KTRH Garden Line does not necessarily endorse any of the products or services advertised on
this program. Welcome to ktr H Garden Line with Skip Rictord, Smell Crazy,
just watching. Well, good morning, it's gonna be a good day.
You are listening to garden Line, and it's gonna be a good day
for gardening. Every day is a good day for gardening, but this is
gonna be a good day for gardening. I know some I was just thinking
about gardeners in the area, which include myself, what we're going through right
now. You know, it's hot, it's dry. It depends on where
you live. Maybe you gotta squirt a rein here and there, but in
general, this is just a time where you go outside in the middle of
the day and kind of make a U turn head back inside to the air
conditioning. I understand what that's like because I'd gardened in this area for years,
and you know, when it comes to our plants and the struggles and
trying to water enough to keep up with things. When the it's not raining
and it's so blazing hot, I can get a little tired and discouraging.
Well, we're going to give you some encouragement today. There are there are
a lot of things that we can be doing right now that make a difference,
and we'll make a difference later. So if you're if you're outside right
now, you're about to hang yourself with your garden hose or fall on your
hoary hoary knife and put an end to all this, take a step back,
take it easy. We've got some things that we can do. And
you know, I promise you. Fall is coming. I know it doesn't
feel like it right now, but it's coming. When it comes to rainfall.
Rainfall is coming. I don't know when, but it's come. It's
just the cycle. I know. We have years that are worse than others,
droughts that are worse than other, summers that are hotter than others,
and all that. But the bottom line is we have a earth that goes
around the sun, and as a result, we get to have seasons.
I know, I jokingly say something done in Houston area sometimes winter is like
two and a half days long, and those two and a half days aren't
necessarily consecutive either, But we have seasons. We get to enjoy different things.
So this blazing, blasting, infernal Gahenna that we are walking through,
right that's a lot of adjectives that we are going through right now. It's
going to break and so let's take heart the plant you got alive right now,
Keep them alive, take care of them. Give your long enough water
to keep it alive, at least keep it going. It is fall is
coming. It's going to get here. For your trees. Let's minimize the
stress on those trees. Not by water in them every day. No no,
no, not by laying a little hose somewhere alongside the tree, but
by giving it a good deep soaking. And when you want to give trees
a good deek soaking, I mean, if you've listened to garden Line Long,
you know that I'm going to brag on the tree hugger sprinklers. I've
got down three of myself. They're nice. If you put a little new
tree out, turn the sprinkle on just a little bit, and it waters
that root ball in the area just beyond it, you've got a trade spinning
ground for a year. It needs a lot of water in the summer.
I mean, let me put it this way. It needs regular watering in
the summer because its root system is still confined. It takes years for root
systems to fully reach out and establish in the soil. If we can get
them past the first summer, that's the big one. But even after that
we're taking care of them. And tree hugger does that. You can get
the big tree hugger, put it around your tree, turn it on,
crank it up, and if you've got a tree it's got a twenty five
feet wide canopy, you can water that area easily underneath there with a good
tree hugger sprinkler because it's reaching out twelve feet in all directions. There's no
problem with a tree hugger being able to do that. And I would encourage
you to take care of your trees again. Rescue watering, A good soaking
for an established tree, not a new one. For an established tree,
a good soaking about ever ten to fourteen days is all they need. And
a good soaking it is going to take about an inch of water. If
you don't know if you've soaked the soil, well, take a long handled
screwdriver, one of those long screwdrivers, push it in the ground and it's
going to go through wet soil kind of like a knife through butter. And
then when it hits dry soil, it'll be like there's a sidewalk somewhere down
below the surface. I mean, it'll hit hard and you won't go past
that. That tells you whether you've watered well or not. You would like
to be able to water that soil about eight to ten inches deep at least
for a good for a tree deeper than that is okay, But again there's
the balance between hey, how much water do we want to purchase and you
know, but again think in terms of rescue water. That's what we're trying
to do for our trees. And tree Hugger they're easy to find there.
They're everywhere. I mean you can go on into TreeHugger dot com to find
out more about I see them. And hardware, ace, hardwaressum and feed
stores and garden centers and all kinds of places. Another thing we deal with,
you know, at this time of year, are the cycle of pests.
If you ever, you probably never thought about it this way, But
there are seasons where termites are more of an active creature in terms of their
flights and things. There. There are seasons where we tend to see the
rodents and raccoons or whatever else. Rodents going up in the attic, and
squirrels in the attic, and raccoons their seasons well pretty much all year where
cockroaches are a deal. McGrath Pest Control is on top of all that.
You know, Scott's dad started it over forty eight years ago and Scott still
runs it in the old fashioned way. What does that mean? Well,
they give you a time and they show up last Let's see, what was
it, Thursday, Thursday or Friday? Anyway, I was sitting at the
house all afternoon waiting for some service person who was supposed to show up sometime
within a five hour time span. What a ridiculous waste of time for a
customer. Not McGraph highly rated company. They show up when they say they're
going to, They give you a time. They serve the whole Houston area,
modern technologies and techniques with old fashioned customer service. You can go to
McGraph Pest Control dot com online to find out more, or just give him
a call to eight one four six nine eighty two forty two eight one four
six nine two four zero and you'll see why I brag on mcgrah best Control.
With this blazing heat that I was talking about we do rescue our plants
to get them into fall. And there's a couple of reasons that that is
important. Now this isn't true with every plant, but with a lot of
plants, when you stress them with drought and excessive heat, they get weak
and diseases have an opportunity to move in. With Saint Augustine grass at your
lawn, take all root rot is a stress induced disease. It's there.
It's not killing your grass until you misapply a weed control product that weakens your
lawn, or you have drought, or there's shade, or there's compaction.
All those weakened lawns and when that happens, take all moves in. With
your oak trees. There's a disease called hypoxilin canker. It is already there,
but it's not killing your oak tree. But you get drought, you
do soil compaction, You add a bunch of soil over the root system,
or take soil away, or trench and cut root. Anything that stresses that
tree opens the door to hypoxilan, and when it moves in, it finishes
the tree off. But the cause wasn't the hypoxilan. The cause hypoxilan was
the ultimate killer. The cause was stressed. So we try to keep our
plants out of stress. And that means more than just keeping them alive.
It means making sure that they have adequate moisture, not excessive amounts. We're
not trying to get him to grow actively all through this tough season. We're
wanting to keep them healthy and alive. And that's really important. And it
also reminds us of the importance of planting plants that are good and tough.
And I'll talk about that more and a little bit here. We're about to
take a break. Our phone number is seven one three two one two five
eight seven four. Give Josh a call and he will get you on the
boards for when we come back. Good morning, Good Saturday morning. You
are listening to Garden Line and we're listening to Jimmy Buffett. Boy, that
was I did not know until I got to the station this morning that Jimmy
Buffett had passed away. A lot of years of listening to that fellow.
Some of you may relate to that too. You know. I was talking
about the brutal summer before we went to break, and the fact that we're
trying to keep our plants not just alive, although alive would be a nice
good start, but out of major stress, because major stress can lead to
other problems down the line, and we'd like to avoid that. I realize
our situation where you can't water there are restrictions by various water supplies Stage one,
stage two. I don't nobody's in stage three to my knowledge right now
around this region of the listening area region of Texas. There may be somebody,
but you have to work with all that. But at the same time,
just remember that this is going to be over with and you want you
don't want your plants and a problem when we come out of it. Another
thing that you may want to consider is the plants that you plan. Now.
Houston is not Opasso, so there's no need for us to panic and
think that every yard needs to be full of agavii and yucca. Those are
great plants, by the way, But I'm just saying, you know,
we have a wide variety of things we can plan over here, but choosing
things that are tough, that resilient are good. And a good example of
that is the Texas Sage. It's also called Sneezo. If any of you
remember, see excuse me the sage and bloom smells like perfume deep in the
heart at Texas, that's what they're talking about in Texas. Say, there's
one called Desperado that is pretty cool. It's got kind of a silvery leaf.
Texas sages can be anywhere from green to silvery. But they bloom typically
following a rainfall or right you know, about the time of a rainfall.
They call them a barometer type of plant because they'll just turn into a ton
of blooms. And some people box them up, like as if they were
some sort of a boxwood hedge. And I think that looks unnatural. And
it does affect the bloom cycle because blooms occur on the new growth. New
shoots come and here comes the blooms. Is that's why it's a summer blooming
plant, not a spring blooming plant only. So Texas age a goodnight.
I saw they have them out at Chanted Gardens if you're out in the Richmond
area. By the way, it's always a good time to go buy enchanted
gardens out in Richmond. They've got the Desperado stage out there, along with
only eight hundred billion other wonderful planets. You can't live without, but you
should give them a tryout. You can go online to Enchanted Gardens Richmond dot
com. Enchanted Gardens Richmond dot com. They've been around a good while in
that community and have built a nursery that truly is a destination. I love
to go out there now. They're open Monday through Saturday eight to five thirty
and Sunday from ten to four butt on Labor Day. They will be closed
this Labor Day, So don't run out there on Monday. Go ahead and
get that done today. Today be a great day to get out there and
do it. In fact, look next door. If your neighbors lights aren't
on, they're probably not listening to Garden Line. And that is a that
ought to be a horticultural crime in the Greater Houston area. And I listened
to garden Light. Knock on the door, invite them to go with you
out to in Chended Gardens and help you haul all the good stuff home.
Yeah, I love to go out there. By the way, they're on
FM three fifty nine. They're on the Katie Fulsher side of a Richmond Chended
Gardens. Yeah, so picking plants that are resilient, you know, a
plant that's resilient. That first time I saw some dad on it, I
was shocked. And that is rosemary. I don't know, I know Rosemary
is you know, I think a Mediterranean type of climate over there and living
on a rocky hillside, which means it ought to be able to do without
rainfall for periods of time. But it's real resilient. They did a study
up in north central Texas. It was way up I think Denton County man
been where they looked after the brutal summer of twenty eleven, which is kind
of like the droughter record for us. And they looked through landscapes after it
was over, what's alive, what looks good? And rose mary was near
the top of the list. It is a very tough plant. Now you
put it in a container and don't water it, and it has no root
system volume to work with there it's yes, it's it's gonna croak. I
mean it's not in a goave a govey. You can dig them up,
throw them in the back of a pickup driver on Houston in the middle of
summer for two weeks, pull it out, throw it in the ground and
it takes off growing I mean, that's amazing. But rosemary is a good
tough plant. Let it get established in your ground and make sure it has
good drainage. Must have good drainage. It is not it does not want
to sit in a wet, soggy winter soil condition. That does not tolerate
that. Don't over water it. That's true. A lot of these tough
plants. They're tough because they have the roots system to be resilient. That
is one of the key aspects of a plant that is tough. Or they
have the ability to hold water in their leaves and stems and things like that.
Anyway, you get the idea, find some good tough plants, Adam
Deer Landscape. Fall is the best planning season of the year, and we
are on the doorstep of fall. Now. You can plant every day,
three hundred and sixty five days a year here in the Houston area. You
can. It's tougher to plant it sometimes because you're trying to help that confined
root system get established and the watering is touching go and how you go about
it, so you make it a bigger challenge at sometimes of the year,
like summer, but it can be done anytime of the year. But if
you want foolproof, that's fall. You wait until it's cooled off. The
plants have kind of stopped growth. They're settling in. Deciduous plants are about
ready to drop leaves and all that. And you put a plant in the
ground then and the demands are almost zero. So you watered in really well
and then occasionally just check on it and do a little watering. It has
all the way the rest of fall, through winter and into spring before the
weather starts to heat up, and roots established during that time. So I
wish I could take spring fever and put it in a bottle and release it
into the water supplies in the fall, because that's when we really ought to
have spring fever. I guess we could call it fall fever then, right,
Fall's important, don't don't you forget that. We're gonna go out now
to Cyprus and we're going to talk to Sandy. And by the way,
our phone number seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. Well,
hello Sandy, Hi there, good morning, Skip, Thanks for taking
my call. I have a question. My vegetables, my lapinos, my
bell peppers, my opra, they're still growing, but they're not. They're
like miniature. They're like mini Is that normal? They're not getting long?
Did it is? It is for the peppers. Now your ochra pods are
not getting as long as they normally do, right, They're they're getting hard
and stiff. Okay, so everything the peppers are struggling with the heat,
and certainly drought can do it too, but the heat and the drought is
just tough on them. I've got a lot of peppers that are just not
setting much right now. That's normal, but they will set up a storm
when we get a little bit of a cooling here. Hopefully later this month,
you should start to get set and you should be eating peppers almost to
Christmas if you pick them before the first freeze. As far as the okra,
yes, it's also this is a water stressed response, not not as
much of a heat stress, but more of a water stress. And one
thing to remember about okra pods is people talk about will pick them when they're
four inches long or three inches long or whatever the number they say is.
But the length is not the real determiner of when you pick okra. It's
the number of days past bloom. Like for example, if you get about
three days four days past bloom that that pod and good conditions, it's going
to be long. If you reach that time in these conditions, it's going
to be shorter. And so if you wait for it to get bigger,
you're going to end up with a little pod that's woody. Did you see
what I'm saying. Yes, yeah, So I know you're not going to
tag blooms and count days, but just keep that in mind that it's not
necessarily the length if the plan is a little stress okay, And also I
can ask you one more question. Sure, there's no way to prune my
blueberries because there's just it's just it's getting to be like a miniature dish and
I can't see my pot to fertilize it. And that then it's the branches
are just getting thicker and stiffer and longer and bigger. Well, the best
time to prune blueberries in the winter. But if you need to trim away
some small twiggy debris and stuff down low so you can get the pot,
now, go ahead and do that. Just don't do don't do a full
fledged pruning right now. Do enough to get to the pot and then make
your pruning time in the winter. Okay, okay, well, thank you,
thank you so much. All right, thank you, thank you too.
You have a wonderful day. In fact, I hope all those folks
out there listening, I have a wonderful day. You have got a day
where you can get out this morning, get a little bit of stuff done
in the yard before it gets too terribly hot, and just enjoy it.
And then when it gets hot, head out to a garden center where you
enjoy walking around seeing plants. You know, every time I go to a
garden center, I learn something. I learn about new plants that are out.
I visit with folks that work at the garden centers. The only ones
I go to are the ones that are mom and pop that really know what
they're talking about. I just don't go to the garden centers. I don't.
Sometimes I'll wander down outside the hammers and lumber and everything like that,
and just to go see what's green on the other end that they're currently killing.
But I go to quality garden centers and I talk to the staff,
and I always learned something. There's no no person on earth that there's not
something that you can learn from them. I mean, even if it's don't
try this at home, and there's there's there's always something to learn. When
it comes to horticulture, you never finish, which I think is one of
the best parts of gardening because we it's a it is always a new day.
It's always stimulating. You're looking out there right now at a brown lawn
and maybe a dead tree in the yard and just thinking, oh my gosh,
just wait. We get a new start in the fall, we have
another we have good things we can do in the wintertime and in the spring,
and it's just it's just a good hobby because it's always something new.
Gives you kind of hope. Definitely definitely does. That gives you some really
good hope to be able to look out and enjoy do that sort of thing.
Hey, if you live up in the Navasota area or out in Carlos
or out in bed Eyes or out in Rhnes Prairie or Shiro, you have
a hometown feed store and that is Grimes County Feed. I've bragged on them
for a while now. But for those folks living in the division subdivisions like
Kingwood excuse me, Murewood or king Oaks, I get the mix those up.
That's your hometown feed store. They carry the products we talk about.
They have ten percent off all bird seed and stock, tempercent off a tree
hugger sprinkler, tempersent off Nelson Medina, Night Fuss Microlife. It's a good
time to go by and pick that stuff up. It's available there now and
their customer appreciation has been going on for a good while now. The Roy
family has been really creating a beautiful, wonderful, fun feed store to go
buy and visit. Give them a call to eight one eight one four twenty
four ninety four. You know what I'm saying that now I'm wondering if that
those sales are still going on. I need to check with them. I
may have misspoken on that, but anyway, they still have all those things
in stock and it's well worth bind. Get your tree hugger sprinkler now.
The soils out there tend to drain really really well and it gets dry fast.
Keep those trees alive with a tree hugger sprinkler from Grimes County feet and
the wind whisps really well. Good morning on a good Saturday morning for gardening.
You are listening to garden Line and Our phone number if you would like
to give us a call is seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy
four seven one three two one two five eight seven four. I hope you'll
just write that down and have it handy, so who knows. You may
be cruising along through the show and suddenly think of, oh, I need
to ask this question. Will there you got the phone number. Also listen
with a pen and paper near I, because you know no I may give
out a phone number or a website or other kinds of information that you would
want to jot down. By the way, Also, if you miss a
show, or if you heard something in a show and then you gotta can't
remember, you gotta go back and see what it was it was said,
you can go to the podcast. We have a podcast for garden Line.
You can go on your podcast app, whether it's iHeart Media app or some
other podcast provider, look for garden Line and check out some of the past
shows and tell your friends about that too if they if they're interested in being
able to listen to gardening stuff, even if it's not from this region,
we have a lot of folks outside the region that listen. They can also
listen by podcasts too, just another way to be able to listen in on
garden line information. When I think about, especially down south of the Houston
area, when I think about, where's a place you go where you can
get a hold of all that we're different products I'm talking about. I mean
the fertilizers that we talk about here, the soils that we talk about here.
That is going to be Cnamulch. It's it's it's really simple. This
is a no brainer north of Rocher and they're near the nearerwhere Highway six and
two eighty eight. It's on FM five twenty one, five twenty one.
You can just go online to CNA mulch dot com. They are open Monday
through Friday. They're open on Saturday to today, by the way, from
seven thirty to two pm, So don't delay. After the show would be
the time to get by there. And why would you go by their,
Well, we're coming up on fall fertilizing season and they've got the products there
to do it. It is always a good time to add compost to your
soil. It's always a good time to build a new garden bed with a
quality bed mix. It's always a good time to mulch your plants, to
cover that soil, to minimize weeds, to moderate soil temperature, to avoid
the erosion from rain. It's always a good time and Sienna Mulch always has
that on hand for you, so you can do it whatever time you want.
While you're out there, check out all the stone that they have,
pallets and pallets of stone, gravel, sand, everything else you can imagine.
Within twenty miles of their area, they will they will deliver for a
small charge. So wherever you live out in that area Meridian first Colony pair
Land, if you live in Arcola, Sandy Point, Pomona, Sun Creek
Estates, Sienna Maltch is your hometown soil supplier, and you are really fortunate
out there to have that kind of a quality place. I love going there.
In fact, I'm gonna go out there this fall. I've got an
appearance out there. I'll tell you more about that as we get closer to
it. Speaking of appearances, I'm going to be on Saturday, September ninth,
That would be next Saturday at the Plantation Ace Hardware store now the Plantation
Ace Hardware stores out there in Richmond. I'll be there from a eleven thirty
till one thirty, and they they're going to have a great, great event
out there for us to be part of, to meet you if you've got
samples you want to bring in to look at, if you want, if
you have pictures you want to bring in for diagnosis or for perhaps identification of
plants. We'll be there for all of that. Nitrofus is going to be
given away free bags of fertilizer and quite a few of them through the course
of the two hours that I'll be there, So that would be another great
reason to stop in out there. While you're there, you're going to get
a chance to see the store that Mickey and Jill have put together out there
for Plantation Ace Hardware, and it is a it is a wonderful Ace Hardware,
which is what we expect of ACE. Right These locally owned Ace Hardware's
just throughout the Houston area are unbelievable. Well, you need to go see
Plantation Ace and we will be there next Saturday, nine, nine September nine,
from eleven thirty to one thirty. I'll be answering gardening questions and all
kinds of things. And I hope to see you, all of you that
live out there in the Richmond area, anywhere around the Richmond and sugar Land.
Even Katie, come on down, let's meet and let's talk plants.
Next Saturday after this show. So in Texas Gardener Magazine, which is the
only statewide magazine for gardening in Texas, and in fact it's one of the
few statewide magazines for gardening around the country. They're not a lot of them.
But I'll tell you this, Texas Gardeners alive and well. And I
write articles form every issue. But the last one I wrote was on orna
metabals or metabals, which you may have already figured out is a combination of
ornamental and edible. You know, we have gardens where we put our edible
plants, and we have landscapes where we keep our ornamental plants. But what
about letting them escape and join the other side of the fence over there,
right? So things like a bay tree bay tree is a beautiful evergreen shrub,
really cool fennel. Gosh, the glossy purples bronze foliage on a funnel
is unbelievable. We've got ornamentals. We had edibles like Mexican met marigold like
the pineapple sage. That would be another good one. Uh. Those particular
plants will bloom in the fall, So not only do you have herbs for
cooking, but you have beautiful fall blooming plants. Types of charred like rhubarb
charred with bright red stems are just gorgeous. The silvery color of a cardoon
or what's the artichoke would be another example of that. They're awesome. There
are a lot of great ornamental edible plants out there that you can use,
and I would suggest maybe you do a little online research. Go to Texas
Gardener and read my article. First of all, Uh, you can you
can find Texas Gardener online. You can you can find the magazines and garden
centers. You know, I was just just talking about enchanted gardens out there.
I know the enchanteds in the out of other garden centers will carry Texas
Gardener magazine. You can just pick one up there and see what I'm talking
about. If you are interested in improving your landscape. Again, fall,
you don't get a better time for planting than fall. But now's the time
to plan it, to draw it out, to get it designed, and
get it ready to go for fall and who do you call for that,
Well, that's Peerscapes, Jason Garty and his whole team. At peer Scapes,
they can design professionally a landscape that fits what you want. Take pictures
of your home, go in there, sit down, sit down with Bob
or candas designers, and just let them brainstorm with you on what you want,
come up with a design, and then come out and get it installed.
If your irrigation needs fixing. By the way, they are very good
at maintaining, taking care of irrigation issues that you might have. They know
how to fix drainage issues that you might have. They do anything you need
done pretty much in the landscape. You can call them at two eight one
three seven zero fifty sixty two eight one three seven h fifty sixty R.
I always like to just go to the websites because you can see a lot
of visual there as well. That's peerscapes dot com. Peerscapes dot com.
Don't let this fall sneak up on you. Go ahead and give him a
call. Get ready to turn your place into not only a beautiful place to
gather with friends and family outdoors, but a visually beautiful place just driving by
and looking at it from the street out there. You want something that is
a beautiful place, and they know how to turn whatever you're starting with into
beautiful, that is for sure. I am going to be talking a little
bit later more about my lawncare schedule that is now out on the web.
But for those of you who who have looked at it in the past and
last couple of weeks since I put it up, we keep updating it and
there's a new updated version out there, but you have to go to Skip
now excuse me, gardening with Skip dot com. Gardening with Skip dot com,
and I would suggest rather than downloading the schedule or you can do that,
but always go to the website. That's where the newest version, any
enhancements we make to it will be right up there. Hey, we're gonna
take a break a phone number seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy
four. Well, good Saturday morning on a great day for gardening. You
are listening to garden Line and we're here to talk to you about whatever is
of interest to you. You can give us a call if you like.
Seven one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two one,
two fifty eight seventy four if you live up in the Montgomery area,
the Lake Conro area. I was up there for their home and Garden show
that they had out at Margaritaville this past weekend. And I tell you when
every time I go up to that area, I have to swing by Ana
plants and produce because it is just fun to see what's going on. I'm
always set back by the amount of color that they have upfront. You know,
you can go during pretty rough times of the year when you look around
your yard and neighborhood and there's not much color. You show up at Ana
and you find out, Oh, these are all the things I could be
growing right now that would make the place beautiful. Plumbago. I love the
blue plumbago that they have. That is a tough plant. I learned that
one year we had a drought when I was at the Extension office in Austin,
Texas, and our office it was a drought, but it was also
the waterline broke and we were without water for almost a whole month. In
the landscape, and that sucker just went right through I'm talking about plumbago and
went right through the It looked horrible, but a lot of plants died.
A lot of other plants looked horrible, but Plumbago stuck with it and and
we put a little water on it. Later it bounced right back. It's
a tough plant. Boog and v is another example of a good summer blooming
plant. But those are just examples. I mean, they've got everything you
can imagine, you know, Ana Plants and Produce Again, they're on the
east side of Montgomery, right there on Highway one oh five. They have
got all kinds of different plants. They've got all the kinds of things you
want to use to decorate your patio. You know, three acres to wander
through. You just need to walk by or drive up, walk through and
see what I'm talking about at Ana Plants and Produce in Montgomery on the east
side, right on one oh five. This is the hot, dry time
where we sometimes struggle along with ideas for the landscape. And I would highly
recommend, in fact, this morning would be a good time to do this,
when you get enough daylight out there where you can get outside, grab
your cup of coffee or tea or whatever, and just take a stroll through
the landscape and look over your lands. Go stay it out of the street
and look at it. Walk through, walk through the gardens and have a
little piece of paper with you, a little pad or something, and write
down. Make note of the plants that are not doing so well. And
it may be that there's a plant that is struggling that just needs to be
moved. Maybe it's in just too much sun and if you moved it into
a little more shade it would do better, or vice versa. There are
plants that are in shade but they want more light and they're alive. The
plant looks pretty good, but it's not blooming like it could because it needs
more light. Look at your lawn in the areas. Is there a spot
that you're just not able to get water too very well? Well, maybe
that should be converted to a drought tolerant type of groundcover, or a mulched
area that has shrubs in it, or some other thing. Do that assessment,
and now it's a good time to do it. Now take a box
of kleenex, because you know, you look around. If you're places like
I've got a few plants that it's like, oh my gosh, you know
that's that's that's so sad. Well. Seriously, though, get out there
look at it, because then you are ready when fall comes to make those
landscape changes, and you'll already have your shopping less ready to go. In
fact, you could you not to wait to fall. I mean you could
do shopping today. But my point is just take a look at your landscape
and this summer. You know they say make lemons out of lemonade. Well,
this summer has been brutal and it is taken a toll on a lot
of plants. We'll make lemonade out of that by letting the summer tell you
how you need to change your landscape, because this isn't gonna be the last
time we have a hot, dry summer. It's just not. And you
know, there's there's the aesthetic of landscaping, where what would look pretty?
How do I redesign that? I was just talking about having Peerscapes work with
you to do that. But there's also the how are things doing here?
Maybe there was a tree that was cut down and that totally changed the environment
in that particular area that was once shady and now it's not. Whatever the
reason, do an assessment now, because it's not gonna for warm season.
It's not going to look any worse than it does right now. I mean,
this is kind of the time when it's the end of the brutal summer
and it's like our plants have been in a punching match and it's been a
long one and they are they're beat up and worn out, and this is
a time those that look good now, those are gold star plants, and
you need to hang on to those, maybe get some more of them to
put in other places. But there's a lot of things you can do,
and now's the time to make that assessment. I know, I'm I'm beating
that horse to death, but it just take advantage of it. This isn't
you know, it's hot, people don't want to go outside and those kinds
of things. But boy, you can learn a lot right now and start
those plans. Remember, gardeners or eternal optimists, we have hope. We
always know that next year's tomato patch is going to be are more bountiful,
more tasty than this year's stam in a patch. Right that's how we feel.
Well, use a little bit of that optimism and put it. Apply
it to your landscape, to your vegetable garden, your flowers, your herbs
bed, you know whatever, trees even maybe there's an area that needs a
good shade tree and we need to get that thing going. All right,
Well, you know what I mean. If you live in north central Houston,
your hometown feed store is Quality Feed and Garden Company. Now, some
of you probably have been going there for over a decade, like I have.
And you know what we're talking about here. Well, Quality Feed's been
around since nineteen twenty eight. Kenn and Chris have owned it for the last
thirty two years now. The old location I used to go to now they've
moved to a new location. They've been there for a while. It's eighteen
thirteen Luzon Street, so it's inside the Loop, just north of downtown.
Why do you go to Quality Feed? Well, Number one, it's one
of the coolest old time feed stores you ever seen. I mean they got
an antique seed rack in there from nineteen twenty eight stocked with heirloom seeds.
That's just cool and fun. I mean that is retro fund that I always
have to go check it out every time I go buy there. Ever fertilizer
I talk about, and then some you're gonna find at Quality Feed and Garden
Center. You're going to find the mulches, You're going to find the potting
soils. In fact, Ken makes his own calls it Kin's Potting Soil.
That is a really quality blend that he has there. But the other ones
we talk about, you're going to find him there as well. If you
have backyard chickens, they've got all the supplies you need and you know feed,
feeders, waterers, bedding, everything for your backyard chickens. They even
have their own house special called Granny's Laying Mix. And if you need chickens,
about ever two weeks they get a shipment of chicks in at Quality Feed,
more shipments than any place in the whole listening area I've seen quality feed
coo dot com Quality feed coo dot com. They are at eighteen thirteen Luzon,
near their intersection of equipment and a lesion, But you need to go
by say hi to Ken and Chris and just see what I'm talking about.
They're open today from nine to four. Tomorrow they will be open from eleven
thirty to four and then through the week nine am to six pm, so
when you get off of work you still have time to swing through there.
And grab what you need quality feed and garden company. Well, we're running
near the end of our time here. I don't know. Segments always seem
like they go fast to me. Maybe it's because I'm having fun. I
hope you're having fun too. By the way, we're gonna come back from
break and in a bit here. Our phone number, by the way is
seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. Give Josh a call.
He will get you up there on the boards. Viggie out and willis
just because I don't have enough time to really take your call right now.
You will be first when I come back from the break. Now, I
want to talk a little bit about as we end this segment, the garden
law or excuse me, the lawn care schedule that I have online if you
go to Gardening with Skip dot com Gardening with Skip dot com. About all
that's up on the site right now. It's a brand new website. Is
the lawn fair schedule. We've updated it. We will continue to improve on
this and other schedules I'll be putting up as time goes on, so I
always check back. You can download a copy to print out and stick on
the refrigerator if you want, but always go check to see if you've got
the latest, and the website will always have the latest. This one tells
you the fertilizers and when to apply them throughout the year January December. It
tells you about air raiding and compost top dressing. It tells you about proper
mowing and how to do that. It tells you about proper watering and the
typical water use. It is a very helpful resource and I hope that you
will check it out on Gardening with Skip dot Com. KTRH Garden Line does
not necessarily endorse any of the products services advertised on this program. Welcome to
KTRH Garden Life with Skip Rictor It's smell the Crazy trim. Just watch him
as a wood, so many good things. Well, good morning, starting
to glow in the sky out there a little bit towards the east. We
are about to start a really good day to get outside and do stuff.
In fact, now be the time to suit up, grab a cup of
coffee, whatever you need, and head out in the garden. I talked
about walking through and taking an assessment of things. That's certainly something I want
to do today. Maybe a little spot watering, some other issues you will
take care of out there, getting ready because fall is on the way.
We're gonna head out now to Willis and talk to Vicky this morning. Good
morning, Vicky, Hey, good morning. Kind of a twofold question.
We have a timber management plan going on on our property. So we have
about ten or twelve acres mostly woods, but we're seeing a lot of suffering
as all over the area, of course, of oaks and hickories and sycamore.
The ones closest to our home we can we've watered fairly well. I
think those are going to be salatable. Curious is what we would look at
with the other ones. And then also our local are plants that we have
hybiscus and azaleas and so forth. When can we start fertilizing those for the
fall, or what we should do even with our grass or say in Augustine.
Okay, how do we deal with this? Going back to the trees,
I didn't quite follow what your question was for me. Well, some
of the trees we're going to lose for sure with the drought because we can't
water everything. Some are watering nearest our home, and that's I'm not quite
sure how much sweety to water them. We're on well water, we certainly
want to, don't want to danger that right, not sure about our water
levels. We get conflicting opinions on all of the above. Got you all
right? Well? With tree watering, it depends on the edge of the
tree. If it's a brand new transplant, you're watering it every other day,
just to put a little water in that root ball where all the roots
are still confined to. As it gets older and older, you water less
and less often. Once the tree has been in the ground for a year,
you're probably giving it a at this point, giving it a good soaking
about every ten days. When it's a little more established, like a nice,
pretty good medium to large sized tree, I would probably say ten to
twenty four days, excuse me, ten ten to fourteen days would be a
soaking. And that would mean you want to at least put an inch down.
If you can put a little more than that, that's even better.
And you want to if you've got to, you know, you're kind of
trying to go well, I don't want to waste water. I don't want
to buy a lot of water and so, but I want to keep my
tree alive. I think that's the sweet spot over ten to fourteen days,
and focus on the area beneath the branch spread. So picture the tree is
a giant umbrella. Where does the water drip off that umbrella? Well,
that would be the edge of the branch spread, and so from there,
okay, especially a little bit in from there toward the trunk. If you
focus on that area, you can go beyond it. That's even better.
It just takes more water, but if you can at least give it enough
to get it by, you know, that is what you're trying to do,
and that helps avoid excess water applications. Don't little squirtings on your lawn
and stuff are not going to help the tree much. Okay, well,
thank you very much. Okay, I don't I know you had some other
aspects of the question, but that's the tree part. Was that pretty much
all of these trees are older, mature trees that were there before. We
love din so we don't have any new plannings on those. But you know,
we're just dealing with we have well water. We don't want to use
too much because we don't know where the water level is right. We certainly
don't want to endanger that. Yeah, so I'm trying to balance. I
don't want to run a well drive it. Also don't want to lose tree.
So I'm trying to figure out, well, what's a minimum we can
do and keep alive. Yeah, that's what I would do now. I
mean, if you've got a tree that that's kind of on the wimpy whiney
side, anyway, you're gonna probably give it a little more water to keep
it happy. You get a really deep rooted well established, like a live
oak, for example, they are surviving out with essentially zero water out there,
and they're okay. But you just kind of have to assess the tree
and the situation. You know, if I'd had root damage to part of
it, maybe a trench was run through, or maybe I don't know,
a house was built on or driveway. I'm part of the root system,
then you would give it a little more TLC because it's it's adjusting to wait
to a shock there. As far as your other plants, it's always a
good soaking on an infrequent basis. Of course, you're a zelie. As
you ask about fertilizing them, I'd hold off for right now. You could
put on a light amount if it wasn't a like an organic type product that
isn't a salt based You could put on more if you want it now.
But when a plant is drought stressed, putting on like a boost of plant
food fertilizer is probably not that helpful. It's better to wait just a little
bit. Well, that's what we thought. Maybe later in the fall.
You don't have to wait long. Just let it, let's get it.
Let's say, let's do this, let's get it well hydrated, and then
then a little fertilizaization is okay. So if you do that with a sprinkler,
fine, if you do that with waiting on rainfall, fine, But
we just don't want to push them too much too late. A zelius are
already setting the buds for next springs bloom. They've been doing that in the
summer and they can continue on into the early part of fall, and so
just be conscious of that fact. Yeah, so you don't want them to
dress you bet, Thank you, VICKI, thank you, bye bye.
Yeah, it's it's a boy. Plant watering is It's just a constant question
because there's only eight hundred thousand different plants out there different situations. Some people
have clay, some people have sand. I always hate to give a water
two days a week, or water, you know, one day a week,
or water for thirty minutes, or any numbers, because everything's different.
Sun versus shade, sand versus clay, those all affect how much and how
often you're gonna need to water, And so I like to just, you
know, with the lawns and with tree watering, take this long straight screw
driver, push it in the ground. If the if you've watered and it's
wet on top, give it thirty minutes or so soak in and then push
that screw driver down in there, and you'll know how deep you've wetted.
It makes it really easy to know have I given it a good deep soaking,
because when you do that, you don't water very often. You wait
until it dries out in water again. On the other hand, when it's
around let's say perennial plants or flowers or vegetables, just dig down in the
soil with your hand, take a little hand trial if you want, and
dig down about I don't know four inches so and feel the soil and you
can tell is this moist? This is adequately moisture. You know what this
is, getting a little on the dry side and water accordingly. Now,
that doesn't mean you're feeling the soil three times a week to decide when to
water. It just means you know, learn your landscape, learn your plants,
learn your locations in the landscape, and that way you can know exactly
when you need to water that plant in your yard. That's the ultimate answer.
All right, our phone number seven one three two one two fifty eight
seventy four. We're gonna take a little break here and we will be right
back. If you'd like to give Josh call, he will get you on
the boards. Welcome back to garden Line. We are here to talk about
gardening. Whatever is of interest to you. Give us a call at seven
one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two one two
fifty eight seventy four. Are a Do you consider yourself a brown thumb gardener?
You want to turn your thumb green? Well, the way you turn
a thumb green is with information and Plants for all seasons. Has got the
quality staff that knows how to help you with your plants. When you walk
into Plants for all Seasons, you know You're not going to buy stuff that
won't grow here. They carry stuff that grows here. When you walk into
Plants for All Seasons, if you've got a question, maybe a sample of
photo, something you'd help with, you know you're going to get the accurate
answer and you're gonna get pointed to something that works on the problem that you
have. They're not going to sell you something that doesn't work. And they
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know, I'm very very impressed with the selection. When perhaps you want a
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beautiful, they've got all of that there, and then some plants for all
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give him a call to eight one three seven six sixteen forty six. And
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the plants, and the products are all there. Plants for all seasons.
I'm gonna head out to West University and we're gonna talk to Jonas next.
Hello Jonas, Hey, how are you skipped answered getting my phone call?
Yes, sir, I have several pot and high business plants and one
of them died. But I think I know why it died. I think
that the issue was I did not have enough soil in there. I realized
it too late, and before I knew it. I realized that it just
was liking soil and the pot became kind of soggy and it died. So
I pulled the hot business out. My question is, if I want to
transplant or put a pot another high business there, should I remove that soil
for fear that maybe it got a fungal infection or something like that. I
would seriously doubt that it did. That would be very unusual unless you know,
you just had another pot that you mixed soil in that had a fungle
in affection, and maybe now it's in that pot. But in general no,
I would just reuse, freshen it up, put some good quality mix
in there. If you have any questions and you're not real sure, you
can always dump that soil out in the garden in a bed and just you
know, have good use of it elsewhere. But I don't think that's going
to be a concern. You just need to make sure and and have a
good quality soil that drains well but yet also holds moisture. In this summer,
I've I've had a time of it keeping my hibiscus adequately watered, you
know, and if you if the pot size is a little on the small
side, that makes it even harder. Right now, I've noticed that all
my hibiscus have more verdant colored leaves, greener than others. Are there a
different species of lease? Well, there's the tropical hibiscus that cannot take a
freeze, and then there's a perennial hibiscus that dies to the ground in winter
and comes right back. The perennial type has the big, old dinner plate
sized blooms on it. The other one has smaller blooms, but the colors
are much much farther ranging. And you know, just all kinds of colors,
and the tropical tropicals tend to have dark green lays with shininess to them,
and the perennial dozen't. So it's as far as the difference in color.
I would I would get you a good quality hibiscus food and put it
down in order to provide a little nitrogen to get a little bit of a
boost to them. If they're lacking the green color, that that may be
something that would help. Right. So I have a couple that actually froze.
I covered them in the free selace winter, but they actually just froze,
but they came back. They came back and they're beautiful. Now,
okay, big trunks and all that. I'm want to bring them inside this
winter. I don't want them to freeze again. Yeah, good idea,
good idea. And sometimes some leaves turn yellow while others not. Yeah,
I guess I could be also related to maybe just minerals it in my need
or what. Yeah, if it's the brand new ends of the shoots that
the leaves are just not getting green color, then that would be a deficiency
of a micronutrient like iron for examples, the more typical one you see.
But I suspect what you're describing as the older leaves that are turning yellow.
And you know, leaves, even though the plant has leaves on it all
the time, those leaves don't live forever. And especially if you go through
a dry period and then you water it again, a lot of you will
see yellowing and drop of some of the oldest leaves on the shoot as you
go from the tip back down. It's the oldest leaves that turn yellow with
a with a sole moisture stress like that. Okay, I even add coffee
grounds to the soil. That's fine, and I've heard that it's good for
them that agree with it. Yes, in moderation. I mean, if
you just picture a pot, I wouldn't put more than a boat I don't
know, maybe half inch at the most up on the top, just a
little dusting of it, and that would be just fine. Salt as well
because of the magnesium, well, if magnesium is knee but you know,
it's kind of hard to know for sure if magnesium is deficient in the hibiscus.
And I'm not at the run to the next call here, but if
magnesium is deficient, the older leaves will have green veins with a less green
rest of the leaf, and it almost sometimes it almost looks like a little
green Christmas tree in the middle of the leaf. But that type of sometimes
yeah, thank you, hey, I appreciate the call Jonas, thank you
very much out there. If you haven't done your lawn fertilization in I don't
know the last two or three months, I would consider a application of Microlife.
In fact, two things. The six two four is the green bag,
that's the one we use through the year for everything pretty much. I
use it in vegetable gardens too. Even though we think of it as a
lawn fertilizer, it's just a good quality organic fertilizer. Then combine that with
a purple bag that's humates plus humates plus is concentrated compost in a bag.
Now you can find Microlife products all over town. They're easy to find.
You can go to Microlife Fertilizer dot com Microlife Fertilizer dot com. During this
stress time, you're not gonna have to worry about burning with the Microlife fertilizers.
But what I would also do, I would seriously consider getting the Ocean
Harvest that's the blue label liquid. It's a fish based fertilizer follow the label,
but water. You can water plants in with that, but you can
also use it as a folier feed and that done. I would do that
on a weekly basis. Actually, folier feeds don't last long. They get
in quick. It's a fast way to circumvent the roots and get nutrients and
other beneficial things that you're going to find in that blue label Ocean Harvest.
Get them to the plant, but you're going to need to do that about
weekly in order to keep keep them supplied with the things that they need because
we're trying to get them out of this stress. Summer has been brutal on
our plants, and I find that that Microlife blue label Ocean Hard it's a
very good product for dealing with just that kind of stresses. Because fall is
coming, so let's get them, let's take care of them. Let's get
them to that point so that we can have success in an ongoing way,
not just keeping plants alive, but keeping them healthy. Let's head out to
West Houston now, and we're going to talk to Andy. Hello, Andy,
how are you today? Well, I'm well, what's up? Well,
I've been told I've got some nice boxwood hedges, and some of them
I've been told they have box would blight. The leaves are turning brown,
and pretty soon the whole thing is dead as almost as if it gets no
water. I understand this a fungus. And what's your suggestion to do with
it? Did that diagnosis come from like a plant pathologist or a professional horticulturist
or is it just somebody that trasional horticulture is named andy through the internet?
Okay, okay, all right, Well the Internet is a good place for
good information and a great place for bad information. It's it's you know,
it's kind of like when you if you if you say, well, I've
got a stomach ache and you google it, doctor, Google will make you
think you're dying of stomach cancer as well as some rare tropical disease. You
know. So, but it starts off with little leaves like it's just some
of them start to turn brownd in just grows and grows and grows. The
prison though, and it did, it did as a door nailed it.
Okay, Well, I mean it could be a blight for blight you for
that kind of thing, you would need to send a samp up to the
plant clinic and have them do a professional diagnosis of it where they cultured out
in the pet tradition, they do that for small charge, and it would
be good to know because if you got it, that's that's an issue and
it's not an easy one to deal with. Unwatering underwatering would do that.
Underwatering nematodes. Box woods are susceptible to nematodes. Nematodes can do. Oxwoods
are subject to cold injury and last December when it got so cold, it
caused some splitting of bark and as the it's a little late now to start
seeing it, but if you've been seeing it through the summer, that's a
possibility. Follow a brown leaf section down the stem and to where it connects
with a good green, healthy shoot and if you see splits in the bark,
that could be an old cold injury that now the plant is just not
able to keep up trying to get water through that. Once you know that
dead area and get enough to the leaves to supply it, so that's also
a possibility. Okay, alrighty, okay. I appreciate the information. Have
a great day, you bet you take care. Check those out and see
what you find when you take a look at them. If you want a
quality sail mix, you're not going to do better than airloom soils. I
mean, airloom soils has a wide variety of products. I mean, do
you need something for fruits and berries and citric? Do you want something for
vegetables and herbs, maybe cactus and succulent. Do you want a quality potting
soil? They got something called the Works that is outstanding as a potting soil.
They've got various components like a leafmoil compost or expanded shale or a mix
of those two. Wide variety of products from airloom soils. Airloom soils are
available in many, many garden centers. You're going to find them in everything
from hardware stores, feed stores, garden centers. Airloom Soils carries it.
They have the quality products that you need. By the way, if you
want to buy bulk, you can go pick it up there at their porter
location, or you can have them deliver a supersack to your yard. A
supersack think of it as a big old you know those grocery sacks we carry
that are so you don't have to throw away paper and plastic imagine one of
those full of soil that holds a whole yard a Q picky hard three by
three by three of soil mix. They will deliver it to your driveway.
It's neat, it's clean, it's easy. Give them a call. By
the way, Airloom Sauce is open Monday through Saturday from seven am to five
pm, so check it out. They deliver all over town. Well,
it's time for the Nick News Network to give us the latest. I'm talking
about the fire. The fire, okay, Well, I know that we
can trust the information that comes from the Nick News Network, so I'm on
the edge of messy detail. Let's do this. Well. Good morning,
beautiful day for gardening out there. The sun is coming up. I see
it shining cross street tops. Good day to get outside and get some gardening
done. Good day. Also to give us a call garden Line. Let's
talk about what you're interested in our phone number seven one three two one two
fifty eight seventy four. Hey, for those of you living out in Mont
Bellevue area or Baytown area, your hometown feed store is Texas feed Stop.
Texas feed Stop is on North Highway one forty six and Mont Bellevue. If
you're on I ten, just go north on one forty six just a few
minutes and they're right there on the right hand side. At Texas Feed Stop,
you're going to get great customer service and you're going to get great product
selection. Brian and Hope Rhodes made sure of that. When you show up
there, they're gonna treat you like family. They carry the bags out for
you to the card when they hire teenagers from the Mott Bellevue community, they're
part of the community there. Texas Feed Stop is and it's just the good
old days where you walk in and you get treated like family. Now,
if you need any of the fertilizers I'm talking about here, if you need
other products I talk about, you know, the soil types of products,
or mosquito docks for example, you're gonna get all that Texas Feed Stop.
Hey, it's hunting season. They're loaded up on supplies for that as well.
It's just a win win to stop in at Texas Feed Stop. Make
sure that's part of your week, whether you need feed for pets or feed
for your livestock, or occasionally they have plants in there as well. As
you come in to pick them out. But trust me, when you walk
in you maybe you've got a disease or an insect pastor problem. They've got
a wide variety of selection of those types of things as well. Again on
Highway one forty six, just a few minutes north of ten out there in
Mountain Bellevue. Let's now head to let's see, we're gonna go to Parker
in South Houston. Hello Parker, good morning, skip morning. Hey,
I bought I recently purchased the home in uh See, Southeast Arkansas, Okay,
a couple of hours north of Texarcana. I got the most beautiful yard
you've ever seen, full of weeds. So I am needing some information or
some contact information. Where should I begin this process? The Dallas area or
can you help me there? Well, the Arkansas has their own extension service
up there, and I suspect you have a county extension office in your county
that's through the University of Arkansas. They will have a lot of good information
on managing the weeds of Arkansas. Now, I mean, if you want
to call me send me a picture of weed. I probably know what it
is and can tell you what to do. But just know that locally up
there, you've got that information, just like we do in all of two
hundred and fifty four counties here in Texas. With the Texas I have got
a variety of weeds maybe I don't know, twenty twenty different kinds and bermuda
and sant Augustine is trying to take hold, but it was neglected for a
long period of time. So so your options up there. First of all,
we're up that far north, you're going to be entering the pre emmer
urgent cool season weed prevention system or time of the year. You're going to
be entering that this month. In fact, you know, again I don't.
I don't live that far north, but I would say maybe maybe even
early to mid September, you would be putting a pre emergent down. But
don't quote me on the exact time that far north. I don't. We
don't do it till we don't really do it till in a month of October
here down in this over here. Yeah, but the followed I followed this
station for since I was growing up, and h back, I guess it
was Jun Burrows and Bill Zach yes back in the day. And then my
father always had it on the station in the Covar because it was the AM
station we could get so all right, man, Skip, thank you very
much, and I will pursue the county sits in the offices here. Yeah,
And just to give you one one little quick final thing, don't forget
the pre emergent for all the cool season ways that are coming. Then in
the spring you're going to do that for warm season weeds. And in the
meantime there are things you can do to kill existing weeds. But that gets
down to a lot of specifics. But feel free to call us back if
you have any trouble finding help up there. Yea, our temperatures deal up
about round one hundred grees. It's you know it is here, so it's
a yeah, sticky situations. Thank you very much, Skip, Yes,
sir, thank you for the call. I appreciate that I was mentioning while
ago talking about the Texas feed stop out there that they carry mosquito dunks,
and they do. And I know right now you're thinking, was not raining.
Why do I worry about mosquitos? Well, it's gonna rain, and
you better have some mosquito dunks or one of their other products. They've got
a granular product as well, same compounds, same purpose. The mosquito dunk
is a little donut. It floats on water, and it lasts about a
month, and it releases a disease of mosquitoes only. So if you know,
like honeybees, go get a drink out of the water, they won't
be affected. If you've got fish in the water, or you're pets,
you're drinking out of it, wildlife of any kind, birds, it's not
going to affect any them. It's just the disease of mosquitoes, which is
a beautiful thing. Now, a dunk will cover about one hundred square feet
of water last about thirty days. If you've got a large area and you
just want to scatter a bunch of granules, they have a granular product as
well, and that gets you really quick results. Right now, it's not
gonna last as long, but maybe you look out there and there's mosquito regulars
all over the place, Throw the granules out there and let's knock those things
out. Mosquito dunks is the most environmentally sound way of managing mosquitoes that we
have here in our area. Let's go out now to Humble and we're gonna
talk to Lily. Hello, Lily, good morning, Good morning. I
have all different kind of flowering plants. They're gonna be a fried paradise.
I just Guardinia's hw business. Do I need to feed them all different kinds
of food? Well, they're one that I can buy. Yeah, you
said, Hibiscus Guardinia. Tell me the others that you have. Abiscus Guardinia,
Pride of Barbados, Gosh, Rangon Greeper. I have Rangoon Greeper,
lots of lots of the buying, but they have no flowers. Okay,
what I would do is I would get Nelson's makes a product called color Star
that's very very effective for that kind of thing. Color Star products just kind
of cover pretty much all your blooming options. With the acid loving plants.
I would probably get a second product to just be able to focus on something
that's going to help keep that acidity down. And Nelson's makes one called Azalea,
but it's it's not just for azaleas. I mean it's for azaleas,
it's for Guardina's. H you use it for blueberries if you want it,
but it's a it's an acid loving plant food. I would probably do those
two, but color Star would be the one you could use just anywhere.
It wouldn't hurt to put it on on your Guardina's. It's just with guardina's.
Sometimes our pH gets a little high, and we always want to continue
to use things that keep that pH down. How would I know if their
acid loving? Well, Guardina's are. I didn't hear another acid loving in
your list. But basically, acid loving is to summarize ninety nine percent of
the acid loving things you're going to grow here. That's going to be azaleas
and camellias and guardinya's. You could also use it a little bit with the
hydrangeas, but primarily azalia, guardina camelia and roses. Roses would be again,
you could use the color star for roses. You know they you were
asking. Your initial question was do I need to buy eight hundred different fertilizers
and you don't, but there is a rose fertilizer. But I would I
would use I'd use a color star on the roses, or I would just
you know, use a quality even I use lawn feed sometimes on my roses,
but hey, I gotta I gotta go to a break lelite. But
I hope that helps and good luck with those plants. I hope you have
a beautiful If you get a bunch of beautiful bloom semi picture, I'd love
to see that. You take care our phone number seven one three two one
two fifty eight seventy four. Just hang on, we'll be right back,
Ruth. You will be first up anyway you want you want. Well,
good morning, you're listening to garden Line and we're here to talk about gardening.
What are you interested in? Hey, if you're interested in some beautiful
plants, you need to know about RCW Nurseries. Now, a lot of
you've been there. I know you're familiar with it, but some folks aren't.
R CW Nurseries. By the way, the website RCW Nurseries dot com.
RCW Nurseries dot com easy to find. They're on Tomball Parkway, which
Highway two twenty nine, right where it comes into Beltway eight. Now,
RCW, you know they I think when I think of roses, I think
RCW because they have a huge, unbelievable selection of roses. They have an
unbelievable selection of trees because they grown themselves out on their own farm. This
weekend Labor Day, Labor Day sale twenty percent off select trees. That would
include Saturday, Today, Sunday, and then Monday, all three They are
open Monday through Saturday seven to four on Sundays from nine to four, but
take advantage of that Labor Day sale. I mean that is a significant savings
on the select trees that they have. They're in stock. While you're there,
check out all the other plants that they have. You know, r
CW is always going to have beautiful color. They is gonna have a wide
range of cool plants as well as They've got a lot of really cool landscape
bling. You know, if you want to decorate for fall, you know
the old like a metal pumpkin, and you know, just different kind of
figurines and they do you know, how we decorate our yards. RCW has
an unbelievable selection of some really really cool stuff as well. I hope you'll
hope you'll go check them out. Easy to get too, easy to find
r CW Nurseries, RCW nursery dot com. Let's head out now to Cyprus
and we are going to talk to Ruth. Hello, Ruth, I have
two questions. I'm not much of a gardener, but I just love plants.
I have this one plant in my house, a Christmas cactus. When
I bought it, i'd say, from the store about three months ago or
six months ago, and had beautiful pink blossoms on it. They fell off
all the foliage screen and perky, and but I have no blossoms. Okay,
Now is that plant near where you are? Right now where I can
ask you a question? You can look at it? Yeah, okay,
when you look at the little sections coming up, the little pads are like
you little cactus pad kind of things on the edges or their points or their
little like points sticking up around the flat edges of that or are they rounded
not a not a like a little thorn point. They're points, They're points,
They're points. Yeah. Well, that's interesting that it was blooming six
months ago. Because there's a there's a Christmas cactus, there's a Thanksgiving cactus,
and there's an Easter cactus. Well all this is kind of like the
limbs are all separate, you know. There, it's just I tell you
what, Yeah, I tell you what, Ruth. I don't want to
mislead you by assuming here, So I'm going to put you on hold and
have Josh pick up ther he he'll talk to you and give you an email
where you can send me a picture close up of what those little green segments
look like. I want to take a look at them because something is not
added up. It only blooms those cactus. All three of those only bloom
at a certain time of the year. And that's why they have the names
Christmas, Thanksgiving, an Easter, and I want to make sure we're talking
about the right one. But the bottom line is they need really good light,
not direct sun, but very bright light. They need to be watered
pretty often. When the word cactus, may think you don't have to water
them, but no, you need to not keep them soggy. You don't
want to rot, but you need to water them regularly and then fertilize them
with a light fertilization when you water, and you will get unbelievable growth and
it will be beautiful when we come to the next bloom cycle. But I
need to know which one you got to advise past that. Okay, one
other question, All right, another question I have. It's my four o'clocks
are on the north part of my house for I've had them for twenty years.
They're beautiful. I went out yesterday and they're the lapidated. They're black.
They need water. But I don't know if they're going to come back
or not. They still have leaves on them. They will come back.
They have an underground think of a sweet potato. That's not an accurate description,
but they've got an underground storage structure and they will bounce back from that.
Just make sure they don't go ahead. Do you think I need to
add soil? I hadn't had soiled and years to them. I don't think
you need to add soil unless you can see the tuber sticking up out of
the ground. Oh okay, yeah, they just water. A good soaking
on an infrequent basis will get them by. But I don't I don't think
you killed them. I believe they're okay, okay, all right, well
I will put you on hold, hang on and Josh, we'll pick it
up and give you all right. You take care. You know, if
you want a quality garden bed, there's really only one name that I would
suggest, and that's Vego. V Ego Vego garden beds. It's funny it's
called Vego because it reminds me of Lego, you know, with legos,
you just popping together. Make whatever shape you want. Same thing with lego.
They common panels. They're really easy to assemble. But you can make
a long, skinny bed. You can make a round bed, C shape
bed, L shape bed. I mean you can create. Go online here,
here's what you need to do. Go online to vegogarden dot com v
ego garden dot com. Look at the pictures. You'll see what I'm talking
about. Gorgeous beds and you can grow anything in a Vego bed with a
quality bed mix. They're maide in Houston. There are lots of impostors out
there. Don't go with those. Vegogarden dot com. They're available at many
of our local mom and pop garden centers as well. Vego Garden. When
you try it out, you agree with me and everybody else who strive them
that this is the way to garden really cool stuff. Uh you know I
talk about I talk about the folks out at Nature's Way a lot because they
it's kind of like I guess John Fergus is kind of the grandfather of quality
soil mixes here in the Houston area. John, I'm if you're listening,
I'm sorry, No age comment there just you've been doing this a long time
and you've been doing it right, and now ian in the business. This
combination of folks has put together super quality materials and you can buy leafmol compos
rose soil, you can buy mulches to go on top of the soil.
They have the mineralizer for adding those extra trace minerals and just lots of good
products out there. This fall, I'm going to be out there by the
way, and you need to write this down. September thirtieth, they are
putting on an incredible shindig a hoop law what's another country name for that,
the Fall Garden Festival. I'm going to be out there doing question and answer
with folks. They're gonna have Latin food, live music, local vendors,
adult beverages that kids will have a scavenger hunt. There's fun for little gardeners.
They have demonstrations at nine am. We're talking about a party here,
right. There's lots and lots more. I'll talk about more as I get
closer to it, but just ride down September thirtieth, put a big circle
on that calendar date. I'm going to be out at Nature's Way to do
all these things that I just mentioned, and it will be a blast.
We are going to have one heck of a good time out there. In
the meantime, go by nature's way, or order some soil for them to
deliver. They've got it by the bag, they got it by the bulk,
and again with them, they take their time and it's always a quality
mix out there. Really really easy, not difficult at all, not difficult
at all. I mentioned I was gonna be a Plantation Ace next Saturday.
And you know with Ace Hardware, you can go online to Ace hardware dot
Com. There's thirty nine stores in this Greater Houston area, thirty nine stores.
They carry all the products. We know. If I mentioned a fertilizer,
it's there. If I mentioned a soil, it's there. Ace Hardware
stores are easy to find. And I can't wait on nine nine Saturday.
Next Saturday, the ninth of September, eleven thirty am to one thirty pm.
Plantation Ace that's out in the Richmond area. Come see me again.
We're gonna have a good time. They got a lot going on at Plantation
Ace. I'll talk about it again tomorrow, talk it again next week,
but just get that on your calendar, because i'd really love to see you
this coming Saturday. Well, you're listening to garden Line and we're gonna take
a little break here. We will be back and when we come back,
we'll answer your gardening questions. If you'd like to give Josh your college seven
one three, two, one two five eight seven four seven one three two
and two fifty eight seventy four, he'll get you on the board and we
will visit about what you're interested in when we come back. In the meantime,
just want to remind you again, for those of you who don't know,
I've got my lawn care schedule up online and you can download it.
It is at Gardening with Skip dot com. Gardening with Skip dot Com.
Check it out. I think you'll find it to be very helpful. Katie.
Our H garden Line does not necessarily endorse any of the products or services
advertised on this program. Welcome to KDRH garden Line with Skip. Ricord's Crazy
Just watch him as a wooden Well, good morning on a beautiful Saturday morning.
Always a good day for gardening around here. I mean it could be
pouring down rain, hail falling outside all kinds of things going on, too
freezing cold to even walk out the door. Well, it's still a good
day for gardening. We have indoor gardening. You know, we could be
starting transplants for fall right now. Yes, that's right, you can.
You can get those started and plant them out things that like the cool weather.
That'd be a good thing to do, taking care of your houseplants,
getting them spruced up. I mean, nothing can keep a gardener from gardening,
that's just the way it is. Nor keep a gardener from learning.
And that's what we're hoping to do a little love today. Hey, if
you're doing some transplanting, and I hope you are, because it's time to
be getting ready for the fall season. Has to grow six twelve six by
Medina is a product you need to know about now. Has to grow six
twelve six. I mixed mine in a little watering can and just drench it
over a new transplant. When I put it in the ground, it's got
the six twelve six fertilizer and it's got plenty of phosphorus to help support the
roots, support bloom production and other things. Make sure you got enough of
that in there. It's got humates with humic acid. It's got medina soil
activator, it's got seaweed extracts, just a lot of good stuff. What
are your transplants in with this? I don't care if it is a marigold
or if it is a rosebush. Water him in with medina. Has to
grow six twelve six, About a week later, water them in again with
it, and then about a week later, water em in again. Three
good doses. You want those plants to hit the ground running. You want
them to success, to get a good root system established so that they take
off and do what you planted them to do, which in most cases is
bloom. But maybe with vegetables it's to produce fruit, produce leaves and other
things we can eat. Medina has to grow six twelve six is a way
that we can accomplish just that. I am now going to head out to
pair Land and we are going to talk to Sam if I can figure out
how to push the right button here. Hey Sam, good morning, Good
morning. I have some fear of trees that haven't bared fruits since the both
the freezes, But my neighbor across the street, his pair of trees are
got tons of fruit on them. What am I doing wrong or do I
need to do or something that they used to produce for you, Sam,
you have one of them, then the other one I had just planted and
they got a few buds the first year, and I took the buds off.
I was always told to take the buds off the first year. And
we got the first freeze, and then the next year we got another freeze,
or the year after that. Okay, and uh, well I haven't
got any fruit on any of my trees. Yeah. The one tree used
to bear like crazy. Yeah, Okay, are they all blooming? No,
they didn't bloom. Okay, all right, Well that that's good to
know. Some kind of stress has occurred on those trees. And I can't
tell you for sure what it is because I'm not there and haven't been been
around them the last couple of years. But uh, it could be a
drought stress. It could be a cold kind of thing. December freeze came
kind of early on plants. But I don't think that's it. I think
it's probably some root related stress. So saggy, poorly drained soil can cause
it. Drought conditions can cause it. So both ends of the soil moisture
spectrum can cause it. It's going to be something like that because ears,
I'm assuming they're getting a lot of sun, like full sun pretty much.
Okay, so if they don't get adequate sunlight, they won't set blooms.
If they go through certain kinds of stresses, they're not going to set blooms
well either, And so it's going to be something along those lines. Sam,
So what do they need to put some kind of ferbializer down or let
me something or yeah, let me ask you this, what do you what
does the growth look like? Are you getting vigor like over the course of
a year, are you getting shoots that are maybe eighteen inches or more long?
It really haven't noticed that. But it's got plenty of leaves, both
plants, both trees, the new tree and the old tree. But the
old tree used to bear like crazy. But there's a quick bear and after
the first freeze. Yeah, well it's not like the freeze made the tree
where it will never bear again, that's for sure, So don't worry about
that. But something along the line has prevented the establishment of buds because if
you're not getting blooms, then the previous late summer and early fall, when
that tree would have been creating bloom buds in the branches for the next spring.
It didn't happen, and so something And that's why why I look toward
drought stresses and other things. Sometimes pairs will get drought stressed and they just'll
almost go into a late summer dormancy and then you get a little bit of
fall and they actually come out and try to bloom. And so you use
your bloom crop up in that untimely fall bloom which followed the stress. If
you saw that, that could be part of it too. But something along
the lines in that mid to late summer on into early fall is going on
with them. So do you fertilize if you've got good vigor? No,
If you don't have good vigor, yes, just be careful because pairs can
be a little bit rampant in their growth and that runs into other problems.
Okay, well, what I did. I got some of those uh fertilizer
stakes for fruit plants at Hold Depot, and I'll put two of them in
each plant. But that didn't seem to help any Can I put more mortilizer
nail or or different kind? Now different kind for sure? The little sticks
are. It's a novelty. I mean, it is fertilizer around them.
But that's not the best way You're done. In Parland. You've got a
couple of good Ace hardware stores down there. Walk into one of the Ace
hardware stores in Pariland and just tell them, you know, look, I
need a good quality fertilizer for fertilizing fruit trees. They're gonna have a variety
of those at the very least. Just get you a good lawn fertilizer and
go up to your pear tree, stick out your thumb, and for every
thumb width going across the trunk, give it one to two cups of that
fertilizer. So like, if let's just say the trunk was the size of
a coke can, just to make it simple, that's about three inches or
three thumb widths apart. So it would get three to six cups of fertilizer
spread all around evenly around that plan, not just dumped at the base.
Okay, should I get one high in nitrogen or just an even balance,
an even balance in general, But right now I would go light on it
because it's too late to set fruit. It's too late to do anything to
make it set fruit for next year, and you don't want to push a
lot of late season growth that fertilizer time of the year, should I put
it down? The primary time is going to be in the spring. You
can fertilize a little in the summer if you need to, but remember pears
ten toward being overly vigorous, so generally we don't fertilize them as heavily as
most of our other fruit trees. Okay, all right, well I'll do
what you say. Either that or I have a little bottle of parallel.
I want little pears on the tree. Oh, I know that that that
doesn't make sense. Hey, Sam, thank you for that call. We're
gonna take a break here seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four
Robert in spring. You will be first up when we come back. There's
some jazz. Hey, you're listening to garden Line. We are here to
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for more information. We're gonna head out now to talk to Robert in Spring.
Hello. Robert had a few quick questions, one of them being I
use the synthetic metropols fertilizer, okay, and I've been watering pretty decently with
this heat, but I noticed that mcgrasstille is not really really green, So
wondering could I put sweet green in? Being that it's organic, mix organic
and synthetic together, there's no problem to help out. Yeah, there's no
problem mixing them. The product you're using probably as a slow release, and
so you're not gonna you're gonna get immediate nutrient provided, but it's gonna grab
dually take the nutrients and that product and feed over time, which is excellent
way to go about feeding the lawn. Now, the sweet green will be
more of an immediate but I would I would not overdo that. Now,
you could do it now if you feel like you need a little bit more,
but just don't overdo it. But remember that our fall fertilization time is
coming up in October, when we focus less on nitrogen and more on getting
good potassium out there in the lawns for over winter quality and ability to take
cold and so uh, you know here we are already in September. I
just wouldn't do a whole lot right now because when you do your next fertilization,
it's going to have some nitrogen and it's going to have some good potassium
in it as well. So go light with the sweet green if you want
to add a little bit more, And I think that will will help out
a lot. When when you push a lawn with too much nitrogen at one
time, and we're about to enter that rainy cool season where we get large
patch which used to be called brown patch, that just makes it worse.
So you want to go light on it. If you haven't had an annual
brown patch problem, then is probably not a big deal. But we just
want to be careful with the overdoing a good thing. Okay, Well,
I guess that kind of lead leads think to my next question was brown patch,
and I forget the new name that you call it. Yeah, large
patch, large patch. Yes, So the last the last two years,
the yard was looking awesome, and then yeah, October November we started getting
the brown brown circles. And my question on that was what can I do
to prevent that? Okay, all right, let me let me answer that,
Robert, I'm gonna have to move to another call then. But here's
the deal with large patch or brown patch. You number one, you don't
want to predispose it to the problem. So excess water, excess fertilizer both
make it worse. Mowing too short makes brown patch or large patch worse.
Having a taller mowing height that's helpful. So those three things or where you
start. If you've got the problem every fall, then you're better to put
a preventative fungicide down then to wait until the big circles appear, because you
can't make the brown green with a fungicide. You can just stop further progression.
So if you kind of feel like, here it comes, I've get
it all the time, I'm going to get it again, then go ahead
of the of the problem by putting an application of For example, Nitrofuss makes
a PCNB PCNB product that will control brown patch very well or large patch very
well, and you would get that down ahead of time to prevent it.
Okay, all right, so i'd probably put that down in like early October.
They're on, we have to work, okay, And just real quick,
other item was it's a Saint Augustine yard and had a little bit of
bermuda here and there, but in fact the December, the bermuda has spread
quite a bit more and I don't know if the heat that's causing that.
And then okay, so bottom line, and I am going to have to
break this after this question, but the bottom line on that is whenever it's
droughty, hot, dry, droughty, the bermuda gets the upper hand.
Whenever it's shady, the Saint Augustine gets the upper hand. Setting a higher
mowing height gives the Saint Augustine an advantage. There's not a product that kills
bermuda without killing Saint Augustine. So culturally you just kind of have to do
the things I just got through saying there to try to give the Saint Augustine
the edge. But the alternative is to go in if you've got little spots
of bermuda, and just spray them and kill them and kill the Saint Augustine.
Two. Try to keep it off, but kill the bermuda and then
either replug or let the Saint Augustine crawl back in. And if I appreciate
those calls. There's not a great answer to that last one, but hopefully
that'll be a little helpful. If you're up in Tomball, you have a
hometown feed store, and that's called dnd Feed. You're up in Tamball on
Highway two forty nine, go west on twenty nine twenty about three miles from
two forty nine twenty nine twenty three miles west. D and D Feed.
The Over family opened it up in nineteen eighty nine and they just keep growing
and going. In fact, this summer they expanded a nice little expansion.
Lots of new products, high quality dog food, Origin Diamond, Victor Star
Pro, livestock food of course, food for other pets too, by the
way. And then the products you need to take care of your horses,
they've got it at D and D Feed. If I recommend a fertilizer on
guard line, they've got it at D and D Feed. They carry a
wide variety of products to support your lawn and garden efforts at D and D
feed again twenty nine twenty about three miles west of two forty nine and Tom
Ball, let's head out. Now we're gonna talk to Gary and Bear Creek.
Hello Gary, good morning, Skip. I enjoy her, so thank
you real quickly. Years ago, I harvested some chili pekin plants out near
Fredericksburg, and I've picked some wild peppers and took them home, dried them
and planted them. And as a result, I have wild pepper plants around
my yard every year. Yeah quick, Yeah, the mockingbirds eat the beer
anginau and then they spread them around. Yeah. But this year I have
some beautiful plants you're three feet around, and but they won't flower. It's
not like the forming flowers and fallen off. But I just can't get any
flowers to form. Do you have it a suggestion for that? They can
get a virus. You should see some little bit of a not natural looking
leaf form and that would be a virus that could do that. Also,
you know, as time goes by, areas can get shadier and shadier if
it's near a tree, So a lack of light can also cause a lack
of protection on your chili pekins. Those would be two possibilities. Yeah,
well, I know their plants are absolutely beautiful and they get plenty of light.
I just was wondering if they're played out, or if I could,
you know, put some kind of amendment to get them to because I've had
them before where the bloom, but bloom calls off. And this year I'm
just saying, and my fear is is that I won't get any and then
the birds won't and then I'll have a season where I don't have any more.
They've been going on fifteen years. Yeah, well, they don't play
out. The plants don't play out. I mean, you could always put
a new plan in and see if it performs better. But for a bloom
to form on a chili pekin, you need good sunlight, adequate nutrition,
and good soil moisture. And if it has those three and it's not blooming,
I'm not sure what would be causing that. Yeah. Well, they're
fun to have around and it's fun to see the mocking birds pick they are
where. Yeah, there's plenty spicy. I make of vinegar sauces. Oh,
they are plenty spicy. That is true, they will set you on
fire. Well, I sure enjoy your show, and I love the science
parts that you bring into the show. Oh goodist. Well, I try
to bring some in, but not so much that people's eyes roll back in
their heads and they they fall over. So I know that there's a balance
there. But thank you. I appreciate the kind words. Gary. You
take care. Hey do you live out in Kingwood? Well, I brag
on Warrens in Kingwood garden centers all the time because I mean one town too.
Awesome. Awesome garden centers they are. It's just a fun place to
go. They're both of them are fun places to go. By the way,
I noticed that at Warrens they they have a bunch of fall bedding plants.
I suspect that Kingwood as well. I need to run over there and
check that. But the fall bedding plants are starting to arrive, and you
know you may still plant some of those warm season plants. You know,
Selosha looks good boy, they have some beautiful Slosha out there. Collius can
still keep going in the garden. Now's a good time to still plant marigolds.
Believe it or not, you get marigolds in it's not going to freeze
for a long time here. I hope I'm not proven wrong by erratic weather.
But marigolds will carry into fall and just glow in the beautiful cool days
of fall without spider mites bugging them. All of that. You know,
Moren's Garden Centers got it all. So you need some dianthus, and he
needs oppetunias. Check them out new supplies and warrants and over at Kingwood too,
and always check out the beautiful gift shops that they have. They're just
really nice. Remember on September twenty first, they're going to have their Garden
to Glass Mixology class. Oh that kind of rolls right off your tongue.
It's herb infused fall into Prosecco events. So they're going to talk about creating
an exquisite cocktails with prosecco using herbs straight out of your garden, a gardtending
class as they like to put it. Now. That's at Kingwood Garden Center,
Kingwood Garden Center dot com. Go buy there, give him a call
and sign up for that September twenty first at six p m. That sounds
fun. Oh my goodness, yeah boy, you got my running around the
yard picking stuff and shoving it in a bottle of something to Yeah. Indeed,
pretty cool wine tasting, yeah, wine and herb and prosecco tasting.
There you go, it's prosecco. Yeah, prosecco. Yeah, very special
stuff. How are your houseplants doing? Okay? They are, I mean
everything transplanted. Yes, And I sit and I talked to them every chance.
I guess that is very important. And when we say talk to your
plants, it's not just encouraging them. If they're not acting right, you
just tell them, hey, you know, show them a picture of a
plan out at the curb side and say you either straighten up or you're going
to be out there on your own. I mean you wouldn't do it,
but at least no that you convince them it's time. Well, I cannot
get the ivy to straightened up. It just keeps going down. Well,
you just need to play good cop, bad cop. Well, good morning.
You are listening to garden Line, and we are here to talk about
whatever interests you when it comes to gardening. Now fall is the time to
get trees and shrubs planted. Woody ornamentals. We call them tree shrubs and
woody vines. Now, you can plant a tree or shrub any month of
the year if you know how to plant, you know how to take care
of it. But fall is the best time that there is for it,
and it we are like on the doorstep of fall. So it is time
to be getting those products purchased and getting ready to get them planted so you
can have success. Now. Verdant Tree Farm. The folks at Verdant Tree
Farm, they know how to grow trees and they grow all sizes, even
up to like seven hundred gallons, not even larger. I believe, great
selection. It's easy to find a Verdant Tree Farm near you because there's one
out on the West side at barker Cypress. There's one done in Parland on
Broadway Street. And now if you are at E ten where Yale Street comes
together there and the Heights, there's a Verdant Tree Farm there as well.
They really are the king when it comes to providing palm trees. They absolutely
their selection of palms is just unmatched. But they have a wide variety of
other very good, high quality trees. Here. You can bring a picture
of your house and go down and sit on, sit on with them.
And say, look, I got this area, I want some good shade.
What would you recommend? They'll tell you what they have are there that
will work well. You walk out, you pick your tree, they tag
it, they bring it, they plan it right free in office Design Consults
Consultation, and they do offer a one year warranty included with the installation on
your tree. If you're a military, if you're a first responder, this
is a ten percent discount additionally for you as well. Verdant treefarm dot com,
Verdict treefarm dot com. Go by, check out what I'm talking about,
and don't miss this opportunity to start creating a beautiful, shady flowering,
whatever kind of addition you want to your landscape. The best time to plan
a tree was fifty years ago. Second best time is today, So don't
delay. We want to get a hammock in that thing as soon as we
can. Right, let's that out to League City and we're gonna talk to
John. Good morning John. How can we help today? Yeah, I'm
calling about what a previous color was talking about with large patch. Yes,
I you know, our yards healthy in the summer and then every fall I
fight it and uh, what I was trying to do is the last three
years, I've aerated and put down leaf mode compost, yes, twice a
year, and I'm still getting it. I think the reason I'm getting it
maybe because I get nervous right before the fall and I start putting down the
fungus side. So I'm probably counter acting this leaf mold compost and killing the
good bacteria. So I wanted to get your thoughts. Is it better to
put down the fungus side or just keep throwing down leaf mold compost. Well,
I would do the leaf mold compost now. If when it's a problem,
as I was saying earlier, overwatering, over fertilizing, and mowing short
all predisposed toward take all patch or I'm sorry, large patch brown also called
brown patch gosh I we should say both of those ever time, But anyway,
the names changed towards those that disease becoming an issue. But in addition
to that, you can't control the weather. You know, if you get
a gully washer rain with a hurricane coming through here, you're going to see
large patch when the weather cools off a little bit. The thing that you
can do is the preventative types of sprays. Now, the leaf mold compost
will not eradicate large patch, but it can help. It can help because
large patch is a fungus, it's a disease, and when you put more
competing fungal organisms into that situation, it actually does benefit. But a lot
of people just because it's such a problem, they resort to a preventative fungicide
application. And you can certainly do that. You're still going to have the
leakmo compost there and it's still going to decompose, and it's still going to
give you the nutrients and the you know a little bit of a blocking of
light from around the soil. So maybe helps a tiny bit with the weed
control or weed sprouting as well. But don't you know, you're not going
to ruin that. It just it's the tradeoff that we have to do.
If you choose to do a fungicide spray, do that before you do the
leaf mold on top. But because otherwise your spray ends up getting on the
compost and not on the thatch and the base of the grass leaves and so
on. Okay, so you would do you would recommend both or just compost.
If it were my yard, I would probably try to do the leafmo
compost and the cultural protections that I'm men no overwater and overfertilizing, no moing
low. I would do that, and if I'm not getting satisfactory results,
then I would resort to a preventative done probably really early in October too,
so that when the disease conditions are right and it's about to take off,
there's a fungicide there shutting it down. I generally don't do that every year
in my yard because I don't have a problem with it just through all the
cultural things of the year. But I do understand that they're yards where it's
just an annual issue and you've got to get ahead of it. Not a
black and white thing. But those are your two options, and you can
go whichever way you want to go. All right, thank you, all
right, thank you? Yeah. Out there in League City, you're fortunate
you've got in that area, those of you listening out there, and what
Dickinson, Lamarck and Webster in League City and clear Lake City, El Camino
Reale, you've got a hometown feed store called League City feet west and Madison
Funderberg. You know they took over their dad. Actually well actually a third
generation now that are running the show. The grandfather built that over forty years
ago. But League City Feed carries our fertilizers that we talk about on there.
They've got a great selection of pest control, weed controlled, disease control
products, premium pet foods, of course surfeed storey. They got all the
livestock feeds. If you're in the backyard chickens, they have everything you need,
feeds, feeders, waters. But for the folks down south there,
we're talking about Highway three, a few blocks south of Highway ninety six,
League City Feed, they are going to have the products you need. And
they're open Monday through Saturday nine to six, closed on Sunday, so it's
easy to get by there even after work. Give McCall to eight one three
three two sixteen twelve and they can tell you more about what's going on there
at League City Feed. You're listening to Garden Line our phone number seven one
three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two one two fifty
eight seventy four. I was sitting outside enjoying one morning this past week,
enjoying the sound of birds, and that's one of my favorite things in the
garden. You know, gardens aren't just plants to look at. Gardens are
smells, Gardens are sounds. Gardens are movement, you know, the way
grass is swaying the breeze, the way a butterfly or a hummingbird or something.
I mean, it's just a lot of cool stuff. By the way,
now is hummingbirds season? I mean they are here and they need food
for that long trek across the Gulf of Mexico as part of their migration.
Wilbirds Unlimited can get you set up on that now. Write this down w
BU dot com, WBU dot com, forward slash Houston. You can find
the wall birds near you, and that's not hard. There's seven of them
clear Lake, West, Houston, Cypress bear Land pair Land bel Air adding
up in Kingwood or over in Katie There. They're wilbirds in all those places
and they have super quality products. Do you need a hummingbird feeder? Ask
them to show you their high perch hummingbird feeder. I've got one. It
is outstanding, works really really well. Do you need a birdhouse? Do
you need a quality blend? Their food blends don't have waste, not full
of all the little red beebies that birds kick out because they don't want to
eat them. They make they make the doves go sit on the ground and
eat them, or they just sprout up and make a weed in your yard.
Nope, not with wild birds. Quality feed that all every bit of
that feed sack the birds want to eat. And that's what you would expect
from a quality place like wild Birds Unlimited. We're going to take a break
our phone number seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. Well,
good morning. You were listening to Guardline and we are enjoying visiting about
all all kinds of things. Gardening. You know, gardening is just a
fun it's it's a fun hobby and we want you to have success. So
how do we help you have success? We give you good information. What
are the plants you plant? How do you prepare the soil? What works
well here? How do you take care of things? How do you diagnose
the problem and make sure you get the right product to deal with it if
a product is required for dealing with it. That's what it's all about,
keeping it simple and making it easy, and that's what Arburgate has done.
As a matter of fact, they've got a one two three completely easy system.
And what does that mean one two three, Well, it's a food
to feed anything with roots. It's organic four three plus calcium fertilizer that is
also chock full of microbes as well, which is always a good thing for
roots and for the soil. It's a soil second of all, for any
application quality soil. It's got some. It also has some a an expanded
shale I could think of the name of it. Expanded shale is like think
of it as a kitty litter that's been fired to a temperature so hot that
it expands and causes these little pitted granules, Like remember the days when we
have barbecue pitts and there was the lava rock on them. They still have
those. That's kind of like a taking a close view, if you will,
at an expanded shale particle. It's lightweight, it holds moisture, it
holds nutrients, and it keeps your clay open. That's very important and that's
why they put it in Part three, which is a complete compost. Organic
compost is made from two different kinds of quality compost, again of course chock
full of microbes, and it also has the expanded shale in it. Expanded
shale lasts a long time. Compost is wonderful. It is rocket fuel for
soil. It's a miracle worker for soil. But expanded shale will continue lasting
even after compost decomposes, and it just year by year. Continue to use
these quality products. Make yourself better and better and better. And everyone thinks
your thumb is getting greener and greener and greener. But it's the secret products
of the one two three completely easy system, not so much of a secret
anymore. Available bit at Arburgate. You can go to arburgate dot com for
those of you who don't know Arburgates out there and Tomball just head out twenty
nine twenty west of Tomball and you will get right to Arburgate and you can
find these products. Got them on hand. Let's head out to Pasadena now
and we're going to talk to Randy. Hello, Randy, good morning,
and wow, thank you. Well you segued right into my question. I've
got about a twenty two twenty three year old lawn established construction debris and excess
or you know as they always put in there. I've been following the fertilizer
schedule for about three years. And the lawn's pretty good. But I've been
reading about the application of the compost and let's see if I could get some
ins with that. Just you know, the frequency and how much to put
on so I can start enriching the soil. It's it's it's doing well,
but I think you can do better. I think you were Uh we're talking
about the leaf mold compost. Is that correct? Yes, I've read more
on Randy's website. You know, he was a huge proponent of that,
and I hear you mentioned that quite a bit as well. Then yes,
it didn't doesn't really give any instruction on what's the best time, how thick
do you put it right, how many yards per square foot or what have
you. Okay, well, you know with with a leaf mold compost.
Uh, we're well, let me back up one step. When you have
a lawn, when I talk about preparing soil and I talk about mixing compost
into the soil, well, you can't mix compost into a lawn. I
mean you can't rote a towel your lawn. And so what we do is
we do a core aeration, which is a machine that goes in and it
pops plugs of soil out and it looks like a like they had a small
dog convention on your lawn, if you know what I mean. There's all
these little little things that look like dog droppings everywhere. That's good. You
want. You don't want an narrator that pushes the soil apart to create a
hole. You want one that pops the soil out, that gets it up
on the surface. And then you follow that with a leafmo compost top dressing,
and that allows your turf to be able to get good oxygen down in
the roots system and the compost goes down in those holes as it decomposes.
And so when you do that over a period of time, you really help
with compaction and you also help with soil eration and other things. So that
that's the combo thing. Now you can just arrate, you can just top
dress with compost. You don't have to do both. But if your lawn
is struggling, and you mentioned, you know, it sounded like the soil
quality and all the stuff that they did in construction certainly didn't help it much,
you might want to consider having those both done. And you so understand
saying I'll have it a rat on a standard aeration. What would I about
a half on the inch? What's the proper application? I don't want to
under or overdo it. Uh, you have some range there. It doesn't
have to be just a certain half an inch would be a nice application to
go on it. In fact that a lot of times they'll go a little
lighter than that, maybe a third of an inch or something. But either
way, it just make sure they've got a well screened or that you purchase
a well screened leaf mold compost. And you can purchase that locally and have
it delivered to you, and you can do it as do it yourself,
or you can run a machine, or you can hire somebody to do it.
There's there's a lot of options out there. Okay, well good.
I was really concerned with the time and the you know, the time of
the year to apply and have much to actually put on. So what's the
what's the recommended time of year? Or is any time? Okay, you
know, it's really okay to do it anytime. I like in the spring
to let the lawn get going and kind of pretty well established before I start
in with that kind of thing. Uh, if you if you want to
do it later in the season you can. By the time we get into
let's say mid to late fall, the grass roots are not growing as much
and I generally will not do that the aeration at that time. It's not
that you couldn't you could do it any month of the year, but that
that's the easy way to do it. Hey, And if you need a
place it does it green. The folks at Greenpro do that. You can.
You can go online and green pro textas dot com or give him a
call to it. I'm all right, you're the guy. You're the you're
the weekend warrior. All right, man, Oh yeah, we'll go for
it. Appreciate it. Hey, thanks for the call. I appreciate that.
I have a great day, yes, sir, and you as well.
Yeah, you know you can. You can make a lawn feel or
you can make a lawn just really happy by creating that natural uh and arm
that happens in a grassland. You know, as grass grows, the roots
grow and die, the grass blades fall on the surface and they decompose,
and the grass it just gets better and better over time. And we speed
that process up when we correerate, when we top dress with compost, and
especially when we take good care of our lawn and return the grass clippings.
No, or I'm going to overstate this, but it's true. No organic
matter should leave your property. Now. The exception would be, Okay,
I got severely diseased plants, and I don't want to put that back down
around those plants and so on. Okay, I get that, but seriously,
if you even tree limbs, if you have way to chip them up,
do so and put it in as a mulch. Now I'll grant you.
Even at my house, I don't have a big chipper, and so
I do have to get rid of stuff like that some But organic matter is
stuff you grew with your nutrients and your soil. Return it to the soil,
Let it decompose, Let it feed the swill. Let it become a
compost full of biological activity that stimulates root systems. Return, recycle your grass,
return, recycle your tree leaves. Don't let organic matter leave your soil.
Otherwise you're just renting fertilizer and speaking a fertilizer. Folks at Nelson Plant
Food they have a wide variety of products. You know, Nelson's has the
color Star line. I was bragging on that earlier. It's great for anything
you're growing for color. They've got the Nutrastar line, a number of different
specific fertilizers for different kinds of plants, and then the turf Star line.
That's the one we talk about a lot because we're always taking care of our
lawns. There's a slow and easy that we do during the summertime that is
a gradual release over time. There's a Bruce's Brew It's an eighteen four nine.
It's an immediate release, and would you could do it now in a
small amount. Just remember that cool season is coming and we're gonna be putting
the Nelson's carbo load when that comes on. That's one that's got plenty of
the last of the three numbers. Potassium can't go wrong. Any of those
products from Nelson Plant Food and Nelson Plant Foods easy to find all over the
Greater Houston area. Well, we're about to put another hour in the books.
We've got one left this morning. If you've been thinking about give us
a call. Hey, be brave, step out there. I promise I'll
be kind. We will have a good time. If you have questions,
don't forget Next Saturday, September ninth, Plantation, Ace Hardware and Richmond.
I'll be there from eleven thirty to one thirty. I'll let's see to go
to an Mma, Lazarth Poem and the Statue of Liberty. Bring me you're
tired, you're weary, you're worn out, plants, you're diseased, you're
infested. We'll diagnose them. If you got pictures of your yard. You
want to talk about what to do here, we'll talk about that. I
can't wait to see if we're gonna have a good time out at Plantation,
Ace Hardware. I'm gonna talk about a little bit more to Charleton. You
what all is going to be going on out there. KTRH Garden Line does
not necessarily endorse any of the products or services advertised on this program. Welcome
to KTRH Garden Line with Skip Ricord's just watching as well. Good morning on
a beautiful morning to get out there and garden. Also a beautiful morning to
get out there and check out some garden centers. Go visit our feed stores,
Go visit our home mom and pop garden centers, Go visit our Ace
hardware stores around there is you know, there are so many great places here
in the Greater Houston area. If you are a gardener, for you to
get your supplies, your plants, your advice, it's all out there.
I was I was visiting, you know before we took a break there with
Randy out in Pasadena on leaf mold compost and aerating and top dressing, and
I mentioned garden Greenpro. You know, the folks at Greenpro, they absolutely
know how to take care of a lawn with quality compost. Quality leaf mold
composts to be specific, that's the one that really just performs the best when
you're doing a top dressing. They also know how to do a proper aeration
of your lawn with a deep time errator. They have the equipment they can
do that. Now. They have a special going on right now, special
for garden lined listeners. If you will sign up for aeration and top dressing
by the fifteenth of September, they're going to give you ten percent off of
that. So you're thinking about doing it, you wanted to do it,
You're probably going to plan on doing it anyway, now's the time to do
it. You don't have to have it done by the fifteenth, but you
have to be book it. You have to book it by then so you
can receive that ten percent discount, and that is a significant break. So
go ahead, you know, give them a call. Let's let's get that
done on your yard. If you are going to do any kind of a
pre emergent herbicide, you are gonna want to do that after you do the
core aeration because that just brings new soil up to the surface, and pre
emergence sort of create a force field over the surface of the soil for weeds
that are trying to break through and establish they stop that, well, you
just need to give Green Pro a call. Give them a call at eight
three two three five one zero zero three two eight three two three five one
zero zero three two and do you mention that you would like the ten percent
off discount. But you got to do that by the fifteenth of September.
We're not too far away, so don't delay. I'm making this decision.
Aeration and cob post stop dressing. What a good combination for taking care of
your lawn. You are listening to Guardenline. Our phone number is seven one
three two one two fifty eight seventy four seven one three two one two five
eight seven four And if you're out there doing your lawn fertilizing and you're thinking
about, you know, what else might I need to do to take care
of my lawn properly. Well, one of the things is to consider a
micronutrient application with azamite. Now, azamite is a mind product and it is
ground up as a crushed mineral. It has a lot of trace elements in
it, and so I don't think of it like a fertilizer like your nitrogen,
phosphorus, potassium, regular fertilizer. I think it is an addition to
that. It is nutrients. But I'll do the fertilization and then follow with
the azamite application to your lawn. You can go to Azomite Texas azo m
TE Texas dot com and find out more about it. It's easy to find
in the Houston area again, and all the price. All the places we
brag on and talk about about buying plants and supplies here they're gonna carry as
MTE. It's easy to find. Let's set out to Spring Branch now and
we're gonna talk to HIRTA. Hello, HIRTA, well, good morning,
thank you for being there for us. Thank you, Yip. I have
a follow up question on my Zaiah plant, the parent plant. It's a
clump of stams of summer happnage wide summer quarter of an inch. But at
any rate, the diagnosis was root rot. Now I have breaked away all
of my pine needle cover and I put down some leak mold composts around it.
Now I don't want to put that same pine needle pile. How much
should I cover it with pine needles? Now? Should I? Or should
I? Not? You? It's it's always a good time to mulch around
plants. So if you don't have a good cover of mulch, then go
ahead and do it. If you've already got like four inches of mulch over
it or pine needles, then you don't need to add more. That's enough.
Oh okay, Now, well no, I just have the least more
multch on there, and it's only it's barely an inch. Okay, so
put put another pack of pine needles on there. Yeah, yeah, I
would, I would add more. Whatever kind of mult you're gonna choose for
it, go ahead and get those get that done, because yeah, well
that's done already. I'm just asking about the pine needles now, Yeah,
yeah, that's it. You can add them. It's perfect. An inch
two inches what I would probably put a couple of more inches on there.
Yeah, oh all right, all right, thank you very much, Skip.
Yeah, you want to keep those things happy. I know I'm working
at it. Oh this horrible heat, but we're coming out of it now,
and I'm very thankful for that. Now, if I want to transplant,
I have some quarts that came up from the parent plant about three feet
away. There may be two feet tall or so. Lord, I'll wait
till fall to transplant those. This isn't azalea again, you're talking about.
Yes, yes, that's the plant. If you've got little shoots that have
roots attached to them, you can transplant them, but don't do that until
I would wait until October. I want to get all the heat and stress
and stuff off these plants, all right, Move them quickly, don't let
those rich dry out, Water them and really good. Put them at the
same level they were growing when you dug them up, and a new location
and you should be good to go. All right, Thank you very much,
Skip, all right, her, thank you very much. I appreciate
you call. Oh my goodness, you know I brag about Buchanan's Plants a
lot for those of you in the Heights, really for those of anywhere in
town. It's a fun place to go see that big trees and I don't
care how hot it gets today, it's a good day to go walk around
in the shade out there at Buchanans and enjoy yourself. They've got unbelievable selection
of plants. They're on the eleventh Street and the Heights. You can go
online to Buchanans Plants dot com. By the way, while you're there,
sign up for their newsletter. They've got some events coming up. I want
to butt Darryl Ching, who is an Instagram influencer and the author of the
New Plant Parent. He is a very popular houseplant type person on Instagram.
He's going to be there on Saturday, September ninth. He's gonna talk,
he's gonna do a book signing. They're gonna have houseplant giveaways, light bites,
beer and wine. Tickets are twenty three dollars this weekend only, but
that is Saturday, September ninth, and also on October seventh. That's way
out there, but you need to put this on your calendar. From ten
am to three pm. Buchanans is going to be having their hay Rides,
pumpkin painting, moon Bound, moon Bounce, and on food trucks. It's
just another great family free event. And while you're at Buchanans, check out
their new shipment of mums, snapdragons and other plants that are available. Let's
go ahead and take a break. When we come back from Blake, Glenn,
Eddie and Amy, you will be the first one's up. As good
as I want. I got a few years now, but there was the
time in my friend but I could read, Oh boy, here we are
a garden line talking about all kinds of things gardening, and we got a
few calls lined up here. We're gonna get right to them. I did
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delay our shifting Houston soils wreck havoc on our concrew, eat pads in our
on our landscape being a home and all around. Just you've got to watch
out for that. And when we get into dry weather like this where it
shrinks up and then we get a rain that swells up, Katie bar the
door. Here we go. Unfortunately, that is the place where we live.
I'm gonna go now to the phones and we're gonna talk to Glenn out
in full sure. Hello, Glenn, good morning. Hey. Let me
throw this composting technique at you and see what you think. This is the
way I do it out here. So I have basically a big bucket.
It's a really a container. Put all my scraps in there, and I
mix it with water. I throw in fire ash, and every once in
a while calmanure and just mix up to a slop you miss. Do you
think I'm losing a nutrition when I do all that, when I keep the
water in there, or what do you think about that? Is there a
better way to do it? Yeah? The problem with the water, you
know, just being truly saturated water is you exclude the oxygen and decomposition will
take place. But it's what we call anaerobic, and you can get some
pretty nasty odors unless you've got a little like one of those aquarium bubblers in
there that's putting air through the system. I would I would mix up the
things you're talking about, and and but just leave them a little more air
rated, have them moist but not saggy wet. Got you? Okay?
Now? Can let me let me ask you one more thing to them before
I forgets right interrupt? The wood ash is fine in moderation. If you
use too much, you really mess things up. I don't know if you've
ever seen on a farm or something. They had an old burn pile and
they just burned and burned on that spot. Now nothing will grow there with
all the excessive ash application. Okay, yeah, I'd do it randomly,
maybe once a year or two, you know, just a couple of shovelfuls.
Okay, it's probably a sixty five or you know, gallon container.
So anyway, I just thought, oh, that's a bit doing this,
and I'm thinking, I wonder if I'm helping myself or hurting myself. I
know, what keeps the rodents away a little better? So yeah, okay,
well, ye give it a try. Just just watch for that anaerobic
and just don't overdo any anything too much of a good thing, not a
good thing. Sure, all right, thank you sir. Hey Glenn,
thanks for the call. I appreciate that very much. If you are looking
at plants and it is obvious that this summer has beat the heck out of
it and just flat warn them out, consider doing an application of Microlife's Ocean
Harvest. That's a blue label bottle. It is a seaweed based product.
Now you can use it just directly on the plants. I mean you mix
it in water and drench roots if you want, you can also use it
as a follier feed. And these plants that they need minerals that you know,
all the different kinds of things that come in a seaweed product. There's
there's product. There are ingredients that help stimulate plant growth that you know,
that provide the biochemical supplements that I'm talking backwards here, the supplements that are
needed for biochemical re actions that are going on in the plants. Those plants
are stressed right now, So add the microbes, add the materials that you're
going to get from a quality product like the Ocean Harvest Blue label for microlife.
You can also you know, we got the humans plus that is absolutely
important. We want to provide those for the soil, but we also can
spray a quality product like the Ocean Harvest on the plants and help them out.
I mean, it's one thing. We got to keep the plants well
watered. They definitely need that, but they also need a little bit of
help coming out of the stress that they're dealing with right now. And fall
is coming, but let's just help them hang on for a little bit longer.
We're going to go out there to Pasadena now and talk to Eddie.
Hello Eddie, Hey Skip, good morning. Just had a quick question about
my Saint Augustine lawn. As you know, this heat hasn't been no jokes
of the lawn has been kind of stressing. But I also experience some chinch
bugs that did some damage while I was out of town for work along with
this heat. So I managed to suppress the tinch bugs and now I'm kind
of a recovery mode and half of the front yard and looks burned. Half
of it looks nice and green and lush. Yeah, but I wanted to
ask if I should to keep following the schedule and put down a summer fertilizer
or should I do something different to kind of help me get ready for the
fall. Well, you sure can. I mean, the number one thing
that lawn needs is moderately moist soil, so you know, a good soaking
followed by drawing out period that that step one. Uh. The other thing
is having the nutrients that it needs are important. Now, you know,
when when drought kills a grass plant, it doesn't change the fact that there
are or are not nutrients in the ground. If they were there, they're
they're there, But if not, they need to be added. We're we're
going to enter here when we get in to the you know, beginning of
October time into September early October, we're going to be looking at our fall
fertilization. So we're getting close to that right now. So anything do right
now, I would go very light on. Don't overdo the nitrogen because we
don't want to push them a lot with nitrogen going into that false period that's
when the large patch and brown patch occur. So go light. But just
know that the most important fertilization in many ways for the year is that fall
fertilization because you send your grass into winter stronger and after what your lawn has
been through this summer, having a good quality fall fertilizer application that it can
take up. Think of it as anna freeze for the plant. As that
nutrient comes in, as it gets some sunlight and creates the carbohydrates. When
it comes out next spring, it's going to be way stronger. And that's
why that's the most important fertilization. So yes, okay, to do a
little now, but the big important one is coming up and fall. Okay,
awesome, thanks you you bet. I hope that helps. Thanks a
lot. I appreciate that very much. And you know we're talking about all
these products and where do you get products? Well, Ace Hardware. That's
a good place. And how many thirty nine Ace Hardware. I bet you
can tell me that number because you heard me say it so many times,
thirty nine Ace Hardware stores throughout the Houston area. If I talk about a
fertilizer on guarden line, they carry it at Ace Hardware. If you need
an insecticide, of fungicide, a herbicide for your lawn, any kind of
lawn care, plant care products, they've got them at Ace Hardware there.
It's as simple as that. It's the one stop shop. And they have
much much more in Ace Hardware. And for those of you who never been
in an ice go check one out. If you don't get a chance before
next Saturday, come out to Plantation Ace down there in Richmond. I'm going
to be there from eleven thirty to one thirty. We'll show you the store.
You will see what I'm talking about when I brag about Ace Hardware all
the time. It's just a great place. You know, it's going to
cool off and you know, I kind of quit grilling this summer because if
it's just a hot outside, well, I'm fixing the head back out and
start the grilling season. That's what we do during football season, right Well.
Ace Hardware has every kind of quality barbecue pit that you can't live without,
and all the bling that goes with it, all the other supplies that
are important and having fun in an outdoor cookout when friends come over and you
enjoy that sort of thing. Right, let's head out to Tomball. Now
we're gonna talk to Amy. Hello, Amy, good morning. I have
got good morning. I have a weed in my yard that is kind of
a vine, kind of a thick brown vine with green on it, and
I've just been trying to pull it out, but I'm losing that battle,
and I'm wondering what I might use to get rid of it. A thick
brown vine with green on it is he well, I mean it has green
leaves on it, but it's it's it's almost I was hoping I could send
you a picture, but they put me straight through to you without that.
Okay, well, let's do this. We've got half an hour left here.
I'm going to put you on hold. Josh can give you an email,
send me the picture and if I can get to it for the end
of the day. Well, if not, I'll talk about it tomorrow.
Okay, good, thank you. Let's look at a picture. That way
we won't waste time trying to figure out what it is. I appreciate the
call. You're going on hold and Josh will take care of you. Yeah,
it's a you know, it's a challenge to identify weeds and plants,
and it's important to get them done at the right time. We control.
We can simplify it or we can make it complicated. When we really look
at all the detail of it, it's complicated, but we try to simplify
it down. We got cool season weeds, we got warm season weeds.
We got weeds that are annuals. We got weeds that are perennials. We
got products that prevent weeds seeds from getting established, and we've got products to
kill existing weeds. So if we get an identity of the weed, I
know exactly when to tell you to prevent it, and I know exactly how
and when to tell you to control it after it's already up. But remember
one thing about weed control, and I stress this and my lawn care schedule,
which is online at Skip Gardening with skip dot com. You can find
it there. The best weed control is proper mowing, watering, and fertilizing.
It's just the best weed control. I've got another schedule coming out that's
on dealing with pests and diseases and weeds, and that's what we say on
there. The best weed control is a dense, healthy lawn. If not,
if you got a thin lawn and sunlight's hitting the soil, you're just
going to be on a herbicide treadmill, just constantly fighting one weed after another.
We got some great purbicide products to do that, but why not do
everything you can to prevent weeds first and then pull out the herbicide when you
have something that the prevention just didn't work on. We've got those kind of
products. It's easy, easy to take care of. We're gonna take a
little break here in just a moment. I will be back for our last
half hour to day. If you'd like to give us a call, our
phone number is seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four seven one
three two one two five eight seven four, or if it makes it easier
for you to doll seven one three two on two kat r H. Doesn't
get any easier than that. Didn't get easier than that, doesn't It certainly
does not. What kind of exciting NICKI News Network news do we have coming
up? Well, we're going to talk about Jimmy Buffett. Were you a
Jimmy Buffett fa Oh my gosh, I was, And apparently not everyone was.
Really no, I didn't. I thought everyone loved Jimmy Duffett. I
found out today not everyone did. Oh okay, well I didn't know that.
There's a lot of fun. But we all know the lyrics to those
songs. Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, here we go. Yes,
we do. Absolutely may have to play another one of those that star
right little asleep at the wheel there to carry into us our last half hour.
First thing I want to do for I go to calls and everything is
I had a call about a weed came in from Amy and Amy thanks for
the photo. That is Virginia buttonweed. Virginia buttonweed is a common weed here
for those of you who are wondering what does that look like, Well,
it's crawls along the ground through your Saint Augustine. You know how I always
say that you create a dense, healthy lawn to choke out weed problems.
This is one of the weeds that a good dense, healthy lawn just doesn't
choke out. Virginia buttonweed. Those are the exception, but they're there.
They got a little white flowers with four petals, like a little a little
white cross, tiny white cross in the ground, or a little X in
the ground. Virginia buttonweed's tough to control. It is not easy. I
would get a product containing are called celsius, as in fahrenheit and celsius.
Celsius. You buy a little packet of it. Look for a little packet.
You mix it with water, and you use it. You use up
what you use when you mix it up. You don't try to store it
in the bottle. It's not gonna work. It's gonna take more than one
application. Virginia buttonweed is a very tough weed to control. One shot does
not get it. Celsius. Use it early in the morning for the temperatures
heat up. It is more let's say, more safe to use in the
heat of summer than many of our good broadly weed control products. But Celsius
is the one I would use for that reason. On it, there are
a couple of others you can use on it, and other seasons you might
use the fertile lime. Oh gosh, what's for loom called? There's wheat
free zone, wheat free zone or bonid we beat or ultra just all those
kinds of things. When the temperatures get up about eighty five degrees, they're
going to damage your Saint Augustine. And so it's hard to find time when
it's not above eighty five degrees are on here this time of the year.
But gift Celsius to try. I think you'll find it works pretty well.
It's gonna have a lot of seeds. Get your lawn as dense as you
can to prevent the weed seeds of Virginia buttonweed from coming up as bad.
But once it's established there in the lawn, it just crawls along right through
the grass and it's pretty happy. Hope that helps Amy and the question that
you had. Let's head out now to Baytown and we're going to talk to
Susan. Hello, Susan, what weren't you skip? Thanks for taking my
callet. I have something ferociously eating my lantana. That's all it's bothering is
a lantana. What do I spray it with and make sure it's dried out
before I spray it. The leaves are being chewed away on lantana, Yes,
yes, away, totally eating leaves. I honestly cannot tell you a
pest I know of that eats lantanna. So that's curious. It's either a
caterpillar or a beetle or a grasshopper, one of those three. I would
probably use something containing spinosaid SPI n O SAD. There's a lot of different
spinosaid type products out there in Baytown. You've got some good ace hardwares nearby.
Go into one of those. I need an insecticide that contains spinosid.
You spray it on the lantanna. It soaks into the tissue, so it's
not systemach moving all through the plant. But it's not just sitting on the
surface where rain will wash it right off either and a leaf chewing insect choose
on a spinosid sprayed leaf. By the way, spinosaid happens to be an
organic product. It it gets the poison and it kills it. It works,
and so that I would use that. But boy, that's a that's
interesting because I've not run into my lantannas being all eaten up before I know
they're They're usually hardy against everything. They're tough. They're good and tough.
But I hope that helps, is susan? Oh? Should I make sure
the plant is dried out before I sprayed on? No, just don't.
Don't water, don't sprinkle water it after you spray, you know, give
it, give it some time, Wait till the next day if you need
to water, but give it some time to sak into the tissues. Yeah,
I need to water, so yeah, well going water first and then
spray it. Yeah, that's fine. Okay, Yeah, all right,
good luck, So thank you so much. You bet absolutely. Hey,
we are in the storm season, right, I mean we're hearing about storms.
Florida just got one the other day. Affordable Tree Care can come out
and can take care of your trees in terms of do you need some pruning,
do you got some weak limbs, some dead limbs that need to come
out of there to get him cleaned out it hadn't rained in a while.
They can also come out and do a deep root watering. They go all
the way und the tree, stick a probe in the ground. And give
a good thorough wedding of the soil down deep, and that provides that rescue
that your trees are eating right now. You know, normally we don't have
to water by deep rooting every time we water a tree, but right now
it's hard to get a good soaking that goes down deep and provides that bank
account to keep your trees healthy. Affordable Tree can do that as well.
They do anything you need for a tree. Just call Martin Martin an Affordable
Tree. Either Martin or his wife Joe will answer. They're the only ones
that answer the phone. They're at Affordable Tree. So if you call and
it's not Martin or Joe, you call the wrong place with Affordable in the
name. Affordable Tree. You can call them at seven one three, six
nine nine twenty six sixty three. They don't charge for bids. They'll come
out, they'll they can do consultations, they can do pest and disease control,
they can boy. If you're going to build anything around a tree,
absolutely have Martin come out first and do an assessment of the site and tell
you what needs to be done in order to avoid serious damage to a tree.
If someone did root damage because of construction or dropped a slab over a
big part of a tree this past spring. That tree would be in serious
hurt right now, with the kind of summer we've been having, have a
consultation before you do something like that to your trees. Let's go back out
to pear Land now and we are going to talk to Kay. Hello,
Kay, good morning, Skip, thank you for taking my call. I
have question. I'll back of a lot of and I'll spend several weeks ago
more into the spring. Into the spring, I guess. I transplanted some
volunteer crape myrtles and they were very small you most of I don't. They
were various sizes, but not really very big, not more than like six
or eight inches tall. Okay. They were doing fine and they were leafing
out and then they started turning brown and the leaves dropped. Now they're all
just bare stems. However, they are still flexible, and I'm thinking they're
maybe not totally gone. And I keep watering them about every other day,
give them a good watering. Okay, so what do you think. I
think they're probably still alive and crapes will drop the a lot of plant,
a lot of trees will drop their leaves as a way of just last chance
effort at surviving and try keep that's all moist, so the roots have something
to take up. Do not for water. It's not that they need a
swamp. In fact, a swamp will kill them. Give them a good
soaking and keep the soul moist occasionally with a good soaking, and I think
they'll be okay, Okay, I do. I water them until it runs
out the bottom and then, you know, and leave him a couple of
days. There's one that was actually pretty tall. It was like two feet
tall or so, and it was right up next to a wall, okay,
at the back of a bed, and I pulled it and I'd dug
around it and everything. I had to cut off a good bit of the
tap root, but it too, is still flexible. And I thought I'd
probably have killed it by cutting the tap root. But well, yeah,
it's a you know, they got You did it earlier in the year and
so they had some time to kind of get in there before it got really
brutal. But you've just given them a good soaking, is the main thing.
That's the main thing, because containers dry out so fast. Hey,
kay, I've got a run for okay, but I hope half a great
day you as well. Thank you very much, our phone number or seven
three two one two fifty eight seventy four. Sharon, You'll be first up
when we come back. It's past all care it's five o'clock something. Well,
it's fifteen til ten here in Texas. But we are listening. We
are talking with you about all kinds of things here on garden Line related to
your garden. And without any further Ado, let's just run right back out
there and talk to Sharon in Westchase. Hello, Sharon, Hi, Skip,
Thanks real quick in this heat, I want to ask about mowing my
yard. It's got about a month's worth of growth on it now, which
means it's about four or five inches high, and I've left it. I've
asked my yard car guy to skip mowing on purpose in this heat. So
how long can I go with this routine? And I just wait until can
I just let it keep growing? It's beautiful, it's green. I'm on
the nitro foss fertilizer schedule, and it's really healthy. It's the only lawn
on the block that's not gone yellow because everybody else our neighborhoods so highly managured.
They just the yard guy just mows of every week even though they don't
need. The grass isn't growing, he just keeps mowing. Okay, So
Mom's the only green yard just about. And can I just continue with this
until it cools off? Yeah, I mean you can have them mow it.
Just keep the mower high. You know, now that you got a
tall lawn, you don't want to cut it way way, way way back.
That's real. Always mows it high. It's the highest level on his
mower. Okay, so I'm the highest, uh you know, I'm this
as high as I can get. There's a direct relation between the heighth your
grass and the depth of the roots. That's just how it works. And
so as you keep it high and it just it creates a more resilient grass
plant. And so some people my mother told me that yea many years ago.
You know, the hide of the blade and correlates to the depth of
the roots. So yeah, yeah, and I've always done that, and
I'm the one that has tried to persuade my neighbors, you know. And
finally we have about a seven yard mow, you know, I mean he
comes and he does seven yards on our block, and everybody's gone to the
heights because of me. So it's still in its heat. I mean,
grass is just dying, right, it is. It is. It's a
tough time, but a good soaking on an infrequent basis is important. Don't
wet it all the time, and don't the main thing on mowing. You
know, mowing regularly creates a very dense lawn. But if you're gonna let
it be high, don't. The worst thing anyone could do is let it
get high and then mow it down low. Let it get high. That's
what I'm asking. Now, how long can I go with it just letting
it continue to grow without? Can I go another few weeks? Well,
I would do some mowing, because what happens is at some point that grass
blade is going to start arching over and going back downward. You know that
with whatever foot? Yeah, right now it blows in the breeze. It's
so pretty. Okay, well it sounds like it sounds like you like it
like it is, So we're gonna leave it down. I mean, what's
gonna happen in the next few weeks. I'm just trying to look ahead it's
somewhere here. We're gonna get some rain and we're going to enter that cooling
season usually comes. Should I ask him to go ahead and mow today?
Hi, mo hig, go ahead and mow it high. It's okay,
mow it high. But when you start getting rain, Sharon, you want
to start mowing it a little lower, a little lower, a little lowering,
until you get it down around the three en Traine. I don't know
where you have it right now, but well, it's the highest that his
mower will go. And it's it's yeah, I don't know how high that
is, but it's just the highest. That's okay to guess high as it'll
go. That's fine, yeah, okay. And because once we get into
fall it cools off and things, it's okay to take it down a little.
We just don't want to get it down like two inches high on Saint
Augustine. That's too low. Don't ever go that low, okay, okay,
So I'll tell him the mode to day. I hate doing this.
I love the look at my grass blowing in the wind. Well, I
mean, if you want to let it go, I mean, let it
go. Just if you're doing you were mentioning you're fertilizing with nitrofiles and it's
getting you know, getting some water out there, I guess. But yeah,
yeah, just you don't want to grass. It's you know, being
pushed to grow and you're not mowing. So you need to keep that in
check. But whether they mow it or not today, that's up to you.
Alrighty okay, all right, thank you. Okay, you're listening to
garden line. Hey, if when I try to when I'm thinking about like
here in town, where can you go to get anything you need for your
garden? I mean anything that is going to be a place called Southwest Fertilizer
down on the southwest side of town. They're out there. We're abissing it
and a Renwick come together. You can go online Southwest Fertilizer dot com.
You can find them there. But I've never seen a selection of herbicides and
secticides and fungicides anywhere as what Bob has there at Southwest. Now, if
you're an organic gardener, they have more organic products than I've seen in any
other location, single location. It's amazing. They've got a long wall of
tools that you need. Do you need multch, do you need heard all
the fertilizer I recommend, and then some the products that control weeds, the
products that you use to build your soil, and molts on top of the
ground, and all of that that's there while you're out there. By the
way, if Bob, if someone hadn't checked it out, I talked to
Bob about getting the soul probe. They will loan it to you to get
out yet to leave it deposit so it doesn't sprout legs and walk away,
but just a deposit. It didn't charge you to use it. Do a
soil test on your soil that will help you fertilize very wisely. Who knows,
maybe you're phosphorus is high, maybe it's low, Maybe potassium's high,
maybe it's low. Find out, do us all tests. Bob's got the
probe to make it where you can do it accurately while you're out there.
Asked to see that kneeling benches that they have that I think are just probably
one of it. If I were to pick the top five in the last
five years my top five favorite garden tools, kneeling benches one of those,
and Bob's got them out there. They've been around since nineteen fifty five Southwest
Fertilizer dot Com. Easy to find everything you need. It's simple, it's
one stop and you're done. Let's go talk to Sheila. Now. Sheila's
out there on the north side of town. Hello, Sheila, Hi,
how are you. I'm well, thanks, I'll have a calling about my
single palms and on my patio and I have three and it's a potty plant.
And I went on in a fertilize and watered the plants and they're yellow
now, the leaves they've still got a little green in them, but it's
more yellow. And I thought, I say, well, why are they
looking like that when my other elevers and yeah, other plants look or are
tolerating the heat. And so I thought maybe ebs and so. But then
I don't want to kill it. So I don't think it's a magnesium deficiency.
Could it? Could it be that the pots are standing too wet,
maybe the drain holes are clogged up, or do you think something like that
could be happening, or maybe over water You gotta check. You gotta check
that because plants do need water in this heat, absolutely they do. But
if you if you submerge those Sego's roots and water, meaning you don't see
the water because it's underground, but in the pot. You know, think
of the pot is a bathtub. If the bathtub fills up, I know
what I'm saying. Think of that pot is a bathtub. If that bathtub
drain is plugged up, then water level just starts coming up from the bottom
and you're not seeing it. It's underground, but you end up with submerged
roots, and that could cause the yellowing. That's one of the main things
that would cause yellowing. Go a sago, all right, I would look
for that. I would look for that. They continue, how off the
sha You know, it depends. It's so varied, Sheila, because some
soils drain well, some soils whole moisture well, the size of the pot
compared to the size of the plant. You got a little bit of pot
and a big plant, you got to water it pretty often. If it's
a big pot, then you don't waters as often. Take your fingers,
dig down, little hand trout, get down there about oh three inches deep
in the pot, and feel the soil. That'll tell the answer. On
the end of our hands, both of our hands. God gave us to
soil moisture sensing devices and those are called fingers. So just get down inter
in a soil and you will know for your pots, your soil, your
plants, all that. You'll know exactly whether you and don't fertilize anymore for
a couple of months. It's okay. It's okay to wait now on it
if you put some down. Here's another thing I go is it's cold hard
here. But when we have a bad winner, it's one of the plants
that can get hammered, and so we don't want to push him into fall
growth. So a lot of nitrogen going into fall makes them less cold hearty,
and we would rather avoid that. So I think you'll be okay with
where you are. All right, Thank you, Thank you for being a
garden line listener and a garden line caller. We appreciate that. Hey,
we're putting another show in the books. I'm going to be back around tomorrow
six am to ten am. We're going to be doing some more garden line
then, so feel free to give us a call. In the meantime,
go online to skip now Gardening with Skip dot com. Gardening with Skip dot
com. That's where you'll find the current lawn care schedule, which has very
recently been updated already, So if you had no copy you looked at,
get you a new one. Take a look at it. We are always
finding ways to make it easier to understand, to make sure we didn't leave
anything out, you know, to do the little edits and things had come
along. After I stared at this for about eight hundred thousand hours, I
began to just my eyes crossed, and I wasn't a good at it or
anymore. It looks good now, good. Check it out