Sanhedrin Nursery – Garden Blog

• Cage or stake tomatoes while still small so that you can train them as they grow.

• Roses bloom all summer with their abundant flowers in so many different colors. Choose some now when you can see their lovely flowers.

• Paint trunks of young fruit trees with Tree Trunk White. This will keep the soft bark from sun-burning which leaves cracks for borer insects, the most common cause of death of young apple trees.

• Petunias, in bright pink, red and purple, will add beauty and color to sunny borders all through the summer.

• Look for a colorful plant or a useful tool for Dad for Father’s Day. A fruit tree might be just the thing, or a pair of Felco pruning shears.

Color Combinations for Flower Pots

How do you take a nice big pot, fill it full of plants and finish up with something that not only looks great but grows great too? Think ‘Thriller’, ‘Filler’ and ‘Spiller’. 
 Thriller stands for the tall plant in the combination. It is often a spiky tall accent which can be in the center or in the back of your combination.

Filler will be the center bulky or eye-catching special plant. It can be round or grassy, but it’s the center of attention.

Spiller, of course, stands for the hanging plant that falls over the edge and continues the line on down onto the container surface. If it is a basket, then you have lots of ‘floppy’ plants and you might want to vary the look with different colors or textures.

Use plants with different textures of foliage or flowers. If all the plants have narrow long leaves that is boring. The same with all big fat round foliage. Try to have different types.

For professional looking results, consider following a color theme. Use all one color, such as all blue flowers, for a monochrome look. Pastel flowers provide soft colors that are most effective in gentle light, shade or morning sun situations. Vivid bold colors look best in bright sun. Red, yellow and orange flowers look great in terra-cotta planters.

Here are some ideas for colorful combinations. Let a colorful grass or New Zealand flax arch from the center, flanked by pink and purple petunias and plum-colored Heuchera with rose calibrachoa tumbling over the side of the pot.

Use Kong Coleus for the tall centerpiece, with a Figaro Dahlia, yellow or red, in the middle and colorful portulaca draping over the sides.

Start with a bright-colored Gerbera daisy, plant Northern Sea Oats grass behind it and fill in with yellow million bells to tumble over the front of the pot.

Another good summer mix is a combination of pink or purple petunias, with dusty miller, and a heavy border of white sweet alyssum. Put the taller dusty miller towards the back, fill in with the petunias, and finish with the white alyssum.

Use Victoria Blue salvia for the spiky plant, pink verbena for the spiller and a purple-leafed Heuchera for the filler.

Zonal geraniums have bright, colorful leaves. They are perfect for the eye-catching filler plant. For a lime-green effect, choose a yellow-leafed geranium, add some dark-leafed fibrous begonias, and let yellow calibrachoa hang over the sides.

For a shady area, start with a green-and-white variegated Hosta. Add color with impatiens and Non-Stop begonias.

Add some new life to your container garden display by exploring different color combinations in your flower pots. You will be surprised at the very different effects you can create.

• Hang codling moth traps in apple trees to reduce the number of wormy apples in your harvest this year. Be sure to use a fresh pheromone (attractant).

• Star jasmine is an evergreen vine that prefers some shade. The fragrant blossoms fill the June air with their sweet scent.

• Earwigs are out and about and hungry. Control them with the new “Sluggo Plus”, or diatomaceous earth sprinkled around the plants, or go out after dark with a flashlight and a spray bottle of Safer’s Insecticidal Soap. One squirt will put an end to the spoiler.

• Thin fruit trees now while fruits are still small. Thin apples to 6 inches apart and peaches to 4 inches apart. On Asian pears leave 1 fruit per spur.

• Ladybugs are a big help with aphids in your greenhouse or garden. Release at dusk in problem areas.

Heavenly Bamboo

Heavenly Bamboo—Nandina domestica—has to be near the top of any list of desirably attractive, easy-to-care-for, mid-sized shrubs for the home garden. In spite of its name and appearance, they are not related to bamboo and share none of their negative traits.

The delicate foliage, with its bamboo-like appearance, is attractive in every season. In spring the new growth is pinkish, turning to a light green in the summer. Then when the chill of fall arrives, the leaves turn a bright red. They hold on the plant most of the winter with this colorful look. Considered a semi-evergreen shrub, it is never without leaves.

Large clusters of creamy or pinkish white blossoms appear in late spring, followed by showy red berries that hang on the plants into the winter, until the birds discover them and enjoy the tasty winter treat. In the meantime, they can be used for winter decorations.

There are many different varieties of Nandina, which is what makes it such an interesting and useful group of shrubs. The largest is the common variety, Nandina domestica. It grows to 8 feet tall and about 6 feet wide over time. It is mostly an upright shrub, useful for height in somewhat narrow spaces. But be sure to give it at least a 4-foot bed.

Another fine large Nandina is called ‘Moyer’s Red’. It has the same growth habit as common Nandina, but truly brilliant fall color.

Nandina domestica ‘Compacta’ is similar to the parent shrub, but it only grows to 4 feet tall and 3 feet wide. This makes it very useful in smaller gardens, as a low hedge, or in courtyards or entryways. Slightly smaller is a variety called ‘Gulf Stream’. The new growth is scarlet, maturing to blue-green in summer and becoming intense red in the fall.

Among the dwarf varieties is ‘Firepower’. It grows to about 2 feet tall and wide and is knows for its brilliant red foliage in the fall and winter. It produces no flowers or fruit. It is an excellent plant to add color in a shaded landscape.

Heavenly bamboos are hardy shrubs that grow well in either sun or partial shade. Once established, they need only occasional watering, so they are useful in dry shade. In many landscapes they are deer resistant.

They are particularly useful in Asian-inspired gardens. Or, for a real show, grow in glazed ceramic pots beside water gardens and fountains.

Adding its unique foliage color through four seasons, natural rugged vigor and low care needs, this is an excellent landscape shrub.

Feed roses to encourage a beautiful display of color later this month. Treat plants to prevent insect and disease problems.

• Beautiful African Violets will decorate your indoor spaces with their masses of flowers in all shades of purple, blue and pink.

• Fuchsias in hanging baskets make beautiful patio plants. They bloom all summer and attract hummingbirds to their pendulous blossoms.

• When you plant your tomatoes, put a handful of bone meal in the bottom of the hole to help prevent blossom end rot on the fruit later on.

• It’s time to put out oriole feeders. You can also attract them with fresh orange halves.

Open Pollinated, Hybrid, or GMO Seeds

Each time I plant a seed and watch it germinate several days later, I experience the magic and wonder of Nature. The complex information, which is carried in each and every seed, that tells it how to create one certain kind of plant, color of flower or size of tomato, is truly awesome. Most of the time we take this for granted and are just thrilled with the number of choices of tomatoes and peppers available to us. But a look behind the scenes shows us that even the scientists are just beginning to understand these complexities.

Let’s take corn, for instance. Twenty years ago, Golden Cross Bantam was available on all the seed racks and was by far the most popular variety of corn for homeowners. When you harvest this corn you “get the pot of water boiling first, then run out to the garden, pick the ears, and throw them into the boiling water.” That’s because as soon as the corn is picked, the sugar cells begin turning to starch, so time is of the essence. A nice benefit of Golden Cross Bantam corn is that you can save an ear of corn, dry it and plant the seed the following year. This is an open pollinated variety. Most of the seeds on seed racks are open pollinated varieties. Heirloom seeds are varieties that are at least 50 years old and they are generally open pollinated.

To create a hybrid corn, two varieties are crossed with each other by removing the tassels of one kind so that the second kind pollinates the first. To produce hybrid seed, parental lines are grown side by side in the field, and the cross must be repeated every time the seeds are produced.

In the early 1950s it was discovered that corn kernels that shriveled stored less starch and many times more sugar than the kernels of normal sweet corn. In 1961, they created a “supersweet” hybrid of “Iochief” and named it “Illini Chief.” From there they developed a three-way hybrid named “Illini Xtra Sweet,” which became the first commercially available supersweet corn. This corn lacked the enzyme which converted kernel sugars to starch after harvest.

Once grocery-store produce buyers learned about the extended shelf-life of supersweet corn, almost all the growers of sweet corn switched over to supersweet varieties. Canneries were also happy to process supersweet corn, which required no additional sugar. Other crosses have been made which make sweet corn resistant to fungus diseases such as rust and northern leaf blight. And the development continues as researchers make new hybrids with high sugar content, long shelf-life and creamy texture. Organic seeds are collected from plants that have been grown organically and can be either open pollinated or hybrids.

But these are all quite different from GMOs. A GMO is a plant that has been genetically modified through the addition in the laboratory of a small amount of genetic material from other organisms through molecular techniques. You won’t find GMO seeds on any seed racks.

GMO corn does not cross two types of corn, it crosses corn with a bacterium or fungus. In the case of Bt corn, the bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, is injected into the corn gene to produce a protein that kills European corn borer, to reduce pesticide use. This sounds like a good idea however, along with the Bt gene, a gene which is not killed by antibiotics is injected, so that they can determine which genes successfully received the Bt gene. So this GMO corn has in it a resistance to antibiotics, which may be passed on to us when we eat it. This does not sound like such a good idea. In addition, the corn borers are now developing a resistance to Bt which may make this useful, mild pesticide ineffective.

In any case, there is a great deal to be learned about GMOs. FDA scientists have warned that genetic engineering differs from conventional practices and entails a unique set of risks. Long term studies have not been carried out. This is a very new technology and many scientists believe this whole area of GMOs needs more research. Because of these concerns with GMOs we should proceed with more caution before they are released into our environment.

In the mean time, enjoy your supersweet corn with dinner tonight.