Category: Uncategorized

One of the recommendations that I always make when I discuss organic methods that work is bagging fruit.  If you’ve never heard of it then here’s the story.  By placing a bag of some sort around your fruit, such as apples or peaches, when they’re young you can protect them from insects and disease.  I used to recommend plastic ziplock bags (up here in the North anyway), and I still do, they’re cheap and work well.  You can also purchase Japanese fruit bags that will work.  But recently I was introduced to a more streamlined product which I really like — a cloth pocket with a cord to close off the top.  Since it’s made out of cloth it probably won’t protect against disease as well as plastic bags or Japanese fruit bags, but if insects are your main concern then I think these might be just perfect for you — if you don’t mind paying a few dollars for them (they are reusable!)

At a master gardener conference I recently attended one of the vendors handed me some of her Startbagging fruit bags to test on tomatoes.  I say test because, while these bags have been pretty effective at protecting tree fruits, they haven’t been used much for veggies (OK, OK, a tomato is technically a fruit).  To be honest though, I’m not as worried about insects on tomatoes as I am deer.  The deer near me don’t seem to care for the plants themselves, but they just love to pick the tomatoes off when they’re almost, but not quite ripe.  Jerks. 

Here are a few bags on a tomato plant.

Here’s a closeup of one of the bags.

I’ve only had these bags on the plant for about a week now — so far so good.  The company producing these bags is a small start-up.  From what I understand these bags are patent pending.  I wish this company well because I think this is organic pest control at its best — reusable products that don’t utilize chemicals.  If you have any interest you can go to startbagging.com to take a look (the website is a little basic right now — hopefully they’ll fix that soon!).

Just a little bit of show and tell today.  The week before last the Central Region of the American Conifer Society (ACS) hosted the National ACS meeting here in Michigan.  Over 300 conferites gathered to discuss their favorite plants and share their conifer addiction.

The highlight of the meeting was a field trip to the Harper Collection of Rare and Dwarf Conifers at Michigan State University’s Hidden Lake Gardens.  The Harper collection, which was donated to MSU by noted plantsman Justin ‘Chub’ Harper is a world-class assemblage of conifers and includes over 550 plants displayed in a wonderfully-designed layout.

To add a little fun to the outing, each ACS member was give three pink pin-flags and asked to mark their three favorite conifers.  Tough to choose just three from this collection. 

ACS members descend on the Harper Collection

Adrian Bloom adds his vote to Metasequoia glytostraboides ‘Gold rush’

The elephant tree. Pinus strobus ‘Pendula’

Got my vote but wasn’t the winner: Taxodium distichum ‘Pendens’.  If the meeting had been in October when this tree is in fall color, this would have won hands down.

And the winner is… Abies concolor ‘Blue cloak’

Linda’s posting this week made me nostalgic for some good old garden guru advice, so I couldn’t help but zip on over to Jerry Baker’s web site (www.jerrybaker.net) to see if he had anything interesting to tell me.  I wasn’t disappointed!  Here is one of his recommendations:

Three-minute eggshells

“Place eggshells in the microwave for three minutes, remove, crush into a fine powder, and place them in a cloth sachet. Then drop the sachet into your houseplant watering can to give your indoor plants a nice nitrogen-boost.”

Wow! how about that! Eggshells for a nitrogen boost!  Who woulda thought….  Anyway, after I saw this, I got to thinking, maybe, just maybe, there might be some nitrogen there…..

So I microwaved four eggshells, crushed them, and put them into a half-liter of water, then let them sit in the water for about 9 hours.  Then I filtered the water off and ran that water (along with a control sample) over to our soils lab to be tested.

And wouldn’t you know it?  That water DID have nitrogen in it!  About 5 parts per million!  Which is about 1/10th of what I would consider even close to a fertilizer application….So then if we do the math, that would mean that eighty egg shells per liter (about a quart) would make a decent shot of nitrogen.

Sorry Mr. Baker, I just don’t eat that many eggs.

In prepping grad students for their first big talk at a scientific meeting I always tell them everything will be fine – until the first data slide hits the screen.  The audience will nod knowingly during the introductory comments and even during the materials and methods, but data charts and tables are to scientists what chum is to hungry sharks.  So clearly I should have known better than to post figures without error bars in last week’s post.  In my defense, SigmaPlot, my program of choice for scientific graphing, currently resides on my old laptop which is running slower than molasses, so I did the ‘quick and dirty’ and used PowerPoint on my desktop.  Yes, my mother did raise me better than the present a measure of central tendency without an indication of dispersion.

So, duly chastised and humbled, I present the latest (July 12) volumetric soil moisture values from the SoMeDedTREEs.  N=8 for all means *=means are different at p=0.05.  The table below is more complete than last week’s post, which only presented the means from measurements just outside the container root ball.

Mean (std err) volumetric soil moisture of planetrees at MSU Hort farm, with and without 3” of ground red pine mulch

Inside container ball			MC%	std. err.
	15 cm	Mulch*	10.7	1.9
		No	6.4	0.6
	45 cm	Mulch	10.6	1.5
		No	10.5	1.7
Outside ball
	15 cm	Mulch*	21.9	1.3
		No	16.7	0.7
	45 cm	Mulch*	26.1	0.9
		No	23.1	0.9

As I noted a few posts back, this summer marks the 10^th anniversary of the discovery of emerald ash borer (EAB) in southeast Michigan.  While a lot of progress has been made on many fronts in the battle against EAB, the outlook for ash trees in North America still looks bleak for the foreseeable future.  Ash trees, both green and white ash, were popular choices as street and landscape trees throughout the Midwest and elsewhere.  In Michigan ashes comprised up to 30% of the overall tree cover in some communities.  Like chestnut blight and Dutch elm disease, EAB provides a cautionary tale of the destructive potential of invasive pests.  As global trade continues to increase (and the potential for exotic pest movement along with it), the most practical defense in the near term is to spread the risk and increase species diversity.  In spring 2003 Bob Schutzki and I installed an ash alternative species demonstration at the MSU Tollgate Extension Center in Novi, MI, near the epicenter of the EAB infestation.  As we near the completion of the 10^th growing season of the planting we can take stock of some of the better selections.

Dana (R) and Aniko assess the lindens

Hophornbeam Ostrya virginiana


Hardy rubber tree Eucomia ulmoides


Northern pine oak Quercus ellipsoidalis (R) can maintain good leaf color even when soil pH turns Q. palustris (L) chlorotic.

American Sentry linden Tilia americana ‘McKSentry’

Baumannii horsechestnut Aesculus hippocastanum ‘Baumannii’

State street maple Acer miyabei ‘Morton’

Thanks to our partners!

Over the weekend our blog was inaccessible.  The server room in Pullman (where this blog is housed) overheated and everything was shut down.  I apologize to those of you who tried to comment and/or post.  Things are back to normal, at least for the time being.

To those of you who don’t like Blue Oyster Cult, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t stop myself.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I spend some time flame weeding.  It’s a technique for getting rid of weeds by frying them using a 500,000 BTU (I’m not kidding – that’s how powerful this thing is rated) torch hooked up to a propane tank.  It’s not something I do a lot, just something that I get the urge to do periodically — when I need to feel macho.

Here’s the blow by blow – it’s kind of a good news, bad news story.

 

a Good news – Igniting the propane torch was quick and straightforward process.  The torch lit on the first try!

 

Bad news – Here’s my hairless finger after igniting the torch.  Even though the process of igniting the torch was quick and easy, I still burned all of the hair off of the fingers on my right hand. The black dots are all that’s left of my fantastic finger fuzz.

 

Good news – Damn but I feel powerful using this thing!  It’s like holding a jet engine in your hands!  Yes, it does make me feel macho.

 

More good news – only a couple of days later the plot looks almost spotless!

 

Bad news – Two weeks later the perennial weeds are already on their way back.  The ground insulates the roots too well.

If you live anywhere east of Montana you know that two-thirds of the country has been roasting under record heat for the past few weeks.  While the weather has been a bane to farmers and many others, it has provided us with an ideal set of conditions to begin to look at the responses in the SoMeDedTREES project. 

To recap, we installed two experiments with 25-gallon container-grown ‘Bloodgood’ planetrees.  In both experiments we applied one of three treatments to the root systems at planting: 1) “Shaved” the outer  portion of the root system to remove  circling roots, 2) “Teased” apart the outer portion of the rootball to remove circling roots and 3) “Control” where we did nothing to the root system, or “Pop and drop” to use Linda’s terminology.  One set of 48 trees was planted at the MSU Beaumont Nursery where half the trees were fertilized (400 g of Osmocote 15-9-12) and half were not.   The second set of trees was installed at the MSU Hort Farm.  At this site I made an executive decision to change the Fertilizer treatment to a Mulch comparison based on our discussions related to a recent study that suggested mulching does not actually reduce evaporation or improve soil moisture. We applied 3” of ground red pine bark in a ring approximately 40” in diameter around each tree in the “Mulch” treatment and left the other half of the trees with bare ground.

Overview of SoMeDedTREEs site at MSU Hort farm

If I had a hammer…  Summer Intern Aniko Gaal demonstrates proper form for installing TDR rods in clay soil (also works for relieving frustrations with your choice of summer employment).

Obviously this is a long-term study and we’re a long ways from any definitive results – especially with regard to the impact of the root treatments on eventual root structure – but the point of this exercise is to allow GP blog readers to come along for the ride and get a glimpse of what goes into our research.  For the mulch study one of our primary objectives is to track changes in soil moisture and tree stress associated with mulching.   In order to monitor soil moisture we are using a technique called Time Domain Reflectometry or TDR for short.  A TDR system is basically a glorified coaxial cable tester.  The system sends out an electrical pulse to a set of metal rods that are buried in the soil and then measures the return signal.  The greater the moisture in the soil, the longer it takes for the signal to return.  The instrument converts this information into volumetric soil moisture (% volume water/volume soil).  For this study we installed rods at two depths 15 cm (6”) and 45 (18”). Rods were installed 12” from the trunk of the tree at the edge of the root ball (inside) and 24” from the trunk of the tree (outside).

Volumetric soil moisture at 15 cm and 45 cm depth of planetrees with and without mulch at MSU Hort farm, Summer 2012.

We planted the trees in mid-May and watered them from a portable water tank once a week until mid-June.   Since then we’ve left the trees on their own.   So far the trees actually seem to be fairing pretty well given the heat.  We have one tree that is beginning to drop a few leaves but most look pretty good.  Our soil moisture readings to date are consistent with a couple of related studies that we’ve done that show mulching increases soil moisture.  Soil moisture was greater at the 45 cm depth than at 15 cm and the difference between mulch and no mulch was greater at the shallow depth.  Still very early, obviously, but we will continue to update – sort of like FOX Radio news: “We report – you decide.”

Many blue spruce trees in our area are suffering from a progressive decline.  This is more than the usual combination cytospora canker & rhizospaera needlecast that tend to make most mature blue spruce look crappy.   The current syndrome has been linked to phomopsis blight and affected trees show increasing branch die-back and in some cases trees go from a having a few dead branches to completely dead in a 3-4 years.  Because of this alarming and pervasive issue, I’ve been asked to put together a list of alternative selections for blue spruce as part of my extension duties.

Whenever I put together one of these lists I always include my all-time favorite conifer; a graceful, elegant tree that is native to the Pacific Northwest but grows well in Michigan and fulfills a range functions in the landscape.  Of course that tree is… well, that’s the problem.  I’m not sure what to call it anymore.  In Mr. Chance’s 6^th period Botany class at Olympia High School 30-some years ago I learned it as Alaska yellow cedar, Chamaecyparis nootkatensis.  Had to get the Latin spelling right to get full credit.  When I moved to Michigan in 1999 I heard people talk about Alaska cypress or Nootka cypress.  Took me a minute but I figured it out.  At least I could take comfort in the scientific name.  After all, as Mr. Chance taught us, we use scientific names to eliminate confusion; using Latin since it is ‘dead’ language and not subject to change.

About the same time I came to MSU a new conifer was discovered in Vietnam.  The new tree, Vietnamese golden cypress, was originally described as Xanthocyparis vietnamensis.  Moreover, this new species was closely related to nootkatensis, so both were added to the new genus.  Subsequently it was argued that the genus Callitropsis was originally used for Xanthocyparis nootkatensis before it became Chamaecyparis.  So, based on precedent Callitropsis was the proper genus for nootkatensis and vietnamesis.  Got it?  Well, as Lee Corso would say, Not so fast my friend…   Here’s the rest of story from the font of all knowledge, Wikipedia:

‘In 2010, Mao et al. performed a more detailed molecular analysis and placed Nootka Cypress back to Cupressus. However, this is disputed, as the tree would compose a monophyletic subgenus. "The argument that it warrants treatment as a monotypic genus is not without merit, in which case the correct name is Callitropsis nootkatensis."’

Then the Wikipedia poster shows their true colors.

‘Although acceptance of the revised classification of this tree is widespread among botanists, inertia in the horticultural and forestry industries (both typically very slow to adopt the results of botanical research), mean the name Chamaecyparis nootkatensis is likely to continue being listed in many situations.’

So let me get this straight.   Taxonomists have put the tree in four different genera within ten years and in one sentence current molecular analysis puts the tree in Cupressus (which the International Botanic Congress approved last year) but that’s disputed by other botanists – and WE’RE the idiots because we won’t jump on board?!

Tuesday morning I started the day by going outside, lighting a propane torch, and doing a little bit of flame – weeding for a demonstration.  Then I went inside, answered a few e-mails, and worked on a paper.  Around 4:00 I decided to go get a haircut because Wednesday I was due to speak before a portion of the Minnesota congress, along with a Professor in the department of Plant Pathology, to seek funding for a project that we have which identifies Dutch elm disease resistant elms in Minnesota.

In short, up until about 4:00 on Tuesday, I was feeling pretty darn professorial not to mention highly important.

Then, just before I headed out the door, an e-mail came across my computer screen, letting our department know that Bud Markhart had passed away.

For those of you who didn’t know Bud, he was a professor in the Department of Horticultural Science here at the University of Minnesota.  He was a plant physiologist who also did a lot of lecturing and work with organics.  He taught, among other things, a hands-on organic production course.

His passing wasn’t a surprise.  He was only 60, but he’d been fighting cancer for a few years and all of us in the department were aware that he probably didn’t have much time left.  Still, it hurts to lose someone like him.

As I’ve gone through my academic career I’ve had the opportunity to meet a lot of academics.  To make an unfair generalization, we tend to be self-righteous, self-important, and highly critical of others.  Bud was none of these things, and because of that he was loved and respected by many people both inside and outside of academia, but especially by students who were deeply appreciative of a professor who treated them as equals and didn’t talk down to them.  He earned the highest teaching award presented by the University of Minnesota, the Morse Alumni Teaching Award, a couple of years ago.  But the fact that he taught a class this past spring despite his illness reveals more about his commitment to students than any award could.

Personally, well, this is the guy who invited my wife and I to his house for Thanksgiving the first year that I lived in Minnesota.  In fact, he’s the guy who invited my Dad and me over my first day in Minnesota.

I think that a lot of people who talk about the recently departed refer to themselves as being closer to the departed than they actually were, and I don’t want to do that.  Bud and I were colleagues and, though I considered Bud a friend, we weren’t particularly close.  Still, I always knew that Bud’s door was open if I ever wanted to talk about anything.  He cared about people and he let it show.  His presence in our department, and in the small world that is horticulture, will be sorely missed.