A Tip from Jerry Baker

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.

Upside: he won’t have to mow for a while…

This is old news by now  – I’m surprised Jeff hasn’t pounced!!

Minnesota man accidentally kills entire lawn with herbicide

Sadly, the dead lawn ruined the plans for a charitable fund-raiser, also.

Lots of eye-rolling and sassy comments out there (from "duh" to "d’oh!") berating the guy
for not reading the label. Actually, my first reaction, too (RTFM, as
my Lt. Col. father would say.)

But it’s not so easy sometimes. I was trying to make out the fine print on the
silly peel-off, accordion-fold label on some Spinosad the other day and
it was impossible.  Finally gave up and looked up the application info on the interwebs. Not sure if that was the issue, but tiny, tiny print is a huge pet peeve of mine, so I’m comfy laying a bit of blame there.  

There is, however, readable print on the front label – the words "non-selective" and "glyphosate" and "grasses"  are large enough for even a blind squirrel like me to read. And I don’t know what on earth to think about the garden center employees who "helped" the poor guy.


(Another option: don’t get so worked up over weeds, says she with the
turf-like substance consisting entirely of anything but grass. But hey,
it’s green.)

For “entertainment value” only

So reads the sticky note from my retired entomologist colleague.  It’s affixed to the latest flyer promising the "greenest garden in town" using the "best all-time tips, tricks and tonics."

The entire brochure is ludicrous, and picking it apart is like shooting fish in a barrel. But sometimes it’s fun going for the low-hanging fruit. Here are some of the more memorable claims:

Epsom salts – grow sweeter melons, energize your roses, supercharge your grass seed, grow giant geraniums, bust tomato blight, boost your bulbs, force stubborn shrubs to flower, etc. etc. How does plain old magnesium sulfate do all of these miraculous things? The short answer – it doesn’t. There’s not one speck of science behind any of this nonsense. (On a more amusing note, the garden guru’s chemistry is a little shaky.  He claims Epsom salts will "give bulbs a dose of much-needed nitrogen." Either that or he’s figured out alchemistic transmutation.)

Barbeque forks – "perfect for spot aeration, harvesting root crops, and mole control." Eeew.

Latex paint – "seal up fresh cuts on trees, shrubs and roses." A colorful way to inhibit a plant’s natural ability to seal wounds.

"Stress reliever tonic" for lawns that contains shampoo, tea, mouthwash, and "chewing tobacco juice." Not only is this a toxic mess, but how is one expected to produce the "chewing tobacco juice?"

Salt – it’s not just for slugs anymore!  You can use it on weeds, "bad" worms, poison ivy, and ants.  Somehow the "good" plants and insects are immune to the effects? 

According to the back of the brochure, our guru has "taught" over 32.7 million people how to misuse common household products in their garden.  Incredible.

Blood in the water…

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

Demonstrating Diversity

As I noted a few posts back, this summer marks the 10th 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 10th 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!

I’m Burnin, I’m Burnin, I’m Burnin For You! — A Short Story Told With Pictures

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.

Suddenly Symphyotrichum

Also the Anemone x hybrida, Solidago, etc.  Everything’s blooming early here in the Mid-Atlantic.


"Fall-Blooming Anemone." Not.

I teach an herbaceous plant i.d. and use course each fall and spring. By looking back at my plant lists, I can tell what was blooming when.  I usually teach the asters at the end of September.

That’s going to be tough this year, since they are all BLOOMING RIGHT NOW dammit.   This will be a great experiment in "does deadheading = rebloom" for many of the asters.  Things like garden phlox (Phlox paniculata) are dependable post-deadheading rebloomers, but I can’t say I’ve ever  needed to deadhead Asters to get another flush of blooms, since they bloom right before frost for us, then pffftttt anyway.


Great Fanny’s Aster, this is too early! (Sympyotrichum oblongifolium ‘Fanny’)

My source for perennial maintenance advice is Tracy DiSabato-Aust’s marvelous "The Well-Tended Perennial Garden."  I’ve utilized her strategies for cutting back to both delay blooms and create a more compact plant.  If I’d been thinking ahead (ha, ha!), a good whacking on some of these things might have fended off blooms for another month or so; or at least had something to look at when class starts at the end of August. But alas. At this point the best I can hope for is a sporadic bloom or two.  At least I have lots of photos for lecture…

Making hay while the sun shines

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.”

The ugly side of compost

In my part of the world we’re able to send most of our organic stuff through the green cycling program, where it ends up being made into compost.  Cedar Grove contracts with the City of Seattle to do this service.  As you might imagine, this requires huge, multiple facilities to handle all of the organic material that comes through the system.  And it’s not difficult to imagine that problems arise, especially in choosing locations for these sites.

I don’t know anyone who would welcome a large composting facility next to their neighborhood, and I sympathize with people who were living downwind of where these facilities were constructed.  (People who moved there afterwards should have known what they were getting into.)  But even worse is putting a facility in an environmentally sensitive area – like on an island.

On one hand, it might seem the perfect solution – put the facility on an uninhabited island to keep mainland neighbors happy.  On the other hand, it’s an ISLAND – runoff is going to be a problem.  So if such a site is chosen, then the company should be required to manage runoff and keep it out of the water.

Thus, I was most severely vexed to hear that Cedar Grove has asked to be exempted from the rules regulating phosphorus runoff into the adjacent slough. Unlimited amounts of phosphorus.  The facility routinely exceeds the legal limit of runoff of phosphorus and occasionally other nutrients set by the state Department of Ecology. Citations, fines, and out of court settlements are nothing new to this company.

According to their spokesperson, Cedar Grove "cannot find a treatment that would work" to manage phosphorus pollution and need a waiver from the requirements. Somehow this has become the public’s problem and we should just absolve Cedar Grove of any responsibility to be a good environmental steward.  

I don’t know what bugs me more: the fact that this corporation did not design an adequate facility to contain the runoff before it began operations, or that whatever governmental agency approved their plan didn’t require it.

Shut ’em down.