Hits & Misses: Hydrangeas & black-eyed Susan vines
Question of the Week: Will fertilizer help my houseplants out of their winter slump?
The Business: A visit from Olds College
Upcoming: On the road again in Coronation, Alberta

I’ve decided I want to be a forensic botanist! It seems like a perfectly reasonable career change to me…well, that and it looked really cool on the documentary I saw. For those not familiar with forensic botany (which is probably just about all of us), it involves the acquisition and evaluation of plant material to solve crimes. I know!
Anyway, one of the crimes solved with the aid of botanical forensics was the Mysterious Case of the Golf Course Crop Circles. It seems these mysterious circles shared a striking resemblance to those created by the doughnut-spinning wheels of a vehicle’s tires. Fast forward to the police accusing a suspect of driving his truck on the greens and, of course, to the suspect denying he had anything to do with the incident—that is until forensic botanists proved that the species of grass stuck in the man’s fender was the kind that could only be found on golf greens and that the cuts on those blades of grass matched the cut pattern common to the golf course’s specialized mowers. I guess it kind of gives new meaning to landing in the rough.

Hits & Misses
Hits: Hydrangeas
The hydrangeas are absolutely beautiful this year and their timing is perfect for Easter. Getting the flower colour just right can be a bit tricky because it involves a little manipulation of soil pH values, but they are well worth the effort. What I really like about growing hydrangeas is how—almost overnight— the light green flower clusters seem to burst into rich hues of blue, pink or white. They’re a great gift to give this time of the year, especially to people who find the fragrance of Easter lilies a little overpowering.

Misses: Black-eyed susan vines
I’ve really been enjoying walking through the greenhouse and seeing the masses of flowers on the black-eyed Susan vines (Thunbergia), but their exuberance for growing is starting to cause a bit of a problem: they refuse to stay within the confines of their cages! It’s a classic case of too much of a good thing and we’re dealing with it by tediously trimming back the vines. The first haircut is well underway, but they will no doubt need another before they are ready for sale in late April. Oh well—what doesn’t kill us, makes them stronger.

Black-eyed Susan vines are prolific growers that are hogging more than their fair share of our greenhouse space.

Question of the Week
Will fertilizer help my houseplants out of their winter slump?
Many people see fertilizer as the magical elixir to cure all that ails an unhealthy plant, but it’s not. Another thing fertilizer is not is plant food—sunlight is plant food.

I like to think of fertilizers as being similar to the building blocks in a kid’s toy box. The blocks won’t assemble themselves into a barn without the ‘food energy’ provided by the builder. Well, the same principle can be applied to fertilizer: simply poured into the soil, fertilizer can’t assemble itself into anything useful—the plant must first be actively growing, and active growth requires sunlight. So the short answer is, yes, now is a great time to fertilize houseplants because the sunlight intensity and duration have increased substantially from those short, dark days of winter.

Fertilizers contain three major nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. As a general rule, plants use five times as much nitrogen as they do phosphate.

The Business
A Visit from Olds College
Olds College is one of Alberta’s most treasured horticultural training facilities, and this Friday we’re pleased to be hosting a group of students from the college. Every year, one or two groups make the trek up to see us and we give them a tour that highlights our growing technologies in action and provides a peek into the behind-the-scenes workings of our greenhouse. I always enjoy answering the questions the students ask, but I think the two most important lessons that the students learn from the tour is that a commercial greenhouse business is like any other business in that the only constant is change and that adaptation to new technologies is critical for survival. Not bad for a for a day’s work.

Did You Know?
Birds usually pollinate flowers that are red and odourless, whereas bats pollinate flowers that are dull coloured and aromatic. Why the preference?—that’s easy: birds pollinate during the day and, therefore, rely on their eyes, and bats (you guessed it!) pollinate during the night and, therefore, count on their sense of smell.

Upcoming: On the road, again
I hit the open road this week and end up in Coronation, Alberta for a talk on performance plants that will thrive in the areas’ windy climate. The talk is hosted by the Coronation Library and I’m pleased to note that part of the proceeds from ticket sales will go towards the Lois Hole Library Legacy fund.

Quote
“You do not need to know anything about a plant to know that it is beautiful.”
–Montagu Don

First published March 22, 2007

Not long ago, I wrote the foreword for a new book called Create an Impression: Landscaping for Curb Appeal by Landscape Architectural Technologist Maggie Clayton. Although the book has many great chapters, the one that caught my eye was called “If You Don’t Have a Plan, You Don’t Have a Clue.” One particular thing Maggie wrote that I thought really summed up an essential landscaping principle is that “A foundation planting is a bed of plants located next to the foundation of a building, and its purpose is to marry the building to its surroundings.” I don’t think she could have said it better.

Dysfunctional landscapes
When the importance of marrying the house to the yard isn’t taken into consideration, you can end up with a dysfunctional landscape. Most of us acknowledge that the yard and house should have a relationship with one another, but we tend to think of houses and yards as cohabitating—the idea of the relationship involving wedded bliss is given little thought. So when the inevitable happens and the house and yard have irreconcilable differences, we tend to either ignore the situation or hope that, somewhere down the road, the couple will “find one another.” Of course, neither happens, and as the plants grow up, the yard and house grow apart.

One doesn’t have to look further than his or her neighbourhood to find numerous examples of bad marriages. For instance, who hasn’t seen a group of Colorado blue spruce nestled only a few feet in front of a living room window?—it’s the perfect example of a union destined to fail from the get-go. You might not consider it at the time of planting, but the spruce trees will slowly but surely become a nearly impenetrable barrier, blocking both sunlight and sightlines. This is not a happy union, and the until-death-do-us-part bit begins with the sound of a chainsaw firing up.

Without proper planning this…	…can easily become this.

To fail to plan is to plan to fail
OK, so maybe equating poor landscaping with a failed marriage is a rather harsh indictment of homeowners who plunge headlong into planting without a plan, but over the years, I’ve talked to far too many people whose failure to plan, ironically, becomes a plan for failure. As Maggie points out in her book, one of the easiest ways to avoid a house divorcing itself from the yard is simply to have a good landscape plan. The plan doesn’t need to be expensive, either. A fairly rudimentary plan that is well thought out will do the trick, and simply understanding the growth habits and mature sizes of the trees and shrubs you want in your yard is half the battle.

Crowding is one of the biggest enemies of a landscape plan. Whether it’s one tree crowding another or a tree crowding a house, it all equates to time and money spent correcting an error that could have been avoided. Trees and shrubs need room to breathe, so plant them the appropriate distance from your home. If you plant the right plants in the right spot, you won’t have cedars jammed up against eaves troughs and lilacs obliterating sightlines. Moving beds away from the house will not only eliminate crowding problems but will also add depth by giving the yard a roomy, three-dimensional look rather than a crowded, two-dimensional one.

If you properly consider your foundation plantings at the start of the project like in this illustration…	…your yard will become a more interesting yard, with depth and dimension.

A last thing to keep in mind is that bare patches of soil are inevitable when plants are spaced properly, but those open spots will fill as your planting beds mature. Until that time, look at those spaces as a great opportunity to liven up your beds with some colourful annuals. Besides looking great, annuals will help make the transition to a mature landscape feel seamless.

As Maggie illustrates so wonderfully in her book, it is possible for house and yard to share a long and fulfilling life together. With just a bit of planning, house and yard can beautifully complement one another. Who knows, maybe messy chainsaw divorces could even become a landscaping thing of the past.

Jim explores a few of the handy tools and gadgets to help make this spring’s seeding chores quicker and more effective.
Quicktime
WMV

For more information on Jim’s new book What Grows Here? Indoors check out holesonline.com

And if you are looking at any sort of landscaping this year be sure to have a look at Maggie Clayton’s new book Create an Impression

Hits & Misses: Automation & discrimination
Question of the Week: Why are my stored potatoes starting to have a musky taste?
The Business: Weighing options

Our greenhouses are beginning to look a lot like a big pot operation lately…wait, let me rephrase that. We just received our pot shipment from Colombia and…er…that doesn’t sound right either. Ok, one more try—a company in Colombia that makes outstanding, beautifully patterned, plastic pots that range from coffee-table size to gargantuan hot-tub size, has just sent us a shipment of their products. There!
I tried a couple of their pots last summer and found that they stood up really well to the damaging sun and heat. I even left them outside over the winter and they seem to have survived completely unscathed. Now that’s quality stuff.

Hits & Misses
Hits: Automation in the Greenhouse
The one concept that novice staff members have a little difficulty wrapping their heads around is how we transplant our seedlings. Rather than gently lifting seedlings out of their trays and placing them carefully into pots, we use a rather torturous-looking transplanting machine that has steel rods that punch the seedlings through a specially designed plug tray and push them into soil-filled transplant flats. I must admit that the first time I saw seedlings being punched through a tray, I couldn’t believe they could emerge unscathed, but the reality is that pushing down and through causes less damage than pulling up and out does. The push method, which eliminates any squeezing of tender seedling stems, has solved a lot of transplanting problems for us and has made the entire process more efficient—and all without compromising quality. We do, however, have to hold the hands of a lot of squeamish, first-time viewers and transplanters.

Misses: Leafless Citrus
We have a leafless citrus tree sitting in our greenhouse this week and, no, it’s not a new variety. There really is no kind way to describe it, either—it looks nothing short of pitiful, as in heartbreaking. The reason we’ve acquired this spindly little orphan is that it was returned after being put into too dark a spot in a customer’s home.
You see, a citrus plant’s response to low light is to immediately drop its leaves, just like a deciduous tree does when it senses winter approaching. This is why having lots of direct light in your home is an absolute prerequisite to even thinking about buying a citrus plant. In fact, I go as far as to tell our staff to screen customers who want to buy an orange or lemon tree to ensure that customers have the right home environments. We might not sell as many plants this way, but I would much rather tell a customer that a citrus tree is just not the right plant for him or her than see a skeletal-looking plant brought back shortly after being purchased.

Question of the Week
Why are my stored potatoes starting to have a strange, musky taste?
Quite a few people have complained about their homegrown potatoes tasting musky. The likely cause of this problem is due, in part, to the potatoes having been grown in hot, dry soil the previous summer. What happens in these types of desert-like soil conditions is that a number of fungal species called xerophiles can start growing. One particularly foul-tasting compound that these fungi produce is called TCA, and it’s this TCA that finds its way into potato skins and creates a rather unappealing flavour. So if you want to avoid eating musky-tasting potatoes next winter, ensure that this year’s potato crop is watered consistently throughout the growing season.

The Business
Weighing Options
We received an e-mail enquiring about the results of a trial we did last summer on a device that automatically waters hanging baskets. Well, I’ll start by saying the device looked promising. It had a hook at each end: one for securing to the basket and another for hooking to a post bracket or to a hook on the house. Basically, a small hose that feeds water to the device would open or close the water supply based on the weight of the basket. The principle is pretty simple: heavy baskets are wet baskets (at least in theory), so when the device senses that the basket is light (and therefore dry) it triggers the device to allow water to flow. This all sounds good in theory, but the reality was that the weight of the basket didn’t correlate very well with the plant’s water needs, and the result was quite a bit of suffering—and not just for those of us who wanted to do less hand watering.

Did You Know?
You need about 300–400 cubic feet of soil to support a medium-sized tree, but many trees planted in urban environments have only 50 cubic feet of soil available to them. Trees grown in such restrictive root environments are much smaller than those grown in soils with ample room for root growth—they are also much shorter lived.

Quote
“If you are not killing plants, you are not really stretching yourself as a gardener.”
–J. C. Raulston

first published March 15, 2007

It is rather obvious that the reason we add colour to our gardens is to capture and feed our visual senses. But what isn’t immediately apparent is that colour can play an equally vital role in our physical health, and this year it’s the good, old carrot that’s showing us that colour is about more than fashion sense.

Revival of the fittest
There has been a bit of a renaissance in carrots recently. Because of the years I spent growing carrots commercially, it’s hard for me to get too excited about their revival, but the new varieties of seeds I see on the shelves refuse to be ignored. When I was growing up, carrots were classically long, orange, relatively straight clones that moved down our conveyor belts by the thousands. Walk down any grocery aisle today, and those classical carrots appear to have had the equivalent of carrot makeovers. You can buy them cut into coins, shaved, julienned, shredded or diced. There are large ones, baby ones, purple and red ones, but regardless of the look each is sporting, the thing they all have in common is that they’ve come a long way from the time when a grower’s biggest concern was how resistant the carrots were to breakage when dropped onto a concrete floor. Colour was still important back then but only aesthetically in the sense that consumers expected that a nice carrot should be fairly orange. The relationship between colour and health, however, was largely unexplored territory.

Today, we have a better understanding of what a vegetable’s colour means to our health. We know that it’s a strong indicator of the presence of certain phyto (plant) chemicals. For example, the richer the orange colour, the greater the concentration of beta carotene, the precursor to Vitamin A. Comparatively, the richer the red colour, as is the case with some Japanese varieties (like ‘Magestic Red’), the higher the lycopene content, which has been associated with a reduction in the incidence of prostate cancer.

What’s interesting about today’s new and colourful carrot varieties is that they really aren’t new at all—many are simply throwbacks to their genetic origins. In fact, orange carrots are a rather recent introduction; white and perhaps even purple are the original colours.

Tricks of the trade
So how can you get the best colour from the carrots in your garden? There are a few tricks and they start, not surprisingly, with knowing the makeup of your soil. Heavy soils high in clay cause pale, misshapen and stunted roots. I can remember a spot in our fields that had a clay hardpan, and many carrots grown there would have an ugly and abrupt 90 degree turn at the spot where the root encountered that hardpan—not commercially attractive. Ensuring that the soil is loose to a depth of at least a foot is important for the overall yield of nice, straight, richly coloured carrots. We had mostly clay loam soils on our farm, which grew wonderful vegetables in general, but I was always envious of the farmers who had rich, black, sandy loams that could grow those picture-perfect, straight-as-an-arrow carrots.

Carrot quality and pigment concentration are also directly related to soil temperature. Soil temperatures in the 15–20 C range provide the best conditions for accumulation of pigments in the roots. Carrots that mature during heat waves are rather insipid and lack the rich flavours of carrots grown under ideal temperatures.

Waterlogged soils will also have a negative effect on colour. What happens in these conditions is that the lack of oxygen in the soil will stunt root growth and inhibit the accumulation of pigments. The best solution to minimize waterlogging is to provide as deep a layer of loamy soil as you can and not to plant carrots in low spots. Carrot roots that taper abruptly from crown to root tip are usually indicative of waterlogged soils.

So although carrots might lack the aristocracy and artistic flair of rare perennials, think about giving a few purple, red or even orange carrots a try this year. You just might find that the most important colours in your yard spend most of their time buried deep within your garden soil.

Research has shown that having plants in your home can help to clean the air. Jim talks about which indoor plants can help improve your environment.
Quicktime
WMV

Hits & Misses: Air plants & sore thumbs
Question of the Week: What size cooling fan should I use to keep my solarium at a constant temperature?
The Business: Vegetative floral designs

I was reading an interesting article in the latest issue of Chronica Horticulturae, a monthly magazine published by the International Society for Horticultural Science. In it, the author, current board member and director of publications, Jules Janick, compared the memory capacity of an iPod to a wormwood (Artemisia annua) seed. Interestingly enough, as incredible a memory as an iPod has (it’s able to store the equivalent of 60 million pages of text in its tiny 85-gram hard drive), it proved no match for the tiny seed. In fact, a single seed holds one trillion times the information in its DNA than and iPod is capable of holding in its hard drive!
It just goes to show that seeds may be low tech, but they are no less fascinating than any of the most sophisticated electronic devices.

Hits & Misses
Hits: Air Plants
Some really interesting indoor plants arrived at the greenhouse a few weeks ago. They are called Tillandsia, and they are a fascinating genus of air plants guaranteed to raise a few eyebrows. As their name suggests, air plants are epiphytes, meaning their roots grow above ground and attach themselves to rocks or other plants. Furry scales on their foliage allow them to absorb water and nutrients from the air and airborne dust. No matter what type of Tillandsia, if their foliage is soft, shrunken or appears limp just give them a soak by submerging them in water for a few hours. If growing a plant that doesn’t need a pot isn’t novel enough for you, look for air plants that are sold mounted on pieces of coral or bark that have magnets attached to them and grow the air plants on your refrigerator.

Misses: Sore Thumbs
I hate potting up dead roses, but every year at this time that’s exactly what happens. Invariably, a few roses that haven’t got a hope of producing a single leaf arrive at the greenhouse among the batches of healthy bare root roses. Unfortunately, when the roses are at this bare root stage, they all look dead, so there’s no way of weeding out the good from the bad. The numbers of dead rose bushes isn’t huge, but it is a pain—literally!—to pot them up and then have to unceremoniously toss them out a couple of weeks later after our intensive care treatment fails to coax life from them. I think the reason the roses fail is due in large to how they were treated when they were harvested. If the weather is exceptionally hot and dry when roses are harvested, a few extra hours in the sun is all it takes to dehydrate their tender roots. It’s just the way it goes every year. And as unpleasant as it is to remove the dead roses, at least their skeletal forms stand out like sore thumbs among the lush sea of green leaves.

Question of the Week
What size cooling fan should I use to keep my solarium at a constant temperature?
I get asked this question quite often and for a good reason: most people misunderstand the principles behind cooling fans. The first thing to understand is that installing a fan in a solarium will do nothing to cool the facility unless outside air can be drawn in and the inside air can be exhausted out. Simply installing a fan in a solarium that isn’t vented will do little more then circulate warm air. Ideally, you want a louvered vent that will open when the solarium gets above a certain set temperature and a wall-mounted fan that will draw in the cooler air and exhaust out the hot air. The size of the fan and louvers will depend on the size of the solarium. The other point to keep in mind is that because a cooling fan draws in air from outside, it’s impossible for the solarium temperature to be lower than the outside temperature—regardless of how big your fan is. So on a 30 C day, the solarium can never be lower than a sweltering 30 C. In fact, on such a day, a solarium temperature of 32 C would indicate a well functioning fan and cooling system.

The Business
Vegetative Floral Designs
On my way out to the coldframes the other day, I couldn’t help but noticed an interesting new trend in our floral department. I always find it interesting to see how trends in fashion spill over into the greenhouse industry, and from what I’ve seen and heard, the natural look is in everywhere this year. So as not to be outdone, the floral industry is following suit will an inspired type of floralscaping called vegetative floral design. It’s a bit of an awkward name; in fact, a few people at work said it conjured up images of comatose plants laid out in hospital beds, but the vegetative in vegetative floral designs refers to the placement of the plant materials, which are juxtaposed with one another in a parallel or radial style. These beautiful creations are inspired by nature and arranged to appear as though a tiny slice of the landscape has been scooped up from the forest floor and gently placed in a container. Flowers and decorative elements, such as moss, driftwood, stones and twigs are arranged in vertical groups just as they would be found in nature—the perfect way to capture the feeling of a walk in the woods.

Did You Know?
A large Birch tree can absorb and transpire 10 bathtubs full of water on a warm summer day! How?—each leaf is loaded with tiny “breathing” pores called stomata. The stomata allow gas exchange and water to evaporate, which cools the leaves and pulls up minerals from the roots.

Quote
“Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.”
–Rabindranath Tagore

We had previously posted some pictures from the Parkallen community garden. Well the kids are at it again, this time beautifying their community with a colourful frozen garden.

first published March 8, 2007

For me, the name switch grass conjures up images of kids running around whacking one another with bundles of long grassy stems. I suppose many children would argue that is indeed the best use for switch grass, but this prairie-hardy grass is a lot more than a toy. Besides being a beautiful, tough ornamental, it shows great potential as a biofuel that could reduce our reliance on non-renewable energy. So what exactly is this miraculous plant, and why has it wallowed in obscurity for so long?

Beauty & personality
Switch grass is the common name for Panicum virgatum, a one-metre-tall grass that is native to the eastern Canadian prairies. It has a dense, upright, vase-shaped growth habit, and in addition to being both heat and drought tolerant, its extensive, fibrous root system makes it excellent for reducing soil erosion. Because of its toughness and appealing form, it has undergone a lot of breeding work, and one of the great benefits of a bit of tweaking has been the development of some outstanding red-colored varieties. Two that I really like for their wine-red blades are ‘Ruby Ribbons’ and ‘Shenandoah.’ Like all grasses, switch grass performs best in full sun and is hardy to Zone 3 or even a bit lower, providing is has snow cover during the coldest months—the perfect plant for the prairies. As wonderful an addition as switch grass makes to any garden, it’s the other half of its personality that really intrigues me, specifically the fact that switch grass show a lot of potential as a biofuel.

Biofuels are just like conventional fuels in that both were once constituents of living organisms. It’s just that the organisms that gave rise to crude oil have been dead for a whole lot longer—millions of years to be more precise—whereas the plants that give rise to biofuels can be grown and refined within a year. The push to find suitable biofuel plants is twofold: we want to reduce our dependency on non-renewable energy resources (like oil), plus we would like our biofuel plants to scrub some of carbon dioxide from the air before we transform them into fuel.

Farm by numbers
The bulk of biofuel that is produced today in North America comes from “brewing” corn so that the ethanol can be distilled off and blended with gasoline. Apparently, the problem with corn is that only a relatively small percentage of its biomass (the kernels) can be readily and economically converted to ethanol. On top of that, the input costs to grow corn are high. But don’t be too discouraged. Some number-crunching researchers feel that switch grass could not only produce more net energy per hectare than corn can but that switch grass could also be produced at a lower cost. Switch grass is also adaptable to a much wider region of the prairies than corn is, and because it is a perennial, soil tillage is minimal, which substantially reduces the potential for soil erosion.

So is switch grass just another pretty face in our gardens, or will it also solve North America’s insatiable appetite for energy? Well, if I were a betting man, I would say that the demure side of this plant’s personality is where the bulk of its potential lies. Although switch grass might help to reduce our dependence on conventional fuels, I have talked to some researchers who say that even if every hectare of arable land on the prairies was converted to biofuel production, we still wouldn’t come close to meeting domestic demand. But then again, I suppose the formula for a bright energy future for all of us was never meant to rest solely on the shoulders of one fuel source. I believe the sustainable energy equation is a combination of conventional fuels, ‘green’ fuels (like wind power), biofuels and, of course, the big one—energy conservation.

So while Panicum virgatum may not be the panacea for our entire fuel needs, its does show potential to help out. At the very least, if switch grass won’t keep all of our cars fueled up, it is sure to do a good job of fueling some important conversations about the environment.