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  North Country MGV

gARDEN bLOGS

Late Season Webinar Series

8/15/2022

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​Join the Division of Extension-Horticulture for the next set of FREE mini-webinars about 
Late Season Issues. These engaging mini-webinars are 20 minutes each followed by Q&A. Registration is required for each mini webinar…. attend only one or all three! This series is open to the public. All webinars will be recorded. 
 
Go to https://bit.ly/3g0IfhF to find out more and to register!
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Late Season Issues Mini Webinars
Yard and Garden Cleanup with Diseases and Insects in Mind
Wednesday, August 24, 12:00 p.m.
Be prepared to approach your garden and yard cleanup with a better understanding of  strategies you can use to benefit your yard, keeping in mind plant diseases, insects, winter interest and wildlife food.
Presented by: Andrea Ackerman,  Horticulture Outreach Specialist, UW-Madison Division of Extension Brown County
 
Fall “Lawndry” List
Wednesday, August 31, 12:00 p.m.
Fall is a good time of year to give your lawn some TLC. Join us to learn more about lawn fertilizer requirements and recommendations for this time of year, aeration and overseeding, and the basics of weed control.
Presented by: Paul Koch, Associate Professor, Department of Plant Pathology, UW-Madison
 
Bringing the Garden Inside
Wednesday, September 7, 12:00 p.m.
Get ready to continue enjoying your garden by bringing your plants indoors. You’ll learn about which plants can come in, the requirements for growing plants indoors after they have been outside all summer, and how to properly transition them to their new indoor home.
Presented by: Darrin Kimbler, Agriculture Educator, UW-Madison Division of Extension Iron County
To register for any of these mini webinars, go to https://bit.ly/3g0IfhF 
 
This mini-webinar series is hosted by UW-Madison, Division of Extension, Horticulture. For upcoming events and learning opportunities go to: https://hort.extension.wisc.edu/events/

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Annual Twilight Garden Tour Set for Tuesday August 23!

8/13/2022

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Spooner, Wis. – Aug. 12, 2022 -- The University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison Spooner Agricultural Research Station, UW-Madison Extension and North Country Master Gardener Volunteers (NCMGV) will be holding their Annual Twilight Garden Tour on Tuesday, August 23 from 4-7 p.m.
 
To be held at the Station’s Teaching and Display Garden, located at 780 Orchard Lane off Highway 70 just east of Spooner, this is one of the region’s premier summer gardening events and it includes displays, speakers, demonstrations, and guided tours of the garden plots.  In addition, this year’s event includes an “Edible Landscaping” feature. Building on this theme, vegetable and home-made wine tastings will be available.
 
The staff from UW-Madison Spooner Ag Research Station, Extension Educators, the North Country Master Gardener volunteers, as well as the event’s speakers will be available to answer gardening questions and identify plant, insect and disease samples. Attendees are welcome to explore the Teaching and Display Garden as well as bring samples of diseased plants or representative photos for identification and advice. Displays will feature Hunt Hill, Spooner Farmers Market, Forts Folle Avoine, as well as others.
 
The expert panel of speakers will kick-off at 4:45 p.m. and then provide walking tours in which they will answer questions. Speakers and topics covered this year are:
 
•Brian Huddleson, Director, Plant Disease Diagnostics Clinic at UW-Madison on plant diseases;
•Renae Essenmacher, forester with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources on non-native invasive trees and shrubs; and
•Sarah DeGraff from UW’s Seed to Kitchen program discussing their projects.  
 
The Teaching & Display Garden is an official All-America Selections (AAS) display garden featuring both flowers and vegetables and has been awarded multiple awards in the National Landscape Design contest sponsored by AAS. The garden also includes organic vegetable gardening, a children’s garden, container gardening, displays of table and wine grapes and the Monarch and Pollinator Sanctuary perennial garden featuring native plants.
 
As in the past there is no charge for this educational event and there will be a raffle for flower bouquets. In the case of severe inclement weather, the event will be cancelled and not rescheduled. Please visit www.facebook.com/spoonerag to learn more about event status in case of weather. For more information, please contact Kevin Schoessow at 715-635-3506 or 1-800-528-1914, or learn more at https://spooner.ars.wisc.edu/ or https://www.northcountrymgv.org/twilight-garden-tour.html.
 
More information about the North Country Master Gardeners can be found at https://www.northcountrymgv.org.
 
UW-Madison Extension provides equal opportunity in employment and programming including Title IX and ADA requirements. Please call our toll-free number 800-528-1914 if you have any special needs or require special accommodations.
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Learn to Garden with Extension – Register by August 15

8/11/2022

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This fall UW-Madison Division of Extension Horticulture Program is offering the online course, Growing and Caring for Plants in Wisconsin: Foundations in Gardening. This is a twelve week online course that runs from  September 11 through December 10, 2022. 
Growing and Caring for Plants in Wisconsin: Foundations in Gardening (Foundations in Gardening) teaches participants university research-based methods to successfully grow their plants and manage common pests. The course introduces a decision-making framework used by gardeners that focuses on understanding how plants best grow, why pests and problems happen, and how to keep plant problems from happening.

The Foundations in Gardening course is divided into three units. The first set of topics are the basics: general gardening, botany, soils and decision-making strategies for pest management. The next set of topics helps participants understand how to identify and manage pests they might encounter. Finally, the last group focuses on specific types of gardening such as vegetables, fruits, lawn, and houseplants. As part of the learning experience, Foundations in Gardening participants will have the opportunity to ask questions of UW-Madison horticulture experts at live webinars. The webinars are scheduled so that each expert will be taking questions about the material currently being covered. The webinars are also an opportunity to ask questions participants may have long had but did not know whom to ask. Q & As with the Experts will be recorded for future viewing in case the live broadcasts are inconvenient with participants’ schedules.  
 
In addition to the Q & As with the Experts, participants receive a complete electronic (PDF) copy of the Foundations in Gardening training manual.  A bound hardcopy of the manual is available at an additional cost. This is a valuable reference tool to have on the bookshelf.  Participants will receive a certificate of completion and earn up to four continuing education credits (CEU) for certain professional organizations. For participants wanting a deeper dive into the learning experience, there are optional live lab webinars to reinforce the material covered in the course. These give participants the opportunity to work in large and small groups with Extension educators to answer more in-depth gardening scenarios.

If you are interested in becoming a Wisconsin Extension Master Gardener, this course is considered an approved learning opportunity from the Wisconsin Extension Horticulture Program. Visit https://mastergardener.extension.wisc.edu/get-started/ for more information.

Registration is July 18th-August 15th for this fully online, learn-at-your-own pace course. Whether you are a beginner, avid gardener or professional, you and your plants will benefit from this course. For more information and to register for Foundations in Gardening, visit: https://bit.ly/3aBUGBe ​
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Twilight Garden Tour Returns August 23, 2022

8/8/2022

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The annual Twilight Garden Tour returns on August 23, 2022, 4:00 to 7:00 pm.  The gardens are brimming with vegetables, annuals, and perennials.  Presentations will start at 4:30 with these confirmed speakers:  
  • Renae Essenmacher, Forester for WI Dept of Natural Resources, will talk about non-native invasive trees and shrubs.
  • Sarah DeGraff  will talk about the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative .
  • Brian Huddleson, Director of the UW-Madison Plant Disease Diagnostic Clinic, will focus on plant diseases.
UW-Madison Horticulture Educator Kevin Schoessow and Master Gardener Volunteers will be available throughout the gardens to answer your questions.  
We look forward to seeing you on Tuesday, August 23.
 
Check http://www.facebook.com/spoonerag,  or  http://www.northcountrymgv.org  as more information becomes available.  In the case of severe weather the event will be cancelled and announced on Facebook and the website.
The session is free and open to the public and will be held rain or shine. In the case of severe weather the event will be cancelled and announced on Facebook and the website. The garden is located at 780 Orchard Lane, 1.5 miles east of Spooner on Highway 70 or 1/2 mile west of the Hwy 70/53 interchange.  Watch for garden meeting signs.
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Japanese Beetles

8/2/2022

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From:  Kevin Schoessow, UW Extension Area Agriculture Development Educator, Spooner Agricultural Research Station

​Japanese beetle a voracious defoliator of many landscape and garden plants has been confirmed in many locations in NW Wisconsin in recent weeks.  While very common in other parts of the state, this pest has not been known to be in our region until recently.  Adults beetle feed on over 300 species of plants.  Roses, birch, lindens, grapes, raspberries, Norway maples, beans, apples, plums, crabapples, elms, beech, asparagus, and rhubarb are some of its favorite species.  Adult beetles emerge in early to mid-July and feed for about six to eight weeks.  This feeding is quite noticeable and concerning especially on prized perennials and on fruits and vegetables.  Japanese beetle are tough to control, especially when bees and other beneficial insects are active during the same time.  Gardeners need to be cautious in their management decisions and be aware of unintended consequences of treatment options.
 
To help gardeners and homeowners make informed decisions about management options for Japanese beetles the following resources should be very helpful.
 
The first is a wonderfully insightful webinar presentation by PJ Liesch, Entomologist and Director of the UW-Madison Insect Diagnostic Lab.  The recorded presentation can be found on the Wisconsin Horticulture Division of Extension website https://hort.extension.wisc.edu/videos/  or directly through youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFFZs2gLAfs
 
The other is an article title Japanese Beetle
 
https://hort.extension.wisc.edu/articles/japanese-beetle/
 
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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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Pinch and Prune Basics

6/28/2022

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​​We use “pinch and prune” to mean a variety of techniques.   They can include pruning, deadheading, pinching stems or buds, or cutting back leggy plants to shape, form and trim.  It is usually species-specific and based on common sense and experience – don’t worry about hurting your plants by experimenting. 
 
Some tools that you will need are by-pass pruners, pruning scissors, and hand-held shears.  Avoid anvil-type pruners that can crush stems.    Different techniques call for specific tools, find the one that works for you.
Techniques
Deadheading is the removal of old or spent flowers and is beneficial to most herbaceous ornamentals.  Seed production can drain a plant’s energy and cause foliage to deteriorate.  Deadheading can promote vegetative and root growth rather than seed production.  By deadheading you can prolong bloom periods, initiate a second smaller bloom, improve overall appearance, and prevent self-seeding.  Some examples of species that benefit from deadheading are:  Daylilies, Hostas, Lady’s Mantle, and Lambs Ear. 
 
Cutting back refers to pruning a plant to renew its appearance or encourage a new flush of growth or flowering, control its height or flowering time.  Pinching can accomplish the same objective.  If you travel for several weeks, you can cut certain plants by one third to delay bloom time until you get back home.  Examples:  Dianthus, Candy Tuft, Moss Phlox, Catmint, Geranium Amsonia, Baptisia, Achillea, Aster, Mums, Sedum, Joe Pye Weed. 
 
Pinching allows for experimentation and usually involves removing only the growing tips.  Generally do this early in the growing season because it will delay bloom time.  Examples:  Sedum, Shasta daisy, Joe Pye Weed, Aster, Artemisia. 
 
Thinning can prevent disease, create sturdier stems, and increase the size of flowers.  It can often help to increase air circulation to help prevent powdery mildew.  Use this on:  Aster, Delphinium, Mondarda, Phlox, Bulgeweed, Lambs Ear, and Lady’s Mantle. 
 
Disbudding involves removing side buds so that the plant’s terminal bud produces larger flowers on a longer stem.  Removing the terminal bud will cause the side buds to produce smaller but more flowers; it can also eliminate the need for staking.  Examples:  Mums, Carnations, Pinks, Dahlias, Peonies. 
 
Deadleafing removes individual dead leaves to improve appearance.  Examples:  Elijah Blue grass in spring, Lady’s Mantle in summer, and Hellebores (Lenten Rose) in the spring. 
 
A great source of information on all these techniques is The Well-Tended Perennial Garden by Tracy DiSabato-Aust, Timber Press, 2006.  

Article and photo credit:  Sue Reinardy, Master Gardener
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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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