I was horrified to realize that Canadian Thanksgiving, celebrated the second Monday in October, had passed me by, completely unnoticed. Since I’m not Canadian by any stretch of the imagination, it must seem strange for me to be upset.
But for me, the day is my personal “the-holidays-are-coming!” panic button. I am given a week of nervous breakdowns and mental preparation (I have how many shopping days left?) before I need to have my act together. It means my sewing needles and crochet hooks work up a frenzy. It means searching for new pumpkin soup recipes and stockpiling cookie ingredients. It means one month before total insanity.
It also means that the monarchs are hatching and beginning to cocoon in the Aesclepias, and the hummingbirds seriously need to consider migrating from the loquat tree. It means the squirrels are digging up anything the raccoons haven’t knocked over. It means the leaves are beginning to fall. Once we settle our most precious plants in for the winter, and rake the final litter from the lawn, we often leave the yard until spring and the sun return.
The winterizer (high potassium and phosphorous) fertilizers have been applied, the mulch has topped the soil, and we forget the ailments of spring.
Now is also the time for dormant spraying. From blights, to curls, to scale and borers, everyone has something to watch come spring. Spraying during the holidays can reduce (and occasionally eradicate) those problems before they begin again.
For insects, you should expect 97 percent to 99 percent concentrations of petroleum or paraffin oil. The different concentrations are nearly identical in effect. The brand differences lie in price (usually within $2), directions (the longer they are, the more specific about dosages per insect type) and convenience (some are available in a hose-end attaching bottle – no mixing!). Superfine oil acts by smothering insects (remember the actress from “Goldfinger”?), which means that it will adversely affect beneficial insects such as ladybugs and monarch butterflies as well, if used with wholesale abandon in the yard.
For anyone with a peach tree, and a conscience, spray for leaf curl! It is highly contagious and equally unsightly, although not particularly injurious to peach trees. If you do not deal with it for your own yard’s sake, do it for the sake of everyone with a peach tree for blocks around you. Really.
Ortho’s dormant fungicide brand name was Daconil. It is undergoing a marketing overhaul and is being renamed Garden Disease Control, but it is often still referred to by the original package label. It is 29.6 percent chlorothalonil and should be used only in the winter months, as it is damaging to leaves.
Lilly Miller’s dormant spray is PolySul, named for its active ingredient, calcium polysulfide (lime sulfur) at 28.7 percent. PolySul is less expensive up front but is used at higher concentrations, proving to be more expensive in a year of extreme infections than Daconil is. PolySul, however, is available pre-mixed, can be used year-round and can be combined with insecticidal oils.
Other products, based in copper, are also available but are more toxic to use. These are to be used to fight very persistent and difficult-to-control issues, such as blight in apricot. Your decision to use copper should be close to desperation. If you are desperate enough to use copper-based fungicides, use Microcop. It is harshly effective and will last longer, through worse weather, but it is more complicated to use than other products: Mix a certain amount from bottle one (copper sulfate 90 percent) with a certain amount from bottle two (potassium resinate 12 percent and potassium oleate 2.5 percent) into a hose-end sprayer. This product generally defies my mathematical skills, although Ortho has a great dial-up sprayer that makes life pretty easy. This attachment costs about three times as much as a cheap sprayer, but no mixing or mathematical genius is required. You dump in some product, screw on the lid, and set the dial to the concentration recommended on the product’s label. When finished, the product is undiluted and can be returned to the original container (except Microcop, as it is two products together).
All fungicides need three seasonal applications: around Thanksgiving, Christmas and Super Bowl Sunday.
So, all sarcasm aside (well, not all): Happy (belated) Canadian Thanksgiving!
Holmes of Mountain View is an experienced horticulturalist who has worked for local nurseries.
