The Garden Thyme Podcast
A monthly podcast where we help you get down and dirty in your garden, with timely gardening tips, information about native plants, and more! The Garden Thyme Podcast is brought to you by the University of Maryland Extension. https://extension.umd.edu/. This institution is an equal opportunity provider.
The Garden Thyme Podcast
503: A Berries Nice Time with Dr. Haley Sater.
Hello Listener,
This month, we discuss cane berries with University of Maryland Extension Agriculture Agent for Wicomico County, Dr. Haley Sater.
Some berry good resources:
- Mid-Atlantic Berry Guide
- Haley’s Fact sheet new fact sheet - Start Growing Thornless Blackberries
- UME Home and Garden Information Center Fruits for the Home Garden webpage.
We also have our:
- Native Plant of the Month - Spring beauties- Claytonia virginica (~31:35)
- Bug of the Month – Spotted Wing Drosophila (~ 36:20)
- Garden Tips of the Month – (~42:20)
We currently have an open survey for ALL listeners; whether you’ve listened to all of our episodes, or this is your first time. We developed an evaluation to find out if the information we share on the podcast has made a difference in your practices at home. We promise that it is a short, easy 5 min survey, and we even have exclusive podcast stickers to give to those who participate. We are so thankful for the feedback, and we appreciate you tuning in for the podcast!
If you have any garden-related questions, please email us at UMEGardenPodcast@gmail.com or look us up on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/GardenThymePodcas. For more information about UME and these topics, please check out the UME Home and Garden Information Center and Maryland Grows Blog at https://marylandgrows.umd.edu/.
The Garden Thyme Podcast is brought to you by the University of Maryland Extension. Hosts are Mikaela Boley- Principal Agent Associate (Talbot County) for Horticulture, Rachel Rhodes- Senior Agent Associate for Horticulture (Queen Anne's County), and Emily Zobel-Senior Agent Associate for Agriculture (Dorchester County).
Theme Song: By Jason Inc,
University programs, activities, and facilities are available to all without regard to race, color, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, age, national origin, political affiliation, physical or mental disability, religion, protected veteran status,
We currently have an open survey for ALL listeners. Whether you’ve listened to all of our episodes, or this is your first time. We developed an evaluation to determine if the information we share on the podcast has made a difference in your practices at home. We promise that it is a short, easy 5-minute survey, and we even have exclusive podcast stickers to give to those who participate. We are so thankful for the feedback, and we appreciate you tuning in for the podcast!
The Garden Thyme Podcast is brought to you by the University of Maryland Extension. Hosts are Mikaela Boley- Principal Agent Associate (Talbot County) for Horticulture; Rachel Rhodes- Senior Agent Associate for Horticulture (Queen Anne's County); and Emily Zobel- Senior Agent Associate for Agriculture (Dorchester County).
Theme Song: By Jason Inc,
University programs, activities, and facilities are available to all without regard to race, color, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, age, national origin, political affiliation, physical or mental disability, religion, protected veteran status, genetic information, personal appearance, or any other legally protected class.
Garden Thyme Podcast Transcript: S5:E03
A Berry Nice time with Dr. Haley Sater
Note: The Garden Thyme Podcast is produced for the ear and is designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
:Up beat Music:
Mikaela
Hello, listener. Welcome to the University of Maryland extension presents the Garden Time podcast, where we talk about getting down and dirty in your garden. We're your hosts. I'm Mikaela.
Rachel
I'm Rachel.
Emily
And I'm Emily.
Mikaela
And in this month's episode, we're welcoming University of Maryland extension agriculture agent in Wacomco county. Meet Dr. Haley Sader, who's going to talk to us about growing berries.
:Up beat Music:
Emily
Just a friendly reminder to all of our listeners that we currently have an open survey for all listeners. Whether you've been listening to all of our episodes, a handful, or this is the first time listening to us, we've developed an evaluation to find out if the information we're sharing on the podcast has made a difference in your practices at home. We promise that it is a short, easy, five minute survey, and we even have an exclusive podcast sticker to give to everyone who participates. All of us are so thankful for your feedback and we appreciate you tuning into the podcast. To take our survey, go to go umd.edu backslash gardentime. That's garden t h y m e. We'll include a link to the survey in our show notes as well as share it on our Facebook page.
:Up beat Music:
Emily
Welcome to the podcast, Haley. It is very nice of you to be here today.
Mikaela
Nice.
Emily
I'm going to use that berry pun as much as I can until you guys force me to stop. I know that I want to say last year, one of our episodes, we talked about the challenges of growing fruit and distinctly fruit trees, and how smaller bushed fruit, or shrubbery fruit perhaps is a better way to describe it.
Mikaela
Bring us a berry shrubbery.
Emily
Yes, is a little bit easier with regards to a learning curve and for backyard gardeners. So we are ecstatic to have you, our berry expert in extension, come on to give us all the tips about growing.
Rachel
You.
Haley
Thank you so much, Emily, for the introduction. This is my first time ever being on a podcast, and I'm excited that I get to talk about my favorite subject, which is berries, of course.
Emily
What type of berries do you recommend? Homeowners kind of start out with, we know that blueberries require some admins to soil and they are a little bit more challenging. But then we also know that there's raspberries and blackberries sometimes are thorny and people are hesitant to do them because of kids and pets and all that. So in your recommendation for the mid Atlantic, what type of berry fruits do you think are the easiest for home gardeners to kind of get into? Because we know that the last thing you want to do is start this and then get frustrated and then stop.
Haley
Yeah, definitely. In my experience as a homeowner, but also as somebody who provides technical assistance to growers and especially new growers, I always recommend to people to try blackberries and raspberries in the mid Atlantic, blackberries and raspberries are closely related. They're both in the Rubis genus, and they are just simple, woody stemmed plants. To get going, you will have fruit after a year. So after the first year planting, that second year, you will for sure have fruit. So there's no waiting around for ten years, like with an apple tree. And they just tend to be a little bit hardier than a lot of the other types of perennial fruits that you may want to grow.
Mikaela
We love easier. For the record, we're all in favor of that, and I think all of us probably receive the call new homeowner in the area, first thing they want to do is plant an apple tree. And even though it's very emotional decision for people because they're very attached to them, we love being able to recommend some of these easier fruits to start out with because this is kind of a hard climate to work in.
Haley
Yeah, it definitely is. I think really the most robust fruit, if you want to venture for the first time into growing fruit, are blackberries, and that's because they are just, some of the new varieties are so hearty. They do get a few diseases. You may see some rust developing towards the fall, but in general, they put out a lot of fruit, and most of these new varieties are thornless. So the blackberries that you may be familiar with, that you may have picked in the woods when you were a kid, these are not the same. A lot of the new BlackBerry varieties are very sweet, have very large fruit, and are much easier to grow and involve less blood during harvesting.
Rachel
Oh, so, Michaela, we don't get torture our children, right.
Mikaela
They have it so easy.
Rachel
They have so easy. They're not going to have to wear long sleeves in July to pick berries.
Mikaela
That's right.
Rachel
Jeez Louise.
Mikaela
So before anybody goes out and buys their plants and just pluck them into the ground, what do you recommend people do before making their purchases?
Haley
Sure. So I guess the first thing to do before you buy any berry plant is to make sure do you have an adequate space. Really? Berry plants take a lot less space than like, an apple tree or most of the other tree fruit. You need maybe like a three foot square space to support a single plant. If you're going to be planting a row of them along a fence line. With raspberries, you can space them every 2ft. Or with blackberries, usually you would space them about every 3ft, so make sure you have a good place for them. Both blackberries and raspberries are going to require a little bit of support, so you need to be able to build them some kind of a trellis, or like I said, a lot of people will grow them along a fence line. As far know your soil condition, Emily had mentioned in the beginning, blueberries take a lot of soil preparation because they need those really acidic soils. Blackberries and raspberries do not need acidic soil. They actually prefer their pH to be up around 6.5 to 6.8. So if you want to, it's a good idea to do a soil test to make sure your ph isn't too low.
Haley
That said, if you've been growing vegetables in this area, it's probably the right ph or maybe a little bit low, in which case you would add some lime before planting. The other thing that berries like is obviously well draining soil. Very few garden plants want to be in soil that holds too much water, and they like high organic matter. So they like that dark, rich, black colored soil. So you can add some compost if your soil is too sandy.
Rachel
Those are great tips, Haley.
Emily
I know when we talk about fruit trees, there's like, some fruit trees have to have the same variety to pollinate them, and some fruit trees need a different variety to treat them. And some are early blooming and some are late blooming, and some don't bloom unless the moon is full. And it's really complicated when it comes to apples and peaches and stuff like that. So I guess the question is, are berry plants as tricky with regards to having to have a set in a number of different ones or similar ones in order to get sure that they pollinate.
Haley
So when we're talking about blackberries and raspberries, the answer is they're fairly simple. They do require pollination, so you're still going to need bees, but they don't require cross pollination, so you don't need two different varieties. That said, it never hurts to have more than one variety, but if you're space limited and you only want to plant one specific variety, you'll still get fruit. That is not true for blueberries. Blueberries do require cross pollination, since we kind of talked about them earlier. So you do need two different varieties, usually to get fruit, or at least to get full sized fruit.
Rachel
So, Haley, what is the difference between permocaine and fluorocanes? When we talk about fruits.
Haley
Yeah. So I don't know if I mentioned this, but blackberries and raspberries grow on biannual canes. And what that means is that a cane is just a woody stem, and those canes last for two years, hence them being biannual. So the first year that the cane comes out of the ground, it's called a primacane. And a primacane, its function is to grow, get big and strong, and then the next year it becomes the fluorocane, where it's supposed to bear flowers and then create fruit. After that second year, that cane will die off, and at that point it can be pruned out. So that's basically the life cycle of most BlackBerry and raspberry cultivars. I will say there's a caveat to that. So that's how blackberries and raspberries behave in the wild. But through breeding efforts, we've actually developed BlackBerry and raspberry varieties that will bear fruit on the first year canes. So on the primacanes, and usually when you're looking up information about a specific cultivar, it will say if it is a primacane fruiting variety or not. And generally if it is a primacaine fruiting variety, it will fruit later. So maybe towards the fall, whereas when the plant fruits on the fluorocanes, it will fruit more.
Haley
In my part of Maryland, blackberries are coming in in June and July, same as raspberries.
Mikaela
So is that the same as the term June bearing? Because I know some people use that term. Are fluorocanes basically June bearing raspberries?
Haley
Yeah, fluorocanes would be June bearing. Usually when I hear the term June bearing, people are referring to strawberries. And with strawberries you have determinate or indeterminate fruiting. So the determinate varieties are called the June bearers. Sometimes they bear fruit in May, and then the indeterminate ones will make fruit all summer. So those are the ever bearers.
Mikaela
Thank you for clarifying.
Emily
So that kind of leads me to a question. Do you have varieties that kind of bloom for just that short period, very flourishy, or are there some that will continue to bloom throughout the whole summer?
Haley
All blackberries and raspberries are determinate in the sense that when they put on flowers, they're not going to flower for the whole season. That said, cultivar to cultivar, some of them might concentrate their harvest window. So you might only have fruit for a week. Some of them, it's going to be a little longer, maybe like four weeks. That is going to be kind of a variety to variety difference. And really, I don't know that there's a lot of good information on that. In general, if you want to have fruit kind of all summer, what we would tell you to do is plant an early variety of BlackBerry or raspberry, then plant a late season, and then if you want some fall fruit, make sure you have a primacane fruiting variety so that you're hitting these different harvest windows.
Emily
So what I hear is I need nine plants.
Haley
Oh, you definitely, I mean, you might as well plant all the varieties.
Emily
Might as well. Okay, so you're not typically going to get flowers and fruit developing at the same time. Then it's going to flower and then they're all going to develop into fruit.
Haley
It's going to depend on the variety. I know that this year, one of the varieties of blackberries, I grow a watchitaw, I think there were still some flowers as the fruit were developing, but by the time I was picking ripe fruit, there were no more flowers.
Mikaela
And since you mentioned, okay, so we've talked about kind of getting prepared. You talked about how they bloom in the summer. But if we're talking about seasonal care for cane berries, what would you approach with, like, what should we be doing in the spring? What should we be doing in the summer? That kind of thing.
Haley
Sure. Yeah. Well, berry plants, I think, are fairly easy. The most important thing you can probably do is to prune them when they need to be pruned. So for blackberries and raspberries, you want to go through sometime in the winter and prune out all of the dead canes. So anything that was a floricane the previous year, you can prune out that dead wood, and that'll help the planting stay viable and keep producing new suckers. Another thing you're going to need to do if you have blackberries or if you have black raspberries, is you're going to have to do tipping, which is where you cut off the top four inches of kind of soft plant growth. And you do this mid well, kind of in the spring when the plants are starting to get too tall. So with blackberries, they can get very tall. Some of them are more viny types. When they get to be, for me, about chest high, that's when I would start to tip them. And when you cut off that soft top four inches, you promote lateral growth or horizontal growth, which will result in a higher yield. It's more or less the same for black raspberries.
Haley
If you don't tip them, they will fall over, usually, and then they will start rooting in the ground. So it's important to kind of keep that upward growth that they want to do in check and get them to grow horizontally.
Emily
It kind of makes me think that it's the opposite of suckering your tomatoes. Like early in the season when you take all the suckers off your tomato, it's because you want to establish that lateral growth. And at this point it's like you've gotten too tall. I'm going to deadhead you to keep you short and put out like side planks.
Haley
Yeah, exactly. And now, in terms of fertilizing your plants, that is important. But blackberries and raspberries, because they are woody plants, they actually don't take quite as much fertilizer as your garden vegetables. So what we would recommend is using something like a 1010 mix at around five pounds per 100 linear feet. And then you would do that sometime around flowering or before fruiting in the spring.
Mikaela
And I'm assuming that tipping process does not affect production, fruit production, it should.
Haley
Increase yield, because what you're telling the plant is, hey, stop putting energy into apical growth. You need to start putting out these lateral shoots. And the lateral shoots are where the floral development is going to happen. Those are going to be your flower buds.
Emily
So is there anything that distinctly needs to be done for these berry plants when it comes to fall and overwintering them? I know with strawberries, you put straw and stuff like that on them. Do berry plants need anything like that?
Haley
Not so much. Yeah, most now I guess I'm speaking from the lower eastern shore. All of the BlackBerry varieties that I know of are winter hardy for this region. Now, if you're in another part of the mid Atlantic where it gets a little bit colder, some blackberries might have some sensitivity because a lot of the BlackBerry varieties, they're more of a southern plant, whereas raspberries are more of a northern plant. But in general, we don't do any winter protecting for berries.
Emily
We kind of touched on pruning already. Do you have any other tips or anything else you want to say about pruning?
Mikaela
Really?
Haley
Just that. If you're going to be pruning blackberries, first of all, you should only purchase thornless blackberries because it's not worth it. It's just not worth it to deal with a thorny BlackBerry plant. But with raspberries, there aren't as many thornless varieties. Plus the raspberry thorns aren't quite as bad as BlackBerry thorns. So wear gloves. I cut myself up a little bit this winter pruning up my raspberry plants. So wear gloves and long sleeves.
Emily
And then I assume we'd want to follow good pruning methods of making sure our pruners are sharp and clean and you're not transmitting diseases. So get some of the alcohol wipes or sanitize them between moving to plants and all that good stuff. You can go back to one of our past episodes about prunings and maintaining pruning tools, which I think was a winter one, from, I want to say, 2021 or 2022 for more info about that. Maybe. So you've mentioned a lot of different types of ones. We've got blackberries, we've got raspberries, and we have black raspberries, which wasn't a thing that I knew was existed. I kind of love it, though. So what are some good varieties that our homeowners should be looking for or potentially looking to buy into order from catalogs and stuff? What are ones that you would recommend are good homeowner varieties of blackberries and raspberries?
Haley
You're really hitting on my favorite subject here.
Emily
I know it's your favorite subject.
Haley
Variety trials. My favorite thing is to walk into a field with all different fruit cultivars and get to taste all of them. Now, unfortunately, my BlackBerry trials, we just put them in last year, so I haven't actually tasted all of them. That said, I grow both blackberries and raspberries in my house. So I have a little bit of experience, and I am going to introduce even a few more types. So if you are somebody that likes pink or golden raspberries, I grow a variety called double gold, and I really like it. I think it has good flavor. Another variety that's recommended for our area that was, I think, bred at the University of Maryland is Anne, and it also has good flavor. So if you like kind of a different look to your raspberries, I think those are fun to try. Now, for red raspberries, I think the early varieties make a lot of know, if only because you get the fruit sooner, but also your pest pressure builds up the later in the year you get. So some of the varieties that grow well here and that have good flavor are, Caroline Jalen is also another one that has pretty good flavor.
Haley
I grow Joan J. Because it's thornless. I don't think it has quite as good of a flavor as some of the other varieties, but it's more or less thornless. And then polka is another one that has pretty good flavor. If you want to grow some of the later varieties of raspberries, which we can do here on the eastern shore, they need a little bit longer season. So if you're maybe in western Maryland or further north, these might not be good options for you. But where I'm at, you could grow crimson night. It does pretty well in warmer parts of the state. And then Josephine, that's another one that's got some heat tolerance. So raspberries tend to be the most heat sensitive, whereas blackberries tend to be a little bit more heat tolerant. I'm not going to mention any of the purple raspberry varieties, because I don't really like any of them. But that's another type of raspberry. They don't tend to have as good a flavor. If you want to grow black raspberries, the two varieties I would recommend are jewel and Bristol. And then moving on to blackberries. The ones that I really like, there are two out of the University of Arkansas, Panka and Kato.
Haley
They were bred and are specifically branded as being very sweet. So I think they're some of the best thornless varieties. And then there's a new variety out of Oregon called galaxy. I haven't tried it yet, but it's in my variety trial, and it's supposed to be another sweet variety. But if you're old school and you like a sour BlackBerry, I would encourage you to grow awashita or osage. Those are two other varieties that came out of the University of Arkansas, and they're really hearty, strong plants. They make very thick canes, and they're good. Yeah, those are my top picks.
Emily
And I will say for listeners who are not located in the mid Atlantic, please check out with your local extension for varieties that would grow better in your area. But I'm excited. I know every time Haley and I get together, I talk to her about how I need to rip out everything in my backyard and stop doing my vegetable garden and put in berries and just enjoy the fruits of my labor.
Mikaela
I'm already shopping.
Emily
Okay.
Mikaela
That was the main thing I wanted out of our interview, is, what does Haley recommend buy?
Rachel
I feel like every time we have a conversation, it just adds something else to my list, my cosmic list. I want to try all these berries, and I need to figure out a space to put them in.
Mikaela
I knew there were yellow raspberries, but I never trusted that their flavor was going to be good. But now I'm really tempted.
Haley
I like my double gold.
Mikaela
Double gold. Okay.
Haley
And then Anne is supposed to have good flavor.
Rachel
I'm trying to figure out if my trellis system can be my chain link fence.
Haley
I think for commercial production I would tell people that's not a trellis system for a home gardener. Yes, because a chain link fence, you can just plant your blackberries or raspberries up against it and you can string them up. Maybe you put in some t-posts every 10ft and you run some wire and you'd only be able to pick them probably from that side, but they'll start suckering and going under the chain link fence. But if that gets mowed, it's no problem. Or if you don't care about what's on the other side, then.
Rachel
So that leads to another question. If you're suckering, can you dig up those suckers and share them?
Haley
Oh, yes. So both blackberries and raspberries are going to sucker. They're going to send out rhizomes underground, and they send out more rhizomes than I want them to. And you can pull those plants up.
Emily
I volunteer as tribute to take some of your suckers. I'll even come dig them up.
Mikaela
A podcast field trip to Haley's house.
Emily
Back to Trellis systems I didn't mean to get distracted with that, but I imagine so. If you're like Rachel and you have a chain link fence on your own property, that's probably fine. If you are a homeowner and your chain link fence is someone else's property, you may want to go ahead and set up a trellis in the middle of your yard. Then in order to prevent suckering onto someone's property that is not yours, although your neighbors may be happy having berries on them.
Haley
Yeah, they would definitely grow through to your neighbor's property. And depending on what relationship you have with that neighbor, they may be fine with it. If they're mowing their yard consistently, it's not going to be a problem. That said, setting up a trellis is probably the most ideal thing you can do, because then you can harvest from both sides of the trellis. But it does take a little bit of work. I mean, to put a trellis up, you can use wood posts, you can use t-posts, something that's going to be strong enough to bear the weight of these canes once they're full of foliage and full of fruit in the middle of summer.
Mikaela
So what are some of the major issues or pests that a homeowner might run into if they chose to grow cane berries?
Haley
Probably the biggest pest issues I have are with the birds, and that's one where you're probably not going to win unless you're going to put up some bird netting around your plants. So I let the birds take their cut. But the other kind of pest issues that I see tend to be with insects. So things like Japanese beetle, they are more of a problem for me on raspberries than on blackberries, but I know that they'll get into blackberries, too. Japanese beetles really like those, like soft fruit, so they'll do a lot of damage on raspberries. And then the other thing that is a new kind of invasive pest, spotted wing Drosophila, and that will get in there and lay its eggs in the fruit, which is very gross. So that's kind of a tough pest to control. Other than those two, I think they're kind of the big ones. I've seen red necked cane boar, which will get in the cane of a blackberries, but it's not a huge problem. And then the other pest that I've seen before is strawberry clipper weevil, and it will kind of clip off the buds on a BlackBerry plant, but it won't totally devastate your harvest or anything like that.
Emily
And spotted wing Drosophila is my bug of the month. So people can stick around for a few more minutes, and we'll talk more in depth about that because I didn't want to make Haley talk about the gross bugs. Well, unless she wanted to.
Mikaela
I was just going to say, does it hurt if you happen to eat the fruit other than it's kind of extra protein?
Haley
It is extra protein. It's very much an ick factor. You don't want to think about maggots. You don't want to think about these bugs laying their eggs in your fruit. But unless you're selling commercially, this is really not a problem. So, yeah, if you see a lot of fruit flies, I'm a little grossed out, and I maybe don't want to pick that fruit, but it's certainly not going to hurt you.
Emily
So our last question is do you have any resources that you would recommend for home gardeners who wanted to dive more into planting and growing blackberries and raspberries?
Haley
Yeah, sure. So depending on how serious you are about this, I personally use the mid-Atlantic Berry guide, which is a free publication. You can get it online, both at the University of Maryland's website, but also a whole bunch of other universities through extension. We coproduce this guide, and it has a lot of information about how to grow blackberries. And raspberries. Now, if you're not wanting to read 30 pages per se about each of these brambles, then I would say another good place for you to start off is on the home and garden information website. We have a page that's called growing raspberries and blackberries in a home garden. So that's a good place to start. And then I just published a fact sheet that's only four pages about how to get started growing thorn less blackberries in the mid-Atlantic. So I think between those resources, you can find probably all that you ever wanted to know about blackberries and raspberries.
Emily
Awesome. So, one other question that we kind of always ask that's a little bit of an odd ball is how did you get into the topic that's here? So how did you get into growing and doing research on small fruit, Haley?
Haley
It's so funny, Emily. I was thinking about this preparation for this podcast, and it goes back to my grad school days where I was researching an agronomic crop, and I had this plant breeding class with a very famous plant breeder, John Clark at the University of Arkansas, who actually bred a whole bunch of these blackberries. And I went out and got to be in his field trials. I got to taste all these different blackberries and all these different peaches, and I thought, holy buckets, this is where it's at. I want to be doing something with my life where I get to eat fruit all day. And so that led me to another graduate degree in Berry research. So I just really like to eat fruit. I think fruit is really good for people, and it's very fun to grow. It's a lot more fun to grow small fruit, I think, than it is to grow big tree fruit and have to use a lot of chemicals in order to get a product out of it. So I stick to the small fruits.
Emily
So I think that's it for all the questions we had for you. Haley, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. We appreciate you coming on. Hopefully you enjoyed it. We'll have you back on at some other point to talk about strawberries, which I know are a completely different growing cycle, and we couldn't cover it all today, but this has been very fun.
Haley
It was very interesting. Thank you, Emily and Michaela and Rachel, for having me on.
Mikaela
We appreciate it, Haley. And now we know where to go to vet all of our raspberry and BlackBerry needs.
Rachel
True.
: Bird chirping: It’s the Native Plant of the Month with Mikaela: Bird Chirps:
Mikaela
So the harbingers of seasonal change, spring ephemerals will begin emerging and maybe even starting to bloom in March and will soon be in full swing through April and May. Spring ephemerals are usually woodland perennial flowers that emerge and bloom early in the season, followed by dieback in the summer until the following year. So for this reason, that's why I picked spring beauties, or Claytonia virginica, as my native plant of the month, because it will be coming up and starting to bloom in March and it's one of the earliest to bloom and they're often overlooked because they are quite small, so they have a very diminutive appearance, so the leaves are very grass like, but the flowers sport five white petals with pinkish stripes on them. And that's to help their pollinators find them, because, as I'll talk about in a second, they actually have a specialist bee that needs to find them. So this distinguishes it from the invasive star of Bethlehem, which looks very similar. It also has kind of like grassy leaves and white flowers on a stalk. But the star of Bethlehem has six petals on the flower and they are also, like, purely white.
Mikaela
You won't see any pinkish tinges or stripes on them. So claytonia can be found in moist woodland areas, often along stream beds. But it would really make a great addition to a woodland garden with enough soil moisture. So consistent soil moisture, not wet, not overly wet. It's very small. I mentioned it's only about six to twelve inches tall, so it makes a great ground cover. It's native to all parts of Maryland and it has this cute little specialist bee who depends on this early bloom. So it's called the spring beauty minor bee and it's an Andrina. It's really cute. And another fun fact, when the seed pod ripens on this plant, it can eject the seeds up to 2ft away. So it's one of those exploding seed pods. So that kind of helps distribute its genetics throughout an area. So it does sort of spread. It's not an aggressive spreader, but it will start to populate an area. But if you want to know more about spring ephemerals in general, we had a great episode back in April of 2022 with more comprehensive information about a wide variety of spring ephemerals, including spring beauties.
Emily
It is an adorable bee.
Mikaela
I know it's a cute little thing. It must come out super early because spring beauties, like, bloom in March. I mean, that seems early to me.
Rachel
This is an adorable bee. And Dr. Mike Raup actually has his bug of the week from a few years ago on the spring beauty mining.
Emily
Oh, no way.
Mikaela
I didn't know that.
Emily
Yeah.
Rachel
And he even has, like, a YouTube video of a male mining bee diving in to get some is. I know.
Mikaela
They're just way cute.
Rachel
They're adorable little bees, and I love how the pollen on their, they got.
Mikaela
Like, the hairs on their hinds.
Rachel
Yeah. So they got that almost bumblebee appearance that are trying to fit in a flower. They're fuzzy little butts.
Mikaela
And you know what? The Claytonia, the spring beauties, are definitely, they're not, like, endangered, but they do suffer from invasive species pressure, because in woodland areas, you'll have things like stiltgrass or even like Star of Bethlehem or, oh, gosh, what's the other one that's coming out right now? Lesser Calendine. That's what it is. That's an invasive flower in more wetland areas, but it will bully out all of the native plant material.
Emily
Well, and that kind of leads me to a question, which is sometimes with these woodland perennial flowers, you can't really grow them in your landscapes because of the specialtiness that they have of needing trees. Is this one that you could grow in shade in your landscape, or is this more specialized?
Mikaela
Oh, that's a good question. So you can find it commercially, which leads me to believe there is some flexibility in its growing habits. Although it would be happiest in an area that has, like, a thick layer of leaf litter, it's a more woodland environment. I don't know if it would be the greatest pick for dry shade like trees in urban environments with shallow soil, but you could experiment a little bit. Like I said, I think it's that rich soil layer that it needs the most.
:Buzzing sound: It’s the Bug of the Month with Emily: Buzzing sound:
Emily
So my bug of the month this month is spotted wing drosophila, which Haley kind of already talked about is a common pest that you are going to have if you grow thin skin fruit, like raspberries and blackberries. You would also find this on things like blueberries, peaches, nectarines, grapes, cherries as well. So spotted wing drosophila, or Drosophila suziki, is native to eastern Asia, and it's an invasive insect that came over here. It was first discovered in California in 2008, and by 2011, it basically was found here in the mid-Atlantic region. And to my knowledge, it's basically spread across the entire United States. So it is a type of small vinegar fly. And what makes this unique is compared to other vinegar flies that attacked overripe or damaged fruit. The spotted winged drosophila will actually lay her eggs on completely healthy fruit that is just in the process of ripening. And she does this because she has a serrated over positor. So we're talking about a fly here. So we do have complete metamorphosis. So we're going to have an egg, a larvae, a pupil, and an adult stage. The adults are rather tiny because it's a fruit fly.
Emily
So think of that. The typical fruit flies that you might see around, we're talking about a 10th of an inch or so, and they'll live anywhere from about three to nine weeks. These guys, characteristically have those bright red eyes. They're going to have a light brown to yellow brown body, and then they're going to have black stripes on their abdomen. They're rather tiny, so all of these traits might be hard to see. The red eye is probably most iconic, but a lot of fruit flies have red eyes, so you don't necessarily want to jump to that conclusion. They get their name, spotted wing Drosophila, because the males particularly have a black spot at the tip of the wings. The females, however, don't always have this spot. They're going to overwinter as adults and become active in our area. About May through mid June is when they'll start coming active. The females will use their serrated overpositor to kind of nick or to cut into that thin skin fruit, and then they'll just insert one to three eggs in that fruit, and then they'll move to a next one. Eggs will hatch and the larvae, or maggots, will basically feed inside of that fruit until they're ready to pupate.
Emily
Some of them will pupate in the fruit, some of them will drop down into the soil to pupate. It just sort of varies on different kind of climate triggering. Through this process of laying that egg, though, and breaking that skin, it's going to cause a small depression in the fruit, as well as can potentially open that fruit up to secondary fungal and bacteria pathogens. So that maggot itself in there is going to soften your fruit, and then you could have some kind of fungal and bacteria things also happening. So we sort of joked about it being extra protein, but I think unless it's been damaged, like recently, if the maggots been in there feeding, it's going to make the fruit kind of more soft and mushy to the point that anyone's going to really want to eat it. Spotted wing drosophila have multiple generations that overlap throughout the entire growing season. So the early blooming fruits will have less on them than the later ones. So if you are considering some of those later fruiting varieties. Note that this is a pest that you're likely going to have to figure out how to control a little bit better or deal with kind of some extra damage that will come from them.
Emily
Because of having multiple overlapping generations and because of their size, they are rather tricky to control. You can create what we call spotted wing Drosophila monitoring traps, and there are some directions on our website as well as some other extension websites about how to make a really easy one just using household stuff. There's one that involves mixing yeast, sugar and water into like a bottle and then cutting a hole in it. And basically you can hang this around your berries in a shaded area and you would just check it like every few days you'd dump it out and you'd use like a ham lens and count how many flies you had and identify them out. And then from there you could figure out like, okay, what my population is, do I want to attempt to use an insecticide? Do I not? And go from there. There are a few insecticides that you can use. Spinosad and pyrethrin are two that are organic. As always, if you do decide to use a chemical, please read the label. Make sure that you're wearing proper protective equipment and that you're using the right rate of that chemical. With small fruit in particular, it's only effective if it gets on the fruit.
Emily
So this isn't one of those things where you can spray the leaves. You're going to actually have to spray the fruit itself. So if that's something you're uncomfortable with, there's a few other ways you could potentially do this. So removing any infested fruit, particularly early in the year, and smashing and disposing of it is going to reduce that population later in the year. You can also get exclusion netting. You need to make sure, however, that it's very fine netting. And the timing of this can be really tricky because you want to wait until after the plant has flowered and when the fruit is just starting to form to net the plants because you want to exclude the flies. But you also need insects to potentially get in there to pollinate depending on the varieties that you are using. So just note that there are some options out there, but it is kind of tricky. You're probably not going to get 100% control of spotted wing Drosophila growing berry plants in the mid-Atlantic, but definitely you can check out University of Maryland extensions home and garden as well as some of the other extension websites will also have some good resources and options for reducing or limiting spotted wing drosophila on your small fruits.
Emily
And that is my bug of the month.
: Horns: Get your Tip of the Month Here with Rachel : Horns:
Emily
Okay, Rachel, do we have some gardening tips of the month? I am so ready to plant berry plants, but I know you're going to convince me that I need to do some stuff with my vegetable garden, too.
Rachel
What do you mean? What do you mean? Well, most of our listeners know that I like to focus on vegetable gardening. So I'm going to tell you what you need to be doing for this month, because you should be doing things even if it's cold and dicky outside. You need to be planning for your garden that you're going to have in May. So if you've started your seedlings indoors, you want to make sure that when you are watering, you're watering the base of the seedlings because that's going to help the roots grow nice and strong. You also want to add a water soluble fertilizer in there as well, especially if your seedlings already have their true leaves, just because they're going to need some nutrients. And we're watering at the base to reduce the risk of any rotting or any type of disease. You want to make sure that you're applying the water at the base so that it can properly wick up the moisture. So it's the perfect time to sow seeds of spinach and lettuce, arugula and any other salad greens. You can throw these in your cold frame if you have one, or in your vegetable bed under a floating row cover.
Rachel
And I have to say that floating row covers are great additions to your spring and fall garden. If you care for them properly, you can have them last several seasons. A floating row cover is made out of a spun, bounded polyester, and they let in air and light and water, but they offer some protection from frost and they exclude insects and bigger critters. They're really easy to put up. Just get yourself some pvc pipe and some wire and make yourself a little tiny hoop house right in your garden. If you haven't started your seeds for eggplant and peppers, you need to do it today because they are finicky little devils, especially if you don't have a warming mat for them. They can take a long time to germinate. And as we know, if you listen to last month's episode, we are actually up a zone for the USDA hardiness zone map. So we're going to start our planting season just a little bit earlier. So our tomato and pepper seeds, we're going to need to even start those just a smidgen earlier than we normally do to get them germinated and ready to get in the garden by the time that you need to plant them.
Rachel
Broccoli and cabbage seeds are another one that you need to start this month. And they really like to be under lights. So if you don't have a fluorescent light system, you can get some portable lights. And so with our broccoli and cabbage, if you're going to do those for spring planting, they should be started now because they should be ready to go out in the garden in six to eight weeks. So that means you need to have them out by mid April if you're thinking six weeks, if you live in an area that doesn't have a ton of snow, it's a perfect time to put up your trellises and your teepees for your peas and your pole beans and other climbers. If you wait to do this until your seeds come up, you have a really good risk of damaging those roots. And we don't want to damage the roots. So if it's a warm day and you have the time, go ahead and set them up. We also should be hardening off our leaks and shallots and onions in our cold frame. Or you can set those aside on a porch or protected area for a few hours every day before you bring them in at dusk and then gradually work them up to 8 hours a day and do this for about a week before you transplant them.
Rachel
And you need to follow this procedure for all the things that you start inside that you're going to transplant outside. That's all I have. Fun quick tips.
Mikaela
No, those are important ones. In fact, people have been waiting to start their tomatoes and pepper seeds all winter long. So now is the time. Yeah, one thing I would add to tips for the month is if you're lazy like me and you didn't cut back any of your perennials, seed heads, whatever, it's for the pollinators, do it for the pollinators. Probably now the time to cut all that stuff back to about twelve to 18 inches tall and to leave all that stubble, all of the plant material in place because of all these cavity nesting native bees that might be looking for a place to go.
Rachel
Yeah, that is a really great tip, Michaela. Well, that's all we have for this episode listener. We hope you enjoy it and we'll tune in next month for more gardening tips. If you have any garden related questions, please email us at umegardenpodcast@gmail.com or look us up on Facebook at gardentimepodcast that's Garden T h y M E. For more information about the University of Maryland extension and these topics, please check out the University of Maryland Extension Home and Garden Information center website at go umd.edu backslash thanks for listening and have fun getting down and dirty in your garden.
Mikaela
Appropriate.
Emily
I had like this grand Jan thought of doing something unrelated and I was like, you know what, spot at wing Jasapa is right there.
Rachel
Just.
Mikaela
Yeah, do it.
Emily
Just do it. Low lying fruit, as they might say. Bye.