1. Determine the size. The rain garden should be about one-third the size of your roof’s square footage.
2. Choose a spot at least 10 feet from your house and down slope from your downspout.
3. Before digging, make sure you won’t hit any utility lines.
4. Adjust the square-footage mesasurements to your roofs size, but use the following as a guide: for a 200 square-foot roof, dig a shallow depression 6 to 8 inches deep and 10-feet-by-7-feet wide. Slope the sides toward the center.
5. Make sure the overflow from the depression runs away from your house.
6. Direct runoff from your downspout to your rain garden depression. Either dig a shallow channel or pipe a runoff through a buried 4 inch black-plastic drainpipe.
7. Now you are ready to plant and design the layout of your garden. Check out Grow Native for ideas about what to plant where.
8. Keep a layer of untreated shredded hardwood mulch on the soil around the plants to conserve moisture and stay manicured.
9. Water your plants every other day for the first few weeks or until they show growth.

Despite weather delays, this year’s corn crop is yielding a bin busting harvest.

And science is finding ways to make to harvest even more efficient in future years.

According to scientists at the University of Florida, it has been long known that the offspring of two inbred strains tend to be superior to both their parents. Now, researchers, including a University of Florida geneticist, has discovered clues to why that might be the case for one of the most important crops in the world: corn.

The result could boost scientists’ ability to custom-tailor corn for specific traits, such as high protein content for human consumption or high glucose content for biomass fuel, according to researchers.

“An understanding of the combination of genetic factors that result in superior performance will influence future breeding programs, which will produce higher yield or improved quality crops to meet the demands of an energy and nutrition hungry world,” said Brad Barbazuk, a UF assistant professor in biology and member of the UF Genetics Institute.

With help from the newly released DNA sequence of the common corn strain known as B73, Barbazuk, and colleagues from the University of Minnesota, Iowa State University and Roche NimbleGen, compared the genetic sequence of B73 with that of a second strain, Mo17.

The scientists discovered an abundance of two kinds of structural variations between the pair: differences in the copy number of multiple copies of certain stretches of genetic material, and the presence of large segments of DNA in one but not the other. In fact, at least 180 genes appear in B73 that aren’t found in Mo17.

Nathan Springer, an associate professor of plant biology at the University of Minnesota’s College of Biological Sciences and the lead author of the PLOS Genetics paper, suspects that Mo17 likely has a similar number of genes that B73 lacks.

“The genomes of two corn strains are much more different than we would have thought,” Springer said. “What struck us is how many major changes there are between two individuals of the same species.”

The researchers think that this diversity, which is almost as great as the difference between humans and chimpanzees, is what’s behind the superiority of hybrids. When the genetic material from the two very different parents combine, the offspring ends up with more expressed traits than either parent – the best of both worlds, gene-wise.

“Hybrid offspring are probably benefiting from obtaining the genes unique to each inbred parent in addition to unique combinations of favorable alleles.” Barbazuk said.

In addition, the analysis revealed large regions of low diversity.

“There are large segments that are essentially invariant between the two inbreds,” he said. “Some of these sections may have lost diversity as result of selection during the domestication of maize from its ancestor, teosinte, approximately 10,000 years ago.”

The findings are important because corn is important, according to Barbazuk.

Domesticated some 10,000 years ago, he said the crop produces billions of bushels of food, feed, and fuel feedstock each year in the United States alone.

“If scientists understand the molecular underpinnings of hybrid vigor”, Springer said, “they can potentially produce true-breeding lines of corn with specific traits for specific uses.”

 That means better use of land, fertilizer, fuel, and other inputs needed to grow crops, and, ultimately, less environmental impact than might otherwise accrue as we work to meet the needs of a growing population, Springer said.

What will it take to get a handle on global warming?

What is being called a “provocative new study“, a University of Utah scientist argues that rising carbon dioxide emissions – the major cause of global warming – cannot be stabilized unless the world’s economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day.

“It looks unlikely that there will be any substantial near-term departure from recently observed acceleration in carbon dioxide emission rates,” says the new paper by Tim Garrett, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences.

The study – which is based on the concept that physics can be used to characterize the evolution of civilization – indicates:

• Energy conservation or efficiency doesn’t really save energy, but instead spurs economic growth and accelerated energy consumption.

• Throughout history, a simple physical “constant” – an unchanging mathematical value – links global energy use to the world’s accumulated economic productivity, adjusted for inflation. So it isn’t necessary to consider population growth and standard of living in predicting society’s future energy consumption and resulting carbon dioxide emissions.

• “Stabilization of carbon dioxide emissions at current rates will require approximately 300 gigawatts of new non-carbon-dioxide-emitting power production capacity annually – approximately one new nuclear power plant (or equivalent) per day,” Garrett says. “Physically, there are no other options without killing the economy.”

By Robert Pore

An annual event during the Thanksgiving holiday is the American Farm Bureau’s annual price survey of the cost of Thanksgiving dinner.

This year, Farm Bureau found that Thanksgiving dinner for 10 cost $42.91 on average, or $1.70 or 4 percent less than last year.

But this year, the Nebraska Farm Bureau decided to see what that cost would be in Nebraska. What they found, according to Frma McGill of Waverly, who chairs Nebraska Farm Bureau’s Ag Promotion Committee, was that average cost for a Thanksgiving meal for 10 was $42.05, of 86 cents cheaper.

According to McGill, the Nebraska prices were surveyed at grocery stores in Ainsworth, Broken Bow, Fullerton, Gothenburg, Grand Island, Holdrege, Kimball, Lexington (two stores), Lincoln (two stores), Nebraska City, Omaha, Paxton, St. Paul, Spaulding and Stapleton.

The Thanksgiving shopping list, according to McGill, includes turkey, bread stuffing, sweet potatoes, rolls with butter, peas, cranberries, a relish tray of carrots and celery, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and beverages of coffee and milk, all in quantities sufficient to serve 10 people. A national average cost for miscellaneous ingredients needed to prepare the meal is also included in calculating the total cost.

What McGill and other Nebraska Farm Bureau shoppers found was that the 16-pound turkey, which accounts for the largest portion of the meal, averaged $1.16 a pound in the national survey, but the Nebraska price was $1.07 a pound. A gallon of whole milk was the second most-expensive item, at $2.86 nationally and $3.12 in Nebraska.

McGill, a retired farmer, said out that a festive meal for less than $4.50 is a bargain, both nationally and in Nebraska.

“That’s less than you’d spend for an everyday meal at the drive-through,” she said.

According to American Farm Bureau economist Jim Sartwelle, consumers are benefiting at the grocery store from significantly lower energy prices and the effects of the economic slowdown.

Agriculture plays a big role in providing the abundance of food necessary that allows those Thanksgiving dinners costs to be affordable to American families.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 271 million turkeys raised in the United States in 2008, which is about the same as the previous year. The turkeys produced in 2008 together weighed 7.9 billion pounds and were valued at $4.5 billion.

Leading the way in turkey production is Minnesota, which, according to preliminary estimates, was expected to raise 49 million turkeys in 2008. Along with North Carolina, Arkansas, Virginia, Missouri, and Indiana, these six states account for about two-thirds of U.S. turkeys produced in 2008.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the quantity of turkey consumed by the typical American in 2007 was 13.8 pounds.

The USDA forecast 2009 receipts to farmers from turkey sales at $3.8 billion, which exceeds the total receipts from sales of products such as barley, oats and sorghum (combined) and peanuts.

In December 2008, the retail cost per pound of frozen whole turkey in the U.S. was $1.33.

Number of households across the nation, all potential gathering places for people to celebrate the holiday, was estimated by the Census Bureau to be 117 million.

An important part of the Thanksgiving feast is cranberrys. The forecast this year for cranberry production, according to the USDA, is 709 million pounds. Wisconsin is the leading cranberry producing state at 400 million pounds.

Also on the Thanksgiving plate is sweet potatoes, which in 2008, 1.8 billion pounds were produced in the United States. North Carolina, at 874 million pounds, was the nation’s leading sweet potato producing state.

On the desert table at Thanksgiving is pumpkin pie. In 2008, the U.S. produced 1.1 billion pounds of pumpkins, with Illinois leading the way with 496 pounds of vined orange gourd production. The value of all pumpkins produced by major pumpkin-producing states was $141 million.

Other Thanksgiving staples production, includes:

— The nation’s forecasted tart cherry production for 2009 totals 284 million pounds. Of this total, the overwhelming majority (220 million) will be produced in Michigan.

— The total volume of wheat, the essential ingredient of bread, rolls and pie crust, produced in the United States in 2008 was 2.5 billion bushels with Kansas and North Dakota accounting for 27 percent of the nation’s wheat production.

— The 2008 contracted production of snap (green) beans in major snap (green) bean-producing states was 794,777 tons, with Wisconsin led all states at 320,200 tons.

But not all the food ingredients on the Thanksgiving table was produced by U.S. farmers.

According the Census Bureau, the value of U.S. imports of live turkeys from January through July of this year was $9.2 million with 99.3 percent of those live turkeys coming from Canada. When it comes to sweet potatoes, however, the Census Bureau reported that the Dominican Republic was the source of 60.7 percent ($2.8 million) of total imports ($4.7 million). The United States ran a $5.8 million trade deficit in live turkeys during the period but had a surplus of $23.1 million in sweet potatoes.