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pril has been a time of great transition for agents as we try to feel out how to continue our programming. For horticulture, I haven’t had the time to worry about programming! I have been fielding call after call on garden problems and people have continued to ask me to come out and get a look at their plants and see if there are any problems they need to solve. I’ve had 45 different stakeholder contacts in the last month – more than my first three months on the job – and about 30 of them involved a house call to get a look at plants in person (but still maintaining social distancing)! I have seen some very interesting problems pop up in the last month. Maples have put on their fall color and other trees have been completely defoliated thanks to mid-April freeze damage. Drainage continues to be an issue in many homeowner landscapes thanks to multiple heavy rains, and with increased moisture, diseases also increase. Peach leaf curl and cedar-apple rust were the two most common diseases I’ve been called out to diagnose.
There are two projects I have worked on that are more involved than simple house calls. The most important task I took on in the last month was water quality testing for fruit and vegetable growers. These tests are free to producers and measure e.coli and bacteria populations in irrigation water so that growers know how safe their irrigation water is for their crops. Due of the pandemic, the Olathe lab is closed. I took the samples up to the Manhattan lab in-person (and did other district business while I was there) and the results were startling. For two of the samples, there was no bacteria, but for three samples, there was more bacteria than the lab could quantify. The growers are not using that well water to grow crops anymore, because they sell at farmer’s markets and their water could cause a foodborne illness outbreak. These results have led to outreach activities through radio and social media to encourage water quality testing.
The other major project of mine for April is a video on foraging, which is intended to get people out and moving in a safe, sanitary manner. I am currently in the process of editing these videos together for publishing on our social media and on YouTube, but there is over 90 minutes of video to pare down, so it’s slow going. On the plus side, I am learning how to use video editing software that I can use in future programming.