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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 19, 1979)
ajnjnj ^ii i No-vember 13. 19V3—The Agriculturist Page 3 Photo bv Beckv Leake Texas A&M Regent Joe H. Reynolds of Hous- the center, holds the bull named CCR ton donated this Polled Hereford bull to the Beaumode 695. He weighs 1,920 pounds and is beef cattle section of the Animal Science De- valued at $35,000. He will be used as herd sire, partment. John Mauer, one of the directors of Use of native plants Old concept returns to landscape Experienced man shares wisdom By BONNIE HELWIG By MARY C. BECKER Dried sumac leaves with a red beard of berries hung on the wall behind the desk. Staghorn ferns, part of Austin Stocktons doctoral re search, sat under a growing light. Someone from the plant science de partment interrupted to ask if Stock- ton wanted to identify - a plant that arrived in the mail. Stockton shook out a couple dry leaves and a sprig of small, hard brown fruits. As part of his job, he answers identification requests. In a few seconds, he glanced at it and identified it as a Calleryana pear. “A lot of time, the top might have died around an old farmhouse or something. The understock kept growing and people want to know what the devil they are,” he ex plained. The note in the box read: “It came from Mill Creek Park. It was an old homesite. 1 figure it was a grafted pear that has reverted back to what it was grafted from. Could that be pos sible?” “Yep, that is exactly what it is,” Stockton confirmed. Besides playing plant detective, Stockton does research with Dr. Ed McWilliams on native plants. Stock- ton sees a trend toward using more native plants in home landscaping. Using native plants for home land scaping is not a new concept, accord ing to Stockton. Pioneers would often uproot sycamores from the riverbank to soften the outlines of their stark cabins. Later when it became easier to buy cuttings, seeds, or plants from mail catalogs and nurseries, native plants were passed over in favor of exotics from Japan or novelties. Few nurseries produce plants na tive to a region. It is a matter of supply and demand and the nursery cannot produce unless a demand comes from the public. The land scapers cannot use the plants if none are available. The public can not be aware of the possibilities if the plants are not used. “It’s sort of a crazy cycle,” Stock- ton explained. “We don’t have all the information to properly progagate our good native plants to offer the retailer or the general public through retail outlets. “We don’t have the general public educated to the extent of what they can grow mat is native and what would look good in their landscape and be easy to maintain. “We don’t really have all the land scape architects aware of the native material that could be used. “Then there is just the overall public acceptance of whether they prefer the waxleaf ligustrum or a hawthome. They might prefer the hawthome if they could see the two in the nursery. Right now the hawth ome is not there as often as the ligus trum, so we are right back where we started,” he pointed out. Some homebuilders leave the na tive plants on their lots, moving them to the desired location. Another alternative is to uproot and transplant from private property af ter securing the owner’s permission. Stockton advised against people digging up plants indiscriminately. “Most people can’t tell the differ ence between hawthome, yaupon and American beauty bush. . . or poison ivy.” “It really isn’t that difficult, but you have to be patient,” Stockton said. “Then people ought to be pa tient with landscaping in general. However, the overall temptation is to come in and try to do everything in one season. “If you can come up with the best way to propogate, then you come up with uniform nursery stock the pro ducer can get to the retailer. If the retailer has it available, then it can be utilized by the landscape architect or whoever wants to,” Stockton explained. “What it all goes back to is what we need to know to propagate these plants effectively and uniformly. Be cause you can’t sell 50 containers of sophora secundiflora (Texas moun tain laurel) and have one plant 6 in ches tall and the next one a foot and a half.” Soil conditions also dictate what survives. Stockton rated the Brazos area’s soils as “pretty good to ex tremely sorry.” “Some yards will have a fairly good deep soil in the front, and you go to the backyard and it’s solid clay 2-3 inches in the topsoil. So there aren’t any generalizations you can make ab out Brazos county. Native plants are better adapted to the area, they are better suited to the soil and climate, and are more disease and insect resistant, Stock- ton said. He concluded that, “Its possible to save money and effort and still have an attractive landscape.” BATTALION CLASSIFIED PULLS! Call 845-2611 From the crown of his stetson to the tip of his boots, he is 100 percent “cowman.” With his rusty voice, he tells stor ies of ranching experiences with a sense of humor that only a weath ered cattleman would have. His handshake is powerful, his eyes are piercing and his smile is sincere and warm as he visits with students on the Texas A&M Univer sity campus each day. Frank Litterst, an animal science instructor, was not born the son of a legendary Texas rancher as one might expect, but his incurable love for cattle was spurred by an uncle, who was a cowboy and later gave Litterst his start in the beef industry. Litterst, 57, graduated from Texas A&M in 1935 and has spent his life working in the cattle business or closely related areas such as teaching undergraduate beef cattle produc tion for the past four years at Texas A&M. He calls Buda, in the Texas Hill Country near San Marcos, his native home, although he has lived in sev eral regions of Texas as a rancher and a feed salesman. Litterst said he always wanted to move back to Texas A&M since his college days. “When I was ranching near Hous ton, I used to drive to A&M just to watch the football team practice.” In 1961, he and his family moved to College Station and he joined the agricultural education department as a beef cattle specialist in the adult education short course program. Litterst spent the next 10 years traveling a total of 325,000 miles, presenting four-day beef cattle pro duction short courses in 2,400 Texas towns to audiences totaling 12,000 ranchers. He joined the animal science fa culty in 1975 and became manager of the beef cattle center and instructor of Animal Science 406, the beef cat tle production course. As a major project in Animal Sci ence 406, the students must create their own dream” ranch, furnish it with equipment and stock and make a profit after five years of operation. I developed this project to give the student a chance to draw up a dream ranch that many of them will never have, or that I never had either,” he said. This is a senior level course, and a wrap-up of all the things that the student should have learned, such as nutrition, feeds and feeding and management.” Litterst said that he stresses many old-fashioned ideas in his class that once were tradition in the cattle business. I try' to emphasize the import ance of integrity, where a man’s work is his bond,” he said. This is a wonderful but complete business, and wisdom is just as im portant as education and knowledge. It takes some people quite a while to understand how complex it really is, and that s why some people are more successful at it than others.” Litterst said he was worried about the adjustment from teaching adults for 10 years to teaching college stu dents, when he first began in the animal science department. “My biggest problem now is that I get too attached to the students. 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