Cornell Cooperative Extension Community Horticulture

Have you checked out their resources lately?

Lots of good resources including…

Woody Plant Data Base

Recommended Urban Trees

Using Porous Asphalt and CU-Structural Soil® (pdf)

Deciduous Woody Groundcovers (pdf)

What else have you found on the Cornell website to be particularly useful for your outreach to the gardening public? Please share in the comment section.

Here’s a site with some great images to help your volunteers and gardeners grasp some simple botany.

http://waynesword.palomar.edu/termfl1.htm#milkweed

By Dr. Steve Bratkovich (Project Manager for Recycling and Reuse, Dovetail Partners, Inc.)

It’s estimated that today there are nearly 4 billion urban trees in the U.S., with another 70 billion trees growing in metropolitan areas. As urban land in the U.S. expands, so do the urban forests. Urban land in the lower 48 states increased from 2.5% of total land area in 1990 to 3.1% in 2000, an area about the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined. Researchers from the U.S. Forest Service project that urban land in the coterminous U.S. will nearly triple in size to over 8% by 2050, an area larger than the state of Montana (Nowak 2005).

Utilization of urban trees for wood and paper products is still in its infancy. However, the idea is drawing more attention from researchers, community officials, arborists, tree care firms, and wood-using industries including bio-energy producers.

Questions that often arise when discussing the potential for urban tree utilization include:
. How much wood is in our urban areas?
. What are the major constraints to utilizing this wood?
. Are there viable examples of urban tree utilization industries?
. Can bio-energy play a role in urban tree utilization?

This report addresses these questions and concerns.

The full report is available here.

The 4-H Youth in Governance Executive Summary and national report: Youth-Adult Partnerships in Community Decision Making: What Does it Take to Engage Adults in the Practice, authored by Shepherd Zeldin, Julie Petrokubi (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Carol McNeil (University of California-Davis) are available for download at the following National 4-H Council website: http://www.fourhcouncil.edu/YouthInGovernanceProgram.aspx .
The report outlines a strategic, yet practical, framework for promoting Youth-Adult Partnership in settings such as organizational boards, community coalitions and local government. Grounded in two years of research with 4-H Youth Development in multiple states, this report describes “best practices” for how 4-H staff can effectively support volunteer and community leaders as they engage in youth-adult partnerships. The report includes examples of approaches and best practices from the perspectives of youth development professionals, adult community leaders and young people. A brief overview of the theory and research on youth participation is also included to assist professionals in “making a strong case” for Youth-Adult Partnership. This report raises issues that may be useful in planning the promotion and implementation of other types of innovative youth development practices.

New on-line and hard copy Publication from the Department of Horticulture:

High Tunnel Raspberries and Blackberries
Northeast growers can capture more of the lucrative local market for fresh berries by growing brambles (raspberries and blackberries) in high tunnels, according to researchers at Cornell and Pennsylvania State Universities.

These relatively low-cost, usually unheated, plastic-covered hoop houses can help growers fill late-spring and late-fall gaps in the market. Instead of mid-June, high-tunnel berries can be harvested in May. The field-grown season for brambles usually ends in early October. But growers using high tunnels continue to harvest berries through November.

Other benefits of high tunnels include:

• Floricane-fruiting raspberries and blackberries can over winter in climates where they would otherwise be killed by cold temperatures.
• Primocane-fruiting blackberries ripen where the growing season is otherwise too short.
• Berry yields from tunnels can be two to three times greater than field-grown, and the berries can be significantly larger.
• Tunnel-grown berries also have longer shelf-life with reduced pesticide inputs.

The publication, High Tunnel Raspberries and Blackberries, is available online at http://www.fruit.cornell.edu/berry.html or to order hard copies contact Max Welcome of the Horticulture Department at mw45@cornell.edu

With the closing of media services our Master Gardener Volunteer manual has been move to electronic only form for distribution. It is available the left hand column link on the site below. You can print it or down load it on to CD for your trainees or have them access it directly online.

http://www.gardening.cornell.edu/education/mgprogram/volunteer.html

National Gardening Association has a new monthly on-line newsletter on Edible Landscaping.

September’s issue contains:

• The Fall Greens Garden

• Edible of the Month: Apples

• Recipe: German Apple Pancake

• Planning Your Landscape 101

• Growing Berry Shrubs

• Edible Trees

• Growing Edible Flowers in Your Garden

• Vegetable Garden Design

• Edible Resource Guide

Publication for forest owners:

Today, it is not easy to grow a forest. Competing plants, white-tailed deer, and poor harvesting planning make it difficult to grow a forest. A new publication in the Pennsylvania Forest Stewardship Bulletin Series, Number 15; Regenerating Hardwood Forests: Managing Competing Plants, Deer, and Light by Dave Jackson, Mike Wolf, and Jim Finley will help forest owners and others understand natural forests regeneration challenges. It describes how understanding competition, deer and light can lead to successful forest regeneration and sustainable forestry. Forest Stewardship Bulletin 15 provides detail on obtaining successful forest regeneration. It describes actions forest landowners can take to control competition, deer, and light to ensure a regenerating forest for the future. Call the Pennsylvania Forest Stewardship Program to request your free copy (814-863-0401, 800-235-9473). Jim Finley : fj4@psu.edu, Allyson Muth: abm173@psu.edu. The publication is also available as a PDF at http://pubs.cas.psu.edu/freepubs/pdfs/UH181.pdf.

Gardeners:

Almost three months have passed since the International Master Gardener Conference in Little Rock, Arkansas. We had such a great time hosting you all and hope you come back to visit!

We had 1315 conference attendees from 45 states and 3 provinces in Canada.

I have already visited with Las Vegas, Nevada-host of the March 22-26, 2009 IMGC and West Virginia-host of the 2011 IMGC. Both groups are hard at work planning outstanding events. So mark your calendar.

If you visit our website at mg2007.uaex.edu and click on speaker and seminar presentations, you can view 46 PowerPoint presentations. They have all been converted to pdf’s to make them easy to view. Some have handouts as well. Please share this site with your local Master Gardeners so even if they couldn’t attend, they can still see the quality presentations made by our presenters. You can also see the Search for Excellence awards, the new national MG logo and the presentations from Las Vegas.

We will leave these up for several months to give you time to see them all.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Have a great summer and come see us!

Sincerely,

Janet B. Carson
Extension Horticulture Specialist

Janet B. Carson
Extension Horticulture Specialist
University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service
P.O. Box 391
Little Rock, AR 72203
(501) 671-2174
fax (501)671-2303

Part I of Bulletin 74, Cultural Guidelines can now be accessed electronically, Go to
http://ipmguidelines.org/ choose (click on) Pests Around the Home.
And you will see both Part I Cultural Guidelines, and Part II Pesticide Guidelines, (2005-06 version, the latest available as we await the new Northeast Guidelines).
Special thanks to PMEP staff who worked with me to put the Cultural Guidelines (Part I) on line, since there are no more print copies available.

Carolyn Klass 6/13/07