Garden Line with skip Richard's shoes.
Trim.
Just watch him as many gas septs.
Not a sign.
Sun.
Good morning, Good Sunday morning, and thanks for listening in to Garden Line. We're glad to have you with us today. If you would like to give us a call, maybe you got a gardening question. How about dialing seven one three dialing Listen to me, remember I used to dial Remember those funds seven one three two one two kat r H seven one three two one two k t r H. However you want to get there them on let's talk. We'll discuss what everything's sort of interest to you,
that is for sure. I you know, they say, you've heard the term do as I say, not as I do. And you've heard the term the cobbler's kids go barefoot. If you ever heard that one, bonder that for a minute. I walked out one of my flower beds. That was it's just in an area where I don't get over there much often, and I've been traveling a lot lately AND's kind of barely keeping things going while I'm away. And I looked, and oh my gosh, there are weeds all over the place. And that was a mulch bed.
But when you get in there and look at it, the mult is about an inch thick. And wherever sunlight hits the soil, nature plants of weed. It's as simple as that. Wherever sunlight hits the soil, nature plants a weed. And what we find is that when we don't keep a good thick mulch on the surface of the soil, we start to see weed seeds sprouting. And you may
look and go out's mult It's not multipick enough. And if you've got a multitude chunky and so it's kind of like the particles hold themselves apart because they're big, old, chunky particles and light kind of can bounce through. It's got to be a little deeper then than a very fine textured mulch might need to be. But whatever you do, just remember multing is not a once and done. It's you just maintain it and watch it. One question I sometimes get is do I take the old mult away
to put fresh mulch in? And the answer is no. And actually my answer is usually a question does anybody rake the leaves up off the forest floor before the next autumn arrives? Of course not. You drop new leaves on top of the old leaves, the old leaves decompose, and in addition to being a good mulch, now you're
building the soil from the top down as well. So I always replenish on top and keep a good dense mulch on it, because guess what, I get to go out there and hoe or pull or whatever some weeds. That is what's going to have to happen now that I'm back in town and able to get some of that worked. Well. You are listening to garden Line, and I hope you're having so far a good Sunday morning. We are looking forward to visiting with you about the
kinds of topics that are of interest to you. And so early on here usually it's a little quieter on the funes, I just talk about some of the things that I think are important for you to know. So, for example, we are in the big heat of summer. I know, I know, very very hot season of the year. You know, it's it's a kind of it's the time of the year when people just kind of lose their
interest in gardening. Plants are wilting, but so are gardeners too, and it's a shame because we can still be planting, we still be doing a lot of things. Perhaps the most important thing to be doing right now is as you can using those early morning hours when it's as cool as it's going to be during the day, the sun's not shining out baking down on you yet to build the soil. Wherever you plan on doing any additions or change to the landscape, this is a great time
to put in new landscape beds. Get them all ready, get them built up, get the irrigation and stuff set up on them. Because whether you plant now, which can be done with daily TLC on those new plants, or if you wait until fall follows the best planning season of the year for woody ornamentals, for perennials, many other things. Either way you go about it, you're ready to go. Whenever you're going to plant. You've got the beds ready. Remember brown stuff before green stuff. So what does that
look like? Well, there's a range. You could just purchase compost and put it on the ground and rototillet or spade it into the soil to improve the soil you have. That's an option. A step above that, in my opinion, would be to buy a bed mix and lay some down on the ground on the soil surface and mix it in a little bit with the soil, and then lay more bed mix on top of that to build up your bed. Now why did I do that in
two steps? Well, you can do it. But if you've got a really heavy clay soil and you set a really high quality just think of a potting soil or some nice kind of soil on top of it. There's an interface there where you go from wonderful soil to clay soil, and the water doesn't move readily into that clay, and we have what we called a perched water table.
That means that underground, the water is going through the nice bed mix and it hits that clay and it sort of stops or it moves in, but it's extremely slow. Our Houston clays can take water in about an eighth of an inch an hour. That's how fast. Just the clay, not organic matter, roots and all that, just the clay can absorb the water. So that creates that underground water table.
So it's better I think to put some moltch down or not molts, excuse me, bed mix down, mix it into the surface and then add the more bed mix on it. That way, when you go from the nice bed mix down into the clay, there's a transition, there's a gradient if you will going down. It's not you know, night and day difference. You absolutely have to do it
this way, but I found that it works best. So think about that as you're preparing your swell areas and getting ready to do your fall planting, which is coming soon as we get to the end of August. We got this little window where we're putting in potatoes, the new potatoes, Irish potato, you know, not sweet potatoes, but the other kinds of potatoes. And typically it's going to happen at the end of August here, which hey, hello,
we're there. You would take small hole potatoes that you saved from your spring potato crop and plant them whole in the ground. We don't want to have We don't want to plant something that's got you know, six eyes on it, because we just need one or two, and so we plant whole. You can plant like we do in spring, where you cut a potato up, set it out, allow that cut surface to kind of dry couple days, and then plant it. But in the warm, warm, warm
soil of summer cup potatoes can rot pretty quick. I've i myself have even and this is not a normal practice you'll here, but I'll take a little four inch pots and put the cup pieces in four inch pots and just keep them in a cool kind of cooler spot, keep them waste and let them sprout. And once they get up and growing, and you got because you know you will already have roots then and you have the shoot coming up, you can transplant them out into the garden.
So that that allows you to delay the planting a little bit without delaying actually getting that plant going because it's going in the four inch pot anyway. That most people aren't going to be willing to go through all that. But that's just another option because it's hard to find small whole potatoes this time of the year. All right, well, we'll take a quick break here and I will be back.
I just want to remind you our number seven one three two one two ktr H. All right, go a little little balance in music for the first thing in the morning can help us along with a cup of coffee, get our eyes wide open here so we can keep going on on guardline advice. I want to mention that if you have not done your summer fertilization. You can still do some fertilization, especially if your grass is needing a boost. If it's just not looking like it should,
you feel like you know it's lacking vigor. For example, Well, Nitrofoss has a product called super Turf. I think the easiest way to describe it is it's their silver bag. I love it when we color coat bags because that just makes it easy. You cannot can say super Turf, it's a nineteen four ten fertilizer and all that, and that's all true, But then you get to the store and you go which one was he talking about? Silver bag? Silver bag. It's slow release, slow release, so gradually, over
time that nitrogen is released out of the product. That's important because it cuts down on such frequent mowing. Now, Super Turf, like all Nitrofoss products, is widely available. You're going to find it at OspA Ace up on Kirkandaal in the Woodlands. You're going to find it at Shades of Texas, which is also in the Woodlands on at fourteen eighty eight. If you're done the King or over in the King, whatever, you can go to Kingwood Ace at King would Drive, and they've got it there as well.
Many many places carry these nitroposs products. I think it's time now to head out to the phones. We're going to go out to Parland and talk to Mason. Hello, Mason, welcome to garden.
Good Morris, Kip, how are you?
I'm well, Thank you. Hey.
I got a question. It's regarding nutsedge. So I have a I have a garden that I've tilled into the ground, and every year the nutsedge keeps growing back and growing back. Now I've put mulch on top of my garden and I just can't get rid of the nutsedge. Do you have any tips, like should I put shall I put a fabric down before I before I start my planning or what?
No, multi won't work and fabric. If the fabric is down tight on the ground, which is how you want it to be, the nutsedge just punches right through it. There are a few fabrics that are able to prevent nutsedge piercing them, but those are more expensive commercial grade, and to be honest, I'm not a fan of fabric
in general. On the soul what I've done though, If you go to my website, do you have a pent or pencil hinting yes, sir, all righty go to Gardening with Skip dot com Gardening with s I have four new publications. Two of them are about nutsedge. There's a longer one called an in Depth Look, and a shorter one.
I would encourage you to read the longer one. It's only about three pages, but it goes into some of the principles as to why it's difficult to control, which help us understand what to do so we can control. And a lot of people they go at it and they say I tried that it didn't work. Well, you'll understand why they didn't work in there, and it'll help you change what you do so that it does work.
There's also two publications on a weed wiper. One of them is how to build a little weed wiper if you've got nutsedge, let's say, coming up underneath a rose bush or some other area where you just can't blast a spray into there, and it tells you how to do if you want to do that. The other one is, and this is the one we're getting to. It's called
Herbicide Products to use with the weed wiper. And if you look at that one, it has products for if you're trying to control poison, ivy and brush, it has products. If you're trying to grow grasses, it has products if you're trying to control sedges, and that would be the list of the things that you would use. So you can go poke around up there see what you want. But especially read nutsedge and end Up's look. It really
just a super oversimplified. It comes down to jumping on it early and consistently staying on it, never letting it up for air. When it gets up has three to five leaves, it needs to be hand dug. It needs to be sprayed, it needs to be whatever you're going to do to it, because after about five leaves it starts having producing the daughter tubers and now you're eight to ten times more nuts. At June you began with.
Wow, Okay, I appreciate it, Thank.
You very much.
You bet check those out there. I spent a lot of time on them, and I think they'll be very very helpful. Appreciate that. CONTI yes, sir, all right, we're going to go now and talk to Jerry. Hey, Jerry, welcome to Guardline.
Hi, thank you, sir. I was listening yesterday to your show about the monarch, butterfly, and milkweed native plants. Before I run around everywhere trying to find native do you recommend I think you could?
You can of Yeah, are you in Bear Creek.
Eron?
No, you are too ninety.
Yeah, okay, Yeah, Buchanans didn't too far for it's just down on eleven Street and the heights, and they carry probably the biggest selection of natives anybody I know. Now, all of our good garden centers, the ones you hear me talk about on Guardline, the independent nurseries, all of them are going to have some native plants, and so it just is a matter of you know, how how big of a selection are you looking for?
Uh?
And that's why I mentioned Buchannans, because it's in their name Buchanan's Native plants, that that they focus on. That that's it's not.
All that hard.
Scare me. I'm sure if they have it, I've never.
Like.
Maybe could check them out.
Yeah, go run over there this afternoon, check it out and see what you see. Talk to him, tell them what you're looking for. Tell him you heard about, you know, tracting uh monarchs and things like that, because they're going to have a garden center is going to carry the flowers for attracting adults and right now, uh, there is a number of things we could be planting to continue to feed those adults before they start their journey back
to Mexico. And they'll also have product or plants that the larva can eat, and that's basically the milk weeds.
Yeah.
I have plenty of the tropical, but I don't like it, and I don't any butterflies or caterpillars.
Well, they they will, though they just haven't found years yet. But he went into he went into the issues that he has found in his research on on the tropical You know, they're not not great news about, but a lot of people like it. It looms all the time, and it's you know, it has its pluses, but it also has those negatives. And that's what he was spending his time talking about here when we're visiting on the show. The thing about the aphids, though, Jerry, that plant I
have used it for years to attract beneficial insects. And here's how it works. The tropical milk weed gets a yellow aphid on it with little black tailpipes and black legs. It's called the oleander. Aphid. Funny thing is I've never seen it on oleanders, but you see it on monitor on tropical milk weed and other milk weeds too. By the way, now that aphid doesn't get on your other plants, I don't know another plant in the landscape it gets on. It's not the aphid on tomatoes, it's not the one
on crape myrtles. You see what I'm saying. It's like all these things that can get aphids, it's not the aphid that gets on that plant. But what happens is when you have aphids on the milk weed, then lady beetles will show up to eat them and to lay eggs to raise their young. Lacewing larva show up to do the same thing. Parasitic wasp that lay eggs inside the aphid's body. Next time you're looking at your plant and you see aphids that aren't yellow, but they're kind
of paper sacked brown colored or tan colored. Those have wasps growing inside of them, like the movie Alien. It's pretty cool. And so that plant is like a nursery raising beneficial insects. So if you put it beside I mentioned tomato, I mentioned crape myrtle, and you know a rose bush gets aphids, it's a different aphid. If you put it there, then when those insects grow up those beneficials, then they're right next to the plants that you would
like them to help with aphids on as well. So don't look at the aphids as a negative on that milkweed.
It just oh, I know, but it all thrown them a little bit. They're young.
Yeah, of course you can cut them on the ground. You're not going to kill them. But what mister Nemrov was talking about yesterday, you know, is number one he
was saying. He was suggesting people don't do that when do other milk weeds if you want to plant them, but if you have it, you need to cut it down at the end of September, and you need to cut it down again right before we get into the spring season at the end of winter, and get all of the what you cut down, get it out of there, because that is plant surfaces that can hold the spore. That's a disease for the monarchs. And you heard the
show reiterate his whole segment. But twice a year taking it to the ground is probably best to Number one so that new arriving monarchs don't already get exposed to it. Number two, so that those about to head to Mexico don't carry all the spores with them as they go from that plant.
I do have you on milkweed that I gut.
Yeah, Yeah, it's a big one. Hey Gary, I'm gonna have to run, But good luck with that and have fun. Have fun shopping over at Buganon this afternoon or wherever you go. You're gonna find a lot of good native plants at our at our Mom and Bob garden centers. You yes, sir, thanks for the call.
Uh.
We're talking earlier, visiting with Mason about the nuts edge, and we're just talking to him about the different products that are on that list. The herbicide products for the wheat wiper. I like the weed wiper because you're not spraying a ton of pesticide in the environment. You're just wiping it directly on the target plant, which is the weed.
Uh.
And those herbicides that are on there, you're going to find those at any local ACE Hardware store. ACE Hardware cares a wide variety of products, and if you see things on my list on there, Ace Hardware is going to have them now. I want to tell you this. I was at at Langham Creek Ace Hardware. That's the one on five point twenty nine over in Cyprus. It's it's in the Copperfield neighborhood for those of you over in West Houston northwest Easton that know that area. They're
going to have their grand reopening. They after I was out there, they had a time where they were kind of closed down and getting a bunch of work done. And man, they have redone the place and it's great. This coming Friday, Saturday and Sunday, they're going to be giving away an Eggo power trimmer two hundred and fifty dollars value, a Webers Guess grille four hundred and fifty dollars value, paint a room makeover two hundred dollars value.
They're going to be doing demos on Big Green Eggs and Tregger grills and Weber grills and the Gosny Peacha oven on Saturday only. Saturday, only fifteen percent off all still units. So if you if you're looking for some power equipment, trimmors, weed eaters, whatever, Still's got a lot of them, fifteen percent off that day. Only at only at Langham Creek. Ace Hardware have forty ACE Hardware is
in the Houston area. You can go to Acehardware dot com find the store locator and find the ones near you. But anyone over in that region you should just check out Langham Creek Case Hardware this coming weekend. Got three days to do it. Just check them out and I think you'll see there's a lot of really cool stuff, plus some fun activities that they got planned as well. All right, we're gonna take a little break here, it's time for the news. I'll be right back. Wishing you
the best this morning. And you know what, I'm glad you're listening to the guard Line. We got plenty of things that we can discuss today to help you have more I don't know, bountiful garden, a more beautiful landscape. How about that. That's a goal that I have. You know what another goal I have in the garden, though, is is to have fun. And I one of the things that always makes me kind of sad. I want to talk to someone and it's like you talk about gardening.
It's like, yeah, I tried that, I killed everything. I couldn't grow anything. I got a brown thumb, and you can just see they they did not have fun, and gardening should be fun. Listen, this is this is not like you're making a painting and you got to get it all right, and then you hang that thing on the wall and nothing changes. Gardens are forever evolving. They're forever evolving. Even that includes landscapes. I saw it went back to a place where I grew up many years ago.
It went back probably I don't know, ten fifteen years after I had moved on to college, and the shrubs were like through the eaves of the house. You know. There were all kinds of abelias and red tip fotinias, all kinds of things like the traditional shrubs of those days, and they just had overgrown and it was time. It wasn't my place anymore, but it was time for them to pull those suckers out and get some new ones. Breeders have always coming up with new, more compact plants
like lossy abelia. Now there's all these colors to the foliage. It's just beautiful. But that's how landscapes are. It's not a one and done and that's part of the fun of it. Can you imagine, well, some of you could if you if you just had one set of clothes and you never bought another set ever. I mean it just you wore the same thing day after day. We
get kind of boring, wouldn't it. And you may look out there and go, oh, well, there's a beautiful new shirt or plouse or whatever, and you go get it and change the look a little bit. Why not do that with your landscape. By the way, I'll be real self deprecating here, one of my daughters said, when I look at old pictures of mom and Dad, I think she looks so good in that dress, and I also
think he still has that shirt. Guilty is charged, Guilty charged? Yep, I do, I know, but some people like to eat new clothes all the time. But your landscape can be the same way. And I would encourage you to think about it that way. And you know, one way to go about this would be just to call beer scapes beerscapes is awesome at designing new landscape makeovers. I don't care if you got a pool that you want to get landscap. You know, sometimes pools can be a little
bleak looking. Piercescapes can come in and I mean they can make it look great, absolutely great. Do you want an outdoor sitting area? Listen, it's a bazillion degrees outside right now, but fall is coming. How about an outdoor
area with a built in fireplace? How about a one of those what do you call it, the little fire tables, something that's bricked in or landscape pavered in and you just gather around it on those crisp fall nights, or and here we can do it all winter because our winters are so mild, and you can just enjoy that
with friends. Pierce Scapes can do all of that. Even if you just need a re re renovation of the landscape that you built and then you've changed a little bit, but it's just time to give it a new makeover. They can do all of that. They do all aspects from landscape lighting to drainage improvement, to fixing irrigation systems, to installations and design. Piercecapes is the number one company I can think of for doing just that. Go online, look at their look at their website pierscapes dot com,
or give them a call. Two eight one three seven fifty sixty two eight one three seven zero five zero six zero. I was just on the phone a minute ago talking with someone about the discussion I had yesterday with mister Namrov regarding the research results of the milkweeds and the issue of the disease of caterpillars and so on like that. We're talking about using some native milkweeds
and things. Well, I tell you, I just checking the other day out Nelson Watergarden and Nursery out there in Katie, Texas, and they have the orange tuberosa milkweed. They probably have some others out there. I didn't I didn't look around for all them, but the Tuberosa the main one. You see. It's a native Texas milkweed. It is orange flowers and it's one of the ones that will come out and bloom and look pretty and then it'll sort of die back.
And that's good because all those shriveled up dead leaves now that could have been harboring and building up populations of the disease had been the plant essentially cleared all those leaves off. And it's a tough tough summer, tough survivor, but they got it out there, Nelson Water Garden and Nursery. Their nursery is outstanding really a lot of cool stuff, lots of vegetables now and it's time for the fall
vegetable garden. We're planting our warm seasoned crop still, so you get a tomato that moves kind of quick, not one that takes forever to get the harvest. You can still plant them now. Squashes and other things, bell peppers, there's just a lot of things can go in now for fall harvest, and they've got that there at Nelson Water Gardens. And there's a great sale on hibiscus, oh my gosh, really good sales on both the three and five gallon bush forms and the three gallon tree forms
of hibiscus. So this would be a great time to pick those up as well. All out there, where is it? Well, you got ten two Katie. When you get to Katie Fort Benroad, turn north and it's just as stones throw up the road there. Nelson Watergarden and Nursery, Nelson Watergardens dot com. That's their website if you want to check
in to that, Nelson Watergardens dot com. So this morning talking about some of the things that we need to do and take care of in the garden, I'm gonna come back and we're going to do a little more discussion of that. I will be taking a break here in just a second. I just want to remind you one more time if you missed it, the place where all those publications, those new four four new publications have been added is Gardening with Skip dot Com. Gardening with
Skip dot Com. That's also where you'll find my lawn care schedule, things to do in the lawn to make it grow better. That's more water fertilized. And the other schedule is pest disease and we'd management in the lawne and I refer to that one as things that go wrong and how to fix them. Both schedules are free. They're there, multi color, lots and lots of information on them. Print them out. It'd be good night time reading. If you can't fall asleep at night, you can just pull
one of those out and away. All right, it's time to take a break. When we come back, Lewis and Brazoria County, you'll be our first up. If you for the rest of you seven two kt r h back guardline. Good have you with us. We are going to head straight out to the phones to Brazoria County and talk to Lewis this morning, Welcome to garden Line. Lewis.
Question about seed germination. I had some really bad results this year, and I was gonna see if you had any tips. Green beans and cucumbers. Planted squash, yellow squashed, straight neck, and zucchini and that came up fine, and basil came up fine. I plant some green crop bush beings and I planted some sweet success cucumbers on a
parthorin carpet type and got zero germination. Now, I pre watered my soil before I planted, and I soaked the seed for about twenty minutes before planting them, and we watered hand and watered in the morning and the evening. This is in full sun. And this was on the thirteenth of August. So it's been almost.
Two weeks with nothing.
Fresh seed from hot seed, no goodness, germ rates on it.
Yeah.
The only thing about that I would have done a
little different. I don't think this is the cause of them not coming up, but I would have soaked them a little longer than twenty minutes, you know, give them about you know, several hours to fully imbibe that water in at that you know, that time in August, the soil temperatures are really hot, and those plants, those seeds are not planted that deep, right, and I think it could the excessive The only my suggestion to you, lewis, of course I don't have a crystal ball to know exactly,
you know, whether there was like an underground disease that got them or something. But my thing would be soak a little longer. But then when you plant them, do
something to shade the seed row if possible. You don't want them to come up and be bulched where they can't get light, but at least to get that germination going if you could, if you could just cool that soil off a little bit, because the soil an inch deep, I mean it can be way over one hundred degrees really, and when the sun is baking down on it in August like that, so that that could be a factor.
I was going to ask you if you ever tried like soaking cardboard and laying over the soil and maybe picking it up every day, just checking so if you're getting emergents, check if as.
Long as if you're really we didn't even have to soak it. I mean, it'd probably be better just to leave it dry. Because it doesn't stick down. So uh, yeah, you could do that. I've you know, I've suspended like a piece of shade cloth, doubled or tripled over just to take some of that light intensity down. Uh. Doing some frequent watering of the surface to too lightly to to keep it cooled off as it evaporates up there
is helpful also. But I think any kind of a shade, I've tried things like a light scattering of pine needles. Uh see it gets some light through but a little bit of shade. But that's kind of hard to get that sort of just right at least that's been my experience with it. But anyway, Yeah, it's just it's just really hot soil.
I think it's been two weeks. I don't know if the seed is lying dormant in the soil or could actually the heats killed you know.
The Yeah, heavy worth getting in there and digging, digging around a little, see if you can find any seeds and see what they're doing.
Yeah, having there's nothing, there's no coddle eatings, there's nothing on them. They're just yeah, you know, the beans are easy to find, let's.
Just put it that way.
There's nothing on them. So I think I'm just going to ahead and replant and call it up. But it was one hundred percent germ failure where like squashed and that pop right up four days like I expect because we can water in the morning in the evening with rain water. And yeah, I just I was just going to try something different. I'm doing these in vego bits too, so it's a little different.
Yeah. Well, and you know, it's as possible that it could have been a bad pack of seeds, but you'll know that you could. You probably don't have a lot of seeds in that part and a carpet cucumber pack, but if you took a few out, put them in a wet pepper towel, moist paper towel rather, they're not stopping right right, slipping in a little zip lock and just set it on the counter, check it every every day. You can determine germination viability that way. And so if they all also have been.
Pretty reliable on their germ rates, they're showing eighty six percent on the path because they're real proud of their testing.
So well, yeah, I'm not casting dispersions on any any company. I'm just saying here's the things that could be happening. And so that's sure. Well, Louis Lewis, thank you very much and good luck with that. I hope the second round.
Thank you appreciate.
You appreciate that. Uh if you have been experiencing the shrink and swell of Houston's clay soils, and they do shrink and swell. This spring we had a lot of rain, but actually we had quite a bit of rain on endo summer pretty far and then it got hot and dry, and what happens the soil dries out, it shrinks. That's why you see cracks on the surface. Well, that wrex havoc. I mean that is a powerful force that can crack foundations of your home, certainly your driveways and sidewalks. Fix
my slab foundation repair. Tie Strickland hands Down is a company that you need to call. And here's why I say that. I've sat with Tie and his wife. I've talked to them and gotten to know them and looked at the kind of perspective that they have on serving their customers. And they are all about it. They're all about making a relationship with customers. Listen, Tizan native, he's stony in fifth generation Texan. They've been living here doing this.
He's been doing it for twenty three years. And you don't stick around and have good ratings if you don't take care of your customers. He shows up on time, that's big. He gives you a fair price, that's huge, and then he fixes it right. That is also huge. And if you just tell him you're a guardenline listener, you get a free estimate. He'll come out. He'll take a look at it. And I was talking to Tay about a job the other day, about a situation, and you know, I expected to be like, well, you got
to do this and this and this. No for him is like no, that's not enough movement to warrant going in and doing all of this, you know. And he'll tell you that if something needs to be done, or if it doesn't need to be done, he will tell you that he can do driveways and sidewalks too. By the way, fix my slab foundation repair Ty Strickland. Here's the website fixmyslab dot com. Here's the phone number. Two eight one two five five forty nine forty nine two
eight one two five five forty ninety nine. You go out to Dickinson now and talk to Karen. Hey, Karen, welcome to garden Line morning.
I call him for two two.
I have two questions.
One is I got probably a little a quarter of an acre lawn use lawn.
It goes into.
This to the dishes and stuff for I've getting.
To get a lot of crab gas in my yard and how do I get rid of the get rid of the crabgrass? And another one I heard you yesterday talking about somebody who could come in in that area I don't know, Dickens area. That would if you're gone for a period of time, in a long period of time, like a year or so, to take care of your flower bits and stuff like that.
That was.
I just I just drew a blank. Excuse me. That was perscapes I was talking about. They do quarterly maintenance. They come in and once a quarter. Yeah. So crabgrass you said, is in the lawn, right, Yes, it's all.
Well, I've put the silver bag out two or three times and trying to get my lungs drinking that.
But how do you get rid of crab gras well? The first number one is get a denser lawn, because it only can come up where sunlight hits the soil. So that means your lawn has thin areas, and so building that density is the simplest, most environmentally friendly way you can get rid of crabgrass. The second step would be next spring, assuming your lawn hasn't developed a density by then, a pre emergent herbicide like barricade by nitroposs.
You need to follow my schedule online. It tells you exactly when to put it down water then and you may have to repeat that in about sixty days because the product eventually breaks down and crabgrass can sprout all through the summer. And so those two steps would be it. But number one is just determine that you're going to get that lawn dense and lush. And that's my mow, water and fertilized schedule that's free online that tells you
exactly the things you need to do for that. So those two steps I think would be the key.
Sound good?
All right, Hey, thank you?
Hey, Could you put me back to your receiver and I maybe get a number of the streetscape.
I'm going to put you on hold. All right, folks, time for a break. I'll be right back. Welcome to kt r H Guarden Line with skin bricks.
Just watch him as many kind of.
Things to.
All Right, let's get going on this again. We got plenty of go plenty to talk about, plenty of things to discuss today on garden Line. Thanks for listening. By the way, I'm your host, Skip Rector, and we're here to help you have success with your garden. That is it your garden and your landscape and whatever kind of gardener you are. You know some people, uh, it's all about the lawn. They are I call them lawn rangers,
the weekend lawn rangers. They it's making that lawn perfect, you know, make it look as much like AstroTurf, I guess as you can in terms of perfect. No weeds, no anything. That's one kind of gardener, and that's fine. There's gardeners who are all into nature and they would just be happy having a weed growing in the lawn. If its flowers that are going to feed pollinators, they're good with that. Well that that's a little bit other end of the spectrum there. But that's another one of
the kinds of gardeners we work with. Whether you're synthetic, organic, or don't care between the two, Whether you love color or love vegetables or love herbs? Where to help? How can we help you do that? And I hope you'll try a little bit of all of those. I find that, you know, I started off when I got my master's degree. The main focus I had was palmology. Do you know what pomology is? Pomology as in Pomona, the goddess of fruit, Pomona.
Pomology is a study of fruit. Basically, it's a division of horticulture, and that was what I began my horticulture studies in and of course since then it's gone way past that and everything else, with ornamentals being the in turf being the big the big things now that really occupy my thoughts in time. But there's a lot of aspects of it. Some people just want some fruit trees. Maybe you like to have some grape vines. By the way, arbors are underutilized in our area. We should have more herbers.
As hot and sunny as it is here, every patio ought to have a beautiful arbor over it that helps shade that patio. Now, of course you can put a roof on it, but why not a grape vine with clusters of grapes hanging down in it. That'd be kind of cool. I've got one that i'm training, a rose bush or rose vine vining type or rose to go over. It's a Peggy Martin, the one that everybody talks about
from pink flowers, primarily a spring bloomer. But I'm working on getting that Peggy Martin to go over the top of it. That makes a really nice outdoor setting. If you're into herbs, you can go all the way and make an herb garden. You know those beautiful geometric gardens that you see from herbs. You can just put some herbs in a pot or down at the end of your veget will row, or in your flower bed. There's a lot of uses for those. I may come back
and talk about that a little bit more. Right now, I'm gonna go ahead and run out to Willis Styx's and talk to Sherry. Hello, Sherry, Welcome to Gardenline.
I'm not doctor Sherry, and I'm not in the woodlands. Are you talking to me?
No?
Willis, Yeah, I'm talking to you.
Oh Willis? Sorry? Yes, okay, great, Yes. So we have a place in our back lawn where we let the dogs out all the time, and we're just getting a lot of shade, and it was after we had built a pool and the pergola and everything, and there's just the grass is not thriving there at all, and so I was wondering, what can I plant in there instead of grass that's gonna be okay for the dogs to stomp on, and we'll actually grow in shade.
Okay, Well that's a challenge right there. The part that makes it the biggest challenge is the dog stumping on part. When dogs I don't care what it is. When dogs are stomping back and forth over the same thing, it's just hard for any plant to do well.
But some options to stomping and more than peeing. So it's the people round spots in the grass that is there that is getting some sunlight. So somehow, you know, it's a beautiful part of our law, our house and jarred and everything that I just need to make looks good and also not be where I can't see if there are snakes there, like you could put carolina jasmine or I don't know what, and then you don't see what.
You need to see.
I see, okay. Well, so the most shade tolerant groundcover there is is monkey grass it's mondo grass. Okay, it's dark, dark, dark green. There's a standard type that's going to get up oh, I don't know what, six inches or so. Then there's a dwarf type that's only going to get up about three inches. The problem with that is it doesn't spread very fast at all, so you got by a lot of it. You know, you're buying flats and flats of it and plugging it in in between it.
But I'm telling you it makes a beautiful dark green, almost no mode turf. If you wanted to once a year kind of cut it back because it's looking a little rangy, maybe you could do that, but but that that would be the ideal. It's just going to take. You're going to buy a lot of flats of it
to cover an area. There's taller things like ASTech grass, which is a type of it's like loriope and mondo, but it has white leaves with little green stripes in them, and that brightens up an area like that in the shade, So you could use it to border a bed, you could use it make it solid. You could put loriope in in areas like that too. On a native end, there's a groundcover call horse herb it is. It is a wild weed that has become popular with native folks
because it does better in more shade. Now, if it's really shady.
Going to struggle herb.
What did you say, horse a horse herb and it's it's an horse herb. So if you have more of kind of a wildscape, kind of a native scape, it would fit in really well. If everything's super manicured, it's gonna look a little a little rangy for you probably, but just go online look at it, uh and see see what you see? So what else shade up there? Yeah,
I mean there's other things. You know, English ivy makes a good groundcover, but but that is a you're constantly going to be fighting to keep it in bounds, not climbing up the tree trunks and everything anything it can grab on. So that may be one that it's so kind of invasive in its tendency that I hesitate to recommend that one. Those are some options for you.
Skate sd AP or Jake.
Okay, no, horse it's horse herb h RB. Horse herb. It is a wild native groundcover with little yellow flowers, very inconspicuous, nothing write home about. But they yeah, but the pollinators and things might like that a little bit for that amount.
Of shape because it's right next to our pool.
Well, I mean it might. But the water and the pools can attract bees when they're thirsty. You know, you get some water splashing up on the sidewalk and they're thirsty and they need They can't drink out of a pool that they can drink out of small puddles up on the sidewalk around the pool. I wouldn't worry about it from that standpoint. Hey, I've run out of time on another break, but I appreciate your call, share and
good luck, good luck turning you bad you've had. Thanks for the call, all right, folks, will be right back the number seven KTRH. He here on a Sunday morning. I hope you're having a good morning. By the way, we're going to start off by heading out to Magnolia and talking to Bruno. Hello Bruno, welcome to garden Line.
Good morning.
I have a yeah out in Magnolia, so I've got clay soil with sand. It's actually qualified as a select fill, so it was great for building my new house, but not so good for a grass and such. I'm trying to get like a forest preserved look. And so I've had most of the disturbed areas hydro seated with bermuda, and i'd put down some rye earlier, but you know, with the heat, that's all gone. But I have a section also of about three quarters of an acre that's
heavily shaded. But it's also got a couple of dry creeks that run through it, so the whole area will get wet and water moving pretty quickly in those heavy storms we get every couple of years. And uh, and so I'm looking. So the guy that did hydro seeds, so there's no point in trying to put the bermuda down. It's not going to like the shade. So you said it for things other than normal, normal grasses, and you know, again,
I'm looking for more of a forest reserve look. He suggested that a grass called bahia might be good, or a crop called millet, but he said that can be a little difficult to mow if you let it go. And you know, I don't necessarily get out there every week or even every two to mow some of these areas. So I was wondering if you had a different type of grass that might work better for me.
Okay, Well, millet is a grain crop. So if you see sorghum in the field and wheat and oats, that's what millet's like. It's BacT just taller than wheat notes. So absolutely no mellet there. It won't grow in the shade either. The hair grass will take some shade. It'll take some shade. Now, if it gets dense enough, it's not going to be very thick, but I'll tell you, bahea, we'll give you a very thick root system to stop erosion.
So if it'll grow there, that's fine. A lot of people don't like bahead because the day after you mow it, it sends up another seat head and it's like you didn't mow it. But it's not the it's there's a reason we don't have a lot of behalawns here in the area. But it is a survivor. And if you just have a little rangy area, kind of a mini meadow, whatever you want to put it in, it's fine for that.
Uh.
The only other thing, and how how dense is the shade and how big is this area?
Oh, it's it's it's probably you know, it's more like a roadway that most of my property is. I really just mow the weeds and that look is okay for me. So it's not trying to get a manicured lawn. But it's probably all three quarters of an acre at least, and it's very densely wooded.
Okay, okay, but.
It's it's the well texting from the erosion. I had to bring a lot of dirt in, and I want to get something down before that dirt's gone.
Yeah, So if you're talking about a big area like that, you may give seeding he a try, because every other kind of like horticultural plant, it would be completely cost prohibitive to try to, you know, put something like sedges or whatever through that whole area. They'll put up a shade and they help with erosion. But I don't think always.
Really want more of a more of a grass because it's going to get some traffic on it.
Uh.
And but it's it's the erosion control that's that's a biggie for me. But it's it's it's fairly flat normally it's just just a whole lying area.
Yeah, well, all right, I would my suggestion would be, hey, if it's too shady, then we might have to look at something different, but that will probably be the best bet given all the factors you just told me.
Okay, is that I haven't seen that in the gardens stores or in the what do you call big box stores and things? Is where where might I get that seed?
Uh?
Maybe online you might look, or if you go to go to a feed store and ask them, you know, do they carry it?
Uh?
You know you're up there in the Magnolia area. Uh, there's a D and D feed and outside of Tumbul to the west. I would just call them D and D Feed, They're not too far from you and just say, hey, look, do you guys carry a hal seed? Or do you know how we could get it? Can you get it in or whatever?
Uh?
And that would be probably where I would start.
Okay, Now for planting that it's I know, right, I can just just really throw in the soil and it'll grow. The permuta didn't do that. I've got a garden tractor and a drag.
Harrow.
Uh, so I thought perhaps that would be a way to drag that thing back and forth, put down the seed and drag it again.
Is that a good idea that would be Yeah, that'd be an option moet real short first, as short as you can get it. Uh and and that would be probably your best, your best approach.
Yeah.
Well it just had a bunch of dirt put in in bulldoz, so there's nothing there right now. It's just exposed to play.
Yeah, all right, well I hope that helps. I might have to run to another call, but good luck getting that. Hope you accomplish your goals there. Thank you for the call, Thank you very much. All right, let's see here. I wanted to mention that Medina has their new product, supergrol Plus. I knew it's been around a little while, but it's one of their newer ones. It's part of the hast grow line has to grow. Supergrol Plus is a sixteen zero two. It hooks up to a garden hose. It's
a one quart bottle. It's going to cover about four thousand square feet, so in about ten minutes. Really, if you were trying to hurry, you could get done about ten minutes. It's got, of course, the big three nutrient you know, the MPK in it, but it's got the molasses, it's got the humic acid, it's got the seaweed extract. And it also has a keylated form of iron, so those yellow areas kind of get greened up a little bit.
And that that is important because typically when you see yellow in your Saint Augustine lawn, it's due to a lack of iron in the plant for one reason or another. Or plus is widely available, easy to find, just a little post on it to Facebook the other day, something I like a lot. In fact, why you got it hooked up to the garden hose if you get through at the lawn, there's no problem at all the spraying your tomato plants in the vegetable garden or whatever else.
It is a very good product for plants in general, So something you might want to consider. We're going to go now to Spring Branch and we're going to talk to Sally. Hello, Sally, welcome to guard Line.
Good morning, Skiff. I have a very bad lawn in that I have those little weeds that look like little mimosa trees. I have spurge, I have cradgrass, and I have dove wheed. Is there one particular problem that would take care of all four?
Sounds like you need to call a realtor and move you've got such a beyond trifecta there now, seriously joking aside. First thing is I'm hearing that lawn is not super dense, and so the long term solution is the mow water and fertilized according to my schedule to increase density, because every time you get a little more dense, you have a little less light and a little fewer weed problems.
Some of the weeds, the one that looks like the little mimosa, that one, if you catch it early, you can spray the spray it with a product called Celsius and it will. It will kill the young immature seeds coming up. Once they get established and they're setting their seeds and stuff, it's a little harder to kill at that stage, but you can still give it a try with that product. Did you I can't remember the other weeds you say, button weed was.
One, spurge crabgrass, and dovewed weed.
Yeah, dove weed's another one. The Celsius would be an option for it. If dovewed isn't in really large areas, you can use a there's a cinnamon based product called Agra lawn a g r I l a wn that's the line of product. It will if the doveweeds damp, if you sprinkle it or have dew on it, and then you put that product on it, it will just fry it quick. I mean, it turns black. It works really well.
But it comes in small canisters. And if you've got a big lawn area, it's it's tedious and cost prohibitive to do it that way. But it sounds to me like you're going to need to just do a combination of things in order to have success. And I would start with a product call celsius. If you can use it, you can use it now if you do it early, early in the morning, before the temperature gets up very far, because once we're up into the mid nineties, celsius is
causing you some problems for sure. Okay, so you want to low nineties, okay, but try to do it early in the day.
Uh.
And and I would I would start with that and in the meantime be working on building that density in the lawn. The cradgrass is not going to be controlled by celsius, by the way, that's an annual weed. I would just now mow it and ignore it, and then the next spring a pre emergent product to prevent the crabgrass seeds from coming up would be helpful.
Okay, okay, And one other thing. I have a thirty foot flower bed that I just turned over, and I wanted to plant some lawa pellam and some wandering jew but the dogweed has started to spring up in the flower bed. How can I mean, how can I plant something after spraying it with the.
Celsius pretty quick? It's not real problem. Just spray it, let it do. It's what it's going to do. And then uh, just kind of mix up the soil a little bit and get it ready to plant in that area.
Go ahead, I'm sorry, I say.
Well, in addition to like a celsius attempt on it, you can also use a glyphosate type product just with a spreader sticker so it sticks to that doveweed better. In fact, that's true of any product you spray on doveweed. You ought to have a spreader sticker in there so that the spray sticks and doesn't just roll off the leaves.
And do I have to wait a particular amount of time before I could plant my No, you.
Want to tell them, you want to know you want to give both of those products about five to seven days to to kind of move down well into the plant. Uh. And after that you can do what you want in there, mix it up a little bit, new plant and there's not a problem.
Okay, okay, this none of that can harm my St Augustine.
Oh yeah, Oh, glypha sate will absolutely kill your Saint Augustine. We were talking a flower bed there, but the celsius can be used in your Saint Augustine.
Okay, all right, yeah.
Read the label because you know in the air, I don't have time to go into all the details of this, that and the other. It's all on the label. Follow that very carefully. Make sure and read it because any product can be damaging if you misuse it. Okay, Thanks Sally. I appreciate your call very much. We got to run to a break. When we come back. A little announcement here. Quality Home products. You've heard me talk about them before. They sell a number of different things, including generators like
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Check this out qualitytx dot com. I want to head out now to Southwest. You said we're going to talk to Laurel. Hello Laurel, Welcome to Gardenline.
Good morning, mister Skip and this is a thank you call. I asked you last week about where to get a because I was on a waiting list for a hands all. Okay, I went to HANT, I went to Southwest Fertilizer as you recommended. They delivered it within a couple of hours. Everyone was nice, everyone was congenial. They showed me how to offer read it, and Rudy and the crew asked me to say hello to you.
All right, well hello back. Well that doesn't surprise me at all. But you know you didn't do one thing. You need to You need to ask Bob. You need to ask Bob to come to your house. And you need to say, you know, I don't know how to use a chainsaw. Could you fired up? And cut that limb off and show me how you do it. And when he's through with that, you need to say, you know, I learned a lot, but I'm still not quite comfortable
with that. I know how to do it. Could you cut that other limb off, and then that other limb and then you see where we're going here.
I would not take advantage of mister Bob that way.
Oh come on, man, I know what he would say to the first. We got to have some fun here on guard Line. Thanks, thanks, thank you, and you have a great day.
Thank you.
All right, I want to question real quick, where do.
I find twine?
Say that again? What are you asking for? W I n E?
Twine?
Oh, Bob's got that. He's got He's got different kinds of gardening twine and stuff like that. I think even it may even have like a green Jude or something. To be honest, I haven't looked for that product in the store, but call them first for you run over there. But I'm sure they have. If they don't have it, you're gonna find it today's hardware stores too, so not too hard to find. But since you know you love going over to Southwest, I would just give them a call first and see see what they say.
Yeah, and we love a hardware too.
All right, Well you're just hitting on all the right cylinders.
Thanks a lot, because I listened to your show.
This is where I get it from. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. All right, you too, Laurel. Thanks a lot. I have a wonderful day.
Uh.
It is very important if you want to have success with plants that number one you build the soil and number two you throw a mulch on top of it. And why is that? We'll building the soil creates the foundation for plant success and landscaper's pride. They have got gardener's magic. That is an awesome soil. It's got a chicken pellet fertilizer in it that lasts up to three months. It's good for a raised garden. You can use it in your containers as well, organic pine based screen, pine
composted dry salts. Then there's the mushroom compost and that's just rocket fuel. You mix mushroom compost into soil and it really does help plants take off and grow. They've got that, They've got the healthy soil compost. It's one hundred percent recycled composted plant material, got a good neutral pH in there. It adds nutrients as it continues to decompose in your soil. Black humus is a rich organic mix of composted bark and top soil which helps the
soil whole moisture while still draining adequately well. You can use it in a new bed, you can use it to top off and mix in to an existing bed, and then Landscaperspride has a lot of different mulches. Always keep the surface of your soil mulched so that sunlight doesn't reach the soil or overheat the soil, which it will do. Right now, go to Landscaperspride dot com. You can find out all the many places that you can get Landscaper's Pride products here in our area. We're going
to go now to Tumball and talk to David. Hello, David, Welcome to garden Line.
Good good morning, Skip. Hey, I got a two questions. I've got some fruit trees, a fig, a grapefruit, and a meyer limon. A fig and the grapefruit. They say I planted them all probably about a year ago, year and a half. Go, Well, the fig and the grapefruit. They're taking off pretty good. The meyer lemon is not.
It's it's still kind of small.
It's got green leaves on it, but it's just not growing up like the other ones are. And I didn't know if that was just the nature of that particular plant or not.
And then the other I was wondering, I'll.
Go ahead, Well, no it's not. I mean it's it's not the same stature plant as a grapefruit. That's a huge plant compared to a mere lemon. H Are these in containers? Is a mere lemon and a container?
No?
I got them in the ground. Okay, Well, I don't know. Just I would continue to you know, give it adequate water, Keep the weeds away. That's the number one thing to keep the lawnmower and weed eater and the weed competition. Keep all that away from the base of the trunk. Uh, Fertilizing is helpful, I wouldn't. I would go ahead and
fertilize it now if you haven't recently. But I wouldn't fertilize it once we get too far into September, because you don't want to push a lot of late season growth since those plants are already on the cold tender end.
Anyway, Well, I've been I've been fertilizing it with some stuff I got at r C.
Wh okay.
Organic that you.
Anyway, probably the microze.
That's it.
That's it.
Matter of fact, they so me a container ody to go back go you can feel refill that container for half priced.
So there's a little little plug for them.
But anyway, hey, uh, the next question is these plants, the fig and the grapefruit and even the little limit they're getting little sprigs coming off the ground.
I won't see these juvenile plants to grow up and okay, instead of growing when when should All.
Right, here, here's what I'm to do. I'm already into my next break. Here, hang on just a second. We'll come back and we'll address that. Thank you, Thank you for hanging on. We'll be right back to have you with us today.
Uh.
Let's see here we are heading out to uh Pasadena to talk to Freda. Hello Frea, welcome to guard Mine. Thank you.
I have had discussed that my sister in law gave me. It was she got it from loads on work down and I put it the pot on my front porch and when I was watering it, I iiced there were a little white cotton looking things on the leaves.
And.
She gave me some spray and I tried that. Well, the white the little things that look like infectors, they weren't moving, but anyway, yeah, now I see like a pattery like snow on the leaves. And I strayed with what she gave me. And it's still I still have the pottery spray. I don't have the little white toots of cotton looking things.
Okay, but do you know, you know I'm.
Beginning to get hold in them.
Okay, do you know what the spray was that you had?
No, I asked her, Okay, something she mixed up and putting a bottle.
Oh okay, all right. Uh so those are probably mealie bugs. And if you want to, if you're not squeamish, and you don't mind, go out and grab some of that cotton between your thumb and fore finger and kind of squeeze it and slide it to the side. And if you got all kinds of pinkish red goo on your finger, that's mealybugs. Okay. They're hard to control. There's two approaches. One is to individually go after them with a little like a cotton ball, dipped in alcohol and just kind
of dab it on there. Some people use a cute tip if they're trying to get in because he sings, hide in the nooks and crannies of the plant and just stay on them like that. Another way is to put a product in the soil that'll go up in the plant, so when the Meaia bug sucks the juices out of the plant, which is what they're doing, that
they pick up that poison that way. If you're going to do that, I would make sure you don't have blooms on it for a while, because you don't want bees to be feeding on nectar if the plant's been provided with a systemic insecticide like that. But those are the two approaches. The alcohol approach is more tedious and you have to stay with it. But that would be the way to go the holes in the leaves or something else, and probably not a cause for concern on hibiscus.
Okay, all right, thank you so much for help you, bet Freda.
Thank you for the call. Appreciate that very much. Let's go out now. We're going back. David and Tumbull I think we left you hanging a minute ago.
That's Okay, Hey, I've got those fruit trees are coming up and they're they're putting out sprigs posting the ground. I won't pick trees to grow up and correct, so I can pick the fruit right, so, but I don't want them having the limb so postagram. When is the right time to prune them without harming these juvenile trees.
Oh, you can prone them anytime you want. But those things at the bottom, as they're sprouting out and they're a little tender and succulent, you can just take your thumb and rub them to the side and they snap right off where they attach.
But you I don't know if you're going to pick that young if I should just let them grow.
Well, you know, there's not a right or wrong on it, to be honest, David, if I would if your plant doesn't have a lot of foliage on it, I would leave what's there to help keep supporting that root system
for a while. But I wouldn't do the pruning too late into the fall, because when you prune, you stimulate new growth, and on something that's potentially going to be freeze damaged, you don't want to stimulate late season growth because that doesn't have that kind of growth doesn't have any future with the winter coming on, So I would if you're going to do some prune on it, I
would do it now. If you feel like, you know, these plants don't have enough leaves or growth or whatever, you could just leave it for now and then you could get back on it next spring with some pruning and watering fertilizing at that time. Either way, it will work, work all right.
Thank you, sir, You.
Bet, thanks a lot. I appreciate your call. I've talked to you about different kinds of fertilizer products on the program before and Nelson Fertilizers. Dan Nelson and his team out there have created a wide range of products. Now we talk about the turf fertilizers like Slow and Easy soup Er slow release fertilizer for the lawn, Bruce's Brew which is more immediate release with some slow release activity
as well. By the way, if you haven't fertilized this summer, you can put a little Bruce's Brew on now and that would carry you on into our fall fertilization. But I want to talk about some of the canisters that they have that would be things like color Star for any kind of bloom and flowering plant, the Plumeria food, the boog and villia food, the rose food, the crape myrtle, tree and shrub vegetable garden azaleas. There's one for citrus,
fruit and avocados. There's another one for hibiscus, and these things can be refilled. There's a number of a dozen different companies around town, garden centers and whatnot that feed stores to that well. You can come out and you just pull the handle kind of like you're getting peanuts in the grocery store, put in a little bag. You just put your old jar up there and refill it. And it's a lot less expensive to do it that way. Plus you just don't throw more plastic in the environment.
You just reuse that jar over and over again. It just makes sense with a high quality product like that and the ability to refill. I think Nelson Plant Food has a wonderful lineup and just makes sense. And you're going to find Nelson in a lot of different places in the area. We're going to now go to Isaiah. Hello, Isaiah, welcome to garden Line. I've got about a minute or so here. We'll see if we can get you taken care of. Thank you, Good morning morning.
Yeah, I have a tellin the treda is green.
It's about four feet now.
But at least our calling is that it's a spring.
Wasn't like that before.
The I'm sorry, it's a What kind of plant?
Is it?
Thine?
A tree?
Okay? And and what is what is what do you mean by culling? What's it? What's happening? Is it throwing the fruit off?
No, he's not yet, he's just you know, he's about four feet now.
But at least colin you know, Oh, okay, okay, yes, okay, I got you, I got you, all right, Uh, Isaiah? What that is is it is something. It's a little insect that feeds in between the upper and lower leaf surface, so it tunnels out the fleshy material inside the leaf. And if you look at it close, you'll see little black lines or trails through there. And that's called the citrus leaf minor. And then the plant leaf starts to curl from all that feeding activity. Now, that doesn't kill
your plant. It takes it takes away leaf area, though, so some people will ignore it and do nothing. If it's a young plant. I would say for the first couple of years. Let's go ahead and spray it, control those leaf miners and give the plant a chance to build a stronger, bigger plant. And the product I would recommend is called spin nosid. And if you have a pin or pencil, honey, I'm going to spell that word out for you. It's available in many brands in many places.
I know our Ace hardware stores are all going to have spinosid in different forms. It's s p I N O s A D spin oh sad, sad, spin no sad. That's the ingredient. Just go into an Ace hardware store and or a garden center near you and just say hey, I need something with spinosid, and just spray it whenever there's new fresh growth. Okay, thank you, you bet good luck with that. I appreciate your call. I hear the music music playing here. We're going to take a break.
I'll be back our number seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. Thank you, welcome back to the guarden line. Glad you're back with us. We are looking forward to helping you in any way. We can have a beautiful garden, a bountiful landscape, and perhaps most important of all having fun in the process. We're going to head straight out this hour to Maureene out in Lakeside of State. Hello.
Maurene, Hello, I have a question.
I've had to order a special product.
To put in my small backyard pond, and I mean really small. I bought the smallest quantity, which was eight ounces. I'll try to say the name of the.
Am I online.
I guess not yes, uh huh, I'm listening.
Oh oh, I'm sorry.
Well, I made a mistake of leaving my radio one, so I'm gonna step side out.
You have confusion, I'm sorry.
All right.
It looks like it.
Is called Fluma max a scene. I'll spell it if you are not familiar. It's f l U f l U m A x A z I N. I purchased it because I have something called water meal, and I've had a great deal of trouble trying to fight this off in my little pond and had to go online.
So what else?
I believe?
They told me it could be used to kill other plants, and I grasped, so I was trying to get a little bit more finite detail, as is it so strong or I'll let you talk.
I'm sorry.
Okay, So basically, first of all, that's outside my air of expertise. But that particular product is a herbicide and it's used, it can be used, and it's used on road sides in some situations for vegetation management. Did they tell you to put it in a pond? Is that? Is that what it was?
Yes?
I have it small.
It's a small little irritant called water meal. It is so tiny it just looks.
Like a little tiny round.
It has no roots, but it multiplies quickly and it's covered the surface, so it looks terrible. So I'm going to kill the.
But it's super expensive.
So I'm thinking I don't want it to sit in my garage if there is another use for it in the rest of my yard.
I have a small yard.
Yeah, it doesn't have a label for anything anything else in the landscape, so you I can't reckon commend using it anywhere else. But that particular product is used for aquatic weeds and all these things that hydrilla and all kinds of other stuff that get into the into water systems. It helps control that. So as far as the use is for it, you know, there's not another labeled use in the landscape.
Okay, all right, but I just thought best i'd try.
Well.
Good, good question, good question. Good you almost stump the chump on that one.
But yeah, you might send me. You might send me out to a pe place. And that has not been fruitful. I haven't gotten any use out of anything that was recommended. I don't need to mention the name of the company.
But so, but what I would like to, yeah, just stay kind of watch it and stay with it. And also just be aware that as you add nitrogen to water, you start to have a proferation of different things like algae. You know, you get that green algae in the water that uh so, anything that is a fertilizer kind of thing used in that water is going to proliferate some
of those aquatic plant issues that you might have. It doesn't mean don't fertilize and you won't have it, just means don't aggravate it with fertilizer.
Okay, I got you.
I'll let you know how I do.
Good Thank bye, bye, Yes, thank you.
All right, We're going to go now out to Leanne in Cyprus. Hello Leanne, Welcome to guard Line.
Good morning, Skip.
I have to take down at least half of a thirty year old crate birdle that is probably twenty feet high to accommodate putting in a whole home generator. And the question is can I do this or do I have to remove the whole crate birdle? Really don't want to, but these limbs are massive as you might expect at that age, and I don't want it resprouting either, because that area has to be clear for them to have access for any.
Just yeah, is it just how close will the slab for the generator be to the trunk of the.
Crape myrtle twenty two inches?
Oh wow? Okay, yeah, you need to have somebody dig that out. It would be the best bet. You can cut it off and you can treat the stump immediately with a product containing tricle paer and that will kill it. But craymurtle that size has huge roots underground that are going to rot over time, and then the soil sinks,
and now your slab is on sinking. One end of the slab is going to be on a kind of a sinking area of soil, so that I would personally have somebody dig it out and put the saw back in kind of back down again before they come in with the slab. But if you just want to kill it, there is a product that when you cut it off, you treat the stump immediately, not half a day later,
but right away. You put a tricle a peer on that stump and it will kill it may reach sprout once just because that's a huge crape myrtle with a lot of stored reserves. But that will be the way you get rid of the planet itself. But I don't think that's adequate if you're putting a slab in that close.
Yeah, so you do recommend taking the whole thing down.
Then I would get it out of there and get especially over toward the slab side, you know, getting some of those roots out of there, and you can hire somebody to come in and hang grub it out, or how are you going to go about it? The problem with the stump grinder is that fluff stuff up and leaves a lot of wood in the soil, so it's still going to sink afterward anyway. But those are your options.
Yeah, not the wa and I wanted to hear I really wanted to leave. I wanted to leave half of it because I want the height there and the shade there in that corner of the house.
Okay, But the people with the generator saying they can't get access right, well.
They want twenty two inches clearance all the way around the generator to be able to service it, which you know is reasonable and to do that, and I do have to remove part of that crepe, at least half of it.
But you're saying you're recommending all, well.
Yeah, I mean when you cut that back, it's just going to re spout all these suckers from the base. And now you've got a thicket coming back where you to replace the part of the trunk you took off or something. So I from what I can picture in my mind's eye, I don't see a way around this one. But if you want to, I'm going to put you on hold. If you want to get my email address, send me a photo oh of it. Remind me it's
a follow up of this call. I'll take a look and maybe there's something I'm not picturing in my mind's eye. I'm sorry I'm late running to a break here, Liam, but I'm putting you on hold and Chris will give you an email address if you want to stick around all right, folks, I got to take a run. When we get back Blake and Cypress and Walter and Adolph, we will be getting to your calls right away. Hey, welcome back to guard Line. Glad you are. Glad you
are with us today. We're answering questions and trying to help you have a more beautiful on more bountiful landscape and certainly more fun in the process of gardening. Let's head out to Blake and Cypress next. Hello, Blake and welcome to guard Line.
Hiks, Skip, good morning. I've got several porter weed plants that we enjoy. They take the heat and the pots all summer. When we forget to water them. There's bees on them right now, I'm looking at it. But they get singed every they get killed every winter. So I'm thinking about trying to propagate them in from cuttings and that way move the pots in this winter, the small pots in overwinter.
Right.
So I got the hormone, I got the potting mix, But when is the best time of year for me to start that cutting process.
You can try that at any time. I've never tried to cutting propagate porter weed before, so I'm not familiar you know with how successful that's going to be, you can try it. You can also do a division any kind of thing that's a perennial like that. You typically can get down at the base and divide the plant in two and have two viable plants. So that would be another option. You're not going to make a lot of plants out of it that way, but like you,
cuttings can make a lot of plants. But if you're going to try a cutting, I would I would cut some tissues and leave Do you know what a node is? Where like a stem has a swollen spot where a leaf comes out, and then further down the stem there's another swollen spot. If you can get cuttings with at least two nodes, take the leaves off the bottom node, one closest to the base of the plant that you cut it off of, and then leave two leaves on the other one and dip them in a rooting hormone.
You can get a powder rooting hormone powder from garden centers, Ace Hardware stores, Southwest Fertilizer wherever you are there. Actually you're up in the Cypress area, so you you got several good Ace Hardware stores in your area, get that powder, dip it in the powder, put it in a moist chamber with a clear cover over it, and put it in lots of light, but not direct sun, and that'll give it the best chance of rooting that you can.
You want that bottom node and then a note above ground that has the leaves still on it.
Perfect.
All right, we'll give it a truck. Yeah. Yeah, I've used a lot of things for that. If you've got a container, you can put a little bread wrapper over the top of it to kind of create that little greenhouse chamber, you know, if you will. So it's pretty easy to do, but good luck doing it. Let me know how it works for you.
Well.
I appreciate it, Skipt, thank you, sir. I appreciate that. We're going to go now into Stafford, Texas and talk to Walter. Hey, Walter, Hey, good morning.
Skip.
I normally listen to you from Stafford, Texas, but luckily I absolutely am up in New England, in the state of Rhode Island, staring out at aar at Kanton Bay. As I'm talking to you.
I don't want to hear anything about temperatures, but I'll answer your question, all right.
I won't mention temperatures. It's a half tide rising though. So Skip, I've got a question and I can't find a local resource for it, so I thought I'd turn to my home town resource. We have an invasive species weed tree up here known as the tree to Heaven. If you're just looking at it, the leaves are similar to a black walnut, but it's not a black walnut.
It it doesn't produce any fruit or nuts right. And the tree, it grows very fast and it spreads or reproduces whatever you want to say, via the root system, which are much like riise zomes like you find on a fern, So they just pop up from the riise zomes that are out there supporting the tree. Is there any kind of a product that you can think of that as I cut this tree down, or lots of these trees down, that I can put into the soil to prevent the reproduction or the tree coming back.
Not in the soil. Here's what you do. You go to my website gardening with Skip dot com Gardening Okay with Skip dot Com. I put four new publications in the top one on the page. As you go to that page is herbicide products to use with my weed wiper. Now, yeah, you're going to use the weed wiper to do this, but if you click on that, what I've done is I've grouped weeds. There's woodyweeds, shrubs, vines, and perennials. That's what we're talking about here, Tree of Heaven. There's grassyweeds,
there's broad leafweeds. There's wild onion, wild garlic and their sedges, and each of those groups has a different product. Triclop Peer is the product that when you cut the branch, when you cut the stump off or the trunk off, or whatever, anytime you cut it, you immediately treat that cut surface with just straight triclo peer. And I have a list of all the products that contain triclo Peer right there that you can go shop for. But you cut it off, you immediately dab with. I use a
little foam brush like from a paint store. You know those little foam brushes on a wooden stick. You just you dab that in the tricle paer and then just dab it on that fresh cut surface around the perimeter, especially of that cut. It moves right into that stump and it will really do a good job killing it back. Now, if you've got a huge lots of storage underground carbohydrate and whatnot, one little treatment or tricle paer may not get it all. You may have to do it again
later when it tries to re sprout. But that is very effective. It's simple. It puts the least amount of chemical in the environment you can put, but it will move down in the tree and translocate through and kill it. Do a good job of killing that and other things like poison, ivy and other stuff like that.
Okay, that's what I thought I heard you mentioned to the woman with the myrtle beach issue or myrtle create myrtle issue trechlopire. So I will try to find that up here. Now when you say immediately put on it, Can I cut Like they're about two inch stems right now? So can I cut maybe four to five of them and then apply it? Or as I cut one apply it, cut another one apply it.
Yes. Yes, I'm just trying to get people from to not think well, I'll cut it today and I'll come dab it tomorrow kind of thing. Just go ahead and get it all done while you're there. If you need to cut about four or five of them and then go back and dab them. That's fine, there's not a problem with that. It's not that in me, okay.
I just wanted to make sure.
Yeah, good question. Hey Walter, thanks and have fun up there. Bring bring back some cool weather if you come back this way. Well, all right, folks, I let's see here. You know what I was talking earlier to somebody about saying you need to go to any hardware if you weren't listening earlier. Langham Creek Ase Hardware, which is over in Cypress by the way where Blake was doing that Porter Weed transplant. Langham Creek Case Hardware is at the
intersection of Barker Cypress. In five twenty nine, they are having a grand reopening. They'd opened, they'd been in the store new owners. I was over there, you know, we had one of those appearances where people came, there's a great time over there. They they kind of close things down and revamped all the inside and having their big grand reopening now out there, and it starts on Friday.
This Friday goes through Sunday. They're giving away an Ego powered string tremor two hundred fifty dollars machine Ego powered. That's the battery powered device. They're giving away a Weber grass grill, a four hundred and fifty dollars grill, A paint. They're giving away a paint of Room Makeover two hundred dollar value. They're going to be demonstrations on various kinds
of grills like Trager, Big Green Egg and Weber. They're going to demonstrate the Guy's Need Pizza oven, which is pretty cool if you haven't seen one of those before. But it's all at Lang mccreek Case Hardware, Barker, Cyprus in five twenty nine this coming weekend now on Saturday,
this is a Friday, Saturday and Sunday event. On Saturday only, they're having their STILL Power Equipment open house fifteen percent off STILL units and that's that one day only, So that would be a good day if you're looking, if you're in the market for a weed eater or you know, any of those power equipment types of things from Still, this is a good opportunity to get that taken care of. All right, let's see here. I'm going to go now to Manville, Texas and talk to Adolf. Hello Adolf, Yes, sir.
Good morning. Quick question in regard to a mind that has a couple of foot trees that so all the way to the ground they came back. Concern is whether they're any good. In other words, the graft where it was grafted, it's gone, yes, okay.
So if it's coming from below the graft, dig it up. You only have two options. The easiest is dig it up and buy a new quality tree put it back in there immediately. Or you can try to bud or graft onto that rootstock that is hit and mess. It takes time, and I would for ninety nine percent of the people, I would just say, dig it up and put a new tree in.
Okay, all right, Can I ask you one more real quick?
Yes, real quick? Okay.
The cons I've got some, you know, the ones that grow at in the back from squirrels.
Uh, they're pretty big now, I'd.
Say at least twenty foot fifteen foot.
Can they be grafted?
Absolutely? They can. If you go to online and look up the one lay bark graft i n LA y bark graft, you'll see how to do it. I believe there's one of those publications on Aggie Horticulture website, but
look up the n lay bark graft. You're going to do it in the spring, and you're going to have stored the pecan wood from the variety you want to put on those that current tree, you're going to have stored it in a refrigerator, and you're using dormant wood in the spring when the tree you're grafting onto is the sap is flowing and the bark is stripping off and stuff. But just go look it up. I can't do the whole how to do it in the air, but in the bark graft, that's the one. Thank you, sir.
I appreciate, appreciate your call very much. Plans for All Seasons is on Highway two forty nine tom Ball Parkway, just north of Luetta. Now you know, Plants for All Seasons. It's family owned operation by the Flowery. It's been around since what nineteen seventy three. When you walk in there, you're talking to experts who know what they're talking about. You're talking to people who absolutely can point you in the right direction. Plants for All Seasons dot Com is
the website. Here's a phone number you want to call them. In fact, this afternoon be a good time to go buy to eight one, three, seven, six, sixteen forty six. I'll be right back guarden line. Hey, glad you're listening in today. I hope you're having a good time. I am, and I hope that we're helping you have more fun out there in your garden and landscape. You know, when you get to gardening, it's one of the great greatest
hobbies I think that there is. It has so many benefits from mental benefits, to physical benefits, to culinary benefits and beauty benefits as well. Bring flowers indoors. We were just I was just out watering one of our beds where you got some zinias out there for cutflowers in the garden, and gardening just offers so many options. Well, let's go in and head out to Katie, Texas, and we're going to talk to Kevin. Hello, Kevin, Hey, good morning skit. I'm well, thank you all right.
So, for the past couple.
Of years, I've had some some spots show up on out of my house in between my neighbors uh lawn and my lawn, and I've always thought it was, uh some sort of fungus. So you know, I'd buy the nitro foss fungus side stuff. But this year it happened again, and it was also happening, you know, along the devil strip between the the road and the sidewalk on the grass. And and so one morning I went out and I'd see these kind of clumps of dirt on top of the soil, and I'm moved.
I have a real mower, so.
I'm own my lawn about five five eighths of an inch, and you know, so it's very easy for me to spot that. And I started digging around and I noticed there was a tunnel going into the dirt. So then, you know, I hopped on Google and I came up with, or what I thought it was, is a mold cricket. And I don't think i've heard you discuss these before, but.
I went.
I got some soapy water, a couple of gallons of soapy water, and I poured it on that that little clump of dirt, and eventually this really ugly, really ugly insect came crawling out, and sure enough it was a cricket.
There you go, Well, good, so go ahead.
Well, I was gonna say, so I put some insecticide out a granular that I just got from from you know, a big box store. But yesterday I was I was in the ace and I got some fife end. Thren Rady was a body of mine. He always told me to use by fitting thron. But I'm just not sure
how I should apply it. Is this, you know, is am I gonna mix a couple of gallons in a in a pump sprayer and spray the yard and then water it in or I just thought, maybe you give me a little advice on on the best way to go out, And.
In that case, I would I would do a hose end sprayer, and I would I would use it that way because that puts a little more water out and you can get it down in the thatch they're down chewing around down at and below the soil surface. Yeah, and so the I think the hose end will be a better approach. And by fen throing is fine. Uh, you know, it works, it works well. Uh, it does the job that it's supposed to do. So I certainly
something you may want to try. The the uh nightro fiss bug out Max that you hear me talk about here is a by fen throwing granule. So that's another option you would you would put the bug out max granules out there, follow the label and then water it in really good. And if you got good coverage when you put it out and watered in, you're gonna get that chemical the bifendron off those granules and into the thatch and and soil surface area where they can also uh do work.
Okay, going looking down the road, after I put this bipe in thre a out, is that going to kill not only the mole cricket but any kind of eggs or anything going forward? Or should I expect to you know, be more proactive, uh say, during the spring of next year and put out Now you're.
It's not gonna yeah, it's not gonna kill eggs and stuff nothing that It basically is any critters that are crawling around in there will kill them. So it'll kill chinch bugs, if you happen to have some of those in there, it'll kill uh side web worms or in any other insects that live down in that that area, it will kill them. But as far as next year you would you would have to come back, you know what to look for now and early on try to try to get ahead of that.
Okay, So this is gonna be a yearly routine, that that I put the nottro fast bug out.
Yes, yes, yes, that is true. Uh, And so that that's really the only option. I mean, if someone is doing it organically, there is a type of nematode that can be applied that is a more difficult to do process successfully, but that that would be the only other thing that you might want to consider. But anyway, I think you're on the right track, and by fen thren is pretty much going to kill any insect out there. Okay, all right, thanks, good, all right, you bet, thank you
for the call. Take care. Hey, our phone number is seven one three two one two k t r H if you want to give us a call. You know, by Fentherren is a nitrophosphor, and because it's a night frost product, you're going to find it a lot of places around town. You can find it at Lake Hardware and Angleton down of Alasko. You're going to find it at Gym's Hardware up there on Liberty FM fourteen ninety seven. Yeah, up in the Montgomery area. Also it in Brendan Plants
and Things carries those products as well. So just a little tip there to get you off to a good start mentioning the dealing with pests and things. Don't forget I've got my lawn pest, disease and weed management schedule online. It's there. You can download it for free. Can just look it on the screen if you want. I like for people to print it out. It's multicolored so it's
easy to follow. There's a whole there's a row from January to December for insects, a rope for diseases, a rope for preventing weeds, a rope for killing existing weeds, and then a whole bunch of product examples color coded for everything that's on the schedule. So no matter what ails your lawn, probably going to find an answer to it right on that free schedule online gardening with Skip dot com. Wild Birds Unlimited. I love to talk about
them because I love to go into wallbirds. Every time I go into a wallbird's I learn something because they are knowledgeable and I learn about new products that are out and about you know, I used to I'll just true confession here. I used to buy cheap bird seed just good, find a big old bag of cheap bird seed, and then I realized that those little red bebies I call them the little red milo seeds, sorghum seeds in there. The birds don't care for those in general, they don't.
They kick them out. And so you buy this bag of seed. But I've looked, I've seen seed packs that are like fifty percent of that stuff birds don't eat. Well, that wasn't a good deal. You essentially have to buy twice as much just to get bird seed out of the deal. Wabirds unlimited. They have the seeds for whatever kind of birds you're trying to attract. They have no mess blends where I'm I mean, there's not even you know, sunflower holes that are going to be on the ground
from it. They've already got them shelled into the blend. So, however you want to go about it, wabirds is it. And right now you still need to be using the nesting super blend. I know that my birds are molting, uh and oh my gosh, they look horrible, looks like they got in a fight with a wheat eater and lost. But Nesting super Blend provides them the calcium and the protein that they need at a time when they're just not as able to just fly around just as easily.
All over the place, WBU dot com forward slash Houston. W b U dot com Forward slash Houston. That'll get you to the six Wallbird stores here in the Greater Houston area. I'll be right back time for another break. Our number if you'd like to call in seven one three two one two kat r h which one. I'm glad you're with us, Glad you're with us. Today we're going to move on out to Montgomery, Texas and talk to Terry. Hello, Terry, Welcome to Guardline.
Good morning, Thanks for taking my call. I have a couple million questions for you, but I'll only ask you to today.
Well, I'm going to.
Okay, I'll send you an email.
I've been kind of investigating name oil.
N E E M and watching a lot of YouTube videos on this. Mixing it with baking.
Soda, they say, and water and a little soap for surfactants and spraying it on your plants will kill just about every bug and fungus known.
Demand.
Do you have anything to say about that?
Well, that was an over sell when they say every bug in fungus known, when they start making wide claims. Now, nim oil is a product that is produced by this in the seeds of the nim tree. Do you know what a chinaberry tree is? Did you grow up with chinaberry trees around something. It's a weedy tree here in our area, but it is kinned closely kned to name
mean trees. That's a different species. Anyway. The name oil is pressed out of the seeds and then it's mixed with water, and being an oil, it will kill small, soft bodied insects like spider mites for example, or you know larva hatching out of eggs and things those kind of things. Being an oil, it also has a little bit of a fungicidal property in that the spores on the leaves, when smothered with oil can be destroyed. Now, as far as plumerias are concerned, people that grow up
plumerias will use mem oil. You just need to remember it's an oil, and when it's ninety five degrees and the sun is baking down, soaps and oils can burn plants, so you're going to be real careful with it. My recommendation will be to mix a little bit up and just spray it on a leaf somewhere down lower on the planet. Just spray it on a leaf and give it about twenty four hours or a little more and watch and if you don't see any ill effects, then you're good to go. I think I would avoid spring
it during the day. I would do it super early in the morning probably is the best time to apply it. But depending on what you're going after on the plume area, nem oil may or may not be a good solution.
Because enough, which brings me to my next question. I saw a new leaf on my plume area this morning, excuse me, and it looked like it had a black tar substance on the new leaf, and there was lots of tiny little holes within the area of where the black tar substance is. And I'm wondering, is that sooty mold or is it some kind of other fungus And what can I do to help my plumeria.
That's interesting. It's probably not city mode. If it looks like tar. The city mold itself looks more like it looks like soot. So it's not shiny. Yes, it's not tar like. It's just just like if you stuck your finger up in the fireplace and wipe it on your finger, that the way your finger would look. That's what city molde looks like.
Yes, I just sprayed some off of my Japanese you So yeah, okay, Well, do you have any idea what that might be?
Well, you know, without seeing it, it's hard to say for sure. There are some fungal pathogens that can cause the leaves, new blumary leaves coming out to have a black turned black. There are you know, a number of different things can cause fungal growth. You know, certainly a lot moisture and whatnot, a lot of constant watering and whatnot. There are a few nutrient deficiencies that can result in that new growth turning black coming out. But when you say the tar, that throws me a little bit. And
I'm not real sure on that one. That may be one. If we've got any Plumerius Society people listening that you just are going, oh my gosh, I know exactly what she's talking about. Well, feel free to call in. We'll all learn something. But that would be what I would suggest right now. Just continue to provide your plumeria with good care.
And so they okay, thank you. And then one last really fast question. I have a chuffal era and it's in a pot and it needs to be reported, and I'm wondering if I can put it in the ground, and if so, where sunny, shady parts sun part shade.
A very bright shade would be fine. You know, it could go in sun. But most of our schiffleras we treat them like hostplants, and they go in way less than full sun, and to suddenly move them into full sun, you get a lot of leaf burn on that, but a real bright straight The biggest thing is it has no cold heartiness whatsoever, So you're going to have to be able to really protect it during the winter if you're going to put it in the ground.
Okay, all right, well, thank you for you have a good day.
Yeah you too, thanks a lot terry, appreciate the call. Good luck with that. I was talking earlier about I was joking with some of my Southwest Fertilizer. You know, they had purchased a chainsaw from there. We were kidding about me trying to get them to have Bob come out and cut the tree form, which is ridiculous, but hey, you gotta have some fun. Southwest Fertilizer, is it. That is a no brainer for me to recommend people go there.
And here's why, there's nothing you can need for your lawn and landscape to control pest weed diseases, to fertilize, you know, tools that you might need, spreaders for your fertilizer, spreaders for your fire at bait. All of that, there's nothing that you're not they're not going to have at Southwest. If you're an organic gardener, they probably have the most robust collection of organic products is anybody in town, just because Bob always keeps stocked up on everything and so
you have options. But even more important than just the fact that the products are in the store is a fact that you've got knowledgeable folks from you know, Bob and Aaron and and really the whole team there at Southwest.
They will point you in the right direction. So you bring a plant sample, you bring a picture of something on your phone, and they'll take a look at it and they'll try to do their best at assessing what it is and then tell you, well, here's here's what you need to use, here's when you need to use it, here's how do you need to use it, and there's that is priceless to have that kind of advice, but that's what they're all about. As Southwest Fertilizer. You can
go to the website Southwest Fertilizer dot com. By the way, the store is on Bisonet and Renwick Bisonet and Renwick in southwest Houston, or you can give them a call. Seven one three six six six seventeen forty four seven one three six six six seventeen forty four of the Southwest for Life has been a Houston lawn and garden tradition since nineteen fifty five. And boy, is there a reason that they're still in business and people love that place so much. You are listening to Guardline and I'm
your host, Skip Richter. We're here to help you have more success and hopefully have more fun out there in the garden and the landscape. You know, anytime you feel like, well you're just not good at growing plants, well you just need to tune in and you need to listen and you need to call in. Let's help you have success. Because I'm telling you it's not rocket science, not It's a matter of simple principles. Plants moods, soul, moisture, but
not too much. Plants need sunlight, sun full sign Some parts in lance need excellent excellent drainage, they need certain nutrients. They some of them are adapted to here, some or not. I mean, there's a handful of things like that that really amount to the answer to most gardening questions, and we help you think through that here on guard Line. I sometimes I have to hold back because I would
like to sit here and just teach all day. On guard Line, I have to hold back a little bit, but I do try to give you some of the why, because it's just it's one thing to tell you the what, and if you understand a little bit about the why, then as you go about, you just are able to encounter other situations and continue to have success. Hey, I'll be right back seven one three two one two katrh
Thanks all right, welcome back. We're back in the saddle again, ready to go for our last hour of this weekend. We'll be done here at ten am. If you got a phone call and you'd like to give us a call three two one two k t r H. And we're going to head straight to the phones right now and head out to Spring and talk to Lance. Hello Lance, and welcome to guard Line.
Hey, good morning, Skip, Thanks for taking my call.
All right, Clussure I've got some in the.
Ground hibiscus plants, and one of them has gotten the little little white bugs on it, and it almost looks like dirt all over the leaves, and I'm trying to figure out what it is and how to get rid of it.
Okay, my best guest without seeing them, is that you're looking at the cast skins of aphids. Aphids shed their skin just like a snake sheds its skin, and they leave these little whitish things that are like just shrunk and shrivel little aphid skin, and they're all over the leaf, and that would be one possibility. The other thing that's white. When I first you're talking about white on on on hibiscus, my first thought is, well, that's going to be mealy
bugs because they are very tofty, cottony white. But it doesn't look like dirt on the leaf. It's clearly just like little pieces of cottony material, very tiny, that are there on the plant. That's a whole different insect.
Okay, yeah, it's I don't know, they look like little white doodle bugs. I mean they're moving, so I don't know that they're just skin.
Oh okay, Well, then you're probably looking at it. Then you're talking about meadie bugs. That's if they're like if they look like a doodle bug. I remember doodle bugs by the way, You know, you have to say the right words when you're stirring a doodle bug mound to get them to come out, right, Did you grow up with one with those? Okay, well that's a whole nother story anyway. Yeah, that's mealy bugs. And so what you can do, h let's see how big is this how
biscus plants? It don't it contains Probably.
No, it's in the ground. It's probably three feet tall and probably two and a half to three feet one.
Okay, so you got a couple of options. One way that people deal with meadia bugs is they use alcohol rubbing alcohol on a cotton swab or a cotton bowl and they literally just kind of dab them with that, and that will kill them. Because they have that, they have a protective coating on them that makes it hard
to get a pesticide to them. Now, if if that's gonna be tedious, and you're gonna have to keep watching them because there's always gonna be some you miss and they're popping up and sometime they're down right where a leaf attaches to the stem. They're kind of hidden down in that crevice, so you just have to really look all over it real good to do that. That's an option. The other option would be to use a systemic insecticide
that you put in the soil. It goes up in the plant and it is in the plumbing of the plant, so when the media bug sucks juices out, it kills it. It's not a poisonous hot on the surface of the planet. It's in the plumbing of the plant. With those kind of things, I don't like to leave folded or flowers on the planet because you don't want to bring bees then to drink or from something that's got insecticide in the plumbing. So that would be the only caveat to
using the systemic. There's pros and cons to every product, and that's the con for the systemics.
Okay, all right, that sounds good. Well, I appreciate you taking a call.
Yes sir, good luck with those control Yes sir, you too as well. Hey, I was talking about Southwest Fertilizer having everything. They also carry sweet grain. A sweet grain is nitroposs is organic type product. It's an eleven zero zero fertilizer, and what it basically is a is a molasses based fertilizer. So it smells great. Has that Just imagine what a molasses smells like. That's what the fertilizer
smells like. It's eleven percent nitrogen. You put it down, it dissolves away, it goes into the soil, and it provides pretty quick release of those nutrients into the soil. If I were using it now on my lawn, I would normally you would play ten pounds of sweet Green per thousand square feet, and you can read the label
on what to do. I would cut it in half and I would do half now, and I'm a month from now, do half again and spread that out a little bit because after that, the next fertilization is going to be our October fertilization for the things we do to help RASK go stronger into winter. But sweet Green excellent product, widely available. Certainly they have that at Southwest Fertilizer as well as other locations like you would expect of night FoST products. We're going to go back now
to a task casita and talk to Jim. Hey, Jim, welcome to Garden line.
Thank you so much for receiving my call. I just planted sod, and boy, you know as well as I did, this weather's beating up the sad farms. So here's a question. I put sod in yesterday. They told me to water the sod for two hours a day. That seems a little bit too much to water at one time. And then the other thing is yeah, and they said one time, but no, so I'm how many? Okay, First of all, I've got the rachio system watering system, and what I
can do is do different times. Now, I was thinking about four times a day, twenty minutes a day and setting it up so I don't have water runoff. And then my question here is my question here is can I water my new sod and the heat of the day.
Yes, and you should. Here's the thing this is, this is how I did it. When I put in my I put in four different turf grasses. This spring actually is early summer. And what I do is as I'm laying the turf grass. After I lay a section, I turned the water on because that grass has about what three quarters of an inch of soil that it comes.
With no, no, And it actually is a little bit less, not because of the heat.
Yeah, Well, the point is sick. Yeah, the whole root system can't be any deeper than that, which is essentially no root system to speak of. So what you want to do is keep that wet all the time, and I water it twice a day, and I put on the rough water to wet it and to soak into the soil a little bit below it, because you want the roots to go into wet soil, not dry soil.
But for now, like if you put if you put two inches of water on it, it would get it nice and wet, and it would wet the soil deeply. But then within a matter of the course of most of a day, that surface is going to dry out because the sun is baking on those leaves and they got to have water, but they don't have roots. So that's why I would recommend not once a day, I'd do it twice a day. I would do it sometime in the morning. I would do it again sometime later in the day, like maybe two o'clock.
What times would you pick? What times would you pick?
It's not specific. I've got to run to a break, but just a quick answer would be I would probably do it about sometime around eight o'clock in the morning, because the sun's about to come out and start baking down on it. Eight or nine, we'll be fine. And then in the afternoon, I probably do it about two three or four o'clock because that's the heat of the day at four o'clock and so you don't want it to go into that too thirsty. Hey, Jim, I got to run take a break, but good luck getting that.
I'm gonna put you on hold. If you don't stick around till we come back from break, that's fine. I'll be happy to talk to you again. We'll be right back, folks. Good to have Glad to have you with us. We are in head back out to Tescasida. Jim, I think you may have to follow up. Is that correct?
Yes, I grew.
I did.
When we when we planted the sod, we put a top soil blend. I noticed it. To me, it did seemed like there were any nutrients in it. So I put I put my micro life, my life microL life six two four on top of the soil and I dropped my sod. And the reason why is I believe that this microlife will not burn the roots too, false?
True?
Right, right, because this is actually a nutrient for the soil.
Correct, Yeah, it breaks down with microbial activity and releases the nutrients down in the zone. That's fine to do it that way, if you want to do it that way.
Yeah, yeah, I already did it that way. And I'm saying, you know, that's the hole I did. Now, can what should I do with this DoD so I can protect it against the heat and keep it going. Sure, I put a compost on it, nature or whatever.
Right now? Right now? Water water is the thing this odd needs, not excessive amounts, but never drying out. Get it going. Don't worry about any more fertilizing when we get into the fall season. And have you seen my fertilizing schedule online by any chance, Jim, Yes, yes, okay, yeah, if you look at it. If you're going to use microlife again as an organic starting in late September on into October, you would apply that for your fall fertilization. But there you're not going to use your six to
two for when we get to that season. You're going to use the Microlife brown patch. Even though it says the brown pat, which is the disease.
It's a five one three.
Yeah, so but don't do anything. The sod that comes in has a lot of nutrients. Generally, I tell people you don't need to fertilize the first month when you put side in. It's not a lack of nutrients that we're worried about it. It's a lack of water. So but now you've done all you've done, that's fine. Just hold off and then put the Microlife brown patch down when we get into late September on in the first let's say three weeks of October. Ideally that would be the best range of time.
To put it in, and that would be the Microlife five one three correct, five one three.
That is the brown bag, I mean the brown patch, Yeah, brown patch Microlife all right.
Coincidentally, it comes in a brown bag, so it's a brown patch bag.
It comes in a brown bag. Yeah, makes it easy. I love color coding.
That's good. Thank you, sir, Bye bye.
You bet take care bye bye. Yeah. Microlife has a lot of different products. You know, I talk about the green bag all the time because that's a standard through the season lawn fertilizer. I'll be talking a lot about fall fertilization later and what we were just talking about Gemini there was talking about the fall fertilization with a Microlife product that was the brown bag. I don't want
to confuse things now. I'm going to not talk a lot about Fall fertilizer now, but I will and it's on my schedule and all of them are listed on there, and Microlife if you want to find it, you can just go to Microlifefertilizer dot com, Microlife Fertilizer dot com and find it. But I can tell you this, if it's an ACE hardware store, if it's one of our independent garden centers I talk about, if it is a feed store we talk about here on guard Line, if
a Southwest fertilizer we talk about on Garline. All of those places and more carry the Microlife products. Makes it really easy. We're going to go now out to Katie and talk to Hank. Hello, Hank, Hello, how are you? I'm well? Thank you?
I had they had a question, a couple of questions, really, but not.
Where it would be.
The closest place to get too much compost by the Yordas of.
Bel Air.
Bel Air probably if are you able to pick it up. Yes, okay, I would go down to Siena Mulch. They are due south due south of the Houston area. You go down south toward if you know where the town of Sienna is. But it's down south and uh, that's not very far at all really for bell Air, they've got it by the bulk down there. They have different kinds of products by the bulk. They also have products by the bag, so depending on product you're looking for. Pardon it's called
hum compost. Well, yeah, I'm saying that they have a number of different products down there, and the Microlife makes humates plus that is a purple bag which you'll find it's the animals too, uh, And it's it's the humus humates, which is a concentrated comp form of compost, the compost itself. Lots of great compost products out there that also work well that end up becoming reaching that humous state.
Also sometimes you mentioned that a score that sells bird feeders and stuff like that that you highly recommend.
They're really nice.
You know their names.
You said, bird feed.
No bird bird, uh, bird feeders stuff like this.
Yeah, that's wild birds unlimited. And do you have a pin or pencil handy, Yes, sir, all right, go to w B you that stands for wild Birds Unlimited w b EU dot com forward slash Houston. So that's six wallbirds stores will be there. You can find the ones that are closest to you. Uh. And it you know, there's plenty when you when you go to war Birds Unlimited, you're going to find everything you need for birds, including feeders and you know, just just the the birds themselves.
A bird feed, the bird feed itself. You can't buy birds there. That was funny. I can't believe I said it that way, but yeah, that's true. And so for you know you're out in the Katie direction. Uh, there is one a Memorial Drive West. Memorial Drive West is probably the closest one to you out that direction.
Okay, well, thank you, erny.
Yes sir, you take care. Appreciate the call very much. Okay, now, now I just said, actually said online. You can get your birds there. No, you can't cat your birds there. I'm surprised birds don't hang out outside the place waiting for people to walk out so they can mug them and take their bird seed. But anyway, all right, you listening to the guard line our phone number seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four seven one three two one two five eight seven four. We're going
to go now to Richmond, Texas and talk to Steve. Hey, Steve, Hey, they don't good.
Hey.
Yeah, I got a question about Roundup.
Yeah.
I can't find anybody every time I buy some. I've been to all the big box stores and several nurse have been soaked through several bottles. It's all old brown. It looks like coffee. I just known because all the lawsuits and nobody's just buying it and it gets old. I've left it in my garage and it's turned brown. You know, it's my fault.
But I don't know.
If you get you recommend something else, or to buy some frits.
Round Up that's free, where to purchase it? Okay? So, Steve, have you, by any chance been to my website Gardening with Skip dot com?
Now?
If not, right down Gardening with Skip dot Com. And when you get there to the main page, all my publications are down belowed. The very top publication it's called herbicide Products to use with the weed wiper I created. Uh. But the reason I'm referring you to that is when you scroll down it there's a lot of different products, but for glyphosate, which is what was in round Up. Now over the counter garden center round Up doesn't have glyphosate,
as you've discovered. It has a list of products that includes Eraser and high Yield Kills all and ACE Concentrated Weeding, grass Killer, and so on. And you can look at that list and take it with you and you're going to be able to find it at a place like that. And you're done in Richmond the Ace Hardware store. Uh there, you've got plantation Ace and you got another one down
in the Richmond area. Both of those should have a form of glyphasate, like the ACE Concentrated Weed and grass killer that is the same ingredient as Roundup.
Okay, what was the name of.
It, Well, Ace Concentrated Weed and grass Killer. But Ace has different products that they bottle under their name. But if you go to that website, you'll see a list of others. The high Yield product, the Monterey product, a product called Eraser, and they're all the they're still glyphas If you want to use that.
Spray that up phase weed.
Yeah, all right, Well I've got a break coming up here, I have to go, but good luck with that. Remember if the weed is actively growing. If it's actively growing, works very well. If it is just from drought or whatever, gla does not work well. So make sure water the weeds if you have to to get them up and growing. All right, thank you for that call. It's time for
me to take a little break here. I want to remind you our phone number is seven one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. When we come back Terry and Montgomery, let's see Cindy in spring and Charlie at West You you'll be our first up card line. Hey, thanks for joining us. Appreciate you being here. We got plenty more to talk about here, and the last bit
of our show for today. I want to head the first thing out to let's see, we're going to go to Terry and Montgomery. Hello, Terry, welcome to Guardline.
Hi, KiB I have two issues.
One, I have nuts edge and I have sprayed it several times with that image nutsedge killer and whatever. I can't seem to get rid of it. Okay, I don't know how to.
Get rid of it all right, So where's it growing? Is it in the lawn? Is it in a flower bed?
Oh?
I have an area that we're trying to get ready to put sawed down, but it is so innundated over there. I want to get rid of it before I put the sawed down.
Okay, So what you want to use as a product called either sedge hammer, sedge hammer or oh my gosh, I just went blank on the other one. Hang on just a second. I'll say. First of all, let me give you a web a website gardening with Skip dot com. I don't know if you've been to my website or not gardening with Skip dot com. On there the publication When you scroll down the page, there is a list of publications. The first one says herveside products with skipsweed wiper,
and you can see for sedges. Sedge hammer is one that I have on there and it works very very well. That will be a good one. There are other versions of that same ingredient. Monterey has one, Martin's one has one, high Yield has one. They're listed there also on the website. As you scroll down just right there, you'll see something called nutsedge an in depth. Look, now I'm kind of
giving you a homework assignment here. That's about a three page publication, but it goes into that there's two types of nutsedge and they don't grow the same, and it tells you what to use, when to use it, and how to prevent nutsedge from proliferating. Because Terry, the bottom line is you got to get on it first thing in the spring, and you want to never let us nut sedge plant have more than three to five leaves
on it. If it goes past that, it's making more plants, and a spray later on won't recapture the lost ground. In other words, it won't kill all the new plants that it produced. Rate it on. So it's if you read that and you kind of think about it, it makes a lot of sense. It's start early and be consistent, and if you do that, you can win the war on nuts it. You just have to. What people do is that they let up. And I would not recommend
image as the best product. It works good on one type of nuts edge, but not on the other type. The halo sulfur on which is the sedge hammer works well. I think there's another one called sedge ender that has that same thing. In it too, But anyway, it's there on the website. Just read that, and you know, I could it take us an hour to fully discuss it. But if you're read it, I think it'll get you on the right foot. Just remember, start early and never rest.
Never let it rest because it'll recouperate. You got to you gotta don't let it up for air.
In other words, well, yeah, because I read, don't stress it out, don't pull it, don't you know? And so I'm trying to not do all of that. And some of it is turned yellow, but you know, and so I guess it's slowly dying.
But well, and you have about yeah, you have about ten times more than you see right now. It's it just had pup up. Yet they're more, they are more nuts. So I can get on it now, but especially starting next spring. But read that publication. That really is worth an hour of talking.
Is it around? Is it okay to put the spray that's nutsedge around like flowers?
Uh? Read the label on the one that you choose to buy, and it'll tell you if you can or can't use it. I made something called a homemade weed wiper that's also a publication. And when I'm using like a nutsedge control, but I'm doing it among like flowers like lananas, and there's nuts edge coming up. I'll use my weed wiper to wipe it right on the nuts edge and not get the spray on designs.
On the plant.
Okay, okay, yeah, border calls real quick, Terry.
Okay, it's brown spot. So I'm the brown spot is the other issue. I've used that earth Ali, these disease control and the three and one spray, and I can't see.
To get rid of it.
Are you talking about brown patro on your lawn?
No, I'm talking about brown spot on my wack leap Lagusto bushes.
Oh, okay. A product a product containing Daca nil or a similar ingredient. So if you if you go up you're in Montgomery, if you've got the ana plants and produce, tell them you need something that has Daca nil in it, and you're going to have to spray it every time after a rain, spray it again. Rake up all the fallen leaves, get them out of the area because they're just a source of spores for more infection. Anything you
can do to minimize wedding of the foliage. If your lagustrum helps slow it down a little bit, but the spray containing Sorry, I'm sorry, I had to run some best but I got I got some folks here that are that are waiting online? All right, Cindy and Spring, how can we help? Hey?
Good morning?
How are you?
I am good good.
I'm wondering.
We just moved into a house and we have some very large pots by our pool, and we were trying to figure out some trees to put there that would have that were really pretty and showy. Can you offer any suggestions?
You mean a tree and a pot. It must be a pretty big pot.
Huh, it's it's a really big pot, two really big pots.
Okay, what about a magnolia tree?
Can you put a magnolia tree in a pot?
It's going to be a struggle to try to keep it going. It doesn't want to be confined like that, So I would You could try it for a while and be okay, but in general I probably wouldn't do it. There's certainly palm trees that do well. Now, Plumeria is not a tree, but beside a pool, that's a beautiful, tropical a looking plant that gets up in the air a little bit okay that yeah, I mean you could you know, you can plant a ficus tree. You would just have to bring the pot into a protected spot
during the wintertime. But that would be one that would grow out in the sun right out there. Okay, you know there there's a lot of plants that you can make tree like you like a crape myrtle. Train to a single trunk would be another option. Just get a dwarf type. You want one that's not gonna want to get more than about oh, let's say seven to ten feet tall, and there are varieties like that.
What about fruit trees?
Could you put fruit trees like those lemon trees that smells so wonderful when they bloom.
Yeah, citrus CRUs uh huh meyer lemon h huh, satsu h satsuma orange. Satsuma oranges are more cold hearty than the other most other cris That would be a good one. And all the citrus when it blooms, it does smell wonderful, So that would be a good choice. You could train it up into a trunk, and it takes a little while to get it up there. To set suma growing in the ground, they'll get over eight feet high, but in a pot. That would be a nice it'd be
a smaller, but a nice sized little tree. All right, Cindy, thank you so much for hi. Hey, thanks for your call. I appreciate that, folks. We are jumping through calls pretty quick here. I'm gonna go to Charlie and west you. Charlie. I'm really short on time here, but let's get your question and I'll answer it on the other side of the break.
Is this a good time to plant a Saint Augustine plugs?
Not laid the side down, but all right, individual plugs.
That's that's easy. Yes, the answer is yes. Water water water, water them two or three times a day for the first week, and then water them every day for the next week, and then you can start weaning them off from that, but constantly keep the soil moist and you can plant Saint Augustine plugs right now. Thank you very much. I appreciate that call very much. Folks. We're gonna have to go to a break. I'll be right back, just trying to get through all these calls. Hey, welcome back
to the garden line. We are glad to have you with us. Still, our last shot of the day coming up. Right here. So we're going to run right to the phones, head out to Friends with Texas and talk to Ken.
Hello, Ken, I think it's actually Olivia. My husband called for me. My question, Hello, My question is I've been invaded by snails and slugs. I've tried throwing out coffee grounds to run them off. I've tried the what you can get at the box stores snail and slug bait, and I've tried cinnamon, but they just keep coming back with a vengeance. They're climbing the walls. They're killing my plants. What do you reckon?
Okay, gotcha, got you? Got you all right? Well you need it. You're down in front Wood. You got some really good hardware stores. You know, you can go to ashardware dot com. There's some good stores down there.
I do familiar with them.
Some bait and now baits will work, but there's a little bit of a caveat. You need to get fresh bait, and it needs to be put out in a quantity enough to where they eat it and they die. If they eat a little bit and get sick, they kind of learn from that. We call that bait's shyness, and the bait that would work. They're not interested eating because they tried it and it made them sick. So you want to get a good fresh bait, get plenty of it out there. Uh. And there are a number of
different ones. Most of them over the counter now contain iron phosphate, so it's not a it's not like a synthetic chemical poison as much as it's It gives them a terminal case of constipation, which ought to make you happy to know that's what's happening to them. But seriously, the iron phosphate baits work really well. There are some other baits, one that has metalla hyde in it, but I would I would go with the iron phosphates a
little bit safer in the environment, and it works. You just have to You just have to use it, you know, periodically to do that. All that other stuff you're saying, don't bother cinnamon and some people put eggshells out that doesn't work.
I coffee grounds. They don't like the smell I was getting. I'm getting desperate, That's why. That's my point I'm trying to make. But okay, so Ace.
Hardware, get a good quality bait from Ace Hardware down there, and friends with and you'll be able to you'll be able to.
Uh.
It works, it works super super well. I mean it really, it's excellent. Uh yeah that I've I've had good success with those two.
Okay, I will give it a t.
If you don't Yeah, if you don't know, your your ACE hardware is on Edgewood Drive there in front.
Oh, yes, I'm very familiar with it. All run down there today. Yes, thank you so much.
Have a good cool all right, thank you, Ken Slash Olivia. I appreciate talking to you. All right, We're gonna go now to Humble and talk to Carrie. Hello, Kerry, say.
There, I was calling if you're doing well.
I planted some.
Or few pond hollis a few weeks ago, and I guess the heat just kind of took off. I watered them pretty well at first, we got busy, and now now the turn brown.
Okay, so do we need more water?
I did plant them high.
Tell me how how long ago you planted I missed that.
Let's see, I would say that it's been about four weeks.
Okay. So, so a woody plant like a trio shrub, all the roots are in the pot of course that you buy or when you put that in the ground. You need to pretend that it's still on the plastic pot, because what that'll do is it'll make you water the right area. If you knew there was a pot around it in the ground, you wouldn't water to feed out from the plant, you know, because there's no rooms out there.
Water it is well, it takes. It's going to take it, you know, a year or two or three as it begins to expand those roots out into the soil around it. So especially for the first few months, watering that original roots cylinder that went to the ground is very important because you can have moist soil around it, but that that cylinder of roots gets pumped dry on a hot summer day, which we've been having, so that I would focus the watering on that. It doesn't mean you need
to turn it into a swamp. It just means, yes, that we can have drought stress and you think you're watering it enough. But that's just the challenge of it. I would do that and then wait and see what regreens. You may have to do some pruning to remove some dead limbs if that turns out to be what they are.
Okay, okay, all right, thanks, So much.
Appreciate it all.
Right, good luck with it. Yeah, thank you, appreciate appreciate your call very much. Talking about trees and shrubs, reminding me of Affordable Tree Service, you know, Martin spoon More. People all the time they call me like who can I call to trim on my trees? Or I need this and that done? Who do I call? It's always the same answer. It's Martin Spoonmore Affordable Tree Service. The phone number if you like that, it's seven one three six nine nine twenty six sixty three seven one three
six nine nine two six six three. Listen, it's storm season. They're predicting a lot of hurricanes through the year. Well we're getting toward the end of the storm of the hurricane season. But you know, a storm can occur anytime. It can occur anytime, and your trees need to be adequately pruned to give them the best chance of surviving a storm. Bad branch angles are narrowed, they break off easily. That's a no. No. Martin can help fix that. He can help train a tree as it's growing, but also
deal with a tree that's already established. Anything you need to do to take care of your trees, you need to call Martin first, and he's gonna come out, and he's going to charge you a fee to come out, a site visit fee, a uh, you know, just to show up and look at it and assess the situation. If you hire work done, that fee goes right into your work, so you've already paid for that much of the work at least. But having him come out and look at the site is really important because it's like
me answering questions on guardline. I can't see the tree, right, I can't see exactly the situation. He's an expert at it. He knows what he's doing. You can go to the website too, a fftree service dot com afftree service dot com if you want to get a hold of him. And remember, Martin and his wife Joe answer the phones. It's a it's a mom and pop operation, right, I mean,
they take care of their customers. And if you call in someplace and you don't hear Martin or Joe answer, and you probably call the wrong place, you need to die, hang up and dial again. Seven one three Can you tell me the phone number? I've said it enough times seven to one three six nine nine two six sixt' three. I want You've had a couple of things going on.
First of all, next weekend Saturday, September seventh and by the way, and also September eighth, Montgomery County Fall Home and Outdoor Living Show Montgomery County Fall an outdoor home living show at the Lone Star Convention Center. So if you live anywhere up north in a direction, come on over and see me. I'll be there on Saturday from twelve to two. I'm going to be giving a little talk on fall gardening, some of the things we do and fall for success. And then i'll be answering your
questions to the cows come home. I'll stick there as long as you want to talk. I'll be giving away some really cool products for you to try out, too, So another reason to come by. Stick your head in the door, say hi. The Montgomery County Fall Home and Outdoor Living Show September seventh and eighth. I'll be there on the seventh and next Saturday from twelve to two. That's at the Lone Star Convention and Expo Center. It's out there on Airport Road, north side of Conroe. Come
on and see us. They'll have a lot of other fun stuff going on there as well. Also, if you are interested in growing strawberries, you need to attend this program. It's a second annual Strawberry Jamboree in Lake Jackson, Texas. Now the location has been shifted. It's now at the Lake Jackson Rec Center. Lake Jackson Rec Center. That's on ninety one. It's at ninety one Lake Drive in Lake Jackson. October Strawberry Planning Season. You go to this program, you
can even put in an order from strawberry plants. They're going to be doing that, but you are going to hear from speakers that know all about it. It'll go from eight in the morning until twelve noon, and there'll be a strawberry shortcake contest. Wish they'd call me to be judge of that. I'd be willing to give one for the team and eat strawberry shortcake all day. Seriously. They'll be exhibitors, they'll be speakers, they'll be strawberry plugs to pre order the contest. If you think you can
make strawberry shortcake, you need to join it. It's a free event. Nine seventy nine, eight six, four, fifteen fifty eight are called the Brazoria County Extension,