Agriculture

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.

I have long been taught that fall fertilization is preferred over spring fertilization for many plants, but there are some exceptions.

We had a tough 2008 growing season with late-summer drought and a windstorm that only added insult to injury.  Add ice and a generally windy winter, and some plants are in need of a little energy boost.

Summer drought and early fall leaf drop (or the severe desiccation that many deciduous plants experience from the windstorm) means that stored energy may be low.

So much for the raspberries this year. Not the best crop we’ve seen. In fact each year it seems to get a little messier then the last.

We typically cut the “Royalty” raspberries all the way to the ground each year and forgo an early crop to manage disease, but it doesn’t seem to be working that well this time around.

It has not been a total loss, but about half the canes are dried up and diseased.