Why plant tulips?

Click on any photo to enlarge.

For the first week of May 2013 the intersection of Summer, Maple and Brooks Streets was abloom with 400 tulips, courtesy of Maynard Community Gardeners [www.maynardgardeners.org]. See photos.

Every plant, planted, is a commitment to the future. Some commitments take longer than others. Nut-bearing trees take tens of years to reach good yields. Flowering bulbs, on the other hand, represent a gardener's shortcut. Because commercial bulb growing operations produce bulbs of optimal size, all the gardener has to do is make a hole in the ground, step back, and wait until spring. 

Corner of Maple and Brooks Streets, first week of May 2013

Tulips are packaged by type to bloom in early- mid- or late-spring. These May  flowers are mid-spring Darwin hybrids, in yellow, red, pink and orange. With luck and a timely bit of fertilizer they will be back in 2014 and 2015. Beyond that there will be fewer flowers each year, and not as tightly synchronized for height, flower size or timing. By the fall of 2015 they will need to be dug out and replaced.

For tulips do not last forever. The ideal soil, fertilizer and moisture conditions that Holland's commercial growers used to grow and export three billion tulip bulbs or tulips for bouquets every year are tedious to replicate at home.

Planting in well-drained soil will all but guarantee the first year's bloom. Ideally, the plant's leaves will capture enough solar energy to create a good-sized new bulb for the subsequent year. But in less than ideal conditions the new bulb will be smaller, and the next year, smaller still. These compromised bulbs either put out one large leaf and no flower, or small leaves and a stunted flower. And that is a signal to dig everything up and start over.  

Know, though, that any set of instructions beginning with "Make a hole in the ground..." is misleadingly simplistic. There are three basic strategies - make a hole for each individual bulb, digging a trench for a row of bulbs, or dig out an entire bed and put in lots of bulbs.

My preference is to go big. Because, honestly, a dozen tulips is pitiful. If you buy into making a big impact then purchase 60-75 bulbs of the same type. Next, dig a hole covering eight square feet, eight inches deep. Discard all plant matter, roots and rocks. Set aside for later examination all foreign objects: mysterious animal bones, pottery shards, coins, broken glass, etc. 

Summer and Brooks Streets, first week of May 2013

Next, put back two inches of the dirt, add an equal amount of compost (either from your compost pile or purchased) and mix. Firmly press the tulip bulbs into the loose soil about four inches apart. Avoid making rows. Cover with another two inches of dirt and then water copiously. More dirt, then walk all over it to pack it down. Add the rest of the dirt followed by an inch of mulch. All this will take many hours, and many body parts will hurt.

Tulips, as is true for many other flowers, have symbolic meanings. In general, a gift of tulips is a declaration of love. Red for true love, with the black of the inside center said to represent the heart of a lover burnt to a cinder with passion. Pink means friendship and affection without the overtones of romantic love. Orange tulip flowers symbolize warmth and happiness. Purple tulip flowers are traditionally associated with royalty - but now show up in bridal bouquets.

White tulip flowers are a means of asking for forgiveness, but also represent purity, innocence and respect. So again, brides. Cream-colored tulips confer commitment. Variegated/multi-color tulips are thought to symbolize beautiful eyes because of their gorgeous color patterns, perhaps making the perfect date flower. Black tulips, actually, a deep violet, maroon or wine-dark color, symbolize farewell, or perhaps not-that-into-you, so are NOT the perfect date flower.


And then, they are gone. The tulips that maxed out the first few days of May were mostly depetaled stems by the 10th. These are being deadheaded to minimize any waste of plant energy. The leaves will be left alone until they turn brown and wither. By then it will be easy to pull the stems out of the ground, leaving the newly formed bulb to wait until next spring. Expectations are that most of the planting will reappear next year, just not as tightly synchronized for height and timing. 

Water - How Much to Drink?

How much water to drink? The short answer is enough that you pee enough.

Our body's water content is strongly regulated to stay very close to normal hydration. There is no such thing as chronic dehydration unless there is also chronic water rationing. Enough water is enough - more is not better - and too much has risks.

Water comes from beverages, water content of food, and the metabolic water created by converting food to energy (example: sugar metabolized to carbon dioxide and water). Water loss from breathing, from sweating, and as water content of feces are not under strong physiological control. Instead, urine volume is regulated. Normal urine production is 1,200 to 2,000 ml/day (think 1 to 2 quarts). Drinking more than needed increases urine production - can be 10 liters a day or more.

Urine production cannot drop to zero because that is how our bodies dispose of metabolic waste products. Our kidneys can concentrate all the waste into an disposal volume of 500 ml/day, but not much smaller. Drinking more does not dispose of more waste - it just dilutes the same amount into a larger volume of urine.

ADEQUATE INTAKE

There is debate on what is considered Adequate Intake (AI). The U.S. government, through the Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs) for water, published by the Institute of Medicine in 2005, decided that men ages 19 and older should consume 3.7 liters (125 ounces) per day, and women 19 and older should consume 2.7 liters (91 ounces) per day.

These numbers refer to total water intake (TWI), which includes beverages and water content of foods. The typical split is a tad under 80% from beverages and a tad over 20% from food. Hence, men and women should be drinking 100 and 73 ounces, respectively. The reality here is that the IOM wasn't sure how much water is really needed, so it sort of rationalized that the average intake is an adequate intake.

Europe disagrees. The European Food Safety Authority decided in 2010 that an AI for men is 2.5 L and for women 2.0 L. The World Health Organization likes 2.5 L/day for men and 2.2 L/day for women. But keep in mind that the WHO assumes average weights for men and women as being 154 and 128 pounds, whereas the current averages for U.S. adults are 196 and 166 pounds. Adjusting for weight would put the WHO recommendations closer to the U.S. numbers.

A old rule of thumb that tries to take into account a need for more water with an increase in calories being consumed (because physical work or exercise requires more calories and needs more water to compensate for sweating and breathing losses) is to estimate water needs as 1.5 ml per calorie intake from food and drink. By this math a sedentary person taking in 1800 calories would need 2.7 L, whereas a larger and/or more physically active person consuming 3000 calories per day would need 4.5 L.

CONSEQUENCES OF INADEQUATE INTAKE

There is no evidence that drinking more reduces risk of dying. This from a study that tracked 12,650 people for 6.7 years. What it did was look at how many people died in the lowest 25% for water intake (they averaged 1.75 L/day) and compared the three higher quartiles to the lowest. No statistically significant differences among the four groups.

Higher total water intake does reduce the risk of getting kidney stones. Higher total water intake also reduces the risk of exercise-induced asthma attacks.The evidence for weight management is iffy. Drinking water 30 to 60 minutes before a meal reduces calories eaten in that meal. There is evidence that when water is substituted for calorie-containing beverages, total calories per day decreases. In a large epidemiological study, people who drank more water weighed less. But as water consumption might co-occur with other lifestyle choices, it is not clear if the water intake was responsible for the weight difference.

Evidence for health benefits beyond those mentioned above is either weak or contradictory. Dehydration will increase the risk of constipation, but for adequately hydrated people, drinking more water will not alleviate constipation. The idea of more hydration improving skin health has not been proven. There is inconsistent data for more water lowering the risk of bladder cancer, colon cancer or urinary tract infections.

EXCEPTIONS TO THE RULE OF THE BODY MANAGING HYDRATION

Short-term, dehydration and overhydration are easily achieved, with potential for serious consequences. People doing vigorous physical activity can lose a quart an hour via a combination of perspiration and the moisture of exhaled air. A review of 2,135 athletes who had completed endurance events found that 50% had experienced more than a 3% weight loss. Given that we are 60-70% water, that is roughly 5% water loss. It is well documented that body weight loss of more than 2% is known to compromise exercise capacity and mental function.

The same study reported that 11% were overhydrated. i.e., weighed more at the end of the event than at the beginning, and one-tenth of those had symptoms of hyponatremia (low blood sodium). When so much water is consumed that sodium in the blood is diluted, water moves into cells, resulting in swelling. Puffy hands, ankles and face seem harmless, but brain cells also swell, increasing pressure. Symptoms progress from headache and nausea to stupor, seizures and death. Sports drinks contain some sodium, but not enough to prevent hyponatremia if consumed in excess.

For some people, vigorous exercise shuts off urine production even if they are overhydrated. This can persist for hours after exercise ceased. If under the mistaken belief that they are dehydrated because they are not urinating, and then they drink more, this exacerbates the problem. It is essential to do a body weight check before an endurance event and at the end. If weight has gone up, do not drink anything. If weight has gone up a lot, get to medical care quickly.

WATER AND BODY WEIGHT

As easy way to understand the impact of water on body weight is to weigh oneself just before going to bed and second thing in the morning (after a morning pee). Most people find they are 1.5 to 3.0 pounds lighter in the morning. If that were true body weight loss it would represent 5,000 to 10,000 calories expended (using the loose rule of 3,500 calories per pound), whereas the real estimate of calories burned while at complete bed rest for 7-8 hours is more on the order of 500 calories. So most of that weight loss is from water as urine, breathing out moist air, and water loss through skin. That last occurs even it not noticable as perspiration.

The intestinal tract contains water. Food takes several hours to get from the mouth to the start of the large intestine. At this point the water content is quite high, as in addition to the water content of the food and whatever beverages were consumed with the food, the salivary glands and stomach and small intestine digestive secretions contribute at least a quart more. Once into the large intestine more than 90% of the water is recovered/resorbed, but at any time the large intestine contains 2.5-5.0 pounds of feces, with 75%-90% of that being water.

Normal bowel movements are about a half-pound a day of which about 70% is water, but severe, prolonged diarrhea can be dehydrating because the large intestine did not have an opportunity to recover water.  

Tree-of-heaven = Invasive Species

Ailanthus altissima is the Latinate name for tree-of-heaven, a tree native to China, and thus invasive in the United States. The common name refers to its extraordinary growth rate. Ditto the Latinate name: Ailanthus derives from an Asian word for sky-reaching-tree while altissima has Latin roots in altus, for high or highest.

As with many invasive plant species the initial introductions were deliberate. By the 1840s these trees were being sold commercially for garden plantings. One route was China to England, thence to the eastern United States. Tree-of-heaven was a popular city planting because it thrived in poor soil and is resistant to drought and pollution.

In California, immigrant Chinese workers at mines and railroads brought tree-of-heaven with them for its traditional medicinal purposes - the bark used to make an astringent tea.

Trees are either male or female. Both have flowers, but only the female trees create seed clusters. A mature tree can produce more than half a million seeds in a single season. These disperse by wind, and are rarely eaten by birds, mammals or insects. Deer will not eat the leaves nor nibble on the bark of saplings.

Trees - both male and female - also are producers of new shoots from a far-reaching root system, so what starts as one tree can easily become a thicket.

This species does not play well with others. As with garlic mustard, this plant produces chemicals which inhibit the growth of other plants, a trait that is referred to as being allelopathic. Combine that with prolific seed production, a growth rate much faster than any native tree, plus resistance to pollution and drought, and this tree is a nuisance in urban and semi-urban environments unless vigorous combated.

  

Young trees have smooth bark

Tree-of-heaven smells bad. One disparaging nickname is 'stink tree.' Anyone who has tried to pull up seedlings or cut sprouts knows this tree has an offensive odor - sometimes described as having overtones of rancid or burnt peanut butter.  

Tree-of-heaven is difficult to kill. Cutting results in new growth from the stumps that can exceed ten feet in the first year. Cutting will also stimulate a massive production of shoots from the surviving roots as far away as ninety feet from the original trunk. Any site where a mature tree was cut down will require follow-up cutting of new shoots several times a year for at least five years.

Systemic herbicides that kill roots (for example, triclopyr and glyphosate) currently provide the best chemical control for tree-of-heaven. These can be sprayed on shoots, or holes can be drilled in the stumps of freshly cut trees and the high concentration herbicide products applied directly. Both application methods can cause collateral damage to nearby plants.  

Previous winners of this column's "Invasive Species of the Year" were Oriental bittersweet, Japanese knotweed and garlic mustard. The short list for future winners includes Japanese barberry, burning bush and multiflora rose.

Continue to cut or uproot these plants on your own property. Whilst out for walks on town trails consider bring a folding brush saw to cut bittersweet vines. If you prefer not to act on your own, the Friends of the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge organizes volunteer teams to combat invasive plants in the Refuge.

Go to September 2012 for the three earlier articles in this series: garlic mustard, Japanese knotweed and Oriental bittersweet.

Paper Making the Old Fashioned Way

Last weeks' paper mill article did not delve into the details of the process. In this day when a case (5000 sheets) of computer printer paper can be bought for fifty dollars, i.e., a penny a page, it is hard to imagine the tedious labor and cost once involved.

Flax - a three to four foot tall plant - was used to make linen cloth. One hundred pounds of flax yielded three pounds of linen in a process that took six to eight months. Less processed linen was used to make ships' sails. Hemp was also grown as a fiber source, to make rope and coarse cloth. Old linen and old rope often ended up as fiber for paper.

Linen clothing was worn until reduced to near-rags, then sold to the ragman. The advent of printed books so increased the demand for paper and hence for rags that some countries passed laws making it illegal to export this valuable commodity.

In the late 1600s England passed a series of Burying in Woollen Acts requiring that people be buried in wool shirts, shifts, sheets or shrouds, and that coffins be lined only with wool. This was to help use up England's surplus wool and simultaneously reduce the need to import linen for paper making. The Acts were later extended to include Scotland and Ireland, but apparently not to the colonies in America.

A family member had to sign an affidavit attesting to burial in wool. Parish records would have "Buried in woollen" or "Affidavit" next to the name of the deceased. Paupers were buried naked. The wealthy paid the fine (which went to support the poor), and buried their dead in linen, silk and other finery.

Back to paper making. Rags were cut to small pieces, then either boiled or fermented in a process called retting, then pounded to finely shredded fiber by mechanical stampers. This last process is where the mill's water power was needed. The pounding process alone would take 24 to 48 hours.

The end product was a vat about the size of a hot tub, filled with a white slurry of very short fibers suspended in water. A team of three experienced workers could turn out 1,500 to 3,000 pages of paper a day. The vatman pulled a fine-meshed screen up through the slurry. A few quick shakes as the water drained tangled all the fibers together. He handed the frame he was holding to the coucher, who's job it was to transfer the newly formed, still very wet sheet of paper onto a sheet of felt. The layer took the felt and paper from the coucher and added both to a growing stack.

Every so often the team of three would pause from this first step to place a stack between the plates of a screwpress and turn the wheel, applying 30-50 tons of pressure on the stack to expel water out the sides.

The pressed stacks went to workers responsible for separating paper from felt without tearing the still damp paper. The felts went back to the coucher, while the paper moved on to more pressing, and then drying. After drying the sheets of paper were dipped into a hot gelatin solution - a process called sizing - hung up to dry again, pressed again, then rubbed smooth with a handheld stone.

Paper mills often caught fire. It's not hard to imagine the risk of rooms full of paper drying on racks where workers labored by candlelight.

All this reads as very complex - and it was. One historian estimated that in the course of the paper making process each sheet of paper was handled about 30 times and subjected to mechanical pressing 10 times. Anyone wishing to learn more about paper making can visit http://paper.lib.uiowa.edu/european.php to read a wonderfully detailed and illustrated discourse by Timothy Barrett.

The Paper Mill: 1820-1882

"Money for old rope" is more commonly heard in England than in the United States. The phrase means money you get for doing something that is very easy, or from selling something that is normally considered nearly worthless. The origins of this saying are disputed, but one explanation pertains to manufacture of paper.

Once upon a time, rope was made from fibers from hemp plants. When it wore out it was unraveled to use for other purposes, such as ships' caulking. This stuff, called oakum, was hammered into the seams between planks of a ship and then tarred, for waterproofing purposes. Thus, monetary value for old rope. Alternatively, the saying is thought to have come from using old rope for papermaking. Prior to the mid-1800s the raw material for paper was linen rags, or cotton rags or unraveled rope, each finely shredded and pounded to create the very short fibers needed for paper. Using wood fiber for paper came later.

William May built a paper mill on the Sudbury side of the Assabet River in 1820. This means the first dam on the Assabet River was not for Maynard's wool mill (in 1847), but rather the paper mill's dam, decades earlier. May's site was where Tedeschi's convenience store and the Murphy & Synder buildings are now. An August 1914 newspaper account of the demise of the last vestige of the paper mill - its chimney - mentioned that the mill used rags and rope as raw materials.

William May was not successful in his endeavor. He sold to John Sawyer, who in turn sold the mill to William Parker. In February 1831, Parker and his partners Samuel Townsend and Peter C. Jones incorporated the operation as the Fourdrinier Paper Company.

Why that name? At the beginnings of the nineteenth century the Fourdrinier brothers, in England, were perfecting and patenting a papermaking process that made a continuous roll of paper versus the old method of making paper by hand, one sheet at a time. Historical records state that the first Fourdrinier machine imported to the United States arrived in 1827. Parker's choice of name for his company promoted the message that he was using the most advanced paper making technology available at the time.   

Parker's mill (under first the father and then the son, also named William Parker) ran for fifty years, originally powered by a water wheel but later by a coal-fired steam engine. (Hence the chimney that needed to be razed.) An etching of an aerial view of the town of Maynard, dated 1879, showed a sizable mill and a smoke-emitting chimney.

Paper mill dam, circa 1910. Photo taken from the bridge. On the right is where McDonald's is now.

In 1840 a bridge was constructed just downstream from the mill - the Paper Mill Bridge. Looking up-river from the bridge gave a fine view of the Paper Mill Dam. The dam was known locally as "The Falls" for the way water cascaded down the rough stone face. Dam and bridge were both destroyed in the flood of 1927. The bridge was rebuilt in 1928. It is currently in the process of being replaced yet again. 

The paper mill was purchased by Maynard & Hemenway, a company co-owned by William Maynard (Amory Maynard's son), in 1882. The new owners did not operate the factory. Rather, it was used as a warehouse for the Assabet Woolen Company. There was a fire of suspicious origin on the morning of May 12, 1894. The fire department succeeded in quenching the flames. Two days later the mill was on fire again (again arson suspected), but this time burned to the ground. The chimney, which stood "...as a gloomy monument to the past." outlived the mill for 20 years. The dam outlived the mill for 33 years.

Back to rope and money. A different origin story has ties to the days of public executions. The hangman's perquisite was to keep the rope used to hang his 'customer'. Pieces of such a rope were highly valued as bringing good luck to gamblers, so the hangman would sell pieces, and made "Money for old rope."

Coda: Why did Parker's paper mill fail? Because it become obsolete. Once the technology for making paper from wood pulp became commercially successful in the 1870s, new mills were built where the trees were. By then, eastern MA had been tree-cleared for decades - the wood used for timber and firewood. Maynard's paper mill was further handicapped by not having direct access to the railroad, and by having only limited access to clean water needed for paper making. The paper mill never employed many people anyway - at most two dozen versus the hundreds toiling in the wool mill.  

Photo of "The Falls" courtesy of the Maynard Historical Society