Q: I am really frustrated. I have planted peas three times and something digs them up and eats them when I’m at work. What’s the fix for this? I really want to have some sugar peas from my garden.
A: There is a fix that does not involve hiring a sniper.
Purchase hardware cloth or hardware screening, which is a woven, welded wire with small openings. Or you could buy a roll of the wire mesh used to cover eaves troughs. Chicken wire has holes that are too big. Since you don’t know who your muncher is, you want about one-half inch openings between the wires. Birds and furry things can’t get through a half-inch hole.
Cut your material into a strip and bend your wire strip into a long hoop. Place the hoop over the planted row of peas, and you’ll need to bend wire to cover the ends, too, to block out the mysterious pea-fiend.
The reason for the hoop shape is so the plants don’t get stuck in the wire. That is a disaster.
Once the peas have popped, most critters lose interest. These hoops can be flattened out and reused each spring.
Q: I have some kind of prickly evergreen, I think it is a cedar and I noticed that it has these weird, wooden, lumpy nutlike things on some of the branches. These look like little deformed golf balls. The little depressions on the surface now have the beginnings of small orangey nubs protruding out of them. These appear to grow and stop and then grow again. What are these things? Are they nuts?
A: Nuts to that idea. Your tree is an Eastern redcedar. Yes, that’s the correct spelling with the red and cedar squished together. Its botanical name is Juniperus Virginiana. It is a very common evergreen found on the eastern half of the United States to the Gulf of Mexico and into Canada.
It goes by other names — aromatic cedar and pencil cedar. It’s the kind of wood that pencils and cedar chests are made from.
This tree produces berrylike seed cones that are bluish purple and have a white waxy coating that makes them look like tiny, sky blue berries. But this evergreen with sharp, prickly foliage has fungal problem that is pretty much everywhere.
Cedar-apple rust causes woody galls to form on the branches and twigs. Most of the year, they are just roundish, oddly shaped growths on branches. But in the spring, they get to perform their own version of fireworks. Following warm spring rains and humidity, the galls start to grow from the depressions on the surface. These are called telial horns. At first, the horns look orange and dry. They stop growing when there isn’t enough moisture for them. They grow again as moisture and humidity are right.
The dozens of horns from each gall get long, slimy and light orange until they look like multilegged octopi in the trees. That’s their brilliant display. Eventually the horns dry up and spores float away in the wind. With any luck, they end up on another Eastern redcedar or an alternate host, apple or crabapple. Those two never develop the galls and slime, but it causes spotting and leaf loss on the deciduous trees.
The simplest control is to pick the galls off of your Eastern redcedar if you want them gone. Burn or bury the little lumps so spores can’t spread. It’s more pleasant to do this they are not slimy. But be aware, you will be picking galls every year.
Questions? The Michigan State University Master Gardener Horticulture hot line is at 888-678-3464. Gretchen Voyle is MSU Extension Horticulture Educator, retired.