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When your Eastern red cedar tree (Juniperus virginiana), an evergreen conifer that typically contains bluish, fleshy, berry-like cones, suddenly develops structures that resemble hard brown apples, you wonder what is happening. The growths, sometimes referred to as cedar apples or incisions, come from the fungus infection known as cedar-apple rust. The fungus can happen anywhere cedar and apples (Malus spp.) grow near each other. It requires both kinds of plants to complete the rust’s life cycle. At times the cedar’s health is not affected, but the disease can damage or kill both trees.

Beginning Period in Cedar

Although Eastern red cedar, which grows in U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 2 through 9, is the most vulnerable to the rust, ornamental junipers can also be hosts. The rust’s life cycle begins in summer when a spore blows from an infected apple to a cedar leaf. The fungus grows slowly at first, developing a small, greenish-brown swelling from the next summer. That fall, the swelling enlarges to the cedar apple, which can be a gall, or abnormal plant growth prompted by substances from another organism. It can be kidney-shaped or rounded, and can be 1/4 to above 2 inches broad. The surface has small depressions like golf ball dimples.

Fruiting Period in Cedar

Another phase is showy, with activity beginning in spring. Warmer temperatures and spring rains prompt growth of orange, gelatinous-looking horns that protrude from every dimple on the gall. Rather ornamental contrary to the green cedar foliage, the horns produce the reproductive spores that fly around the end to an apple tree. After spore release, the horns die as well as the cedar apple dries up, frequently falling to the ground.

Apple Tree Infection

Not just edible apples (Malus domestica), which are hardy in USDA zones 3 through 8, are affected, but crabapples (Malus spp.) Can also host cedar-apple rust. Crabapples grow in USDA zones 4 through 8a. Spores in the cedar tree gall land on an apple fruit or leaf and begin to feed on the tissues, developing yellowish circular spots. The fungi then form black fruiting bodies at the center of these areas, and insects cross-fertilize the dark spots. Then the last life stage grows in the dark spots, producing small, white, tubular constructions. These release the spores that cycle back to the cedars, typically at June through August. The apple tree loses leaves, fewer apples form and apples can be small or misshapen.

Reduce the Effects

If there are not too many cedars growing within a period of an apple tree, remove all of the cedar galls before they form the star-like reproductive phase. Since red cedar is the most susceptible host, plant rust-resistant species of juniper rather than red cedar. Cultivars of apple and crabapple can be found that are immune to cedar-apple rust. If you can, reduce the number of junipers that grow near apple trees, and maintain junipers as far away from apples as you can. For the disease not to be able to transmit back and forth, nevertheless, they would have to be just two miles apart.

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I must admit the first time I saw a prairie wasn’t before the spring of 2007, when my wife and I were looking for a wedding reception venue. We finished up at Spring Creek Prairie, a never-plowed 800-acre remnant 20 minutes south of our city. I am unsure how I heard of it but I know that ever since that time, the prairie has had a special spot in the lives of my wife and I, especially as we think about buying some acreage and starting prairie-inspired companies.

Here in town you will find plans to make a 7-mile prairie road from a bison park near our home down to Spring Creek. Just 1 percent of the tall-grass prairie remains, I wonder just how my garden might be an extended part of this trail — and what my small suburban lot means in a world of wildlife and individuals where gardens have become refuges for us all.

Benjamin Vogt / Monarch Gardens

It’s difficult to imagine just how big the prairie used to be in the North American Great Plains and Midwest — covering nearly 50 percent of the U.S. — and just how quickly it disappeared over the span of a hundred decades or so. When I visit refuges in Kansas, Oklahoma and Iowa, I feel something I never feel elsewhere — that distance to the horizon that comforts me as the grass sways like waves, the birds leaping through folds of bluestem, insects rebounding from crazy bloom to crazy bloom. I need some of that in my own landscape. I need prairie back, and maybe if I am lucky I will observe the birds and insects come home, too.

Feldman Architecture, Inc..

In case you have a few acres that are full of weeds, the easiest way to prep for a prairie is to till the soil to expose the roots to air or broadcast the area with something like Roundup. I know that it’s not ideal to utilize the latter, but I wonder whether the ends justifies the means — you need a fresh slate to disperse a prairie seed mix, and that mix must be spread onto bare soil. A lot of those seeds also need a period of cold, wet winter weather to germinate in late spring, which is why a late-fall planting (after a couple pops) is perfect.

Here is a detailed prairie establishment guide by Prairie Nursery — by prairie prep to seeding, establishment and upkeep.

Jocelyn H. Chilvers

OK, you do not have a couple acres; maybe you have a bigger suburban lot. You are able to turn that into prairie too, with seed combinations, which would be the most economical method to get a diverse planting — although it is going to take a few years to establish a prairie, and you are going to have to spot check for weeds before the natives crowd them out. After that the plants will probably be quite low maintenance, requiring just an early-spring mowing (or a burning if you can do it safely).

Frequently spaces under trees are bare, and grass can not grow, but you will find shade-loving wildflowers and grasses on the market — two of my favorite places to find those plants would be the searchable database at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the internet shop at Prairie Moon Nursery.

Gardens from Gabriel, Inc..

And now some of you’re thinking, “Hey, I don’t have some acreage or even a suburban lot, and all I need is a low-maintenance some thing on a problem area that gets lots of sunlight and dries out frequently.”

Maybe you are able to mass some sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula) or prairie dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis). Those are two of my favourite prairie shortgrass plants. If you prefer blooms that are taller, think about some racks of bluestem (Andropogon spp) orIndian grass (Sorghastrum nutans) — you might even possess the taller grasses from the back and the shorter ones up alongside mimic a more traditional garden layout. Toss in some coneflowers, blue lavender or liatris (Liatris aspera) for some pops of flowering color from early summer to midautumn, and you’ve started cooking up a prairie.

If you have a shadier place, research native sedges — they look like grasses but are not as tall.

D-CRAIN Design and Construction

You can even get really minimalist if you want. Inside this picture various plants are dispersed almost like they’d be in the arid high plains crazy — a specimen here, a drift there. Designing a prairie garden can spur some trendy imagination, and I strongly think any aesthetic can be achieved using just prairie grasses and wildflowers.

Benjamin Vogt / Monarch Gardens

Here’s a midfall scene from my own garden. Front is a liatris gone to seed, behind it’s a ‘Purple Dome’ New England aster cultivar, and further back is a stand of tall Indian grass. This layout is really a bridge between the formal and informal look I believe prairie plants lend themselves to quite well.

Benjamin Vogt / Monarch Gardens

Here is another view from a very different part of my backyard, at USDA zone 5 (find your zone). Above is a stand of gray-headed coneflower, purple coneflower, long-headed coneflower and yarrow. Sprinkled in you will find some zizia, little bluestem, liatris, milkweed and a plethora of other prairie plants at a 40-square-foot mattress of running colour from May to October.

Christopher Yates Landscape Architecture

If you merely need a lawn replacement, then a seeding of buffalo grass or even blue grama works good for a 6- to 8-inch insure you can also mow once in a while if you prefer (but consider allowing it to grow to form a natural, wavy habit). Prairies in our landscapes do not have to be tall or complex or cluttered.

Great grasses for a new lawn

Kathleen Shaeffer Design, Exterior Spaces

If you live in a cooler climate or at higher elevation, you are able to stretch the rules a bit and allow red fescue grow and make undulating waves 4 to 6 inches tall. A couple well-placed trees from the grass make a playground- or prairie-like feel and are extremely low maintenance.

Mark English Architects, AIA

Why not give some baskets the prairie look? You might seed the containers, but buying some nursery plants may be most suitable for you, so you get a quicker bang for your dollar.

Another planting proposal: Have pleasure and layout one container with some little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) underplanted with purple prairie clover or stunt blazing star (Liatris cylindracea). You may need to put the container into the garage or shed for winter so that the roots do not freeze or shut out, especially if you live in zone 5 or even a cooler climate.

There was all kinds of prairies from the U.S.: inland, lowland, sand and even some on the Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida.

There are prairie plants for virtually any type of environment, from wet to dry. You can go all out having a diverse seed mix, make traditional beds or get modern with just blossoms. Match the layout to your home and maybe pick up Catherine Zimmerman’s publication on meadow gardening, Urban and Suburban Meadows.

Prairie plants are low maintenance when correctly sited, and once established feed all kinds of beneficial pollinating insects, enhance soil fertility and revive a little bit of what was formerly here for lots of species that still rely on native prairie plant communities.

Every small garden landscape, when connected, becomes a prairie corridor for miracle and for life you maybe didn’t know was there till you welcomed it back home.

More: 3 Ways Native Plants Create Gardening So Much Better

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