Pear Trellis Rust isn't pretty

The bright red foliage lesions and bumpy fruiting bodies of Pear Trellis Rust

My sister-in-law was showing me the garden of their new home, including a number of fruit trees. Unfortunately, the foliage of the two pear trees are covered in red lesions, and the underside shows the clear signs that something is seriously amiss.

The problem is Pear Trellis Rust – with info from OMAFRA, and this from the Toronto Master Gardeners – and the extent of the infection on her trees suggests that these two are goners. Treatment includes pruning out infected branches – far too many to count in this case – and removing the host plant, which again is Juniper, from within 100 metres to 1 kilometre – totally impossible in an urban setting.

This rust is from the Gymnosporangium fungus family responsible for the Cedar Apple Rust we wrote about back in July, as well as rusts on other rose-family members such as hawthorn and quince. Likely, the wet weather early in 2011 contributed to the spread, but my guess is that these fellas have been suffering from this rust for more than one season.

Which goes to show: keep an eye on your precious woody material to catch problems early. The most important aspect of control for you and your neighbours is to monitor the host Juniper for telltale galls and orange, gelatinous fruiting bodies after a rain in spring. This excellent fact sheet from Connecticut's department of agriculture shows you what to look for. It ain't pretty, but it's best to know.

Plant profile: Meet the peanut

Peanuts were in the news this morning*. This interested me, as I recently met peanuts in their growing state for the first time. The situation was an urban garden within spitting distance of downtown Indianapolis, which I'll write about later.

Of course most people know that peanuts are not nuts, but legumes, making them cousins of peas and beans. The first photo shows the characteristic pea-like compound leaf and flower with its wings and keel.

What's neat about peanuts is how the nuts or seeds develop. Once fertilized, the flowering stem sends out what look like aerial roots, known as pegs, but which are really part of the reproductive system. In the second photo, you can see the pointy tips that grow into the soil where the peanut pod will form beneath the surface. This is why peanuts are also called ground nuts. While I did know about peanuts' subterranean habits, I'd always figured the nuts formed on the plant roots, rather like potatoes. I will now give peanuts much greater respect for procreative ingenuity.

Did you know that peanuts are grown commercially in Ontario? Those former tobacco fields in Southwestern Ontario offer just the right conditions – sandy soil, and warm enough, long enough, for early-bearing varieties to mature. This link from the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA, to those in the know) tells you more about peanuts and about production in the province. Two Ontario growers that I know of produce and market their own peanuts: Kernal Peanuts and Picard's Peanuts.

*Today's news about peanuts is that 2011's crazy weather has caused major crop losses in the southern States. The price of peanut butter could rise as much as 30%.

Hard news for my family, as peanut butter is a staple in our diet. Although peanut allergies make it a very different world for a growing number of kids today, I think I ate peanut butter sandwiches every day of my public school career. For a family dinner on Sunday, our Gift Child made peanut butter cookies for dessert. Fortunately for me, there were ten other people to help me eat them.

Book Review: Yes, You Can by Daniel Gasteiger

If you cross-pollinated the computing and home canning worlds, you might not expect the result to be so delicious. Yet, this is what makes Yes, You Can!, Daniel Gasteiger's modern guide to food preservation, such a useful addition to the kitchen bookshelf. We were impressed with our review copy as soon as it arrived.

Gasteiger is an experienced home grower and preservation foodie who authors a few blogs, including Your Small Kitchen Garden. A few years ago, he moved to the country with his young family to be a CitySlipper – or what we might loosely call an urban homesteader.

But his career also includes extensive writing for the IT industry, including several software manuals. We are the gainers, as he brings a technical writer's clear, detailed play-by-play to the instructions and recipes in his book. Strong, practical graphic design and photographs are well used to aid the process-challenged. I name no names.

Gasteiger's passion for kitchen gardening, for canning and for food preservation is also clear. So is his sense of humour. Both qualities add flavour to his writing.

Yes, You Can! takes us through preservation techniques from cold storage (if only I had room) to refrigerator pickles (this, I can do), as well as canning, freezing, drying, fermentation and sugaring. My canning experience is limited to jams and the simplest frozen fruits (berries and rhubarb). So if the instructions seem easy to me, they likely will to you, too. 

I hope to try my hand while produce is abundant in the farmers' markets. Savoury leathers to pair with cheese, for example, sound intriguing. Dehydration works for all kinds of fruits, veggies and herbs, and you can find dehydrators now that are not much larger than a salad spinner. Considering.

One lightbulb that went on as I read was that canning doesn't have to happen only in fall. Take clementines. Each winter, our family eats a mountain of these when they're cheap and juicy, then we use canned ones in salads during styrofoam tomato season. Why not bottle clementines while they're inexpensive? Yes, You Can! makes that feel like, yes, I can.

Back in university, I had a summer job with a co-worker who used to say, "Tonight, I'm gonna put up a mess o' beets." Well, Doris, it's possible I might be doing something similar, myself.

Thanks, Daniel. Now if I could just get that infectious Pointer Sisters song out of my head.

Lust List: Seeing Trees (Contest, too)

This Lust List item isn't a plant (which, for me, is usually a tree) – it's a book. About trees. I've lusted for it ever since seeing the teasers.

Last weekend at the Garden Writers Symposium in Indianapolis I held it briefly in my hot little hands, and let me tell you: Seeing Trees from Timber Press is beautiful from cover to cover. The close-up photos by Robert Llewellyn are magical, even in the imperfection of the leaves. They're just as luminous as the cover shot at left.

The good news is that you have a chance to win a signed copy of this gorgeous hardcover, as well as a print from the book, through the link above. The random draw is open to Canadians – hooray – as well as U.S. residents. Just provide your email address. You can opt out of the Timber Press newsletter. Contest closes September 9th, so scoot over there. Winner will have my undying envy.

Guest post: Rick Los, The Butchart Gardens

Any garden that's a major tourist attraction can't afford to sit on its aster. The Butchart Gardens is no exception. I first visited back in July. An impressive experience, even if you aren't a gardener – the garden's theatrical quality gives it a crossover appeal that is a reason why the Butchart Gardens is the top tourist destination in Victoria, B.C.

If you are a gardener, you look at all the annuals, roses and checkerboard mown lawns and wonder how the heck they do it.

I started paying attention to the garden maintenance crews at work. Back at home, I checked Butchart's website for facts then emailed PR director Graham Bell to ask for more numbers. He forwarded something wonderful: a reply from the gardens' director of horticulture Rick Los. So wonderful, I asked if we could use it as a guest post. Here, with thanks, is Rick's reply:

The gardening department at the Butchart Gardens consists of 50 full-time staff and a seasonal complement of 19-20 staff (March through November) or students (May through September). I always say that it is a little deceptive when we throw out these numbers because there aren't nearly as many staff working in the actual garden as one might think.

To begin with there are 3 department managers overseeing 14 supervisory staff. Each area of the garden is broken into specific areas of responsibility, greenhouse production being the largest with 16 full-time staff. We have two-full time arborists, 2 full-time and 2 seasonal staff in our tree, shrub and perennial nursery and 2 working full time off site. 

The department also runs the Plant Identification Center (2 full-time and 4 seasonal staff) and 3 full-time staff take care of landscaping projects and our composting facility. So you begin to get a pretty good idea of what the number of staff doing the physical gardening work actually is.

For most things we work in general numbers as gardening/horticulture is not quite a precise science. Each year we compost a few hundred cubic yards of organic waste which we use for garden beds and greenhouse production. We are pretty well self sufficient in being able to supply ouselves with all of the product that we require for these purposes. 

We have over 2 acres of greenhouse facilities where we grow all the plant material that we use in our displays. Our summer planting consisted of close to 300,000 bedding plants (291,617 to be precise!), just one of our multiple plantings during the year. Each and every display bed in the gardens is planted at least twice each year and some beds are planted up as many as 5 times.

As you probably realize, soil management is critical as this is probably some the most intensive horticulture practised anywhere on the planet and we are now sustaining ourselves using only fully organic fertilizer products. In spring, along with tens of thousands of biennials, we display the colourful blooms of close to 300,000 (288,790 to be exact last spring!) new bulbs imported from Holland each year.

The quality that sets us apart from other gardens more than anything else is our attention to detail in areas such as lawn maintenance and the refusal to allow weeds to get established in any of our garden areas. 

All our lawn borders are edged manually each week to give the borders a clean, sharp look and all of the garden areas are weeded manually without the use of herbicides. This may sound overwhelming when you are dealing with over 50 acres, but the key in any garden is to never let the weeds get out of control. Any weed that is left to go to seed can multiply itself by frightening increments and it is extremely rare that we ever allow this to happen.   

Deadheading of spent blooms is also a critical and time-consuming job, but again this essential to keeping the garden clean and to also promote the development and growth of new flower buds.


I could go on, but I think that this should give you a bit of an idea of what we are all about. There is never a shortage of work for us and never a shortage of compliments to our staff from our many visitors who appreciate all of the effort that goes into creating and maintaining our garden.

Having read how the magic happens, I thought you might want to see a little of the magic itself – a small portion of the hundreds of photos I took at Butchart.

The classic view of the Butchart Gardens

Mrs Butchart's Private Garden – you can look, but not enter.

A river of massed annuals, not a single deadhead in sight.

Arbor into the rose garden. You saw those planters being deadheaded from the opposite side, above.

Meticulously clipped hedges frame the entry to the Italian Garden.

An exuberant riot of colour in the Italian Garden. Not pictured is the Japanese Garden, as subtle as this is loud.