Horticulture Resources
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Landscape professionals must consider many factors when choosing the right flowering annuals to plant for a particular location. Primary considerations include high visual impact, consistent bloom for color, foliage for texture and color, sun exposure, growth habit and low-water tolerance. Cost plays an important role as well. Many landscapers typically choose common annual ornamentals and tropical perennials marketed as annuals. Particular species and cultivars tend to be favored over others for a variety of reasons; these are the bread-and-butter plants, such as cool-season pansies and warm-season petunias. Because of this, staple plants tend to be planted year after year, often in the same bed – a recipe for disease build-up, pesticide applications, loss of plants, plant replacement, dissatisfied customers, and ultimately, lower profit margins. This publication explains how to effectively use crop rotation and cultural practices to reduce disease incidence in seasonal color beds.
Jean Williams-Woodward and Bodie V. Pennisi
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Temperatures affects plant growth and distribution. This publication explains how low temperatures (chilling and freezing) affect plant growth in production greenhouses, nurseries, and landscapes. These three environments have different causes and effects, each requiring unique responses to avoid injury. This publication outlines different techniques that can be used to avoid cold injury to plants.
Bodie V. Pennisi, Paul A. Thomas, and Eric Stallknecht
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Shoot thinning is the first seasonal canopy management practice in wine grape vineyards, but shoot thinning is not implemented in muscadine vineyards. Failure to shoot thin results in a highly congested canopy characterized by reduced air flow, high humidity, and extended damp periods. Muscadines can generally tolerate such conditions without adverse effects. Wine grapes grown in crowded fruit zones, however, will experience excessive disease incidence and severity—especially in the humid Southeastern U.S. Shoot thinning is therefore a necessary canopy management practice in wine grape vineyards in Georgia and other Southeastern states.
Timothy Coolong and Cain Hickey
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Alton N Sparks, Laurel Dunn, Andre Luiz Biscaia Ribeiro da Silva, and Govindaraj Dev Kumar
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This bulletin contains guidelines to determine irrigation scheduling for vegetable production in Georgia. Irrigation scheduling varies with water management and growers may require different technologies to properly manage water application. This information is supplied to help irrigation managers schedule and operate irrigation systems to optimal capacity, applying water precisely to the crop for maximum effectiveness and high efficiency.
Juan Carlos Diaz-Perez and Timothy Coolong
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This resource describes the process of saving seeds, particularly for heirloom varieties in the Georgia garden. This guide is useful for both home gardens and school or community gardens.
Becky Griffin, Ashley Hoppers, Clark MacAllister, Jacob Williams, and Rosann Kent
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Results from this study are preliminary, as only 2 years of data have been collected. Research over longer periods of time will be more revealing about how mechanical pruning will impact the perennial crop yield and health of the vineyard. Mechanical pruning is an option for dormant pruning ‘Carlos’ in situations where labor is unreliable and/or there is a low labor-to-acreage ratio which precludes the ability to finish pruning in the dormant period (December through March).
Concerns remain regarding the inaccuracy of mechanical pruning and the resultant amount of diseased and unproductive grapevine wood that remains in the canopy. It therefore may be a good practice to manually prune blocks of the vineyard on a recurring basis in order to reduce canopy congestion and the potential for disease buildup. Mechanical pruning may not be best practice in fresh-market muscadine cultivars, particularly those that produce bronze fruit that are less tolerant of rots and defects than purple fruit.
Mechanical pruning ‘Carlos’ and ‘Noble’ vineyards is worth consideration as these popular juice muscadine cultivars are vigorous and productive and may therefore sustain perennial health under high bud densities. Because of the preliminary nature of this report, it is recommended that mechanical, or “minimal” pruning, be trialed in vineyard blocks or sections before it is widely implemented with confidence.
Alicia Holloway
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This publication is an introduction to growing industrial hemp for fiber production in Georgia. While not exhaustive, it outlines some of the major production challenges in growing this crop in the Southeastern U.S.
Timothy Coolong and Eric Elsner
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This report provides research and extension results for trials conducted by the University of Georgia Vegetable Team and its collaborators in 2021. Contributing authors include county and regional faculty as well as specialists from UGA’s horticulture, plant pathology, crop and soil sciences, and entomology departments. All research has been supported by the Georgia Vegetable Commodity Commission.
Timothy Coolong
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