The Garden Professors™

Just flew in from Miami and boy are my arms tired – rim shot.  Seriously, I just returned for the annual meeting of the American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS) in Miami.  Always good to wander the halls and renew old acquaintances and take in the latest in Hort science.  Judging by the posters and talks here are some of the hot topics at this year’s ASHS meeting.

LED’s
Horticultural applications of Light Emitting Diodes (LED) are receiving a lot of attention these days.  There are a couple of reasons for this. One, costs of LEDs are decreasing as manufacturing becomes more efficient.  Two, LED’s can be built to generate specific wavelengths of lights.  As many folks learned in biology, plants only use specific wavelengths during photosynthesis.  Therefore LED’s can be used to only produce the light energy that plants need for photosynthesis – this can greatly increase energy efficiency.  Aslo, incandescent light bulbs are being phased out of production.  Old fashioned bulbs are not very efficient (they yield about 10% of energy used as light) but the light they do produce is effective for things like phot- period lighting (i.e., daylight extension for greenhouse crops).  Since LED’s can be designed to reproduce the same wavelengths using much less energy, they may ultimately be a good substitute for incandescent bulbs.

High tunnels

Lots of interest these days in ‘high tunnels’ for fruit and vegetable production.  These are not full-blown greenhouses but simply tall hoop-house structures big enough to grow fruit trees inside.  One of the main benefits is season extension; allowing fruit or vegetable harvests earlier or later in the season than would be possible otherwise.  This is especially important when we consider the local food movement for colder climates.  There are also other, less obvious, benefits such as eliminating cracking of cherries due to rainfall.

Sensor-based irrigation systems

A hot topic, especially for the nursery crowd.  There have been rapid advances in the reliability of capacitance probes and while costs are decreasing.  In addition, there have been advances in wireless control systems.  There are still challenges for nursery growers that have to deal with a diverse array of crop types and container sizes but researchers are definitely on the path of developing sensor-based systems that will automatically turn irrigation on and off in response to real-time soil moisture measurements.  This will help to optimize plant growth while minimizing potential leaching of nutrients and chemicals.   

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’