What not to buy

Following on from yesterday's post, I thought it would be a good idea to illustrate some typical aphid activity. If you click on the picture, I've put two larger versions on my web site. You'll notice they're starting to congregate at the base of the dying leaf stems and around the base of the current season's shoots. These are all ideal hiding places to lay eggs; not to get away from you but to protect the eggs from birds. Again, the same advice as yesterday; kill them before they kill your plant! And yes, small plants can be severely weakened in the spring and can die.

When I'm browsing on the Internet I sometimes suffer from WILF (what was I looking for!) and I ended up on a Technorati page listing that had links to some Youtube videos. I clicked on one of them and it turned out to be a clip from Garden Time tv and an interview and product plug with a garden centre owner describing some Japanese maples. So far, so good, although I never take any notice of people telling me a particular variety is only going to get to a specific height; a good rule of thumb: take the height and double it!

What they were advertising at the end illustrated the danger of jumping on a bandwagon without having the facts to back it up. In essence, they were promoting mycorrhiza as a 'must have' for improving the quality of your Japanese maple. The product contained lots of different strains that would, apparently, all help to make your maple healthier and more vigorous, protect it from soil-borne diseases and generally act as a universal panacea.

The reality, however, is somewhat different. Mycorrhiza have little or no effect on the well-being of your Japanese maple and applying beneficial fungi to them will not be cost effective.

As a professional nurseryman, I started using mycorrhiza in the late nineties when reliable strains first became available, although having said that, there was a lot of rubbish about just as there still is and considerable testing of their effectiveness had to be done. Initially, it held some promise, at least in theory and I started using it extensively but more research and field trials showed that, on it's own, it was doing nothing. There were other elements of the soil microflora that had a far more important role as far as Japanese maples were concerned; specifically, bacteria and some of the most important of these are Azotobacter, Pseudomonas and Rhyzobium.

The subject of soil microflora is an important one, not just for Japanese maples but for most garden plants. I'll come back to this subject next week as there is a large amount of information that can be of great benefit to all gardeners and I'll also have a secret tip for growers of exhibition vegetables that probably no one, outside of a laboratory, is aware of.

Need more information? find it at growing Japanese maples.