June 2007 - Page 3 of 6 - Bumblebee Blog

Bzzzz June 22nd, 2007

I want to believe in miracles. I want BADLY to believe in miracles. Especially the kind that help you lose weight while eating everything you want, “turn back the hands of time” and be more productive “than you ever dreamed.” Heck, I would settle for a miracle plant food!

So when I read about SUPERThrive and the extravagant, if unrealistic claims, of making plants grow seemingly overnight, I had to give it a try.

But then, there’s the heavily marketed Miracle Gro. (I spent MANY YEARS working in a multitude of advertising agencies and grew to HATE cute spellings and words that are JammedTogether with an ExtraCapital. But I have made every effort to overlook that shortcoming of these products.)

SO I PUT THEM TO THE TEST. THE CHALLENGE:

–Three identical plants from the same grower.

–Raised in identical conditions of light, soil, pot and equal amounts of nurturing and neglect for 12 weeks.

–The difference: The water. One plant would be given only plain spring water from our well. One plant would be watered with water spiked with Miracle Gro. The third watered with water spiked with SuperThrive.

I first read about SuperThrive in James Dodson’s Beautiful Madness (a review of which you can read here). Although he was a skeptic, he reported on an extremely successful grower who SWEARS by the stuff and buys it by the barrel full.

On looking into it further, it seemed a bit of a modern aged snake oil. The product label is full or verbose claims. There are some good ones:

–Used by thousands of governments, state universities, leading arboretums, botanical gardens, park systems, U.S. States and cities in multiple drum lots. –Lifts the world!! –Added to 21 fertilizers by 21 growers.

And my favorite…

–Used by FIVE U.S. Departments to help win World War II.

As you can see, it’s difficult to take a product like this seriously since the claims are so outrageous and wholly unsubstantiated.

Nevertheless, in the interest of science, I will suspend disbelief.

The company is fairly vague as to the ingredients. The label claims that it includes “unique, normalizing vitamins-hormones.” In fact, when I embarked on this experiment I happened on a website that had conducted a chemical analysis of the product and confirmed that it does, indeed, have vitamins. It was unclear whether the vitamins were ones that plants need and, alas, I can’t find the website any longer.

The typical application of SuperThrive, according to the crowded label, is about a teaspoon per gallon, which can be added to other fertilizer.

Miracle Gro, on the other hand, simply states that it is a “Liquid Plant Food.” It states that the composition is 8-7-6 and offers a guaranteed analysis of the nitrogen, phosphate, potash and iron content. Application is 10 – 20 drops per quart of water for this particular Miracle Gro Product.

On the left is the plant only given spring water from our well. In the middle is the plant fed with Miracle Gro. On the right is the plant fed with SuperThrive.

THE RESULTS:

As you can see from the photo, the plant that was given only spring water from our well did not fare nearly as well as either the Miracle Gro or the SuperThrive plants. The plant is smaller, there is less new growth and overall the color is less green. The plant is clearly less vigorous than the other miracle food plants.

Left to right: Plain water plant, Miracle Gro plant, SuperThrive plant

After that, the judging becomes somewhat more difficult. My impartial (because he doesn’t give a hoot) observer, Benjamin, says that the SuperThrive plant appears to be bigger, healthier and more vigorous.

Yes, the SuperThrive plant has more new growth, more leaves and is a bit greener. On the other hand, the Miracle Gro plant is also vigorous and the growth is more mature and leaves are larger.

In the end, the SuperThrive plant is probably a bit more vigorous.

But is it a miracle? Sadly, no. Clearly, something in that outrageous bottle works, but it’s no more a miracle than Miracle Gro. And the price is outrageously higher. On Amazon the price was about $32 for a PINT. The 8 oz. bottle or Miracle Gro still has a tag on it from the local nursery for $2.49.

So, in the end, I vote for Miracle Gro. It has a good result with a value price. And you don’t have to feel entirely taken with their marketing pitch either.

My next question: Is that Alaskan fish fertilizer better than either one? Frankly, the only reason I didn’t include it in this test is that the local nursery didn’t have FOUR plants. But I have seen some amazing new growth in the weeks following when I pour on the stinky stuff. (And boy, does that stuff STINK.)

Ciao!

Posted In: Gardening, House Plants

Bzzzz June 20th, 2007

When you’re living in the Dark Ages, you don’t really know it. Remember rotary phones? No one thought, “Gosh, I wish I could just push the numbers instead of taking all the time to dial.” And remember walking to the television to turn a knob to switch between your whopping THREE channels? (Okay, you have to be over the age of, say, 40 to remember that.)

Well, same goes with computers. After all my fretting and after TWO DAYS of hideous angst while I tried to get all my files back and my programs operational, I feel like I have entered the Age of Enlightenment. Do you know that they have computers with little tiny slots on the front where you can just load your little camera memory cards so you don’t have to deal with spaghetti wires and cables? Who knew?

And now that I have this fast-o dual core processor computer with a 22″ flat screen monitor, things seem so much more beautiful. The virtual world is so colorful!

But alas, the delay meant that I missed Bloom Day on Friday, June 15. That’s when garden bloggers post photos and information about what’s blooming in their gardens. (I don’t believe that this Bloom Day has any relation to the Blooms Day, June 16, that is celebrated by James Joyce fans by reenacting Leopold Bloom’s day-long trek through Dublin and told in the incredibly painful read Ulysses.)

I will celebrate with my own personal little Bloom Day +6 with a show-and-tell of the many photos I took yesterday when I walked away from the madness of the computer switch.

bee-balm-06.20.07.gif

This is the bee balm that I have been worrying was going to take over the garden. Our friend Lucia gave me a couple of little clippings from her garden last year. Lucia never seems to know the names of things and always gives me these little gifts with the explanation that “It’s beeeyoootiful.” Often she also gives some little explanation of other virtues. In this case. “It keeps away mosquitoes!”

Well, as you might guess, it is also invasive. I have let it go this year. I even let a garden club lady take a bunch. But next year, I will SHOW NO MERCY. Oh, it’s beautiful alright. But I would like something besides bee balm in the garden!

Also blooming here is ice plant and little miniature petunias. That’s a peony next to the bee balm and obedient plants in the background.

Then we have the cucumbers. Every year I think, “Fewer vegetables, more flowers.” Ever year, no matter how much I try to restrain myself, we ALWAYS have too many cucumbers. AND WE LOVE CUCUMBERS!

These plants have hardly made it up the bamboo supports and already I have a stack of cucumbers in the kitchen. I will likely be carting them around to the wine shop guy, mail store lady and other people I see on my daily errands. I am my own version of “Meals on Wheels.”

A proper Colonial garden always mixed herbs, vegetables and flowers. The type of garden I’ve been more or less modeling mine after is the type you might see on the edge of town, perhaps owned by a moderately successful merchant.

I have also been experimenting with intensive planting–squishing more plants into an area than the seed package calls for. Sometimes it works well. Sometimes it doesn’t.

My bush beans and swiss chard don’t seem to mind the crowding. Tomatoes, on the other hand, insist on having LOTS of room or they get sick.

This is the herb and lettuce patch. The black seeded simpson is starting to bolt, but the red sails lettuce is so far still hanging in there. In the middle are hollyhocks. The purple cone flower is also blooming. Also there is basil, dill, oregano, parsley, tarragon, lavender, chives (just past blooming) and garlic chives. It’s a regular salad bowl!

Then, here’s an overview of the garden from the ground.

garden-06.20.07.gif

Those are day lilies in the foreground. On the trellis over the gate are wisteria and clematis. Yes, one on one side and one on the other. I can only explain that I didn’t expect the wisteria to grow. My mom warned me that I should tear it out before it got out of control. But like in most things, I don’t listen to my mom and will probably live to regret letting it go so long. For now, I still think it’s beautiful. It just stopped blooming a couple of weeks ago.

Then we have a few mixed flowers. This is pretty much the area where I stick all the plants that I don’t have another place for or that people give to me. I found this lovely bird bath online at Smith & Hawkin.

mixed-flowers-06.20.07.gif tomatoes-06.20.07.gif The tomatoes are still just babies. They will grow to nearly 8′ high. I have brandywine, but also planted some hybrids, just to see how they compare in growth and hardiness and also to prove that I’m not a snob.

You may be able to see the marigolds planted between. I stared those in my super-duper indoor light garden this year. I also planted lots of other flowers, such as bachelor’s buttons, cock’s comb, moon flowers, black eyed susan vines, pink spiked cleosa, coleus, yadda, yadda, yadda.

squash-06.20.07.gif Then there’s the squash. Actually zucchini and musk melons too. That’s my henryi clematis (yes, I spelled it correctly) to the left. It has already grown too large for the tuteur, so I need to figure out how to propagate and grow more little Henryis.

Well, enough for today. I need to go check on the mourning dove that flew into our back window. Ben pulled him from Miss P’s (cat) cluthes and we have him in a bucket out back. We’re hoping he’s just in shock.

Ciao!

Posted In: Gardening