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  North Country MGV

gARDEN bLOGS

Wellness Day at the Washburn County Fair – July 30

7/25/2022

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​Join our Master Gardeners at the fair when they present “Gardening with Ease”- Tips on making gardening easier on the gardener.   Their presentation will be at 1:00 pm on Saturday, July 30th in the Exhibition Hall at the Washburn County Fair, Spooner, WI.  
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​Here’s a preview of their presentation:
Tips for Easier Gardening
  • Don’t try to do everything in one day.
  • Take a 10-15 minute break every hour or more frequently if you need.
  • Plan your activities; gather tools, seeds, and supplies to avoid unnecessary trips.
  • Stretch before you garden.
  • Wear gloves and slip resistant shoes.
  • Make sure your tools are sharp to make the job easier.
  • Obtain assistive devices to reduce stress on hands, hips, and knees.
  • Put resting places throughout your garden, a bench with a back will allow a better rest than one without.
  • Place a watering source close to your gardens.
  • Create pathways preferably 5 feet wide to accommodate you and your equipment.
  • Install appropriate plantings, shrubs are generally lower maintenance than perennials, native lower than exotics.
Tools
Select tools that are best for you:
  • Length of handle should be long enough for you to stand up straight
  • If your hands get tired or sore, try retrofitting handles with foam insulation over the handle
  • Sharpen blades before you use them, take file at a 20% angle to get a nice edge for hoes, spades, pruners (if you don’t want to do it yourself, ask at your local hardware store)
  • Seed planting can be easier with a PVC pipe cut to a little higher than waist height; for smaller seeds use a hand seeder
  • A kneeler bench can help you kneel and just as importantly stand back up and can be turned over to provide a nice place to rest
  • Choose wheelbarrows, wagons, or carts with large rubber tires to make it easier to push/pull
  • A hand truck can help you move heavier pots or bags around the garden
  • There are hand tools that have ergonomic handles that put your hand in a better position and are cushioned or have larger handles
  • Use a bypass pruner with extra-long handles to give you more leverage and not have to get so close to the ground
 
Techniques
  • Use watering wands to get closer to the base of plants or leave stretcher soaker hoses in garden beds that need more frequent watering
  • Mulch retains moisture, improves soil and suppresses weeds
  • Move the garden closer to you by using containers, raised beds
  • Put annuals in pots into your perennial beds to add color and make it easier to water and take care of them than if you put them directly into the bed
 
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Blooms at the Teaching & Display Garden

7/20/2022

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We're entering peak season at the Spooner Agriculture Research Station, Teaching & Display Garden, located at 780 Orchard Lane, Spooner.  Photos taken this week highlight native plants and All-America Selections Annuals and Vegetables.  The garden is open to the public for self-guided tours during daylight hours, seven days a week mid-May through mid-September. 
Hover over each photo for description.
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Pine Needles as Mulch and Compost

7/14/2022

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We often get questions about using pine needles, also known as pine straw in either compost or used as mulch.  Same questions for oak leaves.  Many believe that using pine straw or oak leaves will acidify the soil and not be suitable for many plants.  This year a large donation of pine straw was provided to the Spooner Agricultural Research Station Teaching and Display Garden.  Master Gardeners immediately put it to good use as a mulch.  Below is an article contributed by Kevin Schoessow, UW Extension Area Agriculture Development Educator, Spooner Agricultural Research Station providing information on this question.  

Pine needles, like other leaves, are perfectly fine to add to your compost pile. Keep in mind that pine needles, like other leaves or straw, are high in carbon and are considered “brown” materials and should be mixed in a ratio of approximately 3 to 1 with “greens” like grass clipping or food scraps which are higher nitrogen materials.

Fresh pine needles--because of their waxy coating--take a long time to break down and should be limited to no more than 10 percent of the total brown material added to a compost pile. Shredding pine needles and other materials added to the compost will increase the surface area of these materials and speed up decomposition.

While fresh pine needles, or oak leaves for that matter, have a pH ranging between 3.2-3.8, they do very little to impact the pH of finished compost. The reason is that as needles and leaves break down, they are neutralized by the microbes that are doing the decomposing work. Most finished compost has a pH of 6.8-7.0 which is very neutral.

Another potential benefit of pine needles in the compost pile is that they help maintain good aeration. They do not compact readily and keep air flowing through the pile, which is also important in speeding up the composting process.

The notion that pine needles change compost or soil pH is basically a myth. Even if freshly fallen pine needles that have been added to compost are mixed into soil, they will only have a slight impact on pH and over time this impact will be diminished by decomposing microbes.

Part of the reason this myth continues is because people associate pine trees with acid soil and that it is hard to grown anything under a pine tree. Everyone assumes that the accumulated pine needles are making the soil so acidic that nothing will grow. The reason nothing will grow is because the roots of evergreens are so numerous and shallow that they outcompete other plants for water and nutrients. They also tend to create quite dense shade which is a difficult growing situation for many plants.
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So if you are blessed with an abundance of fallen pine needles, rest assured that they are perfectly fine to add to compost--although in limited amounts. Fallen pine needles, sometimes referred to as pine straw, is also a suitable mulch for flower beds, under trees and around shrubs and even in the garden. Remember that the little acid that might be found in pine straw and other leaf materials will be neutralized by microbes and will have negligible effects on soil pH.
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Online Search Tips

7/6/2022

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​The Internet is a great way to get current information on almost any topic, but how do you sort through all the information and find a reliable source?  Here are a few tips to limit your searches that will do the sorting for you.  This example gives you the results using the various methods in Google for “green bean rust”. 
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Typing in green bean rust into a search engine resulted in about 1,120,000,000 results!  I did this same experiment in 2012 with 8.5 million results, which is an indication of how much the Internet has exploded in just a decade.   In trying to narrow it down – here are the results:
  • green bean rust university extension:  13,800,000 results from university extension sites from around the country

  • green bean rust Wisconsin:  6,900,000 results from both commercial and university sites

  • “green bean rust”:  74,100 results, by putting quotes around the words the results include both commercial and academic sites with exactly those words in the site including opinions and blogs of many gardeners. 

  • green bean rust Wisconsin site:edu:  31,600 results, by including site:edu those results are limited to all sites that are educational, sites with a domain name of .com are excluded.  If you wanted to limit your search to only commercial products, you could do that by including site:com in your search. 

  • green bean rust site:wisc.edu:  20 results from Wisconsin extension sites only.  This can work for any website doman that you might want to search.  
​The Master Gardener program highly recommends obtaining your information from reliable sources.  Preferred sources include academic institutions, government agencies, botanical gardens, and non-profit organizations. 

Tip from the Master Gardener Program
While it is better to use a preferred source for information, other sources often come up first when looking things up online. Don’t stop there! Use this as the first step in the process of finding information and searching for more preferred sources. You may learn terms or concepts that you can then apply in a new search with keywords that also use the word “university” or “.edu” to help bring up university sources of information.
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    Learn more about what's going on by checking out these local blogs and Facebook sites: 

    *No. Country MGV Facebook
    *Spooner Ag Station Facebook 
    ​* The River Flowing Blog
    ​
    *  GardenTrueNorth Blog

    (These blogs are not associated
    ​ with the UW-Extension except for the Spooner Ag Station Facebook page.)


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Visit the Teaching & Display Gardens

The Teaching and Display Gardens  are a joint effort between the Spooner Agriculture Research Station, operated by the University of Wisconsin - Madison College of Agriculture and Life Science, the University of Wisconsin Cooperative Extension and area UW-Extension Master Gardener Volunteers.  

Open to the public for self-guided tours during day light hours seven days a week mid-May through mid-September. 

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    • Plant Sale
    • Kids in the Garden
    • Twilight Garden Tour >
      • 2020 Virtual Twilight Garden Tour
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    • 2017 Handouts & Slides
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