Tuesday, September 22, 2020

September 22, 2020 And Autumn Begins

It’s a hazy smoggy day here, smoke from the western wildfires, but much milder than the weekend. I don’t know about your neck of the woods but here in Michigan’s thumb we had a freeze/frost event for 2 nights this weekend. It’s early for that here, but nature does what she wants. Now we are supposed to have a stretch of nicer weather. 


It’s National Indoor Plant Week- I think. It’s the third week in September but we have 5 weeks in this September- or part of weeks. If it’s supposed to be the third full week, this is it.  If you don’t have houseplants shame on you. Go buy some immediately or get some from friends. Houseplants make you healthier and happier.

I spent several days bringing in houseplants, and tender tropicals.  My house is packed with plants. There are 40 plants in the living room alone and some of those are huge. There are about 20 in the bedroom,16 in my home office, 10 in the kitchen and a few others scattered here and there. On the porch there are about 20 plants so far, I still have the hardier stuff outside like geraniums to bring in.

I covered some plants with old sheets this weekend to protect them from frost. I couldn’t cover the huge taro plants I had, the stems wouldn’t hold up a sheet and they were 6 feet tall.  I hadn’t planned correctly for that, so I was outside at dark digging them out of their huge tubs and putting them in buckets to bring inside. The next day I potted them, but they don’t look happy. The elephant ear I treated the same way, but it seems to have taken the indoor trip much better.

Some things did get frost bitten, even with a sheet the top leaves of the sweet potatoes browned. Some dahlia leaves also browned and wilted. Things like roses and wax begonias survived unscathed. There are still many things blooming in the garden actually. I am getting to see the blooms on some new landscape roses I planted this spring, it took all summer to get them to blooming size. Some dahlias are just starting to bloom too.

The sweet autumn clematis is still covered with blooms, the asters are a froth of white. I have canna, salvia, zinnias, cosmos, marigolds, woodland nicotiana, geraniums, petunias, hosta, mums, roses, ligularia, snakeroot, snapdragons, phlox, sedums, morning glories, and a few other things in bloom.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac is out, (there are several almanac versions) and it’s calling for a mild, wet winter here, more wet than white they say. The weather service says we have entered La Nina conditions for the winter at least and they too predict more precipitation. Temperatures and moisture can vary across the US, with some seeing warmer and drier in La Nina and some seeing colder and wetter weather than normal.  It’s the reason we have more hurricanes this season too.  

The day is now just over 12 hours long, today is the autumn equinox (9 :31 am EDT) but here in Michigan we add 9 minutes to “half” the day.  But by Friday we will have lost those 9 minutes, for the real 12-hour day.  By the end of the month we will have lost another 14 minutes. Daylight fades fast this time of the year.

 

One window in my house

About those potted mums

Fall means chrysanthemums in many areas of the country. Potted mums in blazing or soothing colors are outside the doors of every store. Gardeners buy them to pop into beds where annuals have fizzled or have been killed by frost. They are very affordable and create a vibrant look in the late fall garden. Potted mums are also one of the best plants for cleaning pollutants from indoor air, so they may be good indoor decorations too.

There is nothing wrong with using mums as annuals, and not worrying if they will survive the winter. They will continue blooming with proper care until a hard freeze or snowfall kills them. You can just leave them outside until then. Even if the tag says hardy mum, many of the mums you buy in full bloom in the fall would not survive winter and bloom next year if you plant them this fall. But there are some tricks that you can use that might help you save some of these mums to bloom again another year.

First keep the mums well-watered. They are often sold in small pots that dry out rapidly even in cool weather. Keep them in a sunny spot on the deck or in bright light inside. Don’t use fertilizer on the plants. They are primed to bloom by greenhouse techniques and the decreasing daylight and don’t really need it.

If you are putting them in a garden bed for temporary color, simply sink the pot in the ground. If you want a chance at them surviving winter plant the potted mums into the ground as soon as you buy them (without the pot). But I will tell you from years of experience that only a few will survive. Mums that sit on the deck or patio all fall are not good candidates for outside survival, even if planted in the ground late in the fall.

If you do plant a mum in the ground when you buy it don’t trim back the dead foliage in late fall. Leave it until spring. Mums do best when the dead foliage is left to protect the crown over winter. 

A trick you can try for mum survival

If you have the right space inside, you could try this trick with potted mums to get them to survive until spring. Planted in the ground in spring they are more likely to survive and return the following year. I’ve done this several times.

When a hard freeze or good snowfall is predicted it’s time to rescue your potted mums. Bring them inside to a cool room with bright light. This can be a sunny window in an unheated room or under a grow light in the basement. Mums will even stay healthy at temperatures slightly below freezing if protected. The best temperature would be between 40- and 60-degrees F.  Trim off any dead flowers. Many times, the plants are still blooming vigorously when brought inside and that’s fine. 

While inside you will probably need to water the mums less frequently. The pot should dry out slightly between watering but don’t let them wilt. If they do wilt, quickly water them and they may revive.  Just don’t let this happen too often. Don’t fertilize the plants now.

Once blooming slows down or quits cut all of the mum stems back about one third of their length. If it’s quite cool the mums will enter a semi-dormant phase. The leaves will remain green but there won’t be much new growth. That’s a good way to keep them until about March.  Even if the leaves brown a bit the plant is probably still alive. Sometimes the leaves and stems will turn entirely brown if they get really cold but if you look closely and see green near the base of stems the plant may recover. In this case cut the dead areas off to about 2 inches from the soil surface.

If you are keeping them a little on the warm side new growth will appear a few weeks after trimming. Mums can get very lanky and ugly looking if this growth is allowed to grow unchecked. Instead pinch out the young tips of new growth after they have reached 2 inches or so.  This will keep the plant compact and nice looking. You may need to do this more than once.

When March comes you can bring the mum into warmer conditions if you have a place. If the plant is exposed to natural light the lengthening daylight will cause the mum to come out of dormancy even if it’s still cool in its area.  You can start fertilizing with a weak fertilizer solution for blooming plants.  The plant will need water more often as it begins to grow. 

Keep new growth pinched back to 2-3 inches and give the mum as much light as you can. As soon as temperatures moderate in the spring, the ground is thawed, and no hard freezes are likely move the mum outside. You can plant it in the ground or re-pot it into a slightly larger pot, if you need to keep it in a pot. Use some slow release fertilizer for blooming plants, according to label directions, on the mums.


If you want a compact plant pinch off the tips of those stems until mid–June.  After that quit pinching to let the flower buds form.  Sometimes a saved mum planted in the ground in the spring will flower a lot earlier than other hardy mums because it had a bit of a head start. If the plant is in the ground leave it there the second winter, there’s a good chance it will return in the spring.  Most mums will get larger and fuller with each passing season.

There are hardy garden mums that will give you years of color and are really better for the garden that the mums you buy in pots. These hardy mums are best planted in the spring. You’ll find them being sold as small plants generally, but they grow rapidly through the summer and should bloom the first fall.

So, buy those mums if they take your eye outside the grocery or nursery, but don’t expect them to become perennials in the garden unless you put some effort into it. It’s ok to use some plants for seasonal interest only, and you are supporting the greenhouse industry when you do so.

 

Manure may contain pesticides harmful to plants

Do you use manure to fertilize your garden because you want to be organic?  Better think again. Researchers have known for a while that glyphosate and a few other pesticides applied to crops can accumulate in manure. Animals eat grain or hay that have had pesticides applied to them and the minute amounts in the plants accumulate in the animal and are excreted in their manure. Unless the animals are fed organic hay and grain their manure will have small amounts of pesticides in it.

And those small amounts of pesticides in the manure can affect your crops as a study done with strawberries at the Biodiversity Unit of the University of Turku, Finland proved. They fed quail a diet that included grain that was treated with glyphosate while growing. They then used the quail manure to fertilize strawberry beds.  A control group of quail received organic feed and their manure was also used on strawberries.

The strawberries grown with manure from the quail that consumed feed grown with glyphosate were smaller, had smaller fruit and produced fewer runners. The researchers also did the study using meadow grass and found it grew slower and remained smaller than plants grown with “organic” manure.

Similar research has found that manure and compost often contain pesticide residues that can harm plants when they are used to fertilize them. Even manure from grass fed animals can have pesticide residue if the animals graze on fields treated to control weeds or insects.

The takeaway for gardeners is that manure is not always the safe, natural way to fertilize the garden. Unless you know the animals the manure came from were fed organic grain and hay, their manure can contain pesticides. And even if they were fed organically, if the manure is mixed with bedding such as straw that wasn’t grown organically, it can contribute pesticides to the mix. Animals eating commercial feeds are probably consuming small amounts of pesticides.

These small traces of pesticides like glyphosate are very unlikely to harm people eating food grown in contaminated manure. However, it’s important that you realize that the manure may affect plant growth. For anyone worried about pesticide residue you may be better off using a chemical fertilizer and making your own compost from plants not treated with pesticides to furnish organic matter for the garden soil.

More reading

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200918104255.htm

 

Do wildflower strips help crops?

Several research studies have found that if farmers add strips of land planted with wildflowers around crops it will attract beneficial pollinators.  But are these wildflower strips really helpful in the long run? Current research from Cornell University finds that they are helpful only in certain circumstances.  In some cases, they can even reduce crop yields.

Wildflower strips attract harmful insects as well as pollinators. These insects can damage crops or carry diseases to them. If the wildflower strips are planted in an area where there is some natural land nearby then generally predators of the harmful insects will also appear to help control the harmful ones. The optimal natural land area around the crop area is 25-55%. Researchers called it the goldilocks zone.

If the crop is surrounded by fields of other crops, with no natural areas nearby, the strips of wildflowers do very little good. They attract pollinators but also too many harmful insects. If the crop is surrounded by natural land few pollinators are attracted to the wildflower strips because they have abundant food.

Researchers found that some species of wildflowers are also more likely to attract pest insects and should be kept out of any wildflower mixes used to attract pollinators. Fleabane (Erigeron annuus), which has small daisy like flowers, is one wildflower that attracts more harmful insects than pollinators.  The make up of wildflowers in these mixes needs to be studied to find which other flowers may actually be harmful to crops.

The takeaway for gardeners is this; in suburban areas where there are many gardens you probably don’t need to plant wildflowers- or any flowers- to attract pollinators for a crop. If you are planting the wildflowers to simply be able to see pollinators, such as butterflies, be aware that the wildflowers may also attract less beneficial insects to the garden too.

In the middle of a barren city environment, with little natural areas nearby, planting wildflowers around garden crops probably won’t help much either. And planting wildflowers in an area surrounded by natural lands is also unnecessary for pollination purposes. But if you just like the idea of wildflowers go ahead and plant them, just remember your garden crops and ornamental plants may not be helped and may even be harmed.  Besides attracting pest insects, many plants included in wildflower mixes are considered to be weeds in the garden and spread rapidly. You may be fighting to control them for years.

Here’s another bit of information about mixing “wildflowers” among garden crops. Some people recommend certain plants as “trap” crops. They say harmful insects will be attracted to these, and that’s true. But if those plants are close to your garden, the harmful insects will also eat garden plants. “Close” would generally be anywhere in the average suburban yard. Trap plants need to be pulled and destroyed when they are full of harmful insects or their eggs/larvae. If you aren’t doing that you are just farming harmful insects.

As far as repelling insects from crops- or from you- most of the recommendations you read about – such as planting marigolds around gardens or pots of scented geraniums to repel mosquitoes- are old wives’ tales. African marigold roots may repel soil nematodes, but that’s about it.

If you like to grow flowers in the vegetable garden, go ahead and do it. Just don’t expect any miracles from them.

 More reading

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181015163151.htm

 

Eating or drinking the weeds- Cleavers

Cleavers (Galium aparine)- is a common weed found nearly everywhere.  They are also called bedstraw, or goose grass. The plants are sprawling, floppy things. The stems of cleavers have tiny prickles and are square. The leaves are small and narrow and occur in whorls around the stem. The plants will stick to you when you pull them.

Cleavers is usually found in moist, partially shaded areas. Cleaver flowers are inconspicuous greenish white things. The tiny round two compartment seeds that form have little bristles that cling to fur or clothes much like a bur. My dogs bring them in by the bushel. If you like natural foraging or want to be prepared for all emergency situations that come up you might want to collect the tiny seeds of cleavers when you find them.

                                                                           Cleavers seeds

Cleaver seeds can be used as a coffee substitute. The small seeds are washed and rubbed to remove the sticky green pod and then the black hard seeds are spread on a cookie sheet and toasted at 350 degrees F for about 30 minutes. The roasted seeds can then be ground and brewed like coffee. I don’t know if it has caffeine, but cleavers is in the same plant family as coffee.

Cleavers leaves can be dried and used for tea too. Leaves are sometimes “juiced”. That tea/coffee/juice used to be used as a diet aid, probably because it’s a diuretic. It was also used for kidney and bladder ailments. It is said to help the lymphatic system.

You can use any left over, cooled cleavers coffee or brew up an especially strong batch as a deodorant. Simply soak a cotton ball in it and rub under your arms. You can also use it to wash smelly feet. Cleavers coffee or tea is also said to be good for skin problems like rashes and minor wounds and softens the hands if soaked in it.   

Cleavers can be used as a cooked green, the prickles soften when boiled. The roots of cleavers make a red dye and people used to feed birds cleavers roots to make their bones red.  Why? I don’t know.

So when the dogs come in covered with tiny cleavers burrs I try to remember how useful this nuisance plant could be.

Young cleavers plants

                        
Choosing the right apple for the job

Its fall and apples are showing up at the farm markets. You are longing for fresh apples but what apples are right for each purpose?  Do you like tart crisp apples or sweet soft ones? All apples can be eaten or cooked of course, but some apples are better for some purposes than others.  Many varieties of apples are grown commercially, and the guide below will help you choose from the 18 top varieties to get the best apple for your purposes. 

There are many other varieties of apples, including some heritage apples, but the guide would be far too long and confusing if all were listed. Taste is subjective of course, but an attempt has been made to define the taste also.

Apple varieties are listed in alphabetical order. The color of apples can vary with growing conditions to some extent. Remember “ugly” apples can still be useful for cooking.

Braeburn - red-yellow- green apple- sweet, crisp for cooking or eating.

Cortland- greenish yellow, blushed with red apple - sweet- good for cooking.

Empire- red and yellow, sweet-tart- crisp- good for eating and cooking.

Fugi- yellowish with red blush, juicy, sweet-tart- best for eating.

Gala- early red apple with yellow stripes, soft, sweet- good for eating or cooking.

Ginger Gold- yellow, round, medium sized, early apple, sweet-tart, best for eating.

Golden Delicious- bright yellow, oblong, sweet gingery taste, good for cooking and cider as well as fresh eating.

Ida Red - red with a touch of yellow, tart, firm, juicy eating apple.

Honeycrisp- red and gold apple, juicy but firm, sweet- best for fresh eating.

Jonagold- yellow with a red blush, sweet, firm and juicy, good for eating or cooking.

Jonamac - red and green, rich spicy taste good for eating and cider.

Jonathan - mostly red - crisp, spicy and tart - good for eating and cooking, cider.

McIntosh - yellow and red, very white flesh, juicy, crisp, tart, eating, baking, cider.

Mutsu- red-yellow- sweet yet spicy, good eating or cooking

Northern Spy- red and yellow- mildly sweet, juicy good for cooking

Paula Red- yellow blushed red, Michigan’s earliest apple, sweet-tart- eating or cooking

Red Delicious- bright red, oblong shape - sweet, crisp, best for eating

Rome- mostly red, mildly tart and juicy, good for eating or cooking.

 

Some other things to remember about apples, don’t store them near potatoes, they make potatoes sprout by giving off a gas. And potatoes make apples spoil faster by a gas they give off. One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch- if you let it lay there. Go through stored apples often and remove any that are getting soft and spoiled. Use bruised or cut apples first.

Store apples in a cool dark place if you can and they will last for months. Some people wrap each apple in a piece of newspaper or paper towel but that’s impractical for large amounts.

 


 

The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower, share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another's, smile at someone and receive a smile in return, are to me continual spiritual exercises.

-Leo Buscaglia

 

Kim Willis

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And So On….

 

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