When making a spot that attracts butterflies, choose a warm location out of the wind. Choose flowers in yellow, orange, red and pinks that bloom in spring or fall when it is cooler, and plant them in large numbers.
Bob Morris
Bob Morris is a horticulture expert living in Las Vegas and professor emeritus for the University of Nevada. Visit his blog at xtremehorticulture.blogspot.com. Send questions to Extremehort@aol.com.
Right after a rain is a good time to look for borers feeding in the moist cambium of fruit trees. It’s a good time to get out a sharp knife, sanitize and sharpen it, and remove these borers before they cause more damage.
Gardeners can remove small amounts from trees and shrubs any time during the year, but this is the time of year when you can take large amounts of wood from trees, shrubs and plants.
Wood chip mulch is again available at the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension orchard located 100 yards east of Horse Drive and North Decatur Boulevard.
The temperature of compost when it’s cooling is only about 105 degrees. The center of the pile might be hotter, but it’s not hot enough to damage plants.
Phone apps are good for predicting a possible freeze, but nothing replaces verification that an actual freeze happened. Maximum/minimum thermometers are a good bench check against your phone app or the National Weather Service predictions.
It is best to think of plants along a continuum (mesic vs. xeric) regarding whether they grow best in dry or wet soil or the type of mulch covering the surface of a landscape soil. So, instead, we group plants into these two categories for convenience.
Plants are not expecting normal low temperatures early or late in the winter season and are not prepared for them. Having a recording maximum/minimum thermometer and having the weather app prepares you for anticipating winter freezes.
Be careful when buying a soil moisture sensor. Sometimes they don’t always work.
A major key when converting to lower water use is to use as few plants of a larger size as possible. The fewer plants you use and still accomplish your goals, the better.
Some composts are rich and full of nutrients. Other times they are not so rich, and the addition of a fertilizer might be needed.
There is some discussion in academic circles whether crops grown in vertical farms aimed at feeding the world should be the higher-value horticultural crops or staple crops like multiple crops of wheat but with 70- to 80-day turnovers.
The trick to applying chemicals like copper, boron and chlorides is to do it far enough from your raised bed so that the roots from these vegetables won’t be harmed.
Nonfunctional lawns aren’t used for anything except beauty or aesthetics in a landscape. The use of grass lawns speaks to a lack of creativity and underappreciation of where we live.
The best time to plant winter-hardy trees and shrubs is during the fall, from around the end of September through mid-November.
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