Rodd's Seeds of Wisdom Horticultural tips and tricks from Rodd Moesel

Happy New Year 2011! It happens every year, but it all seems so sudden.  We barely close the box on one year and we are already in the next.

This is the time of year when many folks make New Year’s resolutions, set new goals or at least take a little time to analyze their lives and re-focus for the year ahead. This is a good time to spend a little time planning for your yard and garden as well. The seed and mail order companies helpwith that process as they all release their new catalogs with beautiful pictures and write ups on new flowers, vegetables and trees we need to try out.

I enjoy looking at these catalogs and the growing number of internet newsletters and catalogs for ideas and inspiration but I am a big believer in tryingto shop locally as much as possible. On plant issues this is especially important as many plants that look great on the internet or a catalog just don’t perform well under our conditions. The flip side is that many plants that are not in a catalog developed in Michigan or New York will do great here. Pick out some plants that excite you from the catalogs and then show them to your local nurseryman or garden center to help select the right or similar plants that should do well in your neighborhood. Try to buy as much as possible locally so that the local nursery knowledge and experience will continue to be available in your community to help you be a success in your gardening efforts.

This is also a good time to decide if you are going to vegetable garden this year. Do you want to add more trees for fruit, shade or to save energy? Do you want to expand your flowerbeds or create new flower beds? Do you want to add a garden pond or a butterfly garden? Do you dream of growing your own grapes, raspberries, blackberries or strawberries?  Do you want to buy more containers or hanging baskets and expand your container and patio gardening? All these things and much more are possible if you just decide you want to do them start planning and then do it.

There are many resources to help you succeed including the garden catalogs and internet sites but also check out short term workshops and fact sheets at your local extension office. Don’t forget to check out local garden clubs and plant societies, newsletters, tours and speakers of the Oklahoma Horticulture Society.  There is much to learn visiting with fellow gardeners and of course your local nurseryman is always one of your best assets as you plan and plant for 2011.

Hard to believe another year is about to be in the history books with Christmas just days ahead with a New Year right on its heels.

We hope your life is full of the Christmas spirit and will be blessed with special times with family and friends.  The holiday experience can be enriched with the charming beauty of poinsettias, the fresh evergreen scent of Christmas trees, wreaths and swags and the excitement of giving or opening gardening and horticultural gifts.

This truly is the season of giving, whether it be time and attention with those we love, gifts to those less fortunate or extra support for the causes and charities we support. As gardeners and folks that care about our community this is a time when many use the Christmas holiday or end of the year giving to provide extra support to groups like the Oklahoma Horticulture Society, garden clubs, plant societies or to youth gardening and community beautification causes.

This year, a group of horticulture leaders has gone together to initiate six major scholarship efforts to encourage more young people to study and pursue horticulture studies and pursuits in our state. Oklahoma State University is the land grant college in our state and offers most of the university level  horticulture training in our state with highly rated 4-year degree programs in Stillwater and 2-year associate degree programs in Oklahoma City.

Boone Pickens recently offered to provide $75,000.00 matching money to scholarships that raised $50,000.00 over 5 years by February 2015. The resulting $125,000.00 scholarship endowments will each pay out a little over $6,000.00 a year to use for student scholarships. We are attempting to fund 6 of the scholarships for horticulture student studies. When we get all 6 funded this will result in about $36,000.00 per year that can be used to support 36 students with $1,000.00 annual scholarships. As you make year end donations this year or consider gifts over the next few years please consider supporting one or more of these special scholarships.

The Marjorie “Ball” Moesel scholarship will honor my amazing mother and will support scholarships for 4-H youth who excel in horticulture, community beautification and community leadership programs as they pursue college studies. For more on Mrs. Moesel’s scholarship opportunity, please click here.

The Charles & Linda Shackelford Scholarship will honor the wonderful proprietors of TLC Nursery in Oklahoma City and will support scholarships for FFA youth who excel in floriculture, horticulture and landscape programs as they pursue college studies. For more on the Shackelford’s scholarship opportunity, please click here.

The Richard H. Moesel Scholarship will honor my father who loved to share the joy of horticulture and was instrumental in starting the horticulture program at OSU/OKC and served as an adjunct professor there for many years. This scholarship will be for horticulture students at OSU/OKC or those graduating from OKC going on to Stillwater to pursue a 4 year degree. For more on Mr. Moesel’s scholarship opportunity, please click here.

The other 3 scholarships will honor long time professors at OSU who each have trained hundreds of horticulturists and had a huge impact on the horticulture business in Oklahoma.

The Carl Whitcomb Scholarship in Nursery Management will support student learning in all phases of the nursery industry from propagation to field and container production. Whitcomb holds over 29 patents, has published over 400 articles, several books and is famous for his breeding including a steady stream of crapemyrtles. For more on Dr. Whitcomb’s scholarship opportunity, please click here.

The Jim Motes Scholarship in vegetable/herb production will support young people studying these important food crops. Motes is internationally known for his pepper breeding work, helped start the Oklahoma Vegetable Association and has helped develop Oklahoma asparagus, pepper, spinach and melon farming operations. For more on Dr. Motes’ scholarship opportunity, please click here.

The Richard N. Payne Scholarship will support students in floriculture crop and greenhouse management. Dr. Payne was my principal professor and is one of the nicest men in America with a real heart for his students, greenhouse growers and horticulture. He has been honored with National Teaching & Research Awards as well as starting the Oklahoma Greenhouse Growers. For more on Dr. Payne’s scholarship opportunity, please click here.

Please consider supporting one or more of these scholarship efforts with a donation to the OSU Foundation, 400 S. Monroe, Stillwater, Oklahoma 74076, noting the scholarship you are supporting.  E-mail me for a brochure with more details on each scholarship. This would be a truly special gift that will keep giving each year into the future and will help shape young lives for decades to come.

Have a very Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year.

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The 2010 growing season is now complete after several hard Oklahoma freezes. Most of the tree leaves have dropped and most of nature is hibernating for the winter. We enjoyed great celebrations of Thanksgiving and our many blessings. Now we all prepare for the season of Christmas and the chance to share those blessings, celebrations and love with our family, friends, co-workers and neighbors.

Horticulture is a big part of this celebration with the poinsettia in its many colors and styles serving as the floral symbol of the holidays. The Christmas tree has long contributed it’s pleasant scent and graceful charm to the festivities. You can choose beautiful, full “cut” Christmas trees, farm raised and sheared to near perfection to help decorate your home, church or business. Remember to make a fresh cut on the bottom of the tree trunk when you take it home. Mount it in a tree stand that holds water to help keep the tree turgid. Check the water periodically as some will evaporate and the tree will “drink” most of it. The more water absorbed by the tree, the longer it will hold its needles and look festive for the holiday.

You could also select a living Christmas tree at your local nursery, grown in a container or balled and burlapped, ready to plant out in your yard after the holiday. The live trees will usually not be as impressive as the cut trees because of the different growing techniques and the growth habits of the species that are best adapted to grow outside after the holidays.

You should keep the living tree indoors for a shorter time like 10 – 14 days and definitely not over 3 weeks so they don’t get too dehydrated and adjusted to the warmer house temperatures where they suffer freeze damage when moved outdoors. Plant your live tree into the yard as soon as possible after Christmas. There is no better way to remember a Christmas than to plant the living Christmas tree in the yard to enjoy for years to come. Just as you need to water the live tree, even mist its boughs periodically, don’t forget to water it thoroughly after planting and to check on watering it regularly throughout the winter as it gets established.

Don’t forget that live greens have been a part of the Christmas celebration for years and still add to the festivities. Buy evergreen wreaths, rope or swags or cut some juniper, pine or holly branches from your own yard and make your own “live green” decorations for Christmas.

Don’t forget that gardening is one of the most popular hobbies in America and can provide many special gift opportunities. Consider giving a special plant or tree, garden tools, a garden center gift certificate, gardening books, gloves or garden clothes. Most gardeners would enjoy a membership in the Oklahoma Horticulture Society, a botanical garden, plant society or any of a million other neat gifts. We hope you have a wonderful holiday season and a very Merry Christmas.

Happy Thanksgiving week!

This celebration grew out of the historic tradition of harvest festivals as we store, celebrate and give thanks for the last harvest and prepare for the winter season ahead. In Oklahoma gardening that means transitioning from the pretty fall colors on the trees to the dormancy and hibernation of winter, leaving the evergreens to star in our winter landscapes.

Most Okies got their first real freeze in recent days putting an end to most of our vegetable and annual flowering crops for another year. We are now in the season of pansies, ornamental kale and cabbage, planting spring flowering bulbs and ready to enjoy the beauty of poinsettias. Pumpkins, squash, corn and a cornucopia of other vegetable crops produced in the recent season are the horticultural image of Thanksgiving.

Poinsettias have become the horticultural icon of the Christmas season and we are already seeing a few decorate retail malls, businesses and homes. After Thanksgiving they will go on display everywhere to help announce the Christmas season and put us in good cheer. Historically poinsettias are a pretty recent addition to the Christmas party. They were discovered by U.S. Ambassador and avid gardener Joel Poinsett in Mexico, our southern neighbor, during his time there as our Ambassador. He sent the first plants back to the United States in 1828 and just since that time it has gone from Euphorbia pulcherrima, a pretty wildflower to become the Christmas flower in the United States. Now poinsettias are widely recognized and enjoyed worldwide with the Christmas season.

In just my lifetime, there have been tremendous changes in poinsettia breeding so that the poinsettias stay colorful for much longer and are available in many more colors and flower styles. As a boy, I remember the first poinsettias went on sale in mid December and stayed colorful for just a few weeks. Today varieties often stay colorful all the way up into February, March or even May if well cared for. The varieties of my youth had 1 flower per stem and were 2’ to 5’ tall so to get 3 flowers in a pot there had to be 3 plants, for 5 flowers in a large pot required 5 plants. The new varieties we use today are naturally shorter, respond well to growth regulators to produce short full plants and with a pinch of the terminal or center shoot early in the crop they produce many flowers on a single pinched plant.

The colorful part of the poinsettia we enjoy in the many tones of red, pink, white or marbled combinations of these colors is actually the “bract” or flower holder. The real flowers or cyathia are small yellow clusters above the center of the colored leaves or bracts we enjoy and often call the flower. The Aztecs in Mexico used their cuitlaxochitl, our poinsettia, to produce red dye and antipyretic medicine before Joel Poinsett introduced this plant to early Americans.

Please take time to enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday with your family and slip away from the turkey and football long enough to meditate and show thanks for the great growing season we have just completed and the family, friends and many blessings we enjoy in our daily lives. After Thanksgiving it will really be time to put out the Poinsettias and prepare for Christmas, the Season of Giving.

Parts of Oklahoma have already frozen and are watching the tree leaves drop and move towards dormancy. Other parts of the state including most of central Oklahoma have flirted with frosts and dropped near freezing but escaped, so we are still enjoying beautiful fall color from begonias, lantana, marigolds, hardy mums and many other flowers.

This is the season to enjoy the bright fall colors of autumn on our trees and many deciduous shrubs as they transition from the bright greens of the growing season that were dominated by chlorophyll using the long days for photosynthesis. In the fall, these trees and shrubs recapture much of the sugars and energy from these leaves as they change color and then release those leaves to float and flutter to the ground, ready to provide natural mulch and organic matter to the earth below. If you rake these leaves up from your lawn, driveway and walks consider mulching them onto your flowerbeds or starting a compost pile to take advantage of this natural organic matter.

This is a great time to plant ornamental kale, cabbage and the many varieties of pansies which can add so much color and excitement right through most of our winters. They don’t grow very tall but literally make mounds of green foliage livened up with the happy, colorful and enchanting faces of pansies right through the cold bleak days of winter. Few things in the garden beat the joy of bright yellow, blue or red pansies blooming through a cover of light snow. Fall and winter pansies do best when planted in full sun and do well in front flowerbeds, decorative containers, around the mailbox, front yard gaslight or bordering your back patio.

This continues to be the prime planting season for spring flowering bulbs if you want to enjoy the many crocus, tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, dutch iris and many lesser known bulbs pushing up through the ground next March and April to announce spring. Spring bulbs kick off a new season with a burst of color. My favorites are the daffodils or narcissus with their traditional yellow, white or light orange trumpets which can naturalize here and come back to bloom year after year. As kids, my sister, brothers and I loved to plant crocus in the lawn or scattered in flowerbeds. We would throw these little bulbs like Johnny Appleseed and then plant them wherever they landed. The first thing to bloom each spring would be these crocus scattered throughout the lawn and landscape “prairie style”.

Don’t forget this is a great time to plant trees and shrubs if you want to add more shade or atmosphere to your yard. Their roots will grow slowly all winter to help them to get established and ready to sprout to life in their new location this next spring.