It's November, and it's starting look a little dreary weather-wise, but some plants out the demo garden are still looking good. This lantana, called Radiation, is going like gang busters both in bloom and in sprawl. This salvia leucantha from our outstanding plant list really is outstanding!
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Sometimes I get a little bit frustrated with the acronym IPM. It’s a buzz word farm advisors, extension specialists and Master Gardens often use to inspire home gardeners to think about the big picture when tackling gardening and pest issues. My problem is with the name. First of all it's not catchy. It doesn't spell anything and even when you do spell it out -Integrated Pest Management. It's about as inspiring as an accounting textbook (my apologies to all those accountants out there).
But here's the real skinny, it works! Something was doing a number on our penstemon in the garden, turning it a coppery color and generally sucking the life out of it. Aside from choosing the right plant for the right place, IPM involves properly identifying the pest. So I grabbed a few leaves and took a peek underneath them. There was slight webbing, but no critters to speak of.
So I brought it into the office and shoved that little guy under the microscope. It was a text book case of spider mites. It literally looked exactly like picture on the spider mite pest note. The eggs were pretty!
According to the pest note, dry, dusty conditions contributed to the problem. We decided to give the plants a good spray with the hose every time we were at the garden. That seemed to help some.
But add a little plant knowledge and some lucky weather and we managed to skip considering any pesticides at all. We trimmed back all the penstemon (keep in mind that penstemon responds very well to a good trimming, it may not work well with every plant). Mother Nature pitched in with a lovely rain and our penstemon bounced back like a trooper.
We’ll never be sure what technique did the trick, we suspect it was a combination of them all, and that may be the biggest lesson of all that IPM can teach us, it’s the combination of techniques that works, not the one shot of a pesticide that does the trick.
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Gardeners are optimists at heart. They take a seed and plant it in some soil, or a wisp of plant material and coax it along in a pot of vermiculite and they wait patiently for the fruits of their labor.
But in the demo garden, this optimism has proven fatal for several plants. A spell of mild summer weather or a bare spot that we can't ignore anymore, at we think that a plant will survive a transplanting in the middle of summer. We are, after all, Master Gardeners!
But, only the most attentive gardener should attempt this trick in the middle of the summer. With transplant shock, drying summer winds, and several days of temperatures near the 100 degree mark, you almost need to stand over the poor little plants with a hose or watering can.
A little understanding of soil properties makes it clear why it is so difficult to transplant in the summer. The mixture in most nursery plants is a fast draining mixture of sand, vermiculite, and peat moss. This allows the nursery owners to water the plants often without keeping the roots too damp.
The surrounding soil in our demo garden and in most of Alameda County is clay. The tiny particles in clay absorb the water from the quick draining soil mixture, and distribute it to other nearby clay particles. Plant roots can use this water, but the plants in the newly transplanted plant are stuck in the now dry potting soil from the nursery.
When the weather cools down, water evaporates less quickly and plants can hold on to the water already in their leaves and stems, while their roots can grow and seek water from the surrounding soil.
So from now on we'll just have to leave those spots bare, and ignore the pale pink penstemon next to the bright clashing orange coreopsis. We may even need to pass up the big sale at our favorite nursery. The horror!
Check back next year, I'm
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