Agriculture

Small stalks, small ears, poor kernel development…does this describe your corn crop this year?

If it does, there may be several factors at work.  Drought at the wrong time can stunt your corn crop (we haven’t had that this year), as can cold damage (if you put your crop out early you could see a little stunting from a late spring cold snap), poor drainage and poor soil fertility, especially nitrogen.

No other berry crop has gained the popularity of the blueberry.  I am glad it has earned this distinction because blueberries are actually pretty easy to grow if you provide them with some timely attention.

Once they are established, some late winter pruning and fertilization is all you need to do to keep them in production. Sure, you need to start out right if you want to have productive bushes for the next 20 years, but once your established all the chores are straight forward.

We protect some of our plants from cold, so why not protect them a bit from heat?

Sure, we can’t change the ambient air temperature on a 90-degree day, but we can keep our vegetables shaded on the hottest days of the summer with reasonable results.

The vegetable garden can start doing some funny things during a heat wave.  When temperatures start to raise into the upper 80s and 90s, many vegetables drop flowers before pollination and fruit set and stop blooming.

The search for replacement trees is on. After drought, wind and ice, we are all looking for something different and reliable to fill the void left behind by extreme weather.

We plant trees all year round with no ill effects, but some trees do prefer being planted in spring.

Usually soft-rooted species respond well to spring planting. It’s just easier to establish roots during the warm, rainy season, I suppose.