Month: April 2021

Planting in my new raised bed: potatoes, onions, and more

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Everything is greening up and it is officially my favorite time of the year!

We are planting potatoes, onion sets, spinach seeds, and lettuce seeds in our raised bed this month.   

There have  been a lot of posts on social media in the past few years about re-growing your vegetable scraps. I’ve never done that, and when it comes to potatoes, you should always purchase certified disease-free potato seed for planting in your gardens or containers.

I purchased two 4-pound bags of seed potatoes for $12, which was entirely too many seed potatoes for my small area (8 square feet), but I wanted two varieties and I will be sharing the extras. Below are the steps for cutting potatoes. You can get many “seeds” from one single potato tuber. It’s important that each piece has at least a few eyes/nodes, which will become the plants. Remember that potatoes are a storage organ of the stem, which has growing points called nodes, so that is why you can divide them and they will grow. Carrots, beets, and radishes, on the other hand, are root cells and do not have nodes on them, so you cannot cut them into pieces and expect them to grow into new plants.

Early potatoes should be seeded 3-5” deep, later season potatoes can be 5-7” (so that they won’t be sunburned). More specifics on growing potatoes can be found here. I want small potatoes for roasting with the skins on, so we planted 4 seeds per 1 square foot in the raised bed, with the intention that I will dig them as I need the space in my succession planting plan. Many early seeded vegetables can be harvested at many different stages (early or later, young leaf lettuce or more mature leaves, young baby beets or larger beets, green spring onions or larger ones, for example).

We seeded 9-16 onion sets per square foot with the hope of thinning them out and eating them as spring green onions and leaving a few to grow larger.  

We also added hoops to the raised bed which will support floating row cover to help insulate and protect it from pests, including deer, in the coming weeks. Once it warms up, then I will transition to deer netting over the hoops. 

We used ¾-inch, 10-foot long PVC pipes ($2.29 each), six 1-foot rebar pieces pounded into the ground for anchors, nails with plastic washers, and conduit 2-hole straps. The floating row cover ($15 for 7’ x 100’) is only 7 feet wide, but worked out perfectly with the 10-foot long pipe hoops. It’s always so nice when things work out accidentally! 

In order to make the cover removable to harvest and care for the plants, on the one side we used 4-foot boards connected to the floating row cover with nails that have plastic washers on them. The weight of the boards will hold the fabric in place (the boards are just hanging there).

We rolled the floating row cover and used a 6” landscape fabric staple to hold it in place, which can be easily pulled and replaced whenever access is needed to the bed.  

Hopefully next month we will have some photos to share of the sprouted potatoes, onions, spinach, and lettuce. We also plan to seed some radishes, beets, and turnips in the coming weeks. With the weather warming up, it also will be time to start scouting for insect pests and beneficial critters.

What do you have growing in your garden? Have you harvested anything  in 2021? Happy spring gardening!

By Ashley Bodkins, Senior Agent Associate and Master Gardener Coordinator, Garrett County, Maryland, edited by Christa Carignan, Coordinator, Home & Garden Information Center, University of Maryland Extension. See more posts by Ashley and Christa.

How to pick the perfect tree

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I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

Joyce Kilmer

I love trees.  The wind whispering through a grove of pines.  An oak’s limbs raised to the sky in winter.  The pink pom-poms of a cherry tree in spring.   They are nature’s art.

But you can’t just plunk any old tree anywhere and guarantee grandeur.  It takes some thought and planning.  Make “right plant, right place” your mantra.

First, look at the spot where you want a tree.  Is it sunny or shady?  Wet or windy?  

Do you need a 20-foot tree to tuck under power lines?  Or do you have room for a towering 60-footer?  Break out the measuring tape and see how wide your tree can be, too.  Size matters.

Now, think about what you want.  Do you want an evergreen or deciduous tree?  Does it need to flower?  Deliver show-stopping fall color?  Provide shade?  

Are you screening an undesirable view?  Do you want to support wildlife with a native tree that offers food and shelter?  

At this point, you have a wish list.  You want a small, sun-loving, flowering tree to add a splash of spring color to your front yard and a tall evergreen to screen your neighbor’s garage.  

Southern magnolias add beauty to a landscape but large fallen leaves can be a maintenance issue.
Southern magnolias add beauty to a landscape but large fallen leaves can be a maintenance issue.

Now it’s time to hit the books or websites to find some trees that meet your criteria.  Dirr’s Hardy Tree and Shrubs is a favorite for its brief descriptions and color photos of the whole tree, leaves, flowers, fruit and bark. 

Make sure the trees you pick will survive our winters.  We are in cold hardiness zone 6B, so the zone listing should cover that number.  For example, a tree listed as hardy in zones 4 to 7 would be fine here.

Also note any special needs of the tree.  Kousa dogwood fruit is lovely, but messy as it falls.  So don’t place one by a sidewalk or deck.  Ditto with sweetgum whose spiky sweetgum seedpods are especially hard on bare feet.

Oaks drop acorns so they’re not good by a pool. Crape myrtles hate wind.  Goldenraintree makes billions of seedlings.  Heed the warnings.  

Oaks are a wonderful native choice for landscapes.
Oaks are a wonderful native choice for landscapes.

As you do your research, compile a list of trees that make the cut, then head to a nursery or two.  

Trees come in large containers or balled and burlapped rootballs called B&Bs.  Look for a solid root ball, secure wrapping and roots contained in the burlap in a B&B tree.  

Does the tree have a good overall shape?  Are the leaves or needles deep green?  Eliminate trees with damaged bark, rot or circling roots that can strangle a tree.  

Check the roots of a container plant by asking a staff member to slide it out of the container.  The roots should be light colored and not circling tightly inside the pot. 

Have high standards. If a tree doesn’t pass inspection, pass it by.  A tree is an investment and you want to make it a good one.As you sip lemonade in the dappled shade of a willow oak or enjoying the confetti rain of cherry blossoms, I hope you’ll agree with Joyce Kilmer as she concludes:

Poems are made by fools like me
But only God can make a tree.

By Annette Cormany, Principal Agent Associate and Master Gardener Coordinator, Washington County, University of Maryland Extension. This article was previously published by Herald-Mail Media. Read more by Annette.

April Permaculture – The Garden Thyme Podcast

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Spring is here! We are so ready to get in our gardens and hope you are as well.  In this episode, we are joined by Justinian Dispenza, who runs the Eastern Shore Permaculture Institute.   We talked all about what permaculture is and how to incorporate its ideas into our own gardens.   Permaculture is an approach to land management and philosophy that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems.

We also have our: 

  • Native Plant of the Month (Eastern columbine, Aquilegia canadensis) at ~29:00
  • Bug of the Month (Bee Flies) at ~ 35:30
  • Garden Tips of the Month at ~ 37:40

We hope you enjoyed this month’s episode and will tune in next month for more garden tips. 

 If you have any garden-related questions please email us at  UMEGardenPodcast@gmail.com or look us up on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/GardenThymePodcas.

The Garden Thyme Podcast is a monthly podcast where we help you get down and dirty in your garden. The Garden Thyme Podcast is brought to you by the University of Maryland Extension. Hosts are Mikaela Boley- Senior Agent Associate (Talbot County) for Horticulture, Rachel Rhodes- Agent Associate for Horticulture (Queen Anne’s County), and Emily Zobel-Senior Agent Associate for Agriculture (Dorchester County). The University of Maryland is an Equal Opportunity Employer and Equal Access Programs.

Theme Song: By Jason Inc

Wild ginger spices up the Maryland spring

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As a pollination biologist, I have the immense privilege of studying really cool plants who trick their pollinators in fancy and incredible ways, and I tend to be naturally attracted to flowers that may not be super showy to most (but are among some of the most mind-blowing things in nature). These flowers are such a wonderful thing in their own right, and in this post I want to do them justice. Because it’s spring and some of these are starting to point their noses out of the ground, in today’s post I would like to (re)introduce you to a plant you may be familiar with, but that I hope after today you will get to look at with new amazed eyes (in case you don’t already 😉 ). Come with me and let’s chat a bit about the wonderful hidden queen of our forests: the wild ginger!

Is wild ginger, ginger?

The short answer is no. While ginger (the plant we eat) is native to Southeast Asia, wild ginger (Asarum canadense) is native to right here, and more specifically to the deciduous forests of Eastern North America. In case you are not familiar with the plant, it belongs to the family of birthworts, which have really interesting ways of interacting with their pollinators. Unlike other birthworts that tend to have flowers that hang in the air from the plant, wild gingers are very “shy” and the whole plant is restricted to the ground level.

Wild ginger is starting to peek out their leaves right now. Once the leaves are fully grown, they get their characteristic heart-shape and can create nice mats to cover the ground. Photos: A. Espíndola; threelark.

The plant is perennial (it lives for several seasons) and exits dormancy in the early spring when its heart-shaped and fuzzy leaves start to unfurl and emerge from the ground. Eventually, the plant becomes a little mat and over time it creates colonies. This is a reason why wild ginger can be a great groundcover plant to use under trees or in shadier and humid parts of one’s yard (see here for how to do this).

Wild ginger is cool – The flowers!

Unlike other birthworts, wild ginger holds its flowers close and parallel to the ground. Wild ginger’s flowers are not showy, being of dark brown and not very large. These flowers are engaged in mimicry pollination, meaning that “disguise” as something else (here, fungi), to trick pollinators into doing something they don’t necessarily want to do. In the case of wild ginger, the flowers are held low to the ground and close to the base of the stems.

Wild ginger flowers are displayed on the ground, at the base of the fuzzy stems. Being dark and close to the ground helps them lure their pollinators, small flies that feed on decaying matter. Photo: A. Carlson.

Wild ginger flowers are dark, particularly moist, and produce specific odors that attract small flies that feed on decaying matter. The tricking consists in making the flies enter the flowers to lay eggs in what the flies consider is fungi (their egg laying sites). While doing this, the flies contact the pollen-bearing structures, and while visiting different flowers, they cross-pollinate them. In this case, we talk about antagonistic interactions between the plants and their pollinators because the interaction does not benefit both partners. In fact, here the plants have the upper hand, and the flies simply loose their eggs to the plant since their larvae can’t feed on the floral tissues. If this is not sufficient to amaze you, keep reading; it gets better!

Wild ginger is cool – The seeds!

After pollination, the flower ovules grow into seeds. Unlike seeds in most plants, wild ginger seeds have a special “addition”. Indeed, the seeds have attached a special extension (called an elaiosome) that is particularly rich in lipids and proteins. This structure makes the seeds very attractive to ants, who collect the seeds, carry them away from the plant, and, after having consumed the elaiosome, discard the seed. By doing this, the seeds can get dispersed farther away from the mother plant, and the population can slowly grow and expand. Isn’t that super neat????!!!

The seeds of wild ginger have a special nutrient-rich body called elaiosome, which is a delicatessen for ants. This allows the plant to use ants to disperse their seeds. The shiny brown (left) and yellow (right) bodies attached to the seeds are the elaiosomes (arrows). Photos: Sid Vogelpohl, Arkansas Native Plants Society; B. Patterson.

Wild ginger as a human ally

Wild ginger was and is still well known to Native Americans of Eastern North America, and it is very likely that they were the ones who showed the European colonists how to use it. Among the Native names still known for this plant is namepin (see here to learn how to say it), which means “plant of small tubers”. Even though it is hard to find the original local names for Maryland tribes, we know that the roots of the plant were used to treat fever and coughs by Cherokees, Iroquois, and Rappahannocks, and that it is very likely that most of the tribes and bands of Maryland (e.g. Shawnee, Piscataway, Pocomoke, Assateague, Nause-Waiwash, Accohannock) use(d) it as well because the plant was and is abundantly present in the area.

By Anahí Espíndola, Assistant Professor, Department of Entomology, University of Maryland, College Park. See more posts by Anahí.

New! Anahí also writes an Extension Blog in Spanish! Check it out here, extensionesp.umd.edu, and please share and spread the word to your Spanish speaking friends and colleagues in Maryland. Bienvenidos a Extensión en Español!