Earlier this spring I spoke to the Alaska Master Gardeners at their annual meeting in Anchorage. I’d not been to Alaska before this, so I was on a steep learning curve most of the time. It was fantastic.
In any case, I thought it would be fun to do a podcast on gardens and landscapes at high latitudes. And if you’ve ever wondered what, exactly, you can grow at 51N latitude, you’ll find out
One of the things this blog can do is alert gardeners to the presence of new problems. This is one such instance.
WSU produces Pest Alerts, and recently the Red lily leaf beetle has been found in the Seattle area. The state is monitoring the spread of this nonnative pest, so those of you living in Washington please read this and pass it on to your gardening friends. New Englanders have been dealing with this pest for a while, but any of you outside this region may want to keep your eyes peeled.… Continue reading this article “Pest Alert: Red Lily Leaf Beetle”
One of the coolest things about plants is their unlimited ability to manufacture some of the most amazing biochemicals. This week’s podcast will brief you on some of these phytochemicals in the news – they’re good for you as well as for plants! We’ll also explore whether natural organic compounds are really all that much safer than synthetic chemicals. (You can probably already guess the answer to that one.)
Enjoy!
Yesterday I gave a presentation at an Urban Forestry symposium here in Seattle. One of the sidebar conversations I had came from a urban forester who had (to my mind, anyway) a different way of looking at urban street trees. I’ve bemoaned for years that our trees die far too young – we plant species that should live for decades or even centuries, only to watch them fail and die in a fraction of that time. … Continue reading this article “Maybe an early demise is better?”
Those of you who’ve been following the podcasts remember Riz Reyes as one of my recurring guests. He’s back this week, discussing ways you can shop for plants effectively at the big box stores. It all fits into the theme “Getting Your Money’s Worth.” You won’t want to miss it!
Lots of good feedback on this one! Full marks, however, to our retired copyeditor Carolyn who nailed it cold. Maybe you should consider coming out of retirement and helping at the Seattle Times 😉
Thanks to everyone for contributing! If you see EPEs in your local newspaper (that’s egregious plant errors), feel free to send them along for inclusion in a Friday posting!
I can’t match Holly’s post for cuteness, so I’ll have to settle for constructive criticism. Below are photos that appeared in the Seattle Times earlier this week.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify the errors in nomenclature within each caption. (This may seem insignificantly picky, but scientific names need to be uniformly constructed to avoid confusion.)
Anyway, have fun! Answers on Monday.
It’s spring…flowers are emerging and so are the podcasts. Here’s the first of our eight episodes for the season. The theme this week is “Spring Cleaning” and it’s the wide world of weeds. The podcasts are now hosted on i-Tunes, so I can follow you anywhere you go. Just sayin’.
I’m trying to get some listener questions “on air” as it were, so if you have a burning desire to be on a podcast with me, just drop an email to lindacs@wsu.edu… Continue reading this article “Podcasting returns! Season 3 begins”
I’ve been out and about (oot and aboot?) much of the spring giving talks to various gardening groups, including the Sechelt Botanical Garden Club last weekend. Sechelt (in English, pronounced "seashell" with a t at the end) is on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, and we did have a sunny April day (reason number one). That made for an enjoyable visit later to one of the lovely private gardens (reason number two):
And then, there’s that Canadian sense of humor as evdienced by a locally made product (reason number three):
Have a great weekend!… Continue reading this article “I love Sechelt in the springtime”
Recently ScienceDaily.com posted an article about American chestnut trees due to be planted in New York City. Researchers hope that these trees will be resistant to chestnut blight, an introduced fungal disease that pretty much wiped out mature specimens over the last 100 years.
When I lived in Buffalo, I was a member of the American Chestnut Foundation and every spring I helped with efforts to replant chestnuts in the hopes that resistant individuals might be found. … Continue reading this article “The new American chestnut tree: resistant survivor or Frankentree?”