2011 EMG Educ. Conference

Just finished up with the annual Extension Master Gardener's conference here in Manhattan the last couple of days, and a rousing time of camaraderie was had by all! 

The conference here was kicked off by a great keynote speech by David Salman, the President and Chief Horticulturist of High Country Gardens.  David's opener was an interesting discussion of the principles of xeriscape gardening, with many illustrations of plants that will grow in Manhattan. It was really great to hear from a gardener who sees less rainfall than we do here in Manhattan, and one so dedicated to preserving our water resources and helping us design beautiful landscaping.  David's nursery has a blog as well, appropriately titled The Xeric Gardener.

I went to several talks, but my personal "education time" this year was cut short because I gave two talks myself.  I did one presentation about the process of writing a book and blog, in concert with Local Extension Agent Gregg Eyestone, who writes a weekly newspaper column and contributes to Riley County Extension's blog.  I did another talk on growing Hardy Roses in Kansas, and then repeated it the next hour in a second slot since it had been a couple of years since a rose topic had been on the agenda.  Had a great time and some good give and take in all those sessions, and I also enjoyed talking with other Kansas blogging friends such as GaiaGardener.

I've got enough canned talks now on roses and other topics that I'm thinking of sacrificing one of the separate pages of this blog to put up the PDF's of those talks for others to view. What do you think? Good idea or not interesting?

As far as the talks I attended for personal gain, I learned why I haven't been doing well with raspberries (DON'T GROW HERITAGE IN KANSAS), I learned about the basics of tissue culturing from a retired engineer whose home propagation setup is good enough to be a Homeland Security nightmare, and I learned a bit more about the theory of color and design in the landscape.

Along those lines, for those readers who are not Extension Master Gardener's, consider this a plug for joining and contributing to your local groups, wherever they may be across the nation.  Yes, you have to put in a little community service along the way, but that time is well paid back by the network of local gardeners you engage.  Where else do you get the opportunity to spend two days playing hookey from our day jobs and pretend you have entered the wonderful world of full-time gardening for pleasure?   

Barden Vigor

While I'm still in the throes of yesterday's post, dreaming about the potential of  a particular rose in my garden, I thought I should update readers on what I hope is the beginning of a beautiful human-rose relationship.  Everyone knows from this blog that I'm a big proponent of Old Garden Roses and Griffith Buck Roses and Modern Shrub roses;  in short, of SUSTAINABLE ROSES.  Well, after a cold winter and a summer of extreme heat and drought, I wanted to show everyone the health and vigor of the Paul Barden rose bands that I planted last fall, little sprigs of green that I hoped could take on the Kansas climate.

In the picture below, the 5 roses in the foreground are the one-year appearance of several of the above pictured bands.  From right to left, they are 'Jeri Jennings', 'Allegra', 'Morning Blush', 'Gallicandy', and 'Marianne'.   These five nice shrubs, all between two and three feet tall now and nicely branched, look like the very picture of health.  Yes, they received a little extra water this summer in the midst of the drought, but  these happy, disease-free specimens received no fungicides, no insecticides, and only a little compost during the summer.  Not a single blackspot-covered leaf among them, either!  The whole picture is a great example both of the vigor and health of the Paul Barden breeding line and of the importance of buying own-root, sustainable roses and having the patience to let them grow.  They're going to bloom their heads off next spring and I'm going to be a happy, very happy camper.

The only worry I had with any of the Barden roses was that I almost lost poor 'Mariane', at the far left.  She had made it through the winter as a single cane standing proudly in the snow only to snap off at her base in the early Spring winds.  Another cane soon came up in April but some little rabbit made an early meal out of that one.  I didn't have much hope she would reappear a third time, but appear she did, a testament to purchasing own-root bands, and this time, protected by the collar of an old milk jug, she made it to early adolescence, now almost as full as the rest of them.

The Griffith Buck roses I planted in another bed this spring are going strong as well, also without fertilizer or fungicide.  Three of those are pictured at the right, the purchased 'Queen Bee' and 'Folksinger' blooming in the background, and my own rooted cutting of 'Prairie Harvest' in the foreground.  Not quite as large as the Barden roses above, but still healthy and ready to calm down for the winter. 

It's going to be a great spring of roses here in the Flint Hills!

High Hopes for Marie

As a late summer treat, I finally got a semi-decent, but still a bit blurry, picture of a bloom from a rose that intrigues me right now.  Let me introduce you to a fairly rare rose in the States, the now-heirloom hybrid tea 'Mme. Marie Curie'.

I received this rose last fall as a free rose in a shipment from Rogue Valley Roses, and it went into my "Barden" bed along with a number of Paul Barden's Gallica creations.  It was a fairly weak looking specimen and I knew it was a Hybrid Tea, just marginally hardy in this climate, so I coddled it all winter long with one of my then-new glass cloches.  Through this hot dry summer, it struggled a bit, giving me a hint of a beautiful yellow bloom every once in awhile, but never appearing healthy until lately, as it sent up the two nice strong canes pictured below.  I hope it has turned the corner for me.

'Mme Marie Curie' is a 1942 rose bred by Gaujard of France, and it is known as 'Quebec' in Europe.  It was introduced into the US by Jackson and Perkins in 1943 with the name 'Mme Marie Curie', and it was a winner of an AARS award in 1944.  It bears a large, 5 inch, Hybrid Tea-form bloom of about 25 petals and although the first blooms have been fleeting and small for me, I have noticed that the petals don't fade to light yellow as most yellow roses do, but they dry and remain a very vivid bright yellow.  HelpMeFind only lists this rose as hardy to Zone 6B, so it may take some special winter care in my area, but I'm willing to provide it for a few years until I fall in or out of love with this rose.

My yellow beauty here is named for the discoverer of radium and polonium, the widowed and famed Polish-French scientist Marie Curie.  I remember reading as a boy about Madame Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel, and the  the only woman to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciences.  This rose obviously has a high standard to live up to.  You need to be careful searching for this rose on the Internet, nowever.  Enter only "Madame Curie" and "rose" and you get a 1997-vintage orange and pink floribunda of that name that is not nearly as attractive as the pure yellow of the older Hybrid Tea.  I also found a white Japanese-bred climber named, in English, "Marie Curie IYC2011" that seems to be recently introduced.  I suppose we'll someday need a brochure to separate the roses named for this icon of early 20th Century science.  A collector's bed of roses named for Marie Curie, anyone?

(Got to run now.  The younger version of Mrs. ProfessorRoush has just darted into the room, needing the family computer pronto.  Can't a man blog in peace?) 

Story of My Summer

Before anyone panics, NO, this is not a picture of a KSU-physics-department nuclear test cloud over the Jayhawk's football stadium in Lawrence.

But as a rather useful illustration of the frustration that is gardening in the Flint Hills,for all of those who don't live in Kansas, I give you the picture below, snapped on my way home from work on September 9th. 




























I had just gone north from the Vet School, took one look due west, and immediately grabbed my trusty "Jeep" camera, the Nikon CoolPix L22 cheapo that I keep in the glove compartment, and pulled over.  This random rain cloud, the first actual rain hitting the ground that I'd seen in over a month, is sitting just to the south of my house, which is just over the hill on the western horizon at approximately the right hand edge of the cloud.  By the time I'd gotten home 5 minutes later, the cloud had moved on, leaving a 500 foot or so wide sprinkle path over my neighbor's driveway and the pasture between us. 

It was another week before we finally got a decent rain, an all-night soaker that provided us a solid inch of rain to wet the topsoil down four inches or so.  It's an odd feeling to dig down into the dirt of my garden right now; moist soil for the first few inches, and then dry subsoil as far down as my shovel will reach.

Welcome to the Flint Hill's my friends...welcome to the Flint Hills, the most damnable excuse for a mid-Continental climate evident to gardening civilization.