The Biosphere Blog

Back in 1648, Johannes Baptista van Helmont took a young willow sapling weighing 5 pounds (2.3 kg*), and planted it into 200 pounds (90.7 kg) of soil. Five years later he uprooted the tree and determined its weight to be 169 pounds and 3 ounces… more »

Have you ever seen these very smooth round and oval shapes in leaves before, and not known what made them? These aren’t caused by caterpillars, which produce jagged edges. These very smooth edges are the tell-tale sign (to those in the know!) of… more »

What is a Fruit? A fruit, botanically speaking, is the seed-bearing structure which develops from the ovary of a flowering plant. Last week was a brief introduction to the diverse categories of fruits that exist — with maybe a few surprising revelations… more »

Fruits Bananas, peaches, apples, watermelons, and yes, jujubes are all immediately known and recognised as ‘fruits’, and if asked what makes a fruit a fruit, one may perhaps use words such as ‘food’, ‘juicy’,… more »

Introduction Fruit fly is an absolute scourge of a pest. If you have ever experienced just one infestation for yourself, then you will fully appreciate the devastation and its potential to literally wipe out the livelihood of commercial fruit growers… more »

Back in 1st September 2020 I began a new category: “Life of a Ta-Jan” with the intent of following a new Ta-Jan as it left dormancy, budded and grew during its first season after grafting. And then I had the idea of not only recording growth… more »

The History of the Word ‘Humus’ ‘Humus’ to the Romans meant the soil (earth, ground) as a whole. Carl Linnaeus, the inventor of binomial nomenclature, used this word in his system to classify soils as he did plants and animals:… more »

Soil Organic Matter (SOM) ‘Organic’, in science, means nothing more than ‘contains carbon’. It doesn’t imply ‘healthy’ or ‘good for you’ — atrazine is as much ‘organic’ as is glucose.… more »

This post is for people with small (or no) yards, or who otherwise can’t or don’t wish to set up an outdoor compost pile, but who would still love to ‘do their bit’ and feed their trees at the same time. This composting-in-a-box… more »

Composting Composting is an age-old technique of converting waste organic matter into nutrient-rich soil amendments that add fertility to a soil. There is the slow method of ‘cold’ composting, and then there is the faster ‘hot’… more »

The other day I was chatting to a neighbour about, of all things, Casuarina sp. (’She-Oak’) and the mulch they create from all the ‘needles’ they shed. (Casuarinas seem to be a very much under-appreciated and much-maligned tree,… more »

While waiting for the terminal buds of the 2020 Ta-Jan blogging tree to do — or not! — as predicted, I thought a post on transplant shock an interesting diversion this week. Back on the 22nd September 2020 I did a photoblog post showing the two years of… more »

Last week we covered the location of jujube tree nodes and the two types of buds present at each node. (That post has since been updated to include a crash-course description of the branch types as well.) The post ended with a summary of what each bud… more »

Nodes and Buds A ‘bud’, in botany, is a compact, undeveloped shoot which may develop into a twig/branch, leaf, or flower. The region in which buds are located is called a node, and the area between nodes is called an internode. Nodes are the… more »

UPDATE: This post didn’t make it clear at the time that these trees were handled contrary to norms in the interests of science. (Basically, I wanted photos of two years’ of root growth whilst demonstrating how tough these trees are with… more »