The urban biosphere is thriving!!!!

My tiny urban herb pots are doing rather well of late. As closed systems, the limited ecologies of these pocket sized biospheres has been unfolding with astonishing speed. In one pot, the English variety thyme has grown significantly larger. It's thin green tendrils reach towards the "sunlight" of my CF lamps. At the sub-surface layer, the worms are making a fine living tilling the soil. Every time I water the pot, some worms inevitable get flooded out of their subterranean dens. To my surprise, a least one other form of animal life has developed a niche in this pot. A population of tiny gnats seems to have colonized the canopy tops of the thymes. Under the lamp light, one can see dozens of them hovering above the thyme "forest". These animals are truly small, a fruit-fly would easily be 20 times larger.

The other pot seems to have developed a more diverse ecology. For one thing, the Arugula is almost entirely gone, edged out by the faster growing Oregano plants. The mint plants seems to be holding out against the Oregano. One notices an interesting dynamic between these two plants which are now sharing the entire pot biosphere. The Oregano plants are comparatively fast growing, but needs higher amounts of light input to maintain itself. Whenever the Oregano leaves encounter shade, the leaves will turn yellow after awhile. And then a kind of fungus will begin growing on the leaves. Shortly thereafter the leaves would wither up and die. Interesting enough, the Mint leaves can endure partial shade without any problems. However the Mint grows much slower than the Oregano. So after a few weeks, the Oregano had expanded to partially surround the Mints. All along the Mint/Oregano border, one can see the browned edges of the Oregano leaves. Strangely enough, if one looks very closely at the fungus on the leaf edges, you sees tiny mite-like insects eating the fungus. At the ground layer, one can see tiny sow bugs going to and fro. The worms are of course doing well here, they seem to survive adequately anywhere.

More urban gardening and trendy conservation

My urban gardening system has been expanded this week. Now it includes an additional pot for growing English Thyme. The worms have multiplied significantly within their condo due to my generous garbage scraps. So to thin out the surplus population a bit, I have transplanted roughly 20 worms into each of the two herb pots. These little herb pots are in a sense like small islands or worlds unto themselves. Each pot has a relatively simple ecology with the herbs(as trees), the worms(as animals), and an assortment of soil borne micro-organisms. Aside from inputs of light and water, these tiny ecosystems are effectively cut off from the rest of the biosphere. The worm colonists themselves were fairly quick to scramble into the loamy potting soil. With such low numbers per pot, there simply isn't enough genetic diversity within the worm population to be self-sustaining. Thus new worms will have to brought in from the worm condo to periodically "freshen up" the gene pools of the Herb islands.

On another front, I have realized that a little known campaign in NYC to reduce the waste of plastic shopping bags have been wildly successful. Basically, a company took disposable plastic bags which were thrown away as garbage and recycled them into durable, re-usable "designer" shopping bags. These bags are then sold for between 1 to 2 dollars to trendy shoppers. I shelled out a dollar in hard currency and bought one of them. The bag was quite trendy-looking to be sure. But more importantly, they were very well made and held-up to heavy loads of groceries without any problems. Each designer tote has the carrying capacity of a large brown paper grocery bag. When in a hurry, an empty tote bag can be folded up into a pack smaller in area than a piece of printer paper folded in half. When shopping and looking around, I have noticed that there has been a recent surge in the usage of these bags. People apparently seem to be switching to trendy and re-usable shopping bags in very large numbers here in NYC. The average U.S consumer throws away about 30lbs of plastic bags per year, plastics, being a derivative product of oil, is a limited resource that should be re-used as much as possible. The trend of plastics conservation, if continued would be a very positive thing for the city and the country. To get your own "designer", re-usable grocery bag, go to EcoBags.