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

Incorporating Technology into Extension

I mentioned yesterday that I am taking a course on using technology in teaching and extension.  The course has been helpful in a number of ways. 

First, it's helped me to realize that some of the technology I use regularly in my personal life for entertainment can actually be helpful in my professional life as a horticulture agent.  By this I mean things like blogging and twitter.  As I said, I've used both of these, especially twitter, extensively outside of work, but have never really tried to use them for work.  I think part of that comes from not entirely understanding the professional applications of the technology and part of it comes from an uncertainty of how the clients I typically deal with would react.  As a horticulture agent, most of my clients are fifty or older and while most use computers for basic functions like email, it's hard to know how many pay attention to blogs and twitter.  When I initially started this blog 5 years ago, I quickly got discouraged because it didn't seem like anyone was reading it and therefore felt like a waste of time.  Now, however, more of my target clients are on Facebook and it seems to be a little easier to connect with them online, so I hope that this experiment will be successful.  We also have a lot of discussions in extension on how to engage young people and get them interested in things like gardening and farming and we need to realize that technology is one of our best tools to make this connection. 

I've also been exposed to some new technology that I believe will be helpful.  A few weeks ago we had a lesson on Prezi, a presentation software, which is a tool my wife, a teacher, has been encouraging me to try for a few years.  Extension agents always seem to rely on Powerpoint in their classes and while Powerpoint is certainly useful, I sometimes feel as if it is a bit too linear and perhaps the people I'm teaching get a bit bored with its predictability.  Prezi operates a little differently, has a different look then Powerpoint, and presentations in Prezi don't quite have the same linear, straight forward feel that Powerpoints often do.  Animoto, another application that my wife has reaved about, was the subject of our most recent lesson.  I had a little bit of experience with this but not much.  Like Prezi, I see it as a different way to present information rather then always relying on Powerpoint presentations, although Animoto seems better suited to short presentations (around 5-10 minutes, or less) whereas Prezi is appropriate for longer presentations. 

Finally, for our class project I've been exploring Scoop.it, which is an application that lets users search and select online articles, videos, and blogs and act as curators by hosting the most informative and relevant of those selections on a unique website which they can then share with their followers.  I've experimented quite a bit with this, creating sites on home vegetable gardening and strawberry production which I'll share once the project has been completed.

My triumphant return

Well it's been ages since I've posted anything here, but I feel that it's time to end my extended hiatus.  I hope to start posting here more frequently- we'll see if that actually happens.  At the very least I figure I can manage more than once every five years!

The impetus for reviving this blog is a class I'm taking at NC State, AEE 526- Information Technologies in Agricultural and Extension Education.  The objective of the course is to become more familiar with web and mobile technologies and to understand their potential applications in extension and education.  One of our assignments is to experiment with blogging and twitter.  I have used twitter fairly extensively personally, but not at all in my professional life as an extension agent until the last week or so (follow me at @halifaxgardens if you'd like).  I haven't really blogged at all, other than the handful of posts here many years ago, but I read numerous blogs daily, mostly music, sports, and entertainment blogs however, so it will be interesting for me to explore this from the professional side.

A few weeks ago I spoke to a garden club about native plants.  I briefly listed some general advantages of using natives in landscaping and talked a bit about some myths associated with natives, but I spent most of my time discussing specific native plants that I love, most of which I argued were not used enough in modern landscaping.  These included plants like Spicebush (Lindera benzoin), Strawberry bush (Eounymous americanus), and various viburnums (I really have a thing for viburnums. As the great horticulturalist Michael Dirr said, "a garden without a viburnum is like life without music and art").  The last plant I talked about was one called Indian Pink (Spigelia marilandica).  This is a plant that I have never actually grown, but have coveted for years after discovering it in the Plant Delights Nursery catalog.  Plant Delights is a wonderful nursery for rare perennials, both native and exotic, and is located just outside of Raleigh.  I fell in love with this particular plant after seeing the picture in the catalog and reading its description. However, I lamented to the garden club, I've never been able to buy it because Plant Delights is the only place I know of that sells it and every time I've been there it has been sold out.  Clearly I'm not the only one who fell in love with this plant after seeing it in the catalog.  Sure, Plant Delights does mail order sales as well and I guess I could go that route, but it seems silly to mail order something from a business that is only a 45 minute drive from my house.  Alas, I told them, I would have to continue chasing this plant until one day I could finally add it to my garden.

Yesterday, completely out of the blue, one of my Master Gardeners, who also happens to be a member of the garden club I spoke to that day, stopped by my office to say hello.  As she handed me a small black pot, she told me that she had been to Plant Delights the weekend before and she had bought me my plant.  It was snowing while she was there and there were only six of the Spigelias left and they were only barely poking of the soil after a winter of dormancy, but she knew she would make my day if she bought one for me.  So now I have my very own Spigelia marilandica.  All I have to do is keep it indoors for a few more weeks, then gradually start exposing it to the outdoors to harden it off, and find the perfect spot to plant it.  It is days like yesterday that remind me why I enjoy my job and why gardeners are wonderful people to have as friends.  Thank you Ellen!

When I said it was just barely poking out of the soil, I wasn't kidding.  Here's to a life of vigorous growth and prolific blooms.

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.