Becoming a Friend of Penn State

Access to some software applications that the University provides requires creating a “Friends of Penn State” account. This is a totally free account with privacy assured, that will provide a modicum of security control and some demographic data about who is using the application. It’s essentially just an on-line identity for PSU applications, very similar to registering for on-line access to free content from Newspapers and Magazines.

The process is easy. Go here. Click on "Create an Account". Answer the information (First Name, Middle Name, Last Name, Address) and create a password (must be at least 8 characters long and contain both letters and at least one number). You will be given a userid, based on your initials (if you don’t provide a middle initial, one will be assigned) and numbers. So, my userid is rce11, for example. Linda S. is lbs112. Linda H. is lmh19, etc. You’ll also need to fill out some basic demographic data.

Eventually, all Master Gardeners (and other Extension volunteers, including 4H’ers) will need to open a “Friend of the University” account because sometime after the first of the year, the system for reporting our volunteer hours will be changed, and the new application will require folks to use this registration process in order to gain access to the new system.

We'll know more after the training session in Gettysburg that Linda and I will attend on November 12, so stay tuned.

Shelob in the Lavender

I reached down to collect some calendula seeds in the Herb Demonstration Garden on Monday, and came up close and personal with this beautiful spider.

Laurie C. was kind enough (and brave enough – given her confessed arachnophobia) to come in and get pictures.

The web is right in the middle of the lavender patch at the center of the Herb Garden.

We’ve narrowed the ID down to Argiope aurantia (Yellow Garden Spider), or Argiope trifasciata (Banded Garden Spider) and asked Alex to confirm.

Argiopes, like other orb-web spiders, weave an additional pattern of white silk in their webs (visible in the center of the web in the first picture), called stabilimenta. Scientists are unsure of the purpose of the stabilimenta, speculating that they provide an additional attractant for prey, that they can be used to scare off predators, or that they provide a visible means for birds and mammals to notice the web and leave it undisturbed. One of the common names for aurantia, is writing spider, for the resemblance of the stabilimenta to writing. Charlotte must have belonged to this family.

The Cooperative Extension Fact Sheet, Commonly Encountered Pennsylvania Spiders, is an excellent resource to hand out to the public when you're covering the help desk and you're asked about a spider specimen.

Check out this battle between an aurentia garden spider and a huge cicada-killer wasp.

UPDATE: Alex says A. trifasciata and sends this picture of A. aurantia that he took in Delaware County, PA.


















UPDATE II: Alex went back to the Herb Garden and took these pictures:

A Way to Garden

Angela W. sends this link to another garden blog, "A Way to Garden" hosted by Margaret Roach, a former garden editor at Newsday in New York, and, more recently, Martha Stewart Living, where she was the magazine’s first garden editor and until 2008 was editorial director over all of the company’s content: magazines, books, and internet. I've added a link in the sidebar.

An Albino Wooly Bear?

Nancy M. sent in a picture of a wooly white caterpillar that was eating her oak trees. Alex was able to identify it as a hickory tussock moth caterpillar (Lophocampa caryae). Those long hairs are defense mechanisms that can cause stinging rashes.

From the OSU fact sheet:

Caterpillars or larvae of certain moths possess stinging hairs. These sharp hairs or spines are either hollow, connected to poison glands (venom flows on contact), or similar to glass fibers (hairs break off in skin easily) sometimes causing pain like a needle prick. Depending on the individual, reaction to the sting ranges from mild, with local reddening, swelling, burning and itching to severe pain. Hypersensitive persons may experience severe swelling, nausea and generalized systemic reactions, occasionally requiring hospital treatment. In severe cases, entrance of hairs into the eye can cause blindness.

This caterpillar is basically white with a black head and when fully grown is about 1-1/2 inches long. Symptoms are usually a skin rash (poison ivy-like) and sometimes severe itching followed by a painful burning sensation.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry.

Bummer

I was really looking forward to growing some Scarlet Runner Beans next year, based on the ones we saved from the John Brown’s House. (Close up at right). They are simply gorgeous. I was imagining some redone bean dish with that purply, mottled appearance, paired with some contrasting color combination to wow fellow MG’s and folks at Church potlucks. No such luck.

Barbara Damrosh, who writes a weekly (every Thursday) “Cook’s Garden” column for the Home Section of the Washington Post has this to say:

…the anthocyanins that account for the gorgeous pinkness dissolve when cooked, and the beans, though still fine to eat, fade to a lavender-gray

How disappointing. I think I'll grow them anyway.

The Home section is also host to a weekly column by Scott Aker, a horticulturalist at the National Arboretum, who this week has some advice about preventing spindly mums.

He's also doing his part to overcome the "secret" part of the "Best Kept Secret", known as Cooperative Extension. From the same column:

Names vary slightly from place to place. Sometimes it is the Cooperative Extension Service, sometimes Cooperative Extension, and other times simply Extension. Whatever the name, it is always associated with the land-grant university system in each state and the District.

The Extension Service's Master Gardener program provides trained volunteers to advise home gardeners across the country. There are active Master Gardener programs throughout the Washington area, providing plant clinics, lectures and demonstration gardens.

Our own Elmer G. has been a volunteer at the National Arboretum for years. You can sign up to visit his fabulously landscaped surroundings in Shippensburg by taking the November 7th class of Principles of Landscape Design.

So Whodunit?

Ageratina altissima , formerly known as Eupatorium rugosum (Taxonomists gotta make a living somehow) or white snakeroot, is a common native wildflower in bloom in our area now and is on many extension lists of native plants, good for attracting pollinators.

It is also the plant that killed Lincoln’s mother.

When stock animals feed on white snakeroot they show symptoms of trembles—muscular tremors, weakness, and constipation often leading to death. The poisonous principle is named tremetol, a fat-soluble, high molecular weight alcohol. Nursing females are shielded from some of the effects of tremetol because of the high rate at which it is excreted into their milk. This can be a death sentence for their nursing young however. For people consuming the milk of their animals, the resulting sickness was misinterpreted as a dangerous infectious epidemic of late autumn.

In 1818, nine-year old Abraham Lincoln, lost his mother to milk sickness.

Wicked Plants!

In the seed saving post, below, if you enlarge the picture with the beans (by clicking on it), you’ll notice that one of the plates is labeled castor bean plant. Bill D. gave me those seeds last week at the garden tour after I admired and asked about the strange, large-leaved plants growing along the fence.

Not only are these the source of the old health tonic, castor oil, but also, the source of the deadly, full of spy-induced intrigue, compound ricin. From the Cornell site:

In 1978, ricin was used to assassinate Georgi Markov in 1978, a Bulgarian journalist who spoke out against the Bulgarian government. He was stabbed with the point of an umbrella while waiting at a bus stop near Waterloo Station in London. They found a perforated metallic pellet embedded in his leg that had presumably contained the ricin toxin.

Reading that, reminded me of this NY Times article from earlier this summer, about a Brooklyn Botanic Garden exhibit dedicated to growing horrible, poisonous plants. It’s the subject of the book Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln's Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities, by Amy Stewart.

This passage in an interview with the author intrigued me:

Abe - Who’s going to read the book? Gardeners or people who like weird twisted stuff?

Amy Stewart - “Actually, I am really pleased to see that it’s making its way into the hands of people who like weird twisted stuff. I’m getting a lot of very, very interesting emails. There is definitely a sort of horticultural underground out there of people who are into dark and dastardly plants. But it’s also finding its way into the hands of murder mystery readers, and I love that! Those people love a good villain as much as I do!”

I’m a gardener who also likes weird twisted stuff, so I seem to fit the demographic perfectly!

Any others out there? I know of at least one.

Pictures from the book here.

Seed Saving

We recently put the John Brown’s House garden to bed, and saved some seeds for next year in the process. Saving tomato seeds is easy. Squeeze seeds into a class of water, let it sit and ferment for a few days, strain, and dry. I like to dry them on paper plates where I can write the variety on the plate. Paper towels work well, also, but the seeds have a tendency to stick. Peppers and beans are even easier. With peppers, allow the fruit itself to dry, then break open and save the seeds. The same procedure works with peas and beans – allow them to dry on the vine until they rattle, then harvest and allow to dry. Paper envelopes are best for storage, then putting them in an air-tight jar and placed in the refrigerator or freezer. Here’s a fact sheet from the University of Minnesota.

Remember that saving seeds from hybrid varieties, or from plants that easily cross-pollinate (like cucurbits), is not recommended.

Seed saving is not limited to vegetable gardening, of course.

The National Gardening Association’s recent regional newsletter, pointed me to this site. It’s all seeds all the time. There are sections on plant ID, based on its seed, or seed pods. Saving seeds. Links to other seed sites. It's an excellent resource. I’ve added it to the sidebar.

We are always looking for seeds from native plants to add to the wildlife area. Echinacea, Rudibeckia, Ratibida, Cosmos, Cleome, Helenium, Asclepias, Digitalis, Larkspur, Lobelias, and Lupines are all welcome. If you grow any of these, consider not dead heading, and letting them go to seed to collect and spread in the wildlife area.

You can sign up for the regional National Gardening Association Newsletter here. Here is their home page.

The Garden Professors

Ginger Pryor forwarded a link to a new blog (since July) by some PhD horticulture professors and Extension specialists at various Universities. From their promotional email:

We are university professors with expertise in the science behind various aspects of urban horticulture, arboriculture, gardening, and landscaping. Every weekday one of us posts a commentary on something we feel passionately about - and sometimes it's controversial. Follow our debates, and leave your own comments as well!

The professors are:

Bert Cregg, an Associate Professor and Extension Specialist in the Department of Horticulture and Department of Forestry at Michigan State University

Holly Scaggins, an Associate Professor in the Department of Horticulture at Virginia Tech and Director of the Hahn Horticulture Garden, a 6-acre teaching and display garden on campus.

Linda Chalker-Scott, an associate professor in the department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Washington State University and an Extension Specialist in Urban Horticulture

James Nienhuis from the University of Wisconsin (no introduction, yet)

and Jeff Gillman, an associate professor in the department of Horticultural Science at the University of Minnesota.

I like the way they've approached the blog - having fun, debating with each other, and providing lots of science-based information in the process.

I've added a link to their home page on the side bar. The Garden Professors.

An Autumn Stroll

This Sunday, September 20th, 12:00 to 5:00PM, the Franklin County Master Gardener Fall Garden Tour. Here is a preview:

Bill D.'s vegetable garden and greenhouse is also on the tour.

Delayed Gratification

OK. This has nothing to do with Horticulture, or Franklin County, but I had to share:

Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.

Pollinator Class

Don’t forget Saturday’s Pollinator Class 10:00-12:00 at the Clubhouse. Here are some pictures sent in by Laurie C., taken in the Wildlife Area on September 1st to whet your appetite.



Scolia dubia, digger wasp. Not only beneficial as a nectar-drinking occasional pollinator, but a parasite of Japanese Beetle grubs.



St. John's Wort, growing behind the Compost Demonstration Area.



You’d think there’d be flowers, other than the invasive Canada Thistle Bull Thistle weed, she could be pollinating in our Wildflower Meadow. Stoopid bee.

Moths on the Sedum 'Autum Joy'

Update: The antenna look more butterfly than moth. Can anyone confirm?

Road Trip: Gourds, Native Plants, (and Bees)

Angela W. sends these pictures from yesterday’s Road Trip where ten MG’s visited Meadowbrooke Gourds in Carlisle, PA, and Meadowood Nursery in Hummelstown, PA.

Speaking of gourds. Have you wondered what all those vines spilling over the fences over in the Hort Trial Garden are all about?

Hoping for some Winter Squash from another of Steve’s trials?

Sorry, no. They’re the vines for various large-sized gourds: Swan-necked, Bird House, and Basket gourds. It turns out Alex S. is continuing his research in native bee shelters. As you know, for the last two years, he’s been experimenting using various bee box designs to provide shelters for native bee populations. Growing gourds is another potential way to accomplish the same thing, cheaply and sustainably. Alex will be talking to us about the subject at our next MG general meeting on Tuesday, September 22nd. So come for what’s sure to be an informative meeting.

Pomodorians? Lycopersiconiphiliacs? Tomatamorati?

Got a good name for the group of folks helping Steve rate the flavor and texture of this year's tomatoes?

Vote at the poll, or suggest another name in the comments section.

Camera Finds - Pink Lady Slipper

I emptied my partner's camera of all pictures that had been taken and stored in order to free up memory space, and came up with these from back in April. These were taken behind the old log cabin that I use to store old pots and garden stuff for the winter. Here's a fact sheet from the University of Wisconsin on Cypripedium acaule, Pink Lady Slipper. I found this part on how they get pollinated interesting:

Bumblebees are lured into the pouch of the labellum through the slit in the front, attracted by the bright color and sweet scent of the flower. Once inside, they find no reward, and discover that they are trapped--with only one point of escape. Inside the pouch, there are hairs which lead to a pair of openings, one beneath each pollen mass. First, however, the bee must pass under the stigma, so if it bears any pollen from a visit to another flower, it will be deposited before picking up a fresh load, thus preventing self-pollination.
Unfortunately, the bees quickly learn from their experiences and soon avoid C. acaule flowers. Thus, like several other orchids in our flora, they are dependent on naive bees, and generally experience very low pollination rates (Davis 1986).

I'm not sure if it's the seeming cunning of the flower, or the learning process of the bee that impresses me more.

I hope that sometime in the future, we'll establish a Spring Native Ephemeral Garden in the Wildlife area when the trees get large enough to create the right habitat.

UPDATE: Here's a scientific paper on the learning ability of honeybees. Google "naive bees" for more fascinating reading.

eXtension

At the first new Master Gardener class last Thursday, Ginger Pryor introduced us to the eXtension web page. I’ve added the Horticulture home page to the sidebar. Here’s the Master Gardener page. Think of it as a kind of Wikipedia for Land Grant Universities and Cooperative Extension across the U.S. and Canada. It's chock full of interesting articles and pictures. Here's one about Pollinator Gardens.

If you use the "Ask the Expert" feature and ask something about mosquitoes in South Central Pennsylvania, it might even get routed here.

So who's gonna be the first to try that out?

Tomato Day Pictures - Evelyn

Proud Grandpa



Ask the Plant Doctor



Dang, these are good!



Denise L.'s arrangements are wonderful.

Ready to Go.

Dead animal preparers

A window view

Bill D. with a 3 lb Orange Strawberry. Yum!

PawPaws

Laura at the Punk Rock Garden blog informs us that there is going to be a pawpaw tasting this weekend (9/19 and 9/20) in York County at the Gardener of the Owl Valley Nursery. Pawpaws are a native fruit tree, with a fruit tasting something like a cross between a banana and a mango. Here are some fact sheets on growing them. From Purdue, and from Virginia Tech. Our friend, Mike McConkey of Edible Landscapes in Virginia sells them on-line. You’ll need two different varieties for cross-pollination purposes, and they like moist, well-drained soil. They are the larval host plant for the zebra swallowtail butterfly, so great for attracting them to your property.

Tomato Recipes

Some recipes for all those tomatoes coming in:

Oven Baked Semi-Dried Tomatoes (from Peg B.):

Peel, core and slice tomatoes onto a jelly roll pan lined with parchment paper. Drizzle with olive oil. Sprinkle with sea salt. Season with crushed garlic. (Can also add other favorite herbs -basil, oregano etc. sprinkled on midway during the baking process). Bake in 400 degree oven for 30-60 min or until liquid is absorbed, which will depend on the variety of tomato used. Roma, plum, or paste tomatoes do well with this recipe, and will take less time than the juicier slicer, or beefsteak tomatoes.

Freeze in a zip lock freezer bag. Use with pasta, in soups, etc., or any recipe calling for tomato paste, or dried tomatoes.

Lotsa Spaghetti Sauce:

½ Bushel Tomatoes (16 quarts)
1 pint Olive Oil
3 pounds of onions, chopped into ½ - ¼ inch dice
5 or 6 Bell Peppers, chopped into ½ - ¼ inch dice
1/3 Cup salt
1 ¼ Cup sugar
60 ounce tomato paste (or use Peg’s recipe above, instead)
1 Cup of Fresh Basil Leaves, chopped
2 Tablespoons Oregano
3 Cloves Minced Garlic (or more, to taste)

Saute onions, peppers, and garlic in olive oil. Separately cook tomatoes until soft. Strain through a foley mill to remove seeds and skins. Add to cooked peppers and onions. Add seasonings and herbs. Cook down to right consistency. Can in quart jars and follow directions for processing and sealing. Makes 15 quarts.

We tasted the spaghetti sauce at the Victory Garden class this morning and it's a winner!

Upcoming Classes

Two classes coming up in the area in nearby counties Cumberland and Adams. In Cumberland, this Saturday, September 19th a Fall Garden Day will have classes in Growing Garlic and Shallots by our own Steve Bogash, as well as classes on Growing Fall Lettuce, hands-on Salsa making, and a presentation on Green Roofs. Directions on the brochure (pdf), or contact the Cumberland County office.

In Adams County, on Saturday, October 24th, there will be a Rites of Fall day with classes on Food Preservation, Building Cold Frames, Garden Photography, Herb preservation, weather proofing your garden, pruning, and flower conditioning for arrangements. Contact the Gettysburg office for details.