THE KEVIN BACON GAME

What incredibly famous people do you know, by virtue of who else you have encountered in your life? I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with the Kevin Bacon Game, which theorizes that every person on Earth is separated by an average of six acquaintance links. For example, I am only a few degrees from the Queen of England, since my college classmate Ron Sims, former Deputy Director of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, was nominated to that post by our president, Barack Obama, who knows a lot of really big shots! I'm pretty sure that my connection with the president also causes me to be acquainted with Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul, Oprah Winfrey, the Dalai Lama and maybe even Jay Z and Quincy Jones....

You may wonder what this has to do with growing dahlias in North Central Washington......Well, last night, as I was browsing through all my Facebook groups and pages, I came across a post on the ISO Dahlia group page from Teresa Gourde Bergman, where she said "Because of the problem outlined in this article, I have quit using cow or horse manure. Several of the members in our dahlia society were victims of "killer" compost. Dahlias are very susceptible to it." She was referencing an article from Mother Earth News, entitled "Killer Compost Update: Herbicide Damage Continues to be a Problem." There was an accompanying photograph that made my blood run cold -  I had seen that horrible image, a perfect match to the mutant dahlia shoots that had populated three of my raised beds last spring. I was stymied, trying to figure out what on earth had happened, what had I done wrong? I thought I had just prepared my soil with lots of good stuff, no chemicals, all organic composts, just as I had been taught by my dad and my dahlia peers. Then I started to make connections between what was in my garden and these pathetic little plants:

                                  This photo accompanied the Mother Earth News article.

One of my high school classmates had horses, who made a lot of poop, which he regularly aged, and then used as compost on his 4 acres.  Being a good friend, he offered share some of this lovely compost with me and our mutual friend/classmate, NCWDS President Mike Cattin. He was excited to be able to help us grow the most beautiful dahlias this side of Saddlerock, and said he would bring enough for both of us.  Mike and I were both happy at the prospect of getting more organic matter into the naturally sandy soil that we have over here on the east side of the Columbia river, so when our friend arrived with an ample trailer load, we couldn't wait to get it worked into our gardens.

We started planting soon thereafter, and soon, our babies started to push through the soil. I couldn't help but notice that they looked a little sick and I thought there might be some bugs in the soil, chewing off the little shoots, or sucking the moisture out of the infant stems. As they grew taller, the leaf sets didn't look normal. They curled in, and felt tough and waxy, and the ends of each stem where a bud might be were fuzzy and solid, rather than supple. After considering the variants among the different garden areas, I remembered that I had used the horse manure in only three of my beds, which was where the problem was evident. In my other two beds, the dahlias seemed to be developing more typically. I contact Mike right away to ask him about how his plants were looking, and found that he was seeing the same things. I concluded that there was something in the manure that was impacting our dahlias! We asked a lot of our dahlia buddies, who all had guesses, but no certainty about what we were seeing.

South raised bed-My Home Garden                            Curled, tough waxy leaves, fuzzy buds


We have finally arrived at the Kevin Bacon Game....The article in Mother Earth News discussed what has been called "Herbicide Carryover." It works like this: For more than a decade, the grasses, pastures and hay used to feed livestock in this country have been treated with two higly toxic herbicides - picloram and clopyralid. These chemicals remain potent, even in the composted manure of animals who have grazed or fed on the treated food sources. The chemicals have also been found in certain processed livestock food products, which,(according to the gospel of Kevin) ends up in the digestive system of the gentle beasts, then ends up in their manure, which ends up in the compost heap, which ends up in our soil, which ends up in our baby dahlias. (How many degrees is that?)

You might be wondering what finally happened to these poor little things: well, the good news is that eventually they seemed to grow out of this mutant state, and produced some not-too-bad flowers. Not great, but better than nothing, I thought. Mike and I both used a natural herbicide that we bought at our local Urban Gardener store, and we both drenched our soils in an effort to wash out what we had theorized might be nitrogen poisoning caused by an excess of organic matter. By the time the plants started to look a little normal, they were weeks behind their typically developing peers in other horse-manure-free beds.

In addition to the Mother Earth article, Mike also consulted the google, and came up with a couple other very good pieces on this topic. There is a move afoot to ban the use of these chemicals, so I will try to keep up as progress is made on that front. While it is a relief to finally know what stressed my little dahlia family, it also raises new questions: is my soil still toxic? Are the tubers toxic? What about any seed harvested from these flowers? There are a few things I can do to get some answers, but in the end, I'm probably just going to have to find out through the process of trial and error. When all is said and, organic gardeners may have bumped elbows with their partners on the dark side a bit more than we might have deliberated intended...separated by a lot fewer than 6 degrees.

I encourage you to hit the links below and read these articles to find out more about this blight. As much as I love being connected to you all by only one degree, I don't wish the herbicide->feed>horse->manure->compost->garden-> connection on anyone, no matter how close it brings you to the Queen of England!

Herbicide Damage
http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/herbicide-damage-zmgz13fmzsto.aspx?newsletter=1&utm_content=01.25.13+FG&utm_campaign=2013+FG&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email

http://smallfarms.oregonstate.edu/sfn/f09Herbicide

http://theseason.persephonefarm.com/the-season/clopyralid-redux/