Gardener Extraordinaire Ciscoe Morris Visits EvCC

Ciscoe Morris, of “Gardening with Ciscoe” fame, visited EvCC today at 1:00 p.m. in the Gray Wolf plaza as a part of the celebration of Earth Week.

Morris brought excellent gardening advice to students and staff, with a focus on getting rid of garden pests in an environmentally friendly way. He encouraged using various strategies to deal with pests in your garden, including cultural pest control and mechanical pest control.

Ciscoe Morris, outside in the Gray Wolf plaza, explains
how to use environmentally friendly pest control techniques. 

“Cultural pest control means you grow the plants right in the first place,” said Morris. “Soil is the name of the game. If you’ve got great soil, you can do anything.”

Morris suggested ways to test soil to make sure it is good for planting, and suggested that if your soil isn’t good, you should build a berm of good soil to plant on top of.

“The other part about cultural care is, you wanna buy plants that are resistant to pests in our area,” said Morris.

If you buy plants, such as spot-resistant roses, that aren’t affected by pests, then you can avoid using harmful pesticides, suggested Morris. Predatory bugs can also be helpful to get rid of bugs that eat plants.

“Mama nature made the good bugs fast to catch the stupid bugs,” said Morris.

Students, staff, and community members came
to learn gardening techniques from Morris.

He then went on to explain different ways of mechanical pest control that aren’t harmful to the environment or poisonous to animals. One idea to get rid of slugs is to put a half inch to an inch of beer into a container with holes near the top of the lid. Slugs are attracted to the beer, but die when they drink too much.

“You’re asking slugs to stop at happy hour on the way to the restaurant,” exclaimed Morris. “Mechanical pest control is the most fun kind of control because it’s the ‘eek,’ ‘squish,’ and ‘kersplash’ kind.” 

Once the slugs have had too much to drink, Morris suggested pouring the slugs and leftover beer into the soil and burying it. Plant something there and it’ll grow like crazy, he said.

Morris followed up the gardening session with a time for question and answer. 

Participate in tomorrow’s Earth Day event, sustainable art competition judging in the White Horse hall critique space at 1 p.m.

Story by Lily Haight