- Author: Melissa G. Womack
Valentine's Day is one of the most demanding holidays in the cut-flower industry. Consumers struck by Cupid's arrow spend more than $1.9 billion on cut flowers alone. To prepare for the enormous demand for roses, growers produce an estimated 233 million roses, according to an About Flowers research study.
California Growers Making Changes
While many consumers are thinking about love – few are thinking about the impact the cut-flower industry is making on the environment. Since 1990, California has required the agricultural industry to report on all...
- Author: Deborah Mathews, Department of Plant Pathology, UC Riverside
One of California's most adored flowering plants, impatiens, is being threatened by a serious pest. You may have noticed the common garden impatiens missing from nurseries, retail store shelves, and landscapes, parks, and gardens this year.
Impatiens are dying from a relatively new plant disease called impatiens downy mildew, caused by the fungus-like, oomycete pathogen Plasmopara obducens. The pathogen primarily affects varieties of Impatiens walleriana, or hybrids with an I. walleriana parent and wild impatiens (I. balsamina). Note that this pathogen does not affect New Guinea impatiens (Impatiens hawkeri) or other bedding plant genera. This disease develops rapidly, with a few...
- Author: Brad Hooker
Over the last three millennia, the practice of growing rice has evolved and spread throughout much of the globe. From China, through India, to Greece and parts of the Mediterranean and from Europe to the Americas, rice has demonstrated its versatility in desert regions and wetland deltas alike. Abundant in carbohydrates, it is today one of the world’s most widely eaten foods.
While University of California researchers develop rice varieties more tolerant to the modern challenges of climate change — flooding, heat stress, drought — California rice farmers each year discover more new threats in the form of non-native and herbicide-resistant weeds. So well adapted are these weeds that if left unmanaged, they...
Bill Tietje is a UC Cooperative Extension area natural resources specialist in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley. He is based in San Luis Obispo.
UC Cooperative Extension's Master Gardeners have received many calls during the past few months concerning the poor condition of many California native oak trees, in both urban and rural landscapes. Many evergreen oaks, including coast live oaks, have brown leaves and thin foliage. Adding to the unattractiveness, a deciduous oak, the blue oak, dropped its leaves ahead of schedule. Although a tree may look unhealthy, it can recover.
Early leaf drop is a deciduous tree's adaptation for conserving water that it otherwise would...
- Author: Robert Sanders
UC Berkeley scientists will receive $4.9 million over the next five years to study the nearly 10,000 square kilometer Eel River watershed in Northern California and how its vegetation, geology and topography affect water flow all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
What the researchers uncover will help improve global climate models and modeling tools that can be used by state or regional decision makers to guide planning. Their discoveries may eventually allow scientists to predict the impact of changing climate and land use on future droughts, floods and supplies of water for drinking and agriculture.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the Eel River Observatory is...