Class materials

Resources from the 2019 class

• Basic Botany Presentation: Botany is the science of plant life and is fundamental to understanding horticulture/gardening, forestry, and ecology.
• Basic Entomology Presentation: Gain a basic understanding of and know how to identify some of our more common insects you will likely encounter as a gardener.
• Basic Entomology: Insects can be found in great numbers in every ecosystem on our planet except for the ocean. There are over a million different identified species of insects in the world, but only an estimated 31,000 identified species of ‘Mammals’, ‘Birds’, ‘Reptiles’ and ‘Amphibians’. There are over 28,000 different identified species of insects in the Pacific Northwest alone. ...
• Basic Integrated Pest Management: Basics of Integrated Pest Management (IPM).
• Botany Terms Explained: Anther - The pollen sac on a male flower. Apex - The tip of a shoot or root. Apical dominance - The tendency of an apical bud to produce hormones that suppress the growth of buds below it on the stem. Axil - The location where a leaf joins a stem. Cambium - A layer of growing tissue that separates the xylem and pholem and continuously produces new xylem and ...
• Choosing Garden Seeds: That stack of shiny seed catalogs is growing larger and ever more tempting, holding a promise for the new gardening season. However, therein lies a powerful marketing trap. All those pretty pictures and the glowing descriptions that go with them are designed to make you want everything. The problem is that you can be persuaded to buy something that isn’t likely to grow ...
• Coastal Berry Production: Overview of berry production on the Oregon coast.
• Growing Great Vegetables in Our Cool Coastal Climate: Practical Ideas for Success: Overview of coastal vegetable gardening.
• Composting Presentation: Basics of composting
• Blueberries: Wonderful Fruit and Great Ornamentals: Blueberry varieties and common blueberry varieties in the home garden.
• Growing Tree Fruits Successfully: Soil, site, irrigation, selection, pruning/thinning, and integrated pest management.
• Red, Yellow, and Black Raspberries: Varieties, planting, pruning, training, and common problems of raspberries in the home garden.
• Strawberries: Varieties, planting, maintenance, and common problems of strawberries in the home garden.
• What and Why IPM: Integrated pest management (IPM) is an ecologically-based pest control strategy that relies heavily on natural mortality factors such as natural enemies and weather, and seeks out control tactics that disrupt these factors as little as possible. IPM uses pesticides, but only after systematic monitoring of pest populations and natural control factors indicates a need. Ideally, an ...
• Leaf Identification Key: Guide to identifying plants by leaf shape, margin, and venation.
• Managing Weeds: Weed identification, prevention, and management.
• Meaning of common botanical plant names: Common Root Words anthos Flower brevi Short fili Threadlike flora Flower folius Foliage grandi Large hetero Diverse laevis Smooth lepto Slender macro Large mega Big micro Small mono Single multi Many phyllos Leaf/Foliage platy Flat/Broad poly Many Colors alba White ater Black aurea Chartreuse azur Blue chrysus Yellow coccineus Scarlet erythro Red ferrugineus Rusty haema Blood red ...
• Plant Identification: Plant taxonomy, botanical names and methods for classification and identification
• Plant Pathology Presentation: Plant disease basics
• Diagnosing plant problems: Plant problem diagnosis basics
• Recommended Native Plants for Home Gardens in Western Oregon: Recommended native plants for home gardens in western Oregon.
• Soil: What it is and how it works: Soil basics for gardeners
• Understanding Fertilizers: A dictionary defines fertilizer simply as a substance added to soil to increase its fertility, but it is not that simple. Plant nutrients are chemical elements or compounds that are essential to plant growth. Nutrients come from various sources; those supplied by air and water, the things that we can’t control, are Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen. The ones we CAN control are ...
• Basic Weed Science and Management: Weed biology and ecology, functional groups of weeds, and introduction to weed control strategies