Sassafras Farm

05/20/2026

Lessons From the Strait
By Ed Perkins

American and Israeli’s war on Iran has prompted the Iranians to play their trump card - closing the Strait of Hormuz.
All of America’s mighty air and naval power are no match for a few Iranian missiles and drones.

Up to 30% of the world’s oil and natural gas flows thru the Strait, and almost 30% of the urea which is made from natural gas and is used to make nitrogen fertilizer, all of which has been shut off. The result is the spike in gas prices (we have seen $5 gallon gas ) and fertilizer prices and shortages. People around the world are feeling the pain with higher prices. The nations of the world have backed themselves into a corner by becoming so dependent on oil and natural gas, much of which comes from such a volatile part of the world and must pass through such a narrow waterway so close to a rogue nation. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

It does not need to be this way. The world has embarked on a decarbonization energy transition from fossil fuels to solar, wind, geo, hydro and yes even nuclear (dare we include fusion?). The transition is too slow and not without pain. But it is happening. Renewables have been growing worldwide faster than any other source of energy and in many instances the cheapest and fastest way to add energy production.

Imagine a world further along in decarbonization. All nations could be way more self-sufficient with energy from the abundant renewable sources within their borders. Why depend on expensive, unreliable energy from volatile nations? The world has seen several oil crisises. The 1973 oil embargo, Covid pandemic, Russian Ukrainian invasion, now the Iranian war. In a post-carbon future the geopolitical politics of energy would be defanged. Of course there will be other things for nations to fight about such as the rare earth minerals needed for modern electronics and batteries.

Here in the USA we have an administration trying to stop the energy transition. Rebates for electric vehicles have been eliminated, wind farms and large scale solar projects have been defunded. Ford Motor reported $4.8 billion in losses on electric vehicles in 2025. But $5 a gallon gas has driven sales up in recent months - hybrids up 37%, new EVs up 11%, used EVs up 28%. But will it continue if and when gas prices come back down?Americans seem to have very short memories.

Climate change is an important voting issue for most liberals. But it is not an important issue to most voters who have elected the climate change denier in chief twice. The price of gas is a driving issue in politics. Yes, decarbonizing the economy is necessary to address climate change. But affordability and national security are issues more voters can understand.

Ed Perkins and his wife Amy drive an EV and have a solar photovoltaic system at their Athens Co. home.

05/12/2026

Planting onions: flats seeded February 23. Ready to plant by end of April. Varieties are Patterson - yellow storage onion, Red Wing - red onion and Also Craig for sweet onions.

04/21/2026

The Lowly Dandelion
By Ed Perkins

Oh those hated dandelions in your lawn. Dig them out, spray them, get rid of them! Never has a plant been so maligned.

There are several wild dandelion species; the common one in your yard is Taraxacum officinale. The Taraxacum group first evolved some 30 million years ago in Eurasia and is native in Europe. It is possible the first dandelions arrived in the Americas on the Mayflower, as it was well known by Europeans as an herb and edible green, and is one of many useful plants the colonists would have brought with them to the new world.

Dandelions have spread throughout the temperate northern hemisphere, and grow on every continent except Antartica. They are a pioneer species that establishes on disturbed soils. They likely followed human settlement around the world. They are a tap-rooted perennial in the Composite family. Like all Composites, the flowers are individual florets in large clusters we recognize at their flowers. The yellow flowers explode into a puff ball of fluffy seeds that blow far and wide.

The nectar feeds bees and butterflies . Birds eat the seeds. The leaves are edible before the plant flowers. Wine can be made from the flowers. The dried roots can be used to make a caffeine-free coffee. And there is more.

During World War II, Japan controlled the rubber tree-growing areas that produced the natural rubber for tires. The Allies searched for a rubber substitute. Taraxacum roots produce a latex that can be extracted and processed into a natural rubber. The common dandelion in not a good latex producer, but the Russian dandelion is.

During the war Russia tried producing rubber from dandelions. Of course, now there is synthetic rubber made from oil. But a natural rubber is still needed. On average, today’s tires contain 28% synthetic rubber from oil, 28% natural rubber from rubber trees and 28% black carbon soot. The U.S. consumes some 1.78 billion pounds of natural rubber a year.

Dandelion rubber has been shown to be as good as rubber tree rubber. Continental Tire of Germany is one of the oldest and largest tire manufacturers in the world. They are making dandelion rubber and testing it in tires. There is a company in China also working on dandelion rubber.

Since dandelions can be grown in most countries, a new world-wide industry of producing dandelion rubber could develop, instead of relying on the rubber trees grown in the tropics. So dandelions have many uses. And they give color to all the green lawns.

Ed Perkins farms in Athens County.

03/31/2026

Ed is planting chard in the hand-worked beds.

03/05/2026

02/17/2026

The cold spell damaged the kale and our other greens crops. Hopefully they will recover.

02/17/2026

Arctic Blast
By Ed Perkins

The last 3 weeks have seen record low temperatures throughout the NE U.S. - up to 30 degrees F below normal in places. So where is global warming when you need it? It is still going on. The average global temperature is up 2.5 degrees F since preindustrial times. The last 11 years have been the 11 hottest on record. The year 2025 was the third warmest.

But the Arctic is warming 3-4 times more than the global average. The consequences are plain to see. Arctic sea ice is melting, opening up new, disputed sea lanes (the recent Greenland uproar). Permafrost is melting, causing major infrastructure damage to buildings and roads built on once frozen ground. Permafrost melting is releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas, adding to the warming. Greenland’s vast ice sheets are melting. If they all melted, it would raise global sea levels over 20 feet.

So why these periodic winter Arctic blasts? A stratospheric polar vortex, 15 to 50 km high, forms over the Arctic in the fall. This vortex, circling the Arctic throughout the winter, tends to contain the Arctic air mass under normal conditions. But the warming causes the vortex to weaken and wobble. Also, the jet stream has been shifting north in recent decades. These factors allow the cold air to dip south in waves. And the NE U.S. is the usual target.

These polar vortex events in the U.S. have become more frequent and last longer in the last decade, occurring in 2021 and 2025. The current one has lasted almost 3 weeks. So we have climate change bring us hotter hots and colder colds. Of course, climate scientists are always quick to say you cannot attribute any particular weather event to climate change - look at the long-term climate changes.

The longer-term temperature and climate models show increasing extreme heat events but fewer of the extreme cold events. But that is of little comfort to those of us who endured the latest Arctic Blast.

Ed Perkins farms in Athens Co. The cold has damaged his winter greens crops.

02/12/2026

Civil Rights Heroes on Display

Amy is pleased to have her rock paintings of 15 Civil Rights Heroes on display
at the Nelsonville Public Library for the month of February.
Included are Frederick Douglass all the way to Barack Obama.
Amy has been interested in Black history all her life.

01/19/2026

The Root Brain
By Ed Perkins

With the publication of “On the Origin of the Species” in 1859 Charles Darwin made one of the greatest advances in the biological sciences in the 19th century. It was a grueling undertaking - long ocean voyages, trekking over remote landscapes observing and collecting exotic animals and sampling the volcanic geology - well suited to a young man. In his later years, Darwin focused on things closer and easier to study - plants. Most of his books after “Origins” were about plants, as he made many important discoveries in the field of botany.

In “On the Movement and Habits of Plants” (1865) he observed how plants (generally considered to be stationary) did move slowly. Some vines start growing, swaying in a circular motion until they can attach onto something to grow up on. Some flowers track the sun throughout the day.

“Insectivorous Plants” (1875) studied how these plants could move quickly to trap unsuspecting insects for dinner. Within the trap (actually a modified leaf) are trigger hairs. If a certain number of hairs over a certain time frame are disturbed, as by an exploring insect seeking the sweet nectar within the trap, the trap closes. If there is a struggling insect continuing to disturb the trigger hairs, the trap remains closed and digestive juices are secreted. If there is no insect and no hairs are disturbed, the trap will reopen.

“The Power of Movement in Plants” was his second to last publication. Darwin and his son Francis did many experiments with plant roots. They found that the very tip of the root, the root cap, acted as the root’s command center. Poke it and the root grows away from the offending jab. Put between a rock and soft clay, the root turns and grows toward the clay, even before it hits the rock. Place a root between dry and moist soil, and it always grows toward the moist soil. Most astonishingly, the root apparently can “hear” flowing water. Plumbers know this well since roots often grow into water pipes, plugging them up. Slice the cap off and the root will do none of these things, that is until it regrows in a few days.

The Darwins wrote, “We believe that there is no structure in plants more wonderful …than the tip of the radicle.” They called it the “root brain”. More recent studies have revealed the amazing abilities of plants. Zoe Schlanger in her book “The Light Eaters” (2024) describes “the unseen world of plant intelligence.” Plants respond to all facets of their surrounding environment. They communicate within their plant body, with neighboring plants and any animals, especially insects, in their environment. They transform their bodies to benefit the fertilization and dispersal of their propagating units.

Plant brains? Plant intelligence? These are controversial ideas now as they were in Darwin’s time. Of course plants do not have brains and central nervous systems like animals do. The plant’s structures and systems are different from those of animals. But they accomplish the same ends - to ensure the species survival.

Ed Perkins farms in Athens County.

12/10/2025

The Secret of Life
By Ed Perkins

James Watson died last month at the age of 97. Watson and Francis Crick, biology researchers at the University of Cambridge in England during the 1950s, discovered the double helix structure of DNA and how it contained an organism’s genetic information and passed it on to the next generations. They announced their findings on February 28, 1953 saying “we have discovered the secret of life.”

Biologists had been searching for the secret of life for many years. In the early 1800s a Hungarian nobleman, Imre Festetics, developed a new breed of sheep using inbreeding and selection of certain characteristics. He was the first to use the word genetic in his paper “The Genetic Laws of Nature”.

The Austrian friar Gregor Mendel in the 1850-60s worked with pea plants and established set mathematical rules and ratios in the way traits are handed down from parents to offspring over time. In 1865 he published “Experiments on Plant Hybidization.” He knew there must be “units of inheritance” in the cells that are passed on generation to generation. But nobody knew what they were.

Over the same time period as Mendel, the English biologist Charles Darwin was doing his work on evolution. He realized through extensive observations and travels that these units of inheritance which are passed down in each species can undergo changes which allow the emergence of new species.
He published “The Origin of Species” in 1859. But the biological mechanisms were still a mystery.

DNA was first isolated in 1869 by the Swiss physician Friedrich Miescher. He called it ”nuclein” since it resided in the cell’s nucleus. Not much more progress on discovering the secret of life was made until the early 1900s when Mendel’s work was rediscovered after his death in 1900. Then several scientists began to search earnestly for which molecule in the cell’s nucleus was responsible for inheritance.

Watson and Crick started working on it at Cambridge in 1951. Critical to their work was an X-ray image of the DNA molecule taken by Rosalind Franklin and her team at King’s College London. The image was shown to Watson without Franklin’s permission. Franklin died of ovarian cancer at the age of 37 in 1958 and her contribution was never officially acknowledged.

Watson and Crick went on to figure out the double helix structure of DNA. Each DNA strand contains sequences of the 4 bases, cytosine, quanine, adenine and thymine, which makeup the genetic code. When a cell divides, the double helix strands separate, each one attracting the 4 bases in the same sequence to make 2 new identical DNA strands for the 2 new cells. Thus the genetic code for the species is passed on. This discovery is the biological secret of life.

Watson and Crick received the Nobel Prize in 1962, after Franklin’s death, so she was not acknowledged. Watson went on to Harvard where he worked on messenger RNA - the workhorse of protein synthesis in the cell. He wrote “The Double Helix” in 1968. He headed up the Human Genome Project in 1990 for several years. It was completed in 2003. Our DNA contains 3 billion base pairs, our genetic code.

Genetic engineering, gene editing, vaccines - many of our practical applications - come as a result of Watson and Crick’s discovery of the Secret of Life.

Ed Perkins farms in Athens County.