[From the UC Master Gardener Program Statewide Blog]

Proper irrigation and drainage are critically important for the health of plants and trees. But what happens when Mother Nature throws an atmospheric river curveball, and your yard or garden is now under water from heavy rains or floods?

Good garden soil contains a network of pore spaces filled with water and air. Both are necessary for healthy roots and beneficial soil-dwelling organisms. When the pore spaces fill with water, air is no longer available to the root system, and the roots become susceptible to root-rot organisms. Understanding the effects of flooding on plant health and caring for them after a flood event is important to saving your plants and garden.

Once the floodwaters have receded, assess the damage to your garden and begin the recovery process. There are a few things you can do to minimize the damage to your plants from flooding:

1. Remove any debris, such as mud and silt, that may have shifted and accumulated on your plants. 
   
   
2. If the soil is waterlogged, improve drainage by digging ditches or furrows to redirect water away from plants. 
   
   
3. Check the soil for compaction and loosen it up with a garden fork. This will help to improve drainage and make it easier for water and nutrients to reach the roots of your plants. 
   
   
4. Wait until the soil dries out before working with it in order to reduce additional compaction. Avoid walking on waterlogged soil to prevent compaction and further root damage. Stay off a boggy lawn!
   
   
5. Inspect your plants for damage to the roots, leaves, and stems. Remove any damaged parts, and prune your plants back to healthy growth if necessary.
   
   
6. Remove contaminated material. Consider that any garden produce touched by floodwater may be contaminated and discard it. While the risk of contamination is low in residential areas, runoff from septic systems, pastures, or industrial areas can carry potentially harmful microbes and chemicals.
   
   
7. Monitor your plants closely for signs of stress, such as wilting or discoloration, and address any issues that arise as soon as possible.
   
   
8. Once dry, start to water your plants gently and gradually to help them acclimate to the new soil conditions. 

Connect with us! 

Recovering from a flood can be a difficult and time-consuming process, but with proper care and attention, your garden can recover and thrive. The UC Master Gardener Program is available to help! For gardening questions and local county resources, click here to Find a Program. You will be redirected to your local county website and contact information. 

Source: Flood: Plant Stress in Extreme Wet Conditions, https://marinmg.ucanr.edu/PROBLEMS/EXTREME_CONDITIONS/Flood/

Giving Tuesday is November 29, 2022! Please join us in this opportunity to give to your local UCCE Stanislaus County Master Gardener Program. Your dollars are used locally to make our county a better place.

Thanks to generous donations from individuals like you, as well as in-kind donations and funding from sponsors, our Sensory Garden has been installed! In fact, the last landscaping step, adding mulch, will be done by volunteers on Giving Tuesday!

We removed old landscaping and revamped the broken irrigation system for the Sensory Garden space. Grover Landscaping donated time to help with irrigation, and Master Gardener volunteers learned how to install drip irrigation.

These photos show our Master Gardeners installing drip irrigation donated by Hunter Industries, and plants donated by Frantz Nursery.

Where can I see the Sensory Garden?

This garden is located on the east side of the Stanislaus Building, at the main entryway. The garden will be used

to teach classes on drip irrigation and low water use landscaping. It will also be a place where employees and visitors can relax on benches we plan to install later.

The Pollinator Garden

Thanks to a generous donation from the West Stanislaus Resource Conservation District, we are starting our Pollinator Garden. The Great Valley Seed Company donated milkweed seeds which will be planted in the garden, too. Next week, volunteers will be installing irrigation and planting.

How You Can Help

Any amount you can donate helps us grow our gardens and our program! The purpose of the gardens is to showcase low-water use plants the public can see anytime. In addition, the areas will be used as outdoor classrooms to teach topics such as drip irrigation, pollinator gardening, plant identification, low water use gardening, and more!

We also plan to install a pollinator hedgerow to showcase plants farmers can use in rows along their property to provide food for pollinators, in addition to helping keep dust levels low and create privacy. The garden will also include plants for pollinators, especially the endangered monarch butterfly.

Our Goal

We are looking to raise $5,000 to help with irrigation installation, tools, seeds, and other needed materials. We are a 501 c (3), so your donation is tax-deductible. https://ucanr.edu/sites/givingtuesday/ This site allows you to give by credit card. (A fee is taken for the use of a credit card.) If you would prefer to give by check, make your check out to “UC Regents” and mail it to:

UCCE Master Gardener Program
3800 Cornucopia Way, Ste A
Modesto, CA 95358

Thanks for your support!

 

John Karlik, UC Cooperative Extension advisor in Kern County for environmental horticulture and environmental science, will retire July 1. Karlik began his work in Kern County in 1984 with an emphasis on the commercial rose plant industry and local horticulture outreach.

Karlik's teaching activities included five levels of 12- to 15-week horticulture education classes offered in three locations in Kern County, usually two or three classes held each year. For the past 25 years, he has collaborated with Darrell Feil, co-owner of Abate-a-Weed in Bakersfield, to hold landscape management seminars that connect community members with experts on a wide range of topics.

“What I love about John is a couple of things: first, his knowledge base is amazing – he's a treasure of Kern County, for what he's done education-wise,” Feil said. “And second, he has a very active mind – and so many people benefit from that in our community.”

Karlik expanded his teaching to include 10 horticulture study tours to gardens and landscapes of Europe and Asia, and the photographs from those visits enhanced his outreach and contributed to his chapters on landscape design in the Arizona and UC Master Gardener Handbooks.

He earned his B.S. in soil science from the University of Minnesota and M.S. in horticulture from Michigan State University.

Taking advantage of UC Agriculture and Natural Resources' flexibility and sabbatical leave, he completed a doctorate at UCLA in Environmental Science and Engineering, and changed his research focus to air-quality-related projects. That led to a lecture series on atmospheric science and policy, including climate change, which Karlik offered annually for 15 years as a visiting professor at Central European University in Budapest, and resulting in a service award from that institution.

In recent years, he led four tours to study ecosystem response in the still-radioactive Exclusion Zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine, site of the world's worst nuclear accident.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Karlik shifted from in-person classes and offered 75 hour-long Zoom presentations on horticulture, landscape design, climate change and environmental science topics, finding an audience in California and in other states.

Karlik also has held a variety of positions in ANR committees, including Academic Assembly Council and the Communications Advisory Board.

“I especially appreciate the many collegial relationships I have within UCCE, ANR, and on several campuses,” Karlik said. “Authorship on many publications reflects those relationships.”

In retirement, Karlik expects to offer assistance at the UCCE office in Kern County and as an editor for a forthcoming ANR book. He intends to pursue interests in instrumental music and the study of languages.

“We've been really blessed to have a guy like John around,” Feil said.

The month of May is Garden for Wildlife month. Due to factors such as loss of habitat, pesticides exposure, and climate change, much of wildlife is being challenged today. There are many ways home gardeners can directly help birds, bees, butterflies, and other local wildlife. The saying “If you build it, they will come” applies not only to the classic baseball movie “Field of Dreams,” but also to attracting wildlife to your garden.

Plants

If you have the space, plant an oak tree! While it will take several years for the tree to mature, few plants provide more benefits to nature than an oak tree. One Valley oak tree can provide food, water, and shelter to approximately 350 vertebrate species and over 250 species of insects and arachnids.

Plant a variety of native plants which are the foundation of local food webs. Wildlife and plants evolved together in ways that were beneficial to both, plus they are adapted to local soils and weather. Native plants provide food, shelter, and places to care for their young. Native plants also tend to be water-wise, needing little watering once established.

Choose plants that bloom at different times of the year, to ensure something is always blooming during the different seasons thus providing nectar sources year-round.  Include some plants which produce berries to provide food sources attractive to birds and insects.

Create multi-layered planting. Have some canopy trees of different heights, weave in some tall, medium, and small plants, along with some groundcovers. Even a small garden can have plants of different heights to attract and shelter different types of wildlife. Arbors and trellises are also ways to grow vines, providing more variety in your garden.

Lawns lack variety, thus reducing your lawn space and replacing it with native plants will increase the diversity in your garden. Decreasing the frequency of mowing permits grasses to grow taller, allowing flowers to grow and bloom which would attract bees and butterflies. You can also sprinkle some daisy and clover seeds into your lawn to provide forage plants and flowers for many beneficial insects.

Water

Wildlife needs water. The water source(s) can be a small dish, a bird bath, a rain garden, or pond. Water in bird baths needs to be shallow since birds will not use a bath where the water is deeper than their legs. Be sure to clean and change the water frequently to prevent mosquitoes.

Ponds with aquatic-loving plants can encourage amphibians such as salamanders or toads, or wetland insects such as dragonflies, to visit and set up their homes.

Butterflies engage in behavior called “puddling,” where they stop in muddy puddles for water and nutrients. You can recreate this by filling a terra cotta saucer with soil and pebbles, sink it into the ground and keep it moist. Again, change the water regularly.

Plants and rocks around the water source(s) provide shelter, camouflage, and spots for creatures like butterflies, lizards, or turtles who like to sun themselves near water.

Housing for Bees

Most bees are solitary in nature with 70% being ground nesters like mining bees. Cavity-nesters such as mason bees comprise 30% of bees. These live in twigs, abandoned beetle holes, and other tree cavities. The social honeybees and bumble bees who live in hives or colonies make up less than 1% of all bees. Native bees are up to 200 times more efficient pollinators than honeybees. You can attract native bees to your garden by providing bare patches of dirt in out-of-the way sections and/or supply bee housing with hollow reeds or cardboard tubes in a sheltered spot that receives morning sun.

Leave the Leaves

Leaving leaves as they drop from your trees and bushes provides food and shelter for a variety of living creatures including worms, beetles, millipedes, larvae of some butterflies and moths, toads, frogs and more. These in turn attract birds, mammals, and amphibians that rely on the smaller organisms as a food source.

Chemicals

Reduce or eliminate use of pesticides and fertilizers which can be harmful to wildlife (including beneficial insects) and contaminate water resources. Instead use earth-friendly solutions such as garden mulch to discourage weeds and adding nutrients to the soil. UC Integrated Pest Management provides a source of research-based less-toxic solutions for garden pest management.

One Step at a Time

Changing your garden into a wildlife haven will likely be a step-by-step process over a period of time. Building a garden attractive to wildlife will bring you the enjoyment of watching them and the knowledge you are helping wildlife thrive.

Resources listed provide information for ways to you to build a garden attractive to wildlife.

• Butterflies in Your Garden: https://ucanr.edu/sites/CEStanislausCo/files/345791.pdf
• Sustainable Landscaping: https://ucanr.edu/sites/stancountymg/Sustainable_Landscaping/
• Trees in Your Garden:  https://ucanr.edu/sites/CEStanislausCo/files/341553.pdf
• Pollinator-Friendly Native Plants Lists: https://xerces.org/pollinator-conservation/pollinator-friendly-plant-lists
• UC IPM Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program: http://ipm.ucanr.edu/
• The Bee Gardener: The Cavities You Want to Have: https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=12785
• How to Make and Use Bee Houses for Cavity Nesting Bees: https://beegarden.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/How-to-build-and-use-bee-blocks.pdf

 

Denise Godbout-Avant has been a Stanislaus County Master Gardener since 2020.