What is up playing people? It's time once more for the Planet Propology Podcast. The show where we dive into the lives and careers of some very cool playing people to figure out why they do what they do and what keeps them coming back for more. I'm Vic Rumbeliga, your host and your humble guide in this journey through the sciences and as always my friends. I am so excited to be with you today. It's time for Q&A episode. Yes, my friends, it's been a minute, like a lot of minutes. I don't know. What's that play? Rent? Where they talk about how many minutes or a year? I don't remember. It's a big number. It's been more than a year since we've done a Q&A and I thought that would be a good way as summer vacations are wrapping up for a whole lot of people. And just to kick off a fall semester and a fall time, I thought it would be fun to do a summer Q&A. So as always, I asked for questions online through social media. I got questions through TikTok and threads in different places. That's mostly where I am today's threads, Instagram and TikTok. I still use the other outlets a little bit, but mostly those. And I got some really interesting ones. So I picked four questions that I thought it would be great to go over. And some of these are more my opinions about things than, yes, of course, we're going to cover science and talk about actual science. But they're interesting concepts that I thought would be fun to discuss. So this won't be a super long episode. But I did want to get to a few of your questions as we are in the heart of summer and summer vacations are wrapping up and all of that once again. So let's get right into it. Let's talk about a few of your questions. Okay, Doki. So this first one is not a specific or one specific question, I guess, from a listener or from a social media follower. It's actually sort of an aggregate of a whole lot of questions I have been asked over the past few weeks. So if you've been following along with my social media, you'll know that I've had a dragon fruit in the greenhouse that was blooming. And dragon fruits are just such fascinating plants that along the way, I got quite a few various questions about it from how does this grow? What are the growing conditions, how do you pollinate it, etc. And I thought that would be a great place to start. So instead of picking one of those specifically, I kind of wanted to give a overview of how dragon fruits work and how cultivation of dragon fruits work and all of that. So we'll jump into it. We'll talk a little bit about what they are, how they grow, what you can do with them if you have some and we'll go from there. So first off, if you have not seen a dragon fruit before, they're really strange, really wild looking fruits. And I think they get their name because they kind of look like dragon eggs or the fruits themselves do. They have these interesting, kind of scaly, peeling skins. Usually they're sort of like a bright fuchsia red, or sometimes they are yellow. The flesh inside can either be white or red, sort of a, I say red, sort of like a deep, powerful, vehement purple. And sometimes they can be some combination or some area in between the two. There are small black seeds, very similar in structure and appearance and sort of the way we approach them as a kiwi seed. Now if you've eaten a kiwi, you know, they've got little black seeds in them. And dragon fruits have those as well, except that the seeds are more distributed throughout the flesh of the fruit. The flesh of the fruit, as we're speaking of it, is kind of custardy in texture, right? It's not very firm. Usually it's chopped into little chunks and eaten that way, or it's eaten with a spoon or something similar. Now a lot of people don't love dragon fruit. And I kind of get it, especially some of the white fleshed varieties. Their flavor is really subdued. They're sweet, but they don't necessarily get a lot of the tanginess, again, that you would expect with something like a kiwi. And that's okay. You know, it is, again, a very specific taste. But some of the red or purple fleshed ones actually have a lot of interesting flavors. Now, of course, this is subjective. But out of the three, I personally think the ones that are yellow on the outside kind of taste the best. They have an interesting sort of combination of flavors. And in, I think, a lot of times they are the most, I don't know, complex when you eat them in a lot of ways. Now there are three main varieties that are cultivated. They're all in the highly serious genus. And as such, they are night blooming cactus. We'll talk about that more in a second. Probably the most common one that you get is a red skinned fruit. Sort of, again, red is maybe underselling it. It's really like hot pink, but we can call it red. And it has white flesh, and this is highly serious of dottis. The red fleshed fruit, which also has sort of a hot pink outside, is highly serious coaster rickensis. Or sometimes you'll see that as highly serious polyrises. And then the yellow skin and white fleshed fruit is highly serious megalanthes. Now, all of these grow similarly. They have similar growth habits, similar cultivation requirements, and all of that. They are native to different parts of central and South America. But generally, they can be grown interchangeably. Now, what does a dragon fruit look like? Have you ever seen when you go to the Garden Center, Lowe's, Home Depot, wherever, those grafted moon cactus? So they're usually like a bright red sort of bulb looking thing, or sometimes they're yellow or orange or different colors, and they're grafted on top of a green sort of stock of a cactus. That's a highly serious, the one on the bottom. And they grow quickly. They grow aggressively. They are sort of triangular in form. But this is a large sprawling and climbing plant. Out in nature, it would either sort of sprawl on the ground, but more commonly would climb dozens of feet, in some cases, up trees. Now they're heavy. They can cause shading and so they can't actually damage the trees. So in cultivation, they're usually grown on poles. People will use either like a four by four pole or a six by six pole, usually somewhere between eight and 10, 12 feet tall, and they're grown up that pole. And then sort of pruned into a tree. It's really interesting. So you'll see lots of, not vines, but lots of stock from your pole. And then they sort of fan out at the top to kind of look like the canopy on a tree. The flowers form usually on the margins, or sometimes the ends of these pads, of these cactus pads, they're called cladophils. This plant, again, as a cactus, doesn't have leaves, does have the words. You want to be careful about that. But a lot of times in cultivation, the flowers along the sort of main body of these cladophils are removed, and the ones at the end of the stems are left so that it kind of looks like a, you've ever seen the Simpsons, you know, sideshow bob. Think about sideshow bob. That's kind of what these plants look like. And imagine if sideshow bob had big hot pink dragon egg shaped fruits at the end of his hair. And you've kind of got the picture here. Okay. These are night blooming cacti, like so many other cacti. And there's a lot of reasons for this, but what I was mentioning earlier is we had one in the greenhouse that I have worked on a little bit this summer to get it trained up and over this little treeless structure we have. And we actually got three blooms at the same time off of it, which was super cool. Now these blooms, if you've seen a night blooming cactus, are probably not a huge surprise, but they are always just so incredible look at. They are usually somewhere about 20 centimeters in diameter. If you were to put your hand up to it, it'd be, you know, as big or or sometimes even larger than the palm of your hand with the fingers played out. They are sort of bright white with yellow on the outside. The buds are sort of long and scaly looking. And those scales peel back and they're the sepals that form the base of the flower. The flower has a long pistol, which is again female reproductive structure. And multiple anthers producing pollen or multiple stamens producing pollen. Now these have a heavy pollen load. And I would describe the smell and they're very fragrant, very fragrant. It's kind of hard to describe. I would think if you've ever smelled a lily, and if you've ever smelled a jasmine, the smell is kind of somewhere in between. It's very floral, but it's kind of sweet in nature as well. If the pollen, if you're allergic to like lilies and other plants like that, it can cause a little bit of allergy problems and they produce a lot of pollen. Now, some varieties of dragon fruit are self fertile and they can self pollinate. You can usually tell this is the case if the pistol is about the same length as all of the stamens. So if the stigma, which is the place on the pistol where pollen is deposited, is about the same distance from the base of the flower as all the pollen. That kind of makes sense, right? If everything is there in the same spot, that flower can self pollinate. Now these are co-sexual flowers. They have both male and female reproductive structures. A lot of varieties, and the variety that we have in the greenhouse, I believe we are, it's never floured. It's never fruited. So I'm not 100% sure, but I believe we have the highly serious and dottis, the red outside, white inside. So on ours, the pistol is longer than the stamens. So that means that the plant is not so fertile or the flowers are not so fertile. Now, in some cases, and our success rate is pretty low with this, if you pollinate one of these varieties with a different flower on the same plant, sometimes, sometimes you'll get pollination. And I posted a video on my social media of me doing exactly that. I went up there in the middle of the night, and it's a night blooming cactus, and I pollinated it myself. None of them took. None of the three took. Now, I would really need a second plant, which is something I'm going to kind of work on so that maybe we can get fruit one day. So I could cross pollinate. The challenging thing sometimes is I can't just necessarily take a pad from one of my dragon fruits and make a second one, because that's a clone, right? The genetics are the same. So even cross pollinating that usually does not have a really high success rate. So I'm probably going to try to get some seeds, either I'll buy a fruit or something. I'll germinate some, I'll grow some off, and then maybe next summer, summer after I may be able to get some cross pollination. I digress. They are night blooming cactus, which means they are generally pollinated by things like moths and bats, other animals that are active at night. And it's really cool to watch as the flower is developing, you'll start to see these floral nectaries sort of go into overdrive. So on the outside of the flower bug, you get little drops of nectar that form. And that really makes some sense, evolutionarily, because if they're going to put all of their effort, all of their energy into blooming each flower once at night, they want as many pollinators present at that time as possible. So they produce this nectar to try to get moths and bats and again, other animals in the area, they want them around when they finally bloom. And then when they do bloom again, they're fragrant, they are large and white to reflect moonlight, and they have large nectaries so that any animals coming to feed on them have a really good chance of pollinating them. Now, if you read a lot of guides, they actually recommend and it's really interesting that you go right as the flower opens and collect pollen and then keep it and then wait till later in the night or early in the morning to actually deposit that pollen on the stigma, which is interesting. That may be another safeguard in some of these varieties against self pollination so that if there's a little bit of lag time between pollen production and pollen drop in the time that the female reproductive system is really active so that it gives time for animals, insects to go collect a lot of pollen and move on to another flower a little bit later. Now, I've also read stuff that says that you can just do it right away and it's fine as long as you're cross pollinating. So again, I unfortunately didn't have any success pollinating it, but it was fine. I posted some pictures in the time lapse that I will link in the show notes of this episode. So if you'd like to go watch it, you certainly can. I would encourage you to and I would love it if you did. But yeah, they're such cool plants. They're such cool plants. A couple of caveats, they're big plants. They're cool and they're very big. So like I said, they can grow dozens of feet up a tree. Ours is on an eight to nine foot trellis structure and it easily grows up that. They'll put on a couple of inches of growth a day in some cases. So if you're going to get a dragon fruit, some things you want to keep in mind, you need a well-drained relatively sandy soil. A cactus mix works well, something with a lot of perlite or gravel works really well. Heavy clay content in your soil or in your potting media is not necessarily recommended, but you can get away with it if you can add gypsum and some other things to it. You want to water thoroughly when you do water, but you don't want to keep it soggy all the time. Again, it likes a well-drained soil. Now, this is a tropical or semi-tropical plant, so you do need to water it and it likes some humidity. But overall, it is also still a cactus, right? And you need room for it to sprawl. Now, this plant does have a fairly shallow root system. Again, like a lot of cacti and not extensive root system. The nice thing about that is you can keep it in a large pot. As a tropical plant, it would need to come in in the winter. It does not tolerate anything even close to a frost, okay? So anything below about 10 Celsius can kill the plant. It can definitely slow it down and reduce flowering and fruit production all that. So it's a cool plant. It is easy to propagate either through seed or through cutting up the pads. There's a lot of options with it. And I just, I think it's something so cool. And so if you live somewhere where it's really hot in the summer, it likes hot weather. If you've got a bright porch, you could put it on in a large pot, maybe something that trellis it on, I think it's a great option. If you are somewhere semi-tropical, where it's not going to freeze, where your temperatures are probably not going to get below the 40s Fahrenheit very often, or almost never potentially theoretically and ideally, this may be a really good option for you. It may be something really cool that you can put in your landscape. But, yeah, dragon fruits are great. Go watch the video. Let me know what you think. And I hope this gave you a little bit of information about them. Okay, so the second question for today is really interesting one that came from threads. And I'll, by the way, give credits all the question-askers down in the show notes. But this person asked, what is the environmental impact of lichens? And I thought about this for a while, and I was like, is there one? I mean, of course there is. It's a living thing on this planet. We all have an impact on the environment, everything that's alive on this planet impacts the environment. So I thought, sure, let's look into it. Lichens are fascinating, fascinating. And it turns out I really didn't know much about them. Now, I want to preface this and say, lichens are not really plants. They're not really not plants. They live in sort of their own little weird gray area. Okay, lichens are very strange. They're also not really a single organism. If every individual lichen is made up of two different organisms, which is such as just a weird thing to think about. So they are a symbiotic colony between a species of fungi and a species of algae. Now, there are thousands of different, what we would call species of lichen or lichens all over the world. Thousands in North America, thousands of different climates. They're on, I believe every continent except Antarctica, and that I'm even not sure about. Now, again, I don't know a ton about lichens. So if you're a lichen expert, please call me, shoot me an email. I would love to talk to you on the show and take corrections for all the stuff that I'm sure I'm about to mess up. I researched, I read several articles about lichens, and I am beginning to think that I'm more confused now than when I started, but I'm going to take or run at this because they're so fascinating. So again, what we call lichen or species of lichen is a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an algae. And there are thousands of species of both. And some of them live in dry climates, some of them live in wet climates, some of them live in hot and cold or really wet or really hot or really cold rainforests and deserts and all over the place. In fact, we're at a statistic that lichens are actually a dominant life form. In like 7% of our ecosystems, they're a keystone species all over the world. Now, if you've never seen a lichen, I bet you have. I bet you just never thought about it. So if you're in the woods hiking and there's this rock that looks like it's covered in moss, it may be moss, but odds are good that it could be a lichen. Lichens are a variety of colors. You'll see me yellows and oranges and reds and greens and whites and all kinds of colors, but a lot of times will be a little white fringe around the outside with some kind of color in the middle. So a lot of times what we consider, oh, that's a mossy rock is actually a rock with lichen on it. Now, a lichen is essentially a fungus that is acting as sort of a habitat or a superstructure that a different kind of algae lives on. So the lichen provides a place for the algae to grow, the algae photosynthesizes and then feeds the fungus and you get this symbiotic really fascinating relationship. Now a lot of different animals eat like it from reindeer to mice and birds and other herbivores. It's a huge food source for a lot of different things. It also helps in soil creation, which I just thought was so fascinating. So all the soil out there and just a quick soils lesson, soil is made of sand, silting clay. The difference between sand, silting clay is the size of the particle. Sand is biggest, silt is in the middle and clay is the smallest. Now these come from different types of parent materials, but we call it a soil if it has those three things basically in them and the biggest differences are sizes. So all of our soil comes from rocks, from mountains, through erosion, whether that's wind erosion, sun, freezing, cracking, water, all kinds of things. They break rocks down into smaller particles that become the soil that's deposited elsewhere. Lichen also play a big role in this. So as the lichen grows on rocks, the fungi mines between particles and the rocks and breaks off little bits and over time, this creates soil deposition. So without lichens, we would actually have a lot less soil. They have played a major role in creating soil on this planet. Also, because they are essentially made of algae, algae photosynthesizes. Photosynthesis makes oxygen. So in addition to all the trees and grasses and plants and waterborne algae and everything else, lichens are producing oxygen on this planet. They are photosynthetic organisms, and it's really cool, really cool. But one of the major things that we as humans kind of look at lichen for are diagnostic tools. So they get all their food from the air, right? They pull their nutrients essentially directly from the air. They don't have roots. They're not plants. They're plant adjacent, but they're not plants, okay? Algae is a photosynthetic organism, and so it turns sunlight and carbon dioxide and water and other things into sugars. Those sugars are used to run all the processes in that organism. So as they're growing, they are absorbing air. It turns out that lichen adapt relatively slowly to their environment. Now, this is not true of all of them, but a lot of them take time to adapt, and maybe it's because of the symbiotic relationship. There's a lot of moving parts there, so to speak, they don't move, really. That's maybe beyond the scope of this. They're complicated. And because of that complexity, I think a lot of times they evolve relatively slowly, and they're adapted to a specific environment, right? Because it's a specific species of fungi that's endemic to an area and a specific species of algae that's also endemic to that area. So they are very dependent on the environment. Scientists kind of look at them like a canary in a coal mine, right? When the lichen start suffering, or we get a big population explosion in a specific kind of lichen, it tells us a lot about the air they're essentially consuming. Is there more nitrogen in the air? Are they able to produce more of themselves? Is there more carbon in the air? Can they photosynthesize at a higher rate? Are oxygen rates lower? So we can use lichens as a diagnostic tool for what the air's doing, for what the climate's doing. They're going to be sensitive to water, they're going to be sensitive to heat, wind speeds, nitrogen, or let's call it air content. All the things that go into making something like that grow, little tweaks in that can cause big differences. So by actually looking at different species of lichens, we can tell, oh, this one really likes nitrogen, and the population is exploding. We probably have more nitrogen either in our rainfall or in our air. Oh, but this one doesn't like nitrogen, so same answer, or vice versa. We can tell a lot about the environment by what the lichen is doing. So to answer the question, lichen has enormous, enormous environmental impacts, both on the way the environment functions, as part of the trophic system, as part of the whole thing that things eat, and the energy transfer from the sun to everything else. But also again, as scientists who are trying to monitor the environment and figure out what's going on, they are such an important diagnostic tool, such an important diagnostic tool. I am going to have to find books on lichen now. I don't need another degree. In fact, I've been told by my wife that I should not get another degree, but I would love to study them more. So again, if you are a what a lichenologist, a someone who studies lichen, I actually don't even know what that would be, give me up. I would love to talk to you. I would love to interview you on the show. If you know someone who is one of those as well, send them my way, but you can be sure I'm going to be reading about these weird little creatures a lot moving forward. I'm going to take a quick break, do some mid-roll stuff. I'm going to get some stuff to tell you. And then we'll be back, and I've got two more questions to answer. Well, hey there. Welcome to the mid-roll. I hope you're enjoying these questions and their answers. I always have fun doing these. They're really interesting episodes for me. I get to do some research. I get to learn some new things, and I get to share them with you. So if you have questions you like for me to answer on the show, I plan on doing a few more of these this year, hopefully. And I would love to answer your question. But until then, tell your houseplants. I said hello, that I miss them, that I hope they're well. I hope you're well too. Thanks for listening, plant apology, and being a part of what happens here through inconsistent scheduling and long droughts between episodes and just me rambling on this podcast. It means a lot that you're still here, and I do this because I enjoy getting to talk to you. I enjoy getting to talk to really cool plant people, and to just explore this world and learn more about it. I enjoy learning more. If you would like to connect with plant apology, look me up on social media where either plant apology or plant apology pod all over the place so you can get me personally at the plant trough. And you can send me an email at planthropologypod@gmail.com. If you've got suggestions for guests, feel like to be a guest. If you want to just give me some feedback, I would love so much to hear from you. Thanks to the tech tech department of plain soil science for letting me do the show and supporting the show. Thanks to the Davis College of agricultural science and natural resources for the same. And thanks mostly to you, the listener for being a part of it. If you want to support plant anthropology in other ways, the best way to do that is to tell someone about the show. Tell a friend word of math is still the best way to get the word out about the show. If you want to leave me a review on Apple podcast or Spotify or anywhere else, it would mean the world to me. If you did that, if you do it and send me to my email or my social media, a screenshot of the review, I'll send you some stickers and stuff because I'm getting you stickers and I have a whole bunch. I'd hate to get rid of them already here. And if you want to financially support the show, you can go to planthepologypodcast.com and snag some merch, or you can go to buyme@coffee.com/lanthropology and for the price of cup of coffee, you can buy me a cup of coffee and some show hosting and production costs and all of that. A couple of the things I wanted to talk about. I wrote a book last year. It's been out over a year, which is bonkers to me. It's called plants to the rescue. It's about climate change and how plants and science can help us deal with that issue. And if you haven't picked one up yet, if you haven't seen it, I would encourage you to do that. Go check out a local bookshop, go to the library and I would just, it would be in the world to me. And if you have read it, drop me a review for that as well. Also, it has been my pleasure this summer to get to partner with the Lubbock Arts Alliance to promote one of their new city-wide art exhibits called delightful fantasy flowers by artist glory heartsfield. Now, these are spread out all over the city. There are four installations along our highways. It's a collaboration with Lubbock Arts Alliance, the tornado industrial arts, the artist herself, and the Texas Department of Transportation. Now, when I say that these are big metal flower sculptures, I'm not underselling it. They are 13 feet tall. They're brightly colorful. They represent a lot of composite flowers you might find in your landscape. We're actually doing a video series right now talking about plants that resemble them that you could use in your own yard. So go check out the Lubbock Arts Alliance. If you're in Lubbock, Texas, go drive around town and look at the delightful fantasy flowers, installations. They're so cool. You can see them from your car just driving by. You can see them from a long way off. I'll post an image with the show notes or a link to the image in the show notes where you can see the locations of all of them. There's such cool exhibits. I was thrilled when I was asked to be a part of it because I love the Lubbock Arts Alliance. I love supporting community art and I love supporting education about plants. Okay, now time to answer some more questions. Let's do it. So the third and fourth question I got are sort of related. They go hand in hand in some ways and I'm going to take them one at a time, but I hope you can see how they sort of work together. Someone asked, is someone studying how backyard gardeners have to shift their growing seasons or crops due to changing climates, due to climate change? And the answer is a big yes, a huge, massive, incredibly large. Yes, there's so much work going into what's going to happen with our crops. What plants can we grow based on a change in climate and based on changing seasons and seasonal variations and patterns and longer growing seasons, which sounds like maybe that would be a good thing. I don't know. It's a mixed bag, right? Maybe the things that would bloom at a certain time a year and be done before it's cold may not do that or they may bloom too early and get hit by a late freeze. There's so much that goes into it. If you've been sort of following these kinds of things the past few months, the past year or so, you may know that the USDA, the US Department of Agriculture unveiled its new plant hardiness zone map. And in that, pretty much all the hardiness zones in the US shifted higher. We're in higher zones than we used to be. Now, this is an interesting metric and it doesn't necessarily mean what a lot of people think it means. So I wanted to talk about that for just a second. This is a measure of a 30-year average of the average annual lowest temperature on that year. The annual lowest temperature on that year and they take 30 years of data and aggregate them. And there's usually a two or three-year lag between the current year and when all the data is processed. So we're looking at data from at this point 2020, 2021, 22, and there. So it is not an average temperature. It doesn't tell you anything about how hot it gets. It doesn't tell you anything about how long it stays cold during the winter. All it tells you is in this given location. What is the coldest it got? So I'm in zone 7A, now 7B. We actually just got bumped up, which means that our average annual coldest temperature is between 0 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty cold. It's pretty cold here. That does not tell you that it'll get to 114 degrees in the summer. And it does not tell you that it'll be 40, 50 degrees most of the winter, with some freezing temperatures at night, really pretty mild. So this is a useful tool, but it should not be the only thing we look at when we think about, oh, everything is warmer. Everything is warmer. These have been a couple, three of our hottest summers on record. It seems like we break any record just about every day. That's not great. But the USDA hardiness zone map is not the be all $1 as far as that goes. What that does tell us if we look at the big picture, though, is that we're warming up. And if you look at weather data, climate data, we can see that our growing times, our growing seasons, have absolutely shifted. And that means a couple of things. It means that maybe things that we have grown historically in the southern US, we are going to either be able to or maybe have to push a little bit farther north. So we have to think about, okay, how do we address this? When can we plant? How do we go about it? It's going to get harder and harder to grow certain crops in hotter climates and crops that maybe need more chilling in the winter, like a lot of our tree fruits, a lot of our tree crops, it may get harder to grow in cooler climates or just in general. So yes, there is a lot of research that goes into this. In fact, the EPA published some data through 2023, looking at the average length of growing season in the continuous 48 states, the lower 48. Okay. And the long term average, and we see some large deviations from our long term average. And if you look at, you know, 100 years of data, 130 years of data here, there are some dips in the early 1900s. There was a dip in our growing season about seven days shorter than the long term average. Between 1930 and about 1990, we've been hovering right around zero or right around the long term average number of growing days. Now, this is not a hard number, right? Because this is an average of lots of different climates or lots of different regions. But starting in about 1990, we see this huge spike in the number of growing days in a season. And we're up nearly two weeks, our growing season on average across the continental US is up nearly two weeks. Now, that may sound like a good thing. And again, in some cases, I guess it could be, right? We have longer to grow crops, but that also changes when we plant. It also changes how we plant. What also that doesn't capture is the amount of carbon in the air, the amount of carbon dioxide out there. Yes, plants like that to a point, but it also creates more heat, right? We have hotter summer days that makes it harder to grow certain things. So as a backyard gardener, that's actually something we really have to be paying attention to. And there's a lot of science that goes into it. Now, most of the research is being done in more commercial operations, because that's easier to study and easier to quantify. But if you think of the impacts that we're going to see in the agricultural setting in open fields, that's probably going to be amplified in city environments. We get urban heat island effects, we get heat domes, we get increased carbon dioxide output in maybe carbon dioxide in the air from exhausts, we get more pollution, we get water problems. So as we see some of these climate growing season issues in our ag settings, we're absolutely going to see them in our home gardens. I think some things that a lot of home gardeners probably need to do is think about how do we add shade? How do we in certain places, right? This is not true everywhere. But if you live in a place where the sun is super intense, where your humidity is low, maybe you get a lot of solar intensity, where it's really hot, where you get long days, probably thinking about how do we provide some afternoon shade to our garden plants? It's not a bad idea. When we say full sun, we're talking six, eight, 10 hours of direct sunlight in normal conditions. And then much more than that, we start to run into problems. So we need to think about that. We need to think about making sure we can provide enough water and nutrients and everything else to our plants. And we need to make sure that we are growing things that are well acclimated to our area, to where we're trying to grow. So that might mean having to shift our practices a little bit, having to think differently about what we grow and when we grow it and how we grow it. There's a lot that goes into this y'all. So yeah, there is a lot of research going into how this is going to affect backyard gardeners. But I think we need to be looking at it on a global scale as well, on an agricultural and just societal food supply scale as well. Because that's kind of scary, it's scary to me. But this was not, this is, and I hope you understand, like my intent is never to be like doom and gloom. Because there are very smart people out there working on it, right? And yes, maybe it's an uphill battle. But if you go back and listen to Dr. Catherine Hayhoe's episode from earlier in the year, she is someone who is in this every day, right? She's a climate scientist who is in this every day. And she's hopeful. She presents these issues not as a, oh, we're doomed. She's not a doomerist at all. She's, she's hopeful about what we can do. And if we're able to work together, if we're able to be, I don't know, cooperative and open-minded and all of that, like we can, we can still steer the ship back in the right direction. But that's something that's going to take all of us to do for sure. So my last question actually came from my friend, Shannon Perry, who is the writer/producer/brain behind the Oz9 podcast, which if you go listen to episode 100 of the Oz9 podcast, I actually got to be a voice actor and it was so much fun. And I played myself in that. I was, I was me. So I don't know if that means that the Oz9 exists in our universe, or if I exist in their universe. I don't know which one of those is more concerning to me. Don't just go listen episode 100. It won't make any sense. You should go and catch up. I know full well that y'all are out here listening to like 30 hour long audiobooks. These are 20 minute episodes, 20-ish minute episodes. You can catch up. It won't take you that long, okay? If you've listened to the Lord of the Rings on audiobooks, if you listen to Brandon Sanderson, you can definitely your catch up on Oz9. And I think you definitely should. And then tell me what you think about episode 100. It was so much fun. Anyway, Shannon asks, what is the single best plant related thing I can do to help the environment? And that is such a good question. And I wish I had some really scientific, really well thought out, where really well researched answer to this. And I kind of don't because there's never going to be just one thing, right? There's never going to be just one thing, one action, one silver bullet, so to speak, one Band-Aid, that's going to fix this big problem that it took 8 billion of us in 100, 120, 150 years to create. So when I think about what is the best thing that someone can do to help the environment, it is to just start, to just start. And plant related things, just grow something, just start growing something, start educating a friend about what you've learned about plants. Just start. Audrey Hepburn, who was an actor, but also a humanitarian. And what a lot of people don't know, she was an avid gardener, an avid gardener. And she talked a lot about how she used her garden to escape everything else in her life. But Audrey Hepburn once said, to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. And I think that the best plant related thing that we can do to help the environment is to continue to believe in tomorrow. I really believe that hope is our best tool in so many things, but in our fight against climate change, in our fight to save us and save our environment. Hope is our best and strongest and in some ways most radical weapon. So plant a garden, whether that is you planting a peach tree or tomato plants or whatever in your backyard or growing some herbs in your kitchen in little pots or doing some stuff on your patio. Maybe you've got an old bathtub that you put plants in. Whatever it is and however it is that you do it, just start, just start. We, a lot of times, I think, are let our fear and our anxiety about the future immobilize us, immobilize us and it makes us stress and worry and have anxiety. But hoping is a radical act. It is a radical act and it is a powerful act. I cannot overstate in my own mind and in my own life how powerful hope is and how much it can do. So plant a garden, grow a plant, water or something, be better about making sure you're planting while adapted species. Don't spread in vases. Cut down your Bradford pear tree and plant something better. Use a local farmers and work it. Whatever it is that is the place that you can start. Do that. Do that. And planting a garden doesn't have to be literally planting a garden. It can be sowing the seeds of all of these different things, taking your kid to the library to find information about the environment, teaching them to value the plants around them a little bit more, fight, plant blindness, all of that. There is so much we can do. So many little things that seem insignificant, but it turns out that all of us together are not insignificant, right? And if we all do one little thing, one little thing, if we all just start, we can do so much. We can accomplish so much. And we can save ourselves. We can save this environment. And I think that that is incredible. And I think that is powerful. So that is my non-scientific philosophical answer to what is the best plant thing we can do to help the environment. Again, if you want to learn more about like dealing with the environment, fighting climate change, go listen to Dr. Hayhoe's episode, I believe that was 102. And there's so many good things out there. So many things you can listen to, so much you can learn. And I hope that we never stop learning. So thanks for listening. Thanks for being a part of this. Thanks for sending your questions. I really, these are, I think, as far as like solo episodes that I do, these are by far my favorite. This summer, I'll probably have one more solo episode coming out right around the start of the semester in a couple of weeks. And then I have some great guests lined up for the fall. So lots more plant topology coming. Send me your questions. Send me your thoughts. Send me your comments. Follow along on social media. Thanks again to you for listening. It means the world to me. It really, really genuinely does. And it gives me hope, which is something that I carry with me as I go through my day. So you know, I love you. You know, I think you're the best. Be kind to one another. If you have not been kind to one another so far, give that a shot. It's pretty cool. Good way to be. Keep being really cool, plant people. And I will talk to you next time. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
