Different Ways to Grow Your Vegetables

My Gardening Tips article in Friday's Roanoke Rapids Daily Herald brings Square Foot Gardening Week to a close with a look at a few other ideas for gardening in small spaces.

Different Ways to Grow Your Vegetables

What's in your square?

There's even more coverage of the Square Foot Symposium in today's Roanoke Rapids Daily Herald.  Thanks to Donna Clements for spending some time with us on Saturday and sharing her unique perspective on the symposium! Please be sure to read her thoughtful article- Word Pearls: Square Foot Gardening Benefits

This week seems to have turned into Square Foot Gardening week here at the blog, much like the week before turned in to Crape Myrtle week.  Next week I'll be traveling with a group of Extension employees to Arizona and Mexico on a Hispanic Cultural Immersion trip, so I imagine next week's posts will have a consistent theme as well.  Our trip will see us meet with a number of organizations that work with Hispanic communities on issues such as immigration as well as meet with Extension personnel in Arizona to see how Extension provides programming for Hispanic audiences.  I hope that I have enough free time to take in some of the Southwestern landscape, in addition to the food and culture we'll be enjoying.

One last note to finish Square Foot Gardening week: During the symposium we were each asked to give a 1-2 minute presentation on Square Foot Gardening in front of the class.  Some performed songs that they wrote about Square Foot Gardening, some gave elevator speeches, some simulated teaching Square Foot Gardening to an elementary school class, and others talked about why eating fresh vegetables was better than eating chicken pot pie.  For my two minutes, I wrote and shared what I guess you would call a free-form poem:

Square Foot Gardening

Gardening in a square, not a row

What's in your square?

Anything you choose

Warm season or cool

Short or tall

Big or small

All the harvest you want with 

no digging, 

no thinning, 

and no weeds-

well maybe just a few

but fewer than you're used to

Less space

Less time

Less money

Less labor

Less headache

Less heartache

Less backache

Square Foot Gardening

Gardening in a square

What's in your square?

More SFG Sympoium Coverage

Via the Roanoke Rapids Daily Herald, here is a bit more on last week's Square Foot Gardening Symposium: http://www.rrdailyherald.com/news/square-foot-gardening-comes-to-halifax/article_0f1a84b8-9629-11e2-b1e6-0019bb2963f4.html

Roanoke Valley Master Gardeners Host Square Foot Gardening Symposium

28 Newly Certified Square Foot Gardening Instructors (photo courtesy of Betty Bianconi)

Many of us love to garden and love fresh vegetables, but don't have the space to grow a traditional row garden.  Or maybe we have the space, but our soil is bad and nothing ever seems to grow in it.  Maybe it's rocky, or sandy, or nothing but clay and never drains.  Or maybe you're sick of dealing with weeds and are looking for a way to get keep them down.  Gardeners in such situations might have success using the Square Foot Gardening method.

This past weekend, the Roanoke Valley Master Gardeners hosted a 3-day Square Foot Gardening (SFG) symposium, where interested gardeners learned the benefits of this gardening method and how to build and manage these types of gardens.  I was very proud of our Master Gardeners for all the hard work they put into organizing and hosting this training.  We were surprised and honored to have attendees from not only Halifax County and other parts of the state, but from South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Illinois and Missouri as well.  I want to offer special thank yous to Master Gardener Betty Bianconi, who first had the idea of hosting the symposium and did all the legwork of arranging the symposium through the Square Foot Gardening Foundation, and to the Master Gardeners who helped plan, cook, and clean for this successful three-day event.  

Our symposium instructor and Square Foot Gardening Foundation CEO Victoria Boudman (center), her daughter Grace (left), and Master Gardener Betty Bianconi (right)

Getting started

The square foot garden method, developed by author and engineer Mel Bartholomew, is based on gardening in raised bed squares rather than rows in order to cut down on the space required to garden and eliminate the need for digging.  The basic square foot garden design is a 4 foot by 4 foot box, with a depth of 6 inches.  A grid separates the box into 16  one-foot by one-foot squares.  Within each square, you plant your vegetables.

Laying the grid

Depending on the type of vegetable you plant in each square, you may plant 1, 4, 9 or 16 of that particular plant.  For plants that grow to a large size, such as tomatoes, you'd only plant 1 per square (anymore than 1 and the plants wouldn't have enough room to grow), but for very small plants such as carrots, you'd plant 16 per square.  The beds are filled with a modified potting mix composed of 1/3 blended compost, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 coarse vermiculite, referred to in SFG literature as Mel's Mix.  Gardens can be built in a variety of sizes, but never wider then four feet to allow the garden to be accessible from all sides.

Victoria, Karen, and Wayne hang the trellis

Karen planting the last few onion bulbs

During the symposium, we built and planted a 4' x 4' square at the Halifax Agricultural Center.  The box that we planted during the symposium has cool season vegetables in, including garden peas, onions, broccoli, swiss chard, and leaf lettuce.  Some of these were planted a bit later than optimal, but we hope to be able to harvest them before the warm weather completely takes over.  In terms of planting arrangement, we set the broccoli in the four center squares, because it will ultimately be the largest of all the items planted, and we put garden peas along the back row so that they can climb the trellis.  The trellis was placed along the North side of the bed so it won't shade the remainder of the garden.  The remaining plants were set in the outside squares.  The broccoli and lettuce were planted by transplants, all others were seeded.

Our Master Gardeners have been working for over a year to recover what was formerly called the memorial garden and develop it into a demonstration garden.  We hope to use this demonstration garden to expose gardeners to new types of plants and planting systems that they can use at home.  We decided to tie the first phase of planting the garden into the SFG symposium and we will do additional square foot boxes in the coming weeks.  Our plan for this section is to grow a variety of different vegetables, both cool season and warm season, and also experiment with different soil mixes within the boxes.  I'm interested to see how Mel's Mix compares to other potting mixes or even straight compost in terms of plant performance.  Once the square foot section is established, we'll begin on our herb garden and our shade garden.  Additional sections will be added to the garden in following years.

Our new square foot garden and the Roanoke Valley Master Gardeners who helped plant it (photo by Betty Bianconi)

Check back as I'll be posting updates every few weeks, both of the square foot gardens specifically and the demonstration garden as a whole as it begins to take shape.  

A Photo Essay of Stems, Trunks, and Unusual Flowers

Live oak, the ultimate shade tree

Note: I started writing this post on Monday, but I've been so busy this week preparing for and attending the Square Foot Gardening Symposium our Master Gardeners hosted Thursday, Friday, and Saturday (more on that in my next post, which will hopefully be later today or tomorrow), that I wasn't able to finish until today.  

This weekend I got the urge to visit one of my favorite places in North Carolina, the JC Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh.  It was probably the warm weather on Saturday that fed my urge, but by the time I made it there it was Sunday and the temperature had cooled quite a bit.  Many people like to visit places like the arboretum in the height of spring, when many plants are in bloom, and while I like to visit then as well I try as much as possible to visit at a different time of the year each time I go.  Visiting the arboretum at different times of the year, spending time in different sections each time, or even walking around in a different direction help me to notice different plants each time and even helps make different things stand out about plants that I see each time.

A witchhazel flower

In the spring and summer your eye is usually drawn to flowers, while in the fall you often notice foliage color and berries.  During the winter, well there is a lot of bark.  For some plants, this means that they are in a relatively dull stage of their growth, but for others, winter is really their time to shine.  You can also find flowers in the winter, but flowers on winter blooming plants don't often look much like flowers you'd see in the spring or summer on azaleas, or roses.  Winter flowers are rarely "complete" flowers, meaning they may not have all four parts that make up a complete flower- petals, sepals, stamens, and pistils.  So they may look a bit odd at first, but they can still be beautiful.

So what I'd like to do is share some pictures that I took on Sunday of the plants that caught my eye.  While many of these plants are specialty plants that aren't always easy to find or even available in nurseries, I hope that I can get across the idea that plants can be interesting in winter, even without blooms, or without leaves.

Let's start with a few crape myrtles.  I know, I know, I said last week that I was done talking about crape myrtles, but the JC Raulston Arboretum has some of the most impressive crape myrtles you'll find anywhere and I couldn't go without sharing just a few pictures of the best of the bunch.

You can't really visit the arboretum without noticing these first two crape myrtles as they are right near the street entrance.  The arboretum was quite literally built around these two trees as they were among the very first trees planted in the space that would eventually become the arboretum.  These are both Japanese crape myrtles, an ancestor of the hybrid crape myrtles that make up much of our landscape.  Obviously these get much taller then what we have in our yards.

The one to the right was named 'Fantasy' and you can read why on the sign.  It is one of the signature plants of the JC Raulston Arboretum.










This is another 'Fantasy' Crape Myrtle, a cutting taken from the original.  I include this picture to show that crape myrtles can be pruned to a single trunk if so desired.  It certainly changes the shape of the tree, which goes against what I recommend last week, but I think this is an interesting look and obviously it hasn't affected the bark color.


Our final crape myrtle, from a seedling of 'Fantasy' named 'Townhouse', is just incredible.  I figure if any plant should be appreciated in a state that loves camouflage as much as North Carolina, it is this crape myrtle.  Just look at the pattern on this trunk!

You might wonder why I spend so much time writing about crape myrtles, but I think the sign below sums it up in just three words- Four Season Beauty.  When crape myrtles are treated properly, they are the stars of any garden all year round.  When they are not treated properly, they are pretty for about 3 weeks and a scourge for the other 49.  If that doesn't make you want to take proper care of them, I'm not sure what will. 

Lest you think all I did Sunday was photograph crape myrtles, let's move on to a few other plants of note from my trip. I'll start with Poncirus trifoliata, the Hardy orange.  It's pretty obvious what this plant is notable for- the insane thorns that cover the stems.  This makes a pretty ominous look, and these plants have been used as security plants in some situations to keep people in or out of a particular area.  It grows in wooded areas throughout North Carolina, and I can usually count on having a hunter come in the office once or twice each winter asking about the thorned plant they encountered while out hunting.  Despite the intimidating thorns, it does have some ornamental value.  The stems, as you can see, are a pretty vibrant green color, which makes it stand out amongst the browns and grays of winter.  They're also twisted, much like Harry Lauder's walking stick, another interesting plant in the winter.  Now, I'm not saying I'd ever want to have one in my yard, but if you're the kind of person who likes things that are different, this is a plant that would definitely fit that bill.

I always knew about the shrub form, with it's twisted branches, but never knew until this past weekend that there was a tree form as well.  It's not nearly as interesting; basically it looks like any other tree but with branches that are slightly green at the tips.  The tree form hardy orange has regular straight branches, but is also loaded with thorns and if anything they are more dangerous looking.

Many trees with exfoliating, or peeling, bark really shine during the winter time.  These trees exfoliate year-round and thus have interest year round, but when after their leaves and leaves of other plants growing around them have fallen in autumn, it really exposes their beauty.




Most people are familiar with river birches and their exfoliating habit.  This particular one, Betula nigra 'Studetec' really caught my eye during my visit.

Less familiar are the maples that have exfoliating habits.  Paperbark maple is one of my personal favorites and while I know there is one at the arboretum, I didn't see it on this particular trip.  I did however find this one, Acer palmatum 'Beni komachi' a dwarf red-leaved Japanese maple.  Japanese maples are of course highly prized for their unique leaf shape and color and are not always thought of for their bark, but this one clearly has a unique look after the leaves are gone.  Some others have stems that are either red, green, or purple, particularly near the tips that also stand out in winter. 'Sango kaku' is a red stemmed variety that is a particular favorite and is also available from many nurseries, but I didn't see one on this trip.

Ok so obviously I'm sort of a nut for plants with interesting bark and stems, but maybe you're reading this thinking "What about the flowers?"  Sure, there are relatively few plants that bloom in the winter compared to spring, summer, and even fall, but there are some.  Near the beginning of this post I showed a close up of a yellow flower from a witchhazel (Hamemelis x intermidia 'Wiero').  Here's that same plant from afar.  In full bloom it looks somewhat like a forsythia, though perhaps not quite as spectacular.  It blooms a few weeks before forsythia at a time when not much else is in bloom, so it can be a tremendous asset in a garden that is otherwise lacking color in late winter.

Witchhazels also come in other colors, and this young plant with rust-orange blooms really impressed me.  This one is called 'Twilight' and I'll be interested in checking back on it in a few years once it reaches a more mature size.  I'm sure it will be quite a showstopper.

The final plant I’ll share is a personal favorite, one I love so much I've planted it in my garden and given it as a gift at least twice that I can recall.  Edgeworthia chrysantha, commonly known as Paper bush, or Cigar paper bush, is a beautiful and fragrant winter- blooming, medium-sized shrub.  It forms clusters of tiny white tubular shaped flowers that are a soft yellow on the inside.  The blooms hang downward daintily off of the stems, and produce an incredibly sweet fragrance that is noticeable throughout the garden when the plant is in bloom.  And though I’m focusing on the winter interest of these plants, it’s worth noting that Edgeworthia has very large tropical looking foliage that makes it standout during the summer as well.  The large leaves were once dried and used for rolling cigars, giving the plant its common name. 

I encourage you to visit the JC Raulston Arboretum when you are in Raleigh, and other arboretums and botanical gardens when you have the chance.  Remember that plants are not only interesting when they bloom and are not only interesting in the spring and summer.  Filling your garden with plants that are interesting for other reasons and in other seasons will make your garden much more dynamic.   

Checking in on the Bees

In Extension, we like to say that not only is every day a little bit different, but you never quite know at the start of the day what you're going to be doing by the end of it.  Which brings me to this:

I thought I would be spending today in the office finishing up some computer work, completing an assignment for my class, and tying up some loose ends after being out of the office all day Wednesday and most of Thursday.  But as it turns out, a local beekeeper stopped by at about 11:00 and asked if I wanted to go check on some bees with him.  He and I have been working together over the past month to start a local beekeeper's association and he is a great source of beekeeping knowledge.  I have been stuck in the stage of novice beekeeper for about five years now, never really having a whole lot of success, so I thought it would be fun to tag along with someone more experienced for awhile.  Plus, as you can see, I look great in a bee suit and am always excited to put one on!

Right now, we're in a period of the year that is very important for beekeepers.  All winter long, bees stay inside their hive in a period of semi-hibernation, trying to keep warm and survive off of the supply of surplus honey from the previous season.  Now as the weather turns warm, the bees will begin to leave the hive and search for food and the queen bee will begin to lay eggs.  Unfortunately, with few flowers in bloom, there is very little pollen or nectar available for foraging bees to feed on.  Beekeepers will often provide supplemental food to their bees at this time in the form of sugar water or pollen patties in order to keep the bees healthy and strong as they head into spring.

The round brown blob on the top of the frames is a pollen patty.  It looks and feels a little bit like peanut butter.  Once we added it to the boxes, the bees quickly moved towards it, clearly attracted to the smell and eager to feed.  The patties are rich in protein and will provide strength to bees as they begin to forage and also help young bees develop into mature adults.  Around the edge of the hive box, you can see some white powder.  We applied an antiobiotic called terramycin to prevent against two dangerous bacterial diseases, American Foulbrood and European Foulbrood.  Both of these diseases can result in complete colony loss and an expensive and time consuming equipment sterilization process, so prevention is extremely important.  In order to get the bees to consume the terramycin, it is mixed with powdered sugar.  It will be added to the inner perimeter of the hive box every five days, for a total of three applications.

In addition to feeding and applying the terramycin treatment, the other job for the morning was to switch out the boxes.  In the picture above, you can see four different hives, one of which we had open as I was taking the picture.  Each hive consists of multiple boxes- usually two full sized hive boxes, and one shallow box called a super.  The two hive boxes are where most of the bees congregate during the wintertime and are where the queen lays her eggs.  The super is usually where excess honey is produced.  During the spring, summer, and fall, beekeepers will stack multiple supers on top of one another, encouraging the bees to produce as much honey as possible, with each super capable of holding roughly thirty pounds of honey.  When the honey is harvested, one super is usually left through the winter for the bees to feed on.  As the bees huddle together to stay warm in winter, the majority of the bees will be found in the higher of the two hive boxes.  Once they are in the higher box, they rarely move back down and can become overcrowded and attempt to swarm (leave the hive) if they are feeling claustrophobic.  Many beekeepers will switch the upper and lower hive box in late winter/early spring to keep the bees from feeling the need to swarm and also to keep the queen from getting into the supers and laying eggs there.  

Since it's not terribly warm out yet (It is low 60's as I write this, but was 26 degrees overnight), we didn't take out many individual frames because we didn't want to disturb the bees too much, but we did take out a few to look for evidence of egg laying.  If you look closely at the picture above, you can see in several of the cells a small bit of white.  This is the developing bee larva.  The female worker bees will feed the larva until they mature (it takes 21-24 days from egg to winged adult).

We spent a total of about an hour working the four hives and talking about bees and beekeeping, during which time I learned quite a bit. All signs point to four healthy, happy colonies based on what we saw today.

For those who are interested in bees and beekeeping, our first Beekeepers Association meeting will be held on Monday March 25th at 7 pm in the Halifax Agricultural Center in Halifax, NC.  Since it's our first meeting, we hope to get an idea from those in attendance what sort of needs they have as beekeepers, what topics they'd like to learn about in future meetings, and how they feel the association can help them.  All are welcome, from novice beekeepers to professionals and everyone in between.  Please leave a comment here or email me at matt_stevens@ncsu.edu if you'd like to join us. 

Gardening Tips 3/15/13: Pruning Crape Myrtles

And now, my Gardening Tips article from the Roanoke Rapids Daily Herald!  This week's article is Pruning Crape Myrtles, which I guess has been the theme of the blog for this week, but this is my last word on the topic for now.  I will be back soon with something completely different, I promise.

http://www.rrdailyherald.com/opinion/columns/gardening-tips-pruning-crape-myrtles/article_991c8bda-8d9a-11e2-8369-001a4bcf887a.html

Working Towards a Healthy Halifax

I'd like to congratulate Gavin Coombs, the newest member of our office to become a columnist for the Roanoke Rapids Daily Herald.  Gavin works out of our office, but he works for the North Carolina Public Health Foundation through a grant by the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust.  He has been working with Cooperative Extension and numerous other local organizations to increase access to healthy foods and increase physical activity.  He'll be writing his column, Healthy Thoughts, for the Daily Herald every other Tuesday.  Here is his first column:

http://www.rrdailyherald.com/opinion/columns/healthy-thoughts-working-toward-a-healthy-halifax/article_8c217172-8b27-11e2-a71b-001a4bcf887a.html

Creating an instructional video (Pruning Crape Myrtles) Part Two

Before I get to the video itself, I want to share a couple quick thoughts on the making of the video.  Since the impetus for doing this was a class assignment, and this is the first time I've made this type of video and the first time I've posted anything to YouTube, this reflection seems appropriate.  However, if all you care about is learning how to prune your Crape Myrtles, I won't be terribly offended if you skip the next few paragraphs. 

First, I spent a lot of time thinking about the points I wanted to make during the video ahead of time, but I also wanted to appear natural on camera and not read from a script, so there were a few things I forgot as we were filming (I'll fill in the gaps below) and I stumbled over my words a time or two.  We also shot a few takes, on a few different trees, and since each tree was a little bit different some points were stressed less in the final video then they were on other takes.   Overall, however, I'm pretty happy with the information presented. 

Second, I spent a lot of time in my head planning how I wanted the video to look, but not a lot of time sharing that plan with the person who shot the video, my wife.  So there are a few times when I wish the camera was focused a bit more on the tree or the branch I was cutting and a little bit less on me, but I have only myself to blame for that.

Finally, I waited and waited for a day when the sun was out and the weather was warm and the wind was calm (as calm as it ever is in March anyway), and I ended up settling on a great day weather wise.  I forgot, however, that all of the trees I had at my disposal as pruning examples were in fairly close proximity to the road, meaning that there's some car noise here and there.  I tried to pause when cars went by so we could edit that out as much as possible, but I'm not perfect. 

So, I've posted the video below and I hope it gives you a good understanding of how to prune Crape Myrtles.  The main points I want you to take away from the video and these past two blog posts are:

1. Prune to enhance the natural shape of the tree, not to change it.  When you're finished pruning, the tree should like like a neater version of the tree you started with, not a different tree entirely.

2. Remove low growing branches to expose the trunks, and selectively thin the top half of the tree to prevent the canopy from becoming too dense.  Branches that are dead, damaged, crossing one another, or touching one another should be removed.

3. Remove excess trunks early in the tree's life so that it more closely resembles a tree than a bush.  3-5 trunks is ideal.  For older trees, it is not always practical to remove trunks, so you may have to make do with what you've got. 

4. Above all, resist the temptation to hack Crape Myrtles down to the ground year after year as so many people do.  If you haven't already, read my previous post where I outline why Crape Myrtles are so often pruned improperly and how this is harmful. 

Finally, please feel free to leave comments here so I know what other topics you are interested in.  I may not be able to make a video or write a blog for each one, but I can certainly make sure your question answered.  Thanks for reading. 

Creating an instructional video (Pruning Crape Myrtles) Part One

One of the assignments I need to complete for my technology class is to create a video for YouTube that I would use to enhance an extension training.  The first thought that came to mind regarding this assignment was that I should create a video on how to prune.  Many questions that I get, particularly this time of year, revolve around pruning. Grapevines, fruit trees, and Crape Myrtles are the plants most commonly asked about.  Unfortunately, pruning techniques are difficult to explain over the telephone and using pictures and diagrams don't always help all that much.  I have held pruning workshops and have gone to many people's homes to do pruning demonstrations, but it is hard to reach everyone this way and so I thought that a good instructional video would be very helpful. 

Crape Myrtles seem to be a good place to start. Nothing, and I mean nothing, riles up a horticulture agent like the topic of pruning Crape Myrtles.  By and large people seem to have no logical idea of how to prune these trees, and yet, bizarrely, they are convinced, aggressively so, that they absolutely must be pruned.  Well maintained Crape Myrtles are beautiful in bloom, have a unique and elegant shape, and many varieties have stunning, exfoliating bark that gives their trunks a dazzling multicolor appearance.  When Crape Myrtles are pruned drastically, the way they often are, it sabotages both their natural shape and their exfoliating habit, creating trees that are, at best, bland, and at worst an outright eyesore but for the few weeks they are in bloom.   Forget the blooms- Crape Myrtles are going to flower either way- but would you rather have a Crape Myrtle that looks like the one at the top of the page with cinnamon-colored bark on their smooth, solid trunks or like the one on the left below with weak, grayish, knobby trunks, or the one on the right with a mass of thin, overgrown, flimsy branches?  It's all determined by how they are pruned.

I think I understand why people are confused about how to prune crape myrtles- they are a tree, one that will grow anywhere from 10-25 feet tall depending on species, yet they don't have a single trunk like most trees do; instead they have multiple trunks like a shrub.  So this alone creates some understandable confusion.  What I haven't figured out is why people massacre these trees year after year the way they do, cutting them back to within a few feet of their lives, something no one in there right mind would ever do to any other type of tree.  I've narrowed it down to a few theories, and perhaps each of these is true in at least some cases.

#1) People prune crape myrtles back because they become much larger than expected.

This is something that happens with a number of plants.  When they are initially planted, by a gardener or a landscaper, their final size is underestimated, so as they mature, we find they become too close to other plants or too close to a building or structure, and our impulse is to chop the plant down and make it start over.  While I can follow the train of thought here, it's not horticulturally sound.  Pruning may immediately reduce the size of a plant, but it also encourages growth, meaning it won't be long until the plant returns to the size it was.  In fact, the more you cut a plant back, the faster it will grow back, so severely cutting back a plant like a Crape Myrtle is the very definition of a temporary solution. What does often change, permanently so, is the plant's natural shape.  In the case of Crape Myrtles that have been drastically pruned, they no longer form a vase or umbrella shape, but rather become a thick of mass of rather unappealing vertical growth. 

#2) People prune crape myrtles back because they believe this will increase their bloom in the coming year.

While this point is rooted in some amount of truth, it does not justify the level of hackery Crape Myrtles are often subjected to.  It is true, they do bloom on new growth, like many other late summer blooming plants.  However, it is not necessary to prune them so drastically in order to produce the amount of new growth needed to produce sufficient bloom.  Let's try a quick numbers based analysis.  Many crape myrtles in our area have an approximate size of about 10 feet.  These same trees are often cut back to about 4 feet high in the winter time.  This pruning leads to a flush of new vegetative growth, anywhere from 2 to 6 feet as the plant works furiously to recover to it's former size.  New blooms won't be produced on all of this new growth, rather the blooms will always be most prominent at the very tips of each branch.  So, why do we need to prune these trees so that 6 feet of new growth is produced each year, when only 6 inches of that new growth will produce blooms?  The answer is simple- we don't.

#3 People prune crape myrtles the way they do because they see their neighbors doing it and they think that must be how it's done. 

While there is no way to say for sure, I think this is the most likely reason people prune Crape Myrtles the way they do.  When we don't know how to do something, we often look to others for help.  Naturally if you have a Crape Myrtle tree you are not quite sure what to do with and you see all your neighbors pruning their Crape Myrtle trees a certain way, you're probably going to assume that whatever they are doing is the right thing.  It's easier to mimic what you see everyone else doing than it is to search out the right way to do it.  Unfortunately in this case, the people who prune their Crape Myrtles improperly seem to be in the majority. 

So how should they be pruned?  Well now that the weather is warm enough and the wind isn't blowing quite so hard, I plan to go outside today and film a quick instructional video that will show you exactly how to prune.  Check back here for tomorrow to see the video. 

Gardening Tips 3/08/13 Your Gardening Questions Answered

Take a look at this week's Gardening Tips article in the Roanoke Rapids Daily Herald. http://www.rrdailyherald.com/opinion/columns/gardening-tips-your-gardening-questions-answered/article_b117a6c4-8814-11e2-843e-001a4bcf887a.html

Gardening Tip 3/1/13: Controlling Henbit and other flowering winter weeds

I write a column that appears each Friday in the Roanoke Rapids Daily Herald called Gardening Tips.  This week I wrote about henbit, the low, spreading, purple flowering weed that pops up everywhere in late winter.  If you haven't noticed it yet, you will soon. 

Here's the article