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Just a brief note to thank you for visiting us at the recent Home & Garden Show at the Lancaster Event Center.  We greatly appreciated meeting you to learn more about your landscaping needs.  

 by Don Janssen, UNL Extension Educator

 Scale insects are very small and attack a variety of landscape plants.

Oystershell scale is a hardshell scale, meaning that insects develop a hard, protective covering over themselves that is difficult to penetrate with insecticides. The insect overwinters as an egg under its mother's shell.

Each spring many homeowners find dead, reddish-brown foliage on their evergreen plants including pine, spruce, fir, juniper, arborvitae and yew. The extent of the symptoms can vary from brown needle tips on one side of the plant, to one or two branches, to the whole tree. Injury is found on the outer portion of the branches and is often most severe on the side of the tree facing the wind or a source of radiated heat, such as a south or west-facing brick wall or street.

One of the most common fungal diseases of pines in Nebraska is Dothistroma needle blight. This disease is responsible for much of the premature needle drop that occurs in windbreaks and ornamental pine plantings. Twenty pine species are affected by this disease, but in the central and eastern United States the fungus is found most commonly and causes the greatest amount of damage on Austrian and Ponderosa pine. Scotch pine is usually not severely damaged.

Compliments of Mary Jane Frogge, UNL Extension Associate

• If weeds occur in bulb beds do not remove them by cultivation. Pull them by hand so that the bulbs and roots will not be disturbed.
• Some annuals, such as verbenas, snapdragons, and petunias, take 70 to 90 days to bloom. They should be started indoors in early spring or purchased as greenhouse grown transplants.

Analysis - Look before you leaf

The first step in any design project must be an assessment of what you have to work with, what you would like to achieve, and how you intend to get there. The best designs are the result of a response to real conditions and constraints. Start by taking a good look at the site and by thinking realistically about your needs.

Success in home landscape design is certainly attainable for do-it-yourselfers, but there are some pitfalls that should be avoided if maximum satisfaction is to be achieved. Thus the need for this list of the top mistakes to be avoided in home landscape design. The mistakes covered range from miscalculations that have practical ramifications to more subtle errors that negatively impact your enjoyment of your home landscape design.

Chilly weather means frozen soil in many areas of the country. But just because the ground is solid, doesn't mean water can't seep in. It seems odd to water during the cold, blustery months, but winter plant loss of recent transplants (past year or two) is more often caused by lack of water than by freezing temperatures.

When plants go dormant, they still need moisture. The biochemical processes that make plants cold-tolerant continue producing high concentrations of dissolved sugars and amino acids in the winter. They need water to do this.

Landscaping can change the microclimate around a building by 20–25 degrees F. According to the US Department of Energy, energy-efficient landscaping can save up to 30% on home heating bills. Savings for cooling can be even more. Most people can save at least a few hundred dollars a year by properly reworking their yard. This can also increase the value of your home since buyers will pay more for a house with low utility bills. There are a number of things to consider including sunlight, water, soil and color of your house.