LIFE USA TODAY ❚ MONDAY, APRIL 6, 2020 ❚ 7B
Spring is here – time to get out your
gardening gear and ... oops.
If you are among the millions con-
fined to home because of coronavirus,
you may not have a spacious outdoor
garden to putter around in while you
wait for the danger to pass.
Maybe you have a small deck or a pat-
io or a rooftop plot, but you still can
bring in the green by cultivating an in-
door garden, sometimes called a con-
tainer garden.
Container gardens look fabulous and
are perfect for those limited to a balcony
or a small yard. Depending on the size of
the container, you can plant armfuls of
colorful flowers or grow veggies and
herbs in these pots.
There are known health benefits to
gardening, even indoor gardening. Alas,
plants won’t cure coronavirus but they
can improve your mental health and
that’s something if you’re going nuts
cooped up with the kids, the dogs and a
sniffling spouse.
“Gardening is ... good for the soul,”
says Kevin Warhurst, vice president of
the Merrifield Garden Center in Fairfax
County, Virginia, one of the leading gar-
den centers in the Washington metro
area. Scientists say it also is good for
body and mind.
“According to the Journal of Health
Psychology, gardening is a great stress
reliever, which most of us can use now
more than ever,” Warhurst says.
Plants can remove allergens and pro-
duce oxygen in a room. And take it from
NASA: Some indoor plants can clean the
air inside, says Randy Schultz, garden-
ing expert and content editor for Home-
GardenandHomestead.com.
“A NASA study in 1989 proved that
plants can remove (cancer-causing)
toxins such as benzene and formalde-
hyde from indoor air,” Schultz says.
“Common houseplants such as pothos,
gerbera daisy and peace lily are great air
filters.”
Aloe vera plants are not only pleasing
to look at, they’re easy to grow and easy
to transplant, and it’s probably the most
widely used medicinal plant in the
world: Desert-dwellers have known for
millennia it’s a soothing treatment for
minor burns. In the coronavirus crisis,
it’s a main ingredient of homemade
hand sanitizer.
Depending on where you live, you
can probably visit a local garden center
(and certainly its website) because it is
considered an “essential” business still
open during government-ordered shut-
downs. As in the case of Merrifield,
most gardening centers’ products are
outdoors on sprawling properties, so so-
cial distancing is possible.
Here are tips for indoor or urban gar-
deners provided by these experts:1.Get a seed-starter kitTender plants, including tomatoes,
basil and peppers, or flowers such as
marigolds, moon vine and salvia, can be
started indoors and planted outdoors in
pots or window boxes later in the spring,
Warhurst says. “You can use a seed
starting mix, plant the seeds in trays or
small pots, and place them in the sunni-
est area possible and keep them moist.”
Tzvi Rauch, founder of Tier II Land-
scape Design in New York, says he likes
the Burpee Seed Starter Tray he bought
on Amazon (about $40), which features
a greenhouselike transparent plastic
cover over trays of 72 little pockets filled
with “super-growing soil pellets” to
grow such veggies and greens as lettuce,
cucumbers, peppers and squash.2. Go for easy-to-grow plants
Schultz says some indoor plants
need almost no care at all.
A snake plant, also known as the
“Mother-in-Law’s Tongue,” has air-
cleaning properties according to recent
studies, needs little light and “it’s just
plain hard to kill.”3. Grow vegetable scraps
Kids might like this one: Many leafy
vegetables such as romaine lettuce and
bok choy will regrow from the parts you
don’t eat. Just cut off 1-2 inches at the
base, put it aside (cut side up) in a bowl
or shallow saucer filled with about a half
inch of water. Place it in a sunny spot
and watch the roots start to grow, then
transplant it into soil in a pot.4. Grow a vegetable garden
If you’re feeling a yen for tomatoes
and you’ve got a sunny patio or balcony,
self-watering growing containers, such
as City Jungle from Bio Green, make it
easy to grow two full-size tomato plants
or whatever vegetables and herbs you
choose. The built-in water reservoir
automatically keeps plants watered.5. Grow flowering plants
Many exotic flowering plants are
easy to grow, Schultz says. African vio-
lets thrive in bright, indirect sunlight.
Abutilon “Little Sunshine” plants from
Logees.com is a good choice for a sunny
windowsill and they’re pretty, he says:
sunshine-yellow flowers with a blush of
morning-orange on the inner petals
bloom year-round.6. Addnew houseplants
Greening up one’s home is increas-
ingly popular among new and experi-
enced gardeners, Warhurst says, butyou need to analyze the environmental
conditions of your abode. Do you have
enough sunlight?
“We can easily manage (air, water
and nutrients) but sun often becomes
the limiting factor,” Warhurst says. “Ac-
curately defining the lighting conditions
in your home and the sun requirements
of the plants you choose can be the key
to success.”
Grow lights, which offer the full spec-
trum of light plants need, can help if
your home has low-light conditions.
LED lights are very efficient, long-last-
ing and do not use hazardous glass or
chemicals, Warhurst says.
Research what kind of light your
houseplants need. For instance, he says,
cacti, succulents and Ficus require three
to four hours of direct sun each day,
“bright enough to cast a shadow and to
read a newspaper,” Warhurst says. Low,
indirect light is best for plants such as
pothos and Chinese evergreens.7. Repot houseplants
If you’ve already got a lot of house
plants, this is a time to tend: Snip dead
heads and trim foliage. Judicious trim-
ming of a pothos, for instance, produces
new plants in new pots and promotes
fullness in the original.8. Get proper pots
Make sure the new pots have holes in
the bottom for drainage, with a saucer
underneath to catch draining water.
(You may want to get decorative plant
stands, tall or short, to protect your
floors and carpets from dribbles.)
When repotting, add some indoor
potting mix to the bigger pot. Plant roots
need oxygen, but if water doesn’t drain
the roots can drown and the plant will
die. Thus, the need for indoor potting
mix to prevent this.9. Dustand fertilize houseplants
Don’t forget fertilizer, Warhurst says.
You can add fertilizer to water or use fer-
tilizer encased in a resin coating and
placed in the soil where it will be slowly
released to the plant over several
months.
“Wipe the dust off the leaves of fo-
liage plants make them look better and
shinier ... (because) the dust may actu-
ally be blocking sunlight that plants
need to grow,” Warhurst says.GARDENING
Indulge your green thumb indoors
Maria Puente
USA TODAY
An aloe vera plant, left, and an African violet in Marquette, Mich. Gardening at
home is easy in coronavirus quarantine. JACKIE JAHFETSON/THE MINING JOURNAL VIA APcess family planning resources like birth
control, emergency contraception, con-
doms or abortion.”
Still, there’s little data to support the
claim that catastrophes – regional pow-
er blackouts, hurricanes and snow-
storms, terrorist attacks or global pan-
demics that force people to stay at home
for extended periods – lead inexorably,
as night follows day, to a quantifiable
jump in births months later.
But after every disaster, including
this one, people think there might be
such a boom, so naturally the media
feeds the speculation. Just as quickly,
sober scientists play down the hype.
“On the whole, it’s unlikely that
America will see a coronavirus baby
boom – but we could see a baby blip,”
wrote Richard Evans, associate director
in the graduate computational social
science program at the University of
Chicago, in an op-ed column last month
in The Washington Post. “Given all the
previous evidence on how different
types of catastrophes affect our fertility,
it seems likely that we can expect a
small increase in births as a result of the
coronavirus.”
How small? Nationwide, he thinks
there could be a 2% increase, meaning
roughly 6,000 extra births per month
this winter, depending on how long the
shutdown endures. Not exactly a boom.
A coronavirus boom is “very unlike-
ly,” agrees Philip Cohen, a professor of
sociology at the University of Maryland
who specializes in family structure.
Even if people cooped up had sex more
often, he says, frequency isn’t what
counts – it’s contraception.
“Lots of babies are born to couples
not living together, who presumably
(because of social distancing) are less
likely to have sex and children now,” Co-
hen says. “So even if a few people acci-
dentally or on purpose decide to have a
baby now, they will probably be out-
numbered by the lost births from people
meeting less, having sex with non-resi-
dential partners less and deciding now
is not a good time.”
Sheeva Talebian, a fertility/OB-GYN
specialist and expert for Women’s
Health, says she thinks people will hes-
itate to get pregnant due to stress, fear
of infection or money worries.
“My prediction is that we will not see
a true baby boom given the various fac-
tors, such as unknown risk during the
first trimester, difficult accessing rou-
tine medical care at this time, financial
stress and emotional stress,” Talebian
says.
“Yes, there have been baby booms
during times of enforced togetherness
at home, but on the other hand, people
tend to postpone kids when they are in-
secure about the future,” adds Stepha-
nie Coontz, a family expert and a profes-
sor emeritus at the Evergreen State Col-
lege in Olympia, Washington.
“Birth rates generally fall during re-
cessions and depression, and since this
pandemic is causing serious and likely
long-lasting economic hardship, I don’t
expect many people to try for a child,”
Coontz says.
Even if there are more pregnancies,
there may not be more babies, says Sar-
ita Bennett, head of the Midwife Alli-
ance of North America, a licensed fam-
ily practitioner and certified profession-
al midwife.
“Statistics that show when there is
panic or terror, the very normal mam-
malian response is an increase in pre-
term births and miscarriages,” Bennett
says. “The more you feed the panic, the
more of a (negative) effect on pregnant
people.”
Midwives across the country already
are being inundated with requests from
pregnant women who have seen the
chaos in hospitals as a result of the pan-
demic, Bennett says. “I will make a pre-
diction of a possible increase in people
choosing home births because so many
are looking at our hospitals and it’s
enough to push them into that choice,”
Bennett says.
Just to make things interesting, there
are people who predict that there’s go-ing to be a divorce boom, too, thanks in
part to enforced togetherness and the
tensions that arise from, say, one
spouse losing a job or another not do-
ing chores.
“I think it is going to be 50-50” more
births and more divorces, says Randall
Kessler, an Atlanta matrimonial attor-
ney. “We are seeing it. We are fielding
at least twice as many calls per day as
in normal times for people who are
considering a divorce.
“And this is historically consistent.
In times of crisis, or when tensions are
increased, divorces always seem to
rise. It has already occurred in China.
In the United States, we learned les-
sons from disasters like Hurricane Ka-
trina and the 2008 recession.”
Where did this post-disaster baby
boom idea come from? Evans points to
the media, specifically The New York
Times’ articles after the great New
York City blackout of November 1965.
“When several local hospitals regis-
tered an increase in births starting in
August 1966, the Times attributed the
spike to how the infants’ parents kept
busy when the lights went out,” Evans
explained in his column.
But when sociologists tested the as-
sumption years later, it turned out
there was no statistically significant
change in the number of conceptions
during the blackout. The Snopes fact-
checking website confirms this.
“Yet ever since, each new disaster
seems to have brought reports of a new
surge in births,” Evans wrote.
Why does any of this matter and to
whom, aside from a diversion from our
current woes? Most obviously, it will
matter eventually to census takers,
just beginning their 2020 decennial
counting of the American population.
But the people who really care will
be the bean-counting bureaucrats in
local school districts all over the coun-
try. If there is a baby boom, it’s going to
matter to their calculations down the
line about how many new schools to
build five or six years hence.
And that will matter to their taxpay-
ers.Baby boom
Continued from Page 5B
and Chung, while appealing personal-
ities in other contexts, are cringe-wor-
thy as they try to make terrible jokes.
“Cut” marks the biggest departure
from “Runway,” by allowing its design-
ers to use seamstresses to complete
their looks in the short time frame. But
this also is its biggest mistake.
Yes, most major designers don’t sew
their own garments, but audiences
aren’t tuning in to see what really hap-
pens in the Prada factories. Bobby Flay
doesn’t cook in every restaurant he
owns, either, but when he shows up to
compete on “Iron Chef,” we expect him
to roll up his sleeves and fry a steak.
Keeping the seamstresses invisible
(the designers leave instructions and
the workers sew overnight, off-cam-
era) feels icky, almost like an exploita-
tion of labor. Considering that winning
designs are instantly available on Am-
azon, worker treatment is likely not
what the company wants us to think of
during what’s essentially a clothing
commercial masquerading as a series.
Both shows try to create “global
brands,” but most viewers don’t want
corporate-speak when they come to
view pretty clothes. This isn’t “The Ap-
prentice.” It’s hard to imagine a series
selling out more than “Runway,” which
is infamous for its near-constant prod-
uct placement, but the way Amazon
has tasked non-commercial designers
with making utilitarian garments de-
signed for the huge online retailer is its
own form of frustration. These people
don’t want to do these tasks, so why
are any of us even here?
Every change from the original for-
mula simply makes the new series
worse. But the good news is that the
current “Runway,” which wrapped its
18th season in March, is better than
ever (except for when Siriano first
competed in Season 4). The looks are
slick, the judges’ barbs are sharp and
the series still feels fresh 16 years later.Runway
Continued from Page 5B