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Lynn Kunstman

Jan 01

Still Time to Plant Native Plants!

By Beet 2026 01 January

For those gardeners who missed the fall planting window and/or can’t wait until spring when the weather warms, native plants give you another option.  While autumn planting of natives has the most benefits — cooler temperatures, overwinter root growth, reduced transplant shock — it is possible to cash in on some of those benefits by taking advantage of our “false springs”, which often occur in late January and/or mid-February.

False springs are those days when temperatures are unseasonably warm, and plants are often tricked into blooming too early.  While this is a problem for your fruit trees’ eventual fruit set, it can be a boon to your native garden.  While I would never encourage folks to plant non-native plants during these months, natives can be quite forgiving. They can even put on extra root growth before the spring growing season by going into the ground at any time of year except in summer. The trick for winter planting is to be sure the ground is not frozen and there is a window of warmer weather predicted.  This allows any plants you place to settle in and begin the root growth necessary to avoid transplant shock. Of course, native plants are far less likely to experience shock, as they are adapted to our local soil and weather conditions.

Our native plant nursery at Southern Oregon Research and Extension Center (SOREC) has many beautiful native grasses, perennials, shrubs and trees you can plant, even during winter. Our plants routinely survive completely freezing in their pots and wake up beautiful and healthy for sales in the spring.  So, planting them in winter should not be an issue.  We have plants for sale every weekday from 9 am to 4 pm.  The nursery is self-serve. Choose the plants you want, pull the price tags and take them into the office and pay.  Checks or cash are preferred, but if the plant clinic is open, we can run a card.  Yes, this sounds like shameless self-promotion, but we want EVERYONE to plant native plants. The more the better!

Our nursery has a great selection, but if you cannot find the plants you are looking for, check with these local nurseries that specialize in or carry local native plants.

Pollinator Project Rogue Valley

312 N. Main Street, Phoenix OR  97535 Phone: (458) 214-0508

https://www.pollinatorprojectroguevalley.org/

Plant Oregon

8651 Wagner Creek Road, Talent, OR 97540   Phone: (541) 535-3531

https://www.plantoregon.com/

Shooting Star Nursery 

3223 Taylor Road, Central Point, OR 97502     Phone: (541) 840-6453

https://roguevalleynursery.com/

But, of course, always shop with JCMGA first!  GARDEN FOR LIFE!

 

Nov 29

Take a Blue Bag for Bottles!

By Beet 2025 12 December

The holidays are upon us! That could mean lots of friends and relatives visiting, with a resulting buildup of empty beverage cans and bottles! Did you know that you can donate those cans and bottles to help JCMGA with our fundraising efforts?

When you visit the Extension Center, please pick up one or two blue bags that can be found in the entrance area by the information rack. Fill your blue bag with clean, refundable plastic, aluminum and glass drink cans and bottles. Cleanliness is key.

We ask that you COMPLETELY fill the bag with the maximum number of bottles and cans that can be stuffed in there. To participate in this donation program, JCMGA has bought each blue bag for 40 cents each. We lose 20 cents for each bag that is not returned. That definitely can eat into the profit, so getting the most out of each bag is significant to our efforts.

Important Notes about the Blue Bag Program:

  • A bag should hold 50 – 60 containers, depending on their sizes
  • Rinse bottles and remove lids
  • Bring bags to 1179 Stowe Ave Medford – open 8 am – 7 pm daily
  • No need to wait in line!
  • Drop door location on side of building
  • Scan the bag tag to open the secure door (drop up to 10 bags per visit)

 

Please take no more than two bags at a time. You can contact Lynn Kunstman if you need a greater number of bags.

 

Thank you for your support!  The impact is so much the greater when we work together.

 

 

Oct 30

Fall is the Best Time to Plant Native Plants!

By Beet 2025 11 November

While most gardeners think of planting new garden plants in spring when the weather fall.  Autumn planting of natives has many benefits: for the gardener, for the plants and for the soil.  Our native plant nursery at Southern Oregon Research and Extension Center has many beautiful native grasses, perennials, shrubs and trees for you to plant in late October for establishment over the winter months.

We have plants for sale every weekday from 9 am to 4 pm.  The nursery is self-serve. Choose the plants you want, pull the price tags, and take them into the office and pay.  Check or cash is preferred, but if the plant clinic is open, they can run a card.  Yes, this is shameless self-promotion, but we want EVERYONE to plant native plants this fall!

Plants that go into the ground in mid to late fall have an advantage over those planted in spring.  Because native plants use the first several months in the ground growing their root systems, they can take advantage of the soil warmth, even after air temperatures drop to the point that top growth becomes dormant.  It may look like nothing is happening, but those roots are growing and moving down in the soil, making associations with the mycelial organisms that will help them grow faster in the spring, and help them to infiltrate the rain that falls on your property.  When planted in the spring, native plants will often appear to not be growing at all, as they race to get their roots established.  By taking advantage of fall planting and cool season root growth, you can see faster growth in spring of the above-ground vegetation.

Of course, not waiting to plant until spring means not having to water through the dry, hot season while the plant establishes itself.  Native plants require less water and pruning maintenance in comparison to non-natives, but like any young plant, if planted in spring they will require more watering to ensure survival.  Fall planting just makes sense to keep both the plant and the gardener from stressing!

Benefits to the soil abound as well.  As long as the plant can photosynthesize — that is build carbon body parts — using sunlight and carbon dioxide, that carbon is being pumped out of the air and into the root systems as long as there is green vegetation above ground.  Carbon expelled from root tissue can stay in the soil for hundreds to thousands of years.  Think of our native prairie soils, made rich and black by millennia of native bunchgrass roots.  The exact same thing happens in your garden when you plant our deep-rooted native plants.  Soil organisms that evolved with western native plants abound where natives grow and add to the richness of the soil ecosystem.

Plant some native plants in your yard this fall and you will see the ecosystem benefits:  healthier soil, more abundant and diverse wildlife, more pollinators and butterflies, more breeding birds, better water retention and less need to irrigate.  This fall, GARDEN FOR LIFE!

 

Apr 28

Blue Bags for Bottles

By Beet 2025 05 May

Did you know that you can donate cans and bottles to help the Jackson County Master Gardener Association in our fundraising efforts? Here is how:

When you visit the Extension, pick up a blue bag in the entrance area by the information rack. Fill your blue bag with clean, dry, refundable plastic, glass and aluminum drink bottles and cans. Look for the OR 10¢ mark on the label.

IMPORTANT: WE ASK THAT YOU FILL THE BAG WITH THE MAXIMUM AMOUNT OF BOTTLES AND CANS. JCMGA IS CHARGED $0.40 FOR EACH BAG TO PARTICIPATE. WE LOSE $0.20 FOR EACH BAG NOT RETURNED.

 

  • Bag holds 50 – 60 containers, depending on size
  • Rinse bottles and remove lids
  • Bring bag to 1179 Stowe Ave Medford – open 8 am – 7 pm daily
  • NO NEED TO WAIT IN LINE!
  • The Drop Door location is on the side of the building
  • Scan the bag tag to open the secure door (drop up to 10 bags/visit)

 

PLEASE take no more than TWO bags at a time.

Contact LYNN KUNSTMAN AT 541-601-1864 if you can use a greater number of bags.

 

Feb 27

Save our Pollinators!

By Beet 2025 03 March

The “Insect Apocalypse” is happening now. Insect populations are declining worldwide, in numbers that are quite staggering. Some countries are reporting a 45% reduction in insect biomass, while some streams in the United States have shown a 96% reduction in invertebrate life. If we think of insects as the “krill of the land,” we can understand how all other animal groups in the food web – fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals – depend on this food source. This loss of insects is due primarily to the overuse of insecticides.

 

As Master Gardeners, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to sound the alarm and make a change in this potentially devastating trend. Please follow the link below to the information page at Pollinator Project Rogue Valley to find links to information about neonicotiods, and the harm they inflict on our environment and local ecosystems.  What are Neonicotinoids?  By educating yourself, you can better educate others!

Aug 31

The Garden for Life Native Plant Nursery is Open for Shopping!

By Beet 2024 09 September

The Garden for Life Native Plant Nursery, located next to the tall greenhouse at SOREC, is open for business!  The nursery is run by Jackson County Master Gardeners and is open on weekdays. While the nursery is staffed only on Wednesday mornings, 9 am – noon, you can still shop Monday through Friday. If no one is there, choose your plants, pull the PRICE TAGS, and take them inside to pay at the main office. Only plants that have price tags should be taken, as those without are not ready for sale. Cash or checks are preferred, but if the Plant Clinic is open, they can process credit/debit card purchases. Office staff returns the price tags to us, so we can track our sales.

While the nursery exists to propagate and promote the sale of native plants, we do have some non-natives and food plants as well. Most of these have come to us from Josephine County Master Gardeners’ plant stock when Josephine County closed down their extension services. A crew from JCMGA went over on Saturday, July 20th to help remove supplies from their greenhouses, storage sheds and plant racks. Some of the plants we brought back are native birch, cedar, fir and pine trees, Oregon grape, and dogwood, as well as some (non-native) variegated iris and cedars. There are also many grape plants. These have all been placed in the nursery ready for sale.

Since the nursery is bursting with plants, now is a great time to buy.  However, if you plan to buy plants from the nursery before our Fall Festival on September 24th, we recommend you keep the plants in their containers, in partial shade, and keep them evenly watered until October. Our scorching summers are not the time to plant out nursery stock. Wait until daytime temperatures are 80 degrees or less to plant new plants in your yard. Triple digit temperatures are stressful for everyone!

Currently we have beautiful native coreopsis, and a lovely Northeast native Brown-eyed Susan in bloom in the nursery. Both do well in irrigated garden beds. The coreopsis will be more drought tolerant, as it is an Oregon native. We also have many beautiful shrubs for sale. Ninebark grows fifteen feet high and wide and has a beautiful light pink bloom as leaves are emerging. This is one of our earliest blooming shrubs – so important for our early flying bees – and is a great addition to a hedgerow or fence line. We also have a variety of native grasses, which are important to plant among your perennials and shrubs, as they increase water infiltration, provide sugars and exudates that enrich the soil microbiome and are the obligate host plants for our skipper butterflies.

Come and shop at your Garden for Life Native Plant Nursery!

 

Garden for Life!

 

 

 

Mar 01

How Your Messy Yard Can Help Nature

By Beet 2024 03 March

 

Despite being named Oregon State Gardener of the Year last year in 2023, my front yard is a constant embarrassment to me.  It is NOT like the other, “well-tended” yards in my neighborhood.  It is weedy and rangy and has dead stems and flower stalks all over it.  Dry leaves are piled up under all the shrubs and trees.  I even have what we refer to as a ‘dragon nest’- a structure I made from with woody debris from coppicing my hazelnuts, red twig dogwood, and serviceberry.  I wove these materials into a wattle compost container.  This holds other woody debris and leaves in a brush pile.  All of these have been deliberately left – as messy as they are – to support insect life and the birds that come to feed upon them. 

 

Leaving the leaves, as the Xerces Society advocates, has much to recommend it.  Leaves provide winter cover for small invertebrates and insects who help break down the carbon in the leaf mulch and return nutrients to the soil in the form of their waste.  Soil bacteria break down those waste products further to provide nutrients that plants and mycorrhizal fungi can then access.  Soil under leaves is rich in carbon, nutrients, soil life, and holds moisture longer, allowing plants to access all.  Winter birds forage in this rich mix and find critical food during the coldest months.  

 

While I am not above feeling guilty about how my yard appears, I still persist. Because I know that neatly mown, raked and leaf blown yards provide none of this forage and none of these soil services.  So, while my neighbors think they are being good citizens, they are merely addressing the eye candy that humans have been trained to look for in our managed landscapes. Nature is never considered. And nature pays the price. 

I have 39 species of birds that visit my pitifully small corner lot in Medford.  There they find winter seed heads to feed from, leaves to dig through to find isopods, overwintering fly, moth and butterfly larvae, earthworms, centipedes, millipedes, and other winter food.  I do not see this activity in or on any of the other yards in my neighborhood.  The flower stems and stalks of the perennials, though blackened and bent from winter storms, are home to stem nesting native bees, which can also provide larvae to birds who drill into the stems for food.  Lizards and snakes can safely shed their skins and find winter hibernation spots under the wood chips, pine bark and small logs I place under my shrubs.  Toads and salamanders will often find homes under decomposing wood piles and logs placed strategically under shrubbery.   

 

As I went to collect the mail yesterday, I thought, “I had better do some clean-up along the sidewalk and the gutter.” But then I realized that all along the edge of my yard, the leaves had been scraped hectically onto the sidewalk as robins and flickers foraged through them.  Each small dark scrape in the leaf litter represented a bird that had been fed by my yard.  I resolutely left the leaves where they were in the gutter and on the sidewalk and came inside to write this article instead.   

 

Leaves are not LITTER.  Leaves are HABITAT.   

Change your view of gardening, and GARDEN FOR LIFE! 

 

For more resources and information visit the Xerces site listed here:  Leave the Leaves! 

Sep 29

Fall is the Best Time to Plant Native Plants!

By Beet 2023 10 October

While most gardeners think of planting new garden plants in spring when the weather warms, the very best time to plant those native plants you’ve been meaning to put in is fall.  Autumn planting of natives has many benefits for the gardener, the plants and the soil. Our native plant nursery at Southern Oregon Research and Extension Center has many beautiful native grasses, perennials, shrubs and trees for you to plant in late October for establishment over the winter months. And as an added bonus, we will be selling them on Saturday, October 14th from 9 am to 2 pm. Yes, this is shameless self-promotion, but we want EVERYONE to plant a native this fall!

 

Plants that go into the ground in mid-to-late fall have an advantage over those planted in spring.  Because native plants use the first several months in the ground growing their root systems, they can take advantage of the soil warmth, even after air temperatures drop to the point that top growth becomes dormant. It may look like nothing is happening, but those roots are growing and moving down in the soil, making associations with the mycelial organisms that will help them grow faster in the spring, and helping to infiltrate the rain that falls on your property. When planted in the spring, native plants will often appear to not be growing at all, as they race to get their roots established. By taking advantage of fall planting, and cool season root growth, you can see faster growth in spring of the above ground vegetation.

 

Of course, benefits to the gardener include not having to water through dry hot seasons while the plant establishes itself. Native plants require less water and pruning maintenance in comparison to non-natives, but like any young plant, if planted in spring they will require more watering to ensure survival. Fall planting just makes sense to keep both the plant and the gardener from stressing!

 

Benefits to the soil abound as well. As long as the plant can photosynthesize – that is, build carbon body parts using sunlight and carbon dioxide through above-ground vegetation – that carbon is being absorbed out of the air and into the root systems. Carbon in the form of root tissue can stay in the soil for hundreds to thousands of years. Think of our native prairie soils, made rich and black by millennia of native bunchgrass roots. The exact same thing happens in your garden when you plant our deep-rooted native plants. Soil organisms that evolved with western native plants abound where natives grow, and add to the richness of the soil ecosystem.

 

Plant some native plants in your yard this fall and you will see the ecosystem benefits: healthier soil, more abundant and diverse wildlife, more pollinators and butterflies, more breeding birds, better water retention and less need to irrigate.

 

This fall, GARDEN FOR LIFE!

Jul 27

Beneficial Insects You Need to Know – Part 3

By Beet 2023 08 August

In past articles we discussed predatory and parasitic beneficials.  Now we turn our attention to pollinators.  Who are the important pollinators in your yard?  Everyone is familiar with the non-native European honeybee (Apis mellifera), but there are so many more insects that provide our pollination services.  In Oregon, we have over 700 species of NATIVE bees, all of whom are servicing our native and non-native plants. And good news: native bees do not sting!

All bees need pollen and nectar to reproduce.  Many of our native bees are specialists on the pollen of particular native plants so that, if the plant isn’t present, those bees cannot survive.  Plant natives!  Some examples of our beautiful native bees are bumblebees – which everyone recognizes – sunflower bees, and others shown below.

 

 

Most of these bees are solitary stem or ground nesting bees. Young queens gather and build a “bee loaf” of pollen and nectar to lay an egg on, then seal that egg and food in a chamber.

Our second most important pollinators after bees are our native flies, especially the hoverflies.

 

 

These little bee mimics can be identified by their large eyes and their hovering behavior over flowers.  Our beneficial flies overwinter in fallen leaves, and many of their larvae provide winter food for birds. So “leave the leaves”.

Moths and butterflies are a third group of important pollinators.  Remember that all butterflies are moths (that fly in the daytime and are brightly colored), but not all moths are butterflies.  The moths are critical nighttime pollinators, so it is important to put your outdoor lights on motion sensors, keeping your yard mostly dark for these important insects.

 

 

Wasps and beetles make up the other two large groups of pollinating insects.

For more information, visit the Xerces Society page about pollinators.

 

Jul 26

Master Gardeners Catch the Rain!

By Beet 2023 08 August

In September of 2021, the irrigation wells on the OSU Southern Oregon Research and Education Center campus in Central Point ran dry. Watering of all campus demonstration gardens stopped, and plants in the native plant nursery began to die. Through a massive emergency effort, the nursery stock was either donated to local restoration projects or taken to member homes to be maintained until we could install a watering system.

In October 2021, bids were sought to find a contractor to construct a rain catchment system, pending approval of the project. All contractors with rain catchment skills were fully booked until late Spring 2022. As an interim solution, JCMGA purchased eight 250-gallon cage tanks and filled them with water from a local watering delivery service. A small pump was purchased and watering the remaining nursery plants continued all winter using the two thousand gallons of water in these small tanks.

 

In January 2022, as the new growing season approached, Jackson County Master Gardener Association received approval to install the rain catchment system as an emergency irrigation backup for our well.  Fundraising began for the $15,000 system with a Go Fund Me campaign in February of 2022.  A total of $10,367 was raised, with the remaining funds being acquired through plant sales from the native plant nursery, and a generous grant from Jackson County Soil and Water Conservation District.  Sage Hill Landscape, the installation contractors, also donated one of the tanks to the project.

The system, installed by Sage Hill, was completed in the summer of 2022. It is a 5,000-gallon system consisting of two 2,500-gallon tanks that capture water off the roof of greenhouse #2. When the campus well failed again in the late fall of 2022, JCMGA was able to utilize the rain catchment system, beginning in February 2023 to grow all the plants for our May 2023 Spring Garden Fair.

As of July 2023, the well on campus is functioning, and the rain system tanks are full.  Master Gardeners will use the rainwater to maintain the native plants in the nursery on campus in the event of another well failure. Additionally, the system will serve as a demonstration teaching tool for Master Gardeners, Small Farms, Land Stewards, 4-H programs, and any community association that would like to bring members onto campus to see what a large capacity capture system looks like. An interpretive sign was installed in early July of 2023, and we look forward to the public being able to learn about rainwater catchment on the SOREC campus.