Author: Holly Scoggins

Er, Too Much Coverage?

When botany and advertising collide.  Here we have the latest from AT&T.
The advertisement description’s in quotes.


“We open on an urban setting and see a vine begin to grow up a
pillar.”

What kind of vine?? It looks like a mutant clematis, though the leaf arrangement’s wrong, and there are no orange large-flowered ones. Oh well, let’s not be picky. At least it’s some kind of ornamental plant. We’ll call it Clematis broadbandii. Definitely non-native, though.


“From there, we see various landscapes being covered with
similar vines.”

What the…well, I guess the overpass does look better. And the city’s doing a great job keeping it out of the road.


“As the seedlings grow, they sprout brilliant orange
flowers, covering the cities, towns, and countryside’s in a spectacular
orange hue.”

Honey, drive faster. This neighborhood gives me the creeps.


This is ridiculous… I’m calling Linda Chalker-Scott! Or maybe Jeff Gillman, for a fair and balanced herbicide recommendation; or maybe Bert Cregg could suggest how to cut it back. Holly Scoggins is a flake; she’d just tuck Bounce sheets everywhere...


“Coverage is a beautiful thing. AT&T covers 97% of all Americans.”

Dear AT&T: the National Invasive Species Council will be in touch. Unless their call gets dropped.

Winter Trade Show Report

Disclaimer: The information and images below should not be construed as any sort of recommendation, remedy or advice. Just some cool and/or weird stuff I saw at a green industry trade show. Plus this blog needs more photos.

Was at the Mid-Atlantic Nursery Trade Show (MANTS… and yes, there is a Pennsylvania version…PANTS) in Baltimore a couple of weeks ago.  It’s a wonderful opportunity to visit with past students (now gainfully employed – yay!).  I also get to personally thank the nurseries and other businesses that generously support our Horticulture Department and Garden.  I’m more "herbaceous" so I tend to get more (professionally…and emotionally) out of the floriculture summer trade show and conference in Columbus, Ohio (OFA)  If you dig hot new tropicals, annuals, and perennials – it’s THE place to be.  MANTS tends to be more landscapy/woody.  There are umpteen wholesaler booths filled with dormant, ball & burlapped trees and containerized shrubs. There are WAY too many Bradford pears still out there (see Bert’s post below).  Honestly. 

Foot traffic was good (10,000 + registrants) for the 300 exhibitors: wholesale nurseries, garden center suppliers, liner and plug growers, landscape and nursery equipment manufacturers.  Also, all of the allied businesses you might not think of – inventory software, nursery insurance companies, universities and colleges, grower organizations, tag and pot manufacturers, etc.,  always a fascinating vertical and horizontal cross section of this business of growing and selling plants.

On with the show…

Propagation nurseries make the world go ’round.
This IS the proverbial candy shop for greenhouse and nursery growers.  Each flat holds 36, 78, or 105 little plants.  Two flats…would fit in my tote bag. Heh.


Succulents continue to be hot. Here’s Kalanchoe thyrsifolia ‘Fantastic’.
Fantastically awesome.


Even better…check out the pot made from (very) compressed rice hulls. Nice color, pretty shape, biodegradable. You’ll probably see more of these in the near future.


Display promoting the book "Creating a Deer and Rabbit-Proof Garden".  Artificial flowers – that may be the ticket…no, wait, it’s an artificial deer, too.


WANT. My 1972 John Deere 750 is on its last legs/tires. Plus this one would fit down our blueberry rows, AND it has a cup holder.  The brochure is now pinned above my desk.

Great name for a nursery:

that’s Holly, Woods, and Vines if you can’t read it.

Also the home of…


Faux moss-covered faux rocks. Intriguing.

Finally, there’s always a peek at trends in pots (pottery pots), garden art (tasteful or not) and other items coming soon to your local independent garden center…


Lots of antique and rustic looks out there, also galvanized is big.
I loved the fishy pots. Alas, one can only look, and then place an order. Minimum quantity – one pallet. Maybe if we all went in together…

Bounce – it’s not just a fabric softening sheet…

…it’s an Integrated Pest Management tool!

[Note added after-the-fact: this was a  tongue-in-cheek bit of  hyperbole – kind of like “it’s not just a Job, it’s an Adventure.” Did not mean to imply that it actually IS an IPM tool. Very badly worded. Hence the beating I took in the comments. Live and learn.]

Fungus gnats (Bradysia spp.) are a pain in the bottom for commercial greenhouse growers. The adults are more of a nuisance than anything else –it just looks bad when a customer picks up your 6” pot of pansies and a bunch of little black gnats take flight.  It’s the larvae that are problematic. Adult females lay the eggs in especially damp growing media, and the newly-hatched larvae feed on the roots. There’s both direct damage and also speculation of easier infection of root-borne pathogens, of which there are plenty. 

 
Fungus gnat larvae, just making a living…

Standard control measures include insecticide drenches, biological controls including a specific strain of Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis – sold as GnatrolTM), nematodes, etc.  One of the easiest control measures is the one I teach my students: to not over-water, i.e. “grow dry”. But that can be difficult in a big greenhouse range with many different-sized containers, all which drain/dry out at different rates. Propagation houses also have high humidity levels and have to stay moist for rooting/germination purposes and are thus favored by fungus gnats.

Entomologist Dr. Raymond Cloyd of Kansas State University and his group were intrigued by Master Gardener anecdotes of dryer sheets repelling mosquitoes, though no research had been done. Could your common Bounce sheet also repel other pests? And, to take it a step further, what, exactly, repels them?  The answers are “yes” and “lots of volatile compounds.”

Their study was published last month in the journal HortScience. Honestly, I’ve never seen descriptors like “controls static cling” and “gives clothes a fresh scent” in a Horticulture journal. Hee! Plus the researchers made it clear this experiment specifically used Bounce Original Outdoor FreshTM. Still kind of humorous, but really good science and the part that’s usually overlooked in the translation to a News Story. Do NOT extrapolate results to include Bounce Spring Fresh, Fresh Linen, and certainly not Downy or Snuggle brands. 

The study had a simple design, releasing lab gnats (ha!) into a  many-chambered container and observing to which chamber the gnats gravitated to (or away from).  There were five different variations on this theme, including an alluringly soggy media sample; when the sample of fabric softener sheet was introduced, they stayed away in droves. All five experiments showed a fairly drastic aversion to the sheet. To determine what was fending off the gnats, they did a steam extraction on sheet samples and ran the condensate through a gas chromatograph – mass spectrometer to measure the volatiles.



Figure from Bounce® Fabric Softener Dryer Sheets Repel Fungus Gnat, Bradysia sp. nr. coprophila (Diptera: Sciaridae), Adults. Raymond A. Cloyd, Karen A. Marley, Richard A. Larson, and Bari Arieli, HortScience Dec 1 2010: 1830–1833

Well, there you have it. Linalool is a monoterpene alcohol found in lavender, basil, and coriander, and is known to be toxic to mites and insects.  Citronello is another monoterpene and lends lemony-freshness to lemon balm, pennyroyal, and rose geranium and has short-term “repellent activity against mosquitoes.”  Benzyl acetate, though not specifically mentioned in the results, is another natural fragrance compound, found in jasmine – and is also an industrial-strength solvent. One man’s solvent is another man’s perfume. Or fabric softener. I bet their lab smelled GREAT, by the way.

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6

Organic Honey?

As there seems to be a good deal of interest in the topic of honeybees, and I’m a beekeeper, albeit relatively novice, I thought I might continue a bit of discussion.

I’ve been beekeeping for three years, and I sold my first honey harvest this fall.  Six gallons, divided into pint and half pint-sized jars.  As a newbie, extracting the honey from the frames and getting it into the jars was, by far, the messiest thing I’ve ever done.  It’s like wrestling with a living thing…the garage and kitchen still have sticky spots.  It also took forever – honey moves through a three- pail, three-filter system (eventually removing particles down to 200 microns) like…cold molasses.  Once it was properly subdued and contained, I looked into what was required for labeling.  Very interesting. And very, very, vague.

Honeybees have been described as “flying dust mops” – there is no way, unless the beekeeper owns all the land in a several-mile radius, that one knows what they’re getting into.   Our girls’ primary duty is pollination of our four+ acres of blueberries, so their primary pollen and nectar source in late spring is our four acres of blueberries. After that, they hit the sourwood, wingstem, mountain mint, and the smorgasbord of of perennials and annuals in the garden borders. We don’t use any pesticides on our farm (the cabbage looper and stink bug invasion this year is really testing me on that one). But that doesn’t mean the gentleman next door isn’t using Sevin on his squash or pyrethrins on his potatoes. And our bees are just as likely to be over at his house as ours (despite my stern lecture to them).

Noticing the honey labeled “USDA Certified Organic” sold for a premium at both my local grocer and favorite “natural foods” store, I spent some time digging as to certification standards, and whether it would be worth it to get certified. 

I came up fairly empty-handed.  There does not seem to be any USDA National Organic Program certification standards for honey.  Apparently there are some trade-law guidelines that allow honey to be imported from Canada and Central/South America labeled as USDA organic.  Very confusing, and very weird.  But apparently some U.S. honey producers, both large and small, have gone ahead and slapped USDA Organic labels on anyway.  Along with other meaningless statements like “Superior grade” or “All natural”.  Some states such as Pennsylvania are pushing for NOP standards, noting their beekeepers are at a disadvantage, marketing-wise, if they cannot certify their honey but Canadian or Argentine producers can.  On another front, beeswax, especially older wax in frames that are in brood hives for several years, can accumulate pesticides brought in from foraging bees like nobody’s business. So I’d also look askance at claims of products containing “organic beeswax.”

Cirque du Poinsettia

Last week I brought up the seasonal topic of poinsettias. There are so many cultivars to start with, it’ll make your head spin.  Twenty five new varieties were introduced in 2009 alone.  One
of the major breeders lists 36 RED varieties.

But for painting and glitter, growers
and retailers stick to “white” (actually a very pale yellow to cream –
see last week’s ‘Polar Bear’ post) or possibly light pink. The trend had a good start in Europe and crossed the pond in 2004. I

n 2005, I toured a Denver area greenhouse and saw my first air-brushed point. They were doing a specialty Broncos theme with bracts sprayed deep blue and orange and plopped into a football-shaped pot (with the season Denver’s having this year, I imagine sales are down).  The “team colors” theme is everywhere now.  Nothing says Christmas like maroon bracts (looked more like dried blood) with orange glitter – the interpretation of a Hokie poinsettia, available at our local Kroger. Different.  Please comment if you’ve seen a weirder color combo (are there Steelers ones yet?!).

Nationally, independent garden centers note they can’t keep pigmented points in stock, despite charging upwards of $9 more for a painted 6” point than a regular one. 

I'll have a bluuue Christmas without yoooooou

Blue poinsettias at McDonald’s Garden Center in Virginia Beach – a best-seller.

I’ve not seen any studies determining if the dye alters the post-harvest longevity or not; anecdotal evidence suggests it doesn’t have much effect. Just don’t splash them with water – the dye will run. Growers are careful to paint only mature poinsettias with fully-expanded bracts, or else suffer the poinsettia equivalent of bad roots (a la Lindsey Lohan). One of best-known of the poinsettia painters is at K&W Greenery of Janesville, Wisconsin.  The owners have carved out their high-end niche by employing an artist to do the air-brushing and glitter-sprinkling, treating each one as an individual work of art.  Art that will die in a heartbeat if you forget to water it, unfortunately. But the mother of all poinsettia growers/retailers in Ellison’s in Brenham, Texas. They’ve turned the season’s opening  each year into a hugely successful, candle-lit, wine-pouring party. The Today Show even stopped by a few years ago. The Ellison’s tree photo has been making its rounds on the internet for so long, I don’t even know who to credit.

 

Where's the damn partridge

Fa la la la la  (is that enough “la’s”?) 

Whether you take your poinsettias painted, straight up, or not at all – happy holidays!

It’s Poinsettia Time…

Love ’em or hate ’em, poinsettias are the number two potted flowering plant produced and sold in the U.S., only (very recently) surpassed by orchids. Especially amazing when you consider the five-week market window.  Commercial growers go at poinsettia (“points”) production usually one of two ways:  1) smaller pot, high volume, low margin for mass markets; or 2) larger pot, florist-quality, unusual varieties, for independent garden centers, florists, and other specialty retailers.  If you shopped any big box store this past weekend (bless your heart), you saw rolling racks of “doorbuster” deals such a 4.5″ points priced $1.25 or even less.  Interestingly, wholesale prices for even the small, high volume product range from $2.05 to $2.88.

Poinsettias from transplant to finish take from 12 to 15 weeks on a greenhouse bench; often require special lighting (or blackout technology), plant growth regulators, and often extra labor to pinch once to encourage branching. Much more expense/inputs than your average 6-pack of petunias, hence the very slim margin for growers of mass market plants.  That’s why many growers have taken route “2” – the dee-luxe, gift-type point that appeals to pickier consumers.  Big, beefy  plants in 8″ to 12″ pots, unusual colors such as pink, plum, and “marbled”, well-pinched to produce lots of showy bracts, wrapped in tastefully decorative pot covers all can command a much higher price point, both by the grower and the retailer.  (I don’t have it in me to speak of the bizarre painting/glitter trend at the moment.  Maybe I’ll save it for next week.)

Poinsettia breeders are always looking for color breaks, and one of the most “interesting” is this new introduction by Ecke called ‘Polar Bear’:


Pic taken at OFA, the big floriculture trade show, this past July. 

There are a couple unusual things about this introduction. One, it comes with a “cause” – Polar Bears International. Ecke’s donating 5% of the sales price (that would be the sale of their rooted liners to finishing growers) to the non-profit conservation society. There’s a whole slew of point-of-purchase tags, pot covers, bows, and signage that goes with, not to mention an informational web site. The other unusual thing is that they insist on calling it “white”.  Or at least “creamy”.  It’s…not. A lovely lemon-curd yellow, or perhaps off-off-off-off cream.  But most polar bears (except for the exceedingly pristine one in their tag photo) aren’t exactly white either.  Anyhoo, it’s certainly a good cause, and if “lemon curd” goes with your holiday decor, consider picking up a ‘Polar Bear’!

“Leave” Them Alone…Adventures in Extension Podcasting

We’re on the topic of communication this week…how can Extension personnel communicate best with their audience/stakeholders. It used to be via racks of Xeroxed “Fact Sheets” at your local Extension office. A few of these are said to still exist, but with states gutting their extension budgets, the costs of printing have become prohibitive.  And more critically…where do YOU go for information?  A musty file full of handouts? Heck no. Electronic media is tailor-made for extension. It’s virtually free, easily updated, and reaches a vast majority of clients.  Bert already covered YouTube, as well as posted the BEST extension video ever, courtesy of Utah State.  So I shall not be redundant.

At Virginia Tech, we have some folks utilizing the Power of Podcasts to communicate whatever point they’re trying to make.  Dr. Mike Goatley, our Turf Extension Specialist, has done especially well with the technology.  He presents practical advice in a very user-friendly package.  He nearly always cites relevant research.  The information presented in the audio file (MP3) is also available in some sort of text format, whether a fact sheet, script, or PowerPoint handout, often with hot links to the research literature cited.  You don’t even need an iPod; just click on the link and your media player of choice will open and play the audio.

For today’s example, I’ve selected one of my favorite Goatley-casts… his guide to lawn leaf management entitled “Leave Them Alone.” Effective, informative, and very convincing…all in 4 minutes.  Take a look and listen here… 


Mike demonstrates with his mulching mower.  The safety glasses are a nice touch. I wouldn’t have thought of that.

So what to plant under power lines?

I’m going to add a bit more to Bert’s discussion.  Through the efforts of Dr. Eric Wiseman of Urban Forestry at Virginia Tech, we have a
Utility Line Arboretum (ULA).  Modeled after Dr. Bonnie Appleton’s original ULA for Virginia at the Hampton Roads research station, Eric’s includes many woody taxa suitable for planting in the vicinity of power lines (see a nice list of Bonnie’s favorite power-line-friendly taxa here).

Eric came to me with his plan in 2006 and we found some space in our Hahn Horticulture Garden to get it going. Funding came through from both the Virginia Department of Forestry and the USDA. He’s now up to 50+ specimens, including a “no-no” tree for a demonstration of relative size. The Urban Forestry Club students maintain the site and Eric uses the ULA for both education and outreach.  Our hort garden visitors are free to wander through the well-labeled display. Interesting story:  obviously, this would be more effective with a faux power line for scale, like Bonnie has at Hampton Roads. Our campus architect said “heck no.” Apparently Virginia Tech has gone to great lengths and expense to get all power lines/utilities below ground.  And the ULA is adjacent to the much-visited baseball field.



That’s Eric on the right, demonstrating proper planting techniques.

Our Horticulture department has a great relationship with Forestry; especially the Urban Forestry section. Their students take our Landscape Establishment and Urban Horticulture courses and we encourage our landscape contracting students to take Arboriculture. Several are minoring in Urban Forestry (or vice-versa). Just thought I’d share a nice success story – one that should make Bert’s maligned arborists happy!

Water is the answer!

Wildlife week continues!  My humble experience with my own gardens past and present, as well as our campus garden, is that the presence of water virtually guarantees the presence of wildlife.  One of the National Wildlife Federation’s top requirements for becoming a  Certified Wildlife Habitat is “supply water” (another requirement: "$20 fee").   Water is, of course, the beverage of choice for most animals (though I did hear of a squirrel that preferred beer). And some creatures require it as a substrate in which to reproduce (that sounded a bit clinical).  Unfortunately, the popularity of water gardening, according to garden trend surveys and such, peaked in the late 1990’s and has decreased since.  I’d imagine this goes hand in hand with the desire for “no maintenance” landscapes. Whatever. I will not have a garden without moving water in it.  

Our first pond-building experience. Dig 11′ x 16 hole with concentric steps. Place excess soil behind pond to create stream/falls/unintended volcano. Line, add river stone and gravel. Add water and LOTS of plants to disguise said volcano. 

Voila.

True story that has nothing to do with wildlife*: We put this house up for sale one spring when the garden was kickin’. Within 10 minutes of the Realtor putting the sign out front, a truck drove up. The couple walked straight to the pond (at this point outfitted with a spiffy patio) and said "We’ll take it."  I said "don’t you want to see the inside of the house?" and the young woman responded "Sure, I guess we need to."  Sold it at 99% of asking price. Never underestimate the value of landscaping!!!

Back on topic…The sound of moving water is an essential part of the experience for me. Makes pulling weeds in the vicinity almost pleasant. Fish, tadpoles, snails, and salamanders populate our wee pond.

"Burrdurrrrp."

Watching the birds bath on the shallow gravel beach is delightful. The pump runs all winter, keeping the water moving and mostly open.  I’m pretty sure that in the dead of winter, it’s the only unfrozen water source for quite a distance, judging from the multitude of critter tracks in the snow.

Water makes a garden more pleasant, adds value to our home, and increases the odds of survival for the wildlife during the toughest times of drought and cold.  Now get digging.

*Actually, there was a wildlife-related incident…when the buyer’s Realtor took them down the exterior steps to inspect the cellar, he reached inside the door and put his hand on a 5′ long black snake wrapped around the light switch. That was almost a deal-breaker.  Point being…if you create a wildlife-friendly yard, they will  come.  All of them.