Gardener’s Corner

     In June of 2000 I visited Germany on a singing tour with the Midland Music Society.  You may be asking yourself, what does that have to do with plants?  Well my answer would be that just because I was there to sing, doesn’t mean I wasn’t looking at plants.  Many people have called me a plant geek.  I agree.  I can not go anywhere with out looking at plants.  While I was in Germany I noticed 2 major differences between the German landscape and ours in the USA.  First I noticed how clean everything is there.  We are getting better here, some states better than others, but we still can not match their devotion to cleanliness.  The second thing I noticed was that they grow plants everywhere.  It seems that every household loves to garden. I saw a 6′ rose growing in a space of 1 square foot.  This rose was surrounded by cement and a brick building.  It was gorgeous and blooming like mad.  The Europeans just seem to have a way with plants.  Another thing I noticed in Germany was their roundabouts.  We call them Cul-de-sacs.  In the center of each roundabout there is a circular patch of ground that can be glorious or ugly, depending on what is growing there.  I thought I would give you a little insight on what to use in these situations. 

First of all we have to think about the environment.  Unfortunately one of the biggest concerns in our part of the country is salt.  We use road salt which splashes up on the plants or is pushed up by the snow plow.  We have to use salt tolerant plants.  The next thing to consider is soil compaction.  If we are to have a successfull garden in one of these harsh environments we need to get rid of the compaction.  The best way to do this is to rototill in some good compost or manure of some sort.  Next we need to consider the plants.  The best designs have 4 seasons of interest.  I am going to outline a design that fills these needs.  Early Spring: the use of bulbs will give an enormous amount of color in early spring.  From Snowdrops which come out before the snow leaves to Darwin hybrid tulips which bloom in late spring we can get masses of color.  I would suggest using numerous types of bulbs in swaths of color for the best effect.  Next we need plants that will cover up the dying bulb foliage and give us late spring and summer color.  Perennials work well because they can tolerate soil salt.  Late spring and summer perennials include, Allium, Astilbe, Catmint, Delosperma, Deutzia (shrub), Euphorbia, Fragaria, Gaillardia, Gaura, Geranium, Lavender, Russian Sage, Veronica, and Hemerocallis.  Late summer and fall it is useful to use Ornamental grasses (which will also give you some winter color), Echinacea, Rudbeckia, Aster, Sedums, Ligularia, Turtle head, and Chrysanthemum.  The effect will be the best if they are planted in masses and then duplicated throughout the design.  For more information see www.pph.nl.  There will be some pictures of some roundabouts in Sweden that will give you an idea of the swaths of color in repeating patterns that I have spoken of.

     If you need an evergreen tree in your design for winter color, Colorado Blue Spruce is a good choice because it is tolerant to salt spray.  Shrubs that are tolerant to salt include, potentilla, spirea, shrub roses, and anything else that grows naturally along the ocean.  Good luck and keep gardening.

      The weather right now is hot and dry.  Don’t forget to keep an eye on your plants for water needs.  Especially take note of plants that have been installed this year.

     Now is the time of the season to prepare for the devastation that the Japanese Beetles will cause next spring.  Look back at the article I wrote concerning grubs in the spring.  There is a “beautiful” picture of the grub damage that was prevelent last spring.  It may seem odd, but just like you have to plant bulbs in the fall to get spring flowers, you have to think about controlling the beetle/grub population now to prevent damage in the spring.  Let’s look at the life cylce of the Japanese beetle.  The adults usually emerge in June and July.  Their purpose in life at this point is to eat and mate.  Unfortunately for us they don’t have a specific plant they go after.  They are happy to eat around 300 different types of plants.  So controlling the adults is difficult.  The females are happy to mate with many different males as well.  After the female mates she will burrow into the soil 2-4 inches and lay 1-5 eggs.  After laying the eggs she will go back to munching and mating.  This cycle continues until she has buried between 40-60 eggs.  In 17-25 days the eggs will hatch into a C shaped white grub.  The grubs are enjoyed by crows and skunks and unfortunately they will tear up your lawn looking for them.  It is easiest to control the grubs at this young stage.  Applying a grub control with Merit in it will make the grass roots poisonous to the grubs and kill them. 

     If the adults are chewing up your garden you can also spray them with an insecticide.  You will have to spray on a regular basis because the adults keep emerging all through the summer months.  Phermone traps are not recommended because they bring hordes of beetles into your garden.  It is better to not trap at all, or give the trap to your neighbor so the beetles visit their garden instead.  To identify the beetle look for a beautiful metallic green bug eating your plants.  There is only one other beetle that looks like the Japanese beetle and that is the False Japanese Beetle.  The way you can tell the difference is to look at the hair tufts along the abdomen.  The Japanese Beetle has them making it look like they have 5 white dots on the side of their body.

Happy Scouting!

Phenlogy is a study in the correlation between bloom times, degree days, and insect emergence.  It is very useful in IPM.  IPM is integrated pest management.  Integrated pest management is the practice of using biological controls, cultural practices and chemicals to control detrimental insects in your garden with out doing to much damage to the beneficial insects. It excludes the use of blanket sprays which kill everything in their path.  Why are we interested in protecting beneficial insects?  Mostly because we beneficial insects help us out by controlling the detrimental insects and doing the work of pollinating.  Never heard of beneficial insects?  There are lots of the them out there.  Some examples are, Praying mantis which feeds on  insects including aphids.  Lady bugs which are cute and also feed on aphids, and adelgids.  Honey bees which of course pollinate our fruits, vegetables and flowers while making that delicious golden treat we call honey.  There are many important beneficial insects in this world that we simply can not do without.  Phenology helps us to pin point which insects are hatching at a certain time so we can time our chemical sprays to not only protect the beneficial insects, but also kill the detrimental insects at the most opportune time.  An example of this is scale.  Scale insects have a hard shell during the adult phase of their lives, that protects them from weather, chemicals and other predatory insects.  When the young hatch out from beneath this protective cover, it is called the crawler stage. During the crawler stage they are moving around on the plant looking for a place mate and then become a sessile adult with a hard shell.  The most vulnerable time to spray for certain scale insects like Magnolia scale is right now during the crawler stage.  Phenology helps us to determine when that crawler stage is by linking it to something that is easy to see, for example, right now Oakleaf hydrangea, butterflyweed, Greenspire Linden and Queen of the Prairie are blooming. The bugs associated with those blooms are Magnolia scale, Rudbeckia (Black Eyed Susan) psylids, Sycamore lacebugs and Japanese beetle (the adults are out).  Having this information at your fingertips will help you to not only spray when needed but diagnose what may be causing problems in your garden.  Remember we want the good insects and not the bad.  The good insects will help us control the bad. For more information on phenology you can use the internet and Google phenology.

     Last week I wrote about pruning but didn’t have enough space to address all the aspects of pruning that gardeners need to know about.  This week we will finish the discussion about pruning.  Shrubs are another category of pruning that takes a little more time to write about.  There are shrubs that bloom in the spring and shrubs that bloom in the fall.  There are shrubs that we can treat like a perennial and shrubs that reach the same heights as small trees.  They all have different needs.

     The first thing I would like to discuss is renewal pruning.  Renewal pruning is a pruning that can be done to any multistemmed shrub.  An example of a multistemmed shrub would be forsythia or common lilac.  What renewal pruning entails is the removal of 2-3 of the largest heaviest tallest branches at the ground level.  Every time we make a cut on a plant we are changing the hormone level of that branch.  Let me explain.  Every branch (trees and shrubs) have a hormone at the tip of the branch called an auxzin.  This auxzin controls the growth of the branches behind that branch.  If we remove the tip of the branch we remove the auxzin and the rest of the leaves and buds behind that tip are released to grow at any rate they want, and they usually pick fast. The result is that you get a witches broom effect.  A witches broom is a growth that has many branches coming out of one point.  It can be caused by salt damage or by insect feeding or in this case pruning.  Eventually you get a plant that has very little growth at the bottom and massive amounts of growth at the top.  The shrub becomes top heavy.  It always looks like a little girl lifting her dress up to me.  When we renewal prune by removing the growth at the bottom, we have the same hormonal affect, but it happens at the bottom of the shrub.  We get a plant that maintains its natural form, stays full at the bottom, is reduced in width and height, and is healthier because we are removing the old growth which is more suseptible to diseases. Another quick way to prune multistemmed shrubs that have gotten out of control is what we call basal pruning.  You get out your chainsaw and cut the whole plant down to about 8″.  The root system is well established so the new shoots will come up thick the next spring and you’ll have a lovely shrub within 2 seasons.  Pruning of this nature can be done successfully to spirea, potentilla, dwarf lilac.  This type of pruning should be done in the fall regardless if the shrub is a spring flowering plant or a late summer/fall bloomer.

     Now let’s talk about timing of pruning.  If you have a spring flowering plant you will want to prune right after the plant is done flowering.  Spring flowering plants form their buds for the next spring right after they are done blooming.  Pruning later than spring will remove flower buds for the next year which will diminish the showyness of the plant.  Fall blooming shrubs are ok to prune while they are dormant.  Its easier to see the branch structure in the dormant season because there are no leaves on the branches.  They are also less suseptible to disease because everything is dormant.

Single stemmed shrubs like burning bush should be pruned similarly to a tree.  Always go back to a node.  Try to prune from within and not just on the tips of the branches.  This will help you avoid that witches broom affect we spoke about earlier.

My tree fruits professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison used to say,  “prune when your saw is sharp, Prune so nobody knows youv’e done any pruning, except on fruit trees which you prune until you can throw a cat through it.  But we’ll save that discussion for another day.  Happy pruning.

     In my travels through mid Michigan I talk with a lot of people.  I may be meeting with them to discuss a new landscape design or to look at a plant that is sick or dying.  No matter what I am meeting them for, we often  discuss their garden as a whole.  One of the categories of questions that seems to come up the most often is pruning.  How do I prune this plant?  When do I prune this plant?  In my first article I touched on pruning a little bit and so I thought I would go into more depth now.  

     To answer the question posed in the title of this article, its both.  Science is involved because we have to know the culture of the plant to know when to prune.  We also have to know the botany of the plant to know how it will respond to the pruning. Science also helps us to know what needs to be pruned out.  A tree or shrub may have a disease that needs to be removed and the pruner needs to know how far below the disease or injury he or she should  prune.  Art is involved, because we enjoy our landscapes aesthetically and we want our plants to be pleasing to the eye.  This may include pruning that most of us are not qualified to do for example, topiary or bonsai.

     Let’s get down to the facts of pruning.  The first rule of pruning is to remove any dead or dying branches.  How do I know its dieing?  Look for sunken areas, small leaves, areas that are soft to the touch, or a discoloration in the bark.  You may also see galls on certain shrubs or trees that need to be pruned off.  If you have any of these conditions, you will need to cut at least 1″ into healthy tissue to avoid the pest spreading to the rest of the plant.  You should also sterilize your pruners between cuts to avoid transmission of the organism to healthy tissue.  This is easily accomplished by inserting your pruners into a bath of alcohol.  It is important when you are pruning to always cut back to a node.  What’s a node?  A node is an area of the plant where a stem, bud or leaf comes out.  Pruning just above the node with out leaving any stubs on the branch will avoid further death to the branch.  After you are done removing the dead and dying branches its time to look for crossing branches.   If branches cross they will rub against each other and create a wound or could eventually grow together and create a weak area that will break in a storm.  Once we have removed the crossing branches its time to look at the overall shape and size of the plant.  For trees you may want to limb them up so you can mow under them or you may want to thin out the canopy some to let more light in.  Whatever your desires are for that tree, just remember to go slow, stand back and look often, and always prune back to a node as we discussed earlier.  The reason I say to go slow and look often, is because you can always take more off but its really hard to put it back on.  Next week we will discuss shrub pruning, timing, and how and why to perform renewal pruning on shrubs.

Let’s talk about some mistakes that can be made in the garden and lawn.  Now that its June and we are all going to be doing a lot of lawn mowing, we need to consider the height at which you cut your grass.  The healthiest height to keep your lawn during the summer 2 1/2″ to 3″ tall.  This may sound long but unless you have a golf green in your yard, in which case you would keep the blades at about 1/4″, you do not want to cut your lawn that short.  The reasons to keep it longer are the following.  The grass is able to tolerate drought much easier, it will be more competitive against weeds, it will be able to withstand foot traffic, it will be able to compete against bugs better.  Cutting the grass too short in the summer, can lead to scalping which can invite pests to gather there.  Longer grass in the summer helps to shade the grass crown so not as much water is needed.  As we move toward Fall you can shorten up the height and make it easier for the sun to get to the ground. 

Irrigation techniques are another area where homeowners make mistakes.  Many people believe that the more water the better.  Unfortunately this is not true.  Many homeowners actually overwater their plants and lawn.  Most lawns just need about an inch of water per week.  The best time to water is in the morning so the plants and lawn have all day to dry.  This is especially important for plants that suffer from black spot, like roses or powdery mildew, like lilacs.  The only time plants need more water is when they are first installed.  They have a small root capacity when they are first planted and so they dry out quickly.  Building a saucer around the plants when they are first put in helps to collect rain water or the water from irrigation and holds it in the root zone so it can soak in rather than run off.  New plants should be watered once or twice per week depending upon how much rain we get and wether or not the soil is sandy or tends toward clay.

Enjoy the summer.  Keep gardening.

     We have all heard the nursery rhyme, April showers bring May flowers, what do Mayflowers bring?  Pilgrims of course.  This year we did not get much rain in April to bring out our May flowers (even though a lot of them were beautiful this year) and we are not getting much rain in May.  My lawn and perennials at my house are so dry they are almost crunchy.  I think its safe to say we are in a drought condition here in Mid Michigan.

     If you are one of the lucky ones to have put in a new landscape last fall or this spring watch out!  Your’e plants can dry up and die pretty easy with this weather.  On the other hand however, don’t go overboard with the automatic irrigation especially on clay soil.  You could end up drounding the poor things.  The best way to tell if your plants need water is to look at them everyday.  I used to have a 55 gal. fish tank.  The best piece of advise I ever got was to look at the fish everyday.  If you get to know your fish, you know when they are getting sick and you can add medicine to the tank.  It is the same idea with the plants in our gardens.  If you take a nightly stroll with your glass of wine, coffee, or beverage of your choice, and just look at your garden, you will get to know your plants and you will see when they are suffering.  If they look limp, yellow, or lacklustre it could be because they need water.  Unfortunately it could also mean they have too much water, the symptoms are the same.  That’s why you have to get to know them and their routine.  If you know you just watered last night for example, and they look limp, it could be because they are too wet.  Stick your finger in the soil and see if the soil feels moist or dry.  Moist don’t water, dry water.  It is really not that hard to figure out if you look at your plants everyday.

     In the nursery we have lots of bloomin goin on.  If you want to get into the spring spirit and you are not there already come on in and have a gander.  The Rhododendrons are in bloom and we have some specials on plants from last year.  We also have a nice batch of roses in numerous colors brightening up the nursery. 

     Keep gardening.

     I once was involved with a television program called “Ask the Professional”.  It appeared on public television through Delta College.  My husband Chuck, a horticulturist at Dow Gardens, was one of the moderators and I was behind the scenes answering the phone.  Homeowners would call in and ask a question and the phone answerers (there were three of us) would write down the questions and  a runner would take them to the studio where the professionals would answer them on live T.V.  I can say without a doubt the question most asked was, ” how do I get rid of moles?”     You have all probably mowed your lawn at least once this season.  It’s usually that first mowing that gets us groaning about the damage done by those tiny but destructive creatures the moles.  Every time I hear the word mole, I think of Austin Powers, but I digress. 

     Anyway, we received so many phone calls about moles, the phone answerers would just start answering people ourselves.  In this article we are going to discuss the best way to get rid of the cute little beasts.  The best way, according to Christopher Solomon of MSN Lawns and Landscapes, the three Reder brothers, and the mole trapping guy from the Midland Country Club is to trap them.  In other words, use some sort of mechanical device that kills the moles.  Moles are solitary creatures who don’t like other moles around. Usually this means that all the damage done to your lawn has been done by one or two moles.  If you trap and kill one or two you have solved your problem….almost.  The problem remains that if you kill one mole, another one will sniff out the empty tunnels and take them over.  You will have to keep killing them until they stop moving in.  You will probably have to kill several moles.  The most efficient way to trap them is to put the trap in an active tunnel.  You will have to squish down the tunnels and see which ones pop back up.  Place your traps in those passages. 

     The downside to this is dealing with a dead mammal.  I personally do not like to kill anything so I am glad I don’t have moles in my yard. The up-side to leaving the moles in your lawn is that their diet of worms and grubs causes their excrement to be a valuable soil additive.  Great huh? If you tramp the tunnels down often enough the moles will burrow deeper and you can live in harmony with them because you won’t see the tunnels anymore.  So if your a non-killer like me you can reach a compromise.

     In the nursery, we have finally filled the nursery with many beautiful plants.  We have quite a nice assortment of unusual specialty plants and the greenhouse is full of wonderful perennials.  Stop out and see us.  We have had some beautiful, warm days great for strolling through the nursery.

     We’ve been attacked!!  Not by aliens but by bugs!  This winter has been simply horrendous for white grubs.  Our lawns have been decimated by the little beasts chewing on the roots and crowns of our grass plants.  Homeowner’s have until May 15th, according to Michigan State Entomology Department, to kill the little culprits before they pupate into beetle’s.  Products containing Sevin or Dylox are the two pesticides that will do the best job. These chemicals kill on contact.  Water the chemical into the ground by setting up a sprinkler and watering for 60 min.  Then rake up the dead grass and re-seed with grass seed.  The cool weather we are currently having is perfect for seeding.  Grass seed germinates best when temps are cool.  Don’t forget to water it in and keep it watered.  If you would like more information on these grubs, how to identify which grubs you have and how to get rid of them go to http//ohioline.osu.edu/hygfact/2000/2510.html.  A better approach to grub control according to Michigan State Extension, is to prevent them.  Their suggestion is to apply preventative products at the time of egg hatching or when grubs are small.  The first critical issue is to determine what active ingredient the product contains by looking at the label.  The best preventative grubicides contain Merit or imidacloprid and cyfluthrin in partnership.

     In the garden, watch out for frost.  Our first frost free day in Michigan does not occur until May 15th.  We have been having some very cool temps and frost this past weekend and the first part of this week.  Keep your annuals, tender perennials, and any young seedlings or house plants you may have set out, covered in the evenings until the threat of frost has passed.

Happy gardening!