The Deer Thing

Gave a talk last week to the Arlington, Virginia Master Gardeners and friends (howdy!).  What a wonderful group. I was warmly welcomed, they brought awesome goodies, and even laughed at my silly anecdotes.

As is inevitable during any plant presentation, the topic of deer came up. When the question arose of whether a particular perennial that I had enjoyed in my own garden was deer-resistant or not, I responded with  “I’m not sure, I don’t have a deer problem.”  I regretted my words the moment they came out. The audience erupted, and I swear cupcakes were (figuratively)  flung at my head.

1. It was incredibly insensitive of me.

But I didn’t know! I was gently informed that yes, deer were indeed a huge problem. Arlington is tucked deep within the Beltway, right next to D.C. Though they have some nice green spaces and lots of big trees, I wouldn’t describe it as suburban, which is where I’ve heard all the deer problems were in Northern Virginia.  The D.C. metroplex is bumper-to-bumper traffic about 22 hours per day, at least in the experience of this Country Mouse. How they haven’t been wiped out by deer-vehicle collisions, I’m not sure. Maybe the traffic never goes fast enough. I feel just awful for these folks. One lady described afterward how she couldn’t even have pansies in a container on her patio.  She said she gardens “in her dreams.”  I misted up. 

2.  I then had to try to explain why I don’t have a deer problem.

I’m not sure!  What’s worse, I haven’t had too much of a problem at any of my previous residences (just digging the hole deeper, aren’t I). Currently, we live in the Country with a capital “C”, on the side of a mountain, surrounded by forests, pastures, streams, etc. There’s minimal fencing.  The nearest neighbors* are not very near. We should be crawling with deer.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty around – picturesque herds roam the hayfields across the valley. Driving home at dusk in the spring and fall is an adventure in deer-dodging. They do occasional visit closer to the house, traipsing through our blueberries, and eating fallen apples, or nibbling the tops out of my okra. They have damaged some of our veg garden, but no worse than our own destruct-o-chickens.  But they rarely mess with the ornamentals. Of which there are LOTS.

* Incidentally, most of those (very nice) neighbors possesses multiple rifles and armloads of 30-06 rounds. I know this because deer season is nigh, and everyone’s adjusting their scopes and blowing out the dust.  Blam, blam, blam.

My best guess as to our relative freedom from deer damage? Neighbors who enjoy deer steaks, plus an active assault-hound program. OUR weapons of choice:


Bebe (B.B.) the Basenji-mix and Bunny the Whippet. Faster than speeding bullets. Joel is asleep so I graciously cropped him out.

Not very fearsome as depicted here, but two sight-hounds can give the deer a run for their money. They love to patrol the grounds. Plus it’s great exercise for the little couch lizards.

The deer explosion has turned many people off from gardening (both novice and experienced). To have something you’ve grown and/or spent a chunk of money on – there one evening and gone the next morning – must be very, very frustrating.  My heart goes out to the kind and hardy gardeners of Arlington and all others for whom deer are an absolute plague. 

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Confessions of a Weather Channel Addict

My name is Bert and I’m a Weather Channel junkie.  It started innocently enough; sneaking an occasional peek at the local radar.  Then I found myself sticking around for the next Local on the 8’s just for the smooth jazz.  The progression from there was steady and predictable: Glued, trance-like, to the couch for re-runs of ‘Storm Stories’ and ‘When Weather Changed History’; setting my alarm 20 minutes early to catch ‘Wake up with Al’ so I could get my morning Stephanie Abrams fix.  My downward spiral was further enabled by weather.com.  I knew I needed help when I found myself checking the local radar to see if it was raining instead of just looking out the window.
Admit it.  If you’re a gardener or work with gardeners, you’re probably hooked too.  Hard to imagine a Saturday or Sunday morning that doesn’t start with tuning in to TWC or clicking on weather.com.  The local radar and weather warnings, of course, are indispensible.  We had a frost advisory in our area last night and I’m sure some folks will get an extra couple weeks out of their annuals if they paid attention and got them covered.


An often-overlooked feature on weather.com that I encourage gardeners and landscapers to use is the wind forecast.   If you go to your local hourly forecast and click on ‘details’, it provides an hour-by-hour forecast for local wind conditions.  This is a great way to plan any herbicide applications (e.g, Round-up or Weed-B-gone) you may be contemplating.  Doing a little planning and spraying when conditions are calm is one of the best ways to avoid off-target injury.

So clearly there are plenty of reasons to keep us hooked and tuning in, even if some aspects of TWC are getting just a little too predictable:

Studio anchor:  And now we go to Jim Cantore, who’s on the Outer Banks where Hurricane Holly is about to make landfall.  Jim, what’s the latest out there?

Cantore (braced against a gale but looking studly in his official Weather Channel raingear):  Well, just like the other 73 hurricanes I’ve been in, it’s raining.  And the wind is blowing really, really hard!

Cut back to studio anchor:  Thank you, Jim, for that insightful report.

The Weather Channel, live by it.

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Fungal fun continues!

The comments on Friday’s puzzle have certainly been imaginative!  (Tribbles indeed!)  But this weekend nature cooperated to give me some more information.

My little fungus family expanded over the weekend.  As this photo shows, we definitely have a mushroom-type fungus:

Looking at a young member, you can see what look like stalked spores emerging from the gills:

And the edges of the mushroom curl upwards as the spore mass grows

until we end up with the black furry ball shown on Friday:

So the discussion continues:  What the heck is this?  Is it one species, or is there another species that’s emerging from the gills of the first?

Friday fungal fun

The answer to today’s puzzle will depend on YOU!  I have no idea what this is.  (I’m not a mycologist.  And did you know that fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants?)

Anyway.  I found this on our wood chip mulch today.  We always get interesting fungal fruiting bodies on wood chips – one year we even got morels.  But I’ve never seen this type before.

If you can’t tell, these are round and furry.  They really remind me of a mold.

Happy Days

Today is such a good day.  Really good.  Almost as good as my wedding day and the birth of my kids good.  Better than the Eagles won the Superbowl good (I’m a big Philadelphia Eagles football fan — Mike Vick and his transgressions aside of course).

Just for today I don’t care much about the arguments for or against organics, natives or even my favorite topic, pesticides.

What’s the news you ask?

Peanuts.  Hot Boiled Peanut.

If you follow this blog you may recall that Tom Michaels, a professor and bean breeder here at UMN, and I planted a few rows of peanuts last year in between rows of trees — the trees you see below are elms from a selection program we’re running here.  Between the rows you’ll notice some plants starting to turn yellow, those are peanuts.  The darker green plants between the rows of trees are canola.

Below is what a peanut plant looks like when you harvest it.  After the flowers are pollinated the plant sends the stalk on which the flower is growing into the soil where it forms a peanut.  When we harvested we saw anywhere from 0 to about 10 peanuts per plant.

We harvested a test batch of peanuts last night — probably a little over a pound.  They were a little immature, but they still tasted good fresh out of the ground.  Without any treatment fresh peanuts taste a lot like fresh peas — an unmistakable “legume” flavor.  For those of you love roasted peanuts, that familiar flavor is a result of the roasting process.

Boiled peanuts are a little different than roasted peanuts in that the pods are usually harvested a little bit immature, so our first harvest, yesterday, was actually right on time.  We’re planning on finishing harvest next week.

Anyway, once we got the peanuts out of the ground I drove them straight home, put them into a quart of water, added a quarter cup of salt, and put that mixture into a crock-pot on high heat for three hours and low heat for another eleven.  I tasted one after three and knew they would be good.  After the full 14 hours?  The best boiled peanuts I’ve ever had.

As my wife noted, these peanuts aren’t exactly the same as the one’s you get in
the South.  She was trying to be nice — but I got the impression that
they were just a little too different from what she’s used to for her to like them quite as much as
the ones we get when we visit South Carolina (which we visit yearly). The difference between these peanuts and the other boiled peanuts that I’ve had (and I’ve had a lot — from all over the South) is that these are a little bit sweeter.

For me — Best damn peanuts ever — Minnesota grown no less.  Who woulda’ thought?  Not me.  Can’t wait to boil a big batch next week!</d

Tips for garden writers from a science writer

Much as I am itching to continue the current discussion on cultivars of native plants, I’ve got to wait until next week (my seminar schedule has me hammered – doing my third one this week tomorrow).  So instead I thought I’d throw out some suggestions for those nonscientists who blog and/or write about all things planted.

First of all, I do enjoy reading blogs, articles and books by nonscientists who venture into plant and soil sciences.  But there are common errors that both interrupt the flow and – fairly or unfairly – can cause me to question the writer’s grasp of the subject matter.  Here are some of them in no particular order:

Nomenclature:

1)  Common names are not capitalized unless they contain a proper noun.  (This is a general taxonomic rule for plants – and sorry, I didn’t write the rules!)

2)  Scientific names are always italicized or underlined; the first letter of the genus is capitalized, the species name is usually not.  (Also, they’re not “Latin names” – many scientific names actually come from Greek roots.)

3)  While we’re on scientific names and in a nod to our discussion of cultivars, let’s address that one too.  When a scientific name is followed by a cultivar name, the cultivar name is either preceded by cv., or is set off in single quotes.  The cultivar name is capitalized.  So this is how the weeping blue atlas cedar would appear: Cedrus atlantica ‘Glauca Pendula’ or Cedrus atlantica cv. Glauca Pendula.

4)  Plant family names always end in -aceae, which literally means “family.”  When someone writes “the Asteraceae family” they are being redundant.  (This always reminds me of a scene from Mickey Blue Eyes, where the characters are discussing a restaurant called “The La Trattoria” – which, of course, translates to “the the restaurant.”)

Scientific information:

1)  The word “data” is a plural noun (datum is the singular form).  Therefore, “data” must take plural verbs.

2)  “Proving” that a product or practice works.  The philosophy behind the scientific method states that one can never definitively “prove” anything.  Thus, we can have results that support a hypothesis, or we can disprove it.  (Yes, marketers do this, but garden writers shouldn’t.)

Terminology:

1)  “Pesticide” is a generic word that means “pest killer”.  Herbicides kill plants, fungicides kill fungi, and so on.  Many nonscientists incorrectly think that pesticide means the same thing as insecticide.  It does not.

2)  Flowers and fruits are reproductive structures of angiosperms (the flowering plants). Conifers do not have flowers, nor do they have fruits; their seeds are born on cones.  Many scientists, as well as nonscientists, incorrectly label the cones of Ginkgo and Taxus (yew) as fruits.

I’m sure my GP colleagues can come up with some other ones, and maybe you can as well.  Comment away!

Cake and Cultivars

I was working on something entirely different, but thought better of it. I’d like to continue Bert’s (now Dr. Mister Smartypants) really intriguing discussion.

Because when I read it, I felt a pang of…guilt? Confusion?

I’d describe my usual perspective on the “native” topic as ultra-liberal, highly plant-introduction-centric. New plant? Gimme!!! (“Native” shall appear in this post surrounded by quotes throughout, as a safety measure.)

Commenter Wes perceptively noted “part of the gardening public is becoming so enamored with the concept
of natives that I think they are grasping at straws to to assuage their
belief in ecological principal. In my opinion, many want to have their
cake and eat it too.”  As a card-carrying member of the gardening public, yes, I do like using “native” plants, there is some portion of “feel good” to it, and I adore it when a hot new cultivar is also a “native”. And many breeders, propagators, growers, and garden centers would like to assist me with this.

A good example:  the “American Beauties Native Plants” program from a large propagation nursery in Pennsylvania. Some straight species, lots of cultivars, all with marketing materials to match (tags, pots, banners).
Has “Big Plant Introduction and Branding” (really, not that big or scary an entity) co-opted “native”?  Discuss.

Finally, some advice, please:  in our campus garden, we’ve nearly an acre of new plantings in a meadow style that consists of lots of cultivars and some interspecific hybrids; all of “native” plants (even the freakin’ buffalo grass is a cultivar). How in the heck should I refer to these plants, let alone the entire concept, in our educational/interpretive materials?  Any and all suggestions will be considered.

Can cultivars be considered native plants?

One of the questions that arise in discussing native plants is the question of whether ornamental cultivars (e.g., ‘October golory’ red maple) can or should be considered ‘native’.  In short, my answer is ‘No.’

Here’s my rationale on this.  First, when we think about natives we need to put political boundaries out of minds and think about ecosystems. Political boundaries – a ‘Michigan native’ or ‘an Oregon native’ – are meaningless in a biological context.  What’s important is what ecosystem the plant occurs in naturally.  In addition to taking an ecological approach to defining natives we also need to consider its seed source or geographic origin.  Why is it important to consider seed origin or ‘provenance’?  Species that occur over broad geographic areas or even across relatively small areas with diverse environments can show tremendous amounts of intra-species variation.   Sticking with red maple as an example, we know that red maples from the southern end of the range are different from the northern end of the range.   How are they different? Lots of ways; growth rate, frost hardiness, drought tolerance, date of bud break and bud set.  Provenances can even vary in insect and disease resistance.

 


Native range of red maple

If we’re dealing with an ornamental cultivar, do we know the original seed source or provenance?   Sometimes yes, sometimes no, sometimes maybe.  Think for a minute how most ornamental cultivars come to be.  Some are developed through intentional crosses in breeding programs.  The breeder may or may not know the geographic origins of the plants with which they are working.  Or they may produce interspecfic hybrids of species that would not cross in nature.  Some cultivars are identified by chance selection; an alert plantsperson finds a tree with an interesting trait (great fall color) in the woods or at an arboretum.  They collect scion wood, propagate the trees and try them out to see if they are true to type.  If the original find was in a native woodlot and the plantsperson kept some records, we may know the seed source.  If the tree was discovered in a secondary location, such as an arboretum, it may not be possible to know the origin.

 

So, if a breeder works with trees of known origin or a plantsperson develops a cultivar from a chance find in a known location AND the plants are planted back in a similar ecosystem in that geographic area, we can consider them native, right?  As Lee Corso would say, “Not so fast, my friend.”  We still need to consider that matter of propagation.  Most tree and shrub cultivars are partly or entirely clonal.  Cultivars that are produced from rooting cuttings; for example, many arborvitae, are entirely clonal.  Cultivars that are produced by grafting, like most shade trees, are clonal from the graft union up.  The absolute genetic uniformity that comes from clonal material is great for maintaining the ornamental trait of interest but does next to nothing to promote genetic diversity within the species.  From my ultra-conservative, highly forestry-centric perspective, the only way to consider a plant truly native, it needs to be propagated from seed and planted in an ecosystem in the geographic region from which it evolved.  Few, if any, cultivars can meet that test.

Mystery tongue identified

A few brave souls dared to take on Friday’s puzzle.  Here’s a more revealing photo; the "tongue" is actually the top of a pitcher plant: 

Kudos to Hap for correctly identifying the genus (Sarracenia) of this carnivorous plant.  This particular one is S. purpurea, which is distinctive in that it has dark red, open pitchers rather than hooded ones.  You can easily see the downward slanting hairs in the throat of the pitchers.  These hairs, as Diana pointed out, keep trapped insects from climbing back out of the pitcher. 

This pitcher plant is part of my nifty bog garden that we put together this year.  If any of them get big enough, I’ll have to try Hap’s unorthodox method of slug disposal.