Hits & Misses: ‘Golden Spice’ Pear and flowerless lotus vine
Question of the Week: What variety is this?
Timelines: Publishing projects
Science and Technology: Masting maples

It is always interesting to see what lengths people will go to in order to kill weeds. This past week I spoke with a woman who proudly shared the tale of her thistle-killing adventures. She purchased a syringe from the local drugstore, went home and cut the top off a bunch of thistle seed heads. She then proceeded to shoot a few milliliters of concentrated Round-up down the ‘throat’ of the thistles, very effectively killing off the weeds. Apparently, the drugstore staff wouldn’t sell her a syringe complete with a needle, but the syringe’s barrel proved to be all that was needed to do the trick. Now, I don’t advocate this method for two reasons: first, using concentrated pesticides is expensive, wasteful, and potentially unsafe. And secondly, think of the implications if that syringe was used inadvertently for a non-pesticide use!

Hits & Misses
Hits: HARDY PEAR TREES
If you are looking for a tasty pear that is hardy in regions with cold winters, ‘Golden Spice’ might be just the ticket. This year’s warm summer allowed the tree in our test orchard to produce a bumper crop. Golden Spice bears small fruit (only about one quarter to half the size of the pears that you find in the grocery stores), but the fruit is very sweet with an attractive red blush. Many pear varieties ripen and fall quickly to the ground, often while still green, but this variety tends to ripen nicely on the tree, which allows me to enjoy a ripe, delectable pear right in the orchard. Another reason to grow this tree is that it also offers lovely blooms in the spring.


Golden Spice Pear

Misses: WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?
One plant that has annoyed me this past summer is the lotus vine (Lotus maculatus). This annual vine is touted as having wonderful parrot-beak shaped flowers in shades of yellow, orange and red. The problem is that I’ve found the flowers, at least in my area, to be as rare as wild parrots. There is no doubt that lotus vine produces wonderful masses of airy foliage that adds texture to containers, but the city of Edmonton has used it in many pots downtown, and I failed to see one single flower on any of them. I’ve concluded that if you’re growing lotus vine for the vine, you won’t be disappointed, but if it’s flowers you are after, this isn’t the vine for Northern gardeners.

Question of the Week
WHAT VARIETY IS THIS?
We get a lot of samples of fruit this time of year from people hoping to determine the variety of their fruit tree. Often, the best we can do is provide an educated guess. It has been estimated that there are currently over 1000 varieties of apples alone being grown on the Prairies. Interestingly, some of the best varieties of fruit are unknown to the commercial trade in North America simply because someone’s grandfather or grandmother brought a favorite apple or pear from ‘the old country’ and planted it for future generations to enjoy. Many of those trees could truly be one-of-a-kind varieties in our region.

Timelines
WRITE, DARN IT, WRITE!
There was a time when every area of our greenhouse slowed in activity before prepping for the next swell of business. Not so any more for our publishing department. I’m busy writing weekly newspaper columns, and in addition to the Notebook, we have two new books (Indoor Plants and Landscaping Front Yards) in development and have begun work on our annual Spring Gardening magazine, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. There seems to be no break in sight.

Science & Technology
MASTING MAPLES
Maples seem to be ‘masting’ this year. Masting is a condition where virtually all of the individual plants from an entire species of plant in a particular region produce an extraordinarily large amount of seed. Some people think that masting is equivalent to forecasting. In other words, plants preparing for an upcoming severe winter. The reality is that plants can’t predict the future, but they can reflect on the past. Stress from a series of dry winters and summers can cause plants, like maples, to set lots of seed. Basically, if plants sense that they could succumb to drought, seed becomes their best resource to ensure reproduction.

Next Week
We will be experimenting with a change of format for Jim’s Notebook. In order to include more pictures and graphics but still keep the file sizes down we are going to try switching to a pdf format. By using Adobe Reader or Preview you’ll be able to view the files or print them out for reading later.

So another summer is over. I like fall, at least when fall is long and mild, but it’s still sad to see the growing season pass. We still have the mums (great colours! great price! run! don’t walk! better yet, drive! to Holes! don’t miss out! avoid disappointment, heartache, and regret!), which means there’s still a lot of colour out there in the coldframes, rather than just a lot of bare pavement needing sweeping before the snow flies. All the same, (despite the good value they represent!) the mum is something of a rebound relationship. After the garden has left us we take comfort in the distraction of its blossoms, even though we know full well that these, too, will wither and fade (but still tolerate mild frost!). Oh well, life is short. Let no opportunity for happiness, however fleeting, slip away.

The passing of this particular summer, however, is unusually poignant. The breaking of the fellowship that I referred to a few entries ago ended up having farther reaching effects than any of us could have guessed. One of our rookie growers left for med lab studies. Another left for, well, no specific reason, really, but with a job market as hot as Alberta’s who needs to give a reason to anyone for anything? We owe each other nothing! The New Jason, much to my dismay, also left—for Olds College, where he’s learning how to tap spruce trees, hoping to loosen Quebec’s stranglehold on the syrup industry, or something. By way of homing pigeons, he has sent word that the food at the College is very good, and that his new favourite pastime is riding mechanical bulls. Who’da thought?

They weren’t the only ones feeling the need to move on. We also lost Shane Neufeld, manager of our Trees and Shrubs department for a decade and a half, to a new career in a new province. Anne H., one of our favourite garden centre supervisors, also recently decided to move on. Even Darrell “The Eradicator” S. has jumped ship. Seems that all this time his passion hasn’t lain in killing insects at all, but in violin playing, which he is presently studying at the U of A, hoping to bury his nightmarish past beneath the soothing sounds of Mozart and Ashley MacIssac. We miss them all but wish them well.

In retrospect, it would have been nice to ask them to reflect on their time at the greenhouse, to see if we could evoke a tearful goodbye or a shocking confession. As we all know, though, things (laziness, apathy, hunger, Star Trek) get in the way of seeing stuff through. One opportunity, however, remains. Scott M., a part-timer who has been growing for a few years has also just given notice. Apparently, he’s tired of waiting for another Indiana Jones movie and has decided to start writing a script himself before an aging Harrison Ford succumbs to the ravages of incontinence and senility. Anyway, he’s agreed to share his thoughts on the time he’s spent here at Hole’s.

UG: So Scott, how long have you been here at the Greenhouse?
Scott M: You made that up.
UG: What?
SM: The Indiana Jones script. I’m not writing a script. You’ve been making stuff up all summer on this Blog. And Harrison Ford isn’t that old.
UG: They’re just jokes.
SM: Jokes aren’t a substitute for content.
UG: There is content!
SM: The New Jason is tapping spruce trees? Come on.
UG: He might! One day! Can we just get on with this?
SM: Only if you promise to stick to the facts.
UG: I’ve never strayed from the facts.
SM: Promise.
UG: I’ve never lied, if that’s what you’re insinuating.
SM: …
UG: Okay, I promise. Just the facts.
SM: Fine. Let’s do this then.

To be continued…

first published September 21, 2006

I often find myself in an awkward situation, and I wouldn’t mind if it was of my own making, but it’s not. For some reason, I’m asked to settle fights between couples at the greenhouse. And make no mistake, they are bona fide fights, and they come in a variety of forms. I get tag-team phone calls from husbands and wives who need me to help one or the other deliver the final blow to an argument weeks past its best-before date. I get e-mails from gardeners wanting me to set their neighbours straight, and I get front-row seats to battles played out in the garden centre. I get it all.

There’s just no getting around the fact that people make huge emotional investments in gardening. And with those investments come huge compromises. But as much as I would like to calm the waters for other couples out there, I’ve got my own ripples to smooth out.

The Good Fight
Whenever I’m asked what I plant in my own backyard, I’m very comfortable offering the answer: I plant whatever my wife tells me to! Truthfully, I’m happy to have her choose, mostly because I lean too far toward the experimental side of gardening. It’s simple: my wife is all about the perfect aesthetic blend of perennials and annuals; I’m more curious about what makes plants tick—or stop ticking. Don’t get me wrong, I love a beautiful garden, but I get as much pleasure trying something interesting (or occasionally, homely, diseased and insect ridden) as I do looking at perfection. As for our daughter’s input, let’s just say that as much as my wife needs an ally, she’s not going to find it in our daughter—to her, a gorgeous chrysanthemum is simply a great place to look for bugs.

In our search for a harmonious garden, we all end up making compromises. I, for example, promise not to turn our backyard into a scene from Little Shop of Horrors, and my wife saves space in her flower beds for a few trials. Together, we practice the difficult task of softening our judgments. And, in the end, we spend the summer in a yard full of plants that represent, well…us.

The one thing I do insist our yard be is manageable. Time is one resource few have in abundance, so container gardening is my salvation when life gets busy. Large pots raise plants to a height that makes maintenance easier, and soilless mixtures reduce problems with weeds, diseases and insect pests. I’ve also tried to convince my wife that a drip irrigation system for the pots is the way to go, but she isn’t keen on having black polyethylene pipe and spaghetti tubes adorning our deck. I can’t say I blame her. Besides, I think I might want to save my energy for the tougher challenge of convincing her to try some ‘banker’ plants. They are grown exclusively for attracting and harboring insect pests. This sounds counterintuitive, but the principle is fairly sound: grow a plant that is highly attractive to, say, aphids, and you attract lady bugs to eat them. The lady bugs explode in numbers because of the extra food and will—hopefully—hang around to eat the aphids on your plants. Sounds like a reasonable compromise to me, and that’s all that anyone can hope for.

It’s sometimes easy to forget, but gardening is about the care and nurture of both plants and people, and there is a nice smattering of that philosophy in my garden right now. Some of our asters have a strange disease that I’m “nurturing” to figure out how to treat it, while the majority of the blooms look fantastic, which satisfies my wife’s appetite for cutflowers. It might not look like the perfect garden to everyone, but an environment that grows more flowers than weeds and more compromises than conflicts is a beautiful thing to me. But for the record, I’m not giving up on the ‘banker’ plants.

So to all the frustrated gardeners out there who think having to get me to solve their problems is bad, know that it could be worse—you could have to live with me instead.

Even though fall is here, it’s not too late to plant perennials. Take advantage of the sales and plant a few new perennials.

Quicktime
WMV

Hits & Misses: Heucheras and aggressive poinsettias
Question of the Week: Are neighbours poisoning my plants?
Science & Technology: Trap plants

September is pollution-abatement month at Hole’s. I’m not referring to reducing smoke stack emissions but rather to the elimination of light pollution in our greenhouses. While light is a cherished resource for greenhouse growers, a few errant rays at the wrong time of the day, or rather night, can cause havoc with our poinsettias. Poinsettias must have at least two weeks of uninterrupted dark nights starting in late September to initiate flowering in time for Christmas. If lights are accidentally turned on during the night, interrupting the darkness within that two-week window, the poinsettias will either flower erratically or miss the holiday season altogether. Green, flowerless poinsettias just don’t seem to get people into the Christmas spirit.

Hits and Misses
Hits: GORGEOUS HEUCHERAS
One tool I use for judging whether or not a plant will be a hit with our customers is to watch our staff’s reaction to new plant arrivals. The biggest hit this past week has been the beautiful Heucheras (commonly called coral bells) that our perennial manager, Bob Stadnyk, has brought in for fall sales. They are huge with foliage colours ranging from yellow to rich bronze and deep burgundy. As soon as they arrived on the dock, our staff started buying them up to plant in their own gardens. But don’t worry; there are still plenty left and they transplant very well in the fall.

Misses: EXCESSIVELY VIGOROUS
Vigor in a plant is a good characteristic, but excessive vigor, at least in the case of poinsettias, is a less than desirable trait. We are growing a variety called ‘Visions of Grandeur’ that develops beautiful soft-pink bracts, but it has proven to be a challenge to keep under control. The plants are growing just too rapidly and if they continue at this rate, they won’t be manageable for staff or for customers.

Question of the Week
ARE MY NEIGHBOURS POISONING MY PLANTS?
We had an upset customer arrive the other day gripping a handful of poplar branches. He felt that the reason the tree was doing so poorly was due to a vindictive neighbour trying to poison it. When I saw the samples, I immediately recognized the problem as being due to microbiotic organisms rather than the work of an angry macrobiotic, two-legged organism. The poplar was afflicted with ’silver leaf’ or (Stereum purpureum), a fungal disease that turns leaves a leadish-silver colour. This particular disease is quite easy to diagnose and is quite common on a variety of ornamental shrubs. I don’t know exactly how the customer will feel about the diagnosis, but I do know that I am a lot more comfortable talking about mitigating plant diseases than I am being a mediator between quarreling neighbours!

Science & Technology
TRAP PLANTS
‘Trap plants’ is a term that many growers are becoming more familiar with today. It refers to plants grown for the sole purpose of attracting insect pests. It might seem rather counterintuitive that growers would put plants into their greenhouses to harbour pests, but the science is sound. The principle is that trap plants are more attractive to pests than crop plants and will not only entice pests away from crops, but will act as a ‘bank’ for pests where valuable insect predators can easily feed and reproduce. This army of biological agents can then migrate out through the crop combating pests.

first published September 14, 2006

Fog is defined in the dictionary as, “vapor condensed to fine particles of water suspended in the lower atmosphere.” It’s also defined as, “to make obscure or confusing.” Sadly, both definitions apply to a garden product I saw in a hardware store.

It was a hand-held fogging machine that caught my eye—a machine that dispensed plumes of insecticidal fog designed to eradicate any army of bugs that might lurk in the shadows of our yards. But what these weapons of mass destruction really do is pander to our deep-seated fear of creatures of the entomological persuasion and, to be honest, I think they are nothing short of scandalous.

Foggy Notions
Sure, at first glance, the basic principle behind domestic insecticide fogging machines seems reasonable: fog the yard, kill the bugs and have a pest-free gardening season. But once that smoke clears, the tenet falls apart very quickly.

The active ingredient (the bug-killing bit) in the fogging solution is a broad-spectrum insecticide called propoxur. Broad spectrum means that the insecticide kills a wide range of insects without discrimination, and therein lies the problem: the vast majority of insects and spiders in your yard are (from a human perspective) either beneficial or innocuous—few are true pests. Blind to that fact is the insecticidal fog that belches out of the fogger and penetrates deep into tree and shrub canopies killing bees, dragon flies, lady beetles, lacewings and a whole bunch of other beneficial insects that, up to that point, had been quietly dining on bad bugs that see your plants as dessert. True, the fog will reduce some insect pests (in the short term), but this reduction is nothing more than a fool’s paradise, and with the predators gone, the pests quickly rebound and exceed the pre-fogging numbers.

Another flaw with fogging machines is that the fog they dispense does not respect property lines. At least a spray can be directed by anyone with even a reasonably steady hand, but trying to direct and contain fog is like trying to herd cats. And, as if fogging your own yard to death isn’t bad enough, having fog drift into your neighbor’s yard is completely inexcusable.

Pretty Safe
Since everything about this product seems to annoy me, I might as well include the insecticide label on my hit list. The picture on the label depicts a young suburban mother holding the fog spewing machine in her hand. She has no mask, no gloves but did find the time to put on a pair of fashionable shorts to wear while posturing around in a picture-perfect backyard complete with a children’s playground, sans children—apparently she had enough sense to evacuate the kids. Now contrast that portrayal with what would actually be required of someone wanting to apply this product in a commercial greenhouse (which, by the way, would never happen!). If I, for example, wanted to use this fog in my greenhouse, I’d be required to do more than just look great in a pair of shorts. I’d also need to be accredited as a provincially certified pesticide applicator (which I am). Next, I’d slip into my National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety-approved fogging apparel (complete with approved respirator, pesticide suit, boots, special chemical-resistant nitrile gloves), post warning signs, lock the facility to prevent inadvertent entry by anyone or any living thing, for that matter, and ensure that anyone who does enter respects the minimum-allowable re-entry interval (the minimum time between application of the pesticide and safe re-entry of unprotected people). Sigh…

It’s not that pesticides don’t have their place—they do. Most of us use them, too. After all, bleach is a pesticide designed to kill “germs,” (an archaic term for bacteria, fungi and viruses), and few households are without at least a small bottle. But outside the kitchen, pesticides are misused in vast quantities. Worse yet, many of the salespeople who sell those pesticides have little knowledge of the safety or efficacy of those products.

So, certainly, the judicious use of pest-control products is appropriate for specific purposes, but garden foggers?—there is nothing obscure or confusing here; I say get rid of them!

Hits & Misses: Fall planting and Mammoth mums
Question of the Week: Soil-dwelling aphids
Science & Technology: Blue honeysuckle

I mentioned in last week’s Notebook that I had been invited to attend the dedication ceremony of the Lois Hole Memorial Garden on the grounds of the Lethbridge Public Library. The ceremony was a wonderful event made possible by many dedicated volunteers who worked tirelessly to transform the grounds around the library into a beautiful xeriscaped garden. Landscape consultant and Japanese-garden designer Masa Muizuno has successfully harmonized the garden with the shortgrass prairie from which the city was born. I also had the opportunity give a talk to the Lethbridge Horticultural Society. All in all, a great trip to the southern part of our province.

Hits & Misses
Hits: FALL PLANTING
I heard an interesting comment this past week from Jeff Wood of Ball Seeds. It seems that many garden centre operators say that they don’t sell fall mums because there just isn’t a market for them on the Prairies. Our sales figures prove that statement to be out in left field. Not only have we enjoyed strong fall mum sales, but also the fall-planted bulbs, perennials and shrubs that we offer are very popular. I think this may be in part to the warm dry weather and the fact that housing construction is up, but you can’t deny the fact that fall transplants lose a lot less moisture because the days are cooler and shorter. If you are planting now, be sure to water thoroughly to encourage vigorous root growth. Far too often winter cold is blamed for the demise of fall-transplanted plants when the real culprit is drought.

Misses: WILD MAMMOTH
Mammoth mums are a new series of mums that we are trialing this year. They are supposed to be winter hardy in our region, although we can’t say for sure until we have the chance to give them a thorough test. And while they are purported to grow like a hedge and produce masses of flowers throughout the late summer and into the fall, they just don’t look as nice and dense as do our tender fall mum varieties; they tend to be a bit too gangly for my taste. It may take a bit more management on our part to keep the Mammoth series more compact and dense if we do decide to carry them next year, but for this year’s trials, the ‘wild mammoth’ look will be the order of the day.

Question of the Week
ARE THOSE APHIDS IN MY SOIL?
One of our customers was surprised to find aphids on the soil around the base of her elm tree. We normally think of aphids as being exclusively aerial and not terrestrial insects, but this isn’t always the case. The soil-dwelling aphids that this customer dug up are commonly known as wooly elm aphids. They spend the summer attacking elm leaves before moving on to colonize the roots of saskatoons. By late summer the winged aphids emerge from the saskatoon roots and move back to the elms where they lay eggs on the bark. Wooly elm aphids can kill newly planted saskatoons, but I find them more of a nuisance than anything on elms. If you can wait an infestation out, it’s usually only a short time before the lady beetles move in to keep the aphids under control.

Science & Technology
HONEYSUCKLE OR HONEYBERRY
Retail nurseries can expect to see more blue honeysuckle varieties available on the market in the next few years. I was reading the latest copy of Hortscience and came across no less than 36 new, recently registered cultivars. Most of the blue honeysuckle varieties originate from Russia, are super cold tolerant and produce beautiful, edible berries in late spring. I noticed that there seems to be a blue theme running through the naming of Honeysuckles. For example some of the these new varieties are called: Berry Blue, Blue Belle, Blue Bird, Blue Forest, Blue Lightning, Blue Moon, Blue Nova, Blue Pacific, Blue Sky and Blue Velvet. Oh yeah, to break the streak, there is one called Goluboye Verenteno, but this Russian name means “light or sky-blue spindle.” Strangely enough, the industry is using the name honeyberry instead of blue honeysuckle in an effort to distance this edible plant from the inedible common honeysuckle.

Fall mums are a great way to keep some colour around the yard until that first hard frost.

Quicktime
WMV

First published September 1, 2006

At some places, staff bond over a shared enthusiasm for such things as local sports and holiday cheer, but at this time of the year our greenhouse staff finds itself thrust together by a slightly different (yet equally satisfying) brand of camaraderie: corn snobbery. Although we are unwavering in our solidarity to the corn that brings us together, we are not united in our opinions regarding what makes it best…not even close.

Corn is, without a doubt, my favourite vegetable—but you’d never guess that by the way I usually talk about it. In my defense, if I’m hard on corn, it might be because corn has been tough on me! As a kid, I spent a lot of time sitting on the hard, cold lid of the fertilizer hopper that was attached to our two-row Milton corn seeder. Now, the lid wasn’t designed for rear ends, but because that miserable machine couldn’t go two minutes without getting congested, it required some help—mine. So, while my brother drove the tractor, my job was to hold a hockey stick in each hand and stir the corn seed so it wouldn’t jam and get stuck in the seeder’s narrow chute. I will say, however, that the one good thing about that miserable planter was that although it wasn’t great at sowing corn, it didn’t excel at sowing seeds of contempt either, which is why corn was and is my favourite garden vegetable.

Sweet Perfection
That’s why I feel entitled to expect perfection from corn, but I should add that the thing I expect sweet perfection from is actually defective. Sweet corn is essentially a mutant type of maize—one with a genetic defect that prevents the rapid conversion of sugars to starches. Sweetness and maize were never meant to go together any more than sweetness and wheat were. In fact, the corn we enjoy today as corn on the cob, cornflakes, nachos and as sweeteners in just about every can of soda pop exist only because indigenous people saw potential in an ancient corn-like plant called teosinthe. Teosinthe looks more like quackgrass than it does corn, but these ancient genetic engineers used ‘mass selection’ to transform teosinthe into modern corn. Mass selection is based on a simple principle: individuals within a species have a lot of variability, BUT if you select what you deem to be individuals with superior traits and propagate those individuals exclusively, you end up with more individuals that have the traits you want. Mass selection sounds easy but you need a great eye, a lot of patience and plenty of trial and error before you can transform a weed into a vegetable. Fortunately for us, the selection process worked, allowing maize to develop into the sweet corn we love.

Insatiable Snobbery
Truthfully, sweet-corn development is only a blip on the screen in the history of corn breeding, and the great advancements in its development have been only in my lifetime. However, our insatiable appetite for sweetness (a.k.a. corn snobbery) has lead us to develop a whole bunch of sweet corn types with names like normal sugar, sugar enhanced, supersweets and, now, synergistic corn, which I ate just prior to writing this article. Although they all have distinguishing qualities, they all owe their specific monikers to the amount of sugar they contain and how fast that sugar breaks down into starch.

So around here, the question stands: which is the best mutant? Ultimately, it’s all personal preference. My pick this year is “Frisky,” but I know better than to expect everyone to agree with me.

On an endnote, while I was writing this article, I had the opportunity to ask my brother how it was that he got to be the one who drove the tractor while I had to sit numb bummed on the hopper and stir the seeds with the hockey sticks. His self-less response was one I should have anticipated: “I’d have been more than willing to do it, Jim,” he said. “It’s just that you were the better hockey player.”

Hits & Misses: Fruit & boulevard trees
Question of the Week: Are my Mums Bleeding?
What’s Bugging Me? Bug Hibernation
The Business: Advantages of buying direct

The official sod-turning event for the Lois Hole Library in Edmonton was held this past Wednesday. I had an opportunity to thank those involved in the creation and planning of this new facility and to tell them how thrilled my mom would have been with this honour. Friday I’m off to Lethbridge for the official opening of the Lois Hole Memorial Garden located just outside of the Lethbridge Public Library. Mom enjoyed her memorable travels throughout this province, and it’s wonderful to see her, in turn, remembered in ways that enhance Alberta for all its citizens.

Hits & Misses
Hit: FABULOUS FRUIT
It appears to be a bumper-crop year for fruit: everyone seems to be harvesting bushels of apples, plums and cherries, and the quality is excellent. One piece of advice I like to give fruit-tree owners is to create an annual spring-pruning program. Pruning is far too often an afterthought. It seems that the pruning saw is pulled out of storage only after a problem has escalated to the point where the tree isn’t salvageable. Good orchard management uses selective pruning as part of regular maintenance, and I’d recommend pruning courses as an excellent starting point for anyone growing even one fruit tree in the yard. You’ll be rewarded.

Misses: DEATH TOLL
It may be a great fruit year, but the boulevard trees in the city of Edmonton are in the worst shape I have ever seen. The past few years of drought have really taken their toll, and I’m not the only one who’s noticed. I stopped to talk with a city watering crew member who was watering a long row of boulevard trees, many of which hadn’t a single leaf on them (in fact, I counted a row of 46 trees that were at least 50 years old, many of which were either dead or nearly dead). As nice as it was to see her dutifully watering, I’m afraid those trees haven’t a hope of being resurrected—unless there was magical elixir in her watering hose!

Question of the Week
ARE MY MUMS BLEEDING?
This week’s question came about as a customer noticed red liquid running out the bottom of her beautiful, white garden mum pots. No, the plants aren’t bleeding to death; the red stuff is the dye that coats the chelated iron we use to feed the mums. Iron keeps the mums vibrant and healthy, but I can see how the red dye would be a little disconcerting for some. Just think, if the mums survive until Halloween, the blood-red liquid oozing out of the drainage holes in the pot could make for great trick-or-treat tales.

What’s Bugging Me
BUG HIBERNATION
It seems that once we start moving our way towards fall, the number of bug problems in our gardens diminishes greatly (or is it just the case that by September, we just don’t care anymore about what’s eating our plants?). While some bugs die out in the fall, many just become better at hiding. Many species of arthropods (insects, spiders etc.) move into a phase of their lifecycle called diapause. Diapause is a tough resting phase that allows the arthropods to endure the winter cold until the spring arrives once again. Shorter days and longer nights trigger arthropods to enter diapause, although exceptionally warm weather can break the cycle. Spidermites are extremely tough (if not impossible to kill) with pesticides while they are in their diapause phase; however, an application of horticultural oil applied when trees and shrubs are dormant can still kill some spidermites and many other diapausing pests.

The Business
MIGHTY MUMS
Customers have been remarking on how big our mums are this year and asking why the mums are so much smaller at the chain stores. The reasons are simple. We dedicate more space to the potted mums, and we provide them with more TLC. The results are big plants that support hundreds of blooms. We also have the advantage of not having to transport these huge plants any great distance. We need to move our mums only a few hundred meters from the growing greenhouse to the retail area. The chain stores simply can’t truck large mums several thousand kilometers without breaking the branches off the plants—no matter what precautions the shippers take. For that very same reason, the only way to enjoy our gigantic mums is to make a trip out to our greenhouses. Just make sure that your car is big enough to accommodate them!