I hate you, mold!

Mold. Is there anything it can't ruin? Is there any such thing as a good mold? What is the evolutionary purpose of mold? Other than penicillin, does mold do anybody any good?

Obviously, I have mold in my hot house sprouting kit again. Or still, I should say. I was hoping that by frequent rinsing, I could delay the mold enough to give the seeds time to sprout. Today, however, when I checked, there was green mold on A. suarenzis White mold is fine; green mold, I've never seen it on my plants before, but I'm guessing, not so much.

I decided on an extreme remedy: boiling the seeds a second time. It might kill the seeds, but it might kill the mold first. Or not.

Now one thing I know, thanks to the fact that we get a boil-water order every year in spring, is that you have to boil water for a minute to defeat the germs, so I figured, if I boil my seeds for one minute, they should be mold-free. But I didn't have a clean pot available at that moment, so I decided to microwave some water. Water can become super-heated in the microwave, so that its temperature is in fact above boiling but it hasn't undergone phase transition yet. So I figured if I just throw the seeds into super-heated water, by the time the water cools down, the mold should be dead.

As it turns out, however, I didn't microwave the water long enough. My old microwave was very powerful; the one I have now, which I rent along with the apartment, is very feeble. So not only the water wasn't super-heated, it wasn't even boiling. But since you can't tell the difference to the naked eye, I only found this out when I put the seeds in.

Crud...

The white mold was promptly removed by the hot water. The green mold wasn't. But then I noticed something else. So I drained the water and looked at the seeds, and...

two of them had actually starting to sprout.

Boohoohoohoohoo!!!! I'm so sad. Why oh why didn't I rinse them in cold water first? Then I'd have known. And A. suarenzis is one of the two, which means I didn't even really need to worry about the green mold. Two more days, we'd have been fine. And the other was the kwyjibo seed, which is really hard to sprout and had no green mold, and really didn't need this treatment at all.

How sad... I might have killed two perfectly good sproutlings.

Or, maybe not. When you think about it, the water wasn't boiling, and they weren't in it very long. Both sprouts were still white and firm to the touch after the bath. Maybe they're still alive. I put A. suarenzis in one of the pasteurized geranium pots, and kwyjibo back in its cell. Maybe they'll live after all.

If not, at least I got experience. As the saying goes, "experience is what you get when you don't get what you want." I'm getting quite a bit of experience in sprouting stubborn seeds, if nothing else.

Circular excuses

For weeks, I've been coveting a pack of peat-free sprouting pellets that I saw at the hardware store, but they cost a fortune and I had nothing to sprout. Then I got my new baobab seeds in the mail, but I had nothing in which to sprout them. Actually, I wasn't going to sprout them until March. Then I realized, if I had peat-free sprouting pellets, I'd have a good excuse to sprout baobabs; and if I have baobabs, I have a good excuse to buy peat-free sprouting pellets.

Hmmmm...

Well, it's a rather circular reasoning, but it works for me. Of course the pack I coveted was gone from the store, so I went to the other hardware store, which has more selection and better prices anyway, and there, they had those huge seed-starting trays for people who grow vegetables and genuinely need to sprout things indoors in multiples of 72. Or something. Like anyone would ever need to sprout 72 baobabs at once. Even in their natural habitat, baobabs don't sprout 72 at a time. So that's obviously no good to me.

But then, in a different aisle, where the planters are, there it was: one little tray of just ten pellets. Just one, all by itself. $4.29.

$4.29?

Booya!


See? They call these things "greenhouse kits". It's a cheap plastic tray with divots in it like an egg carton, and in each divot is a peat-free pellet. Because peat takes thousands of years to form and we're destroying the earth's peat bogs for the sake of gardening. We can't even be ecological without destroying the earth. How sad. And then there is a clear plastic dome, to create greenhouse conditions. Plastic, ecologically friendly peat-free pellets, more plastic. Er... What? Well, I suppose they'll tell me the plastic is 100% post-consumer material and is also good for the environment, or something.


You pour water on the pellets and they expand. Ten times faster than the competition, it says on the package. (I'm assuming the printed cardboard packaging is also recycled, or something, right?) Really, that's a selling point? Because someone out there seeds so fast, they can't wait an extra minute for their sprouting pellets to expand?

Anyway. I didn't have ten species I wanted to seed, so I got the following: A. suarenzis, A. digitata, A. grandidieri, A. madagascarensis, Diospyros quiloensis, Coffea canephora, Piper nigrum, Arysthaema triphyllum, and two cells of Dodecatheon clevelandii.


Voila, a baobab forest (and that other stuff) sprouting on my nightstand. Sleep tight, little seeds!

Pray for my baobabs!

Currently I have six baobab seeds on the go, but I'm pretty sure one is dead and a second is not moving. Of the other four, two have been in the dirt for a long time, and two were just planted two days ago in pasteurized soil. I'm refraining from checking on them on the grounds that if they're alive, they don't need me bothering them, and if dead, there's nothing I can do about it.

In addition, there is still a lychee, which I think is dead; two kwyjibo seeds; three Robusta coffee seeds; 27 freshly destratified cherry pits; and the holly seeds that still have one month to go in the CryoVat. And then of course the dogwood and cotoneaster seeds in the outdoor CryoVat.

That's not all! There is also the peony root, the three alien spores, 12 tulip bulbs sleeping in the fridge, and 18 bulbs of various species spending the winter outside in the Jungle.

Why am I on about this? Because some weeks ago I read an article about the efficacy of prayer. You see, I'm a Lutheran, and I would say a fairly devout one. Though of course since Lutherans are fairly rare (about 0.26% of Canadians, if I'm not mistaken), I only meet them at church, and ipso facto every Lutheran I know is "fairly devout."

Be that as it may, I don't believe in prayer.

GASP!

How can you be a devout Christian and not believe in prayer? Because we Lutherans believe in thinking about what we believe, whereas most people consider that faith and reason are intrinsically incompatible. But if you look at prayer logically in the context of what we believe we know about God, it should be self-evident that prayer, as most people do it, is useless. There are three things you can do with prayer: give glory, give thanks, or admit you're powerless and affirm your trust in God. Most people, however, use prayer to make long to-do lists for God, and therefore expect that God will manifest his approval by getting some of the to-do list done. And then they'll tell you "prayer works."

All right then. I set out to find out what evidence there is of the efficacy of prayer. Because one thing I can tell you for sure, I've read the entire New Testament, and nothing in it supports the idea that you can tell God what you want and he'll get 'er done for you. So if there is evidence for the efficacy of prayer, given that it isn't supported by the Bible, it better be supported by something very, very convincing.

Promptly I found an article titled Scientific Research of Prayer: Can the Power of Prayer Be Proven? by Debra Williams, D.D. (1999 PLIM Retreat, (c) 1999 PLIM REPORT, Vol. 8 #4).

Ok, first of all, "D.D." means "Doctor of Divinity". I have a B.Sc., "Bachelor of Science." That means I have scientific training and she doesn't. So I feel competent to question her findings. Or lack of findings, insofar that the article isn't original research, but a survey of some of the existing research. In particular, I find the following statement: "In a study on germinating seeds done by Dr. Franklin Loehr, a Presbyterian minister and scientist, the objective was to see in a controlled experiment what effect prayer had over living and seemingly non-living matter. In one experiment they took three pans of various types of seeds. One was the control pan. One pan received positive prayer, and the other received negative prayer. Time after time, the results indicated that prayer helped speed germination and produced more vigorous plants. Prayers of negation actually halted germination in some plants and suppressed growth in others."

Hmmmmm...

Most interesting. Further on, regarding an experiment using bacteria:

Bacteria presumably do not think positively or negatively. Another major advantage of microorganisms in studies of distant mental intentions has to do with the control group. If the effects of intercessory prayer, for example, are being assessed in a group of humans who have a particular illness, it is difficult to establish a pure control group that does not receive prayer. The reason is that sick human beings generally pray for themselves; or outsiders pray for them, thus contaminating the control group, which by definition should not receive the treatment being evaluated.

In studies involving microbes, this notorious "Problem of Extraneous Prayer" is totally overcome because one can be reasonably certain that the bacteria, fungi, or yeast in a control group will not pray for themselves. And that their fellow microbes will not pray for them.

If the study involved negative intentions instead of positives, the advantages remain the same. The thoughts of microorganisms do not influence its outcome.

Jean Barry, a physician-researcher in Bordeaux, France, chooses to work with a destructive fungus, Rhizoctonia Solani. He asked 10 people to try to inhibit its growth merely through their intentions at a distance of 1.5 meter.

The experiment involved control Petri dishes with fungi that were not influenced in addition to those that were. The laboratory conditions were carefully controlled regarding the genetic purity of the fungi and the composition of the culture medium, the relative humidity, and the conditions of temperature and lighting.

The control petri dishes and the influenced dishes were treated identically, except for the negative intentions directed toward the latter. A person who was blind to the details of the experiment handled various manipulations. The influences simply took their stations at the 1.5 meters and were free to act as they saw fit for their own concentration. For 15 minutes each subject was assigned five experimental and five control dishes. Of the ten subjects three to six subjects worked during a session, and there were nine sessions.

Measurement of the fungi colony on the Petri dish was obtained by outlining the boundary of the colony on a sheet of thin paper. Again, someone who did not know the aim of the experiment or the identity of the Petri dishes did this. The outlines were then cut out and weighed under condition of constant temperature and humidity. When the growth in 195 experimental dishes was compared to their corresponding controls, it was significantly retarded in 151 dishes. The possibility that these results could be explained by chance was less than one in a thousand.

Hmmmmmm...

You see, I'm pretty sure that this proves the opposite of anything, but first of all as the more educated scientist here, I take exception with the idea that "one can be reasonably certain" that micro-organisms cannot pray for themselves or each other. In fact eukaryotes very much have the ability to sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony, so whatever non-thoughts go on in their non-brains, I think the last thing I would want to assume about them is that they're not capable of wishing for the well-being of their peers with all their non-heart, with all their non-soul, and with all their non-mind.

Regardless, if we make the assumption that humans have far greater capacity for prayer than bacteria, we can still explain this result as a sign of the power of prayer, in a sense. But if we grant (which I haven't so far) that this proves that prayer does indeed reliably control the growth rate of bacteria, then it also proves that the mechanism by which prayer works has nothing to do with any Higher Power. If the power of prayer lay in the ability of humans to dictate the actions of a Higher Power, then most certainly this experiment would have failed, because the Higher Power would not waste its time speeding and slowing the growth of bacteria over and over as the humans dictate. If there is a Higher Power, then by definition we do not have power over it, therefore we can't make it do this sophomoric little trick with the bacteria every time we ask.

So apparently, attempts at scientific investigation of the efficacy of prayer have shown us two things: 1) prayer makes plants grow faster and 2) this is completely independent of a/the Higher Power. Which means that it isn't necessary to believe in any Higher Power, or in the efficacy of prayer in influencing said Higher Power, in order for prayer to make plants grow.

Ha.

Well actually, that's rather to my advantage. If I believed God listens to those whiny lists of demands and goes out of his way to comply, I certainly wouldn't pray for something as irrelevant as a baobab seed. But since obviously this has nothing to do with God, and since there is some rudimentary support for its effectiveness, it's worth trying. So if you're NOT the praying type and/or you do NOT believe in a Higher Power, please pray for my seeds, bulbs, roots, rhizomes and alien spores. Because the more you do, the more I'll have to blog about.

QED, yes?

The kwyjibo tree

I got some seeds in the mail this morning. They're called "crocodile bark jackal berry."

What's a crocodile bark jackal berry?

I have absolutely no idea. I was looking for something else and I saw the name, and the supplier didn't have a picture, and it was "only two bucks." Like I always say, everything is "only two bucks" until you buy 150 of them.

So, now I have five seeds of crocodile bark jackal berry. I could google it, but I'm not going to; that way it will be a surprise. Assuming I can even get them to sprout, as tropical seeds are a bit of a bother. But the thing is, Blogger post tags can only be 255 characters total, and "crocodile bark jackal berry" is 28 characters, so that's a waste of space. So for the sake of brevity, it will henceforth be known on this blog as the kwyjibo tree.

So now you know.