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It's a typical summer for northern Ohio
By Jim Chatfield
Special to the Beacon Journal
Published on Saturday, Jul 04, 2009
As today's holiday arrives, turfgrass is still growing lushly in Northeast Ohio, though some areas of Northwest Ohio already show some browning, dormant bluegrass already because of drier conditions there. Hydrangeas, daylilies and bottlebrush buckeyes provide landscape blooms and roadsides display their patriotic hues of red clover, white Queen Anne's lace and the blue-sky blossoms of chicory.
Now for some questions.
Q: I have a dwarf Alberta spruce with another tree growing out of the top of it. How can this be?
A: Somewhere between my computer and BlackBerry, I have lost the name of the person who sent this question and the picture sent with the query. I feel confident, though, that they are reading the Beacon Journal for their answer.
What looks like a normal white spruce tree growing out of the upper right side of your dwarf Alberta spruce is known as a reversion.
Dwarf Alberta spruce (Picea glauca var. albertiana ''Conica'') is a cultivar (cultivated variety) of Alberta white spruce (Picea glauca var. albertiana) that horticulturists propagate when the mutated, shorter-needled and more slowly growing dwarf form develops on a normal-size white spruce. This propagated form is then planted and desired for its shorter needles and dwarf form.
In about one in 20 dwarf Alberta spruces, though, the plant tissue reverts to the parent form and size and a normal Alberta white spruce grows out of the dwarf. Solution: prune out the reverted shoot at its base.
Q: What can be done for fireblight on Callery pears?
A: Fellow Almaniac Denise Ellsworth got this question from Munroe Falls earlier this week. We chatted and I stopped by for a look on a few streets with fireblight Wednesday night.
Indeed, bacterial fireblight is present, causing mostly short six-inch spur strikes. These infections originate where the flowers were this spring, as the bacteria that cause fireblight infect blossoms, then spread to the adjacent leaves and twigs.
Fireblight is greatest in years when it is warm and wet during the bloom of these ornamental pears, which was the case in many Ohio locations this spring.
The good news is that most Callery pears, including the ''Bradford'' cultivar that I think was the main type on the Munroe Falls streets I checked, are not badly damaged by fireblight in terms of survival, with the strikes usually being limited to six inches or so, as opposed to longer strikes that can be deadly, such as those on many of our fruiting pears.
The bad news is that with as many strikes as were present on the trees, they do look unsightly.
The other bad news is that not only do we not have very effective fireblight bactericides available, but also that spraying at this point in the season will not be of any use.
Spraying to prevent infections in upcoming springs is problematic as well, because the trees are tall, timing must be perfect and, as noted, the bactericides available are not very effective.
Pruning, the most common remedy for fireblight control, done to remove the discolored leaves and shoots and limit the bacterial
inoculum for next year, is also problematic because of the number of strikes in these large, older trees.
To paraphrase, it would take a village to prune out all these strikes.
So, what is to be done? My opinion? Live with it till you cannot live with it. The trees will survive — it is just a matter of if and when the collective community decides it wants to prune at ground level and replant.
And now for something entirely different, probably totally irrelevant, yet somehow compelling.
The final question for today came from a Master Gardener who recently asked whether I had ever heard of ''the Kissing Bug.'' In fact I had, reading a wonderful article by May Berenbaum in the summer 2009 issue of American Entomologist.
Berenbaum chairs the Entomology Department at the University of Illinois and, like many bug lovers, is a great wit with unusual interests. Read her book Buzzwords: A Specialist Muses on Sex, Bugs and Rock 'n' Roll if you do not believe me.
Kissing bugs are the informal name of certain bugs in the Reduviidae family that, though usually predators on other insects, if in high enough populations may search out soft parts of the sleeping human anatomy, say the eyelids or lips.
A South American species of kissing bug that we fortunately do not have here (Triatoma infestans) is a big deal there, because it vectors Trypanosoma cruzi, a microbe that causes Chagas disease, with sometimes fatal results.
Kissing bug species that live in the United States, such as Reduvius personatus (officially known as the masked bed bug hunter) do not transmit the Chagas disease parasite and I have never heard of anyone having been kissed, other than from Berenbaum's stories.
As she relates, apparently on the cusp of the 20th century, there was a kissing bug scare in New York City and other areas around the country.
In addition to the kissing bugs' welcome biological control of bedbugs, populations bumbled as well upon the soft lips of human victims, leaving a small memento. This led to the Kissing Bug poem of James Buchanan Elmore in 1908:
Some ladies are afraid of a kissing bug
And cannot sleep at night
And yet they embrace and kiss a thug
And think it out of sight.
This bug appears when snug in bed
And you are sound asleep;
You'll feel it crawling o'er your head
And touch your rosy cheeks.
You'll know this bug, with tweezers sharp,
And beak that's very black;
You'll feel so queer beneath the heart
As he takes a dainty smack.
As I said, bug lovers are weird — and wonderful. Not to mention cool and ''out of sight'' in 1908!
Jim Chatfield is a horticultural educator with Ohio State University Extension. If you have questions about caring for your garden, write: Jim Chatfield, Plant Lovers' Almanac, Ohio State University Extension, 1680 Madison Ave., Wooster, OH 44691. Send e-mail to chatfield.1@cfaes.osu.edu or call 330-466-0270. Please include your phone number if you write.
As today's holiday arrives, turfgrass is still growing lushly in Northeast Ohio, though some areas of Northwest Ohio already show some browning, dormant bluegrass already because of drier conditions there. Hydrangeas, daylilies and bottlebrush buckeyes provide landscape blooms and roadsides display their patriotic hues of red clover, white Queen Anne's lace and the blue-sky blossoms of chicory.
Get the full article here.
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Cuyahoga Falls, OH
Posted 10:19 AM, 07/04/2009
Drier conditions in NE Oho? It's been NBR - nothing but rain - since May 1st!
