Gene's Tips

Computing the Coverage of a Bag of Mulch

Trying to figure out how much flower bed  a bag of mulch will cover may seem like a difficult task.
But it is really pretty simple.

Mulches come in bags which measure the mulch inside in cubic feet. Generally, mulches are two or three cubic feet bags. The formula for figuring out how much area each of the bags will cover is this.
(Remember, the recommended depth of mulch in garden beds is 2 inches in depth).

1 cubic foot of mulch will cover an area of 6 square feet, 2 inches deep

So, a 2 cubic feet bag of mulch will cover a 12 (2 x 6) square feet area at a depth of 2 inches. Now if you are considering ordering mulch in bulk by the cubic yard, you can figure out your needs this way.  A cubic yard is equal to 27 cubic feet. So by using this same formula, you will find that 1 cubic yard of bulk mulch will cover a 162 (6 x 27) square feet area at 2 inches deep.

You can use this formula in computing the coverage of any material that is spread over a known area in square feet.
  

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Caterpillars Eating Up the Leaves of Euonymus

Many residents of Maryland, Virginia and DC are waking up to find that most or all of the new leaves on their Burning Bushes and evergreen Euonymus shrubs have been eaten up. The culprit is a small, pale green with black striped caterpillar, Pryeria sinica, or the Euonymus Leaf Notcher. This is relative new pest to us, but it is making quite an impact on our landscapes. He only eats the leave of euonymus, a very popular evergreen shrub, including the popular deciduous variety we call the burning bush.

This pest is here for a very short time.  It is only one-generation species, so its feeding is limited to the month of May. Plants will normally recover without pesticide treatment, putting out new replacement leaves quickly. If you wish to control these caterpillars with spraying, use an insecticide that lists caterpillars on the label. At this point in time, the caterpillars have matured to the point that the popular bacterial caterpillar killer, Bacillus Thuringerensis or Bt, will not affect them.

Photo Credit: Eric R. Day, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Bugwood.org

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Are Your Citrus Losing Their Leaves?

If you have a lemon, lime or any citrus plant inside your home and you have been noticing a lot of leaves dropping lately, it may not be a cause for alarm. This is especially true if you have relocated the plant within the last three months from one location to another.

Citrus, as well as most houseplants that need and prefer lots of direct sunlight to do their best, will often react to the amount of sunlight, more or less, in the places where they are put. So, if you bought the plant at Homestead Gardens, where they are grown in well-lighted greenhouses, and bring them home to a location by a small window, they will react to the change in the amount of light. This change occurs slowly over  a month or more. The plant presumes that this new location of less light exposure is going to be permanent, so it adapts to it by reducing the number of leaves it has.  Leaves are to capture sunlight to make food through photosynthesis. With less light, fewer leaves are required. You may have noticed that as soon as the existing leaves have fallen, some new leaf buds are starting to open. This usually happens when the plant finds that it may have dropped too many leaves and these new replacement leaves will be replacing older leaves that may not have been as efficient in what they do.

Remember, this all occurs because we are trying to grow a plant that is conditioned to grow in a different climate, one that has longer days all year long. When your citrus needed the heavier leaf cover in summer, it started to react to the shortening of days in fall. But as the days started to become much shorter as we got into late fall and the plant made the adjustment to the much shorter winter days that we have here in Maryland by this sudden abnormal shedding of leaves. The citrus plant was becoming less active and was adjusting to it. Come spring and into summer, and the days grow longer, the plant will adjust again by adding more leaves, extending new branches and becoming more active.