I was conflicted this week as to what to write for this article. It was a toss-up between creepy crawlers in the garden or things that make me go bonkers horticulturally speaking. For instance the mega natural disaster caused by last November’s big chill that killed approximately thirty percent of our landscape plants that nobody in the public sector seems to be addressing. So to avoid making people mad at me, I’m choosing creepy crawlers! Let’s start with slugs. If you have slugs foraging on your new lettuce or tomato leaves this is a clear indication that you are over
The temperature spiked to the mid 90’s this past week in Casper, prompting gardeners to worry about their newly planted trees from this spring. I’ve received worried email notes, photos on smart phones, phone calls and samples brought in. It all leads to one thing, improper irrigation technique. Last week I wrote about irrigating your landscape to a depth of twelve inches and then maintaining a system of balancing your irrigation frequency for the health of your mature landscape.
June has been a spectacularly disappointing month for me. Not because sales at my garden center were disappointing, not because the abundance of moisture we received; it was because I got sick with an ‘upper respiratory bug’ that took nearly the entire month to get over. This bug was one of the worst to hit me in my life.
For all you gardeners that have applied fertilizer to your lawn this spring, I feel your pain. With all this rain, plus the fertilizer stimulating growth, I suspect many of you felt you were mowing hay fields instead of your lawns. With warm temperatures and above normal precipitation all our other landscape plants have been in overdrive too, including weeds. A lot of gardeners are asking about a weed they are finding in their lawns that grows to about the height of the lawn with small yellow flowers. It’s called ‘Black Medic’. This is an annual weed, meaning it sprouts from seed
If you consider yourself an environmentalist and have not read Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, published in 1962, shame on you. Ms. Carson wrote about the detrimental effects man made pesticides had on the environment, particularly birds. It awoke our country, causing fierce debate regarding the use of pesticides. An environmental movement like no other ensued. Silent Spring was the impetus for national pesticide policy changes and the beginning of the federal government’s Environmental Protection Agency.
From turning off the furnace to turning on the air conditioner, man oh man, that’s how fickle the weather is in early June in Wyoming. As you can imagine, garden centers have been a bee-hive of activity as gardeners are biting at the bit to do what they love to do—get dirty in the garden! Sure there’s the annual rush to get vegetable starts, but what’s surprising to me is the extreme interest by Wyoming gardeners in making a long-term commitment to fruit-bearing plants.