Petals Fall But Soldiers Stand Strong

Petals fall like an enormous war that just broke out

Soldiers are heroes

That is the ultimate truth

The roots from a rose describes their power

In their eyes

We see the spark

Fighting till the end is a beauty untouched

Tears are powerful, but emotions are even

Stronger

Let us hope they come home safe

Seeing petals fall is beautiful

But

When soldiers fall

It’s an ugly mess

So come home safe

Is what we desire!

Salmonella Probe Adds Foods Served With Tomatoes

Salmonella has been a wake up call for many people. The debate between the Tomato growers and FDA has become a back and forth battle that continues to arise. One reason this is happening is not long ago we had a break out of E. Coli in Spinach. The profits of Spinach declined to a new low as more and more customers decided to stop eating spinach. Tomato growers are feeling this might repeat and will cause the Tomato industry bankruptcy. What’s amazing is that Tomatoes industry is a 2 billion dollar industry that has only been growing steadily for the past decade, but with an outbreak of Salmonella the market will lose it’s cool and many people working in this industry will lose a lot of money.

The following article outlines a plan that FDA will take in the future. They will start testing other fresh produce, which they hope will lead to an answer about Salmonella out break. They believe Tomatoes are not the main cause of Salmonella. They could be in other fresh produce that has caused this outbreak.

Here is the link

Volunteers Across Nation to Track Climate Clues in Spring Flowers

A nationwide initiative starting tomorrow will enable volunteers to track climate change by observing the timing of flowers and foliage. Project BudBurst, operated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and a team of partners, allows students, gardeners, and other citizen scientists in every state to enter their observations into an online database that will give researchers a detailed picture of our warming climate.

Cinquefoil wildflowers in Colorado. [ENLARGE] (Photo by Carlye Calvin, ©UCAR.) News media terms of use*

The project will operate year round so that early- and late-blooming species in different parts of the country can be monitored throughout their life cycles. Project BudBurst builds on a pilot program carried out last spring, when several thousand participants recorded the timing of the leafing and flowering of hundreds of plant species in 26 states.

The Chicago Botanic Garden and University of Montana are collaborators on Project BudBurst, which was funded with a grant from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The project is also supported by the National Science Foundation and Windows to the Universe, a UCAR-based Web site that will host the project online as part of its citizen science efforts.

“Climate change may be affecting our backyards and communities in ways that we don’t even notice,” says project coordinator Sandra Henderson of UCAR’s Office of Education and Outreach. “Project BudBurst is designed to help both adults and children understand the changing relationship among climate, seasons, and plants, while giving the participants the tools to communicate their observations to others. Based on the success of last year’s pilot program, this project is capturing the public’s imagination in a way we never expected.”

“Project BudBurst provides an exciting opportunity for the public, particularly children, to contribute to scientific research on the effects of global climate change on plants,” adds Kayri Havens, a senior scientist with the Chicago Botanic Garden.

How the project works

Each participant in Project BudBurst selects one or more plants to observe. The project Web site suggests more than 60 widely distributed trees and flowers, with information on each. Users can add their own choices.

Participants begin checking their plants at least a week prior to the average date of budburst–the point when the buds have opened and leaves are visible. After budburst, participants continue to observe the tree or flower for later events, such as the first leaf, first flower and, eventually, seed dispersal. When participants submit their records online, they can view maps of these phenological events across the United States.

The science of phenology, or tracking cyclic behavior among plants and animals, has a distinguished history. In Japan and China, for example, the blossoming of cherry and peach trees is associated with ancient festivals, some of which extend back more than a thousand years. Cherry trees in Japan now bloom four days earlier than in the 1950s, according to the nation’s meteorological agency.

A warming trend

Numerous plant and animal species throughout the world are being affected by climate change. Some plants respond to warmer temperatures by extending their growing seasons. Others shift their ranges toward the poles or to higher elevations.

At the same time, many insects breed and disperse based on regular cycles of sunlight rather than temperature. This can cause a mismatch between the behavior of pollinating insects, such as bees, and flowers that bloom earlier than the insects expect. Such asynchronous behavior has already been noted across many parts of the world.

Along with the partners noted above, Project BudBurst collaborators include the Plant Conservation Alliance; USA-National Phenology Network; and the universities of Arizona; California, Santa Barbara; Wisconsin-Milwaukee; and Wisconsin-Madison.

Source

Guerrilla Gardeners Green Their City On Secret Moonlit Missions

This is an interesting article that is worth reading:

LONDON, England (CNN) — On any given day amidst a backdrop of buses, buildings, cars and construction sites, Richard Reynolds can be found bent over pulling weeds, planting flowers or maybe even trimming some shrubs.

Guerrilla gardeners cultivate what was once a patch of derelict land in London.

Sometimes he does it in the morning or in the early afternoon. Often he goes out in the middle of the night because, he says, it’s calmer then, with only him and the plants and the city lights and the stars — and also because, in the darkness, he’s less likely to be arrested for digging up land that doesn’t belong to him.

“I have been stopped by the police and threatened with arrest, which was very depressing,” said Reynolds. “They insisted I stop, which I did, but I went back an hour and a half later and finished off the job.”

Reynolds calls himself a guerrilla gardener — a horticultural warrior who fights battles with flower bulbs instead of bombs to try to reclaim urban turf that has been neglected or altogether forgotten and beautify it back into green space for the enjoyment of all.

The first piece of land he conquered was a tiny bricked-in plot outside the entrance of his apartment building in the London Borough of Southwark. It was filled with nothing but compacted dirt, trash and weeds. “Presumably at one time it had been beautiful,” Reynolds told CNN.

He then moved onto bigger beds (that also didn’t belong to him) down by the street, venturing out at 2 a.m. with fistfuls of flowers for residents to find afresh in the morning. “I felt like Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy,” he said.

And now, four years after Reynolds planted the first illegal seed, a grassroots guerrilla gardening movement has sprouted up around him, with thousands of revolutionaries throughout the world who are armed and ready with rakes and shovels to turn areas of urban decay into springy patches of peonies and sunflowers. Watch Richard Reynolds and his guerrilla gardeners in action. »

In London alone, Reynolds has led dozens of covert digs with hundreds of flower-empowered followers to transform derelict dirt on street corners, roadways and roundabouts into places of rediscovered horticultural beauty — one of his favorite projects, Reynolds says, is a lavender field planted in a once-barren median on Westminster Bridge Road.

Other avant-garde gardening clubs operate in cities like Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and New York, where the Green Guerrillas, one of the first guerrilla groups, was founded by artist Liz Christy in 1973.

“I really think it is kind of a win-win situation,” said Reynolds. “The authorities or whoever owns the land is getting it improved if it is neglected.”

Most of the time, the guerrilla gardeners’ gardens are gardens of peace unless, of course, landowners decide they don’t want them there, which, with the exception of an angry bar owner in east London, usually never happens — a spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan Police Service said that while he had never heard of the seed-sowing bandits, any criminal activity — even illicit gardening — is discouraged and would be subject to prosecution.

Yet on increasingly common occasions, local governments and landowners have actually legitimized some of the illegal flower patches, granting their gardeners permission to plant them and thus rendering them no longer guerrilla.

This happened with Esther Jury’s moonlight gardening in abandoned beds around her tower block in the London neighborhood of Islington. After arranging a meeting with her residents association, Jury was given the (green) thumbs up to continue working the land and just last year, her apartment complex was recognized by Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society for its exemplary blossoms. See images of Esther Jury’s gardens and others. »

Reynolds has also received permission to plant tiger lilies, poppies or whatever other flower he wants in the beds below his tower block in Southwark. “It is now an official sort of public community gardened voluntary space,” he said. “Long may it last.”

Other covert horticulturalists have even inspired local residents to get involved in the greening.

On Andy Beauchamp’s street in the notoriously irritable south London neighborhood of Peckham, for example, almost every single doorstep is dressed with flower-filled planters and over-flowing window boxes after Beauchamp decided one day to start sticking plants in front of his neighbors’ homes.

Much to his pleasant surprise, many of his neighbors started to care for them and even began adding more. Now the tiny residential row has garden parties and other get-togethers along with bumblebees and birds.

“It is greener and in many ways a lot safer,” said Beauchamp. “You are unlikely to get crime in a place that looks attractive.”

A similar story has sprouted on Sean Canavan’s street near Camden Market in north London where, almost a decade ago, Canavan began planting Busy Lizzies and hollyhocks underneath all the cherry trees that line his road.

Canavan does most of his digging in the dark — not because he’s trying to hide but because he’s almost completely blind and the sunlight hurts his eyes. He took up gardening after losing his sight because, he says, it was the only thing he could find to do that made him feel good.

“It has given me a lot of confidence in myself and makes me feel useful and worthwhile,” he told CNN. “It gives me a purpose and is something I enjoy.”

Now on any given day, Canavan can be found with his guide dog Khara walking up and down his street carrying water jugs to his Busy Lizzies and hollyhocks. And sometimes on warm breezy summer afternoons like this one, he pauses to see if he can see what he has grown.

“I don’t know what color those flowers are,” he says while stopped in front of a giant hollyhock that has taken two years to grow. “Are they yellow? I like the yellow ones.”

Source

Have Any Of You Ever Seen A Blue Rose?

Have any of you ever seen a Blue Rose? Well, here is a little sneak preview to a phenomenon that science are currently working on:

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