This is for everyone who has trouble Saying No to Plants. It is important to realize that this impulse is NOT YOUR FAULT. For several years I have been doing research on the theory that through thousands of years of selective mutation, plants have developed the ability to practice thought control on some humans. They do this in order to get their basic needs for water, fertilizer, etc. met. This will make a dandy thesis paper if I ever get to the point of needing one. Here is a summary of my research so far: How to know if you are susceptible to plant thought control:

1. When you visit a nursery, you hear thousands of tiny voices in your head saying, "Buy me! Buy me!"
2. You always carry a pair of scissors and baggies when you visit gardens (especially those with rare plants) in order to take cuttings and collect seed. You rationalize this by telling yourself that pruning and deadheading are good for plants.
3. When you go out to eat, you ask the waiter to fix a doggie bag of all that evening's leftover vegetables and salads for your compost heap.
4. You hold a short non-denominational burial service for the "tail" end of a worm when you accidentally cut one in half with your spade.
5. Your family has eaten take-out for 2 weeks because you are using your oven (with just the light on) as a germination chamber.
6. You have attempted to get a bootleg copy of your favorite seed catalog two months before it is published.
7. You are a charter member of PETP (People for the Ethical Treatment of Plants) and carry out midnight raids to liberate plants from gardens decorated with plaster gnomes in various attitudes of indecent exposure.

Apparently there is little that can be done for people who are highly susceptible to plant thought control. Don't think that resolving to stay out of nurseries will help. Plants have been known to broadcast their insidious messages night and day until even the strongest person has to give in to temptation. However, these few suggestions may be helpful if one is serious about avoiding plant thought control.

1. Wear a football helmet whenever you visit a place with plants for sale. This apprently disrupts the thought control ability of plants.
2. If you are highly susceptible to plant thought control, the football helmet may not work alone. In addition, you may need to cary a small tape recorder with a long-playing recording of a weed whacker. This seems to terrify the plants and disrupts their ability to practice thought control on you.
3. Wear a straight jacket at all times during the growing season. I will soon be manufacturing them in tasteful floral patterns.

If these suggestions fail, remember that there are worse conditions that one might have. And now excuse me. My plants are calling to me wanting to know what's for dinner.

Things to Do in May

The Lawn: Being the first month of the second quarter it is now time to fertilize the lawn again if you did your first application in May. Because of the heavy rains in the spring I would suggest using GreenSense Lawn & Garden Microbial Treatment. I actually use it every time I fertilize my lawn and flower beds. With the summer heat coming up now is a good time to apply lava sand.

Lava Sand helps retain moisture and is a good way to help serrate the heavy clay soils. Clay soils are very small particles that are flat and not round like Lava Sand. Lava Sand is larger and rounded and will help keep the clay particles separated as it works its way into the soil. Because it is porous it has the ability to retain water.

Remember the customer that I talked about last year. His yard did better then any of the neighbors, and he watered his lawn only occasionally.

Humate is another mineral that can be applied to the lawn at this time, With high amounts ofHumic Acid that are essential to plant development. Specifically these include humic and fulvic acids. These act as organic "chelators" which enhance the uptake and utilization of vital plant nutrients contained in both organic and conventional fertilizers. Due to their negative ionic characteristics, these organic acids increase the cation exchange capacity of the soil, which enhances the transfer of nutrients through cell membranes of plant root materials.

Weeds: By now a lot of the cool season weeds should be dying out due to the warmer temperatures. If you still have weeds I would recommend mowing more often. If your weeds have flowers then I would use a grass catcher to collect the weed seeds. These clippings can be placed in the compost pile.

By mowing the grass at a lower height then last year you can force the grasses to grow vertically and crowd out the weeds.

Several customers took my advice and started fertilizing on a monthly basis at a rate of 10 lbs per thousand square feet instead of the recommended 20 lbs and have been able to get more grass growth. They now say that they have fewer weeds then last year.

Use White Vinegar, 10 or 20 percent and not he 5 percent that you find at the supermarket. Mix ¼ of a cup of soap per gallon of vinegar and using an all-plastic sprayer, apply this solution carefully on the weed. On a hot day you can actually see the weed turn brown within minutes.

Seed/Overseed/Sod: After night temperatures have reached the 70’s for over a week you can start to put ot Bermuda seed. At Rohde’s we have hired Bill Graves to start growing plants for us. Bill has been using corn meal on all of his sedd starts and plugs. He has noticed few plants develop any fungal problem at all. In a test tray where he did not use corn meal but otherwise receive equal treatment he has noticed some fungal problems. So when you put out new seed or sod try applying Corn Meal at a rate of 10 lbs per thousand square feet.

Brown Patch: Brown patch appears as circular spots that are a yellowish in color. If you have Brown Patch: use baking soda or better yet, Actinovate or Potassium Bicarbonate. Baking soda and Potassium Bicarbonate go out at a rate of 3 to 4 tablespoons mixed in 1 gallon of water over 400 square feet. Actinovate, which is a powder, goes out dry, at a rate of 1 lb per 1000 square feet.

Aeration: After our heavy rains have passed us by aerate the lawn using a core aerator. The core aerator actually removes plugs from the soil. If you rent an aerator or have some one come out to your lawn make sure that the soil is not pushed in to the ground by the tines of the machine being used this will compact the soil even more. I do not like to aerate until June. By waiting until then I know that the holes made by the aeration will stay open longer. These little cups will now be able to collect water and retain it for longer periods during our dry season.

Beneficial Insects—Predator Insects: For the first time ever we sold 60 boxes of Beneficial Nematodes in one day. That was over 4 billion. Move over McDonald’s. The bad news is that day was Good Friday which meant that Saturday and Easter Sunday, actually until Wednesday the 18th we had no BN’s to sell. I was however delighted to see many new customers buying these predators.

With the emergence of Tent Caterpillars we have also seen a run on Trichogramma Wasp. There are numerous species of Trichogramma wasps that attack the eggs of over 200 species of moths and butterflies. These almost microscopic wasps (0,5 mill; 1/64 inch) are very important in preventing crop damage because they kill their hosts before the insects can cause plant damage. The female Trichogramma lays an egg within a recently laid host egg, and as the wasp larva develops, the host egg turns black. Each female parasitizes about 100 eggs and may also destroy additional eggs by host feeding. The short life cycle of 8-10 days allows the wasp population to increase rapidly. These wasps are harmless to people, animals, and plants.

Flowering Ornamentals: By now all Indian Hawthorns and most of your spring flowering plants have bloomed so feel free to reshape them. Try not to remove to much of the foliage remember they use their leaves to produce energy.

Start a regular fertilizing program so that the plant will be able to store enough nutrients for next springs flowers.

If you were jealous of a neighbor’s plant that bloomed so beautifully this spring and you just have to have one too, make sure your garden has the same conditions. Sun, shade, drainage, moisture. Find out as much as you ca about the plant and ask your neighbor how much special care that plant receives? What amendments went in to the preparation of the soil? Does it have require a lot of water? Is it a native plant that can take our summer heat? Why haven’t you noticed it before? Is it new and you do not know how well it will do later in the year or during a freeze? If it has been there for many years why did it not bloom like that before?

Before planting, know your soils ability to retain moisture, how fast does it dry out after a rain. Plant shrubs that are more drought tolerant in the hotter areas of your landscape.

Annual Flowers: You can now plant your seasonal color using plants like: ageratum, begonia, blue daze, coleus, gaillardia, gomphrena, pentas, impatiens, lobelia, mexican heather, nicotiana, purslane, ornamental peppers, phlox, annual salvias, torenia, verbena and zinnia. I love using the small pepper plants as an annual flower, specially the chile pequin. Mockingbirds love eating these hot peppers.

Caladiums: Just a few more weeks now, wait until the soil temperature is in the 70's.

Buy enough bulbs for two plantings in the same area, this will ensure that your caladium’s will be around through September. By this I mean that I do my first planting as normal in mid May. In late June I come back with more caladium bulbs and fill in calculated spots left open. By doing this I will get these fresh bulbs to grow into October.

Most caladiums should be planted in shade in well-drained soil with plenty of organic matter. Some Strap Leaf Caladiums can be planted in full sun. Soak your bulbs in a kelp solution for 30 minutes. Use rock phosphate at the time of planting.

Perennials: this winter did kill off some perennials that have been around for previous winters. There is a good chance that if some of the plants have not started to emerge yet they have not made it. It could be the freezing temperatures or the extreme wet conditions that we had. You may check and see how well the area drains before blaming the plants death on the freeze. To check for drainage dig a hole in the ground and fill it up with water. If it drains in less the 10 minutes you have good drainage. If it takes longer then that could be the reason that the plant died. Replace it with a plant that can take moist conditions or improve the drainage.

My garden has more perennials then annuals and all of the landscapes that Carol Feldman, our Landscape Architect of choice, does exclude most annual flowers. Be patient with the perennials that you have in your garden some may wait until warmer temperatures before putting out new growth. Divide and transplant perennials to different areas of the landscape where you were used to planting annuals.

Find out which plants require you to remove spent blooms in order to keep blooming vigorously. If possible stay away from those. Fertilize on a regular bases with GreenSense Vegetable and Flower Food.

Roses: Watch roses for aphids. Spider mites and check blooms for thrips. You can use Neem Oils as a way of controlling these insects, but only do so if you have an infestation other wise squish the bugs that are visible or release Lady Bugs. Establish a regular feeding schedule for your roses. Apply a foliar spray that contains kelp to help discourage aphids and spider mites. GreenSense Rose Food.

Mulch: In order to conserve water make sure that all soils are covered with a thick layer of mulch. If you put down and maintain a three inch layer of hardwood, cedar, cypress or my favorite pine straw you will be able to keep the soil temperature from getting to hot and the moisture will not evaporate as quickly.

If you did not have time to compost do not complain if you do get some weeds sprouting from this mulch, just be glad that you were able to save your plants.

It's Spring for the Lawn Too!

Don Trotter

Hello fellow Earthlings, and welcome to that patch of intermittently green stuff we all like to call "the lawn". The discussion we will be having about this often frustrating colony of turfgrass will focus on some of the things we can do to ensure a lush, emerald green lawn that will be free of potentially harmful and polluting chemicals.

Often we gardeners equate beautiful green lawns with a healthy garden. Many of the lawn care chemical companies that bombard us with advertising claim their products make our lawns the envy of the neighborhood. While we buy into this propaganda, they fail to inform us that we must use their product every two to four weeks or that the lawn grows so fast that insect pests come from miles around to munch on it. The reason for this is that they also want us to buy their herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides so that we may "properly" care for our lawns. They also fail to tell us about the nutrient rich runoff that comes off of our lawns and enters the storm drain system, only to pollute our lakes, streams, and ocean. They know that we will respond to their products because they work fast. Well, we're getting smarter aren't we? Many of you have made bold steps away from these products for the general garden. Now we will see how we can use natural products to enhance the quality of our lawns while maintaining the health of our personal and local ecosystems.

Another downside of using chemical and high nitrogen lawn products is the ever-increasing instance of "blue baby syndrome". This is an acute oxygen deprivation condition caused by high levels of nitrogen in a particular environment. It can be dangerous for infants and small children; it just makes adults and larger children dumber due to reduced oxygen levels in our blood and to the brain. Do some Internet research in some of the medical journals, this thing is real.

Natural products that do not contain high levels of water soluble nitrogen and do not work as fast at greening up your lawn. They also do not harm you, your family, or the environment. Turf care products from natural sources are not very popular because they often take some extra time to work. Yet they last much longer and feed soils helping lawns to be more drought tolerant, pest and disease resistant, and requiring less maintenance. It takes a little research to find a garden center that carries natural lawn care products, but that's why I'm here.

Some of the problems encountered with natural/ organic lawn care products is that they are often made from animal products like blood that drive the neighborhood dogs crazy or they smell so bad that using them is a good way to not be invited to anymore block parties. A few products have been squeezing their way onto garden center shelves lately that are mostly odor free and are not attractive to every domestic animal in a five-mile radius.

When I cannot find pre-blended Natural Fertilizers I mix two parts alfalfa meal to one part cottonseed meal and apply it to the lawn at a rate of 30 pounds per thousand square feet of lawn area. This feeding can last as long as four months and is very good for the soil as well. I also add one treatment of fossilized kelp or gypsum per year to the entire lawn at a rate of fifty pounds per thousand square feet. The calcium in these products actually reduces runoff water and helps plants root deeper into the soil. It also extends the effectiveness of fertilizers by as much as 25%.

I use stinky old fish emulsion to feed lawns if I want a faster green up. I know this stuff is foul, but it really works, and the odor only lasts for a few hours. I add one tablespoon of molasses for every four tablespoons of fish emulsion to a gallon of water. This covers about a fifty square feet of turf. The molasses feed bacteria that break down odors and get the fertilizer working faster. If this stuff is just too much to handle, go for the dry mix or the manufactured products. You won't be disappointed.

Next time we will be discussing water conservation techniques that will save you money on your water bills and feed your soil with valuable organic matter. See you in the Garden!

Got Questions? Email the Doc at Curly@mill.net Don Trotter's natural gardening columns are printed nationally in environmentally sensitive publications. Check out Don's books Natural Gardening A-Z and The Complete Natural Gardener for lots of other helpful tips to tend your garden without chemicals. Both are available at all bookstores and on line booksellers from Hay House Publishing.

Almost Famous

During the month of March, my wife Sandra went to several luncheons, women’s club meetings and other activities where people came up to her and asked her if she was connected to Rohde’s Nursery.

After one of these occurrences she came home and told me that she gave out 5 business cards and needed to get more. She was so thrilled that our nursery was becoming "famous.”

Shortly after, I was driving down Miller Rd. when this guy on a motorcycle waived me over. As I got out of my truck, he asked me if I was Mr.Rohde, to which I answered yes. He said that his wife shopped at my store and always found everything that she needed for the lawn. He went on to tell me that she felt like she was more than just a face in a store since we always kidded her and gave her a hard time about some of her landscape mishaps.

All the while this guy was writing in a small pad and looked up to me occasionally. As our conversation came to an end he asked me if I could sign this paper that he handed me. "Your signature is not an admission of guilt for driving 54 in a 40 mile per hour zone, it is a promise to appear in court," said the officer.