I thought that we were going to be able to terrace the back yard into a workable garden space this year; alas, however, the intractable slope remains intact. The French drains that keep the water run-off from turning our grassy hill into a mudslide have collapsed, resulting in a bog at the top of the hill. So, we are having new drainage installed, as is everyone else who lives at the top of this hill–the neighbors on both sides are having it done, as well as folks up the hill a ways further. It has been a very wet spring and summer, and so it makes sense to deal with the drainage issues.

So, once again, I am gardening exclusively on our deck. However, instead of my usual mixture of decorative and food plants, this time around, I am growing only food, and am surprised at the amount of plants I can grow on the deck.

I have a dozen Thai chili plants, forty basil plants of various sorts–four different varieties in total, a handful of different herb plants, seven large tomato plants, and about forty gai lan plants poking their little sprouty selves up out of the dirt. Last week, I also sowed about twenty methi plants, a bunch of cilantro seed, a potful of mizuna and around the gai lan, which is in a whiskey barrel planter (cut in half longitudinally and set on its side in a cradle which keeps it from rocking), I have sown a lot of baby Shanghai bok choi seeds. I also have ordered another large planter to sow with more gai lan and baby bok choi.

I am amazed at how prolific the garden is, and last night, I took the first harvest from it–a huge bouquet of Siam Queen Thai basil and five Thai bird chilies, which I used in my favorite summer dish: Spicy Thai Basil Chicken. Tomorrow night when I come home from work, I will harvest a big bouquet of Italian basil and make pesto, the first of many batches from my own garden.

There are dozens of clusters of tiny green tomatoes, looking like jade beads, dangling from the five-foot high (and still growing) tomato vines. Kat and I watch them greedily, waiting for them to ripen. There are four different varieties of grape/cherry tomatoes–a green one, a black one, a yellow one and a red and yellow striped one, and then there are three roma type paste tomatoes, called San Marzano. The vines of the plants are amazingly strong–stronger than the ones I planted last year–I planted these tomatoes very deeply in the planter, so that roots grew out of the stems I buried in the compost, peat moss and soil mixture in the self-watering planter. This practice, which I read about last year, creates a stronger, more wide-reaching root system which helps to anchor the plant well and also helps the plant survive drought better, although, unlike last year, this year, lack of rain hardly seems to be the problem. (We’ll see how August goes–that is usually the driest month in our part of Ohio.)

It is always amazing to me how well compost and other organic fertilizers, such as livestock manure and fish, bone or blood meal, feed plants and help them to grow strong and healthy. I overcrowd my plants in the garden–the kindest way to put it is that I garden intensively, though truthfully, it is not just that I admire and emulate the work of John Jeavons, but because I am lazy and hate mulching and weeding. The thing is, if you crowd your plants together in a container or even in the ground itself, the plants grow together and their leaves form a perfect canopy, shading the roots, which not only discourages the growth of weeds (weed seeds are triggered to sprout by the sun), but helps to retain water. It isn’t as efficient as mulching, but then mulch isn’t always the be-all and end-all of gardening–it can harbor mice, slugs, mold and other plant killers. In very wet weather like we have been having, it can trap too much water, leading to root rot and worse, so this year, I don’t feel quite so lazy about going mulch-free.

Right now, my favorite bit of the garden is the half of a whiskey barrel that is serving as a seedbed for gai lan, baby bok choi and methi.

I got tired of not being able to get farmers around here to grow these vegetables consistently, so I decided to up and do it myself. Why not? I had the whiskey barrel empty–it usually harbored a garden of coleus plants–and I had some seeds. The fenugreek (methi) seeds I had were from the Indian market, and they were meant to be ground up and used as a spice. Instead, I soaked them for twenty-four hours, then laid the mushy seeds on damp paper towels, then covered them in another layer of damp paper towels and set them on a cookie sheet in a sunny window for about four days, dampening the towels twice daily. On the third day, I took the top towel off and let the sprouts which were springing forth grow upward toward the light.

The next day, I transferred the strongest sprouts, of which there were around forty or so, to the whiskey barrel and to various pots. The soil was light and friable, amended well with compost, manure and fish meal, and so far, even though right after I planted the tiny things, we had a huge thunderstorm with heavy downpours, the methi plant babies are going strong, putting out roots and working on making true leaves.

The gai lan has already started putting out true leaves, and I will have to thin it soon. But I am still waiting for the cilantro, bok choi and mizuna to sprout.

I can’t wait to see how well they do.

I promise to continue to blog about my green miracles on the deck as they grow and as I harvest, as well as chronicling the delicacies I make from them.

In the meantime, for those who want to grow their own Asian vegetables, you can get seeds for many varieties of greens, roots and herbs from Evergreen Seeds. They ship quickly and their prices are great.

After I wrote a post in May entreating Americans to return to our roots and once again become “a nation of farmers” by growing at least part of our food on whatever spot of earth we can find to cultivate, I was amazed at how strongly my ideas seemed to resonate with readers.

Yesterday as I watered the forty basil plants, (we like basil here–a lot), dozen chili pepper plants, various assorted tomatoes and other herbs up on my deck, I reflected on how good it made me feel to know that in a few months I’d be harvesting a lot of tasty food just outside my kitchen door. In a small way, it brought me back to my childhood summers at Grandma’s farm, and how wonderful it was to grow, harvest, cook, preserve and eat vegetables and fruits so fresh that they tasted of the sweet sun-warmed, rain-bathed earth itself.

Of course, I still look longingly at the huge hillside in our backyard, the one that -will- be terraced within the year, dreaming of the plenitude of food, herbs and flowers we will be growing in the future, but as I do so, I cannot help but think that not only is it beautiful to grow my own food, in the future, it will be an economical choice that will help cut down our food costs as well.

It seems that I am not the only one thinking these thoughts in the United States. Other folks have decided to grow food instead of lawns this year, and many of them cite the rising cost of food as the reason for their sudden interest in vegetable and fruit gardening.

According to the New York Times, sales of vegetable and herb seeds and plants from the W. Atlee Burpee company have risen 40% in the past year–an amazingly precipitous jump that heralds a burgeoning interest in home food production that has not been seen among Americans since the 1970’s. Garden centers are selling out of vegetable and fruit plants and seeds and even potted fruit trees faster than they have in past decades as many new gardeners try out their green thumbs on full-blown kitchen gardens.

In the recent past, Americans have spent most of their gardening money and time on lawns, annual flowers, perennials, vegetables, trees and shrubs, in that order. According to a poll conducted on behalf of the Garden Writers Association, this year, American gardeners’ priorities have changed drastically as vegetables have jumped from fourth to second place.

To my ears, this is amazingly great news, because as far as I am concerned, anything that reconnects Americans to the source of our sustenance as well as getting them outside, moving and exercising in the fresh air and sunlight is wonderful. Gardening not only helps with grocery bills and overall health and fitness, it can also help us develop spiritually. There are so many lessons to be learned while digging in the dirt, pulling weeds and harvesting fruits, and I think that Americans will be the better for relearning these lessons.

Reading the New York Times article brought a smile to my face and to my heart, and I just wanted to share it with everyone here.

And while I am at it, I wanted to share some resources for gardening how-tos and inspiration, because as I imagine that many new gardeners could use a little advice on how to grow vegetables, herbs and fruits most efficiently.

For starters, look at this new article from the LA Times about a technique that allows gardeners to get great harvests with no digging and very little watering. In drought-prone areas of the country, ideas like the ones outlined in this article can help make the difference between puny yields and a bountiful harvest.

Then, check out the supplementary website for the gardening book, Food, Not Lawns. The articles there are interesting and informative and give you an idea on what the book is about, which is a call on how to turn our lawns, which are resource-guzzling areas of essentially wasted space, into productive kitchen gardens and orchards

There is always The Mother Earth News, a great magazine that is chock-full of advice on gardening, frugal living, food preservation, composting, livestock husbandry, energy production, solar power and other green topics. I was first exposed to “Mother” as the publication is known by its fans back when I was a kid, because my grandparents subscribed to it and all of us learned a great deal from it. You can order their complete back issues on CD Rom from their website and I cannot think of a better resource for all things green than that.

Grandpa also introduced me to Rodale’s Organic Gardening by my Grandpa who switched from conventional petrochemical agriculture to organic methods and ended up with higher yields in the long run, not to mention not having to worry about pesticides killing his grandkids if we came across them in the barn.

A book of interest to those of you who are looking to grow food for the first time would be Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food In Hard Times. I haven’t gotten a copy of it yet, but I have read many glowing reviews of it, and when my copy of it comes in, I will definitely review it here.

Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long
is a manual for growing vegetables all year around through the use of inexpensive unheated hoop houses and cold frames. Coleman is a market gardener in Maine, and he sells his vegetables all through the year, and he shows how sunlight and protection from the wind are more important for growing vegetables than temperature.

Coleman also has another useful book–The New Organic Grower–which is great primer on the subject of growing vegetables organically in either a home kitchen garden or a market garden setting. It contains all sorts of useful knowledge for both beginning and advanced gardeners.

Finally, there is Edward C. Smith’s The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible: Discover Ed’s High-Yield W-O-R-D System for All North American Gardening Regions--a very useful guide to growing vegetables in a small or large garden. I really like this book myself and have used the principles outlined in it in my garden when we lived in Pataskala to great effect.

Those are just some of the possible resources for all the new gardeners out there–can any of you suggest others?

Americans need to go back to the land.

I don’t mean this in a 1960’s, leaving the city for a commune in the country, complete with goat milk, wheat grass and sprouted lentil loaves, kind of way.

I think we all need to get back to the land wherever we are.

We need to touch whatever bit of earth we have at our disposal, whether that means a planter on the deck, a grassy front yard, or an empty lot at the end of the block. We need to do more than touch that earth–we need to till it, plant seeds, tend them and watch them grow into food for ourselves, our families and our neighbors.

America used to be a nation of farmers, and we need to remember that and return to our roots.

Why?

Because of rising food prices, and looming threats of food shortages.

Because of lack of availability of fresh vegetables and fruits among the urban poor.

Because of soaring obesity rates, and lowered nutrition among the country’s poor.

Because eating locally is good for us and the environment, and our local economy.

And because we need to remember who we are, as a nation.

Gandhi once said, “To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves,” and he is right. As Americans have turned away from the land, as we have allowed farms to be turned into strip malls and condominiums, as we have turned away from self-reliance and embraced consumerism as a lifestyle, we have forgotten the soul of our nation. We have forgotten what once made us strong, and that was a deep connection to the earth, to our homes, to our neighbors.

We need to rebuild that connection, and in doing so, we will be better able to weather the coming economic recession, high food prices and possible food shortages which loom over our future lives.

And the thing is–gardening and growing at least some of our vegetables and fruits–can be accomplished anywhere. You don’t have to have forty acres and a mule, or even one acre and a rototiller. A small urban yard will do, or a series of containers on a rooftop or balcony or a vacant lot.

Urban agriculture is finally coming back into its own in the US, after last being seen as a real movement during WWII with the “Victory Garden” campaign when rooftops and backyards were planted in cities and larger gardens were dug in the country by people from all walks of life.

The New York Times features an article on the growing trend of urban farming in the US where individuals not only grow food for their families on vacant lots, but also grow enough vegetables to sell to their neighbors. Not only does this bring in extra cash for people in poor neighborhoods, it also brings much appreciated fresh food to people who have little choice in where to shop.

The Times reports that co-ops have been formed, CSA;s have gone urban and restaurants have taken to buying produce grown within their own cities.

Of course, none of this is new–there have always been urban farmers. What is new is the idea that urban farming in the US could help to substantially feed citizens while also boosting local income and microeconomic systems. (Cities in the UK and other countries are also embracing urban agriculture as well, but I am primarily talking about the US for now.)

For proof that city-based agricultural ventures, from backyard gardens to community gardens to full-fledged urban market farms, can produce a significant amount of food in modern times, we need to look beyond the US, however. We need to examine the current urban agricultural system of Cuba.

Cuba’s successful experiment in urban agriculture started as a means to feed Cuba without relying on food imports after trade embargoes caused food shortages. Currently, urban farms occupy around 86,000 acres, and in the past few years, these farms have produced 3.4 million tons of food annually. Urban farms grow 90 percent of the fresh vegetables for the city of Havana alone.

Considering that these government-led and supported urban agriculture programs only started a few decades ago, their success is astonishing, and to me, enticing.

Just think of what Americans could do with our abundance of land, in comparison to the smaller acreage available to Cuba.

Why don’t we do it then? Why don’t we all start planting our own “Victory Gardens” again, and take the time to learn how to grow our own food, and take back a measure of self-reliance once more? Why don’t we claim our own victories–against poverty, against processed foods, against corporate control, against our own complacency–and relearn what we have forgotten: how to dig the earth and tend the soil.

Let’s join other Americans and do it, in big ways and small ways.

Let’s remember ourselves.

Author’s Note: Our backyard is finally being terraced this year, and the first things we will plant in it will be asparagus crowns, strawberries and a bunch of annual vegetables. The ornamentals–the flowers and shrubs, and hopefully fruit trees–will wait for next year. The food comes first.

Some like it hot–and some not.

I like stuff hot, and as longtime readers of this blog should have figured by now, I will put chilies into anything, including chocolate truffles and brownies.

So, of course, since I am learning about and cooking Moroccan foods these days, it only stands to reason that I would feel the need to make my own jar of harissa to put up in the fridge. I mean, if I am going to be making my own preserved lemons because they taste fresher than the ones you buy in the store (and they very much do taste fresher), then it only stands to reason that I should give harissa a shot, too.

I am glad that I did.

I have eaten harissa from the store before, and while it is kind of hot and tasty, it is mostly hot and salty, though it tends to have a weird bitter edge. I suspect that this is from some of the preservatives and the vinegar they put in it in preference to the lemon juice that the cookbooks say to use in it. To be honest, most of the commercial harissa I have tasted has left me rather cold, and gave me a less than stellar impression of the beautiful, flavorful and fragrant foods of Morocco.

Homemade harissa, on the other hand, is a scarlet sauce that is filled with the heat of chilies, the sweetness of roasted bell peppers, the bite of garlic the smooth fruitiness of good olive oil, the tang of fresh lemon juice and the musky aroma of cumin. Oh, yeah, and there is salt in there, too–but it isn’t as overpowering a flavor as it is in the commercial kind.

I am a convert.

The other cool thing about making your own harissa is that you can make it as hot or mild as you like by either adding more roasted red bell pepper or by using milder or hotter red chilies. For mine, I used my last harvest of Kung Pao chilies from the garden on my deck–they are about the same in heat level as a cayenne, and I used a fairly small roasted red bell pepper.

It turned out wonderfully tangy-hot, with a lovely scarlet macaw color that looks quite vibrant in the jar or on a plate.

Once you have made harissa, what do you do with it?

Well, anything you would do with any other hot sauce. Put it in soups, stews or sauces to perk them up. Add it to any sort of egg dish, but especially scrambled eggs. Use it in a marinade for meats, use it in cooking or as a table sauce. (If you make that white bean and greens soup from Tangier I wrote about yesterday, you can put some harissa in it for a little extra kick. It’s really good that way.)

If you keep it tightly covered and keep the top covered with a layer of olive oil, your homemade harissa will stay fresh for six months in the fridge.

You can’t beat that, really.

Besides, with the holidays coming, homemade harissa would make a great gift for any hot-sauce heads among your family and friends.

Put into a clean jar just large enough to fit the sauce without leaving a lot of air space. Cover the top of the sauce with a thin layer of olive oil, close tightly and store in the refrigerator, where it will keep safely for six months.

The bees are dying.

They are dying of a strange disorder that causes the worker bees of a previously thriving honeybee hive to just fly away and never return. The brood (larvae) are left capped in their cells in the hive, with no one left to care for them. (Typically, adult bees will not leave a hive until the brood chambers have been uncapped.)

Thus far, no single cause has been found for this disorder, dubbed “Colony Collapse Disorder,” or CCD, while bees from across the United States, some parts of Europe, India, and South America eerily continue to die, silently and without warning.

And we will all die with them, because the tiny European honeybees are the pollinators for most of our food crops.

Who says?

Albert Einstein supposedly said so. “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

If that doesn’t scare the bejabbers out of you, nothing will.

And why is this happening?

Well, it could be the fault of genetically modified crops, otherwise known among the doomsayers as “frankenfood,” or it could be caused by cell phones making the bees’ homing instinct go awry so they cannot find their way home. Instead, they buzz around lost until they just fall down dead and exhausted. Both of these hypothesis have been put forth loudly in the media, with the significant subtext that this die-off is “all our fault, we are the ones to blame, and we should die for it.”

Or at least be scared to death over it.

It all sounds like a Twilight Zone episode, full of the creeping horror that in a very short span of time, civilization will collapse and most of humanity will starve to death, all because of the extinction of a single species of insect: the honeybee.

Scare-mongering sure sells newspapers, but it doesn’t necessarily make for a good understanding of a complex subject.

You see, the fact is, Albert Einstein probably didn’t really make that eloquent, chilling statement about bees and humans which is widely attributed to him. The first known use of that quote was in 1994, long after the esteemed scientist was dead, and so far, no one, including historians and scholars of the life of Einstein has reliably been able to trace that quote back to him having said it before he died.

In fact, the quote was probably made up and attributed to him for political purposes by a European beekeeper in 1994 during a spate of protests on the issue of cheaper imported honeys making it difficult for local beekeepers to stay financially solvent. I suppose that the real author of the quote will probably never be known, and it really doesn’t much matter–the fact is that even if Einstein -did- say it, and he was a genius, it doesn’t make the information contained in it factually correct. Einstein was a genius, yes, but a physicist, not a biologist or entomologist, so really–how could he predict the death of humans four years after the death of honeybees?

Not only did Einstein likely not make that famous dire prediction, but the issue of CCD is both more complex than most of the media is trumpeting, and likely not as apocalyptic.

In fact, it may not be a new phenomenon at all.

I bet most of you were wondering when I would jump in and post on the news stories related to CCD; it is a classic sort of story for Barbara to be concerned with and write about.

I haven’t before now for several reasons. First of all, while I read the very scary reports, including that quote from Einstein, which tied my stomach into knots and made me cradle my infant daughter, Kat, closer to my bosom in a seemingly futile gesture of protection, I was wary of jumping in on the “gloom and doom environmental apocalypse bandwagon” and adding my voice to the mounting media hysteria.

I wanted to hold off and do a bit of research and wait and see if there might arise some more moderate voices of reason from the scientific community.

I also wanted to take the time to talk to some beekeepers around here in Ohio and see what they had to say. (And what they said, each and every one of them, made me take a step back, a deep breath, and start digging a little deeper before running around like Chicken Little, screaming, “The end of the world is nigh!” Thank goodness for calm, reasonable bee keepers, including my friend Angela who said, “Oh, I really wish the newspapers wouldn’t write about this bee business yet. They always make it sound worse than it is. Bees die off periodically–it is what they do. But the world isn’t going to end over it now–it has been happening for years.”)

And I had been sitting on it for a while now, and probably still would be sitting, and writing about a really nice recipe today, if I hadn’t checked out Salon today to see this headline: “Who Killed the Honeybees?”

For all that the headline is pretty sensationalistic, and the graphic used to illustrate the article is way over the top, the piece itself, which is a round-table discussion/interview with four different experts on honeybees and CCD, is pretty informative and interesting.

And not nearly as scary as the editors made it sound like what with their headline and graphics choice and all.

The four experts had widely divergent views on the phenomenon of these honeybee die-offs, divergent enough to paint a clear picture to me that there is no consensus as to how bad CCD is, how widespread it really is, what could be causing it and how much it has to do with human ecological disruption.

Jeffery Pettis, research leader of the seriously underfunded USDA honeybee lab is of the opinion that this die-off is the worst in recorded history. He is also of the opinion that genetically modified crops are not at fault, and believes, in fact, that CCD is likely caused not by a single factor, but two or perhaps three co-factors working together in tandem. He believes that stressful conditions for the bees may be compromising their immunity to disease or parasites, combined with drought conditions which lead to less nutritive pollen for the bees which can lead to starvation, further stress and an even more compromised immune system.

Eric Mussen, of the Honey Bee Research Facility at the University of California at Davis, points to the fact that similar die-offs have occurred historically, and it may simply be cyclical. He also notes that the genetically-modified Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis–a species of bacteria which has been used by organic farmers to control insects for years–crops are now being grown that include the Bt within the plant tissues themselves) crops may have weakened honeybee’s immunity to parasites.

Wayne Esaias, of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and an amateur beekeeper who has kept careful records of the weather and its effect on his backyard bee hives for years, is of the belief that the erratic weather patterns caused by global warming is at least a factor in CCD, if not the sole cause of this troubling disorder. He cites the fact that the pollen and nectar flow of summer comes, on average, a month earlier now than it did in the 1970’s. This abrupt change in food supply may have come too quickly for honeybees to usefully adapt, thus somehow precipitating the unusual behaviors seen in CCD.

John McDonald, a biologist, beekeeper and farmer is pretty sure that genetically modified Bt crops have something to do with CCD, even though both Pettis and Mussen disagree with him. He wrote an eloquent op-ed piece recently for the San Francisco Chronicle on the subject outlining his concerns.

About the only thing that these experts agree on when it comes to CCD is that there is a problem, and cell phones probably are not causing it.

Two troubling facts jumped out at me as I read the Salon article.

One is that intensive monocropping, which is where acre after acre of nothing but a single variety of crop is planted–which is standard operating procedure for modern industrial farms–may be related to loss of food plants for bees and other pollinators to eat when the agricultural plants are finished blooming.

The other is that the National Academy of Sciences recently published a study that showed that all pollinators, not just honeybees, but native bees, butterflies, and wasps, all of which rely on a diversity of flowering plants are declining. No cause is known, but expanding urbanization, habitat loss, and ever-increasing monocropping and pesticide use may all be to blame.

Those two facts hit home for me, because when we lived in Pataskala, we lived very close to the largest orchard in Ohio, as well as down the road from a local hobby beekeeper. We also inherited a large garden, which included sweeping beds that were empty of all but foundation plantings: a few flowering and fruiting shrubs–lilacs, wiegela and barberry primarily–a picturesque stand of river birches, some hardy bulbs and about eight acres of woodlands.

Since our home looked architecturally like a witch’s cottage in the woods, we chose to emulate the English cottage garden in the abandoned beds and borders which came with our home. The herbaceous borders were largely empty, so we filled them with a plethora of blooming perennials, annuals, shrubs, herbs and vegetables, in a crowded, floriferous display of rampant blooms and foliage that lasted for three seasons of the year. (All of the photographs illustrating this post came from that garden.)

Over the three years we lived there, our wildly overgrown and productive gardens were a hub of insect and bird activity. Not only did we have honeybees galore buzzing over from our neighbor’s hives, we had plenty of other pollinators, too: native bumblebees, carpenter bees, butterflies, wasps, moths and hummingbirds. I even managed to see and photograph a rare sight–a hummingbird moth.

Since we have moved to Athens, however, I must say–I have not seen nearly the same amount of activity. This likely has to do with our lack of as large a garden. As we work to put together Kat’s garden, and in years to come, as we terrace the huge back slope and turn it into a productive space filled with a diverse group of flowering plants, I suspect that we will once more see a large amount of insect pollinators.

At least I hope so.

At any rate, though I wasn’t nearly as disheartened after reading the Salon article as I could have been, I was still downcast, until I ran across today’s posting on The Straight Dope concerning the very topic of CCD. Written by Douglas Yanega, an entomologist from the University of California, Riverside, who has been maintaining the Wikipedia page on the subject of CCD, the overview is succinct, and highly skeptical of the idea that this particular bee die-off is as apocalyptic as most of the major news media is making it out to be.

Yanega says, “… there’s no reason at this point to think European honey bees are going to be wiped out, now or ever. The die-offs so far appear to affect some beekeepers more than others, sometimes in the same area. That’s one reason scientists are so puzzled, but it strongly suggests the losses may have something to do with how individual beekeepers are managing their bees. The “significant percentage” of failing hives is still a drop in the bucket when viewed against the global population of honey bees, and there are lots of beekeepers (even in the U.S., which appears hardest hit) who have not had, and may never have, significant losses of colonies. Plenty of honey bees remain to replace the ones that have died. It’s not yet time to scream that the sky is falling.”

So there we are: the sky isn’t really falling, every honeybee in the world isn’t going to die tomorrow, and we humans are probably not going to starve to death within four years. I could feel that knot in my belly begin to relax a wee bit. I highly suggest Yanega’s two articles and the Salon piece as a remedy to the fearmongering that has been running rampant in the media on the issue of bees up until now.

Mind you, CCD is still a puzzling, and the decline of native pollinators is still bugging me. (No pun intended. No, really.) But, it is good to know that I don’t need to freak out over the issue and neither do you.

That said, I would still like folks to get out in the garden, and plant some extra flowers, you know, for the sake of the birds and the bees. (And yourself. Because, playing in the dirt is good for you. )

Add to the diversity of your local biosphere by finding out what flowers and plants attract butterflies, hummingbirds and bees, and plant as many of them as you can cram into whatever patch of dirt (even if it is a pot on your deck) you can. Every little bit helps, and not only that, but looking at flowers helps to lower your blood pressure after reading scary headlines like, “The BEES are DYING and SO ARE WE!!!!!”

You can even go a step farther, like my friend Angela, and keep a small hive of bees in your own urban garden.

Urban beekeeping is on the rise in the US, Canada, and the UK, and may help boost the number of pollinators in any given area. It also would give you a local supply of honey that came primarily from your own flowers, grown on your own land. That is pretty darned cool.

Basically, what I am advocating is this: don’t worry so much, or if you are worried–get up and do a little something to alleviate it.

Whether that means reading a little deeper, beyond the screaming headlines, or planting some monarda and echinacea, or even installing a beehive in your backyard, doing something about what is stressing you is a good bit healthier than just fretting and losing sleep over a seemingly insurmountable issue.