Starting seeds

Here is another good article on starting seeds

Children's Books on Gardening

As a parent of two young children, 1 year old Gracie and just about 4 year old Andrew, I spend a lot of time reading stories with them. One of my favorite childrens authors is Eric Carle, most famous for writing the Very Hungry Caterpillar. His books are very interactive and almost all feature animals or insects or some aspect of nature. Two in particular are pretty good introductions to some basic concepts of gardening and the Roanoke Valley Master Gardeners have used both in programs with school children.

The first book is The Tiny Seed, which tells the adventure of many seeds which have blown off of an old flower in the fall. One seed is flies to high and is burned by the sun, another lands on top of the mountain and dies because it is too cold, another falls into the ocean and drowns, and one is eaten by a mouse. Finally in spring several of the large seeds sprout, but one is smothered by a nearby weed, one is trampled by some passersby, and another is picked when it grows into a flower. The tiny seed starts slow but soon grows into a huge flower that produces many new seeds which start their own journey. This is a good introduction to how seeds grow, and the perils that seeds face in the journey towards germination.

The second book is The Grouchy Ladybug. The story starts as the grouchy ladybug sits on a leaf with two other ladybugs who are eating aphids. The grouchy ladybug doesn't want to share and flies away looking for a fight. She meets up with insects and animals of increasing size, challenging each to a fight before deciding that they aren't big enough for her to bother with. Eventually she runs into a whale, which is certainly too big for her and scares her back to the original leave where she is happy to scarf down some delicious aphids. The story teaches the concepts of time, friendship, sharing, and good manners, but also Integrated Pest Management. Ladybugs really do eat aphids and can help to keep them from being a major pest, as most good gardeners already know.

These are just two personal favorites, but the following website has an excellent list of other books that are great for gardening with kids of all ages:

Growing Minds Children's Literature

One more note about Ladybugs. I have found some cool videos on www.youtube.com about Ladybugs and insects in general, such as this one:

But the only one I can get Andrew to watch is this one:

Recent Daily Herald Articles

Here are a few helpful links to follow up on some of my recent articles in the Daily Herald:

NC State Extension publication on Starting Plans From Seeds

NC State Extension publication on Boxwood Culture

and

A Mississippi State Extension publication on controlling Mistletoe

Fine Gardening Magazine

Fine Gardening magazine is offering a special promotion to help support North Carolina Master Gardeners, by donating $10 from every new 1, 2, or 3 year subscription to the NC Master Gardener program. Fine Gardening is one of many excellent gardening magazines and it is a pleasure to have them support Master Gardeners. An additional bonus for those of you reading this, perhaps, is that the next issue (March-April 2008) will feature a short article on strawberries that I wrote for them.

If you are interested in a subscription to Fine Gardening either for yourself or as a gift, please click here www.finegardening.com/NC. The special offer will run until May 31, 2008.

Strawberry Press Release

Before I came to Halifax County as an extension agent, I was at the University of Maryland working on a Master's degree. As part of my thesis I studied different strawberry systems that were common in Maryland and areas farther North, comparing the environmental, economic, and pick your own consumer preference aspects of these systems. Many years later, I am now starting to get some of the research from my thesis published in scientific journals. The first of what I hope will be three papers was published by the journal HortTechnology in October 2007. I can't provide a link to the paper (and I'm not sure anyone would want to read the whole thing), but the organization that publishes the journal, the American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS), recently put together a short and sweet press release summarizing the findings in the paper. You can see it here if you are interested: http://ashs.org/pressrelease/?p=16

A second paper from this work comparing the environmental impacts of the systems has been ubmitted to another ASHS journal and will, I hope, be published soon.