Garden Tip #162

Information on trendy colorful potatoes is available from Oregon State University.
If we have a cool wet growing season watch out for the dreadful Late Blight! Read about how to control this fungal disease from Pacific Northwest Plant Disease Management Handbook.

Garden Tip #136

Has the sweet aroma of lilacs tempted you to cut a few twigs for the house? Lilacs and other woody flowering shrubs can be disappointing in an arrangement unless they receive special treatment before they go in the vase.

As you cut the branches, place them in water. When you get them in the house, submerge the branches up to the flower in coolish water let them sit for 30 minutes or so, this is a sort of curing step and is very important. Before putting the lilacs into the new water, strip all but the most necessary leaves, and then break the stems at the bottom. They should be split at the ends to open the capillaries so water can reach the flowers. Ideally you should cut the flowers early in the morning, as that is the best time to cut and then don’t arrange them till later in the day. When you are ready to put the branches in a vase add a tiny bit of bleach and a little sugar to the water, its best if this water is also cool.

Then just enjoy them. Add more water daily keeping the level high and change it if the water gets cloudy or smelly, but the bleach should keep this from happening. Also moving them to a cool location at night, like a back porch helps even more. Processing woody branches takes more time but it is worth it in the long run.

Garden Tip #421

While garden centers sell some native plants for general use, thoughtful gardeners and restoration practitioners will want to purchase locally appropriate and ethically sourced plants.

Native plant societies, such as the Washington NPS, usually publish resources on where and how to source native plants.
Conservation districts, such as King Conservation District, often have annual spring native plant sales.
In Washington, the Native Plant Salvage Foundation organizes events to collect plants threatened by development.

Garden Tip #134

August is a good time to lift and divide your Bearded Iris, but don’t touch your Pacific Coast Native Iris until the rains return in fall. To learn more about the joys of growing this “Flower of the Rainbow” go to the American Iris Society’s website.

The King County Iris Society holds lectures and events throughout the year and publishes a monthly newsletter. Their annual rhizome sale is September 13 and 14 at Crossroads Mall 15600 NE 8th St, Bellevue. To join the society send $10.00 to KCIS Membership Chair, PO Box 95538, Seattle, WA 98145-2538. Online at www.kcis.org.

Garden Tip #157

If you jumped the gun and planted your basil too early in the season, it may have been stunted by cold evening temperatures. Don’t despair, you can still have enough basil to make all the pesto you want by buying and planting 4 inch sized starts in late June or July. Basil wants more water than drought loving Mediterranean herbs, so plant it with your vegetables or annuals instead. Read more about Herb of the Year for 2003.

Garden Tip #420

Growing native plants in the garden gives it a sense of place and a connection to local ecoregions. That simple sounding idea sometimes seems to ignite deep passions. True believers want to cast out all exotic (non-native) plants from the garden and even commercial sites with a goal of restoring the landscape to precolonial conditions. On the other side, skeptics argue trying to recreate an imagined pristine natural habitat ignores the reality that people and birds and the wind have always moved plants around the globe. Evolving to grow in a particular site means an organism is sufficiently suited to grow there, but not necessarily better suited than plants that evolved somewhere else.
The debate extends into whether or not anything can or should be done to contain invasive exotics. Do invasive plants decrease biodiversity? Does maligning exotic plants carry a subtext of nativism or xenophobia?

Natives and naturalized plants in the garden and wildlands reading list

Garden Tip #151

If you grow blueberries and found shriveled gray fruit mixed in with normal plump berries your bush is infected with “Mummy Berry” disease. To lessen the severity of the disease in next year’s crop, gather all the mummy berries you can find and throw them away. Add mulch in autumn to cover up the infected mummies that fell to the ground, and then cultivate around the bush in early spring to disrupt the fungal life-cycle that starts in the soil. Details and color pictures.

Garden Tip #145

Help reduce non-point source pollution, contaminants carried by storm water into streams and lakes, which harm salmon and other aquatic life by planting a rain garden. The idea is to plant a garden that will capture and filter rain runoff before it flows into our local waterways. Read about how to design a rain garden and what plants work best in the March/April 2003 issue of the American Gardener Magazine (available at the Miller Library).
An example of how Seattle Public Utilities has implemented the idea on neighborhood scale.
More information on rain gardens from Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Garden Tip #140

Think you’ll solve your weed problem by laying down some weed-barrier fabric, bark mulch and a few shrubs planted through a slit? This “permanent” solution may in fact cause more weed problems than it solves. Linda Chalker-Scott, Extension Urban Horticulturist, Puyallup Research and Extension Center, Washington State University did research to debunk this myth. Read about why
landscape fabric fails.

Garden Tip #20

Amaryllis bulbs are too beautiful (and expensive) to simply throw away after blooming. Starr Ockenga’s book, Amaryllis (Clarkson Potter/Publishers, 2002) describes how to care for the bulbs so they will produce new flowers year after year. In a nutshell,

fertilize the bulbs bi-weekly with a balanced houseplant food after the flowers fade;
move outside to an eastern exposure after spring night time temperatures reach 60 degrees;
stop feeding and slowly cease watering towards the end of summer to induce dormancy;
cut off all foliage, green or yellow, and store in a cool place for three months;
start watering again to stimulate the new flower to bloom.

Ockenga also describes growing Amaryllis in water, and suggests keeping the water level at the base of the bulb, and changing the water periodically or adding charcoal to prevent algae growth. If you plan to save your bulb, you may need to pot it in a container with soil. You may store the bulbs bare-root, rather than in soil, but when you do this, you should sprinkle them with water once a month to keep them alive. She says it is easier on the plants to store them in pots (in soil). If you have space, you can refrigerate your bulbs (not in pots)and store them at 45-50 degrees in aerated bins for at least 6 weeks. Don’t store them near fruit, as ripening fruit releases ethylene gas which will cause your bulb to rot or produce misshapen blooms.

Here are links to additional information:
Iowa State University
University of Illinois Horticulture Facts