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Time for a celebration! Summer is all about celebrations, as I’ve mentioned before. This weekend the Garden Time crew will be celebrating the wedding of Sarah and Tim. They are part of the extended Garden Time crew. In fact, you probably have heard Sarah’s voice on some commercials or read some of her stories in the Garden Time magazine. We want to wish them both a wonderful future together!
Another celebration happening this weekend is the opening of the Art in the Garden event at the Oregon Garden. On Sunday morning at 10am the event kicks off as all the featured artists will be in the garden to meet with visitors and talk about their art installations. William and Judy will be there to meet all the visitors to the garden. Come early, the first 50 paying guests will also receive a complimentary mimosa! Be sure to grab an Art in the Garden Passport when you arrive. When you visit each artist, you will receive a stamp. Once your passport is stamped at each location and filled out, you can turn it in for a chance to win our Dinner Escape Package Giveaway! This giveaway includes an overnight stay, dinner for two and a bottle of wine at the Oregon Garden Resort. We hope to see you there!
This week we featured...
Summer Rose Care
Summer time can be rough on your roses. They normally love the heat, but if you don’t do a little maintenance they won’t give you the blooms you’ve been waiting to see. Rachel the curator at the International Rose Test Garden at Washington Park met with Judy in the display gardens to show a couple of quick things you can do to get your roses to re-bloom again. First she told us about deadheading your roses. This means that you take off the old, spent, dried up blooms. Rachel gave Judy a long stick for the first part of pruning. These are used on the smaller, close to the ground, reblooming roses. You can simply use the stick to knock off the spent blooms so they don’t look so tired between bloom cycles. For the taller rose bushes you can use a pruner or sometimes you can just snap off the spent blooms. If you are pruning back your taller plants, be sure to go down the old stem until you come to a 5-leaf node. Cut right above that 5-leaf and you will get a new shoot with flowers coming up in about 4-6 weeks. Next she told us about summer diseases. Black spot can be treated with sprays, but make sure that you remove all infected leaves and throw them away and not in the compost. The compost will just hold the disease and you will spread it around when you spread your compost next year. The same is true for rust. If you are noticing yellow growths under the leaves, pick them off and throw them away.
The best thing to do is give them a little water, a shot of fertilizer and sit back and enjoy the show when those blooms return!
Alpha Scents – Indoor Pests
Insects, whether inside or out, can be a huge nuisance. Capturing them or controlling them is a big task. To help tackle the job you can use pheromones or their natural instincts to control them. Recently we met with Darek from Alpha Scents (503-342-8611) about using pheromones and traps to capture outdoor pests, but he is also well versed in bug behavior indoors too. When we recently met up with him he told us how he uses his traps to help control house flies, pantry moths and fruit flies in his home. House flies were the easiest due to their predictive behavior. When trapped indoors they will fly towards any window, trying to get back outside. For these flying pests he simply uses a piece of sticky film that he attaches to the lower part of the window. This film can be hidden behind flower pots or other windowsill items. When the fly gets tired, they fall to the bottom of the window and get stuck. For pantry moths it is a combination trap. A lure that is impregnated with a pheromone attractant will draw the male moth to it, then they get stuck on the sticky paper. Problem solved. Finally, he showed us a trap for fruit flies. The fruit fly really becomes a problem in our homes during the summer months when we have warm weather and a lot of ripening fruit in our homes. The trap he had was a triangle shaped reservoir with an attractive lure inside. The fruit flies enter the trap and don’t escape.
If you would like to see all the different traps for controlling pests in your home or garden, check out their website.
Jan’s July Tips
The summer is in full swing as we visited Jan for the tips of the month. She had a couple things to share with us near her house. The first was a dwarf magnolia that had a little problem with powdery mildew. This mildew causes the leaves to get a grey color and start to curl in some cases. This will sap the strength of the plant and it will struggle to bloom, plus it looks terrible. Pruning to increase airflow will help prevent, or slow it down. This time of year with a little moisture and some summer heat, the fungus will spread quickly. Then we took a look at a genetic mutation in a Sweet William. The stem, which is normally straight and narrow became wide and twisted. This is called a fasciation. This is when a stem growth habit changes. It can sometime be caused by environmental factors or micro-organisms too. It is just really cool looking!
We then moved to the vegetable garden and talked about zucchini. Specifically, zucchini blooms. There are a lot of people that get nervous because they see blooms falling off with new fruit production. These early blooms are male blooms. They appear at the end of long stems and are generally taller on the plant. The female blooms, which produce the fruit, come a little later in the plant development and show up at the base of the plant near the main stem. The male flowers naturally fall off when there are no females around to pollinate. It is nothing to worry about. The other thing that Jan had for us to look at was some beet leaves. These leaves had large brown patches in the middle of each one. This is where ‘leaf miners’ had been at work. There are a few different flying insects that lay their eggs between the layers of the leaf. Once the eggs hatch, the larvae eat between the layers of the leaf. Because of this, you can’t really spray to get rid of them. A lot of time when you notice the damage, they are already gone. The best way to prevent the damage is to use a row cover when the plants are young to prevent the flies from laying their eggs in the first place.
For more great summer tips you can always check out the OSU Extension website at https://extension.oregonstate.edu/.
Mt. Angel Monastery Garden
If you have been to Mt. Angel outside of Oktoberfest you probably have heard about the seminary and monastery that are located there. One of the monasteries is the Queen of Peace Monastery which is associated with the Benedictine Sisters of Mt Angel. Recently they wanted to install a new garden for use by their community, neighborhood and for people attending retreats. This ‘Spiritual Walk’ was designed by Anna Kullgren of Optic Verve. She had quite a task in her design because there were certain elements that had to be kept in the design including a flag pole, a peace pole and a 130 foot sequoia! Her design works great for including all those and actually the design looks like a large Benedictine cross in the lawn. Her design also is built for year-round interest. There will be something blooming or looking good all year long. Part of a good garden is the installation. For that we chatted with Dennis and Doug from the maintenance staff. They not only worked with Anna, they installed a large sprinkler project so all the plants will stay watered and healthy no matter the conditions.
We then chatted with Sr. Dorothy Jean. She told us that this garden will not only be used by the staff and neighbors, it is a celebration of the wisdom and beauty that they found all around them. That wisdom is in nature and the people of the community. It is also a celebration of the 138 years that the Benedictine Sisters have been in our area this coming October. If you would like to help them celebrate this new garden they would like to welcome you to stop by tomorrow, Sunday, July 14th. There will be a celebration Mass at 10am and that will be followed by the dedication at 11am in the garden. Then people are welcome to stay for a hosted BBQ in the courtyard. It will be a great day for everyone to enjoy a new garden!
TOW – Tool Handle Measuring Stick
Our tip of the week is about making your tools do double duty. When you buy a plant or plant seeds a lot of the tags will tell you to keep the new plants separated by a distance to make sure they have room to grow. Most of us don’t carry around a measuring tape to make sure we keep those distances, so why not make your long handled tools be the measuring tape? Simply make marks on your handle at 6 inches intervals and then all you have to do is lay your tool down to measure the distance and you can plant without worries!
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