Kat r H Garden Line does not necessarily endorse any of the products or services
advertised on this program. Welcome to kt r H Garden Line with Skip Richard's
shoes crazys. Just watch him as things to set crazy again. Not a
sign gas. So good Sunday morning. I want to wish each of you
are really nice Sunday morning. It is a nice day outside. Glad to
have you with us today. You're listening to Garden Line and what are we
doing. We're here to help you have a more bountiful garden and a more
beautiful landscape. That's our goal. So all you got to do is give
a call if you'd like to talk about something regarding your garden. Maybe you've
never done a garden before, let's talk about that. There are a lot
of ways to get into growing things without having to just dive in full force.
For example, there's containers. If you've never grown vegetables before, there
is a great opportunity to grow them. Just a really nice large container.
For example, if you're going to do vegetables like a tomato, then I
would say five gallons minimum absolute minimum, more like ten gallons to do really
well with it. And why does that matter? Well, it matters because
the plant has to be able to get water and nutrients, and everything it
gets has to come out of the container. So I don't care whether you're
growing a petunia or a tomato or an herb in a container, that whole
root system is abnormally confined for that plant. Okay, if you were looking
at a tomato growing out in the garden, it have roots going down pretty
deep actually, and pretty far in all different directions, drawing from moisture and
nutrients that are in the soil. In a container, it's limited to that
amount of soil. So the more soil you have, the better you are.
That means you water less often. That means you have less drought stress.
That means the nutrient availability is greater because there's a bigger volume, a
bigger bank account for them to draw from. So why not try garden and
a container this year? If you haven't done it before, give it a
try. Now. It's not tomato planting season, that's for sure, But
you can plant herbs. There are other vegetables you can grow in summer.
You can grow flowers, beautiful container gardens of flowers. Oh and by the
way, there's no rule that you have to keep your flowers and your food
apart. There are flowers that are edible. There are ways to mix both
blooming beauty and bounty in the same garden, and I would encourage you to
do that. For example, what's the Swiss charred bright lights. It's got
all these beautiful colors of ribbed leaves and Swiss charred. Of course it's an
edible charred, but my goodness, that is gorgeous and a colorful container at
the right time of the year when it's happy. So consider some of that.
What are you gonna do different this year? What are you gonna try
new that you haven't done before. We're gonna head straight out to the phones
and we're gonna go to Montgomery and talk to Albert. Hello, Albert,
Hello, skip make show you have. I love the patience you have with
the callers. Thank you. Are you gonna try my patients now? Albert?
Oh, I think it's I think this is a pretty simple question.
I just I've bought a ten gallon a red oak tree, and uh,
I've been struggling with how to dig the hole. Can you give me some
pointers on how to dig the hole so I can get this tree to grow.
Please. Yeah, well, you know we don't want to dig a
hole deeper than the root cylinder that you're about to pull out of the container
and plant. Okay, because you know you've probably dug trenches or holes before
where you thought you filled them up level, and then later you came and
they were all sunking in because it swell settles over time, and you want
the plant to be at the right level. And the right level for a
tree is so the topmost root is right at about the soil line. So
now you know, if you bought the tree, it may have been re
potted several times as it grew, and it may not be that the topmost
root is at the top of the container anymore. But just dig down wherever
the topmost root is that is at the level of the soil, and then
you just measure down and that's how deep you dig your hole. From the
topmost root to the bottom of the container cylinder. That's how deep the hole
is. And people talk about digging holes that are two and a half times
as wide as the root cylinder. That's fine, that's a good rule of
thumb you can do that. I've gotten to where I just don't like bending
and stooping and lifting dirt, and I pay for it the next day if
I do too much of that. So what I'll do is dig a hole
big enough to get the thing in, but then use a spading fork go
around the plant. Like imagine your tree is sitting in the hole at the
right level, uh, and it's not a huge hole. But then you
take your spading fork and you're going around in the soil around that hole,
and you're sort of pushing the fork down and pulling it back to crack it
open. So you're basically loosening the soil with ever having a stoop and pick
it up, and you know, hurts your back on that, and it
accomplishes the same thing, whether you dig out the soil and then put the
soil back in or whether you just loosen it up really good. Either way
you can help that tree get established and then always water really really good to
settle all the soil in as best you can. Well, when you pull
it out of the container, the root, you're like in a circular circular
do you cut those or loosen them up? Or yeah, you need to
they don't unwind underground, and if it's a small enough circle, like let's
say if it was in a one gallon pot. Well, that little one,
that little spaghetti sized root going around a one gallon pot. In about
eight years, it's going to be big enough and the trunk's going to be
big enough to where they're going to come together, and that root's going to
end up being a strangling route. We call them a girdling root around the
trunk, which is a bad thing. That's why, that's why we cut
them. All right, you have a great Father's day, Skip, Thank
you, good to talk to you. You as well. Thank you very
much for the call over. Take care, Thank you, Bye bye bye
bye. Plants for All Seasons is a is a wonderful garden center. It's
up it's up on Tomball Parkway Highway two forty nine, which if you're going
from Houston to Tomball you exit Louetta a crossover Luetta and a trade there on
the right hand side. They've been around for a long time, the Flowery
family, I think is about nineteen seventy three they began Plants for All Seasons
and they've been going strong ever since. You know, the expertise not only
within the family members but and it is family operation, but within the staff
as well, the other staff as well. It's excellent. And so when
you go in there, you get good advice, you get good direction.
They will help you. But let's say you want to do one of those
beautiful color containers I was talking about. They could kind of walk you through
and go here, these are some plants would be good for maybe the center
of your container. Here's some ideas from the others. What do you like?
In other words, they make sure you have success. You know,
you come back in later. You got a bug on your plant, you
bring in in a bag and they identify it, Yeah, don't worry about
it, or well, yeah you need to control it, and here's what
you use, and they have that on hand. And it's that kind of
service. It's that kind of walking along with you as you're learning to garden
and as you're you know, trying to create that beautiful homescape that eden around
your house. That's what Plants for All Seasons does. You can go to
the website Plants for All Seasons dot com, Plunts for All Seasons dot com,
or you can go to the phone and just call them up seven or
not seven two eight one three seven six sixteen forty six. Let me do
that again. Two eight one three seven six, sixteen forty six. Plunts
for all seasons. Right there at two forty nine and Lueta, it's starting
to warm up outside. I know you guys realize this. I had a
week last week out in the landscape where I'm doing a lot of different kinds
of work. I started talking about it yesterday. We have a bed that
just had the worst clay soil I've ever seen in my life in it.
I mean it was, it just is a sticky mess. And so we've
done several things. I've done a drainage pipe away from there, kind of
an underground French strain to get the excess water out of that area. And
i even excavated a little bit of the clay out and put a whole bunch
of expanded shale in, mixed it into the soil, and then I've got
a whole bunch of organic materials, bed mixes, compost that kind of thing,
mixing that into the soil as well, getting my nutrient levels up,
putting some fertilizer down. And this next week will be time to be planting.
But that was a lot of preparation. But it's more fun, isn't
it, just to get flowers and put them in the bed and then hopefully
enjoy them. But I'll tell you, if you want to be able to
enjoy them, to realize that enjoyment, you got to get the right first.
That's really important. That bed has been there for about a year.
In fact's been there longer than that. When we moved into the particular house
that we're in right now, that bed it's just never been right. It's
never been right. And I finally just bit the bullet and went in and
redid it. And now we're gonna have a nice bed with nice flowers,
and I don't have to worry about it going forward. Just some swell amending
here and there as we go. But if you think about it that way,
you can take your garden areas just one at a time and get the
swill right. That is so important to get it right, And part of
that is getting the nutrient levels right. And I know, normally when I'm
talking about fertilizers and things, I'm talking about for your lawn, because that's
kind of the elephant in the room around our Landscapes's got to get that lawn
care, but there are a lot of other ways that we can enhance our
garden success with fertilizers, even sometimes ones that are with the lawn. I'm
going to talk about that a little bit when I come back. Right now,
we're going to take a quick break and I'll be right back. Our
number is seven three two one two fifty eight seventy four. Welcome back.
Good to have you here with us on Garden Line. What kind of gardening
questions can we assist you with today? That's what we're here for. Give
us a call when you're when you've got something you'd like to discuss, such
as maybe it's vegetables or flowers or fruit. Certainly lawns and trees. Lawns
and trees are the big ones. That's what the phone rings about most of
the time. So I was talking about lawn care and lawn care, fertilizers
and other things. You know. Microlife they have some excellent products for the
lawn, their Humantes Plus it's a purple bag that works really well. It's
concentrated compost in a bag. That's what it amounts to. It provides benefits
that help not only with the microbial activity in your soil, but also with
the physical characteristics of the soil. Humus is something that does assist in developing
a good friable structure to the soil, meaning it breaks apart. It's not
just a mass of clay with poor drainage compaction. It listens it up and
over time, as you improve your soil with organic matter, including with humans
like microlife humates plus, you're going to see those benefits. I would also
say that if you were doing any kind of vegetable gardening that these kinds of
products are also very effective because it's it's plants with roots growing in soil,
and so you need to follow the kind of the design that nature created out
there that has a wonderful, loose, open soil that builds better and better
over time. That's kind of how it works. We tend to tear soil
up by not taking care of it, and if you just look at how
nature functions, soil gets better and better each year. That's what that's what
we're aiming for, and micro life fertilizers can help you with that. The
green bag that we would put on our lawns, the six to four good
Summer fertilizer good fertilizer throughout the year. It is also one that I would
use in my vegetable garden. I would use it in a flower garden.
We use it in a bed that you are growing herbs in. It's a
good all purpose fertilizer. The six to four green bag. There's a lot
of other products. I like Microlifs. They have a number of things such
as the seaweed product, fish emulsion type product, and other general fertilizers.
The orange bottle, the seven percent nitrogen liquid is an excellent I use it
for houseplants. I use it for a lot of other things. You're not
going to go wrong with these. Just take one look. If you want
to give us a call talk about a particular kind of plant, we can
be a little more specific. I can be a little more specific on recommending
these, but in general, you're going to find success with all of them.
And I know I say this because you know we put on bags or
bottles or whatever. We say this is a biscus food, or this is
a tomato food, or this is a whatever rose food, and those are
all true in their guidelines. Excuse me, Ben. In general, plants
need the nutrients that they're lacking, and so if you were to have a
soil let's say that the phosphorus was already through the roof high, just for
example, well, then a high phosphorus fertilizer that might otherwise be a good
one wouldn't be the one for you for that particular situation because you were supplementing
what your soil needs. That's why we often go with a three one two
kind of ratio, because in general that's kind of what plants tend to take
up in terms of the ratio for especially a leafy green growth on plants.
Anyway, just some thoughts on it. One of the things that is difficult
to encourage people to do or difficult to talk people into doing, is soil
testing. And you know it's just you'd rather go take your money and go
buy a plant, right, or fertilizer or something. And when you say,
well, go spend a little on soil testing, you know it's not
that expensive. But what soil testing does is it gives you your snapshot in
time, so you know exactly what's already in your soil. Is it balanced,
is it imbalanced? Is something excessive? Is something deficient? All the
above? You know, all of that and you know the pH of your
soil as well, and then you can fertilize more intelligently and more targeted in
a more targeted way. So if not, we go with these general guides
like use a three one two on your lawn and put it out and put
it out so that you're putting a pound of nitrogen per thousands square feet.
Those are all guidelines, and there most of the time they're just fine.
They're just fine, they work fine. But the ultimate is periodically test your
soil and find out what you need. It may be that my standard recommendations
for you at your yard are not the best choice and that we would need
to adjust that based on a soil test result. Does that make sense?
Analogy I like to use is if I walked into a kitchen and somebody was
in the process of putting together a cake. You know, they had the
mixing bowl and had some flour in there and other things, and I walk
in the room and they go, hey, do I need to add more
sugar, more salt? Do I need any more baking powder in this?
How would I answer that question? Because I, number one, I don't
have the recipe, but I don't know what's already in the bowl. And
if they've already added all those well then no, you don't need to add
those. And so I use that as an analogy because to just say every
soil needs a certain thing is it's a good guess, but it's better to
know exactly what's already in the soil and then fertilize accordingly. All right,
Hopefully that wasn't too too dry and nerdy. But it's a simple, simple
point, but it sure will help you have success. Our phone number is
seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four seven one three two one
two five eight seven four. I had a good time yesterday. I want
to thank the folks at the wall Birds Unlimited in bel Air for having me
out after the show. We were out there. I always like going into
Wadbirds because they're fun. I got to meet some nice folks while we are
out there too, give aways some nice products. And thanks to Products for
donating some really cool stuff that we're able to give away yesterday for folks that
came by. You know, Wildbirds is an ideal spot if you're looking for
a great gift for Dad. And guess what today is For those of you
who have let it sneak up this far, here's your chance. Wildbird's Unlimited.
They have wonderful feeders, they have wonderful bird houses. They have all
kinds of accessories for birds. I was visiting with them about some of the
bird watering devices and the little they have a little gadget that drips water and
that makes the water and the bird bath have constantly have ripples in it,
and as a result, mosquitoes don't like to lay their eggs in water that's
moving and that little dripping movement. It's a little simple gadget, but that's
really a great idea. But we were looking at bird They have excellent books
on birds. It's easy to find something for dad. And Wildbirds Unlimited.
It just is. And the quality feed that they have is outstanding. I
picked up some myself. I'm doing kind of a blend of two of their
feeds myself right now. And I just enjoy Wilbird Unlimited quality feeds because when
you buy a pound of it, you get a pound of stuff that's bird
food, not the stuff birds kick on the ground because they don't like to
eat it. And I think that's important. And if you've been dealing with
squirrels and you're all frustrated with that. Go into Wilbirds and say, hey,
what are the options, and they're going to give you four or five
ways where you can help avoid problems with squirrels getting in and stealing everything that
you're wanting to feed the birds with. I know some of you are out
there feeding squirrels, but that's a whole other thing. Wilberd, Hey,
how do you find one? There's six of them WBU dot com forward slash
Houston WBU dot com forward slash Houston that will help you find the wildbirds near
you. Excuse me, I'm having a time of it this morning. If
you have never tried growing and grafting different kinds of fruit, you ought to
consider that. There's just something to try out. It's not something you would
necessarily do right now, but there it is not that difficult to learn how
to graft, or that difficult to learn how to bud to attach a bud.
There's a lot of good for information online. I know the Agrolife Extension
Service, the Horticulture Department has some publications that teach you how to graft.
There's good videos online to learn how to do it. But it's really a
cool hobby. And if you let's say you had a citrus tree and a
freeze killed it back, and now the rootstock sprots up and you got this
thorny rootstock. What do you do. Well, you can dig it up,
you can buy another one, put it in that's fine, totally legit.
Or you can try your hand grafting it yourself. Get some bud wood
from somebody who has a particular let's say, a satsuma or I don't know,
a lemon, something you're mere lemon, something you're interested in, and
just graft it on yourself. And it's not that difficult. And if you
mess up and it doesn't work, well, you get another you to try
it again, because you're not killing the plant in order to just craft.
It pretty easy to do. Well, It's time for me to take a
little break here and let the news do the news. It is going to
be probably, I'll tell you what. Let's do this. We're gonna take
a little break. When I come back, I want to talk to you
a little bit about some general tree care and we're going to go to the
phones, and Charles you'll be there first. Stup, Welcome to garden line
this morning. Good have you with us? What are we going to talk
about? That would be your call. So we're going to start and let
Charles answer that question. Up in Huntsville. How are you doing, Charles,
Good morning. I am forty miles north of Huntsville, Alabama, in
southern Tennessee. Oh that yeah. I've got fifty four sweet cord plants in
my in my garden, and I fertilized with ten ten ten before I planted
them, and then once they sprouted, I used as a mic. They're
about four tall, but they haven't tasseled yet. They haven't got that little
brown spike yet. Okay, they're about four feet. Does it do any
good to fertilize them at this point? As far as the quality of the
corn, the sweet corn usually usually how fertilized trails the corn. I'll get
the soil right for I even plant, and I think that's what you said
you did, you put some ten ten ten in. I would then when
it gets about knee high, I will usually side dress them with just some
nitrogen. I mean, you can use more than just nitrogen, but it's
primarily the nitrogen that you're needing. So a turf type fertilizer that's hiering nitrogen
would be fine, or even just something that is just nitrogen would be fine
too, and then that gives them the boost. Corn is a heavy feeder,
and in order to keep it growing and producing well, just making sure
it has plenty of nitrogen is important. Okay, yeah, So the thing
about it, though, you know, it depends on what's already in your
soil. So if you ever have a soil test, that will be educational
because it may be usually over time, we don't need to keep using something
like a ten ten ten usually that that's going to change a little bit,
because that mental number tends to build up. Well, I was using the
information that I shouldn't plant until the ground temperature was sixty degrees, but I
noticed the real farmer across the road has a huge, big field of field
corn, and he put his when it was fifty and now his is already
starting to tassele out. But right, well, if field corn does better
germinating in cooler soil, if you're going to do like a sweet corn,
then and especially if you're going to do a super sweet that so one needs
to build a considerably warmer to do equally well, so you're not necessarily too
late. Well, I know it's about four foot tall. Now, I
just noticed when I drive by the other farmer's field, his is way ahead
of month. Okay, all right, well may well have sweet corn by
the fourth of July. Well, I appreciate the information. Thank you,
sir, thanks for listening up there. I appreciate it. Good luck with
that corn. You know, one thing I found about corn, Charles,
is somehow the raccoons know the day you're gonna pick it. I have more
than once been ready to go out the next morning and pick my corn,
and that night the coons got in it and chewed it all up. So
when we hunted in South Dakota, you could get out and you could go
drive around and there'd be corn field corn growing, and there was just a
line you could draw a rumor on it. It was so straight where the
deer had eaten. They down the line, whole line of corn. There
you go. We don't have any problems with the raccoons because we've got dogs.
Raccoons away from it. All right, there you go. We'll good
to talk to you. Take care of Thank you, bye bye. Yeah,
that is that you talk about frustrating in the morning, is like,
what were they doing, like sitting off in the edge of the woods,
listening to me say I'm gonna pick it tomorrow, and they go, we
got to get in there tonight. We're won't get any corn out of this
deal. It almost feels like that. So I wanted I told you a
while ago, I wanted to talk about trees a little bit. Our trees
are the most valuable single plants in our landscape. They provide incredible benefits.
Number one, a shade when it's summer. Having shade, whether it's shade
on the roof of your house or the side west wall of your house,
or just shade for you sitting out in a patio. It's a valuable thing
to have those trees. We need to pick trees carefully before we plant them
because we're going to be living with them for a long time, right or
somebody will. And to pick a quality tree species, one that's going to
last. It's going to be strong wooded, that has a great structure,
that just has a reputation for being long lived. That's important. It may
be a flowering tree, though, and that again, picking one that is
going to perform well and do well. Here is important. Once you have
a tree, you need to take care of it, and that involves a
number of things. From the time it's young, it needs to be pruned
properly. We start off we say train the tree, meaning you're pruning it
in a way that develops a good, strong st structure. And this is
something that you can learn by getting out and doing some reading and studying about
it. And there's a lot of good information out there online, or you
can hire somebody to come do it for you. But whatever you do,
you need to have it done right. And that's important because when you mistrain
a tree, you can end up creating problems that down the line you just
never really overcome. And when you butcher a tree by printing it wrong,
you do damage that is a lifetime And I see a lot of this from
so called professional tree prunters. And we have some very reputable folks through the
Houston area that know how to print trees. And then we have a lot
of people that own a chainsaw a pickup and that's kind of their level of
expertise. And I see the work they do driving down the streets. I
see really bad prunting jobs. Affordable Tree Service Martin spoon Moore. The reason
we talk about Martin is he knows how to do this. He's been doing
it for many years now. He's got the expertise to do it. He
knows Houston, he knows our trees. He understands what it means to live
in storm Alley here where we get the hurricanes and all the other kinds of
storms that come through like the one that did the other day. If you
have a tree that hadn't been looked at and examined by a professional in a
while, you ought to give Martin a call. Let me give you a
phone number. It's seven one three six nine nine twenty six sixty three.
Martin knows exactly how to take care of your trees. And whether you call
him at seven one three sixty nine nine twenty six sixty three, or go
to the website Afftree Service dot com, have him come out. Schedule for
him to come out. Tell him your guardline listener that puts you at the
front of the line for Affordable tree In Martin spoon Moore. But have him
come out and look what is needed. Is there some deadwood? Are there
some narrow branch angles that need to be pruned and removed. What need What
does your tree need? He will tell you and he'll do the job right.
And that's the bottom line. And so don't wait until after the storm
and you're looking for somebody to come chainsaw the limbs and throw them in the
back of a truck that fell out of the tree. Get ahead of it
and get your trees in the best condition because again, very valuable parts.
They're valuable to if you ever resell your home. One of the most important
things in terms of a nice home resale is a beautiful landscape with beautiful trees
around it. That is a very important thing. And you can have that,
but you got to take care of them. Don't trust your trees with
is somebody who owns a chainsaw. That's the bottom line for that. I
wanted to point out. Next. Let's see schedule here in front of me.
Next June the twenty ninth, it's two weeks from today, June the
twenty ninth. I'm going to be at Langham Creek Ace Hardware. That's over
kind of in the Copperfield neighborhood. For those of you sort of West Houston
know the Copperfield area. Langham Creek's over in that area, and I'll be
at the Ace Hardware there on Saturday after the show, two weeks from yesterday,
and I hope you go ahead and put that on your calendar. That'll
be my last appearance of the season. So here's your chance, one last
chance if you want to bring some samples by or just come by and meet.
I'd always love to meet people that are listeners to Garden Line, So
make that note Langham Creek Ace Hardware. I'll tell you more about it as
we get closer, but it's two weeks out from right now, eleven thirty
to one thirty on that Saturday. We're going to take a break, get
some information here, and come right back. Our phone number if you want
to get on the board with Chris. Seven one three two one two fifty
eight seventy four. Welcome back to the garden Line. Good to have you
with us. If you'd like to give us a call and talk gardening,
here's the number you want to write this down. Seven one three two one
two five eight seven four seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four.
We're gonna go out to Brenham and talk to Mike. Hello, Mike,
Hello, sir, how are you? I'm well, thank you.
How can we help today? I have two apple trees. One of them
is a pink lady, and I think the other is uh kalla, I
don't remember what. They had a lot of growth this year and I did
some hand of pollinating and it worked really well good, probably too well.
I've got clusters of apples on little limbs that are I don't know, half
the size of a diameter of a pencil. Yeah. So anyway, so
first off is that should I find those apples out? I mean, I've
got clusters of five apples on a little limbs like that. Yeah, you
need to. It's how big are the apples right now? Right now they're
golf ball are a little bit bigger. Yeah, So going forward in future
years, go try to get them thinned before they certainly reached the size of
your thumb the end of your thumb, okay, last joint of your thumb.
That that would be kind of a goal to get them done. Now,
on an apple looms, it has a cluster of blooms and there's one
in the middle that's called a king blossom, and it's bigger, and that
would be the one that's most important. If you get that pollinated, it'll
make the best, biggest apple on the cluster. But the others are there
too, and sometimes something happens to the main one, and it's good to
have some others around, But you thin them to one per cluster, So
that's pulling a lot of apples off. But yeah, one per cluster is
all you should have on an apple tree. Okay, okay. Additionally,
the there's been a lot of above ground growth, but with the storms and
whatnot, those both those apple trees have have and I took off their supports.
They were about three years old. They're leaning, they've they've had they've
been leaning over. I had to put supports back on. Yeah, to
keep them, to keep them upright. Is there something I can do?
And I had been using root activator and stuff like that. There's something I
can do to help strengthen the strengthen truth just mainly the thing that strengthens would
on whether it's a fruit tree or a shade tree or whatever, is movement
and stretching of those tissues. And they get stronger if you do that.
And so if you were to take a tree trunk when it's a little skinny
trunk and tie it to a post tight. It would never develop the strength
if you took the post away to snap off. But when it moves in
the wind, that slight movement, that stretching, it gets stronger and stronger.
It's kind of like our muscles working out getting stronger. It's the same
principle in nature. And so if you can allow it some movement, you
got to stick it out, but a little bit of movement in time it
will get stronger. Do you know offhand what rootstock your apples are on?
Usually? Okay, that's fine, that's fine. That affects sometimes tree growth
too. I see, should I trim the canopy if you will? I
mean, they're not twelve foot tall now, But should I trim it out
just kind of limit the sale effect? I would. I would trim it
only to take away things that don't have a long term purpose in the canopy.
Everywhere you have foliage, it's producing carbohydrates, which is setting fruit buds
when we get into mid to late summer. That's so you need that and
for next year. And it also is strengthening the plant, helping it grow
bigger. And better root system, cutter top growth. So I wouldn't prune
just to prune. But if you go online, there's a website called Aggie
Horticulture and they have free publications on there. There's one in the fruit section
on apple trees, and it shows you how to prine and apple. It's
a little different approach than when we're pruning peaches. It's hard to describe on
the air, but the bottom line is you want branches that are spaced apart
enough so that you get good air movement through there and good light down into
that. We say, into the canopy of the tree. You don't want
your treat to become an umbrella with all the foliage and fruit around the top
and outside. Okay, yes, sir, Yes, sir, okay,
awesome, awesome. I appreciate your time. All right, well, good
luck with that. Thanks, Mike, appreciate the call, Yes sir,
take care. Nelson Plant Food has a wide variety of quality plant foods.
You know, have the turf Star line. And by the way, if
you haven't done summer fertilizing Slow and Easy by Nelson Plant Food, part of
their turf Star line of products gives you a very very nice smooth, gradual
release on from the time you put it down. You get a little nutrient
release then, and then it just continues to do that and all the way
up to like three months, four months, even a little further out in
time, it's still releasing that nutrient. So when you're fertilized with slow and
Easy in the summer, you're done until fall. It's got a little bit
of an acidifying effect, which is a good thing also, but it's high
quality fertilizer, very important to do that. Now. There's a lot of
different kinds of products from Nelson Plant Food. They're nutrius Star line is especially
interesting. You know, for example, if you got any kind of vines
from bougainvillias to wisteria to you know, trumpet buyes and caroline adjustment, all
of boog and villa plant food by Nutristar, the Nelson product is an excellent
choice. They have a crape myrtle fertilizer that's also a very good blend,
works well. And the Plumeria which works with all your flowering tropicals, is
just another example of a quality product in the nutri Star line from Nelson Plant
Food, and they're widely available, easy to find them easy to come by.
While we're talking about taking care of the soil, the importance of making
sure that we have prepared the soil well with good quality organic matter is important.
Now you can go out to the soil you have and you put composts
and things down and mix it in and create a nice soil. You can
also just buy a soil that you put in a box, put it in
a container, put it in a raised bedgarden, put it on top of
the ground and grow in that. Things like the fruit berry and or excellent
for that. The veggie and herb mix would be excellent for that. For
succulents, the cacti and succulent mix. Airlom soils has a wide variety and
they're widely available. It's really easy to find heirloom soils no matter where you
live because they're sold by the bag. You can also bat by the bulk.
You can go to Heirloom Soilsoftexas dot com, Heirloomsoils off Texas dot Com
and find out you can go get it. You can have them deliver it
to you. You can have them bring a supersack, which is a qbcard
sack that's set on your driveway. Real easy to do and very high quality
products. I've used in myself. They work very very well. And remember
round stuff before green stuff, the fertilizers, the soil amendments, all of
that. It's very very important. We know. Now out to conro and
talk to Archie. Hey, Archie, we got about a minute. If
it takes longer, I'll just hold you over the break. Okay. Hey,
Well we spoke last year and had some little volunteer elm trees come out
and I replanted them, and they're they're doing awesome, really are I think
they're going to be fine? My question is should I trim them up?
And what should I fertilize them with? Uh? You know I would?
Are you gonna are they containers right now? Are they already where they're going
to finally be? Yeah? No, they're they're where they're going to be.
Okay. I I went straight from a wheelbarrow where they volunteerily come up
straight to the ground. Okay, So what you what you want to do
with a young tree like that is as it grows, you're not going to
see the first long term limb for a good while, because that first limb
that is a long term limb is going to be a way above your head
high, right. I mean, if you go out to a big tree
in the yard, you don't have limbs done at your waist on that tree.
Uh. And so the branches that are growing out, now, I
would take my prunters and I would just cut the last couple of inches out
of them, just tip them. And what that does is it leaves the
foe on them to make carbohydrates and move down into the plant to help that
plant get bigger and stronger, get more root system, and do better and
better. And then once they hit the stage where they're about the size of
the end of your thumb, let's say, about an engine diameter, then
you can cut them off where they attached to the branch. But by tipping
them, you dwarf them and you prevent them from taking over and using all
the energy of the tree. Instead, they're more of an energy producer than
an energy user. Uh. And just continue to work it up there until
you finally get to a height where you're going to have a permanent branch.
And at that stage you wouldn't be tipping those Does that make sense? So
blowing on all of them all about an inch from the bait. No,
no, no, let me do the music is playing here. I'm going
to have to come back to you on it. No, I'm talking about
taking the inch, final inch out of the end of the branch. Let
me come back and oh god, I'll explain it. Just saying welcome to
kt r H garden line with skimp Rictor. It's just watch him as a
sign welcome back to the garden line. Good to have you with us.
Look outside, will you take a look at that sky. It is beautiful.
It's going to be a beautiful day. I love it. I love
it, love it, love it. Hey, this is an opportunity this
afternoon for you to get outside to get a little couple of things done.
If you want to put around the art a little better, just go buy
a garden center and pick up some applies and get ready to go for taking
your lawn and landscape to the next level. Remember it is time to be
planting all kinds of things in the vegetable garden and in the flower beds.
We got a lot of good heat tolerant plants that we can we can use
and so there's no reason even when summer heat hits to lose the beauty and
the color that we can have around the landscape. We're going to go back
to the phones now. We were talking with Archie up in Conroe and Archie
we were discussing elm pruning. And I'm gonna take another kind of stab at
at what I'm trying to describe. I wish I wish you could see me
wave my hands in the air. And you know how I can't talk without
my hands. Well anyway, Uh So, you've got this little trunk coming
up out of the Ground's a young little tree and it's going to have sight
and a half foot and a half foot tall right now, huh. And
you want that trunk to come on up. It's going to keep growing bigger
and bigger. But rather than cutting off all the branches where they attached to
the trunk and just living leaving you with a little bamboo pole coming up out
of the ground, We're we're going to take the tips of those and just
snip the tips out so they stop growing, but they stay there with the
leaves that are on them. And that we call that a trashy trunk because
what we're doing is we're leaving them as to serve like they would be nurse
limbs, meaning they're they're they've got leaves or producing carbohydrates, but they're not.
The tree is not putting its energy into growing those branches. It's putting
its energy into growing that upright trunk you're building and eventually the true scaffold branches
that will appear way above your head and time. So rather than just cut
them off, let's take advantage of the leaves on them, and you can
get more of a response in terms of tree growth. Rapid tree growth is
a result to that. So just just you're what you're saying is just just
clip the ones that are there about an inch and that'll kind of go dormant.
Yeah, sometimes you get even a tree comes up and it has two
trunks and they want to compete with each other who's going to be boss,
And if you let them do that, they just get bigger and it just
ends up being a mess and time. It's a very weak union. But
if you anytime you snip the tips out of a branch, it dwarfs it
and it may try growing again and you can do another trimming on it later
if you need to, meaning trimming meaning just cutting the tips out, But
at the end of the season, those that you tipped will just be a
fraction of the diameter of the ones you let just grow, in this case
the trunk. So where will they start growing after you tip them? Yes,
well, anytime you cut a branch off, you may get two or
three buds at break and and and grow out in response to that. Do
you see what I'm saying? Like, if you cut the top out of
your little trees you got, they would have buds at form and try to
replace that trunk and go back up in there. Okay, okay, okay,
gotcha? Gotcha? All right? And should I should I fertilize it
now? Or moderate amounts in general, as yours is pretty small. But
in general, what I say is, on these young trees, go up
to the trunk with your thumb. That's my one inch measure close enough?
And how many thumb wits across is it? You know? So let's just
say the tree was the size of a typical broom handle, you know,
that may be what inch inch and a half whatever across, And and so
you would give it a cup or two of fertilizer for every inch of trunk
diameter. So if you had, if you had a broom handle, it'd
get a it'd get a cup or two or three of fertilizer. And if
it was the size of a Coca Cola can, that's about three inches,
so that's going to be about three or six cups. And that makes it
real easy, really easy to know. And you just sprinkle it around all
around. It watered in really good. Okay, okay. And what what
what? What type of fertilized is? I would no, I would use
lawn fertilizer whatever you use for your lawn. You hear me talk about fertilizers
all the time. And just get one for your lawn and then just scoop
a scoop some cups out of it for your for your trees. Yeah,
okay, okay, he's doing us perfect, all right, man, Thank
you appreciate it, buddy. Thank you. You have a good day you
too. Take care of you. You know, the Father's Day is today.
First of all, for those of you who aren't aware, If for
any reason you are still in need of a really good quality Father's Day gift,
I've got a perfect idea. In fact, just take dead with you.
Go to an Ace hardware store there's so many things that we dads would
love to have from an ACE hardware store. I mean, you can go
to the barbecue section and look in there. You can go to some of
the tools and equipment and whatnot. We always have a need for some other
kinds of tools, or some better things for taking care of the lawn and
the landscape outside, something to make the outdoor area more beautiful. There's just
a lot of opportunities. I don't know what your dad's interested in it,
but I guarantee you Ace has got it whatever it is. There's a lot
of different things, and they have some really cool stuff at the ACE Hardware
stores go way beyond just what you would think of from a hardware store.
You can find ACE Hardware all over town, all over the region really and
in the Greater Houston area. We have forty of them. So just go
to Acehardware dot com. Ace Hardware dot Com, find the store locator in
there. You go, takes you right in there where you can find exactly
the nearest stores to you, and they're gonna be some close to you.
We're going to head back now to Spring Branch and talk to Herta. Hello,
Herta, good morning, morning, I have a kalily that I got
for mothers today. Okay, but they're at least I counted ten or twelve
stems in that pot. It's about a five inch pot. I think there
are too many in there. There's a leaf that's yellow and another leaf that's
like a yellow brown. Okay, okay, well they do they do that,
some heard it. I would just mainly if I'd worry about is it
getting a good amount of light but not direct sun that they want a bright
area? Okay? And is it getting they don't have to be in full
sun? In fact, they shouldn't. That's the price they're in full sun.
Yeah, that's that's probably a little too much for them, especially with
the sun with the temperatures we're about to get into here. But anyway,
the uh so you could you could do that and then make sure you keep
the soil moist but not drenched soggy. They don't like, they don't like
to be in a swamp, but they do want moisture, I see,
okay, And I have some athemite. Should I give them that? Oh?
You can put a little on them, but I wouldn't be careful because
you could end up overdoing it by, you know, asthmight we put down
like a ten pound bag over a thousand square feet easy and so I mean
you would maybe a quarter teaspoon of asthmite in a little container would be enough.
Okay, but they're not too crammed. Well they might be, but
they grow like that, and they can grow like that. I would for
now, since they're kind of new from Mother's Day, I would just leave
them alone and see how they do for you. Oh okay, okay,
thank you very much. Take care all right, heardy, you take care
too. Thanks for the call. Appreciate that if you have not put your
summer turf fertilizers out, you still can do it. You know. We
put things on a schedule as a guideline for when you ought to do things,
and if you miss that date, that's okay, it's not the end
of the world. Just go ahead and do it later. Get it done
though. Summer fertilizing helps build turf density and nitrophoss superturf. That's the silver
bag. That's the silver bag nineteen four ten. Those are the three numbers
on the bag that is designed to gradually release at least half of the nitrogen
over the next two or three four months. It's a very gradual release product.
And the nice thing about that is it gives you a nice green lawn,
good density, but not overdoing it. You know, anytime we overdo
nutrition, it's not a good thing. And this idea that if a tea
spoons good at tablespoons better, I don't care if it's pest control, fertilizing
or whatever. Don't operate by that principle. Do what the plant needs.
And what the plant needs in the case of a lawn is about a pound
of nitrogen per thousand square feet. That's that's kind of what it amounts to.
So when you use superturf and you apply it and follow the label,
follow the instructions, get it down on there, get it watered in,
you're going to see that gradual release over time. You're going to see the
benefit in terms of your lawn that along with some moderate applications of water here
and there in the absence of rain and then regular mowing will create the most
beautiful lawn that you can have. And that is I know what you're going
after there. If you go out to Ace Hardware at Sincle Ranch, you're
going to find nitrophost products like the superturf a task Asida Ace also has some
Lake hardware done in Clue Lake Jackson Lake Hardware. Clue in Lake Jackson is
going to have Jem's Hardware up in Montgomery also another place where you're gonna find
super turk and other nitrofos products as well. So we were we were discussing
earlier about fruit trees and little gosh I'm looking at the time. I better
take a little break here. I'll come back to that thought in just a
moment. Hang on our phone number seven one three two one two fifty eight
seventy four. I'll be right back. Welcome back to Garden Line. May
you with us this morning? A little Brian White for those of you who
may remember that. You know I was talking about fruit while ago, and
the fruit is such an enjoyable thing to add to the landscape. You know,
you may not have room for orchard. Maybe you're looking at in the
back like I don't. I don't have a back forty to put an orchard
in. But you can grow fruit in a lot of places. Citrus trees
do well in containers, large container. That is, when we're talking about
things like when I say citrus tree, I guess it's say trees and shrubs.
So something like the kumquats that make more of a bush or a shrub.
They do well. A lime, various types of limes, a mere
lemon, even a satsuma orange could be put in a very large container,
something that is the equivalent of a half whiskey barrow, but definitely made us
something that won't rote out like a whiskey barrow will rote out, but something
about that volume. You can grow even a satsumn. If you just have
room for a tree or two, why not make it part of your landscape.
I used to have a peach tree that was I just used it like
I would a small tree in the landscape, and it just happened to produce
fruit for me. Also beautiful blooms. Peaches do not require pollinators. Plums
generally do, but not always. And if you don't know, you can
always go online and find out. The Aggie Horticulture website. Aggie Horticulture has
a fruit section and every single plant that species you can imagine is on there.
I mean, if you want a publication on peaches and plums, there's
one on apples on pears. There's one on avocados, there's one on several
more than one on citrus that they have. I'm just saying it's free advice,
and it's very good advice. They'll suggest varieties for you. They'll tay
hot a parnum and things make it easier on yourself. But try something like
a fruit. Maybe you have an arbor area, how about some grapes on
an arbor. If you're going to do that and you want to grow some
grapes on an arbor, I would recommend one called Southern Sensation Seedless SSS.
Southern Sensation Seedless. That is one of the newest grapes that we have.
It's actually comes out of the breeding program up in Arkansas, but it is
one that doesn't do well for them there, but it sure does for us
down here. That's the same breeding program that produced a lot of the blackberries
that we like so much down in this area. The blackberries, if they
have a Native American name like Navajo or rappa hoo, those kind of names,
they came out of the Arkansas breeding program and they also produced Southern Sensation
Seedless, which is an excellent I believe Arkansas breed is that great pretty sure.
Anyway, it's a good one, So it'd be a good one for
an arbor if you'd like to do that. I think it would be an
excellent way to add something of interest and yummy at the same time to your
landscape. And just with a little good advice you can you can get off
to a good start on that. Quality Home Products of Texas is a company
that really specializes in doing it right when it comes to taking care of the
customers. Let me just brag on them for just a minute. Eight times
they have won the Pinnacle Award by the Better Business Bureau. It is the
most prestigious customer service award BBB offers and they've won it eight times. That's
that in and of itself, is amazing. This is a family owned company.
It's been around since nineteen eighty nine. But when you go in and
say, hey, I need a let's say, a generator, a generaic
generator. First of all, by the way, three hundred and fifty dollars
off all their generators right now and a free ten year warranty on their air
cooled units. The generators that they do. You sit down with them and
they find the generator that it fits you. It's going to be a Generaic
because that's a super high quality generator. They're gonna do all the work of
getting you through the process of having that thing set up, and that includes
everything from getting permission from Hoa's or whoever is part of that process. They
do this, They know how to do all that. They'll take care of
all that for you. They will also put the pad down, create the
pad to put it on, they'll set it up and once you once they
walk away, power goes out, the thing comes on, and you're in
good shape because you've gotten a good generator from a good company that knows how
to do customer service. Three hundred and sixty five days a year, twenty
four hours a day, seventy of course they're there, and that's why they're
so highly related. That's why fourteen thousand people have given them a five star
rating from that company. That's why seventy seven thousand homeowners have been served by
their company. Because word gets out and there is nothing that replaces quality service.
Nothing, And when you take a quality product like Generak and a quality
company like quality home Products, you're not going to go wrong. The website
is easy, it's QUALITYTX dot com QUALITYTX dot com. The phone number is
seven to one to three Quality. And so if you've even thought about doing
a generator, because here we are again in a big, long hurricane season,
well you should give them a call, sit down, start the process.
Just get some information, get sit down with them, give them a
call and check it out, because it takes a while to get the whole
thing done and you don't want to delay. So now it'd be a great
time to go ahead and do that. And you know, we don't don't
have to have a hurricane to lose power. We learned that the other day
again, didn't we That is for sure. I enjoy houseplants that have color
in the foliage. I don't know, you know, it used to be
I don't know, maybe it seems to me like it used to be that
all houseplants were just green. You know, you had a green ivy,
maybe splotches of yellow and apothos or something, but it's basically green on green.
And now there are so many other colors and patterns and things. And
it's not like they weren't there before. It's just that we have so many
more options now. When COVID came along and we were all shoved inside the
house for a while. Houseplants became popular, and boy did that whole world
ever go crazy in terms of all these new kinds of plants. And I
think they're beautiful. And I like uglionima that's Chinese evergreen. There are some
types of it that have kind of a coral and a pink and a reddish
color in the foliage that is just beautiful. There's various kinds of variegated houseplants.
Why not do some different colors in the house just by choosing plants that
you know can do that. And we have a lot of good new ones
now. Morana prayer plant is an excellent one for providing a very interesting pattern
of color to the to the foliage. So I would encourage you to do
that. You know, the summertime is maybe you don't want to be outside
when it's hundred degrees outside, But there's always things you can be doing indoors,
including with your houseplants, doing some cuttings, starting some new things,
giving them a little fertilizer is needed. Just to remember that the number one
problem we make with houseplants is we overwater them. Number two, as we
underwater them. So it's like you're walking down the line here, you're going
to go to the left, to the right, one of the other vis
really not that hard. You want a really good, well drained mix.
That's number one, because if you overwater, you want it to run out.
You don't want it to turn into a soggy swamp that doesn't drain.
So a good pot that has holes that drain away. You give it a
good drenching, set it and sink, let it all drain out, and
then you're good for a while. Don't water again until it dries out.
Now, for some tricks, there's two tricks that you can use. One
of them the most basic one. And I was talking with someone yesterday when
I was at Wabird's Unlimited in bel Air. We were talking about testing plants
for water and discussing the idea that if you take a pencil and you sharpen
it, that fresh cut would end as you've sharpened it. You stick that
pencil down into the soil and just go ahead and stick it. I usually
go like two inches in and pull it out and look at it, and
go another two inches, pull it out and look at it. And you're
testing for moisture at different levels, because when you have moisture, either you'll
see actual moisture soaked into that wood because instead of having you know, like
it's real slick with the oils of your fingers and stuff, you've sharpened it
fresh and now you have a fresh cut on there, moisture shows up real
easy, or kind of like when you're baking a cake and you put a
little toothpick in it and you pull it out, and that's one way you
tell of like a pound cakes ready, you know, is there stuff clinging
to the toothpick or not. Well, soil will also cling to that fresh
cut pencil edge or surface that you did, and so you can do a
real quick test that way. I also test just by picking them up.
You know, once you have a plant for a while and you kind of
know how heavy it is, you pick it up when it's full of moisture.
Almost all the weight of a plant is the water you put in the
pot. I mean, that's a huge, huge part of the weight.
And so you can pick it up right away and ooh, this is really
light. This is going to need water, and you kind of get better
at that. But that pencil is a great way to go, or the
toothpick. You can use a toothpick. My wife has some little succulents and
very tiny containers, and she uses a little toothpick because a pencil would just
kind of push the whole thing out of the pot. But a toothpick works
well just for testing. For that, We're going to take a little break
here. Our phone number is seven one three two one two KTRH. I'll
be right back. We got some bright sun coming outside. It's going to
be a beautiful day. Take a look look outside. Wow, what do
they call that Chamber of Commas? Weather? A good day to get out
there. Hey, you've got any Father's Day shopping left to do? I
tell you a lot of our garden centers are all chocked up and ready to
go. I've got some really good deals going on various things. I was
checking out some of the things going on online, and oh my gosh,
it'd be a good time to get out and purchase some things, even if
it wasn't for a Father's Day gift. This is good sales going on all
around in our garden centers. Landscaper's Pride is a company that is, first
of all, it's a local company. It's been around here in our region
for a good while now, providing quality products. And they have a wide
variety of blends of soils and composts and all kinds of things, so twenty
something different products that they produce. But right now I want to talk about
the mulches because mulch is very important for summer, and I know it's I'll
be thinking, Okay, how exciting can you get putting bronze stuff on top
of the ground. Well, I'll tell you how exciting I get. As
excited as I get when I know I'm not going to be pulling weeds by
hand in one hundred degree heat with fire ants biting me in the middle of
summer because I maltched. But for summertime arrived, That's how excited I get.
My plants are going to do better. Do you know how hot the
soil gets when the surface is unmulched, He gets very hot. I mean,
go put your hand, Go put your hand on bear dirt sometime on
a hot summer summer day, and then think about how would a root that
needs to be operating probably would like to be in the seventy degree range,
if not fifty degree range somewhere in there. They do pretty well all through
that range, and then we're going to take them up to over one hundred
degrees up near the surface. And yes, it does get that hot.
Well, mulch helps avoid that. So meanwhile, back at the comments about
Landscaper's Pride, they've got a cypress moultz that is locally sourced. Cypress logs
cyper smults is really good about kind of when it gets wet, it sits
in, stays in place really well. It's got a nice light color to
it, and it doesn't tend to just float away and move around it it
really kind of honkers down. Cedar mulch is nice because it has an aroma
to it. I think it's really nice and it goes away in time as
it ages, but it's just a beautiful natural red streaking. It's a very
attractive kind of melt. Pine bark multch is the most popular. It's the
one. It's again beautiful colored, a little slow to decompose, which is
good, which is also true of the cedar and the cypers. And then
hardwood malts hardwood materials ground up and they are put into a moltch that holds
well in its place. It's good for walkways too, by the way,
and then of course Landscapers Pride has their black velvet. Black velvet is not
dyed. It is naturally velvety, dense, beautiful moults and it just it
just works well whatever you use. Get some bags of it. You can
find Landscapers Pride all over the place. You can go to Landscaperspride dot com
the website find out where to get it. But it's widely available. But
whatever you do, get some and get it out there and get it down
about three inches thick. Put it over the beds, keep the soil cool,
protect the soil from erosion, stop weed seeds from getting started. And
it's just a win win. And always remember this when you're adding more malts.
Don't take the ol malt away. Throw the new mulch on top of
it. Let the ol malt slowly decompose. That's what nature does in the
forest. No need to take the old out just when it's getting pretty good
in terms of releasing its nutrients back into the soil. So give the n
skippers Pride to a shot. I think you think you'll be impressed with the
kinds of products that they that they carry I have. Let's see all.
I want to give you a phone number again, our phone number if you'd
like to give us a call if you have a question. Uh seven to
one three two one two fifty eight seventy four seven one three two one two
five eight seven four. Don't forget my website, Gardening with skip dot com.
It's a new site. I haven't had it that long and we're slowly
building it out right now. The main thing you're going to find there are
my two schedules. The lawn care schedule, which is how to grow a
lawn. It talks about mowing, watering, fertilizing, errating, doing the
micronutrient top dressing, talks about all that. The other schedule lawn Pest,
Disease and weed management schedule. That's about what goes wrong with the lawn insects,
when do they occur and what do you do about them? Diseases,
weeds, How do you prevent them with premurden, how do you kill them
with a post emergent, How do you grow your lawn so you don't have
so much of a weed problem. It's all on there. Whether you're interested
in organic or synthetic options, they're both on both of those schedules, and
the schedules are free, so you know you can't beat that. Just print
them out and there you go. You're ready to go for for it.
I have a beautiful, beautiful lawn. Makes it takes all the guesswork out
in the wondering, makes that simple. All right, let's see here I
wanted to We're going to go the phones here in just a second. I
wanted I did want to make one quick comment though about this, the whole
lawn care thing. Just remember that whenever you're going for the best lawn you
can have, it is important to fertilize, It is important to water as
you need to. But the most single most important thing is a good sharp
mower and mowing regularly. That is the single most important thing. It's not
the only by any means. But the more often you hedge your lawn,
think of it that way. A lawnmower hedges your lawn. The more you
trim a hedge, the dentsuer the hedge gets, the prettier the hedge gets.
If you let a hedge grow two feet out into the walkway and you
cut it back two feet, it won't kill it, but it's your will
look bad and it'll be thin, and you'll be able to see right into
the hedge right. You trim regularly to keep it dense. The same is
true with your lawn moh regularly get a good sharp more for good clean cuts,
not a whole bunch of big old brown tips on the ends of every
grass blade. A good sharp mower on a regular basis, that's important.
We're going to head now out to sugar Land and talk to June. Hello,
June, Hi. I was calling to see about what kind of mulch
to use on hydraineas and I have. I was questioning if pine mulch is
good or which mulch is the best I have Limelight hydrainus. You know,
they don't care what kind of mult you put on them. They'll be happy
with They'll just be excited that you Molted pine bark is fine. Pine needles,
pine straw as we call it, is fry. You can do that.
You can use, you know, shredded hardwoodmulch if you like. Generally,
with hedrangs, we go with something a little more on the acidic side.
We generally go with the pine needles and pine bark kinds of things.
But listen, you can just melting. Ajdranga is doing the right thing.
Okay, that's all I need get to know. That's okay, all right,
thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you. I have
a great day you too. You take care. Appreciate that. Let's see
here we're going to go now to k in Paarland. Hello. Okay,
good morning, Skid, good morning. Thank you for taking my call.
I have a couple of questions. One is about round up. I have
a bed that has a variegated hibiscus in the middle and amarilla is all around.
It's kind of round, but the weeds have taken over in it.
Can I use round up at all in there with a protective cardboard barrier?
You know? Next you can. You can use it if you don't get
in on anything desirable. So however you go about doing that, you can
do that. Now, if the weeds are grassy weeds, you have other
options. There are some grass killers that don't kill broad leaf plants. So
the plants you describe that are your good plants, these grass killers wouldn't ca
kill them. If you actually, I don't think these are not grassy weeds.
They're they're feathery little yeah. Okay. The other question was I have
a couple I've just received a couple of small trellises that I ordered. I
was wondering about something that is heat and preest tolerant both. Who doesn't want
that? You know you're looking for a vine. You're looking for a vine?
Okay, a vine? Yeah? Buy anything like like what am I
trying to say? Passion flower or okay? Uh, let me, let's
come back. I'm gonna run to a break right here, and let's come
back to that. But but uh and be thinking about how big of an
area of this can encompass, and then we'll recommend a vine based on that.
But hang on, Calby, right back with you when we get on
the other side. And then Bob and Kingwood you'll be the next up.
All right, time for a little break. Seven kt r h. All
right, welcome back to gardenine. Let's get back into gardening. We're gonna
go back to the phones and talk to Kay in pairland. Ka, how
big of a vine area do you want to have? I mean, is
this something like ten feet long or what? What dimensions? Well? I
have I have a bed that's full forty feet forty feet long. Oh wow,
okay, so you got room for a vine it's you know, three
three to four feet deep, three feet deep probably, okay, I don't
it can go out on the ground too in something that big, because I
have two trellises, and I would separate them, okay, and I would
like to put two different things on them. Actually, okay, Well,
there there's so many vine options. There's some things that are woody vines that
would be something like westeria, for example. There is another when we say
woody. When I say woody, I don't necessarily mean in the sense of
like tree trunk wood. I mean like for example, the coral vine is
a vine that grows above ground, but it last year after year. It's
like a shrub, you know, it doesn't die back to the ground.
Coral vine has beautiful little coral reddish color, pink, tubular blossoms that hummingbirds
like. It is a I'm sorry coral honeysuckle does. Coral vine comes out
of a sweet potato out of the ground, and it will run for a
long it'll take over the world. But it has beautiful blooms, especially late
summer and fall in clusters. They look like little pink clusters of flowers.
That's a good one. I like. Let's see, butterfly pee is a
good one that has very small, deep, deep blue, beautiful blooms.
It's very tame, but it's an annual vine that comes back from a seed
each year. So there's so many options. Confederate jasmine or are star jasmine
is an evergreen that has wonderfully fragrant blooms that are white. That is another
one you might be interested in. Soot does it die back? Men to
be an almanda. Both are tropicals, and they're beautiful, little kind of
a morning glory looking bloom that is gorgeous. But they don't take hard freezes.
Okay, okay, I know passion flower can be very invasive. You
can, yeah, sometimes all of them probably can. Well, but it'll
come out, it'll go out in the yard and pop up in the yard
somewhere. A lot of the types of passion vine will and so you have
to be a little careful with that. But it's a beautiful flower, one
of the most beautiful. That's a great list, and I do appreciate it
so very much, and I enjoy your program every every weekday. All right,
Thanks appreciate you listening. Have a blessed day. Well, thank you,
kay, I appreciate that. Thank you very much. Bye bye bye
bye, all right our phone number seven one three two one two fifty eight
seventy four seven one three two one two five eight seven four. If you
are looking for a little bit of help keeping your flower beds looking their best,
your landscape beds, then you ought to give Pierscapes a call. Pierscapes
does something called quarterly maintenance. Now, normally, when I think of pair
scapes, and you too, probably you think about just gorgeous landscape renovations.
I mean we're talking about hard scapes and outdoor lighting and improved drainage and just
on and on. I mean, they all kinds of features. They they
can create whatever kind of thing up to the taj Mahal you are looking for.
But they also come out and they do things like check your irrigation system.
If you need a summer's coming, it's pretty much already here. You
need to get out there and have I have this system checked, make sure
it's efficient, make sure it's working, there's there's everything's aligned, it's you
know, it's in good shape. That is important because when you provide a
good even distribution of water, you save water because you're going to end up
watering enough to keep the dry spots wet, and it wastes water when you
have an air inefficient system as a result of that. But talk to Pierce
Scapes about their their quarterly maintenance too. By the way, they come out
once a quarter they will do weeding and fertilizing and mulching. They'll change out
color if you want it. Two times a year, three times a year,
four times a year to have them take out a set of plants and
put in a new set of color plants for the next season that's coming on,
they can do that. They'll inspect the irrigation in those beds. It's
really easy. Piercescapes dot com, Pierce scapes dot com. If you want
to give them a call, write this number down two eight one three seven
oh fifty sixty two eight one three seven oh fifty sixty and do go to
the website perscapes dot com and see the kinds of works that they do.
It's pretty amazing, very in fact, it's very amazing, very impressed with
that. Let's see here. We are going to now go back to the
phones and head to Kingwood and talk to Bob. Hello Bob, Yes,
hello Skip. I have a Asian orange that I bought in the pot about
six inches wide maybe six inches high. I bought about two months ago,
and I didn't replant it though it was about maybe three foot tall. You
know how in the store they were already starting a flower on top, big
long, skinny thing. Asian orange. You're talking about, like I said,
an edible orange. Okay, yes, they call them CALAMANSI they're only
about the size of a big, big marble. Oh, a klamandon,
yes, I then, yeah, you got it, now gotcha. The
last two I planned died is there is what's the smallest pot or I guess
that's the way to ask it. The smallest sized pot I could put it
in. Yeah, you know, here's the deal. The smaller the pot
is, the more touching go taking care of it is. So you could
grow a kalamandan and a little pot that was like two or three gallons,
but you're going to be watering it all the time, and if you forget
it, you're going to get in trouble because it's going to redamage it to
set it back like that I would if I had a kalamandan, I would
try to get it into something that had about at least ten gallons, maybe
fifteen, so that it does better and you can move those. Even though
that's a heavy container. You can put a little dolly underneath it and a
strap around it and take it in when we're going to have really bad cold
weather too. Right, So you were scaring me with the two or three
gallon. Obviously ten gallon I can water it once every couple of days.
Yeah, yeah, well yeah, the bigger the container, the more water
it can hold, the less often you have to worry, the less likely
it is to have. So really it's only the watering part, the roots
and all that, and the bearing fruit will be okay, Yes, it's
the thing is it's the root system that's the confining factor that only nutrients are
available from that pot. The only water is available from what's in that pot.
So the bigger the pot, the more of a bank account that you
have, and that makes it a little more resilient, a little more forgiving
if you forget to water. For example, I had one that went about
fifteen foot tall and about eight foot wide. Now, question, you're gonna
have to have a bigger You have to a much bigger pot than the little
ones I'm talking about to get a plant that size. Yeah, oh for
sure. Sure. But my question meaning that analogy was how big do a
root system go out on something like that? Is that a rule of thumb
that the wider the plant is what you see above the ground, the roots
or underground? Yeah, just in general. Yeah, if it was in
the ground, your roots will be about twice the height of the tree in
all directions about Oh really, yeah, yeah, twice the height of the
tree in general directly, And that's a generalization. And so last question.
On the internet, I see these pictures of people that got like plants in
a little small two gallon container. They're only about the plants only maybe about
two foot tall. And you see papayas on there. Yeah, mango,
do that fake pictures or they really do it like that? That's mostly blooney.
Hey Bob, we got to we've got to run here for the top
there. If you want to continue the discussion, hang on, keep you
through the hour and then we'll come back to you. But i'll later occupacture.
Take care, all right, man, we're putting an hour in the
books there. It was beautiful, beautiful weather outside. Folks, this afternoon
would be a good time to get out and about. If you don't want
to you don't want to do any planting or puttering like that around the yard,
at least go out and visit one of our garden centers. Take take
Dad with you. There are some really cool stuff out there that I think
you would like. A lot of our folks are still selling fruit trees,
and some of them even have some really good deals on fruit trees. And
here there's plenty of good things. Get outside and enjoy with Dad. I'm
gonna take a little break here. I will be back. Just a reminder
two weeks from yesterday, I will be at the Langham Creek Langcumbe Creek Ace
Hardware that's in West Houston, kind of in the old Copperfield neighborhood area.
Hope you'll come out and see me two weeks from yesterday Langham Creek Ace.
Are welcome to kt r H Garden Line with Scared Ricter. It's just watch
him as many things to welcome back to the guard line. Good to have
you. It's good to have you with us today. We uh talking about
all kinds of things. Gardening wants you to have success, a more beautiful
garden, a more bountiful garden. The goal is to enjoy it. You
know that. That's the thing a lot of people. I've heard this many
times over my career, as people saying, you know, I'd like to
garden, but I just don't know how. Or I tried growing something and
it died, and it's like, well, okay, that's okay. We
can walk you through that. But first of all, let's just take the
pressure off. In order to be a good gardener, you got to kill
a lot of plants. Can I just tell you that, Go ahead and
get out of your system. Don't be afraid you plant something, you try
it, it doesn't work, that's okay. We can put you know,
a whole vegetable gardens and flower gardens and all kinds of things out there,
and sometimes things thrive, sometimes things don't. That we can't control the weather,
you know, insects have their own opinion about how things are going to
go, and we have to deal with that. It's okay, though,
It's okay to not have things do well. We can always start over.
A garden is never finished. Did you know that. You know, we
think about, well, I'm gonna landscape my home, this beautiful thing,
and I'm done. No, it's never done. Things grow up. There's
always a time when it's time to pull that out and plant something else there.
Maybe shrubs get overgrown and you're just having trouble keeping control of them.
Maybe an area that was really beautiful and sunny and everything was doing good,
and now the trees years down the line have gotten bigger and it's too shady.
Pull them out, redo it. It's a shade garden. Now,
let's do some of that. It's okay to do that. There is a
there's a little toy from years ago some of you remember, called an etch
a sketch, and you would draw with two knobs, and one knob goes
left right, one knob goes up down, and inevitably it is impossible to
draw, especially a circle with an edge of sketch, because your brain goes
backwards and you end up going left when you meant to go right or whatever.
And it's like, oh man, I messed it up. What do
you do? What did you do with your etcher sketch? You turned it
upside down? You shook it and then you brought it back down again.
You had a blank slate. You got to start over. Rototillers or the
equivalent of shaking an etch of sketch. In other words, I'm sort of
joking. But if you plant something and it doesn't do good, pull it
out, put something else in. That is okay. You know. Part
of the fun of gardening is knowing that nature is forever changing. It's forever
it's just evolving out there in front of us. We may have a planting
that grows up and it fills in nicely, or we may find that this
plant is struggling there, pull it up, put it somewhere else, or
get rid of it and put a new plant in that spot. Will figure
it out, and that's part of the fun of it. Part of the
fun of it is just getting out there and doing it, and don't worry
about failing. You're not going to fail. All you can do is quit.
Okay, you're not going to fail, So don't quit. Just keep
trying. There's a lot of fun things we can do. And you know,
there's some people that they want everything. They want to hire it done,
and that's okay. Somebody comes in they do the landscaping for them.
They take care of the landscaping for them. That's all okay. There's other
people on the other end of the spectrum that are all do it yourselfers and
they don't even want to buy a plant. They want to buy a seed
and grow their own plant to plant. Well, whatever, whatever you like,
our garden centers can help you have success. We've got all these great
feed stores, these hardware stores, places like Southwest Fertilizers that have the supplies
you need to have success with it. And we have so much expertise here
in the Houston area to kind of guide you so that you can find exactly
the types of plants that you want to have the kind of garden that you
want. And I'll tell you this more than once I have had a bunch
of plants in and they look good, and I just at a point where
it's like, yeah, I'm gonna try something different. I'm gonna try something
else a little bit different there, and that's okay to do. Think about
your wardrobe. Do you only get rid of a item of clothing when it
is completely worn out you practically see through it? Or is there such a
thing as you know what I'd like to change my style a little bit.
I would like to try some different things. And that's kind of how gardening
is. By the way, on the item of clothing thing, if I
were asking myself that, the answer would probably be, yeah, he only
gets rid of it when it's completely worn out. By one of my daughters
one time posted to I think it was Facebook account or whatever. She says,
Well, I see old pictures of mom and dad, I think she
sure looks pretty in that dress. And when I see pictures of mom and
dad, I think he still wears that shirt. That's the truth. Guilty
at charge. But when it comes to my garden, I changed things out
a little bit more. All right, enough of that nonsense. Let's go
back to the phones. We're going to head to Northwest Euston and talk to
Donald. Hello, Donald, oh boy, thank you for answering. I'm
back again. Happy Father's Day. This is my Father's Day gift, by
the way, talking to somebody who actually knows what they're talking about. All
right, well, I'll pretend to at least. Well, Okay, the
pine tree issue in the front lawn that has the roots that grow above the
grass, well, okay, that has to just stay as it is.
I measured it. It's about thirty inches wide as the yardstick goes, and
it's thirty years old, thirty or thirty two years old. Now the issue
is with the little pine bark holes that I saw in it. We talked
about what was actually the name of that blight that happened is some years ago.
You remember that was really terrible because on my on my street, like
four or five big pine trees just turn and com oh brown, and well,
I don't know a blight on pine we deal with, of course,
lightning strikes or is an issue on big pines especially, but we also have
some pine bark beetles that will underneath the bark. Yeah, I guess that's
what they were called. Anyhow, I saw what they did, you know,
years ago. It's like ten years ago if that happened. However,
the reason I'm calling you, I'm gonna I checked the holes and there's no
sap and told me that's great, okay, But I want to take a
calking gun and stick a little nose of a calking gun in there and put
a little plug of cock in there to make sure nothing else gets in there?
Would that be okay? It wouldn't be necessary, Donald, and I
don't think it would help a lot. These beetles, they drill in in
between the where the outer bark kind of sticks out, and then you kind
of have a furrow in between where it's it's a shorter distance to get inside.
They go in right there, and so even if you cocked a hole,
something else isn't going to go in that hole to cause damage, and
the beatle, if it were in the hole, would just come out somewhere
else. Well, I might seem overcritical here. What I'm going to do
is take straws and put straws in the hole and take a picture of it
with my phone, so I know which ones are there now, and that
way I can save that picture and then if I see any kind of a
new hole, I can go look at the picture. Oh that one wasn't
there before. Okay, here's the main issue. My neighbor had a pine
tree cut down right next door, was a nine hundred dollars cut down.
It was way smaller than mine, and this one probably cost me twenty or
twenty five hundred dollars to have it taken down the hole the way, So
it's a big issue. It's a big issue, and you could always hire,
you know, somebody to come out and take a look at it and
do an assessment to determine if there's something else that maybe we're not even discussing
that they would see on the tree. And I have called Lewis Flurry before.
He said, you know, his guys come out and they're very straightforward
and did what we had to do. This was a dip my older a
different house that I had. However, Okay, if you have trees that
big trees, you better be careful because big trees equal big money whether they're
up there and they stay up there. This one made it through this tornado
that we had. Yeah, wonderful because I had it thinned down and I
don't want to lose it because if I if I lose it, there's no
possibility of putting another one. Yeah, you won't take care of the ones
you have. That's why what they're talking about. Yeah, you're trees and
your kids, take care of the ones you have. There you go,
that's good advice. Donald, Happy Father's day, man, Thank you,
Thank you all right, you take care. That is good advice. Absolutely,
we were I was talking about this being Father's Day. And you know,
Ace Hardware Store is just an excellent place to get a Father's Day gift.
You're not going to do better if you've not already gotten some kind of
gift for Dad. Go to Ice Hardware because there is so much there.
In fact, I if I I would take Dad at this point, let's
go this afternoon, Dad, Let's head out there. There is so many
cool tools. There's all kinds of stuff for barbecuing, and I could just
go on and on and on. Ace has so many cool things that your
dad would love, really he would. Speaking from a dad, it's always
a good idea to have another tool. It's always a good idea to have
some of the gadget for barbequing and whatnot. Just go and check it out.
You're not gonna find a better place for Father's Day shopping than a good
Ace Hardware store with all of the things that they carry to make things just
beautiful in the backyard, make it enjoyable in the backyard. Ace Hardware is
all over the place here in the southeast Houston area or Southeast Texas area around
Houston. We got forty stores around us here. You can go to Acehardware
dot com. Acehardware dot com find the store locator and the stores nearest to
you, and they are stocked up and they've got some really cool stuff.
I was in an ac of the today walking through just looking at some of
the new kinds of things that they have been bringing in. And it's always
changing. You know. ACE hard restores are independently owned. The guy who
is the owner of the store where you would go shop is going to be
some maybe you know, different than some guy down the street that owns an
ACE Hardware store, and so they can each do with their stores like they
want. And that's why no two identical, although they are very very similar
in terms of you got all the basics that are going to be there that
you would expect from ACE, but there's also some cool new things that a
store owner may decide to bring in and do, and I think that's kind
of kind of nice, kind of fun too. As a matter of fact,
in the category of do it yourself in and starting seeds and things,
now is a good time to be collecting your supplies for what we're going to
be doing for a fall garden here pretty soon. For example, tomatoes.
We can grow tomatoes in the fall, but you need to get those things
planted in July in order to have time for the tomato plants to be able
to produce before the temperatures cool off and growth slows to a stop. And
so planting the seeds and starting your own seeds in an outdoor area is a
good idea. You can do it indoors initially if you've got good light,
but since we're in the warm season here, I would go outside to a
very bright spot underneath the tree where there's no direct sun, but it's very
bright and get those things started and growing. Do that in the next few
weeks here, and get ready to go for fall planting. Later on.
We're going to be starting transplants for things like broccoli and cabbage and cauliflower and
whatnot as we get further in to the late part of summer. But right
now it would be a time to begin to get started. If you want
to do peppers, maybe you want some jlopenias or some eggplant starting from seed.
Just go to your garden centers, go to your feed stores and things,
grab the supplies you need and start some things yourself. Give it a
shot. All right. We got to take a little break here. I
will be right back the number seven three fifty eight seventy four. Welcome back.
We got some sunshine outside. Good day to be outside today. I
know it's a little on the warm side, but hey, it's okay.
We we live here, we can we can deal with it. We can
deal with it, and there's plenty to do. I hope you haven't a
good Father's Day. For all the dads out there and family's out there in
general, we certainly do wish you a very, very happy Father's day.
Let's head out to the woodlands and we're going to talk to Katie. Hello
Katie, Well, good morning, Master Skip. How are you this morning?
I'm good. Harr are you today? What? Thanks for that title.
I've been itching to do that for ever since you got on this show.
Okay, so much all you do? Okay. So I was wondering
if I could add on to that pine bark beetle conversation, that kind of
crazy town straws and plugging it. So last summer noticed on the bottom of
one of our trees looked like a bunch of sawdust, and I thought my
granddaughter was cutting and I asked her, I said, what are you doing
over here? To cause all this sawdust. Well it turned out to be.
We called a tree service. They came out and it was a pine
bark beetle infestation. And what he told us was that the pine bark beetles
are always trying to get into your trees, and when they find a weak
one, the female goes in and she releases a pheromone and it tells all
the females to come and, you know, totally masticate this tree. So
basically I looked around at all our trees. Oh my gosh, probably about
ten of them had signs of this. It looked like little white lumps all
over the tree, which was the beginning of the infestation. So he looked
up to the crown of our tree and he said, you have a good
The good news is it's not yellowing yet. He said, I think I
can save your trees. And so they came out and they did three springs
two months in between. So bam bam bam, and they rate all of
our trees for less than what it would cost to cut one down. Let's
good, and totally save them all. Well good. They must have had
some good equipment to get up and spray pretty high on the trunk. Yeah,
they came completely masked and with these big sprayers, we watched the whole
thing and they went way up the trunk and they did everyone. And they
recommend an annual spray. We have not done that this year yet. We're
considering it. But it was a fantastic three months or three treatment process.
And I'm really excited to announce because the problem with those pine bark beetles he
was telling us, is they just jumped from tree to tree to tree.
And I saw them a lot on the path while I was out walking dogs.
And it can be devastating to all of your trees. And like he
said, one tree, one of those big pine trees could literally cost two
to three thousand to down. Yeah, they can get expensive. Well,
yeah, there's a lot of thing to do if they get in ahead of
them, you know, once the tree has severely infested did it, it's
usually too late to be able to save them. But fortunately they were able
to catch her. There's a you got to spray about eighty percent of the
height of the trunk to effectively do it. For most of the beatles.
There's like five different about five different beetles that attack pines. Here in our
area. One of them attacks down low, about eight feet off the ground
and below, but the rest of them go way way up the tree.
I think that might have been the type that we had, the ones that
were eight feet in below, because we didn't see it much higher than that.
Okay, but it was very effective. And I think that this guy
instead of doing the whole straws and plugging it, which sounds to be a
little bit, if I could say so, ridiculous, because they're just going
to keep on coming back. Like you said, they're very they're very slender,
they can slip in anywhere, and there's no way that he's going to
be able to Well, you're you're correct about the tree being stressed and being
a magnet for those beetles. They smell that, and I've been amazed.
And I've lived up in the Willis Conroy area for a number of years,
and up there you would have a let's say, a lightning strike hit a
tree and not be so bad that it would kill the tree, but it
would it would knock the bark off one side, and then all of a
sudden you'd find pine marked beetles in it before too long. It's because that
that stress tree is just like sending out a clarion call and the beetles head
that way. So yeah, And he said it was based on the drought.
So thet before last we had a very bad drought, and he said
those trees that were severely impacted by the groat are now showing signs of weakness.
Yeah, that's true. So interesting that that's true. All right,
Katie, Well good, I'm glad you were able to turn yours around.
Thanks for calling filling in on that Happy Father's Day. Bye bye. Take
care. If you are looking for a organic product, there's a high level
of nitrogen in it for unorganic. Naturally speaking, organic products tend to be
lower in concentration of nutrients. That's on. Nature does things. But Sweet
Green is a molasses based product through microbial activity, turned into an eleven percent
nitrogen fertilizer and it's a product that is produced by Nitrofoss sold by Nitropos.
It is available widely, like all Nitrofoss products are. You can find it
at places like Shades of Texas down in South Houston a Fisher's Hardware, both
the one in South Houston on Southmore and the one down in the port on
Broadway Street has it as well. You're going to find it a King web
Ace hardware for example, and the arburgate up in tombol. Sweet green is
the kind of product that you put it down and when you water it in
or when rain waters it in, it just dissolves away and moves in.
And it's a high carbon material. Any kind of a sugar is a high
carbon material, molasses based, and that really fires up the microbes. They
need carbon, and that's why organic gardeners often will put molasses on the garden,
on the soil for that reason. Provides that in addition to the fact
that it's just eleven percent nitrogen out there, it takes about about ten pounds
of sweet green per thousand square feet to cover an area and to provide that
nutrient to carry you on into summer. You can do it now, I
would probably if you do it now, do it again in about eight weeks,
and that ought to carry you into the fall fertilization season. Those two
applications of this week green. And by the way, did I mention this
It smells good. It smells wonderful too. We're going to head out now
to the phones and just a moment. When we do, Luishi will be
our first up. In the meantime, it is time to get Jared in
here for the news and talk about what else is going on out there,
out and about in the greater Houston area. I'll be right back, says,
Your moment is you can thank me later, all right, all right,
if we do nothing else on garden Line, we stretch your musical experience
a little bit. How about that cuckoo yodel. Let's go to the phones.
We're gonna talk to Luise. Louise, what's up. Well, I'm
in beautiful downtown a leaf and it's a group to stay. But I have
a tiger little it's from sitting on my porch for twenty six years, and
every once while there's some leaf damagines. So I put slogo in and I've
been doing that for the last month, and it's just getting destroyed on the
leaves, hole, eating and everything. So what could it possibly be besides
snails? So do you see trails on the leaves, the slim trails,
the dried slime stuff? No, yeah, ass just gaping holes. Oh
okay, so it's more like holes in the leaf as opposed to being eaten
from the edges in like some chewing from the edge of the leaf. In
it's more holes in the leaf. It seems like it's more on the body
rather than the edges of each leave. Okay, all right, it could
be a beetle, it could be a caterpillar either way. Some of those
critters are nocturnal, so you go out in the day and you don't see
them, and then at night they're doing their work. You might try going
out with a flashlight see what you find, because there's some time a day
when it's going to be doing the damage. And if you can find out
what it is doing it, then it's easier to prescribe the right product to
control them. For example, if it's a caterpillar BT or spinocid, either
one will control caterpillars quite well, and it will and the spinocid will control
beetles in addition to caterpillars, So it could be that you would want to
try that. There's also a product called neme and it's not the name oil.
It's the name that has the chemical in it. It's a natural chemical
in the plant. It's called acid direct and it's just aza is the ingredient
start and either either name or spinocid would probably be a better shotgun approach because
it's going to work on both caterpillars and beetles. But if you found out
exactly what it is, we might switch to a different recommended product if we
knew exactly what. All right, Well, all TV I on it.
Yeah, I'll all your direction. All right, you know, sounds good?
Okay, take care of thanks, look all right, all right?
Bye bye. Our phone number is seven one three two one two fifty eight
seventy four seven one three two one two five eight seven four. Uh.
The Southwest Fertilizer Bob you know, talk about Bob Patterson all the time here
in Southwest Fertilizer, because that is a place where you're going to find any
supply you need to take care of your garden and your landscape. And that
would include every fertilizer I talk about on Guardline. It would include every kind
of pest control, whether it's disease or insect or weeds that you're going after.
Bob's going to have a supply of all the things you need for that.
They get a little shop in the back for small engine repair. They
carry a lot of different tools an eighty foot long wall of tools as a
matter of fact, and so no matter what the tool is, some really
nice high quality ones too, by the way, you can find them there.
Do you need a fertilizer spreader, Do you need a little hand carriage
spreadder maybe that you put the fire ant bait out with, or do you
need fireant bait? And the chancewer is probably you do. This is fire
ant season and when we use baits, it's an easy way to put a
very low rate of a pesticide out there that works really well because you're not
nuke in the whole yard to kill everything in the yard. You're basically putting
out a little bait that they will pick up, take back, feed to
the queen, feed to the colony, and it takes them out. That
way, it's much easier way to do it. And of course Bob's got
plenty of that stuff on hand. If I talk about a product on guardline,
it's at Southwest Fertilizer. Because if they don't have it, you don't
need it. It's as simple as that. They're in the corner of Bissinet
and Renwick. Bissonet and Renwick. You can go to the website south West
Fertilizer dot com. Southwest Fertilizer dot com. Let's go now to Spring Branch
and we're going to talk to Christine. Good morning. How are you.
I'm fine, what's up? I just moved into a house and the front
yard has been pretty good shape. But the backyard is just like full of
weeds. And when I say weeds, I mean like little bushes waist tie.
One of them is that jewel of opar with the little pink flowers,
and the other one has little gold flowers when it's wet. When it's wet,
I can pull them up out of the dirt fairly easily. But I
mean this is an entire backyard of these, so that's going to take forever.
Is there something I can just like spray that will kill them? There's
no grass. There are a couple of crape myrtles out there that I don't
want to harm, okay, and there's a bush or two that are some
sort of hedge or something that I wouldn't want to kill. But other than
that, well, there's different ways to go about it. I think were
at mine, I would probably I think the better thing to do would be,
can you just mow it all down to the ground just about as a
as a first step. Well, I mean these things are like waist high,
and some of the little trunks are fairly thick, I mean, like
okay, the thickness of my little finger. Okay, okay. Well,
other than mowing it, you know down, If you mow it down,
you get to start there, and then as weed seeds come up, or
as these trunks as you described, start to re sprout, then you can
put a spray down and it's easy to control everything. When you got things
waist high, you're blowing a lot of spray up all over the place trying
to spray all these things. You want to be real careful with it.
If the breeze is blowing at all and you have a little bit of a
mist from your spray that drifts and it gets on something desirable, you're going
to hurt it. The advantage of being able to start down at the dirt
level almost is that you know you're you're putting a course spray right down.
It's just a different type and amount of application. So if you whether you
hand pull them, whether you mow them with whatever you do, I would
do that because even if you sprayed and killed everything. You still have waste
high weeds that are now dead. You got to get out of there somehow,
either by pulling or mowing. So that's that's how I would approach it.
Be real careful with the glycas because anything desirable that you get it on,
it'll kill it. So a low, low pressure spray, don't pump
it up so much that you get a fine mist drifting around, just a
real course drop. Okay, Okay, Well, and I can also I
mean, I don't know how much I'm going to get done in this heat,
but I can also wait and see what happens during the winter, if
things die back or what happens, you know, because there's a lot of
other work that still needs to be done too. Well. Yeah, and
it may even be better just to you know, have somebody come in with
a big lit a weed eater or whatever it takes to knock it all down.
But once you get ahead of it, then as it starts to reach
brought out, you can you can spray and kill the things and plant the
things you wanted with something like a round up or something like that. Like
that, that only because that is a broad spectrum. So if it's a
grass or a broadly if it's going to kill it either way, depending on
specifically, if I saw the exact layout and all this, I may have
a different opinion on it, But I think in general that that's a good
way to get started. Just take your time, get ahead of it.
But the more you can when it sprouts, spray those weeds, get ahead
of all the You got a really good supply of weed seed that's sitting there,
that's been building up for years in that place, probably right right,
All right, christ thank you, take care, appreciate the call. We're
gonna have to run for a break here. When we come back. Georgie
will be first up. Dennis Marene you will be right after that. All
right. Now, all of you Beach Boys fans out there, how many
of you knew that the Beach Boys sang a song named Vegetables about vegetables.
I did not listened to Beach Boys my whole life. That was a surprise
to me. As we're gonna head out now to Jersey Village and talk to
George. Hello, George, Hey, Skip, that's a horrible song,
by the way, horror I mean, aren't you disappointed? I like the
beach boys too, but no, that's pretty terrible. Anyhow, I want
to grow on apricot tree, but we're not. I'm not encumbered by poor
quality music. I'm happy to play it. Yeah yeah, right, who
put that on for you? You gotta manager that doesn't know. Unfortunately,
that's all on me. Anyhow, I want to grow an apricot tree.
So do you know anything about those that which one you recommend them? We
don't have a good apricot for this area. There are a few out there.
The problem with apricot here is our winter fluctuations and tempered or such that
we just have a hard time with them. They the tree will grow,
the tree grows, but we just don't get good fruit set. And then
you'll have a year where you have great fruit set, and then you'll go
several years without. And it's a combination of chilling hours being right. So
there's an overiety called Blenheim that used to be tried a lot. But I'm
just telling you, unless you just have a lot of space and want to
try, I wouldn't give you great hopes of getting to eat apricots as a
result. Okay, the ones in the supermarcers are horrible. They're mushy and
they have no flavor. So anyhow, yeah, all right, well so
far the text and M was looking at a couple of newer cultivars a while
back, and I don't know that anything ever came out of that, but
we're just trying to find some that, you know, they grow well in
other climates, but for something, it's about our winter fluctuations. I'm told
that they just have a hard time with that. Yeah, my brother had
one that was delicious, So I called him yesterday, the one that lives
in California, and now he said, give me, give me some of
that. He says, well, it got hit by lightning and they had
to take it out and he doesn't what it was. So yeah, I
know, so all right, thanks. Any how, when you have to
come up with one, let me know. Okay, yeah, when you
you know, I was, let me go right here while we're sitting here,
Well, I'm going to check on this and see if there's any update
up there on the Eggy Horticulture website on those, but I don't think there
is at this point. Is that where I would look to check on that?
Yeah, Horticulture, how they have a free section of the website,
and there's a publication on all kinds of fruit. It would probably go.
It probably be in the stone Fruit publication, which includes peaches and plums.
So yeah, all right, I'll go look right, George, you bet,
Thank you appreciate it, sir. Let's go to Marine now. Hello
Marine, Oh, good morning, good morning. I called to you yesterday
about some leaf mold and on the tree, and I sent some pictures Ken,
did you have to review those? I did, and yes, that
was a water oak. That is true a water oak. Yeah, And
what I see in the photos there is a leaf spot that's most likely fungal
in nature. It could be back to your involved in it too, but
mostly it looks like a fungal leaf spot to me. There is not a
practical way to spray a whole water oak tree. And these kind of spots
are not something that is going to kill your tree. They're not doing it
any good. And apparently the weather we've had have just really promoted the spot
growth. And I know you're losing a lot of leaves from it, but
at this stage, like the pictures you showed me, those leaves, even
if you spray them, they're they're going to be cast off the tree is
not going to hold onto those leaves. So I guess the bottom line is
we just don't, as a general rule, go out and spray our water
oaks or any of the oaks really all the time, just because they might
get these diseases. I think it's just kind of fluke that this year was
really bad for that one. Okay, my neighbor just ask can this sungus
travel from one tree to another? A fungus can because they float through the
air, oh, on the spores, and they're present, and you just
don't see them because they haven't sprouted in an infected the leaf yet. But
they're actually out there in nature, and a lot of things are that way.
You don't take moss or algae for example. You know, you look
at the side of your house and there's maybe bricks on it, and you
think, well, there's no algae there. We'll start spraying that brick with
water every day, with a constant mist of water, and within a week
or two suddenly got algae growing on the brick. Well where did it come
from? Well, it was there all along. You just created the environment
where the algae could grow. That's how it is with these leaf spots on
your trees and things. We get some rain, we get the right conditions,
and now this disease attacks. But it was always around, it just
wasn't a threat. Okay, So I think I read online that if you
spray your water oak before it starts budding, that it might keep the sungus
from coming on next year. Is that true or not? Well, not
this fungus. But there is one called oak leaf blister that causes the leaves
to be bumpy. They're more like a spinach leaf than a normal leaf.
You know how spinach is bumpy. Oak leaf blister does that. Of course,
those bumps turn brown and then the leaves fall off and it attacks water
oak. It attacks I'll attack live oak and other oaks too, And that's
a spring thing. So we can do a copper spray early before the buds
come out to help cut down on oak leaf blister. That's another one that
some years it's bad and some years it's not. And so do you really
want to be on a schedule where every year you're having to spray your trees
because when it, even when it shows up, the leaves look bad,
they fall off and the tree puts out new leaves and life goes on.
So unless you go ahead ahead, we'll just continue the rest. We'll keep
falling and falling and falling all summer. Or do you think it'll stop.
I think at some point it's gonna stop and and not do that anymore.
But there's a really serious a lot of leaf spot on those leaves, and
so they're they're gone. Okay, thank you? All right, I hear
the music, So either you and I have to sing or we have to
hang up. I think we ought to hang up. Day by good we
will be back, Dennis and Roy. You will be the first two up.
I know you've been waiting a bit. I appreciate that, but we
we will be our first two up in that order, Dennis and Ryan when
we come back. Don't forget. If you want more information on taking care
of your lawn, my lawn care schedules are online at gardening with Skip dot
com. Gardening with Skip dot com, that's me. We'll be happy to
help you along. Give us a call if you'd like to get on the
boards and be ready to go for the next hour, which we have one
more of today. Seven one three two one two k t r H seven
one three two one two. K t r H. Wait right back with
your calls and with more from garden Line. Welcome to k t r H.
Garden Line with Scamp Ricter. It's crazy Trim. Just watch him as
many good things to say. Hey, welcome back to the garden lines.
Thank you, we're back. We're here. Let's do this. We are
here to answer your gardening question. Seven one three two one two fifty eight
seventy two five eight seven four. We're going to go to Dennis out in
Memorial right off the boat here. Hey Dennis, say good morning. Skip
quick question. I just recently moved into a new home and trying to do
some early late late spring, early summer re landscaping. So I've got some
roses underneath a tree that just aren't doing well. They don't get any sun
and obviously they're competing with water with the tree. What could I plant this
time of year for some some color, some flowers underneath a tree like that.
Uh So it's a lot of shade, is what you're telling me?
Right? Is there any sun? Yeah, well enough shade. It's a
smallish backyard patio. But the tree isn't huge, but it I looked one
of the rose bushes gets a bit of there's rose bushes under there now.
The ones that don't get any sun have no flowers. The one that gets
sun has flowers. And it makes me think that they're just too much shade
or something like that. That's it. Roses need six hours of sun really
to begin to perform well. So are you talking about replacing the roses?
When you say plant something under there, you mean pull the roses out there?
Yeah, okay, I would. I don't think there's much hope of
ever getting a nice rose bush undernaate that tree when you're when you're in a
bright area, that opens the door for the hydranges, for example, is
an option. You need to keep them adequately moist. They don't like to
dry out, but they like a very very bright shade. A littled apple
sign here and there, but some bright shade and they'll they'll put up with
that and do well for you. You've got a lot of annual types of
flowers that you can put in an area like that. Of course, impatients
and kalladiums do well in the shade if it's a bright shade. Persian shield
is a foliage plant with purplish silver foliage that's truly attractive that would do well
in an area like that. There are some salvias Salvia garon nittka. It's
called it's blue, a niche sage that does well in a very very bright
shade area and it gets up about four feet high, has kind of a
bluish purple colored flowers that are attractive hummingbirds. So that's another app option.
You know, a lot of ways you can go in a spot like that.
Well great. A couple of quick follow up questions and patients. I've
done the sun patients out in areas, you know in Houston, sun patients
out the sun. They're fantastic. You're saying just regular patients. If I
use that, you could do regular patients, or you could do sun patients.
Some patients will grow in less sun. They're just able to take more
sun than regular impatients are. And so you know you can you could do
either one of them in an area. Wishbone flower does good, Terina,
it does good in an area like that. There's there's just a number of
options, kind of depends on what you want to look at, what you
find, what you find attractive. Well, hydrangees tell me I've had hydranges
before in kind of a shady area and they never did well. Okay,
well, do you really think that's an option underneath a tree that gets a
lot of shade. Yeah, that's an option. They're not an easy plant,
though, I'll acknowledge that getting the water right on them, and you
know, keeping them adequately fertilized, getting the water they need, never letting
them dry out. So if you want to make it a little easier on
yourself, you know, we could go a different direction than the than the
hydranges would be. But okay, well, thanks so much. Another one
is a shrimp plant does well in a in a bright, shady type area.
That would be another good choice for that that you might say that one
again. Shrimp plant. It's very unusual looking. It's blooms look sort of
like shrimp if you have to look at a picture of it online to see
what they're talking about. But that's that would be a pretty we for an
area like that. Okay, I've never heard of that one. Well,
thanks so much. And you're in the you're in the Memorial area, go
up to Buchanan's plants. They're just down the road from you. Uh.
They have an excellent selection of shade loving plants. So you could walk through
there and take a look at it and you know, have them help you
pick something out because they're gonna have an excellent selection. Okay, thanks a
lot. All right, Dennis, thank you appreciate the call. Thanks a
lot. Let's go now to Richmond. We're going to talk to Roy.
Hello, Roy, thanks for waiting. Good morning, Skip. Happy Father's
Day to you and to all the fathers out there. Thanks. I have
a poison ivy that I have put chemicals on there from the box stores and
all that, and that that just keeps growing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a Is it a vine that's attached to a tree going up a
tree? Or how's it growing? No, it's just on the it's just
on the on the grass. Oh okay, so it's like coming up out
of your lawn. Some of you on the fence line. Oh, on
the fence line. Okay. Roy. What you need to do is you
need to get a product that contains an ingredient. Do you have a pin
or pencil handy there, it's triclo peer t r I c l O p
y R. You will find it in things that are called like poison ivy
killer or a brush killer or stump killer. But triclo peer is the ingredient,
uh, And you can spray it on the poison ivy, but don't
get the triclo peer on anything desirable like your lawn or flowers or things like
that. Another way to approach it is if your poison ivy is like little
trunks, little vines coming up that you would cut off, you can dab
the triclo peer right on those cut surfaces. So what I would do would
be go to a paint supply store by those little wooden handled foam brushes,
you know the kind I'm talking about, and you dip it, dip it
in the tricle paer, and then when you cut the poison ivy off,
you just dip it right on that cut surface. Just dab it right on
the You have to spray it and get on everything else. You can do
that, or you could, you know, apply it anyway that's practical to
you along the vines of the poison ivy and it'll work. So whether you
put it on the leaves, the cut stump, or on the vine,
tricle a pear is pretty effective. And I would I would give it a
shot at that it's going to die back. Just remember that dead poison ivy
still has that oil in it, so never burn it because that in the
smoke that oil will volatilize. It's very dangerous. And be real careful,
you know, get it into a bag because even dry dead poison ivy will
will cause skin irritation. Well, great, thank you, skip all right,
good lucke o you right, take care of good day you as well.
Thank you very much. Appreciate that we're gonna take a little break here
in a second, Lily and James or our first two up when we come
back. Thank you guys for hanging on with us a little bit longer online.
I will be back shortly. We'll continue garden Line. If you have
any questions, I would like to give us a call. Seven one three
two one two fifty eight seventy four. Seven to one three two one two
fifty eight seventy four. Give us a call. We'll talk about the things
that interest you. Welcome back to Guarden Line. Good to have you with
us. We're rocking and rolling this morning. Let's head out to Humble,
Texas. We're going to talk to Lily. Hello, lily, Good morning.
How are you. I'm good, I'm good. What's up. I
have a lot of different kind of plants. I just want to know if
there's a staple fertilized that I can put on them. You know I have,
Oh, go ahead. You're like wanting one fertilizer for a whole bunch
of stuff, right, nice, fair enough, fair enough. You know
I use lawn fertilizer for a lot of things. I just do. And
you know, there's situations where I would say, now, don't use that,
use something different because you need a little extra phosphorus or some other thing.
But in general I find that a good lawn fertilizer, if you got
it on hand, just use it for whatever you need it for and it'll
work pretty good. I put it on my fruit treeways, I put it
on my lawns. I put it in vegetable gardens and so on. On
flowering plants. You can, you sure can. And here's the thing.
You know, we know that like phosphorus for examples, it plays a big
role in flowering. But a lot of soils already have phosphorus in adequate amounts.
Not all do, but some do. But also a big thing about
flowering is having good vigor to produce leaves, to catch sunlight to make sugars
that build flowers. That that's how the plant is able to flower. And
so nitrogen is also an important part of a flowering plant's success. And nitrogen
is the big number in the lawn fertilizer. Okay, so is there a
certain number that you would suggest or no, just like a three one to
two kind of ratio of nutrients. We've got a lot of different ones.
I don't know. If you have a particular lawn fertilizer you like, it'll
probably be okay to use on that. I use Natural Fuss. That's what
I then go with that one you could use if you've got night Fuss,
if you've got some of the Imperial the red bag, that's an immediately available
fertilizer, that would be a good one for a lot of things. You
know, for our lawns, we're thinking more slow release long term right now,
but if you had a little flower bed and you're going to have plants
in it for a couple of months, just use a more immediate release,
or maybe a vegetable garden, you know, a tomato plant. You could
put some of that imperial around a tomato plant if you want. And I'm
answering this not to say that no one should buy any other kinds of fertilizer.
I'm just saying your question was if I could I buy one fertilizer and
just use it for a lot of stuff in the answer is yes, And
if you're going to do that, I would do it with a lawn fertilizer.
Okay. I have a list of twenty different kinds of things that I
have. It's fertilized individually. Yeah, we'll just kind of okay, go
for it and see how they do. And all I ask is that whatever
produce and flowers you produce, you bring half of them to the KTR studio
and drop them off for me and we'll call it even I will do I
know where it's at. That's a fair trade, isn't it. Free advice?
Thank you, free produce, Lily, you have fun out there and
Numble, thanks for your call, appreciate that. Thank you, Bye bye
bye. All right, we're going to keep moving here. Yeah, we're
talking about fertilizers. And one thing I should have mentioned to Lily. Another
good one is astro grow. It's a Supergrow Plus by Medina Medina Supergrow Plus,
it's a sixteen zero two. It's a hoose end fertilizer. So that
one's kind of cool because you know, it takes what maybe ten minutes to
go over about four thousand square feet along, which is what one of those
bottles will carry. It's got a really good blend of nutrients, and it's
got a lot of extra things. Got some keylated iron in it. It's
got molasses and humic acid. In other words, it is low did with
things to make your plants happy. And I saw a picture the other day
someone who used Supergrow Plus the lawn fertilizer on their tomato plants, and I
mean they looked awesome. They were in great shape. They're very happy to
have that. Plants can't read, they don't know what is or is not
a lawn fertilizer. But anyway, the Supergrow Plus from Medina is an excellent
product. It gave some away yesterday when we were at at Wibird's Unlimited in
bel Air. So that is just one of those new products on the market
that I'm really excited about. A Medina super Grow Plus and it's a sixteen
zero too. It's got a hose end hookup one court bottle, easy,
easy to use, and it works. It does work. I can tell
you that for sure. Let's head to northeast Texas. We're going to talk
to James. Hey, James, where is Northeast Texas? Up around Marshall.
I've got a house here that we've remodeled and put in a driveway and
a new garage. Really tore up the yard in the sprinkler system. So
we took all of that out and put it back down and we put sant
augustine grass in about a month ago. And it's really looking great, really
looks sure good. But now, what what kind of fertilizer should I put
on in the in the beginning of summer here when it's about to get hot.
Yeah, we don't have the nitroplus products up here. You don't do
that super green super green Okay, I'm not familiar with that. I'm not
familiar. Well, well you just mentioned product oh, a super supergrow plus.
You could do that. That that is more. You know, it's
a hose end, so it's going to give you a lot of immediate release
and about a fifth of the nitrogen is slow release and supercrow plus. Uh.
And so it would be fine. You would just do that in smaller
doses over time. So you may do it now, you may do it
like two months from now, do it again. But if you're going to
go with just a typical traditional lawn fertilization, I would do something very slow
release. Uh. And if you don't have like the nitrophiles up there,
do you have Nelson plant food products up in that area? I haven't seen
that. Okay, it's mostly the big box stores. Okay, yeah,
well let's see here. But I can get to Houston sometime and describe some
bring it back with you when you come the the Nelson plant food there is.
Let me think, I think they may have one up in your area.
You said you were in Marshall. Marshall, Marshall area. Yeah,
they've got a website where they have all their their located. I know they're
in the df W area. I don't know how far out they consider DFW
go, and I think Marshall's too far from f W. But but but
if they do go pretty far out from there, and what's the product?
Nelson's would be slow and easy. That's their version, okay, Okay,
Nelson same. It's a you spread it with a fertilizer spread walk behind fertilizers
udder, yeah, okay, yeah, So I'm just sitting here looking in
Houston stuff. Yeah, they might have it. But next time you come
down this way, describe some if you've got If you've got the super Girl
Plus, go ahead and get it and do it for the next two fertilizations
this summer, and then you'll be ready for the fall fertilization, which we
would put on you know when we go back. Do you have you seen
my schedules online? Yes? Okay, all right, good, well then
that that lists them right there, and yeah, makes it easy skip.
Thank you very much, and happy Father's Day and you too, and have
a good time up there at your place up in northeast Texas. All right,
we are. Let's see, I got some room here, got a
little time here for some calls if you'd like seven to one three two one
two k t r H. Seven one three two one two k t r
H. If you are dealing with bugs in the lawn, and I'm talking
about things like ants, of course, but also chinch bugs, webworms,
those are coming up. We're on the verge of those seasons. In fact,
I thought I saw an area look like chinchbugs other day, and I
got on my hands and knees and crawled around in the grass for a while
and never found any. So dodge that bullet. But they'll come, they'll
get here. Well. Nitrofoss bug Out Max is a product that works well.
It's very persistent too. You put it down and within forty eight hours
it's killed the bugs. But it's going to continue to provide that for the
whole summer season. It stays with it, so later when chinchbugs or side
web worms come along, you've already got that product in place and that works
really well. You're going to find bug out Max in a number of different
places. You know, nitrofos products in general are widely available. You're going
to find them at places like the Ace Hardware stores for example, the one
that is in the area just north central m and d Ace Hardware is up
in the Houston area. Are going to have those kinds of products. You're
going to find them at the plantation Ace out there in Richmond, for example,
just another example places where you're going to find nitropost products. Pretty much
when you say it is hardware you know, they're going to have nitrofosts there,
including that bug out Max. See, we're going to go back to
the phones, and this time we're going to Cyprus to talk to Linda.
Hello, Linda, Do I have a Linda there? Okay, let's see.
I'm put you back on hold. Linda. I think we may have
a get my producer involved. Here we go. Do we have Linda?
Yeah? All right, I got you back on hold. We may have
to see what's going on there to get Linda connected back in with the call.
When we've had the questions about, you know, fertilizers and whatnot,
and just remember fertilizers are supplemental nutrients. The soil has nutrients in it,
compost decomposing away has nutrients in it. And we don't have to apply and
supply everything that a plant needs in order to survive, but we do supplement,
and when we supplement, we're able to get more out of our plants.
See, it's one thing for a plant just to survive out there in
nature. It's another one. You want a lawn that's dense and keeps regrowing
back in and getting denser and denser and better. Or you want a rose
bush and you want blooms and blooms and blooms. That's where we come in
with our supplements and our fertilizers, and that's where we do. You know,
that extra boost that provides what the plants need. But never forget that
the number one thing that makes blooms and fruit on any plant, whether it's
an annual flower, whether it's a tomato, or whether it's a peach or
you name it, the number one thing that makes blooms and fruit is sunshine
shining on leaves. That's what makes blooms and fruit. Our fertilizer creates more
leafy growth. It can, the nitrogen can, and it provides more ability
for the food factories that drive blooming successful blooming. So always keeping a plant
healthy a is a bait thing you can do. Now, all the other
nutrients, the phosphorus we know that plays a big part in bloom production,
Potassium, magnesium, a lot of other things like that, but ultimately,
what we're trying to do is create a healthy leaf because when you have a
healthy leaf that the sun shines on, then that plant is capable of producing
and blooming like you would want it to. Let's go back to cypress.
We're gonna talk to Linda. You there, Linda, Hello, alrighty,
let's see maybe Chris, could you check into that one for me. I'm
gonna go now to talk to Donna. Hello, Donna, Hi, good
morning. How are you? Thank you for taking and we don't have a
Donna there? All right? I tell you what, Linda, Donna and
Rachel. I'm gonna take a break and when I come back, I will
give another try at it and we'll see if we can get one of you
guys on on here. And we'll be right up with that. We're gonna
take a little break for the news. Got Jared walking in the door,
tell us a little bit about what's going on around the greater Houston area,
and I will be back. Remember if you need my lawn care schedules,
which we keep talking about today, gardening with skip dot com. They're free,
can't beat that. Print them up, take them with you so you
can put your finger on them and go wherever you're purchasing stuff. This is
the one I need right here, This is the one, and they can
get you set up with that. We'll be right back all right. We're
back. Welcome back to Garden Line. I'm your host, skip Rictor.
We're here to answer your gardening questions. We're going to start off by heading
to Donna. Hello, Donna, how are you this morning? Hi?
Good morning, I'm great and you I'm good. I'm good. What can
we do for you? Thank you for taking my call. I have some
great myrtles that have this kind of a dark, patchy look on the leaves.
They don't look healthy, but it's still thriving, but they're not blooming,
and I'm wondering, is there what can I treat that with? Okay,
you may be seeing city mold. A city mold grow on sugary substances
produced by insects, and crape myrtles have aphids that will produce city mold or
the honeydew that city mode grows on. Crape myrtles also have crept mertle bark
scale that can weaken the plant a little bit. You'll notice on the trunks
little white flecks, a real small white flex and kind of a black city
material when you have crepe myrtle bark scale. So those are possibilities of what's
going on there. Crapes bloom they need good sunlight, so if it's getting
at least six hours of sun, then it ought to be blooming. If
not, part of the problem may be a lack of sun to the leaves,
but it also could be these pests that are sort of blocking the sun
by creating that city mold on the leaves. You see what I'm saying.
It's almost like instead of having a nice clear solar panel, now you've got
a dirty solar panel that the sun can't get through. Right, they're in
full sun, okay, but you know, the new growth doesn't seem to
have any of that on there. It's the old growth, but they do.
They do look kind of a dirty, moldy. You can't really scrape
anything off, but well, usually if you something is happening, Yeah,
usually if you kind of lick your thumb and rub the top of the leaf,
if you're thumbs, you're wet, it'll come right off. And it's
a it's a superficial, but think of it as like a dried sugar with
a soot, moldy soot growing on it. It's kind of what it amounts
to. But anyway, some people will use like kind of a soapy spray
to spray on there, and a lot of times it go dry and kind
of flake off. That's sort of something you just have to try out and
see how that works for you. If it's aphids, insecticidal soap sprays work
really well and blasting them off. If it is the crape myrtle bark scale,
that's going to be a little bit more of a job to try to
get it under control. But in the meantime, I would fertilize it.
I would do whatever you can do to get some vigor in that plant,
because for crapes to bloom, they need good vigor and that's the best look
and crapes when you have good vigor. So cleaning up the leaves a little
bit if we can, but boosting them with some lawn fertilizer to give them
get them stuck. And somebody's saying, name oil, Is that something that
I need to spray them with? Name oil would help? If it was
aphids, it would work pretty good on those. It's not going to help
with the scale much. Knem oil is. It doesn't. It has a
little bit of an insecticide in it, but it mainly works by smothering insects
being because it's oil. Because it's an oil. Okay, So Okay,
yeah, gosh, I love my crape myrtles, but they're just they're not
blooming. Well, I think what's going on. Yeah, I think getting
that vigor back in them is good. You may want to do a little
bit of a spring. You don't want to be careful because crapes, honey
bees really need crepes in the summer. That's one of the sources of pollen
for them, a nectar. And so when we start nuking our crapes to
kill all the bugs on them, we can do a lot of damage to
the bees too, and we'd really rather avoid that, of course. Okay,
fair enough. And then I have a mandavilla that I've planted this year
that was beautiful, absolutely beautiful, thriving divines were climbing, and then one
day it just started wilting and then just completely died off, no matter how
much I've fed it. Are they very very sensitive to heat? No,
they can take the heat. Is it in a container or was it in
a container? No, it's in the ground. It's in the ground.
I'm wondering about root rot or so moisture levels, you know, of course
being too dry as bad, but being soggy the roots can't get oxygen.
And we see a lot of root right issues and plants like that when they
don't have good drainage. So a water extreme would be one of the first
things that I would look to for that. Mando Villa is a pretty pretty
good tough plant, doesn't have a lot of problems, but like a lot
of plants, when the roots get water logged, we into some long term
problems, especially in hot, hot weather where the demands are so high.
Yeah, I suspect that's what it was. I was heartbroke. It was
beautiful. But thank you again for taking my call. I appreciate it.
All right, don I thank you, appreciate the call. Take care.
Let's see, we're going to go now to Chapel Hill and talk to Rachel.
Hello, Rachel, are you there? Hello? Hi, how can
we help? Thanks for taking my call. Just question about we planted a
bunch of new trees, not little babies, but you know, maybe ninety
gallons okay, you know, and I just want to know what to fertilize
them with. I use lawn fertilizer. There are some fertilizers that are just
for trees. They make them for that. Nitrofoss makes one for woody plants
that's in little plastic canisters. You can buy it by the bag too,
sometimes depending on where you're shopping. But a lot of times I use land
fertilizer and I find that that works just fine. And so here's what I
will do. Get you a loan fertilizer that does not have weed control on
it, definitely not a weed control product, just fertilizer, and then apply
it at a rate of one to two cups per inch of trunk diameter.
So how long ago did you put those trees in? Probably well when it
was still cool, okay, very cool, so probably six months, six
months? Okay, Well, the root system is still largely where that those
cylinders went into the ground, those ninety gallon containers went in the ground.
It has begun reaching out, but it's not like it's a full root system
that's reaching out in all directions. So focus you're fertilizing on the area beneath
the branch spread of the tree. Put most of that down. So let's
say on a ninety pounds, what you are, your trunks are about what
almost the size of a coke can, or a little smaller, maybe a
little bit smaller not much, little small. Well, let's just say that's
about a three inch diameter trunk. Then you would put three to six cups
of lawn fertilizer all around it and watered and really good. You could do
it again in six weeks and six weeks later. Just stop by the time
you get about the beginning of August. Stop your your furtilyzation. Then okay,
okay, And I poured some medina has to grow around him. Does
that help at all? I'm sorry, say that one more time. You
poured some what medina has to grow around the us. That's helpful, that's
helpful. Yeah, okay. And there's several different has to grow, some
of them different nutrient mix than others. But that that's nothing wrong with that.
That's fine. Okay, great, thank you very much. All right,
Rachel, thank you. I appreciate the call very much. We're gonna
take a little break here June in sugar Land. You will be the first
up when we come back. Here we go a little bit of break for
the news, and I'll be right back. Welcome back, Welcome back to
guard Line, Little Lenyard skinnerd. For those of you who remember that,
we're going to head out now to sugar Land and talk to June. Hello,
June, Hi, I was wondering, do I need to fertilize or
feed my hydraene here? Yes, you should use something for acid loving plants.
Ideally gets you a product that is for acid loving plants, and follow
the label carefully, a little gradual feeding over time. You can do it
more than once. Uh, just to provide good nutrition so that they can
have the vigor necessary to grow foliage and make a nice healthy plant that blooms
well. Okay, acid polish, Okay, Yeah, I got you something
a little acidifying, so you know you're down. You're in the sugar Land
area. You got a lot of good places to get a good oh yeah
forest. Yeah, and they're gonna they're gonna have it. Just tell them
I need I need something for kind of an acidic a type plant like like
okay adranger for example. It's not essential, okay, not essential for her
drangers, but I think they do a little better with those. Well,
mina blooming beautiful right now. But I thought my landscaper said, June,
I think you're supposed to be using iron and stuff on them. You're on
the ground, And I said, I have no idea. Well, June,
if you if you see the new growth, the young leaves that are
forming at the end of the shoots, if you see it starting to look
a little yellowish, or maybe the veins are green, but the in between
the veins is a yellowish. That's a sign you do need to supplement with
some iron. But just in general, I wouldn't grab the iron and apply
it until the plant is okay, I'll get the extent. Yeah, okay,
that's great. Thank you so much. You have a great day,
happy fall this day, well, thank you, jin and you have a
wonderful rest of your weekend as well. Thank you. You're out in West
Houston. I want to tell you about your home town nursery, your local
nursery. That is what you tell me. You hear me talk about it
all the time. Nelson Water Garden. It's out there in Katie, Texas.
You just head out to Katie. It's just right on the outside of
town. That's why I call it our West Houston Garden Center. Nelson Nursery
and water Garden is it's a one of a kind place. And because they
carry one of a kind things, of course, they're a water garden.
Specialty. They've been doing that. They're nationally known for that. So do
you need fish, do you need fountains? Do you need water plants?
Plants that can survive submerged in water, or lily pads, those kind of
beautiful things that are just gorgeous to have. They've got all of that,
they've got the disappearing fountains, but their nursery is chock full of all kinds
of very very valuable things that you just don't find everywhere. Last time I
went out to Nelson's, I was visiting a throut and I was really surprised.
I mean, they had things like, for example, they have three
different kinds three different varieties of elderberries. Did you know that? Did you
know there are three? They're more than that, but three different varieties of
elderberries. That's pretty cool, that's pretty amazing. They have got an excellent
selection of fertilizers and things. You know, you heard me earlier talking about
Nelson Turf Star, Slow and Easy, Well it's out there at Nelson Water
Garden nursery and water Garden. They have clemitis that are just beautiful, very
beautiful out there, and many many other things plumerias and fruit trees and everything
you can imagine. But one thing I haven't mentioned much on Nelson Water Garden
is their houseplants. Their indoor plant selection. When you walk in from the
parking lot, you walk into the store, it is stunning. Remember how
earlier I said a lot of houseplants, or just to see a green,
it's like green this green, that green that. Well, if you want
to see some variegations, some colors, some really like you notice it from
across the room. Houseplant, they've got those there. They've got things like
the money tree. They got the allocacias of various types of calathea. I
mentioned moranta, the prayer plant. They also have the kalathias there that are
just beautiful and so go buy and check it out. The beautiful plants,
excellent condition, beautiful health. I was there the other day. I had
to grab some particular things going into that new flower bed we've been working on
getting ready for that. But Nelson Water Garden is always chuck full of what
you need. And when it comes to herbs, excellent excellent selections of herbs
as well. They still are stocked up on fruit trees, figs and blackberries
and various kinds of citrus like grapefruit, lemon, lime, satsumas, mandarin,
other mandarin types of orange, blood orange. They've got it all there.
Nelson Water Garden, the nursery and water gardens specifically. Hey, here's
the website, Nelsonwatergardens dot com. Nelson Watergardens dot com. Stop by and
check them out. But I have to warn you that I don't say I
didn't warn you. When you go there and you walk out back, you
will be enthralled by this water wonder world they've created with the disappearing fountains and
everything, and you're going to have to have one to go home. I
can tell you that you're going to want one for your backyard. I do
every time I go there, whether it's a waterfall or a disappearing fountain,
it is inspirational. Take some friends with you and run out there and check
out what it is that I keep talking about for all of that. All
right, Well, here we are. We're on guard line. We're running
the end of it, toward the end of the show here today. You
know we're here every Friday, excuse me, Saturday. I'm here on Friday
too, But I'm not on the air. We're every Saturday from six am
to ten am and every Sunday from six am to ten am. If you
want to listen to us, you don't just have to have a radio.
You can listen on your phone. Gets you an iHeartMedia app or some other
app and just tune in to guarden Line. You can listen to me live.
You can listen to pass shows. We basically turn those into a podcast
where you can listen to pass shows. So if you hear me talk about
something and you didn't get a chance to write it down, you can just
go on there and you can check it out and find out more. That
way makes it makes it easy to keep track of I enjoy so much getting
to talk to gardeners, getting to help you to have success. That is
one of the things that I most enjoy it. I just find that gardeners
are They're just a fun group of people because they're out there trying to make
the world a more beautiful, better place. And you're also doing the hobby
that I think is the best hobby in the world. You know, I
know it's hot outside, we're moving into summertime, and you don't want to
be out a lot in that but make room early in the morning to get
out and do a little bit, because every time you're outside interacting with nature
and plants, not only are you getting the exercise, but you are getting
a lot of mental therapy. I'm telling you that all aspects of gardening I
find to be pretty much therapeutic. I joked about this once before, and
although I'm kidding about it, I'm also serious and that I feel this way,
and that is that when I go home and look at a bed full
of guard of weeds and I kneel down and start working through that bed,
it is therapeutic in that you stand up and you look at the work you've
done, and you can see the result of your hands right there. And
a lot of things in life. You know, if you've got a job
where you go and you work all day, you're doing stuff, you're working,
but at the end of the day, it's like, what did I
even get done today? Well, gardening tells you right away what you got
done, and then you get out there. Take advantage of that, get
out, get some kids involved, to your kiddos. If you have never
grown vegetables with your kids, today this afternoon be a good day to get
you a container, get some quality potting mix to go in it, and
let's grow something. Let's do something with kids that help them be set up
for a lifestyle of eating healthier and just surviving better. And for those of
us that are a little getting older through the years here, gardening keeps you
young. That's just one way to put it. It keeps yea. All
right, we will be back and we will see you again next weekend here
on Guardenline. Thanks for being a listener. Don't forget to check out my
website at gardening with Skip dot com. MHM.