Workshops to focus on making wine

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Are you interested in making wine from Nevada wine grapes? I will be sponsoring a series of classes on winemaking in the next few weeks. Materials will be provided as well as locally grown wine grapes. If you would like to learn this old form of beverage making just e-mail me at Extremehort@aol.com and reserve a seat or call the Master Gardener hot line at 257-5555. Space will be limited. This will be your access to Nevada produced, high quality wine grapes.

The instructor is an experienced wine maker and grower of wine grapes. You will have an option of making wine at home or having the instructor helping you with its production. All materials will be provided, if you don't have any.

You will be taken through the entire process from crushing and destemming to the finished, fermented product.

Just a quick reminder, if you haven't been reading this column, summer patch disease on tall fescue is ready to emerge. If you have had it bad in the past, apply a fungicide now.

It is very important that any fruit from fruit trees that has fallen on the ground or rotting on the tree should be picked up and put in a sealed container. Particularly figs and other soft fruits like peaches. If you can smell fermenting fruit in your fruit tree area or from your compost pile so can bugs like the dried fruit beetle and they will head there.

The dried fruit beetle is the insect that causes souring of figs and can attack soft fruit like peaches on the tree and ruin your harvest. Head them off at the pass. The best control is sanitation.

Tomatoes, for the most part, are no longer producing new fruit as long as temperatures are above 95F. You are now waiting for the fruit that has already set to mature so you can harvest. When they are finished producing you can cut the vines back and force new growth for fall production.

When you cut them back, you will need to provide some shade on them to prevent sunburn on the stems or the whole vine may die after cutting.

Question: Please instruct me on pruning and fertilizing a crepe myrtle called Magenta and a three-tier Ligustrum.

Answer: The crepe myrtle was introduced to this country out of northern and eastern China and Korea where it is used to a much colder climate than ours and much different types of soils way back in the late 1700s. Magenta is an older variety of crepe dating back to the late 1800s, which is still maintained at the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C.

Crepes are easy to propagate from cuttings, making new plants identical to the mother plant or a clone.

Crepes are heavy feeders of fertilizer and like moist soils, not dry conditions like a desert plant. They don't particularly like rock and desert landscapes. Reflected light and heat, and a lack of organic matter can cause leaf scorching and leaf yellowing. They would be better off in the high water use zone of an urban landscape, close to the living areas such as patios and entrances.

Crepes will perform best with organic mulch surrounding the tree out to a distance as far as possible -- to the dripline would be best. The mulch should be 3 to 4 inches deep and the soil surrounding the trunk should have organic matter, compost or composted manure (composted manure does not smell), applied to the surface or mixed with the mulch each year.

We have had good luck at the research center with applications of a fertilizer like 16-16-16, plus an iron chelate such as 138 iron or EDDHA applied in early spring combined with wood mulch. The iron chelate is needed since this plant will become yellow over time in our soils. We have followed this with two or three light applications of a liquid fertilizer applied to the foliage such as a Miracle Gro or Peters when leaves emerge in the spring.

Another good fertilizer would be any of the manure-based products such as a composted turkey manure, fish emulsion, kelp or guano applied in late winter or early spring. Believe it or not, you can skip an early spring application by applying fertilizers in late fall, say around Thanksgiving, in our climate. Even foliar applications. This is provided the plants are winter hardy here, which is the case with crepes. They will take winter temperatures somewhere between 0 and 10F.

The ligustrum is an easier plant to maintain here since it is not as particular with its source of fertilizer or soils that have added organics. The 16-16-16 fertilizer will work well on it when applied in the early spring, the same time as the crepe. It is not a desert plant so it also will do better with an organic mulch surrounding its base. It does have a tendency to scorch and dieback in really hot locations such as against a south or west facing wall or surrounded completely by rock mulch in full sun.

Pruning ligustrum is done during the winter months. Pruning crepes, since they bloom on the current season wood, is done right after flowering. This is usually in the very late summer or fall.

Q: I noticed that two of our sago palms are sprouting fronds again from the nearby ground, while one other continues to develop fronds on the side of its trunk. I cut the ground-emerging fronds at ground level to no apparent ill effect. The mutant sago with the side fronds continues to sprout normal fronds from the center point. Before growth started this spring I trimmed these side fronds off hoping to force growth to the normal center, but new fronds still grew from both sides. What can I do to have just normal, center growth of fronds?

A: Sago palms represent a very large number of plants native to Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. The cycad, the sago you have, is only one of the many plants that the world calls sago palm. So let's call the one we grow here a cycad.

Cycads are very ancient plants that look like the tropical tree ferns you might see in Hawaii, but they are neither. Cycads are actually more closely related to pine trees than palms or ferns.

Cycads can be either a male or female plant. The male plant will produce a cone in the center of the whorl of leaves that releases pollen while the female produces a flower that looks like a brown mop in the center that produces the seeds. The cones may not be produced every year, and they usually are not produced until the plant is older, perhaps 15 years old and well established in the ground.

I get questions from people about the cones emerging from the center once they first see them because they are not sure what it is. You can remove the male cone from the plant if you don't like it, but I am not sure how you would remove the female flower even if you wanted to.

Now your first question. The female plant produces orange-colored seeds that are quite large and can drop to the ground where, if left undisturbed, can germinate months later. I am wondering if these "sprouting fronds from the ground" are seeds that have dropped from the female and germinated. Cycads, to my knowledge, do not have underground runners for producing new plants a distance from the mother.

Cycads produce a flush of growth in the center called a break, usually one or two each year. As the plant matures it will very normally produce daughter plants called pups or offsets at the base of the trunk. These are the side shoots you are seeing.

Rarely offsets may be produced in the crown or the center bud of the plant. This will make a plant with a center that has multiple heads. These offsets can be separated from the mother plant to form new plants.

Remove these pups or offsets in the fall or early spring with a sharp knife or by prying the daughter plant from the mother with a trowel or large screwdriver. Once the cuts or damage caused by removing the pups has healed over (a few days in the shade in the open air) they can be planted in a good potting soil where they will form new roots.

There is not much you can do to stop them from producing new offshoots or pups on the mother plant other than removing them as you see them develop.

Bob Morris is a horticulture specialist with the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension.