The Garden Professors™

Well, students just finished finals here at MSU so I suppose it’s appropriate we put our faithful GP readers through their own gauntlet of quizzes…

Top marks to Terry for determining the damage on the conifer seedlings was due to incomplete overlap on the sprinklers the grower used for frost protection during our most recent freeze.  Our record-setting March warm up pushed budbreak ahead by about a month in most locations in the state.  Fruit crops (cherries, grapes, blueberries, and peaches) have been devastated but nursery crops and landscape trees came through relative unscathed until the freeze the weekend before last.

I know Linda normally handles quiz duties, but I received a couple of intriguing pictures last week.  Rather than just tell you all what’s going, I thought we’d have a little sport with it.

The photo below was taken last week ago at a container seedling nursery in western Michigan.  These are trays of container-grown spruces.  Most of the seedlings are green and growing but some are tip-damaged – with a specific pattern.  What’s going on and what caused the pattern?

Last August I posted some photos from a field tour in Austria where we saw an organic Christmas tree farm that used Shropshire sheep as their principle form of weed control.  The particular breed of sheep is suited to the task since they will graze on grass and weeds but not on conifers.  Since then I have shared the pictures elsewhere and found out the Shropshire sheep are also employed in the U.S. and the U.K. for similar purposes.  Recently, I have had several people share websites for a service known as ‘Rent-a-Ruminant’.  As with the Shropshire sheep, these services use grazers to control vegetation, but instead of sheep these companies use goats. 

Unlike sheep, goats are much less selective grazers; so call these guys in when you’re in need of land-clearing or invasive species removal.  I have seen Rent-a-Rumant advertised in the Pacific Northwest http://www.rentaruminant.com/goats-clear-land.html and in Australia http://thebegavalley.org.au/24484.html so clearly this is a widespread idea.   And, I suppose, an example of an old idea that’s new again.  As many GP blog readers probably know, I have issues with the ethics (not to mention efficacy) of exploiting grade-school children to pull garlic mustard or purple loosestrife in the name of invasive species control.  But using goats to control invasives?  That might be a solution everyone can get behind

Not baaaad work if you can get.  Rental ruminants chomping on English ivy in the Northwest. (Just for you, Linda)

Why does everyone want to kill dandelions?  I like dandelions.  I like that my kids go and pick them and give them to me.  I like that they break up the monotonous green of my yard.  I like that they can be used to make wine (though I’ve never had any).  I like that I can pick one and take it apart to teach my kids and the kids in my classes about the basic morphology of flowers.

I don’t like the fact that the most common herbicide used today to kill dandelions, 2,4 D, may have serious effects on the health of dogs, in part because it isn’t rapidly excreted from the dog’s body.

I also don’t like the fact that many shrubs and perennials are killed every year because of poor spraying techniques intended to kill dandelions.

But what’s most irritating to me is that we have a technique out there for controlling dandelions which is pretty darn effective, but which is almost never used.  It’s not a 100% control, probably not even an 80% control, but it still works pretty well if we’d just give it a go.  And that technique is….wise fertilization.  You see, dandelions like to be fertilized with potassium.  They love the stuff.  In fact, they love the stuff more than grass loves the stuff, so if we’d just reduce the amount of potassium we applied to our yards…we’d have fewer dandelions.

But if you just can’t get over the idea of having a yard clear of dandelions, there is a new, relatively safe, product out there that will kill them though it may take a few applications.  It is not an “organic” product – though in my estimation it’s safer than many organic products.  The active ingredient of that product is FeHEDTA, which is an iron chelate that delivers a dose of iron the dandelion can’t handle but which, apparently, grass can. This stuff is available in two products I can think of offhand – Ortho elements lawn weed killer and Whitney Farm lawn weed killer. 

But come on — dandelions are cool.  They’ve been in the US just about as long as European settlers and their descendants have — and taken over the landscape just about as effectively.  Shoot, we should probably have the dandelion as our country’s official flower! Why are we so anxious to toss ’em?