The Garden Professors™ – Page 106 – Advancing the science of gardening and other stuff since 2009

Deer Finale (and then we move on…maybe)

I believe I may have shared this with you previously…pardon the recycling.

But cogent to the discussion (and still breathtaking in its absurdity…)

About $1000 worth of 10′ tall Arborvitae that were freshly dug, moved to a commercial job site, and then EATEN ALIVE before they were even planted. The remains (seen here) were shipped back to the wholesaler near Richmond. My guess is that deer evolution may be headed in the direction of longer necks. In another epoch they’ll be…giraffes. Minus the festive coat pattern.

Oh Deer! Part 2

Last week Holly and I extolled the virtues of our dogs for helping to keep our gardens and landscapes relatively deer-free even though we live in areas with high deer pressure. Of course, letting dogs roam your property is not an option for everyone. So what are some other options to keep deer from turning your garden into a salad buffet?

My former grad student, Sara Tanis, shows off deer damage at her parent’s place near Ludington, MI

One of the most popular non-canine deer remedies is applying various deer repellants. Typically I’ve been pretty skeptical of deer repellants. Trying to stop hungry deer from chowing down on your garden is like trying to stop a high school football team from devouring an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet. Recently, however, I saw some results from some colleagues at North Carolina State University on the effectiveness of various deer repellents in Christmas tree plantations that looked promising. Deer damage is a major issue in Christmas trees; deer browse pressure can be very high on conifers since they may be the most palatable thing available to deer in the winter. Research at NCSU and other studies (Wagner and Nolte 2001, Wildlife Soc. Bull.29:322-330) indicate that repellants that contain putrescent egg solids or animal protein can be effective at reducing deer damage. Of course, no repellant is 100% effective. If they’re hungry enough and don’t have an alternative, deer will likely overcome their fear of these scents and still come in for a nibble. Also repellants need to be re-applied periodically to be effective. Nevertheless, for gardener’s at their wit’s end and ready to resort to high velocity lead, repellants may be a better alternative. Although Sara says lead works too!

Pruning perpetrators

Just when I thought I had you all fooled, Judy slipped in at the last minute with the correct answer – the “pruners” in question are deer:

The pruning ends when the deer can’t stretch any further, giving the tree its odd bell-shaped crown:

This is also a great demonstration of how pruning stimulates new growth – you can see the dense healthy growth at the base of the “bell,” even though this part of the crown normally would be much sparser.

Thanks for all the guesses!

Puzzling pruning

In an otherwise nicely maintained Japanese Garden (at Tacoma’s Point Defiance Park), this black tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica) stands out, and not in a good way:

Why would someone prune a tree in this manner? Answer and more photos on Monday!</d

When history and good stewardship collide

One of my colleagues emailed me a couple of pictures last week taken in Puyallup, WA. As you can see, there’s a trellis supporting a massive old trunk…

…and crown…

of an ancient Hedera helix ‘Baltica,’ a cultivar of English ivy.

For those of you not in Washington or Oregon state, English ivy is a designated noxious weed. Thousands of dollars and hours of labor are spent on removing this species from forested areas in Washington state, where it crowds out native species and increases tree failure simply through the weight of vegetation. It is not a well-mannered ornamental in our climate.

So why, you may ask, is this particular English ivy prominently displayed and obviously cultivated? Chris Pfeiffer (my colleague) found out that it had been planted by Mrs. Ezra Meeker, wife of the founder of Puyallup, over 140 years ago at their original homestead. It is part of Puyallup’s cultural history and is considered a heritage “tree.”

But as you can see in the second photograph, the ivy is in flower and presumably will set seeds, thus contributing to the invasive problem. I don’t know enough about the City’s management plan for this specimen, but I doubt it includes removal of the flowers before seed set.

So what should communities do in situations like this? I think the city needs to remove the flowers, though this would be a labor intensive activity. But it would only take one person a few hours to hand prune the flowers.

I’ll be curious to hear what you all think, and whether you have seen similar collisions between historical significance and appropriate plant choices.

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