I just had a long conversation with Michele Owens (of Garden Rant fame) about vegetable gardening. This isn’t one of my strong areas, either professionally or personally (I do have containers of herbs, but that’s as far as it goes). But what piqued my curiosity was her revelation that the vegetable gardening is just as … Continue reading Veggie gardening science – whaddya know?
About 3 months after I started my job in Minnesota I hired a technician to help me run the nursery and to manage research plots. His name is Chad and he stands about 6 foot 4, has shoulders that threaten to pop the sides of the skid steer loader whenever he enters it, and he … Continue reading Chad and Jeff’s Excellent Nursery Adventure
Earlier in this blog we had a rather robust discussion about the merits of transplanting trees bare-root. Bare-root transplanting has had a renaissance in arboricultural circles, based in large part on the work of Dr. Nina Bassuk and her colleagues at the Urban Horticulture Institute at Cornell. As our bloggers noted, transplanting trees bare-root has … Continue reading Baring it all, again.
Every year I teach a class called nursery management. In this class students have the opportunity to try all kinds of different growing techniques out in the nursery. They get to use a tree spade and prune and all kinds of other stuff. But something else that I have the students do is to make … Continue reading My Favorite Class Project
The last few years have been a perfect storm for the resurgence of home vegetable (and fruit) gardens. Grapevines are trellised along sidewalks, herbs replace the grass in parking strips, and tiny gardens of carrots and lettuce are shoehorned into any available spot. It’s all good – but we need to be particularly careful about … Continue reading Eat your veggies! (But not the arsenic, or the chromium, or the lead…)
Nothing is more frustrating to a gardener than watching a newly installed tree or shrub slowly die. In performing “post mortem” analyses on failed landscape plantings, I’ve identified four common errors that can be easily avoided: inadequate root preparation improper soil preparation planting below grade inadequate aftercare This blog entry will be dedicated to the first … Continue reading Health care reform (of trees)
For the past 11 years I’ve been running a nursery at the University of Minnesota called the TRE (for Teaching, Research, and Extension) nursery where we research all kinds of fun stuff like Dutch elm disease, the dangers of mulching, and what happens when you plant a tree too deeply. One of the most interesting … Continue reading Bare Root Trees
Sometimes I feel guilty because I always seem to be putting down the products that people sell to make their living. But not today! Today I’ve got something that actually works! No, it isn’t pretty, and it does have some irritating problems, but I can honestly say that it does what the company that manufactures … Continue reading No Way! Something that actually works?
As some of you know, my background is somewhat different from most faculty members in Horticulture in that my roots (no pun intended) are deepest in forestry. I’m sometimes asked to compare and contrast various aspects of horticulture and forestry. There are certainly differences – some of which I’ll get into in later posts – but … Continue reading The other side of nurseries
Part of the problem with being a professor is that companies assume that I have a bottomless supply of funds to test their products and that it is, in fact, my duty to do so. And of course they assume that this testing will ultimately find their product useful. The truth is that I do … Continue reading The Pile Of Ash On My Floor