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Nov 20th SpeakerNancy Moore Garden Design for Year Round Interest Doors open at 7:00 pm Speaker begins at 7:30 pm Nancy has had a life-long love of plants and gardening, and feels extremely fortunate to be able to make a living doing what she loves. After graduating in landscape design/horticulture, Nancy was involved in many aspects of this field, including being the horticulturist for a parks department, teaching landscape design and horticulture at the University of the Fraser Valley, and running her own landscape design/consulting business. Nancy recently retired from most of her commitments, but still enjoys teaching the Master Gardeners at VanDusen Botanical Gardens, and giving gardening talks to various organizations.  | Gardening StuffThe Bees Need Your Help!!
Neonicotinoid pesticides are slowly killing bees. 75% of the world's honey is now contaminated with bee-killing pesticides. Please educate yourself and make sure you are not part of the problem.
Oct Gardening To Do list By Angelika Hedley General Bare earth yields weeds, soil erosion, dead bees. Let plants die naturally and rot in place, returning nutrients to soil and sheltering beneficial insects. Dried stems/flower heads give winter interest as well as seeds for birds. Plant - Indoor herbs - Bulbs, ground & forcing - Evergreens, shrubs, trees, rhubarb - Lawn seed until 10th - Divide Peonies Prune Take cuttings from - Geranium - Summer flowering wood Plant Health - Feed: Fall bloomers Dig, store tubers, corms Leave dying plants as mulch EXCEPT roses. For Roses, pick up all leaves to avoid black spot. Click here to see the entire calendar. | Sept Meeting RecapLaurelle Oldford-Downs Maximize Your Harvest by Heather Fayers
Because gardeners have practiced the art of grafting for centuries, many apples from the past are still available. Laurelle, an apple expert recruited to fill in for Brian Minter, brought samples from various valley orchards for us to try.We enjoyed Gravenstein, a soft apple which requires two other trees to pollinate; ripens as early as July and has been grown since 1682. If picked green, it will ripen on the counter. ( I have grown one since 2008 in an oak barrel.) Her favourite is Sweet Sixteen, a beautiful apple which is one of the last to bloom, so care must be taken with a pollinating tree. Ribston Pippen, the parent of the famous Cox’s Orange Pippen, grows better in our damp environment and is a fine hard apple. Liberty, (which Conway Lum recommended as a good apple for the lower mainland) was a red skinned white fleshed apple with a very crisp pleasant taste. It is also a heavy bearer. If you want bigger apples, you have to thin in June. Belle de Boskoop looks and feels as if it is covered in fine leather, which helps it resist coddling moths. It is very high in vitamin C with a good flavour. Golden Russet is another “leather look” apple which is productive and very tasty. Haralson, from Minnesota,is a stand alone cider apple with a distinctive peppery taste. To avoid damage from scab, canker, apple maggot and coddling moths apples require full sun, moisture, a dusting of lime and clean growing practices. Gather up diseased apples and leaves and send to the municipal incinerator. Cut out canker and disinfect the tree and equipment with 2-4% bleach solution; Use canker resistant root stalks on your grafts; For coddling moth, use dormant oil spray, trunk wraps or the fine clay spray called Surround. Bad infestations of moths and apple maggot can be eliminated by destroying all apples, including ones on nearby trees for one year in order to break the life cycle. Larvae can be killed by cultivating the soil at the foot of the tree in fall or my having your neighbours chickens come in for while. |
