I can’t match Holly’s post for cuteness, so I’ll have to settle for constructive criticism. Below are photos that appeared in the Seattle Times earlier this week.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify the errors in nomenclature within each caption. (This may seem insignificantly picky, but scientific names need to be uniformly constructed to avoid confusion.)
Anyway, have fun! Answers on Monday.
Oooof, what a week. End of the semester, quizzes, labs, hosting of faculty position candidate, Hort Club Plant Sale, and 2 graduate student defenses in 8 days (3 in 15 days – am up to my pits in theses 😉
Sorry to say, I’m not feeling particularly profound or informative (like that ever happens), but I do have gardening fever! We’re so close to our last-frost date I’m ready to barge ahead with putting out warm-season veg, tropicals and annuals.
Happy end-of-the-semester to my fellow GPs – hope you have time this weekend to dig in the dirt.
And to all our readers, thank you for sticking with us throughout this crazy spring despite slightly erratic postings.
Now get out there and GARDEN!
We recently had a question sent to us about GMO seeds – whether they were being foisted upon us at the store. The simple answer is no. You can’t just go to the garden center and buy genetically modified seeds of any plant, they’re not available yet. I suppose, theoretically, you could call yourself a farmer and purchase genetically modified corn or soybeans, but the corn isn’t sweet corn (for the most part), and soybeans – who grows those besides farmers? You could ask a farmer friend to get you genetically modified alfalfa or sugar beets, but why? Are you really going to broadcast roundup across your garden? And it wouldn’t be legal for the farmers to give (or sell) it to you anyway.
It is worth noting that in the near future there may be grass seed that is genetically modified to resist Round-up, but it isn’t available yet (I’m not a person fundamentally opposed to genetic engineering – but I am opposed to Round-up ready grasses).
So, as a consumer, what can you buy that’s genetically modified? Not seed. Just the plants or plant parts that grow from the seed. Corn chips and processed foods. High fructose corn syrup, that kind of stuff. Also, you can buy carnations genetically modified to be blue – called ‘Moondust’. Most of the cheese we eat has been made with fungi genetically engineered to produce rennet. In terms of meat – it’s not available yet, but we’re getting close, especially with salmon.
It’s spring…flowers are emerging and so are the podcasts. Here’s the first of our eight episodes for the season. The theme this week is “Spring Cleaning” and it’s the wide world of weeds. The podcasts are now hosted on i-Tunes, so I can follow you anywhere you go. Just sayin’.
I’m trying to get some listener questions “on air” as it were, so if you have a burning desire to be on a podcast with me, just drop an email to lindacs@wsu.edu and let me know.
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)
I’ve been out and about (oot and aboot?) much of the spring giving talks to various gardening groups, including the Sechelt Botanical Garden Club last weekend. Sechelt (in English, pronounced "seashell" with a t at the end) is on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, and we did have a sunny April day (reason number one). That made for an enjoyable visit later to one of the lovely private gardens (reason number two):
And then, there’s that Canadian sense of humor as evdienced by a locally made product (reason number three):
Have a great weekend!
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?
North Creek Nurseries in Landenberg, PA is a marvelous, native-centric (but not exclusively native) nursery. North Creek is a wholesale propagator (sells liners
to other nurseries for finishing). But if you can meet the $300 minimum, they’d probably be happy to fill your order. They have, among the usual liner sizes, a very neat product – "Landscape Plugs." I’ve been wanting to try them for a while – our work with the backhoe this past summer cleared some nice large swathes of the cursed autumn olive, and made room for perennials. I selected a number of locally-native species from North Creek’s extensive listings, with the plan to scatter them along the creek sides and sunny spots of our 4-acre field/meadow/thingy.
Primarily marketed for restoration and conservation projects, these"landscape plugs" are simply huge liners – great for anyone who wants a large number of a certain species without paying an arm and a leg. Each 5" deep tray holds 32 plugs. North Creek carries a wide array of Eastern N. American natives perennials, grasses, and ferns – mostly straight species with a few named cultivars. I ordered eight different species for a total of 256 plants (and 256 holes to dig). The species I picked out ran from $1.08 to $1.40 per plug. They arrived within a few days via UPS, packed two trays per box, and all were intact and in good shape. All were well-rooted, having been "stuck" the previous season and then overwintered/vernalized. I expect most will bloom this year. Will report back!
North Creek Nurseries landscape plug of Solidago shortii ‘Solar Cascade.’ Nice roots, no?
Recently ScienceDaily.com posted an article about American chestnut trees due to be planted in New York City. Researchers hope that these trees will be resistant to chestnut blight, an introduced fungal disease that pretty much wiped out mature specimens over the last 100 years.
When I lived in Buffalo, I was a member of the American Chestnut Foundation and every spring I helped with efforts to replant chestnuts in the hopes that resistant individuals might be found. The problem is that the disease doesn’t kill young trees: it can take many years to find out whether a particular tree is resistant or not.
Chestnut suckers from live roots of blight-killed tree. I saw these a lot in western NY forests in the 1990’s.
Part of the earlier research efforts involved crossing resistant European chestnut with American chestnut in hopes of creating resistant hybrids. The downside, of course, is that such offspring would not be “pure” American chestnuts. More importantly to many people, these hybrids might not produce the same quality of nuts.
The research mentioned in the Science Daily article involves creating transgenic plants: a wheat gene resistant to the fungus was inserted into the chestnut genome with the hopes that the resulting trees would be immune to blight. These trees are genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.
It’s worth noting that it’s this kind of work that has been branded as “Frankentree” research, which incites a lot of fear and hysteria. It’s what caused ecoterrorists to mistakenly firebomb the UW Center for Urban Horticulture in 2001 when I was faculty there. It’s what causes people to freak out about eating GMO foods.
So my question for you – does the fact that transgenic chestnut trees will be “on the loose” fill you with fear? Or does it make you hopeful that we’ve possibly found a way to overcome an introduced disease? (As I just noticed in reading this over before posting that I used some form of the word “hope” in nearly every paragraph. I guess it shows where I stand.)
Well, things continue to run fast and furious as we get rolling for a new round of field research projects. But we did find a little time to break out the Cornhole set and initiate a new season at Daisy Hill farm. Life is good!
