Flying colors

Learn more about Messenger:

Messenger is sold in two sizes. A $9.98 package contains three single packets – each packet makes 1 gallon of solution and covers up to 1,000 square feet. The $19.98 size contains three packets that each produces three gallons and covers up to 3,000 square feet. Messenger is sold at specialty garden centers or available through www.messenger.info.

You can read a section with Frequently Asked Questions about Messenger at www.edenbio.com.

Story by Debra Prinzing

Special to The Herald

Photos by Michael Martina

Herald Photographer

The idea of packaging a naturally occurring protein into a hot, new gardening product is one that causes excitement for some plant lovers and wariness for others.

This is indeed what happened when Eden Bioscience Corp., a Bothell-based biotech company, began introducing Messenger to home gardeners last year, followed by a stronger marketing effort this spring.

Eden promotes Messenger as a treatment that helps boosts a plant’s overall growth and production, improves its stamina and vigor, and strengthens its resistance to disease.

“I don’t know,” mused one of my garden-writer friends who grew up in the nursery trade. “I can’t help thinking it’s like an artificial sweetener for plants.”

Mind you, she hasn’t tried diluting the Messenger powder packets in water and mixing up small batches to spray on the foliage of plants in her landscape. But she’s just convinced that this product is too good to be true.

That’s not how Marie Olson reacted when she first read about Messenger in the business pages of The Herald last year.

“There was an article on this biotechnical lab in Bothell, and it sounded like Eden was making an immune booster for plants,” Olson said. She contacted Eden directly to order a few samples of Messenger’s consumer package and began treating numerous plants in her one-acre Marysville garden.

In January, The Herald Home &Garden featured an article about Messenger’s potential for residential gardens. Nearly 500 readers responded to a sample offer to try the product in their own backyards.

Messenger is a powdered form of a protein called harpin. In the late 1980s, Dr. Zhongmin Wei, formerly a Cornell University scientist and now Eden’s chief scientific officer, discovered that when a plant detects the presence of harpin it triggers an early-warning system in plants. As a result, the plant acts as if it’s under attack. But since there’s no disease to fight off, the roses, tomatoes or strawberries respond with increased growth and vigor. Harpin is a naturally occurring protein in bacteria.

The benefit of using Messenger is obvious, Olson maintained.

“I haven’t gardened that long because we lived in an apartment. I really didn’t become a wild and crazy gardener until we moved about seven years ago,” Olson explained. “Being a novice gardener, I’m really thrilled.”

Equipped with a 3-gallon pump-sprayer that she describes as “almost like a luggage carrier on big, fat wheels,” Olson treats her plants with the water-and-Messenger mixture. She follows the directions for use printed on the Messenger packet, which suggest repeated treatments every two to three weeks while plants are actively growing. The product can be used on all plants grown indoors or outdoors. People and pets may enter treated areas after the spray has dried.

This is Olson’s second growing season to try Messenger in her garden. While her results are more anecdotal than scientific, she’s a believer.

“I cover everything I want to in my garden,” she said. “Everything is just bigger and better now.”

She is especially proud of a dogwood tree that had never bloomed before using Messenger. “I said to it, “Darned you, you’re going to bloom this year,’” she joked. The tree’s white blooms emerged for the first time last month, paying off on Olson’s hunch that Messenger might help give it a jump-start. A pink-flowering dogwood she treated bloomed with more abundance this spring, as well. “I think Messenger is a great deterrent to disease,” Olson added.

Other plants are also responding. “My wisteria had been really wimpy, and this year, it was wonderful. I’m also noticing with my roses that there are far more blooms on much heavier stock.”

Messenger’s potential for enhancing blooms and the overall performance of roses garnered the product’s first big endorsement last year when consulting rosarians with the American Rose Society started recommending the product.

That’s how Messenger’s benefits first intrigued Jackie and Don McElhose, proprietors of the Antique Rose Farm in Snohomish.

“I saw the article in The Herald and we knew about Messenger from articles in the ARS magazine,” Jackie McElhose said. “The ARS hardly ever endorses anything that’s new – that’s what caught our attention.”

Sharon Wallace, an Antique Rose Farm employee, also encouraged the McElhoses to try spraying the harpin protein treatment on hundreds of roses at the nursery. “She used it last year in her own garden in Gold Bar – she’s really excited about it,” Jackie McElhose said.

Since March, Antique Rose Farm has been using Messenger to treat rose plants in the display garden and nursery sales area. The specialty nursery has also set up rose trials, using pairs of two identical container-grown roses. There are plans to compare the plants’ progress with and without Messenger during this growing season.

Don McElhose uses a giant atomizer-style sprayer to douse the plants every seven to 10 days, Jackie McElhose said. “I think everything is healthier in the sales area – that’s definite.”

When asked how she thinks Messenger affects her plants, this nurserywoman pointed to disease-resistance, a widespread problem when countless roses are packed together in nursery rows. “We usually have black spot and we have way less outbreak right now. I think Messenger gets the rose’s immune system growing.”

Debra Prinzing is a regular contributor to Home &Garden and the editor of “The Northwest Gardeners’ Resource Directory.” Send e-mail to Dkprinzing@aol.com.