Since 2012, Korean American farmer Kristyn Leach has been growing plants on her own land. Her two-acre farm, called Choi and Daughters, is in Winters, California. Leach’s farm provides vegetables and herbs native to Korea and East Asia.

Leach was born in Daegu, South Korea, and then adopted into a family in New York. As a child, she was drawn toward her grandmother’s big garden. Her interest in farming continued into adulthood. In Bolinas, California, Leach met her mentor (导 师), farmer Dennis Dierks. The two bonded over their admiration for Korean natural farming. Asian American farmers are a key part of the history of farming in America. Leach’s farm is seen as a recent addition to this long history.

Ten years ago, Leach received her first order for perilla, a leafy green herb with a sharp taste which is popular in Southeast Asia. Soon, Leach wanted to try producing her own Korean seed varieties. Leach struck up a partnership with the seed company Kitazawa and produced some Korean chili pepper seeds for them. The seeds were a success. Today, she continues to add new seeds for Kitazawa to sell.

Leach’s perilla experiments introduced new foods to her area. Soon, Asian American restaurants began to partner her farm.She started sharing her vegetables and greens with local kitchens. Despite her successes, Kristyn Leach found 2020 to be a challenge for the farm. News of the disease shook up the produce orders. Many local restaurants she worked with struggled to stay open.

Now, demand was growing for her seeds. Leach discovered that people found in her seeds a way of getting meaning from their food. Home gardening allowed people to work with her seeds on their own time. This made Leach ensure that her work mattered. Leach enjoys growing seeds that connect people with their families and histories. For her, sustainable farming practices and seed preservation are key to her success.

Many animals depend on sound to find food and communicate with one another. These species (物种) understandably suffer when loud motorways cut through their habitats (栖息地). Some manage by singing more loudly, some change the timing of their calls to occur when fewer people are driving, others just move to quieter places.

It has always been believed that noise is a problem only to animals. But a new study by Ali Akbar Ghotbi-Ravandi, a botanist at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, has showed that plants suffer too.

Working with a team of workmates, Dr. Ghotbi-Ravandi grew two commonly seen plants in his lab. They were grown from seed (种子) and allowed to stay there for two months in the same space before they were divided into two groups. One group was exposed (暴露) to 73 decibels (分贝) of traffic noise. The other group was left to grow in silence. After 15 days’ growing, study of their leaves suggested that none of the plants exposed to the traffic noise did well. The chemical compounds, hydrogen peroxide and malondialdehyde, two chemicals that are signals of stress in plants, were found at much higher levels in those exposed to the traffic noise. The team also found that a range of hormones (激素) normally connected with healthy growth and development of plants were present at greatly reduced levels in the plants exposed to the noise.

Dr. Ghotbi-Ravandi’s results were published in the journal Basic and Applied Ecology. The next question is whether all noise pollution affects all species in the same way. The natural world is by no means silent. Whether some plant species have developed some ways to deal with it, which might one day be connected and used for urban species, is a mystery worth exploring.

The giant panda is one of the most popular animals in the world. A giant panda can grow up to 1.5 meters long and weigh up to 160kg. People think the giant panda is very lovely. ①So it is not surprising that the World Wide Fund for Nature chose the giant panda as its symbol. The WWF tells people about animals that they are in danger and raises money to save them.

The giant panda only lives in the wild in China. In the early 1980s, were only 1,000 left in the wild. The main reason why pandas are endangered is that the area where pandas can live has become smaller.

The WWF works to help giant pandas in the wild in many ways. One of the ways that helps them is to increase the size of panda reserves. Some reserves need to be joined together by planting bamboo between them to make “corridors”. These are paths that lead from one reserve to another. No one may harm the pandas in these areas. The corridors let pandas move from one habitat to another to look for food. ②People are working very hard to make sure the giant panda does not die out. (213 words)