McMinnville Garden Club, PO Box 386, McMinnville, OR 503-434-4344
Monday, September 19, 2011 – MEETING
Hillside Retirement Community
“Activity Room” at the Manor
900 N. Hill Road McMinnville, OR 97128
PLEASE REMEMBER TO PARK IN
THE CHURCH PARKING LOT
9:30a.m. - 10:00a.m. - Social time
10:00
a.m. - 11:00 a.m. - Business Meeting and FUN
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. – Speaker- Linda
McMahan, Horticulturalist, OSU Extension Service, “Gardening With Native
Plants”
Mark
Your Calendars:
September 19, Monday 1st Meeting
of the 2011-12 season: Speaker: Linda McMahan, Horticulturalist, OSU
Extension, “Gardening with Native Plants: Yesterday and Today” In
addition, Cindy Flake will be giving a short demonstration of propagating lily
scales.
September 22, Thursday Nursery
Crawl: One Green World and Edelweiss Nursery Carpool
leaves Bethel Baptist Church at 9:30a.m. These
are located between Hubbard and Canby. Urs Baltnesperger has opened his
nursery just for us that day (he usually has only 3 open days per year). Urs has years of
experience in famous European nurseries and has in-depth knowledge of alpine
and rock garden plants. He features
beautiful European perennials that are not commonly found here. He will give us a tour and have plants available
to purchase. We’ve committed to Urs that there will
be at least 16 attending and I’ll ask for a show of hands at
the September meeting. Please invite
guests. This is going to be good. View inventory at www.edelweissperennials.com/. Just
down the road, at One Green World, you can purchase fruit trees. You can view their inventory and order a
catalog: http://www.onegreenworld.com/
September
26, Monday Arts & Crafts: Leaf
Casting – Merle Dean Feldman’s
Carpool leaves
Bethel Baptist Church at 9:30a.m. Evelyn
Mundinger will help us create our own special leaf castings. Cost is $3.50 per person. Wear warm work clothes. What to bring:
a shallow nursery box, plastic gloves, and large leaves (like hostas or gunneras). For those
who wish to stay afterwards, Merle Dean will offer a tour of her botanical garden. More details at our September meeting.
October
17, Monday Meeting
speaker: Oregon poet, Marianne Klekacz, will explore the ways in which gardening and journaling complement each
other, “Every Garden Is a Journal and Every Journal Is a Garden.”
October
20, Thursday Instead of the regular field trip, everyone is invited to attend
the Pioneer District Garden Club Meeting
and Fall Luncheon. Please pay
Treasurer, Mike Stewart, $15. (lunch) if you wish to
attend. This is also a fund raising opportunity and Patty Sorensen will collect
donations for the “Pink Panther” Sale. Details at the September meeting.
October 24, Monday Arts and Crafts – at Rosemary Vertregt’s. We will be making hypertufa
pots. Wear warm work clothes. More details in October.
President’s Message
What a
wonderful and cool summer! The only
problem is that now all the figs and blackberries are ready in the same
week. After a “jammed” week of making
raspberry fig, blackberry fig and boysenberry fig jam, I am ready to get back
to my garden. I hope that all of you had
a fruitful and relaxing summer and that you had enjoyable and refreshing
gardening experiences.
Thanks to all
of you kind and generous folks for taking the time to talk on the phone to me
this summer and help get most of the committee chairs filled. I continue to be amazed at your commitment
and dedication to our wonderful club. Your board has been working hard to bring
you a series of fun meetings that you will not want to miss this coming
year.
Good news from Myrna Cuscaden
and Patty Sorensen regarding the 2012 Tour:
They have selected the 5 fantastic gardens to be included for our
glorious event in June! It is
unbelievable how fast those ladies have worked and what good results they had. More good news is that Judy Wilkerson and
Elsie Carpenter will be our new tour co-chairs.
With Mike and Gaye Stewart leading the Faire and Patty taking care of
all of the documents, we have an amazing team.
Title is “The Art of Gardening”.
A note from our former Faire co-chair:
Most of you know that I've been on
the Garden Faire committee for the past 5 years. It was a challenging, but very
rewarding experience, and I loved doing it. I urge you to volunteer to help the
new committee, for the continued success of the Faire. I’d like to express my gratitude to the
wonderful ladies and men that I've had the pleasure of working with during
those 5 years. Thank you so very, very much. –Joanne DeWitt
Yard of the Month
Our new team, Cozette Caster and Myrna Cuscaden,
really had a good time selecting the Yard of the Month locations for August and
September. Congratulations to them for
finding such beautiful and diverse gardens.
Let them know when you see a garden that should be featured.
Membership Update
Please be sure
to send or give Mike Stewart your membership renewal. It is important that this is completed at our
September meeting so each of you can be included in the directory. We are still snail-mailing some
newsletters. If you can give us an
e-mail address to use instead of postage, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Cindy and Mike, for keeping us current.
Organic Fruit Care
Sally Parks-Brown
This is the first of a short series on growing
backyard fruit organically. I have cultivated quite a few different fruit trees
as well as berries over the past 30 years and will try to share some of the
successful techniques I have used. In the late 1970s, I began reading Organic
Gardening magazine and several other publications and realized how
dangerous it is for us to consume the chemical pesticides and sprays that are
used on almost all commercially grown fruits and vegetables. There are methods
to control pests and diseases that are healthier for us and our
environment. The first is to select
disease-resistant varieties. Dwarf and semi-dwarf varieties are easier for the
home gardener to manage. If you already have fruiting trees and plants you can
choose to start cultivating them organically.
Since we are in the early fall it makes sense to
discuss what can be done at this time of year and move forward through the
seasons. The following is a basic guideline for established plantings:
·
Prune
and discard (off your property) or burn all diseased and damaged branches.
·
Pick
any fruit damaged by pests such as the coddling moth (apple maggot) and discard
in garbage, never in compost. Also do the same with damaged fruit that has
dropped off.
·
Spray horticultural oil in late fall by
following directions on the bottle. This spray is applied again in early spring
before bud break and again right at bud break. This oil kills the eggs of many
overwintering insects and also kills plant diseases.
·
Check the pH of the soil. Fruit trees like a slightly
acid soil of 6.4 – 6.8.
·
Mulch
around trees with compost twice a year, not allowing mulch to cover the lower
trunk. This prevents insects from harboring between the mulch and the bark.
Trees in full sun will produce more and better fruit. Good air circulation
helps prevent disease.
As the year
progresses I’ll address further care and fertilization for your fruit trees. I have several books that I can recommend for
planting and maintaining an organic small home orchard. Two publications
include: Organic Gardening Encyclopedia and Organic Gardening
Magazine by Rodale Press. The library has a good selection of books, as
well.
Wildlife Habitat:
California Quail
A running soccer ball?
A “chicken-like” bird? These are web descriptions of
the California Quail. This bird is certainly round!
These handsome birds have a topknot that looks like a single feather but is
actually a cluster of six overlapping feathers. There is a pattern on their
bellies that looks a bit like scales on a fish.
Quail live in Oregon year-round and are sometimes called valley quail.
Mountain quail are native to Oregon but live at higher elevations.
These birds spend most of their time on the ground,
walking and scratching in search of food (seeds, insects, or fruit). This is
one bird that only flies when it is alarmed; it prefers to run away and often
outruns or out-maneuvers predators. I
often see them for a few seconds but only running toward a shrub to hide. The
male will perch on a post or tree and call out to claim his territory; when a
male perches on my deck, I assume he serves as a “look-out” while his mate and
family are feeding. He often calls out. Warnings? Or
maybe “all is ok”?
Quail usually travel in groups called coveys, which
may range from just a few birds to 40 birds, but coveys in excess of 1,000
birds have been reported. They will stay in these coveys until mating season.
They roost in trees to avoid danger and to rest although their nests are
usually on the ground amid grasses or at the base of shrubs or trees.
A mated pair produces only one brood per year but it
may contain as many as 28 eggs! There is speculation that these large broods
may be the result of females laying eggs in other nests, an odd behavior known
as “egg dumping.” Quail have been seen
using pheasant and other nests, too. Quail broods may mix after hatching and
all the parents care for all of the young.
You can attract quail to your yard by sprinkling
grain or birdseed on the ground and by providing dense shrubbery nearby for
cover. As an adaptation to living in arid environments, quail can get by for
short periods without water, acquiring moisture from insects and succulent
vegetation, but they will appreciate any water source you provide.
Berries & Birds --- A Field
Trip to Pan American Berry Growers, LLC.
Rosemary, Patty, Judy, Evelyn, & Cindy
On a perfect
sunny day, five of us set out on a field trip arranged by Cindy Flake and
husband Jeff who works as a field manager. We signed in, received badges, and
were taken to the edge of one of the huge fields of blueberries to meet the
farm’s new “security system”. This year there is a new worker protecting the
developing berries. He’s a peregrine falcon, brought here from California’s
Central Valley. He and his handler arrived a few weeks before the berries began
to ripen, so the bird could learn his new territory. The trainer explained how
the falcon works to discourage birds, mainly starlings, from dining without invitation.
Starlings can strip rows of berries, as they fly in huge flocks. In comes the
falcon, flying at up to 100mph, dive-bombing the clusters of starlings. The
farm can lose $500,000 per year to bird damage!
The vast fields, with row after row of blueberry bushes that all seem to be
copies of each other, are actually planted with about ten varieties. Jeff did a “show and
tell” of varietal characteristics, offering generous tasting opportunities.
Plants of the same cultivar can vary greatly in size, due to age, soil, and
drainage conditions. Some plants produce huge quantities of fruit while close
neighbors are “slackers” {sound familiar, gardeners}?? Differences in fruit
include size, crispness, flavor (one variety has a ginger taste), and ripening
time. One variety, Rubel, traces back to a wild
variety grown here. We saw these being picked by an enormous machine straddling
a row and “flip-shaking” the bushes. All other picking is done by hand in a
very organized manner: At a station in the field, pickers get their flats
weighed and their tickets punched. Sorters (people, not machines) pick out
unsuitable fruit--reds, “redbacks“, greens, bird-pecked, etc. Forklifts zip to
the cool packing facility, piled with flats of berries. Here, the fruit moves
through machines and along conveyor belts for more hand-sorting, then
packaging. Plastic “clamshell” boxes come along and are filled, closed, and labeled
by machine, then forklifted to controlled atmosphere storage or packed for distribution.
Some berries go to the freezer, where workers wear parkas, really. In these areas, we wore hairnets ---like five
Garden Club Ladies on their way to surgery!
Websites
to Explore: http://www.humeseeds.com/qa_ndx.htm#2004 Questions and Answers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgqfPYCSpyg&list=UUQdf5YqmXKUgKZLa3u6-jxA&feature=plcp
Video on planting colorful Fall containers http://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/calendar#september September Garden Chores http://blessingsfromthegarden.blogspot.com/ Barbara Blosssom has a Daylily named after her!
Pioneer District Newsletter State
Website
http://oregongardenclubs.org/pioneer/ http://oregongardenclubs.org/default.htm