Perhaps "Noxious" is Only a State of Mind

I think it is genius.  Or a horticultural appropriation of aikido.

Over the weekend we traveled across the prairies of Kansas to attend the 34th annual Prairie Festival sponsored by the Land Institute near Salina.  There were scientific reports, art exhibitions, folk concerts, dire lectures by climate change experts, glimpses into the tragic stories of farmers in India who were shifted from subsistence farming to cash cropping.

And there were prairie walks.  We hiked out into the fields to explore the test plots under the guidance and annotation of the scientists who are conducting the fascinating research.  All focused on the perennialization of grains, my favorite involved efforts involving grain sorghum...

...and Johnson grass.

Johnson grass -- a noxious weed -- and sorghum -- a desirable grain.  Crossed.

It turns out that Johnson grass and sorghum share some genetic ancestry which make them likely partners.  This isn't, after all, the kind of genetic modification that borrows an isolated gene from a butterfly and inserts it into a squash to produce a kind of tie-dyed pumpkin.  This is the slow and tedious process of shaping and nudging the generations of natural selection and crossing between cousins to borrow the desirable traits in one for the benefit of the other.

Or, as I was thinking, that horticultural aikido I mentioned before.  Aikido, a Japanese martial art synthesizing physical defense, philosophy and even religious belief, redirects the force of an attacker into a positive action.  In the case of these experiments, the tenacious reproductive and perennial prowess of the Johnson grass -- typically viewed with hostility by gardeners the world over -- is redirected to the positive benefit of the sorghum, rendering it not only perennial, but also as tenacious as its incorporated cousin.

So I have begun to think about this spirit of aikido with regard to my own garden, wondering to what positive uses I could turn the noxious elements I have encountered -- indeed, "battled" there.  I am certainly not into genetic research or experimentation, so those kinds of applications are out.  But surely the only obstacle to an effective and transformative use of squash beetles and tomato horn worms is my own lack of imagination.

Give me time.  I'm working on it.  In my spare time.