The hope of trees, cont'd; Ginkgo biloba

 

Several years ago, driving to work on cold days, the tips of several of my fingers started turning waxy and bloodless.  This went away when they warmed up, but it was irritating and painful. These were the same fingers that, long ago, suffered painfully from exposure to cold as I rode around on my motor scooter.  It turned out I was suffering from Raynaud's disease, which is a spasm of the blood vessels causing loss of circulation to the affected parts.  I looked online and found there was an herbal remedy reported to work; extract of Ginkgo biloba leaves. (1,2)  I got some and started taking two 500 mg capsules of the powdered leaves daily.

Unlike all herbal remedies I’ve ever tried, this actually worked.  The Raynaud’s phenomenon went away entirely, and has not returned. Ginkgo is purportedly good for the memory as well.  It stands to reason; anything that is good for your peripheral circulation should be good for your whole body. 

Ginkgo now seems like a friend to me, an important fellow traveler on this planet.  Apparently others have felt this way, for ages.  Ginkgo has long been cultivated in China; some planted trees at temples are believed to be over 1,500 years old. The tree is important in Buddhism and Confucianism, and is widely planted in Korea and parts of Japan.  It’s also widely planted in North America and Europe, in part because it tolerates urban conditions so well. (3) The wonderful author Rutherford Platt, noting that Ginkgo is closely related to trees that lived 280 million years ago, wrote, “Ginkgo should be as exciting as a crocodile on a big city street… its leaves are fern leaves, from the age of reptiles… There is no other tree like it, delivered.. from the age of dinosaurs into the heart of our teeming cities…somehow a tree evolved in a bygone age can take our ruthless cities, creating trunk, leaf and fruit from miserable dirt below the scorching pavements.” (4)

My sister-in-law Carol spotted some Ginkgos growing near where she works, and they were old enough to be bearing fruit (which doesn’t happen until they are 30 years old).  She kindly gathered a whole pile of fruits this fall, and I squeezed the seeds out of the malodorous pulp.  The seeds (pictured) are now being stratified, mixed with moist peat moss in the bottom of the refrigerator, getting happy for spring planting.  They’ll go into the ground in April, and more Ginkgo trees should be on the way. 

1.       http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12710841 accessed 2/8/13

2.       http://www.livestrong.com/article/330576-ginkgo-biloba-for-raynauds-disease/ accessed 2/8/13

3.       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginkgo_biloba accessed 2/8/13

4.       Platt, Rutherford, 1952, 1968, Discover American Trees, Dodd, Mead & Co., NY

Lawns, the Price of Eggs, and Chicken Tractors

Lawns provide fine venues for sports, but why do people maintain big lawns that are never used for anything? Maybe lawns stimulate something deep in our psyches. Maybe at an unconscious level the smell of fresh cut grass equals “good” (food for a horse) or an expanse of close-cropped green surrounding the house equals “safety” (no snakes nearby). Lawns don’t come without some cost however. According to EPA, Americans burn 800 million gallons of gasoline yearly, about 0.6% of the total use of that fuel, to mow grass. Lawn care also uses water and pesticides.

A big lawn could become a useful resource for feeding chickens. There's an upsurge in interest in chicken-raising, perhaps related to the price of eggs, which has risen recently as shown in the chart. Agricultural commodities can be expected to rise in cost as energy prices increase, so eggs may get more expensive. Also, the grossly crowded conditions of today's industrial poultry operations raise questions about the quality of commercial eggs. Unfortunately, producing one’s own eggs with a small flock of chickens is only marginally cost-effective. The main cost is the price of feed. My calculations suggest that buying, housing, and feeding a dozen or so egg-laying hens for three years will cost in the range of $150 per bird, not counting the labor to take care of them. Each hen will produce approximately 50 dozen eggs during this period; so if the eggs are worth $3 a dozen the benefits more or less equal the costs.

However, if you have a flock small enough so that you can feed it largely with kitchen and table scraps, and if you can keep your chickens on good pasture a lot of the time, the cost picture improves. The scraps from a family of four could make up half the feed of four chickens. Good pasture would cut the feed bill further. Chickens will eat just about any food scrap that is at all edible. They are adept at catching flies and other insects and ticks. They love green matter so much that they will quickly defoliate a small fenced-in yard, reducing its pasture value to virtually nothing. The key to providing good pasture is to have a large enough area so that the birds can’t get ahead of plant growth. An ideal approach is to frequently move them to fresh pasture. It’s not hard to do this with a different kind of lawn tractor - a chicken tractor. The chicken tractor pictured was built by a co-worker of mine, Dave Bean. It houses several chickens and is not hard to move around on the lawn. It protects the chickens from predators, but it’s open to the grass below. With a chicken tractor making its rounds, the chickens eat, the grass gets chopped off and fertilized, lawn insects and ticks are obliterated, and there’s still a lawn area for a volleyball game.

Weeding Out False Positives

Weeds are unwelcome parasites in a garden, taking water, nutrients and light away from plants we want to grow. Individually or in low numbers, they aren’t a concern, but a weed infestation can be devastating. A false positive is a belief that things are connected when in reality they are not. In a way, a false positive is a weed of the mind. Like weeds, false positives seem to sprout naturally. We look for patterns and connections, and we file away memories of what look like cause and effect relationships. False positives are typically harmless, but if there are enough of them, or they are particularly influential, they can lead us astray. In his recent book The Vanishing Face of Gaia, James Lovelock points out that superstition and belief in magic – classic examples of false positives - are long-standing habits of human thought, whereas the scientific method, with its use of observation and measurement to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old.

I had a chance to weed out a false positive three months ago. A person who seemed authoritative told me that it was getting time to plant peas, but that the Farmer’s Almanac said that peas planted on March 21 would rot in the ground. My plan had been to plant peas on just that day, and my first thought was to put it off to another day with a less ominous prediction. After all, it’s a strange world, and maybe the Almanac had some insight on peas and planting dates. But March 21 was a beautiful sunny day, and the seeds went in the ground, albeit with some trepidation on my part. I’m happy to say they sprouted and have produced the bountiful plants in the photo above. Did I tempt fate and get lucky? I don’t think so. More likely, I just stumbled on another pesky false positive and, this time anyway, was able to pull it out.