Winter Blues You Should Know

 

This article will be a good primer for anyone that wants to propagate plants over the winter…in fact winter propagation is one of the best times for woody plants. Are you a business that wants to double their stock? A savvy homeowner that wants to maintain their frugal ways? Or are you just bored and need something to do over the winter? Then keep on reading.
Hardwood Cuttings are by far the best way to start most deciduous plants; althea (rose of sharon), chaenomeles (quince), crepe myrtle, currant, fig, forsythia, gooseberry, grape, honeysuckle, ligustrum (privet), mulberry, multiflora rose, philadelphus (mock orange), pomegranate, spiraea and wisteria.
The first step of the process is to find a healthy host / stock plant that you can multiply and multiply and multiply and eventually take over the world….muhahahaha! Ahem, anyways, it is very important to find a healthy host plant free from disease, insects, or any other ailing problems. We are going to need a healthy gene pool here.
Choose your cuttings after the leaves have fallen and all of the energy has been stored in the plant. Say away from old wood and frail new wood. You want something in the middle, good and sturdy. Harvest 6-12 good stalks taking note of the top and the bottom. Easy way to keep track is to cut the tops at an angle and the bottoms flat. Make sure to use sharp clean pruners and not to crush the cuts. When you have your harvest material tie them together (jute twine will work) making sure the bottoms are all even with each other.
Now there are two options here…depends on your climate.
Our winters are cool like dat (not much snow if any, but a definite season change)
The most important part of this method of propagation is to create calluses development. To do this, dig a hole 12-to-18 inches deep in sandy or well-drained soil in a sunny location and place the bundles of hardwood cuttings into this pit. Place them top end down, so that the bases of the cuttings are about four inches below the soil surface. This promotes root initiation at the cuttings base and inhibits bud formation at the top. Fill in the pit, leaving a shallow basin over the ends of the cutting to channel water and keep the cuttings moist (important).
Our winters are so cold my pug needs to wear booties (too much snow and too cold to care about anything or anyone)
In area’s with severely cold winters, wrap the cuttings in moist burlap and store them in a cellar or cold frame at 32-to-40F. After winter storage, when you see that there is callus formation, lift the bundles and wash and untie them. (Protect cuttings with moist burlap so that the callus tissue does not dry). Then, set the callused cuttings (top end up) directly in a propagation bed or container so that half or two to three buds of each cutting are above the soil surface. Firm the soil around the cuttings and water to eliminate air pockets and assure good contact between the cuttings and the soil.
In warm winter climates, callus may develop in four to eight weeks. In fact, some species won’t need to be stored to develop callus. Cut leafless stems of rose, abelia, bridal wreath, privet and other plants into 8-to-10-inch lengths and set them directly in the propagation bed or container.
So there ya go, just a taste of what you can try out. Tell us your propagation stories (legal ones) and how they worked out for you. Did you find this article useful? Please comment.

How Long Do Cherry Blossom Bloom?

When do they bloom?


The most important factor in determining the blooming time of cherry trees is the geographical location. Basically, the milder the climate, the earlier the blossoms open.

On Japan's southern, subtropical islands of Okinawa, cherry blossoms open as early as January, while on the northern island of Hokkaido, they bloom as late as May. In most major cities in between, including Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, the cherry blossom season typically takes place in early April.
Furthermore, the blooming time of cherry trees differs from year to year depending on the weather. If the weather during the months and weeks preceding the cherry blossom season is mild, blossoms will open early. If it is cold, blossoms will open later. From year to year, the start of the blooming season can vary by as much as two weeks.

How long do they bloom?


The cherry blossom season is relatively short. Full bloom (mankai) is usually reached within about one week after the opening of the first blossoms (kaika). Another week later, the blooming peak is over and the blossoms are falling from the trees. Strong wind and rain can cut the blooming season even shorter.

Cherry blossom forecasts


Every year, weather services and the media, including japan-guide.com, closely follow the so called "cherry blossom front" as it slowly moves northward. Note that the front indicates the opening of the first blossoms (kaika) rather than the arrival of full bloom (mankai).

Of course, not every tree in a city opens on the same day, as trees in shadowy places, for example, bloom several days later than trees in sunny places. For this reason, a set of representative sample trees is selected to define the date of kaika (the opening of the first blossoms) for a whole city. In Tokyo, the sample trees are located at Yasukuni Shrine.

Beautiful Nature In The Heart Of The Urban Jungle

Beautiful Nature

For many city dwellers, the only glimpses of beautiful nature they’ll have on a regular day would be in the images of their desktop nature themes or screen savers. Unless you live near an urban community garden or a rooftop garden, the only green you’ll see sometimes is the flaking green paint on your neighbor’s wall.

Photographer Tim Simmons in an initiative called The Urban Land Project seeks to break the monotony of the urban scenery by injecting billboard images of nature right along busy metro arteries. Large scale, highly-visible billboards showing Simmons’ vivid images of breathtaking natural scenes — underground pools, forest floors teeming with life, moss-covered stones, etc, — are placed next to hard urban features in Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

Beautiful Nature

 In a way, it’s a challenge to people to reflect and reconnect with their surroundings.

“From the outset I have tried to produce work that captures the feeling of a place, and expresses the memory of that feeling. That is what I am trying to communicate to others,” says Simmons.

“This project is meant to stimulate awareness. These images against these backdrops accentuate the tension between the human and natural worlds.”

Nature Is Mighty

Nature is mighty

Nature is strong

Nature is usually always right

Nature is rarely ever wrong

Nature is beauty

Nature is moody

Nature is smart

Nature always has the greater part

Nature is blue

Nature is green

Nature is every color possibly seen

Nature is true

Nature is beaming

Nature is dreaming

Nature is in every place

Nature is always with grace

Nature is true

Nature is you

Nature is me

Nature will forever be free.

Do You Know What Are The Natural Sciences?

Natural science is one of three divisions of science, the other two being the social sciences — psychology, sociology, economics, etc. — and the formal sciences — mathematics, logic, and statistics. The natural sciences are astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth science, and physics. There are also cross-disciplines such as biophysics which integrate between sciences. Natural science has been practiced for millennia, but prior to the 17th century it was called natural philosophy and was less scientific. The introduction of the scientific method by Sir Francis Bacon and the ensuing scientific revolution came to create what is considered science today.

The natural sciences, especially physics, are often referred to as “hard science” because of the heavy use of objective data and quantitative methods. In contrast, the social sciences rely more on qualitative evaluations and thus tend to have less certain conclusions. The study of human beings in the social science is hampered both by the complexity of humans and the increased tendency towards unscientific bias when studying humans as opposed to, say, rocks.

Much of what defines our modern civilization are advances in knowledge and technology caused by investigations in the natural sciences. For instance, the production of most if not all of the food you eat can be traced back to a chemical process called the Haber-Bosch process which was developed during WWI. This chemical process allows the creation of fertilizer nitrates from atmospheric nitrogen, rather than relying on biologically fixed sources of nitrogen such as cow dung or bat guano.

hanks to developments in biology, especially accelerating in the last half-century, we have advanced medicines capable of curing or treating many diseases that were otherwise fatal. The scourges of the 19th century and before, such as plague and smallpox, are now largely under control or eliminated thanks to biology research. The biological subfield of genetics has allowed us to understand the very code of life itself, and recognize the way it expresses itself within each of us.

Advances in earth science have allowed us to extract huge amounts of minerals and petroleum from the Earth’s crust, powering the engines of modern civilization and industry to the present day. Paleontology, a subfield of Earth science, has given us a window into the Earth’s distant past, long before humans ever existed. This helps us trace the reasons why the spectrum of life and the geology of Earth is the way it is today.

Some of the most fascinating of the natural sciences are physics and astronomy, the most quantitative fields in all of empirical science. Physics is the science that underlies all others, and has been subject some of the most unexpected twists and turns in the last century, most notably the discovery that matter and energy, space and time are each facets of each other. Astronomy has led us to discover an enormous amount about the universe we live in. Up until about a century ago, it was thought that the entire universe was just the Milky Way galaxy, until a series of debates and observations clued us in that it was literally millions of times bigger than we previously imagined.

The natural sciences are one of the most important and interesting fields of human endeavor, and while the specifics of future advances are largely unpredictable, one thing is for sure: scientific findings will continue to improve our lives and fire up our imaginations for a long time to come.

4 Incredible Natural Phenomena You've Never Seen

Venezuela's Everlasting Storm

The mysterious "Relámpago del Catatumbo" (Catatumbo lightning) is a unique natural phenomenon in the world. Located on the mouth of the Catatumbo river at Lake Maracaibo (Venezuela), the phenomenon is a cloud-to-cloud lightning that forms a voltage arc more than five kilometre high during 140 to 160 nights a year, 10 hours a night, and as many as 280 times an hour. This almost permanent storm occurs over the marshlands where the Catatumbo River feeds into Lake Maracaibo and it is considered the greatest single generator of ozone in the planet, judging from the intensity of the cloud-to-cloud discharge and great frequency.

The area sees an estimated 1,176,000 electrical discharges per year, with an intensity of up to 400,000 amperes, and visible up to 400 km away. This is the reason why the storm is also known as the Maracaibo Beacon as light has been used for navigation by ships for ages. The collision with the winds coming from the Andes Mountains causes the storms and associated lightning, a result of electrical discharges through ionised gases, specifically the methane created by the decomposition of organic matter in the marshes. Being lighter than air, the gas rises up to the clouds, feeding the storms. Some local environmentalists hope to put the area under the protection of UNESCO, as it is an exceptional phenomenon, the greatest source of its type for regenerating the planet's ozone layer.

Honduras' Rain of Fishes

The Rain of Fish is common in Honduran Folklore. It occurs in the Departamento de Yoro, between the months of May and July. Witnesses of this phenomenon state that it begins with a dark cloud in the sky followed by lightning, thunder, strong winds and heavy rain for 2 to 3 hours. Once the rain has stopped, hundreds of living fish are found on the ground. People take the fish home to cook and eat them. Since 1998 a festival known as "Festival de la Lluvia de Peces" (Rain of Fish Festival) is celebrated every year in the city of Yoro, Departamento de Yoro, Honduras.

Morocco's Climbing Goats

Goats on trees are found mostly only in Morocco. The goats climb them because they like to eat the fruit of the argan tree, which is similar to an olive. Farmers actually follow the herds of goats as they move from tree to tree. Not because it is so strange to see goats in trees and the farmers like to point and stare, but because the fruit of the tree has a nut inside, which the goats can't digest, so they spit it up or excrete it which the farmers collect. The nut contains 1-3 kernels, which can be ground to make argan oil used in cooking and cosmetics. This oil has been collected by the people of the region for hundreds of years, but like many wild and useful things these days, the argan tree is slowly disappearing due to over-harvesting for the tree's wood and overgrazing by goats.

As a result a group of people and organizations have banded together to try to save the tree. To do so one of the primary locations where the trees grow has been declared a biosphere preserve. It was also decided that by making the world aware of the oil, it's great taste and supposed anti-aging properties, would create a demand for it. However, the people who planned to marketthe oil could not envision people wanting to put an oil on their food or their face that was collected from goat excrement. As a result, a campaign is being led to ban grazing on the trees by goats during certain parts of the year to allow the fruit to ripen and fall off on its own. The fruit is then collected and turned into oil by oil cooperatives. So far, this arrangement seems to be working.

Denmark's Black Sun

During spring in Denmark, at approximately one half an hour before sunset, flocks of more than a million European starlings (sturnus vulgaris) gather from all corners to join in the incredible formations shown above. This phenomenon is called Black Sun (in Denmark), and can be witnessed in early spring throughout the marshlands of western Denmark, from March through to the middle of April. The starlings migrate from the south and spend the day in the meadows gathering food, sleeping in the reeds during the night.

The Beauty of Nature

Nature is the masterpiece of god. Nature, like the coin, has two sides, both beauty and disaster, but I prefer to concern natural beauty, because I believe that there are more beautiful things in nature than disasters. Wherever we are, as long as we observe nature attentively, where natural beauty exists.

A lot of natural phenomenons bring new hope and gain to people, so there are a lot of writers and poets and painters who like to sing the praises of nature. When spring is coming, someone says that “the ten thousand things of creation come to life”; when it snows, there is a saying “a timely snow promises a good harvest”. When I see a rainfall, first I think of a beautiful sight, and it needn’t worry about the rain would cause flood so quickly since that there are few opportunities of flood. And if we worry about every natural phenomena would occur disaster, consequently, we would have no happiness.

And nature also can give us beautiful environment in which we can enjoy ourselves. Take our campus for example. Our campus is like a garden, especially including some wonderful sights. When I am in depression or in trouble or in some other bad position, I often find some silent and beautiful places to ponder upon my problem. As a result, fortunately, through this I often can get out of trouble. As a matter of fact, no matter you are happy or sorrow, nature is the honest friend of you, because it can listen to you heart everywhere as you like.

Therefore, we see a rainfall, we think of amrita; and we see the sun, we can bathe in sunshine. Just like me, see the good side of one thing first, and then consider its bad aspect. Effectively, I am always positive to life. However, nature has its own rules so that we cannot dominate its way; there are also some nature disasters like earthquake, flood and drought, etc. So it reminds us to not only recognize the beauty of nature, but also the disasters of nature.

Orange Mystery Dust

We were only a few pitches into the first inning and everyone's feet were completely orange. No one could figure out why the grass had been spray painted.

Luckily, there was a plant pathologist in center field.

The softball field was infected with a rust fungus, most likelyPuccinia graminis. This fungus grows invisibly inside the grass blades until it's ready to reproduce, when it bursts through the epidermis with structures called uredinia, covered in the appropriately named (and bright orange) urediniospores.

These fungi are famous for their very complicated lifecycles, which often require different host plants at different spore stages. The stages of P. graminis are shown in the figure: Urediniospores are an asexual spore stage that allows the fungus to spread quickly through fields during the summer. Later in the season, this infection produces teliospores (on telia), which are a thick-walled survival structure that remain attached to the host. Teliospores eventually produce basidia, which eject wind-blown sexual spores, known as basidiospores. The basidiospores ofP. graminis can only infect barberry plants, on which they produce spermagonia on the upper leaf surface.* Spermagonia produce sticky male gamete cells, which are tracked onto receptive hyphae by rain or insects. Once fertilized, the hyphae of the spermagonium grow down through the leaf to produce another spore structure, an aecium. Aecia produce aeciospores, which in P. graminis can only infect certain grasses.

Rust fungi often don't hurt their hosts very much, at least until they burst through the epidermis to produce spores, which interrupts photosynthesis and makes the plant susceptible to dehydration. It's pretty much just a cosmetic problem on lawns, but causes major diseases on crops like wheat. It was such a problem for the ancient Romans that they invented a special god who presided strictly over rust epidemics, Robigo. Every spring, they celebrated the holiday of Robigalia, when they sacrificed red dogs and sheep in hope of appeasing him!

According to Purdue Extension, lawn rust fungi rarely survive the cold winters of Indiana, but blow up north from warmer climates in the late summer and early fall. The same thing happens with wheat rust - urediniospores are carried on the wind along the "puccinia pathway," from the southern U.S., where it successfully overwinters, north into Canada, infecting progressively later and more northerly wheat crops along the way each summer.

Recently ag scientists have been scrambling to find wheat and barley genotyes that are resistant to a newly discovered strain of wheat stem rust, P. graminis f.sp. triticiUg99. Previously, they had worked to prepare for the inevitable U.S. invasion of asiatic soybean rust, Phakospora pachyrizi. One of my old plant path professors liked to tell a story about how epidemiologists had predicted the exact location and time when they expected soybean rust spores to blow up into the Southern U.S. They were proved wrong when a hurricane brought the spores in early. Others (who hoped the invading rust would wipe out kudzu) were also proved wrong as this noxious weed just provided another host for the fungus to sporulate on.

"Alternate hosts" of rust diseases simply refer to the required host that we don't care about. In the devastating forest disease, white pine blister rust, the alternate hosts include gooseberries and currents (Ribes spp.). Unlike the previous example though, this rust attacks our host of interest as basidiospores and severely damages trees with the repeated production of bark-rupturing aecia.

Although the aeciospores can travel for hundreds of kilometers to infect Ribes plants, the basidiospores that cycle back to attack pines are very fragile and short-lived. So, unlike these grass rusts, an infected pine can only sicken its neighbors if there are Ribes plants within range. For awhile, the New Deal's Works Progress Administration tried to take advantage of this by eradicating this alternate host from mountain forests of North America. To some extent, eradication of alternate hosts is still used today. And in fact, this tactic was one of the first recorded descriptions of people dealing with plant pathogens.