Rob Goodspeed describes his vacation encounter with the “greenest gas station in America.” Located near Eugene, Oregon, on a restored brownfield site, it has a green roof, a vegetated bioswale, locally produced biofuels, and racks of organic foods instead of Slurpees and Moon Pies.

An interesting story by Joel Achenbach in today’s Washington Post is, on its face, about how the price of potting soil has soared in the past year due to the high cost of the fossil fuels used to manufacture, package, and ship the stuff. But read between the lines and the story is really about how a once humble material has been transformed into an upmarket mixture of largely unnecessary components from across the continent and around the globe — and about how gardening (or at least the kind practiced by many Americans), an activity by definition assumed to be “green,” is anything but.

Bob LaGasse, who represents soil and mulch manufacturers as executive director of the Mulch and Soil Council, explains that consumers demand these high-priced designer mixtures, which a South Carolina-based producer calls “potting soil on steroids.” (Bob LaGasse also happens to be executive director of the Garden Writers Association, representing the people who recommend potting soils and other horticultural products to consumers.) 

It’s virtually impossible these days to find a bag of potting soil that isn’t loaded with synthetic fertilizer. Nitrogen fertilizer, as David Wolfe, professor of plant and soil ecology at Cornell University, has pointed out, is the typical gardener’s biggest contribution to global warming. The manufacture of synthetic fertilizer is extremely energy intensive. And the use of nitrogen fertilizers (whether synthetic or organic) releases nitrous oxide gas, which in Wolfe’s words “has 300 times more global warming potential per molecule than carbon dioxide.” Yet American gardeners have been hoodwinked into believing that applying fertilizer to their plants, whether in containers or in the ground, is as fundamental as brushing their teeth.

In addition to organic matter, from composted clam shells to pine bark, which could just as easily come from local sources but is often shipped from far away, the typical bag of potting soil is also likely to contain perlite transported from the Greek island of Milos and coconut coir from Vietnam, if not peat moss “vacuum-harvested” from Canadian bogs. Then the concoction is packaged in plastic bags, which are piled up and shrink-wrapped on wooden pallets for shipping to nurseries and superstores. In short, the amount of embodied energy and greenhouse gases associated with a bag of potting mix is mind boggling.

All for a few petunia plants likely to end up in a dump after the first frost.

Den of Geek compiles a list of horror films with evil plant protagonists, from “The Thing From Another World” (1951) to “The Happening” (2008).

A paper in the journal New Phytologist has truffle aficionados in a panic. Written by Claude Murat from the Dipartimento di Biologia Vegetale dell’Università di Torino and his colleagues, it documents the recent discovery of the aggressive Chinese black truffle, Tuber indicum, at an Italian truffle plantation. “We dread that T. indicum will spread all over Europe and crowd out T. melanosporum and perhaps other truffle species,” Murat told Science News. Lovers of the fungal lumps, underground reproductive structures that fetch astronomical prices in gourmet markets, turn up their noses at the Chinese species, considered much less flavorful and aromatic than European natives like the Périgord black truffle, T. melanosporum, and the even more precious Piedmont white truffle, T. magnatum. The record price of a single white truffle, $330,000, was set in December 2007, for a 3.3-pound specimen unearthed near Pisa by Luciano Savini and his dog Rocco. 

Fritz Haeg has been deemed a horticultural revolutionary of late for daring to propose scrapping front lawns for “edible estates.” But his proposal pales compared to Columbia professor Dickson Despommier’s vision of entire skyscrapers devoted to growing crops. Such “vertical farms” could reduce the carbon footprint of city dwellers by conserving energy used for long-distance transport of food to urban markets. Even better, they could free up expanses of farmland to return to forest, radically reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Among the other benefits of skycropping: a year-round supply of organically grown fruits, vegetables, grains, and fish; no weather-related crop failures; no polluting agricultural runoff; lots of green collar jobs in inner cities; and an intensive form of food production capable of feeding the 3 billion additional people predicted by the year 2050, most of whom will live in urban areas.

Several sky farm designs are featured on Despommier’s website. He says roughly 150 30-story towers could feed the entire population of New York City for a year. This article, published in New York magazine last year, explains in detail how they would work.

You may have seen some of the snide commentary in the press about how the Swiss government has deemed that plants, as living beings, have an inherent worth and therefore we should not damage or destroy them for no rational reason. Seems pretty obvious to me. I’m continually shocked at how so many people treat plants so cavalierly, bulldozing them, ripping them out, or sawing them down as if they were inanimate landscape props.

The way they’ve been portrayed, you’d think the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee, which made the decision, was a bunch of New Age flakes. Actually, they are a distinguished group of ethicists who have issued a detailed, well-reasoned report, which is available here. But the idea that plants have dignity may be difficult to fathom for a society that can’t even manage to engage in a well-reasoned discussion about the dignity of human detainees. 

A reader asks:

“How does the carbon footprint of homegrown fruits and vegetables compare with that of imported produce?”

In the past few years the carbon footprint of food has become one of the hottest issues in the western world. A number of luminaries have weighed in on the subject in the U.S. alone, from best-selling novelist Barbara Kingsolver (in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) to ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan (in Coming Home to Eat). All this discussion has generated its own jargon, including such terms as “food miles” (the distance any item of produce travels from farm to table) and “locavore” (a person who makes a point of eating food grown within 100 miles, give or take).

At first glance comparing, say, a tomato grown 30 feet from your back door with one cultivated half a continent away would seem to be a no-brainer. (more…)

In its front-page story on how soaring food prices are making life even harder in the world’s poorest countries, the New York Times notes that “one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil, and sugar.” A 24-year-old Haitian describes the taste: “It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt.” In the Business section, trend watchers say the success of technology brands like Apple and Blackberry is at least partly behind Madison Avenue’s current fascination with everything plum, from the new American Express Plum Card to Plum TV, a channel aimed at resort communities like Nantucket, Aspen, and the Hamptons. A marketing maven explains the thinking: Colors like plum and purple “evoke royalty, sophistication” and can appeal to “the individual’s desire for zest and to be distinct.” Another notes that “plum says calm; plum says clean; plum says health.”