Summit County Master Gardeners

09/01/2026

Here is your link to this month’s The Root newsletter! Happy September!! 🍂🍁

Email from Summit County Master Gardeners Getting to the Root of it with the Summit County Master Gardeners Volume 7 Issue 9 | September 2026 We're nuts about acorns! The Root of It newsletter ends wi

09/01/2026

"Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas." - Elizabeth Murray. Artist: Claude Monet 1880

09/01/2026

08/30/2026

08/30/2026

💛 There are more than 20 species of goldenrod in Ohio (genus: solidago and/or Oligoneuron). We're entering the golden season where you can see and appreciate them everywhere.

💛 But they're not just gorgeous - they also provide critical late season food for many species, supporting biodiversity everywhere they appear!

A few key reminders:
(1) they're not the source of anyone's fall allergies. They need pollinators to move their pollen around - it's too heavy to be sent out on the wind and be bothering you!
(2) some of them can be aggressive in garden settings - species like canada goldenrod (solidago canadensis) are adapted to quickly colonize disturbed spaces. They can't help it that sometimes our gardens have open space to sneak into! You can add a less aggressive species to your garden to provide goldenrod benefits to pollinators too!

08/28/2026

🦋Wildflower Weds: gigantic summer wildflower

🌼Welcome back to Wildflower Wednesday! 🌺This week we’re featuring hollow-stemmed joe-pye w**d (Eutrochium fistulosum). A giant summer wildflower, in prime conditions, can grow to 12 ft. tall! 😳

🌿This native species of joe-pye w**d features large clumps of stems with aesthetically whorled leaves and large terminal domed flowerheads that are often covered in pollinators. 🦋 It’s especially beloved by tiger and black swallowtails!

🌳Predominately found in the southern and eastern halves of the state, hollow-stemmed joe-pye w**d prefers moist soils in sunny habitats like marshes, fields, forest edges, roadsides, and ditches.🌺 In fact, just about any rural forested roadside in Ohio’s unglaciated region is bound to feature this wildflower come late summer. 😎

🌼Ohio is home to two other native species of joe-pye w**d: spotted joe-pye w**d (E. maculatum), and sweet joe-pye w**d (E. purpureum).🌿 A shorter plant, spotted joe-pye w**d has distinctly spotted stems and blooms in sunny wetlands. 🌳Sweet joe-pye w**d is a woodland species, much shorter in stature and features pale pink-white flowers.

🧐Learn more about Ohio’s wildflowers at naturalareas.ohiodnr.gov

08/28/2026

𝐅𝐞𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐃𝐫𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐲? 😎

The Botanist in the Kitchen blog does a deep dive describing some of our favorite summer fruits ...

>>It’s August, and we are keeping things easy with a profile of peaches, the most straightforward of all the rose family fruits in our kitchen. In our last two newsletters, we tangled with strawberries and brambles, deceptive fruits that are definitely not “berries.” But peaches and other stone fruits like cherries, nectarines, and apricots, fit the most basic definition of a fruit: the mature, seed-bearing o***y of a flower. They don’t include any other floral parts, as strawberries and apples do, and they aren’t a collection of small fruits pretending to be one giant fruit, as raspberries are. Morphologically speaking, they are pretty basic.

08/28/2026

𝐓𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐨 𝐅𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐲 𝐓𝐫𝐞𝐞

Cool set of informative, interactive pages and facts about our favorite big berry ...

>>DNA settled a 250-year argument: tomatoes sit deep inside the genus Solanum, sister to the potatoes. Linnaeus named the tomato Solanum lycopersicum in 1753 and was right the first time. Its whole family lives in western South America — Andean slopes, coastal fog deserts, cloud forests, and the Galápagos — and by wild-tomato standards, everything about your garden plant is exotic: the red fruit, the self-pollinating flower, the annual lifestyle, even its existence outside South America.

08/26/2026

🥀 Statewide population surveys estimate we have 300,000 individual ruby-throated hummingbirds, with the strongest populations in the northern areas of the Ohio Hills. Lower densities are likely linked to the availability of forest habitat for nesting and food resources.