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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.

Christmastime is also time for another ‘Why oh why?’  As in, why do people make such a big deal out of watering their tree?  Working in Extension with Christmas trees, I’m glad that we’ve gotten the word out and people are concerned with keeping their tree watered.  But is it really that hard to put water in the stand?  I use a watering can with a long stem and it seems to work fine.  Let’s look at some of the devices people have come up with water Christmas trees.  I’ve rated each on scale of 0 to 4 watering cans.

 


The tree IV.  I’ve mentioned this one on the blog before.  The theory here is that the tree will suck up water from a reservoir you attach to the trunk.  Trunk injection is possible with conifers but requires pressure and resin quickly fills the hole. 0 cans.


The watering cane.  OK, maybe you’ve got back problems and bending over with a regular watering can could be an issue. 4 cans.

 

 

Water funnel system.  I’m not sure the video convinced me this is faster and easier than the watering can. 2 cans.

Water reservoir cleverly disguised as a package.  Assuming the issue is you don’t like to bend over and put water in the stand, I don’t see where bending over to put water in a fake package is a big improvement.  And what happens if you forget which package is which? 2 cans.


Funnel cleverly disguised as an ornament.  Gets around the bending over issue, but can you really hide the tubing? 3 cans.

 

 


Christmas Vacation anti-transpirant.  According to the advertisement you can put this stuff in the first time you water the tree and then you are good to go for the next month.  The same product is sold as ‘Stasis’ and is used to protect bedding plants from wilting during shipping.  The theory is that the product induces stomatal closure by increasing abscisic acid levels.  I’m withholding judgment on this one until I see some data one way or the other, but to say I’m dubious is an understatement.

 

Keeping a Christmas tree hydrated is like most things; you can’t go wrong with the tried and true.  A fresh tree that is kept well-watered will retain needles for weeks and is very unlikely to be involved in a tree fire.   A tree this is allowed to dry, on other hand, is another story.  So before depending on a gimmick to keep your tree watered ask yourself if you’re willing to bet your house on it.

 

Thanksgiving

Yesterday was the day before Thanksgiving.  In my plant production class I always set up a short lab for Wednesday afternoon so that students can leave early and get to wherever they need to go (hopefully to see family).  As usual, I got to lab a little early so that I could get the students going right away.  Waiting for me there was one of my students. 

Earlier in the year I had told the class about commercial mycorrhizae and how the beneficial spores that you think you’re buying are usually dead when you purchase the package.  Well, this student wanted to check it out, so, unbeknownst to me, he purchased some mycorrhizae and placed them into a petri dish with a special nutrient mix to grow these fungi (he works in a lab which has this kind of material available).  He came to lab early to tell me about his results.

As a teacher it’s easy to get discouraged in a classroom.  Sometimes it’s tough to tell whether the students are listening and I wonder if I’m getting through.  But then a student goes and does something like this and it’s all worth it.

The results of his little test don’t really matter (though they did confirm what I’d told the class), what matters is that the student heard what I’d said and went to the trouble to test it for himself.

So this Thanksgiving I’m thankful that I’m fortunate enough to witness and take some small role in the intellectual curiosity of students.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

PS:  Just so everyone knows, The Garden Professors are becoming much more active on Facebook.  Just search for The Garden Professors and Like us!

Cold Weather Discussion

Next Monday Nov. 19th, we’re going to have a google+ discussion (that means digital cameras) on getting ready for cold weather.  It will be scheduled for 2:00 Central, 3:00 Eastern, 1:00 Mountain, and 12:00 Pacific.  It will be Linda, Myself, and a few other people.  If you have any interest in participating, or any burning questions, please drop me a line at gillm003@umn.edu.  We’d like to get three or four people from cold climates on with us!

Yes, this will be on YouTube a few hours after the discussion occurs.

Vacation in Colorado and Washington

Wow, election week.  Maybe your candidate(s) won, maybe not.  To be perfectly honest I’m not really sure that we know whether we’ve won or not until they actually take office and start doing things.  Along with the candidates, you probably also had the opportunity to vote for other things, like whether your state constitution should include an amendment saying that a marriage should be between a man and a woman or whether IDs should be required for voters to vote (those were the two on the Minnesota ballots).

For us horticulture types there was one vote that really made us happy.  In Colorado and Washington they voted to legalize marijuana for recreational use.  OK, I should come clean – I’ve never smoked marijuana.  Been around it, sure, but I have never actually partaken.  At this point in my life I don’t think I’d bother with it regardless of whether it was legal or not.  So why am I, and other horticulturists, so excited about it?  If things work out this is a new crop to work on, and new crops are fun.  Breeding, growing techniques, maximizing productivity, etc.  Shoot, maybe there will even be new grants for this stuff to fund the work.  And imagine the fun that we extension types will have writing about it!  I can’t wait.  

Webinar update – yes, YOU can attend!

A few days ago I posted about a webinar I’m doing on using academic databases for gardening myth-busting.  At the time I wasn’t sure what the rules were for viewing the webinar, but happily I’ve found out we can have outside viewers!  So here’s the information about when and how to log on to Adobe Connect (keep in mind this is Pacific Standard Time here).

Speaker: Linda Chalker-Scott

Date: Wednesday, November 7

Time: 10:30-11:30 a.m.

Address: http://breeze.wsu.edu/ext_skills/

We have 99 slots for people, so there should be plenty of room.  And if you can’t make it, no worries.  The presentation will be archived so you can watch it over and over and over…

I’ve gotten some great ideas from you – thanks!  Hope to see some of you there. 

It’s the bomb!

Between Hurricane Sandy and the inglorious end of the Tigers’ season, the news today has been pretty depressing here.  So I figured I’d stay with something light today and talk about a bombing incident that occurred on campus last Friday.  In case you’re wondering how a bombing on a major university campus can be considered a light event, I need to point out that this was a Yarn Bombing incident.  Yarn Bombing (also referred to as Yarnstorming or guerrilla knitting) is type of street art – in this case garden art – where trees and other objects are covered with colorful yarn.  What’s the point?  I don’t know; does art have to have a point?  Anyway, to add a little whimsy to your day, here are some photos from this weekend’s Yarn Bombing at the MSU Gardens.

For more photos go to the MSU Gardens website

An Interesting Idea

This past week one of our loyal followers, Karen, sent me a link to a New York Times Article by Mark Bittman.  I have read articles by Bittman before and have found them to be kind of a mixed bag, some good, some not so good (but then I suppose many of you could say the same thing about my articles – so I’m not complaining). Anyway, this article was good.  It discusses a study conducted in Iowa which demonstrated that growing different crops over time is healthier for the soil, reduces inputs like fertilizer and pesticides, and increases yields.  Basically they’re saying that growing more than just soybean one year and corn the next is a good thing to do.  For example, you could grow soy then corn then alfalfa.  And basically I agree with the article.  One of the things that it drives home really well is that there is a happy medium between dosing our soil with chemicals and going organic.  I do have one complaint though.  In the New York Times article Bittman seems to imply that yields of corn and soybean are higher when more crop rotations are used, and this isn’t exactly true.  Certainly the yields were higher on a per year basis, but since corn (for example) was only grown for one out of every few years instead of once every two year, over the course of a decade you’d still produce more corn on the conventional plot – of course you would have additional crops, oats and/or alfalfa, planted to make up for this, but still, this is a significant concern and not one that can be brushed off quickly.   There are certainly other concerns with this model if it ever became large.  Would we be producing too much alfalfa?  This study utilized cow manure as a fertilizer – how many cows per acre would you need?  Still, I think this is a neat study and one which we should pay attention to as it’s stuff like this, rather than what we now call organic, which has real potential to decrease our pesticide and fertilizer use.

A guest blogger (sort of)

One of the best things about my job is I get to work around bright, enthusiastic young people everyday.  And not just students here at MSU.  Through conferences, meetings and other contacts I get to interact with students at other universities as well.  Over the last couple of years I have had a chance to sit in on a couple talks by Alison Stoven O’Connor, who is an Extension Agent and Ph.D. student under the direction of Jim Klett and Tony Koski in Horticulture and Landscape Archetiecture at Colorado State University (and you thought you were busy!).  For her Ph.D. research Alison is working on a subject near and dear to the hearts of the Garden Professors; nursery production and tree root development.  After I saw her talk at the ASHS meeting this summer I invited Alison to take slot as a guest blogger but she declined, citing her time constraints – we’ll call it an excused absence.  She did, however, graciously share some photos from her trial which, as you’ll see, pretty much speak for themselves.

 

A brief run-down on Alison’s study.  She grew Chanticleer pear trees in #15 containers, including both standard black plastic containers and Smart Pot fabric containers in summer 2010.  After growing the trees in the nursery for the summer, she transplanted the trees into a landscape-type planting in the fall of 2010.  Last week (remember you come to the Garden Professors to get the latest!) she began sampling the roots of a subset of her trees with the aid of a local landscape company with an air spade.  The depth of rooting appears to be consistent regardless of the type of container the tree was grown in.  Width of the root system; that’s another story… While Alison has a ways to go in gathering and analyzing data, the photographic evidence looks pretty good for the Smart pots over the status quo.

 


Trees in nursery production.

 

 


Trees in the ‘Landscape’ after transplanting,

 

 


Air spading to harvest roots


Root systems two years after planting in the landscape.  Left – tree grown in conventional black plastic pot.  Right – tree grown in Smart Pot.  630 miles between East Lansing and Minneapolis and I can already hear Jeff gloating, “Neener, neener, neener…”

Fruits and Plains

Recently there have been a number of plant related books that have done really well in terms of sales.  Brother Gardeners is one and What A Plant Knows is another.  Personally, I think both of these books are nice additions to any horticulturists bookshelf.  But there are always those books that have been forgotten.  One of those books is Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America by Philip J. Pauly.  Published in 2008 this is an accurate history (much more accurate that anything by Pollan for example — Not that Pollan writes bad stuff, but let’s face it, he’s a storyteller) of the evolution of horticulture in the United States over the past few hundred years — If you really want to know the history of horticulture here in the US then this is probably the best place to start.  I can’t recommend it enough.

SoMeDedTrees update

Things have settled down briefly here and I have had a chance to summarize some of the data from the container tree transplanting experiment we installed earlier this year.  For those that aren’t familiar we installed two tests this summer using 96 ‘Bloodgood’ plane trees grown in 25 gallon containers that were leftover when we completed an earlier trial in our Pot-in-Pot nursery.  I decided to use this as an opportunity to look at some tree transplanting recommendations.   With input of our GP blog readers, we installed two tests.  In both tests we applied three treatments to the tree root-balls before planting (‘shaving’ the outer roots to eliminate girdling roots; ‘teasing’ apart the rootball to eliminate girdling roots, and a control or ‘pop and drop’ to use Linda’s nomenclature).  At one site we fertilized half the trees at planting and left the others unfertilized.  At the second site we mulched half the trees with 3” of ground pine bark and left the others unmulched.

 

On the fertilizer trial we have not seen anything remarkable.  We conducted measurements of leaf chlorophyll content using a SPAD meter (a device that measures light transmittance through leaves) but did not see an effect of either fertilizer or root ball treatments.  This is not completely surprising.  In the nursery trial we fertilized the trees at standard production levels, so their nutrient status was pretty good at the outset.  What will be interesting is to see if either treatment at planting has a longer term impact.

 

In the mulch study we have seen some more immediate impacts.  We measured soil moisture to 15 cm (6”) and 45 cm (18”) inside the rootball and just outside the rootball periodically during the summer.  Soil moisture levels were consistently higher for the mulched trees that for the trees that were not mulched (Fig. 1), especially at the shallow (15 cm) depth.

Figure 1. Soil moisture of trees with and without mulch in the SoMeDedTrees study, summer 2012. (Sigmaplot wizardry by Dana Ellison)

This was reflected in tree moisture stress levels during August.  We measured predawn water potential with a pressure chamber.  Using a pressure chamber enables us to estimate the level of tension with which water is being held inside a tree.  We remove a leaf from the tree and put it in a chamber with the cut end sticking out.  We gradually increase the pressure in the chamber until we see water appear on the cut end.  The more stress the tree is under the more pressure we have to apply to get water back out. In this case, mulching, by virtue of the fact it increased soil moisture, resulted in lower water potential values, indicating less stress (fig. 2).  The root ball manipulation treatments, on the other hand, did not affect tree stress.

 

Figure 2. Mean pre-dawn water potential (in -MPa) of plane trees in the SoMeDedTrees study, August 2012.

So where does that leave us?  Well, as we’ve noted all along, this is long-term trial.  The plan is to track the trees over 3-5 years and maybe longer.  But long-term responses are the cumulative results of series of shorter-term effects.  So far, mulching appears to be the only factor that has made a difference but we are still early in the game.