Ridgewood NJ, Deeply Rooted. This is my new venture, consisting of pop up plant shops, until I can find my brick and mortar retail location and retire in a year or two!
Additionally, if any of you have a business location or know of one that would like to host a pop up, I’m looking to do about one a month. So far August and October are booked, in Ridgewood locations. I’m mostly interested in Glen Rock, Ho-ho-kus, Allendale, etc, but I’m open to other towns!
Ridgewood NJ, our backyards have taken on a greater importance in our lives since the COVID-19 pandemic. Yards, parks and other green spaces are the safe places for socializing, playtime and recreation. Just about anything you can do indoors – working, cooking, reading, exercising – can be done outside. And that’s why so many people are “backyarding” today and enhancing and expanding their personal bit of green.
Ridgewood NJ, NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife has created an interesting website to upgrade Your yard for wildlife! With all the extra time at home lately, lots of people are trading travel plans for house projects, starting gardens, and finding ways to make our yards a little more cozy, colorful, and self-sufficient. The right kind of landscaping can also make a better home for beneficial insects (and other wildlife, too), for whom backyard habitats are important “stepping-stones” that keep their populations healthy and connected.
Jersey-Friendly Yards has great tips to help you create that better yard! Mow less and flower more…get inspired with the Interactive Yard tool:
The Interactive Yard – Learn how to transform yours into a Jersey-Friendly Yard!
Catch the summer webinar series, “Wild About Jersey-Friendly Yards,” to get bonus pointers for your backyard habitat. And check the Jersey-Friendly plant database to pick the best native plantings for your specific part of the Garden State.
See our Connecting Habitat Across New Jersey Guidance Document (Chapter 4, page 9) for even more resources like these. You don’t need a lot of land to be part of the CHANJ!
For centuries, herbal medicine has provided a safe and natural way to treat or prevent diseases. Aside from curing diseases, plant-based medicine has been proven to be an effective way to improve one’s health and well-being. One of these common plants used in natural dietary supplements and other herbal products is the plant called milk thistle.
USA TODAY NETWORKJames M. O’Neill, The (Bergen County, N.J.) Record
WOODLAND PARK, N.J. — Despite the large, heavy-duty waterproof boots he wore, Scott Sherwood stepped with a dancer’s delicacy through a mucky meadow, trying to avoid crushing the tiny yellow wildflowers blooming all around him.
After all, this flower grows only in this one location in New Jersey — and no place else on Earth.
Eating a leaf off a plant may not kill it, but that doesn’t mean the plant likes it. The newest study to examine the intelligence (or at least behavior) of plants finds that plants can tell when they’re being eaten — and send out defenses to stop it from happening.
We’ve been hearing for decades about the complex intelligence of plants; last year’s excellent New Yorker piece is a good place to start, if you want to learn more about the subject. But a new study, conducted by researchers at the University of Missouri, managed to figure out one new important element: plants can tell when they’re being eaten, and they don’t like it.
The word “intelligence,” when applied to any non-human animal or plant, is imprecise and sort of meaningless; research done to determine “intelligence” mostly just aims to learn how similar the inner workings of another organism is to a human thought process. There’s certainly nothing evolutionarily important about these sorts of intelligence studies; a chimp is not superior to a chicken just because chimps can use tools the same way humans do. But these studies are fascinating, and do give us insight into how other organisms think and behave, whatever “think” might mean.
This particular study was on the ever-popular Arabidopsis, specifically the thale cress, easily the most popular plant for experimentation. It’s in the brassica family, closely related to broccoli, kale, mustard greens, and cabbage, though unlike most of its cousins it isn’t very good to eat. This particular plant is so common for experiments because it was the first plant to have its genome sequenced, so scientists understand its inner workings better than almost any other plant.
Vegans Beware How Plants Secretly Talk to Each Other
By Kat McGowan
12.20.13 | 9:30 am
Up in the northern Sierra Nevada, the ecologist Richard Karban is trying to learn an alien language. The sagebrush plants that dot these slopes speak to one another, using words no human knows. Karban, who teaches at the University of California, Davis, is listening in, and he’s beginning to understand what they say.
Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
The evidence for plant communication is only a few decades old, but in that short time it has leapfrogged from electrifying discovery to decisive debunking to resurrection. Two studies published in 1983 demonstrated that willow trees, poplars and sugar maples can warn each other about insect attacks: Intact, undamaged trees near ones that are infested with hungry bugs begin pumping out bug-repelling chemicals to ward off attack. They somehow know what their neighbors are experiencing, and react to it. The mind-bending implication was that brainless trees could send, receive and interpret messages.
