Stories – Page 3 – The Garden Professors™

Stop planting things so close together, Holly!

I love Linda’s idea and there are some great comments – but y’all need to send her photo evidence of these gardening adventures/casualties to post! Would make me feel better. It doesn’t take much to get me going on dubious stuff I have done, gardening or otherwise.

Was just up to Northern Virginia to help with Fairfax Master Gardener training (at the fabulous Merrifield Garden Center). My talk was on "site analysis and plant selection." As I looked through my digital photos to illustrate the points made, I came across several "ahem" moments, that lead to the "do what I say, not what I do" caveat (but usually gets a few giggles and snorts).

Here’s a classic:

East side of our "yarden." The only preexisting material was the pair of white birch in the background and the purple-leaf plum. Please direct your attention to the left side of the border.

We built the bed in spring of 2008.

Inserted a very happy redbud, (7 gallon), Metasequoia glyptostroboides ‘Ogon’ (my pride and joy) ($$$ for a 15 gallon specimen), Salix x ‘Hakuru Nishiki’ standard (7 gallon lollipop), underplanted with some sun/part shade perennials and one little Tetrapanax root dug from a friend’s garden. There was also a Calycanthus raulstonii ‘Hartledge Wine’ tucked between the redbud and dawn redwood but you can’t see it from this angle.

The sun perennials took off, and it looked AWESOME.

Coming up on this border’s 4th anniversary, things are a bit…crowded. Only a few Echinacea remain to fight for the morning sun. The Tetrapanex just loves the light sandy loam and has gone ape-doo. The Phyllis Diller-esque Salix standard, despite my pruning it back each year, is about to get the chain saw. ‘Hartledge Wine’ got relocated this fall.

I think this is a common gardener’s dilemma. Maybe I just can’t picture my pet dawn redwood reaching 50′ tall, like it probably said on the tag I ignored. The upside is…"lush." And there needs to be a new bed built to relocate the sunny stuff (yay!). I’m actually a pretty patient gardener; and I even distinctly recall with this particular bed I was all "Look how far apart I’m placing these! Suuuper genius!" Feel free to giggle or snort.

Wicked Good!

At the tail end of August, we (the Hahn Horticulture Garden at Virginia Tech) hosted our second-ever all-day symposium. I christened it the Down ‘n’ Dirty Garden Symposium series – no stuffiness allowed! All fun, all useful info. This year we lured the fab Amy Stewart in as our anchor speaker. Quite the coup for our little town! My friend from grad school, Paula Gross, of the UNC-Charlotte Botanic Garden and co-author of "Bizarre Botanicals" brought her roadshow of wacky plants and action video. Karen Rexrode, northern Virginia gardener, photographer and artist, inspired us to explore the Dark Side of gardening.

I love it when a plan comes together…these ladies played off each other perfectly and the topics meshed nicely (though decidedly different than the usual garden symposium). The best part for me was I just had to M.C., thus got to enjoy each and every talk. Amy hit the nail on the head when she e-mailed after with "That has to be the most entertaining lineup of speakers I’ve ever been a part of — I just want to go on the road with them now!" Maybe they could use an agent…

Amy, Karen, and Paula relax, post-symposia,at the (botanical) garden of Elissa Steeves.

(photo: Nancy Jurek)
Amy’s "Wicked Plants" talk included a tour of her marvelously creepy garden!

(photo: Nancy Jurek)
Paula’s Bizarre Botanicals roadshow. Did you know the pollen of Lycopodium (clubmoss) is highly flammable (and was, at one time, useful as a condom lubricant?).

(photo: Nancy Jurek)
Karen Rexrode presented a very different and completely awesome take on terrariums, dish gardens, and planters.

(photo: Nancy Jurek)
Karen explained how to remove the top of the doll head with a Dremel saw. Good pal and frequent GP commenter Paul Westervelt turned to me and whispered "don’t you love how she just says that…so normally, like everyone does it…"

I’m still smiling. And totally inspired. This symposium is going to be really, really hard to top.

p.s. Pardon the missed post, was in Hawaii. I’ll probably post about that experience a little later on, when I’ve fully recovered. I can’t speak for Bert and the mai tais – except they were $14 each at the wildly-overpriced Hilton resort hosting the conference. Doubt he had many…</d

Consternation in the You-Pick Field

It’s high season at our blueberry farm. Each morning, the yard fills with cars (at 7:00 a.m. – aargh) and eager blueberry pickers hit our four acres of Northern Highbush berries. No late freezes, lots of hard work by our honey bees, and good rainfall have added up to a blockbuster crop. Certainly helps with the mortgage.

Running a you-pick ( U-Pick makes me itch) farm is an …interesting experience. Upside – you do the picking, we weigh the buckets, we take the money – $2.40/lb + tax. Very reasonable for big, fat berries. Our average sale is right around 10 lbs. I’d (theoretically) invite 90% of our customers to stick around for dinner – they’re that nice. Downside, besides hot, grumpy children, bee stings, and porta-potties: some people literally eat their way across the field. We absolutely expect pickers to taste a few as they go. That’s part of the you-pick experience. But I have witnessed some remarkable acts of blatant face-stuffing. Kids, I can kind of understand, but adults? I mean, do you eat your way through the produce section of the grocery store? The truly noble customer recognizes this and offers an extra dollar or two (“Gosh, I may have eaten a lot”). But the clueless #%$& who eats with both hands for an hour and then pays for a pound makes us a bit queasy. We get reports all the time from concerned customers i.e. “See that guy in the brown hat? He’s eating more than he’s picking.” One incident that comes to mind is a lady that completely denuded a 6′ plant; encouraging her daughter to eat the whole time, and then paid for less than a pound.

We try not to sweat it – maybe it’s a compliment as to how good our blueberries are – but it still puzzles me. What am I missing here? Why is this acceptable? Taking a tip from another local farm, we put out a jar near the register last week. They call it a “sin jar” but that’s a little too judgmental for us. We call it “munch money” and note that the contents of the jar goes to our local woefully-underfunded animal rescue and shelter. We make a donation yearly anyway; now it’s more fun (and satisfying), served up as a gentle nudge – we raised $120 for the shelter over the 4th of July weekend alone!

A Garden Professor migrates east, albeit briefly

I was AWOL last week, as I had 3 presentations to get ready for 3 different states all in the span of 4 days. Yow! But they are over and done, and I’ll try to keep up on the blog from now on.

This is a short but amusing post (to me anyway). My second talk was in Virginia, where I spoke to Master Gardeners at their annual conference. The speaker right before my talk was fellow GP Holly Scoggins. (Note to self: never agree to follow Dr. Scoggins again. I’m not nearly as amusing, though I am almost as tall.)

Anyway, Holly was discussing garden trends among other things and mentioned meta-gardens. Hmmm. I hadn’t heard of these, but assumed that, like meta-analyses, they were probably gardens that showcased plant collections from other places. Kind of like arboreta but smaller, and maybe something you could do at home. I nodded wisely, pretending that I was fully on board with this new trend.

Alas. My west coast ears were not adapted to Holly’s southern accent. As I discovered several slides later when it was obvious she was talking about meadow gardens.

Oh well.

Upside: I’m Two Pounds Lighter!

Cape San Blas
mullet and bass
cheap sunglass
sand flea and crabgrass
beachy landmass*

Had big, relaxing fun last week in the greater Port St. Joe/Cape San Blas/Apalachicola region of the Florida panhandle (billed as the "Forgotten Coast" or more locally "Florida’s Last Stand"). The bays are filled with fishies, the gulf is turquoise and rimmed with soft white sand. Highly under-developed, it’s truly paradise for anyone who likes to boat, fish, kayak, and run with your hounds on empty, wide, dog-friendly beaches. I’ve got fodder for a couple of posts, but will postpone the flora/landscape observations until next week.

The news of the awful outbreak of a particularly virulent and dangerous strain of Escherichia coli in Europe coincided with my own mid-vacation, not-so-pleasant experience. Twenty-four hours of bed-bound, trash-can-gripping, don’t stray far from bathroom non-activity while paying for a beach house and boat rental gave me some time to think deep thoughts about food safety. Salad, meat, seafood, and cream sauces were all involved. I could have ingested one of any number of sweat-and-barf-inducing microorganisms. Being off food and drink for another couple of days wasn’t ideal either. I didn’t go on vacation intending to detox (rather, "to tox"). But at least I was up and about. Renal failure and death takes the E. coli strain O104 to a whole ‘nother level.

In digging for a bit more information, the usual safe food handling advice has been trotted out in regards to this vicious beast; wash, peel, cook, etc. But a microbiologist at a Scottish agricultural research center (The James Hutton Institute) has noted there are strains of E. coli “associated with plants, not animals.” Dr. Nicola Holden says that the bacteria “are not simply sitting on the surface of the plants and are particularly difficult to remove post-harvest.” She goes on to state that these particular bacteria colonize the root system and then “have the opportunity to move to the edible foliage or fruits.” Yes, E. coli is a motile organism; that’s one way to get from the soil to your salad, but there is evidence it can invade the tissue and move within the plant; no amount of peeling or washing will help. Dr. Jeff LeJeune’s lab at Ohio State was taking a look at this several years ago, especially how E.coli can enter through points of damage from mechanical injury or plant pathogens. Haven’t had a chance to dig any deeper, but will be having a chat with a friend from our Food Science and Technology Department to find out more.

*apologies to the Car Talk guys, but I always wanted to do that.

Trees: Dead or Alive

In light of the comments on Dr. Jeff’s latest post (When Trees Don’t Know They’re Dead), especially those by Shawn, Ed, and Dr. Linda, I absolutely have to post this.

To the best of my knowledge, the number of stand-up comedian bits related to tree health can be counted on one finger. Here it is, transcribed, as close as I can without having Linda ban me from the blog/WSU server.

Ron White is a big, bawdy, laid-back Texan, permanently armed with a cigar, glass of scotch, and high-beam smile. I think he got thrown off the Blue Collar Comedy tour for not being red-necky enough. However, not recommended for the easily or moderately offendable. Anyhoo, here goes, and it suffers without the drawl…

****
From Ron White’s You Can’t Fix Stupid recording
(verbatim, mostly):

I was having a fight with the landscape guy because, like, half the plants died…you know it cost tons of money and half the plants died. And the guy is fighting with me over whether or not a tree is alive or dead. Can you believe that bleep? We walk over to two trees, there’s not one leaf on either one of them except [you look toward the] timber [where the] the forest is a-blooooom.

I said “those two trees are dead right there.”

He goes over to one of the trees and scratches the trunk with his thumb and comes back and says this, and I quote: “The core of this tree… is still alive”. [Long pause]

I said “Let me tell you what I’m looking for in a bleeping tree.”

[lotsa laffs]

I’m looking for tree that you can tell is alive even if you don’t know bleep about trees.

I don’t want to spend the next two years every time somebody comes over to our house “… oh no, those trees are fine right there – go scratch the trunk with your thumbnail. You will find a vibrant core. Just beneath the bark.”

******

Science Education and Lichens

Seemingly once a week we see a report in the news about how Science and Math education in the US lags behind many developed countries around the world. http://articles.cnn.com/2011-05-15/us/education.obrien.response_1_math-and-science-national-robotics-competition-education?_s=PM:US

While we typically think of Chemistry and Physics when discussing science education, biology is in there too.

I bring this up because I am continually amazed at how little many people know about basic biology. Some of this funnels its way into extension calls and e-mails. A couple of weeks ago I got a call from a distraught homeowner in a Detroit suburb. “My maple trees are dying”, he told me sincerely. “There are growths all over them. They’re big trees. What do I need to do to save them?”

I tried to get as much information as I could over the phone: How old are the trees? What kind of maple? Describe the site. Describe the symptoms. I told him the problem didn’t sound like typical issues with maples in our area (i.e., not manganese chlorosis, tar spot, gall mites, or verticillium wilt). Diagnosing problems sight unseen is difficult so I asked if he could get me some digital photos. “Yeah, my son has a digital camera. We can do that.” Later that week I got a series of digital photos like the one below.

Lichens on maple

I informed him the growths on the trees were lichens, a combination of a fungus and algae; they’re normal and they don’t harm trees. I gave him a quick biology lesson on lichens and pointed out that some of the pictures he sent were of lichens growing on the sidewalk. The algae part of the lichen is photosynthetic so they just need a place to hang out – a tree, a sidewalk or a piece of wood all work fine.

British soldier lichens

One of my all time favorite bumper stickers says, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”. I suspect if this homeowner had happened to call an unscrupulous tree service instead of MSU Extension, they would have been more than happy to ‘treat’ the problem and sign him up for their deluxe 8-step pest and micro-nutrient maintenance plan. Sometimes a little knowledge can go a long ways.

Bordeaux Mix

One of my favorite stories about pesticides is the story of Bordeaux mix. It’s a story of France in the 1800s (so it must be pretty romantic, right?) and how they were suffering from a shortage of grapes. Don’t feel sorry for them — it was really their own doing. Over the course of the 19^th century grape vines were brought from the United States to test their merits against European grapes. It was quickly discovered that, for the most part, American grapes were not the equal of European grapes for winemaking. Unfortunately for the French, however, along with the grapes came a disease: downy mildew. This mildew absolutely ravaged grape vines across Europe, and particularly France from the time that it was introduced, around 1878.

Meanwhile there was another problem for grapes growing in France. People. People like to eat grapes beside the side of the road and so, throughout France’s grape growing regions, grapes on the sides of the road were typically bare. Unlike downy mildew, however, grape growers had a pretty good idea what to do about people. They sprayed nasty stuff on the grapes. This nasty stuff took many forms, but the one which was most effective was a mixture of copper sulfate (basically you dissolve copper in sulfuric acid) mixed with lime. Brushed on a plant’s foliage, it was darn ugly.

Then came 1882; a terrible year for downy mildew. Grape vines were losing their leaves all over Europe, except for those vines beside the sides of the road. There the grape vines were doing just fine. The reason was the copper in the lime/copper sulfate mixture which was eventually dubbed Bordeaux mixture because of where it was first used. Bordeaux mixture is still available today, and is one of the most important tools in the organic grower’s pesticide arsenal. Unfortunately it’s nasty stuff – it builds up in the soil and it’s toxic to earthworms and a wide variety of different plants and aquatic organisms. Using this stuff once in a while – such as once a year – isn’t terrible, but regular use is a good way to ruin your plot of land.

One final thought – Those American vines which originally brought in mildew? They eventually became very important to French wines because of another introduced pest, phylloxera. They were used as rootstocks because they were resistant to this pest — unlike European grapes.

Keep Calm and Carry On…

This past weekend GP Jeff Gillman and I were in Midland, Michigan for two different conferences and had a chance to catch up over dinner (Boulevard burgers – best in Midland) and a couple of cold Bell’s stout ales. It was nice to visit with Jeff since we have so much in common but rarely get to see each other. As you might suspect, our conversation centered on negotiating the perils of the tenure and promotion process at research intensive universities, dealing with bumbling administrators, and, of course, our fellow Garden Professors. Quick Garden Professor trivia: Who’s the shortest Garden Professor? (Answer below).

Another item we discussed is how frantically worked up some people about following the various landscaping ‘rules’, especially for tree planting.

I have a program that I do on soil amendments. I present 6 or 7 examples from about 30 studies that I’ve collected from the literature that show that amending backfill when planting trees provides little, if any, value. Invariably, 2 or 3 audience members race up to podium after the Q & A, veins popping out of their foreheads.

“You have to add compost/peat/hydrogel/cow manure/take your pick when you plant!” they sputter.

I counter, “No you don’t. I just showed you a half dozen examples where it didn’t matter; if I had time I could’ve shown you two dozen more.”

The conversation usually turns one of two directions from there.

“Well, I saw a gardening expert on TV and they said you always have to add compost/peat/hydrogel/cow manure/take your pick when you plant.”

The other variation is: “Well, I always add compost/peat/hydrogel/cow manure/take your pick when I plant trees and shrubs and they do great.”

“Did you try any without the compost/peat/hydrogel/cow manure/take your pick? ”

“No, why would I? They always do great when I add compost/peat/hydrogel/cow manure/take your pick !”

As part of the soil amendment talk I present some data from a tree planting study which also included a comparison of width of the planting hole (1.2 times the width of root-ball, 2x root-ball width, and 3x root-ball width). After three years, width of planting hole had no effect on shoot or diameter growth. At this point in the talk I wait ten seconds before I move on to allow the results to sink in. By the time the next slide hits the screen half the audience is in a state psychologists refer to as ‘cognitive dissonance’.

People just can’t get over it. Another race to the podium after the talk, “But you have to dig the hole 3 times the width of the ball.”

“Can if you want to, but I wouldn’t say have to.”

“But, but…”

Clearly, there are things that shouldn’t be done when planting trees, like planting too deep. But a lot of things we “know” are based on what sounds right, on what feels right; not necessarily on science. Many practices have worked their way into extension bulletins, fact sheets, and our communal knowledge through sheer repetition. Often times, these are things that won’t hurt the tree (adding amendments or making a wider planting hole) but make the job harder than it has to be.

Point is, we need to take a deep breath, get a grip, and be careful with absolutes like ‘never’ and ‘always’. Working with trees is a lot like working for a university; it requires a high tolerance for ambiguity. Trees are living dynamic organisms that are able to respond and acclimate to their environment. I’ve stated many times that trees often grow more in spite of us than because of us. So calm down and carry on.

GP Trivia answer: At a hair over 5’8”, I am the shortest GP.

An Early Valentine’s Story

In honor of Valentine’s day I have a story about love and betrayal to share….OK, maybe not….perhaps something more along the lines of branches and ants. Same difference right?

There was once a tree that was much loved. It was planted in a cute little corner of a street next to a historic building and was well cared for by its owners. Its many limbs rose to the sky in a seething mass which made the tree look vigorous and robust…and those who planted the tree were very happy.

Over time, however, the people who planted the tree neglected it. The street where it was originally planted changed from a bustling center for traffic to a lonely, out-of-the-way road. As it was ignored its branches grew together and made a mess — and nobody noticed this mess — except for a little horticulturist who had to walk by the tree every day on his way into work.

The little horticulturist was fascinated by the tree. Not because the tree was a particularly fine specimen, no, that wasn’t it at all. Instead the little horticulturist was fascinated by the tree because its limbs grew together so closely that they actually appeared to be grafting with one another, something that the little horticulturist would often spend hours contemplating (what can the little horticulturist say — sometimes he liked to avoid real work).

Two limbs apparently grafted together!

Then one day something terrible happened. An evil green insect invaded the street where the tree lived, and all of the ash trees on that street had to be cut down. Even though the tree couldn’t be infested by the insect (it was a hackberry), it was still on the list. The little horticulturist pleaded with the groundskeepers to keep the tree, but orders were orders and the tree had to go.

But unbeknownst to the groundskeepers the little horticulturist knew one of the people cutting down the tree and asked the tree cutter to save him some of the trees limbs where they appeared to be grafted together. And the tree cutter did, and delivered them to the little horticulturist.

But alas! The grafts that the little horticulturist had seen were not truly grafts at all! They were rotted out sections of trunk which had grown around each other! The little horticulturist was crestfallen! How could this be? He left the decaying limbs in his office as he considered what to do next.

Hmmm…There’s no graft after all –what a mess!

Days stretched into weeks and the limbs continued to sit in the little horticulturists office. And then, one day, from the depths of the limbs sprouted new life! Winged carpenter ants flew around the room and into neighboring rooms! Colleagues shouted curses and obscenities! Graduate students were afraid to use the drinking fountain because of the masses of ants which alighted there! The custodians took to wearing dust masks! And, despite incessant pleading by almost everyone, the little horticulturist would not part with the limbs because he wanted to have props whenever he told the story of the day the ants took over the 4th floor.

The moral of this story is that you shouldn’t hold onto things once you figure out that they’re worthless.