery by holding the packet high up and by tapping the thumb bone to urge seeds, one by one, out of the packet. This is a better, more accurate, way to get a light, even, distribution of seed than by throwing out the seed as if you were feeding the chickens.

If the seeds are very small mix them with clean dry sand whose particles are the same size as the seed. You’ll get a lighter sowing this way. If you like gardening gadgets there’s a trowel-like dispenser that puts out one seed at a time with a click of your finger on the trigger. After you’ve sown the seed, scratch the soil to evenly bury them

If you are a patient gardener (and surely we all should be) you can lay out a piece of a paper towel on the kitchen table and put a spot of Elmer’s glue at the spacing your mature plants will need when they are approaching maturity. Before the glue dries, put a seed (or two if you’re a pessimist) on the spot. Now you lay this sheet down in the garden and cover it with an inch of soil. The paper towel will rot after a few days and the seeds will safely do what seeds do–come up, nice and green!.

As an observant gardener, you will have noticed how self-sown plants are strong and vigorous. This is because their roots go down deep and are undisturbed. On the other hand, plants that you set out seem to suffer from a planting shock and unless you are careful to avoid bending the leading roots such plants don’t do well.

People talk about a “window of opportunity” when they see a chance to do something but the middle of September is, to gardeners, a wide open door to get going with their landscaping operations.

After summer’s rains, trees and shrubs need pruning, not just to develop new growth but also to restrict exuberant branches from scratching walls and parapets and from hiding street signs. Some of our desert trees like mesquites are basically untidy trees and we need to guide their new growth before it gets out of hand. Rose bushes can be pruned now in order to get full blooms. A vigorous bush can be cut back half way for you to see how the branches are behaving in the center of the plant. Those crossing over and working their way to the center can be cut out. The outer branches can be pruned to a large outer bud from which new shoots will grow. These will give strong blooms that last much longer in the cooler months of November and December than those spindly branches that arise from a summer pruning. A cut made on a thin branch will give small shoots with small flowers. A stout branch, when cut, will give sturdy shoots and larger blooms.

It’s a good time to fertilize trees and shrubs, in spite of their recent ebullient growth. It’s also a good time to plant new ones, because the soil is warm and root growth will be vigorous during the next three months

The cooler nights encourage tomatoes, peppers and eggplant to come back and flower to produce abundant fruits before frost of December kills the plants (in some years not all, mind you). Citrus trees often flower, and sometimes give a light crop and fig trees give a second harvest as the weather cools

It’s a joyful time of year when the cooler temperatures allow us to work harder and longer.

It’s also an invigorating time for butterflies. Non-gardeners delight in watching them flapping around but we gardeners have mixed feelings about butterflies, because we know that they are laying eggs before they die. Those eggs turn into caterpillars that eat the leaves of our citrus trees, tomatoes and peppers, and many other plants too.

If you like to grow and eat your own vegetables, walk through that door of opportunity and prepare the soil as quickly as you can, because the good times are starting to run out. There’s a chapter on soil preparation in my book “Desert Gardening” but now I’d like to interest you in a novel way to get an early harvest (as well as a main harvest later on).

On your prepared soil scratch an area three feet by three feet and leave the suface rough. Scatter a packet of cabbage or broccoli, or kale or lettuce, or carrot or radish, or turnip, seed and then lightly cover them with another scratching. Keep covered if you have birds and ants. Water the areas every day and the seed will be up in less than a week.

Before a month is out you’ll be able to selectively pinch out about half of the seedlings and eat them in sandwiches. After another three weeks do the same and then again in another two weeks eat about half of the remaining seedlings, which will be aboiut four inches tall. Those fifty percent plants that remain are allowed to grow to mature grocery store size, and this might take you into December.

Walk through this particular door to get quick harvests, as well as a conventional final one.

We desert gardeners are on the horns of a dilemma again. It happens twice a year when the planting seasons change. Now, in August, our gardens are suffering from summer’s heat and we wonder whether to pull out unproductive peppers, eggplant, tomatoes and dying remnants of chard, beans, and other cool season survivors. We know that the cooler nights will enable tomatoes, eggplants and peppers to recover and even become their most productive, until mid-November when a frost can kill them.

So the problem is to either let them be, or to pull them to make room for soil preparation as the first step of growing the fall cool season vegetables like broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower, lettuce, carrots, radishes, turnips, peas and beans. That season is about to begin.

Fall gardens are more varied and more reliable in giving us food for the table.

This problem of effectively managing overlapping growth opportunities can be avoided if we have two gardens and this is what I have in my own home. The productive garden of tomatoes, eggplant and Chinese Pole Beans is giving me harvests and will continue to do so until the first frost of the fall in mid-November. The other garden is ready for rototilling as soon as I clear out the residue of Faba Bean stalks from the final harvest in May. Since that time it has been fallow. It will be planted to cool-season leafy vegetables, but there is a golden window of opportunity for an extra quick harvest if I get going right away.

I’m going to sow seeds of sweet corn and bush beans before the middle of August and that will give me a harvest at Thanksgiving and a little beyond. Of course, short-season varieties are necessary for success so the Sweet corn will be Serendipity and the beans will be Contender both claim to be 55 days to maturity. Seeds will be soaked for a few days to get early germination so I’ll need to be careful not to break the tender root shoots when sowing the seed the right way up, with the roots pointing down. Tumbling seed into a furrow or hole without regard to which way is up delays their appearance above the soil because roots often have to turn themselves round after they’ve come out of the seed at all angles

Here’s a story of congested planning in a single garden. My Community Garden grew Faba Beans from November to May with some interplanted onions (that did not do very well). Then sweet corn was sown, together with sweet potato cuttings interplanted. Sweet corn was finally harvested early August and the plot then became solid Sweet potato vines. After the sweet potato harvest in November or December the plot will be used for broccoli and lettuce but prgramming will be tight.

The competition for light took its toll on the onions and on the sweet potatoes. This might have been avoided by a more open sowing of Faba Beans and then corn, but either way would give a lighter harvest. Management of a single garden is trickier than management of two separate gardens, especially when timing is concerned.

The rains in Tucson have become pretty general but when the wet season started they were unprdeictable. The presence of threatening clouds was no guarantee that your garden would get a useful shower. Now things have changed because there’s general humidity whether it rains or not.

And this, strangely enough, means that we need to be watchful for our plants’ welfare. The reason for this is, if I remember my Botany classes, that humidity causes the stomates to stay open. In dry desert weather they are tightly closed when the air is dry in order to conserve moisture within the plant. Stomates ( and I think the origin is Latin for mouths) allow the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide which are basic plant functions. There are guard cells that control the closing and opening of stomates and humidity is responsible for their function. If they are open there’s a lot of plant activity (which we call growth) and the manufacture of sugars. However, when they are open there’s a loss of plant moisture so in spite of rains and humidity plants can become short of moisture. That’s why, during these days, plants are wilting.

This becomes a dangerous situation if we turn off the irrigation system or decide not to hand water because there are clouds in the sky and there’s a likelyhood of rain.

In addition to the condition of the stomates–which, by the way, are so small you can’t see them with a microscope but are found all over on both sides of leaves, we have to consider tha condition of the soil. It will not dry out if clouds are with us for days andit’s easy to get the soil too wet, which means that roots can drown. Use your soil probe to determine how wet the soil is and adjust the irrigation accordingly.

There’ll be a “comfort cushion” if you dug your soil deeply and you irrigate deeply instead of sprinkling often. Deep roots grow through loosened soil. This is a reminder that, if you’re going to plant a tree or a bush, you should dig the soil as deeply as you can. Three feet for a shrub or five feet for a tree. This seems excessive to those who merely scratch the surface and place a new plant on top of undisturbed soil. Those people say that desert trees and shrubs have wide-ranging surface roots and this is true. The reason is, of course, that Mother Nature usually does not give deep waterings. Heavy summer rains run off and winter rains are often of a light nature.

Overcome these inadequacies by deep digging. The soil is soft, so it’s not hard work!

The recent windstorms have torn up limbs of native mesquite trees, and its really no surprise because they are untidy trees. Their branch structure seems to be haphazard, lacking orderliness and resulting in congested growth with branches resting on top of one another or running side by side. Strong winds readily break off such branches. Recent spring growth has been vigorous and it comes as no surprise to see branches and even limbs lying on the ground.

To prevent this becoming a repetitive event it’s a good idea right now to examine the branch structure and where there is thick congestion do some thinning. Don’t cut back, but remove branches that run alongside another–or two. This pruning will allow future winds to pass through the foliage, not against it.

I took a look at my native mesquites—and wish that I had the Chilean kind that is more orderly in its growth habit–and although I didn’t have any broken branches i saw a number of ripe pods laying on the ground. This is a fortaste of what’s to come later in the season. Seed pods are abundant and they become a maintenance nuisance because they shatter when driven over or even walked over. If you rake them up before anyone breaks them you can use them as food. When they are really dry they will shatter into flour in a blender. It’s not the seeds that you’re interested in but the product off the dry pods, so sieve off the seeds. The flour makes a heavy bread or scones or pancakes, so use a small amount with the usual white flour. It gives a good flavor to oven stuff. If you don’t want to go to this trouble one of the neighborhood associations has a grinder that more easily and more quickly does the same thing. Watch the newspapers for a forthcoming announcement of when and where this service will be provided.

If you don’t want to go even to this amount of trouble, simply feed the unwashed pods to your goats and they’ll apprciate the sweetness of this seasonal treat. If you don’t have goats there’s another tactic you can employ to avoid the mess of broken pods laying in your driveway and walkways. Don’t let the pods fall off the trees!!

Any time now you can go around your mesquite tree and easily pick off bunches of pods thus preventing them falling off one by one, or being shaken off by the next storms. Of course you’re not likely to get the pods at the top of the tree, but you will reduce the later job of raking up bits and pieces. You’ll find a rigid bucket a better basket than a floppy plastic bag to put your “Harvest” in.

In the desert our beginning summer affects the way we garden and some people think of growing their flowers and vegetables in containers, rather than in the ground. You avoid digging when you use containers and this is a tempting thought but my feeling is that the work of digging is a good investment and makes for easier growing because a mass of soil has reserves of moisture and of temperature whereas soil in containers that “captures” plant roots, does get hot and certainly dries out faster.

Admittedly, containers can be moved out of the hot sun to a shadier and cooler place if they are not too large and heavy. A cardinal feature of container growing is that you should use as large a container as you can afford but obviously you should not limit its portability. It is hard work to move a large conatiner even if it is on a wheeled platform.

You can have either a plain or ornamental container and the choice will be determined by your aesthetic style. I avoid any of the “bulbous” shapes because it’s hard to replace plants whose roots are caught in the bulge. Straight tapering sides are much easier to handle when it comes to replacing plants and soil. Another choice is what kind of material you should buy. Clay is a heavy material but it allows breathing is if it is not glazed. The breathing cools the soil by evaporation, and this means you’ll need to water your plants more often than if they were in a plastic container. The very worst kind of container is the nursery black plastic kind which, though cheap, gets very hot when left out in the sun–to the point of cooking the roots of any plant. In between these extremes are all kinds of materials, including pressed cardboard, concrete,Tufflite, metal. In my opinion the best material is Italian clay pots because it looks clean and tidy as well as allowing evaporation. Mexican pottery often diintegrates in a year or two and seems to “fill-up” with salt residues even if a bitumen sealer is used on the insides.

A container for flowering plants needs to be full and overflowing for the best effect. Often you see a large container holding a few measly plants with a lot of bare soil in between. This is a pathetic attempt at providing beauty and is so easy to avoid.

Whichever kind you use it’s certain that you’ll need to water more often than plants in the ground. Depending on the size of the container, its material, its place in the sun, and the kind of plants it is holding you may need to water every day. Even if you put in a drip system to save you work, you’ll still need to take a look every day to se how things are going. There’s a danger of keeping the soil too wet in your battle with sunshine and high temperatures. If that happens your plants’ roots will be candidates for being cooked. Plant roots need to dry out between waterings and, with container growing, the risks are too great unless you are prepared to spend a lot of time watching things. This means that, when growing plants in containers during summer’s heat, you’ve defeated the purpose of saving effort and energy and avoiding going outside.

That’s why my containers, of all shapes and sizes and materials are holding dry soil and no plants at this time of year

Three leading lights of the Community Gardens of Tucson spent a day at a recent Farmer’s Market on the University of Arizona Mall. Actually there was only one true farmer there selling local produce, but other booths advertised good things to do with growing your own healthy food, herb plants, royal jelly and honey. The Community Food Bank had a strong booth and there was Organic Coffee (whatever that is!) and roasted corn for sale.  Altogether an interesting collection of ideas and information.  Students from the Nutrition Classes were cheerfully energetic.

We three passed out brochures, newsletters, a print-out on container gardening, and information on how to grow your own food by joining our organization.  One visitor greatly encouraged us by praising this blog, saying it was most helpful, informative and well-written (and easy to read, etc).  I hope you find it so, too. Anyway, the praise reminded me that I’d not written a weekly blog post for some time—so here it is.

A recent walk-through at a couple of our gardens made me realize how well the gardeners are doing this spring.  The weather has been kind to us and people have responded timely.  Onions that were planted in November are now fattening up and ready to eat with hamburgers.  Regular small doses of ammonium sulfate and nipping off the flower stalks, together with favorable weather made the fattening bulbs touch one another and encourage harvesting. They are not ripe enough to become storage onions, but that will take place in a month or so.

Adventurous gardeners have put in a variety of “new” plants for the desert and are most encouraged by the results so far.  We have rhubarb with leaves as large as umbrellas and stalks long enough to be put into a pie.  If you’re interested, the variety Victoria seems suited to our conditions and the gardeners sowed seed in November), sweet potatoes are spreading out now that the warm weather is with us, (Centennial is the kind we favor and you need to get slips to get started), Yacon is shooting up.  It’s a kind of sunflower–tall stalks and sweet roots like Jerusalem Artichoke; it’s a staple food in South American countries. Jerusalem Artichoke itself has become a favorite plant in our five gardens.  Besides being tasty and crunchy it’s a good food for diabetics.  Fava Beans are being harvested while the beans are soft, but it’s hard to keep up with their production and more than half the crops will be saved to give hard beans later for storage.

Then there’s the vegetable gardeners palette of traditional food, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, corn and bush beans coming on.  The winter plants, broccoli, cabbage, peas, lettuce are all fading out as spring progresses, but gardeners have had plenty to eat during the past five months.

All of this gave me a feeling of other peoples’ accomplishments and satisfactions in the name of “growing your own food” without the costs of trucks consuming diesel or gasoline and running up the basic price of production.  Look in today’s vegetable racks and note the higher prices than a month ago, and fear a trend’s about to take place.  And one trend that frightens me is the increasing political dominance of the mid-east oil-producing countries.

We can grow our own food, maybe not entirely but to a large extent and it will be better for us and more enjoyable.  One of our gardeners just came back from a visit to San Francisco and looking down from his high-rise hotel he saw a massive garden of green vegetables.  Going down and walking through this two-acre site of raised bed gardens he spoke with some gardeners, who were Oriental people growing a wide range of interesting Oriental vegetables and snipping off a handful of green leaves to take home.  He noted that there were very few Occidental people!  What an impression!!  Are we too tied to supermarket food planning?