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One pretty spring day about 12 years ago, she stopped in at her favorite coffee shop and, for the first time, wandered over to the nursery next door to savor the sunshine with her joe. Almost immediately, she spotted a striking blue flower just like one she had seen in her yard.

"I asked what it was and FANN member Bruce Turley, the owner, told me it was spiderwort. Then he started talking about native plants. I'd never thought about whether a plant was native or not," she says.

Put natives in the right places and they'll not only survive, they'll thrive — with little to no help from you, he told her. Before long, she contracted Wilcox Nursery to re-landscape a small section of a side yard with natives, pulling out the all the non-natives except for her beloved azaleas.
 
 
   
In sunny and warm Florida, insect control is in the works 52 weeks out of the year. And with 13 years of experience as the head grower of Riverview Flower Farm, Jeff Lewis knows a thing or two about integrated pest management (IPM), and he’s offering up some advice about how to make your customized IPM program as efficient as possible.
 
 
   
In integrated pest management’s four-pronged approach—biological, cultural, mechanical and chemical control—cultural control is one of the least-used strategies, typically because measures are difficult to test or demonstrate experimentally. But as a preventative approach to pest management, where some part of the growing environment is manipulated to make it less favorable for pest survival and reproduction, cultural control techniques, such as trap crops, mulches and crop rotation, could significantly reduce costs and pesticide usage.
 
Green Seasons Nursery
Florida Pine Straw Supply Co.
Advocacy
 
   
Terminally ill patients would have access to marijuana under a measure that would legalize full-strength pot for the first time in Florida if signed into law by Gov. Rick Scott.

The proposal, approved Monday by the Senate, would add cannabis to a list of experimental drugs available to patients diagnosed with illnesses that could result in death within a year without life-saving interventions.
 
 
   
Mowing less frequently along Florida’s highways boosts pollinator and wildflower biodiversity and would likely save money on gasoline and manpower, new University of Florida research shows.
University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences researchers are studying how to preserve pollinators and wildflowers along the state’s roadsides. Pollinators visit flowers, searching for food in the forms of nectar and pollen. During flower visits, pollinators may deposit pollen from a different flower. The plant uses the pollen to produce a fruit or seed. Many plants cannot reproduce without pollen carried to them by foraging pollinators.
 
Naylor Association Solutions
Naylor Association Solutions
Calendar of Events
March 2016
March 18 – NEW Deadline to submit entries for FNPS Design with Natives Landscape Awards Program You have more time, participate!
March 21 – First Day of Spring
March 31-April 1FANN’S 4th Annual Native Plant Show in Kissimmee, Central Florida

April 2016
April 1 Native Plant Show second day! Kissimmee FL
April 18-22 National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration, Coral Springs
April 22 – EARTH DAY

May 2016
May 4 Palm Beach International Agricultural Summit – educating the public about the intricate business of modern agriculture and its role in advancing our quality of life and the economy.
May 19-22Florida Native Plant Society Annual Conference in Daytona Beach

June 2016
June 16-18 – FNGLA Annual Convention in Orlando
June 20-26 – National Pollinator Week
June 21 – First day of Summer
 
Naylor Association Solutions
Naylor Association Solutions
Naylor Association Solutions
Industry Updates
 
   
You can save up to $50 per day on CEU classes for horticulture, landscape & restoration industry professionals when you sign up by March 25. This year’s Native Plant Show features more than 20 hours of continuing education for horticulture, landscape, and environmental professionals seeking to select, use and maintain native plants for restoration of urban and wild habitats.
 
 
   
Floridians say the state’s water resources are just as important as healthcare and the economy, according to researchers from the UF/IFAS Center for Public Issues Education in Agriculture and Natural Resources.

PIE Center researchers presented 523 state residents with a list of 10 issues. Only two-tenths of a percent separated what the respondents tagged as the three most critical issues. When asked to describe the significance of each issue between "not at all important" and "extremely important," 81.5 percent of Floridians deemed healthcare highly or extremely important, compared to water at 81.4 percent and the economy at 81.3 percent. Fifty-two percent of Floridians believed that water was an extremely important issue.
 
 
   
This report serves as a first installment in the findings from the online focus groups as the first portion of our project with Flowers Canada entitled, "Keeping the Interest in Gardening Alive!" This is the first step in the project. Subsequent steps are to (b) identify marketing campaigns, (c) develop campaigns with Ontario garden retailers for spring 2016, (d) measure impacts of those campaigns in summer 2016, and (e) craft a marketing handbook with the information collected from the project by the end of summer 2016.
 
 
   
We’ve reached the point where some sort of online presence is non-negotiable for businesses. It’s how people find you, plain and simple. The Internet can be more than a digital yellow pages ad, though. Have you been thinking about dipping your toe in the world of ecommerce? For many brick-and-mortar garden centers, online sales provide an additional source of income. Deciding to add an additional sales channel is not necessarily a no-brainer, though. Is an online store the key to a river of money flowing into your bank account during the off season or a thicket of thorns best left for someone else to hack through? The short answer is: it depends. Here’s the long answer.
 
 
   
A global epidemic is hitting Florida honeybees, and it could affect your kitchen table.

The virus, called deformed wing virus, or DWV, is man-made and driven by European populations of the honeybee, according to a recent study.
 
 
   
Any new studio reference book needs be beautifully illustrated. In this respect, Harvard University landscape architecture professor Niall Kirkwood, FASLA, and landscape architect Kate Kennen, ASLA, don’t disappoint with Phyto: Principles and Resources for Site Remediation and Landscape Design. But while we all like to look at beautifully-crafted, well-curated imagery, that’s not the point. This book is illuminating, a careful and coherent, critical and constructive analysis of the Phytoremediation movement, which calls for using plants to remove toxic chemicals, metals, and other contaminants from the environment.
 
 

 

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