The Garden Professors™ – Page 69 – Advancing the science of gardening and other stuff since 2009

Are you a “before” or an “after” mulcher?

Planting annual displays is not (at all) my
favorite gardening pastime, but we do some "color" around our events
building and along the garden entrance to make the area pop during our busy
season.

Those of you who install institutional or commercial color beds are familiar with the process – yank out last season’s annuals/tulips/whatever, smooth out the bed, plant new annuals, then mulch. Or…do you mulch first, then plant?

If the order of events is plant, then mulch, care must be taken not to get it all over the plants. Some over-enthusiastic students practically buried an entire display bed full of stuff last spring (more…is not always better). We spent a great deal of time unearthing the plants, having to pull the mulch away from the crown. Alternatively, if a bed is smoothed and mulched, you have a lovely blank slate to work with, but inevitably end up with the heartbreak of surface dirt chunks and some loss of mulch.

I’m not referring to planting and mulching perennial/mixed borders, veg gardens, or anything like that. Strictly annual displays. But I’d like hear from those experienced with this particular facet of horticulture: before, or after?

Hello, Longwood? Hello Kitty called and wants some of her pink stuff back.
(Seriously, no one does quality color like Longwood Gardens. Except Disney.)

Answer to Monday quiz

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.

Answer to Friday quiz

Lots of good feedback on this one! Full marks, however, to our retired copyeditor Carolyn who nailed it cold. Maybe you should consider coming out of retirement and helping at the Seattle Times 😉

Thanks to everyone for contributing! If you see EPEs in your local newspaper (that’s egregious plant errors), feel free to send them along for inclusion in a Friday posting!

Monday pop quiz time!

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?

A Friday treat for taxonomy buffs

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.

Happy Friday

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!

Are GMO seeds available for purchase?

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.

Podcasting returns! Season 3 begins

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.

Something sure to get your goat

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 love Sechelt in the springtime

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!