Products or services advertised on this program. Welcome to kt r H Garden Line with Skip Rictrim.
Just watch him as many thanks to.
See what.
They're not a sign.
Well, well, welcome, welcome to Garden Line on a lovely Sunday morning. We're glad you're with us and looking forward to talking about the things you're interested in. I want you to have a beautiful, bountiful garden and landscape, and there's a way to do that. One of the things that I like to say is that there's no such thing as a brown thumb. There's just an uninformed thumb.
And the words if you understand some of the basic principles of what plants want, well, then you can give them what they want and suddenly it looks like your thumb turned green. That's really that is really the way it works on this kind of thing. It's just a matter of given plants what they want. Well, I bet you have dealt with weeds that are problematic, but they're growing right next to a plant you like. In other words, if you tried to spray it, you would get it
on the plant you like and cause collateral damage. Well, there's a couple of ways to avoid that. One is to use a shield, something like a board that you put in between the desirable plant and the weed, and then don't pump up your sprayer too much, because when you do pump it up too much, you create a mist that drifts off target, and that's a problem, and you can use that technique to avoid getting the spray
on a desirable plant. Another one is to create a wheed wiper, and I've done one of those for you. I looked online, I've looked in stores and things, and I just don't see many weed wipers available in the gardening trade. So I created one homemade that you can make yourselves very inexpensive using a grabber tool, one of those things you used to get a jar off a shelf. And so if you would like, you can go to my website gardening with Skip dot com Gardening with Skip
dot Com. It's one of the latest publications I put on there, and it tells you how to build your own weed wiper tool, and I love mine. It works good. I can reach underneath the rosebush and apply a herbicide to maybe a nuts edge plant coming up underneath it, or if I'm walking through the yard and wild onion is sticking up above the grass. I can use it to get the herbicide, wipe it directly on the wild onion.
Do you have hackberries or maybe poison ivy coming up in a fence line and you don't want to spray something that's going to kill your grass around it, Well you can use the weed wiper tool to do just that. It's really handy, works really well, easy to make, very easy to make. And I also have to go with that a list of herbicides. It's a separate publication but it's also on my website, and depending on the weed
you're going after, it tells you what to use. For example, wild onion in your lawn, you're going to use image for nuts edge. I know it says nuts edge and it's wild onion, but that's what works on wild onion, Image for nutst If you're going to go after to let's say peppervine, I had some cause yesterday. On peppervine, you can use something called tricl containing triclope here. That's a herbicide, but it's all on that chart. You don't
have to worry about that. But for whatever kind of weed you're going at, there's that chart that says put this on the sponge. And the thing I like about this weed wiper is you're not spraying pesticide all out in the environment. You're applying it directly to the target weed and that takes very very little pesticide to do that. So check it out at gardening with skip dot com. Well, we're going to just start right off this morning, going straight to the phones and we're going to head out
to Kingwood, Texas and talk to Anna. Hey, Anna, you get the Early Bird Awards today? Were you there? Yeah, I'm here.
Can you hear me?
I can now? Yeah?
Good morning, okay, h good morning, scip. I have two questions about trees. The first one is we had we have a lot of trees of our property and we had them all trimmed before the hurricane, and now they're starting to grow back where they trimmed the low hanging branches. Is there something that should be done when they cut a branch to keep a phone growing back?
So, in other words, where they cut the branch off around that cut, you're getting sprouts coming out. Is that the case right? Well, those that is the result of doing a significant prune to a branch and it's just the it's the tree saying, hey, I was sending all this energy down the branch, and now the branch is gone. So I'm going to push out some buds that are asleep all around that area and make them grow. So that's kind of normal. Usually what you do is you
follow up with another pruning and settle those down. Other words, take those out as they try to grow, and it will settle down. It may have to do it once or tries to do that. There are some sprays that prevent sprouting and growing. Not real practical to apply in a lot of tree situations, but there's one called sucker stopper. There's another one. I can't think of the names of them, but sucker stopper is I mean, the name it tells
you what it's going to do. It's going to stop those sucker shoots from coming out and doing that.
Okay, question, After the hurricane and we had some trees, they came out and all these big logs are out there. Is the city going to come pick that stuff up?
That? I don't know. I don't know the rules out there in Kingwood. In most cities there is a brush pick up. But I just don't know in your particular you'd have to call you, you'd have to call your city public works department.
Well, I know they've been around and they have picked up a lot of stuff, but are they going to keep coming around?
Yeah? That again, that one, you would just have to ask them and see that. I where I live, they come by once a week. But I don't you know, there's not not all places are the same.
Is that like three one one to the city.
No, I don't know. It's yeah, I just call our city. Like if you do, go on Google or something and do Kingwood City public Works or something, maybe that'll pop the number of for you.
Okay, thank you, I appreciate it, all right, an a good luck out there.
Okay, well you got here we go. We already hitting the calls this morning, so we welcome you to call in. Our phone number is seven to one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. Seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. That will get you right through here to me. And by the way, let me just here's a tip. Sometimes you get real busy here on Garden Line and the calls really back up. I do everything I can to get as many as possible h on air and to solve the issues that people
are calling about. But as we get toward the end of a show, that's when oftentimes it get gets busy. Not every day, but oftentimes it does. And those of you who are listening early on, if you got a question early on is a time it's easy to get through. There's not a big backup of a bunch of calls sitting waiting at that time. So if you're trying to avoid having to sit or wait, you know, there's your tip.
Early on is a good idea for that. Out in the lawn, I know everybody seems like everybody has a lawn that they care a lot about, and for good reason. Lines of the carpet, of the landscape. There's some things we can be doing right now, And when we come back from break, I will get right on that and start talking about a few tips for what do you do right now on your lawn. We'll be right back things. Well.
One of the things you need to be doing is if you have not fertilized this summer, it's time to put on something that will provide a gradual release of nutrients over time. Now Nitrophoss is designed a product called Superturf. It's their silver bag. It's a nineteen four to ten fertilizer. You may think, well, nineteen that's a lot of nitrogen. Well, it's a lot in the ratio, which is okay. You just don't put as much on when you have a
bigger number like that, you put less on. Take about five pounds of nineteen four ten per thousand square feet to cover over your lawn and it's going to gradually release those nutrients until it's time to It'll take you all the way up until you're going to put on a fall fertilizer. And my schedule online at gardening with Skip dot com. It tells you when to apply and what to apply and all of that. You're going to
find Nitrofoss's Superturf at many places. Kingwood Ace has it, The arbor Gate carries it up the Shades of Green, Texas, up and down in southeaston on Genoa, Red Bluff. Those are all places that you're going to find Nitrofosh products such as the super Turf. I want to back out to the phones now and we're going to go to Northwest Houston and talk to Matthew. Welcome to Garden Line.
Matthew.
Hey, skip be a longtime listener. Somebody knock on my door at six am and woke me up and told me I need to listen to your show and wasn't happy at the moment.
I don't shore. How do you just start saying that again? I haven't said that. You're funny? All right, what's up?
So you know?
I followed my wife. She has been a longtime gardener. In fact, she has terraformed our whole house. And now I've gotten into gardening myself.
And I'm looking at it is it is. And now I am.
Looking to put in a raised garden bed in our backyard and kind of do some kind of home garden things crops, edibles, herbs, peppers, onions, things like that. And the the problem I'm facing is our backyard, which is the only place I can really put it faces west and it just gets at Texas heat. And I'm looking for any advice you have before I put this in, because you say brown step before green stuff.
I want to I want to plan this.
For success, so I'm looking for anything, like.
Any advice you have on positioning this thing.
I want to put in a large raised bed and put in some uh I guess crops.
I guess you would say.
In any advice, you would have kind of planning for this.
Okay, Well, first of all, I would make the raised bed at a height that suits you. If you're putting it on top of soil, it doesn't need to be as high as if you were setting it on a concrete patio, for example, where the only soil the roots can get is in the bed. But I would do that. I have mine. I try to keep mine about seventeen to twenty inches high somewhere in there. That's a nice height for not having to stoop so far when you garden.
If you have a little seat or something, it's you can sit down and kind of work at a nice level. But the plants don't care if they're in a raised bed or not. But raised beds improve drainage, and so you choose the height. I like Vego Beds, which is a company just down the road from you, up in the Klein area in North Houston. That Vego Beds are handy, They put together modulely, and they work. You can build your own. I mean I've seen people stack up cinderblocks
to make a bed. It's whatever you want and whatever esthetically you want to look at. As far as the content, you need to get a good bed mix, and places like Nature's Way Resources heirloom soils, they will provide a something called a veggiean herb type mix. You just tell them I'm going to grow a vegetable garden. They'll give you a nice blend that works for that, and they can both deliver it or you can go get it if you've got a trailer or a truck or something,
but you want to fill the bed with that. I like beds that are about three feet or four feet wide at the most. And the reason is if you get like a two foot bed, well, you're you've got all these you're paying for all the bedsides without much growing area. But if you get past four feet, you can't reach it halfway from each side. And you never want to walk in a bed, and so you want to be able to reach all areas of the bed from you know, one side or the other at least.
And so that I like about a three or four feet wide bed myself. And then as far as the you know the size of it, that's up to you. The mix is important, and getting it in full sun is important. If you don't have a lot of full sun, then give it as much sun as you can and you'll end up planting your leafy crops where there's not quite as much sun, and you're fruiting and rooting crops where there is full sun you don't have.
So my concern is more with the heat that it's getting. Because it's west facing. I'm going to put it up against like the back fence so that it gets a little bit of that late afternoon shade. And because I've kind of taken my hand at growing peppers this summer and.
It's kind of like you say, you have to hit it with.
Water almost every day, and I'm wanting to kind of try to avoid that. And I don't think I'm gonna be all do that with the west facing bed. Will I have success if I put in a raised bed with that west facing sun and at late afternoon heat.
Right well, you will? You will. And you know there's some there are probably some bed materials that you know would tend to heat up more than others. But I know I've got bego beds and I've got beds that are made out of treated wood, and I've made beds out of cinder blocks in the past. And the bottom line is you don't worry a lot about that. It's the volume of soil we're talking about holds a lot of moisture and plants are going to have to grow
and those warm temperatures. Now, if you're going to put it up against a fence, then I definitely would probably go to about a three foot with. You go two foot if you want it, but about a three foot with because you're can only be able to reach from one side.
Okay, okay, Now that's.
You can grow anything you want to grow in a bed like that, with soil like that.
That's excellent information. And I will send you half of what occur next season.
That's it. That's part of the rule. Thanks a lot, appreciate your call, Matthew. You take care well. Yeah, he was referring to I used to say first thing in the morning that if you look at your neighbor's house and go and it's dark over there, go bang on the door and tell them they're missing garden line, and they will rise up and call you blessed that Actually, they tend to rise up and call you something else initially, but anyway, just having some fun there. But it isn't
a bad idea to tell people about garden line. You know that neighbor that won't take care of his yard, maybe if he listened a few times, he would suddenly start to make that place right next to yours a little more attractive. So that's another perk, I guess tell them folks about garden line, talking about blends and bags and different things like that. Landscaper's Pride makes some awesome blends for garden soils. You can do these. It's just a mending a soil that's already in your garden. You
can use them to actually create the garden. There's one called Garden Magic Gardener's Magic. It's an organic pine based, pine based blend. It's got like humus and screened pine bark, very finely screened pine bark, composted dry cells and a chicken pellet fertilizer and the chicken pellate actually gives you a nutrient release from up to six months. It's really good for raised and container gardens. Of course, they have other sources like the healthy soil compost. It's really high quality,
very good for replenishing nutrients in an existing soil. It's not the bed mix itself. Mushroom compost is another one just like that, really really good at providing a boost. Mushroom compost is like rocket fuel for plants. Black humus. Black humus is a very dark, rich mix of composted bark loamy top soil. It would be good for an established bed or a new bed most growing conditions, I think. For you know, if you're looking at putting in a new bed, maybe the gardener's magic may be the best
way to go for something like that. But however you go about it, get good quality soil and Landscaper's Pride can provide you with that as well. Landscaperspride dot com. That's their website if you want to go look. They have a lot of other products, including some really great mulches. And by the way, we got to keep a mulch on the soil surface for a number of reasons. So when it gets thin, when you start seeing weeds coming through, put more multch down, get it thicker. It does wonders.
Mult is like the miracle cure. Multing compost for example, on malt're you're stopping erosion you're stopping crusting of the soil from rainfall. You're moderating soil temperatures. Go outside on a sunny day, put your hand down and feel the soil, even three inches deep. Feel how warm that is. Roots
don't like that. Mulch helps with that as well. What's time for me to take a little break here coming up, if you would like to give me a call seven to one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four give Chris. You can be our first up when we come right out of break. Dard Line, welcome back. Good to have you with us this morning. Congratulations you were up right and early. That's always a good day, A
good way to start a day. I appreciate these early morning hours. Is nice and quiet. At least if I keep my voice down a little bit, it'll be nice and quiet. Uh. The chance to kind of do somethink and do some planning, get some things ready to go, just kind of wake up for the day. Today is going to be a nice day. I think I'm looking forward to this afternoon, getting out a little bit and enjoying some of the outdoors. I know it's warm, but hey, you know, we live here. It's it's just part of
the package that goes here. At least we're not shoveling three feet of snow every one or time, so we're going to count that as a plus plus. We're glad you're listening with us. If you'd like to give us a call seven to one three two one two k t r H seven one three two one two KTR that's the number you need to reach out. Plans for All Seasons is up on two forty nine. That's Tomball Parkway.
For those of you that are new here, if you're heading up toward Tomball, it'll be on the right hand side, so you exit Luetta if you're heading north and you cross over Luetta and it'll be right there on the right hand side. In other words, when when you're standing at Plants for All Seasons, you're just staring at top two forty nine right there in front of you, and
so it's easy access, easy to get to. But folks that live in that region know that Plants for All Season is the place to go for awesome plants and awesome advice and all kinds of things that you need. And right now it's time to get ready for fall. I know it's hot, it's August, but fall is coming. And we were talking earlier, you know, about putting in a new bed with Matthew, and there's a there's a lot of things we can be doing right now so
when fall comes, you're ready. And sole prep is an example of that, because when if you wait, let's say you're planning on putting in your broccoli and mid September or something, transplants or late September, and you get to that point and here comes a bunch of rainy weather. Well, now how do you work your soil because it's all soggy, wet and stuff. But if you build it now, you're
ready to go. And plants for all seasons, carries all the products, I mean, you get to pick from all these different soil products, composts and mulches and bed mixes and everything, and you can get everything set up and ready to go. Now. They have beautiful containers, gorgeous. I've got one of the couple of their containers actually that are just beautiful glazed pottery and we just really enjoy them. They just gorgeous. And then of course plants, they've got
all kinds of plants. And remember we have several months of warmer weather left. We got August, we got September, and we got a good part of October where the temperatures are quite warm. I mean around here, it doesn't We typically don't get those frosts until much later. So why not put in some color to carry you all the way through up until the time when you're gonna think about things like pansies and violas and alyssum and other other flowers like that. Plans for All Seasons has
got all of that. Hey, The website is Plans for All Seasons dot Com. The phone number if you'd like to give them a call two eight one three seven six one six four six two eight one three seven six one six for six. They got good stock of all the things you need to get ready for the upcoming planning seasons or just to get out there and get some color going right now, tell you what, Let's head out to the Houston area and talk to Steven. Good morning, Stephen, Welcome to garden Line.
Morning.
Question is we're actually out on property in near Fayettville and we get Johnson Grass and I'm looking for herberside just to control the Johnson grass and not kill other stuff.
What's growing around the Johnson grass.
Bermuda mainly, and then weeds.
So you're not wanting to kill the bermuda or or the other things, right, is that what you're saying?
Not really?
I mean, okay, I'm not too worried about it.
But how big is this patch of Johnson grass? I need to kind of know just to kind of direct for the right technique.
We're on thirty two acres, so it could it could be a lot.
Oh, I mean, I've got.
Yeah, it gets mainly trying to control it along my ditches.
Along my road I see, and then in the entrance. I'm not too worried about field. Okay, all right, Well, uh, in that case, you're just going to have to try to apply a spray to the Johnson grass and minimize the amount that goes out all around it.
Uh.
And if you use a little course droplet spray and get close enough, you know, don't use a fog misty high pressure spray that drifts off target. Just apply it to the Johnson grass. You can you can do anything from a general weed killer, which glyphosate is the example that's been around for a long time on that. There's also grass only killers. There's one that sutoxiden as dim as the ingredient. The other is fluazephope, and I know
those are okay who wrote that down right? So if you go to my website gardening with skip dot com, I've got instructions for building a weed wiper, which is not going to be practical for you using this huge, huge amounts of Johnson grass, but with it is a herbicide list of things to put on the weed wiper, and depending on the weed you're going after, it names
the herbicide that you should use. Ok So those two those two words that I just said for grass, if you look over and it says grassy weeds, then look across and you're going to see those two ingredients as ones that you could use for the They translocate down. They do a pretty good job of killing the rhizomes. Johnsngrass has a lot of rhizomes underground, very thick, pencil sized rhizomes, and so you got to kill those two.
So one spray may not get it all, but you can come back and do it again, but it will kill the bermuda that you get it on, so just try to focus on spraying the johnsngrass. They translated. Thank you all right, my bed Steven. Thanks for the call. Bye, I appreciate that. Let's go now out to Richmond and we're going to talk to Bernie.
Hello, Bernie, Hey, hey, Skip, how you doing, man?
I'm good? What's up?
Got a promoted yard? Ties four nineteen chinch bug problems? Never dealt with it in my life before. I've been working in the yard for sixty years. I went and got the bug out, Max and put it down, watered it in. I've heard you say that chinchbugs are very hard to eradicate. Is there a second treatment I need to do with the bug out? And if not, do I need to go back and lay some sweet green down or something to try to stimulate the grass that's still alive.
Well, I mean, you certainly could do that. I don't think of chinch bugs as being a pest of bermuda grass. So I'm kind of wonderfully seeing when you look at the bermuda grass.
Well, a lots of patches of brown blades of grass. There's some green interspersed throughout the backyard. The backyard's much worse than the front. I have dealt with a fungus brown patch two different times in the seven years we've lived here, and I first thought that's what this was. I put a funge aside down, and then it became obvious with all that rain that we had in July
that I might have chinchbug problems. I did the chichbug test where I took a tomato sauce can, took the top off, the bottom off, punched it into the ground, filled it with water, and we did see bugs float to the top. So that's what they made me think.
Did they look like chinchbugs?
Is that what you Well, they're so small, they're so tiny, it was hard for me to differentiate what kind of bug it might be. But all right, at that point, listen.
Bernie, I'm gonna it's break time. Let me Will you hang on. I want to come back to this in the meantime. I got a computer nearby. Go to a website called Aggie Turf, and when you get there, look at turf, grass, insects and chinchbugs and we'll be right back and I'll talk about it some more. Whether you're able to get there or not, we'll be right back I'm good to good to have you with us today. We're going to jump right back in to our call
with Bernie. Here if I can actually push on the right button, go hey, Bernie, did you happen to have a chance to look online or not? It's okay if you did.
Not yet I'm on my walk skip okay, oh okay, that's fine.
Well, if you go to Aggie Turf website, there is a publication on chinchbugs and you can see exactly what they look like. They have a bunch of them. They put on a dime so you can see how big they are, the colors they are. I would check that chinchbugs can feed on bermuda grass a little bit, but they don't do big damage. It's Saint Augustine that they really do the damage to. And I don't know what's
going on on the bermuda. I think it's something else, and so I would you know, I I the only thing I can suggest if you want to take some pictures and send them via email, we could we could take a look, kind of show me from a distance, show me close up, and we'll see what else might be going on out there. But I'm really doubting if you're seeing significant browning, that that's a chinchbug thing.
It's got to be a fungus, don't you think it.
Would be a fungus? Or it could be a you know, drought related. It could be what else, something eating, you know, feeding on the roots. It could be you know, a herbicide or some product to use that burn the grass. I mean, there are possibilities of other things. But I'd like to see the pictures though, because the pattern of the damage, the extent of the damage, and all that kind of helped me narrow down who done it?
Okay, I'll do it all right.
Well, I appreciate that call. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
B Yes, sir, you take care, Yeah night for us. He was mentioning night frous bugout Max. That's an awesome product for chinchbugs. I mean, it's a granule, you put it out, you water it down, and it washes the pesticide ingredient, the insecticide off the granule and into the thatch. And that's where chinchbugs are hiding. That's why you have to pull the thatch apart if you're looking for them
visually to get down there and see them. But it works well within forty eight hours, it's pretty well done its job and it continues to stick around for a while, so you're not gonna have to treat again this year. But it is chinchbug season, so you might want to have some of the bugout Max on hand. You're gonna find it at places like Stanton Shopping Center down in Alvin. Lake hardbur Done in Angleton on Alasco has it, as well as does Lake Harbar Clute on Dixie Drive and
Lake Jackson. We're going to go back to the phones now and talk to Eddie and Kema. Hey Eddie, welcome to Darnline.
Thank you, thank you for taking my call.
I've got an orange tree that I planted and I got the instructions from moz over in Seabrook and it said to use the original dirt and it said watered every day. Well, when I dug the hole, there was a bunch of pine roots and I think that is what's keeping the tree from doing from growing because it's not doing well at all.
Okay, And what do you think is he getting a lot of sun, Eddie?
It is?
It does get a long Okay. I would get a fertilizer and Moss going to have several of them that are options for a citrus. You know, Nelson's makes one, Nitruss makes one, micro Life makes one. Uh, there, there's there's there's plenty of options out there. I can't off the top of my head. I don't remember what Jim Carrey is there at Moss, but they'll have it. And I would put it out according to the label and
watered in, and uh, I would do that now. I wouldn't probably wouldn't fertilize again because we're going toward winter and you don't want to push a lot of late season growth. Citrus is kind of cold tender, and uh, if you get real succulent growth, something that the tree could have survived, will be very damaging because you created that succulent late season growth. So now would be the time to do it. And then just keep adequate moisture.
You know, it's hard to tell someone how much to water because the soil type, the rainfall and everything else. But I would just when you dig down around where the roots are, not out from the tree, but where the roots are, which is pretty much where you what you put in the ground still, and if it feels a little dry, it's time to water, but you want to not let it dry out or keep it in a swamp.
So you don't think those are that you don't think the pine has heard it.
I don't think that tree has had time to get roots out where the pine would roots would be. I think the tree's roots are still primarily in the cylinder you put in the ground when you pulled it out of how long would you plant it?
About two months ago?
Two three months ago?
Yeah, yeah, they're still primarily in that container. They are venturing out. I mean you can cut some pine roots around it. You know, you went three feet out and did some roots to do that. Yeah. Yeah, But it's just it's going into an environment where the soil is full of wood would be in tree roots, and that's displacing soil volume and it's having to compete there. So but once you get it on its feet, it ought to be able to do. Okay, you just have to
excuse me. You just have to make sure that it gets a boost of nutrients and consistent moisture. Those are the important things.
Okay, thanks for your help.
You bet good luck with that. I know, getting a brand new citrus tree is a is a fun thing to be able to do. Let's go out to Katie and talk to John. Hey, John, welcome to Guardline. Hey, good morning, Skip. I have a question for you. I sent you some pictures I called earlier.
And your producer gave me your email. I have an oak tree in my backyard and it's got some it's like split, like a fissure opening up, and it's either a sick tree or it's a dying tree, or I don't know what I should do.
Yeah, I had a chance to look at those pictures and something split the bark a long time ago. It's already callousing. You'll see this like lava flow of new callous growth coming back in to close over that area. Yeah, it could have been that when we went through the really bad freezes excuse me, a few years ago. It could have been that. It could have even been a very minor lightning strikes. It's got a characteristic to it that I couldn't eliminate a lightning strike from way back
when being part of the problem. Not a major one that blows bark across the yard and kills the tree, but just a minor one. But the thing is, it is trying to regrow. So anything you do that builds vigor for the tree, helps speed that regrowth. Get the dead bark or tissues out that might be in the way but where it's trying to close back over from the sides. And how would I clean that out? Oh, just pulling on loose bark or.
Oh okay, I'd take a screwdriver in the.
Yeah, you're not doing surgery. Sometimes I use like a call hammer thing if I can't get my fingers on it, you know, just kind of breaking loose. But you're not doing You're not wounding the tree. I'm talking about just taking out dead stuff that's in.
That's okay, yeah, okay, yeah, I agree that.
But the main thing is the tree's got to heal itself. And anything you do that creates a bitterer that's fertilizing and watering basically water and during during hot dry weather. Thanks Jo, thank you, thank you. You bet good luck with that. All right, folks, I hear music from you. That means we're going to go to a break. When we come back, Larry and Alben you'll be our first up. And Andy in College Station you will be next. Don't forget my website gardening with Skip dot com Gardening with
Skip dot Com. That's where you'll find the two new publications on nuts edge and the two publications on the weed wiper and the product that you put on the weed by how to build one yourself. You just gotta go see the thing. You look at him and go well, that's simple. Making it easy.
Was advertised on this program. Welcome to kt r H Garden Line with Skip rictor.
Crazy Trip. Just watch him as world.
That so many bird things to see, black crazy ways.
Not a side crazy.
Welcome back, Welcome back to the guard Line. It is good to have you with us. We are looking forward to talking to you about whatever is of interest to you. We talk lawns, trees, shrubs, house plants, herbs, flowers, What kind of plant issues do you have? What kind of plant goals or plans do you have. This is a great time to be planting your fall garden. Fall is for planting. It is It is the best season overall
around the year for planting all kinds of things. It gives the plants all winter to develop roots because they do. You know, roots grow in the soil temperatures like above fifty degrees or so I mean and it's out all the time in the winter here. And so that plant that you put in and let's say late October November, whenever you put it in, is going to be ready to hit the ground, run in when hot weather arrives next year. Compared to a plant that you put in
in late spring. Now you can plant twelve months out of the year here in our area, this whole region of the country, you can plant twelve months out of the year. Well I say region, I mean Southeast Texas region. But the idea is to make it as easy as you count on yourself and your plants and fall planting is what does that. We're going to run now out to the phones and head to Alvin and talk to Larry. Hello, Larry, Welcome to guard Line.
Good morning, Skip, Good morning. I got a question. I've got a ditch in the front of my house. It's about one hundred and fifty feet long, probably five or six foot deep. Anyway, it's just been solid weeds. So I killed the whole thing with round up, and I'm thinking about planting red clover or crimson clover. What do you think about that?
It would look good for the season that it's growing, But then when the hot weather comes in, it's gonna all turn brown and then weeds. Arguing that because yeah, there's there's nothing shading the soil. So I think you need you probably need to go with something that's a little more of a perennial, maybe an evergreen year round. And that's gonna be a little bit of a challenge in a spot like you just described.
Yeah it's adiot. I won't get something that's gonna block the weeds if nothing else, and I don't have to weed date. It's real hard to we date.
And yeah, yeah, well there's some good native groundcovers, but the density is not going to quite cut it unless you're out there watering it and taking care of it a lot. And I know you don't.
It's about three hundred feet after and a half. Greg oes, Oh.
Boy, yeah, let's not do that. Oh boy, I tell you. I was trying to think of something to be a grasp but be lower growing U and that's kind of getting into to more of a native grass that you might I'm trying to think of what would be a good good option for that. Everything's going to require mowing, mow in or weed eating. That's the problem. And it sounds like it's too steep to mow.
Right, Yeah, yeah, you can't mow with you can't get a mower down there, it's too steep. Yeah. What about I kind of wanted something that was flowering. I felt about wildflowers, but yeah, I don't know. And I saw that that I can buy the red clover seed its Stanton's here in town, and I thought wow that well I didn't look on the internet.
Yeah yeah, well yeah, of course. Uh so that would be something that'll be a cool season. You know, playet like we do our blue bonnets, for example, and it comes up and the springtime is when it's going to do its growth, and look, look we'll get on spring cot early maybe early summer. Other than that, it's not I don't know. That's a that is a little bit
of a that's not a yard question. So I'm not thinking we need to call our local lag agent and find out what is a native grasp, pasture grass or something that would stay low that you wouldn't have to be out there mowing all the time and weed eating. I know there's some there are some aquatic plants that will grow you see pickerel weed and others that grow in standing water down in a ditch and they bloom. They look good.
Another one it's pretty much hard packed clay and uh it's uh, it's it's full sun all the time. So yeah, I thought that clover might be pretty nat because but you say it don't bloom.
Long, Well, it's it's a it is a like a biennial that it s brought up in the cool season and then it grows and doesn't. It doesn't continue. It's not going to be blooming all summer and all fall and anything like that.
It's I that's not it's grow clover, because I get that in the yard.
You know.
It's yeah, it's pretty yeah bees.
Yet the problem with all everything that is coming to my mind is it's is not going to have the density. There is a native it's a weed. It's a low growing groundcover. It's called huh gosh, I just went blank. I was trying to say horse herb, and that's not the one. I'm I'm trying to think of frog fruit. It's called frog fruit.
Uh.
You some will sell it it grows crazy, but it's it's very low, very low, And I don't think the density is going to be adequate. To choke out everything, but that it might be a start. And it's it.
I mean it, I around the bird bath and okay, it's pretty it's pretty good.
Now.
I do have edge coming up in it now, but so more that's only weeds that's come up in it.
I mean that, I don't know that that's the panacea for your question, but that that's about all the king in mind the other thing. Let me just leave you with this, Larry, you might want to call a company called Native American Seed. They're in Junction, Texas, and they sell mixes for all regions of the state, really the country.
They sell all over the country. But you can say, hey, I'm over here, you know, in Alvin, Texas, south east Texas, down Long not too far from the coast, and I would like something I can put out in a bardetch area that will grow. They probably have a blend that you could at least give it a try, and it would be They sell wildflower seed, but they sell pasture grasses, native pasture grasses and other things, so that may be worth a look. Or you can go online and look
at what they have. Okay, Native American Seed and Junction, Texas.
Okay, I'll check them out. I have bought stuff from that, uh, Wildflyers and Fredericksburg.
Yes, while seed really well.
To all I think.
Okay, well, give give that a try. I'm gonna have to run to a break. But good luck with that. You came real close to stumping the chump on that one, Larry. Thank you.
Well, I've been because I just won't do stuff.
All right, Well, you take care. I appre I appreciate your call. Hey, we're gonna go to a break here. Andy in college station. You are first up when we come back, and just be a moment. With the snap of your fingers, you head up now to College Station. Andy, welcome to Guardline. All right, Texas, so long to get to you.
Oh that's okay, Skip, Thank you so much for taking my call. I've kind of got I don't want to grow something. What we want to do is is I've got some Bermuda, not bermuna, Saint Augustine grass, and I want to make an area where I can have some crush grantitede.
Uh do like a walkway out to a circle to.
Put a fire fit out there and maybe my barbecue grill and stuff.
Uh?
Is it the best way to uh use like round up on the grass the way it is right now first and then kind of let that that hot sun kind of kill it out first. Or or what's what's the best to keep the grass from coming back in?
What's is it only sit out there? What's that?
Yeah? Is it only Saint Augustine or do you have other weeds or bermuda or anything mixed in there?
Basically just Saint Augustine.
Okay, So Saint Augustine is just it is all on top of the ground. There's no rhizomes underground or like bermuta. It can do. So if you were to take like a gardening hoe or show and just scrape a half inch under the soil surface, that it would completely get rid of Saint Augustine. It wouldn't come back. It could come in from the sides. That's always the case. That's why we have to use edgeres and things in our driveways and whatnot. But it's not hard to get you.
You can spray it if you want, but then you're going to have the dead Saint Augustine material lay in there, uh, And so you're probably gonna rake that out anyway. So you choose which way you want to go yesh glif as they would kill that. There are a couple of
grass only killers, septoxidam and fluezepholk or two. And if you'd like to see what those are, you can go to my website gardening with skip dot com and there's a new publication up there and it's it's herbicides that you would use with my weed wiper, and it lists the herbicides by grass type. So if you go to I mean by plant type, you go to grasses, you can see three things one the two grass only killers or the other two and you just go shopping for those.
So either way is fine. Just if you kill it, you're gonna have to then rake it out, or you can just you know, hoe it out, or run a little rototiller over it and then rake it out, or however you want to go about it.
Okay, I'm going to put that barrier, what is it a barrier? Cloths or plastic that's underneath it before I put the rock down. Is there one that's better than another?
Are they all about.
Saying you need to get one that is a true commercial landscape fabric. Some of the cheap oat things are almost just like a rubbery, plasticky thing that doesn't hold up at all. I don't know that you need that barrier. The barrier would keep things from coming upward, up from underneath. And again, if it's just Saint Augustine, that's not going to be happening. What happens when you do the barriers or anything is you get soil on top or seeds
land on top, and then they sprout anyway. So I don't know that the barrier is going to help a lot, but it's certainly not a problem to use. It keeps your Decobo's granite from pushing down in the soil a little bit. It kind of gives a little bit of support for that Decombo's grantite is not the cheapest thing out there, and some people will get a little bit of a road based kind of material, put it down
and then put the granite on top of it. I think if it's just a footpath like you're talking about, you're not putting landscape stones and trying to create a nice level patio. Uh, then it's probably okay just to use a thick enough layer of decomposed granite.
Right, thank you so much.
If you just yeah, hey, Andy, if you decide to get the landscape fabric, if you go down south Texas. Uh, there is Site one has a soil yard. You've probably seen it. Rocks and soil is right where six comes back into Texas and they're going to sell a commercial grade land kate fabric there.
Okay, thank you so much, appreciate it.
Yes, sir, you take care all right, folks our phone number seven one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two one two fifty eight seven. We've been trying to catch up calls all morning and finally did that. Was that was a little bit of a chore there. I you know, normally we don't have that many calls early on. But that's fun. Makes it more fun to do radio, and I think more fun
to listen to radio. If you haven't fertilized your lawn in a few months, well Microlife has got you covered. They have. They've got the green bag that is the six two four. They've got the Purple bag that is the zero zero four humates plus. The purple bag is concentrated compost in a bag. The green bag a sixty four nice ratio of nutrients for your lawn. Uh, Microlife also has a number of liquid products that are excellent. You know, there's a seaweed type product, there's a fish
emotion product called Ocean Harvest. Then they Biomatrix is the orange label. That's a seven to one four seven one three. I can't remember that last number anyway, it's a good ratio. I use it for all kinds of things. You can use it for houseplinch, you can use it for containers outside. You can just use it to you know, spray and water in things. Do FOLDI your feeding with it. It won't burn. Microlife products are not salt based. They do
not burn your plants. But they're very effective and they're widely available at Microlife Fertilizer dot com, Microlife Fertilizer dot com. You can find them all over the place. And i'd encourage you to try out some of these others. Maybe I mentioned some you haven't tried yet. They all work well. And I say that because I've used them, and that
is important. You've heard me say that before, but it's important to me for you to know that I don't just recommend a product because they want to be a sponsor. We talked to our sponsors. We have had sponsors. We don't take on Guardline because I don't believe products are going to work. And if I have, if I'm talking about it, either I've seen research on it working or I've tried it myself and it works. That that's important
to me. I'm put my name on these things. And so just know that when we talk about things on guard Line, there are things that I have a reason to believe you are going to have success with. Let's go back out to the phones and we're going to talk to Danny in Houston. Hello, Danny, welcome to garden Line.
Yeah, good morning, sir.
So my question, my question to you is I have a pool that's about to be finished, and what the pool guys did was they they put sand, you know, probably about four foot out around the whole perimeter of the pool, right and there's concrete around the pool as well, and so I'm going to be hosing that of from
time to time, I'm sure. So I didn't know if it would be best to just put sod there or I have seen some people that have put like a like an eighteen inch rock bed around the edge and then they're grass.
You know what you would suggest?
Yeah, I generally like plants over hardscape just because reflective heat and I don't know, plants, they do a lot of things. You could do the Saint Augustine if you feel like foot traffic is going to be running outside that concrete around the pool, you know, and then in time that grass is going to get pounded. Of course, if it's gravel, they're not going to run their little
bare feet out there. But if you've got a decent sized concrete pad around the pool for them to walk on, then I would just bring grass up to it and you can edge it and go with that. And if you get some if you get some water blown over that way, that's okay, it's not a big deal.
Okay, Yeah, there's a four foot path of concrete around the whole perimeter.
Yeah, but if you if you want to go with something gravelly, that's fine. Just gravel tends to get kicked and knocked and bounced around and end up on the on the and other things. So, uh, either way is fine. It's the bottom line.
Got you all right, I appreciate your half this morning, Have a great days.
All right, good luck. Uh, just you know, I can't I can't ask you, uh, to bring me produce as a result of this call. But I can say, let me know when it's time to come swimming. If you've got a margarita machine, we'll be there.
Hey, it's yes, sir, all right.
Got to have a little bit of fun here, card a little bit moderate everything in moderation. Is that what they say. Let's be speaking of moderation. The weather has not been in moderation this year. Boy, that first storm that came through that knocked out power. Uh family mine done in Houston was out. I think they were the last. My son is the last neighborhood to get power back, which is crazy. It took forever and then Hurricane Barrel
comes through and here we are again. Well it didn't take people long to figure out it might be a good idea to have a generator. And oh my goodness, there is a lot of interest right now in generators. And that's a good thing. I mean, you know, we have portable generators and things like that that people carry, But what about the whole house? What about you know, something that comes on that's automated that the minute power
goes off, the generator comes on. If you got a work from home job and you need internet all the time, you got it. If you need to take care of that refrigerator and freezer, you know, if power's going to be out for over a week, your food's in trouble. Right, Well, the folks at Quality Home have got you covered. They have Generaic and they have more than one branded generators,
but they're generat high Quality Generator. If you bring in an old portable generator, they'll give you five hundred dollars off your new generator that you're purchasing from them. They have whole home generators standby power is how we call it. But the thing about Quality Home is you're not just buying a generator. What you're purchasing is the service and the expertise that comes with it. And here's what I mean. They talk to you about what do you want it
to do? How big is your house, what kinds of things do you have? How big is the air conditioning units and stuff. So you get a generator that will service what you need it to service, and they design it that way and they have a lot of technology. I don't know if you heard the guy from Quality Home on a few weeks ago. They were talking about some of the ways that it just moves power from
one thing to another and it's cool. They pour the slab, they talk to your city for the codes and the regulations or HOA or whatever's involved and getting permission to put a generator out. They do that for you. They bring it out and then after it's done, they don't just walk away. It's twenty four seven, three hundred and sixty five days a year service. You can call them now right now. They are getting a ton of calls
because everybody wants a generator. Be a little patient if you call and have trouble getting through, they'll get back to you. But when it comes to Quality Home, there's a reason that they have over fourteen thousand five star reviews. There's a reason that eight times they've won the Better Business Bureau Pinnacle Customer Service Award because they take care of their customers. And that's why, without a doubt, I love to recommend Quality Home because I know the kind
of service you're going to get. We'll be right back. When we come back, we'll talk to Paul over in Troy, Alabama.
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Welcome back to Guardline. Welcome back. If you got a question you'd like to discuss with me, you just doll seven one three two one two k t RH and we will see what we can do to resolve it for you. We're going to head right now out to Troy, Alabama and talk to Paul. Hello, Paul, Welcome to garden Line.
Good Laurene Skip the young man that had been uh the problem with the ditch. The only thing I can think of, don't know what your thoughts is. I hear you use beheld grace for that gets up about a good high.
And it's a good one.
It covers it. So that's the only thing I can have.
No flowers, you know, it would keep They actually did, Yeah, I did think about. The thing is that the minute after you mow it, it sends up those seedheads up almost a knee high. And a lot of people don't care for that. But boy it's tough. I mean, it could be droughty, it could be poor soil, you know, acid soil, or it's.
Pretty rights they have to try to keep out of his loan mat. But that's the only thing I could think of. What I really called about on composts that has points zero five or the piney soil has zero five?
Is that too.
Strong to plant seed into it? Or do you need to mix it with some souls to get your seeds come up.
Point zero five? Like a nutrient content.
It's almost it's got some nitrogen.
It what I was looking at with black cow composts the only thing I could find. And then there's a potting soul says it's got the exact same thing in it. But I was thinking it should be too strong.
Well, your thoughts usually I don't usually I don't put seeds in straight composts, but I don't I don't think it would hurt them. The only thing is, you know, if it's if it's not what we say clean, But basically what we're meaning is it doesn't have weed seeds and doesn't have diseases and stuff like that in it, that that should be fine. Otherwise, you know, you could get into a situation where your little ceilings come up and they rot and fall over. It's called damping off.
It's it's a fungal disease. But I think it'd be okay, I'm mix it. What what what kind of seeds do you want to plant, Paul.
I'm fishing some grass seed. I guess I could til this into the soul that's there and that would weaken it.
It would work, Oh that stuff.
I see, Yes, yes, mm hmm, I would uh. But you don't need to tell it. You don't need to tell it a lot. Just barely scratch the surface. But working a little bit in would help. And then raking it smooth and putting your seed down and watering it in. Are you are we talking about behea grass seed?
No not, I'm talking about loan seed. Like, uh oh, okay, whatever kind I might come up, could be bermoodal ras, something up. Okay, take make a solid loan. But yet still I didn't want to that the seed to start off with.
Yeah, well that was all you is this long? Is this long one in Alabama? Or is it? Okay? So, uh, I'm not I don't know. Troy is that north, south east, north central or south what.
Bottom corner about a hundred miles from Georgia and one hundred miles in Florida.
Okay, good. So there's a number of good bermudas that you could use. Auburn University has a good turf department, and if you go online, uh, they probably have a list of some of the bermuda's they recommend. I know over here Texas and m we've got Aggie Turf is the website and if you click on on types of
grasses and then Bermuda, it gives you a list. And of course most bermudas are vegetatively propagated, but there are seated bermudas, and it'll give you a list to some of the varieties to look for that are going to stay kind of semicompact, you know, for lawn as opposed to being like something in a pasture, a very tall rangy bermuda.
What about cynipede that see you can.
It is your soul sandy or clay or what do you have over there? It's a mixture.
It's not real real clay yet.
Mm hmm. Centipede uh does okay in in a little bit of a more acidic soil. It doesn't have to be like something a blueberry grows in. It just has to be, you know, not super high pH which I don't think you have in that area. The the thing about centipede is it never gets a deep green. It tends to stay more of a we would say, sharp truce green, whereas Saint Augustine gets emerald green when you fertilize it. A centipede doesn't want to be fertilized a lot.
It doesn't do well with a lot of fertilizer. Once a year is about all they recommend for centipede.
Uh.
Well, win.
Zohia also there's here.
Yeah, well, all three are fine. I'm just telling you. On centipede. The reason we don't see it over here as much is because one reason is, Uh, in the winter time, it just turns straw brown, uh, tan colored, whereas some of the Saint Augustine is going to enjoys. You're going to give you a little bit of green still through the winter, centipede just turns completely tan, and some people don't care for that.
I think we understand, certainly appreciate you. Thanks for the hell, thanks.
For the call. All right, tell everybody in Alabama to listen to garden line right off. Okay, boy, let's uh, let's go to Spring, Texas now and talk to Ken. Hello.
Ken, Hey, I'm calling about a peach.
Yeah, can you hear me?
All right, I'll tell you what. I'm sorry. I just got a message. Well, let's go ahead, Ken, We're about to break, but let's see if we can at least get the question going.
Okay, I got a red bear and peach tree about eight years old, and it looks like fall. It's losing all of us leaves. They're turning yellow. And I was just wondering to is that too much water? Are what the problem was?
It could be too much, could be not enough. It could be you know, drought. It could also be are there holes in the leaves or are they not to be begun? Okay, No, no, I would say, yeah, I would say some sort of a stress. I don't know what caused it, but some sort of a stress. You're probably losing the older leaves turning yellow rather than the leaves toward the end of a shoot. Is that correct?
Well, it's all over, it's it's it's like totally losing all of them.
Huh.
It's it's bare like winter upfront up around.
Something is wrong underground, very wrong to dry to wet. I don't know what else to tell you on that one, but that it shouldn't be going completely like that. A few older leaves, yes, but not completely. Something's very underground, ken, I'm sorry, I have to run to break but I can't tell you what it is. But I can tell you this, it's happening down in the root system. You might check the base of the trunk for sap and sawdust, for borers cutting through the tissues and preventing water from
getting to the top. That would be the only other thing I would suggest, Sorry, but I've got to run here. Uh, we will be right back. Seven one three two on two KTRH.
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We are here to answer your gardening question. Seven one three two one two k t RH is the number I've talked to you before about Peerscapes. Peerscapes is a company that does all kinds of things to make your landscape beautiful and successful. And here's what I'm talking about. Irrigation systems typically are not designed properly. They get misaligned over time. There all kinds of things happen to make it go wrong and you're spending money on that water.
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Would you like put in some new beds, or would you like them just to come in and do quarterly maintenance. That's it, come in once every quarter, trim weed, fertilized, check the irrigation, seasonal color changes, mulchz. They can do all of that. Piercescapes dot Com is their website. Piercescapes dot com. Go check out the kinds of work they do there. Two eight one three seven fifty sixty two eight one three seven o five zero six zero. If you go to the website, you'll be very impressed with
the kind of work Peerscapes can do. We're going to head now out to Richmond, Texas and talk to Alan. Welcome to Garden Line.
Alan, Hey, glad to be here. Thanks for having me. I just had a live oak. I actually called you about a couple of weeks ago that I finally had taken down and the company left me with a bunch of stump grind shavings. Now, can that be used in any sort of way? Can I spread that out or use it as malt, or mix it with compost or anything like that.
You could use it as malt, you could let it pile up and compost for a while. It just with a fresh wood in the soil ties up nitrogen because the microbes that break it down they need nitrogen and carbon. The wood is the carbon, so they got to pull nitrogen from somewhere to do it. And so I don't like to mix wood into the soil, but as a surface that like a mult that would be okay.
Okay, That's probably what I'll do with it. If I were to buy some bags of mulch and are in that mult but compost and mix it together with that, would that help or it would still need to break down.
Now it's going to just the fact that soil is touching wood, the microbes are there. They're ready to go. If you were piling it up in like a compost pile or something, you want to break it down a little faster, you could throw a little bit of nitrogen fertilizer on it. Then you're providing the nitrogen. The carbon is there, the microbes are already there. You don't need to bring them in.
Okay, well that sounds good. Might give those a shot. Thanks for your help, all right, good, you bad.
Thanks for the calling. I appreciate that very much. Ace hardware stores I talk about them all the time. And here's the deal. If you just go to acehardware dot com and you find the store locator right there on the website. In fact, it probably is going to say can we use your location? To say yes, and you'll get this map that has dots all over the place. There's forty eight hardware stores in the Greater Houston, Aario.
Of course they're all over the country, but that in our Greater Houston, Aario there's forty stores that you can go to and when you walk into ACE, you're going to find what you need to have a beautiful landscape. A beautiful garden, a beautiful lawn. Do you need tools, Do you need hoses and sprinklers? Do you need fertilizers? They have every fertilizer I talk about on guarden line. Do you need pest control products or weed control products?
They have all of those. So if you go online and you see my weed wiper and that list to herbicides that go with it for particular kinds of weeds. It's set up so that if you have like peppervine, it gives you a certain herbicide. If you got wild onion gives you a certain herbit. You go to ACE and they're going to have those. That's what they do. They stock up and they carry the things they need to carry, plenty of tools. Right now, I'm in my yard. A lot of fireant mounts popped up. I didn't even
know where they're from. That rain that's kind of drove them up to the surface to create those little mounds at appear above ground. Get you a fireant bait. They've got several options at ACE that work very well. Mosquitoes popped up after the rain, the little buggers. Well, ACE has got the mosquito dunks we talk about they've got mosquito fogers, They've got mosquito repellents. ACE is the place.
What do you need? They got it. You want to have a beautiful outdoor patio, backyard, barbecue area, strings of lights, they got all of that, including, by the way, some really sweet barbecue pits. We're talking like Treger, and we're talking like Big Green Egg and Weber and all the accessories to go with them. Acehardware dot Com. Just go check it out. There's one near you. You are listening to guardline and our phone number we're about to take.
We're about to hit the end of the hour here, but if you'd like to get on the boards with Chris, you could be one of the first ones up when we come back from break. Number is seven one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. And I do want to mention again, I know people kind of cut in and then have to leave to go do something and miss things. So I've learned the hard way through
the years. But people keep reminding me they didn't hear that. Well, I'll say it again. Gardening with Skip dot Com is my website on there there's some brand new publications. You really need to go check them out. One of them. Two of them are about nutsedge nut sedge. Also people call it nutgrass. It's not a grass. There's a longer publication that goes into great detail on nutsedge, so you understand the the way that weed works and therefore how
to control it. People try all kinds of things and say they don't work, and it's because they're not doing it at the right time, at the right rate. They're not following up. Bottom line on nuts edges, you got to shut it down and never let it have a
chance to capture sunlight and replenish. So we say, by the time nutsedge plant has three to five leaves, you better be digging it, you better be spraying it, you better be doing something to it in order to prevent it from creating new tubers and just multiplying the problem that you had. Do you know that by the time you hit May, about May, maybe mid to late May, one nuts edge tuber. We're gonna call it the mama tuber from spring that popped up one plant, and you go,
I'll get to that later. By the time we get to late May, it has eight or ten daughters. See what I'm saying, a tenfold increase because you waited a while. You can't do that. And in this publication it explains the difference between yellow and purple nuts edge their products don't work the same on those two types. Tells you how to know what kind you have and what to do. It's really thorough. There's another one that's kind of a
quick sheet, one page. Here's what you do. Also on the website I put this up is the I call it the Skip's weed wiper. You used to could find weed wipers here and there in the trade. Now I just find them really hard to find. And weed wipers wipe a product onto the weed. Only you don't spray it all over the environment. You don't get it on things that are gonna that the curbside's going to kill your good plants flowers and shrubs and trees and whatnot. You just wipe it right on and I'll show you
how to build one. It's very inexpensive, but it's at gardening with skip dot com. With that weed wiper. There's another publication that has a list of the different orbicides for each type of weeed, just to use as an example. Wild onions and wild garlic coming up in your lawns and above the lawn image is listed for those weeds because that works best on those weeks. And you just wipe that on to the weed itself. You didn't hurt your lawn and you did what we would say a
little surgical application right to the weed itself. I think these things are pretty cool. We spent a lot of time putting them together. You can find them at gardening with Skip dot com. And maybe we're gona take a little break or I want to go check that out. Tell your friends about it too, because I guarantee you when it comes to nuts edge, everybody's got it, and some people use language that just shouldn't poke out about that infernal weed.
Products or services advertised on this program. Welcome to k r H Guarden Line with skin Gritter.
Its just watch as so many good.
Things to.
Welcome to garden Line. Welcome back. It is good to have you with us. We are going strong this morning, answering your gardening questions, trying to help you have a more bountiful garden and a more beautiful landscape. That is the goal. Hey, if you have not fertilized in the last few months, you might want to consider sweet green
from nitrophoss. Sweet green is a natural fertilizer. You call it an organic type fertilizer because it has a base of molasses, and organic gardeners know that molasses stimulates microbial activity in the soil, specifically good bacteria. They need carbon. That's part of that's what they eat. That's why they eat organic matter and compost it and turn it into compost is because of the carbon that's in it. Well,
sweet green is carbon. It's a molasses base and it's eleven percent nitrogen, and you put it down and it dissolves away and releases right into the soil. So it not only is providing the nutrient eleven percent nitrogen nutrient, it's stimulating the microbial growth, which is important. Now you're going to find sweet Green, like other nitrofoss products all over the place. It's very widespread. D and D feed up in Tomball carries it. Lake Hardware down in Angleton
or Velasco. You can find it down there, Fisher's Hardware out in Baytown, or go to Plants and Things up in Brenham. All places where you're going to find nitrofoss products. I'm going to head now out to League City and we're going to talk to Suzanne this morning. Welcome to garden Line, Suzann.
Thank you. I need help in identifying a weed that's grown in my Saint Augustine grass. It's it's low to the ground. It's dark, dark green, and kind of star shape.
The flower is star shaped, or the we it is star shaped.
Look, there's no flower, it's it's the weed itself is like a it's loaded. Like I said, it's tight to the ground, and it's dark, dark green, and it's kind of star shaped. But it's gotten multiple leaves. I've never seen it before, and I've lived here for forty years.
Yeah, you are throwing me on the star shaped like a five pointed star.
Well, yeah, well it could be more than that.
Okay, I'm sorry, I you know.
Okay, well I didn't know if you I mean. Yeah, like I said, I've lived here more than fifty years. I've never seen it.
Yeah, but I'm not.
I'm not upset about it because it's the same colors as Saint Augustine and it's this looks good.
Okay, Well it's real. Send me a photo because.
Well I'll try. I'm away from my home right now.
Okay. Well, I mean there are some there are some thistle kinds of weeds, you know that that can come up and have a star shape to them. But that that's unusual. You're not talking about each individual leaf is star shaped. You're talking about the weeds.
No, no, no, no, there's a whole bunch of leaves that are just shooting out from the plant.
Well, I okay, I'm gonna put you on hold.
What email do I send it to?
Just just hang on. I'm putting you on hold, and Chris will pick up the phone. He's talking to another caller. He'll pick up the phone just a second and he will give you my email. Wow, that's interesting. I always like to see the photo because when I see it, it's gonna be like, oh, that's what that's what you're doing about. All right, let's go up to Lee and Conroe.
Hello, Lee, good morning to skip them. Thanks for taking my call. I just sent down three pictures of a couple of lantana plants that we've had the inside of our entry do very well with some get developing, some holes in in the waves that I can't see whatever.
Yeah, tell you what I've got good good news for you. Two bets of good news. Number one, that is so little damage that I would not worry about it at all. You are not. You know, if you killed every bug that was possibly around doing that, you wouldn't benefit the plants at all in terms of getting more blooms or anything. That is a minuscule amount of loss of leaf area compared to what the plants already have, So I wouldn't
do anything of it her mind. Secondly, when I look at the holes, the edges around the holes are brown browning. So that wasn't damage that occurred last night. That was damage that occurred before, earlier on. And so I it is very possible that those bugs are have already moved on, or something got them and at them, or who knows what. So I don't know that it's even a currently ongoing problem.
Are you there? Well, I think I lost him anyway. Yeah, that and so my opinion now as far as what did it, based on the shape of the holes where they are and everything, probably a caterpillar, possibly a beetle was the culprit in doing that. But I'm telling you that is not that is not an issue that weren't spraying. So I hate to go out and just spray because you know, l Antenna's or there attract their flowers attract certain things, and I'd rather not put a spray on
them if I didn't have to. We are folks. We're having a problem with dropping this morning. I'm just I'm watching people up here and disappear, so I don't know what's going on there. If you know, I just one or two, i'd say, well, people had to go do something and they left. But that's kind of unusual. So if you lost the car, just call right back in. We'll get to you. Let's go to Northwest Houston and we're going to talk to Marcy. Now, Hello, Marcy, I.
Keep good morning. I have exactly the same problem as the lady before you last call.
I know what she's talking about.
And it looks like grass, very dark, dark green, and it blends really well with sant agustine. But it's very invasive, okay, but it's really easy to take out. It's like almost like a succulent. You take it out and it doesn't have like guides, you know, like sant agustine. Is really easy to take it out. But it's very invasive. I don't know what is it. This is the first time that I see it.
You know what, As you're talking about that, now, something's occurring to me. I bet it's a sedge. There are some very low growing sedges. And there's also something called ki linga that Suzanne. I guess it was it Suzanne that had that question. Yeah, uh, Susanna, if you're still listening, that may be kylinga, which is a sedge, and are controls for it, kayling There are controls for it in
Saint Augustine. But I think Suzanne was happy just because it's green, looks like grass, so she's happy to living with.
But he's very invasive.
So I can buy something to control that.
Yes, yes, okay, look look for something called sedge hammer. Sedge hammer, Okay, okay, it'll come out of a little packet. It's not Yeah, it's not cheap, the low packet, and I think it makes each packet probably makes about a gallon of liquid that you don't need a lot of it.
Uh.
And there's another one called sedge ender. Like I'm going to put an end to this sedge ender. It's the same ingredient and both sedge hammer and sedge ender and they will work and follow the label very carefully, very carefully.
Okay, okay, thank you.
Thanks Marsy.
Bye bye.
Glad you're listening, and we got plenty to talk about. We're going to head straight uh this segment to the phones to West Houston and talk to Donald.
Hello, Donald, How much water is too much?
Water?
Good question? What do you? What do we? What plant were talking about?
Well, like sunflowers and some other little weeds that actually grow up with little blue flowers on them. I don't know what they are. But the ground is rock hard. But I water pretty much either in the evening or early in the morning with a regular host, and this spray around that it is every day too much.
Well, here's the thing the answers to your questions is keep the soil moist and so if you had a sandy soil, you'd water more often because the water runs right through it. If you had a clay soil, you'd water less often. In the shade and in the sun, your watering schedule changes. The goal is to provide enough water at one time to wet the soil about six inches.
Deep at water.
Until it dries up enough you may go, you know, in a lawn. I don't water even once a week, hardly on my lawn because I've got a good deep root system. I give it a good soaking and let it let the air come back down and the soil as it dries out. So that schedule can be you know, it could it could mean water, and twice a week, you know, once a week it could mean water, and once every two weeks. It depends on the weather, the temperature, a lot of things. But the real bottom line is
is a soil moistu or not. And if it's soggy, that's not good, and you don't want it to be soggy. So I would go by that kind of schedule. Donald, I think that if you can check that out, and if you, let's say, how a launch you said the soil was hard, and that gave me an idea. You can take a long handle screwdriver, a flathead screwdriver, and if you water for a while and then the water
goes off and you take that screwdriver come back. You'll give it a little bit of time soak in maybe forty minutes, and push that in the ground wherever the soil is moist it'll go straight in the ground, like pushing it through soft butter. And when you hit the dry spot, it'll be like you hit an underground sidewalk of concrete. I mean, it stops, and that measurement on your screwdriver tells you how deep you've wet the soil.
So screwdriver works really well. Now in a fluffy landscape bed full of bed mix and stuff, that technique doesn't work because it's already loose. But where you said the soil is hard, a lawn or anything like that, the screwdriver test will tell you how deep did you wet it. And if you wet it deep enough, you don't have the water all the time. And it's better because you get more use out of the water you apply with less promotion of diseases by wetting it frequently.
Well. I actually have an am Leonard Horticultural catalog, a gardening knife that has a measurements on it and six inches long, And so if I stab that knife in there that I can measure how I wouldn't think I could put it in there more than two or three inches editing day because it's really hard soil.
Yeah, the sole knives are a little hard to put, harder to push in. I like the screwdriver because it's real skinny and it's.
Well, that's true. I have plenty of those.
Yeah, I've got soil knives too. I would not use this so all knife for this test. If you got good at it, I guess you could kind of figure that out. But the flathead screwdriver, it just is easy, and it'll tell you when when you hit dry, it'll it'll tell you.
Well, there's no point at which I can get it mushy or sloppy. So if I water every evening and I don't water an evening and then again in the morning, but at least in the morning or in the evening, I probably can't kill anything because I can't get enough water on there to make it soft.
Well, so what there If your soil sheds water, which clays can shed, it takes about an inch of water, by the way, to wet a clay soil that deep. But if you water for a while and then you're going to see runoff, turn it off and let it soak for forty five minutes and then turn it back
on again to water for low on. That's called cycle and soak, And by doing that, you can get that full inch on and I'll use a straight sided can or a rain gauge or in anything like a tuna fish can's got straight sides that can be your rain gauge and it tells you you know then if you put an inch of water down or not. But you'd like to get an inch down, and you may have to cycle and soak to be able to do that without runoff.
Okay, I guess my big question I forgot to ask is morning morning, so that you wet it down and then the sun burns it off, or better to do it at night so that stays wet the least overnight.
You would like it to dry out as soon as as possible when you're done watering, because the water sitting on the plant leaves are the mult or that it's not going to go in the soil. It's going to evaporate away. So let's let's get that done sooner rather than later. Leaf.
So I water, If I water at night, I'm not going to rot anything because it certainly dries out by the next morning.
Yeah, but you've got hours then that it's staying wet. If you got up and did your watering and let's just say six am to pull a number out of the air. Then by the time that watering cycle's done, the sun is coming up and it's going to dry out faster. Because leaf wetness is the number one thing that promotes foliage diseases on grass and on flowers and shrubs and trees and vegetables and everything else, we want to keep bit wet for as little time as possible.
Oh so, okay, I thought I was thinking that the longer it's wet, the better it is. But that's really not.
True, Absolutely not true.
Okay, good, all right, that's what I need to do, So I'll do the six o'clock in the morning.
All right, sir, you take care. Thanks for the call. Donald appreciate that. I hope that is very helpful. Yeah, water and properly is something that doesn't come naturally to us, and sometimes it's counterintuitive the things that we have to be thinking about. If you're looking for supplies for your lawn or for your garden, whatever you have in terms of plants that you're growing, Southwest fertilizer is stocked up with everything. They really are. If the Southwest doesn't have it,
you don't need it. It's as simple as that. They've got every fertilizer I talk about. They have every kind of pest control, disease control, weed control. Are you an organic gardener? They have it all inorganic as well as synthetic. They carry and both. They got an eighty foot wall of tools. They've got that really cool folding kneeling bench that I like so much. I'm telling you, if you've never seen one, go buy Southwest. Say ask Bob or Aaron or someone there, just say show me the folding
kneeling bench. And I'm telling you, of all my tools, it's top five favorite of every tool I have or have ever had. I love those things. Southwest has that. They have that and then some Do you need a fertilizer spreader? Do you need a little hand a little hand crank spreader to put out I don't know, fire ant, bait or whatever. Southwest has all of that and more. Southwest Fertilizers on the corner of Bisinat and Renwick in Southwest Houston. You can go to the website Southwest Fertilizer
dot com. But you need to check it out because whatever kind of supply you need, they're gonna have it. Along with good advice. You can take them a plant in there, you can get a baggy, you can take them a photo and they'll identify, they'll diagnose, they'll get you the product that's gonna work. That that's really important. I always like going in there because there's always always something new, you know, there's new products coming out all the time, and I wish companies would tell me, but
they don't. But I wish they tell me, Hey, we got a new product. Here's what it is. And that way I'd have a chance to check it out and see if it's something I'm gonna recommend or not, something that works or not. In other words, but I can go to Southwest, Bob's going to have the newest ones and we can talk about them. I can try them out if I need to purchase one and give it a try and see if it's going to work. Well, that's another option. Bob's got things like supergrol Plus, that's
the one from Medina. You know, Medina's been making quality products for a very long time, decades and decades and decades. They've got the has to grow line. There's has to grow, there's has to grow for lawns, that's a twelve percent nitrogen fertilizer. It's a very good one, by the way. And then they have Medina supergrol Plus that's a sixteen
zero two. It contains keylated iron, so if your grass is turning a little yellow, the keylated iron prevents the soil from tying that iron up and it releases it for the plant. It's got molasses and humic acid. It's it's just seaweed extract. Another thing is in it's a great concoction. You hook it up to a garden hose. One quart bottle that hooks to a hose, covers four thousand square feet, takes about ten minutes to do a whole area. And I was telling some of the other
day to use it on something else. You don't have to just use it on your lawn. You use it in the vegetable garden. You can use it on flowers. Can't remember what the thing was the other day we were suggesting they use it on but there it use it on plants. How about that plants. It's made for lawns. Good for lawns, but if you've got a plant that needs a little quick boost, it's good for that too.
You were listening to garden Line and our phone number if you'd like to give us a call seven one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two five eight seven four. I was talking earlier about the new publications that are online. You know you need to check those out at Gardening with Skip dot com Gardening with Skip dot com. And what are the publications. Well, first of all, there is the two nutsedge publications, a long version and a short version on how do you
control nut set? How do you control nutset? And there is a science to it and if you just understand number one what kind of nutset you have, and a few other things about it that are in that publication, it will help you have success with what you try to do in controlling it, and that is important. There's also the weed Wiper publication, a homemade, really cool little device for getting weeds without damaging your plants. You welcome
back to Guardline. Glad you're listening with us. Hey, if you'd like to give me a call seven two two k t RH. That's the number seven one three two one two k t RH. For those of you who are wanting to have work donender your trees or those of you who are wondering if you need work done to your trees, you need to call Affordable Tree. Martin Spoonmore has been doing this for a long long time
and he knows his stuff. When we're dealing with storms that come through, there is a way that you can do some selective pruning to help make your tree safer when it comes to heavy winds. This doesn't mean somebody goes in and butcher's everything up, and there are people that don't know what they're doing that are out there doing that. We're talking about a proper selective pruning to be done. We're also talking about training your trees all along their life to give them a good strong structure.
We're talking about providing help for trees during struggling conditions such as drought. We're a good deep watering or deep roof feeding. Those kinds of things can be helpful. We're talking about knowing how to take care of a tree. We're talking about a vice on things that might be done. If you have a beautiful tree that you love, and you're gonna do anything around the yard. You're gonna put in a trench, You're gonna put in a driveway over within the branch, spread of the tree, any of those
kinds of things. Call Martin first he comes out. There is a charge for him to come out and look at the situation. Consult. If you end up hiring him to do something, that charge goes right into the the cost of what it would have cost to get it done, so you don't lose that money. You can give him a call at seven one three six nine nine twenty six sixty three. Say that again seven one three six nine nine two six six three. I to just write that down and keep it because you never know when
something's gonna happen. You need to give him a call or go to the website aff tree Service dot com. Aff tree Service dot com. Trees are extremely valuable in our landscapes. They I have said this before, but trees should never be planted on a whim. You can do that in a flower bed. Oh there's a new flower. I've never seen it, poort, let me try it out.
But trees, you should do your homework. Find the species, even in some cases the varieties that are going to do best for you for what you want, For what you want it to be, How big do you want it to be? Do you want it to bloom or not. Do you want to be evergreen or deciduous. You want a tree that grows at a moderately good rate, but one that is going to last a lifetime and be stronger and stronger as it gets older and older. And
that is very important. Never just plant a tree, becauld you saw it at a garden center, find out which one you want, then go find that tree HOMEO Guardline. We'll put you in touch with somebody that can provide that kind of tree for you. Because quality trees added the value of your home. They add to the enjoyment of your home. Planted properly, they can help cut down on your summer electric bills, the cooling costs and things. They can make that patio a pleasant place to be,
can just be beautiful. A blooms at certain times of the year. So of all the plants out there, the one you most need to not buy on a whim as a tree. You need to know what you want. That would be my suggestion to you. Let's go out to a task a star. Now we're going to talk to Thomas. Hello, Thomas, good morning.
I called you about a month ago. I told you that my plants weren't flowering, and I have really good soil, everything's great, and you told me they were probably too healthy, so I stopped. I stopped feeding them. They finally started a bloom again, but they're only but okay, one boom at a time. To measure pH and soil, how far down do you have to go?
I would take the soil in, let's say, I mean probably the top six inches and just put some in a in a cop Are you talking about doing it yourself measuring? Are you talking about sending this?
Yeah?
I know how to I know how to measure it.
I just need to seek you. Yeah, put it in a cop put some fill up with water, and just kind of slash it around, you know, and then pour off the water, just the water, and then measure the pH of that liquid.
That is.
That's a good a good estimate. Now, when you do a home measuring, those are not as accurate as sending a souce ample in and so things can throw that off a little bit. But that would be the best way to do it with that With what you're asking.
Okay, if the pH is a little bit too high, if I used to stilled water, would that cause more damage than not try and flush.
No, no, it wouldn't. In fact, So first of all, what kind of plants are you talking about? This producing one flower? What kind of plant are we talking about?
Oh, got everything under the sun. I've got a lot of climbing plants. I've got jasmine, I've got man carella. Everybody, every everybody's just been complaining this past month or so.
Yeah, let's let's do this. So there's a lot of things that make plants bloom. Nutrition is important. Now, Nitrogen makes them grow fast, and that's probably what I was talking about on our last call, is don't push a lot of vigorous growth. You know, I wouldn't say don't keep them too healthy. I would just say, in fact, too much nitrogen makes them unhealthy. But there's also other nutrients like phosphorus and potassium and others that are important
in blooming. Sunlight is important in blooming, and so there are a lot of factors that go into whether a plant blooms well or not. But when you're talking about you know, changing pH pH is okay, let me do
it this way. You mentioned distilled water. If you take straw and blow into distilled water while you're measuring pH you can watch the pH change from the carbon dioxide in your breath because there's no buffering in pure distilled water, but most of our soils and moisture are very buffered, and so you could add something to raise it or lower it, and it may dip down and come right back up again. That that happens, and so having the soil test tells you how much you need to add.
Sulfur brings pH down, lime brings pH up. That's oversimplifying. There's other ways to bring it up and down, but that basically is the fast thing. I doubt that aph is way out of whack unless there's some unusual situation with your soil that I'm not aware of. In general, I would say to suggest, why don't you just once do a good soil test, get all the data you need, and then work from that.
All right. I got frustrated last few because I've used should see the mulch take the seat of moulch for years, but when I'm not trying to dig, you know it's hot. So I got I got to pull everything out of the garden, turned all the soil mulch into my soil, and then started using composts. But that I've got a lot of mulch in the soil. Now, could that be throwing everything arose?
That could be a problem. That could be tying up nitrogen too. Generally, moulch goes on top of the soil. Compost goes into the soil. But I'm hitting a hard break, Thomas. I'm gonna have to run, but I would I would get a quality compost, mix it into the soil periodically once a year, just when you're redoing and changing colors out or something. If you can do that, do that and then keep your mulch up on top of the soil. I hope that helps. I'm sorry I have to run,
but good luck with that situation. Our phone number seven one three two fifty eight seventy four. I'll be right back. Welcome back to the guard Line. Good to have you with us this morning. We are hopping here this morning. We're gonna keep going here. Let's see, we're gonna go now out to John in Brownsville. Hello John, Welcome to guard Line.
Yes, sir, good morning.
I heard a lady asking you to identify a plant a few calls ago, and it got me to thinking, have you tried or would you recommend those Plant Identify your apps that you can get on your phone.
Have I done something? Yes, I have done some.
Can you hear me, yes, sir?
Hello? Okay, yes, sir, so I have done some. I messed around with them for a while. I didn't buy the app. I did the free version, you know, on simper ones. I've tried. Oh gosh, what are some of the ones? Oh, photo apps? Let me see. I was just gonna look on my phone. No, nope, they're not there. Snapseed. I tried that one. There's some others I'm trying. I can't think of the names of them now. And they were okay, they did pretty good on certain kinds of plants.
You know, if you've got a native plant in the woods here in Texas, you probably are not going to find the enter on some of those. They're just not geared for that. I tell you what I use almost all the time, though, and that is Google Lens. If you have the Google app on an Android or an iPhone, the Google app, you go to Google App, there's a little kind of a square with the Google colors and the dot in the middle. It's part of the search
and that does a search for an image. You can search with your phone by pointing your phone at the plant, or you can take a picture of the plant and search the use the photo as your search. The other thing I like to use is john is the Google I mean, sorry, the Apple itself. If you go to Apple Photos and you pick one of your photos, at the bottom of the screen, there's a bunch of icons. There's a heart and then one with an eye in it, and the trash can right next to the trash can
that eye. When you click on that, we'll look at the image and it will tell you what's in it. And that. Both of those are so good that I just haven't gone back to plant apps at all. They're good for bugs too, by the bugs two.
By the way, oh wow, that would be awful. Okay.
The key to the key to using any app, including the two my favorites, the Google Lens and then just the the iPhone's natural ability to search is to make sure that your photo shows what it is you're wanting
to ask about. In other words, if you have like a whole bunch of plants at a garden center, and you take a picture of the garden center, it doesn't know what plants you're asking, and so getting up close getting something maybe something dark behind it, so it really sees the flower or the leave or whatever that helps it to do a better job of identifying for you.
Well, I appreciate that, Thank you.
Yeah, sure, have fun out there. You're in Brownwood, Texas. Huh oh, Brown's.
Still yes, Okay, it's very hot.
Okay, thanks a lot. I appreciate that. Appreciate the call very much. Let's see here. Oh, I want to tell you about Nelson Water Gardens. Nelson Water Gardens is outing Katie. It's your West Houston independent garden center. It's your West Houston destination garden center. And we got destination garden centers here in the Greater Houston area. This one's the one
out west. You go to Katie, you turn north on Katie Fort Ben Road and it's just a hop, skipping or jump across the tracks on the right hand side, easy to get to. Nelson Water Gardens and Nursery has an outstanding selection on plants. They got some really good deals on plants too. Right now by the way you can get just to go check out their website. It's Nelson Watergardens dot com. Nelson Watergardens dot Com. You're gonna find a lot of great plants, and of course it's
a water garden. Beautiful beautiful fountains, those disappearing fountains where it comes out of a a like a tall vase, a glazed vase, and the water runs down, goes into gravel, and then goes back up through the fountain. They invented that. They've got it. They can install them for you. They can tell you how to install them and save the
parts if you want to do that. Nelson Water Gardens is a wonderful place to turn your backyard into the kind of setting that is so nice and peaceful and relaxing that attracts birds, just as sound of water attracts birds. And Nelson Water Gardens and nursery out there in Katie, Texas. I head over now to the Bear Creek area and talk to Kay.
Hello, Okay, I I just heard you talking about trees and shade and it made me think of a question I've got for you. I had to have my beautiful tree between me and the sun.
On the east side of my house.
I didn't have to take it down a few years ago because it died.
They just cut it off at the ground. They cut it off at the ground level.
And it's hotter than can be in this room now because of that. So how close to that? It's not a stomp, it's just you know, the root ball that's still in the ground. How close or how far away do I need to plant a new tree?
That's a good question. There's not a good They're not a great black and white answer to that question. Uh, you know, if you can move over, oh at least four feet. The problem is if you if you stay that close, you're digging into wood because those old giant roots near the base of the tree are still there. Did they they did grind it. You said you just cut it off, Well they did.
They ground it down level with the ground, and it's got grass cover over.
There's like there's no dent in the ground.
I think a really hard time. You're gonna have a really hard time diggings. You're gonna have to get far. Here's my answer, as close as you can where it's possible to actually dig a hole. Okay, that's kind of the answer. And those roots are gonna make you it's gonna be eighty percent wood and twenty percent dirt. If you get too close to it, so you're gonna have to move away a little bit to do that. You know,
in the forest, it happens all the time. The tree dies and falls and some little seedling sprouts up right beside it, and as that old wood decomposes, it's just more for the seedling to have, you know, the organic matter. The microbes break it down and so it can grow like that. It's more the practical of digging the hole that That's also if they did a lot of grinding and the soil was loosened, well, then we would have
the issue of that soil is going to settle. So it's hard to plant a tree at the right rate if it's going to end up dropping down several inches in the next few months.
It's it's been a couple of years and it was a big, old live oak, so I'm sure there's a pretty decent sized system under there still.
Yeah, I bet there is. I bet there is. Well, go buy a few sticks of dynamite and get your new tree, and I think we can make it. We can make it work. Oh, it's going to make the neighborhood library one evening. They won't mind, they won't mind.
I live.
I live in an area where they shoot fireworks all the time, so you know they.
Won't even You can volunteer. You can volunteer to place the broken windows up and down the street.
And so.
All right, thank you very much.
I stay out of trouble. I did not say that on the air, did I. Oh my gosh, bye bye, there you go. Hush money. I like that a lot. Okay, well, we are about to have music up here here on guard Line because it's the end of the hour. It's time to take a break. Uh medicea medici see I believe as I pronounced it in Montgomery. You'll be Marisila. Okay, you'll be the first up when we come back. Hang on with us. We'll be right back with you for the rest of you. Don't forget new publications on the
website that you need. If you've ever had nut sech, if you've ever used fell language trying to control nut sedge, stop it. I can fix that. Go to gardening with Skip dot com and read the publication, the in depth publication if you would. I've got two, one short one long. Read the long one because it helps you understand why and what you're doing. It's more than just saying, oh,
go spray this herbicide. That that's helpful. But done at the wrong time of the year, done at the wrong stage of growth, done on the wrong type of nutsedge, you may not have a good success. We want you to have success. That's why I put it up there. Also up there is the weed wiper tool. How to make a homemade weed wiper with sponges so that you can put a little herbicide on the sponge and not spray all over the place on your good plants, and just retry it in there and get it just on
the weed. All on the website.
Welcome to KTRH Guarden Line with Skip rictor.
Just watch him as all.
Right, welcome back to garden Line. Let's just jump right in here and get going again. We got got plenty more to talk about today. By the way, this is the last hour of garden Line on this weekend. We're here every Saturday from six to ten in the morning. Every Sunday from six to ten in the morning. Tell your neighbors about it. You've heard today. We calls from other states and other parts of the state. Here in Texas.
People listen and we help whoever We can however, we can, so we do love to get the word out, tell folks about garden Line and continue to listen. Thank you for being a listener. I appreciate that we're going to head out now to Montgomery, Texas and talk to Is it Maricia.
Uh, Marisella?
Yes, good morning, Maroslla.
Thank you Skip.
Is it too late to apply nitropalls bug out next to my flower beds to control grubs?
No, let me think just a minute. Probably here's the deal. Grubs hatch out in this late spring and they feed as little tiny grubs underneath the surface, and then as it heats up, they go down deeper and deeper into the soil. So when we treat them early on. If you go to my lawn pest disease and we'd managed schedule, and I realize that's for lawns, you're talking about flower beds.
But if you go there, you'll find out that we have some products that we use when it is earlier in the season, like June, and then we whenever it gets later in the season, that's when the grubs get a little bit older and we have to switch over to some other things that will move down a little bit further into the soil, you can give the bug out Max a try. I think there are some things that are going to move down a little bit deeper in the soil, and you can also do that. But
let me ask a question first though. Are you just finding a grub here and there or do you feel like you're losing plants and you pull them up and there's roots or full of grubs? Which is the situations are you're seeing.
It's just here and there.
I applied the bug out Max to my lawn back in June, but I failed to apply it to my flower beds. And I don't have a lot of grubs but I do want to keep them in check for the last several years, so I have applied it back in June.
I just happened to miss it this year.
Well, I would let me say this, if you're looking at a lawn and you talk to a turf specialist, they're going to tell you that you need to have five to seven grubs per square foot in order for it to be doing enough damage to warrant needing to control it. So it's not just I saw a grub in the lawn, it's there's a lot of them. Right. I don't know that anybody has developed the number like that for flower beds. But just because you see a grub here and there, it doesn't mean you need to treat. Now,
there's nothing wrong with treating. If you want to treat, you know, that's fine. Uh, just just know that just because there's a grub doesn't necessarily warrant having to put something down on it. So just something to think about.
Great, Okay, Well, thank you so very much.
All right, good luck up there, Montgomery. You've got a and a plants and produce not very far away. I wish I lived that close to it.
That's all I do. I enjoyed place.
Yeah, no kidding, all right, well, thank you very much for your call. Yeah, those kind of products, by the way, you can get nitro foss. She was talking about the bugout Max. You can get that at ACE Hardware. I was talking about different products. And you go to my schedule and look at lawn pest Disease and Weed Management schedule, and you'll see a bunch of things for chinchbugs, for solid web worms, for grubs, for various diseases in the lawn.
They're all listed there, organic and synthetic and you know what they're Alladays Hardware. You go to ACE Hardware and you find whatever you need to cure what ails you if you want to think of it that way, for weeds, for insects, for diseases. Do you want to make your lawn pretty? Ingreen, I talk about fertilizers, they're Holliday's Hardware. If I talk about wrong guardline, you're going to find them there. Ace Hardware is everywhere, forty stores in the
greater Houston area. Easy to find one, very easy driving distance. If not across those from you go to Acehardware dot Com. Acehardware dot Com, find the store locator and there you go. It's as simple as that, no matter what the products you need are. And we're entering the season now. Before long we'll be doing our fall fertilizations. ACE has got those fertilizers. Before long, we're going to be doing the weed preventatives in the fall, and ACE has got those.
They just have what you need. Ace is truly the place. Puts set out to Wharton, Texas now and we're going to talk to Ann.
Hello, Anne, good morning, have a fifteen You have a fifteen year old eight to nine foot Texas Mountain Laurel. It bloomed beautifully this year. However, all of a sudden, it's now the limbs are dying in intermittently in the tree and the top of the leaves looks like they could have a scale issue. But I'm concerned about the brown limbs dying. And there I did lose another one a couple of years ago.
Well, when the whole limb dies and the rest of the tree at that point is still green, we got a plumbing problem. So one of the worst things that can happen to Texas Mountain Laurel is to go in a swamp. And you know it's native to central Texas. It grows on those limestone cliffs and bluffs and things. Yes, it's a very tough plant, but when we put it in a heavy clay soil with our typical amount of rain over here, it can have problems. The roots just
aren't able to tolerate that. That's why we say put them high and dry, meaning a raised mound that's going to drain away well, and they'll do just fine. So it could be a sm moisture excess that they're dealing with. Anything that would plug the plumbing. You know, of course physical root damage could do that. But sometimes we'll see you may see something like a borer in a branch that essentially is chewing through the tissues that are taking water up and down. It could be something like that.
You just want to prune those out. I don't know of a specific soil root rot that attacks those. There's probably one, but I don't know of one. So I think soil moisture is the thing I'd be most concerned about. Prone out. The dead is not going to come back to life, and then hopefully it'll continue on. Just watch that water.
Okay, well, it's probably from the excess rain that we had. But getting back to the scale, what do I do for that? On the top may on the top of the leaves.
There's not a scale insect that attacks the leaves of Texas Mountain Laurel. There is an algal leaf spot. Are these scale what you're calling scale? Is it a gray colored area.
Yes, kind of spots. It's tiny covering the top, not not specifically the back of the leaf, just the top.
Right, and that's the algol. That's the algyle leaf spot. And uh, you know in our climate over here, it's that can happen. A lot happens on southern magnolias too, by the way, But I would tell you what if you want. And but when you're done here with this call, I'm gonna put you on hold and have Chris give you an email. And if you'll take some good close up pictures, make sure they're in sharp focus. First of all, show me the whole plan. I want to see those
dying branches and where they are. But then get up to those leaves and show me that. And I want to make sure that I'm right about the algle leaf spot. I think I am, but I want to be sure, So send me, send me a photo, and I'll be happy to take it to the next step if you like.
Takes a bunch.
All right, here we go. We're gonna put you on hold and Chris will be right with you. Good luck with that, you know, Texas. Mount Laurel is a wonderful, wonderful plant. I want to talk about a little bit when we come back, but it is if you like to plant things for fragrance, that is a good plant for that. We'll be right back. Welcome back to garden line. Hey, We're glad you're listening. Today, we are here to answer your gardening questions, try to help you have a more
beautiful and bountiful gardening landscape. That would be a goal that I have at least in the deal. You can give us a call at seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four seven one three two one two five eight seven four. I was just about to head out to sugar Land, and I see we had not one of those call drops. We're to figure out
what's going on with that kind of thing. Uh, If you have been looking for a way to come up with more, more interest, more color, more beauty for your landscape, I think that it is important to recognize the fact that every plant has its pros and cons and every plant has its seasons. Perennials are nice because they really look go and they go through their season and that season is limited and then they die down or they
just quit blooming or whatever. And so that's not something's going to give you color all year, but that's part of the mix and having a beautiful landscape. Perennials and plus, you buy them once and you want to buy them again. They just keep coming back. That's why we call them perennials. Annuals, on the other hand, can give you instant color, and you can change your annuals out twice a year, like spring and summer. You can change them out four times
a year. I mean, we call those color changes. So if you're let's say you put the petunias in in the spring, and by summer it's like, yeah, they're not real happy to be here in the summer, then you just change them out, put in angelonias or something else that can take the heat of summer. And then when we get to the end, you can put in marigols to go into the fall, because they just glow in
the fall, they're beautiful. And then when it comes cool season, you put in your pansies and violasm and listen and snapdragons and all those other kinds. You can do color changes all the time, but it comes at a cost because you're constantly rebuying flats of plants to add the color. Then we have our shrubs. But the thing that gets neglected most is foliage. Foliage, especially in the summer, can give you outstanding color at a time when blooms are
not as plentiful as they are in spring. So by foliage, things like Joseph's coat, things like purple foliage of Persian shield or the purple foliage of Secretia pallida. That those are great plants. The coppery foliage of copper plants standing at colius and kalladiums. Oh my gosh, so many colors
of foliage from colius and koladium. A beef steak plant with its red, reddish flowers, and don't forget whites of color too, and areas that are very shady and dark white brightens it up and brings the eye in there as tech grass, which is a loriape tight plant with green and white striped leaves, can lead your eye around a bed if you use it to border a bed, or down a pathway if you use it to border the pathway. Foliage, foliage, foliage, don't forget the foliage. That's
an important way that we bring color in. I like the canna called phasian are also called tropic canna. It has oh gosh, what are the colors? Yellow, it's got green, it's got yellow, it's got a bronzing color in it. It's just multiple colors that fade in and out across that leaf. Very beautiful bolt. Even if the cana didn't have blooms on it, which it does, it would still
be beautiful to plant. So just a tip there for foliage color, especially in this hot season that we're dealing with, you you should or for color, you should consider foliage because it is a good dependable part of that overall mix to have color in your landscape, and we should have color through the year. We can do that here in our area. We're going to head out now to Sugarland, Texas and talk to Carol.
Yes, good morning. I've sent to a little by text treaty last October and it's doing really well. But some of the branches are trying to grow horizontally, and I just wonder if there's a way to encourage them or to force them to grow more vertically so it's taller rather than wider.
Just by pruning it, just by doing the selected pruning. Leave things that are going upright, cut off things that are going sideways. Vtex is a difficult plant to shape. It's not like a crack, which is easy to shape. As it's growing, vtex wants to get wonky. You know. I tried to prune one up one time, and when I got through it that it looked more like a zigzag than a trunk going up because it just is
always going the wrong way. That's my opinion. So just do the best you can in shaping it like that. Most people leave them as multi stem shrubs. Some people like to try to cre et a trunk to them with a top. You just have to get in it early and stay with them because they are not easy. They don't cooperate well with our attempts to train them.
Okay, thank you.
You bet you bet iex I tex agnes castis that's the proper name for it. It typically is going to have blue flowers. But I'm telling you you want something that blooms through summer as long as you cut it back because it'll make little seed pods and the energy you don't want to go in there. The minute the bloom spade cut it. Wherever you cut it, it's going to send out two new shoots with new seed pods or new bloom pods bloom stalks on them. And so if I tax a great plant for many reasons, but
it has its drawbacks. We're going to now go to Carol in Southwest Houston. Hello Carol, Welcome to garden line.
I'm having a problem with my okra budgs. They're covered with tiny, tiny, tiny white specks.
Okay, well, a couple of things. Okra produces a little drop, a little round ball drop. It's a sap like substance that occurs on the outsides of parts of the different parts of the ocra plant. But also okra can attract aphids, and aphids will cast their skin like a snake grows out of its skin and sheds its skin, gets a new set new skin. Aphids do that, and when the once are left behind, they look like little tiny white things all over the plants. And so you're going to
be seeing one of the two. If it's white, I think it's probably aphid skins as opposed to the natural little eggjudate that comes out of okra.
Do I need to worry about it?
Do I need to put something on it?
You do one or two things. You can use an insecticidal soap, spread very early in the morning and it's cool, spray and spray upward it because those aphids are gonna be under the leaves is much or more than they're on the leaves. They're gonna be on the around the pod bays. They may be on the stems of tender new growth and you just spray the soap all over it and let it dry out before the hot, hot sun comes out, and that will control them on a
lot of my plants. If I'm out there, and I don't know how much OKRE you have, but if it's not too many plants, you can just take that water hose with a gun on the end and just blast the suppers off. I mean, you don't eradicate everyone, but you knock off all the loose aphen skins, and you knock off a lot of the aphids that way, and that keeps the force of the water. Yeah, but just remember under the leaves, there's gonna be a lot of aphids, So don't just spray up on top what you can see.
Flip those leaves over and you're gonna see a lot underneath there.
Oh good, Okay, great, Thank you.
All right, Carolyn, Thank you preciate that. I do love okra, absolutely do love Okrah. Hey last week was it last week? Yeah? Last week I was talking to Ty Strickland. He's the guy that owns fixed my slab foundation repair and one of my daughters is buying a house, and they were looking at an inspection on a house and some issues that occurred, cracks in the house and whatnot. And I just was picking Ty's brain because I'm telling the guy
knows his stuff. He's forgotten more about foundations than most people know. And he's been doing this for twenty three years here in the area. Fix my slab as a professional service. And I like a lot of things about guy Number one, Guy Tye very knowledgeable. Ty is very knowledgeable. He knows this stuff. Number two he says he's going to show up. He shows up on time. Oh my goodness, How valuable is that in this day and time anybody's sat around waiting for someone to show up at the house.
He fixes it, right, that's the most important thing, Right, we need to fix it. And then a fair price. This is also very important. Tight us. All of those things tell him you're a guardline listener. Get a free estimate. Uh, if you see doors sticking, if you see cracks in the brick, cracks in the sheet rock, those are all warning signs. Doesn't mean it's the end of the world. Just call him to come out and look at it.
The sooner you catch things the better you are. And he is not going to jump the gun and go, oh, there's a tiny crack. We got to go in and do thousands of dollars worth. He's not going to do that. He's going to tell you exactly when it is a situation that warrants the efforts to control it, he knows how to do it. He can also advise you on things like, hey, why don't to put a dripper around the sides of the house to keep that soil from
shrinking and swelling and shrinking and swelling. That's what causes a lot of our problems. Here's his website. Write this down, go see him. Fixmslab dot com. Fixmyslab dot com. Here's his phone number. Two eight one two fiy five forty nine forty nine two eight one two five five four nine four nine. We live in an area with a lot of clay soils that move a lot, and when we have that gully washer rains, they swell up and then when it gets dry, which it's doing now, it's
hot and it's drying. Out to you about the things that interest you. How can we help you have a more beautiful, bountiful garden and landscape that's what we're about here on garden Line. Let's head out to Rosenberg now and we are going to talk to Teresa. Welcome to garden Line. Teresa, Hello, Skip.
I appreciate your show.
My question is.
I have soggy it's soggy and I was trying to clay soil and I was trying to find out what type of tree would grow into that. What would you recommend?
Are you wanting a tree that's for.
Shade possibly shade or what are my options shade or what's what's the option.
Well flowers or you know, I mean, it depends on the size of the tree you want and stuff. Well, if let me start with a good shade tree. Uh, there is a red oak, a type of red oak called nut tall oak, and you t t a l not tall oak, and that's all. Oak will provide you with a very good growth rate and it makes a large spreading tree, very very nice for shade and things. And it tolerates some soggy soil conditions. You know, it doesn't want to live in a swamp like a cypress can.
But when you have periodic times or it stays a little wet for too long, not tall oak can tolerate that and it does really well. So that would be that probably be the first one that comes to mind. Uh so, yeah, we think about that.
Okay, I think that's a nice suggestion. Now what about some I think that's pretty with flowers or anything. Is there anything you would recommend?
I think let me when you when we're talking about wet how wet I mean, is this like water stands for a week after a rain or.
Something like that?
Described that.
Oh okay, it rains and it stays wet for days.
Okay. Well, another thing too, as we get to smaller stature trees, things that aren't gonna get so huge, uh, is you can you can bring in some soil, create a raised mound a little bit, and plant on that and then your your your pallette expands quite a bit. Crape myrtles don't want to be in a swamp, but they can take some periods of leaf wetness I mean a root sogginess for a while. And crapes can be anything from a five foot high little mini tree to
something thirty five feet high. And so you get to pick the color of the bloom, you get to pick the size of the plant. There's so many new crapes. I did a I created a chart online years ago on crape myrtles, and I had crepes from three feet to thirty five feet, and I showed that the bloom color. It showed whether it was resistance of powdery milde or not. It showed you whether the bark was just standard putty colored like most crapes, or if it had a kind
of a cinnamon colored bark. And if you do a Google search and you put in my name Skip Richter and you put in crape myrtle in a search, that you're probably gonna come up with that one. Still, the problem with that chart is it's older now. Those varieties, most of them are still around, but there's a lot of newer stuff that you can choose from. One of these days, maybe I'll tackle it and try to re revisit it. Okay, I see h yeah, like the earthquake scale r I C H T E er. Okay, that's it. Uh,
let me think of what else. I'm thinking of. Things that are more shrub like button bush grows in a swamp. It has little round blooms that look like a little you know, when fireworks go up in there explode and go in all directions. That little blooms remind me of that little round balls that have little things sticking out from them. But it's not going to be a big tree. It'll get up about twelve feet or so in time if you do a lot of pruning on it, but
in general it's going to be smaller. Let's see swamps for trees. Two below is one that has some fault color, and if the conditions are right, Tupelow can provide you with a good swamp tolerant tree. Not really easy to find those because there's not a high demand for them, but that would be one you might want to consider a little bit of a stretch there compared to some of the other things I'm suggesting.
Okay, Skip, thank you so much, all right, and we appreciate that, we appreciate you, and we appreciate you here in Texas. Take care, Thank you.
Well, thank you glad you feel that way. Thanks a lot. I appreciate you for calling. Take care. Let's see, I was yester day, I was I have a bird feeder that takes pictures. Yeah, the birds come and when they sit there, there's a camera and it takes a picture and it sends it to my phone or it says, hey, you had a visitor, and I'm going to look through them and I see little videos and I've got the scruffiest looking birds you've ever seen. So naturally, who do
I call Wabird's Unlimited. I just sent a quick cup few pictures over to Rich from the Cypress store. You know, there's six Warbirds Unlimited stores in Houston. That's just one of the six stores here in the greater Houston area. And I said, Rich, what's going on? Is this still molting going on? Or you know my birds have the some new disease that appeared. He said, no, I just molting.
There's still Boy, do they look horrible. Oh the cardinals looked like you ran them through a weed eater or something. That's just they're just all messed up. And that reminded me that Wabirds has a number of high quality feeds. You know, when a bird is molting, and our birds are I mean I had let's see, I had a blue jay in the picture. I had a type of finch in the picture, and I had cardinals in the picture. Well they're all molting. Well when they're doing that, they
just can't fly all over the place. I mean they're getting new feathers. They're kind of wonky. Well, what you need to do is give them something like nesting super Blend from Wabirds Unlimited. Unfortunately I already was and I believe in that food. It's really good. It's got things like sunflower chips and peanuts and dried mealworm and bark butter bits and sapflower nuts and all kinds of tree nuts.
It's just a super food. And that helps because you know they can't go flying all over creation trying to fight food. Put that in your feeder. Get them also, by the way, from waburd you need to get their cylinders, especially if you're going to go on a trip. You use cylinders whether you're going on a trip or not. But with a cylinder, it's a hard packed cylinder of food. And you go on a trip and you come back
and is still there. Birds are picking the seeds out, so they got something not like your feeder goes dry. But it works really well. I like the cylinders because if you put them kind of near a window you can watch the birds. It takes them instead of flying in getting a few seeds and flying away. It takes them just a second to kind of peck those out and you get a little more time to get to
watch your birds. Anyway. That's Wabirds Unlimited. Warbirds Unlimited is six stores, WBU dot com, slash Houston, WBU dot com slash Houston. You need to check them out. Okay, it's time for me take another break, and we'll be right back for our last segment. If you'd like to give us a call seven one three two one two five eight seven four. He appreciate you joining us today for all kinds of gardening advice. I hope you're enjoying the show.
We try to keep it a little entertaining as well as we go along, because hey, you got to have fun, right and when we are gardeners, we have issues we have to deal with that break our heart first of all, when a plant dies, or when something decides to come in and chomp on our plant, or something that's happened to me. The night before I was going to go out the next morning and picked my sweet corn. Every
raccoon in town got together sent theired. I think they have text communication or something, because they all came and they stripped my corn patch. That'll break your heart, fire ants, nuts, edge bermuda grass in the flight. We have a lot of things we have to do with hey. Challenges build character. They make us stronger. But you got to laugh occasionally along with doing the things you need to do to get them under control. And we help you with that.
But gardening is a fun hobby, you know it really, it just is. It's the kind of hobby that I personally I think is one of the best ones to have. And here's why. You can spend a lot of money on any hobby. I mean, if you want to, if you want to buy a bass boat or a deer lease, or if you want to buy a very expensive, you know, Troy built rototiller, you can spend it on gardening too. Or you can do it for almost nothing. You can do almost nothing save your own seeds. You can make
your own compost. I mean, it's for everybody. If you are young and able bodied, you can do all kinds of work out there in the garden, do it yourselfing around the place. If you are getting up in ages and just not able to do that kind of thing, we have ergonomic tools. We have beds that bring things up high where you can you can get access to them without having to stoop and go up and down and up and down. Gardenings for everybody, and it's mental health.
It really is mental health. I promise you that the benefits are. If you've never gardened, I highly recommend you give it a try, because that is there a chance of being outside in nature and breathing fresh air and getting some sunshine and just enjoying the outdoors. That is physically and mentally helpful too. And then of course the physical ability, you know, getting up, walking around, taking steps.
Even people that work in an office cubicle are told you need to get up ever so many minutes and walk around for a minute and before you go back and sit down. Well, gardening is more than a walk around a minute. I mean, you can just walk around the yard and go back inside. But anytime you're doing any kind of exercise like that, even if it's not you know, physical, big physical exercise, it benefits you. And
that's gardening. And it's one of the reasons why I say it is the best hobby there is, the best absolute hobby there is. Now, I know that I'm biased, but that don't make me wrong. You can be biased and wrong, or you can be biased and right, and I think I'm biased and right. All right, Well, you're listening to Guardline our phone number seven one three fifty
eight seventy four. I got a few minutes left here if you'd like, I think you can take another call if somebody wanted to call in, Uh, just one please. That's about how much time we got.
Uh.
Nelson Plant Food is a quality fertilizer producer. They've been producing fertilizers for decades. A Dean and the team out there. They've got their turf Star line that is for lawns. Things like slow and Easy that last for months after you put them out, gradually feeding your lawn a little bit of nitrogen at a time, keeping it growing at
a nice, even smooth rate. That's a quality fertilizer. Bruce is Bro also has a slow release to it, by the way, it's not all fast release, but it puts them a little bit more out early and then continues to feed over time. That's an excellent fertilizer. Then they're canisters are fertilizer, the jars are fertilizer. The plastic jars, the screw lids. Uh, there's things like Nutri Star line, things like the tree and Shrub I recommended that earlier today.
Tree and Shrub or a neutral star from Nelson's is a general fertilizer for woody ornamentals, whether it's a deciduous or evergreen tree. It's going to give about three to four months per application. So if you've planted a tree in the last two years, you should be using this the tree and shrub on that tree on a regular basis.
You can do it now and then when we come out and get into late spring, go ahead and do it again because spring, early spring growth, excuse me, late winter early spring growth is going to begin and you want to get that down where it can provide the feeding. And there's many many others in the Nutri Star line. Then there's a color Star which is for flowering plants, and these also are available in the reef. You can
refill the canisters. There's almost a dozen places around the Greater Houston area that have the low canister refills where you take your empty plastic jar and you pull the handle, just like you're buying peanuts at the grocery store, right little things. You pull the handle and put your bag underneath it. Does that. It's a less expensive way to buy fertilizer. Plus you're not throwing even more plastic in the environment. We all know why we don't want to
do that. Nelson Plant food quality products for whatever plant you're growing easy to find across the Greater Houston area. I was talking earlier about the birds and my scruffy birds that are in their process of molting. I'm going to post a picture to our Facebook page. And by the way, if you don't follow the garden Line Facebook, you ought to because we're always putting stuff up there. You'll be the first to know when I'm putting up
new publications because I announce them. They're on the Facebook page of garden Line. So I'll post something showing my scruffy birds because when you look at them, it's like you feel sorry for them, you know. I hear Sarah McLoughlin singing in the background, these poor birds. If you don't know what that means, I'll explain anyway. But they're gonna get better because I'm feeding them good feed and they are gonna get their new foliage and be as
beautiful as ever. I'm telling you right now, beautiful. They are not the cardinals and whatnot. If you haven't purchased a bird feeder, you ought to get a quality bird feeder. Two. By the way, there are a lot of different kinds. No matter what you're trying to feed, there's a great way to do it. I like the ones that are scrolled, excluding my favorite, absolute favorite. But if you we're about
to run out of time here today. But I did want to mention that this week out there in the lawn and garden, keep the lawn mode as regularly as you can. The more often you mow, the better that it's gonna look. Regular. Mowing sharp, more blade on a regular basis, at a taller height. Those are the keys to good density of your ear. I'm going to run out to April and the woodlands real quick. April, we got about a minute left. Let's see if we can get it done.
Hi, we have some I think harvest strants in Kerrville. They eat like a seven foot wide circle. Does that sound about right, and then eat little paths away.
Yes, that is a harvard. That's the red harvest rant. I grew up with those things and they I probably am not going to convince you they're a good thing out there but they are. That's one of the reasons that the Texas horned lizard. We grew up calling them horn toads. Those feed on harvest rants, and as people have done things that have reduced harvest grant numbers, it's
been a crisis for the Texas horn toad. They can be controlled, you know, pesticides will kill them if they're not really bothering you're leaving them alone is certainly a good idea. So that's kind of up to you, though.
Well, I have I have like a dozen, you know, seven foot wide circles that these guys creating my lawn. That's a little much.
Oh in your lawn. This is not in Purville, you said, yes, oh, okay, okay, Well I was picturing just pastures and stuff like that. So if you put any kind of a dust insecticide right there at the opening, they all have to come in and out of that opening. And it kills me to talk about killing them. I understand what you're talking about. Like I said, I grew up with them, and they
do create a vegetation free huge area around them. Yes, but a dust whatever kind of a dust from ortheene to seven dust or whatever they have to track through it. It will kill them, but you just have to get it just a little bit there at the mound. You don't want to spray everywhere everything, No need to do that. That one opening is where they all come in and out, so that that would get them.
Under for you.
So don't bother with the red ant killer. So I've been buying the twenty dollars bag red ant killer.
What is in that?
Do you happen to have a No, I don't have it in front of me. Wish I did.
I'm sorry, red I'm gonna I'm gonna see if I can find that red ant killer that is. I don't know what that.
That's all I see there in curvill Is bags and bags of red ant killer, not anything about harvest ants.
Hmm. Well, I don't see a product named red ant killer, so I'm sure it exists. You're seeing it. I just don't know which one that is, depending on the on the name of it.
But that's what they kill. Okay, try for a more specific harvest ant killer, or go get our go get some horn toads.
Or go get some horn odes. That would be that would be it. But you're not going to get results in your lawn fast enough with the horn toads. I'm sure you won't be happy, you know the speed of those results. But all it takes is just a little dust right in the entrance opening. You're not nuke in the yard here. This is just a access. If they have to crawl through it, you may have to reapply it a week later, the reply it again a week later. You know, with rain and different things, it's not going
to always stick around. But that'll do it.
Well.
Thank you for your time.
Appreciate it all right, good good luck out there. I appreciated by the April. Bye bye. All right, there it's time. Let's see. Ow we're about to the end of our time here, right, do we need one more break? Nope, we're looking at the end of the show. That's what. All right. Why you've been listening to Gardenline. I'm your host, Skip Richtor, and I appreciate you giving us a call today, those of you who called in, those of you who listened, thanks for listening. Don't forget that