I received a comment over the weekend requesting an update on an article I posted back in February of 2010 (Wow, hard to believe we’ve been at it that long!) about FreezePruf, a product that is purported to improve freeze tolerance of garden plants. The ingredients and proposed mode of action of FreezePruf are described in my earlier post, so I won’t repeat them here. Back in 2010, there were no published studies available on the efficacy of FreezePruf; just advertising claims from the manufacturer and data that were included in the patent application.… Continue reading this article “FreezePruf revisited”
Tag: products
Lights!
Today I want to share something that I’ve been working on recently with Fine Gardening that is really cool! So you know all of those lights you can buy to get your plants started over the winter? Did you ever wonder which of those lights really work? I’m going to leave the final answer for my article, but let me tell you, there’s a world of differences between the lights. The best seem to be some LED lights that aren’t available yet, but are made by a company called Heliospectra. … Continue reading this article “Lights!”
Master Gardener Researchers Rule!
The Garden Professors test new products all the time. Fertilizers, pesticides, tree wraps,compost tea, etc., they’ve all found their way into our fields and greenhouses at one time or another, but still, we can’t test everything, it’s just not possible. New stuff comes out all the time, and it’s impossible to keep up, so one of the things we love to see is people who take the initiative to test things themselves. Recently we got to see the results from a group of Master Gardeners who tested biochar on growing vegetables. … Continue reading this article “Master Gardener Researchers Rule!”
The Winter Weekend Garden Warrior
As Garden Professors, we are very careful regarding product endorsements. Actually, much energy is spent trying to bring to light weird/crappy/useless/money-wasting gardening products.
But when we feel strongly about the usefulness, quality, and utility of a product, it is our duty to pass that information along as well.
I didn’t mean to be a walking advertisement last weekend.
We were in the final throes of getting our garden cut back; Joel was laughing that I “needed another set of hands” when I came around the corner. … Continue reading this article “The Winter Weekend Garden Warrior”
Good Stuff
Boy oh boy, what a fun day! People yelling at me from the left and from the right. But hey, I didn’t start doing what I do to make everyone happy. With that said….Nah, I don’t feel like attacking anyone today. Instead, let’s look at a good renewable fertilizer: Cotton seed meal. It’s got a reasonably good ratio of nitrogen to phosphorus and potassium — slow release of course. Basically a waste product given a meaningful purpose. … Continue reading this article “Good Stuff”
Why oh Why? Christmas tree edition
Hope everyone has had a chance to digest their Thanksgiving meal and is spending a productive day at work shopping on-line. My daughter and I enjoyed one of our Holiday traditions this weekend and brought home a Christmas tree from a local choose-and-cut farm. This was followed by another tradition at our house known as the “Annual cursing of the Christmas lights.” Seems like no matter how careful I am when I put away the lights when we take down the tree, they are always a mangled mess the next year.… Continue reading this article “Why oh Why? Christmas tree edition”
Deconstructing the cornmeal myth
Back in June of 2010, I wrote about an online column that recommended applying cornmeal as an antifungal soil amendment. (Important note: we are not talking about corn gluten meal. Just cornmeal.) The upshot of the post was while some gardening personalities extol the use of cornmeal to kill soil pathogens like Rhizoctonia and Sclerotinia, no published science supports the practice. The post was effective in encouraging the author of the referenced online column to update her information, but the controversy didn’t die.… Continue reading this article “Deconstructing the cornmeal myth”
Poisoned bird seed and trust
Over the years I’ve said some nice things about Scotts Miracle-gro products, such as one of their potting soils, and some not so nice things, such as with their Round-up resistant Kentucky bluegrass. I’ve never thought of them as a particularly good or particularly bad company, just a company trying to do the best it could while being reasonably honest about what it was doing (You could argue that they tried to pull something fancy with the Round-up resistant Kentucky bluegrass, but I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they were just exploiting an obvious governments loophole – not exactly good, but hey, it’s a dog eat dog world out there).… Continue reading this article “Poisoned bird seed and trust”
The Wrong Message
Every once in awhile I’ll see a new garden product that really speaks to me. Something that promises spectacular results on some garden problem that I’ve had to deal with before and attacks it in a novel way. Then I’ll read the advertising materials for the product and be let down before even trying it. Such is the case for a new product called Liquid Ladybug (which, by the way, is one of the niftiest product names that I’ve ever seen — so there’s a win for the company!).… Continue reading this article “The Wrong Message”
Sugar and Spice and Misnomers
At a lively hobnob with friends and colleagues, the discussion ranged from critique of the Virginia Tech offensive line to the logic/mystery behind commercial carbon offsets. Someone mentioned Domino Sugar’s efforts in that direction. Apparently their product has been certified “carbon free” by a business carbon offsets program that they pay a fee to. This led to hoots and snorts as to their selection of terminology since it involves a molecule (sucrose) that is 27% carbon.… Continue reading this article “Sugar and Spice and Misnomers”