Happy Holidays!

I survived finals! I'm so thankful to have a whole month of winter break ahead of me. A small amount of it will be spent in Houston, Texas because my college football team is playing in a bowl game there on the 28th and the band is going too! Then it'll be home or a little more than a week in January and the rest of the time will be spent relaxing in Minnesota.

In honor of the holidays, I did a little research on the lovely poinsettias that grace all the holiday displays every year.

1. Poinsettias are native to Mexico and the ancient Aztecs, who called the plant "Cuetlaxochitl", used their colorful bracts (the red part) to make dyes and the sap was used as a fever medication.

2. Poinsettias were first only known by the Latin name Euphorbia pulcherrima, meaning "very beautiful".

3. The plant got it's current common name from Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first US ambassador assigned to Mexico by John Quincy Adams. While in Mexico for his work as an ambassador, Poinsett, who was also an avid botanist, collected plants to bring back to his home in South Carolina and is known for officially introducing the poinsettia to the United States. A man named William Prescott, who was given the task of giving Euphorbia pulcherrima a new name had been working on a history of Poinsett and assigned the plant the new name of "Poinsettia".

4. This plant is very popular around Christmas as the flowers are said to represent the star that guided the wise men to the baby Jesus. The color red also symbolizes the blood sacrifice of the crucifixion of Jesus. Today, the flower is known in Mexico and Guatemala as "La Flor de la Nochebuena" (or "The Flower of Christmas Eve").

5. In Spain, poinsettias are used as an Easter flower as opposed to the popular use as a Christmas flower elsewhere.

6. Contrary to popular belief, poinsettias are only mildly toxic, meaning children and pets would have to eat a lot of poinsettias before dying. A study at Ohio State University shows that you'd have to eat 500-600 leaves before the side effect would be death. That being said, eating them would still cause an upset stomach an vomiting and apparently they don't taste very good anyway, so why you'd want to even try them is beyond me.

 

(I find this picture hilarious. He's so grumpy!)

7. Poinsettias are mostly grown in California and their sale contributes more than $250 million to the US economy at the retail level.

(Source)

So now that you all have a few interesting facts to impress your family and friends this season, I'll be signing off for a while to enjoy Christmas with my family here in Minneapolis. My family surprised me by coming down from Michigan a day early and we got to my grandmas to find all the decorations up (as you can see below). So I wish you all a very Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and a very festive New Year. :)

Accepted!

"Congratulations! You have been admitted to the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS) for Spring Semester 2013. Welcome to CFANS!"

Yesterday morning I woke up to this lovely sentence starting the first email in my inbox. I'm officially a Horticulture major! No more, "potential" about any of it. As an added bonus, one of my really good friends got the same email as well. So we're finally, officially in the track to getting our Bachelor of Science in Horticulture.

Also, IT FINALLY SNOWED!

And with that update, back to finals week studying! Happy Wednesday everyone!

Finals

This will be a rather short post, but just as a heads up, I will be disappearing into the depths of finals week (or should I say finals month!) starting tomorrow so I won't be posting very much.
On a happier note, once school is out for break I'll have a month off to post a good amount. I'm also going to be traveling to Houston, Texas right after Christmas as my band is attending a bowl game that my University's football team is playing in. I'll try to post some pictures of any plant related things I see down there. :)
Until then, I might post once, but I'll be studying as much as possible in the coming weeks.
See you all around the holidays!

Find of the Day

While surfing the internet today I found a really awesome product that ties in with the aquaponics post I put up yesterday. It's quite similar to the large beds of vegetables fed by water from fish tanks, only in miniature (and much more compact and stylish!).
The page is titled "One Pot, Two Lives" (click the title for the link) and is a fish tank and flower pot all in one. The fishy's waste feeds the plant while the plant filters the fish's water. You still have to feed the fish, but there doesn't look to be a whole lot of nasty fish tank cleaning involved.

 

It also does look like it needs to be plugged in, probably for a bubbler to keep the fish water moving.  Hopefully it would be a simple fix if it broke and wouldn't need to be thrown away if only part of it broke. 

It's not specific as to if certain kinds of plants are preferred over others. It would certainly be an awesome thing to have in a small apartment like the one I live in. Surfing through the comments, it seems that the only fish that would work in a small environment like this would be a beta fish or a goldfish. No one knew if there was a heater in this product, but both of those fish don't need one because they're okay with colder water temperatures. Of course, most of the debate centered around if it was "cruel" or not to keep a fish in such a small container. But I say that's up to the individual to decide. The concept is, however, a really cool one. It would be neat to see if this could be made into something a bit larger, possibly on the size of a regular fish tank with multiple fish and plants.

Lots of Plants, Small Spaces

Today, being the last day of our long Thanksgiving weekend, I decided to spend the day browsing gardening blogs, pinning great garden projects to Pinterest and getting sucked into some great videos about urban farming and hydroponics on Youtube. I found these through one video I saw while browsing the blog The Blogging Nurseryman by Trey Pitsenberger.
I thought I'd share a few.

1. Internet of Food: Ardunio-based, Urban Aquaponics in Oakland
This video was the one I found on Trey Pitsenberger's blog and led me to the others. The concept of aquaponics with a garden fed by water from a fish tank was new to me and the video was really informative. I also loved the technology element, one in which the gardener can interact with their garden through the internet. Figuring this technology out now in order to pass it on to younger gardeners, ones who will be inheriting a world where there's a need for smaller gardening spaces and new ways to grow what we need.

 

2. Biointensive Mini-Farming: Grow More Food in Less Space

This video was a neat look into how one person can grow all the food (if you're a vegetarian that is) they could need in a small space. One of the most interesting things to me was the grains being raised and how many of them were alternative grains to regular wheat.

3. Urban Forest Erupts in San Fransisco's Edgy Tenderloin

I loved this video. This is about a garden springing up in an alleyway between apartment buildings in the middle of a densely populated area of San Fransisco. The greenery just seemed that much, well, greener surrounded by all that concrete. The local art decorating the buildings and the clay oven they actually cook were really cool touches. My favorite part was the the words "Our Lady of the Alley" painted around the oldest resident's kitchen window that looked out upon a cherry tree they planted just for her.

4. Soil-less Sky Farming: Rooftop Hydroponics on NYC Resteraunt

The last video was about a resteraunt in New York City that grows it's fresh produce on the roof of it's building. Climbing up six stories, you'll find the roof covered in tall, very thick PVC-looking pipes that have notches cut into the sides where the produce grows, fed by water that is mixed with fertilizer and pumped through the top of the pipe to rain down the sides and water the plants. It was another really good look at a method of hydroponics I'd never seen and was interesting to see how much faster the plants grew in this way and how high a yield the restaurant gained from it.

 All of these videos certainly inspired me because at this point I'm starting to look at focusing my major towards things like urban farming and other sustainable methods of growing food in the spaces left to us, ones that just keep getting smaller and smaller. I find it fascinating how resourceful we can be when it comes to feeding ourselves and the new ways we find to go about doing so.

The videos were found on the channel of the co-founder of *faircompanies where all of these videos and a lot more can be found. The channel has a lot of videos on individuals, small companies and businesses who are doing projects in a much more different and sustainable way. I certainly enjoyed the one about the couple who build hobbit holes as playhouses, chicken coops and even tiny cottages. I'd definitely check some more of them out because there will probably be quite a few more of interest to you.

And I'm Back!

Hello all!
I'm sorry for not posting for about 2 months. I can't believe it's been that long. It's felt like only a few weeks!
Like I said in my last post, this semester's been pretty crazy. My classes have been going okay. I'm just barely making it through my algebra course (I'm terrible at math) and struggling to pass my online chemistry course. I'm just hoping it all turns out okay in the end.
As far as updates on the horticulture major, I'm talking to the department adviser tomorrow to get details about switching into the college I need to declare the major and what courses I should take next semester. At this point I'm looking at Intro to Microeconomics, Intro to Soil Science and a basic Biology course. I'd only be taking three courses, plus a campus band and pep band so hopefully I would have time to look for a job/work once I find a job. Because I'm a poor college student and really just need to work. :P

As far as personal updates go, one big reason I didn't post at all last month was because on the 14th I was in a car/pedestrian accident where my boyfriend, his dad and I (and three other people I didn't know) were struck by a drunk driver as they made a left turn (not yielding to the bunch of people crossing the street with the right of way). Everyone that was involved was okay, my boyfriends dad with the worst injuries of a broken leg and slightly fractured shoulder. I had a lot of bruises to my knees because that was where I was struck and some bumps and bruises from being thrown, but an MRI and multiple doctors visits confirm that I don't have anything more serious than some deep bruising in my legs. At this point, I'm almost healed up, but it'll probably be another two weeks before the majority of the bruises are totally gone. We were really lucky though, so I'm super super thankful for that.

Needless to say, all that craziness really threw my academics off. So I probably won't be getting the best grades this semester, but hopefully I can pull a pass in everything.
My horticulture class is going pretty well. Memorizing Latin names is certainly a challenge, but I tend to do a lot better than I assume I will, so it's pleasantly surprising to get good grades back. For our last midterm we were required to learn the common and Latin names of 70 deciduous trees... Somehow it managed to be my best test score yet in that class. Our next midterm that's coming up next week is on the conifers and thankfully there's not as many trees to memorize this time. :)
That's about all the updates I have for you guys. I hope you're still reading! I'll leave you with some pictures I've taken during our class walks around campus. :)
-Abby

Sophomore Shenanigans

Hello readers!
Sorry I've been MIA lately. The beginning of my second year of college is proving to be much more busy than I expected it to be. My excursions into horticulture are much different than they were last year, and this, along with my other classes and extra curriculars, have been keeping me on fast forward for the past three weeks. On top of my course work, every Saturday for all three weeks of the semester so far has been a football game which I'm required to rehearse for and play at for marching band. Needless to say, I've had few breaks.
The little break I have now before tomorrow's football game is the little window of time I've found to write.
Like I said before, this semester's horticulture courses are nothing like last semester. Instead of work in the greenhouse, this class is completely plant identification. Our labs consist of excursions outside around campus, learning the Latin and common names of plants. We then have to memorize these names and are quizzed every week. It's pretty tough work, but I've managed to get by pretty well so far. We have midterms next week already, so we'll see how the 20 plant identification goes. Thankfully the class is broken into sections and the final exam isn't cumulative. Instead, it's broken into herbaceous plants and woody plants, with another section that hasn't been quite determined yet for once it's to cold and snowy out for identifying plants outside to be effective.
The one setback to my year so far has been my other requirements to the horticulture major, algebra in particular. I've never been very good at math, so college algebra, a class I'm required to take to enter into the college that offers the horticulture major, has been very difficult for me. Chemistry is going somewhat better, but it's a hard class to keep track of with everything else happening.
With that update, I'll leave you with some pictures of the plants we've been identifying in class.