Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

View from the visitors center trail at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.  In this photo jumping cholla, saguaro, and organ pipe cacti can all be seen with the Ajo mountains in the background.

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is located right on the boarder of Mexico as far south as you can go in Arizona. The monument is quite a ways off the beaten path and probably the most dangerous monument in the national park system. There are multiple boarder patrol checkpoints that are actually in or near the park and boarder patrols can be found all over the park. Tragically, a few years back a park ranger was killed in a boarder incident and things were quite dangerous within the park. Today however, a barrier fence has been put into place along the monuments boarder and dangerous sections of the park have been closed to visitors. The park is significantly safer today than it was several years ago. Unfortunately, Senita Basin, the only population of the columnar senita cactus is currently closed due to these issues. Fortunately, other sections of the park such as the Ajo Mountain Drive are open and offer spectacular views of the Sonoran Desert. For a desert, the monument is quite green and hope to a decent amount of vegetation. This unusually green desert is a result of this particular desert being one of the wettest deserts in the world. Organ Pipe receives about 10 inches of rain annually with significantly more falling at higher elevations. Both winter and summer rainfall seasons also contribute to the amount and diversity of vegetation here.

View along the Ajo drive in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

A total of 28 species of cacti can be found within the park. Several of these are at their northern most limits, and are prevented from migrating further north due increased number of days with freezing temperatures to the north. Organ pipe cacti are one of these species and can be found in abundance within the park. The amazing diversity of cacti can be found on the Ajo Mountain Drive, and it is spectacular for organ pipe viewing. Most commonly, the organ pipe is found on upper slopes facing south. The sun warms southern slopes just enough to prevent colder freezing temperatures that prevents the cacti from growing on colder northern slopes. Upper slopes also are slightly warmer due to warm air rising up these slopes. If the growing tissue of an organ pipe freezes for too long of a period of time or too many times in the winter it will kill the plant. So these slightly warmer areas give the cacti an added edge so they can become established. I also have a strong suspicion that organ pipes prefer soil types typically found on upper bajada slopes. Even with this added warmth however, conditions are not absolutely perfect. The organ pipe sill needs some help from what is called a nurse plant. Small shrubs, mesquites, ironwoods, and palo verdes all help protect young organ pipes from the intense summer heat and sun. The cooler temperatures and shady conditions also help hold the water in the soil for longer. On occasion, large rocks can even provide these added benefits of shadier, cooler, and slightly wetter conditions. Nurse plant associations can be found for several different species. The saguaro cactus has very similar nurse plant requirements. A different type of nurse plant association that can be found within the park is that of the jumping cholla and pincushion cactus. The jumping cholla is a rather large shrubby-tree like cactus that looses an abundance of spine dense joints. These joints naturally fall from the cholla and often will form a mat around the mother plant. Nothing really wants to go close to these piles of spiny cactus joints making it a perfect place for the small pincushion cactus to live.

Organ pipe cactus

Tassel Ear Corn

Tassel-ear that another garden produced.

Back in July we planted several blocks of corn in our college garden.  July is the normal time to plant corn in the Arizona Sonoran Desert.  The corn we planted was a normal desert adapted variety that was supposed to mature in about 70 days and grow to about five feet.  This would mean we would harvest our corn about the first of October.  Some of the corn grew exactly as we expected.  Most of it however just kept growing and growing and growing until December (150 days) and never reached maturity.  The corn grew to over 10 feet tall and produced weird tassel-ears at about five feet.  Oddly, this extremely tall tassel-ear corn was the exact same variety as the corn that grew to only five feet and reached maturity in 70 days. 

Why the extreme difference?  We wondered if we had messed-up by planting some other seeds instead.  But we could find no evidence of that.  We also wondered if we had some mutant corn.  Again, no evidence.  We also wondered if we had planted to late in the season.  Probably not since the varieties of corn we planted normally are planted that time of year.  So what was mutating this corn into a gigantic tassel-ear plant?

With a little more investigation we found that the soil where our gigantic mutant corn grew had extremely high clay content and was very commonly saturated with water.  Water was often found pooling in this area.  Areas where the corn grew as would normally be expected also had slightly lower clay content but were not saturated with water and did not have pooling issues.  But we had no good explanation for why poorly aerated, high clay content, water saturated soils would produce gigantic mutant tassel-ear corn.  So we took to the internet, where answers to all good gardening questions are found of course...

What we found was the condition of tassel-ear corn.  This is where corn cobs also form tassels, just as our corn did.  Our corn appears to be an extreme example of this condition though with the corn cob actually becoming very elongated and forming mostly tassel.  Apparently this condition is common where corn plants are growing under poor soil conditions, just like ours.  No one knows what triggers tassel-ears but from what I read, all corn cobs start off as both male and female, or both tassel and corn cob.  Hormonal changes in the cob during development normally cause the cob to become fully female and produce seed and not a tassel.  For some reason, tassel-ear corn does not have a hormonal change and the result is a corn cob that is both male and female.  This condition does not however explain why our corn grew twice as tall and for twice as long as it should have.  I could find no explanation for these weird problems though.  For now, I'm simply blaming poor soil conditions on everything.

The Truth About Genetically Modified Corn

There is an increasing amount of hype about genetically modified organisms. And for good reason, without us really knowing it, genetically altered foods have invaded the grocery store. For example, 90 percent of corn grown in the United States is genetically altered. This necessarily means that a huge proportion of corn products within the grocery store are also genetically modified.  Considering corn or corn products are found in seemingly everything, that's a lot of grocery store products that have genetic modification as part of them.  The question is, is genetic modification really a problem I should be concerned about?  To be sure, there really isn't a perfectly straight forward answer.  Mostly, the answer is we simply don't know.  Corn amazingly has 32,000 genes, nearly 12,000 more genes than humans.  That means there are 32,000 genes that could be modified, or added to or subtracted from.  In reality there are potentially millions of ways to genetically modify corn or any other organism.  There is no way we could say that all of these tens of thousands of potential gene modifications are harmful, and there is no way we could say all of them could be helpful.  Its sort of complex.

For example, Bt corn has a gene added to it that produces a pesticide.  This gene was taken from a naturally occurring bacteria that infects insect larva.  Bt corn therefore produces this pesticide and kills potential insects that might eat the crop and therefore decreasing the harvest.  So Bt corn becomes extremely beneficial to corn production but has negative impacts on insect populations.  You may initially think that this is a good thing, who really cares about those annoying insects anyway?  Well, some of those insects are bugs that people love and are very important to the environment such as monarchs and other butterflys.  Bt corn can and is having very negative results on the environments we live in.  Beyond that and into our homes, there is evidence that Bt corn is causing elevated immune responses which means increases in auto immune disorders and allergies.  A number of studies though suggest there is no negative health consequence to Bt corn.

Another common corn genetic modification is round-up ready corn.  This is corn that can resist being killed by the herbicide round-up, so farmers can spray there fields of corn killing only the weeds and not the corn.  Again, corn production is greatly increased but the environmental and health consequences are negative.  It not clear though if the actual genetic modification is actually causing the health problems however.  Residue round-up herbicide is however causing at least some of the health problems though.  These health problems are very serious in lab rats and include kidney and liver damage, and cancer.  It is very likely humans have very similar health problems with round-up ready corn.

Other genetic modifications are likely less harmful to the environment or health and may even be extremely beneficial.  For example, modification of a heat shock protein in corn could allow it to tolerate drought better.  The heat shock protein would likely have no consequence on human health.  Corn could also be modified to have higher levels of vitamins.  Whether these so called 'good' modifications are actually 'good' would be very difficult to actually determine, and may only be in the eye of the beholder.

Currently in the stores, nearly all corn products are genetically modified.  Only corn that is labeled as non-GMO or organic can normally be assumed as being GMO free.