238 Teaming with Bacteria

Show Transcript

GB 238 Bacteria TRANSCRIPT

Farmer Fred  0:00

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by Smart Pots, the original lightweight, long lasting fabric plant container. It's made in the USA. Visit SmartPots.com slash Fred for more information and a special discount, that's SmartPots.com/Fred.

Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, you've come to the right spot.

TEAMING WITH BACTERIA, PART 1

Farmer Fred  0:30

Teaming with Bacteria. Well, there's a title sure to send the casual gardener to another podcast. But please bear with me. What if I told you that the future of plant fertilizer was not fertilizer? It will be bacteria. That's according to Jeff Lowenfels, he's the author of the book Teaming with Bacteria. Today, America's favorite retired college horticulture Professor, Debbie Flower, geeks out on garden science with Jeff, who for the last 20 years or so has written other garden books about plant nutrition, microbes and fungus. And as you might imagine, Debbie Flower had a wonderful time talking with Jeff. Me, on the other hand, I was busy thinking about buttered popcorn. You're going to have to listen to the episode to find out why. And I tell you what, if you listen to the entire episode, you're going to get garden psychic bonus points. We're podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful abutilon jungle in suburban purgatory. It's the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you today by Smart Pots and Dave Wilson Nursery. Let's go.

Farmer Fred 1:00

You're probably familiar with Farmer Fred's 11 Garden Rules. And two of them are, “Everything you know is wrong”; and,  “If it works for you, fine, but keep an open mind. And what you're going to hear in this interview is going to blow your mind. It's going to change the way you garden for the good. You're going to save money. Debbie Flower is here as well. Debbie Flower, America's favorite retired college horticultural professor. And we are talking with author Jeff Lowenfels. Jeff has written many, many books. I remember interviewing him on the old radio show back in, I think it was 2006. It was about one of your first books called “Teaming with Microbes”. More have come since then. In “Teaming with Microbes”, he revealed the fascinating facts around the soil food web, all the tiny organisms that live in the soil and aid a plant's growth. Then, there was “Teaming with Nutrients,” exploring how those organisms ate and about the uptake of nutrients. “Teaming with Fungus”, where Jeff Lowenfels details the symbiotic relationship between plants and fungi, the most important organism living in the soil. And his latest book is, “Teaming with Bacteria.” And Jeff lives in Alaska. And you're probably thinking, “oh, so he doesn't garden?” Oh, no, no, no, he even writes a garden column. He's had a garden column in the Anchorage newspaper for well over 40 years. Jeff Lowenfels, it's a pleasure talking to you again, after a 15 year respite or so.

Jeff Lowenfels  3:14

Yeah. Wonderful Introduction you did there. I'm wondering who this guy is.

Farmer Fred  3:21

Oh, but wait, there's more. You have a fabulous history, but one of my favorite parts about your life is the fact that you are a recovering lawyer.

Jeff Lowenfels  3:29

Yes. In fact, when I only had two books, I used to bill myself as, because they were both on soil, “America's dirtiest lawyer”.

Farmer Fred  3:48

that's appropriate.

Jeff Lowenfels  3:49

that was my moniker for a little while. But yeah, I'm a lawyer, when you can't do anything else. That's what you end up becoming.

Farmer Fred  4:01

But the fact that you had a garden column for over 40 years,

Debbie Flower  4:04

the longest running garden column in the United States, correct?

Jeff Lowenfels  4:08

Actually it is 47 years now. I've been told it's the longest in the world, from a gardening column perspective, and maybe in terms of consecutive weeks. anyway, it's a long time. And the reason why I do it is because when you're not there, my particular newspaper puts your picture in the paper and says, “ this is XYZ columnist who is on vacation, and will return in two weeks”. If you write the column and you're thinking about it, and you're a lawyer, you'd begin to think that just sort of advertises “He's not home”. Yeah, so I  I always have a column and it just become a religion. Uh, you know, it's like, Ty Cobb the baseball player. I I don't want to miss a week and, and I don't want anybody robbing my house. I always have the goal not to repeat yourself,  which I don't.

Debbie Flower  5:08

That would be tough over 47 years every week.

Jeff Lowenfels  5:11

There are only so many ways you can tell people to grow tomatoes.

Farmer Fred  5:16

A lot of people think, how can you garden in Alaska? But it's probably not very different than living in a city in the mountains, like maybe Colorado Springs or here in California, in the Sierra, Truckee, California. It has a lot of altitude, and you have a growing season of a couple of months. you can grow anything that the people in the flatlands can grow. It's just got to be a little quicker. That's all.

Jeff Lowenfels  5:39

Well, yeah. And actually, it's not as quick as you think because of our daylight situation. But yeah, one of our favorite phrases of gardeners in Alaska is, “How can you stand the weather Outside? That's what we call where you live, we call it the Outside. Because we really have a season that starts by Memorial Day weekend. And then of course, we can continue sometimes right on through October 15. That's a long season.

Debbie Flower  6:12

When I look at this at this gardening calendar, when to plant vegetables in Anchorage, Alaska by garden.org, the dates I see on this gardening calendar look very much like the ones I adhere to when I lived in New York and New Jersey, typically nothing before  Mother's Day, right? And then through the summer, and then frost comes in. It's over. I'm amazed.

Jeff Lowenfels  6:37

That's right. I mean, and there’s been a big change from when Fred and I first talked, it's an even bigger change from when I got to Anchorage in 1975. We've added probably 20, maybe even 30 days on to our growing season. So those  who are listening and don't think that global warming, of course, I don't have to convince anybody in the Sacramento area that Global warming doesn't exist, you're crazy, it does exist. And I'll give a statistic that people always go nuts about. They used to keep records in Talkeetna, which is a little further north than Anchorage. What a wonderful name, Talkeetna, the town that has a cat as an honorary mayor and has for 20 years. But in any case, they keep records there and they kept those records. I think they started  around 1875 or there abouts. And lo and behold, we've added well over 100 days to the growing season, that's amazing.  You know, it just smacks you in the face. And of course, we have another saying that gardeners in Alaska like to use that you might not appreciate. And that's “global warming. It's our turn now.”

Debbie Flower  7:54

Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Lowenfels  7:57

So you know what one of my friends grew a couple of years ago, maybe two years ago… okra. It’s the first okra I know to have grown in Anchorage, and probably all of Alaska. It's very hard to grow okra. Grew okra. I couldn't believe it. It was just a stunner. It's always an interesting experience watching our climate change. it's  amazing, just completely different than it was when I first got here. So yes,  we all garden. And the reason why we garden is because you go nuts during nine months of winter. And it's not so much the cold as it is you can't garden! It’s dark and the ground frozen. I try to convince my readers and anybody who gardens and has a warm season like like we do, in winter you should have lights, period. I mean, it's just you spent all that time for two and a half months in the vegetable garden. You can be grown vegetables all winter long.

Farmer Fred  9:00

yeah, I would think stores would have plenty of grow light fixtures and little, inside greenhouses.

Jeff Lowenfels  9:07

Absolutely, absolutely. And of course, cannabis has been legal in Alaska since 1975, in the privacy of your home. And so the grow light business  well developed in Alaska. There are two or three good grow stores, and it's something everybody needs to do everywhere. But in a place like Alaska, Fairbanks just makes tremendous amounts of sense because it is such a long season. Nonetheless, the plants grow exactly the same way. So it's the same kind of excitement, the same kind of satisfaction as you normally get when you go out and plant out in the garden. I would say there's one other difference between the Alaskan gardener and maybe the gardeners where you are, and that's that many people in Alaska have plants that they brought up from the lower 48 states. Those plants are Family, “this isn't my grandmother's Christmas cactus” or, “I took this clipping from my grandfather”, and they come up the highway with it in the back of the Volkswagen bus. And you don't want  that to die. So that gets people going in the wintertime. we got to keep those special heirloom plants alive.

Debbie Flower  10:23

Yes, I have several of those in my house that I take from place to place. And around here the local utility was, at least when I was teaching, they wanted  us to teach how to grow in basically  a metal box, an outdoor truck body or something like that, and have the lights on at night so that they could balance out power usage. Everybody's using the power during the day, then everybody goes to bed, the power need goes down. And the utility wanted us to teach how to grow at night inside these enclosed environments so that that they could even out their power needs.

Farmer Fred  11:02

Wow. But are greenhouses, outdoor greenhouses, cost prohibitive in Alaska?

Jeff Lowenfels  11:08

no. if you're a serious gardener, everybody has an outdoor greenhouse. whether it's a little plastic hoop house, or whether it's a permanent structure. we don't necessarily use glass, there are a couple of those. But we've got the outdoor greenhouse for the tomatoes, because if the temperature drops below 55 degrees at night, you don't get tomatoes. And tomatoes are the holy grail. Well, they were the holy grail of gardening in Alaska. And so, you know, people just everybody seems to have a little outdoor greenhouse, some bigger than others. And we grow cucumbers and tomatoes, and peppers.

Debbie Flower  11:50

You have a lot of white fly control information, then.

Jeff Lowenfels  11:53

We have a lot of white fly control information. We try not to get white flies. From my perspective, when you have an outdoor greenhouse, the white flies come from the nursery when you buy your plants, even if you have grown it yourself. Okay. Nothing is worse.

Debbie Flower  12:10

You're right.

Jeff Lowenfels  12:13

It's a difficult one. And particularly now, since I think we have fewer insects that might take them out. This year, I noticed we don't have any mosquitoes in Anchorage anymore. Seriously. It was just dumbfounding to me. We have far fewer birds. But we don't have any mosquitoes.

Debbie Flower  12:29

Are you drier than you've been?

Jeff Lowenfels  12:31

We had the driest spring and the first  half of summer and then we literally had the wettest other half of the summer. So we've had both extremes, it is very interesting. We are again, I think the bellwether, so you should be keeping an eye on all this. We know we're losing insect populations. But to me, it was it's just dumbfounding the bird population differences. So some will want to be worried about them today.

Farmer Fred  13:14

so would any of this have a bearing on your congressional run that you attempted earlier this year for that open congressional seat?

Jeff Lowenfels  13:22

Well,  I really left myself open for that one. And I have to say, it was  one of these crazy experiences. For those who don't know, we had a beloved longtime congressional representative, we only have one, and he died. And so there was a special election. And many of us, probably because of our stupor from COVID isolation, decide, “okay, I could do this job, and I could  do a good job at this. I'm going to put my name in there and run for this office.” And then we discovered that there  50 other people running, including Sarah Palin, a guy who had been running against our representative for six months prior to that, who had a massive fortune, and a guy who had run for Senator a couple of years ago, who had $80 million left over from that. Anyway, it was one of these situations where because of the press rules, it's not like gardening. You know, if a carrot doesn't come up, another carrot does. You've got to be fair. And so there were no debates. How do you debate 51 people? There really weren't any one to one interviews, because how do you do that? Unless it was public radio, and they had to do all 51.

Farmer Fred  14:36

Hey, Jeff, you work for a newspaper.

Jeff Lowenfels  14:39

I worked for a newspaper. And thank God the newspaper was gracious enough, I think, to sit back and say, “he's gonna lose let's not get rid of his streak.” Frankly, I sort of was the Garden Party candidate.  I mean, I've got some name recognition. And it's one of those situations where I was an attorney. I represented native corporations, I did mining law, environmental law, pipeline law, public utility, I did all the things, you know, and more important, I represented clients, which is what a congressional person does. And I dealt with the acts that ended up resulting in the formation of the legal system in which Alaska reacts to the federal government, called the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which was passed in the 70s and 80s, when I was there. And in any case, I had the qualifications. So it was gonna be fun. And then it turned out not to be so fun. I have to say that I had one gardening moment, there was only one event, which allowed 14 of us to appear in front of a group at breakfast. And we each got a minute to say our piece, just one minute. And then they asked us five or six questions. We just got a minute to answer  three or four questions. And then they had the panel thing.  I'm sitting next to Sarah Palin, who's a friend of mine, I don't agree with her politics at all. But I know Sarah. Well, I just had written my column. And in my column, I always have been pointing out not to rake your leaves, because it is a waste of time it's bad for your yard . It is a terrible thing to do. You know, those leaves decay, then they disappear.. Because I think it's an it's an interesting topic of conversation these days. That has to do with the soil food web. But anyway, Sarah is sitting next to me. And she begins, “I’m gonna go to my dad's house in Wasilla and I'm gonna help him rake leaves”. I couldn't help it. Because I am a wise guy. So, I just blurted out, “You're not supposed to rake the leaves!” And of course, everybody knows who I am.  I'm Jeff the gardener. I'm not Mr. Lowenfel,s a congressional candidate. And of course, it got a gigantic laugh, embarrassed the hell out of poor Sarah. It was the only little funny thing that happened during the entire campaign.

Farmer Fred  17:29

Don't sell yourself short. You there were like 48 to 50 other candidates, and you finished eighth.

Jeff Lowenfels  17:37

And I think I was seventh. Actually.

Debbie Flower  17:39

Well, one guy dropped out.

Farmer Fred  17:40

One guy dropped out. But it was still worth  almost 6000 votes. You made a good representation for yourself. Even though Santa Claus did beat you.

Jeff Lowenfels  17:52

Yes, he did. And, you know,  I like to moan and groan about the son of a gun. People thought it was funny, you know? And I got to sit back and say, Wait a minute.  But I have to say that the woman who won, and she called me after that vote came out.  and the first thing out of her mouth was a really clever, cute gardening question. You watch  her name is Mary Peltola. And she walks on water. I have never met a politician and I dare say any person, who's more charismatic than this woman, and more sensible. It's unbelievable and better yet, for a state like Alaska, to have a native who becomes a leader. So anyway, it was a terrific experience. I’ll never do it again. I thought writing a garden column was hard. I thought writing books about gardening  was hard. No. Sitting around, wondering what you're supposed to do when half the people have COVID, nobody's answering doors, and there are no debates or public forums, and you're running for Congress.

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TEAMING WITH BACTERIA, PART 2

Farmer Fred  21:25

All right, let's move on. Let's sell some books here. “Teaming with Bacteria is your new book. The follow up to, “Teaming with Microbes” “Teaming with Fungi”, “Teaming with Nutrients”. Is bacteria the missing link in all of this? And according to your book,  this is going to be the next hot thing. Are we going to be inoculating every seed we plant from now on?

Jeff Lowenfels  21:42

Not right away, but at some point in time, we're going to certainly be thinking about it. Let me put this whole thing in context so that people  know why I wrote this particular book. When we talked about Teaming with Microbes in 2006, it was an eye opener. it was Dr Elaine Ingham’s science and ability to be able to go out and talk about this stuff, and deal with the ridicule that people threw at her when she said, “Here's how the system operates.” There's photosynthetic energy, maybe 30-40% of it is used to produce exudates that drip out of the root system. She called them cookies and cakes, their carbon filled molecules, they attract bacteria and fungi that are in the soil to the rhizosphere, that little area right around the root system. And they're happy, they need that carbon, because they don't photosynthesize. Along come nematodes and protozoa and they go, “we're hungry too”. And so they eat the bacteria and the fungi. And, they do so because they also need carbon, they're not able to photosynthesize, you and I eat toast because we need carbon. They don't need it all. And so they poop out the excess. And the excess that gets pooped out, basically is in plant usable form. We learned that from “Teaming with Nutrients,” the second book. The microbes, bacteria and fungi put the charge onto the nutrients so that they can get into the plant. So you have this production in the soil that then migrates to the plant. And then “Teaming with Nutrients” talks about how they get absorbed. And then what happens to them once they're in there.  Lot of studies on mycorrhizal fungi since then, but it  was a paragraph in “Teaming with Microbes”. It was revised, I put a whole chapter in. And finally, it came to be that there was enough for an entire book on fungi, and so “Teaming with Fungi” added to the way plants get their nutrients and these mycorrhizal fungi that are in that area are attracted by the plant. It's not the fungi going into the plant. They go in between plant cells, and they trade water and nutrients, and they they get the exudates. They have a nice symbiotic relationship. They never invade the cell, but they're there. So everything's happy and copacetic and then a friend of mine in about 2010 sends me a one word text: Rhizophagy.  I had no idea what he was talking about. I looked it up. Rhizo, I know, means roots.  Phagy means eat. okay, what the hell was he talking about? it didn't make any sense. And he wasn't the kind of guy that I call up on the telephone. lo and behold, there was a discovery in 2010 by an Australian team, led by a woman, with a hyphenated name that I always forget.

Debbie Flower  25:06

Doctor Paungfoo-Lonhienne.

Jeff Lowenfels  25:11

God, I wish  I could just record that and push a button. And anyway, there was also another woman who I don't think I gave enough credit to I think her name was Miller. But in any case, this team was funded and the funding ran out. But what they discovered using conical microscopies, special kind of microscope, they discovered that bacteria were all inside meristem roots cells, and  they theorize that what was happening was that you were getting the meristem, which are very thin walled cells, very young. That's where they started. As meristem opened up and let these bacteria in, and sort of ate them.  They really weren't sure exactly what was going on. That was the theory, the funding must have run out. And then it was picked up by a guy at Rutgers University in New Jersey, named Dr. James White. And Dr. James White has done some unbelievable work. Those bacteria that Dr. Elaine's taught us were attracted to the rhizosphere, some of them are not eaten. And that's where the rhizophagy story begins.

Debbie Flower  26:37

You know what, I read the book, I read the entire book, I loved it. I learned things. it  open new worlds to me. And one of the things I really, really loved was, pretend you're a bacterium. On page 109, it starts. And it's like the Disney ride of the bacterium from the soil into the plant. What it does in the plant, and then it gets spit right back out. That was just, that was a hoot.

Jeff Lowenfels  27:04

Well, funny. You know, Dr. White, who I wrote Teaming with Microbes, basically with Dr. Elaine Ingham,  she's the guru of the soil foodweb. And this book doesn't take anything away from her by any means. But I was talking with Dr. White and he loves that particular passage, by the way. But I said, how come everybody doesn't know about this?  Can't get traction? And so I said I'll write a book. And that's, that's where the book came.

Debbie Flower  27:33

Rutgers, by the way is my alumni.

Jeff Lowenfels  27:38

Yeah, if I could go back to school.

Debbie Flower  27:39

Yeah, right. I do it too. So much new stuff.

Jeff Lowenfels  27:43

Maybe they would take a 73 year old who would pay them. But in any case, let's talk about this rhizophagy.

Farmer Fred  28:47

What is your consumer definition for Rhizophagy.

Jeff Lowenfels  28:52

Oh yeah. Okay, so here's what happens. Let's pretend you're a bacteria. What happens is the bacteria form a slime, everybody knows about bacterial slime. The example, of course, is  that's what's on your teeth every morning and right now, everybody is licking their teeth. But that bacterial slime contains lots of different kinds of bacteria in the soil and formed right up there on the meristem area. The very tip right right after those slough off cells, they begin to smell popcorn, buttered popcorn, and like anybody else in the world, they go, “I wonder if it's free.” In fact, it smells like there's a whole popcorn factory. They're looking for bacteria and so they move through that bit that's butyric acid, which is released by the plant and they move through  the cell wall into what's known as the periplasmic space. And they go, “What the hell happened there? Where's the Popcorn?” while there is no popcorn, but when they move through there, there is a spray of super oxide, which is designed by the plant to strip off the cell wall of the bacteria.  The cell wall gets stripped off, the bacteria goes, whoa, I don't like that at all. And two or three things happen. The first is the bacteria says, I gotta weaken this stuff, or I'm dead. And so they produce nitrite, the nitrate is converted to nitrate. And both the cell wall and the nitrate are then continued through the membrane into the cytoplasm, where there are nutrients, up to 30% of the nutrients come from this nitrogen fixation inside the root. You could stop right there. And it would be  eyeball dropping, but it continues. Now you got a bacteria in there that doesn't have a cell wall. But it's still alive. It's called,  L class. it doesn't have a cell wall, and they divide every 20 minutes, it divides. And  behold, it divides probably even quicker than 20 minutes, because you don't have a cell wall in the way anymore. And at the same time is producing this nitrate to be an antioxidant to the superoxide, which, incidentally, the superoxide production to the plant goes, “I gotta make sure it's not killing me, it's gonna, it's going to destroy my soul.” So it causes the plant itself to strengthen its own cell wall, heavy stuff, and it continues on through the life with a plant incidentally, then the circulation takes over. And these L Class, they circulate around the inside of the meristem cell. Now, you probably say, what does this look like? Picture a tofu container, that common white plastic tofu container with the water. And then it's got the tofu on the inside. So the outside that white container, that's the cell wall, they then move into that watery area, that's the periplasmic space. And lo and behold, it cycles, and it goes around. Now, another thing is happening, the bacteria are producing one of their phytohormones. Because a lot of bacteria make phytohormones. This one, ethylene. Ethylene causes the meristem cell to grow to stretch. So you've got the nitrite, you've got the ethylene, you've got the cell wall, this L form circulating, multiplying, and they end up forming quads. They form these quads, sometimes six months, but mostly quads. And they circulate around, producing this ethylene, taking a little bit of carbon from the cell wall. And  everything's happy until they get too many. And they begin to back up against the cell wall. And when they back up against the cell wall, the ethylene stops circulating and instead causes a tube to grow in the meristem cell wall. And bingo, the tube is known to me and you as a root hair.

Your stem cell is part of that cell, you know it's not a separate cell. And it's very thin walled, which is probably why it allows nutrients in there. But the real reason why it forms is because of this ethylene bacterial backup and engulf the bacteria. A low tidal wave creates a pressure and boom they pop out of the tip of the growing hair, and boom, it closes up and more of them come in and it grows and boom they go on. You can go four or five times you can open up and drop out or throw out or eject the wall-less quads of bacteria, and they in the soil, use the nutrients there to regrow the cell walls. And lo and behold, they multiply and…

Debbie Flower  34:41

they say that was fun. I'll do it again.

Jeff Lowenfels  34:44

Right. and they go back in and they do the same thing again. Unbelievable. So when you don't have the bacteria, you don't have the root hairs. Who knew? Not me.

Debbie Flower  34:56

but you cited, I Don't know if there were experiments or, or cases where people did grow plants without the bacteria. And the plants. Lo and behold had no root hairs.

Jeff Lowenfels  35:08

Right. They had no root hairs and their roots themselves were all deformed and grew the wrong way.

Debbie Flower  35:13

Yeah, that was pretty amazing grew in the wrong way.

Jeff Lowenfels  35:17

then what was even more amazing when you put the bacteria in, they were back the right way.

Debbie Flower  35:23

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding from the book was that directional growth had to do with metals that were brought into the root by the bacteria that helped the plant Orient, to gravity. And without the bacteria bringing those metals in, there wasn't that ability.

Jeff Lowenfels  35:41

I don't know if I put that in the book. But it makes sense to me. A lot of sense. It might be.

Debbie Flower  35:47

There's a lot of information in that book. Yes.

Jeff Lowenfels  35:49

I know. I just read it. It came out. September 27. yeah, I had to pick it up and read it. I mean, I literally it's, and if we can interrupt just for a second, we're talking bacteria, and people really need to understand bacteria.  So let me do this.  Google bacteria, a head of needle, head of pin. And you'll see in the images that were too expensive for me to to buy. But there they are. And so we're don't think of one car in a driveway.  don't think of that as a bacterium. Think of the Hartsfield  airport in Atlanta. You know, that's ba