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The Tucson Gardener |
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More Quick Answers 1. What do I do to maintain my lettuce plants? Growing your lettuce during the cool season is the best thing you can do. Lettuce is a cool season crop in Tucson and is grown in the fall, winter, and into early spring. When temperatures warm, the plants have a tendency to go to seed which means they turn bitter tasting and send up a tall flowering stalk. The process is called bolting. Some types of lettuce are less heat tolerant than others and will bolt more easily. By March my lettuce always has way too many aphids and loopers (small worms) causing me to toss much of it into the compost bin. When I grow lettuce, there isn’t much maintenance required other than watering, pulling a weed or two, and possibly removing some of the lower older leaves if they start to look a bit ratty. I watch for insect damage and remove worms by hand or dust the plants with BT, Bacillus thuringiensis, if I see damaged leaves or too many worm droppings. I always use floating row covers but that’s to keep the rodents and birds away from my lettuce. On some occasions the row covers kept insects in more than it kept them out.
As much as I like using the floating row covers I have discovered a couple of problems. One, if the covers are allowed to rest on top of the plants instead of on some sort of support a lot of moisture can get trapped under the covers and on the leaves after winter rains. If the leaves don't have a chance to dry out the lettuce can rot, turn mushy, and become destined for the compost bin. Another problem is gardener complacency. You begin to believe the lettuce is safe under those row covers and there's no need to watch it too closely. Unfortunately that’s not always true. Once the insects get started, especially aphids, the environment turns out to be a perfect breeding ground. Few predators get in, whether they are beneficial birds looking for a worm or insects. It doesn’t hurt to take the row covers off during nice days and let the lettuce plants have a taste of the outside world. Yes, it can be a nuisance taking the covers off and putting them on again especially if you use a lot of clothespins like I do. Sometimes if I have a lot of beds planted and they are all covered by floating row covers I forget to regularly check on some of the plants. (This time it's due to laziness.) They become overly mature before I get a chance to harvest. It can happen to quick maturing crops like radishes. They can become quite woody and inedible in just a few days. 2. I’m looking for the correct planting procedure. The words "planting procedure" encompass a lot of gardening. Are we talking seeds, bulbs, shrubs, annuals, trees, cacti, etc.? That’s like me asking you to suggest the perfect plant for my garden. In my landscape I don’t use any one procedure. I also don’t always follow the recommended procedure because I may be a bit lazy the day I’m planting. When it's hot out, and all I can think about is a cold glass of iced tea and a siesta the hole I was digging for a new shrub or tree may end up a bit shy of the recommended size. Not every plant I put in the ground, hanging basket or pot has survived and grown into the bedding plant, shrub, house plant, vegetable or tree I thought it would. That's part of gardening. And often I don’t have a clue as to why the plant failed. Was it something I did? Bad potting soil? Bad plant from the garden center or nursery? Insects? Disease? Too much water? Not enough water? Too much fertilizer? Did I dig the hole too deep? Plant the tree too deep? With all these variables it seems like the odds are stacked against the gardener success. But you do have a few options. First, if you can afford the price you can hire someone that has experience with planting or landscaping to do the work for you. For a fee some of the local nurseries now plant the trees and shrubs they sell. If you're paying money for the service I'd make sure the planting comes with some sort of guarantee providing you take care of the plant appropriately once it's place in the landscape. Second, you can ask how to plant something from the people that sell you the plant. They're always anxious to sell you extra soil amendments and mulch to help with your planting success. Of course that won’t guarantee you’ll get the right information. You can also read the labels that comes with many plants and see what they say about planting location and planting instructions. Pay your Ag. Extension an on-line visit to look for written material, or stop by and chat with a Master Gardener. There are also plenty of books for gardening in the Tucson area. Check with the local library, this website, or visit your favorite bookstore. There's also a link to a tree and shrub planting guide from Ag. Extension in the Links for Special Needs section of The Tucson Gardener. 3. Tree pictures? Plant pictures? The only plant pictures you’ll find on this site are related to stories on specific subjects and a few here and there to pretty up the appearance of the website. If you’re looking for specific photos from a large database I’d try some of the grower sites like Monrovia or Mountain State Growers. You might also try Desert Tropicals out of Phoenix. Dave’s Garden is another website with plenty of pictures from contributors. Or you could invest in a good book like Landscape Plants for Dry Regions listed in the Garden Books sections. Sorry, but there is no plant database on the Tucson Gardener website. 4. How do I rehydrate dried out potting soil? I’d be more worried about the plant in that dried out soil. It’s probably pretty wilted, if not deceased. There are a couple ways to get the soil to soak up moisture. One is to submerge the soil, container and all in a bucket or trash can of water and hold it down until all the air bubbles are gone. You’ll be able to tell if the soil has actually absorbed the water by the increased weight of the container after all the excess moisture has drained out. Potting soil that has dried out can fool the gardener into thinking he or she has watered the plant when in reality the water has passed through the soil or down the sides of a container without stopping long enough to get absorbed into the air pockets and attached to the soil particles. A fresh bag of sphagnum added to the soil can be a real challenge when it comes to getting it wet. Often the instructions on the bag say fill the bag up with water making sure you hydrate the sphagnum before you start adding it to the soil. A wetting agent, which can be as simple as a few drops of liquid detergent added to water will also help with the adhesion to the soil particles. It’s difficult, especially in the summer, to keep container plants from totally drying out. 5. Where did the list of Tucson’s Nurseries go? Although once a popular destination for Tucson Gardener visitors it wasn’t fair to lump all the nurseries together considering there are some that I’d only visit once. I've actually walked out of a nursery or two because I couldn't get staff to help me out in a reasonable amount of time. So instead of possibly listing the good with the bad the brief nursery descriptions and accompanying photos were deleted from this website. Another problem was keeping the photos or information up to date. I would need to visit every nursery listed at least once a year and I really didn't want to do that. Readers might get the impression all nurseries are created equal but that’s not true. The staff, merchandise selection, quality of plants, pricing, services offered, and even the location help make a nursery what it is. Either you get a great garden shopping experience or it becomes one of those plant shopping adventures where once is more than enough. 6. Why do my snapdragons have yellow blotches? I always grow snaps through the winter and often they look pretty shabby by spring. They look really bad if we have a wet winter because the moisture helps spread and promote the disease that's on the underside of the leaves. You usually notice the yellow circles on the top side first. If you flip the leaves over you'll see lots of rust colored pustules. That's the disease, it's called rust. It's tuff to control and hard to avoid. I've picked up containers of snapdragons in garden centers and had to put them back on the display table because the plants already had rust pustules on some of their leaves.
There are supposed to be rust resistant varieties of snap dragons and a lot of how bad your infestation will be is how you grow the plants. Good air circulation and keeping the foliage as dry as possible helps reduce the chance for rust. That means no overhead watering. Water the soil not the plant. The spores produced in the pustules can be easily spread by wind and rain so it's hard to prevent. You can control rust using a regular spraying of fungicide but that's too much work in my garden. When the infestation really hurts the appearance of my snapdragons, I pull them up and discard them in the trash. They shouldn't go in the compost bin where the spores can infest another planting of snaps. (2006) |
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