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March 1st, 2014 11:00 am by Marci Gore

Although were not completely out of the woods yet, the warmer, sunnier weather weve had these past few days does hint at the end of what has been a very long and very cold winter.

Local gardening expert and horticulturist Roy Odom II says now is the perfect time to think about getting our gardens and landscaping ready for spring and summer.

February is a great time to prune fruit trees and fruit bushes, Odom said. Mainly what you want to do is just remove any overgrowth, anything thats just really sticking out.

However, dont prune anything that blooms in the spring, Odom advises.

Anything that blooms before June, things like azaleas, rhododendrons, forsythia, dogwoods, red buds, you dont want to be whacking on right now. If you prune those right now, youre cutting the bloom buds off, he said.

Odom says February is also a great time to check for any winter damage.

With the cold weather, theres a lot of burned foliage. But dont get too eager to start cutting things back. Keep in mind that just because foliage is burned, this doesnt mean that the stems and trunks are dead, Odom said.

It is also a good time to cut back liriope, sometimes called monkey grass, Odom said.

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Late winter a good time to plan garden

Q My sister from Minnesota sent me a clipping of a Forum article (Jan. 11) in which you had a photo of pink paintbrush grass (Melinis nerviglumis Savannah).

I am interested in finding this grass, and Im wondering if it is available around the country. The soil here in Amish country is very rich. Would this grass do well here, or is it more of a prairie grass?

Joyce Nickel, Lancaster, Pa.

A I received much mail regarding the beautiful photo of the Savannah paintbrush grass taken at the North Dakota State University display gardens. It is native to Madagascar and the African grasslands.

Because it is hardy only to Zone 8, just the Deep South can consider it perennial. The rest of us across the United States can enjoy it as a beautiful annual grass attractive in flowerbeds and containers. It will do beautifully in Pennsylvania as it does across much of the country.

Rose-pink flowers/seedheads rise above slender blue-green grass foliage in an attractive, round clump. When blooming, the average height is 14 to 18 inches. Plants can be spaced 9 to 12 inches apart and full sun is preferred.

Seeds are easy to start indoors and should be planted 10 weeks before outdoor transplant date. A March 15 indoor seeding date will produce nice transplants by late May. Seeds are available through one of my favorite companies Park Seed http://www.parkseed.com.

Q Although Ive addressed rabbit problems in previous questions, judging by the mailbag, this continues to be serious trouble for homeowners this winter. Readers have indicated that rabbit numbers are at near-plague levels and damage has been extensive to shrubs, evergreens and young trees.

They have eaten my clematis vines down to soil level, and have begun tunneling lower. What can be done in late winter to avoid complete demolition? On behalf of all whove written Ill sign this

Elmer Fudd, Almost Everytown

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Fielding questions

Spring is just twenty days away. Even though Old Man Winter keeps hanging on; dont be fooled. Spring will arrive. When it does, I plan to be ready. My first proactive action is to attack crabgrass. (It really makes me crabby.) I love a beautiful lawn so I will be ready in plenty of time to prevent most of those ugly, grassy nuisances from every showing their faces in my presence. (I told you it makes me crabby.)

If your lawn was damaged this past summer chances are that there is open ground ripe for crabgrass. Even the best of lawns may have an invasion along the driveway and sidewalks. So, when, where and what should be done?

Crabgrass is a summer annual grass that germinates in the spring and dies with the frost in the fall. Hot, dry environments, like Kansas summers, encourage crabgrass because cool-season lawns are struggling at that time. Crabgrass will often take over if the lawn is not well taken care of. A healthful lawn is always the best weed preventer.

There are two chemical methods to control crabgrass: pre-emergence (before it appears or slightly after), and post-emergence (after it appears).

Pre-emergence products dont actually keep the seed from germinating; instead just after germination the new plant absorbs the chemical from the soil and dies. With few exceptions, most crabgrass preventers will have no effect on existing crabgrass plants. Crabgrass germinates when the soil reaches 55 degrees or warmer for 3-5 days at the inch level. This happens typically around May 1 so April 15 is a good date to shoot for if a spring application of product is made. Note: not all spring weather cooperates with gardeners. A good indicator for timing product application is to watch the Eastern Red Bud trees; when they begin to reach full bloom its time to apply crabgrass preventer.

Dimension and Barricade are the only two products that will give season-long control of crabgrass from a single application. In fact, they can be applied much earlier than April 15. Dimension can be applied as early as March 1 and Barricade can be applied in the fall. Both will retain their effectiveness. Because of the way these products work (killing seed as it germinates) new grass seed cannot be planted during the same season.

If you need to plant grass seed in the spring (fall is the better time) here are a couple options:

i. Tupersan can be applied while seeding. It will allow the grass seed to germinate while preventing crabgrass and various other weeds. The drawback is that it must be reapplied in 8 weeks and is not overly effective as a weed preventer.

ii. I prefer allowing grass seed to germinate and two weeks after it emerges from the soil applying Dimension. Dimension is one of the rule breakers because it can kill crabgrass at germination and in its very young stage (2-3 leaves). Dimension is also the best choice when treating a lawn that was planted last fall. It is kind to young tall fescue, perennial ryegrass and Kentucky bluegrass seedlings.

Note: Products that contain Dimension and Barricade may use the common name rather than the trade name. The common chemical name for Dimension is dithiopyr. A product with this in it is Turf & Ornamental Weed & Grass Stopper by Hi-Yield. The common chemical name for Barricade is prodiamine. This is found more often in a weed and feed product like Fertilomes All Seasons Lawn Food + Crabgrass Preventer. (It is best for your lawns health to apply preventers in April and fertilizers in May so using Barricade in the fall is a good idea.)

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Jamie Hancock: Get mean now in battling crabgrass

Rhododendron Blue Peter. Picture by ULF Eliasson

GARDENING

MOSS. Isnt it just a pain in the grass?

It creeps up on you and, almost before you know it, you appear to have a moss lawn.

Richard Day wrote asking my advice about his lawn at Magdalen Crescent, Cowes, which is suffering from the green invader.

He had the lawn replaced four years ago, first noticed some moss on it around a year ago and then, this autumn, it had become half moss, half grass.

"Unfortunately, the lawn is overshadowed by a large leylandii hedge and is very wet in the winter," he told me.

"I have looked on the internet but there appears to be conflicting ideas on how to deal with the moss. One is to replace it with artificial turf!"

I am afraid moss is an inevitable consequence of shade and moisture and the acidity from the leylandii hedge will give it a boost too.

If I was the sort of gardener who wanted a billiard table surface, I would consider myself plagued with the stuff because my lawn is probably more shaded than Richards, situated as it is beneath a canopy of oaks.

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Foster Lawn and Garden, 51 Huron St, Minesing 705-726-9189

Foster Lawn and Garden has been a staple of the Simcoe and Barrie region for over 22 years. Starting out as a single owner/operator Foster Lawn and Garden has now grown to be one of Barrie and areas most recommended Lawn Care, property maintenance and landscape companies covering estate properties, residential, and commercial clients for all their landscape needs, whether it be hardscape (interlocking stone, retaining walls), softscape (garden design, tree and shrub planting and sodding) or property maintenance.

Over the years, FLG has gone above and beyond to help our customers achieve a healthy and lush yard. Today, we now provide weed and grub control, in addition to our fertilizing programs, as well as chinch bug and the all new crab grass control at competitive rates. If youre looking for more advanced services such as dethatching, aerating, slit seeding. rototilling and tree and stump removal, we also have you covered.

When it comes time to spruce up your property for the spring and summer months, FLG can give you a helping hand with beautifying your landscape. If you want to start from scratch or if it is a garden makeover Foster Lawn and Garden can design, build and maintain it for you.

FLG isnt just there for spring and summer, but fall and winter as well. During the fall months Foster Lawn and Garden is there to help by offering Fall fertilizers, fall clean ups of lawns and gardens, tree pruning and removals. When it gets colder and winter sets in, Foster Lawn and Garden provides you with snow plowing, snow removal, sanding and salting as well as shoveling walkways and roof snow and ice removal. We can also provide you with Firewood to help get you through the winter months.

See for yourself how Foster Lawn and Garden strives to meet and exceed our customer's needs and expectations at a competitive rates Expect the best, were greener than the rest. Call Foster Lawn and Garden at 705-726-9189, email them at flg1966@live.ca

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Foster Lawn and Garden

The winds of spring have begun to blow, making it time to start preparing lawns and gardens for the upcoming growing season.

Before getting your hands dirty, it's important to find out what's going on beneath the surface of your yard.

"They should start with a soil test if they haven't had one in the last couple years," Mike Miller, host of Garden Hotline on KMOX radio in St. Louis, said.

The soil test will tell a gardener what nutrients need to be added to the soil to make it ready for spring.

Application of a pre-emergent herbicide is the next step for the person with a green thumb, but Miller recommends purchasing a soil thermometer rather than marking a day on the calendar for application.

"When you see several days in a row when soil temperature is 55 and up, that's when you should get pre-emergents," Miller said.

Pre-emergent herbicides need to be applied before the weeds have been allowed to germinate.

"The crabgrass roots are so strong," Candice Healey, sales representative at Weed Man in Carbondale, said. "Once they've established roots, there's not a whole lot you can do after a certain amount of time."

Healey's company uses a granular, slow-release fertilizer with its herbicides to feed the yard over a longer period of time.

"With slow-release, it sits there until it gets liquid," Healey said. "It will last longer, so it works over a period of time instead of just working and then stopping."

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Sprucing up your yard for spring

The men's doubles clash looms as crucial heading into the final of the Craigs Investment Partners Marlborough premier interclub competition between Renwick White and Marlborough Blades at the Forrest Winery Marlborough Tennis Centre in Blenheim tomorrow night.

Both teams are expected to be at full strength for the title decider in the eight-team competition, which has been highly competitive and provided numerous entertaining matches throughout the season.

As always, tomorrow night's contest will open with the two doubles matches. Blades strong young mixed combination Lee Harborne and Lily O'Fagan beat experienced Renwick duo Peter Rogge and Mel Trolove 6-1 7-5 last time the sides met just over a month ago and should be too good once again.

However, it is much harder to pick a winner in the men's match. Renwick's Chris Nott and Jean-Luc Hauswirth are favoured over the Blades pair of Yuichi Ando and Josh Winter, but they have not met in the two previous encounters between the two teams this season. And, with the four singles matches a good chance to be shared, it could well be a battle that proves important in the final reckoning.

The No 1 singles match will see two captains Rogge and Ando square off. Rogge has prevailed both times against Ando this season, but Ando took the first set in a very close encounter second time around and can not be discounted.

Renwick are likely to claim the No 3 match, with Hauswirth expected to be too strong for Winter after a 6-0 6-2 triumph in round four, but the other two singles should go Blades way. O'Fagan should have little trouble in overcoming Trolove, while Harborne has been in good form and beat Nott 6-2 6-4 earlier in the season, although the Renwick No 2 has got much better as the competition has progressed.

Blades were the fourth and final qualifiers for the playoffs, but defied that seeding to upset season-long competition frontrunners Rapaura Drylands One 4-2 on grass at Rapaura in the semifinals last week.

That victory, plus the strong form of Harborne and O'Fagan, makes Blades slight favourites to bag the silverware.

Renwick scrapped through to the final with a game countback win over Grovetown, but the newcomers have the edge when it comes to experience and another countback result could well be on the cards.

Matches start at 5.45pm at the Pollard Park courts and spectators are welcome.

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Teams at full strength ahead of title decider

Seeing the light: Catherine Borger measurers light available to annual ryegrass in the inter-row space of a wheat crop, using a Sunfleck Ceptometer. Source: Supplied

A CHANGE in seeding direction may be the solution to weed problems in cereal crops, a West Australian study has revealed.

WAs Department of Agriculture and Food research found altering the sowing orientation of cereals from north-south to east-west reduced ryegrass weed seed sets.

The study found an east-west row alignment created more shade, reducing ryegrass growth and seed production.

It found a 51 per cent drop in ryegrass seed set across the six WA trial sites of wheat and barley grown in 2010 and 2011 after adjusting paddocks to an east-west sowing direction.

DAFWA research officer Catherine Borger said an east-west orientation cast more shade on the interrow space and reduced light penetration through the canopy. With a weed like ryegrass, which is below the canopy, the increased shading will suppress weed growth, Dr Borger said.

While the study indicated there wasnt a big impact on the weed biomass, a dramatic reduction in seed volume helped control the weed.

Dr Borger said this method was also a cost-effective way to tackle ryegrass.

Especially with weeds continuing to develop resistance against herbicides so in-crop weed control with selective herbicides could be difficult.

East-west crop orientation is a free technique rather than increased seeding rate, herbicide application or increased fertiliser rates, she said.

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Seed direction research

A pearl net filled with seedpods, tethered by a rope anchored in the coastal mud but swaying with the tide, could be an especially effective way to restore disappearing marine meadows of eelgrass, according to a new study.

The resulting crop of eelgrass grown by SF State researchers is as genetically diverse as the natural eelgrass beds from which the seeds were harvested, said Sarah Cohen, an associate professor of biology at the Romberg Tiburon Center. As eelgrass meadows are threatened by a number of human activities, restoration plans that maintain diversity are more likely to succeed, she noted.

The emphasis on genetic diversity is a relatively new concern in ecosystem restoration projects, where there has been an understandable urgency to move plants and animals back into an area as quickly as possible. "It's taken a little longer for people to say, 'we need to know who we're moving,'" Cohen said, "and to explore how successful different genotypes are in different settings, so we can more strategically design the movement of individuals for restoration."

Eelgrass restoration projects are challenging because it's not easy to plant seedlings under the water, and seeds scattered over a large area could be washed away from the restoration site. Instead, RTC researchers tested the Buoy Deployed Seeding (BuDS) restoration technique. They first harvested eelgrass seedpods from several eelgrass beds in San Francisco Bay, then suspended the pods within floating nets over experimental tanks (called mesocosms) supplied with Bay water and with or without sediment from the original eelgrass areas. As the seeds inside each pod ripened, a few at a time, they dropped out of the nets and began to grow within the tanks.

The researchers then examined "genetic fingerprints" called microsatellites from the plants to measure the genetic diversity in each new crop. Genetic diversity can be measured in a number of ways, by looking at the number of different variants in a gene in a population, for instance, or by examining how these variants are mixed in an individual.

Based on these measurements and others, the new crops were nearly as genetically diverse as their parent grass beds, Cohen and colleagues found. "These offspring impressively maintained the genetic diversity and distinctiveness of their source beds in their new mesocosm environments at the RTC-SFSU lab," said Cohen.

"I think it's impressive how well it worked for a relatively small scale design," she added, "and that's one of the things we wanted to point out in the paper, since a lot of eelgrass restoration projects are so small, up to a few acres."

Sea grass meadows are a key marine environment under siege. In their healthy state, they stabilize coastal sediment and provide a huge nursery for a variety of algae, fish, shellfish and birds. But a variety of human influences, from bridge building to runoff pollution to smothering loads of sediment, have threatened these grass beds globally.

They're often overlooked and misunderstood, Cohen said. For instance, many of the eelgrass beds in the San Francisco Bay are submerged. "If you were out kayaking at low tide, you might see these grasses in places like Richardson Bay, which is full of a big meadow," she said.

During low tides, beachcombers could walk to eelgrass beds at places like Crown Beach in Alameda or Keller Beach in Richmond. But for the most part, "people might see the green blades washed up on the beach, and not realize that these are flowering plants instead of a piece of algae."

Continued here:
Seed-filled buoys may help restore diverse sea meadows in San Francisco Bay

Q: Can I overseed my lawn and prevent weeds at the same time? Can I do it right now?

A: If you have a Kentucky 31 or blended fescue lawn or any of the special shade grass mixtures, you can certainly overseed through the month of February and into March. The benefits of early dispersal of seed are that the soil has been loosened, rains are certainly coming, and weeds have not yet grown enough to choke out the new grass. In fact, a light cover of snow over the seed can be beneficial.

Obviously, the weather is a problem this year, there is no guarantee that there will be no late freezes. The main threat to newly emerging grasses would be a hard freeze that could damage the tender seedlings. Another threat would be light freezes and thaws that push the seedlings out of the ground.

If you keep your eyes on the weather reports and choose just the right time, early seeding can produce a nice lawn. Be sure to include fertilizer along with the seed. Treat with lime if your soil test says you need it.

You cannot use weed prevention products, called pre-emergent weedkillers, that are often packaged as "Weed and Feed" on a newly seeded lawn. These products prevent weed seeds from germinating, and they will kill all your new grass seed. Read those labels carefully. Get only the plain fertilizer products.

If your lawn is seriously in need of help, plan to seed again in the fall around September, depending on the weather. Fall is the optimum time for fescue renewals, but our weather has been so hard on our cool season grasses that a spring effort may be required.

Contact Pat Lea at lea.pat@gmail.com.

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Lea: Weed 'n' feed products kill new grass seeds