STRANGLER

July 17, 2008

The morning glory is a seductive plant, with heart-shaped leaves and blooms of purple trumpets, the very symbol of love and passion. But it is a possessive lover, and in its ruthless drive for dominance it will strangle every competitor.
Before taking a planting bed at Genesis Park Community Garden here in the South Bronx, I’d had a long and abstract affection for morning glories. They’d always seemed so charming, so well-behaved, delicately climbing up neighbors’ trellises. All that has changed for me now: They are the weed above every other weed. Like lovable stray kittens that turn into ornery cats, they come up coyly in the spring along with the beans and the beets and the peppers you’ve planted, looking to the naïve like new-found friends.
"What are these?" I ironically test novice gardeners in the spring, pointing to the tiny hearts already sprouting in the untilled soil. "Some kind of flower?" they always respond. "They do have lovely blossoms," I tell them, "but they are the devil disguised. You must pull them out as soon as you see them or your plot will become a morning-glory patch in a matter of weeks."
They never listen. They may root out crabgrass and dandelions, but they’ll spare the morning glory. Soon they are in despair; it is taking over everything, twining around the tomatoes, creeping up the corn, choking the okra. To restore order, they must carefully pull the glories up by the roots, a task not only tedious but enfuriating: The more of them you kill, the more appear, wave after wave of attacking troops.
Genesis Park was carved out of a vacant lot 25 years ago by the Franciscan Brothers who had a monastery across the street. Legend has it that some visiting Brother, caring for the garden when the regulars were away, thought the bare fences needed adornment, bought a packet of morning glory seeds, and sowed them along the borders. Amazingly to me, this species, Ipomoea purpurea, designated a "noxious weed" by federal and state agricultural departments, is actually sold for real money in garden shops. You’d think the packets, if not banned entirely, would at least carry a warning, like cigarette packs do. This poor guy, like so many others, never knew.
The Brother went his way, but his work remained. Casting their seeds year by year, the demons spread from fence to plot to path, and even sprang up among the boulders of the rock garden. They have also become grotesque, their stems now thick and tough as baling wire, with leaves bigger than your hand. They grow so fast that without persistent pulling, the entire garden would be submerged beneath a weedy sea in a single summer. Even with persistent pulling, it is only possible to inhibit, never to eradicate.
In its June 29 issue, the New York Times Magazine ran a story by Tom Christopher about the research of Lewis Ziska, a "weed ecologist" at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, on the effects of increased temperatures and levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide on plant life. In 2002, Ziska dug up soil from an organic farm in rural Maryland and poured it into three large beds, one at the farm, one in suburban Baltimore, and one in the city itself. The inner-city site, retaining heat from the surrounding pavements and CO2 from auto emissions, matched the average temperature and carbon dioxide levels projected for the planet in 30 to 50 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Over five seasons, the weeds that sprang up in that plot grew two to four times the size of those at the farm, produced more pollen, and replicated far faster.
Uh-oh, I thought as I read: In the South Bronx, the future is now.
Weeds are weeds because of their genetic resourcefulness. As the earth warms and fills with growth-stimulating carbon dioxide, they will become an ever-greater menace to food crops. Along with their warnings of a weed-bound world, Ziska and his colleagues have proposed some creative solutions, including crossing wild, weedy grains with their cultivated cousins for a hardy, edible hybrid, and using starchy invasives like kudzu, presently devouring the South and moving northward, for biofuels.
That’s a weed ecologist for you, always on the sunny side.
My old friend Norman Bantz, the Yonkers beekeeper, read Christopher’s article and also found a silver lining. "That’s actually good news for bees," he ventured. "The more pollen in the flowers, the less the bees have to work to get it, and that means stronger, healthier hives. What are weeds to bees? Just another flower." Of course, more pollen may be bad news for allergy sufferers, though many people I know are turning to local honey, made from the same plants that afflict them so badly, as an antidote.
The day is hot, and passing cars and trucks are ladling their emissions over Genesis Park; it’s time to go on morning glory patrol. As I reach for the root of this noxious weed, I keep thinking there’s a gothic parable growing right there before my eyes, a tale of hearts and flowers and strangling love.

THE SISTERS SPEAK

By Roger Repohl

June 18, 2007
THE BRONX, N.Y. - Over the years, the children who farm at Genesis Park Community Garden here in the South Bronx have been most fond of planting the "Three Sisters" for their summer gardening project. They dig up the soil, and after playing with (or running from) the earthworms and other bugs they churn up, they add compost and then shape the dirt into circular mounds. They poke kernels of corn into the mounds, cover them up, water, and wait (the hardest part). When the corn seedlings are up and growing, they plant pole bean seeds at the base of each mound and a few seeds of summer squash in between. Then they water, wait, and watch. As the corn stalks grow, the bean plants twine around them while the squash crawls along the ground. By midsummer, the kids are harvesting fistfuls of string beans and little yellow crooknecks, and some weeks later, big ears of corn (if the squirrels don’t get them first).
The Three Sisters is a planting method traditional to the Iroquois and other Indian nations of the East. It maximizes the use of the land, with two vegetables growing vertically and the third horizontally, and each plant benefits the other: the corn stalks support the bean plants, the bean plants return nitrogen to the soil to feed the hungry corn, and the squashes crowd out the weeds, retain moisture, and cool the earth below.
Kids love the Three Sisters. Not only do they learn about the way of life of Native Americans, but they actually practice it. They like planting the Indian way, three days before the full moon in May, while "thinking kind thoughts." They come to realize what it is like to befriend their environment and live in harmony with it.
And then there’s ethanol.
There is something subtly perverse, as well as positively ominous, about this latest unconsidered prescription for energy independence based on fuel made from corn. I’ll consider the ominous first.
In 2005, Congress passed an energy bill containing a "renewable fuel standard" that required increasing the amount of ethanol blended in gasoline from five to ten percent overall by 2012, while enticing refiners into compliance with a tax break of what is now 51 cents per gallon of ethanol used. The oil companies enthusiastically embraced this mandate, so much so that last year they’d already beaten it by 25%, along with hiking their already swollen profit margins.
Our eco-friendly President has been pushing ethanol passionately of late, to burnish his greener image. But it is important to realize that energy independence and pollution control are two quite different things. Though research results vary (depending on what criteria the researchers use, and who funds them), the most balanced sources conclude that ethanol is no cleaner burning than gasoline and actually becomes less so as proportions increase. In last October’s issue, Consumer Reports released test results showing that using E-85, a motor fuel that’s 85% ethanol, gas mileage decreased an average of 27% over standard gasoline in the same vehicle, meaning more pollution per gallon, not less. Still, the automakers, which can trade low fuel economy for high ethanol content, are all over the media with do-gooder slogans like GM’s "Live green, go yellow."
All the above are not really ominous; they’re just business as usual among big oil, big auto, and big government. The real omens come from the convergence of food and fuel.
Over just the last year, corn prices have risen from a relatively stable $2 a bushel to close to $4, due to the demand for ethanol, which now takes 20% of U.S. corn production and may eat up half of it as soon as next year. Higher corn prices mean higher prices for all the food products that depend on corn, from pork to milk to cereal. Check your grocery bill; it’s happening right now.
Here is where the perversion enters. As with gas prices, most well-off Americans will complain about but tolerate food price increases. But those living on limited incomes will face ever greater strains on their resources, forcing more of them into food stamps and food pantries. As more and more of our grain is consumed as fuel, worldwide emergency food distributions will be cut back. Most ominous of all, farmers large and small, now profiting handsomely from the ethanol boom, will return to the dangerous one-crop practices that led to the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s, the agricultural version of strip-mining; without crop rotation, soils will require more artificial fertilization and insecticides. And then there is the very real possibility of a drought in the corn belt comparable to the current one in the Southwest. Such a combination of factors may bring about a food crisis greater than any energy crisis we’ve seen.
There is something fundamentally wrong in a deeper sense about mixing food with fuel, about putting corn into your gas tank instead of your mouth. The ethanol fix-all further disengages our already disengaged relationship to our food.
The kids in our garden are re-learning something our ancestors took for granted, something now so foreign we’ve had to give it a niche-name: "sustainable agriculture," the ways of providing local food for local people.
Compare the Three Sisters to the Archer Daniels Midland Company. The sisters speak for themselves.