Sweet Cicely

Sweet Cicely growing through plastic mulch

My favourite herb is now showing serious signs of growth! It has been slowly sending up a couple of tentative shoots for weeks, which have been viciously attached by slugs, but it finally has a couple of leaves on it. The picture above shows the most advanced, but the other ones I have in the ground and/or pots also seem to be making a move.

I first bought a sweet cicely plant from the a market stall of the Herb Nursery, about 2 and a half years ago. I'd previously read about it in various gardening books, and I have to say that despite its relative lack of availability in garden centres it does live up to its good reputation. The leaves, young seeds and roots are all edible with a delicious sweet anise flavour. And when I say sweet, I mean sweet - the young seeds taste like crunchy Black Jacks, which were one of my favourite sweets as a child.

It's quite a pretty herb, pollinators love the flowers, and it will quite happily live in shady damp corners. In fact, when I tried growing it in full sun it looked seriously unhappy by summer, so it's definitely a plant for the shade. But doesn't everyone have some shade? And since most other herbs have 'full sun' on the label, having such a good one for those awkward places is really nice.

So why can't you buy it everywhere? The only possible issue I've seen is that it's supposedly difficult to get the seeds to germinate, as they need a period of cold. But I've not had any issues growing sweet cicely from seed as long as that need is met - in 2012 I stratified the seeds in the fridge, but last year I just planted them in autumn and left them in the garage all winter.

Song of the Day - Come Undone

Medlar leaves

Of all the fruit trees that I planted, the one I've been keeping the closest eye on is the medlar. The leaf buds have been getting gradually bigger over the last few weeks, but over the last day or two they've finally started to open! You can see the tree in the picture below:

My Iranian medlar from Keepers Nursery

And here's a close-up of the leaves unfurling: 

The medlar is leafing out!

Why the medlar specifically? Well, fruit trees take up quite a lot of room (12.5 m2 if the diameter is 4m), so the rest of fruit tree varieties were carefully selected according to a variety of more practical criteria:

1. picking time
2. disease resistance
3. yield
4. reliability
5. storage duration for the fruit
6. ability to fertilise other trees I ordered

Of course, each one was a compromise, but the main emphasis was on usefulness and reliability.

The medlar was a bit different. I know that I like jelly made from the fruit, although I've not tried it raw. In fact, I love the jelly - I would say it is much better than quince jelly, which seems to have the better reputation in general. But in most of the world it is not grown much any more for its fruit, so finding reliable numbers for yield is quite hard. Does it provide more than an apple tree in its place would, or a pear tree? Does the fruit store as well as a late-keeping apple? Doubtful on both counts. But I don't really care too much, because out of the trees the medlar was my 'something slightly different and interesting'.

So what does the medlar offer? In addition to the unusual and not widely available fruit (unless you're from Iran or Europe a few centuries ago), it is quite a pretty tree with zigzagging branches and a lot of colour in autumn. Despite its origin around the Middle East, it also has a history in this country, so it's something to talk about when people ask what it is.

The 'Iranian' variety which I've planted is from Keepers Nursery. The family who run the nursery are Iranian themselves, where the fruit is still quite popular, and have a relatively large range of different varieties. Their 7 varieties beats the usual 1 - 3 of other fruit tree nurseries. Here's what they say about the Iranian medlar, which they introduced themselves:

Iranian Medlar is a dessert variety introduced by Keepers Nursery. It originates from the wild medlars which grow in the Alborz Mountains in northern Iran. It is widely grown in Iran where it is a traditional and popular late autumn and early winter fruit.

The fruit is slightly smaller than most other varieties of medlar and rather more conical in shape. It is the one of the best flavoured medlars. In common with other medlars the fruit has a brown russet skin. The flesh is quite hard and green until it is fully ripe when it turns brown in colour and becomes soft. It is quite sweet with a texture and flavour similar to a thick apple puree. It ripens earlier than other varieties. It can be left on the tree to ripen in November or picked prior to ripening and allowed to ripen in storage. The ripe fruit can be frozen and eaten fresh after defrosting.

The tree is compact with a bushy growth habit. It crops very well and does not have any major disease or pest problems. It has attractive large white blossom in May. Unlike most fruit trees medlar blossom opens after the leaves.

I chose this variety because I do want to try eating the fruit raw, so good flavour is attractive, because they say it is compact (Medlars tend to be spreading trees), and because well, again it's something different. As far as I know, no other nursery has taken up selling the Iranian medlar variety yet, preferring to stick to the more well known Nottingham and/or Royal varieties. Of course, the Iranian variety might not live up to the description,  but I guess I'll find out in a few years.

Rational behaviour is maximising ... what?

Utility maximisation

In economics, rational actors are assumed to maximise their utility. However, the fact that world is uncertain means that you can't always know what would maximise your utility, so this is instead amended to expected utility. This means: a rational actor makes the decision that on average produces the highest utility. Many people then take a step further and move from utility to money: rational individuals make decisions that maximise their expected worth.

This assumption also feeds through into a lot of financial modelling and optimisation. For example, valuations using methods such as dynamic programming typically assume that decision making maximises expected utility and nothing else.

But... does this make any sense? To see why it might not, consider what you would do if a billionaire offered you a choice. If you accept, he will flip fair coin. If it comes up heads, he will give you a million pounds, and if it comes up tails you will give him all your assets. Now let's consider the expected value here. If your assets have value A, and you take the bet, then your expected financial worth after the bet is:

0.5 x (A + 1,000,000) + 0.5 x 0 = 0.5 x A + 500,000

Obviously, if you don't take the bet then your assets will continue to be worth A. Therefore, the expected improvement in your financial position if you take the bet is:

(0.5 x A + 500,000) - A = 500,000 - 0.5 x A

So if your assets are worth less than 1,000,000 then you should take the bet if you are maximising your expected worth. What's more, the less your assets are worth, the stronger the expected benefit of the bet, and therefore the more "rational" it would be to take it as an maximiser of the expected.

But do people behave this way? And should they? This bet would mean, for a middle income home owner, that they have a 50% chance of becoming a millionaire, and a 50% chance of becoming a homeless pauper. I think a significant proportion of people would not risk becoming homeless even for the chance of becoming a millionaire. It has been demonstrated experimentally that people are strongly averse to losing what they have, even when there are significant rewards to taking the risk.

As to whether they should... well, despite the fact that many economists equate rational with maximising the mean, it does not seem irrational at all to decide not to risk homelessness. In fact, it seems pretty rational to protect your access to necessities before trying to get the nice-to-haves. But this kind of maximising the minimum, rather than the mean, behaviour is too often ignored.

Agricultural modernisation
 
The same phenomenon crops up in traditional agriculture. New high yield varieties of major crops have slowly spread through the world, but in traditional communities there was a lot of resistance to their use. Why? Don't those peasants want to improve their lives? Modern agricultural experts tended, I think, to see peasants in poor countries as backwards, since the new high yield varieties would make them more money.

But it is seeing yield from a commercial perspective that makes you miss why standardisation on high yield varieties was resisted. From the point of view of the subsistence peasant, the product of agriculture is not just food to sell, but survival into the next year. For this reason, an extremely high value was place on reliability, and the ability to reliably produce enough to survive. The natural consequence of this was:

1. to grow crops that could tolerate tough conditions and still produce something
2. to grow diverse crops so that if one failed there would be another source of food

In other words, the backwards peasant was making the perfectly rational decision to maximise the minimum yield instead of to maximise the average yield. Peasants and subsistence farmers are conservative because their system, while it might leave them hungry, at least minimises the risk of widespread starvation. Any change is risk, and risk is what they are trying to minimise.

The book below, which I would like to read from cover to cover one day, discusses some of these issues in more detail:

A book partially about how peasants maximise the minimum

Raised beds

The first raised bed - surrounded by Raspberries/Blackberries/herbs/skirret/pear trees

One of my jobs today was putting together the first of at least two raised beds in the garden, so that we can grow some annual veg. The bed itself was relatively cheap - four 3.6m lengths of decking at approx. £5 each and 1.5 fence posts at £10 each gives a total of £35 for a 2.6m x 1m bed. This works out at £13.46 / m2. Since I've seen garden centres selling flat pack ones about 1 m2 for £30 or £40, I don't think that's bad.

Of course, I also had to fill it. I turned over the turf underneath the bed and loosed up the soil a bit, which filled out the bottom a bit since when you dig over the soil always expands. I also chucked in soil from a number of empty containers I had standing around. But still, the bed was mostly empty and I didn't have any more soil available.

A bed that size with a depth of 24cm has a volume of 0.24 x 2.6 x 1 = 0.624 m3. Since there are 1000 litres in one m3, this means I needed around 600 litres of soil. Not having any good quality soil free, I bought 600 litres of top soil, compost and manure from the garden centre for about £60 and mixed it together.

So the question now is, what's the best annual veg to plant in my new 2.6 m2 raised bed? I do plan to build at least one more, but we don't have much more free cash right now so it might be another month before I can.

Extreme levels of Roundup in Soybeans

How much of this ends up in your food?

Following on from my previous post on genetic engineering for pesticide or herbicide production/resistance, I found this article via Naked Capitalism. The article is about farmers using ever higher doses of Roundup (a herbicide) to fight herbicide-resistant weeds, and about the ingredients of the herbicide accumulating in crops. To quote from the article:

Seven out of the 10 GM-soy samples we tested, however, surpassed this "extreme level" (of glyphosate + AMPA), indicating a trend towards higher residue levels. The increasing use of glyphosate on US Roundup Ready soybeans has been documented (Benbrook 2012). The explanation for this increase is the appearance of glyphosate-tolerant weeds (Shaner et al. 2012) to which farmers are responding with increased doses and more applications.

 Regulatory agencies have responded to increasing usage not be intervening or even investigating its potential health effects, but by raising the legal limits to align with the current practice of farmers. God forbid that the precautionary principle is applied to public safety if it costs money.

The authors have studied the impact of Roundup on a kind of water flea, and their findings were as follows:

Our own recent study in the model organism Daphnia magna demonstrated that chronic exposure to glyphosate and a commercial formulation of Roundup resulted in negative effects on several life-history traits, in particular reproductive aberrations like reduced fecundity and increased abortion rate, at environmental concentrations of 0.45-1.35 mg/liter (active ingredient), i.e. below accepted environmental tolerance limits set in the US (0.7 mg/liter) (Cuhra et al. 2013). A reduced body size of juveniles was even observed at an exposure to Roundup at 0.05 mg/liter.

Water fleas are very different to human beings, but it does suggest that there might be cause for concern. And if there are the same insidious effects in humans, noticing it will take a while - if something makes people drop dead immediately then it's pretty obvious, but if a chemical has a more subtle effect like reducing human fertility and/or increasing the rate of miscarriage then proving it can take years or decades. Think how many chemicals were widely used in the past but are now banned as unsafe, simply because their danger was more subtle than immediate death.

Of course, many plants we eat do contain chemicals which are hazardous in large doses, so in a sense this is nothing new. But for most of human history, diets were varied enough that exposure to individual toxic chemicals was typically low. However, industrialised agriculture has meant that people now mostly eat a small number of highly productive crops, raised in a similar way. This means that exposure to these major crops is massive, and exposure to any toxins in them is also large. The same kind of market concentration applies to herbicides, so if glyphosate (the active component of Roundup) does turn out to be dangerous to human health, so will a very diverse range of crops that it's been used on or with. A range that is almost certain to increase as the Monsantos of the world engineer resistance to it into more and more crops.

If I had a choice, I would prefer to avoid foods containing high levels of herbicides or pesticides. But I don't have a choice, really - the level of such chemicals is not on the packet, so how can I really know? The only way I can control my own exposure is to grow all my own food, which is not really possible even in a large urban garden. So I'm therefore forced to trust regulators to protect me - the same regulators who have been taken over by those they're supposed to be regulating.

I suppose the only bright side is that so far GM foods have been resisted more successfully in Europe than the US, no thanks to my own government in Westminister. If GM food ends up being herbicide resistant crops, rather than, say, higher yielding crops, then I hope that GM continues to lose the battle for Europe.

Is Chinese Rhubarb safe to eat?

Chinese Rhubarb - Rheum Palmatum Tanguticum

Last weekend I bought the plant shown above from Ashdale Nursery, who specialise in perennial and cottage garden plants. The reason I bought it was that I vaguely remembered it was edible, and because it didn't cost too much. Since then, though, I've googled the plant and found a lot of contradictory information.

On one side are a number of forest garden and permaculture sites. For example, PFAF has this to say:

Leaf stem - raw or cooked[2, 7, 105, 183]. The stem is superior in flavour to the common rhubarb and quite tender[2]. An acid flavour, it is sometimes used as a cooked fruit substitute[K].

 Similarly, the same plant is being sold by Martin Crawford with the following description:

Rhubarb (Rheum palmatum) Turkish

Rheum palmatum. A large perennial from Mongolia, growing to 1.5 m (5 ft) across and 3 m (10 ft) high with very large leaves. Grow in any moist, well-drained soil in sun or shade. Makes a good ground covering plant, and the leaf stalks are edible in the same way as ordinary rhubarb, with a superior flavour; the roots are used medicinally. Hardy to -20ºC.

Rhubarb (Rheum palmatum tanguticum) Turkish Red

A variety of Turkish rhubarb with reddish stalks and leaves.

The Gardeners' World website also explicitly says that the plant is edible:

The large, jagged leaves of this rhubarb bring architectural drama to a moist pond edge. As well as being a valuble ornamental plant, its red stems are full of flavour, making this a variety well worth growing as an edible crop. Divide the rootstock in spring with a knife, leaving one bud on each division, or sow seed in autumn.

On the other hand, Wikipedia makes no mention of the leaf stems being edible (although it does discuss medical uses of the root and rhizomes), and a number of sites selling this species as an ornamental explicitly warn that it shouldn't be eaten. For example:

 Please note: this is an ornamental plant that does not offer any edible produce. Although it is related to the common garden rhubarb plant, it does not produce the same edible red stems. This plant has no edible parts and the leaves are actually poisonous if consumed, as with all varieties of rhubarb.

I am inclined to trust PFAF and Martin, but I think perhaps the first time I will try a small amount just to make sure.