All Weeks
32 weekly editions, newest first. The current week lives at the homepage; every earlier week has its own page below.
Soybeans grow better nodules when planted next to mulberry trees
Plant soybeans beside a mulberry tree and the tree starts feeding from the soybean's side of the soil. Researchers added traceable nitrogen only to the soybe...
These common weeds can suck heavy metals out of dirty soil
Taro growing near factories in Bangladesh packed lead into its tissue at close to nine times the concentration in the soil around it. The plants weren't just...
Urban farm microbes are so local they reveal which farm grew your greens
The bacteria on a kale leaf can tell you where it grew. Near Washington, DC, a computer program guessed which of seven urban farms and gardens a sample came ...
Charred wood scraps help burned forest soil bounce back
In a burned northern Arizona forest, soil mixed with charred logging scraps ended up holding more water than ground the fire never touched.
Wild garlic leaf extract calms gut inflammation in lab tests
Wild garlic, the ramsons that carpets shady spring woodland, calmed inflamed gut tissue in the lab when its leaves were steeped in half water, half alcohol.
Wildflowers evolved fast during drought, but only at range edges
Someone had the foresight to collect seed from a small yellow wildflower years before the western US drought of 2012-2016, then collect again when that droug...
This vine's flowers impersonate figs to fool a wasp
A tropical vine has learned to counterfeit a fig. Heterostemma ficoides opens globe-shaped, closed flowers that copy the fruit of Ficus heterophylla in both ...
Manure beats fertilizer at reshaping soil life long-term
Twenty years of hauling manure onto the same Kenyan plots did something bagged nitrogen never managed. At the driest, most nutrient-poor site, ammonia-oxidiz...
Backyard tree watchers reveal how climate shifts flowering timing
Jackfruit might now be one of the best-documented flowering trees on the planet. People across Kerala, India photographed their neighborhood jackfruit, mango...
Soybeans in shade recruit soil bacteria using sugar signals
Put a soybean in the shade and it stops talking. Dim light cuts the sucrose and pipecolic acid leaking from its roots, and those two compounds are exactly wh...
Leaf-sprayed bacteria let tomatoes thrive on less fertilizer
The bacteria that let you cut fertilizer by a quarter were already sitting on your tomato leaves. Researchers swabbed the leaf surfaces of tomato and eggplan...
Passionflower's citrus perfume vanishes 90% by mid-morning
Passiflora pohlii opens at dawn and fills the air with something close to citrus peel. Two hours later, ninety percent of that scent is gone, and the cells t...
Wild blueberries now ripen a week earlier than a century ago
A pressed blueberry sprig from 1901 and a phone snapshot from last summer count as the same kind of evidence, and stacked together they show the berries arri...
Worm-composted rabbit manure and food scraps supercharge vegetable yields
Feed worms a fifty-fifty mix of rabbit droppings and kitchen scraps, and you get compost that grows measurably bigger tomatoes. Not a vague soil-health promi...
Hazelnut shrubs boost soil life more than any other pine understory plant
Plant a hazelnut under a pine and the soil beneath it starts keeping different company. Researchers compared soil under Scots pine growing alone against pine...
Bacterial soil vapors prime crops to survive drought for months
One puff of bacterial vapor, and an agave plant remembers it for eight months; a tomato holds onto it for four and a half. Soil bacteria constantly release f...
UVB light boosts cannabis flower flavonoids without altering cannabinoid levels
A reader asked us to cover cannabis this week, and the research lands somewhere any grower can use. The light you grow a plant under shapes the chemistry it ...
Trending: common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) — 2095 observations this week
A confession before the science: this issue is a day late. I spent the weekend in a weedy field of my own with my hands in the dirt, and I forgot to come bac...
Genome-wide analysis of the CsGIF gene family and functional identification of CsGIF1 and CsGIF5 in leaf development of tea plant (Camellia sinensis L.).
The difference between a brisk black tea and a grassy green one starts long before the kettle — it starts with the shape of a leaf. New genome-wide work in t...
Site-specific variation in flowering phenology of a spring ephemeral plant and its implications for phenological mismatch with pollinators under climate change.
Siberian corydalis sets its bloom clock by snowmelt. The bumblebee queens that pollinate it set theirs by soil warmth. Same forest, two different calendars -...
Cold-induced peptide signalling secures pollen resilience and crop yield.
Your tomato plants already know how to survive a late frost, they just can't shout loud enough. Scientists found two tiny chemical signals that tomato pollen...
Straw Return Enhances Photooxidative Disintegration of Mulch Film and Microplastics Formation in Farmlands.
That plastic mulch you spread to protect your beds is quietly shredding itself into fragments small enough to sabotage the fungal threads your plants depend ...
Rapid disruption of pollination function by the invasive plant Impatiens glandulifera.
Himalayan balsam doesn't need to crowd out your native wildflowers. It just needs to confuse their bees.
Climate mediates phenological and phylogenetic differentiation in plant invasions.
The amount of dead wood near your front door predicts which helpful bacteria live on your skin. That's not a metaphor.
Targeted knockout of a host peroxisomal peptidase confers field resistance to maize lethal necrosis.
Rice makes serotonin when caterpillars start chewing on it, the same molecule our brains use to feel good. It backfires. More serotonin actually weakens the ...
Host-mediated rhizosphere microbiome transfer suppresses Fusarium oxysporum in banana.
Plants eavesdrop on their enemies. When soil bacteria start coordinating an attack, exchanging chemical signals as their numbers build, nearby plants interce...
Nanoplastics interfere with plant-mycorrhizal communication and limit plant growth.
Tiny plastic particles in soil are jamming the conversation between plant roots and the fungi that feed them. Not blocking nutrients directly, but disrupting...
Temperature regulation in plants: From molecular mechanisms to climate-resilient crop improvement.
Peach trees poison themselves. They leak a compound into the surrounding soil, and after a few years in the same spot, the buildup stunts their own growth, a...
Climate impacts apple pollination, yield and economic outcomes of farmers.
Bean plants remember droughts their parents survived. The memory isn't mystical; it lives in a tiny community of organisms in the soil around their roots, sh...
Editing strigolactone hormone receptor for robust antiviral silencing in rice.
Poplar trees, it turns out, have a politics. Male and female poplars of the same species share the same web of fungal threads in the soil under their roots, ...
An eco-friendly alkaline lignin/sodium alginate/β-cyclodextrin composite hydrogel for enhanced foliar deposition and sustained control of Botrytis cinerea with azoxystrobin.
Pepper plants make their own pesticide. A single compound brewed in their roots does two things at once: it attacks the spores of the pathogen behind root ro...