Happenings June 2023

June 2023

Forgiveness is linked to better mental and physical health

Curious how to Help our Local Food System?

Growing your own Beautiful Cut Flowers

In the Lab: Pachysandra Woes

CCE Putnam County's 2nd Annual Duck Derby - Adopt A Duck Today!

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Forgiveness is linked to better mental and physical health

Carolyn Penniman, Michigan State University Extension

Research has shown a powerful connection between forgiving others and our own wellbeing.

A growing body of research on forgiveness is finding that people who forgive are more likely than the general population to have fewer episodes of depression, lower blood pressure, fewer stress-related health issues, better immune system function and lower rates of heart disease.

Fred Luskin, Ph.D., is a practicing psychologist, the director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects, and a senior consultant in health promotion at Stanford University. He is also the author of Forgive for Good: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness, in which he offers a nine step forgiveness method that helps people move from being a victim, to a life of health and wellbeing. They are:

1. Know exactly how you feel about what happened and be able to articulate what about the situation is not OK. Then, tell someone you trust about your experience.
2. Make a commitment to yourself to do what you have to do to feel better. Forgiveness is for you and not for anyone else.
3. Forgiveness does not necessarily mean reconciliation with the person that hurt you, or excusing their action. Forgiveness can be defined as the “peace and understanding that comes from blaming that which has hurt you less, taking the life experience less personally, and changing your grievance story.”
4. Get the right perspective on what is happening. Recognize that your primary distress is coming from the hurt feelings, thoughts and physical upset you are suffering now, not what offended you or hurt you two minutes – or 10 years – ago. Forgiveness helps to heal those hurt feelings.
5. At the moment you feel upset, practice a simple stress management technique to soothe your body’s flight or fight response.
6. Give up expecting things from other people, or your life, that they do not choose to give you. Recognize the “unenforceable rules” you have in expectations about how you or other people must behave. Remind yourself that you can hope for health, love, peace and prosperity and work hard to get them.
7. Put your energy into looking for another way to get your positive goals met than through the experience that has hurt you. Instead of mentally replaying your hurt, seek out new ways to get what you want.
8. Remember that a life well lived is your best revenge. Instead of focusing on your wounded feelings, and thereby giving the person who caused you pain power over you, learn to look for the love, beauty, and kindness around you. Forgiveness is about personal power.
9. Amend your grievance story to remind you of the heroic choice to forgive.

The practice of forgiveness has been shown to reduce anger, hurt, depression and stress, and leads to greater feelings of hope, peace, compassion, and self-confidence. Michigan State University Extension says that practicing forgiveness leads to healthy relationships as well as improved physical health and a positive attitude.

This article was published by Michigan State University Extension, May 07, 2013. https://extension.msu.edu.

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Curious how to Help our Local Food System?

We are seeking your assistance to support our growing community food systems initiatives! Our most significant need is transportation - from the farms to the kitchen - and - from the kitchen to the freezer in senior centers and places like public libraries. A regular two-hour commitment will supply meals directly to those in need. Click here to fill out the interest form.

A community food system encompasses sustainable food production, processing, distribution, consumption, and waste management, while also providing opportunities to access local foods. Most importantly, it involves serving residents who are most impacted by current inequities and creating a new, community-oriented, self-reliant food system.

Putnam County is home to a significant number of individuals who live paycheck to paycheck, with approximately one in three residents facing this challenge. Our primary objective is to ensure that everyone has access to nutritious and culturally relevant foods, regardless of their economic circumstances.

If you share our passion for enhancing our community's food system and would like to contribute, we invite you to fill out the interest form by clicking here. Please remember to select "Food Systems" as your area of interest.

Your involvement can have a profound impact on the lives of our neighbors, promoting food security and economic resilience. Thank you!

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Growing your own Beautiful Cut Flowers

A floral arrangement or bouquet, arranged carefully or romantically (the nice word for chaotic) brings color, scent, and texture close. We can experience nature within the busy confines of our day. How nice would it be to have the pride of growing those flowers yourself? If you have garden space or a container garden, you can grow cutting flower to brighten your home or office.

Growing cut flowers

If you have a garden or access to a wild landscape, you can cut and make bouquets from the materials you find; the natural world provides so many beautiful options. To expand those options, gardeners plant annuals (plants that live only one season) and perennials (plants that come back year after year), not only for the natural beauty they provide in the landscape, but for cutting and arranging. How many of those flowers are you willing to cut? Another option is to plant a garden, much like you plant a vegetable garden, strictly for the purpose of harvesting flowers. Some varieties and types are best for this use (see sidebar for a list), but there are a few other things to consider before embarking on cut flower gardening.

Support systems

While you can certainly cut any flower from your garden or landscape, ideal cut flowers have stems long enough to fit well in vases. Those same tall stems also lead to the primary complication of a cut flower garden: the need to stake the stems upright or provide a grid for supports. If not staked, heavy rains and winds, along with gravity, will lead to broken, floppy stems and muddy faces.

Individual staking can be a hassle and is recommended only for a few species, like Dahlias. For most plants in your cut flower garden, stake-and-string grid systems can support most of the flowers in your garden. Alternately, rows with poles on the ends, strung with wires running between, allow for a variety of plants to be tethered to the wires to keep them from flopping.

What’s in a name?

Many of the plant species in the provided list often have varieties chosen for either short stout stems (garden plants) or tall stems (cut flowers). For example, garden favorites like zinnias ‘profusion’ and snapdragons ‘sonnet’ series were developed for the garden and have short self-supporting stems. Snapdragon ‘Rocket’ series and Zinnia ‘Cut-and-come-again’ were chosen for their longer stems better suited to the middle of the flower border or for cut flower gardens. The variety names may give you a hint as to the size or shape of the plant at maturity. As you choose plants, take a moment to read the plant tag, or to look up the variety on your smartphone to be sure you have the right plant for the right place.

A riot of color?

Chances are you have favorite flowers or color preferences. Maybe chartreuse works best with your table linens or a painting on the wall? As you choose the plants for your cut flower garden, keep these preferences in mind. There are so many varieties to choose from that will do the trick. Picking the flowers that thrill you is the easy part--a deep-maroon sunflower for example--but don’t forget “filler” flowers or foliage. These are usually small, or finely textured but equally important. They make flower arranging a pleasure, adding the complementary or contrasting colors and providing additional structure to the bouquet itself.

Protection

Deer and Woodchuck are the biggest threats to your plants. Tall tender foliage and succulent flower buds may tempt them in closer, and once they have discovered your garden you may have a hard time keeping them away. Container gardens on decks can thwart some herbivores. For flower beds, chances are you’ll need a stronger defense system. Repellents that include putrescent egg solids work very well for deer and are barely detectable, once dried, to the human nose. Sturdy fencing is always the more dependable critter deterrent.

Sources:

Photos - 

• Corn Cockles and Pot Marigolds.Chris Penny via Flickr under CC
• Zinnia by Swallowtail Garden Seeds. under CC SA
  

Cornell Garden-based Learning, Home Gardening Flower Growing Guides:

http://www.gardening.cornell.edu/homegardening/index.html

Cornell High Tunnels, Soil Health and Fertility, Cut Flowers:

http://blogs.cornell.edu/hightunnels/flowers/cut-flowers/

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In the Lab: Pachysandra Woes

By Cynthia Crossen

If there was an award for the plant that has worried Putnam County gardeners most this spring, the easy winner would be the so-called “low maintenance” pachysandra.

Pachysandra terminalis, sometimes called Japanese spurge, is an evergreen ground cover that spreads by rhizomes to form a dense carpet of dark green foliage. It needs little tending, and best of all, it loves shade–in fact, if it’s been growing under a tree and the tree goes down, the pachysandra will suffer from too much light.

In the past couple of months, callers to the MGV garden helpline have reported that large patches of their beloved pachysandra, which have been problem-free for years, are now wilting or dying. What can they do?

The culprit is almost always Volutella, an opportunistic fungus that preys on plants that have been stressed by, among other things, winter injury, insect infestation or drought–like the one we had last year. Once present, the fungal spores are easily dispersed by splashing water, wind or pruning tools.

Infected plants develop small brown spots on the foliage and stems, which grow to form larger blotches. The infected foliage wilts and dies but often remains on the plant. Plants usually die in patches, making circular patterns in the bed.

Sadly, nothing will bring those dead plants back to life–they must be removed and buried or bagged for trash. For plants that are still healthy, an approved fungicide may be used–the details are here: plantclinic.cornell.edu/factsheets/pachysandraleafblight.pdf

Boxwood is also susceptible to Volutella blight, and for some of the same reasons–the plants have been weakened, often by lack of air circulation and high humidity. You can learn about this disease and other problems with boxwood here:

ccesuffolk.org/resources/photographic-guide-of-boxwood-pests-diseases-on-long-island

Low maintenance doesn’t mean no maintenance–pachysandra should be watered during droughts, regularly fertilized and occasionally thinned to keep air circulating. But your reward? You’re made in the shade.

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CCE Putnam County's 2nd Annual Duck Derby - Adopt A Duck Today!

Calling All Quack Ups!

Interested in volunteering for Cornell Cooperative Extension, but don’t want a lengthy commitment? How about working on the Duck Derby committee? The Duck Derby is the culminating event at the Putnam County Country Fest and 4-H Showcase.

If you have ideas to share, time to work as a team and ducks are your spirit animal too, reach out to Stefanie at sh379@cornell.edu and find out how you can get involved. ADOPT A DUCK TODAY!

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Last updated June 1, 2023