Mounds of Goodness
It’s too hot for raspberries here. Blackberries are fine, blueberries and strawberries are fine, but not raspberries. That’s what my permaculture peeps have always said.
But I love raspberries, and they are too expensive at the grocery store, and they’re so delicate that they mold in the fridge almost immediately. So I keep trying for fresh ones.
My first attempt was a wire trellis along the back edge of my property. I made a big wooden T to echo the existing clothesline at one end, and screwed eyebolts into the corner post of the wooden fence at the other end. This was much too close to a giant black walnut on my neighbor’s property that I call Barad-Dur, the Dark Tower of Mordor.
I had both red and yellow varietals back there, and neither prospered. Those trees leak a chemical called juglone into the ground that many plants find toxic.
My second attempt was reds only, along the southern border, next to a chain-link dog fence. I put up a similar wire trellis, but hung off steel fence posts driven into the ground, carefully avoiding the existing gas line. They liked the soil and the partial shade from a tall holly tree on my other neighbor’s property, but they wouldn’t grow along the wires. The raspberry canes were more delicate than a blackberry. The least little bit of wind, or my clumsy efforts to wrap them around the wire, would break them.
My third attempt came after having spent years cutting two ancient honeysuckles, complex messes of living and dead wood, down to their two single stumps. I read that they wouldn’t sprout from the roots, and that the regrowth from the stump would be soft enough that they couldn’t pierce a black garbage bag. So I staked a double layer down over the stumps and waited for them to starve. It took four years of zero sunlight and temperatures over a hundred degrees for one and five years for the other. That’s impressive. That’s nuclear winter tough.
Once they were gone, the invasive Eurasian vinca that they had been shading out saw its chance and exploded into rampant spreading growth. The lawnmower was effective at the edges. I tried smothering it with cardboard. That didn’t work.
I piled up soft wood cut from invasive privet trees, including some failed mushroom logs (another story, that), on top of the cardboard, and covered that with clay, compost and wood chips.
It’s a pretty standard permaculture technique borrowed from Germany, where they call it hugulkultur. I figured the mound would be a better support for the trailing canes of the raspberries. I was right about that.
What I did not expect was that the cursed vinca would help the raspberries. The vinca’s looping up-over-root again growth pattern seems to be a perfect scaffold for the raspberries.
They surf right along the top of the mass of vinca. Their leaves get sun and their roots get shade, which seems to be the best of both worlds for them. Berries are enormous and sweet. I eat them right off the briar.
The vinca has shallow roots that are easily pulled out, so this year I tried clearing off the middle mound, where there weren’t any raspberries yet, and resurfacing it with new compost and wood chips to see if I could give the raspberries a head start.
Mixed results. There is definitely such a thing as too much sun.
The more westerly mound with the more established raspberry briars is going gangbusters. I still have to reach in and pull out the climbing wild grape vines and the Virginia creepers, both of which compete for sun with the raspberries more directly. The grape vines go so far as to wrap tendrils around the raspberry canes, trying to use them as support. That’s not tolerable. I make the best of it by putting the tender leaves and tendrils at the tips into my salads and sandwiches, along with passionfruit leaves and baby oak leaves, which have a lower level of bitter tannins and make the mix pleasantly complex in flavor. I use a lot of flowers, too.
Slime Molds
This load of wood chips has seen unusually high activity from the social amoebas, which have become darlings of the scientific world under the name slime molds, because they are both microbes and multicellular creatures. They spend most of their time dispersed through their medium, like the little yellow flecks in the soil on this dying zucchini’s root ball,
but they can also form temporary bodies, which can move and solve mazes (lab nerds love mazes). They have a sort of algorithmic intelligence, allowing them to grow around obstacles, find food, and deal with rivals in mathematically efficient ways.
If I wanted to get all neuro about it, I could point out, like the linked video above, that one group of related species goes back and forth between individual cells and bodies, while the Physarium group form one giant cell with lots of nuclei — a syncitium. Back in the early days of neuroscience, there was a big rivalry between Spaniard Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who said neurons were cells, and Italian Camillo Golgi, who was captain of Team Syncitium.
Cajal won temporarily with his detailed drawings of synapses, which have gaps between them that cannot conduct electricity and require chemical messengers we call neurotransmitters to cross those gaps. Decades later, after they were both dead, people found that the astrocytes, the support cells of the brain, are in fact connected by protein gates called gap junctions into a large continuous network. To this day, we don’t talk about them very much.
It remains completely unknown the extent to which an impaired syncytial isopotentiality contributes either as a cause or an intermediate step in neurological diseases. For instance, the syncytial architecture as a whole can be altered in certain disease conditions, such as epilepsy.
That means we’ve been hyper-focused on neurons, making drugs that affect their ion channels and their synapses, when they are maybe half the cells in the brain. We’re way behind on the other half.
Maybe slime molds could be a useful model system?
Having found a burrow in that middle mound, I no longer think that dying raspberry was due only to heat and drought. I think some rodent damaged the roots with its digging.