January « 2017 « The Yellow Farmhouse Garden

January 31, 2017

Greenery is fashionable this year

Filed under: Related topics — bob @ 3:38 pm

The folks who help drive popular culture have finally acknowledged what gardeners have known all along, green is the color of the year for 2017. Actually green has been the color of the year every year for gardeners. More specifically, for non-gardeners, this year the color is Pantone “Greenery 15-0343“, a very specific shade of green.

Pantone color engineers describe this shade of green as “nature’s neutral” since it can appear wherever plants predominate. When choosing a color, they make a serious attempt to reflect what they see as happening in the world — a “color snapshot” of our global society at a certain point in time.

It may seem frivolous to some to have a color of the year, but when you realize that people are very much visual creatures, it makes a lot of sense.

As someone with a background in biology, I see green as the color chlorophyll. Without chlorophyll, there would be no photosynthesis and without photosynthesis, there would be no life on earth as we know it. To fuel photosynthesis, leaves absorb red, blue, purple, yellow and all of the wavelengths of sunlight except green to gather energy from the sun. Green is no use to plants so they let it bounce off their leaves instead of absorbing it. And that is the color our eyes see making the leaves appear to be green to us.

There are of course many shades and hues of green in the natural world, Greenery 15-0343 happens to be one of them. Gardeners use leaf color to design their plantings as well as flowers. The bright, eye-catching, chartreuse-green of Marguerite Ipomea is one well-known example of using leaf color as a design feature.

A plant’s leaf color is a fairly accurate indicator of its general health. Many disorders have symptoms that show up as changes in leaf color. For example, a nitrogen deficiency will cause lower leaves to turn a lighter shade of green. An observant, experienced gardener will know that something must be done quickly to bring the nitrogen levels back into balance before serious damage is done to the plant.

Manufactures, graphic designers, architects,fashion designers and others have geared up for a Greenery year. If you keep your eye open, you’ll notice this color popping up all over in 2017 and not just in the landscape.

Bob

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January 12, 2017

Re-purpose broken window blinds into plant tags

A new winter gardening project presented itself yesterday. The frame on one of our window blinds snapped as I was pulling on the cord to open it and the whole works crashed to the floor.

As it turns out, mini-blind slats make fine pot markers, you know, those small white tags that gardeners use to identify trays and pots of seedlings. The slats are just about the same width as the markers that are sold in gardening departments every spring.

One big advantage homemade markers have over the garden-store variety is that you can easily cut them with a pair of scissors to whatever length you need, short ones for flats of seedlings, or longer ones for potted plants.

One set of broken window blinds will provide materials for years worth of plant tags.

Homemade tags decreases the chance that seedlings will be mislabeled. Since each set of blinds will yield dozens of markers, you won’t be tempted to skimp on labels, that way every pot or six-pack divider can have it’s own tag.

Re-purposing old blinds reduces the amount of plastic debris that eventually finds it way into the landfill. And you save a few bucks along the way. Plus, it’s fun making your own gardening supplies and this happens to be a very easy project.

I’m looking at that high-quality braided pull-cord on those blinds too, but I haven’t figured out a use for that yet.

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January 5, 2017

Ways insecticides work

Filed under: Insects,Pesticides — bob @ 10:42 am

Winter is a time of planning for gardeners. I decided during the deep, dark days of the dead of winter to take inventory of my fertilizers and pesticides. That got me thinking about some of the different insecticides and how they work.

Chemical insecticides have been around a long time. Fortunately, modern chemistry has eliminated the need for most of the nastiest chemicals we used to use in food products. The lead-based and arsenic-based materials used in the nineteenth and early twentieth century were made obsolete by more sophisticated chemicals introduced into the marketplace after world war two. Take for example the organophosphates, they were the by-product of chemical warfare research done in Germany during WWII. I remember using some of those products from time to time during heavy insect outbreaks in order to save a crop. I’ll tell you one thing, they sure did the job. Unfortunately, many gardeners used them constantly and on everything. I guess they thought if it was legal and on the market it was fine to use it like that. Sometimes they even eyeballed the amount to use instead of carefully measuring it before mixing. While a few organophosphates are still on the market, most of the harsher ones are no longer available for use in the home garden.

Different insecticides work by different means. For example, the contact insecticides kill when the insect comes in contact with it, either by being directly coated by it or walking across an area on the plant that has been treated.

Stomach poisons work when an insect consumes the material and it enters into the insect’s digestive system. The biological insecticide Bacillus thuringenses is a stomach poison. It’s commonly use in organic gardening.

Bacillus thuringiensis was the first bacterial insecticide approve for use in home gardens.

Some insecticides are absorbed by plants and are moved to all parts of the plant and remain inside the plant for a relatively long time. These are the systemic insecticides. They are often used on ornamental plants that are not intended to be eaten. I used systemic insecticides many years ago when I had over two hundred roses bushes to care for. The systemics work great for controlling rose pests.

The translaminar insecticides insecticides move just a short distance into the leaves and are not carried through the entire plant. Think of a leaf being constructed of a number of different layers, like a piece of laminated plywood. A translaminar insecticide only moves into the first or second layer of the leaf. The organic pesticide spinosad is a translaminar material.

Some insecticides work by a combination of two or more of the these modes of action. Often manufactures combine insecticides in order to gain the advantage of multiple modes.

Because an insecticide can act differently on various types of plants, it’s important to closely follow the printed label and not try to extrapolate other uses on your own. This holds true for both conventional and organic insecticides.

Of course we’re not applying insecticides to our gardens right now but it’s not too early to remind ourselves of these things well before the gardening season.

Bob

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January 3, 2017

Preventing scale honeydew on overwintering plants inside your home

Filed under: Greenhouse,Houseplants,Indoor Gardening,Insects — Tags: honeydew, overwintered plants, scale insects — bob @ 4:19 pm

With Christmas and other hectic, holiday happenings , now may not seem like the best time to check those plants you brought inside for winter but it should be done soon.

When potted plants live outside during the summer, they become susceptible to infestations of all kinds of insects. Usually, if they are in reasonably good health they can tolerate a moderate insect attack. And natural predators like lady bugs and lace wings will keep the bad insect population to a minimum. But when plants are moved indoors, they loose the protection of those natural predators which can allow the insect population to grow.

Scale insects are the ones I have the most problem with. When I start to find a sticky coating, called “honeydew”, on the lower leaves, table, nearby furniture or floor, I know that the scale insects are ramping up their feeding. They can get out of hand quickly at that point and do some real damage to the plant– not to mention the mess they make. Honeydew is sometimes mistakenly called “sap” because the plant owner thinks it is the plant leaking sap all over the place. It’s not always easy to spot a scale infestation if you’ve never seen it before.

Yellow spots caused by scale feeding are one symptom to look for. The yellow spots are not always present however.

Yellow spots caused by scale feeding are one symptom to look for. The brown oval spots are the scale insect’s shell. The clear sticky substance is honeydew.

Scale feed by poking their “beak” into the the plant and feeding on the nutrients from the plant juices. Like most other animals, they excrete waste. In this case it is in the form of that sticky, syrupy honeydew. Honeydew contains a high concentration of sugar. But how and why do scale insects produce so much sticky residue? The answer is that they pick their feeding spot very carefully. If you remember from middle school biology, plants have two basic types of tubes inside. Those that carry water from the roots up into the plant are called xylem. The other tubes that carry nutrients manufactured by the leaves to the rest of the plant are called phloem.

It is the phloem where the scale insects like to poke their beaks. If they pierced a xylem tube by mistake, all they would get is mostly water and some dissolved minerals. The phloem sap contains sugars for energy, proteins for growth and other things necessary to sustain plant and animal life.

The scale can’t use all of the sugar dissolved in the phloem juices so they excrete the excess sugar which then falls all over the immediate area. Since it is primarily sugar, it is water soluble and fairly easy to clean up with a damp cloth. Small plants can be rinsed off in the sink or bathtub.

My citrus trees are way too big to rinse off in the bathtub and too heavy for me to move to the shower. Instead I use a damp cloth — or even my bare fingers– to rub off the scale from the leaves and branches whenever I find them. I find that if I do a few leaves every day, I can usually keep up with the multiplying insect population, especially if I remember to start early. If you wait too long, it can turn into a tedious, frustrating job.

One other by-product of honeydew is sooty mold, a black, powdery mold that grows om the surface of leaves and other surfaces. All of that sugar provides food for sooty-mold fungus which will grow and leave sticky surfaces with an unsightly black film that can rub off onto clothing.

Even though you may feel overwhelmed by the holiday rush, remember your plants, they will thank you for it.

Bob

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