May Ramble

It’s the beginning of a new month, and what better way to start things off than with a little bit of everything? So, here’s to the glorious gardening month of May and my May ramble.Spring has been slow to start in these parts and blame it on what you will but it takes awhile for things to warm up out here each and every year. It’s a combination of the influence of the cool ocean waters and sandy soils that can’t retain the heat. What makes this phenom particularly frustrating is that we’re trying to figure out what’s been damaged by the winter cold, and Mother Nature is only grudgingly giving us clues.

We know some roses have had excessive die-back, but I was looking at some climbing roses near the ocean and nary a single bud was nipped. On the other hand, it looked like lots of hydrangeas had buds freeze and plenty of stem dieback. In this case there will be reduced and diminished flowering and on those that flower on old wood the flowering may take place close to the ground where the buds were protected by the snow. Hydrangeas are rarely a total loss, though, because they should come back during the summer and flower next year for those who are patient.

A note of caution for those who will be quick to write off every garden and horticulture problem to the bad winter. Don’t forget that the summer of 2013 was hot and dry. The damage from that period may well be confused and/or exacerbated by the frigid winter. In this case we’re mostly looking at tree and shrub root damage from the lack of water, double stressors and any of the myriad of unknown causes. As in the diagnosis of the human condition, it’s not uncommon that we can’t accurately diagnose the cause of a plant’s condition.

Landscapers have been putting down so much mulch (way too much) and making so much money at it that a landscape trade newspaper is now saying there’s money to be made in mulch remediation. Now they can make money on removing the “volcano” mulch jobs they’ve been at for the past decade. Mulch is good. Too much mulch applied by untrained landscapers can be deadly to trees and shrubs.

The deer had a very rough winter. Snow cover and cold left them very, very hungry and I’ve never seen as much deer browse on rhododendrons and azaleas as last winter. On some properties the shrubs have been browsed from the ground to a height of four feet. It looks weird. Resist the temptation to prune, though. The foliage will return, but slowly. Also hearing about losses to rhodies and laurels. I’m suspicious that these losses are from nursery stock that came from Oregon and not varieties that are hardy enough for our coldest winters. Watch for trunk girdling at the base of fruit trees (ornamental cherries and plums as well), where voles and rabbits may have stripped and eaten the bark.

Every year there’s a flare-up and re-controversy over Roundup. And while I don’t want to delve into that quagmire again, I do have a word of caution of a different sort. Once upon a time Roundup was a registered trademark for one product and that was glyphosphate. You bought a container of Roundup and you got … glyphosphate. Not true any more. There are now several formulations of Roundup that do contain glyphosphate, but they also contain a number of other herbicides. There’s Roundup Poison Ivy Plus, Roundup Wild Blackberry Plus Vine & Brush Killer, Roundup Max Control 365 and others. The basic difference is that the original Roundup killed weeds on contact and had very limited to no residual effects. However, use one of the newer formulations like the one with “365” in it and you’ll find that the killing can continue for a year. Surprise! Read the label and know what you’re buying.

I’m familiar with the term “unboxing” because of my interest in cameras and electronics. From time to time I’ll watch an unboxing video online when a tester gets a new gadget and does a video of, yes, opening the box and playing with the new toy for the first time. Well, we have the same thing in gardening as the boxes of new plants have started to arrive at doorsteps. But for some of you unboxing may be delayed a week or two this year: the mail order nurseries had shipping and field access issues due to the long and late winter. But it sure was great when my first two boxes arrived from Klehm’s (a week late, though), and inside were the most perfect Heucheras in two-quart pots. As nice or nicer than any I’ve gotten at a nursery or garden center and competitively priced. Will my unboxing from other vendors leave me as happy as a kid in a candy shop? Stay tuned.

And speaking of shopping ... a number of you had questions about my column on pruners and what type to use and where to buy them. I happened to be online when one of those emails came in so just out of curiosity I checked the White Flower Farm price on a Felco #8 ($90) and then looked on Amazon ($56). That’s just ridiculous.

But then I got my monthly newsletter from the WFF and there was a very interesting piece by their ethereal horticulturist Amos Pettingile about roses and how the rose-selling industry had done us wrong for so many years. It made for fascinating reading. You may be able to find this piece on their website. It would be in their “Down on the Farm” newsletter from late March. To quote briefly, “The problem arose when American gardeners, under the spell of an intensive marketing program called the All American Rose Selections, were persuaded that hybrid tea roses (based on crosses between tender tea roses and hybrid perpetual roses) were the final word in horticultural sophistication and a necessity in any respectable garden.”

The piece is a short glimpse at our current conundrum with roses and if you can find it I’d urge you to read it. Well done, WFF. And no sooner did I file that away than I got some junk mail from a once respected mail order nursery company that now owns a once respected and once the largest grower of roses ... once again pushing, yup, hybrid tea roses. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

You may recall that last year I was a big booster of grafted tomatoes. It was the first summer I was able to grow some and a dozen gardeners in my vegetable gardening class got their own to try. I guess all I can say is that at least in my book the jury is still out. Just about everyone agreed that the grafted types were late to fruit, so if you want to extend your tomato season this may be one way of doing it. I noted a few plants that were certainly not disease-free, but then again they are advertised as disease-resistant, not disease-proof. And one Westhampton gardener had such success with her grafted tomatoes that she was afraid to tell her friends that that’s what they are, probably for fear that in no time the whole neighborhood will have them.

But I did have one interesting tomato revelation last summer. I visited a small farm on the other side of the sound where they grow their tomatoes under plastic-covered frames. The structure is really a plastic lean-to that’s open on all sides and has only a plastic roof. An agricultural plastic was used to allow as much light transmission as possible and the crop was great, the season started early and lasted late and there were virtually no disease problems. Pretty unusual for tomatoes, but with the plastic roof and drip irrigation at each plant there was no splashing water from rain or irrigation and thus very little chance for tomato diseases to spread.

So if you’re not environmentally allergic to using plastics over (not in) your garden, this may be a very interesting way to have great tomato crops every year. Time to plant them soon, so give it some thought and of course ... keep growing.