This months meeting we had Ray Broughton as our guest speaker.
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Rays back ground is in horticulture with an extensive knowledge in this subject leaning more to the scientific side, his talk started with pest and diseases and how important it is to make sure any tools that are used in pruning are regularly sterilised as they can carry potentially many diseases some fatal to a plant.
On one of his slides he showed a conifer hedge that had been trimmed with a dirty hedge cutter and how brown patches of dying conifer developed this was a lethal infection on the hedge trimmer and the mature hedge had to be dug out and destroyed.
One of his recommendations on how to sterilise tools is with Tomato sauce which not only removes sap but kills bugs this did cause quite a bit of debate on this subject..
His talk included on how different hormones in a plant affect what it does and that timing pruning to specific times of the year to coincide with when say growth hormones are dominant causes the plant to bud back and not die out.
With certain pests and diseases how critical it is again to spray at certain times of the year to kill eggs or spores before they can infect trees etc..
His talk was very varied and very interesting and has made us think more about our timings and plant physiology and will certainly give some subjects for discussion at further meetings