Gardening – Yarn, Books & Roses

The BioGeek Memoirs: Jade Plant

I still have with me the jade plant that I bought for my classroom almost 25 years ago. I had to make a special trip to the garden center to locate one that year as I needed it for a prop in a lesson in AP Biology about photosynthesis.

Okay, I told a little lie. This isn’t that original plant, but a direct clone of the original. In a way I still have that plant that was bought so long ago in a panic trip to the garden center near the high school I taught at.

Why did I need that plant? Well…do you remember anything about photosynthesis? (I mean, why would you unless you like to memorize chemical formulas from your days in the classroom, and then retain them for the rest of your life…) I’m guessing that you haven’t thought about it in a loooong time! I should start out mentioning that plants use their leaves as little factories to capture sun energy and then they transform that energy into a chemical form that can be used by the plant to make everything that it needs to stay alive. On their way to producing sugars (which we can think about as stored energy) the plants take carbon dioxide from the air, water from the ground, and then produce oxygen as a waste product along with the sugar that they need. Whew. Photosynthesis. There are a lot of structures and chemistry involved and it makes brains hurt everywhere when this unit is taught in biology classrooms. As a teacher I tried to use cute animations, labs, demos, activities, and as many props as I could drag into the classroom. Facing a section in the AP Biology curriculum that demanded that the students understand different types of photosynthesis (adaptations that plants have to survive in extreme environments), I needed examples of the different types of plants.

Which brings me back to the jade plant. This plant comes from Africa; southern Africa to be exact, and it is adapted to living in dry conditions. Remember that plants need carbon dioxide to do photosynthesis? The leaves of most plants have little trap doors (called stomata) that open to let air in. If the plant is losing water through these trap doors too quickly they shut. For plants growing in hot, dry conditions, this is a problem as plants need both CO2 and sunlight to do photosynthesis, but opening the stomata in the day dries out the plant. Jade plants solve the problem by only opening these little trap doors in their leaves at night. The jade does some chemical trickery to store the CO2 dissolved in water stored in the leaves where it is safely banked until the sun comes up. Did you notice how thick the leaves of the jade plant were? These plants need thick, waxy leaves with lots of stored water to support their photosynthesis. When the sun comes up the little trap doors are closed, but the CO2 is released from its chemically captured form in the leaf where it is now used for photosynthesis. Sneaky, right? Do your photosynthesis, minimize water loss, and survive in the wasteland: way to go, jade plant!! The whole process is called Crassulacean acid metabolism or CAM photosynthesis. The entire process was worked out in plants that belong to the same group as jades, which is why I needed a jade plant!

Anyway, back to my plant. It got really old and kind of ugly, so I took cuttings off it and gave plants away to people. When the plant that I kept grew into a shape I didn’t like anymore, I took more cuttings and started a whole new generation of plants growing.

So easy to get a new plant. I made four pots with cuttings, gave two away and kept two with me. They grew really well in my indoor garden under the grow lights and then in the summer I put then outside in a shady location, and they really took off then. These cutting are now the grandchildren of my original plant, but also genetically identical to that jade.

Here are the plants after their second summer outside. I now have them behind chicken wire because of Mateo. He loves to dig in the plants, but they are toxic to cats, so best to be safe.

Yes, one plant is much larger than the other. I don’t know why, but I suspect that it may have something to do with the slime mold that suddenly appeared in the soil the first summer that the plants went outdoors. Actually, that’s why they went outdoors. No slime molds in the house!!! Mine looked exactly like the slime mold used in the opening credits of The Last of Us if you watched it. Do you see why the plants moved outside?

They were fairly large at this stage and getting pretty dense. Happy plants, right?

The jades are 4 years old now and too big to get behind the chicken wire indoor garden. Mateo and Hannah don’t mess with them, so they are growing in the front room. Everything was fine until…

…this picture arrived in my Facebook feed from Nick’s Garden Center, the place where I bought the first plant all those years ago. It’s a blooming jade plant!!! Me want, badly!!!!!

I actually drove over to look at this plant, but it had already been sold.

Dying of blooming jade plant envy, I hit the internet looking for ways to get my plants to bloom. Water more, some sites suggested. Hold the water said others. Everyone said to give the plants a high phosphorus fertilizer to encourage blooming. Do it in the late winter, early spring for best results.

Okay, let’s think about this. This plant comes from an arid region. These are CAM plants, so it makes sense that more water helps with photosynthesis and that means that they have all the materials that they need to grow, and they will prosper if they grow because they need to store extra water in their leaves. The plants actually don’t like overly damp soil, so they have been taking action to keep the soil the way that works best for them. These plants have been growing really well… I think that I have been overwatering them.

This is the plant at four years old. It is now huge, and it has been doing well over the winter in a western facing window. There is lots of new growth.

Yeah, these guys are totally going on a water diet. I gave the plants high phosphorus fertilizer April 1st, and that is the last water that they got. I don’t plan to give them more for at least another month. I also decided to heavily prune the plants as they are so heavy at this point, they struggle to hold their branches up. You can see all the stakes that have gone in over the last year.

Here is the larger plant pruned down. I may take more of the lower growth off tomorrow.

I will probably water these plants with fertilizer again May 1st, but it will be a light watering. It is still too soon to move them outside, but by the middle of May the large plant will be back on the front porch doing its jade plant thing.

Remember that I started this plant with cuttings? That is a type of cloning, and this plant, happily growing on my front porch and hiding all of my delivered packages, is the same plant I used that day decades ago to teach about CAM photosynthesis. That lesson, taught so long ago, reverberates today as I try to convince this plant that it should bloom.

I used to tell my students that biology is life.

Yes, it is.

Notes:

There are three main types of photosynthesis in plants. C3 is the most common type that is used by the grass in my lawn, my roses, and the ash tree growing in the front yard. All of these plants struggle in the high heat of the summer because they have to keep the stomata in the leaves shut due to the extreme dryness of the air.
C4 plants overcome this problem with some chemical trickery that lets them move lots of CO2 along in the cells of the leaf without losing too much water and they grow quickly in July. Corn and sugar cane are examples of these plants.
Cacti are also CAM plants, but they have really gone to extreme measures to control water loss. The plant that we see is the stem (and the stomata are there) while the leaves have adapted into needles that help protect the plant.
Class is dismissed.
Oh, I forgot. Pineapple is also a CAM plant. Pina coladas for everyone who read all of this!!!

Hannah and the CoalBear: Orchid Cat Caturday

Hi. I’m Hannah.

The Mother of Cats has been ignoring me for days and days while she knits on a… CAT!!

I hardly know what to think. She had this cool yarn in the stash that kind of reminded her of orchids and spring. The orchids started blooming a few weeks ago and that was that… she began to ignore me and the CoalBear and started fussing over the orchids and the yarn.

Okay, it is true that the orchids are kind of cool. I like to climb into the garden where they are growing from time to time to hang out with them. The Mother of Cats gets a little cranky when I do it, however, so I don’t get to do it all the time. I lately have been sleeping right next to the Mother of Cats while she knits on this… cat… Really, it doesn’t look all that much like a cat, but she kept telling me that it was. Here’s what happened.

The cat started out with some crazy knitting that produced this leg. Whatever. I have a cat paw, and it doesn’t look anything like that. The colors kind of are like orchids, however…

As she kept knitting it began to look a little more like a cat, but…

I was really concerned for the Mother of Cats. It seemed like she didn’t really know what a cat is supposed to look like. I can kind of see the chin, but that nose and the EYES were the stuff of ~~knitty~~ kitty nightmares.

Finally, the ears, nose, and eyes were on the cat. Oh, wow. This is starting to look like a kitty (or maybe a pug?) and I can almost hear it asking, “When will I be done?”

Two days ago, she finally finished knitting the cat and I helped her put the whiskers on. Gee. He almost looks like he belongs in the orchids, doesn’t he.

He even looks pretty good in my strawberry box!

But the Mother of Cats says that he actually belongs in the orchid garden. He does look pretty good in there.

Now that the Mother of Cats has finished up the orchid kitty she has gone back to knitting on my blanket. Yay!! She isn’t ignoring me so much because she keeps putting the blanket on me while she sews the pieces together. I can’t wait to get my blanket and we are working on it every evening together while the CoalBear runs wild and chases his toys downstairs.

Mateo the CoalBear: why does Hannah get all of the cool knits?

Hannah: Because I am a little princess, and also because you don’t share the toys!!

This is Hannah, signing off.

Happy Caturday everyone!!

Notes from the Mother of Cats:

The pattern that I used is Grey Kitten Calico Cat by Claire Garland.
The yarn is a silk/merino/nylon blend by Noro called Tsubame. It is dk weight and I just knit the colors as they appeared in the ball as I worked. Mostly. I did throw out some green along the way.
My project page on Ravelry is here. Yeah, I was too lazy to write in any notes on the page.
I used the center quill of feathers to make the whiskers.
5 of my 7 orchid plants are now blooming and they definitely deserve a knitted cat to hang out with them!!
Did you want to see the back of the cat? Here he is!

Month’s End Report: July, 2022

July was quite the month! A lot of it was hot, really hot. I felt great for a part of the month due to a drug-induced power surge that carried me through lots of landscaping in the back yard. I read two books that were just exhausting. I went crazy for color and bought more yarn. I cooked, sewed, knitted and planted lots and lots of new plants in my gardens. A great month, July!

Today I drank my morning latte out on the deck and thought about everything that got done last month. There were new birds in the yard (blue jays!) and a small flight of honking geese flew over me as did my watering. Most of the baby bunnies have moved on, and the butterflies of July are gone. The flowering plants are recovering after a short break in the heat last week and I look forward to the late summer blooms. It is now August, but I can sense the looming presence of autumn just over the horizon.

In the yard this morning: a just bathed robin fluffed out and drying on the fence, the very first hydrangea bloom on my shrub, and a woodpecker (!) stabbing for insects in my freshly watered lawn.

So this was the month:

I finished my Salty Air Tee! It used exactly 2 skeins of sock yarn and is just perfect to wear now and will be great for layering later. I am now a fan of I-cord bind offs and used them on the sleeve and at the bottom of the body. The neckline was a little loose, so I picked up stitches along the cast on edge and put an I-cord BO around the neck, too! Perfect fix to a sloppy neck problem!

I finished a pair of socks!! This yarn, from Hue Loco, is in the Blast Off colorway. Perfect for the month!

I sewed a drawstring project bag, and then I spent some time on YouTube watching tutorials and learned how to sew zipper pouches from my “Knitting Goddess” fabric. I still have some of the fabric left over so I just ordered a pattern to make itty, bitty sewn boxes from it. 🙂

I read two books that were a handful. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is confusing, exhausting, and maybe the best book I have read this year. Think about the Lord of the Rings trilogy set in African antiquity, awash with magic and violence, and you would have this book. Hummingbird Salamander is a cliffhanging ecothriller that also chronicles the trainwreck of the main character along with the impending crash of the planet. Another good book, but one that I feel went too far down the climate change rabbit hole. Neither one of these books is uplifting. Nope, not at all. Worthy reads, but not good entertainment on a blistering hot day.

That’s it. In July I used up 4.75 skeins of yarn. I knitted one chemo hat and 5 PICC line covers. I finished a sweater and a pair of socks. You already know about the books.

I have cast on several new projects, and I’m still feeling pretty ambitious and getting things done, but the prednisone party is definitely over. In my new, dialed down state, I’m slowly knitting on a new cat, crocheting squares for a still undefined purpose, and sending my loom some regular side-eye. The spinning wheel has been put back into a corner but I’m hoping to return to it when the weather cools. I’ve pulled out a quilt project and I need to head on over to YouTube again to learn how to paper piece…

Bring it on, August. I’m ready for you!

Down the Fiber Hole and Other Essential Updates.

If you have been keeping up with the adventures of Casa Hannah and the CoalBear you know that I have been feeling just freaking wonderful for the last two week and getting more done than at any time in the last two years. I’ve been planting lots of new plants and getting all the gardens into order (for the first time in years because… next door pit bull who has now left the scene… yay… adios, pit bull…), and dragging out lots of things to get working on that have been languishing for years. The garden is starting to produce some color with the perennials now which is awesome as I’m seeing hot pinks and purples. Lavender, bougainvillea, and sage. Perfect!

Um… and then the party came crashing to a halt a few days ago as I started weaning myself off prednisone (marvelous stuff, prednisone!) and I got a little dizzy, and I… fell off the stairs. I literally realized I was going to be airborne at the last second and managed to push off enough to twist around and land on my feet in the living room where I pretty much crashed landed into the couch. Sad outcome. Did you realize that you can actually bruise your lungs? Okay, my lungs are less than pristine, but still… my ribs aren’t too happy, either. There was some talk about my liver… I had to stay indoors over the weekend and go back onto daytime oxygen.

That, however, did not stop me from going down the fiber rabbit hole!!

I finished the first silk/yak roving from Greenwood Fiberworks and am ready to start on the second.

I’ve been considering how to attack the variegated roving. Should I separate the colors? Do pencil rovings down the length of the larger piece? Just take it off in strips and let the colors end up however? Still thinking about this one, but I am tending towards pencil rovings.

I made some really good progress on my Salty Air Tee.

I love, love, love the yarn that I am using for this sweater. Isn’t that the perfect color for summertime knitting? This pattern is racing right along and I’m racing to get it finished because… some new patterns dropped on Ravelry and I am dying to knit one of them.

This is the Lace & Fade Boxy by Joji Locatelli, and that first picture is swiped off the Ravelry page and has her copyright. I have four skeins of a dark grey fingering yarn with smoky/woody tones that I am dying to use for this sweater. My first idea is to knit the entire sweater in the main color (lace and all… ignore the fade, we don’t need no stinking fade because I have four skeins of this color…) and then go back and knit I-cord trim at the neck, bottom, and wrists in that really cool multi yarn. That will look awesome, right? On the other hand, if there is enough yarn, I can do the lace in a fade with the pink yarns. I only have just over 100 yards of each color, so that may not work, but it might look pretty cool. I really am tending towards doing the whole sweater in the solid fingering. I have knitted two boxy sweaters in the past (the Vneck version) and I know them to be comfy layering workhorses in cold weather.

Then there is the crocheting. I haven’t crocheted in years because of my dodgy wrists, but I loved this bag (Square Scramble Sack) on Ravelry so much I bought the Noro yarn a week ago. Like I need more yarn, right? I had to order the crochet hooks from Amazon and then I was off to YouTube to learn how to make the puff stitch… that first little square has too many puffs in it, but I felt pretty successful and I’m now making a few squares every day that I don’t fall off the stairs.

There are two more sweaters that I want to knit, but I’ve got them on the back burner at the moment because I’m so far down the fiber hole at the moment I am just focusing on working steadily on each project for a few hours each day. Or maybe every other day so I don’t wear out my hip (spinning) or wrists (crochet). So far I’m making progress and I’m recovering from the fall okay at the same time so all is good. Except… the days of prednisone wonder are coming to an end as I feel the energy and the good times fading away. I start the lowest dose tomorrow and after a week it will be over.

Still, if you look at all those pictures that I put into this post, the days of color continue. Yay! My gardens have been returned to some semblance of order, I am making good progress on a number of projects, and I also got some chores done.

Hannah: I was put into the carrier and then put into the car and then taken to the vet and then I got cat-handled and there were some shots and would you believe that the vet said that I was slightly pudgy…

Hannah: Now I have to eat Indoor Cat food and the Mother of Cats has cut back on my cookies. Ugh.

That was my week. 🙂

You all watch out for those stairs!!!

Six Months Update and Days of Color

Okay, this is an update on my progress on my goals for the year, but it is also a celebration of how well I feel at the moment and my launch into several projects that are rocking the color right now. Seriously, I am so drawn to colors at the moment that I’m pretty much doing some silly impulse shopping. Who cares. I’m having a good time!!

You want to see the silly impulse shopping and/or pink things first?

I could not leave the local garden center without that pink flamingo for my garden! Hello, it glows in the dark with an LED body. 🙂 What do you think about my Knitting Goddess fabric? Yep. That was a late-night Etsy impulse purchase. I’m thinking that it will make a fabulous project bag. What do you think about that Noro yarn? That will become a crocheted tote bag… I also needed to buy some brightly colored hooks to make the bag, and there may have been another big ball of beautiful yarn that fell into the shopping crate before I checked out, but I’ll never talk about it. My feet are hurting because of the spinning I’m doing, so I had to get those wicked compression socks!!! Yep, I am a total sucker for pink. Well, raspberry pink to be specific, but I will settle for hot pink. Finally, Hannah kept trying to drag off my knitted finger protectors, so I made her and Mateo some little tube-like cat thingies to play with. They like them!

Speaking of color, look at my progress on the spinning for Tour de Fleece.

Can you see that I am making progress? The bobbin on the right is where I am today. I’m almost through the crocus-colored roving (50/50 yak/silk from Greenwood Fiberworks), then I get to start on the variegated roving. I’ve been watching episodes of Vera on BritBox while I spin so I’m actually coming to think of this Tour de Fleece as the Tour de Northumbia… I am happy with the spinning as I think that my drafting is getting easier and the thread that I’m spinning is getting smoother. It may also be slightly larger, but I can live with that!

I started reading this book this week because… look at that cover!!!

I don’t want to talk about this book yet because it really is remarkable, and I am changing my opinion about it as I go. It’s like entering a dream world and just experiencing the adventure without worrying too much about what’s going on. In time, I’m sure, I’ll understand what is happening. Maybe. I don’t care. I’m so entranced at the moment I’m reading a couple of hours a day during the heat of the day.

There is color in the garden, too. Look at this:

There is more color in the garden to replace the fading roses. My veronica is finally blooming, and I went back to the garden center to buy more lavender plants. I now have 11 lavenders in the garden… don’t you think that I should get another, so it is an even dozen? The pink yarrow is hard at work. Oh, yeah, there was also a garter snake in the garden today. Not a lot of color, but a ton of fun to see.

So, how much progress has occurred over the last 6 months?

I finished 30 hats and 28 PICC line covers in the first 6 months. I was hoping to get 50 of each done this year, so I am on track.
I have removed 76 skeins of yarn (100g of yarn = a skein) from the stash through knitting and donations. I hope to get 100 skeins out before the end of the year, so I am on track. I did just have a 6-skein slip, but I’m not worried.

The other knitting accomplishments are two sweaters and two pairs of socks.
I finished a quilt and got it hung up on the wall!

I learned how to double knit. Actually, I’m really stoked about how fun it was and I am looking forward to doing some cute projects. (I found that chart online and watched videos to figure out how to do this. Piece of cake, as it turns out!)

I have finished 32 books.

Well, that’s the progress report. My son helped me get my table loom set up for me to use and I’m dreaming of warping the floor loom before the end of the year. (Mateo: that sounds like fun!!) I’m wondering if I can weave something with the yarn that I am spinning now, and I’ve pulled out another quilt kit that has been languishing forever in a cupboard so that I can work on that in my sewing room. I’m entering the last few days on the full dose of prednisone; the dose will be tapered off and stopped over the next two weeks. While I was on prednisone my rheumatologist gradually stepped up my immunosuppressant to a final dose that is double what I was on previously. I feel really good right now and I have huge plans for the rest of the year.

Scleroderma, behave yourself!!

The BioGeek Memoirs: Snapdragon

I just love snapdragons! I mean, they have those cute little faces; they do look a little like dragon faces if you use some imagination.

Snapdragons are great plants for me in my gardening efforts. They are really hardy, tolerate dry conditions, and there are new varieties that are small and easy to grow in containers and along the edge of your driveway or garden. The picture above is one that is growing in the margin between my rocked-in area and the driveway; I didn’t plant this guy; it is a volunteer that sprang up from a previous year’s plantings. The original plant was something like this one… a mixture of orange, yellow and pink that changes in the flowers as they age. Pretty cool, huh. I look at the plant and wonder how/why the pigment in the flower is changing over time. BioGeek, right?! It gets even better…

All of these plants are also volunteers from the original parent plant from a couple of years ago.

Do you see all of those colors? They are the result of genetic recombination that happened in the original plant’s flowers when the plant reproduced and created the seeds that rose up to produce this array of colors. Some of the offspring have clear-colored flowers (the yellow and the red), while other have the mixed hues and color-changing characteristics of the parent plant.

Notice, I said parent plant. The funky thing about snapdragons is that they self-pollinate and reproduce on their own with the pollen getting to the stamens within the closed flower without any intervention by outside helpers like wind or insects. In fact, they are so hard to open that only a really heavy insect like a bumblebee can open the flower to get to the nectar inside. As the (big old fat) bumblebee climbs into the flower the little hairs on its body pick up pollen. When the bumblebee flies on to another snapdragon and then climbs into that flower it can carry the pollen in with it to cross-pollinate the new plant with the previous one’s pollen.

Bumblebees started showing up in my garden last week, and I would like to believe that they have been busy with the snapdragons too. If you snap open one of the flowers like I did in the picture above, you can see the pollen-carrying anthers above the opening and then waaaay down at the bottom of the flower is the nectar with the ovary. An industrious bumblebee can push open the flower and then muscle its way in to the bottom. Yay! More flower colors are on the way when there is crossbreeding among my plants. Here’s a great blog posting (Ray Cannon’s Nature Notes) showing a bumblebee taking on a snapdragon.

All this brings me to Mendel and classic genetics. Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) was a monk who had a deep interest in the science. He lived in a time when genetics was very poorly understood, and the basic question was “how are traits transmitted to new generations?” Mendel chose a plant that self-pollinated like a snapdragon (pea plants) and controlled the cross-pollination between parent plants with distinctive characteristics like the color of the flower, the height of the plant, or the color of the pea. He cut away the pollen producing structures in the flowers, used little brushes to carry pollen from one plant to another (taking on the role of the bumblebee in snapdragons), and then put little fabric hats over the flowers to prevent any other pollination from occurring. Tedious, right? Anyway, this work led to the essential understanding in basic genetics that we all now know. Some genes are dominant, and others are recessive. You have two copies of each gene (one from your mom, one from your dad), and the inheritance of which copy you got from each parent is random. Here’s an online tutorial of classic genetics maintained by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Good thing that Mendel didn’t choose snapdragons. Snapdragons are a problem for classic genetics because their genes don’t always follow the dominant/recessive inheritance pattern. Instead, some of the colors in snapdragons are both expressed at the same time, and we call that codominant. So…. a red snapdragon crossed with a white snapdragon will produce plants with pink flowers. We now understand how and why that happens, and there are lots of other examples of non-Mendelian genetics like blood type inheritance and tortoiseshell cats. If Mendel had chosen snapdragons to study, he would have floundered around forever, but thanks to him (and pea plants) the first understandings were worked out. Think of how hard that was… no one knew what the genetic material was or had glimpsed a chromosome, but he figured out the process using his pea plant data and some truly exhausting math. Way to go, Mendel!!

Seed pods on my snapdragon plants. Those seeds carry the next generation of snapdragons waiting to grow up next year.

So, when I see my snapdragons, I am transported once again to my biology classroom and those early genetics lessons with students. I am connected to the world of science and the legacy given to me by Mendel and others. Why are my flowers a mixture of pink, yellow, and orange? Hmmm…. maybe there is more than one pigment gene at work at the same time, and the amount of pigment being produced is changed as the plant ages? Is this some funky combination of red and yellow genes? I kind of think so, since I now have plants with clear red and yellow flowers: they must have two copies of either the red or yellow gene. Is there another gene kicking in to modulate the amount of pigment produced as the flower ages? What about the pigments that I can’t see, but are there for the bees to see? This is so cool, and I just love snapdragons!!!!

This isn’t just a garden, but a genetics experiment that I’ve been running for a few years now.

Yay, science!

Thoughts on “Lessons in Chemistry” while sitting in my Garden

The monsoon has arrived in Colorado! This monsoon is not bringing any rain my way, but it is carrying in cooler air and gentle breezes through the day. Suddenly I am spending lots of time outside. I’ve worked in the gardens every single evening for a couple of hours and the gardens are actually starting to look like… gardens! Okay, I have to admit, there is still lots of work to get done, but I’m so happy to see tidy weeded gardens with lovely rose bushes without a throng of weeds around them.

In the late afternoons, when it is still a little too sunny to work in the gardens, but nice for sitting outside because my swinging garden seat is in the shade, I move out to read with the wildlife. Look at the great pictures I got this week!

My yard is a playground for a group of juvenile squirrels who are always entertaining. There are huge swallowtail butterflies and tiny birds in the yard, but those guys haven’t stopped long enough for me to get a photo yet. The robin is a regular at my little birdbath, and the first bumblebees of the year showed up to sample some of my flowers. My favorite rose bush, the Princess Alexandra of Kent, now has 15 blooms going. My back gardens are filled with new plantings, and the lavender and yarrow are just a few days away from the first blooms. I’m really enjoying my time outside reading, and then I think about the book while I pull weeds and put the gardens into order.

Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel by Bonnie Garmus has been on my mind a lot this last week. The story is of Elizabeth Zott, an intrepid individualist woman who is a scientist by nature and calling, challenged by her gender and the time in which she lived.

I just love the Elizabeth Zott character. I understand and identify with her so much. Elizabeth is a chemist/scientist trying to do research into an original area of chemistry that intersects with biology. Did I mention that it is the 50s? Oh. Elizabeth has a lot of obstacles to overcome: women are expected to be homemakers, and misogyny and gender stereotypes are everywhere. Other women gossip about her and sabotage her. Men steal her work and take credit for it. She loses her job and ends up doing a cooking show on television.

Where she teaches cooking as lessons in chemistry to produce the best, most wonderful dishes ever. Women love her show, take lecture notes through the programs, cook the meals, and learn to think differently about their abilities, their role in society, and their individual worth. The book is wonderful. The book is about keeping an open mind, questioning everything, collecting data, and thinking for oneself. Also, there is a dog who is a major character in the story and who has a wonderful voice and viewpoint of his own.

So why does this book connect so much to me? Well… I grew up in the 50s and 60s. I entered college as a chemistry major (but once I discovered molecular biology, which is kind of biological chemistry, I was gone…). We kind of forget how things used to be for women, but I do remember how things were.

A small list of events from that time:

The men talking out front after church each Sunday sure were critical of women drivers. Like, women shouldn’t be allowed to drive. They were serious!
A woman at my church had cancer. Her husband, who was in charge of her health care, had that information concealed from her.
My high school counselor told me that I would make a great nurse because I was so smart, I could support doctors in making their diagnoses, helping them with their careers. I decided that maybe I should be a doctor…
My chemistry advisor in college told me that women were just taking away a slot from a man and that the education was wasted on them because they would just become housewives. Umm… I had just made the Dean’s List…
I interviewed for my first research lab job after college. I had to answer a lot of questions about my husband, his career plans, and whether we would be having another child. I think that I got the job because my husband needed me to support the family while he finished college.
Working at my lab bench late one afternoon I overheard the head of the lab discussing the research of one of the postdoctoral fellows, a woman. They were denigrating her work while, at the same time, talking about how they could clean it up for publishing. They published her research under their own names later that year.

Well, that’s enough to give you a glimpse of what it was like for women as they struggled for equal opportunities, standards, and pay. We’ve come a long way, but the fight goes on. What I especially loved about science is that it helped level the playing field and encouraged independent, out-of-the box thinking.

Which brings me back to the book. Elizabeth reads to the dog and teaches him hundreds of words. Elizabeth allows her daughter to read just about anything that she can get her hands on (a reading philosophy that I also benefited from), and teaches her cooking show viewers to take a few minutes to savor their accomplishments. Elizabeth rows with men. Elizabeth moves through the world, astonishingly self-confident, striving always to extend the envelope of her knowledge, fearlessly challenging the status quo, viewing everything through the lens of science.

I kind of think that Elizabeth Zott is my hero!

And science. Always, science.

Cooking may be chemistry, but biology is life.

This is me, sitting in my garden, thinking about life.

The BioGeek Memoirs: Sunflower

Okay, I need to be complete upfront about this: this is a crossover post. It is going to be a total amalgamation of the Scleroderma Chronicles and The BioGeek Memoirs because I just couldn’t come up with anyway to make them separate posts. Hey, I’m a biogeek with scleroderma. It was bound to happen eventually…

So, let’s get this ball rolling by talking about bean plants. That makes a lot of sense, right? When I was a biology teacher struggling to make plants interesting and to help students understand experimental design, I came up with the genius idea of letting the students design an experiment looking at the effect of fertilizer concentration on the growth of bean plants. The students had solutions with different concentrations of Miracle Gro fertilizer available to them, and then they had to struggle with planting and growing 6 bean plants while holding all the other variables constant. The plants grew, the students measured their growth, and then they charted the growth to make decisions about the best fertilizer amount.

I had the hot idea of using an Excel spreadsheet to display the student data to the whole class. That worked great! I then combined the data from all 5 classes together and… it was a huge mess. The plants were all different heights depending on which class was collecting the data. The students weren’t making any errors; the bean plants were raising and lowering their leaves each day in circadian rhythm. Depending on the time of day, the plants were a different height. Oh. Plants can move!

Sunflowers have been on my mind a lot recently. Beautiful sunflowers, whose faces turn throughout the day to follow the sun. My cousin grew enormous sunflowers one year that towered over the other plants in the garden. Sunflowers are the symbol of Ukraine. The sweater that I am knitting right now is in the colors of a field of sunflowers with their faces in the sun.

Those aren’t sunflowers, but the colors remind me of all the “Support Ukraine” knitting that is going on right now.

There are enormous fields of sunflowers near the airport in Denver that are just spectacular in the late summer. Early one morning in late August,2014, I drove past them on my way to my first appointment with a rheumatologist; my primary care physician had referred me to a specialist after some concerning bloodwork results. I was pretty sure that this morning was going to be a turning point in my life, and I was nervous and kind of fighting off tears. Behind me the rising sun poured light onto the glowing faces of sunflowers ahead of me as far as I could see; the sight was just thrilling, and I settled right down. An hour later the rheumatologist explained that I had limited systemic sclerosis (a form of scleroderma) and Sjogren’s disease. I was prescribed medication, sent for more testing, and told to stay off the internet. I looked for the sunflowers as I drove home that afternoon, but I couldn’t see them; the fields were too far from me as I drove east. Still, just knowing they were there sort of helped. Sunflowers. They were kind of a symbol of hope and the promise that I could handle anything.

Are you ready for this? The sunflower has been chosen as a symbol for scleroderma by Scleroderma Australia. Shine like a Sunflower is their campaign this June to bring scleroderma into the light of awareness.

Just like that the sunflower became an international symbol for scleroderma. I swiped this shirt image off of Amazon.

Why a sunflower? Well, like sunflowers, we scleroderma people follow the sun. Strong sunlight is actually a problem, but the warmth… bring on the warmth! For the last few weeks, I have been recovering from surgery and waiting for my biopsy results. I have been sitting outside on my deck out of the direct sun, soaking up the heat and light. Day by day, I have been improving and no longer need daytime oxygen support. My cardiologist has restarted the medication that was halted while I was in the hospital, and it hasn’t even caused a bump in my recovery. Heat and sunlight are really making a difference.

My biopsy results arrived on the first day of June. I have developed a type of interstitial lung disease that presents as hypersensitivity pneumonia. I also have the characteristics of what the report called a vascular/collagen autoimmune disease, which is pretty much a descriptor for scleroderma. Yep. What my pulmonologist prepared me for. This is interstitial lung disease associated with system sclerosis (SSc-ILD) and I am going to get started on an increased dosage of immunosuppressants and a new drug to prevent scarring in my lungs called OFEV. This drug is really new; it has been developed in the years since my diagnosis, and now it is here just when I need it.

June is Scleroderma Awareness Month. Here in the US the theme of the campaign is Know Scleroderma. Oh, I know scleroderma, and so do some of you through my blog. Let’s put scleroderma aside for the time being and go back to sunflowers. And science. Remember that this post started with a little story about doing a science experiment with bean plants and my students? As simple as that was in my classroom, the heart of that process, curiosity, scientific experimentation, and data manipulation, is serving me well now. Ironically, new therapies and treatment approaches are being developed because of the lung scarring caused by Covid-19. Science. It rocks!

Today I planted these sunflowers along my side fence.

This afternoon I am once again outside in the warmth and light, knitting on my new sweater in the colors of sunflowers against the sky, admiring my beautiful newly planted sunflowers. They have their little faces angled to the southwest, following the sun as it starts to dip towards the Rocky Mountains.

Beautiful, tough, follow-the-sun sunflowers, reminding me to also follow the sun and to shine when I can. They remain a symbol of hope and a promise that I can handle anything.

Shine like a Sunflower.

June is Scleroderma Awareness Month. You can learn more about scleroderma at these links.

Month’s End Report: May 2022

This month passed in a hurry. I spent most of a week in the hospital, and then the rest of the month recovering from the surgery. I haven’t been exactly frisky for the whole month, but I have been making some progress on several projects.

Hannah: The Mother of Cats has been spending lots of quality time with us!

Doesn’t Hannah look pleased with her box? The house is pretty much full of boxes at the moment as I have been making use of all the shopping services that cropped up during the height of the pandemic. I’m getting everything that I need with little effort and Hannah and Mateo are having the best time ever. From their prospective it has been a really great month!

Knitting

I worked on a sweater and community knitting this month. I really pushed and got the body of my Goldenfern sweater done early in the month and then immediately lost it on sleeve island. Poor sweater. It languished for the rest of the month in its knitting tub while I knitted chemo hat after chemo hat with a few PICC line covers thrown in for variety.

I have lots of brightly colored yarn so that’s what’s getting knitted right now!

I know that this is the end of month report for May, but I want to acknowledge that now that we are in a new month, I have pulled myself together and taken that sweater off of sleeve island. I made some good progress over the last couple of days, and I finally got to the colorwork section of the sleeve today.

I’m knitting the ferns onto the bottom of the first sleeve now.

I also made a couple of more passes through the yarn stash culling out yarn that I will never use and throwing out scraps. (So hard to do; I deserve a gold star!!) Altogether, I knit 6 chemo hats this month (Barley Light by Tin Can Knits), 5 PICC line covers, and used up or removed 38 skeins of yarn from the stash. I think that I deserve more than one gold star for the destash efforts this month… I am kind of thinking that I will get more than 100 skeins out of the stash, and to be truthful, things are looking a lot more tidy in the stash room.

Garden

Everything is growing like crazy now. The roses all made it through the late season snowstorm and there are buds everywhere but very few blooms. The snapdragons, however, are blooming their little flower hearts out.

All of these snapdragons are volunteers growing from last year’s plants. Look at all of those colors; they are the descendants of pink snapdragons that were originally planted a couple of years ago. Also, those flowers are NOT in a flowerbed where they belong!

This plant is my favorite in the bunch. It is growing with reckless abandon in the rocks along the driveway.

With absolutely no effort on my part these snapdragons have spread through the front gardens (and rocked landscaping…) and have brought lots of early color in reds, oranges, pinks and yellows. There is a BioGeek story here, but I will save it for another day. 🙂

Books

I managed to read 5 books in May. Not great, considering that I was a slug for most of the month, but I’m still on track to make my Goodreads challenge goal of 50 books this year.

I’m reading the most amazing book right now.

I read A Visit from the Goon Squad, so I had some idea of what I was getting into with this book. The book is organized like a series of short stories about people who are connected to each other. There are a lot of names flying past, and there are also embedded themes within the stories, so there is a lot to keep track of. I am creating a flow chart showing the linkages and themes as I read which is helping me immensely. How I long for a book group!

So, here’s the simple backbone of the book: what if there was an electronic, open forum vehicle that let you store all of your memories? Think of this like Facebook on steroids where it is open to the world and people can access and search other people and memories. What would such a thing do to us; what would we lose, and what would we gain?

The people and themes that I am meeting as I read the book are engaging and I’m really enjoying myself. Also, I am going to need some really big chart paper to map out all of the interconnections the way things are going as I read.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

The BioGeek Memoirs: Rose

My mother was a great lover of roses. One of my earliest memories was of an ongoing battle she had with the family dog and a newly planted rose bush. My mom planted the rose bush in a garden along one side of the house. The dog dug it up. My mom replanted the rose bush, and the dog, a boxer mix, dug it up again.

My mother, not one to give up easily, spanked the dog with the rose bush and replanted it.

Not my mom’s roses, but they were bright red like these.

That bush did really well and was covered with blooms every year. I can’t remember the color for sure, but I think that they were red. Our dog was so well behaved in the garden for the rest of her life that the story of the rose bush battle took on the stuff of legend. Look at that rose bush, my sister would say. Mom once spanked the dog with that bush!!

Later in her life my mom grew tea roses in her garden that were also the stuff of legend. These shrubs were huge; at least 4 feet high and the producers of really showy blooms; people occasionally knocked on my mom’s door to ask what type of rose they were. I once asked my mom what she did to get her roses to grow and bloom so well. I expected to hear some complicated formula to produce fabulous blooms that featured bone meal, wood ashes, and who knows what else… Nope. It was a really, really easy routine. Feed the roses Miracle Gro fertilizer every week, prune them once a month, and if they didn’t respond satisfactorily rip the shrub out and go buy another one. My mom, an agent of evolution in her rose garden. Who knew her success was partly due to ruthless natural selection? That earlier incident with the dog should have tipped us off!

Now I grow roses. I feed them Miracle Gro, prune them after each blooming, protect them from early frosts, mulch them with care. They are doing well, but not as well as my mom’s did. I tell myself that is because I live in a different climate from the one where she grew her show-stopping roses, but the truth is she had quite a gift for rose growing. Anyway, here are my favorites.

The pink rose on the left is Princess Alexandra of Kent, the yellow rose is Charles Darwin, and the one on the right is Hot Cocoa. I just love the English roses for their shape and scent, but they don’t do that well in my climate. The Hot Cocoa rose is hardier and handles the heat and low humidity better. Anyway, don’t they look nice?

Wait. I have more roses!

These roses are more like the wild ones that grow in our mountains. The one on the left is a Home Run, and the one on the right is a Cinco de Mayo rose. I love these guys; simple, hard-working and favorites with the bees. They handle the climate here well and flourish in the long dry summers.

I do have more roses, but you get the idea. There are rose bushes along the driveway, at the front of the house, in all the flower beds in the back yard, and even in pots in the house. You can never have too many roses is kind of a motto of mine.

I grow the roses for myself, but I also grow them for my mom and the other rose growers in my family. My aunt grew roses too and had a huge climber that I envy to this day. For all I know rose growing has been going on for generations in my family. Every single rose shrub, each rose bloom, is a link to the past and a promise of beauty in the future. You can never go wrong with a rose.

My mom died one year early in May after a long battle with cancer. A few days after the funeral was Mother’s Day, and in her memory I planted six red floribunda roses in my front flower bed. Those roses, bright red Showbiz roses, bloomed like my mom herself was taking care of them.

One day someone knocked on my door to ask what they were.

My mom would have been so proud!!