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January 27, 2008
Growing Beautiful & Healthy Houseplants
Master Gardener Column 1/26/08
I can’t bear to prune plants in the fall and then throw out the clippings. Instead, I root and plant them and then give them away at Christmas to neighbors and friends. Most of the recipients are grateful, but some look forlorn, as if to say, “What do I do with this?” They suffer from “black thumb,” a malady easily cured.
Caring for houseplants is easy and makes for healthier indoor air. They need the same things we do: water, food, light, and a little love and shelter. I talk to them regularly. They’re members of my family.
The first thing is light which is essential for growing and flowering plants. Too much or too little light causes spindly plants, yellowing or dropping leaves, and even death. The watchwords for light are intensity, duration, and quality. Intensity is affected by exposure. A southern exposure is the most intense, eastern and western about 60% of southern, and northern only about 20%. Intensity is also affected by such things as curtains, trees, weather, season, and shade from other buildings.
The length of daylight affects photosensitive houseplants, such as poinsettia, kalanchoe, and Christmas cactus buds, which flower only when the day light is short, 11 hours or less. If more light is needed, extra light can be provided with fluorescent lights.
In placing a plant, check the tag attached to most plants, research the plant’s needs in a book or on-line, or place it where you want and see what happens. The plant will let you know whether or not it’s happy.
After light, it’s water. Incorrect watering results in ugly and unwanted plants and sadly most plant deaths. Watering depends on many factors, such as soil composition, type of pot, and room temperature as well as types of plants. Dry and crusty top soil doesn’t mean the plant needs water. The roots use the water and are generally an inch down in the pot. Put your finger down into the soil about 2 inches (about 2nd finger joint) to see if the soil is moist. If you can’t get your finger in the soil, the soil may be too dense or the plant root bound. Don’t water unless it’s dry at that depth. Water until it runs out the bottom, but don’t let it sit in water because the roots may rot. After a while, the watering needs of each plant will become evident.
Feeding is last. Plants in pots need more than water. Water leeches out many nutrients in the soil. Most plants need nutrients only during their growing seasons: March to September. They don’t need food when they’re dormant. Food comes in many forms: granular, crystalline, liquid, or tablet. The form doesn’t matter as long as the directions are followed. Most can be diluted more than suggested. Frequency depends on the vigor and age of the plant. Some need food every 2 weeks to continue flowering while others can go a month. As in watering, feeding requires paying attention to the plant.
A couple of problems unique to Flagstaff are accumulating soluble salts and lack of humidity. Some plants need extra moisture. Soluble salts can reduce growth, brown leaf tips, cause lower leaf drop off, induce rot root, stunt new growth, and bring on wilt. Other obvious signs are whitish yellow crusts and white rings on the outside of clay pots. To prevent this let the water run out of the pot when watering. DO NOT LET IT SIT IN WATER. If salts still appear, leech the pot every 3-4 months by running extra water run through the soil but not when fertilizing. If everything else fails, empty the pot, clean it well, and put in new soil.
Plants needing extra humidity, such as ferns and tropical plants, can be put or hung in bathrooms. Room humidifiers work as do trays of wet pebbles, just as long as the accumulated salts are cleaned at regular intervals.
Healthy and beautiful plants require attention and care. Neglect as with family, friends, and pets usually results in poor health and behavior. Remember: house plants are “All in the Family.”
Loni Shapiro is a Master Gardener volunteer. Dana Prom Smith, a Master Gardener volunteer, is coordinating editor for the Master Gardener Column. He can be contacted at stpauls@npgcable.com. For more information about the Master Gardener Program, call Hattie Braun, Coordinator of the Master Gardener Program, at 774-1868 ext.17 or visit our Web Site: highelevationgardening.arizona.edu.
Posted by maxmaddy at 5:57 AM
January 23, 2008
Flagstaff Garden Starts CSA
What is the Flagstaff Garden Starts CSA?
The Flagstaff Garden Starts CSA is a collaborative effort between Mountain Meadow Farm and Flagstaff Native Plant and Seed. Our CSA’s mission is to provide high-quality, responsibly grown vegetable, herb, and edible flower starts to the Flagstaff community, while educating and bringing together backyard growers. We’d like the CSA to be an opportunity for gardeners to network, share ideas, and ultimately learn from one another. Members of this CSA will be taking local food production into their own hands, while procuring part of their food security.
For information contact:
Anne at (928) 773-9406 or flaggardenstarts@yahoo.com for more information.
To print a registration form:
Download file
Hattie Braun
Posted by maxmaddy at 6:33 AM
January 19, 2008
Cynthia Warzecha
Master Gardener Column 1/19/08
In a time when angst, alienation, and vitriol are fashionable, a conversation with Cynthia Warzecha is refreshing. She isn’t angry at her parents or ashamed of the place from whence she has come. She embraces them and sees her life as an adult a continuation of her life as a child in northern Minnesota. Her face shows it as do her hands resting comfortably in her lap. At ease with her background, she’s at ease with herself and thus with other people.
As she said, “In a Lake Wobegon kind of small town in northern Minnesota there aren’t many diversions, except the local tavern and the outdoors. My family chose the outdoors. I went fishing and agate hunting with my Dad. An outdoorsman, hunting for him wasn’t just a sport, but a way to put food on the table.” Never losing her love of the outdoors, as an adult, she has worked to sustain that world, the natural world, as the artificial world encroaches on it.
As such, she is currently the Area Assistant Agent, Natural Resources and Agriculture with the Coconino County Cooperative Extension, all of which means that she is on the faculty of the University of Arizona’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Rather than merely embracing her childhood in northern Minnesota, using it as a foundation, she’s has developed it. Her family valued education, but being of modest means, they couldn’t help her. As the first member of her family to seek a college education, she had to pay for it with work, grants, fellowships, and loans. So when she graduated from the University of Minnesota with both B.S. and M.S. degrees, her education was an achievement. She always wanted to accomplish something with her life and saw education as the way to do it.
She has taught English in Germany and worked for the Department of Transportation in Michigan, mitigating the adverse effects of new road construction on the environment, both natural and social, such as the disruption of communities and the despoiling of the natural environment. Her life then and now has been two-faced in that she faces two ways, natural and social and the intra-action betwixt the two.
For her, the world doesn’t work like a machine with interchangeable parts, but as an organism with feedback, each member affecting the others. Rather than external, human relationships with the environment are internal, such as the juniper-piñon woodlands where birds, small animals, grasses, and trees all intra-act with one another to form a biological community.
For her, nature isn’t “out there,” something that human beings observe as an object apart from themselves, such as “going out into nature” as though they were going out into the backyard. Nature isn’t a part but the whole of something, not an object, but the subject. In short, human beings are as much as part of nature as the Ponderosa or Arizona fescue. Her task is to see that the two don’t destroy each other, such as wildfires, which means that she has to work with “all sorts and conditions of men,” as the Prayer Book reads.
Her task is the sustainability of nature, that is, the conservation of natural resources, such as keeping the watersheds healthy and unpolluted. In addition, she works for the welfare of those unprotected biological communities, as they intra-act with those pesky creatures who seem bent on befouling their own nests. In working with human beings, her ease with herself is her secret weapon. Graciousness always seems to work.
She isn’t on a crusade. She’s doing a job. The job is to sustain nature so that human beings can continue to enjoy themselves as members of nature. For her, the Biblical mandate to subdue the earth is a call to sustain it for generations to come.
A tall, slim, attractive woman who likes to wear sweaters, Cynthia Warzecha is making the world richer for her presence. One of her enrichment activities is teaching a Master Naturalist Class in the fall. There it all comes together that nature is not only out there, but right here. For her, sustainability is self-preservation for the human race.
Dana Prom Smith is a Master Gardener volunteer and coordinating editor of the Master Gardener Column for Coconino County Cooperative Extension. He can be contacted at stpauls@npgcable.com. For more information about the Master Gardener Program, call Hattie Braun, the Master Gardener Program Coordinator, at 774-1868 ext.17 or visit our Web Site: highelevationgardening.arizona.edu.
Posted by maxmaddy at 8:28 PM
January 14, 2008
Mysterious Gift from the Garden
Master Gardener Column 1/12/08
As a naturalist for 30 years with the National Park Service in places like Yosemite and Sandy Hook, New Jersey, I have encountered some of nature’s most secretive fauna, including bighorn sheep at Lake Mead, mountain lions in Big Bend’s Chisos Mountains, and pink rattlesnakes inside the Grand Canyon. However, chance meetings with certain members of the spider clan are especially exciting and have not lessened since my move to Flagstaff 13 years ago.
Early in June, when I flipped on the light switch to my spare bedroom, a flicker of movement on the carpet caught my eye. As I tiptoed over, I realized that a small, tan multi-legged thing was sprinting along the baseboard, trying desperately to escape the light and me. Frightening in appearance with dark fangs and weird way of running, I was baffled at first but then remembered I had seen such a creature 25 years ago when I worked in Death Valley. What was one of these doing in Flagstaff? One of the natural world’s shyest creatures had stealthily made its way inside my house and had even evaded my two energetic, three year old cats.
After carefully capturing it and gently depositing it outside, I watched it dive for cover under a rock. Then I went to work to confirm my suspicions about its identity.
The strange visitor was a wind scorpion or sun spider of the arachnid order Solifugae, derived from Latin meaning “those that flee from the sun.” Wind scorpions are as beneficial to the garden as they are unattractive in appearance. They use their characteristic pedipalps, a 5th pair of long, slender legs equipped with tiny adhesive tips, to drink water, fight, and seize prey. The 4th pair of legs acts as feelers to detect their primary food of insects, especially pests in our gardens, such as darkling beetles, pill bugs, larvae, and termites. Larger species can run down and subdue mice and lizards.
Wind scorpions are not scorpions and are not poisonous. Generally nocturnal, they generally range in size from 5/8” to 2” and sometimes even 4” long. They are found worldwide, primarily in arid and semiarid climates. According to the National Geographic, they are called camel spiders in North Africa and the Middle East because of their humped profile. Some species inhabit grassland and forest environments. The Audubon Society’s Field Guide to North American Insects & Spiders mentions that one species, the Pale Windscorpion, “…ranges from Arizona to North Dakota and adjacent areas of Canada.”
Wind scorpions don’t run in a straight line, but weave with an odd gait, and yet they can tear after prey, “…like the wind.”
I was feeling good about escorting my bashful company outside, doing my part to protect wildlife in Northern Arizona, until I read that these reclusive animals hatch out in broods of 50. Indeed, during the next couple of weeks, I found two more alive inside, two or three which had met their fate with my cats, and one in the garden in August. Maybe it was the same one I had caught and released earlier in the summer. They may live from two months to a year.
If one of these amazing creatures happens by, don’t dispatch it. Instead, turn it loose in your garden, where, silently, it will conduct night-time missions to protect it from unwelcome insect pests.
Freddi Steele is a Master Gardener volunteer. Dana Prom Smith is a Master Gardener volunteer and the coordinating editor for the Master Gardener Column. He can be contacted at stpauls@npgcable.com. For more information about the Master Gardener Program, call Hattie Braun at 774-1868 ext.17 or visit our Web Site: highelevationgardening.arizona.edu.
Posted by maxmaddy at 5:58 AM
January 6, 2008
Master Gardener Class: Expanding Horizons
Master Gardener Column 12/8/07
When I was an adolescent, I thought that Bob’s Big Boy cheeseburgers were the ultimate in fine dining. My mother took me to a fancy French restaurant in Santa Monica, Le Petite Moulin, to expand my gastronomical horizons. Baffled by the menu, I asked her, “What’s escargot?” She said, “It’s French for snails.” I hit the bœuf button. I got filet minion with mushroom sauce. After I scraped off the sauce and mushrooms, I asked the waiter for ketchup. The maitre’ de, a sallow-faced Frenchman with slicked down black hair, a thin mustache, and a flickering sneer, came over to the table and said, “Young man, you may ask for ketchup, but you cannot have it.” At the time, I wasn’t up to the lexical shift, but I got the idea. This wasn’t a drive-in with cheeseburgers, French fries, hot dogs, Cokes, and malts. Eventually, I learned that over the rim of my horizon lay other realms of cuisine.
So it is with the Master Gardener Class coming up Wednesday, February 6. There is a lot more to gardening in the High Country than horticultural chili dogs. Freddi Steele who is in the current Master Gardener Class is also a naturalist with the National Park Service at the Grand Canyon. She’s said, “It’s an excellent opportunity to study with the best in the fields of horticulture, water conservation, high altitude gardening, and arboriculture in the Southwest.” This coming from an expert herself. There’s nothing like getting it straight from the horse’s mouth especially on subjects about which so many people have opinions but little information.
Karen Cooper, our City Council member, after years of listening to political flapdoodle, said it plainly and simply. “It’s really nice to hear from people who know what they’re talking about.”
When Dave and Jean Hockman retired to Flagstaff several years ago, Jean signed up for the Master Gardener Class. “It was a great decision,” she said, “introducing me to an absorbing new hobby and to new friends.” The absorbing new hobby is getting closer to the earth, an activity much needed in a time of so much glass, steel, concrete, and asphalt. If someone is looking for down-to-earth friends, gardeners are a safe bet. As with a lot of people who work with their hands, they’re open, congenial, and convivial.
Linda Chan’s experience has been simple. She wanted to be a better gardener than she already was. “It’s been things like compost for my garden. I knew a little about it, but now I know a lot more, and my garden’s better for it.” As an insurance agent, Linda knows the value of property and how much a good garden increases property values.
The people who take the Master Gardener Class are a cross-section of Flagstaff, but they all have one thing in common. They want to be better gardeners. This means expanding their knowledge of gardening. In the class a person not only learns about landscaping, plants, soil, water, and fertilizer, but also how to find out more. In addition to that knowledge, they also become a part of a community of gardeners. In a society in which so many people are strangers, a sense of community goes a long way.
The final test of a course is the pay-off. There’s no better pay-off than a beautiful yard, great flowers, and abundant vegetables. Just learning about growing tomatoes in Flagstaff is reward enough.
Hattie Braun is the impresario of this horticultural repertoire company, a cast not of thousands, but of about ten. Her shows, matinees all with a different show each afternoon, run on Wednesday afternoons from 1:30 to 4:30 with an intermission, starting their run on February 6 and finishing on May 14. The stage will be dark March 19. The tickets are $200.00 for the fourteen shows and include the Arizona Master Gardener Manual, a comprehensive playbill. The theater is the East Flagstaff Community Library, 3000 N. 4th St. For tickets email Hattie Braun at hbraun@ag.arizona.edu or call 774-1868, ext 17.
By The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D.
Dana Prom Smith is the volunteer coordinating editor for the Master Gardener Column and a Master Gardener volunteer for Coconino County Cooperative Extension. He can be contacted at stpauls@npgcable.com. For more information about the Master Gardener Program, call 774-1868 ext.17 or visit our Web Site: highelevationgardening.arizona.edu.
Posted by maxmaddy at 3:42 PM
Docent Training Orientation
The Arboretum at Flagstaff
Are you interested in sharing your love of the local landscape with school children and visitors to our community? The Arboretum at Flagstaff's docent training program is a great way to learn about gardening with native species, plant/animal relationships in our natural habitat, and current environmental issues. Docent trainees will meet on Tuesday afternoons from 1:00 to 3:30 p.m.(February 5-April 29, 2008), to learn from Arboretum staff and local experts. Topics covered include the history and mission of The Arboretum, touring techniques, basic botany, rare plant research, forest health, ethnobotany and much more. There is a fee of $75 for the program.
There will be an informal orientation on Tuesday, January 29 from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. for prospective docent trainees. Please call Rachel Edelstein at (928) 774-1442, ext. 110, by Friday January 25 to sign up for the orientation or for more information. A full schedule of the 2008 docent training program is available on the web site thearb.org.
Posted by maxmaddy at 8:47 AM
January 5, 2008
Slow Gardening
Master Gardener Column 1/5/08
Meine Überfrau runs upstairs, hops in the shower, jumps in her jeans, and runs to the store. She’ll be back in a minute. A junket to Trader Joe’s is just a hop, skip, and a jump. Yeah, sure, hopping right over the Mogollon Rim, skipping Black Canyon City, and jumping onto the 101. She hasn’t pole vaulted upstairs yet.
I like to mosey into the day, sneaking into it so that it won’t know I’m there, that is, until I hear that chirpy voice, “I’m awake.” Then, I know my cover is blown. Gretchen says my sotto style is a carryover from my times of stealth in military counter-intelligence and that it’s time for me to change. Fat chance.
What’s appalling is that she’s not unique. Most of the women I know are always running somewhere. When leaving a meeting, they don’t just get up and leave, saying “See ya ‘round.” No, they’ve “got to run.”
Quick living afflicts men as well as women. I watched a reasonably sane, middle-aged guy I know fast-walk up the sidewalk in front of our house with stopwatch in hand racing against time.
There aren’t any stop watches in gardening. It’s like scratching a dog’s belly. Slow time. Seeds don’t respond to commands, such as, “Hop to it.” When I set out my tomato seedlings in the spring enclosed in their walls of water, I don’t shout, “Now, hit it.” If I did, they’d wither. I wait, slow time, for a couple of months, and then they produce more than we can eat. If people don’t want to wait, then they’re destined to eat those supermarket papier-mâché wannabes.
Like a good pot roast, gardening is done slow time, especially with plants. It’s best to plant them small and let them grow big, allowing them slowly to get acquainted with their surroundings. If they’re double- timed planted big, they don’t acclimate well, suffering shock and desiccation. Besides, who wants a gang of instant teenagers? Part of the pleasure is watching them grow up.
The seasons aren’t on speed dial, either. Some yahoo always wants winter “get a move on.” Such language will likely result in June snowstorms. Pushing the seasons elicits a push back. “Tired of winter” doesn’t mean an early spring. As my Greek professor said, “Gentlemen, we don’t break God’s law. We break ourselves against it.” That’s certainly true with global warming.
Instant gratification motivates speed gardeners to heat up their yards by plastering them with gravel, concrete, and asphalt. After heating themselves up radiating their yards, they go inside the house and flip on the air conditioner.
One of the worst things the English ever did was to invent the clock. Actually, the malady of keeping time goes way back to 7th century Muslims. However, the mechanical clock was invented by Richard of Wallingford in 1336. The problem with the clock is that some damned fool is always trying “to beat the clock” which is akin to running “a race against time.” Another chronological malady is being “on time” or, worse yet, “being late.” I’ve even heard fast track, stopwatch gardeners say that their tomatoes are “late this year” as though they needed a tardy slip.
A garden takes “its own good time,” like the tortoise in the tortoise and the hare. By now, we should know enough to bet on the tortoise rather than the hare, but we don’t. Harried, we continue betting on the hare. Better yet, we should sync with real time.
Several years ago when rafting down the American River, the rafter, a doctoral student in philosophy at Berkeley, philosophized about running the rapids. “The first principle is: don’t fight the water’s power. You’ll lose and crack your head on a rock or get sucked into a whirlpool. The second is: cooperate with it and you might win. No guarantee, but a fighting chance.” Don’t fight the natural processes, use them, relax, enjoy the ride, and you might get there. No speed trials in the backyard.
Dana Prom Smith is a Master Gardener volunteer and coordinating editor of the Master Gardener Column for Coconino County Cooperative Extension. He can be contacted at stpauls@npgcable.com. For more information about the Master Gardener Program, call Hattie Braun, the Master Gardener Program Coordinator, at 774-1868 ext.17 or visit our Web Site: highelevationgardening.arizona.edu.
Posted by maxmaddy at 7:39 PM