Regulars (All)

Article - The Bay Gardener by Dr. Francis Gouin; by Dr. Francis Gouin - 3/24/11

Are Your Houseplants Dying of Thirst?

Monthly dunkings will keep them moist all the way through

A reader called to ask if she could visit me with a large houseplant she purchased last summer. It was dropping most of its leaves, and the margins of the remaining leaves were turning brown. After questioning her on how she was caring for the plant — watering practices, fertilizer and quantity used, proximity to windows and room temperatures — I invited her to the farm. Soon after I hung up, I saw the car coming down the farm lane. Her husband was driving while...

Article - Sporting Life by Dennis Doyle; by Dennis Doyle - 3/24/11

White Perch Have Sprung

To catch them, fish fresh shallows of tribs

The spring equinox has kicked this year’s white perch run into overdrive. An increasing amount of daylight in early spring is one of the prime stimulants to the white perch spawn. The equinox, coupled with our recent record rainfalls, has gotten this best loved denizen of the Tidewater moving early. White perch are semi-anadromous, which means that they prefer salty, brackish water, but each spring they migrate to freshwater tributaries to spawn. They are a slow-...

Article - The Bay Gardener by Dr. Francis Gouin; by Dr. Francis Gouin - 3/17/11

Attack Your Holly Now

These trees flourish after heavy pruning

Hollies can be butchered to near death and come back like gangbusters. Last year I did a pruning demonstration for a group of nurserymen to show how severely hollies could be pruned without killing them. I pruned American holly, Japanese holly and Burford holly. The American holly was 10 feet tall; I pruned all of its side branches to within four to six inches of the main stem. The Japanese hollies were pruned back to within two to three feet of the ground. The side branches...

Article - Sporting Life by Dennis Doyle; by Dennis Doyle - 3/17/11

The Coming Season Is Now

Day by day, new fish come our way

Our new angling year on the Tidewater is rich with possibilities. But if you don’t plan to take advantage of what’s happening now, some good times may slip past. A number of particularly great fisheries have already started. The yellow perch spring run, always the first to grace our calendar, is in full blossom. These beautiful and tasty rascals can be found in many Bay tributary headwaters. With a minimum size of nine inches and a limit of 10 fish a day, they...

Article - Sky Watch by J. Alex Knoll; by J. Alex Knoll - 3/17/11

Look, Up in the Sky ...

Neither plane nor loon, it’s Super Moon

Thursday’s near-full moon shines below the bright star Regulus, the heart of Leo the lion. This star, 77 light years away, has four times the girth, burns more than twice as hot and is more than 100 times brighter than our sun. By Saturday the moon is full, and like all full moons, it rises as the sun sets, around 7:30 on this day. Aligned as they are, with earth in between the two, the gravitational pull of both sun and moon work in conjunction to produce the highest...

Article - Sky Watch by J. Alex Knoll; by J. Alex Knoll - 3/10/11

Seasonal Holdouts

Spring is days away, but the stars of winter still rule the heavens

Thursday as the sun sets around 6:10, the waxing moon glows high in the west. Look just a few degrees below this smiling crescent for glimmers from the Pleiades star cluster. With clear dark skies you might see six of these distant lights, but with the moon’s glow you’ll have an easier time with binoculars, which should reveal far more stars. Shaped like a small dipper, the Pleiades cluster fits within a pair of binocular’s field of view, about 5 degrees. ...

Article - Sporting Life by Dennis Doyle; by Dennis Doyle - 3/10/11

Knotty Matters

If you want to catch fish, you’d better know how to tie a fisherman’s knot

One simple thing an angler can do to help catch more big fish is learn to tie the right knot correctly. In a life of fishing and after working in a sports store for a good number of years and listening to countless tales of big fish broken off, I’ve learned many anglers aren’t sure which knot to tie or how to tie it. The weakest link in the connection between fish and fisherman is the knot. Common household and sailing knots such as the square knot, granny knot,...

Article - The Bay Gardener by Dr. Francis Gouin; by Dr. Francis Gouin - 3/10/11

The Best Fruit Grows on Pruned Branches

Now’s the time to prepare your fruit trees and berry bushes

Fruit quality and size are based not on the amount or kind of fertilizer you apply but on how well you prune the plants in the spring before they bloom. You should be pruning your apple, peach, nectarine, apricot, pear and cherry trees now, as well as your blueberry, raspberry and blackberry shrubs. To prune peaches and nectarines, first remove all branches growing above and below each main branch. Then remove all branches less than 12 inches long. Finally, prune all...

Article - Sky Watch by J. Alex Knoll; by J. Alex Knoll - 3/3/11

Escaping the Sun’s Grasp

Sometimes we can’t see the things right before our eyes

By week’s end, the moon is lost amid the glare of the sun, with new moon at 3:46 Friday afternoon. While you might say that the moon has disappeared behind the sun, it has in truth disappeared in front of the sun. As our natural satellite, the moon’s orbit around earth never carries it opposite the sun. Rather, the new moon is there before our eyes, as close as ever. But as it hovers in broad daylight directly between Earth and the sun, we are blind to it. By...

Article - The Bay Gardener by Dr. Francis Gouin; by Dr. Francis Gouin - 3/3/11

Tomato Alert!

Help needed in avoiding white core at tomato-ordering time

Have you ever sliced open a tomato and found one or two white spots, from the size of a pea to the size of a dime, in the flesh near the stem end of the fruit? Several Bay Weekly readers have brought the problem to my attention, and it seems it was quite common this past summer in many home gardens. One home gardener noticed that the white core problem was rampant even when the plants were irrigated and asked why I had not written about it. White core is...