Well, welcome to garden's success. Today, I'm going to be going over
fifty common gardening and landscaping mistakes that I see people make. You know,
in thirty five years as a county Extension horticulturist and a radio host, I've
kind of seen it all. We even driving down the road sometimes I'll see
a landscape and oh, I gotta go take a picture of that is that
is legendary. And there are a lot of common mistakes we make, and
I've made them myself. So this isn't just a you know, only some
people make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes from time to time. But the reason
I'm spending time today on fifty common mistakes is hopefully to help you avoid making
them. What do they say, I learn from the mistakes of others.
You don't have time to make them all yourself. Well, here we go
learning from mistakes of others. One of the common mistakes number one lack of
preparing the soil before you plant. The most important thing you do and having
success in a vegetable garden, a flower bed, an herb garden, whatever
it is, is preparing the soil first. And by preparing the soil first,
I mean mixing some compost into the soil, doing a soil test ahead
of time, making sure everything is ready to go, so when you put
that plant in the ground, it's ready to go. By the time you
walk away from planting, you are well on your way to success or failure.
And preparing the soil is one of the key things. I'm going to
talk about some others in this list of fifty mistakes, but preparing the soil
is really critical. Spend a dollar on your soil before you spend a dollar
on your plant. That's another way to think about it. When you get
the soil right, plants literally hit the ground running. Plants live in their
roots. Yes, they need sunlight, but essentially the root system takes up
the water, it takes up the nutrients, and the soil determines whether it's
well drained or not, whether it can whole moisture well, whether it also
can hold nutrients well, and making sure you take care of that is important.
Along with that, preparing the site first is getting rid of perennial weeds.
If you've got nutsedge and bermuda grass growing in an area and you want
to have a flower bed or a vegetable garden or a herb garden. You
got to get rid of that stuff first. You have many more options and
can be much more effective by getting rid of the weeds before you plant.
Once you've got rose bushes and flowers and tomato plants and other things growing in
a bed, the products you can use to get rid of those pernicious weeds
are very very limited, and even at that you can still do damage.
It's much easier to destroy weeds before there are plants in the bed. That's
just as simple as that, So prepare the soul first. That's number one.
Number two planting and poorly drained areas without building raised beds. Here in
the Greater Southeast Texas area, it rains a lot from time to time.
We wish we had that rain this past summer, but I'll tell you,
when it rains, it pours. And with heavy clay soils being predominant in
much of the area as well, poor drainage is a common thing. Low
lying areas where the soil or the water would collect after a rain can sit
there for days, and that water logging is really bad for plant roots.
There are not many plants that can live with submerged roots and The reason is
when they're underwater, they can't get oxygen, and believe it or not,
roots have to have oxygen. That's part of them respiring, if you want
to anthropomorphize it, it's them breathing. And when you don't allow them oxygen,
they're not going to make it. There are a few plants that adapted
ways, like cypress trees to grow on a swamp, but by and large,
it is very important to fix the drainage first. Either har somebody or
do it yourself to come in and put underground drainage in we call those French
drains, where the soil goes into a pipe underground and then is taken off
by gravity or by pump to another location. Or Number two, you can
also just make sure you have a raised bed. It's as simple as that.
Raise up the soil and things do well. We tell people when you
plant azalea's set the plant on the ground and then bring in a bed around
it. And the concept is that that plant is sitting above the soil level
and the bed is above of course the soil level, and that works well.
Makes a lot of sense, and boy will it ever save you some
big time woes. Number three of our common fifty common gardening and landscaping mistakes
is choosing poorly adapted, disease and pest resistant species and varieties. There may
be plants you're in love with, maybe you move from the Midwest and you
love the smell of lilacs. Well, as close as we can get to
a lilac here is you buy a crape myrtle and spray it with perfume.
That's about as close as we can get. But there are a lot of
examples of plants that don't belong here. They're not adapted. Maybe they're super
super own to disease and insect pests. You know. Let's take roses for
example. Roses are notorious for getting leaf spots and all kinds of other issues,
and so a lot of people have said, I just don't have time
to take care of roses. Well, we have roses that grow in cemeteries
where nobody is taking care of them. Those old time we call them antique
roses. They're a great example. We have modern roses that are also pest
resistant. By the way, about the cemetery, one of my mentors used
to say that if dead people can grow a plant, you can too,
And I think that if a plant is growing in a cemetery, that's a
good sign that you probably can bring it home and keep it alive. But
that would be an example of a disease and pest resistant plant. The same
is true as I said with species, but choose wisely no matter what you're
planting, from fruit trees to ornamental trees to perennials that you hope to make
it hasta. There's a good example. Or what's the other peonies? Peonies
are beautiful in the Midwest, and so with you know, with choosing things
that will grow here. Maybe it means you don't get that plant from home
that you get to keep enjoying, but at least it means you have a
beautiful, resilient landscape. Number four overwatering. I don't know what it is
about us, but we love to water water water. We overwater our house
plants, and again in the water log soil, especially a poorly drained container,
they die. They just I think more houseplants die from overwatering than underwatering.
When it comes out to outdoors. Yeah, we water too much and
we waste water. So forget about the drainage and the water log. Roots
just considering the fact that you're paying for that water, and when you buy
water, you also get a little higher septic or sewer bill. They sort
of tie those together a lot of times. So wasting water just doesn't make
sense. And plants need enough water, but once they have enough, any
extra is just wasted. And we overwater our lawns all the time. I
mean, lawns really often get over watered. People want to have the water
come on three times a week. All that does is that frequent wetting is
not a good idea. In fact, that leads us to number five,
which is shallow frequent watering. If you water with a little squirt on a
frequent basis, you're just keeping the plants wet and you're going to have more
disease problems, and as a result, you are creating an issue you shouldn't
have to have. It's better to have good deep soaking, to wet the
soil deeply when you water. And when you wet the soil deeply, the
roots can get water from down deep. It encourages deeper rooting. Then let
it dry out. Let it dry out. When it dries out, oxygen
comes back down into the soil as the water is displaced and you just have
a healthier root system. You can apply the same amount of water that you
would have, but in a good deep soaking rather than light frequent waterings.
And that is a mistake that we often make. We're going to take a
little break. We'll be right back with some more of the fifty common gardening
and landscaping mistakes. Well, welcome back to garden's success today. I'm going
over fifty common mistakes that people make when they're landscaping and gardening, and we
are now on miscape mistake number six, and that is putting plants where you
want them rather than where they want to be. I realize you want that
beautiful rose bush or that azalea bush in a certain spot where you can enjoy
it. But if you don't consider things like the sun exposure and the light
level, that aalea will fry in the blazing hot sun and the only rose
booms you may see will be at the flower shop. The same can be
said for soul drainage. We do have plants that can take it, and
when the weather or when the soil conditions are very swampy, wet, Louisiana
Iris does really well they're a button bush is a native shrub that does well
in those areas, So there are plants for that, but you just have
to consider where does the plant want to be when you come up with the
location. We always are trying to plan things that aren't from here, that
don't grow here, that have issues when we put them in our spot.
But just with a little planting like that, it can be very, very
very attractive. And you always want to be careful when you're planting things.
If something says that it recedes profusely or that it's a vigorous grower, beware
that means it's taking over your house and you'll look like an abandoned Southeastern homestead
covered in kudzu by the end of the summer season. You do want to
watch out for certain things. Mexican petunia is just an example of one.
I mean it recedes, they wash down the sidewalk and come up there a
little over vigorous. There's a reason they don't sell Mexican petunia with a little
combo pack with a pint of roundup or something, although they probably need to
because it's that vigorous. Anyway, don't plant plants in the shade if they
like sun, or in the sun if they like shade. Number seven,
trying to grow a lawn in too much shade. Now, we want to
have trees and we want to have grass, and if you were to interview
the grass, it would say, get the trees away from me. I
need sunlight. If you were to interview the trees, let's say get the
grass away from me. It's stealing water and nutrients and they don't get along.
And so what do we do when we want to have a beautiful yard
with shade trees. Well, we have to brighten the shade. We have
to either do some thinning out of the trees so that there allows a little
more light through. That's a very short term solution though, but at some
point it just gets too shady in your yard when that live oak tree gets
bigger and bigger. Certainly the magnolia trees are that way, but any good
dense shade tree. So when you have that, you got to go with
a turf like Saint Augustine. Maybe right behind it would be some of the
zoisias in terms of some shade tolerance. But if Saint Augustine doesn't want to
grow there, you don't need a lawn there. You need to have a
shade loving groundcover. You need to have a molted area with some shade loving
shrubs or something else. But as you push a line into the shade,
it gets weaker and weaker, and then you're forever trying to get it to
be dense, and it just can't overcome the fact that it doesn't have the
fuel that basically pushes all growth, and that's sunlight. Sunlight is the energy
that makes carbohydrates, that makes growth, that makes blooms, that make fruit.
No matter what it is, you put it in the shade if it
needs if it needs sunlight for fold for the blooms, then you can't do
that if the light levels aren't there. Number eight. Planting vegetables and flowers
at the wrong time. You may move from another area where you plant tomatoes
in May. We don't here. We plant tomatoes at the end of February
or in March. It depends on how much of a gambler you want to
be. But our summer comes early, and our big fruited tomatoes don't set
fruit when the temperatures above nineties in the day and certainly the upper seventies at
night, which is about half the year here, and so what we have
to do is we have to plant them very early and choose fast varieties in
order to be able to have a productive garden. Now, when it comes
to flowers, there are also flowers that like to grow in the cool season.
There are flowers that like to grow in the mild weather of spring and
fall. There's a few that can take the hot summertime. But think about
your planting time on all those. You know, if you wait too long,
let's say September October and you're planting warm seasoned vegetables, still you're gonna
have a very short season on those. So think about the best time to
plant, follow schedules that are provided and you'll have more success. The next
one is number nine. That is not training trees when they are young.
It is. It is critical if you want a long term beautiful, strong
shade tree to direct its growth when it's young, just to allow it to
grow whatever direction it wants and have split trunks and other things are a problem.
In fact, split trunks are the worst. That's too competitive upright,
shs growing together, each wanting to be the boss. Take one or the
other out. It doesn't matter which one you take out. If it's much
better to just make a decision and a pruning cut and leave yourself with one
trunk. Then to have them become competitive, that'll be a weak joined union
between the two that will split out in a storm down the line, and
you wish you'd trained it when it was young. There's a lot of other
types of training we do with crate myrtles, making sure you know if you
want a multi branched, a multi trunked crate myrtle. The trunk comes up
and then it forks into two, and then each one of those forks into
two at someplace, and building that whole structure when it's young is easy.
Later on you're left with bringing out saws, and that leaves trees just flat
ugly, especially with crate myrtles. That is that is not a good pruning
practice. In fact, one way I like to put it is if you've
planted a tree and later on you're having to use a saw, you it's
an emission at guilt you didn't do something back when you should. It's much
easier to snip out a young shoot because you know it doesn't have a future
in that spot. Then to wait until you have to use a saw to
take it off. And another example of that would be a tree that's a
shade tree and you've got a branch, let's say it's a little above head
high, and you think, well, I'm going to leave that. Well
think about that when that branch gets big and starts to sag down, or
are you going to be able to walk and mow underneath it? You see
what I'm talking about. Don't wait until then to make the cut. Do
it when it's pencil size or the size of a golf ball at the most,
and make that cut when it's young. Number ten is training shrubs and
trees Incorrectly, some people go out with pruners. It's kind of like what
they say, why does a man climb a mountain because it's there? Why
do you plant prune a tree because it's there? Well, that's not a
good reason. You need to know what you're doing. It is so easy
to find out online how to train a deciduous tree, or how to build
a hedge or any other kind of thing like that that you're doing starting off
when they're young, and you being educated on how to make the pruning cuts,
then you're going to be able to end up with a really good,
strong tree. The branches are spread out properly. There's good branch angles by
the way, although species vary. In general, we would like the branches
to come out from the trunk at about a forty five to sixty degree angle.
That creates an open tree. We don't have a bunch of upright growth.
Some species, like pairs, for example, they are just determined to
send every shoot straight up to the sky. But training them when they're young
is very important because if you spend the first five years training a tree properly,
you will not have a lot more pruning to do, and by the
time you hit about fifteen years, there should be very little to none that
you're having to do. Although at times in certain situations, yeah, we
do have to come back, but training saves you a lot of butchering later
on number ten, excuse me, that was I said ten with training them
incorrectly. Number eleven Pruning flowering trees and shrubs at the wrong time. If
something blooms in the summer or fall, it's because it produced those bloom buds
that year, and so later in the year, being the summer, they
start to bloom that would be like vitex or chase tree is a good example
of that. If it blooms in the spring, like a dog wood or
a red bud tree, or a spy rea bridles wreath or a flowering quint
or any of those once blooming roses like lady banks, it blooms in the
spring but never blooms again. You prune those after they bloom, because if
you prune them in the winter, when we do most of our pruning,
you're cutting away all the bloom buds, so that spring season you're about to
enjoy will be less enjoyable. So if it blooms in the spring, it
sets its buds in late summer and fall, don't prune after I would say
midsummer, and because you want to have time for branches to grow and do
that. And if it blooms in the summertime, then you can prune it.
Be An oleander's another example of a summer bloomer that you can cut it
back in the winter and it's still going to bloom in that summertime. Another
one is bad pruning cuts. Bad pruning cuts means you leave a stub that
dies and now the branch can't close that wound over or you cut so close
to where the branch is attached that instead of a small wound, you've now
got a giant wound. I mean picture as the branch comes out from the
trunk. It's kind of a cone shaped and it hits a point where it's
kind of the normal branch size. That's where you need to cut it off.
Don't leave a stub. Cut it off at the proper place. There's
a lot of information online on how to do that, and also on how
to make a three point cut. I'm going to leave that one for you
to go hunt down. But a three point cut for any limb too big
for you to hold with one hand is very important. It avoids stripping away
material on the tree. Well, I think that we are going to take
a little break again and I'll be back continuing with fifty common gardening and land
landscaping mistakes. Welcome back to garden Line. I am going through fifty common
mistakes that people make when gardening and landscaping in hopes that if I can save
you even one or two of these, it will save you a lot of
pain and in many cases a lot of expense too, having to replace plants,
but we're now on number thirteen, and that is miss using weed killers.
Weed Killers are labeled for a reason. The label tells you what you
can use it on and what you can't use it on. The label tells
you how much to apply, how to apply it, and when to apply
it, and when you ignore the label. I know that you know you
are the uh specialist at all things lawn, but trust me, you can't
just ignore the label when things get hot. Our broad leaved weed killers that
work so well in lawns, they'll flat really hurt your Saint Augustine gress cause
it major problems. But that happens when we apply them at the right time
or at the at the wrong rate. Rather so, for example, if
a teaspoon is good, a tablespoon is not better a tablespoon of When you
double or triple up on a broad leaf pre emergent or a grassy pre emergent
weed killer, you can literally cause the grass roots to be stunted and those
runners not to peg their roots down into the ground because you misapplied the weed
killer. When you apply a broad leaf post emergent weed killer to kill weeds
in your lawn, and it's above eighty five, maybe ninety degrees. Some
will go above ninety, most won't. You will hurt your lawn. So
the rate and the timing are very important. If you don't put a pre
emergent down before the weeds are up, well, it's kind of too late.
It's like swinging in a baseball when the catcher's already holding on to it.
You missed your chiant, your chance. So do these at the right
time. By the way, if you go online to gardening with skip dot
com, I've got my pest disease and weed management schedule on there that will
help you with a proper timing for cool season weeds and warm season weeds number
fourteen. And this is similar using a weed and feed combination in late winter
and early spring. Now that is when we come out of the winter,
and I know there's a lot of weed and feeds on the market. They
can do their job. But here's the problem. We're putting a weed control
pre emergent down typically about mid February in most of the listening area here.
You may go into early March as you go further north up Conroe and a
little further, but basically it's mid February when do we fertilize ideally, well,
ideally we'd like to fertilize when we've mowed the lawn twice, and that's
going to come later on. And if you look at my lawn care schedule,
that main initial spring fertilizer application is based on that. We do have
an earlier one for quick greenup, but that is just for folks that just
demand getting an early greenup. The standard time to begin is going to be
when you've mowed the lawn about twice. The schedule reflects that. So when
you are fertilizing with a weed and feed, do you put it on in
February or do you put it on in late March or April whenever that would
be. It's hard to find the right time with that combo. In the
fall, those times line up a little bit better. When we're doing off
fall fertilization is when we're doing off our fall pre emergent weed control, so
that works a little bit better. I would rather that, even if you
had a product that works, I would rather you pick a good quality fertilizer
and then pick a weed control product that matches the weed problems you have,
and let's put them on separately. In that spring season. That's a better
way to go. Number fifteen Planting invasive plants. I already joked about Mexican
petunia taking over the world. We have other plants to take over the world.
Mint wonderful herb takes over the world. I mean, if you don't
confine the roots, you got a problem. We have many plants that are
like that. It just continue to spread. Then we have plants that in
nature, they tend to spread and be invasive. For example, Chinese tallow.
Years ago, somebody planted Chinese tallow down here. It's one of the
best plants in the world for fall color, but it's just not a good
one to use because it absolutely we'll recede and take over entire pastures with the
seeds from Chinese tallow. Some of the viburnums are the same way. They
create the little purple berries that birds eat. And now everywhere in the woods
birds land, we got wild or burnham taking over as an invasive plant.
So avoid those, just avoid them. Now, there's degrees of invasiveness,
and there's some plants that have the potential to be invasive but in our area
aren't so bad. But in general, avoid invasive plants. They're just a
problem. Nature has enough invasive plants of its own. If you've ever had
an elm tree around, you get to pull the little elm seedlings out of
the flower bed all the time because they love to recede. Number sixteen harvesting
vegetable too late. A quality green bean is a young green bean before the
seeds are swollen up and you got strings on the pods where you know,
some of you grew up having to snap and string green bean pods. When
you let those go too late, they lose their quality. The taste isn't
good. They're stringy, almost woody textured, and it's just it's just terrible.
Don't do that. Some vegetables don't have a certain time when they ripen.
You know, tomato has a time when it ripens, but like a
squash or a cucumber, the minute the bloom falls off, you could eat
the thing. You wouldn't want to eat it at that stage. But it
doesn't have to ripe and it's ready to go. We're just waiting on them
to get the right size and then pick them before they get too old,
because then the skin gets tough, the seeds inside start to become woody,
and so timing is very important. And I don't have enough time to go
over every single vegetable you might plant. But just keep that in mind.
Don't wait too late to harvest is better than later, unless you're having to
wait on something to actually ripen. Number seventeen planting too large of a garden,
too much of a good thing. How much is enough? Well,
probably less than you think. New gardeners are notorious for planning a big garden.
You know, you get the garden fever, and this year you're going
to be planning a vegetable garden and you end up creating this giant garden that
by June you're a wishing you hadn't because the crabgrass is coming in. You
know, every square foot you choose to plant is a square foot you get
to pull weeds on and water and fertilize and do all the other things we
do mulch. So just have a nice sized garden that you can handle and
grow into it. That would be my recommendations. Turf is an example of
that. You know, just because you own property doesn't mean you have to
turf it from border to border. Those are areas that have to be watered
and fertilized in mode, why not go easier care on some of it and
put the turf where to most enjoy it, where the family gathers or you
know, everybody is different, so what suits you just don't plant turf because
you own property. Another example would be the lost my train of thought here,
Oh, the bedding plants. Bedding plant annuals have to be changed out
through the year. So if you have these giant beds and let's say they're
full of violas and pansies in the winter time, and then comes summer and
you're filling them with petunias, and then it gets too hot for the petunias,
and now you're putting out summer plants like angelonia and vinc ar, madagascar
periwinkle. Each of those is time when you're buying plants, you're planting,
you're cleaning it out, you're adding some compos and you do those plant color
changes several times a year, and that adds up in terms of cost and
in labor. So color is a good thing. But just remember that when
we're planting, consider the size. Don't go larger than you need to go,
especially early on number eighteen. Planting too densely. That means not thinning.
When when we plant carrots, or when we plant beets and radishes,
for example, in the vegetable garden, and we don't thin them out,
we have lots of tops with no roots. You'll have these big green carrot
tops and you'll think, man, I've got a carrot patch. And you
pull them up and the roots aren't even the size of a pencil. That's
because they're crowded. And so if you do plant, if they come up
to dense from your planting, thin them out. Take some scissors and clip
them off right there at the ground. And for root crops, about the
width of that root at maturity maybe fifty percent bigger than that or wider than
that is where you want to plant. So, for example, if you're
going to plant a beat and it's going to have roots, oh, I
don't know to say three inches in diameter. When you harvest it, put
them about four inches apart, or thin them to about four inches apart the
same way with a one inch carrot, then make them about an inch and
a half apart. That way you have a chance of getting a really good
stand. When it comes to flowers, a similar thing is true. They
tend to compete with each other when we plant too densely, and so just
consider the space another thing that happens with density, And this would be like
even things like rose bushes. You've got this little bed and you want five
kind of roses, but it's a ten foot bed, and that's too crowded
for a rose bush, and you end up with more black spot, more
powdery mildew, which are diseases promoted by poor air circulation and moist conditions.
So make sure and give things room to grow. Finally, failing to malch
your flour and your vegetable beds, that is a big one. When you
fail to malt you are sentencing yourself to weed pulling or hoeing. So when
you plant, just throw the moltch down two or three inches deep. Do
not let sunlight hit the soil in your vegetable garden. Don't let it hit
the soil in your flower garden either, And by doing that you save yourself
a lot of weeding problems. Now, things like nutsedge and bermuda grass are
going to come crawling through any mulch or pushing up through any mulch in the
case of nutsedge, But there's no need for that to be the case.
You can multch and avoid a lot of the annual weed seeds that you have.
Keep that mulch going, it will thin out over time, so just
add fresh mulch to the surface and keep them covered. The only exception to
that is in early spring, if you're trying to get a tomato growing,
I will leave the soil bear to warm the soil faster, knowing that I'm
going to have a few weeds to deal with when it's time to pull the
mulch back over the plants and around the beds. That would be the tips
as far as mulching and whatnot. And we're going to take a little break
here we will come back to more of our fifty common gardening and landscaping miscap
mistakes. Welcome back to garden Line. I'm your host, Skip Richter,
and we are going through fifty common gardening and landscaping escaping mistakes today. By
the way, if you missed some of them, or if you have a
neighbor that you think would really like to hear this show, have them go
online and check out our podcast. You can do your whatever your podcast supplier
is. Maybe you have iHeartRadio. Maybe you have a different kind of podcasts.
Search for Garden Line and find this show, and it is all about
fifty common garden and landscape Landscape mistakes number twenty not controlling garden weeds early.
When weeds are young, you can throw mulch on them and it kills them.
I mean when they're a little bitty you know, one inch or two
inch little plants coming up. If you most deeply, that will kill them,
and not just prevent weed, but kill young weeds. I use newspaper.
Not a lot of people, you know, take and have piles of
newspaper around these days. But any kind of a paper cover over the soil
where mulch is thrown on top, that will give you pretty much two or
three months, if not sometimes four months of good weed control in that bed.
So that works early. But once a weed is established, now we
got a problem. It is competing already with water and nutrients. It's probably
starting to shade out your desirable plants around it. Another thing is to get
it out of there. If you pull it up, you may disturb the
root system of the vegetable or flour that it was growing in, or the
herb garden that it was growing in, so trying to hoe it and cut
it out when it's young. It is so easy to take a hoe and
just lightly scrape unto the soil and get rid of weeds. There's no work
essentially at all to it. Basically, what you're doing is just slicing under
the soil and disturbing that little tender seedling's root system, and it's easy once
it becomes a established weed. An established weed, now you've got a little
battle on your hands. Those are harder to cut out with a hoe.
They're tough for two more difficult, and again trying to extract them when they're
growing around your garden plants without damaging your plants is much more difficult. Don't
delay. Either prevent the weeds before they start or deal with them when they're
young. It's real easy to do. And there are special gardening hose that
aren't the kind you grew up with that are more for moving soil around.
But they're very thin bladed. Some of them have sharp sides on all four
a diamond shape, sharp sides on all four. Those are really good the
diamond hoe and instead of chopping stooping and chopping like you picture hoeing. Instead
of that you're standing up. It's almost like you're sweeping or you're playing shuffle
board or something like that. It's just a very upright slice just under the
surface, disturb the soil as little as you can, and boy, that
makes hoing really easy. Number twenty one Purchasing infested, diseased and stunted plants.
I have been in garden centers before where I pulled a little plant out
of the pot to check the roots, and there were nematodes on it.
When you bring that home, you now have nematodes. Period. You're never
going to get rid of all of them, and you could have avoided it
by the sanitary measure of just not bringing the problem in. If it's a
disease, certain diseases can become quite persistent. There are some diseases of our
coal crops in the winter, like broccoli and cabbage and cauliflower. There's one
called black rot, and if it comes in with the plant, which it
can, it is difficult to get rid of. Next year you plant these
crops and the black rot comes back from the residue that's left in the garden.
So avoid bringing that in. If a plant is stunted. Like you
go to buy a little vegetable plant like a tomato or something. It's kind
of purple colored, by the way, and a good, good mom and
pop nursery, you're not going to have those kind of plants. But some
places that will go unnamed. I don't know why, but they're going named
for right now. They will leave plants out, they forget to water them,
they get stunted. You get a purplish color to the leaves. Don't
bring that home. A cauliflower that's been stunted like that, just a good
example. It will make a good cauliflower head. You'll get cauliflower if you
like cauliflower the size of golf ball, but you won't get what you're looking
for. Purchase healthy plants, get them in the ground, have them hit
the ground, running watermen with a good quality fertilizer, and get going and
you'll have much more success. Number twenty two Choosing bedding plants with the most
or largest blooms. I know, I know, I know. This little
plant than a six pack or a four inch pot, and it's got you
wanted to have a bloom the size of your steering wheel on it. That's
red right, don't do it. If you have a plant right next to
that that isn't supporting this heavy crop of blooms trying to you know, maintain
and set and then develop those blooms. It will hit the ground running and
you will get blooms and you have a stronger, better plant, which will
end up being much more floriferous. That's a nice term, much more floriferous
for you. So I know it's tempting. I do the same thing myself,
but I keep reminding myself, Nope, I want the strongest plant.
That's when I want to bring home because in the long run, I'm going
to have the best crop of vegetables or blooms or whatever I'm going after.
Number twenty three Planting seeds at the improper depth. Some seeds very few,
but some are planted on the surface because they need the red rays of light
from the sun in order to help them germinate and establish. Things like carrots
would be that way. Lettuce isn't a good example. If you bury a
lettuce seed a half inch into the soil, you're not going to have lettuce.
It needs that surface and you got to keep it moist up there.
Most seed are planted underground and they're planted. If you don't know how deep
to plant a seed, look at how wide it is and plant it about
three or four times that deep. Okay, So if something is let's say
a pento beean, that's when everybody knows what it looks like. You're going
to plant something like that about an inch inch and a half deep in the
soil as an ideal planting depth for that. And if it were a little
tiny seed like a broccoli seed, which is third the size of a bebe,
we're barely going to cover it with soil at all. Those seeds have
their stored energy that helps them to sprout, grow a root, and get
established so that it can collect sunlight and produce its own food. But if
it has to burn its energy trying to find the surface of the soil,
you're just not going to have good establishment of seeds. So let's plant them
at the right depth. That's important, and there's a lot more to seed
planting, but that in and of itself is important. I had a bunch
of people plant some seeds for me one time in a garden. We were
doing a trial, and I gave seeds to each different person without thinking about
this. They don't all plant the same way. And we had some plots
that came up really well when they were planted at the right depth. The
others I kept looking going why aren't they coming up? And I dug down
and it's because they were planted too deep. They never saw the light a
day. So plant them at the right depth. Number twenty four inadequate lighting
when starting seeds indoors. I'm going to talk a lot about this and probably
put a publication on gardening with skip dot com this winter when we get past
the New Year's people are starting their seeds indoors, but I want to put
more information up there. But just know this lighting is critical and indoors there
is almost never enough light to start seeds. You may have a very unique
bright area, sunroom or something like that, but they need light otherwise they
become spinlely seedlings, They stretch, and they will never establish quality plants.
They'll break off when you plant them out in the sun. It just make
sure you have really good lighting. And again what good lighting is I'll have
to go and elaborate on later, but that is very if you do nothing
else right on starting seeds, make sure that you've got a good quality light
right down on the seeds. And let me say a little bit about that.
When I say good quality light, I'm talking about a light that has
a lot of the red and blue spectrum of all all the rainbow colors that
when you refract white light into the red in the blue is the most important
for seeds. The blue is primarily vegetative growth supporting. Now I'm not saying
you put plants under just a blue light, but that's what the blue wavelengths
support. The red wavelengths are most helpful when it comes to some types of
seed germinating like lettus. I mention that, but also in producing blooms and
fruit the red wavelengths. So if you want to grow a tomato indoors and
have tomatoes, you need some good red wavelength in there. Usually we aim
for lights that are in a red and blue primarily that range of wavelength.
There's a lot of great led lighting systems out there. They're very inexpensive to
operate, they don't produce a lot of heat, and which is good,
and they will just create really good strong seedlings for you. Number twenty five
Planting trees and shrubs too deeply dig a hole. They dig it too deep.
And so maybe you pull this container of tree or shrub soil out of
the pot and you've got about oh, I'm just going to make up a
number like eight or ten inches, and you dig a hole fourteen or sixteen
inches deep and you feel soiled back in. So that the plant sits at
the right depth, that soil will settle and the plant will end up at
too deep of the depth. Dig it as deep as the root system.
And when I say that, when you pull it out, find the topmost
root on the plant, that is the top of the root system, even
if it pulls soil away and planet that depth. That is important. The
topmost root should go right at the soil line. Just think of it that
way, topmost root at the soil line. Don't dig the hole too deep.
You can dig it wider, but not too deep. I see a
lot of people make that mistake. Very important to do that. Well,
we're going to wrap it up here again and come back. But you're listening
to the fifty most common landscape and gardening mistakes steaks that people make. When
we come back, we'll talk about number twenty six. Welcome back, to
Garden Line. I'm your host, Skip Richter, and we are walking through
fifty common gardening and landscaping mistakes that people make today. My hope is that,
as they say, learn from the mistakes of others, you don't have
time to make them all yourself. So here is your little tidbit of advice
on avoiding things that not only create disappointment but also can be expensive when you're
having to replace a plant because of some of these mistakes. Number twenty six
is where we are now, and that is planting trees and shrubs without checking
for and cutting circling roots. So here's what happens. You grow a tree
in a container. Had that tree grown in the ground, the roots would
have reached way out in all directions beyond the branch bread of that tree.
But now it's in a container instead, And so where do the roots go.
They hit the side and they go around and around and around. Well,
okay, we can grow plants that way, but it takes a lot
of TLC to keep those small, little confined root system roots happy. But
instead, what we want to do is we want to cut those circling roots
at planting. And I know you're thinking, oh, my gosh, I'm
going to kill my tree. Well, no you're not, especially when you
plant in the fall and the winter in the spring season that you want to
cut those roots because when you cut them, they will branch out and form
fresh new roots. I did a little test on this one time at a
garden center where we pull some trees out, saw roots going around. We
just cut them with a little handsnut with pruning snaps. You can also use
a one of those box cutter knives that has a little one inch blade.
Just slice vertically from top to bottom through that root cylinder in three or four
places around the cylinder. If it's a bigger roots, you got to use
handprinters to do it. We put them back in the container, came back
two weeks later, pull them up and there were fresh white roots about two
inches long already growing out of those cut surfaces. So why cut them?
Well, that's one reason it establishes better. But another reason is if that
container, let's say it's a one gallon or two gallon container, and a
root's going around the outside of it, maybe it's the size of a spaghetti
right now. Once it gets planted over the next eight to ten years,
that root's going to get bigger and bigger, and the trunk's going to get
bigger and bigger, and next thing you know, that root is embedded in
the trunk, strangling the tree. It's like an anaconda, you know,
wrapping around something to strangle it to death. And there's no fixing that.
I mean, you can go in there with a hammer and chisel and try
to take the root out, but by the time you see the problems above
ground in terms of the way the plant's growing, it's a little too late.
That could so easily be fixed at planting time by cutting any circling roots.
Don't be afraid to do it. Number twenty seven planting a large plant
under a window. I guess another way to put this is failing to consider
the ultimate size of a tree or a shrub plants grow up right. Failing
to consider that that little thin whip of a tree you put out there in
the yard, it just looks like, oh, it's lost way out there.
Well, someday that's going to be a forty foot wide and tall tree
reach across the whole property maybe, And you got to consider that size and
plant it away from power lines. You know, the power companies are so
nice, so prune trees for you for free. You will not like what
they do to them though. Their planning practices is how do we prune this
tree enough to not have to be back next year, in fact for a
long time, to keep it out of the power lines so people don't lose
their power in a storm. Well, you don't want that, so just
consider that. Consider the eaves of your house and the shingles on the roof
of your house. You can't put a big, giant tree right there unless
you're really careful in training and pruning it. In the meantime, that little
compact shrub may be taller than the eaves of your house in a few years.
I grew up in a house where we had red tip fatinias, and
let's see, there was a a nandina and what was the other There was
a beautiful summer blooming shrub escapes me now, but I remember years later going
back and they were all above the eaves of the house. They were literally
rubbing into the eaves. Now we have dar varieties that stay much smaller,
and you would rather have those because you don't want to have to shear your
way into keeping a big shrub a genetically large species small I mean otherwise that
gives you the opportunity to get more practice at cheering than an Australian sheep rancher.
Another common practice is to putent is to plant things too close to a
sidewalk. That's another common one. You know, these little two shrubs on
each side of the sidewalk look so far apart, and by the time they
get half their mature size. People that visit you, the mom and dad
are grabbing the kids by the hand and they're getting a running start to try
to bust through the gauntlet to get to your front door because the shrubs are
encroaching on both sides. So other than adding byop to your party invitations,
bring your own printer. Consider the mature with and half of that number is
the absolute closest that you want to plant it to a walkway. So consider
that there's a lot of versions of this. I've given you a few.
Crowding plants together creates problems also, so just keep that in mind. Especially
for evergreens, they only have foliage with their sunlight and when they grow together,
and then you try to prune them to keep them off the sidewalk.
Now you've got bare exposed interior, dead or bare branches, and they're not
going to get good leaves on them again as a result. Another one I
mentioned that was planning under a window. I said number twenty eight was planning
them too close to your home or the sidewalk or power lines. So pick
shrubs that get the size you want, or if you have a real low
window, maybe you don't even need a shrub. Maybe it's an ornamental grass
that's short, or maybe it's some perennial plants that are that are more compact.
Twenty nine. Planting fast growing trash trees. Trees that grow fast typically
die young. If it grows really fast, if it has awesome fall color,
you probably don't want to plant. Those are both signs of species that
tend to not do super well here. And a trash tree would be like
an Arizona ash. You could go back to Neighborhood's planeted in the nineteen sixties
about the nineteen eighties. They look like hat racks. They'd been pruned,
and these giant trees just were stubbed off because they were falling apart. Bradford
Pear is bad about that too. By the way, I wouldn't recommend that
species. It looks great when it's young, but a day is coming and
then you get to start over. So plant trees that are well adapted,
that have a moderate growth rate, and then you can fertilize and water them
and take care of them and get a fast growth rate out of them.
But don't plant trees just because they grow fast. And if you read about
it and the Sunday paper ad supplement and it talks about this tree grows ten
feet a year, run the other way. Don't do that. Finally,
number thirty, coming to thirty. Now buying the largest bear root tree you
can find a lot of people will mail order bear root trees or they'll see
some, you know, in a catalog, and they want to get the
biggest one they can find. If you plant a small tree, I used
to have a peach orchard and you could buy six foot bare root trees.
I would buy mine about waist high, about three feet high, three and
a half feet high, and plant those and I'm telling you they hit the
ground running. A big tree has had a lot more roots cut off,
and it just takes a while to get established. And sometimes that's true with
containers. Let's say within the same size of container, maybe a fifteen gallon
tree, or or for example, you may have one that's not as big
and then one that's just giant. Well, remember you've got that confined root
system. So don't let let me put it this way. You don't buy
trees by the board foot. You buy them by the quality plant and root
system. So we're going to drop it there for now. I'm going to
take a break. It's fifty common landscape and gardening mistakes, and when we
come back, we are going to be talking about some of the additional tips
for you, including beginning with number thirty one. Welcome back to garden Line.
I'm your host, Skip Richter, and we are going through fifty common
gardening and landscape mistakes that people make. In thirty five years as a County
Extension horticulturist, I've seen a lot. I've made many mistakes myself, and
I've seen a lot of other folks do them. And we're going to try
to save you some pain and suffering and expense by giving you these fifty tips.
We are now on number thirty one, and that is failure to mulch
a wide area around new trees and shrubs. If you put a tree in
the ground and you got a little maybe one foot area between the tree and
your turf grass, a couple things are going to happen. Number one,
the lawnmower and the weed eater are going to end up nicking the bark of
that tree, causing large canker wounds and really setting it back. Number two
is that tree is competing with the grass. And I mentioned earlier, but
trees and grass do not get along. We try to make them get along
in our landscape, but they they don't. They're competitors. So if you
can mulch an area as wide as is esthetically acceptable to you do it.
If you ask the tree, it would say, I want my mulchary to
be every piece of property you own. I don't want anything but tree in
that area. No grass. But that's not aesthetically acceptable. But mulch wide
and mulch deep enough, three or four inches of a good quality mulch,
and the if you can expand that a little bit, it's huge. And
let me let me just put it this way. We've done this in studies
with fruit trees and other things. But if you look at a tree that's
growing with grass up to it versus a tree that's not. The growth is
dramatic. I saw a pecan orchard one time, planted in a bermuda grass
field. They killed half the field, killed all the bermuda grass, and
half the field is baar dirt, and they planted pecon there, and then
they planted them in the bermuda grass. Five years later, it was like
the trees that weren't in bermuda grass are like three times the size of the
trees that were growing with that competition of that of that turf. Now this
was a field it didn't have, you know, just excessive amounts of irrigation
available and things like that. But it's same as true at your house.
If you will mulch a wide area and make that tree think it has a
forest floor environment, it will do better that one thing. Wide Mulching on
a brand new young tree will do more than all the watering and fertilizing and
whatnot that you're wanting to do to make it grow faster. Just keep the
weeds away and you'll be well on your way to that. Of course,
it's important to fertilize in water, but people don't consider the fact that a
wide mulch bed is really important. Number thirty two improper trees staking or waiting
too long to remove the wires. People steak trees as if they're a rocket
and they're afraid they're going to come blasting out of the ground. They put
those wires on them, honker them down tight where they can't budget. All
trees need to move a little bit. Many trees don't need staking. In
fact, in many situations, you don't have to stake a tree if it's
properly grown. That's step number one. Some growers have poorly anchor trees,
and depending on the species, you may not need staking. But if you
do, you want your wires or whatever you use. There's different devices that
will avoid cutting into the trunk tree staking, tree holders that go from the
stake to the tree. There's also people sometimes use a wire, but they
just put it through a section of gardening hosts just to keep that wire from
cutting the trunk. But then let it move a little bit. As the
branch grows, it strengthens it. You know, a that is a actual
principle of nature. If you want your muscles to get stronger, how do
you do that? Will you stress them, you push them, you exercise
them, you know, you bend and do that kind of a stress on
your muscles. It makes them stronger over time. Right, Well, that's
true actually of the way woody plants grow. If you take a plant and
just strap it to a steak and it doesn't move in the wind, the
tissues in that bark are not nearly as strong and able to be resilient in
the wind as a tree that has been moving, because that movement creates strength.
That even happens with little seedlings. I was talking about starting seeding seeds
indoors, little tomato plants coming up in still air versus those you brush your
hands over every day. It literally changes the strength of the stem of that
plant. So let your things move. And then after they've been in the
ground six months, those wires need to come out certainly by a year.
Don't leave them longer than that. You only end up in problems. And
I see it all the time plants now that the wires and steaks are cutting
in there to the tree. Number thirty three lack of adequate watering for new
woody plants during the first season. Remember I said that plant was grown with
a very artificially confined root system compared to what would happen in nature. You
put it in the ground, and in the nursery there were water in it
every other day and warm weather, excuse me, twice a day in warm
weather, probably to keep it going. Now it goes in the ground and
we forget how to water it, and you need to water lightly and frequently,
wetting that root zone and a little bit beyond it. You can use
a berm of soil around it to do that. You can use something like
a tree hugger sprinkler to water whatever width or size you're wanting to water of
the area, but water that area regularly. Early on in the first hot
summer season, you may be watering it a couple times a week if you
plant it in the fall or the winter. If you plant it in spring
or early summer, you're watering it probably three or four times a week the
first week or two, not a lot of water, not keeping it water
logged, but just supplying each day what it needs in that new planting situation.
But going then on into the first summer the next months to come,
you're probably still watering it a couple of times. The next months to come
a couple of times a week. Eventually we back off and we don't have
to a water tree like that. You know, established tree almost never needs
watering, but during that first critical season with confined roots, you've got to
take care of it. And whatever it takes to do that, you want
to do that Number thirty four choosing containers that are too small for vegetables and
flowers. Especially vegetables. You can grow a tomato and a two and a
half gallon container. If you sit there dripping fertilizer water on it all the
time, who does that right? Well, I would say with a tomato
five gallons is really pushing it. Maybe if it's a small statue tomato variety,
I like to put them in ten gallon containers. And why is that
it's more soil for the roots to have to get water and nutrients. So
if you could get to water one day, you're okay, it's still okay
a day or two down the line. And depending on where it's located,
how much sun high the weather is, that all affects it. But I
watch gardening shows often that are filmed in other parts of the country, and
I see these little containers and they're you know, they're cute and nice,
but every time I look at them, I go, yeah, that plant
here. You would need it to be up one or two sizes in container
to have a good dependable sized container for success, because when you stress vegetables
and flowers, you lose the production you planted them for, so big containers
went in doubt go up a size and container number thirty five. Choosing poorly
adapted fruit species and varieties for our area. Now, you can grow apples
here, but we're far enough south that our number of apple options are limited
because apples are really geared genetically for cooler areas of the country. But we're
we're on one end of that range of genetic variety within the apple genus.
So you can do that, but it's better to choose things that are more
adapted to here. And that would mean don't try to grow hazel nuts here.
They're not going to do well here. Don't try to grow filbirts or
try to grow a what is the ras, black and yellow and purple raspberries,
those three especially, There are a few reds that'll do well here.
But pick your fruit species and varieties varieties is important with deciduous fruit, we
have something called chill hours. What chill hours are is it's an accumulation of
temperatures between about freezing and forty five somewhere in that range. Primarily that help
break down the things that inhibit dormant fruit tree bud growth. So here's what
happens. Think of these Think of these buds as having a little little countdown
eggtimer inside. When we have temperatures in the let's say forty forty five degree
range, especially, that egg timer is moving and for every hour of time
you get an hour of chilling. When it gets too cold or when it
gets warmer than that, it slows down a lot and you don't get that
hour of chill for hour of time in the spring when it's time to grow.
If it's a high chill variety, it hasn't had its chilling and it
just won't take off growing. It won't do well. If it's a low
chill variety, you wake up on early February late January morning and your peach
trees full of blooms, and you got a problem because there's gonna be another
frost. So pick the ones that are for your area. Finally, if
you need a pollinator. Make sure you note that and plant more than one
variety. Peaches do not need a pollinator, Apples do need a pollinator.
Most pears really do need a pollinator. Most plums need a pollinator. Blueberries
don't need one, but they make better berries when you have a pollinator variety,
and on and on down the line. You can research that online and
find out, but the bottom line is makes your first because you don't want
to wait five years later and say it's a bloom and skip, I'm not
getting any fruit. Well, you know you gotta have two to tangle.
We're gonna do a tango. We're gonna take a break here fifty common landscape
and gardening mistakes, and we'll be right back. Well, welcome back to
garden success today. I am going through fifty common landscape and gardening mistakes that
I've seen people make, that I've made over the years, in hopes that
we will save you from some of the pain and suffering an expense that comes
from making these mistakes. We are on now number thirty seven. Incorrect training
and pruning of fruit trees and vines. Grapevines. There's a style of pruning
that you do for success with grapes. Now you may have a grape arbor
that would be a very different type of pruning, but in general, you
have a grape trunk that comes up and then branches that go out each way,
from which the shoots then year after year grow and they're prune back to
those branches. Now, I know that didn't create a great mental image.
So now you know how to prune grapes. But there's information online on how
to do it, but it's important to do it right. When it comes
to fruit trees, apples and pears, we typically prune to a central leader.
In the case of pairs, may be more than one central lead,
just because of how they're determined to grow, with branches coming out up and
down the trunk spaced out apart. It's just the typical branch structure you would
expect from any kind of a single trunk tree. With peaches and plums,
we call those stone fruit because they have the pit inside. That would hold
true for apricots as well. With those, we prune to an open bowl
shape or a chalice shape, So the trunk comes up and then you may
have typically about three scaffold branches that go in all directions. So you've cut
the trunk off and chosen three branches to go out, and from there they
branch, and then those branch and you're basically picture this big chalice slash bowl
somewhere in between a chalice and a bowl shape, and you're cleaning everything out
of the interior and anything going out and downward on the outside of the bowl,
you're puning those off. That's a super over simplification. If you want
to know more about how to prune plants, the Aggi Horticulture website, it's
Aggie hyphen Horticulture dot TAMU dot edu. There is a publication on every type
of fruit tree and they tell you how to prune it. They give you
a little diagram showing what you're going for. So I'd recommend taking good hard
look at that because beginning at planting the training process begins. So don't wait
until your tree is four years old. And then, now, how do
I make it look like the picture? It's not. They don't grow like
the picture. But when you prune them that way, you have a strong
structure to minimize breakage of branches and a heavy fruit crop and you end up
getting light into the interior of the tree. When the interior becomes shaded,
it doesn't produce bloom buds, which become fruit, and so you end up
with this umbrella of fruit around the outside of the tree, the tops and
sides, but no fruit on the interior. With proper pruning, you can
have fruiting literally from almost knee high up to as high as you can reach
and never have to get a ladder out. Very important Number thirty eight.
Scouting for plant problems. Early detection and action is the key. When you
wait until there's severe damage. Let's say a caterpillar has eaten almost every leaf
off your broccoli. You know it's a little late then to do much good.
Or maybe some beetles have decimated some of your let's say greens, cool
season greens or whatever you're growing. But that can also apply to rose bushes
being overloaded with aphids and diseases. It'll apply to any plant. You want
to get out and check it out early. They say the best fertilizer is
the footprints of the gardener. Well so is the best pest control the footprints
of the gardener. You get out early, you see the problem because you're
checking on it periodically. And you go, you know what, I think
I need to step in and do something here, and at that time,
the least toxic control options are also available to you. As pests get older,
as diseases get more developed, it's a little late to do much to
save the plant or save the crop. But when you catch it early,
you have more options. Especially for those of you who are gardening organically,
you're less toxic. Organic options are going to be more effective at that stage.
Insecticidal soap, for example, when plants are when pests are very small,
can be quite effective, especially small, soft bodied pests. But you
let those same pests get older and it's just not as effective. The same
is true with BT, which is an organic product. So scout check it
out early, catch problems early, and you avoid a lot of problem.
That's a good life lesson, isn't it. I just thought of that,
Hey, number thirty nine, Spraying with accurate identification first of the pest diseases
and weeds. A lot of beneficial insects who have been killed because they're guilty
of having six legs? Do you even know what it is that you're spraying?
Do you need to spray? Get an identification that's what we do in
Guardline. I can help you with that. Your County AGROLFE Extension office.
You can take samples into them. Are our super mom and pop garden centers
all over the Greater Houston area that we brag on every week. They know
what they're doing. Take them a sample, you know, I mentioned Southwest
fertilizers. Another example. You take them a sample in there of a disease
or a weed or a pest, even if it's a well focused picture,
and it can be identified so that the product you get actually works, or
you may find out you don't even need to spray that at all. Start
with accurate identification before you reach for the gun, the spray gun in this
case number forty. Not having soil tested periodically every week on Guardline, I'll
tell you this is a good time to apply these, let's say, fertilizers
to your lawn or something else. Those are good best estimate applications. But
what if you and your neighbor each had a soil test and you had absolutely
no potassium to speak of, and your phosphorus was through the roof and your
neighbor had low phosphorus and high potassium with the same lawn fertilizer be ideal for
both of your lawns. Well, not really. A soil test helps you
know exactly how to gear your fertilization, but most importantly, before you plant,
if you do a soil test, you can amend the soil and get
the levels where they need to be so that going forward, those recommendations I'm
making are exactly on target. We're not dealing with an unknown deficiency. So
soil testing is not expensive. Go to soil testing one word dot TAMU dot
edu. You can download the Urban Soil Test form, the Urban Soil Test
Form. I don't care if you live in the timbuk two. If you've
got a lawn, a rose garden, a vegetable garden, flowers, fruit
tree, shrubs, trees, that's urban From salt testing standpoint number forty one.
Over fertilizing, under fertilizing, misfertilizing. What are we talking about?
Well, a little bit is good, but a lot isn't good. You
know that comes true from my diet too, if I if I overdo,
you know, Thanksgiving is notorious for that, but that's not good for your
health. Right to live like that? Well, overfertilizing, even though fertilizer
is a great thing, is not a good idea. Underfertilizing is not a
good deal. Plants need nutrients supplied to do their best. They may survive,
but do you want blooms? Do you want fruit? You got to
fertilize some And misfertilizing means using the wrong product, adding a nutrient that's already
in excess, and maybe not adding something that it needs. A lot of
people do that, and I know we have fertilizers that say this is for
citrus, or this is for roses, or this is for palm trees or
whatever it is. That's fine, but knowing what's in your soil to begin
with is very important to do. Now. Number forty two using snake oils,
that is testimony or claims based as evidence. Someone comes out and says,
hey, you know, I did this last year and my plants just
did great. Well, maybe they did, but was it pause of the
product they applied or was it in spite of the product they applied? Do
you see what I'm saying? Claims can be made. It's best when we
have things that are based on research, and that's what I try to focus
on on garden line is university based research, which is evidence based information where
they test a bunch of things under controlled, replicated conditions so that they can
really determine. Yet it does seem that this is this work so that variety
does do better, or whatever the question is. But just because someone says
you got to use this, it worked for me, Well maybe it didn't.
Heard a story one time this kind of gross, but it was a
garden writer and he would sit and he would clip his toenails on the front
porch and he would toss them onto a rhododendron bush, and that bush bloomed
wonderfully. Now he joked about it, saying toenails did not make the rhododendron
bloom, But he put them on it every few weeks, and by golly,
that was a beautiful rhododendron. See what I'm saying. Causation does not
necessarily mean the same as causation correlation, correlation. Excuse me. Just because
two things happened at the same time doesn't mean one cause the other. Well
that's what I mean. Look for research based information. Oh, social media
is just loaded with bologney. Don't believe what you read. Maybe it's true
in a different area, but not where you live. Number forty three planting
a landscape without a plan. That is probably one we should have made.
Number one. Oh, we love to buy new plants. You walk me
through a garden center and I can show you dozens of things I just got
to have. But I'm a recovering plant person. You see. We need
a twelve step program for people in plants pretty bad. I'm like one of
my daughters is that with house plants, it's like little shop of horrors.
When you walk in the front door, it's hard to get in. People
become plant collectors, you know. If we need one of everything, maybe
two or three. Well, start with a plan, you know. There
It just it always helps to have it. But what do you want it
to look like when it grows up? Do you want your yard to look
like a bomb went off in a garden center and everything rooted where it landed?
Or do you want it to have a design and a beauty to it?
It just makes sense. And I know it's fun to buy plants.
I get that. I do it all the time. But you know what,
ultimately, what is your goal? What do you want it to look
like and plan that way. And one final thing is consider in considering those
seasons. I'm gonna actually get to that one a little bit. But you
want to have a plan. You want to design it that way where you
can have success, where you can have success with your plans. I'm gonna
take a little break here. Let's say we are on number forty three.
There next will be forty four. When we come back. You are listening
to garden Line and my fifty common gardening and landscape mistakes. We'll be right
back. Welcome back to garden Line. I'm your host, Skip Richter,
going through fifty common gardening and landscaping mistakes that people make. We are now
on number forty four. Under use of drip or micro sprinkler irrigation. Now,
the standard way we've always irrigated our shrub beds and other things is with
a sprinkler. Sprinkler pops on, it wets everything, and that's how we
do it. It's not an efficient way to water, and every time you
wet foliage, you increase the potential for disease problems. Many diseases need a
little thin coating of water over their spores that land on your leaf they need
it for a certain number of hours a time at a certain temperature, and
they germinate that spore like a weed seed sends its roots right down into the
leaf. In fact, weed seeds a good example. You know, if
you have dry soil full of weed seeds, you'll never see a weed until
it gets wet, and all of a sudden, then that bare dirt area
looks like a chia pet with weeds coming up everywhere. Well, when it
comes to diseases and plants, if we can avoid wetting the foliage, it
helps cut back on it. And also when you use drip and microsprinkler it's
more efficient. Now drips water right on the ground where the roots are in
the soil. Microsprinklers are down very low and they spurt the water out in
a small area down low. They don't wet the whole foliage of the plant,
but they're a little better than drip in that they wet a larger area.
With drip, you have to have a lot of emitters, so you
thoroughly keep the whole soil area moist. With microsprinklers or microjet, that's a
little more efficient. You can do do it yourself. You can hire someone
to put in a system. But drip and microsprinkler irrigation are wonderful, and
especially when we get into water restrictions and we get into hot weather and we
don't want to just dump a ton of water and have half of it evaporate
off the plant foliage and increase diseases in the process. Number forty five not
keeping a gardening journal of some sort. But you didn't see that one coming.
And this is one it's a mistake I've made before. I go through
a year and I'm planning all these different varieties of different things, and I'm
not keeping track of stuff. And next year I'm going what was the variety
that I grew that did better than others? Or what when did I plant
last year? And you know, just trying to learn over the seasons and
over the years. A journal is great. It could be a printed journal
if you're a person who likes paper and pens and writing. It could be
an online journal. There's some really good note taking apps that are absolutely great.
I can name a few, but go find the ones you like and
record things. The good ones will allow you to take a picture and put
that picture in your journal online, in your notes, and so when you
saw, like let's say this first year you've ever had cross striped cabbage worm
on your broccoli, and you took a picture of it and you found out
what it was. Now later when you go back, you have that reference.
You can see the days you planted, the fertilizer you use, the
pests that you encounter. An on and on a gardening journal is a way
to learn, and it's important to do that. Number forty six. Not
reading and following the pesticide label. Ah A teaspoons good, A tablespoons better?
No, no, no. The label is the law. It'll tell
you how strong to mix the spray. It'll tell you what you can and
can't put that spray on. And that could be a health issue. You
know, you spray your tomatoes with something not labeled for something like a tomato
that you're gonna eat, that can be a concern. Read and follow the
label, but especially don't feel like you need to overdo it. When you
mix things too weak or too strong, they don't do their job, and
in many cases they can literally damage your plant. Some plants are more sensitive.
Take horticultural oil for example, that's a very great product, good for
organic gardening or any kind of gardening. But some plants are very sensitive to
oil sprays. Plants with kind of a silvery hue of the foliage that's a
little like dusty material on the surface of the that gives it that silvery color.
You spray that with an oil and it just turns a muddy brown color
or muddy muddy green color. Rather, so follow the label, follow it
carefully and make sure you get the products applied early enough to do some good
Number forty seven mowing too low or too infrequently. So grass plants in general,
the top growth supports the bottom growth the roots. That is, the
roots support the top. So when you cut the top way back, it
means there's less carbohydrates for the roots. Okay, if you went along with
the shovel and cut roots, it would mean now your top is not getting
the water in nutrients that it needs. Do you see what I'm talking about?
The balance, So, whenever you are are going to mow your grass,
if you cut it too low, you're going to have a limited root
system and a less resilient grass plant. And when you mow to infrequently,
it grows a lot of top and you cut it way back, and it
looks bad because you cut off most of the green and then it grows back
again. Bermuda grass is the worst about this. It's just think of a
pine forest where you walk in the forest. If someone mowed all the trees
off at fifteen feet high, what would you have a bunch of brown sticks
until it regrew. Forests can't do that, but your bermuda can. So
mow frequently for the best lawn, more more often than you want to for
the best lawn, and mow at a height where you're cutting about a third
of the grass blade off with each mowing. So the taller you set your
mower, the less frequently you're mowing because it gets to grow a little more
before you have to mow it again. If it's a golf course green,
they mow them every day. You don't want to have to do that.
Number forty eight. Mixing too many colors into a color bed, or another
version of that is not using large swaths of color. So picture this with
me. When you're up close to a flower bed and maybe it's pansies,
and you've got every color a pansy in the world in there. It's really
interesting. Maybe it's a container. Right where you sit on the patio or
whatever, you can appreciate a lot of colors. But as you back off
and go, let's say, all the way out to the street and take
a look at that same bed, it just the colors blend together. It's
like the pixelation effect. If you use large swaths of color, as you're
looking further and further from the bed, at the bed, it looks more
beautiful and it makes more sense. So there's no wrong, nothing wrong with
large swaths close up. But the further you get away all those wonderful colors,
you just lose the effect of them. So you use large swaths of
color, don't mix too much in especially when viewing from a distance. Number
forty nine. Number forty nine is not considering all four seasons when you landscape.
In spring, everyone's a gardener. Everybody's got the bug. There's lots
of plants at the garden centers. You can plant just all kinds of things
that would never have a chance of making it through summer here, but in
spring they look good. But we got to consider all four seasons. What
does summer look like? Do you know we have things that bloom in the
summer very very well, lots of good blooming options. What about fall.
You know, we have plants at bloom in the fall. Typically those are
plants that are initiated into bloom by the shortening day length the fall, and
that would include things like Mexican bush sage for example, copper canyon daisy,
Mexican marigold, fall aster, beautiful plants. Include them in your landscape so
then in the fall you also have flowers and beauty. And by the way,
those are great plants for pollinators as well, including beneficial insects. So
consider the four seasons. How about winter. You know, we don't have
a lot of blooming things that bloom in the winter. We have a few,
But what about bark features like crape myrtles with the rusty colored bark,
a beautiful exfoliating bark, that would be nice. There are many plants that
have great features in the wintertime. I like to leave ornamental grasses unpruned until
the end of winter because as you get frost on those little sea heads and
the sunlight comes through, it's really attractive. But consider all four seasons when
you're landscaping. Part of that. One last concept about that is don't put
all your evergreens on one side of the house looks okay in the spring and
summer, but in the winter very lopsided. And finally, Drummer, will
please number fifty. Believing what you hear or read on TV, on radio,
Yes I'm coming to you by radio, in print, in social media,
and for crying out laout loud, on the internet, even Wikipedia.
We love to check out Wikipedia, but it's only as accurate as a person
who wrote it right. And maybe you read something that would be accurate in
New Jersey or Kansas or California, but not in this area, not in
Southeast Texas. So make sure that you check things out, find really good
sources, sources that are research based. We try to be that here on
garden Line for you. But there's a there is a Langrane University in every
state does research on agriculture, landscape, plants, production, vegetable gardens,
fruit. Take advantage of that knowledge. It's free and it's available to you.
Don't believe in it. Social media is about the worst. It just
lots of things that just ain't true. Someone once said, it's not what
I don't know that bothers me, it's what I know that ain't so,
And a lot of people know a lot of stuff that just ain't so when
it comes to landscaping. Well, that was a fifty common gardening and landscaping
mistakes that I deal with the most often. Thank you for hanging around with
us to Dave. Thank you for listening to garden Line too. By the
way, we really enjoy getting to visit with you and hopefully, in this
case help you not make some of those common mistakes yourself.