George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

The Mystery of Morphing Plants

August 25th, 2020

   One question I get a lot is about plants that seem to be turning into something else (i.e. some other version of plant, not a lizard or monster or something).

A bigger-branched “reversion” is growing out of this dwarf Alberta spruce.

   A common one is the popular landscape evergreen dwarf Alberta spruce, that dense little pyramidal upright that flanks so many front doors.

   Often times, dwarf Alberta spruce will start growing a branch that looks like it came from a much bigger evergreen – one with longer needles, larger branches, and a much faster growth rate.

   Given a few years to grow, the oddball branch can dominate the bush and almost look like it’s a new tree growing out of the one you planted.

   People mention all kinds of possible explanations. In the 1970s, it would’ve been blamed on TMI. But in reality, this shape-shifting is a case of “reversion.”

   Reversion is an oddity of the plant world that involves genetic plant mutations that are sort of “undoing” themselves and going back to the growth habit of an ancestor.

   In the landscape, it typically happens to plants that came to us from breeders who capitalized on a chance mutation of a plant.

   Dwarf Alberta spruce, for example, is a type of native white spruce that was developed decades ago from a plant that put out unusually small and narrow needles and had a very slow, tight, conical growth habit.

   Mutated branches like this – called “witch’s brooms on conifers – can be removed from parent plants and grafted onto the roots or wood of other plants of the species to create a new plant with the mutated traits. Or a mutated cutting can be stuck in a potting medium and rooted to produce a new baby plant of its own.

   The gardening public sometimes prefers the mutated traits to the original ones. That’s why dwarf Alberta spruce, with its compact, slow-growing habit, became a huge hit despite being highly prone to attack from spider mites.

My Lawn Strangled Itself

August 18th, 2020

   A lot of lawns went brown during the weeks-long hot, dry spell in July.

This whole section of my front yard isn’t coming back.

   That’s normal and is a lawn’s way of “hiding out” in survival mode until conditions improve.

   A good rain or two typically brings a lawn out of summer dormancy, and it goes on to green up and start growing again.

   Not my lawn.

   About a third of it is dead, and I know what happened.

   Thatch.

   Thatch is a spongy layer of mostly dead grass stems and roots at the top of the soil. It’s normally a quarter- to half-inch thick and is useful for insulating the soil from temperature extremes and cushioning impact when we walk or play on a lawn.

   But when this thatch layer builds up faster than it’s breaking down, it can grow to levels that impede oxygen and rain from reaching the soil underneath.

   Anything more than an inch thick is trouble.

   I wasn’t too worried when big sections of my full-sun, sloped front yard starting going brown in June. It got browner quicker than a lot of other lawns, including my own lawn in the back yard.

   However, I’d seen lawns stay brown for four weeks or more, then bounce back completely after a single soaking rain.

   When we finally got a soaker toward the end of July, some of my front lawn showed green. Another rain that dropped nearly an inch a week later caused about two-thirds of the lawn to start growing again.

   Yet two huge swaths and a few other smaller patches stayed brown as straw at Halloween.

What Plants Won’t Deer Eat?

August 11th, 2020

   So here’s what I’ve learned after a year and a half of trying to garden up close and personal with deer.

Don’t you wish they’d just eat the grass?

   1.) Deer are picky. That’s right. You might’ve heard (and seen) that deer will eat just about anything when they’re hungry enough. And that’s right, too.

   However, deer have definite preferences for some plants over others. They start with their favorites (hosta, daylilies, tulips, eastern arborvitae, azaleas, young yews, roses, and rhododendrons, to mention a few) and then go down the list until they’re full.

   On one hand, that means that nothing you plant is safe from one day becoming deer dessert. But on the other, the lower you stay on their preference list, the better shot you have at them filling up in someone else’s yard.

   2.) Not all deer like the same thing. I suspect that like people, different deer have different food preferences at different times. That might explain why some people claim that deer never eat, say, panicle hydrangeas, while others say that’s the first thing they picked out in their yard.

   It might also help explain why deer-resistant plant lists don’t always agree.

   Different varieties or species of the same plant also seem to have enough taste or smell differences to either elevate them or lower them on the deer menu.

   Rutgers University’s venerable deer-resistant plant list (which I highly recommend) bears that out in its finding that deer seldom mess with Geranium macrorrhizum, occasionally dine on Geranium sanguineum and Geranium cantabrigiense, but frequently eat Geranium endressii.

   I’ve seen that in my own yard, where deer ate some varieties of my coleus but not others (at least yet).

   They also ate about half of all three of my arrowwood viburnums, but they haven’t touched any of my four Korean spice viburnums (yet).

   And I’ve seen deer walk by a plant for months and never touch it, only to gnaw it nearly to ground on a given night.

   Maybe they just happened to be more hungry than usual when they walked by the plant that time. Or maybe the eater in question just got done thinking, “I’m sure in the mood for a good spirea tonight!”

To Treat or Not to Treat?

August 4th, 2020

   We’ve reached that point in the growing season where much of our gardening time is spent dealing with “issues” that have cropped up with plants.

Spraying isn’t needed as much as some people think.

   By now, just about all bugs and diseases have made their annual appearances, not to mention troubles related to animals, weather, and such.

   Figuring out what’s gone wrong isn’t always easy, which is why some gardeners – fearing their plants will die if they don’t do something – turn to sprays, fertilizers, and other products in the hope that one of them will help.

   Unfortunately, that hail-Mary approach usually doesn’t work.

   If you’re not attacking a problem with the right treatment at the right time (assuming treatment was needed in the first place), you’re wasting time and money, needlessly polluting air, water, and sometimes yourself, and maybe even doing something that makes the problem worse.

   Now before you say, “Here goes another wacko organic rant,” this is not about the evils of the Ortho aisle.

   Sometimes plants really are going to die unless you take action.

   Sometimes treatment is justified and effective.

   And sometimes a chemical treatment is less harmful to people, plants, and the environment than some of the “natural” products and homemade concoctions that people assume are “safe.”  

   The missing puzzle piece here is detective work. Before taking any action on a plant problem, I think it’s worth investing in some homework to figure out what’s going wrong.

The WOOPS Way to Predict Weather

July 28th, 2020

   Forget AccuWeather, the National Weather Service, and even the Farmer’s Almanac.

Got this going on? Then WOOPS says no rain is in the forecast.

   If you’re a gardener and you really want to figure out what weather’s on the way, the most accurate system is one I’ve figured out… one I call the “WOOPS model of weather forecasting.”

   I’ve been using it for years, and I’ve found it’s the most accurate, laser-focused way to predict the weather – right down to what’s coming to your specific yard.

   WOOPS stands for “Weather Opposite Of Plant Situations.”

   It’s based on the principles of Murphy’s Law and has only two simple factors: 1.) determine what weather you really need at the moment, and 2.) expect the opposite.

   The most glaring example is the weather we’ve had for most of this month.

   If you watched the “regular” forecasts like a hawk, you probably had your green-lawn hopes raised by the almost daily predictions of thunderstorms – often 30 to 50 percent chances.

   Statistically, that means a storm should pan out on at least one out of every two or three days.

   I don’t know about you, but the storms missed my yard every time.

   That didn’t surprise me because my WOOPS model expected absolutely no meaningful rain, based on the fact that I just got done planting a whole yard full of new plants.

   New plants need a lot of water regularly, so what I really needed this summer was a summer like the past two – wetter than usual.

   WOOPS told me that wasn’t going to happen, so I was able to forecast a brutally hot and dry summer of 2021 as far back as last year, when I cleared out the jungle I inherited in order to plant this spring.

   WOOPS forecasts become even more accurate the higher that water bills go. Since my sewer-attached water bills in Pittsburgh are incredibly higher than my former Hampden Twp. water, sewer, and trash costs combined, I knew a dry summer was a lock.

   To put WOOPS simply, if you need rain, you’re going to get dry. I’ve had people in the Dillsburg area tell me that when they get into a dry spell, they can watch the weather radar and actually see storms split apart so the rain misses their yards right down the middle.