Turf management in Australia is at the forefront of a new era of sustainability and technology. With a growing focus on cost-effectiveness and environmental responsibility, the future of turf management is rapidly evolving. The need for qualified and skilled turf management professionals was identified as a priority skill area in the 2018-2021 Agriculture, Horticulture, Conservation and Land Management IRC Skills Forecast
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As professional horticulturists and landscapers, it’s essential to understand the pros and cons of using glyphosate in our industry. It’s the active ingredient in the popular herbicide Roundup, and the horticulture, agriculture and natural resource management sectors have used it to control weeds effectively and relatively safely for decades. However, despite its effectiveness in controlling weeds, its use has been
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Whether indoor or outdoor, all plants are potential prey for the right insect pest, and some plants are much more susceptible than others. Knowing how to identify and eradicate these pests is integral to ensuring our plants live long and happy lives while keeping their natural, beautiful aesthetic beauty. Due to the ideal conditions in indoor and ornamental gardens, insect
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A long, long time ago, a sea-algae, probably from the division called Charophyta, produced a new idea among the plant kingdom and crawled out of the sea to establish the lineage of land plants we know on Earth today.
There are a wide variety of weird and wonderful land-dwelling plants out there today that have all evolved from this pioneering organism, but we can break them up into 4 groups:
1. Bryophytes are considered the simplest of the four types, because they lack a full vascular system, true roots and true leaves. These include mosses and other small plants that grow in wet areas and use spores to reproduce.
Flowering plants, also known as angiosperms, can be broken into two groups: monocotyledons (monocots) and dicotyledons (dicots). You’ve probably heard these terms being discussed by gardeners, and if you don’t know the difference it can be intimidating to ask. Grasses, onion, monster and palm trees are all examples of monocots and if you look closely you will start to see
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Plants must find a way to move energy and water around in order to survive, and the most sophisticated way plants do this on Earth is by using specialty cells to form a “vascular system”. Plant cells form veins that are extremely efficient at sending supplies up to the incredible heights that plants can manage to reach and back down
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Plants aren’t always able to grow new shoots wherever they please. There usually needs to be an existing shoot, whether exposed in the axil of a leaf or hidden beneath their bark. Buds contain meristematic tissue that is necessary to grow new plant cells. A bud is a condensed shoot with tiny leaves and branch material including nodes and internodes
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Go outside, pluck a runner of grass from your back yard and take a close look at it. You will see that it is made of a system of connected “nodes” and “internodes”: the swollen linking points are called the nodes, and the skinny part connecting one node to another is called an internode. Usually if there is a bud,
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Meristematic tissue isn’t a term that’s usually thrown around by gardeners, however all plants do have this type of tissue and understanding its function helps us understand plants a little bit better. Plants create new tissue through “meristematic” cells that are similar to stem cells found in animals. The “meristem” of a plant is made of undifferentiated (meristematic) cells that
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Plants get sick for all sorts of reasons. Before we run in like a bull at a gate with the first health treatment that comes to mind, we need to dig a bit deeper and figure out what’s actually happening to our plants if we have any hope of helping them.
All plant health problems can be broken into two categories: biotic and abiotic. Biotic problems are those associated with biological phenomena such as insects, animals, bacteria, virus, fungi, etc. Abiotic problems are those associated with any other factor than a biological one, including water, sunlight, soil, weather, temperature, fertiliser, chemicals, etc.
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