Wow! It's 62 Degrees in Central Wisconsin and Indicator Plants Are Indicating What?

Daffodils blooming on May 1.

Skies are blue and the sun is shining! My car thermometer says it was 62 degrees at 3:30 P.M.

Wow! Our first really nice day and I was inside with students who would much rather play video games than learn to keyboard. When I first got home I took a few moment to sit and soak up the sunshine, check out my daffodils, and notice the hepatica was in bloom.

My bloodroot, which goes by fairly quickly, although I have it planted in the shade on the north side of my house is very sensitive to that 50 degree number; shot up its still unfurled leaves. I figure two days of this type of temperatures and it will bloom.

I saw my first dandelions in bloom today. My forsythia is in glorious full bloom. All this leads me to the next thing gardeners need to think about. The calendar for when to do what in the garden is all messed up. For those of you who plant potatoes when the first dandelions bloom, here you go! That forsythia says to plant those peas. For those of you looking for a wood tick, get out your repellents.

And those of you looking for that biofix date where you will see a codling moth in your traps three days in a row and whatnot, you better hang your traps and start thinking about pheromone baits.

Normally, you would spray a dormant oil on fruit trees sometime in March when the temperature was to be above 40 degrees for the next 6 hours. If you have not done that you need to do it ASAP. You want to spray your dormant oil before the buds have green tips and the leaves begin. You also want to allow 10-14 days between your different treatments. I sprayed my fruit trees with dormant oil around the 22nd of March.

With April so incredibly cold and raining or snowing, all the typical dates are way off. According to data taken at the Wisconsin Rapids weather station between 1961 to 1990, the first daffodils bloom around March 26. This year, I think it was April 29.

So here goes a short list of indicator plants on what to do when here in the garden in central Wisconsin based on temperature tracking at the Wisconsin Rapids weather station and the resources compiled by the UW-Cooperative Extension.

When violets open apply crabgrass preventer.

When forsythia are in full bloom, tent caterpillars and pine sawflies are hatching.

When common lilacs are first in flower, the first generation of codling moths emerge to lay their eggs. This is the time for pheromone disruptors. About three days after the first lilac begins to bloom, if you are going with your typical spray programs then would be the time. If you are hanging Tanglefoot-treated red balls, have them up before the lilac blooms. Keep the sticky ball about 5 feet from the ground and be sure to re-coat before July 1 to catch any early apple maggots. (Just a note for those of you fearing catching beneficial insects, I used these with Tanglefoot one year and did not catch a single bee of any sort nor any beneficial insects.) Recommendations are for one trap per 50 -100 fruit. On my heavily laden 'Honeycrisp this would be about 4 traps!)

In addition to traps, pheronome disruptors, using landscape fabric to prevent access to soil, be sure to clean up and bag any windfall apples as soon as they fall and pick off any apples showing frass (the jelly like goo that indicates and insect's larva is working that apple).

If you are using traditional fruit tree sprays for coddling moth control, for example malathion, spray at 75% of petal fall, again at 7-10 days after petal fall, and then on a cycle every 10-14 day thereafter.

At this time, the first onion maggots lay their eggs. An organic gardener shared this tip. Interplant onions and carrots by rows, a row of carrots, a row of onions. Carrot fly doesn't like onions and onion maggots are confused by carrots. These two make great planting partners.

So by the time lilacs are in full bloom, those coddling moths are laying their first hatch of eggs on your apple trees. When this group of eggs hatch they will pupate in the ground. If you have laid down black landscape fabric around your fruit trees you will cut down on a large part of this population getting to and out of the soil.

Also around the time the lilac is in full bloom the cabbage maggots first generation of eggs hatch. You might want to think about row covers for your cabbage family of crops. This would make it much more difficult for those yellow and white "butterflies" (I'm told they are really moths.) to lay eggs on your cabbage plants.

Traditional spraying methods for codling moths are spaced about every two weeks throughout the growing season. There have been studies showing two or three properly time application of dormant oil will do the trick versus having to follow a nearly religious twice a month traditional spraying schedule.

If you are attempting to time dormant oil applications on fruit trees, I would time them to the peak moth emergence times, before they have a chance to lay eggs. One application of dormant oil in mid-March (decidedly before green tips), the second application three days after the first lilac blooms, and the third application in typical years about August 3rd (or using indicator plants, a week after the wild bergamot is in full bloom). If you have apple maggot, this third application should take care of those, too.

Some additional correlations for other garden chores:

Plant beets, carrots, cole crops, lettuce,and spinach when lilac is in first leaf. Plant corn when oak leaves are the size of a squirrel's ear. Plant beans, cucumbers and squash seeds when the lilac is in full bloom. Transplant eggplant, melon, and peppers when Irises bloom.

What to do in the garden, today, March 28?

Nothing.

Still over a foot of snow covers anything that remotely looks like a garden here in the Central Sands region of Wisconsin, zone 4. My Dad says we are 20 degrees below average temperature. He's a farmer. He should know; he's been growing things a tad longer than I have.

So today, my garden activities center around my seedlings in my growing racks in my extra space in my loft. I thought I would include some pictures of this growing rack, dimensions, and building tips.








Although I do quite a bit of hammering, sawing, nailing, etc.; I am far from a pro. I have built a deck ("cobble"might be a good word there), built a couple fences, and remodeled more than one or two bathrooms, and have developed some skills. I am far from a finish/trim carpenter, but this light rack was easy to build.

It measures about 20" deep, about 5 feet high, and 44" wide. I built it using (4) 2" x 2 x 8' pieces. I cut 36" off each of the 8' pieces and then cut the 36" pieces in half again. Having those (8) 18" piece is key to getting the right dimensions as I use 4 standard 10" by 20" flats without drain holes to keep everything nice and dry.

As this light rack holds four trays across (the width part), I purchased (4) 1" by 4" board and cut each in half. If I was doing it over I would go with 6 though. With six, each shelf would have three of these as tray supports.

I assembled this rack with screws, pre-drilling my holes and "L-brackets". These L-brackets on the corners with the 18" pieces top and bottom and two equi-distant spaces between form the sides of my rack. The brackets are key. Pre-drilling is important. Don't skip that step, and it helps to have a helper to hold things together during assembly.

I had the screws in my cast-offs bucket. I purchased the wood and brackets (8 in all, one at each corner.) I think the rack itself cost me just about $20.

I had a couple shop lights to start. I hang these with chain. I prefer to use 2 per shelf. If you use one only put 2 trays on the shelf and put them parallel with the width. The chains are important to keep the lights within 4" of the growing seedlings. I use regular florescent light bulbs with about 3,500 lumens. I don't use special light bulbs. The lumen thing is important, though. The higher the lumen the better. I think the minimum you should attempt to grow with is 3,200. A couple years back I bought a light meter and it really helped me nail down the issues I had with whether there was enough light or not.



I plug all my lights into a circuit panel things with a switch so I can flip one switch to turn a whole rack on or off. That plugs into a GFI-wired outlet. This space is planned to eventually be a bathroom, so the GFI-circuit makes sense for now, watering plants and using lights are not a good combo; and in the future for the bathroom. I have tripped the circuit more than once with dripping water.

The second plug in the outlet is where I plug in my one heat mat. This allows me to use the heat mat even at night to encourage those seed to sprout, rather than plug it into the light panel and turn it off. I also use two screws to attach/stabilize it to the wall.

My son, who was then probably 14 and had never built anything before, helped hold pieces of this together when I built it a couple years back. Yesterday, he and I were out shopping for a couple of new bulbs for the rack. We walked by a really fancy, metal, pre-made rack priced at a couple hundred dollars, and he commented, "Wow, Mom! Ours is really nice, and it holds twice as many trays as this one and only cost us a few bucks!"

Yes. I thought. Yes, it did.

Bloom Day, Global Gardening, and What to Do in the Garden in March?

(The graph above showing degree days as of march 17, 2011, courtesy of http://www.soils.wisc.edu/uwex_agwx/thermal_models/tree.)

We are increasingly becoming global citizens in our outlook and the availability of information on gardening on the internet. Every so often I come across pictures of gardeners doing some exotic gardening task while I still have two feet of snow on the ground. My ex-husband, with whom, I am still chummy, confined that he saw an old mutual friend while out buying mulch to mulch the garden I left when I divorced him. "Would you believe I used 50 bags of mulch last year!"

I looked at him dumbly, "Huh?" I still have frozen ground, and plenty of snow, and had to chip the ice out of my co mingled plastics and glass, Wednesday.

This is the way of the world, I guess. He lives 180 miles to the south, surrounded by asphalt and concrete. Here in the Central Sands of Wisconsin, those Canadian Artic blasts just keep bringing it on! I wore my winter coat to school this morning. A fire burns in my fireplace. Someone searched this blog on "when in March to transplant berries..."

Transplant berries in in March?

I've been thinking of making the trek to the Community Library with the sole purpose of seeing how many more measureable snow days the village snow witch has forecast. (Yes, my village has a snow witch. AND she, accurately forecasts such stuff as the exact frost date and number of snowfalls each year.)

I pay attention. I must just not be paying the right people, obviously.

Where I garden, no one is doing any berry transplanting in March. One strawberry grower keeps his covered with straw, until I think it is May 1! I'm a little more adventurous than that and I probably have a better selected cultivar as well. (I think Honeoye are just the BEST June-bearing strawberries, by the way.)

A couple years ago, I came across the idea of plant phenology or degree days. It's how to get "right and tight" with your zone. It is the idea that certain insect and plant things happen after there have been x-number of accumulated degree days. It usually centers around the idea of the hours where the temps reach 50 degrees.

This website (from the University of Massachusetts) gives a good explanation: http://www.umassgreeninfo.org/fact_sheets/ipmtools/gdd_phrenology.html

"Monitoring: Growing Degree Days and Plant Phenology
Timing
The growing use of less persistent, more environmentally benign pesticides, increased use of alternative management strategies and the rising costs of labor have all magnified the importance of accurate timing in pest management. Effective plant protection and efficient time management are dependent on our ability to predict pest activity. There are several ways to predict when pests are vulnerable to treatment or when monitoring for pest activity should begin. The calendar, calculation of growing degree days (GDD), and correlation of pest deveopment with plant phenology are the three most commonly used methods for insects and mites.

Calendar
The calendar method is based on following the historical record and past experience and is expressed as an approximate date. For example, gypsy moth egg hatch occurs in Massachusetts somewhere between late April and late May. As each spring in New England is unique and the season progresses differently in different areas, scheduling treatments by the calendar method alone can result in poor control, wasting both material and labor time.

Growing Degree Days (GDD)
Insects are cold-blooded animals whose activity and development is controlled by the temperature of the surrounding environment. It has long been recognized that growth could be measured indirectly by tracking temperature over time once the lower (baseline) and upper threshold temperatures for a particular insect were known. This would enable predictions of events in an insect's life cycle during the season by measuring growth in terms of temperature over time. While the concept of GDD has been around for many years, the baseline threshold temperatures are known for only a relatively few insect species. Currently, 50°F is used as a standard baseline for all insect and mite pests of woody plants. This standard was chosen because plant growth in the northeast is thought to start between 45° F and 55°F. Obviously, the farther an insect or mite's true baseline is from 50°, the less accurate these range numbers are. However, in most cases, the GDD method is proving to be much more accurate than the calendar method.

EXAMPLE:
average daily temperature - baseline temperature = growing degree days gained. (Negative numbers are ignored as growth does not go backwards.) If the high temperature for April 1 was 70°and the low was 60° then the average temperature for April 1 was 65° F.

70° + 60°

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2
= 65°

When a baseline temperature of 50° is used, the accumulation for April 1 is 15 growing degree days.

(GDD): 65 - 50 = 15 GDD.

As each day's GDD are added to the total, a growth unit calendar for the season is created. Gypsy moth egg hatch is known to occur between 90 and 100 GDD. By the calendar, this can be anywhere from late April to late May, a range of some 30 days. In contrast, if growing degree days are closely observed as they approach 90, egg hatch can be predicted within a few days.

The daily average temperature is readily available from weather stations or newspapers, or is easy to record using a high-low thermometer, thermograph, or a Biophenometer.

Approximate GDD Scale for Massachusetts

March, April, May, June July August, September October

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000


Plant Phenology
Plant growth also responds to accumulating heat units to some degree. Bud swell, leaf emergence, flowering, fruiting, and other growth stages can be correlated to the growth stages of some insects and mites. Continuing with the example of gypsy moth egg hatch, this is said to occur about the time Amelanchier (shadbush) is in bloom. However, as day length and other environmental factors can affect specific events in a plants life cycle and different cultivars frequently have different bloom periods, these correlations are less precise than using GDD, but more accurate than using calendar dates. As landscapers and nursery workers can easily observe bloom and other plant events as they perform their normal routines, this is an attractive method for basing monitoring and management. Plant phenology and GDD information relative to Massachusetts' plants and insects has been researched and are incorporated into fact sheets and newsletters. Weekly GDD accumulations and current plant bloom are available through the Landscape Message. As with relying on a calendar approach, caution should be exercised when using GDD and phenology. Both are meant as an aid to monitoring, not as a substitute for visual confirmation. "

This website is based in Wisconsin.

This one lets you fill in your location info and will shoot out the current information for organic pest management, planting, and whatnot.

This last page by plugging in my location info and apple scab as the pest I wanted to work with, on the day I sprayed my dormant oil it showed I had already accumulated between 106 and 113 degree days. (I sprayed about 1 PM.) A lot of science here!