Courtesy Penn State University/ Amitabh Avasthi

Penn State horticulturist Robert Cameron created a biofilter that uses plant roots to clean wastewater.

Plant roots enmeshed in layers of discarded materials inside upright pipes can purify dirty water from a washing machine, making it fit for growing vegetables and flushing toilets, according to Penn State University horticulturists.

“Our global fresh water supplies are fast depleting,” says Robert Cameron, a doctoral student in horticulture. “So it is critical that we begin to look at alternatives on how we can take wastewater and turn it into a resource.”

Cameron and Robert D. Berghage, associate professor of horticulture, use discarded materials and a combination of plant and bacterial communities to treat water from a washing machine and other wastewater.

According to Cameron, this design is superior to previous living water-treatment systems in that it requires much less space and is much more efficient at removing water contaminants.

“We have shown that with this system we can take wastewater from a washing machine and remove more than 90 percent of the pollutants within three days,” says Cameron. “The treated water had very low levels of suspended solids and no detectable levels of E. coli.”

The water-treatment system consists of two 7-foot-long plastic corrugated pipes 1 foot in diameter. The researchers placed these pipes upright 3 feet apart in a basin containing a foot of potting soil and crushed limestone.

“We planted the 3-feet-by-5-feet basin at the foot of the pipes with papyrus and horsetail reed,” Cameron says. “Just like in a wetland, the roots of these plants and associated bacteria clean the water as it flows under the basin surface and through the two columns.”

Both culvert pipes are filled with alternating layers of porous rocks, composted cow manure, peat moss, tire crumbs, potting soil and crushed limestone.

Researchers planted vegetables and ornamental plants—tomatoes, peppers, rosemary, basil and orchids—in holes drilled along the length of the pipes. They then pumped about 45 gallons of wastewater from a washing machine to the top of the two pipes.

“As the dirty water trickles down the pipes, the tight mesh created by the soil, gravel and roots filters out pollutants,” explains Cameron. “Additionally, bacterial colonies among the roots eat away the dissolved organic matter while layers of iron scraps or clay can be added to trap phosphorous.”

By periodically replacing the plants, pollutants not metabolized but trapped, can be removed from the water-treatment system, he adds.

Chemical analyses of the treated water show a reduction of nitrites from 24 parts per million to just 1.9 parts per million, a reduction of more than 90 percent.

The water-treatment system also is effective in filtering out boron. While boron is a necessary micronutrient for plants, it’s toxic at high levels and can accumulate in the ground.

“Our gray water sample had boron levels of about 702 parts per million,” Cameron says. “But after about three days of treatment, water collected from the foot of the pipes had only about 58 parts per million—a reduction of about 92 percent. Dozens of other pollutants were similarly reduced in two to three days.”

Cameron indicates that the next phase of research will focus on the beneficial reuses of the treated wastewater, such as reducing a building’s need for air conditioning.

Photo by Audrey Pavia

Smokey chewing on something appropriate.

I had rabbits as a kid growing up in the surburbs of L.A., but they always lived outside. No one ever heard of an indoor rabbit back then. But by the time I got back to bunny ownership, keeping indoor rabbits had become the norm. And it makes sense.

When keeping rabbits outside, they are subject to all kinds of threats. The weather is only one thing that can take down an outdoor rabbit. Predators are probably the biggest issue, with raccoons being among the worst. Those striped carnivores can and will reach through the bars of a rabbit hutch and kill the bunnies right in their cage.
 
So, my two Miniature Rexes, Smokey and Prudence, live indoors. They have a large exercise pen in my home office that houses their bed, litter boxes and wicker bunny tent. When it’s time for them to romp around outside the pen, I section off the part of my office near my desk and let them have the run of the house.
 
Anyone who has indoor rabbits knows that rabbit-proofing is crucial if you are going to let your lagomorphs run loose. Rabbits are notorious chewers, and will chomp through anything they can get their teeth on. This brings me to Smokey’s great adventure.
 
Two weekends ago, we had some friends over with their kids. Our house is a popular spot for children, who think it’s a private petting zoo. The bunnies are a favorite attraction.
 
When kids come over, I escort them to my office, lift them up over the pen so they can sit inside with the rabbits, and monitor the interaction. When the rabbits seem like they’ve had enough, I take the kids out of the room and that’s the end of it. But this time, one of the kids found his way back to the office without me knowing and tried to get into the pen. He didn’t succeed, but he did manage to compromise its security.

The next morning, I came in my office to feed the bunnies their a.m. pellets. And I saw Smokey sitting outside the pen. After I put him back in, I went into optimist mode. “He must have just gotten out,” I said to myself. “I found him right after he discovered the gap in the pen panels.”
 
Content with my conclusion, I went off to work.
 
Two days later, Randy calls to tell me he is trying to send a fax, but it won’t go through. I tried to troubleshoot the situation over the phone, to no avail. When I got home that night, I crawled around under the desk, fishing through the spaghetti bowl of wires that connect all my equipment together. I figured a plug must have come out. Yeah, that’s it. I was still optimistic.
 
It didn’t take too long to discover the problem. The wire connecting the fax machine to the telephone had been neatly sliced in two. Smokey.
 
I went to the garage, got another phone cord and replaced it. But the machine still didn’t work. I crawled around under my desk some more and found another sliced phone cord, this one connecting the phone to the answering machine. Smokey.
 
Another try and the machine still wasn’t working. More crawling around and another discovery: a severed phone cord attaching the phone to the wall jack. Smokey.
 
After I had replaced all the phone cords and got the machine working, I decided all my problems were solved. Still optimistic.
 
But this entire week, I have been discovering severed cords under my desk, one by one. First it was my speakers. Then it was my digital camera. Today, I discovered my back-up drive.
 
I guess it’s safe to say that Smokey had not just gotten out of his pen when I found him that morning, but had quite a bit of time to spend under my desk, slicing every cord he could wrap his mouth around. He must have been out all night, in fact, chewing to his heart’s content.
 
Lesson learned. When it comes to escaped house rabbits, remember one thing: The glass is always half-empty.

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Courtesy Stock.XCHNG

The USDA Honey bee survey is expected to provide information on Honey bee pests and diseases that could be contributing to colony collapse disorder.

The USDA is conducting a 13-state survey of Honey bee pests and diseases to help USDA scientists determine the prevalence of parasites and disease-causing microorganisms that may be contributing to the decline of Honey bee colonies nationwide.

Since the 1940s, the U.S. Honey bee population has dropped from 5 million Honey bees to approximately 2.5 million, according to the USDA.

“Bee health is critical for the success of pollination-based agriculture, which produces about a third of our diet in the United States,” says agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack. “There has been a disturbing drop in the number of U.S. bee colonies over the last few years while the demand for commercial bee pollination services continues to grow, and this survey will help us to better understand the factors threatening our Honey bees so we can take effective action to protect them and the crops that they pollinate.”

The voluntary Honey bee survey includes 350 apiaries across 13 states and will last through the end of 2010. The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service developed the survey protocol jointly with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and Penn State University.

Honey bee survey kits have been mailed to state apiary specialists, who will collect samples of bees and debris from the apiaries in their states. ARS and PSU scientists will test the samples for specific Honey bee pests and diseases. APHIS is particularly interested to know whether foreign mites of the genus Tropilaelaps have entered the United States.

The survey will take place in Alabama, California, Georgia, Indiana, Florida, Hawaii, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Washington. Once all the samples have been analyzed, APHIS will summarize the results and post the summary on its website.

Beekeeping is an essential component of modern U.S. agriculture, providing pollination services for more than 90 commercial crops and adding $15 billion in value. Since the 1980s, however, a number of factors have contributed to the declining health of U.S. Honey bee colonies. These include widespread use of pesticides, the introduction of several Honey bee pests into the U.S., such as the small hive beetle, which can damage honey comb, stored honey and pollen, as well as deadly Honey bee parasites such as the Varroa mite, tracheal mite and single-celled gut parasite Nosema ceranae. Honey bees also face a number of newly introduced diseases caused by viruses, bacteria and fungi.

In addition, beekeepers began to report in 2006 a new threat to Honey bee health that scientists have named colony collapse disorder. In colonies exhibiting CCD, adult Honey bees leave the hive and never return, abandoning the queen and eggs. APHIS, ARS, USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and a number of other organizations have formed a CCD working group, which is researching the possible causal agents of CCD. The Honey bee survey results will provide valuable information in this effort.

For more information about the survey, please visit the APHIS website.

Photo by Rick Gush

I’m looking for wine bottles with rounded bottoms, like this one, for an upcoming project.

I’ve got a new art project, and I need a bunch of old wine bottles. I’m looking for the kind that has a rounded bottom. These were most commonly used in the old days to make raffia wrapped flasks for Chianti and other Tuscan wines, but everywhere in Italy these bottles were common in the 19th and 20th centuries. 

I have a collection of lots of different wrapped flasks, or fiasci, as they are called here. So now I’m hunting around, looking for old bottles. I printed up some flyers with a photo of the kind of bottle I want, and I spent a few hours passing out the flyers yesterday. On my last call I hit a potential jackpot.

Photo by Rick Gush

Mario’s shed is packed with wine bottles like these.

Ten years ago, when I first arrived in Italy, I saw an old guy who had a big Dahlia imperialis near his garden shack, and I used my unintelligible Italian to ask him for a cutting. (Dahlia imperialis is a spectacularly tall dahlia that grows from 15 to 30 feet and blooms in the fall.) He was Mario, and we sort of became friends. I went over to his shack a number of times, and we would drink his horrible homemade wine and sometimes I’d bring salami to eat.  He always spoke Genovese, and I barely spoke Italian, but we had a nice friendship and he rattled on with a hundred stories of which I understood perhaps three. 

He had a bunch of grapevines growing around his yard and lots of bottles of different wines that he had made, and he loved explaining the whole deal to me. I’m always a sucker for anyone who wants to talk about their garden … no matter the language.

I spent the night in the hospital a few weeks ago, and one of the other guys in the room with me was Mario. Unfortunately, I heard he died a few days later.

As the last stop on my bottle leaflet passing tour yesterday, I stopped by Mario’s shack, thinking perhaps to give my condolences to his brother who lives in the big house up front. There was a new guy in the garden area, and I convinced him to open the gate. After a few minutes chat about Mario, I asked if perhaps I could get another cutting of the tree dahlia, and I also asked about the old bottles. Turns out Mario’s whole back shed is packed with old bottles stacked in the dark. 

The new guy let me take three old wrapped wine bottles from near the doorway where there was a bit of daylight, and they were almost but not quite the style I was hoping for, but still cool. I made a date to come back this afternoon with a flashlight, and I’ll get to explore the whole shed. How cool is that? I’ll probably have trouble sleeping tonight, I’m so excited.

So, ciao, Mario. I was happy to see you one last time, and I very much appreciate being able to scrounge around in your wine bottle shed.

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