The final presentation of the Four Seasons Gardening Horticulture Series will be held Tuesday, Oct. 24 at 1 p.m. and repeated on Thursday, Oct. 26 at 7 p.m.

How Insecticides and Miticides Work. Raymond Cloyd, U of I Extension specialist in ornamental entomology, will present the program. He will explain how these pesticides kill plant-feeding insects and mites and offer guidelines on effectively and safely using chemical control products.

All programs will be held in both the Jo Daviess and Carroll County extension offices. Advance registration is requested and there is a $3. charge. To register, call the Jo Daviess County office at 815-858-2273 and in Carroll County call 815-244-9444.

The programs use the University of Illinois Extension telenet system and local computer PowerPoint presentations, allowing live discussion between the instructor and gardeners throughout the state.

Freeport will be the site of the 2007 Master Gardener training for residents of Jo Daviess and Carroll Counties. Classes meet on Fridays beginning January 26 through March 30 from 9 a.m. until 3:30 p.m.

Master Gardeners are people of all ages and walks of life who share a common interest in gardening and a willingness to share their knowledge with others. The classes, all taught by University of Illinois Extension staff members, focus on specific topics each week such as Botany, Soil, Woody Ornamentals, and Vegetables to name a few. After the training, the Master Gardener Interns volunteer 60 hours of service to their county program in order to become an Active, Certified Master Gardener. The 60 hours of service can be completed in one or two years depending upon the individual's schedule.

After the initial internship program, MGs are required to volunteer 30 hours a year to remain on active status.

The program is offered through the University of Illinois Extension. There are over 3000 MGs in the state serving in most of the counties.

One of the volunteer activities includes working at the Help Desk during which MGs help find solutions to gardener's questions. Master Gardeners are NOT expected to know everything, your training will teach you that is impossible, but you will receive the resource information to find the answers locally for commonly asked questions and call upon the U of I Horticulture experts for the more difficult questions.

Other volunteer opportunities are facilitating the Four Seasons Gardening Telenet series, helping plan for garden walks and working during them, Food Pantry gardens, assisting residents of nursing homes with their gardening projects, making presentations, or working on beautification projects.

If you like to garden, and especially if you like to garden and share of yourself to "help others learn to grow", you are the ideal candidate for the Master Gardener Program.

To learn more and receive an application form, contact your local county office (Jo Daviess, 815-858-2273; Carroll, 815-244-9444) by November 3.

Candace Crossley and Lori McIntyre, both of Jo Daviess County, were two of the Illinois Master Gardeners who were honored for individual awards at the state annual convention in Moline on September 8, 2006. State Outstanding Master Gardener Award winners actively volunteered in the University of Illinois Extension Master Gardener program, completed over 120 hours of service beyond their internship and were nominated for outstanding service by their extension unit director, horticulture educator, or Master Gardener coordinator.

Crossley has been instrumental and provided leadership in four community projects: The Galena Steps Beautification Project (planting 300 plants on steep terrain!); the period gardens at the Galena Museum, the food pantry Plant-A-Row garden at the Galena Museum and the Galena Triangle Beautification Project.

McIntyre was the chairperson for the 2004 Hort Heaven Workshop and fundraiser. She was active in the growing and planting of over 300 perennials for the Galena Steps Project. She has also played a huge role in the Heritage Vegetable Garden at the History Museum in Galena, where produce is donated to the local food pantry.

Over the past several years, this award has been earned by various Jo-Carroll Unit Master Gardeners including Mildred Siedenburg, Madelynn Wilharm, Patt Caldwell and Carole Pousar.

In 2003 a group of Jo Daviess County Master Gardeners received the State Teamwork Award for their participation in the planning and planting of the initial gardens at the Galena Historic Museum, a program that has obviously continued through the years.

Maggie Friedenbach, Recycling and Conservation Recycling Project Coordinator for the Jo-Carroll Solid Waste Agency, will be available to answer your questions on composting and recycling from 1 to 4 p.m. at the University of Illinois Extension office in Elizabeth on Tuesday, Nov. 7.

At 2 p.m. that afternoon, she will give a slide presentation on backyard composting.

So bring your recycling questions and concerns, have a cup of coffee, and learn about composting those autumn leaves. Composting bins and kitchen scrap collection containers will be available for purchase. The Elizabeth office is located at 204 S. Vine.

Call 815-858-2273 with questions regarding the afternoon's activities or to sign up for the compost slide program.

A similar program is planned for Carroll County at a later date.

Apply winter mulches to protect perennial flower plantings from alternating freezing and thawing cycles over the winter. Apply a 3-4 inch layer of mulch in late November when the plants have gone dormant. Straw, wood chips, evergreen boughs, pine needles and shredded leaves make good winter mulches.

Remove soil from terra cotta containers. These containers can crack when filled with soil in our cold winter temperatures. Plastic and wooden containers are much less likely to crack.

Reminder...clean your birdfeeders

Clean your birdfeeders in preparation for the winter bird feeding season. Wash feeders with hot, soapy water and soak and rinse with a solution of one part liquid household bleach in nine parts of warm water. Clean feeders twice a month during the winter.

We are expecting a large emergence of periodical cicada in northern Illinois next spring. Cicadas are expected to emerge north of a line from northern Iroquois County on the east, dipping southward to northern Sangamon County in the center of the state, and then rising northward to Moline and the other Quad Cities on the west. This is the Northern Illinois Brood, also known as Marlatt's XIII brood. They last emerged 17 years ago, in 1990.

Brown, 1-inch-long nymphs emerge from the soil in late May, climb up the trunks of trees and other vertical objects and grab onto the bark; adults emerge from a split made along the back. Adults harden and darken into 1-1/2-inch-long black insects with red eyes. They have clear wings with orange veins. Males sing to attract females, filling the air with a wonderful trill or obnoxious noise, depending on your attitude.

This brood has the reputation for the largest emergence of cicadas known anywhere. This is due to the size of the emergence and the research and subsequent reporting over the years by entomologists Monte Lloyd and Henry Dybas at the Field Museum in Chicago. During the 1956 emergence, they counted an average of 311 nymphal emergence holes per square yard of ground in a forested floodplain near Chicago. This translates to 1-1/2 million cicadas per acre. In upland sites, they recorded 27 emergence holes per square yard, translating to about 133,000 per acre. This number is more typical of emergence numbers but is still a tremendous number of insects. For comparison, a city block contains about 3-1/2 acres.

When the cicadas start dying and dropping from the trees later in the spring, there are large numbers on the ground, and the odor from their rotting bodies is very noticeable. I have received reports from people in the Chicago area using snow shovels to clear their sidewalks of the dead cicadas in 1990.

More will be written about the periodical cicada emergence next spring in this newsletter. The reason for this article is to warn against planting small trees in heavy-emergence areas this fall and next spring.

After mating, the female cicadas use their ovipositor, or egg-laying device, to slice several inch-long crevices in twigs and branches to lay their eggs. They prefer twigs and branches from about ¼ to 1-1/2 inches in diameter. The leaves past this damage typically wilt and die, and the twigs and branches commonly snap off in the wind. Small transplanted trees, particularly fruit trees, commonly have a trunk diameter small enough that egg slits are made in the trunk, resulting in the tree snapping off.

Insecticide applications kill huge numbers of visiting cicadas, but analysis of egg-slit trunk damage shows little difference between treated and untreated research plots. In fact, Fredric Miller found similar results in insecticide efficacy research conducted in the Chicago area in 1990. The only way to protect small trees from serious damage in a heavy emergence area is to protect the trunk with screening or other material. This is expensive in materials and labor. It is much better to delay small-tree planting for a year or install larger stock, preferably those with a trunk diameter of at least 2-1/2 inches.

Emergence of periodical cicadas is not heavy in many areas, so tree planting can continue in those areas. These areas are very predictable. The memories of people living in particular areas during the 1990 emergence are very useful. Similarly, local newspaper accounts can be useful.

Some thought about periodical cicadas and their needs can also help. Realize that these insects require a steady supply of sap-supplying tree and shrub roots for 17 years. Housing developments in which all trees and shrubs were removed prior to building will have few cicadas because the nymphs died when the trees were removed. Similarly, housing developments in areas that were originally farm fields or prairie will have few cicadas due to the lack of trees. The practice of bulldozing all trees off of a housing development site has been common only since the 1960s, so older housing developments probably will have large numbers of cicadas.

Another consideration is the long generation time of periodical cicadas. We are not used to thinking of insect life cycles longer than one year. Only nine generations of periodical cicadas ago, Abraham Lincoln was practicing law in Illinois prior to the Civil War. Periodical cicadas apparently move only about ½ mile during each emergence, so immigration into new areas is relatively slow. During the intervening time, periodical cicadas have probably spread only about 5 miles. Consider what northern Illinois was like before the 1900s. Large areas of prairie were present that had periodic prairie fires, which killed many trees. With prevailing west winds, large prairie fires would have moved east with the wind. Rivers that run roughly north to south, such as the Fox, Des Plaines, Illinois, Rock, and Mississippi Rivers would have functioned as firebreaks. Trees would have survived much longer on the east sides of these rivers, and so would the periodical cicadas. As a result, we see higher populations of periodical cicadas in East Peoria than in Peoria, Rockford east of the Rock River, and similarly along other rivers.

Keep these in mind as you plan your tree-planting activities and look forward to this great biological event that will occur next spring.

- Phil Nixon, U of I