Can impoverished African community gardeners learn to use and maintain a simple centuries-old nonelectric water pump to grow more vegetables?
The other Johns Hopkins team aims to improve the irrigation of vegetable gardens that provide nutrition and income for families in remote rural communities in South africa.
The goal is to enable the community gardeners to maintain and repair their pumps. The focus is on a particularly inexpensive appropriate and robust type of ram pump designed by a South african named David Alcock.
and community gardeners in other regions to run their own ram pump irrigations systems without relying on outside assistance.
Funding was provided by the Carnegie Museum of Natural history's Powdermill Nature Reserve in Rector Pa. a Botany-In-Action Fellowship from the Phipps Botanical garden and Conservatory in Pittsburgh an Ivey Mcmanus Predoctoral Fellowship
Co-author Professor Phil Stevenson from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and the University of Greenwich's Natural resources Institute said:
#School-based kitchen gardens are getting an A+:+New study highlights benefits of for both children
Through community-based kitchen garden programs particularly those with dedicated cooking components schools are successfully introducing students to healthier foods.
A group of investigators from the University of Melbourne and Deakin University recruited a total of 764 children in grades 3 to 6 and 562 parents participating in the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Program.
and includes 45 minutes per week in a garden class with a garden specialist and 90 minutes per week in the kitchen with a cooking specialist.
and skills in environmentally sustainable gardening along with the skills to prepare and cook 3-or 4-course meals based on available fresh produce from the garden.
Different dishes prepared each week included handmade pastry bread and pasta salads curries and desserts. According to Lisa Gibbs Phd principal investigator one of the major themes that emerged from the study was children eating
For school gardens this study emphasizes the other half of the equation to growing the food in school gardens
they disperse the seeds of many of the rainforest trees--elephants are forest gardeners at a vast scale.
Funding was provided by Nancy Abraham the African Wildlife Foundation Beneficia Foundation Busch Gardens CITES-MIKE Columbus Zoo Conservation International Daniel K. Thorne Foundation Diane
#Excavation set to shed new light on Londons Victorian pastfrom a clay smoking pipe to Neolithic flint a 19th century garden has been revealing some of its secrets to an archaeological team from London's Kingston University.
whether she could find traces of a garden marked out on early maps. The Seething Wells site in Surbiton is of historic significance
A garden on a site like this might tell us more about the people who lived
The team expected several small metal garden tags they discovered to bear the names of plants.
what feeds the world said Friedman who also directs the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard. If flowering plants weren't here humans wouldn't be here.
It's the same reason why sparsely planted gardens wilt in hot dry conditions while more densely planted gardens survive.
Mutually beneficial soil shading becomes more important than competition for that soil moisture when it becomes scarce.
which they cultured in their lab using seeds of the garden-variety rice plant Oryza sativa.
#How does your garden glow? Nature's ability to create iridescent flowers has been recreated by mathematicians at The University of Nottingham.
Researchers from the Illinois Natural history Survey and the Morton Arboretum have been examining the potential role of herbivores on the invasion of nonnative plant species in diverse plant communities.
and clayas more gardeners and farmers add ground charcoal or biochar to soil to both boost crop yields and counter global climate change a new study by researchers at Rice university
and gardening buffs took off after archaeological studies found that biochar added to soils in the Amazon more than 1000 years ago was still improving the water
Scientists from the University of Oxford and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew which manages the Millennium Seed Bank have shown how by using advanced mathematics they can boost the overall diversity of the seed bank by targeting a'hit list'of particular species
and she adds It is primarily found in gardens or under scattered debris but also in greenhouses and out in the open nature.
They are brought in with imported vegetables garden supplies or tiles. Together with her colleague from GÃ rlitz Dr. John M. C. Hutchinson and a colleague from the United states Department of agriculture (USDA-APHIS) the scientist has studied the distribution of these mollusks
and Laura Martinez-Suz from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in London set out to ask this question by using DNA-based taxonomy.
Garden-variety staph are common bacteria that can live in our bodies without consequence. When they do cause infection most aren't life threatening
and wreaking havoc in the fields and gardens of smallholder farmers. The plant is an aggressive invader.
With their attractive purple and pink flowers gentians are cultivated popular as garden plants. The Pine Barrens gentian species (Gentiana autumnalis) thrives after its ecosystem has experienced disturbance as one of the earliest species to begin re-inhabiting empty spaces--a phase known as early succession.
With a lower supply of coffee in the market prices rise and that favors fraud because of the economic gain says research team leader Suzana Lucy Nixdorf Ph d. In 2012 a study from the U k.'s Royal Botanic Gardens
Remarkably in 2012 field botanists Hank Oppenheimer & Keahi Bustament with the Plant Extinction Prevention Program and Steve Perlman of the National Tropical Botanical garden found a population of these unique trees in a remote
Researchers from North carolina State university are looking to rain gardens as one way to remediate the water quality concerns caused by urban stormwater.
Rain gardens--also known as bioretention cells--are depressions in the landscape that trap stormwater runoff so microbial activity filtration/adsorption
Typically the gardens are excavated backfilled with a filter bed substrate then planted with vegetation that helps to remove pollutants.
The research team constructed 12 rain gardens filled with one of three filter bed substrates. The gardens were planted with 16 plant species
and then irrigated with stormwater. The substrates used in the experiments included a sand-based substrate (sand) composed of 80%washed sand 15%clay
The researchers determined that 11 of the 16 species used in the experiments grew well in the rain gardens.
and could be used as rain garden plants according to the authors. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by American Society for Horticultural Science.
The UW Arboretum long a refuge for Wisconsin's native plants and animals is confirmed the first site for Amynthas agrestis an invasive worm believed to have arrived in the United states from its native range in Japan
Williams and members of the arboretum staff confirmed the earthworms'presence in the fall of 2013 checking regularly in the spring to see
That appears to be the case according to Brad Herrick arboretum ecologist and research program manager.
but we are still trying to get a handle on the extent of their distribution at the arboretum Herrick says.
That's our concern in the arboretum and anywhere they turn up Herrick says. Our native plant communities developed without the presence of all these hungry worms.
According to Herrick the arboretum DNR and other researchers will be testing potential control techniques. But careful cleaning of equipment and quarantine is their first line of defense.
and we're hopeful we can find a way to protect the arboretum from these worms
#How gardens could help dementia carea new study has revealed that gardens in care homes could provide promising therapeutic benefits for patients suffering from dementia.
) the systematic review also found that gardens could offer welcome spaces for interactions with visitors helping to stimulate memories for dementia patients
We think that gardens could be benefitting dementia sufferers by providing them with sensory stimulation and an environment that triggers memories.
if gardens are to be useful in the future care of dementia patients. These include understanding possible hazards that a garden might represent to residents
and ensuring staff have time to let residents enjoy an outdoor space to its full potential.
There's a lot we don't know about how a garden's design and setting influences its ability to affect wellbeing yet it's clear that these spaces need to offer a range of ways of interacting--to suit different people's preferences and needs.
Further development is performed across the globethe development of biodegradable cover material will continue through tests performed on various paper types in combination with different garden plants
#Beloved crape myrtle in nurseries now susceptible to bacterial leaf spotit's enough to send gardeners into conniptions.
Steve Bender a senior writer at Southern Living magazine The Grumpy Gardener blogger and well-known gardening author says it would be a huge disappointment
if the disease ever makes the leap from nurseries to home gardens. Crape myrtle is so close to Southern gardeners'hearts that they endlessly debate such topics as how to spell its name (variants include crepe myrtle crape myrtle
and even crapemyrtle) and the annual rite Bender calls crape murder--an unceremonious lopping of its limbs.
Researchers are continuing that tradition by designing robots to work in a deep-space habitat tending gardens and growing food for astronaut explorers.
A year ago the University of Colorado student team demonstrated a gardening system with plants robotically tended on a Lazy susan-like device.
In their new system a Remotely Operated Gardening Rover or ROGR travels around the habitat tending to a fleet of Smartpots or SPOTS
I see myself as potentially being the first Mars space gardener. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by NASA.
These include the U s. Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the northern Gulf of mexico Bermuda and Bonaire all of
#Earth-Kind roses analyzed for salt toleranceearth-Kindâ roses are favorites with gardeners and landscapers.
Identifying and using salt-tolerant garden roses is important in landscapes where soil salinity is high
As Director of Munich's Botanic Garden she was in a position to remedy this situation.
Some 16000 plant species from diverse climate zones are cultivated in the Garden and Renner and her doctoral student Constantin Zohner have taken advantage of this unique resource to monitor the timing of leaf-out in nearly 500 different species of woody plants.
#Surprising spread of spring leaf-out timesdespite conventional wisdom among gardeners foresters and botanists that woody plants all leaf out at about the same time each spring a new study organized by a Boston
Significantly observations the past two springs of 1597 woody plants in eight botanical gardens in the U s. Canada Germany and China suggest that species differences in leaf-out times could impact the length of the growing season
While previous researchers observed leaf-out for a limited numbers of species in a single location this study uniquely obtained observations of the same species from gardens around the world.
Notably the order of leafing out of species was almost the same in different gardens
At the Arnold Arboretum in Boston some gooseberry and honeysuckle shrubs start leafing out Mid-march
The data was obtained by walking around each of the botanical gardens once a week and recording the appearance of first leafing out for all of the species. Leaf-out time was considered
Along with Primack the team included Zoe Panchen (Carleton University) Birgit Nordt and Albert Dieter-Stevens (Berlin Botanical garden) Elizabeth Ellwood (Florida State U.)Susanne
Renner (U. of Munich) Charles Willis and Charles Davis (Harvard U.)Robert Fahey (Morton Arboretum) Alan Whittemore (U s. National Arboretum) and Yanjun Du
The animals sometimes nicknamed killer slugs are known to do their fair share of damage in fields and gardens.
The U-M studies were supported by the Matthaei Botanical garden a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation
#Gardens help cancer survivors cope, heal and growa diagnosis of breast cancer in 2010 hit Susan Rossman pretty hard.
For Rossman the key was Harvest for Health a UAB study that paired cancer survivors and master gardeners from the Alabama Cooperative Extension System.
If cancer survivors started a vegetable garden would they eat more vegetables? We found they not only ate more vegetables they also got more exercise.
or provide Earthboxesâ--large gardening containers on wheels--that can be kept on a porch or patio.
Master gardeners visit with the survivors monthly for one year offering advice and answering the questions new gardeners have.
Mary Beth Shaddix is the master gardener who worked with Susan Rossman in 2011. They mapped out a strategy that Rossman still follows:
growing tomatoes kale lettuce spinach and a variety of herbs. Rossman has added since another raised bed has planted strawberries
Shaddix one of more than 100 master gardeners in Alabama who have volunteered for Harvest for Health is something of a fresh food crusader.
Shaddix of Maple Valley Nursery is a gardener not a psychologist; but she knows firsthand that gardening's benefits extend beyond the harvest.
I think gardening improves your mental well-being tremendously she said. Just being outdoors for an hour each day to tend to your plants improves your mental and physical well-being.
I think there is room for gardening in everyone's life and I also think there is room on your kitchen table for
#Weeding out pesky poison ivy with discovery of killer fungusmuch to the chagrin of gardeners hikers
airborne P. infestansspores are drifting through home-garden tomato crops. If you think genetically modified crops are dangerous'frankenfoods
#Social media garden is first step in creating emotional buildingsa Twitter-reactive garden could provide a prototype for the future development of'smart'buildings that can adapt to our emotional state.
The garden consists of an articulating raw steel structure which sits vertically and horizontally and is controlled by people's responses via Twitter.
The STAN project will be making its first public appearance at the Garden Up horticultural event in Sheffield on 7th and 8th june 2014.
The garden will react to activity on Twitter when people use the#gardenup hashtag translating this information into movements of the garden's mechanical landscape.
Richard M Wright Senior Lecturer in the Lincoln School of architecture developed the construct together with fellow academic Barbara Griffin and students Amy Hayeselden Nicholas Sharpe and Liam Bennett
The garden essentially points to a future in which buildings could modify themselves in response to monitoring our emotional state via social media.
and vegetables from the playground garden--and to get children to eat more healthfully. But is it working?
and vegetables--farm-to-school programs school gardens --and we know that exposure to foods helps develop preference for those foods
Dr. Alan Paton Kew Royal Botanical gardens England; Dr. James A. Macklin Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Canada;
in gardens in all four locations. The southern imports do better across the range than locals Schmitt said.
#Best way to rid a garden of pesky snails? Use your strong throwing armthe new study published May 16 in the journal Physica Scripta has used statistical models to show that simply killing the snails you find in your garden offers little advantage
if you want to remove them completely. According to the researchers gardeners should revert to damage limitation as their results proved that snails are part of larger colonies that live in the garden
and come and go as they please using a homing instinct. As opposed to simply killing a snail throwing it over the wall is pretty effective
if snails are moved out of the garden by a distance of 20 meters or more the likelihood of those particular snails finding their way back home into the garden was almost zero.
Co-author of the study Professor David Dunstan from Queen Mary's School of Physics and Astronomy said:
or irregularly visiting a garden is many times greater than the number actually present at any one time in the garden.
As such gardeners shouldn't be setting out to eliminate their gardens of snails. To achieve such a feat would require the gardener to rid the whole neighbourhood of snails
which would be a slow process. Gardeners should be setting out to minimise the damage done by snails
which our results showed could be achieved quickly by simply removing the snails over 20 meters away.
A recent poll by the Royal Horticultural Society showed that one-in-five gardeners in the UK have thrown snails into their neighbours'gardens.
Whilst our study shows that this may be more beneficial than actually killing them we believe the gardening community would benefit as a whole by removing the snails to a convenient wasteland rather than passing the burden onto their neighbours.
when a small suburban garden was being refurbished. Around 120 plants were planted in the early summer
Rather than kill the snails the owners systematically removed them from the garden for six months.
and was thrown then five meters over the garden wall into wasteland. All snails that returned to the garden were given an extra mark on their shell
whenever they were found. A total of 416 snails were marked and thrown over the wall 1385 times during the study.
#School-based gardening encourages healthier eating in childrenschool-based gardening schemes can increase the amount of fruit
Forty-six children aged between nine and ten years old took part in a twelve week school-based project to create a garden.
As well as building the garden the children also had devoted lessons to cooking plants and growth (in science) and writing (in literacy.
The results showed that children who took part in the school-based gardening project ate 26 per cent more fruit and vegetables.
Plant a rain garden. A rain garden is landscaped a area planted preferably with wildflowers and other native vegetation that soak up rainwater from the roofs driveways or other impervious surfaces.
Rain gardens can be very diverse biomes full of life. They offer a great opportunity to add beautiful water loving plants to the landscape
Davis offers four simple tips for starting your own rain garden: 1. Location location location--Pick a site for your garden where runoff from your driveway or roof gutters can be diverted into it
or that tends to collect water. Your rain garden should be at least 10 feet away from building foundations underground utilities
and septic systems. 2. Don't go too deep--Make your garden between four and eight inches deep.
If it is too deep the garden might pond water too long and can resemble a big hole in the ground.
On the other hand a shallow rain garden will need a lot of surface area to provide enough water storage to filtrate runoff from larger storms.
Make sure to have at least one inlet for water to flow into the garden and one outlet (an area slightly lower in grade where water can exit) for water to filter out.
and installed a rain garden on campus with only a line level and some string--no fancy laser levels
Once excavated add at least four inches of good organic compost to help with plant growth. 4. Choose plants carefully--There are many plants that do well in rain gardens or occasionally flooded areas.
#Younger adults benefit from gardenings moderate-to high-intensity activitiespeople throughout the world enjoy gardening.
Studies have confirmed that engaging in gardening can lower cholesterol and blood pressure and increase psychological well-being.
although many studies have focused on the health benefits of gardening for older adults research on different age groups is limited.
A new study suggests that gardening can provide similar benefits for younger adults. Researchers from Konkuk University and Hongik University in Seoul South korea published a study in Horttechnology that evaluated the intensity of gardening activities for adults in their 20s.
The exercise intensity of physical activity may differ between age groups and fitness levels and there was not enough data on the metabolic equivalents of gardening tasks in different age groups to develop a garden exercise program for maintaining
or improving health conditions explained the study's lead author Ki-Cheol Son. Fifteen university students in their 20s participated in the study in South korea.
Each subject performed 10 common gardening tasks in a high tunnel and in a nearby grassy area with a vegetable garden and weeds.
The subjects visited the garden plot twice and performed five gardening tasks during each visit;
each task lasted for 5 minutes and was followed by a 5-minute rest. Subject wore a portable telemetric calorimeter
and respired into the facemask during the gardening tasks and resting periods so researchers could measure their oxygen uptake.
The subjects also wore a heart rate monitor to record heart rate data during the gardening tasks
and determined that all 10 gardening tasks were moderate-to high-intensity physical activities for the research subjects.
Determining the exercise intensity of gardening tasks should be useful information for developing garden exercise programs based on physical activity recommendations for health benefits the researchers said adding that the data will also be valuable for designing horticultural therapy program based on
At its core is a curriculum that integrates classroom nutrition activities with physical activity and gardening.
Using urban land including domestic gardens allotments and community gardens for own-growing is an important
The final straw was an unseasonable and devastating frost in 1774 that until this study was known only to historical diaries like Thomas Jefferson's Garden Book where he recounts a frost which destroyed almost every thing at Monticello that was equally destructive thro
On the other there is a growing global movement among gardeners farmers and others to use another form of black carbon--biochar--to both boost crop yields and to counter greenhouse emissions by locking
#Urban gardeners may be unaware of how best to manage contaminants in soilconsuming foods grown in urban gardens may offer a variety of health benefits
but a lack of knowledge about the soil used for planting could pose a health threat for both consumers and gardeners.
and challenges related to the perceived risk of soil contamination among urban community gardeners and found a need for clear and concise information on how best to prevent
While the benefits are far-reaching gardening in urban settings can also create opportunities for exposure to contaminants such as heavy metals petroleum products and asbestos
Our study suggests gardeners generally recognize the importance of knowing a garden site's prior uses
and expertise to determine accurately the prior use of their garden site and potential contaminants in the soil.
To characterize urban community gardeners'knowledge and perceptions of soil contamination risks and reducing exposure researchers conducted surveys among urban community gardeners and semi-structured interviews with key informants in the gardening community in Baltimore Maryland.
Informants included individuals whose job function or organizational affiliation makes them knowledgeable about Baltimore City community gardening and soil contamination.
People may come into contact with these contaminants if they work or play in contaminated soil
and supporting urban green spaces it is critical to protect the viability of urban community gardens
while also ensuring a safe gardening environment. For more information including resources for urban farmers
and gardeners please visit the Center for a Livable Future's Urban Soil Safety page.
To counter them some home gardeners use pheromone-baited traps that are designed to attract trap
The researchers asked 15 gardeners to place stink bug traps at the ends of rows of tomatoes while another group of 14 placed no traps in their gardens.
but the the abundance of stink bugs on the tomato fruits was marginally greater in the gardens with traps
and the fruits sustained significantly more injury than tomato fruits grown in gardens without traps.
and it appears that the addition of traps to gardens may increase injury to tomato fruits.
Vegetable gardens with traps may sustain more injury than those without traps. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Entomological Society of America.
#Ancient clam gardens nurture food securitya three-year study of ancient clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest has led researchers including three from Simon Fraser University to make a discovery that could benefit
The researchers discovered that ancient clam gardens made by Aboriginal people produced quadruple the number of butter clams and twice the number of littleneck clams as unmodified clam beaches.
One of the ways they did this was by cultivating clams in human-made rock-walled beach terraces known as clam gardens.
When the researchers transplanted more than 800 baby clams into six ancient clam gardens and five non-walled natural beaches to compare their growth rates they made a groundbreaking discovery.
The clams in the ancient gardens grew almost twice as fast and were more likely to survive than baby clams transplanted into unmodified beaches in the same area.
We discovered that flattening the slope of ancient beach clam gardens expanded the real-estate for clams at the intertidal height at
Traditional knowledge by coastal First Nations members further revealed that their ancestors boosted these gardens'productivity by adding ground clam shell and pebbles to them.
They surveyed 11 ancient clam gardens and 10 un-walled clam beaches and compared their number size
Lepofsky says On the Northwest Coast we are fortunate to have both the tangible record of clam gardens
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