“My spruce tree has brown things all over it! Is it sick?” The caller was quite anxious. He had a beautiful Colorado Blue Spruce growing in his yard, and now it had some sort of weird alien growths at the ends of all the branches. Was it going to die?
Over the years that I volunteered at the master gardener help desk, we would often get calls like this. No, the caller’s tree wasn’t sick, not exactly. Those prickly, cucumber-shaped growths that show up on spruces from time to time are actually galls caused by an insect. They might look peculiar, but they weren’t going to cause significant harm to his spruce.
In the year we’ve lived in our new house, the first on the block, we’ve gained a number of neighbors. Now that the growing season is officially underway, these new yards are being landscaped. And I’m reminded all over again of why, back in 2000, I signed up to become a master gardener.
Crows can make tools, or unzip your backpack to extract your lunch. Macaws have been known to open complicated latches their cages in order to escape their captors, demonstrating insight into complex problem solving. Jays can remember where they stashed each and every one of thousands of nuts. And I knew an African Gray Parrot that, in an effort to keep its owners home (and therefore receive more attention), mimicked the telephone’s ring every time anyone started to leave the house. In fact, many birds are exceptionally intelligent. But how do they fit those smarts into their tiny brains?
Do you grow onions? They’re not the most popular crop for the home veggie garden, which is a shame because they’re incredibly easy to grow. Sure, you can go to the store and buy a bag for a pittance, but that’s true for most vegetables we grow. And the flavor of home-grown onions isn’t that different from the ones at the market. The primary advantage of growing your own onions is that you know exactly what you sprayed them with—or didn’t.
The scarlet blossoms really do look like bushy paintbrushes dipped in red paint; they’re hard to miss, even in a meadow crowded with wildflowers. Most of us easily identify these iconic perennials, although we may be a bit confused by the species that bloom in pink, white, and yellow.
Mountain Plover 