Katie r H Garden Line does not necessarily endorse any of the products or services
advertised on this program. Welcome to Katie r H Garden Line with Skip Richter's
Crazy Trip. Just watch him as so many peas supt crazy gas truble bricking
not a sound. Good morning and welcome to Garden Line. Boy. We're
glad you're listening today, and congratulations you were an early bird. I hope
you got a cup of coffee and at least one eye half open. About
two hours ago I was in that condition. I managed to get it myself
together and here we go. We're going to talk about gardening today. I
know that's surprise, but we're going to talk about what you're interested in too
today and the way we do that is for you to call. All you
have to do is a'll seven to one three two one two fifty eight seventy
four seven one three two one two five eight seven four, and we'll talk
about the things that interest you and excuse me and doing and doing garden a
gardener question and answer. Over a lot of decades now, I've heard a
lot of different questions. But it's interesting how the same types of questions sort
of come to the surface each year. And that makes sense because number one,
it's things are seasonal in the garden. But we have a lot of
new people gardening every year, which I think is a wonderful thing. So
maybe someone's never gardened before, they experience something and they ask the same question
someone earlier had asked. But that's okay, because our goal here is to
help you have a bountiful garden and a beautiful landscape. That's what we're here
about. That's what we're trying to do. So if you've got a question,
just ask it. Let's talk about don't worry about it. If it's
a dumb question or not. I'll worry about dumb answers. That's on me,
okay, So just ask your questions and we'll work through it. I
think it's important because you know, you may think I'm the only one that
has a question, but I guarantee you a lot of other people do.
I was out at the Home and Garden show up in the Cipher area,
which is still going on today by the way up at the Berry Center,
and just talking with a lot of different people that came by, came in
for the presentation, and then came by the booth or the table that I
had, and in visiting with people, I just realized that a lot of
things that you would think, well, you know, they they've worked through
that, or they figured that out, or they've heard that. People don't
always hear. You know. I've had my schedule out now for a good
while, my lawn care schedule, and there's still quite a few folks I
talked to us like they didn't know it was there, and so, wow,
Okay, I thought I talked about it too much, but apparently not
enough. But that schedule is designed to help you have success. And there's
actually two schedules on my website, Gardening with Skip dot com. One of
them is how to take care of your lawn. It's proper mowing schedules in
height, it's the proper watering and certainly proper fertilizing, and it gives organic
and synthetic options and it tells you what to use all the way across the
year. So when do you fertilize with? What is basically what it's about.
The other schedule is about what goes wrong in the lawn weeds, diseases,
and insects, and it tells you when do you expect side web worms
to maybe show up. If they're going to show up this year. They
kind of tend to be a hit and a miss. When does take our
root router brown patch controls? When do they need to be put down to
control those diseases? I cover those sort of things, and certainly with weeds
and weeds are always a challenging question because it's not a simple answer. You
know, people think, well, I'm going to put it something that says
it kills weeds on my weeds, and that's going to kill my weeds.
Well, not necessarily. There's grassy weeds, and there's broad leaf weeds.
There's weeds that are existing, and there's weeds that are not yet emerged from
seed yet. And so you select the product to fit the situation that you
have. But one thing that's true acrossword culture is our number one goal is
cultural management to avoid problems and to build a dense, healthy turf or a
healthy plant. So we don't just have grass that's out there and then we
run around killing whatever the problem is that shows up. What the better approach
is is to how do I grow a dense, healthy turf. That's my
first schedule. That's what's about when you do that to find that problems minimize.
There will still be an insect or disease or a weed that can cause
you problems, but you've cut down a whole lot of those problems. And
I think if I could just convey to you listening that getting a healthy plant
and establishing and maintaining and building a healthy plant is the number one goal that
you have, we would have a lot less problems that we have to deal
with. You don't want to be on a treadmill where every year you're having
to deal with this and that and the other. And a lot of problems
that we have in our lawns and landscapes are caused by weak plants. They're
caused by growing conditions that the plants are not healthy and strong. For example,
lawns last year went through one heck of a hot, dry summer,
lots of stress from that. I would expect take all root rot to be
much worse this year because it's an opportunist opportunist that really gets the upper hand
when a law is stressed. Our oaks went through a very dry, hot,
stressful time. I would expect hypoxylin canker for some of you that have
oaks, especially those of you with property outside in the countryside outside of town.
I would expect to see a lot of that this year because it's an
opportunist and when the tree is stressed, it moves in. And so our
number one goal is to create healthy plants. One of the ways we do
that in our lines, for example, is by providing fertilizer nutrients to sustain
good, healthy growth and density. Nitrovis has something called Superturf. It's their
silver bag nineteen four ten. Those are the three numbers nineteen four ten.
Half the nitrogen in that is going to release slowly over time, and that's
exactly what we would like because we want to feed that grass. Like the
grass takes up nutrients which is a little bit here and there, week by
week, day by day over time. It also has iron. If your
lawn looks a little on the yellowish shide, typically we see sort of patches
in the lawn that are they look like they're yellowing a little bit. That's
our deficiency and Superturf provides four percent iron for uniform growth and excellent color for
it. Now you can buy Superturf all over plantation Ace Hardware out there in
Richmond Rosenberg they carry Superturf I forty five North Area Hiding and Feed. On
Stubner Airline they have Superturf and then Bearings both the Bisonette and Westheimer locations.
Toward the Southwest, Bearings Hardware they have Superturf as well. It's not hard
to find, really easy to find. Well, I'm going to take a
little break here and we'll be back if you'd like to give us call seven
one three two one two K t R H. Welcome back to guarden Line.
Hey, it's good to have you with us today. What are we
going to talk about? I suspect we'll talk a little bit about turf and
weeds as we go through the day. I also think we might even talk
a little bit about trees. It is time we should be thinking about trees,
that's for sure. Vegetable gardens. I don't know. We can talk
about anything you like. Whenever you're looking for the kinds of products that you
hear me talk about on garden Line, I'll make it real easy for you.
Ace Hardware. Ace Hardware there's forty stores all over the Greater Houston area,
so you're going to find a store pretty close to you, if not
right across the street. ACE Hardware makes a point to carry the fertilizers,
the soil products that I talk about on garden Line. This yesterday, I
happened to swing by the Langham Creek ACE Hardware over there in the Cypress area
and had a chance to. I always like to stop in, you know,
just visit with the folks that are sponsors and things. Rick and Lacy
are the new owners over there, and boy, they just have a wonderful
little store. It's what you expect when you walk into an ACE, just
a wide variety of all kinds of things. I was up at Jones Road
recently too, just visiting with them. And when you go into an ACE,
it you find people that can help you, but you find every product
you need. I talk about all these fertilizers, they're there. Do you
need weed and disease and insect control and things, they're there. But so
much more is there. You just have to go in to look around and
see. It really is the place where you get whatever it is you need.
Now. For example, right now is fire ant time. I'm gonna
talk about fire ants a little bit later today, but the ACE has you
covered on all the different products that you would need to manage your fire ants.
Just go to ACE Hardware dot Com find the store locator, and that
makes it really easy to find what you're looking for because ACE is going to
have it. Let's go up to the Woodlands and let's visit this morning with
Bill. Hello, Bill, Oh, good morning, Skip, good morn.
I hope you're having a good day so far. I am so far.
We have a sago palm that has a lot of dead branches, some
branches that are green, and then some branches that are half and half.
And I'm trying to figure out that I can see. I figur were supposed
to cut off the dead ones, but what about the ones that are half
and a half? Yeah, so you want to leave green leaves on the
plant to provide carbohydrates to strengthen the plant and get it going good. If
you've got some other healthy green leaves on it, I'd cut those that are
half and half off because they're unsightly. If you don't have a lot of
other green let's leave them for now, get some new green on them,
and then take them off. Because the leaves, the green leaves fuel the
plant. They fuel growth and health and everything else. So we'd rather leave
what little is there. And so that's kind of how I would make that
decision. Bill. If you've got some green ones and take the old ones
off, Okay, we'll do. Thanks so very much, Hi Bill,
good luck the Woodlands. Appreciate your call very much. By the way,
up in the Woodlands area, I was swinging through across one oh five.
This is north of the Woodlands a little bit, but stumped in A and
A plants and produce, and I always like to stop in there because they
have so much in stock, lots of color, lots of plants and all
the things you want to go with it. They have the products. I
was checking out some of the microlife products they'd gotten in on a shipment up
there. A good selection of those, but they're going to carry a wide
variety of things you hear me talk about here on Guardenline. They got the
nitroposs and Nelson's in microlife. They have airloom soils products for the soil by
the bag. They have Nature's Way resources as well. I mean, it
just goes on and on. If you live up in the Lake Conro area
and you would like to have somebody come in and kind of spruce up the
landscape, little flower bed work and planting and cleaning out and things. Call
A and A and ask them about their landscape crew, you know, say
hey, i'd like to harm to come out and do that. That's what
they do. They're very, very good at it. And it's just another
service that you can get from A and A Plants and Produce on the east
side of Montgomery on Highway one oh five. It's easy, easy, easy
to get by there. I mean seven days a week they're open nine to
five. So even today this afternoon would be a good time to go buy
an A plants. Let's see. I think we'll go out now to Faith
in Port Arthur. Hello Faith, Hello, Good morning Skip. I'm calling
about carbads that has invested in my garden. I don't want to use any
poison that my plants might pick up. I'd really like to use something that
I already have at my house. I thought about bulk balls, but decided
that might be poison. Can you help me, Well, everything in the
right quantity can be a poison. Just to kind of, you know,
clarify on that, even table salt and aspirin as a poison if if you
take the right amount of it, that's our connection is not good. You're
sounding for okay, is this any better? Can you hear me? Oh,
yes, okay, I must have turned my head to the side.
I'm just saying everything just about in nature and life is a poison, even
aspirin and table salt is a poison. I understand your desire not to needlessly
put out chemicals that may have environmental effects to people in the environment. I
don't know a crowd ad control that's labeled, and I'm not going to make
unlabeled recommendations on the air on guard line, and so you know, I
can't say we'll go mix up this concoction and put it in the hole.
They there are things that they will kill crowd ads, but they just it's
a misuse of the product, and it would fall in the category of what
you're thinking when you say the word they're poisons, and so well, stiff,
I was thinking about pepper might be breaking shoulda or just trying something thought
I had hoped that you had heard a remedy such as that. Well,
no, I don't know. I don't in well, okay, I just
want to be careful here. You know, we're broadcasting out in a large
area and making recommendations that are not on the label. It's just not something
that that Well, if that's on something that works, I'll call back and
tell you about it. Okay, you want me to love you well that
that's that's all right. I would let's do this. I would call your
county Extension office. David Oates is out there in the Beaumont Port Arthur area
and he's a horticulturist. I would call him and see if he has some
ideas that would work out for that crowdad control. Okay, I'll do that.
Thank you, you bet, thank you. So just to kind of
be clear on things, the label the label on products is a law.
And misusing a product applying something that doesn't belong uh, you know it's not
labeled for that plant. Uh. There's a reason it's not labeled. And
it may not be that it's going to kill you if you put it on
the plant, but it may be it may be that it poses a human
risk. And and I'm just not gonna go online and say, oh,
I know that's not on the label. Just use this stuff and get rid
of them that way. Uh, it's just not it's not something that I'm
gonna do. Try to stay with the label and there's a reason that the
labels are there and whatnot. I understand the problem with crowded. I used
to tell people, well, you just need to import a bunch of folks
from South Louisiana come over here and and uh graze the ground, graze the
front yard, because we all know we love crowd eds and crowded season.
Unfortunately, those in your yard are not the kind you want to They're not
the size and what not that you want to eat. But it is kind
of a humorous thing. When I was a kid growing up, we would
we would use bacon on a string in little ditches under the roadways and stuff
to bring catch crowdads, to bring them in. But that was more sport
than harvesting food, that's for sure. I mentioned earlier that now's the time
to be thinking about your trees too, and we're going to be getting tree
calls before long, but now's the time people should be thinking about trees.
And here's why we got these spring storms that come through and that can do
damage break limbs. By the time we get the end of the year,
we're in hurricane season and anything you do to strengthen that tree by proper pruning
is important. Affordable tree service, they know how to do things. Martin
spoon More has been doing this for a very long time here in the Greater
Houston area, and Martin stays busy because he does a good job and people
know that. And as a result of you would like to have Martin come
out and do your trees, you need to give him a call, tell
him that you are calling that your guarden line listener. He'll give you kind
of move you up into the front of the line. He does give a
preference to the folks that listen to guarden Line. I appreciate that. And
what I would do is hav him come out for a consultation. A consultation's
one hundred and fifty dollars. He takes a look at everything, sees what's
going on. There may be things you didn't even know to call him about
that he'll see out there. And if you decide to hire him for work,
that one pin fifty goes right into the cost of hiring. So that's
that is just a way to make sure you're serious about it before he comes
out and takes a look. Martin prunes properly. He only prunes when it's
necessary. He doesn't just create hat racks out of your trees that ruins them
permanently, like a lot of people do. You can call Martin at seven
one three, six nine nine twenty six sixty three seven three, six,
nine nine and two six sixty three, or go to his email. It's
afftree Service dot com. Aff tree Service dot com. Take care of those
trees. They are a huge value to your property, and they provide the
shade for that blazing summer heat that's coming. There's just a lot of reasons
to take good care of them. Don't just assume that they're going to be
okay. I suggest that because I've seen a lot of I've seen a lot
of folks I'll drive down the road. I can't help but look, just
being a plant person, I just see trees and just instantly I'm thinking,
Okay, that needs pruning, or that's a bad pruning job, or why
did they plant that tree right there? Or wow, that's a good one.
It look how beautiful it is. Somebody must taken care of it.
And it's just kind of automatically what I do is I'm driving down the road
looking at plants and things, and it is important. It is important to
take the most valuable single plant in your landscape and not take care of it.
It's important to take care of it. That's that's just the way it
is. If you're thinking about putting in a garden this year, or if
you're already working on doing that, you need to consider the products that Nature's
Way provides for enhancing the soil, because the soil is where it all starts.
When you create a soil that is well drained, when you create a
soil that has high levels of organic content, organic matter, the microbial activity.
When you create a soil that has all the nutrients your plant needs,
the plants are going to thrive and you're giving them a head start. You're
setting them up for success. And Nature's Way resources they build that kind of
soil, they make that kind of soil. Listen, John Ferguson's been making
soil for a long long time, basically making compost, taking organic matter,
taking it through the process the proper way, taking the time to do it
right, and that's important. Anybody can pile up a bunch of woodchips,
wait until they turn brown and then sell it. That is not quality compost
or quality molts or any other compost related product that might be out there.
Nature's way provides. Actually, they were the originators of rose soil. They
were originators of the leaf more compost. And now's a good time to put
leaf mold compost out on your yard. If you've got a yard that's kind
of thinning and needs a little boost, put some leaf more compost out.
I was talking to somebody up in Conro or not Conra, Cyprus yesterday and
they had a problem with that. Just theyd overfertilized through the years and just
had grown a lot of runners and it was a thick thatch. And one
of the things I suggested, in addition to air rating is top dressing with
leaf mold compost. Anything you do like that's going to be helpful to the
lawn and help bring it back, and we do need to bring our lawns
back from the stresses that they just went through. Compost has many benefits,
including helping to deter disease problems like brown patch that we might have. Well,
I'm gonna take a little break here. I'm going to pass the baton
over to Nikki for the news. If you'd like to give us a call.
Seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four seven one three two
one two five eight seven four. Welcome back to guarden Line on what is
going to be a beautiful Sunday. I just am, I really am excited
and appreciate the fact that we've had a beautiful sunny weekend, A great weekend
for getting out in gardening. It was rainy last week. I got a
little rain coming back. I want we get out of the weekend. But
wow, this is I love it this way. I hate it the opposite
where you know, it's sunny during the week, but got to go to
work and get things done and then you come home on the weekends and it's
just gone to rain. That's no fun. But anyway, it's been a
great one, so I think that's a wonderful thing. Hey, have you
ever been to Buchanan Plants, Buchenants, Native Plants and the Heights bu Cannan's
Native Plants specializes in natives, and I'm telling you, I've never seen a
selection of natives like Buchanans Plants have. They have a very wide variety of
things all kinds of cool stuff. They even have the little red native columbine.
Did you know that there's a columbine native to Central Texas on the little
creeks and seeps through Central Texas. It grows well in a bright shade and
it recedes, So that's kind of cool. You buy one and you'll see
it again next spring when it comes out with its little bluish green leaves.
Very pretty, very pretty plant. They've got things like cone flower. They
have things like the rude Beekia, for example, the coral berry, lemon
bee, balm, golden rod, greg grey golden rod, actually black eyed.
It's just a wonderful place to shop. There's always something going on cool
at Buchanan's Plants. Right now, vugenbilias and mandavillas are looking awesome, and
I think everybody ought to have a mandavilla on their patio. It is a
vine that is just beautiful. It does well here. Just go by there
and take a look at them. Don't forget. Next Saturday the thirtieth,
at eight thirty am, they're going to have their Easter egg hunt at Buchanan's
Plants on Eleventh Street in the Heights for kids that are ten years old and
under, so make sure and show up for that. Oh. By the
way, they also just got in the first shipment of jungle Jack's Plumeria,
the Hawaiian lay flower plume area. You got to have one of those.
Two. Let's head out to Conro and we're going to talk to Dennis.
Hello, Dennis, how you doing. I'm well, sir, How are
you? I'm all right? All right? How can we help? Well?
I got a weed problem. Help maybe tell me how to kill it.
It's a kind of a slender leaf. The main thing of it.
It grows like one stem that goes straight up and has the little seed black
seat pods that shoot off from the top. Is there anything that kills that?
Or do you have to dig it out? I need to see a
picture of that done us. I can't. There's several weeds that could kind
of fit that description. Uh do what the leaves are are more grass like?
Is that what you're saying? Yeah, it kind of resembles the Saint
Augustine grass. Okay, but it grows very fast and very tall. Yeah.
Let me. I'm gonna put you on hold when we're done here,
and uh get my email from Josh and send me some pictures from you know,
kind of standing up and taking a picture of the lawn, but then
also getting down as close as you can and making sure it's in sharp focus
and I can cover it that way. That way, I'm not sending you
for the wrong product. Okay, all right, if you got you can
get it to me here when the sun comes up a little daylight. If
I can get it done by ten, I'll try to reply to you this
today sounds good. Thank you, all right, thanks a lot. I
appreciate that. Yeah, the weeds a lot of different kinds of weeds,
and it's important to get a good id so that you apply the right product
to control them. And there's a lot of products out there. Each has
its strength. There's no perfect herbicide that kills everything that you wanted to kill
and doesn't hurt anything you don't want it to go. There's no such a
thing as that, but we can definitely direct to the proper ones. By
the way I mentioned fertilizing your lawn, it's also important to make sure your
lawn bank account of nutrients includes the trace minerals that are needed for growth,
that are essential for growth. That's why we put out azmite. Azamite is
a trace mineral supplement mind in Utah that has those minerals that are needed in
tiny amounts, but that are essential. And that's hard for people to get
their head around. You know, it's like, well, if they just
need a little of them, how important can that be? Of what it's
essential. So if you took a plant and you could take some soil and
remove all every molecule of something like selenium or zinc or iron or manganese,
those kind of nutrients, you can remove every molecule of one of those,
the plant couldn't grow because they're essential. So we don't need a lot of
them, but we need them in the soil and azemite. That is exactly
what it's about. You can do it when you're fertilized. Just don't put
them in the same hopper because it's different particle sizes and you wouldn't get an
even spread. So go through the yard with your hopper and your fertilizer and
go through the yard with a hopper of asmite. You can do asimite anytime
a year, but you know, if you're out fertilizing, maybe now would
be a good time to go ahead and get that done. I'm going to
head now out to Rosenberg and we're going to talk to Tommy. Hello Tommy,
Yes, good working shirt. Kind is a new construction home. They
it's looks like some kind of clay. I don't know that the soil is
filter somewhere, but Sarga Saint Augustine sad. Okay, I kind of want
to get your take on new grass. What might be a good starter fertilizer
for it? How long ago was it planted? About a week? About
a week ago? Okay, So the most important thing for you to do
right now is to make sure that it's watered every day with a small amount
of every small amount. You don't have to turn it into a swamp,
but just because it's going to take it a couple of weeks to get some
roots down to a point where it's resilient. More resilient after a week or
every day or a week or so, you can go to a maybe every
other day, but just kind of watch your grass after it has been in
for I would say at least two weeks. Right now, it's still cool
and Saint Augustine is not actively growing. It's growing, but it's it's slowly
waking up kind of like I do. Y. Yeah, and so after
at least two weeks, maybe a three week at this time of year,
you can do your fertilization and whether whatever approach you want, organic or synthetic.
I have them both on my lawn care schedule. Yeah, yeah,
yeah, Okay, Well gardening with skip dot com. That's the website and
they're free to print, download, look at online, and it tells you
exactly what to use. When I would begin with a we're kind of at
a point now where the early greenup with this new lawn. By the time
you're going to start fertilizing, I would just begin using the summer fertilizers that
we have on the schedule, and those would be things that gradually release the
nutrients over time, will really show yeah, better way to go. You're
out there in the Rosenberg area. You know, you've got a hardware stores,
the plantation aces out there in that area, and they're going to carry
those things. So whether it's Nelson's nitroposs or or microlife or whatever, that
you're going to be able to find them right out in your area. A
little bit less on the pond ash. Yeah, it's kind of a quite
a bit of nitrogen percentage wise, very little phosphorus percentage wise the middle number,
and a medium amount of the third number. Okay, we say three
one two four one two. But the slow releases, they you can have
a little higher nitrogen, and that's okay because it's going to take a month
or two or three to have all that released into the soil pressure. Let
me, let me give you a real quick way to know how much to
put it out. Whatever fur measure you buy, Take the first number that's
nitrogen, and divide it into one hundred and that's how many that's how many
pounds for thousand square feet. So like, yeah, So for example,
U Nitrofoss and Nelson's both have a fertilizer that's either nineteen or twenty two percent
nitrogen. So we're going to all that twenty twenty goes into one hundred and
five times. You need five times of either of the five pounds of either
of those fertilizers per thousands plus. That gets you in the ballpark. You
can go a little higher than that with the slow release, and that it'll
be well, that sounds good in terms of herbersidn or pest a sign any
thoughts around those guys, I wouldn't use those right now. Let's get that
grass growing. Some of the products can be stressful to the grass, or
can I give it rooting or other things. I would just hold off.
You've got new sod laid out there. I think you ought to be okay,
sure, all right, Well appreciate it. Yeah, long time whister.
Yeah, I guess I appreciate you. Glad you did. Thanks a
lot, Tommy, appreciate that. We're gonna take a little break here.
Our phone number is seven one three two one two K t R H.
Give us a call, Josh. We'll get you on the board and we'll
talk to you when we come back. Okay, that's enough. I tell
you what. It is a challenge to find a song where you have both
the odling and chicken sounds in the same saw. But we did it here
on garden Line. I was just talking with Tommy and Rosenberg about he just
put in the brand new sowd and I said, well, hold off on
the weed control right now. If you have an established SOD and you've got
weeds in it. Nitrofoss fifteen five to ten, containing the ingredient trimac will
help nail those weeds. You want to wet the wet the weeds, don't.
You don't have to water and soak the lawn. Just wet the foliage
of the weeds. Put the product out. It will soak into the tissues
of those weeds. That trimec product will move in and kill the weeds that
are there now. And then after a day or two, just go ahead
and water it in. Get that fifteen to five to ten down in.
It's kind of a quick release. It's like our early green up. That's
exactly what it is. And it will help kick that lawn off and get
it to a good start. And it's as simple as that. That's one
way to deal with those broad leaved weeds that come in. And you can
find night foss products a lot of different places. They are widely available throughout
the area. For example, you can find them at Enchended Forest down there
in Richmond Rosenberg. You can find them at Growers Outlet up in Willis.
You can find them at RCW Nursery, Tomball Parkway where it comes in to
Beltway eight, and you can find them at Plants for All Seasons. You
know, plants for All Seasons is the Garden Center on Luetta. You probably
have been by there. If not, you need to go by. They've
been around since nineteen seventy three in the Flowerty family. They are incredibly knowledgeable
about what it takes to grow plants successfully. Here. They know the problems,
they know when those problems occur. They know the best plants, and
they sell the best plants. They don't sell you something that isn't going to
grow here. When you go in, you can take a sample, you
can take a picture, you can get help with it, and that alone
is worth the price of admission. As they say, having somebody that knows
what they're talking about that's not going to send you home with something that doesn't
work that is important. You can go to the website Plants for All Seasons
dot com. You can also just give them a call two eight, one,
three, seven six, sixteen forty six. They are loaded up with
color and vegetables and shrubs and rods, everything you might we want on the
plant Right now, you're going to find it. Plants for All Seasons.
They're just north of Luetta off Tombo Parkway to forty nine, So if you're
going north toward Tomball from the Houston when you you exit Luetta crossover Luetta and
they're right there on the right hand side, really easy to get to.
Well, I tell you what we are going to go to visit with Louis
now in West Houston. Hello, Louis good. How are you? I'mll,
sir, I'm will. How are you good? Good? So this
is with their loom soils. Yes, we and you and I were talking
the other day about something going on in the green industry and I appreciate you
calling because I want folks to hear about this and I'll turn it discussion over
to your air. Thank you for the platform for me to inform everybody that
listens to Garden Line. So here's what I wanted to inform everybody. Off
the green industry has landscape supply companies such as I just give you examples and
named CNMLS, the company I worked for Warren's Broken Mulch. There's companies all
over town that sell gravel to the retail market to the listeners. If a
listener or somebody just that doesn't live in the Garden Line goes on Facebook Marketplace
and looks for a deal on an example of the product would be gravel or
sowd and you find a deal that seems too good to be true. And
this is the prime example. Let's say you ordered seven qv cars of black
start gravel. The retail price and the competitive price in the market would be
about fifteen hundred dollars for selling QB yards of that gravel. But you find
this deal on Facebook marketplace and they tell you we will deliver it for three
hundred and twenty dollars to your driveway. It's too good to be true because
it's a total scam. The people you're dealing with are criminals that have defrauded
other people and have stolen their credit card numbers or have done identity theft to
get credit card numbers issued to them with limits, you know, credit card
limits, and they call the landscape supply company, they place the order,
they play with a fraudulent credit card, and the transaction goes through normal and
then the product gets delivered to the homeowner. The homeowner thinks, wow,
I really got a good deal. The product is being delivered by a landscape
supply company, and the owner then pays the camera the criminal through zell,
Vemo, cash app or PayPal or They even say, go to Walmart and
make it pozzit on this, you know, on one of these apps.
And a few days later or a few weeks later, the credit card charge
drops or gets red flagged as fraudulent then drops, and the landscape supply company
is out of the money and out of all the work to source that product,
to send that product to this figtitious criminal customer. So the end user
of the actual product, the gravel or the sod never knew that they were
aiding and supporting a criminal organization. Why this came about? And why why
I found out about this, this this you know fraud. Back in July
of twenty twenty three, I got a phone call from within order. I
thought CNM MOLT was closer to the job site, so I called actually an
emotion. I said, hey, can you deliver this Instead of delivering it
from from sixty miles away, let's go ahead and take it from three miles
away. And she said, no, we've been scammed by these people.
And I started calling around and I found a trend that almost every landscape supply
company had been scammed. Wow. And I started investigating this, and I
figured a lot of things out about the whole fraud, and authorities have not
helped us. In the landscape supply industry, credit card companies can care less.
Zell doesn't care, and so I decided to take it to take a
kind of a step forward and investigate this and try to crack down and try
to prevent this fraud from happening. But it continues to happen, and as
the season starts evolving, then these criminals get more active and people are going
to start, you know, aiding this criminal activity. Well, that's your
advice is good, but if it sounds too good to be true, it
probably isn't true. And that we find out a lot in life. But
the scope of this is pretty large. Though this didn't happen just a few
times, you know, the scope of this is in the hundreds of thousands
of dollars or millions, and that is not an exaggeration. We have personally
as a company been hit by it, and we've probably lost out twenty thousand
dollars. When I spoke to Ashley Cnemoti is of one of the prime examples.
They've lost like fifteen thousand dollars. Other companies have been hit by thirty
thousand dollars and so forth. So yeah, there's a lot of honest sellers
on Facebook Marketplace in this marketing Houston, but there's always that bad apple that
ruts everything out. And just be cautious if you're buying stuff on Facebook marketplace,
be very cautious because there's a lot of criminals that will take advantage of
the situation and we'll defraud us as a landscape of that company. That's that's
good. Well, man, I appreciate you, know, you providing that
information and everybody listening. All you have to do. You hear me talk
about some excellent soil yards, excellent compost providers here throughout the Houston area.
If you see something that looks too good to be true, to just give
them a call and just check in on it, because they're probably going to
use some soil yard, some industry person to try to be part of the
scam. And Luis, I appreciate that. Hey, you and I are
both going to be down at Siena Mulch next Saturday, aren't we. We
will be at CNA Molch next Saturday. It's going to be a total blast.
I know. Actually and Corney have been planning this for quite a while
and They always make it very fun for everybody that attends and visits, So
make sure you know, take some time and go go visit with Siena Mulch,
with all the vendors that are going to be there. I will be
giving up a bunch of stuff away, so you will be giving up sure
it will be, sure, will be Yeah, it's Jay White from Texas
Gardener Magazine will be out there. We're gonna have the OMG baked potato food
truck. That's a good one. By the way. I'll be giving away
stuff good Nelson and heirloom and medina and all kinds of things. But hey,
thanks for calling in. I appreciate that, and I think it's important
that people are made aware of it. So and I appreciate your work.
One more kid. As a kid, I always wanted to learn how to
yodeling, do yodeling, and I can never do it. Yeah, well
now I can do it. Well all right, thanks so much, thank
you, thank you. Take care. Uh yeah, I'll be at Cena
Maltz. Where is Cienamultch For those of you who have been hiding under a
rock, Well it's on FM five twenty one down Roach Sharon Texas, just
just north of Roach Sharon. Here's what you need to do. Go to
Sienna Mulch dot com. Sienna Multch dot com. That's the website. You
can find the phone number, you can find the location of it. Next
Saturday, I'll be there. This will be going on from ten am to
two pm. From ten am to two pm, and I'll be there as
soon as I can get there out of the after the radio show, and
we'll be giving away a lot of cool stuff. So again, I definitely
want to put that Ciena Maltz visit on your calendar. Hey, it's time
for another break. I think we're about to hit the top of the news
and music should start playing here any minute. Now. There we go.
You're listening to Garden Line. And first of all, I want to thank
the folks up at the Cyprus Home and Garden Show for having us up there
yesterday. That was a blast. I always love to get to visit with
listeners eye to eye. Next Saturday is Ciena Moltz. I'll be there from
eleven thirty to one thirty and I'll be giving away samples from ASMI from Nelson,
plant food from heirloom soils from Medina. We've got a lot of good
stuff to provide for you out there. We'll be there to your gardening questions
too. As in all appearances, you can bring samples, you can bring
pictures. I don't know. Think of me as a statue of liberty.
Bring me. You're tired, you're sick, you're huddled. Your disease,
your insect infested masses are very good. Yearning to breathe free, very good.
That was almost poetic. Pikiladi named Emma Lazareth came up with that.
Katie r H Garden Line does not necessarily endorse any of the products or services
advertised on this program. Welcome to Katie r H Garden Line with Skip Richter.
It's just watching. As in the thumbs taking not a sign. Welcome
to guard Line. Hey, it's good to have you listening today. I'm
happy to tell you that we are going to help you have a more bountiful
garden and a more beautiful landscape if you just follow with us and make some
notes. You've heard me say this before. There's no such thing as a
brown thumb. There's an uninformed thumb, and we are informing thumbs all over
the Greater Houston area this morning, so that you can have success. It's
just a matter of doing the right things. The reason Grandma seemed to have
a green thumb and everything she touched grew, I wasn't any magic. It
was just Grandma was doing things that plants like her to do. She was
taking care of them in ways they like to be taken care of, and
so on. And you can do that same thing yourself. Out in the
landscapes, our warm season weeds are starting to germinate and we are looking at
future weed issues in your lawn. One thing that's a problem with this is
with the warm season weeds is that by the time they show up big enough
to whear, oh I got a weed problem, it is too hot to
put out most of the broad leaf post emergent weed control products. So yeah,
we have something that will kill that weed, but it will also really
hurt your Saint Augustine and the temperatures that are of that period of time.
So it's better to just prevent them in the first place, and barricade from
nitrofoss is a product for doing just that. Barricade controls broad leaf weeds,
it also controls grassy weeds. When I say controls, I mean prevents them.
It's a pre emergent before the weeds emerge. So you're putting barricade down
not because you see weeds, but because you know they're coming. And I'm
telling you they're coming. We have two big seasons here, warm season,
cool season. There's a set of weeds for each one. Now you can
find barricade. It's just available all over allspa Ace in the Woodland carries barricade.
You can find it at Plants for all seasons on just northwest on Tomball
Parkway area. You heard me talk about that a minute ago. And out
in Brennam Plants and things is another place where you can get barricade and other
nitrofoss products. Make sure to follow the label watered in with just a little
bit of water to move it into the soil where it does its work.
That is a very important step when you're going to use a product like that.
I was shopping around for some different kinds of plants that you know,
there's always a new plant that I don't have and that I want. Salvia
is my favorite genera of plants, and it's hard for a horticulturists to pick
a favorite plant, and so I decided to just pick a favorite genera and
that's Salvius. I just love them. Salvias. Some attract hummingbirds, Salvias
can attract pollinators. Salvias go through our heat and laugh at the humidity of
the Southeast Texas. They just have a lot of wonderful features. Or Salvia
is the get up chest high. There's salvias that stay down low, low,
and it just it just gives you a lot of options. And that's
one reason why I like those. Savvia ger Nitka is one of my favorite.
Is it gets taller and it typically is going to have purple flowers or
a bluish flower. I bought one the other day that had a little bit
of a kind of a fishia tint on the end of the purple flowers,
kind of different. Hummingbirds love those. They'll put up with a little bit
of shade. That's good. A bright shade, they'll put up with a
little bit. And most flowering plants don't like to be put in the shade.
They want sun to get the carbohydrates to make the flowers. Best.
One that you might want to consider, and where do you get these kinds
of things. Well, they're available at our home local mom and pop if
you want to put it that way. Garden centers out in Kingwood. There's
the Warren's Garden Center, There's Kingwood Garden Center. And by the way,
Warrens in Kingwood have dropped their prices and you need to check it out very
they have really dropped their prices on a lot of things. They're loaded with
bougainvillias. You can get salvia's out there too. Of course, they have
those herbs and vegetables and so on. By the way, if you're going
to plant quite a few vegetables, you got to just buy a flat because
you get an extra discount when you buy a flat of eighteen plants, and
you can mix and match. So maybe you have an egg plant, some
peppers, some tomatoes. You see what I'm saying. You can mix and
match to get those eighteen and get that extra discount. Really beautiful, beautiful
things include Hollywood hibiscus, mendavillas. They have all kinds of color like kalladiums
for the shade at Warren's and Kimwall Garden Center out there in Kingwood. Make
your place burst with color this summer. That's something we should be trying to
do, and we have plants that can take us into the summer. We're
going to head out to Katie and talk to Sean. Hello, Sean,
Hey, good morning, Skip. How you doing today? I'm well,
thank you. So I have San Augustine here and Katie ticks is. I
had actually quite a bit weed on it and I threw down the we donator
from Nelson Nelson. I do have a question though, is there any overseating
I can do to prevent weed next time? What can I do to choke
off the weeds? Yeah? Yeah, you can put out a pre emergent
herbicide ahead of the weeds sprouting season. If you go to my website gardening
with Skip dot com Gardening with Skip dot Com, I've got my two lawn
care schedules on there and on the on the one that deals with pests,
diseases, and weeds. What you'll see is that you put a pre emergent
out for weeds in October, maybe early November, but I would prefer to
get it out in October, and then you do that again in late January
through February and the fall all application is for all the cool season weeds.
That's what you're seeing right now in your yard. They're still around, but
they're about to go out. And then the spring one we put down for
warm season weeds. Now, if you haven't applied it yet, you can
still apply a pre emergent herbicide to your lawns. If you did it in
the spring, don't do it again, but you can go ahead and do
that now to prevent the weeds that are going to be coming up. Okay,
but is there any like like a grass seeds I can oh, I
mixed it with sant augustine. You know it's kind of centerpede or tall fisty
because I'm trying to have more denser grass. Uh. And what do you
have in your lawn right now? What kind of grass? Augustine Augustine?
Yeah? I would you could plug in Saint Augustine, but there's not a
seeded version, and I wouldn't recommend, Like fescue does not do well here,
centipede, I don't think you're going to be happy with the results of
it in a lawn here that you can plant that one from seed, but
I wouldn't recommend mixing it into your Saint Augustine. Okay, so just stick
with it, Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine, and use my other schedule that
tells you about fertilizing, and if you will mow it regularly, and if
you will just continue to provide a release of nutrients through through the season,
you can get that thing back in shape by the end of this season,
for sure. Even if there's sprigs of grass within a foot of each other,
you can probably fill it in all the way by midsummer. Okay,
we'll do that. I'll print out the paper and stick it on my fridge.
Thank you. Good luck with that, you bet, thank you,
and you're out there. And Katie, by the way, all the stuff
that's in my schedule is available at your Katie as hardware. Out there,
they carry all of these things I'm talking about. All right, Yes,
that's where I go. A right, good, thank you, appreciate that
time for a little break. We'll be right back the number seven one three
two one two, Katie. Alright, if you've got a question, welcome
back to the garden line on a Sunday that is going to turn out to
be absolutely gorgeous. We still look outside, it's dark, by the way,
if your neighbor's lights aren't on. Go bang on the door, tell
them they're missing garden Line. They will rise up and call you blessed someday,
maybe not this morning. They call you something else this morning. For
those of you up in the Navisota College Station area, all through a Brian,
all through that region up there, we're talking about towns like Rones,
Prairie, Anderson's bead Eyes. I oh lah, Yes, there is a
town called i Ola, Schiro and Richards. You have a hometown feed store
and it's called Grimes County Feet for those in the neighborhoods of King Oaks and
mire Woods. By the way, I loved I've driven through your neighborhood.
I love that place out there. This is your hometown feed store and they
carry the fertilizers I talk about on garden Line. You're going to find those
brands there. You can also find seeds and tools and sprayers and pest control
things for your lawn and other things. Grimes County Feed is just a one
stop shop. Of course, they have quality feeds. That's a whole nother
thing. For those of you who live out in the country and you have
a pond, they have the supplies for taking care of your pond. They
also stock fish about twice a quarter. I believe you just call them up
and ask about that, but they they're involved in making that available. So
if you'd like to stock your pond Grimes County Feed, where are they?
Well, they're on State Highway thirty, Carlos, Texas, two miles west
of two forty four. State Highway thirty, Carlos, two miles west of
two forty four. Stop by, say hello to the roy family, and
I think you will find out why I like Grimes County Feed so much when
you go and visit, see the way you're treated, see the products you
can get there. We're going to go out to the heights now and talk
to Steve. Hello, Steve stay Skift. Two questions. You were talking
about this new generation nugenics or something yesterday that's kind of like specially made for
transplant stuff. Yeah, what Genesis. Go ahead, It's called Nelson's Fertilizer
produces Genesis. Okay, it's Genesis by Nelson. And where's the closest place
I can get that? Do they have that over there on Eleventh Street,
like at B Cannons or something or you know? Yeah, I would call
them and see they probably carry I can't remember, you know, having the
last time I was at no the cannon's checking for that particular one. Uh.
The next thing I would probably do would be to, you know,
find your local ACE Hardware store by going to Acehardware dot Com, go to
that store locator and see, okay, so has it, and I guess,
yeah, usually they carry the fertilizers that I talk about here on Guardline.
And what about I guess And if they don't have it, I guess
Southwest for a lot of what habits for sure? Huh you think yes,
yes, and that it's always worth driving over to Southwest fertilizer. Uh.
So, okay, it's a little out of a drive for you, but
not not too bad. No, it's not that bad. In my second
question, I had some twenty gallon containers, but I had some papaya plants.
In the papaya they they they froze, they're dead, but in their
twenty gallon containers. And in those containers, I mean, I've got a's
am I and uh, all that stuff that you advertise on the on on
the radio, you know the Macro you know Macro fun guy and all this
stuff Okay, in those containers, the papaya plants are dead, but I've
got mushrooms growing up in those containers. Is that a bad sign? Can
I still use that dirt for something else? Yes? Those are not plant
killing mushrooms that you're seeing. Uh okay, So that's that's organic matter decomposing
mushrooms that are popping up. Very good, Thank you so much. Just
like the forest floor, we got mushrooms when we got good soil health going
on too. Well. So that's so that's actually a good sign. Well
yeah, well it is because it shows that you have organic matter, and
fungi are part of turning organic matter back into soil. Okay, all right,
very good, Thank you so much. You bet, thank you okay,
man, appreciate that a lot. I know you love the sound of
birds in your landscape as I do. But I'm telling you right now is
nesting season and it's important to put feeders out. You know, wildbirds has
their nesting superblend. It's got high protein, all kinds of things like dried
mealworms and sunflower chips, peanuts, tree nuts, all kinds of things that
are important because you need a high protein feed to fuel those birds. Those
birds also are capturing caterpillars in your garden and taking them back. That caterpillar
is a number one you know pest that birds are grabbing at this time of
the year to feed their young. So grab some nesting super blend to provide
that. If you don't have feeders, check out wildbirds. They have awesome
feeders. I'd highly recommend their squirrel excluding feeder. That's one I have that
it works well, very very well, and you're going to find everything at
Waldbirds. It's time where ruby throated at hummingbirds are coming through on their way
north. You want to get your feeders out for them as well. So
cool watching those things and their antics as they fly around. You can get
them right up to the window with a good feeder. Wildbird's Unlimited WBU dot
Com, WBU dot com, Forward slash Houston WBU dot Com Forward Slash Houston
find the wildbirds near you. That would be the way to go about it.
I've kind of grown into the bird attracting and you know, putting that
as part of my landscape these last few years. I'm starting to learn about
different kinds of birds and things. But I just enjoy going out in the
morning and listening to the songs. I mean that is that's a beautiful and
enjoyable thing. When was the last time you were down in Rosenberg at in
Chenna Gardens? In Chenna Gardens is I don't know how to say it other
than it is a destination and people was out there a while back and visiting.
People from Austin had driven over to enchanted Gardens because they know that kind
of play. They loved to go out and shop like that. I call
that horticulture tourism, but it's that kind of place. I could sit here
and name every plant that they have, but basically just let me say every
plant. I mean, do you want roses or flowers, or vegetables or
shrubs, just on and on and on down the line. They've got it
all. They have knowledgeable staff that's important. And it's just a nice,
wide, spread out, open, beautiful place to go visit. They're going
to have the products you need to take home member brown stuff prior to putting
that green stuff you're buying in the soil. They'll helpe you do that.
They know how to do that. They're open today from ten am to four
pm, normally only Monday through Saturday. Eight to five today ten am to
four pm, So this afternoon be a great time to get out to Enchanted
Gardens now. They're on FM three fifty nine on the Katie fullsher side of
Richmond. Here's the website, Enchanted Gardens Richmond dot com. Sign up for
their newsletter. It is very informative, very informative. You want to get
that Enchanted Gardens Richmond dot com. You're listening to Gardenline. Our phone number
is seven one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two
Poe two fifty eight seventy four. Back at my house this as soon as
I head back there and I'm all done with the radio. I have a
drainage. I have a drainage problem. Had a drainage problem in the front
beds and when it rained just the way the driveway slopes, it just would
fill those beds with water and they'd sit there a long time, because yes,
I have a clay soil, and I put in a little underground drainage
pipe to get that extra water out of there, and it's working really well.
And it just reminded me the folks at Peerscapes. They do work like
that, and they do it. Mine was just a simple little do it
yourself drain. But sometimes you've got to go quite a distance from the low
spot to where the water gets dumped, and you may have to put in
a sump pump or something out there to get that water out. But I'm
telling you, when you get excess water out, it opens the door to
planting a lot of things. Now, Pierscapes they can do anything. Go
to their website and look at some of the really cool upscale stuff that they've
done. They can do that kind of thing at any home. At your
house, pierscapes dot com, pierscapes dot com, spring us here. Don't
put up with a gloomy landscape. Let peer Scapes come in and really turn
it into a showplace. Two eight one three seven zero five zero six zero
two eight one fifty sixty. That's how you get a hold of them,
and I encourage you to do that. They stay busy because they do good
work, but boy, can they ever transform a place. You're listening to
garden Line and our phone number is seven one three two one two fifty eight
seventy four seven one three two one two five eight seven four. Just visiting
with some of the folks that have called in this morning. You know,
the the microbes in the soil, the microbes that are in We were just
talking about the old soil that the mushrooms are coming up out of. Microbes
are what makes they rule the world. They really do that that's a topic
for another day, but they run everything. They work with plant roots,
the good microbes to enhance that plant, to make the They actually there are
a fungi that live with the root and reach out and bring nutrients from way
out past what the root can get. They bring it back to the root
form. There are microbes that help plants become more disease resistant. There are
microbes that protect the plant against the tack and root rots and things and microlife
fertilizer, like the name implies, that's what it's about, the microbial life
of the soil. And whether you buy their sixty four the green bag.
It's loaded with all kinds, just dozens of different species of beneficial microbes,
and the sixty four is a perfect blend for fertilizing your lawn. It's a
three to one to two ratio. It's going to release, not super slow
release, but it's going to release some immediately and it takes a little while
for it all to go out, which is good. We want to gradually
open it up over time. Get their hemates. Plus, so that's the
purple bag. That one is another thing that's going to help your soil structure,
which means that heavy clay we always gribe about roots and oxygen go deeper
and deeper as you improve the structure and microlife he makes plus I can do
that. Plus again, it adds micro isilo FUNCHI and a central MicroB swing.
You put it out there. That's important. Let's go now out to
Jeff in Spring Branch, Hell. Hello, Jeff, Hey, Skip,
Hey, appreciate you taking my call. Man, first time I've been able
to call in ask you a question. I'm excited to hear what you have
to say. All right, let's go, let's do it good. All
right. I have a Zoijah that I've had in my front and back lawn
for now going on about six years. And this fall and winter my backyard
took a beating. I was building a project back there and walking on it
a lot more than I generally do. And it's not coming back nearly like
my front yard, which I expected, you know, a little bit slower.
What advice can you give me to kind of help get that going back
there and catch up maybe you and I'm just got FYI got about one minute
before I have a heartbreak from the news. So here's where's the fast one.
Go to my long care schedu gardening with skip dot com and look at
it. I've got everything lined up there. Your lawn needs warm temperatures,
and your lawn needs a good fertilization, and you can find the fertilizer on
the schedule. But our grasses wake up slow, our southern turf grasses,
and so sometime an area is a little shadier, may stay a little bit
cooler or but whatever reason, mowing properly and getting that nutrient out I think
is the best thing. After you do that, if you start to see
problems, you can call back, you can give us a send me a
picture and let's look at it. But right now, I think what you're
seeing is just a slowly waking up lawn and the nutrients of little warming temperatures
what it needs. All right, gotcha, all right, all right,
thank you, Jeff, Thanks jam Sorry we ran up. Yeah, yes,
patients, that's it. We're going to take a break time for Nicky
in the news. For us, you are first up when we come back
from break. Welcome back to the guard Line. Good to have you with
us today. If you would like to give us a call seven one three
two one two five eight seven four. For those of you up in the
Magnolia area, we're talking about SM twenty nine seventy eight. It's just real
close, just minutes away from Highway two forty nine Grand Parkway. All of
that. Well Spring Creek Feed Center is your hometown feed store and they carry
the products I talk about on garden Line. If you need the fertilizers and
it is time now to be fertilizing your lawn, stop by there. Check
it out. You're going to find not only fertilizers, but you'll find the
herbicides, insecticides, the fungicide. They have organic products, they have synthetic
products. Friendly, courteous staff are going to greet you. That's the experience
I've had going in there and uh, you know, but they didn't know
me from out. I'm walking in first few times it went in. So
there we are there. I can tell you that I always like to do
that with a new sponsor, just kind of go in as a just as
a person off the street. I guess coming in and see how they treat
you, and I can guarantee you they do that. Did they do treat
you well there at Spring Creek Feed? You know it? Just write this
down FM twenty nine seventy eight in Magnolia Spring Creek Feed. Go buy and
see them. If you are in FFA or four h if you're from the
if you've been in the military, or a senior citizen, there's discounts for
you. And if they don't have something, they can special order it,
which is also a very nice add on because a lot of times there's new
products coming out and want them. They'll be happy to see if they can
get that for you. We're going to go now to the galleria and talk
to Forest. Hello, Forest, Ay, good morning. Skip over the
years I've been buying peppermint peach trees from RCW Nurseries. Yeah, and this
this year, for whatever reason, my peppermint peaches didn't blue them out first.
Normally they put on these this spectacular blooms, but this year it was
just leave that came out. Do you have any idea know why that happened?
So, did you get zero blooms or just not as many, just
not as many. I mean one tree gave me some blooms, but the
other three trees that I have gave me zero blooms. Well, if a
peach tree doesn't bloom, either it's not getting enough sunlight, which I doubt
is the case for years, because they need sunlight to produce blooms, or
I don't know enough. See I said ore, and I can't think of
an ore. If a peach tree is too high chill and we don't get
enough chilling hours in a particular location, what you see is not a lack
of blooms necessarily, but it's a lack of the buds from the leaves and
shoot buds coming out. And you're describing it like those have come out just
fine, It's just no blooms on it, right, Yeah, I mean
I normally get these really spectacular shows every year, and I love these trees.
I can if you can't think of anything that you've done different around the
tree, I'm a little flummoxed by why that would be. The bloom buds
are set in late summer and an early early fall for next for the next
year, So if you go back to last Oh, I don't know,
let's say August September, especially that time of the year. If something really
stressed the tree, perhaps the buds didn't get set. But other than the
two things, maybe just thinking out loud here, maybe the drought had something
to do with it last year. Well, I did water regularly. But
the other thing is that I've never pruned any of these, you know,
peppermint, peach, flowering peach trees. Is that something I should be doing,
well, just just for shaping as you want, you know, if
you may, you probably don't want low hanging limbs, you thinning them out
just a little bit to kind of open it up just a little bit.
It's not you're not growing it for edible fruit. So we don't go with
traditional peach tree pruning on any ornamental peach like bonanza or peppermint, any of
those. Yeah, okay, all right, thanks sir, all right,
you bet, thank you for the question. That is very I'm gonna have
to think on that one. That's very peculiar. If you're doing color on
your patio container color, and I hope you are, because that is a
fast, easy way to get beauty and to really make things look nice.
Jungle Land is distributed by Nitrofoss. Jungle Land is a potting potting soil,
and there's an outdoor version called it's called flour and Vegetable, but it should
be also called flour, vegetable and herb because you can plant anything in it.
The indoor version has water saving crystals. It's jungle land water saving potting
soil. Both of those are great, they work well, and they're easy
to find. Nitro Fuss jungle Land, you're going to find them at a
place like in Chinnet Gardens down in the Richmond Rosenberg area. Shades of Texas
up in the Woodlands are going to carry that as well. How about Fishers
Hardware, both the one on Southmore and the one on Broadway Street we're talking
in southeaston Laport area. All of those are going to have the jungle Land
product available. Let's go now to Spring and we're going to talk to James.
Hello, James, good morning. How are you doing this morning.
I'm well, got a question, got a question for you. My daughter
lives in Woodville and she has a pastor and she's having a problem with bull
netals trying to trying to take over what kind of treatment would you recommend?
Also, would the treatment be safe for like livestock, cattle, pigs,
and sheep you know that roams in that area. Okay, is this is
this a sandy soil or do you do you know? I have no idea.
Okay, whatever soilt will be around Woodville when in the Woodville area?
Right, So when you see these netles, are they very tall with big
white flowers on top? Or are they smaller with little yellowish flowers? They
a little smaller ones and not the real tall like like a milk weed.
Yeah, nothing like that. They kind of like spread out. Yeah,
you're gonna you're going to need to use a post emergent broad leaf herbicide in
it and something that has the two four D ingredient two four D D is
and dog h that there are a lot of pasture versions of that that you
can use. Another thing that she could do is call her a county extension
office and speak to the ag agent about, you know, the products that
they would recommend for that area for the bull nettles. I'm not a pasture
specialist, but I do know that it's going to take a broadly post emergent
and two four d has kind of been a standard, but it won't hurt
the grass and whatnot. It'd be better to buy one labeled for the past.
Sure though, Okay, okay, I appreciate that it was they take
it over, but they Oh my gosh. Listen, when I was a
kid growing up, I used to move irrigation pipe and peanut fields. Was
a laborer. And when you go running barefoot through a peanut field carrying irrigation
pipe, your your foot pops through a bull netal. I'd rather step in
a bet of fire ants. To be honest, It's all right, James,
we'll go appreciate you bet. Good luck with that, oh bull netal.
You know you can eat the seeds of those. My mom told me
that. She said when she was a kid, they would. I don't
know how they got them. I mean, I guess a little flyers or
something, get them out of there, get it from the bull But the
dried seeds, it's just like eating sunflower seeds or something like that. They
would eat those so interesting. Can't beat them? Eat them? How about
that? That's good? I like that. We can do that for weeds.
Do you know you can eat chick weed? You can? You can
eat dandelion greens. Yes, you can do that. There's a lot of
weeds that are edible out there. Now, edible and palatable are two different
things. So I'm not saying don't plant greens in your vegetable garden, just
eat weeds grazier lawn. But you can do that, and there's folks that
are very knowledgeable about that. The idea of eating native plants that are growing
all around, or just it's really cool. Maybe I'll talk about that a
little bit when I come back. Have you been out to mos Nursery recently?
Because Moss has all kinds of stock, They're always getting shipments. Every
time I turn around, I'm looking at things going on there. There is
a new shipment of stuff coming in. If you go to their social media
like Facebook or Instagram, they have a little video where they're walking through the
nursery and you can see what I'm talking about. Acres of wonderful stuff around
every corner, more plants on the ground, hanging on shelves. Moss Nursery
is always going to be a place to get things. Chinese, French.
My favorite spring bloomer Texas Mountain Laurel. Another spring bloomer vegetables, herbs,
cactus. They have very good cactus and succulent, very good houseplants. You
just got to go. Moss Nursery is always a place where something is beautiful,
if something is happening, and those plants when you bring them home,
you're gonna have success with them. And I just always love to go.
Buy moss by the way, m Aas Nursery dot com, Moss Nursery dot
com. We're gonna take a little break. We'll be right back. I
bet you did not know the beach boys sang about vegetables. Think about cars
and girls and all kinds of things. But I bet you didn't know they
sang about vegetables. But yes they do. So there I go. I
work long and hard, step late at night to find songs that you haven't
heard four or that maybe you never want to hear again. In some cases,
welcome back to garden line seven to one three two one two five age
seven four seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. If you've
got a question about anything that you want to grow or do, we're happy.
We'll be happy to do that for sure. Landscaper's pride is it's a
company that transforms organic materials into plant growing soils, composts, mulches, all
kinds of quality things like. They have twenty seven different bag products available.
And Landscaper's Pride is a regional company here local to US that produces that and
the products are excellent. They are absolutely excellent. You can go online to
Landscaperspride dot comy you and find out more about them all these different products,
but I just want to tell you about a couple of them right now.
Premium Potting Soil is a compost rich spagnum based all purpose potting soil. It's
great whether you're using it indoors for your houseplants or outdoors on your patioplanters.
They put some pearlide in that that keeps it loose and well drained, and
they put some color Star which is a slow release fertilizer that feeds up to
three months, so your roots are gonna thrive, and when roots thrive,
the plants thrive. They also have pot Dirt which is an OMRI certified that's
the organization that certifies organic OMNI certified organic soil. Now, if you are
wanting to get some really quick results on your flowering plants. The pot dirt
is a good choice and here's why. It's packed with nutrients like worm castings.
It also has sand and vermiculite which helps drainage and more things than just
that. You want to revamp an annual bed do a seasonal color change from
your cool season color to your warm season color. Well, pot dirt is
a dirt for you. Go to Landscaperspride dot com. You're gonna find out
a lot about all of their products and also weahing buy them and they are
white available here in the Greater Houston area. I want to mention something the
Organic Horticulture benefits Alliance OBA. We call that OBA OHBA. They're going to
have their Soil Science Conference coming up April third and fourth. That's Wednesday and
Thursday, April third and fourth. It's at the United Way. Most OBA
meetings are there at the United Way on the first day and then they're going
up to Nature's Way Resources for the second day. Now, this event is
they bring in speakers that are highly trained, well respected in the industry.
Doctor Tom Dykstra is going to be the first speaker on the first day that's
April third, and he's going to talk about using bricks instruments to measure results.
What does that mean? Well, bricks measures like essentially the sugar content.
Just put it simply. So, if you're like a great grower and
you're trying to decide when it's time to harvest, they go out and squeeze
some juice and they say, oh, this is a time to harvest.
Well, bricks also is a sign of things going on inside of your plant
and plant health. And so by understanding this along with the microbe activity,
and doctor Adam Cobb, by the way, is going to be talking about
the latest in soil biology and microbes, you can have healthier plants. Now
day two April fourth, they're going to be up at Nature's Way. They're
going to do a little tour there and then they're going to have a half
day hands on workshop on how to learn to take measurements with a bricks instrument.
If you want more information, go to OBA online, ohbaonline dot org,
forward slash register. When you get to OBA, you'll see the events
coming up. And I've never been to an OBO event that I didn't learn
something. In fact, often a lot and found the speakers to be excellent.
I would recommend it. We're going to go to Clear Lake, Texas
and talk to Don. Hello, Don, Hey, how you doing.
I'm well, sir, How can I help? Well? I'm interested in
are wanting to plant this with sterea on the outside of the house directly in
the ground, And I was just wondering, what are the pitfalls of that?
How successful is it? Is it difficult? What do I have to
do? Yeah, there's different kinds of hysteria that you can plant in general.
There's one that's kind of the flowers you're blood red, and it is
it's a little easier to manage in terms of its growth rate. The typical
blue wisterias that look like clusters of grapes that you see. They're pretty vigorous,
and so you're going to need a good strong trellis to hold them,
or an arbor if you want to go that route, and you're going to
need to prune them to keep them in within the where you want them to
grow, because they are a vigorous viner. I've seen people put them on
a steak out in the yard and train it up the steak and then just
let the branch's arch back down toward the ground and sort of create a shrub
out of it, but that's taking quite a bit of care to keep it
like that. So those would be your options for wisteria, okay. And
then is it picky about the soil here? Do I have to mix anything
into the ground or just put it just in a natural soil? I think
it's always a good idea to mix some quality soil amendment into the ground.
But when you do that, mix it into the whole area around where this
plant is, and then dig the hole, put the plant in the hole,
and refill it with that blend that you dug out to make the hole.
A lot of people want to dig a hole in a clay soil and
throw compost on the bottom, and that clay soil just becomes an underground bathtub
and the compost is decomposing without oxygen because it's filling up with water. And
that is so like, how big of an area would I have to dig
up? You don't have, you know, there's not like X feet.
But if you could give that wisteria about three feet in all directions or four
feet in all directions, that would be great. If if for whatever reason
you can't do that, just do what you can do okay, all right,
well, thank you, all right, good luck with that, all
right, Thank you boys. By bye. Beautiful plant, very beautiful plant
whenever you plant. To talking about planning, that was steering a steak,
reminding me of planting trees. And by the way, if you if you
want to plant a tree, you know the best time is forty years ago.
Second best times today. You want to do it before summer if possible,
because it's just easier on the tree to do that. And you're going
to need to steak the tree initially because winds will come and move it,
bend it over in things you don't want that. Well. Three sixty tree
stabilizers a brand new product on the market, and it is the way to
go the old way. We had to buy fifty feet a wire, We
had to put steaks in the ground, and we had to have sections of
hose to go around the branch slip over the wire so it doesn't cut into
the tree. Forget all that. You just put a iron steak in the
ground. That's the simplest, easiest way to do it. And the three
sixty stabilizer can attach to an iron steak or any kind of steak and It
grabs the trunk and holds it loosely, so the trunk can move, which
builds trunk strength. That's very important for that. You can find them all
over the place. Down in Alvin Jorges Hidden Gardens carries them. Southwest Fertilizer
Southwest Houston carries them. Plants for all seasons, Buchanans, Arbrogate RCW.
Those are just some of the places where you can get the three sixty tree
stabilizer. They last a very long time. They you know, it's not
something that next year you got to buy a new one. Like a lot
of products are made cheap, this one is not. It holds firmly.
You can do it from you know, one stabilizer holding the tree, or
you can put two of them at right angles to each other. Then which
way north, south, east, west that have beens or the wind blows,
it's going to hold that tree in its spot. But always remember on
these let the trunks move a little bit in the wind, just a little
bit. That helps strengthen the trunk. That's really important. Well, I
what have you been talking about that? I've been wanting to talk about fire
ants. Maybe when I come back, I'll just go into a little bit
on fire ants. I think that would be a good thing. It is
fire ant management season, that is for sure, and we have some great
suggestions for how to manage those in your yard. Fire Ants are a very
interesting creature that came here long time ago. I believe it was in the
fifties that they arrived here. But anyway, they came in from ships.
The ships will load up like soil in the bottom that they call ballast,
and that way, when they're not weighted down with cargo and stuff, that
soil helped stabilize the ship. And they go to South America, load up
with some ballast, come here to the ports in America on the Gulf Coast
and empty some of that ballast out. And guess what came with the ballast,
Well, the ballast soil at fire it's in it. And then they
spread from there and the rest is history. As they say, well,
let's talk about how to manage those when we come back. Don't forget.
I'm going to be at Ciena Moltch next Saturday. I'll be there from eleven
thirty to one thirty. I'll be answering your gardening questions and giving away free
products from Nelson plant food and heirloom soils and medina. By the way,
Andy chid Ester, anybody who's heart Andy knows that is a great lady to
listen to. She's going to be there as well. Let's see an amultch
on Saturday, March thirtieth. KTRH Garden Line does not necessarily endorse any of
the products or services advertised on this program. Welcome to KTRH Garden Line.
With Skiff Richter's so crazy gas trip. Just watch him as gas us so
many supposing gas dogs back together. Not a sign gas Welcome back to the
Garden Line. Guess what it is. The light has come on outside.
We don't have direct sun right now, but we sure do have a nice
bright light appearing. We get outside, do a little bit of morning lawn
chores if you got some. If not, this afternoon would be a good
time to get out and do that as well. You're listening to Garden Line.
The phone number is seven one three two one two five eight seven four
seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. I was talking about
fire ants going into break and I'm just going to use a little segment here
to talk about fire ants that is a problem that a lot of people have
to deal with, and they are they hurt when you step into a fireant
mound. You know why they're called fire ants. They really sting. One
time, I was in Louisiana in a peach orchard doing some pruning. So
I was looking up and suddenly I found hundreds of ants biting me from the
waist down. And let's just say that is not a place for fire ants
to be. Now. By the time I realized what was going on,
pants are coming off, and all kinds of things were going on out there,
and so modesty somewhat gives way to survival in those situations. Some of
you have been in such a situation where you stepped in firence before. Here's
the thing about fire ants. If you just use individual mound treatments to control
fire ants, you're playing whack a mole. You know the game Whack them
mole, where you whack a little thing that sticks up and then it pops
up somewhere else and you get there. That's what's happening because fire ants have
colonies that are forming underground that you don't see the little dirt mound on top
yet. And those colonies are often interconnected, and so when you treat just
the dirt mounds, I see fire ants here. There are others that you're
not reaching. So we start with a bait and then we do the direct
mound treatments, and that's called the Texas two step. That ought to be
an easy one to remember. Texas A and m Agro Life Extension came up
with that many years ago. So you start with a bait. Now,
this bait is put out at extremely low rates. We're talking about a pound
of bait on many of the baits, a pound of bait covering an acre
that's forty three over forty three thousand square feet. So we're talking about granule
here, a granule there. You don't take a tablespoon and dump bait this
on the mound. That's not how you apply it. You sprinkle it everywhere.
The ants pick it up, they take it back, And baits are
very low talks in terms of working because you don't want to kill the ant
that picked it up. You want them to take it back and feed it
to the colony. So environmentally, this is about as safe as you're going
to get. Now, there are baits that are synthetic, and there's a
bait that's organic. The organic bait is called come and Get It. I
think it's a fertile and product. Come and Get It has spinosied as the
active ingredient in the bait. There's other baits like MDRO and the extinguished fire
ant bait. There's just a bunch of them out there, and they all
work pretty good. They vary a little bit and how fast they work.
You want to put the bait out when the ants are foraging. So what
does that mean. Well, in the summertime, when it's hot, ants
don't get out and about during the day as much. They kind of hunker
down underground and they come out in early morning or evening hours to do a
little bit of their foraging work. And so if you don't know if they're
foraging, get you something oily. It could be a potato chip, it
could be a little knew guy wants to cut hot dog wieners into little sections
and put one of those pin flags that you stick in the ground to say
here's where the pipeline is. He put them on those so he knew where
the hot dog was and he put them all over the yard. Maybe three
or four and then come back in fifteen minutes. And if fire ants are
all over it, they're foraging. If they're not, don't put the bait
out because they're not out there to get it, and you don't want You
want the bait to be as fresh as possible for the fire ants to pick
it up. So don't store baits in the hot shed out back, keep
them cool and use that. And then if there's going to be some you
miss from the baits, and that's where individual mound treatments come in. And
again there are many different products that'll do that. Texas Agger Life Extension has
a fire ant website. It makes it real easy, you know, to
find exactly what you're looking for, and there's a lot of information on that.
I can go into a little more on it. I'm just going to
talk just for a moment on it. But fire ants are something that we
need to manage. If your neighborhood or your neighbors would also treat when you
treat, that works even better because that way you don't have somebody from fifty
feet away, here come the ants in from the yard next door. And
now one last thing, you'll hear a lot of home remedies like put grits
out and the fire ants eat the grits, they swell up inside the ant
and the ant explodes. Now, while that's a very pleasant thought, it
doesn't work. And here's why fire ants don't eat dry food. They liquefy
the food and drink it. That's how fire ants take it in, so
it's already liquefied by the time they take it in, So grits don't work.
Another reason they don't work is these are Southern fire ants, Southern fiants,
So if you start throwing grits on the mound, they're gonna come to
the top and ask for bacon fat because we all know those are those two
are butter. We all know that goes together in the South. Right.
Okay, enough joking aside, but seriously, fire ants are very manageable.
The large chrevenirea you manage the better. Starting with baits is the way to
go, and then the individual mound treatments. You can use a variety of
different things organic and synthetic to control them and more ant. I think the
website is like fireant dot tamu dot edu and maybe fireants dot tamu dot edu.
Let me check that, but it just gets some good information. Yeah,
it's fireant dot TAMU DOT ed U, TAMU, Texas A and M
University. There's a wealthy Oh there's also videos on the website where you can
watch a little fly that is imported now into this country that flies around in
lasin egg in the back of a fire ant's head and the larva hatches and
the firean's head falls off. Another cool thing. Makes me happy to know
that's happening out there in the landscape and the environment. So fire ants are
a number one thing that we deal with. But again, a little information
will help you have success, but also importantly help you minimize damage to the
environment. You're going out just nuking everything to accomplish a purpose not necessary.
You can you can control them a lot of different ways. A general purpose
insecticide. Some people use those in the yard and you that will control them
too. But fire ants are not that difficult to deal with. But I'll
tell you when they are coming on you, that is difficult to deal with,
that is for sure. All right, we just kind of used that
up for a little firet monologue. We're going to be back after a little
break here. Our phone number is seven one three two one two fifty eight
seventy four. Welcome bout your guard line. Good heavy with us today.
Our phone number is seven one three two one two kt r H. If
you live down in the Richmond area, I want to tell you about Enchanted
Forest. Enchanted Forest is a garden center. If you're in Richmond heading to
a trigger land, it's off to the right FM twenty seven fifty nine.
Now they always have events every weekend going on there. Right now they have
gotten in some spring and summer bulbs, things like Dahlias, gladiolus, the
oriental lilies, kalalilies. My wife just got some klaliies the other day,
Kracosmia freezia. Those are all bulbs, not the winter bulbs like daffodil,
or early spring bulbs like daffodils and things. We're talking about things that bloom
on through warmer season. They also have a lot of cool antennas. You
know, for a long time we've just had the new gold the yellow lantana,
which is a good lantana, but there are a lot of nice dwarf
lantenna's, compact size lantennas. Lantanna's got that scent to the foliage that deer
and rabbits don't care for, which is a nice thing to have when they're
a problem. They have the bandalist align the red chili and the coconut and
the pineapple. They've got all that out there by the way. Next Wednesday,
on the twenty seventh, at Enchanted Forest Fairy Garden make and take workshop.
So you pay about I think it's twenty five bucks unless you want to
add a bunch more to it, and they'll have a class at ten.
They'll have a class at eleven thirty and you will be able to make what's
called a ferry garden. It's a little miniature scene with plants in a container
and it looks really cool. That's Enchanted Forest in Richmond, Texas. The
website Enchanted Forest Richmond TX dot com. Love going there. I'm serious.
That place is. It's just fun. It's fun and if you're into butterflies
and stuff, oh my gosh, you've got to go there. It really
They specialize in plants that attract butterflies, both the flying butterflies and the crawling
caterpillars stage so that you can have that kind of butterfly garden that's nice.
Someone called me earlier asking about the Nutristar Genesis transplant mix, and so I
want to be real clear about this product. Nutristar Genesis is by Nelson Plant
Food, and it's a six three that comes in a little canister and you
mix it in to the soil or the potting soil or whatever you're moving a
plan into. So when you're relocating a plant or putting it from a smaller
pot into a bigger pot, for example, Nutristar Genesis I use it.
It's a new product. I first started using it this spring with some peppers
and the results were very impressive. You know, I always like to try
products before I say you need to go buy them. I'm going to make
sure that they do work, and this one does. It's got beneficial bacteria,
it's got the two types of fungi that attached to the root and go
out and get nutrients. It has humates. It just it enhances the biology
of the soil. But it provides that six to one three naturally decomposing,
slow releasing fertilizer into the mix, and the plants do respond. That's been
my experience with it. If you'd like to give us a call on Garden
Line. Our phone number is seven one three two fifty eight seventy four seven
one three two one two five eight seven four. Earlier you heard me say
that the best time to plant a tree is forty years ago. The next
best time is today. You may have heard me say this on guard line
before. But a master gardener from Montgomery County years ago, Jim and Fukumi
Smith, boy, they were wonderful folks, uh. They Jim brought in
a picture of a house that they had like forty years before. He was
showing me this picture and there was a little, tiny, broomstick sized tree
in the front yard of this little house. And then he brought me a
picture of what that he drove by and had seen that house, and he
took a picture and he showed me what it looked like then forty years later,
and I mean it was. It was huge. It covered the whole
area because it was well adapted, well planted, and it was choosing a
good, good species that's going to thrive. And it just reminds us that
we want to hang a hammock the day after we plant tree, right,
and so we got to pick a good Species's got a planet right, We've
got to care for it right now. Verdant Tree Farm they have three locations
where you can get those kinds of plants, those kinds of trees that are
going to be long term success for you. There is a location out on
Barker Cypress in West Houston. There's one where Yale comes into it up in
the Heights area, and there's one done in Pairland on Broadway Street. It's
easy to find a Verdant fairly near you. Verdentreefarm dot Com is the website
you're going to find there. They have a great selection of palms as well
and trees of all sizes. Now, if you let them come out and
install it, which you should, they know how to do it, and
these root balls are incredibly heavy. They give you a one year warranty included
with that installation. It's a veteran owned company and they always offer a ten
percent discount for both the military and first responders at Verden Tree Farm Verdant Treefarm
dot Com. It's time to plant a tree. Don't wait until summer.
Go ahead and get it done now. That would be even better. You
listening to the guard Line and I took a little bit of time while ago,
just to kind of go into firance because that's one of the big topics
that we have and as I'm able, I like to do that from time
to time so we can we can kind of talk about, you know,
what are there, what are the things that we most need to know.
I think when you begin to understand why, it helps you to do a
better job of what you do. You know, I could tell you here's
what you do. You go buy this fiant bait and this variant mound treatment
and go use them. Or I could explain to you what's going on you
need to do it when they're foraging. And that's why I go into those
things because then you know, a week from now this fall. I mean,
if you've heard that and kind of learned it it makes sense, then
you know exactly what to do and to have success. And we want you
to have success that that is very important to us for your lawn. A
good way to have success is nycropass is super turk. That's a silver bag.
I was at Langham Creek Ace Hardware yesterday talking to them about the superturf.
It's on my schedule as something that you use through the summertime because it's
slow release, it's fifty percent of the nitrogen. It's slow release, and
Superturf it also has iron to green up those yellow spots in your yard.
Superturf is a quality product that is specifically designed to feed your lawn over two
or three months period of time. Now you can find Superturf at Ace Hardware
and Sinco Ranch. You can find Superturf at a Tascasita, Ace Hardware and
Lake Hardware down in Clute Lake, Jackson. That is going to be another
place as there are many where you find nitoposs products like the Superturf, and
I would encourage you to get it. I mean, even if you're not
going to fertilize this weekend, go ahead and get some have it on hand
because then when you're ready to go, you can just run out there and
get the job done. And so anyway, something to think about. We're
going to go to Spring Branch and talk to Sally. Hello, Sally,
good morning. I believe you had mentioned a garden tool and the people that
sell it, and it is for pulling out weeds in the easy manner where
it just pulls up the roots and all can you remember the name of that.
Yeah, that was actually a caller came in and mentioned it, and
I happened to have a tool, so I did say, yes, they
work. It's called Grandpa's weeder. And it's a little stick and at the
bottom or is a hinge with like two fingers on each side of the hinge,
and you push it in the ground, uh, with your your its
you like press it down with your foot and then you just pull back on
the handle and the fingers squeezed together and they pull up the weed. So
if it's a tap rooted weed, that works. Well. If it's something
like Virginia button weed or dichondra or dollar weed, well you can't use the
tool for that. You just need you need to read weed that you grab
the of the weed and pull it straight up. And the name of it
again, please Grandpa's Weeder. Okay. And who sells that, you know?
I don't know, but my first call would be the Southwest Fertilizer because
they pretty much have everything. Southwest Fertilizer is best and Nutton Runwick. It's
not too terribly far from you. Okay, all right, thank you,
yeah, you bet, thank you for the call. I appreciate that very
much. Yeah, Southwest Fertilizer doesn't matter what it is, fertilizers. Everything
I mentioned they have. When it comes to soil bags, you know,
the quality soil, take care of the brown stuff, they got it.
They have it there with its past disease and weed control. They have it.
And the most important part is they have people that know what they're talking
about. You know, whether you talk to Bob the owner, whether you
talk to any of the staff that he has on hand, they're going to
be able to point you in the right direction. And that is important when
we don't want to misuse a product. We don't want to use a product
that accomplishes nothing. Aerin, for example, there is extremely knowledgeable and so
you go in, you get what you need, and you find out how
to use it and what to do about it. It's good they have an
eighty foot wall of tools. I mean, I could go on and on.
I like to put it this way, if Southwest Fertilizer doesn't have it,
you don't need it, because they pretty much have everything. We're going
to go now out to Tomball and talk to John. Hello, John good
More to skip. I have a quick question. I want the perfect answer
from you. Okay, the unt the pressure's on, all right, here
we go. You know how new bills are right one on top of each
other. Well, I'm trying to kind of ground out the sound on one
of these neighbors, because there's always one, and I'm looking at to put
around the fence line, right around my fence. I'm looking at Eagleston's Polly's.
Do you have any other suggestions to where they can kind of grow and
Lauren's grows some type of barrier. Yeah, Holly is fine. Holly,
you need to make sure and water it the first couple of years. I
would say, water by hand, just to make sure all the root system
is getting a soaking, because it takes them a while to get established enough
where you're not worried about them drying out. Uh. And and but they're
they're as fine. That's a good Holly. Uh, you're gonna I'm trying
to think, what is the other one? Oh, Nellie Stevens, that's
another good one. Nellie Stevens is another good one. There are other plants
that I just know that evergreen shrubs do muffle the sound a little bit,
but you know they you're still going to hear the sound through them. They're
not perfect, but they are nice. They block of you too, which
is which is good? Okay, well that's close to a perfect answer.
I appreciate all your health, Skip, I appreciate that. Take care.
Oh boy, well, have you been to nelson Water Guard? Not?
And Katie, I'm telling you, we are so lucky here in Houston.
We just have the best garden centers, the best mom and pop local garden
centers. Nelson's is it's a showplace. It's a destination. Now. Their
big thing is the water gardens, but they also have a retail garden center.
I mean you can buy all kinds of plants there as well, but
the water garden. Do you need a pond you want to have koi or
some other type of a fishi in. Do you want to have the lily
pads, you know, the beautiful blooming lilies that are tropical or the kind
that are very resilient to cold they able to come back. Do you want
a waterfall? Do you want one of those big beautiful urns that have water
coming out of the top that it's called a disappearing fountain that goes into the
ground and recirculates. Well, they invented that and so they know how to
do it. They can come to your house and add beauty, gargeous beauty
and the sound of water. And you have to just go to Nelson Water
Garden to see what I'm talking about. I can sit here and describe it,
but you just need to go see. You wander through and it's like,
yes, I need one of everything. You get the sense of the
sound of water and how peaceful that would be in the background, the beauty,
the fact that birds will come to that as well. I mean,
there's a lot of reason to go to Nelson's, but let's just do this.
Here's their website, Nelson watergardenswith the NSS dot com Nelsonwatergardens dot com and
where they located. Just head out. I tend to Katie turned north on
Fort Ben Road and throw a rock from there to Nelson Watergarden. It just
a little bit down that road. Love to go to that place. I
highly recommend you go just to see it. Well, it's time for Nicky
in the news our phone number seven one three two one two KTRH. Welcome
back to guard Line. Thanks for listening today. Glad to have you with
us. What do you want to talk about. Do you want to talk
about vegetables or fruit or flowers or you name it, houseplants. We can
talk about that too. I've got some orchids you want to get blooming again.
Whatever it is, just give us a call on guard line seven one
three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two one two fifty
eight seventy four. When you are doing transplanting, when you're putting a new
plant in the ground to get it established, I suggest that you do something
that I basically do all the time, and that is use medina. Has
to grow. It's a six twelve sixth formula. It's got a good hyphosphorus
content for getting those roots started. It's important for that. But it also
has the nitrogen and the potassium in it. But here's what else it has
has to grow. It's got Medina soil activator to stimulate the biological activity.
It's got humate humic acid. We already talked about humus and the importance of
that and what it does. It's got seaweed extract as well. Now you
can use as a folio application. It's not going to burn plants, but
I use it to a watering in. That's my favorite use of it.
Put in a watering can add your water when you plant the plant. That's
what you water in with. Use has to grow six to twelve six water
to water in the plant. Then a week later, do it again,
a week later, do it again, And those three applications over two weeks
give that plant the best start to get established quickly so it can do what
you planted it to do, whether it's flowering or fruiting. And when I
say plant, I mean any kind of plant. We're talking about vegetables and
herbs and flowers, we're talking about rose, bushes and shrubs and tree You
can use this product to water in any kind of plant to help it get
off to a good start. Now a lot of people will use it in
an ongoing basis with plants, and like I said, you can do whatever
you want with it. But this is how I primarily use it is as
that watering in of a new plant. That's the touch and go time.
You know that plant has been living the life of riley, being taken care
of by a grower or a garden center, and now you bring it home
and plan it into your soil and it's got to get established because summer is
coming. We want to speed that up. If you haven't done a fertilization
of your lawn yet and you would like to get a spring green up as
quick as you can get some green in that grass, well, Nitropos Imperial
fifteen five to ten it'll do just that. It's a fifteen five to ten,
which is the ratio of nutrients. That's turf researchers from Texas A and
M to every other LANGRA university across the country throughout the South that have recommended
because that's what goes into grass. If you take clippings and say what's in
this? Tell me about the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in these clippings,
you're going to hear it's a three one two four one two ratio of nutrients.
And that's why they do this. It's immediately available. You watered in,
the nutrients are going to dissolve away and be there for your plants.
Where do you get Imperial, Well, you can get Imperial at Kingwood Ace
Hardware. You can get it at the Arborgate up in Tombol. If you're
in South Houston, Shades of Texas out there, on Genoa Red Bluffs southeast
Houston. They've got Imperial out there as well, so it's easy to find
night Foss products. Very widely available, so no problem finding those for sure.
This past week have been working on a couple of wheelbarrows that I have
for color and vegetables. And also I have a Vego garden bed that's on
wheels. It's our rolling type of bed, one of the big long oval
beds, and I planted that too. I love these movable containers because I
don't know it just it's versatile. So my Vego bed, I've got some
things that are going to spill over the side, like nearing burgia as one
of the ones going over the side. You've got the summer alyssums, the
lobularia like white streams an example of one they'll spill over the side. I've
got some little petunias that also spill well over the sides, and then some
plants to go in the middle. So when this thing is looking at its
best, when it really gets established and gets going, I mean it's just
going to have color draping over the sides and going up. And there's a
little strategy people use. It's called the thriller, filler spiller, and what
that means is in the center of a large container, you have something that
comes upright. That's the thriller, they call it. It could be an
ornamental grass. The burgundy colored ornamental grasses work excellent for that. It could
be a lot of different things. And then the filler goes in around it,
and it's kind of a medium height plant that also brings color. It
could be color from the foliage, it could be color from flowers. Maybe
you've got a planting like this in a shade place. Then that filler would
be things like impatience or palladiums to kind of fill in around it. And
then the spiller spills over the side, as the name would imply. And
there's a number of things. A lot of people like to use the sweet
potatovine, the Shartruse colored one sweet potato wine as there as their spiller.
Especially in areas that are a little lower light. It does okay in those
areas and it will spill over the side. But that strategy is just a
good one to do. By the way, when you're out and about and
you're purchasing plants and things, always look for good quality, healthy plants and
keep that thriller filler spiller in mind. If it's a large container, now
that doesn't mean you have to do it that way. You can plant one
plant like a big, large container that could be a beautiful one, maybe
a hibiscus plant for example, or you've put a rosebush, a small rosebush
in a container. By the way, RCW rose bushes made me think about
RCW. They have over two hundred types of rose bushes there. That's the
nursery. That's where Tumba Parkway comes into belt Way eight. It's real easy
to get to the website. Let me give you that for I forget RCW
nurses Plural dot com. RCW Nurseries Calm. They're open Monday through Saturday eight
to five. They're open today from ten am to five pm, So this
afternoon it'd be a good time to get out there. And they're going to
have your herbs and perennials and annuals and shrubs and native plants. They grow
their own trees up in Plantersville, so they have a nice selection of well
adapted trees. Uh. It's just a good place to go. But I
last year I went there and was google lying over their occajun hibiscus that they
have out there, because those are just gorgeous plants. But I love to
go buy RCW Nursery. They'll also say you the fertilizers that you need for
your lawn, and they'll sell you the products you need when you're planting a
woody ornamental like a rosebush or a tree to enhance the rooting and success with
that plant. What our phone number is seven one three two one two fifty
eight seventy four seven one three two one two five eight seven four. Just
a tip out there. I know some people, uh, you know,
don't want to wait in line on the phone. Right now. We've got
an open board, so if you'd like to have your chance to get right
in, this would be a good time to do that. We're about to
take a break here in about a minute and a half, but when we
come back from that break, you will be the first ones up that we
talked to. Honey Bees and other pollinators are very important for our landscapes.
They're important for pollinating our fruit and vegetables, for example, squash, cucumbers,
watermelons, cantalopes. There's two different flowers that the bees that pollen has
to move from and the pollen doesn't walk or fly through the air to get
there. You need something to take it there, and honey bees are a
way to do that. The Bee Supply can help you have a little backyard
high where you produce your own honey. I think that's pretty cool. You
can do that if you want to do that, if you just want to
go out and learn about bees. They also have beginning bee keeper classes that
are absolutely there's so much information you feel like you got to drink out of
a fire hydrant when you get to I mean really, they really have great,
great classes. The next one's April thirteenth, I believe, uh,
and then April twenty seventh is another one. You just need to contact them
vbesupply dot com, vbsupply dot com. Uh. They're always getting bees in
And for those of you who just want to learn about bees, do one
of the what they call the I think they call it the Interactive Honey Tour
where you get to taste honey and learn about bees. They have an observational
hive where you can actually watch the bees working in the store. Your kids
have got to see that. That is really really cool. Well, I'm
gonna have to take a break right now. Those of you who have called
in Gordon and Ralph, you're the first two up our phone number seven one
three two one two fifty eight seventy four. Welcome back to the garden Line.
Good to have you with us today. What is the what is the
broken record that you hear on garden line all the time? What bronze stuff
before green stuff? What does that mean? That means create the place where
the plants are going to grow. That is most going to enhance growth.
That means good drainage. That means it holds water, but it drains well.
That means good nutrient content. That means all of the stuff fertilizing.
Fertilizer's part of the browns, part of the soil. Then when you put
the plants in the ground, it makes it look like you have a green
thumb because you've given them the perfect place to grow. Airloom soils creates that
kind of soil. Do you need a vegetable and herb mix. They've got
that. In fact, they've got it in bulk and they also deliver,
by the way, for a charge. The veggiing herb and bulk is a
really good deal. It's one hundred and nineteen dollars. One hundred and nineteen
dollars. You can load it, you can go to the site you haven't
loaded in your trailer truck. You can get them to deliver a supersack that
is a big, giant, one cubicyard sack. They have a wide variety
of products at Airloom Soils and their quality products and they're also available of course
by bag. Widely available from Heirloom Soils. Now. If you want to
find out more about Airloom Soils and the products and stuff that they have,
well you just need to go to their website. And it's not hard to
find airloom soils on the web. It's Heirloom Soils of Texas, Airlomsols off
Texas dot com. There's a compost calculator there. I was just recommending it
to somebody yesterday. Go to the compost calculator. You can find out how
many five gallon buckets of soil or in a qbcyard, you can say I've
got an area this big, how much do I need to order? How
many bags of soil or how many bulk yards? It does it all the
work it does all the work for you, makes it easy. Airlomsolls off
Texas dot Com. I'm going to head now out to James and McAllen.
And James, how are you this morning? Doing great? Partner? Okay?
Is this McAllen is in the South Texas Valley? Yes, that's where
we are. Beautiful weather down here. Well, you must not be listening
on the radio. You must be listening through the computer. Yes, I
listened to it through the iHeart. Okay, good. How can I help?
Well, I've planted some periwinkles here, I think that's what they are,
and white and purple and pink and all, and most of them are
doing great, and every once in a while there'll be one that the leaves
just start shriveling up and it dies. I've planted them, but composts in
there. But some little fertilizer. Well it's in there, you know,
when I transplanted them into the ground. And I don't know if it has
a drip system to it and when it dries out, because it does dry
here pretty good. I'll add a little sprinkler type water from my hose,
yes, but I don't know if I'm getting too much water, not enough
water. But most of them are doing great with the same kind of care.
But every once in a while they just kind of shribble up and die.
The ones and I don't know if you have any suggestions, Yeah,
I do. The ones that shrible and dyed. Are they kind of turning
a chocolate brown to black color the plants, No, not really. The
leaves just kind of it's almost like it just sucks the life out of it.
They just kind of start curling under and start shriveling up. Okay,
but there's no blackness to them. Okay, Something's going on down in the
soil, and I don't know what it is. It could be an insect
eating the roots. It could be a root rot, which overwatering is mostly
damaging because it leads to root rots because the roots can't get oxygen and root
rots. So that just pull up that plant because you get it out of
there. That's the only thing I can think of. There's a common disease
of Madagascar periwinkles. People call them vinca too, but I don't think your
description doesn't fit that. So I would just say watch the water content now,
feel the soil about three inches deep, you'll know if it's sop and
wet or if it's too dry and water. Accordingly, those are good,
tough eat tolerant plants for all of Texas, but especially your area. Well
that's why I'm playing it because when it gets in the summer here, there's
not much that'll live yeah with the heat. All right, Okay, I
appreciate your advice. Yes, sir, thank you. I appreciate the call.
Good to visit with you down there. Hey, if you have weeds
in your lawn that are growing now that are visible, now, those are
cool season weeds. They're typically broad leaf, primarily nitrophoss fifteen five to ten
with trimeac will kill those weeds and it will provide you a spring green up
quick release fertilizer. So if you haven't done a fertilizing yet, if you
just did a green up, then don't do it again right right away.
But if you haven't done that, this will be two birds with one stone.
You get the early green up and you get the broadleaf weed control.
I just follow the instructions on how to apply it. This is very important.
They always follow the instructions on how to apply it. And you can
find it in a lot of different places, but Ace Hardware, lots of
ACE Hardware are one good way to find nitroposs products. You know, ACE
Hardware carries everything. They talked about fire ants a minute ago. They have
every kind of fiant control. I was just describing while ago when I went
on my little session on fireant management. Do you have mosquito issues? They
have the repellents, and they have the mosquito dunks because those are coming.
That's the national bird of Southeast Texas in the summertime. And fertilizers. All
the fertilizers I talk about are at ACE Hardware. You can go to Acehardware
dot com. That's the website Acehardware dot Com. Find the store locator.
There's forty of them in southeast area between Houston's. I'm over in Beaumont Way.
It's easy to find them, and when you get there, it's easy
to find what you need for your plants. I'm going to go now to
Gordon in Cloverleaf. Hello, Gordon, Hey, good morning. How are
you doing today. I'm good. I'm good good. I just put down
some the we doonator. I couldn't get through two weeks ago, so I
decided to put down the weedinator and okay, my question would be I have
a gallon jug of the Medina has to grow for lawns that I didn't get
to use last year. How long do I have to wait before I could
use this? You can use it, just go a little light with it.
Since you have the weedinator down there. The Medina has to grow is
going to give you a quicker response than the weedonator is made to spread that
feeding out over time. But if you're looking at your lawn and you don't
have the color you want, do a light dose of the has to grow
and keep it around. You're gonna you can use it on a lot of
different things, including your lawn, so it's not going to go bad on
you. Yeah, I heard you mentioned something about the the active ingredient for
the weeds in the microfoss was you said the active ingredient was trimex. One
of the nitropass products has trimech in it. It's a broad it's three different
broad leave weed controls mixed together. Okay, so the guy I put down
has like Diekamba I think was the active ingredient. Those are in the in
the Nelson product. Those are two different ingredients, but they also work.
But again, when we're doing those, we gotta have a you want to
have a wet weed leaf surface so that when you water it, I mean
so when you put it out, it sticks to the weeds that way it
gets in there. All right. I did that when the when the morning
dew was on the ground to be sufficient. Yes, sir, Yes you're
good. Hey, I'm sorry, I got to run, but I gotta
move kind of quick here and take a call. Okay, all right,
thank you, appreciate your help. You bet uh hey route Routh and northwest
Houston. Yeah, hey, Ralph, I've got about fifty seconds, but
I wanted to try to get your call. Good. All right, Okay,
Occajun was really doing good and I appreciate it. But there's a lot
of people play getting them. Thanks all right, Well, thank you good.
But it's just slow coming. Is that? Uh something I've done everything
I thought we just talking about. My god, it's just not vegetable going.
If you've done what you should. You got the fertilizer, you got
the water on it and everything. Just give it some time, let the
soil warm up a little bit more, and I think you're going to see
good growth. Yes, I don't though, Okay, over all the years.
Thank you, okay, thank you so much for the call. So
were so short on time on that segment. Well, here we're putting another
hour in the books. I will be back for our last hour of the
day if you'd like to give Josh a call and get on the boards seven
one three two one two five eight seven zero. I just want to remind
you next Saturday, I'm going to be at Ciena Moulch. We maytor heard
Luis from Heirloom Soils call in a little bit earlier talking about the scam going
on in the grain industry with these things. Well he's going to be there
too, and so is Andy Tidester from Medina Products. You just heard me
talking about hastro Grows six twelve six. Well, Andy can answer questions on
any Medina product there is. She does an excellent job. Audiences always love
to hear from Andy. We're all going to be at Moss Nursery. Jay
from Texas Gardener Magazine is going to be down there at Moss Nursery as well
doing this. This is the event is from ten to two. I'll be
there from eleven thirty to one thirty. I'll be giving away products from Nelson
plant food, from heirloom soils, and from Medina products as well. I
hope you can make it to Ciena Mulch next Saturday, three thirty twenty four.
KATRH Garden Line does not necessarily endorse any of the products or services advertised
on this program. Welcome to Katy r H Guarden Line with Skip Rictor.
It's so crazy here Gus trip. Just watch him as so many things to
supper Brazer Gas. You damost tub back again, not a sun Welcome back
to guarden Line. Welcome back. What are we going to talk about today?
You tell me seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four.
I have a few things I'd like to talk about, but we always like
to show to be directed and driven by the kind of questions you have,
because I guarantee you one thing. If you have a question, somebody else
has that question too. It's a time of year where we're dealing with a
lot of different things in our yard. You've got I was talking earlier about
con trolling the weeds that are already in your lawn that are post emergent,
and we had a color call in asking about the turf Star weedenator, So
I just want to explain a little bit about that while we're going forward here.
Turf Star weedenator has a weed control product in it that kills the weeds
now, but the fertilizer in it is gradual release, to release slowly over
time and to feed the lawn over the next two or three months. So
here's what happens. When the spring soil starts to warm up, microbes have
become active. The nutrients that are in that turf Star weedinator, the slowly
available water soluble nitrogen and water insoluble nitrogen, both will be released over time
gradually, and that is a good way to feed the lawn because it gradually
releases it. A turf Star Weedenator is a product that contains twenty percent total
nitrogen. But again it's not can all be dumped at once. It can
be released gradually over time. And if you wet the lawn and then put
it out, it sticks to the weed leaves the moist wet surface of the
weed. The turf Star weed enator sticks to that and it soaks in and
kills the weed. I'd wait about a day or so and then watered in
to get the fertilizer down in the soil, and there you sort of kill
two birds with one stone. That's kind of how that works. So your
broad leaf weeds that you're seeing now, the ones that sprouted last fall,
they're the ones that the turf Star weed Enator now if you apply it now
that they're the ones that it's going after, and it works works really really
well. Our phone number if you would like to be able to call seven
one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two one two
fifty eight seventy four. Have you been down to Jorges Gardens that's done in
Alvin. I don't know if you've been there for you need to go if
you haven't. There's a fairly new arrival on the garden center scene, but
hoge Is it's been actively growing and I'm telling you every time, I'm really
impressed with the kind of selection that they have. I mean, they were
loaded up on fruit trees this spring, the Peggy Martin roses, vegetables and
tomatoes. Yeah, crape myrtles, that's a common and a popular plant.
Right now, they've got a lot of vegetables available if you'd like to get
that instant vegetable garden. There you go if you want Mexican heather. I
love Mexican heather. I have I plant it along the driveway at my house
and it just forms little bushes with kind of a pinkish flower, pinkish purple
flower on it. The bees love those flowers. By the way, Mexican
heather is an excellent bee food be attractor of Speaking of attracting milkweed, jorgez
milkweed for attracting the monarch caterpillars into your garden. They've got steel plenty fruit,
they got grapes, they got lots of different kinds of berries. They
have perennials like salvia. Remember I said, salvia is my face genera.
Well, Orges got it down at Orges Hidden Gardens. So they're on They're
in Alvin, Texas. So I those of you down anywhere near that region,
you need to swing by. They're on Elizabeth Street. Elizabeth Street in
Alvin, Texas. Go check out Orgey. Tell them tell them we said,
hey, I want to go. Now we're gonna go to the phones
and we're going to talk to Matthew and Northwest Houston. Hello, Matthew Hey,
Skip, how are you doing. I'm good, I'm good. What's
up? Well, first off, I wanted to I can't see the praises
of that genesis that you got me started on. I've got my Scotch bonnets
and orange gusher peppers going in there, and they are just flowering and budding
like crazy. So I could be happier with that. Well, I'm glad
to hear that I had the same results. I took a picture and I
had to end when I posted it to social media. I had to say,
I have not enhanced this photo. I mean it was emerald green peppers.
They were, and they were budding like you said. In fact,
Matthew, I left I forgot a couple of klopenio peppers behind them. When
I planted all my peppers, they were back behind some other plants. And
I've pulled them out yesterday and they had three inch long klopenio peppers on them
all already. So anyway, oh, I must believe it. I am
a true believer and this is my method going forward. I've never had this
good result, good good, But I was calling you today. I've got
a backbed and it's it's a new construction. We've been there about five years,
and all of a sudden we have had this grass start shooting up through
the clay and the mulch and the soil. And it must grow about a
foot a week, and it's it's very thin with lots of little leaves.
But I had heard you mentioned something for direct applying, like you'd mentioned like
applying it to a sponge and just swiping it up to kill the grass or
the weed, yes, without killing the plants around. What was that product?
Well, if you're going to do it with a wiper applicator, you
could use a product that kills any weed, broad leaf or grass like a
glif WI say product would do that. And when you use the applicator,
you're not spraying it everywhere. You're not getting it on yourself or anything.
You're using the wiper. I use the little grabber tools to put sponges on
those for the wiper. But another thing you can do if it's a grassy
weed is use a grass only killer, and there are a number of them
on the market. The ingredient begins with the boy's name Seth set So if
you see a thing that's for grass killing and it starts with seth as the
ingredient. There's only one product like that, and that's the one you spray
it. It'll kill your grass, but it won't kill your broad leave.
So if you get it on your petunias or your roses or whatever, it's
not going to hurt them like gly would just fly kill them. Yeah,
okay, so that won't harm me or mentals or anything else. And they're
perfect. No, not unless it's an ornamental grass. But yeah, that's
okay, okay, perfect. That answers my question. Thank you very much,
Thanks for the call. I appreciate that we are now going to go
to Mary and West Houston. Hello. Mary, Yes, yes, Skip,
I'm calling with regard to your comments on the toash tar reedonator because I've
done something that probably shouldn't have done. I've got a severe infestation of weeds
okay all times, and they got to be properly a cup two three feet
high, and I've got the homeowners association on me, okay, giving me
ten days to get them in order. So since I've cut them all down
in the front yard but not the backyard, you have to wait let them
grow up again before I can put on the tars tar weedonator or is there
something else I can use in the meantime, So a turf Star weedenator.
I don't know which weeds you have, but if they're broad leaf weeds,
go ahead. I sent you pictures. You said they were broadleaf Oh okay,
okay, broad leaf weeds. Yeah, so you could use that if
they're that big and it's not in your lawn. Turf Star is made for
using it in the lawn. Then I would switch over and I'm gonna give
you a quick product. And I got to run to break. But the
product is bonn eyed weed beater, Ultra bon eyed weed beater, Ultra weed
seed, Ultra weed Okay beater, b e A t e R Beater,
Ultra oh bnad weed beater Ultra Ultra. Use it now, but don't use
it when the weather heats up. Okay, but but it'll work now.
Hey, I'm sorry, I do have to run. Thanks for the call,
Doris, Allen and Steve. You'll be the first up when we come
back. Welcome back to the guard Line. Good to have you with us.
Hey, are you putting out some containers this spring? I hope you
are. Hope spring and summer containers that would be the flower pots out there
on the patio driveway wherever you put them. And that's a nice thing about
them. They're versatile. You have to consider jungle Land. Jungle Land is
a product distributed by Nitrofoss that is a quality product. Really it holds moisture
like it should, but it drains the excess away like it should so your
plants can thrive. When you use jungle end, you're adding a mix of
Canadian blomb peat with four different sources of aged organic matter, decomposing organic matter,
and microhizal fungi, and so it just really provides that long lasting vibrant
color because the soil is so rich, which makes the roots so happy,
which makes the plant so productive. That's kind of how that works. Indoors.
Jungle Land with water saving crystals, that's the one that helps when you
forget to water. You know how that goes. Those crystals whole water and
they help hold your plants over until you find it. Get back there and
remember and your plant lets. You have it for being so negligent. Memorial
Ace Hardware City in the Memorial Area, that's where you can get jungle Land.
Alvin Stanton Shopping Center that's where you can get jungle and Katie Katie Ace
Hardware, that's where you can get jungle end and a lot of places.
In addition to that, let's head out to Austin County and tuck to Doris.
Hello, Doris, Hello, how are you? I'm well? Thank
you? Yesterday on your program you gave out a remedy for cut ants.
Yes, something about mixing it in a five gallon book. It can you
repeat that? Please? Well, here's what I want to do. I
want to if you have any other questions, we can handle that. But
I want to put you on hold. Have Josh get you my email,
and if you will email me that I can give you a better answer than
I can say all this stuff on the air. Okay, describe it.
I'll give you the very pacifics through an email. Let's let's do it that
way. Did you have any other things that you want to ask about?
Yes? I have. I don't know if it's root rott or what.
But in my backyard where it's wet, it's slow to come up, come
back green. What can I put on that? A couple of things.
First of all, if there was a way to make that area not wet
when we have rainy periods, that would be helpful. That could be an
underground drain to help with out. It could be putting in some soil to
raise the area and move the water off of that kind of soil, topsoil,
a topsoil, or if a dally, a sandy loam topsoil would be
good for doing that. I wouldn't use just sand, but a top soil,
sandy loam, okay type soil. You could raise it up. Just
think about where the water's going to go when you do that, because it
may just create another wet area somewhere else. If you've got gutters coming off
the house that are dumping water in that area, those can be redirected to
a different spot. So fixing the base of the problem would be my first
thought. Secondly, when you have a low lying area, sometimes that tends
to be a little soggy, tends to be a little extra wet, and
so you may need to consider doing an aeration, accompost, top dressing,
some fertilization to get the grass growing in there. But if the problem is
primarily just that soggy soil, those in and of themselves are not gonna help
much. Okay, what kind of fertilizer? What are you used? A
lawn fertilizer for summertime? And that would be on my schedule. I don't
know if you peruse the web or not, but I have a website called
Gardening with Skip dot com Gardening with Skip, and on that I have a
list of the best fertilizers for our area that tells you when to apply them,
what the name of them is. So it makes it really easy to
go shopping and finding them. You're out there, okay, you're out there
in Austin County. You're just in the back door of Nelson's Fertilizers and they
have one. They have one called turf Star Slow and Easy, and that
would be a good one for your lawn. Out there. You're just not
far away from Nelson's. Just a runner and grab it if you want to.
Okay, So you don't think it's a disease. It's just too much
water. I don't think it's a disease. If it were a disease,
we would we should be seeing symptoms on the leaves, like spots on the
leaves, or like dying runners. You know, the roots are rotted.
When you pull a runner up. It's green runner, but it's as rotted
roots. Those are possibilities, but I just can't diagnose that over the air.
Okay, all right, all right, thank you so much. Take
a sample into your Austin County Extension office and have them take a look at
it. Maybe they'll send it up to A and M. I don't know.
Take a look and see if they can see anything on it. Just
a four by four inch plug. Slip it into a ziploc bag with some
soil roots and have them take a look at it. Maybe with their eyes
on it they can they can see a little better. All right, Thank
you. I appreciate that, Doris. All right, take care. I'm
going to go to Laporte and we're going to talk to Alan. Hello,
Alan, good morning, Skip. How are you. I'm well, sir.
I got a problem with some well established, long established crab grass,
and I'm just not sure short of digging it up. Is there any other
solution that you have that I could use? Where is it growing? Typically
out in between the sidewalk and the curve of the street. Oh okay,
It's been there for ever since I can remember. I've been in the home
twenty eight years. Okay, and I've been back at for a long time.
Well, I'm thinking it's not crabgrass. Crabgrass is an annual grass that
comes from seed, and there are several others. There's Dallas grass, goose
grass. There's a number of different grasses that could be in a lawn.
And the problem with killing a grass in a lawn grass is the product that
does one kills both of them. One technique you can use is and I
do this. You can get a wiper applicator, you can purchase those certain
places, but you can also build your own. I use those little grabber
tools that you grab a jar off a shelf. You know when to come
about three feet long. And on the end, I take a kitchen sponge,
cut it in half an attached with a washer to both sides, and
then you can squirt something on there. You could squirt a grass only killer.
You could squirt a glyphosate product just on the sponge, and with the
length of that handle, you can walk through without stooping and just squeeze it
together. Over one of those grassy weed leaves that's sticking up above your lawn.
You can squeeze it on that and just pull it up the weed leaf
and you wipe it right onto the grass. And if you say at it
like that, you can kill those plants, whether they're annual or perennial,
it'll work pretty well. So that's that's one solution to how do I kill
a grass in a grass? Now, if it truly is crabgrass, then
you're going to want to get a product called barricade and apply it pretty soon
because crabgrass is already starting to germinate. But each spring, if you get
my lawn care schedule online, it tells you when to apply it. That
prevents the seeds from coming up. So a perennial plant, barricade's not going
to stop it because it stops seeds. But crabgrass is an annual plant,
and so are other grasses, certain other grasses. So those are a couple
of combos that you might want to try. Okay, great, great.
One of the questions. I got a load of what the company called a
yard mix, and it was it wasn't a sandy loam or anything like that.
It kills everything that I put it on, and it just seemed like
it was mostly sand. So I'm curious, is there any type of fertilizer
or help that I can use on that to bring back my Saint Augustine.
Well to that is a very strange thing. I don't know a reason why
putting a sandy soil would kill something unless you smothered it. But that has
got me a little concerned because I don't know what would do that. If
I don't know, for whatever reason, the plants that it was on died
And it's really okay, now, then you could use a quality fertilizer.
You could mix a little bit of a compost in to the sand to make
it whole water a little bit better and to release those nutrients to it.
But then just go ahead with your summer fertilization schedules on those airs. That's
a very curious thing. By the way, you're down in the Portsher's Hardware
on Broadway, Pardon. That was my question was if Fisher's Hardware would carry
those products. Fishers Hardware carries Nitropross products both the one and Laporte on Broadway
and up in South southeaston on Southmore. Both of those Fishers have that product.
Okay, great, great, all right, thanks appreciate, appreciate your
call. All right, thank you for taking it all right, bye bye,
yeah something sence for time. Down the southern area there top dressing with
composts. You hear me talk about core aeration and top dressing, and what
is that. Well, core aeration is pulling plugs of soil out of the
ground. That opens up a hole in the ground that the nutrients from your
fertilizers, that composts that's applied to the top can all move down in that
hole where the roots are going to be down down below the surface, and
it brings oxygen down, especially into a heavy clay soil, and that helps
roots to grow better. And core aeration can be followed by fine textured compost
top dressing, not the standard compost you often sees for sale around in place,
especially cheap o stuff. Those are chunky wood things. We're not talking
about that. We're talking about a fine textured quality compost. Now down south,
you've got a really good operation that can do just that, and it's
B and B turf Pros. Their websites B and B or an excuse me,
BB turf Pros dot com, B B Turfpros dot com. Here's a
phone number. You'll please write this down seven one three two three four fifty
five ninety eight seven three two, three, four, five, five nine
eight. Listen. Their focus is on customer satisfaction. They do high quality
work. I've seen the work that they do. I've seen the equipment that
they use. They bring in equipment that can do the job right, and
they focus on quality products. They only use products and companies that I own.
Garden Line Trust, for example, Ciena Mulch that is a local multiplier,
high quality product. That's one of the things that BnB turf Pros uses.
They can do the aeration and the compost top dressing. So check them
out b B turf Pros dot com two or excuse me seven to one,
three two three, four, five, five nine eight. Those of you
who live in all the way east to sugar Land, all the way west
to sugar Land, all the way east to Pearland, all down Highway six
Missouri City, Yeah, that's up there on ninety Highway six, Presno or
Colas, Sienna, Iowa, Colony Manville, these are all part of the
region that BnB turf Pros takes care of and sponsors are serves. Rather,
when you're doing that kind of product, you're hauling a lot of bulk around,
so you can't just run all over creation with it. You got to
kind of stay pretty close to home. Please give them a call. Well,
we're gonna take a little break here, Steve. I see you there.
I don't have enough time to justify you know, bringing you right on
right now, but you'll be the first when we come right back from a
break, and we're going to turn it over to Nicky and the news.
If you'd like to call us seven one three two one two ktr H.
Welcome back to Guardline. Good to have you with us today. We're going
to go straight to Steve out in Deer Park. Hello, Steve, how
you doing. I'm well. I have a bridle reef that bloomed really really
well this year and I was fixing to cut it back, I think,
uh, And I was going to ask you about if you had any tips
on that. Yes, I sure do. Uh, bridles wreath. The
beauty of the plant is its arching branches. You know, they kind of
come up and out and go down toward the ground. So anything that would
be like a hedging of the plant would be a big mistake. I would
look if you if you feel like I don't know what it what the reason
for pruning it is like if it's getting too big or whatever, I would
take out the biggest, longest canes all the way back almost to the ground,
so that when you're through pruning, you still have a beautiful form in
it, but it doesn't need pruning just as an ongoing basis. So well,
I wanted to control the size of it, and that would be that
would be just find those big long arching canes, the biggest, tallest,
whitest and cut those either back all the way to the ground or cut them
back to where they join another branch that's not going out of bounds like that.
Okay, Well I was no shape or anythind Yeah, and so no,
not really. I mean it has the shape that it has. I
mean, if you want to if you do cut it back kind of I
said, don't share it. If you do share it, you're going to
get new growth. But it just affects that. It's just like a fountain
of white blooms, as you know from having that place. Okay, we'd
like to maintain that if we can. Also, it being a spring bloomer,
spring only bloomer, it sets its bloom buds in late summer and fall,
so if you prune, it'd be better to go ahead and do it
now as it finishes its bloom, or you can do it in the summertime,
but don't do it past about I would say July, because you want
to have it plenty of time to not only grow a branch to set buds
on it for next year. Well, I think I'll do like you said,
just trim the biggest ones back. Yeah. I had another question.
We got these oak tassels all over our driveway. Huh, and do they
make a good mulch? They're fine, you can use them for mulch.
Okay, I won't have a whole bunch of oak trees popping up, I
guess not from the tassels. No, that's the pollen carrying structures. So
the acorns is a whole nother thing. That's where the pollen ends up,
and that's what makes the oak tree. And one more thing, if I
could, my wife heard you comment about how much fertilizer to put out on
trees and how to put it out. Do you put the holes around it
or do you just sprinkle it around it? Or I generally just sprinkle it
around it. The holes are okay, But you're putting fertilizer in one little
spot right there, and the roots are everywhere. And so what I do,
and this is a generalization, and anytime you overgeneralize, there's going to
be exceptions to the rule. But in general, if you look at a
young tree, and I don't worry about fertilizing older large trees already as big
as going to be, but a young tree, take your thumb and how
many thumbwits across is the trunk. So, using the example of a soft
drink can, that's about three thumbwits across, and so that would get three
to six cups of fertilizer. If you use an organic fertilizer, you can
double or triple that rate because the concentration of nutrients is less than it,
but you can go higher. But with the centered synthetics, about one to
two cups per thumbwi going across the trunk. And can you use a lawn
fertilizer? I do. That's what I use. And in fact, if
you're fertilizing your lawn, your tree is going to get some benefit from that.
And so if you don't want a big green, circular area out in
the yard, you can just let the lawn fertilizer take care of things,
and it will. The most important thing you do for a young tree that
you're trying to get growing is to make sure that it doesn't have to fight
weeds all the time. So the wider you get that mulched base around the
tree, the better off early growth on that tree is going to be because
the tree wants to be in a forest where it's covered with leaves and there's
no grass in there choking out nutrients and water and stuff create a forest floor
and is wide of an area to make a tree feel at home. Okay,
well, thank you for that. Thank you, Steve. Have a
good day, appreciate your call. Good luck with all that. I got
some projects going there for sure. He was talking about a turf type fertilizer,
and Superturf is a slow release fertilizer from Nitrofoss. It is the silver
bag Silver Super Turf NITROFOS nineteen four ten nitros. Superturf is gonna it's the
chemistry of it is such that it's going to release that nineteen percent nitrogen gradually
over two or three months going out there. It's got the iron to help
with green up because those little yellowish areas you may have in your yard that's
typically iron deficiency, and so super turf will help with that. And you
can find it in a whole lot of places. It's widely, widely available.
You go out to the Ice Hard Restoring Kingwood, you go up to
the arbor Gate Nursery and Tomball, you're going to find it. Shades of
Texas down on Genoa Red Bluff has it. Saw some of that at the
arbor Gate. As a matter of fact, easy to find super turf from
Nitrofoss. Talking about the Arborgate, I was by there the other day and
just looking at the things coming in and it's like, I don't know how
they manage to get all the plants in there as often as they do,
because about the time they stock up, people show up and clean them out,
and they got to get another truck and bring all the plants in and
get them set up. I know that's what nurseries do, right, that's
the business. But still they you got to be on your toes to keep
a stock of the range of things that Arborgate carries. I mean, and
they have all kinds of things. They have fruit trees, year around.
They've always got some vegetable, they always got some herbs and flowers. You
want shrubs, some of the newer developed shrubs from Inrovia and other companies that
have features that we used to not have in a shrub. You know,
some of the old glossy abilia that we used to plant when I was kid.
That thing got huge, like six eight feet tall practically. Well,
now we've got all these more compact types that have beautiful color, and Arburgate's
got a great stock of those. They have a great clock on everything they
carry. While you're out there, first of all, I want to tell
you you got to use that back parking lot that is easy in and easy
out. It's so convenient. There's a road called Trischel Road that takes off
the twenty nine to twenty before arbor Gate and comes back in after Arburgate.
Whether you're going east or west, you come to Trischel, you come to
Arburgate, you come back to a Trischel where it comes back in. You
drive back behind there and the parking lot's there. It's all weather. It's
really full design and it works well. Also, while you're out there,
they've got a three part one two three system Organic Food Complete. It's a
four four to three plus calcium organic food complete for anything with the roots.
It's got the They have the organic soil Complete that also has expanded jail in
it, and the Organic compost Complete that also has expanded jail. Now,
organic matter is important for improving the soil structure, but organic matter does decompose
over time, So with the shale in there, you're adding a little bit
to help keep that soil open for a longer period of time. Every time
you add it, that sheale's going to be left behind, and it's going
to be there. It's going to help out. That's a nice combination.
One two three. Out at the Arbigate. For those of you who've been
living under a rock and don't know where the Arbigate is, twenty nine to
twenty go west of Tombol on twenty nine to twenty. It's just just not
too far out of town there on the left hand side, easy to find.
And I promise you leave yourself an extra thirty minutes to an hour over
what you thought, because you are gonna you're going to be there a while.
Trust me, you're going to be there a while. Cyprus to take
a break. Here we go, I'll be back for our last segment of
the day seven one three two one two ktrh. And that you'll be our
first up. If your foot does not tap into that, you do not
have a pulse. Trust me on this one when you go to the doctor.
I love that song Footloose. Hey, you're back with guardenline our phone
number seven one three two one two ktr h. Microlife products are a wide
range of products, really a wide range of fertilizers and other kinds of products
that are stock full of microbial organisms. Microbes rule the world, and microbes
are what helps plants have success. They do a million. We can do
a whole show just on what microbes do for plants and then some The green
bag of microlife is the six two four That is an excellent fertilizer for the
lawns. I actually use it for all kinds of things, not just lawns,
but that's it's a great lawn fertilizer. Microlife. Humates plus is a
humate. What is that That is a final decomposing stage of compost. We
call humates plus concentrated compost in a bag. Put that out as well.
Not it doesn't have a lot. It doesn't have nitrogen and potassium or phosphorates
callot potassium in it. But we don't put it out just for the nutrients.
We put it out for soil structure and for microbial stimulation in the soil
to have a more effective roots system. And that's what we do it for.
You put it, don't put in the same hoppers sixty four fertilized with
one then fertilized with the other. That way you get a good even blend
all the way across the yard. And doing the hemats plus periodically will help
your soil over time. Nature bills soil slowly over time. This is a
little bit of a shortcut. It allows us to get that lawn, turf
soil in better and better shape as we go. Nitrofoss and excuse me.
Microlife Fertilizer dot com. Microlife Fertilizer dot com. That is the that is
the My brain cells I think are starting to short circuit today. I've talked
too much. Microlife Fertilizer dot COM's the website where you can find all the
microlife products and they're widely available. I've seen Microlife in just about ever garden
center that we talk about. I've seen it in all the Ace hardware stores,
the feed stores. It's easy to find Microlife and it's a quality product
too. We're going to go out to Conro now and talk to Annette.
Hello, Annette, Hi, thank you for taking my call. My problem
is in my garden bed in the front. I have all this what my
neighbors called nutgrass that throw out roots. I've had it dug up with a
fork and pulled out. Yes, I myself try to keep after it.
I mean, nothing seems to kill this stuff. And it's really a problem.
Okay, it is hard. It is a problem. Just to tell
you why that's the case. A nutsedge tuber can have eight or nine buds
on it, so when you chop it off, it just sends up the
next bud, and then the next bud and then the next bud. When
you try to dig it, which is a good thing to do, you
remove as many tubers as you can, but the little lines break off and
you leave some of the ground and here it comes back. The thing.
Let me just give you a philosophical thought about nutsedge. Were I talk about
specific controls. By the time we get to May one, nutsedge tuber already
has ten viable daughters. So if when it comes out in spring, you
dig up everything you see coming up that you can, or you spray it,
you are stopping it from being ten times worse before we even get to
summer. And so early management with however you do it is important by the
time we get into summer. I saw one time that they did a study
in some sandy soil with very wet and one nutsedge. Tuber by the end
of a twelve month growing period this is a warmer climate, produced two hundred
nuts. Oh my gosh, that's what you're up again. That's why that
was my Okay, that was my philosophy of it. Start early, don't
let it up for air. Now, the products. There are several products
from trollt that are labeled for different types of areas. There's one called image
we primarily use out on the lawn. There's one called Manage that you can
get that we just read the label on where you can use these the flower
bed, for example. And there's one called sedge Hammer, which is a
good name sedge nuts. Sedge is the weeds name. We call it nut
grass. It's nut said sedge hammer. All of those are widely available.
You should find those at an ACE hardware store. We got a number of
places that carried them, some of them in little bitty packets. They're not
cheap that they work very very well, and those are the ones that you
would want round up. Will not get rid of it. Well. If
I bought a groundcover, I heavy groundcover, would that help well? Nutsedge
tends to show up like a neon sign, you know, and because it's
got those thin leaves, and you got a broad leaf groundcover, so it
to help. Another thing you can do with nuts edge is I described earlier
making a homemade weed wiper using one of the grabber tools you used to get
a jar off a tall shelf, a high shelf, put a to take
a kitchen sponge, a standard size sponge, cut it in half, and
have somebody with a bolt and a washer attach it to each side. And
you can squirt these products on that sponge and just reach in there without even
hardly stooping, grab the nut sedge leaves, squeeze and then pull up and
it wipes the product right on the leaves, with a lot of product very
concentrated on those leaves. That's very helpful. But again you have to stay
with it. Once it shows three to five leaves, you better do something
to it because it's already working on making more. Well. Thank you very
much. It's one more question though. Lemon tree. Okay, I have
a lemon tree, and I've lost a couple because of the way the weather's
been between the snow of a few years ago, I lost that one and
the in the dryness this last summer. Okay, I was thinking of putting
it in a pot. Is that really my best bit? It's a good
idea because you need to make a really large pot. Don't use a whiskey
barrel because I'll rot out, but about the size of a half whiskey barrel,
or a little bit smaller initially, but eventually that size. You can
use a dolly with a strap to go around the pot, and it makes
moving it indoors into a garage much much easier. But that way you're in
control of whether that thing freezes or not. You're not out covering it every
time it starts to get cold. Okay, thank you, thank you very
much, Thank you very much. Good luck with the nuts edge. You
got your job out. But just the things I told you, if you
just remember that it'll help you win the battle. We're going to now head
Galveston and talk to Bill. Hello. Bill, Hi, got a question
about about the settings of my law, my spread my lawn. I've got
a turf builder Mini from scott but when I put out the fertilizer, when
I put out the barricade, I have no idea how to set it because
it's not showing on the bag. You got any suggestions, Yes, I
need to post this to the website. In fact, I'll put this on
the short list to get it on the website. For fertilizers on the I
assume you have a walk behind spreader, correct, Okay, On those,
you want to put it at about a notch or two above halfway. So
if there were twenty notches on the spreader, eleven or twelve would be the
setting that you'd use. That's a general guide for fertilizers on fertilizer spreaders.
Now it's general because different sized fertilizers have different sized particles, but in general
that's a pretty good place to start. I always go a little low,
though, because if you're going north south spreading fertilizer and you do much lower,
then you can go east west spreading fertilize, and you und up with
a much more even spread. You'd hate to get two thirds of the way
across the lawn and run out of fertilizer, right, So just just be
willing to go north, south and east west, in other words, crossways
to get better even spread. Now, for the herbicide, I assume you're
talking about barricade. Probably correct, Okat on a walk behind spreader, you're
going to do a notch above one quarter, So if there were twenty notches,
five or six would be your setting. That's a general guide that seems
to work pretty well on these. But again, also with the herbicide,
don't be afraid to spread it one direction and turn ninety degrees and spread it
that way too. You get much more even spreading, and if you should
be off a little bit on the setting, you're not going to be in
as much of a problem. Okay, Okay, thank you very much.
I appreciate it all right, Bill, Good luck with that. Sure.
Yeah, herbicide and fertilizer spreaders, that can be a problem. There's so
many brands out there, and a lot of fertilizers on the bag. Will
put settings for different fertilizers, s threaders, And that's wonderful if you can
do that, But for a lot of people, you know, it's like,
well they don't have the one I need, and how do I know?
How do I go about it? Well, that's how you go about
it. Well, hey, you've listened to another weekend full of garden Line.
We're about to close things down here. I want to remind you that
we're here every Saturday and Sunday from six am to ten am. And if
you are not able to hear us by radio, you can listen to us
on the iHeartMedia app. Just look for garden Line KTRH seven forty am garden
Line. You can listen to me live that way, and you can also
listen to past shows. So we call that a podcast where you can go
in later and listen to a show for something that you missed, probably that
spreader discussion. You may be going, Okay, I didn't have a pen
first of all, yois listen to guard Line with a pen and paper.
But if you didn't have it, go ahead and listen to the show and
then catch up on it that way. I want to remind you that I'm
going to be next Saturday, that is the thirtieth of March, from eleven
thirty to one thirty, I'll be at Sienamulch. I'm going to be given
away Azamida, I'm going to be given away Nitrofoss plant food, niter Nelson
plant food, and Airline soils and medina as well. We're just going to
have a good time out there. A lot of folks will be out,
including Jay White from Texas Gardener magazine. I hope you can join them.