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PLENTIFUL RAINS TURN GARDENS INTO VERDANT PARADISE
What a marvelous spring season we're having! I am in awe of many simple miracles of nature I've witnessed lately.
The view from my home-office window has offered repeated surprises. I look out at an 8-foot Norway spruce a few feet from my window. One minute, a red-tinged house finch perched on a spruce branch is carefully feeding a fledging finch whatever it is that gets transferred from one beak to another. A few minutes later, a robin lands in the spruce with a plump worm dangling out both sides of its beak. This spruce, by the way, is called 'Acrocona.' It has an irregular growth habit and forms forming abundant purple cones on the branch tips that glow in the landscape.
On another recent day, a pair of bright yellow goldfinch lighted on a purple allium flower just beyond the Norway spruce. To see them, I had to look through a stand of blue and white blooming iris and the swelling buds of a Cuthbert Grant (red) shrub rose. The globe-shape allium flowers are standing right next to another lavender flower whose name I can't remember.
(Some of you must also have flowers you can't identify! I try to keep track of names but each year I seem to have several new mysterious flowers I've planted sometime in the past and never got around to recording the names. I know how it happens...in the fall I buy a half dozen or so of those 25-cent perennial specials at the garden center. The plants have already gone dormant but the attendant assures me the plant is in there somewhere. Trouble is, they've also misplaced the nametag. So I plant the chunk of soil and forget about it until spring. Then, surprise, a blooming plant of unknown origin!)
The other day I was pruning new candles on three mugho pine shrubs growing not far from the plants described above. I noticed a collection of puffy orange sacks on the pine branches. In answer to a query, Chad Behrendt, University of Minnesota plant pathologist, suggested these orange galls are most likely caused by pine-oak rust fungus.
I also read a story in a Minnesota forestry newsletter this week that suggested the spore sacks might be a fungus named Coleosporium asterum. The alternate host for the first disease is oak and the alternate host for the second fungus is goldenrod. I have plenty of both plants, so the diagnoses make sense. More gardening mysteries.
Mature oak trees surrounding my house shade my largest garden area. This time of year, the shade-loving plants are reaching their full size and the mix of green color shades and leaf textures creates a delightful palette of color. In some respects, these subtle colors and textures are visually more interesting than bright, sun-loving flowers.
My Haralred apple tree is loaded with apples this year and I've been derelict in spraying the new crop of fruit. I've been traveling too much lately and each time I have an hour to mix up and apply the spray, it's either been raining or rain is predicted. If I don't get around to spraying soon, my apples may just have a higher protein content this year.
At least my apple tree still has apples. An Anoka County gardener recently complained on a gardening listserv I subscribe to about apple trees that dropped all their apples. Apples on trees of nine different varieties blossomed and formed fruit. An all-purpose fruit spray was applied according to directions.
The two most likely causes of total fruit drop a couple of weeks after bloom, according to Doug Foulk, University of Minnesota extension horticulturist, are poor pollination and a hard freeze during or after pollination occurs.
Chances are the cause was frost. A Wright County Master Gardener writes that, at an orchard in Stearns County, temperatures dropped to 22 degrees in mid-May and the orchard lost 90% of its apple crop. Other orchards in the area, she reports, also experienced severe frost damage. Apples that were damaged stayed small and in the days after the freeze, she says, if you opened up a damaged apple, the center was brown. At this point, all the apples have fallen off the tree.
Perhaps the later-than usual frost in mid-May nipped some of your fruit and your tender annual flowers and vegetables. My son, a first-year gardener in Shoreview, was dismayed to discover wilted tomato and pepper plants on May 17. He replanted with new seedlings but anytime frost kills spring plants, it's disappointing, especially for novice gardeners. Seasoned veterans probably either covered their young plants or waited to set them out until Memorial Day weekend.
I suppose I could be classified a seasoned gardener, but I'll admit I put my tomatoes, peppers and annual flowers out earlier. Fortunately, the frost that hit the northern suburbs wasn't as damaging here in the southwest suburbs, or at least not in my yard.
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PUTTING DOWN ROOTS:
A Delightful Blend of
Gardening Wisdom, Wit
and Whimsy
$10 + $2 for shipping
by Cliff Johnson |
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