Dayton "Dirt" - November 29, 2013

This past week turned surprisingly quickly to winter shutting down most (but not all) gardening chores. At least two necessary items to perform is to apply a wrap or tree guard to young trees with less than a 2” caliper trunk to prevent rabbits from chewing off the tender bark during the winter. A too soon application of the protective trunk is detrimental to the tree as it creates on warmer micro climate around the trunk resulting in the increased chance of the bark splitting due to it’s being un-acclimated to the ensuing cold weather. Experiments performed by Dr. Hannah Mather’s has confirmed that the above can be one cause of bark splitting on trees. Again, any tree or shrub in areas of heavy deer concentration needs protected. One method of hanging pieces of soap from the plants works for many gardeners but can be quite time consuming. Another method would be to apply the concentrate Liquid Fence as directed as soon as temperatures rise above freezing even for just a couple of hours. Rhododendron, Azalea, fragrant Viburnums, Taxus (yews) among others are susceptible to deer browsing in winter. The Taxus genus is interesting in that it is poisonous to humans and cattle but is a delightful salad to hungry deer! The nursery is in full swing now for the Christmas season with poinsettias, greens, deciduous holly, cut trees and our balled burlapped beautiful baby blue spruce. Many of the grave decorations went out before Thanksgiving but many more are in the works ready for pickup, deliveries or “walk out” sales. Now that the nursery is set up for the Christmas season, the next item on the table is to prepare for cuttings of annual flower plants and some perennials that come from Central America where the heat and longer days during winter keep the stock plants in full growth so that multiple harvests of the cuttings can be continually shipped to the northern greenhouse operation all winter. No doubt, just before Christmas we’ll be harvesting cuttings from our stock geraniums to be potted into various size containers and hanging baskets in January that will be ready to sell about May 1st. Spring will arrive sooner than you think! Tom