Lettuce in the midst of winter

Maryland Grows3 Comments
hydroponic lettuce under a grow light
Hydroponic lettuce under a grow light.

Homegrown lettuce in the dead of winter or the heat of late summer? It’s possible with hydroponics. And you don’t need a fancy setup with electric pumps and a water circulation system. The Kratky method lets you do it with a grow light and an empty coffee bin. 

Developed by horticulturist Bernard A. Kratky of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the Kratky method is ridiculously simple. Plant roots need access to oxygen. When grown outdoors, a plant’s roots find this oxygen in air pockets within the ground. In a commercial hydroponic system, pumps circulate air to the plants’ roots. In the Kratky method, an air pocket is formed as the roots take up water, lowering the water level. This air pocket provides all the oxygen a plant needs at the root level.   

Continue reading →

Curl up with a good gardening book

Maryland GrowsLeave a comment
stack of garden books
Books for gardeners. Photo: C. Carignan

The holidays are over. The temperatures have plummeted. Now is the perfect time to curl up with a mug of tea and a good gardening book.   

Yes, I have go-to reference books when I have a gardening question. But I treasure a handful of gardening books for sheer reading pleasure. Yes, you will learn. But, oh the beauty of the language.

I just finished reading Diane Ackerman’s Cultivating Delight, a lyrical ode to her garden. You sit beside her in her window seat to watch birds building nests. You hear a garden center’s siren song. You can smell her roses.  

She tells more, more deeply, and with intrigue. She weaves tales of intrepid plant collectors risking life and limb, Greek gods becoming flowers, the glory of a summer storm, and cricket sex.  

Along the way, Ackerman quotes Kipling and Longfellow, Muir, and Blake and gives us lessons on botany, biology, ecology, history, and garden design. You’re not aware you’re being taught, only lulled with lush language. 

Continue reading →

Indoor lighting options: terms, types, and measurements

Maryland Grows4 Comments
terrarium plants under LED lights
Terrarium under LED lights. Photo: M. Talabac

This is the third in our four-part series of articles about indoor lighting for plants. You can also read the first, second, and fourth articles.

Artificial light sources come in several forms, all relatively easy to acquire. Costs can vary wildly, and some are more electrically efficient than others. The variety of available options allows you to customize setups to your needs and the preferences of your plants. Before you dive into an overwhelming list of web search results, here are traits of the basic categories:

Light-Emitting Diode (LED)

  • best energy-efficiency in terms of light produced per watt consumed (especially if the light has the ideal spectrum)
  • coolest to the touch except for high-powered units, which usually have small built-in cooling fans
  • can be expensive for high-quality fixtures, though costs are decreasing
  • light output does not dim significantly over time, though diodes do have a finite lifespan
  • reach full brightness immediately or very quickly when turned on
  • diodes can either be exposed or under a frosted or textured cover to help diffuse the light
  • diodes are directional, meaning they don’t emit light in every direction the way a fluorescent tube does, so reflectors aren’t usually needed
  • more even light output from one edge of the fixture to the other
  • can be round like a spotlight (with a cluster of diodes) or straight strips (or strips inside a tube) with one or more rows of diodes
  • some replacement “tubes” can be used in place of fluorescent tubes in a fluorescent fixture, but you must check with the fixture’s manufacturer for compatibility as mixing components is a matter of electrical safety
terrarium LED spotlights
Terrarium LED spotlights. Photo: M. Talabac
LED panel lights
LED panel. Photo: M. Talabac
Continue reading →

Heat-tolerant vegetable crops and cultivars for the changing climate

Maryland Grows7 Comments

Our food-growing spaces allow us to grow healthy produce, connect with Nature, and hopefully save money. They are also a solid response to climate change and COVID.

My blog articles this year will be about climate-resilient food gardening. Each month I’ll address one or more aspects of how climate change is affecting our food gardens and changes we can make to reduce global warming and ensure a future of healthy harvests.

HGIC has a new Climate-Resilient Gardening section (thanks to Christa Carignan!) where you’ll find more information on these topics. We plan to continually update content and add new pages. And please check out the University of Maryland Extension’s new Healthy Garden, Healthy You project that connects food gardening and human health.

This first installment includes an overview of how our mid-Atlantic climate is changing and a look at heat-tolerant crops and cultivars. Future articles will explore low-dig soil prep, composting food scraps, peat alternatives, heat stress in plants, reducing plastics, and “hardening” our garden spaces.

Resiliency is mentioned a lot with respect to climate change. A climate-resilient garden can both withstand and recover from warmer, more extreme weather. Resiliency can also mean transforming how we grow food by creating and sharing a community knowledgebase of new ideas and techniques.

Continue reading →

Variety is the spice of life: creating a new garden with native plants

Maryland GrowsLeave a comment

Nothing like starting out a blog with a cliché, right? But this perfectly sums up one reason to change from a monotypic lawn to a mix of native plants. Instead of looking out at a sea of sameness, the diversity of colors, sizes, and shapes of plants offer a more pleasing landscape to view. And, bonus points, more and different kinds of plants attract more and different kinds of butterflies, birds, and beneficial wildlife!

butterfly milkweed with monarch caterpillar
Butterflyweed planted in spring 2020 provides food for Monarch caterpillars later in the summertime.

A do-it-yourself garden is harder but more fulfilling

Once you figure out that you do want more variety of plants instead of lawn in your yard, the real planning begins. But, it can be hard to know where to start – do you just chop up the lawn and start planting? How much will it cost? What’s the maintenance on these plants? What about soil conditions? Don’t worry! There are some really good online tips for beginners. To sum mine up: start small, don’t overthink it, and stick to things you like looking at.

For example, my sister moved into a small house with a fenced backyard. She knew she wanted to avoid the pain of mowing. She knew she wanted low-maintenance, flowering plants. And since she’s a redhead, she knew what colors she liked (hint: little to no red flowers). The first thing we did was start tracking the sun, in both the front and back yards. Each month over the winter, we took a picture in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. We also got started on the paths needed through the garden areas.

Continue reading →

Houseplants – The Garden Thyme Podcast

Maryland GrowsLeave a comment
two houseplants on a windowsill

Happy New Year! It is hard to believe that we are already in a new year. We are kicking off our third season by sitting down with Extension Educator Ginny Rosenkranz. Like many of you, during the pandemic our acquisition of houseplants increased exponentially. Ginny guides us on caring for all of our botanical beauties.

We also have our: 

  • Native Plant of the Month, Musclewood, Ironwood (Carpinus caroliniana) at ~24:55
  • Bug of the Month, Ice crawlers or ice bug family Grylloblattidea at ~29:05
  • Garden Tips of the Month at ~31:50

To listen to the podcast visit https://www.buzzsprout.com/687509.

podcast sound wave image

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

  1. 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/GardenThymePodcast.
  2. For more information about University of Maryland Extension and these topics, please check out the UME Home and Garden Information Center website at https://extension.umd.edu/hgic.

The Garden Thyme Podcast is a monthly podcast 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). Theme Song:  By Jason Inc.

Planning your garden to support specialized pollinators

Maryland GrowsLeave a comment

Looking out my window, as the ground is covered with snow and I am getting ready for another snowstorm coming tonight, it seems ironic that I have been spending many hours these days ordering seeds and planning my garden. While I am thankful that the winter brings some rest to the soil in my garden, planning this season brings me happy memories of the scents and buzzes in my yard during the growing days… which reminds me that I should also plan for my little buzzing pollinator friends when I plan what to grow this season. In today’s blog, I want to chat about how we can plan for many types of pollinators, with a special focus on planning for specialists and not just for generalist pollinators.

Specialist pollinators – never heard of them?

As we mentioned in a previous post, pollinators visit plants to feed on nectar and/or to collect pollen to feed themselves or their offspring. However, pollen is not just there for pollinators to feed on; pollen is central to plant reproduction, so plants tend to make it both attractive to pollinators but hard to digest. For this reason, and in order to be able to properly digest the pollen, pollinators are often specialized in their pollen choices. This is because being able to digest the compounds that plants add to their pollen to make them hard to eat requires some level of adaptation, which often involves a trade-off with the ability to eat anything. There are, of course, many levels of specialization, and, while many pollinators feed on many plant families, others are more specialized than that, and feed on only specific plant genera or even species! For us gardeners, this means that if we want to support many different pollinators, we need to make sure that we are also providing for those very specialized pollinators as well!

Luckily for us, the floral choices and pollen specialization is known to some extent for Maryland and Eastern USA bees (see this site to learn more). For this reason, we know that many specialized bees in our region are also rare or uncommon… another reason to try to provide resources for them!

Who are pollen specialists in our region?

Many known pollen specialist bees in our region belong to bee genera Andrena, Colletes, Osmia, and Melissodes, which have many species considered rare or uncommon in Maryland and Mid-Atlantic.

Continue reading →