First published February 21, 2008

Is the grass really greener on the other side of the fence? Well, this year the more appropriate question to ask might be, “Is the grass greener on the other side of provincial borders?”

Why the riddle, you ask? Simple. Beginning in 2009, Manitoba’s government will limit the concentration of phosphorus (technically phosphate) in lawn fertilizers to a maximum of one per cent as a way to reduce the amount of phosphorus that makes its way from lawns and into lakes and rivers. Like all issues regarding pollution, this one is also complicated, but the main concern is that adding phosphorus to our water can lead to an explosion of algae growth. In “normal” phosphorus-starved water, algae are very low. But add extra phosphorus and that algae population skyrockets—the dire results being a wake of oxygen-starved, murky-green water and a whole lot of dead fish.

So now that you are feeling a little uneasy about applying fertilizer to your lawn, it might be a good time to explain a bit more about this mysterious plant nutrient we call phosphorus.

Phosphorus is one of only three elements (along with nitrogen and potassium) that is referred to as a major plant nutrient. Translation: all three are required by plants in fairly large quantities, which is exactly why fertilizer labels lists three hyphenated numbers, with phosphorus always occupying the middle spot on the nutrient list. The main role of this all-important nutrient is to act as the energy currency or fuel that drives plant growth. Plants that are severely deficient in phosphorus are invariably stunted and will often reflect their deficiency by displaying a purplish hue in their foliage. I have seen an entire field of corn (unfortunately, mine) that was stunted and purple for that very reason.

Getting back to lawns, the main controversy regarding phosphorus is not about whether it is essential for growing grass (that’s a no-brainer); it’s about deciding how much is needed and what type is best to use. Manitoba, for example, has many soils that are inherently high in phosphorus, so applying phosphorus to lawns is completely unnecessary.

Saskatchewan and Alberta, however, have a little bit different situations. Because many of our soils show some level of phosphorus deficiency, most of our lawns benefit from the addition of phosphorus-containing fertilizers. Having said that, I have to add that I’ve seen many soil tests from people’s lawns that showed exceptionally high phosphorus levels due to years of high-phosphorus fertilizer applications. Exactly. So what can we do to ensure we’re making good decisions? Well, start by becoming smart, responsible consumers.

A simple rule to remember when buying lawn fertilizer is to only choose those with labels that have a phosphorus number that’s in the single digits. Fertilizers such as16-20-0 (which are often sold as lawn fertilizers), contain a disproportionately high concentration of phosphorus and should never be applied to lawns. The next thing to remember is that the best way to keep phosphorus from ending up in lakes and rivers is to read instructions. Misapplication and over-application are surefire ways to spread phosphorus granules across sidewalks and driveways. Not only won’t your lawn benefit from that, the environment and your wallet won’t either. Across the international border, it’s interesting to note that Minnesota allows the use of phosphorus only for establishing new lawns—any other use requires a certified soil test to prove that the soil is phosphorus deficient.

Intelligent use of phosphorus-containing fertilizers really is the key to keeping our lawns and water bodies in good shape. Phosphorus, after all, is a good thing. But like all things in life, moderation is the key. With it, there’s no reason why we can’t have grass that’s green on both sides of the fence and water that’s blue.

Hits & Misses: Boss moss & one of these things is not like the other
Question of the Week: How do I know what type of mulch to use?
The Business: Recreating Eden presents “A Mother’s Legacy”

As the days get longer and our greenhouse plants grow more aggressively, the one comment often heard on our weekly walks is that certain, leafy plants are “badly in need of a haircut.” Normally, I would agree that plants such as passion flowers or fuchsias could use a good trim to bring them into line, but Monday’s Oscar Awards may have changed my thinking. The epiphany came to me while Javier Bardem delivered his acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actor in the film, No Country for Old Men and acknowledged that although he is a great actor, his bad coif played an important roll in helping him pick up one of those golden boys. Hmm…perhaps, this year, we could save bunch of labour on pruning and instead market Javier Bardem plants…it was just a thought.

Hits & Misses
Hit: Boss Moss
There is something plain old irresistible about the Scotch moss (Sagina subulata aurea) and the Irish moss (Sagina subulata) we’re growing. I don’t know if it’s the colour, texture or elegant simplicity that I love, but both are fantastic species that I wouldn’t be without. The Scotch moss is golden, while the Irish moss is a deeper green—but both are excellent shade plants for containers.

Miss: One of These Things Is Not Like the Other
It’s amazing just how different two similar varieties of bedding plants can be. A couple of weeks ago, we ‘stuck’ (yes, that really is the industry term for placing un-rooted cuttings into a rooting medium) two varieties of bacopa in our propagation greenhouse and waited patiently for them to initiate roots. The two varieties were placed side by side and treated identically. But did they respond indentically? Umm…no. The one variety called ‘Copa Rose’ produced thick lush leaves and lots of vigorous roots. The other (which will remain nameless!) looked emaciated and horrible and made a beeline to the compost bin. Needless to say, the literature that accompanied the bacopa to the bin extolled the beauty of the flowers but somehow left out the fine print about vigour. I guess a grower’s greenhouse is where glossy brochures and reality collide.

Question of the Week
How do I know what type of mulch to use?
There are two commonly used types of mulch: inorganic (rock based) and organic (plant based). Inorganic mulches are best used in alpine gardens, where they are needed to keep moisture away from the crowns of plants, and in Japanese gardens, where they are integral to design. Organic mulches are preferred in most other gardens because they improve the soil and are more economical. Organic mulches vary in particle size, ranging from compost (more of a top-dressing than a mulch) to bark chunks. The size chosen depends on the amount of attractiveness that’s desired. If appearance is not a concern, you may opt for arborist’s chips, which can often be obtained free of charge. If appearance is important, cocoa bean hulls or dyed wood chips can be used.

Organic mulches decompose over time and need to be topped up periodically.

The Business
Monday, March 3, “A Mother’s Legacy”
We are very excited to announce that Recreating Eden, Vision TV’s Gemini Award-winning spiritual gardening series, will be present an episode dedicated to our mother, Lois. It’s called “A Mother’s Legacy” and will air Monday, March 3, Channel 93. Check the Vision TV website for the show time in your city.

Trend Spotting

Tillandsia is a fascinating genus of air plants that is sure to raise a few eyebrows. Air plants are epiphytes, meaning their roots grow above ground, attaching themselves to rocks or other plants. Furry scales on their foliage allow them to absorb water and nutrients from the air and airborne dust. Plants that don’t need soil or containers!—what’s not to like?

Did You Know?
Coffee comes from the Arabic word kahveh, meaning stimulant.

“The flowers of late winter and early spring occupy places in our hearts well out of proportion to their size.”
–Gertrude S. Wister

first printed February 14, 2008

Hopefully, once you have finished reading this article you will feel compelled to tear it into tiny pieces and toss it in the dirt. And no, before you send Dr. Phil my way, this odd declaration has nothing to do with some self-deprecating need to have my writing disappoint or anger you. What I really want is to get you thinking of newspaper as a material that’s excellent not only for keeping minds enlightened, but also for keeping weeds in the dark.

Newsprint, as gardeners discovered at the dawn of the printing press, is a rather good material for reducing weed germination. Just a few sheets laid down between rows of vegetables or shrubs can inhibit the emergence of tiny weeds. Of course, there’s nothing magical about a newspaper’s ability to suppress weed growth. It simply acts as a light-reducing, physical barrier.

The largest component of newsprint is nothing more than finely chopped wood fibres, which are comparable to any other organic mulch material, from compost to pine bark. However, the biggest difference with newsprint is that it breaks down more rapidly than commercially available mulches because of its composition and high surface-to-weight ratio. Translation: a lot of a newspaper’s surface is exposed to moisture and micro-organisms, so it decomposes rather quickly. As of yet, we don’t have organic standards in Canada, but the OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute) in the U.S. lists newsprint as an organic product, and I would guess that when our standards are set (in the very near future), newsprint will qualify as organic here, too.

Most of the inks used on newsprint are petroleum based, which, to my way of thinking (from an environmental perspective), is of little concern in the garden. First of all, the ratio of ink to newsprint is rather small, and secondly, the tiny bit of ink that is on the newsprint is digested fairly rapidly by various soil microbes found in gardens. Of course, that’s not to say that dumping a few litres of petroleum-based products is ever a good idea, but the volume of ink that comes with a few layers of newsprint is entirely manageable.

Some of the research I’ve read on newsprint’s role in weed suppression states that shredded newsprint is more effective than overlapped sheets of newsprint. Apparently, shredded newsprint can be fluffed up, forming a looser but thicker layer, which is a more effective weed barrier than the thin sheets. However, having said that, I would never put shredded paper into my garden for two reasons. First, I think it would look rather ugly, and secondly, a good wind would blow it throughout the neighbourhood. And I’ll take a few weeds over angry neighbours any day. Since flat sheets of newspaper won’t win any yard-and-garden-beautification awards either, simply place a thin layer of compost over top of the newsprint to conceal your handy work.

So, if you think that newsprint might be worth trying, just keep in mind that although it is cheap and environmentally friendly, it won’t control the really tough perennial weeds, such as quackgrass and thistle. However, if you have a small vegetable patch with rows of carrots, beets and the like, you might want to give newsprint a try. Then again, if you think that this is the stupidest gardening article you’ve ever read and pitch it out the backdoor, well you might inadvertently be giving the weed-killing newsprint a chance anyway.

Hits & Misses: Encores & High maintenance
Question of the Week: What do I do with my celeriac?
Science & Technology: Porcupine whine
The Path to Enjoy 2009: History repeating

I know I shouldn’t have laughed the other night when my daughter began crying about her homework, but I couldn’t help myself. Her frustration was due to a Grade 4 English assignment that involved writing a fairytale to fit on no more than five double-spaced pages. Having written 10 pages of her fairytale, my exasperated daughter screamed out that not only was she less than half way through her story but also that a five-page fairytale was “impossible and stupid.” Now, seeing as I was 650 words into my 500-word maximum Western Living magazine article, I could empathize to a certain degree…damned genetics! Whenever I ramble on with my writing, I always remember Dad quoting Winston Churchill. Apparently, Churchill had ended a letter to a friend of his with “I’m sorry I wrote you a long letter but I didn’t have time to write you a short one.” Uh…I think I will stop my intro right here.

Hits & Misses
Hit: Encore!
I know, I know. I’m always writing about primulas at this time of year, but I just can’t resist! Everyday, I walk past a sea of primula that yield a multitude of brilliantly coloured flowers that perfume the entire greenhouse with a truly amazing fragrance. To my way of thinking, primulas are the very definition of spring.

Miss: High Maintenance
Heat is a friend and an enemy from a grower’s perspective. Grow plants too cool and they stop growing and become more susceptible to root rot and leaf spot. But grow them too warm and plants become lanky, weak and—you guessed it—more prone to root rot and leaf spot. This year we have a few begonias that have been grown just a tad too warm and are a little too tall for their own good. The solution is to move them from their nice, warm, 20°C environment to a slightly cooler, 16°C greenhouse for a few weeks. It’s amazing how quickly a temperature change of a degree or two can change the life of a plant.

Question of the Week
What do I do with my celeriac?
To serve celeriac on its own as a vegetable dish, cook it as you would a turnip. The cut surface of raw celeriac darkens quite quickly when exposed to air, so if you want to retain its milky colour, don’t cut it until just before cooking. If you’re serving it raw, simply rub the cut surfaces with lemon juice or vinegar. A great choice for enhancing soups or adding flavour to vegetable juices, stews and salads.

Science & Technology
Porcupine Whine
When porcupines dine on bark, they’re also dining on the tree’s vascular cambium, the thin layer of tissue beneath the bark. Vascular cambium is responsible for moving nutrients from the leaves to the roots, and destroying this cambium eventually starves the tree to death. We’ve lost cherry, apple, pear and spruce trees in exactly this way, so as you can imagine, porcupines are one of the least welcome visitors to a yard or farm.

The Path to Enjoy 2009
History Repeating
“Are you willing to consider some new ways of constructing this building?” was the question our architects asked us last week. Well, yes, but we never thought that our follow-up meeting today would include ideas that involved using rubber tires, straw, scrap lumber and rusted metal in our new location. In that moment, it became clear to Bill, Valerie and myself that we needed to think outside the box and, in some ways, get back to our roots. Convention, after all, was not something our parents always subscribed to. When Dad started on this farm, his first greenhouse was made of wood trusses from a cancelled project with Nelson Lumber. The first root cellar was insulated with straw, and rubber tires were used to hold down the roof. Today, nearly 45 years later, we’re considering using some of the same materials and methods. Can it work? It might just be a little bit of history repeating.

Did You Know?
An Oriental sacred lotus seed germinated after lying dormant at the bottom of a dry ancient lake bed for over 1200 years.

“Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.”
–Lawrence Clark Powell

First published February 7, 2008

A weekly ritual of mine is to ‘walk the crop’ with the growers in our greenhouses. Actually…walking, bending, picking up plants and sticking my face into the flowers and foliage is probably a more apt description, but it’s hard to find something that rhymes with that.

In all seriousness though, an up-close-and-personal inspection is the only way to determine if plants are experiencing stress—especially the kind caused by insect pests that hide within plant canopies. I know I’ve made the classic mistake of giving the thumbs-up to a perfunctory visual sweep of a crop, only to learn there was a serious bug problem lurking beneath waves of foliage. Had I bent over for a closer inspection, I’d likely have found the clandestine pests and devised a plan for giving them the boot.

Although pest discovery is an important reason for walking the crop, it certainly isn’t the only one. By walking and inspecting you can detect a multitude of problems, and early detection is the key to keeping problems from escalating.

Of course, when you’re growing thousands of plant varieties, 100 per cent success is a pipedream, but fortunately, there’s always something to learn from the misses. So with that in mind, I thought it might be interesting to invite you to join me for the walk every few months so that you can see some of the hits and inevitable misses that are all part of growing plants. Here we go!

Monday afternoon, 1 p.m.
I join four growers and we begin the walk, starting with an inspection of the high-intensity lamps that flood our ornamental grasses with light. Even in a greenhouse, mid-winter light levels are too low to keep many plants growing happily. When I attempt to measure the light with my handy-dandy light meter, I also manage to flip over a flat of grasses with my size 13 shoe. Judging by the looks in the eyes of the growers, I get the distinct feeling that I might be just another greenhouse pest and move on silently with my tail between my legs.

Next stop: a sprawling aisle of new succulent varieties. Most of them look great, but one has developed some bronze-coloured dead patches on its leaf blades. Everyone looks to me for the answer, and I find myself wishing for a Star Trek-like tricorder that provides instant diagnoses. Since I don’t, I deduce that the damage is likely the result of chilling injury and decide to blanket them to bring up the heat. Hopefully it’ll solve the problem.

On the walk through the Easter lilies, we all comment on the huge variability in crop height. Most customers like an Easter lily in the 40-cm-tall range, so we decide to split the crop into tall and short specimens so that we can better regulate the height and still have them bloom at the right time. Easter lilies are always a bit of a nail biter. Grow them cool, and they stay short but might not bloom on time. Grow them warm, and they bloom on time but might get too tall.

In Greenhouse 10, we notice that the azaleas that we trained into heart shapes for Valentine’s Day are a little too exuberant, so we give them the ‘cold shower’ by sticking them in our 8C coldframe for a week or so. Talk about killing the mood. The hydrangeas, primula and cineraria, on the other hand, appear right on track, so we give them the nod and move along.

Last stop: the fuchsia cuttings. They’re a tad slow to root, so we add some high-intensity lights to the propagation area, remembering the rough rule of thumb that for every one per cent increase in light, there is a one per cent increase in growth. With that, we call it a walk and conclude that our concerns are relatively minor and are far outnumbered by the hits.

As we get closer to the time of the year when plants move from the greenhouse to their new homes in gardeners’ yards, I hope that the walk-the-crop principle will also make the change of address. If it does, I guarantee you, too, will have more hits than misses to report. After all, a miss usually owes its existence to a missed opportunity to observe the beginning of a problem…Of course, it could also be due to a size 13 shoe.

Hits & Misses: Tissue culture & gray mould
Question of the Week: What can I do to get my plants off to a good start this year?
Science & Technology: Plants at work

It isn’t a great revelation to say that flowers and Valentine’s Day go together like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. But having flipped though Paisley’s Illustrated Language of Flowers, I was surprised to learn that the old Valentine’s flower formula of roses equal I love you, is just the beginning of the inextricable relationship between flowers and feelings. In fact, the moment you venture beyond roses, a whole unspoken language is revealed. For example, did you know that endive (Cichorium endivia) means “frugality”? And really, that should come as no surprise because anyone who would give his or her significant other a bouquet of endive probably still has the first dollar they ever made. The variegated tulip (Tulipa spp.), on the other hand, means “beautiful eyes” and is bound to put any guy onto the starting line of the romance all-star team. Of course, if all stories I’ve been hearing about forgotten Valentine’s Days are true, I would say that the most appropriate flower for a lot of men would have to be Love Lies Bleeding (Amaranthus caudatus), which appropriately means “hopeless not heartless.” Hmm…it could just be the romantic in me, but to my way of thinking, if you have a heart, there’s always hope.

Amaranthus caudatus a perfect pick for hopeless romantics.

Hits & Misses
Hit: Tissue Culture
I’ve never seen as many wonderful canna lilies as I have this year. And they’re not just beautiful, either—they’re incredibly vigorous, too. The reason for their outstanding performance can be attributed, largely, to one thing: tissue culture. Tissue culture is a propagation method that involves harvesting the tiniest tips of plants and then growing the tips into disease-free transplants. Worldwide, cannas are gaining notoriety for being infected with viruses, and the old propagation method of simply digging and dividing roots just accelerates the spread of the disease. Tissue culture circumvents the disease problem and assures growers and gardeners that the cannas will be clean. In my opinion, tissue culture is the only way to go.

Miss: Gray Mould
Fuzzy-leafed cuttings can be a bit of a pain to root. This year, a few of the geraniums succumbed to disease because their leaves didn’t dry out thoroughly enough between the frequent mistings we gave them. Diseases such as gray mould love that environment. Warmth and moist geranium leaves are all it needs to become established, and it can multiply very rapidly under these conditions. The solution? Simple. Ensure that free-standing foliar water is kept to a minimum.

Question of the Week
What can I do to get my plants off to a good start this year?
One of the first things that my mother taught me about growing plants was that watering is one of the most important tasks. The second was that a sturdy water wand with a flood nozzle is essential. The gentle but high-volume shower of droplets delivers a good soaking, without bowling over plants. A high-quality rubber hose is a must, too. Vinyl hoses crack and are difficult to handle, while a good rubber hose remains supple and easy to move around the garden. And if you prefer to water with a can, I recommend investing in a good galvanized metal one, such as a Haws model. Besides being durable, they are perfectly balanced in your hand and have long spouts to make reaching plants much easier.

Science & Technology
Plants at Work
A simple way to increase employee job satisfaction is to add plants to the working environment. According to research from Texas A&M University, employees who worked in offices that had plants and windows reported higher overall quality of life scores. In fact, the no plants/no windows group was the only one that stated that they felt miserable. Hats off to the Texas A&M University researchers for a scientific approach to the plants-equal-happiness equation, but I can’t say that I am surprised by the results.

Did You Know?
Ethiopia’s national flower is the canna lily.

“Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.”

–e.e. cummings

First published January 21, 2008

If December gets to be known as Christmas month, then February should have its own special designation, too. Therefore, I’m unofficially declaring it seed month! I think it’s a reasonable request, too, because to my way of thinking, February is inextricably linked to germinating seeds. Most of that has to do with the fact that I spent many a day watching my parents delight in germinating seeds on the heat radiator in our sunny living room while the yard was still packed with snow.

Dad and Mom had no choice but to start many of their seeds themselves because, unlike today, there were no greenhouse specialists who supplied seedlings. You either started them yourself or were out of luck.

Nowadays, there’s a much greater range of seedlings available in the marketplace, but that still doesn’t mean that you’ll find all of your favourites available as transplants. Since quite a number of plants don’t ‘hold’ well in greenhouse packs or pots, growers simply don’t sell them as plants—only as seeds. That means if you want to grow some of the most outstanding plant varieties available, you too will need to adopt February as your seed month.

Now, if the idea of planting seeds is a little too pedestrian for your tastes, I have to say, you don’t know what you’re missing. Seeds are some of nature’s most intriguing structures, and you really owe it to yourself to try at least one foray into the world of germination.

For example, from the strange-but-true file, did you know there are boy seeds and girl seeds? Well then, look no farther than the good old cucumber. If you open up a package of cucumber seed, you might be surprised to find the odd blue seed mixed in with the regular beige ones. Well, the blue seeds are dyed that colour to show that they are androdioecious (capable of producing individual plants that are almost exclusively male flowered and unable to yield fruit). The unaltered seeds are gynodioecious (almost exclusively female flowered, individual plants that will produce fruit).

Why have gendered seed, you ask? Well, much like our human species, cucumbers don’t need a lot of male flowers kicking around to get the pollination job done. One or two male plants can provide plenty of pollen to fertilize a lot of female flowers. The end result is that fruit yields are much higher in gardens where the ratio of female to male flowers is large. In other words, females don’t need a lot of males—they just need a few good ones…I’m talking about plants, of course. So, if you’ve ever had a spectacular row of cucumbers plants covered in yellow blossoms but been disappointed by a scrawny harvest, it’s likely that a lot of those blooms were male flowers.

Starting indoors
So now that I’ve shamelessly used sex to titillate you into trying seeds, here are some tips for starting them indoors.

Always start with the highest quality seedling mixture you can buy. Poor-quality seed often gets the blame when seedlings fail to emerge, but 9 times out of 10, poor-quality soil is to blame.

Also, there’s no point in going to the trouble of buying clean seedling mixture and then subjecting it to a dirty work area. Success with seedlings requires that everything that comes in contact with them is disease free. That means clean soil, clean trays, clean tools and clean water.

Seedling soil should be watered fairly heavily prior to sowing but never after. The irresistible temptation is to soak seed flats, but over watering will drown seeds or wash them to the sides of the flats. Gentle, consistent misting will do the trick.

Seedlings also need warm soil for successful germination, so always place seedling flats on a heated surface, and keep the soil temperatures between 22 and 24˚C. However, once seedlings begin to emerge, move the flats to a bright, cool (16˚C) spot. Don’t hesitate for even a day. Failing to move the seedlings to a cooler zone is where most people go wrong. Bright and cool environments yield stocky, tough plants; warm environments with poor light will yield stretched, weak seedlings that won’t adapt well to the outdoors.

So if you don’t have “Start seeds in February at home” written on your 2008 resolutions list, add it. I think that once you try it, you’ll be hooked and, lets face it, resolving to explore the sex lives of seeds is infinitely better than that tired old weight loss/get fit resolution.

Hits & Misses: Umbrella pines & things that go bump in the night
Question of the Week: Will adding sand to my soil increase the drainage?
Science & Technology: Night Watch

I am spoiled. There—I said it. It really struck me this week that I take for granted that every day, regardless of how cold and miserable it is outside, I get to walk about greenhouses filled with tropicals and spring bedding plants. Of course, I know that once I leave the greenhouses, the reality of the prairie winter will hit me square in the face, but even so, the hours I spend in a tropical oasis way outnumber the minutes I spend in the cold outdoors. I know! Spoiled! Hmm…as I get older, the thought of adding some sand and a heated pool to the greenhouses doesn’t seem as far-fetched as it once did.

Hits & Misses
Hit: Umbrella Pines
The umbrella pines (Pinus pinea) are receiving a lot of accolades from customers and staff. I think it’s the pine’s wonderful texture and the attractive pots that they’re grown in that are really striking peoples’ fancies. They are Zone 4–5 plants, which means they’re not reliable outdoor plants for our climate, but they really can’t be treated as standard houseplants, either. The reason they don’t fall perfectly into the latter category is that umbrella pines require a 10-week dormancy period (in 3–10°C conditions) around the end of January/beginning of March. After the dormancy period, they can be moved to a sunny window and treated as houseplants—and fabulous ones at that!

The foliage is so dense on this tree that some people mistake it for a plastic plant.

Miss: Things That Go Bump in the Night
One situation that I find both annoying and disappointing is when I receive a shipment of clay or metal patio pots, open the crate and find nothing but damaged goods. It just seems so senseless. Carefully crafted pots should never be destroyed in shipment. Of course, we can claim for the damage, but everyone in the chain—from manufactures to shippers to retailers—suffers. The damage can’t always be blamed on the shipping company, either. If the packaging is poorly done, it is nearly impossible to receive a shipment of pots and not find at least a few clay pots cracked or some metal containers looking like they have been in a traffic accident. Part of the equation simply escapes me: if thousands of eggs can get shipped to supermarkets unscathed, can we not figure out a better way to package and ship pots?

Question of the Week
Will adding sand to my soil increase the drainage?
Reaching for a bag of sand is the natural inclination for a lot of gardeners, but it can be a very serious mistake. Most sands are quite fine and often transform hard clay into even harder concrete! Sand fills in the pore spaces in clay soils, creating a solid, nearly impenetrable block. Unless a huge amount of sharp, coarse sand can be added to the clay soil—enough to create about a 50/50 ratio of coarse sand to clay—adding a bit of sand only makes matters worse.

Science & Technology
Night Watch
Plants are not often thought of as restless sleepers, but many of them are. Plants actually have biological clocks, and several species undergo ‘nyctinastic’ or sleep movements. The leaves on some plants, like the wood sorrel, will drop their leaves from a horizontal position to a nearly vertical position at night. One hypothesis for this nyctinastic movement is that it prevents absorption of moonlight, thus protecting the plants photoperiodic clock so that it can grow and reproduce at the optimum time of the year.

Did You Know?
Last year, the NFL planted 3.5 acres of trees to offset the estimated 260 tons of CO2 that were generated by the Super Bowl in Miami.

“Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.”
–William Dement

first published January 24, 2008

Poplars and prairies—it’s hard to think of one without the other. Over the last century, poplars have been planted in vast numbers across the prairies and, for the most part, it’s because they were a practical choice for our climate. My family alone planted hundreds on our farm to create hardy shelterbelts that would grow quickly and endure extremely cold and windy winters. And even though poplars have long been thought of as weedy and out of style, they continue to be planted because their resilience and toughness trump their questionable beauty—or that is, they used to.

If nature has its way, the resilience of poplars might be put to the test in next few years. A new and potentially serious poplar disease that’s indigenous to Eastern Canada has shown up in Manitoba and could threaten a wide variety of poplar species in both Saskatchewan and Alberta. It is called Bronze Leaf Disease (BLD), and it’s caused by a fungus called Apioplagiostoma populi. The fungi’s hallmark, as the disease’s name implies, is that it rapidly transforms poplar leaves from a healthy green to a sickly bronze.

April showers make leaves cower
The life cycle of BLD looks something like this. Showery, mild weather (18C or so) during mid to late spring causes the fungi to produce spores that are then dispersed to poplar leaves via the wind and rain. By midsummer, infected leaves turn a reddish or orangey brown around their edges, and by late summer, the disease renders the leaves completely brown. The remainder of the cycle is just as straightforward. Throughout the winter, infected leaves tend to cling to the branches and come spring, the disease resumes its dastardly work. Sounds like a reasonable enough disease, right? Umm, no. If BLD had the decency to restrict itself to staying in the leaves, it would be, but unfortunately, it frequently has the audacity to move into the branches, causing sensitive species of poplar to die within a few years of infection.

Now, I don’t want to create a panic. After all, BLD is but one of many diseases we must contend with. However, it is one we really should keep an eye on—the most compelling reason being that the dominant species of broadleaf trees in our boreal forest are poplars, which means that BLD has the potential to cause serious damage to the forestry industry. Add the fact that Swedish columnar aspen and ‘Tower’ are two of the most popular poplar varieties for landscaping and you get what seems like a reasonable cause for concern.

Constant cleanup
There are no registered chemical controls for BLD and none on the horizon. So the best way to keep it out is to slam the door on it, which, practically speaking, means all poplars should be bought from reputable suppliers who check to make sure their trees are disease free. As for the existing trees in your yard, be sure to give them a once-over. If a poplar does look like it might be infected, zip-lock a leaf sample in a bag and take it to a garden centre that has trained staff capable of assessing the problem. If it is BLD, keep the disease under control by removing infected leaves during the summer and raking them up during fall cleanup. Removal of dead branches and pruning to thin the tree canopy (thereby increasing air movement) will also help. Of course, pruning millions of hectares of boreal forest is neither practical nor cost effective, but what we can do is monitor the problem. And that’s exactly what the provincial governments across the prairies are doing. To date, with the exception of Manitoba, there is only scattered anecdotal evidence of BLD showing up here.

That’s BLD in a nutshell: audacious, a lot to clean up after, but not out-maneuverable. In fact, when it comes to combating BLD, the saving grace for poplars might just be their reputation for being a weedy species. After all, in my 30 years in the horticultural business, I’ve never heard of any disease that could eradicate a weed—and I’ve looked…trust me on that.