After 21 years, Laramie County Extension Horticulturist Catherine Wissner is retiring. She has often been my go-to person the 12 years I’ve been writing this column.
It’s difficult to find hyper-local gardening information online or in print. Every location is different. In Wyoming, it is hard to generalize because of our variety of elevations, precipitation zones and weather patterns.
You need the voice of experience, someone like Catherine who, over the length of her Extension career, has been on numerous yard calls to help locals solve landscape, gardening and farming problems. The plants she suggested to my neighbor are still colorful and going strong years later.
Catherine augmented her professional horticultural training and previous experience by listening to experienced local gardeners. She made her accumulated wisdom available to Laramie County, including teaching the Master Gardener classes.
By July 1, Catherine will no longer be officially available, and there is no one immediately taking her place. I don’t know if she will be going from her role as Laramie County Master Gardener advisor to unpaid volunteer like everyone else, and still be available for questions. We should at least let her have a vacation first.
In the meantime, the “Ask a Master Gardener” committee is ramping up. Chair Marie Madison is setting up a table at every Tuesday Farmers Market at the mall, south side of J.C. Penney, starting June 13, 3 to 6 p.m. Bring your questions, pictures, unidentified plants and plant problems.
I’ve been doing a little teaching myself and realizing how much I don’t know. Wanda Manley and I went over to give a program about Habitat Hero for the Laramie Audubon Society, about planting native plants for pollinators and other wildlife. Even though Laramie is on the plains like Cheyenne, it is 1,000 feet higher, and their growing season is shorter. Their list of native plants might include more alpine species.
Then, at the last minute, I was asked if I could Zoom in the next night with the same PowerPoint program for Evergreen Audubon in Evergreen, Colorado, a mountain town with the same elevation as Laramie. However, my list of prairie native plants might not all work there.
One of the questions was how to grow flowers under evergreens, especially lodgepole pine. Property owners in Cheyenne recognize the same problem and vainly try to grow grass when the better solution is to not cut the lower branches of spruce and pine and enjoy the natural groundcover of old needles. Less work.
However, in the mountains, it seems to me property owners should be studying Firewise recommendations (search for the column I wrote at my CheyenneGardenGossip.wordpress.com site) in which evergreens, being very flammable, should be removed within a certain distance of buildings, replaced by a less-flammable rocky or grassy or flowery terrain.
Some horticultural advice can pertain to wider areas. Kenton Seth, the crevice garden guru who designed the one at the entrance to the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens conservatory, showed me a new way to plant.
When transplanting a potted plant to the garden, pop the plant out of the pot, then gently remove all the potting soil from the roots. Some people even wash the roots before planting directly into the new soil. Kenton does this because a regular root ball isn’t going to fit into one of his rock crevices.
Removing all the potting soil means that instead of confining themselves to it, the roots will have to reach into the new soil and will establish more quickly.
I’m not planting in rock crevices like Kenton, but holding a small plant with wispy roots coming from a 2.5-inch pot, I realize I can essentially plant it in a crevice I make with my hand trowel, hori hori or soil knife. I just plunge the tool in the soil, wiggle it enough so there’s room to tuck the roots in and press some dirt in the opening — much easier than digging a hole.
I’m not sure all 11 volunteers helping me plant the extension of the Habitat Hero garden at CBG June 1 caught on to my planting technique. But all these daily rain showers have erased any inconsistencies. When I checked June 4, all the transplant droopiness was gone.
We didn’t have enough fence to protect all the new plants, but Isaiah Smith, the horticulture and operations supervisor, thinks that with so much lushness to choose from everywhere, the rabbits won’t decimate the unprotected plants, like they did when we planted the first part in 2018.
At home, I’m doing a little editing of my own Habitat Hero garden. I’m replacing more non-natives that filled in the gaps early on with natives I started last summer in my little nursery plot. We will see if the bees, butterflies, bats and birds notice.
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