Katie r h. Garden Line does not necessarily endorse any of the products or
services advertised on this program. Welcome to Katie r H Garden Line with Skip
Richt. It's so crazy trip. Just watch him as many good things to
suppot. Crazy gas canst jump back again, not a sad gas. Good
morning, Good Sunday morning. And I just want to congratulate everyone listening.
A forgetting up at this hour to listen to garden Line. Second for remembering
to set your clocks back or forward? Excuse me, spring forward? We
fall back in the fall. Well, anyway, apparently I remembered because I'm
here today. We are looking forward to talking about all kinds of things gardening.
Now you need to look next door at your neighbor's house. If the
lights are off, go bang on the door, wake them up, tell
them they're missing guard line. They will rise up and call you blessed someday,
maybe not today. They'll call you something else this morning. I suspect
what are we going to talk about today? Well, you get to set
the stage for that by making a call to seven to one three. Hey,
before I give the phone number, do you know that when you need
to reach information on any kind of thing regarding garden Line. You can call
us, of course, and call us when we're here. You can also
listen to some of the past shows. Yep, they're available. Just go
online and go to the garden Line excuse me, the KGRH website. There
you find the past shows. They're right there, ready to go for you.
So anytime you want to go back and listen, you can. Now
we're also the shows and we turn them into a podcast, so you can
listen to past shows that way as well. You just go online if you've
got the iHeartMedia app or I believe some other apps will do it too,
but you can listen to guard Line. Sign up to listen to it.
You can listen live. We have people that listen even outside the state to
garden Line live because they use that feature, which is kind of cool,
I think, because you can kind of go backwards. We always miss something,
maybe I said something you couldn't remember what it was, did and write
it down. Well, you can do that as well. Well. If
you would like to just get really immediate and start talking today with me about
things, you can doll us up at seven one three, two, one
two five eight seven four seven one three, two, one two, five,
eight seven four. And I always tell folks that if you want to
get on guard line fast, the best thing to do is call early in
the morning because phones are wide open right now, so you can get right
in if you'd like to do that. It is spring, and if we
have a bit of gardening blood in us, we are excited to be outside.
And you know, getting the soil ready. Everybody who listens to the
show ought to know that first thing you do is get the soil ready,
brown stuff before green stuff. Getting the soil ready means building up the soil.
It means putting composted materials in. It means purchasing a bed mix to
grow in. It means putting in the right fertilizers and getting that soil ready
for when the plant roots hit the ground. Everything they need is there.
There's good moisture because it holds moisture. There's good drainage because it drains well,
so there's oxygen in the soil. There's every nutrient the plant might need.
They're in the bank account waiting for it. And that's as easy as
it goes right there, you know. For I was talking about spring and
everything, it's an exciting time. Yesterday I was saying we were giddy gardeners
because it's springtime. I would say, take all that energy to all that
interest in the flowers and vegetables and that gorgeous, beautiful lawn and on and
on. Take all that interest and just focus it with facts so that you
can have success. I want you in the middle of summer to look at
a lawn that is gorgeous. And to do that, we got to do
certain things right. And there's a lot of misinformation out there on any topic,
certainly on gardening, and we want to guide you in the right way
to do it. If you want to have a beautiful tomato harvest, there's
a way to get there from here, and that's what we're here to help
you with. Well, we're going to go straight to the phones this morning
and I'm going to head out to sugar Land and talk to Mel. Hello,
Mel, good morning, Hi, good morning. What's up. So
the freeze a couple of years ago it killed these little three beads clovers I
have in the front. They have these real cool looking maroon red looking like
heart to look like hearts on each three of the clovers, and they finally
came back this year barely like little ones. Uh, there's anywhere I can
just like dig that out of the ground and like somehow keep it, I
don't know, put in a a an indoor flower of it, or trying
to cultivate them or keep them keep them healthy all the year round, or
do you think it's just a springtime fan. It's it's gonna it's gonna be
hard to keep it year round. There's a number of different kinds of clovers,
and the kind you're describing is it tends to kind of go away,
and so you can try that and see, certainly let it go back to
seed if you like the looks of it, and have it in a bed
or whatever you're you're wanting to accomplish with it. But you know, some
in some parts of the country you can you can almost have clovers as like
a groundcover lawn type material, but we don't do well with that down here
just because of the summer heat primarily right on and so it's just a natural
seating that does myself. Yeah, that's it. Most of it behaves like
biennial sprouting in the fall, going through winter and then looking good in the
spring when everything looks good, and then they take the idea. I did
some bike riding over here, the like four ben big drals. Yes,
gorgeous, man, it's gorgeous everywhere this year. All right, all right,
well, thank you. Enjoy it out there, mil It is certainly
time to do that. Thanks for the call. Appreciate that very much.
We were talking. I was just mentioning a while ago. You know,
the importance of taking care of your lawn. And one of the things we
need to do is we need to deal with the cool season weeds that now
are really making their presence known by growing fast. Uh. And this is
the time on my schedule where if you're going to do an early greenup,
you do that. Now. Nitrofoss has a product that is the early Greenup.
It's the fifteen five to ten. But it also contains trimeac, which
is a broad leaf post emergent weed killer. And so if you wet the
lawn, just wet the foliage of the weeds, put that product out.
It'll stick to the weed surfaces. Give it about a day or so watered
in really good, and then what's going to happen is you will have moved
the nutrients down in the soil. But you also will take down those broad
leaf weeds. They are going to get bigger and grow more. They're going
to have blooms, they're going to have seeds, and the sooner in that
process you can shut it down, the better. Now you can find nitrofoss
products a whole lot of places. Lake Hardware down in Angleton, Fisher's Hardware
in Baytown, and D and D Feed up in tambule I'll carry the nitrofoss
products like the fifteen to five to ten with the trimeac in it. I
want to go now to Spring, Texas. We're going to talk to Liz.
Hey, Liz, Hey, good morning. Yes, Hey Liz,
I'm sorry. I took your call and I then looked at the clock.
Will you hold on and I'll I'll talk to you first when I come back.
Sure, thank you. Sorry about that false alarm. We'll be right
back. Welcome back to the garden line. Hey, it's good to have
you with us today. Well let's see here, Liz, this is not
a false alarm. We're back and you're the first pack. Can we help
today? Yes? My question is how do you start introducing beneficial bugs to
your rose garden? Do you just buy them. Where do you go,
do you at one type at a time, or how do you go by
doing that? Good questions that you can purchase bugs beneficials around. But you've
got beneficials around, they just don't have a reason to be there yet,
and you can give them a reason to be there. So when you plant
flowers that attract them in and among your roses or somewhere in the yard,
you're going to find that the beneficials show up. The flowers that have small
daisy like blooms like the chemomeal or fall aster. There's a lot of little
flowers like that that have the little small daisy like blooms. And in terms
of the shape of the flower, flowers that have an umbrella like bloom top
and that would be yarrow for example, was a good one for that aniss
when it goes to bloom. A coriander which is cilantro when it goes to
bloom. There's a lot of flowers like that. Herbs like time and trailing
rosemary and chives all attract beneficial insects. And then having a few aphids around.
I usually put some tropical milkweed out and because it attracts a yellow aphid
that will not get on your roses. But when you have that, you're
gonna have lady beetles, you're gonna have lace wings, you're gonna have parasitoid
wasps all in the garden. So basically, it's kind of like the old
movie Field of Dreams of a baseball field where they said if you build it,
they will come, and that that's how it is in your garden.
Okay, all right, thank you, all right, you take. I
need to put something on my website about that. That would be a good
addition. You've given me an idea. Maybe I can get around to getting
that done. Thank you, Liz, Thank you, bet bye bye.
That's good. Good to visit about those things. Let's see, we're going
to go to Mark in Liberty. Hello. Mark, howdy sir, how
can we help today? I just wanna, I just wonder. I'm actually
it's seven thirty at night here in Singapore. I'm just I'll be home in
a couple of weeks. I want to see if it's too late for me
to put down barricade to stop stick or burst. Uh no, it's not,
No, it's not. First of all, congratulations on being the furthest
away caller I've had so far on my time on the show. No,
it's not at all. You need to get it down when you get back.
Grassburgs aren't the earliest weeds to sprout, but don't delay. As soon
as you get back, go ahead and get the barricade down. Water it
in with one half inch roughly of water, just to move it to the
surface. Just a little bit of water, and that's where it'll go to
work when they try to sprout. You must have some sandy soil up there,
yes, sir, And I'm getting a bigger and bigger bumper crop every
year, so it's driving me crazy. Well, that's right, appreciate it.
Yeah, you bet, Mark and have a safe trip back. Good
to hear from you this morning. Yeah. Barricade is one of those products
that we call a pre emergent And what does that mean. It means before
you have the weeds, you put it down. Post emergents kill weeds.
You can see, pre emergence prevent weeds that haven't sprouted yet from successfully establishing.
And that's what barricade does. It works on It works on grassy weeds
and it works on broad leaf weeds. Both the key to a pre emergent
herbicide is to incorporate rate it. And what does that mean. That means
we move it down to the soil surface. In agriculture there used to be
some that they very lightly disked the field to get them into the surface.
For our home lawn weed applications, it's water. We put about a third
inch to a half inch of water on just to move it down to the
weed surface. And that is where it's going to work. And for those
of you who've heard about it, I mean talk about it a lot here
on garden Line. You can find it in a lot of places. So
if you're looking for it, how about a task Asta ace They carry it
out there. You're going to find it at ace at Sincle Ranch too,
for example. That's another place where they will call bary Kate. If you're
done in Lake Jackson, Lake Hardware and Clute will have it as well,
So it's easy to find as you look around. Let's head out now to
kemp Logan and we're going to talk to Ron. Hello. Ron, Yeah,
good morning. Skip. Let's talked to you yesterday morning about a weed
that propped up in some New Saint Augustine saw that. I laid down in
the fall, and I emailed in a couple of pictures yesterday hoping that you
could identified tell me what you used to kill it. I saw that,
and I there are several weeds that look just like that. There. It's
a partially looking leaf. There is a partially type weed that can have it.
But there are some other things in the carrot family that will have that
kind of leaf. So I can't say the specific name of it. If
you tried. I think you tried for a long weed tree zone on it.
I tried that and that didn't seem to affect it. I would I
would give a shot at boneye weed beater ultra do the ultra one. There's
yeah, I would try that and see, you know, without knowing exactly
the weed, you know, I can't say, yes, this will knock
it out, but it has a different mix of ingredients that would give you
a better shot at it. I think you also have the option we talk
about doing, you know, an application of a product to stick to the
weeds when you fertilize. I was talking about that earlier. And if you
haven't put in a spring green up yet and you're gonna put a spring greenup
in you might try one that is going to have a broad leaf post emergent
weed killer in it. Have you have you done it for greenup? Pardon?
Yeah, I've done early greenup and I'll try the weed. That's what
I would do. That work, Yeah, that's what I would do.
Just follow the label, carefully, mix it right and catch the weed as
it's as soon as you can, uh where it's at its most susceptible stage
right now, right, Okay, thanks Jeff, I appreciate it, you
bet, Thanks for the call. Our phone number if you'd like to give
us a call is seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four seven
one three two one two five eight seven four Verden Tree Farm. They make
it easy for you and they have the trees that you need for your yard
here in this area, the trees that grow throughout this whole, and really
they for example, will have palm trees for those of you who are interested
in palms, the hardiest palms that you would want to plant around here.
They can tell you which ones those are and recommend which one to plant.
Maybe you want a different kind of shade tree. Well, They've got it.
Even very large shrubs, types of hollies and other things. They carry
those as well. They make it easy by having three locations. You can
go out to West Houston Parker Cypress. You can go in the central town
where Yale and I ten come together. You can go down to Pearland on
Broadway Street. They have those there as well. And then they make it
easy by sitting down with you and consulting and saying, hey, this.
You bring them a picture of your yard and they'll tell you here's some options
I think would fit what you're looking for there. And finally they make it
easy. You just pick it out and they tag it and they bring it
to your house and they plant it for you. Now, that makes it
easy. A good quality tree, good quality service, and just a downright
good company. Verdant Treefarm dot com. Verdant Treefarm dot com. You can
find out more about them. It's really, really, really a pleasure to
work with the folks, and they do a very good job, very good
job. Let's go out to Austin in League City. Now. Hello Austin,
Hello, sir, how are you doing this morning? I'm well,
thank you, Yeah, I wanted to ask you I saw somebody local to
me advertising on Facebook yesterday about air raiding lawns that I just wanted to Is
that really something beneficial to have done? It is very beneficial, especially in
a clay soil where they can get compacted and you don't have a good oxygen
down in the root zone of the plant yards that are struggling along. We
have a couple of folks in the area that do that. Those companies tend
to not travel too far because it's expensive hauling the bulk of the compost and
the and everything to do a yard, and so you're down in League City,
you're just a little bit I believe outside of where B and B would
go. They cover more southwest. But some people will runt equipment and do
it themselves. I can tell you this. The people you hire to do
it, they've got better equipment that does a better job pulling the plugs out
of the ground, and then the equipment that spreads is fast and easy to
get it done that way. But in a pinch, if you can't get
somebody to come out, you can do some compost, top dressing and even
aerration yourself. Okay, well, I appreciate the help all right, good
luck with that, Thank you, you bet take care. Yeah, heavn
aeration is great oxygen in the soil. When you make those cores, when
you pull the plugs out of the ground, those open hole, excuse me,
organic matter goes in them. You're fertilizers will go down in there,
but most of all oxygen goes down in there, and then the compost top
dressing is just the finishing thing that really helps you have a very very beautiful
lawn. Speaking of a beautiful lawn, the folks at Microlife have a lot
of different products that you can use on your lawn and really anywhere in your
landscape that we're hitting the fertilization time. And they're sixty four is a green
bag. That's the standard product that they produce four lawn fertilization. But don't
forget the hum Mats plus. Hum Mates plus is concentrated compost in a bag.
It's got a little nutrient in it, but you're not putting it down
for nutrient. It's not putting. You're not putting it down to fertilize.
You're putting it down to get the final stage of compost, which helps build
soil structure down on your ground and the microbial activity that comes along with that
that helps the roots to thrive. Therefore the grass does better. So over
time, applying the microlife a few mates plus that's a purple bag over and
over again through the seasons, it just gets better and better and better.
Not that you're not going to see results soon, but to continue to do
what nature does, and that is to build the soil slowly over time.
That is a secret to good success with that. And I would suggest that
if you want go online to Microlife Fertilizer dot com. You're going to find
all their products there with more information on them, and also a list of
all the places you can buy Microlife, which is pretty much everywhere. There
were very very widely widely available. Excuse me, I have some hum mates
plus and I'm actually about to put on my yard this spring. You know,
they say that Cobbler's kids go barefoot? Have you ever heard that Mickey
Cobbler's kids. The other day, I was looking at my yard going,
I'm glad garden line listeners can't see because I took a hit last year.
I'm resotting some areas, so let me get me about three or four weeks
and then take a look. It'll be in a lot better better shape by
that point in time. You know, there's nothing wrong with struggling with plant
things. Nature has its vicissitudes, as we say, and it's always it's
always changing, it's always different, and you can always fix things. In
some years you have challenges, like last year on my lawn I did,
but you can always come back and we give the advice to help you do
that. Hey, I'm going to take break. Let Nicky have the mic
for a bit. Seven one three two one two k t r H.
I'll be right back and Ike, you'll be first up. All right,
enough of that. We play weird stuff on guarden Line. Sometimes I say
fun stuff, you may say weird stuff. My family rolls their eyes when
that kind of stuff happens at my house. But hey, you know,
you got to be yourself right, you know. The one of the coolest
new products on the market that I've seen in the last few years is the
three tree stabilizer. It's a new product that's out there now. You attach
it to a post, a vertical post, and attach it to your newly
planted trees trunk. If maybe you plant a tree last fall and you didn't
stake it. Go ahead and get one now and put it on there.
It holds that tree very firmly, but it has a strap that is soft
and you set it loosely so the tree can move a little bit. That's
important on developing trunk strength. Don't honker it down. You see these people
that put like three guy wires down and that tree, it's like it's a
rocket. They're afraid it's going to take off. No, you want it
to move with the tree stabilizer. You have a vertical post, so it's
not leaning out for someone to cut their shoulder or something on. It doesn't
have the wires going to the ground to trip over. It's very neat and
clean. You set the post pretty close to the tree itself and it just
allows you to get around it and work. But most of all, it
does the job right and you can get it a lot of places. You
can find it at rcw B Cannons at Arborgate Lance for all seasons, Jorges
Hidden Gardens down South and Alvin has it and Southwest Fertilizer. Of course they
have it. They have everything. But it's easy to find and it works,
and it lasts a long time, and it's well worth the investment.
Listen, you paid a lot for that tree, and this is a small
investment to help you make sure you have success because the goal is to get
that tree growing healthy and fast. I'm going to go now out to Cyprus
and we're going to talk to Ike this morning. Good morning Ike, Hi,
Good morning Skip. How are you, sir? I'm well, Thank
you, sir. I had a question I've got hey Ike, can you
hear me? Dog? Yes? Can you hear me? Yeah? Yeah,
you cut completely out. I didn't catch that. Are you there?
Yes, I'm here now. Okay. I have a problem in my backyard.
I cannot get grass to grow. I've got dogs that play pretty aggressively
and I think has a lot to do with it. Yeah. I had
somebody suggest I use many white Dutch clover as a to get something growing to
help with the mud that is caused because of no grass that's able to be
grown. My next alternative is to do just turf just to prevent some of
the mud from coming in. Have you heard of that or is that a
I've heard of it. That's not a wear and terror plant clover. The
turf is your best bet. If Saint Augustine is not working well for you,
you might consider switching over to Azoisia. They're a denser, tougher turf.
They have an underground rhizome that's a little bit more bounce backable. Saint
Augustine just lives sitting up on top of the ground. That would be something
to consider, depending on all the factors of sunlight and whatever that you have
there on the spot. Yeah, it's definitely getting enough sunlight. That's it's
got direct heat on the backside with the sunset. So yeah, that's okay,
Well it sounds good. I'll give that a try, all right,
and just sit down and give the dogs a good talking to. They they
care, I mean they Oh I didn't know that. I'll be happy to
change my habits for you. They definitely love the grass. Yeah, you
bet. You take care, have a good have a good rest of your
day. Have you been to Plants for all seasons lately? I'm telling you
I have, and they are loaded up on all kinds of plants. Uh.
The color is just amazing. There are plants for all seasons and where
you're there, check out their their containers, beautiful glazed containers that if you
were to go in and say, look, I want I want a multiple
plant, beautiful color container that will carry me through spring on into summer.
They can walk you around and go, well, here's a here's a group
of flowers that you can plant in a container. You want to get a
good sized container, and they'll help you in the in terms of I'll say
designing it, meaning we'll put this one in the middle, put these around
the sides, and you can go home and create something that is just going
to be a showstopper on your patio if you want to put it out on
a front porch wherever you have it, tell them how much sun you can
give it and they'll get you straightened out. That's how they do things there.
They give good advice. They have good plants that want to grow here,
and that's the key to success. If you have a problem, take
it in, take a picture, take a plant. They'll identify it,
they'll diagnose it, they'll do it right. That is how the Flowerys have
been doing things since nineteen seventy three at Plants for All Seasons, and you
can just go to the website Plants for All Seasons dot com, or you
can call them to eight, one, three, seven, six, sixteen
forty six. They are right off of FM two forty nine Tomball Parkway as
you're going north for a Tomball cross over Luetta and they're right there on the
side of Tomball Parkway. And I'm going to head out now. I think
we're going out to Spring and talk to Liz. Good morning, Liz.
Yes, it's me again. I have another question. I'm sorry, that's
okay. Yeah, this is regarding the the other call that you had about
the tilling. Yes, so we're gonna be putting roses tomorrow. And my
question is, I know you talked about it. That is a good idea.
So do I need to what kind of tool do I need to use?
Do I need to actually use like the simple menual one? Should I
go to Low's and rent one? Yeah? And my other question that I
have and how deep that's right, how deep do I go? Okay,
my toil that I have right now, it's kind of like hmm soft because
I've been putting you know, stuff on it through the past years. But
then when you get down beep, it's going to be clay. And my
other question is the alfalfa. What's the difference between the pellets and the powder.
There's a preference, that's all. Uh what was the product that you're
has pellets and powder? Oh a'l falfa, oh alfalfa. Okay, well
it doesn't matter which of those two if you want to put it down.
But you know that that it doesn't matter pelletz er powder. So how big?
How many roses are you going to plant? How big is this bed?
It's about you cut out on the numbers, say the two numbers,
twenty eleven, twenty eleven. Okay, we yeah, At that size,
a rototiller is probably justifiable. Either rototilling or spading will work. I would
put about three or four inches of compost or bed mix. Better bed mix
a rose soil would be ideal on the ground, and then I would rototill
it or spade it in as deeply as you can. Rototillers don't go very
deep. They're only going to go about maybe four to six inches if you
really get a good sized rototiller to get as far as you can. So
that's why I just put a little bit accompost on top, mix it in
as deeply as I can, or bed mix, and then add more to
the surface and build up a bed that's about a foot high because it's going
to settle down to about six inches high, and so then you can dig
the holes and plant the roses. Okay, okay, so much I appreciate
it. You bet good luck with that. Sounds like a fun, fun
project and good plans as well. You know, the Landscaper's Pride folks have
a lot of products for you to choose from that twenty something products, and
that includes things like their pot Dirt, which is an omri organic certified organic
soil, proven for short term and really a kind of a high potency plant
growth. It's got nutrients like it's got worm castings and sand, it's got
vermiculite and other things as well. So if you've got a color bed that
you really want to pop, pot Dirt can do it. Landscapers Mix has
pine bark, riceols, pearlite, and even a slow release fertilizer. So
do you want to build up a bed for good drainage, something for a
new bed that you're putting in, or something just to add to and raise
up a little bit more an existing bed that you have. Now you're going
to find Landscapers Pride products all over just go to Landscaperspride dot com and that
will take you to where you can find every place where you can get these
products, and there are a lot of places. We're going to take a
break and we'll be right back. When we come back, Larry, you'll
be the first up. Welcome back to Guardline. Hey, we're glad you're
listening today, as we always are. Yesterday I was out at the antiqu
Rosingporium and I had a great time give a talk on beneficial insects. It
was during their spring celebration, which is still going on today, so it's
not too late to get out there. It's a beautiful drive out there to
Independence, Texas, just north of Brenham, and the Anti rosen Porium is
just beautiful and they have old roses. They know roses grow roses correctly.
For example, they use a two gallum pot, which is a good size
to develop a good root system for your rows to have a good start.
And they have all the antiques that you would want, and it's amazing.
They're beautiful. A lot of them are blooming right now. They just look
great. If you want to find the place, let me just do this.
Here's their website. Antique Roseemporium dot com, Antique Rosenporium dot com.
It's about an hour drive from most of the areas here in Houston. You
can give them a call at nine seven nine eight three six fifty five forty
eight. And remember, they are roses, but they are so much more.
And the experience of going out there and just enjoying seeing the place and
being out in the fresh air, driving through the blue bonnets. Yep,
blue bonnets are popping out there. Well, it's worth it, very very
worth it. I'm going to head over to Sugarland now and talk to Larry.
Hello, Larry, Hey, Good morning, morna. I've got a
about a four inch in diameter red bud tree, of course, is looking
beautiful right now. But I discovered yesterday where I had had some straps around
the trunk, that the that the park got bark got damaged and underneath I
could see some some tiny red buds red bugs. Okay, and what what
in the world should I do? A red bug does not ring a bell
for a tree insect pest, so it may be some things just hiding under
there. If you wanted to squirt them with something, you could I don't
know. Of a red tree pest that would be damaging the trunk on a
on red bud, so little bitty, I mean it was real hard to
find. Yeah, well, I wouldn't sweat it. You know, if
that little you probably squirt some soaper oil on them and they'll be fine.
But I would ignore. But that's just a reminder of, you know,
being careful on those strapping trees. That's why I like that tree stabilizer because
it's got that big soft rubber strap that allows movement. Yeah, helps avoid
that. Right now, Should I try to do anything to protect the bark
where the where the inside you know you can see the under the bark,
No, No, I would. I would just leave it and focus on
getting it good nutrients and as we get into summer and it's hot, an
occasional maybe once a week, good soaking of irrigation so that you get some
vigor into that red bud. And that is what it needs to be able
to heal that over close that over, I should say, and it'll be
just fine. Oh okay, I mean it just doesn't go halfway around the
tree, does it. No? Okay, all right, okay, second
quick question. Okay, the oak leaves the I've got two large oaks in
the front yard that do those things help at all? Do they ever break
down or you know they do? They will, Yeah, they will if
you don't do anything to them, because they do that they break down in
the forest. But if you run over them with a lawnmower and break them
up a little, it increases the surface area and the microbes can break them
down even faster. So if you wanted to speed the breakdown, that's what
I do, Hilary. I appreciate those questions and good luck with them,
but yeah, take advantage of those leaves. They're very good to have around
for mulching and for composting and everything else. And you take care. Good
luck out there, and Sugar Lencer. The bee supply out in Dayton is
the place where you go if you are interested in beekeeping. It's also the
place where you go if you were just interested in learning about bees. They
have be tours where you sample honey and it, trust me, it is
fascinating. You will be glad you went. Very educational, very entertaining and
eye opening. Fun just fun. But for those of you wanting to keep
bees, or maybe you're thinking about it, but you haven't decided for sure
yet. Why don't you sign up for one of their beginning beekeeping classes.
There's one on March twenty third, there's another in April thirteenth, April twenty
seventh, and there's two more in May. Sign up for one. You
go out there, you learn a lot, They provide a lunch for you,
even get to suit up and go work with some bees outside with them,
and it is extremely educational. Those folks really know what they're talking about.
The website, if you want more information, is the besupply dot com
dbesupply dot Com. It's as simple as that. I mentioned that I was
at Anti Grows and Porium last week. Next Saturday, I'm going to be
a Buchanan's Native Plants that's down in the Heights on Eleventh Street. Now,
those of you who have been to Buchanans know that it's worth going to Buchanans
anytime for anything, because they have an encre selection of native plants. But
come out and see me next Saturday again. That is next Saturday, the
sixteenth. I had to look at my calendar sixteenth of the month, and
I'll be just visiting with you at the table. Come by bring me samples,
bring me plants. If it's a sample, put it in a ziplock
or closure bag, bring me photos to look at, and we'll just talk
about all the kinds of things. You can say, Hey, i've got
an area that I can't get anything to run. It's too shady, all
right, Well, beukeins can fix that. They've got a whole section of
plants that do well in the shade. Maybe you're needing some beautiful flowers for
the beneficials. Oh, my goodness, you ought to see the beneficials options.
The bucinnans, for example, they've got a blue adgeratum. Now it's
an annual that produces a lot of nectar and pollinators just love that plant.
But that's next weekend, so make plans right now. Next Saturday, after
the show, I'll head over there and I'll be there from eleven to one.
Oh, they're giving away some prizes too. They are like eight different
prizes are given away. So that's another cool reason, fun reason to go
and to do that. Come see me. Well, I want to welcome
back to folks from Grimes County Feed. Grimes County Feed is a really cool
old time feed store. It's up there in Grimes County. They're celebrating,
by the way, their fifth year anniversary. But it's that old time service.
The Roy family. They've been members of the community there for a long
time and they give back to the community in so many different ways. And
people that go in there. I talk to listeners from time to time that
just say, Yep, we go to Grimes County. We love it there.
And one reason they like it is because Grimes County has the fertilizers I
talk about. You hear me talk about nitrofoss or Microlife or Nelson's or Medina.
They have all those products there at Grimes County feed They're on Highway thirty
Carlos, Texas. So it's just a hop, skipping or jump outside in
Annesota outside Brian College Station area. And if you're in all the beautiful little
towns in God's Country up there, that would be places like Reliance and Iola
and beat Eyes and Shiro and Richard's. Doesn't that sound fun? Rones,
Prairie Anderson. How about that? Grimes County feeds your backyard feed store.
I mean, it's just right in your backyard, easy to get to.
Those of you in subdivisions like kings Kingwood and muir Wood king Oaks. Excuse
me, king Oaks and mure Wood. I love driven through the subdivision.
Stop and visit with a gardener one time out there. Those are just a
hop skipping or jump away as well. Grimes County Feed They treat you right,
they provide the products you need, and they just help you get off
to a good start. And boy, now's the time to go by there
and get that done. This past week I looked up and my water for
the birds was dry and my bird feeder was empty. Now I wish they
had come peckt on the back door and told me to get out there,
because I would have been happy to fill it up. But I had noticed
I wasn't seeing birds around in the backyard. Well shame on me. But
I've taken care of that and we are now back in business with the birds.
You know, Wabirds Unlimited. That's the place I go. That's where
I get all of my bird stuff. Because when they sell you bird seed,
it's bird seed the birds eat. It's not bird seed the birds kick
out. And cheap bird seed is expensive bird seed because what you get for
what you pay is very very little. Now wibirds has a nesting super Blend
listen. Birds are going to be hatching young. In fact, some already
are right now for spring, and those young need high protein oil a lot
of energy in the food to survive. That's why the birds are bringing them
the caterpillars that they got out of our landscapes. Nesting super Blend provide.
It's got like sunflowers and peanuts and dried mealworms and bark butter and safflower and
tree nuts, and it is a superpower food that will really help your birds
raise more birds, so we get to enjoy their antics and their beauty.
I just love birds and always have water out for them. By the way,
always have water out for your birds. By the way, I forgot
to tell you this. If you don't know how to find a wild birds,
go to WBU dot com forward slash Houston. That's how you find them.
There's a bunch of them all over town. I love love, and
I enjoy birds. That's one of the things over the last five years that
I've added to my gardening enjoyment. I think you would too. Sitting in
the morning outside with a cup of coffee, listening to the songs Ah that's
worth the price of admission right there. Well, I want to remind you
I am going to be at Buchanans this coming Saturday, so please come by
and see me, bring me some samples, let's talk. I want to
meet you. I want to find out what kind of questions you have and
how we can I hope you have a more beautiful garden and more bountiful landscape.
We're gonna take a little break. I'll be right back our phone number
seven one three two one two kg r H. Kt 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 rictor crazy trim. Just watch
him as many good things to see. Razing glare not a sound. Welcome
back to Guarden Line. Good to have you this morning, and let me
be the first to say welcome to our folks that think they're turning in,
tuning in for the first time today or earliest time today. You didn't set
your clock back and it's actually seven o'clock, but we're glad to have you.
Anyway you can, you can be the first caller in this hour,
the first caller of the show. I did that one time, and now
forever, every time Day Life Savings Times comes and goes, I go to
sleep, making sure you know, Oh gosh, I don't want to forget
this. It would be a very dead show if for one hour I wouldn't
hear right, that would be kind of kind of boring. Oh gosh,
here's our number if you'd like to give us a call. Seven one three
two one two five eight seven four seven one three two one two fifty eight
seventy four. Now is the time to get your spring early green up done.
That's an optional fertilization, of course, but if you'd like to make
the lawn look a little greener and just have a little more color in it
and as it comes into spring, have that energy to get going, well,
how's the time to do it. If you go on my schedule which
is at gardening with Skip dot com. That's my website, Gardening with Skip
dot com. The schedules there that talks about fertilizing as well as one that
talks about insect disease and weed control. And in the spring we have that
early green up and then a little bit later when we get into April,
we'll be talking about long term fertilization with a gradual release fertilizer. But the
early green up one would be Nitropos Imperial. That's the red bag from Nitrofoss.
It's a fifteen five ten. Why fifteen five to ten because a three
one two ratio fifteen five ten, that ratio of nutrients is what an m
turf research determined a long time ago is what grass takes up. That's what
it needs. And you know, I mean, you can put triple thirteen
on your lawn, but a lot of that middle number is not going to
be taken up by the grass, and it's going to build up in the
soil to high levels over time, which is not a good thing. Three
one two ratios what we're looking for. And so the fifteen five to ten
from Nitrofoss, the red bag, the Imperial they call it, that's the
one for now, and you get it out at the right rate. By
the way, the right rate for those of you who've bought it haven't put
it out yet, is seven pounds per thousand square feet. Around seven pounds
per thousand gives you a good pound of nitrogen. So you're ready to go.
Where can you find things? Like that. Well, when I say
things like that, I mean that. And other nitrofoss products. How about
shades of green up in the woodlands, they carry it up there. Enchanted
gardens out in the Richmond Rosenberg area, they carry that product out there as
well. It's easy to find these products because nitro fross is widely sold all
over town, and the Imperial is kind of a standard in terms of spring
green up for your lawn. You're listening to garden Line. I'm your host,
Skip Richter, and if you would like to give us a call,
you can reach me seven one three two one two kt R eight seven one
three two one two KTRH. I have a bunch of plants sitting on the
porch that are waiting to go in my garden. I waved goodbye when I
left for the weekend because I've been gone all weekend from the house, and
I just said, I'll be back to get you planted when we get back.
And when I do, I'm going to dive right in and get that
job done. Uh. The the plants that sit on my porch are in
great danger of being forgotten to be watered because I do travel around a lot.
Uh, and so I need to get those things in the ground.
When you get those plants planted, get them watered in, fertilized, get
them off to a good start, you are going to enjoy the blooming benefits,
the blooming dividends of those for months to come. And I would encourage
you to do something to color your landscape this spring. For example, what
are you going to do new? What is new this spring for your landscape?
Are you going to try a new tomato variety, a new pepper variety.
Are you going to try a different way of trellising or caging your tomatoes?
You know, we can cage them, We can put them on a
steak. I like to use livestock panels at a slant, so you just
have this wall of foliage. You kind of sort of weave the vines in
and out. You have to get real neurotic about it, just weeding through
a little bit to hold them on there and that way the foliage shades the
fruit that is hanging down below. That works really well. So what flowers
are you going to grow this year? How about some of the supertunias ones
like the variety has been around for a while now, is bubblegum there's some
new old varieties or newer varieties out there from the proven winters folks. Those
things are loaded with blooms. They look like petunias, but they're smaller,
a little smaller flower. But I'm talking wall to wall foliage. Try one
of those this year. How about herbs? Have you ever grown herbs before?
You don't have to have an herb guard. What herbs are you're going
to grow this year you haven't grown before? A new type of basil maybe
you know in basil blooms it is very attractive to beneficial insects. Are you
going to try some new things in the yard? Maybe you set that mower
a little higher, mow a little more regular, Maybe do some replace the
clock on the timer for your lawn watering to one that's much more efficient and
will save you money in the long run. What are you going to do
new this year? What are you going to try and new? A new
houseplant? There's some really cool house plants out there. If you've never grown
the ZZ plant? ZZ what a name? ZZ plant? It is a
bulletproof one. It puts up with you if you forget the water for a
while. It's kind of a succulent plant. It does well with that.
It likes light, but it put it puts up with fairly low light levels
as well, gets a little stretchier, but it miners doing just fine in
a lower light level. How about trying that one. What are you going
to do new this year? I want to In fact, if you call
this morning, I'd like to hear something that you would like to try new
this year, something you haven't done before. Maybe you're gonna garden more for
the birds, plant some things that attract birds, or plant some things that
attract beneficial insects, or take care of pollinators. There's a whole world of
things. How about incorporating some natives into your landscape? Would that be new
for you? I'm just I'm not talking about a renovation. I mean tell
me something you're going to do new, And I hope you will try something
new, because there is a world of horticulture that we never will have enough
life to span to get through, and we got to keep trying new things.
It's fun, it's exciting, and I want to tell you this.
Every year I try a couple a dozen new things that I haven't tried before,
and every year I find something that is now added to my list of
favorites. So I hope you'll consider that. I'm going to go straight out
this morning to clear Lake and we're going to talk to Jim. Hello,
Jim, Good morning, Skip. I aerated my lawn yesterday. I thought
put down top soil today. I was curious, do I need to rake
out all the old thatch and do I fertilize before I put down the top
soil or after I put down top I got you, all right, Well
that's gonna be a little bit of a discussion, so Jim, I'm gonna
put on hold here. We got to go to a break, and when
we come back, I'm going to elaborate on that with you. Thank you
for that question. Greg, You'll be next after that for the rest of
you. If you'd like to call in seven one three two one two kt
RH. All right, let's have some fun, fun gardening fun today on
guardenline. If you want to give us a call, seven to one three
two one two kt r H. I am at the broken record about soil
right over and over again. I tell you brown stuff before green stuff.
If you want to have success organic matter in the soil in a heavy clay,
expanded shale in the soil, fertilizer, nutrients in the soil so that
the plant can thrive. That's important and Airlom Soils has got you covered on
that. They make a wide variety of products. They have a great supply
of quality leaf mold composts. Now we talk about it as a top dressing
for your lawn, but you can use leap more compost and garden bed and
mix it in the soil. You can use it as a mulch on the
surface if you like, I mean any way you want to use it as
good. The veggie and herb mix is one of their most popular selling products,
and rose soil to super super popular. It's really a steel seventy dollars
per yards. I don't know how they sell up with that, but that's
a great, great price. You can get it book delivered, you can
go to there's over eighty stores in the region that carry Airlomb Soils products,
so not hard to find. It all not difficult at all. So I
hope that you will consider that getting the soil right is important. Just go
to Heirloomsoilsoftexas dot com. Airloomsoils off Texas dot Com. That'll get you off
to a good, good start. Okay, Jim, you're doing some fertilization,
so let's jump back in again. I kind of filled me in on
the basic of what you're wanting to ask. Okay, So I made the
areation runs yesterday across the lawn, so all the plugs have been pulled up
and they're all in there. Okay, have some areas that have some heavy
that I wanted to know if I needed to break that out before I start
putting down the topsoil. But even at that, before that point, should
I be putting the imperial down before I'd put the topsoil on the lawn or
after I'd put the top Are you talking about a leaf mold compost? Why
are you adding soil? It's a top soil in compost. Okay. I
wouldn't put too much of that on. I'd keep it a very thin layer.
So yeah, normally we just bring soil in when we're needing to raise
the level of the lawn. But I would go ahead and do the fertilization
now and then give it a little bit of water to moisten it. You
can put the you can put the soil compost mixed down again, just don't
do it too deep, right, all right, Yeah, as far as
raking out the thatch, you don't need to because number one, when you
air rate and bring soil to the surface, it melts down around the thatch
and helps speed decomposition. And if you put a layer of lethal compost or
the compost soil mix you're talking about, that is going to cover up a
lot of those runners and that will speed their decay greatly. Great, all
right, well, thank you very much. I appreciate that you bet Jim
good luck out there getting that lawn in tip top shape. The product of
the new kind of I guess new to me product really it is new in
the market that has just really impressed me this spring has been Nelson's Genesis transplant
mix. Nelson Genesis. It's a six y one three fertilizer. It is
basically loaded with all kinds of beneficial bacteria, the endo, mikeriza, the
ectomicroriza that really help roots to be very efficient and very effective in taking up
nutrients. It's got humites in it also that condition the soil. It just
enhances the biology of the soil. Well, here's what you do you.
Let's say you've got some old tomato plants and you're going to bump them up
to a bigger pot, or you're going to plant them in the ground.
You mix in some genesis with that soil that you're going to plant them into,
and then you plant the plant, and that's how as those roots begin
to move out, they've got that product right there to go. I do
it when I'm potting up houseplants to the next level, doing some of that
this week. I'll be using the genesis again for that. When I'm going
to put a bunch of color plants and a container on the patio. There's
the genesis going into that mix, and then the plants get planted into it.
And I'm telling you the results I've seen. I did some peppers this
spring. Already they jumped out of the ground. They turned so emerald green.
It was beautiful already. By the way, I already have a few
that haven't planted yet, and they already have little peppers on them past the
bloom stage because they're so happy. And where do you get it? All
over the place? For example, I noticed the other day that the folks
at Nelson Water Garden and nursery. Out and Katie are carrying Nelson's Genesis transplant
mix. They carry a wide variety of the things that you hear me talk
about here on garden Line. They carried them out there at Nelson Water Garden,
and if you haven't been, you really should go. This is Think
of it as your nursery on the west side, but think of it as
a destination nursery, because that's what it is. When you go in the
back, you know they have a garden center where you can buy all kinds
of plants. I got some herbs from them one time, and I mean,
they do have a variety of plants. But what their specialty is is
water gardens. And if you want them to come to your house and design
a little waterfall, they can do that. If you want a little pond
that has maybe lily pads, the beautiful blooms of lilies lily pads, if
you want beautiful fish like subunkin the koi and things, they've got all of
that. The plants for the water garden, the fish for the water garden.
But the thing that impresses me, I think almost the thing that impressed
me most would just be the disappearing fountain containers, large beautiful vase, water
running out of the top, going into a gravel bed and recirculating it.
Just the sound of water, the visual of the movement, and just how
beautiful these containers are. It's like a showplace. It is a focal point
in your landscape and they can come out and do that for you. They
do go out and do that. Here's the website Nelsonwatergardens dot com. Here's
the location, Katie Fort Ben Road in Katie, Texas. So if you're
heading out west, you're just going to turn right go north Katie Fort Ben
Road about a stone's throw. If you want to give them a call to
eight one three nine one forty seven sixty nine. I'm going to go now
out to Charles in Kingwood. Hello, Charles, Hey, how are you
today, sir? I'm well, sir, Thank you. Okay, I
got two sagos. The last time in the freeze, what was that two
years ago? They were froze. Both of these have about eighty percent brown
and twenty percent green on the prawns or the leaves. Okay. I've been
driving around and seeing a lot of people now have cut off all the prawns
and some people have left them on. I just wondered, does it matter
if you leave man take them off or should those trees come back since there
is some green on them? Yeah? They should. The real important thing,
you know, the whether a branch lives or it doesn't isn't whether determining
the tree survival. It's the blood at the top. Is it alive or
not? And I can almost guarantee you it is. So if it were
mine, I would leave anything green. Like if you have a half dead
frond, then cut the dead off and leave the green because that's capturing sunlight,
providing fuel for the plant's growth. And then at some point as new
growth comes out, then you can cut off the old, ugly, stubbed
off or whatever fronds. No, what if you would just leave it alone?
Is that negative or is that really not going to hurt it? It'll
be fine, It'll be fine. It just may look a little lopsidednky just
when they cut off those things. It's just it doesn't look great. But
you know, I've seen more and more of people doing that, So I'm
just wanted to ask you, Okay, well, thank you very much.
I appreciate it. I like the show thank you. I appreciate you listening,
and good luck with your your sega out there. Sago palms are kind
of cool. You know, they're not palms there. We call them sago
palms. But listen, in gardening, we call a lot of things things
that they're not. We just do. I don't know why that is,
but it is, and it gets it gets confusing. Like the word jasmine
there is there are plants that are jasmine, and then there's plants that we
call jasmine that are not jasmine, and so we just have to We got
a whole lot of examples. I'm not going to bore you with all that,
but it's one of the things that kind of bugs me about gardening.
It's why we have botanical names for plants. You know, if I say
that's a butterfly plant, well, what does that mean? For some people
it means boodleia, but for the others it means other things. And common
names vary. If you want to go crazy, make a plant list and
try to decide what name to put on things. Because you do a Google
search for this plant and you can find that it may have seven names.
I's got more names than a criminal in the lamb. You know, it's
got all these different colloquial names. But if I started using scientific names,
I think your eyes had rolled back in your head, or the botanical names,
your isid rolled back in your head, and you'd be going, ah,
well, we were talking about ago, about you know, putting down
or doing some aerration on your soil, putting down a compost top dressing,
a leaf moll compost top dressing. We now have a place for those of
you who are south and west, the south and west quadrant of Houston.
So what is that, Well, that's Missouri City. That is sugar Land,
that is all the way east to Pearland and then down all along Highway
six like Fresno, Siena, Arcola, Iowa Colony, Manful and all those
neighborhoods around there. The place is B and B Turk Pros B and B
Turk Prose. It's a family owned place and it's focused on giving you honest
work and quality work. And they do that. I've seen the work that
they do. They've got the equipment to go in and do a deep time
aeration on your lawn and then to follow with a top quality leaf mold compost
top dressing and when you have a clay soil, that is something that periodically
really needs to be done for the benefit if you. If your grass is
struggling as we were getting in here spring, we're getting some growth that's going
to be occurring here soon. You need to call them up and get on
the schedule for them to come by. The phone number is seven to one
three two three four fifty five ninety eight seven one three two three four fifty
five ninety eight. Remember from sugar Land across to Pearland, from Missouri City
all the way down to Manfil and Siena. This is the company that can
provide a quality job when it comes to renovating that lawn. Rejuvenating that lawn,
I should say that's a better word. With the deep tye narration and
the compost top dressing that is applied. I've seen lawns that are done like
that and it is amazing to watch them green up and take off growth.
I always say the brown stuff for the green stuff, right. You got
to make the roots happy. When you do a deep time narration, and
when you do a compost top dressing, you're bringing oxygen into the soil.
Roots need oxygen. And in a heavy clay, it's hard to get oxygen
down there because two dense. You need nutrients down there, and stuff washes
down into the holes that were created. The organic matter gets down in there,
which helps build the soil and improve that clay. And so what are
you doing when you do deep tyme narration, core aeration, and when you
do compost top dressing, you're essentially taking care of the brown stuff which will
make the green stuff your lawn look really really good. Have you been out
to the in Chenny Gardens? Chenny Gardens is one of those places I just
love to go visit because it is always beautiful and it is always it's huge.
I mean, they have stuff all over the area you just wander and
wander through. And the color plants, the roses, the shrubs, the
perennials, the ornamental grasses. Do you need herbs and vegetables, annual flowers
for bedding color, They have all of that. They carry, the fertilizers,
they carry, the soils, the brown stuff that you need to have
success. So make sure and go home with some fertilizer and some bed mixes
and composts and other soils, and you're going to find success with it.
Very knowledgeable folks. Here's the website Enchanted Gardens Richmond dot com. They're on
FM three point fifty nine just north of Richmond. I'm just sitting here enjoying
listening to Linda Ronstadt. Boy, that takes me back a while. I
love that lady's voice, just love the style and everything. Well, I'm
sitting here talking about music, and we're supposed to talk about gardening. How
about that? Give us a call seven one three two to one two KTRH.
Seven to one three two one two KTRH. I wanted to we had
a little break here talk about something that I think is a pretty common misconception
when it comes to pruning plants. Now, we're not in the winter time
when we think of a lot of dormant pruning, but once we get into
the springtime, we have different options when it comes to things that are hedges
in our landscape or that are shrubs, let me say shrubs instead. In
our landscape, there are things that can be shared and make a beautiful dense
shrub. And the more you shear a plant, the more dense it gets.
So you're cutting off very little, but you're cutting it off often that's
called shearing. It's the same reason why the more you mow the lawn,
more often you mow the lawn with less cut off. Each time the denture
your lawn's going to get So that's shearing. But there's also a lot of
plants that have just a beautiful natural form added the anti g rosen perim.
Yesterday I was taking pictures of some of their bridle reath. The spyriea has
big arching branches that come out full of white flowers, really pretty. Now,
if you were to prune that in the wintertime, all those flowers we're
enjoying now would have been cut off, And so you prune it after it
blooms. That's true with azaleas too. By the way, anything that blooms
just in spring. The lady banks rows blooms only in the spring, so
let it bloom. Let it bloom, and then do the prurring on it.
But we tend to box up everything. And you know, it's your
yard, it's your shrub. You can do whatever you want with it.
But I saw some agarita that's a native South Texas wild shrub. It makes
berries and beautiful yellow flowers. Some of the other day New bronfils that had
been trimmed like a meat ball. It looked like a dwarfio pond the way
they'd shared it. And that is not the form of that plant. It
has a beautiful form. We don't have to do that. So how do
we prune those? Well, if you want to leave something natural rather than
if it gets a little lanky, you got some wild hair sticking up in
the air there, just follow a wild hair down to where it attaches to
another branch and cut it off right there. So it's like you you remove
the long branch but leave the shorter side one. And when you prune like
that, we call that thinning cuts. When you prune like that, when
you're done thinning, you know it was prune. But if someone walked up,
they wouldn't go, oh, you just shared your plant. It has
a natural form and a lot of things look good like that. Barbary is
a plant that should be pruned that way. There are a lot of things
that look better that way. When we talk about pruning a abelia, a
glossy abelia, they get shared a lot and they just look batter. If
you take a little time to do more of a thinning work, on them
because they're going to be blooming. Those plants bloom on new growth, the
glossy abilias. So learn a little bit about how to prune a plant.
You're going to have your own opinion of how you want it to look.
And if you want the place, if you want your landscape to look like
Doctor Seuss lives there, then you can turn everything into poodle tails and lion
tails and all that kind of stuff. That's fine, it's your yard.
But there are options, and there's a much more natural and I think subtractive
way to go about pruning. Microlife has a wide variety of products and I
talk about them all the time because they work. Microlife organic fertilizer products have
a number of different components that help your plants thrive. One of them is
the nutrients themselves. The six two four green bag that we use in our
lawns has got a three one two ratio of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium,
but it comes from plant parts and so it contains all the nutrients that plants
took up when they grew. And that way, it doesn't say on the
bag it's says sixty four, but it's got calcium in it. It's got
sulfur in it, it's got magnesium in it, it's got some zinc in
it, it's got you see what I'm saying. It's got the wide variety
of things that go with it. But most importantly, it also has microbial
life in it. And the microbes that are in a good quality fertilizer,
like the microlife, are going to help your plant roots. Roots need microbes.
They don't want to grow in sterile, dead soil. They want soil
that is teeming with life because the life in the soil helps the plants grow.
That's another reason why we use the purple bag hu mates plus. It's
a zero zero four. We don't put it down for the nutrients. We
put it down because humus is the final product of composts, and humts plus
is concentrated compost in a bag that basically is what it amounts to. It's
a purple bag. And so when you're going to do your lawn fertilizing,
why not put in some purple bag humkes plus for microlife in there. Go
to Microlife Fertilizer dot com you can find out more about the products that they
carry and where you can find them. Also, if you'd like to give
us a call if you've got a plant question this morning, you can reach
me at seven one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three
two one two fifty eight seventy four. Spring Creek Feed is your hometown feed
store if you're up there, perhaps in the I'll say the Magnolia area.
They're on FM twenty nine seventy eight, so just a few minutes away from
Highway two forty nine, uh, the Tambol Parkway or the gram Parkway rather,
I should say Grand Parkway. It's easy to get to, really easy
to get to, and it's a cool place. And they have really expanded
their outdoor selection of plants and other kinds of products as well this year.
I was by visiting with them about them month ago, I believe it was,
and I'm telling you that I was very impressed with all of the new
things that they're bringing in now. They've always carried the fertilizers I recommend on
garden Line. They always and still have herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides.
In fact, we were discussing some of the things that they have and things
they might want to get in the store that I think would be very helpful
for customers there. And Spring Creek Feed is always transitioning, changing, growing,
improving, and every time I go, I'm just really impressed with the
things they have there. Again, they're on FM twenty nine seventy eight in
the Magnolia area. And if you need pet food and all that, of
course it's a feedstore, they've got all that tack for your horses and other
things. But the garden center has been really really impressive to me at Spring
Creek Feed. You might want to stop by the We love feed stores here
on Garden Line. We love our feed stores and I just I grew up
going into feed stores. The smell of a feed store, you know,
to go in, you smell the animal feeds and things. I just love
that they think that's cool. That is very cool. Out of my garden,
we are doing some addition of containers this coming week. I've got a
bunch of flowers that I'm going to be putting in and some herbs as well
that I'm going to be putting into containers. I'm building a special herb bed.
You've heard of the term kitchen garden. A kitchen garden, the idea
there, it's just a garden. But the idea of a kitchen garden is
we're going to put it right outside the house, beside the house, maybe
outside the kitchen. You just walk out and you snip, snip, snip,
and walk back in and you use it to cook. That's what a
kitchen garden is about. So it's going to have herbs and vegetables. You
can have flowers in it too. Why not bring some cut flowers in to
decorate the home. But this is kind of a kitchen bed. I guess
it's on our patio and we'll be putting in the different herbs there that we
can get out and enjoy. But I also have them there because herbs have
blooms, many of them do, and the blooms attract beneficial insects, including
some pollinators. And I think that's just another reason. You know, I
talked about beneficials yesterday, and there's a lot we can do to attract them,
and herbs is one way we can do that too. We're gonna take
a little break here our phone number seven one three two one two kt RH.
I'll be right back there. We go a little sleep at the wheel
to get us going this morning. Hey, you are listening to guardline and
what are we here for. We're here to help you have a bountiful garden
and a beautiful landscape. That is what we're aiming for here. So as
I always say, there's no such thing as brown thumbs, there's only uninformed
thumbs. So let's inform your thumb this morning. Give us a call.
Seven to one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two
one two fifty eight seventy four. The soil, the soil, the soil.
Our plants need over over twenty nutrients. Now you look at a fertilizer
bag and how many numbers are on there? Typically three, most of the
time. Three. Those are the ones we need the most of Nitrogen,
phosphorus, and potassium, we need the most quantity of those. But all
of the twenty plus nutrients are essential for some aspect of plant growth. So
if you take some obscure nutrient like manganese and you remove it from the soil,
you couldn't do it. But if you could take all the manganese out
of the soil, a plant could not live because it has to have it,
even though it needs a tiny bit that's azemite trace minerals, micronutrients,
that's what we call them. Azmite is chock full of those. And by
putting azmite down, you are not going to make your plant take off and
grow. You are going to build the bank account so that as it grows
it is able to grow, it has the nutrients that it needs. That's
why we talk about trace minerals and azmite. Texas dot Com cantain you more
about it, but I want you to think about that because it's not like
you put azimite down and it's like fertilizing meaning making the plant grow fertilizing.
No, it's fertilizing meaning building the bank account so the plant has what it
needs when it grows. And so you can do azemite anytime. You do
in the winter, you do in the summer. You can do it now.
Might as well do it now because you've got your lawn fertilizers out there,
you're going to be spreading them. Always spread the azamite in a separate
application, could be the same day, could be before or after your fertilizer.
But don't mix things that have big particle size and things that have small
particle size in your fertilizer. Spreader. Have you ever seen a Do you
ever have a container or something and you kind of were wiggling at shaking it
or whatever, and everything that was big came to the top and everything that
was small settle to the bottom. Well, that's what happens in a fertilizer
spreader when you mix big particles with small particles. So you want a first
fertilized and then azemite, or first azimite and then fertilize. Way you go
about it, make sure you get those trace minerals on there where they're available.
Let's head out to tom Ball. We're going to talk to Craig this
morning. Hello Craig, Yes, sir, thanks for taking my call.
Yeah, I've got an issue with my lawn at Sant Augustine. Over the
winter, it had some areas where it turned browner than some of the other
areas, and it's done it every once in a while in the past,
but this year it seems like the grass actually died and I have small little
pieces of green in the middle of the brown patch or brown area that's dyed,
and I just didn't know if I just need to rake up all the
stats from the dead grass and then let that green stuff take back over,
or if I need to do something else. You know, Craig, there's
a couple of things listening to your description that could be going on. One
thing is there's a disease called brown patch. It's the big brown circles and
in a nice, healthy green lawn, they really show up and you know
you have it because they're a roundish everything. But we can have kind of
minor attacks on them, and it can be in a grass that's not that
healthy and alive, so it's kind of hard to see the circles, but
it's still doing what it does. I would get out of my hands and
knees in those areas and look at the runners really closely. If you see
green on the runners, that grass is alive and leaves will come back.
If it truly is dead, I mean all brown, there's no green runners,
then you're going to either need to plug some soil in or if they're
the big enough area, just bring blocks of sod in to do that.
But over the course of the next few months, if you give good mowing,
watering, and fertilizing care, the lawn can fill in pretty well.
If that gaps between living green spots are more than a foot. I would
put some sod in there in between those, but it'll cover a foot pretty
quickly. Okay, thank you so much. All right, good luck,
Yes, sir, glad glad to have you here today. Yeah, that
is important. Jungle land is a product for container soil that is distributed by
nitrofiss and jungle land has two forms. One is outdoors. We call that
the flour and vegetable planting soil. That is what jungle l and flower and
vegetable planting soil for the outdoors. For the indoors, there is the jungle
land water saving potting soil. It has crystals in it that hold, they
absorb and hold many many times their weight in water. And as the roots
grow, they grow up against those crystals. And then as the soil gets
dry, you forget to water. I know you don't, but your neighbor
does. Let's say, then you've got those crystals holding water that the plant
can get a little bit from, so it makes it a little more forgiving
of let's say, an owner that just isn't on top of things, which
we've all been in that person right when it comes to watering our plants.
That's an advantage of it. Jungle land is available everywhere you get nitro foss
products. Which where is that everywhere? Pretty much everywhere there is night fross
is widely available here in the Greater Houston area. And so where would you
find something like that jungle end? Well, how about going out to Plantation
Ace Hardware in Richmond Rosenberg. They're going to have it there. How about
Bearings Hardware either on Westheimer or Byssinette. They're going to have it there,
hiding and feed up on I thirty five North on Stubner Airline. Yep,
they're going to have it there. Too. Easy to find and a quality
mix, quality soil. And remember, your plant growth is only as good
as the brown stuff that it's growing in, and so we want to take
good care of that have success. I don't know if that resonates with you.
I know I say it all the time, brown stuff before green stuff.
But it's so easy. You go to a garden center and where do
your eyes go to? All those beautiful flowers or that row of tomato plants
and peppers that you're wanting to plant, or herbs or whatever. Eyes go
to that, And that's good, that's fun. Load up, take a
lot of at home. It's good stuff, but before you PLoP it into
an unprepared plot, make the soil a bank account full of nutrients, a
condition of good loose aeration, excellent drainage, all of those things. That
is the key to success. It makes your thumb. People will say you
have a green thumb if you do the brown stuff first. I've been to
garden centers and watch people. I've talked to people that are shopping and I've
seen the results of people that don't do this. They go to the garden
center, they buy a flot of plants. They come home and now they
think, okay, where am I going to put them? And they kind
of scratch out this little flower bed in the yard and they put the plants
into it. They PLoP the plants into an unprepared plot. I love that
lots of piece and it looks good the first day, and then over time
it's not the struggling. The weeds are coming in and they've been mowing around
it, and now they's mow over it and they say, I have a
brown thumb. I can't grow things. That is a shame that shouldn't happen.
I think that the State of Texas legislature needs to pass a law.
Okay, this is tongue in cheek, before anybody gets too upset, pass
a law that says there's a cooling off period before you can buy a plant.
There's a cooling off period. So if you get to the garden center
to check out, the person behind the counter has to ask you have you
prepared your soil yet? And if you say no, they pick up the
flat and they turn around, set it down, and they say, Okay,
we're going to put this back here and we're going to hold it for
you. Come back in a day or two when your soul's prepared and we
can legally sell you these plants. The Society for the Prevention of Plants is
in favor of this law. By the way, prevention of plants, prevention
of cruelty to plants is in favor of that law. I'm not sure garden
centers would, but I'll tell you this, if people would just get things
ready for the plants, they would hit the ground running and everyone would say,
what a green thumb you have. And it's because you simply had the
information you needed to know how to make plants happy. Good sunlight, good
drainage, plenty of nutrients, adequate moisture in the soil. It's not that
difficult brown stuff before Greenstone. All right, Well there I did it again.
Next Saturday, from eleven to one, I'm going to be a Buchanan's
Native Plant that's right here downtown northdown nor not downtown, north of downtown on
eleventh Street in the Heights. Buchanan's Native Plants has an awesome selection of things
they're going to be giving away. I think there's eight different giveaways. We're
going to be providing a really cool stuff from Buchanans, which that's what they
specialize in, this cool stuff. I'm going to be sitting there answering gardening
questions, visiting with you the gardener. You wander around with you and we
can talk about some different plants. We can make sure that that somebody is
there, and they've got such great employees to take you over to fifth the
situation you're asking about to find the right plants for you to answer your gardening
question. Put it on your calendar. Eleven a m. Next Saturday at
Buchanans. Katie R. H. Garden Line does not necessarily endorse any of
the products or services advertised on this program. Welcome to Katie r. H
Garden Line with Scipe Richter's So Crazy Trim Just watch him as so many good
things to sept Welcome back to Guarden Line. On a beautiful Sunday, look
outside, the sun is hitting the tree tops, the sky is blue,
and your plants are calling for you. They want you to get out this
after. In fact, there are plants at garden centers around town saying please
come take me home. I want to live at your house. There's so
many options, as we like to say, so many plants, so little
time. Well, if you're taking care of your yard and you're looking out
there and it is weeds, weeds, weeds, what you're seeing is cool
season weeds. Cool season broad leaf weeds primarily are what takes off and grows
and alarms us this time of the year. That's why the folks at night
Foss put together the Spring green Up product, which is fifteen five ten immediately
available release fertilizer with a trimech in it, which is a broad leaf weed
killing product. You can buy that in spray type forms and things, or
you can get it together in this combo product and The nice thing about it
is you wet the lawn, you put the fertilizer out and with the with
the trimech in it, it sticks to the leaves. It soaks in about
a week. About a day or two later, you can water it in
a little bit, get that furlijer on the ground, and you've dealt with
the broadly weeds and you've dealt with getting your spring green up nutrients into the
soil in a three one two ratio. The ratio the terf researchers long ago,
Texas, A and M and other places determined was the best for your
lawn. Now, nitopas products are broadly available. You can find them all
over the place. They're one of the easiest to find products because of the
wide availability. If you go to KTA's Hardware out there and Katie, yep,
they're going to have them there, Ace Hardware, a Memorial and the
Memorial Drive will have them as well. You're going to find them at Stanton's
shopping center down in Alvin. Two. Just three examples of where you're going
to find nitropass products like this Nitrofas weed and feed fifteen five to ten with
minerals that includes the ingredient trimech as the active ingredient. Very very helpful.
I was amused. I'm always amused when I go out to Moss Nursery because
the place is one you wander and wander and wander through. I mean it's
acres, it's acres, and it's a beautiful tree filled area that just every
time you turn a corner you see something unusual, you know, like a
wooden African mask, a wooden canoe carved out, wooden canoe somewhere. They
just have all kinds of quizzical things out there at Moss Nursery. Well,
right now the trucks are coming through right and left. Just last Thursday,
for example, they started at seven thirty in the morning. Trucks are lined
up waiting to upload unload. Fifteen deliveries later. There were plants. They
were on the tables, they were on the ground, they were in the
aisles and the walkway, they were everywhere. I mean, it was solid
plants. I don't know how the employees keep it up, keep up with
it. Thirty different kinds of hanging baskets came in. They've got vegetables,
of course, they got herbs, shrubs, trees, vines. They have
Texas Natives if you like Texas natives, saying that's a new thing to try
this year. If you haven't done one before, try one. Fruit trees,
Camellias, azelias, including those old standards like jud Solomon and Formosa,
and then the new repeat bloomers as well. It's always fun at Moss Now.
Moss Nursery is not just another garden centers. That's one of their mottos.
Moss Nursery not just another garden center. They're in Seabrook, Texas,
and so wherever you live it's worth a drive down to check them out.
You can go to the website Moss Nursery dot com or drive out to Toddville
Road in Seabrook, Texas. See it for yourself. Believe me, you
will be impressed again, another one of our destination garden centers. People come
from far and wide to go to Moss Nursery. I'm going to head out
now to Cut and Shoot to talk to Teresa. Hello, Teresa, Hello,
how are you today? I'm good? How are things out in the
metropolis of cut and Shoot. It's never dull moment out here. I have
a question for you. We had newly installed. Saw that the hottest time
of the year last year. It's a new build and in the back we
noticed large areas. That's kind of piggybacking off the other guy's question of what
we know had to been brown patch that developed. Okay, so we do,
and there's some pretty thick thatch there that's brown, but we do see
green popping up and the runners are green. So my question is on your
schedule it mentions about putting down a funge aside. One of them is eagle
something false guess. So we've already put the weed neater on about two three
weeks ago. Should we put down that fungicide now? Is it appropriate to
do that? I don't think I would at this stage. That's a good
fungicide, But when we're dealing with a brown patch and we're using a fun
side were it's best to get ahead of it. You get you get the
funger side down, then when the disease would occur, it the grass is
protected. If you wait until you have the big brown circles, well,
the fungicide will prevent additional circles, but it's not going to fix the brown
and you've already got the brown and we're about to warm up to the point
where we don't worry about brown patch anymore until next fall. And so I
don't think you would gain from that, but you might want. You know,
Nitrofuss sells that eagle. They also sell a barricade which is specifically for
pre emergent control of weeds, and you might consider putting that down because when
you put down, oh you did, okay, decree and the okay,
yeah, because that that's important because this is one of the things people don't
think about. But when brown patch rocks, the leaves off the runner,
yes, the grass is still alive and will come back, but during that
time where sunlight is hitting the soil, here come the weeds. And that's
where the barricade would come in and be very effective. Which good good to
you. Sound like you've done all you can do. The weed nater's going
to give you a nice gradual feeding over time. So you should be set
up there. And sounds like should I rake out any of the facets there
or is that protecting the soil from being exposed? Well, it is protecting
it a little bit from being exposed, but raking it out probably not that
helpful. If you're ever going to do it. Compost stop dressing, This
would be a time to do it because it falls over those thatchy materials and
helps keep them moist and then they rot faster. That can help a little
bit, but your grass is going to crawl back in and green up,
So I wouldn't I wouldn't try to get You can do a lot of damage
trying to get the dead out when there's living runners in among them. Now
we are thinking about in the top dressing, and we're actually in top with
the guys that you wreck amended. My concern was should we first take care
of the drainage issues, because again, this is a new acre type lot
and we have a lot of drainage issues we're trying to say on top of
swampy land out here. So should we first deal with the drainage before we
tackle with the top soil? Oh yeah, oh yeah? Or the top
dressing. I mean, I'm top dressing, okay, Yeah. Sometimes drainage
is going to create a lot of trenches and issues, you know, and
so you want to get that fixed, okay, because then when that's done,
you know, you kind of rake the soil down and the damage it
has to be done to get the drainage fixed is over, and then you
go in and do whatever you're going to do to get the side going again,
or maybe new siders needed in some areas. Okay, that's perfect.
That really helps a lot. I appreciate that. All right, you take
care. Okay, you too, thank you. Good luck with that.
I used to go out to to Moorhead Blueberry Farm out near Porter and Cutt
and Shoot area. That was always fun. Hey, we're going to take
a break. We'll be right back our phone number seven one three two one
two ktrh. Bill, you'll be the first up when I come back.
You welcome back. We're glad to have you listening on garden Line this morning.
What do you want to talk about? You got a question seven to
one three two one two ktrh. That's a easy way to do it.
We are coming out of the winter season, so a lot of pruning has
gotten done, but there's still pruning that may need to be done at your
place. And don't let anyone touch your trees except Affordable Tree Service. They
know what they're doing. We're talking about years of experience. Martin spoon Moore.
He does a professional job and a lot of people they just own a
chainsaw and know how to make wood come apart. That is not a tree
service. Someone who knows wisely how to prune for the sake of the health
and strength long term of your trees. Martin charges one hundred and fifty bucks
to come out for a consultation. If you hire him to do the work,
that goes into the cost of what he's doing. So it just,
you know, can't run around everybody's got a question go all over town.
It's a matter of if you're serious about having work done, have them come
out and look at it. Maybe even just a consultation is helpful though,
because I'll tell you, maybe you're going to be putting some trenching in and
you need someone to kind of guide you on what you can and can't do
without hurting that tree's life. What will be the best way to approach it.
Martin can do anything related to trees. We're talking about deep root watering
and feeding. Watering in the summertime and deep root feeding. We're talking about
pruning. We're talking about everything your tree needs to look good and be strong
and be healthy. Affordable Tree Service the website aff Tree Service Dot com aff
Tree Service dot com the phone number seven one three six nine nine sixty three.
Tell them you're a guardline listener that puts you at the front of the
line because they do stay very, very busy. Because that's what happens when
you do a good job in charge of fair price. People come back again
and again and they tell their friends, I want to go out to full
sure and we're going to talk to Bill this morning. Hello Bill, good
morning. I just recently purchased a home in Quorter and need to start the
fertilizer schedule. And so I'm wondering, is so currently I bought the nitropol
silver bag, so I go back and get a weed and feed versus the
silver bag. Well are you I heard you speak of a turquoise bag yesterday?
Right. It depends on the situation. So is your lawn full of
wags right now? Covered up? Yes? Oh? Covered up with leads?
Okay? Yeah. I was just talking a moment ago about the one
with the trimc in it from NIGHTPS and that that is a It does give
a quick release, but it also has the product that controls the weeds.
But you got to get the weeds wet, just barely wet so the granules
stick to the weeds. Leave it a day and then water it in now,
Okay, I would not don't take the silver bag back, because you're
going to need it in April if you do the first one now late April,
I would probably do the silver bag, okay. And then should I
go ahead and mow, bagging everything and then put down the fertilizer or fertilized.
Now, with everything tall and kind of in bloom, you want to
leave it all tall in bloom so all those leaves can capture all those leaves.
When you wet, the leaves can capture fertilizer granules that have the trimic
in it. Okay, great, thank you so much. Give it a
day and then watered in. And after you watered in, I would leave
it another few days, probably five days, just to be sure before you
mow. And then you can bag that stuff up in case there are any
living In case there any seeds that have already formed on the weeds, the
bagger can capture as many as possible so they're not going right into your lawn
for next fall. Got okay, No, perfect, Thank you so much.
Yeah, hang on to that silber bag though you're going to use it.
Yep, Well do all right, thank you, take care. Yeah,
there's a there's a lot of different things that we can do in our
lawns to enhance and create beauty. And so it's a kind of a challenge
on the air. You give instructions on the air, and different people have
different situations. So someone hears you say use this, and maybe they have
a different situation, and so I would recommend a different product for that or
a different timing or something. And so I always listen in and but the
best way to know for sure just to contact me directly and let's talk about
your situation, your lawn and whatnot. I think it is also I realize
we have busy lives and most people are not going to sit down and get
all nerdy about lawn notes and care. But those of you who are covered
up with broad leaf weeds right now, what you do this summer to create
density will help reduce that next year this time. The second thing to remember
is when you have broad leaf weed issues, be looking at your lawn in
January and early February, and if you see the broad leaf weeds are going
to be much smaller, but that's the most susceptible stage, and that's when
it's the easiest to kill them. And it's so cool there you're not concerned
about any damage to the lawn like we would have in the summer. The
products that kill broad leaf weeds can be very damaging in the summer. But
just make a note next February, look at the lawn. Make a management
decision then, and I think that's better. Some people wait until the weeds
are really really high and have blims and seeds already on them, and well,
we can kill weeds, but you know it's better to start sooner because
they're already shading out the Saint Augustine by that stage. If you do what
I say in January and February, the weeds are small and your grass blades
are not being shaded out at that point in time. Because Saint Augustine doesn't
go dormant, contrary to popular belief, it does not go dormant like your
trees go dormant. It just slows down growth because of short days in cool
weather. And as a result, if we have some seventy five degree days
in January, that grass plant can take in sunlight and it can be producing
carbohydrates, which is a strengthening thing. So give your lung what it needs.
It's spring planting. That means we're putting out rose bushes, and we're
putting out boogainvillias, and we're you know, we're putting out vegetable plants like
tomatoes and peppers and eggplant and everything else. All kinds of planting going on.
Perennial flowers. Oh my gosh, I got to get those in.
When you plant them, get you some has to gross, six twelve six
has to grow. Six twelve six has the Medina soil activator in it.
That's the basis of it stimulates the biological activity. It's also got humic acid
in it, which humic acids help improve soil structure. That is one of
the things that they do. They improve nutrient uptake as a result as well.
And also it has seaweed extract. So here's how I do it.
Just get you follow the label, put it in a watering can, pull
it up with water. You plant your tomato, you plant your rose,
you plant whatever you're planting, and drench it in with that. Five to
seven days later, drench it again with the medina has to grow six twelve
six, and then five to seven days later a third time medina has to
grow six twelve six. That new plant has the best chance it can have
to hit the ground running. Everything that's going to make those roots happy is
now in the soil around the roots, from nutrients to microbial activity. Do
you name it, and it has the best chance of getting established. That's
how you get a plant in the ground successfully. Is that one two,
three steps, the same step each time. Water it in with medina hastro
gros six twelve six and it will do well for you. You're listening to
garden Line and I'm your host, Skip Richter, And what are we doing
here? Well, we're here to answer your gardening questions. That is what
we're here for. And so if you'd like to give us a call seven
one three two one two five eight seven four, I'd be happy to do
that. In the meantime, I'm going to talk about things that I am
interested in. For example, I want to remind you again that the Arbor
Gate has a brand new parking lot in the back that is unbelievable. You
don't have to park out in front. There is a parking lot in front,
but it stays full because the arbor gate stays busy. People love that
place for good reason. But in back off a road called Trishel Road,
which is sort of a loop. It leaves before Arburgate and it comes back
into twenty nine to twenty after Arburgate, so it goes around behind the place.
You turn in before or after and get into the back parking lot and
it is all weather. It's a real cool thing that like it absorbs rainfall
and takes it right down into the soil through the parking lot surface, so
it's never muddy. It's always a good firm surface and lots of it's huge.
There's a lot of parking back there. You need to do that.
When you're at Arburgate, you know, you got to come home with all
the cool stuff that they have. They've got annuals and perennials and shrubs and
groundcovers and herbs and houseplants and flowering spring plants and roses and everything else.
Why not this The theme today has kind of been off and on, what
are you going to do new this year? Well, here's something new.
Go to Arburgate and ask them to see their be bomb and put some of
that out. B bomb is a monarda and it's attractive to bollinators, and
it's gorgeous, very beautiful plant. It spreads underground, uh and it just
forms a large area that will be very attractive. Plus I just think the
ballooms are gorgeous. So there's a new one, a new suggestion that they've
got out there at Arborgate, along with eight hundred billion other wonderful things that
you can't live without, you know. I plant nurseries are well, let's
just say for me that, how do we say they're addictive? Okay,
I'll just put it that way. They are very addictive because I've never seen
a plant that I don't have that I also don't want. I mean,
it's like I don't have that I need one. Yep, that's right now.
Some people are good. They landscape and they create this beautiful beauty.
I tend to be a plant collector and some of you are too. I
know, I know you, I know who I'm talking to here. You've
got to have a plant you don't already have, And what do our landscapes
look like when we're plant collectors? But we're not designers, and we don't
hire designer. They look like a bomb went off in a garden center and
everything rooted where it landed. I'm just saying true confessions on the air right
here. Because you get a plant, you got to have it, and
so where am I going to put it? I don't know, Maybe right
over there between these other two plants. That's okay too. Hey. The
whole idea is are you having fun. If you're having fun, it's your
place. You go for it and you have fun. That is true.
Absolutely. I've talked to you about ACE Hardware's before, and the reason we
like Ace Hardware so much is because they have everything that you need. You
know their motto, Ace is the place, and it is the place.
It's the place for everything. Yeah, it's a hardware store. It's a
place for plumbing, it's a place for electrical and on and on. But
it's a place for your yard. It's a place for your garden. It's
the place to get ever fertilizer you here on garden line. It's the place
to get the products to go depressed diseases and weeds, a product to get
tools and supplies and wielborrow. It's a product to turn that backyard pat It's
the place to turn that backyard patio into a wonderful setting. ACE has all
of that stuff and they're everywhere. Acehardware dot Com find the store locator.
There's forty of them in the Greater Houston area. Forty. I think you
can find one or two or three that are near you. In fact,
I know you will. And when you go into ACE, you will be
impressed and you'll see why I like to brag on it, because it's got
everything that you need. I'm gonna take a little break here, and when
we come back, Kevin, you'll be the first up for other people that
would like to be online with me. Seven one three two one two fifty
eight seventy four. Welcome back to Guarden Line. Glad you're with us today.
What are we going to talk about this next segment here? I got
a few things I'd like to visit about. But hey, I bet you
got some questions. You can reach me at seven one three two one two
kat are A seven three two one two KTRH makes it easy, easy to
get your questions answered. And I don't know, I've heard reports that when
your house plans, hear you on the phone with garden line that they just
start turning greener because they know life's going to get better for them. I'm
just saying it's a report, it's a rumor. You tell me if that's
true or not. Let's go out to Montgomery and talk to Kevin this morning.
Hey, Kevin, good morning. What some weeds out in the front.
We got a new house that we built in last year. We put
some saw down in the front, but right past that we have a bunch
of them with the old just normal weeds and grass growing up. I put
a back of silver out, oh about two weeks ago, and I'm wondering,
can I go over all those weeds with the purple bag or the steel
bag? Of me you put the super turf out, yes, you could.
Uh why the silver bag is going to release slowly over time, so
putting an immediate release out would be fine. It's a little overkill, but
it's not like putting two immediate releases out, one right after the other.
I'd avoid that, so you could you could take that approach to it if
you want to go about that. Now, the purple bag that would be
uh pre emergent. The teal bag is going to be the post emergent,
which is going to be the one you want to control the weeds you already
have there. So it kind of depends on how much of the silver bag
super turf you put out if you feel if you're worried about having too much
nutrient at one time, you know, you could spray the weeds. But
I don't think there's a problem with just going ahead and doing the both of
them. Excellent, I'll probably wait a week and then get a bag of
the teal and put it out. Well, I would, I would go
I will go ahead and do it now. It's not like, yeah,
I mean, if you're going to do both, then I would just go
ahead and do it now because the the silver bag is going to be slowly
beginning to release. And so yeah, I think that's a lot. Uh,
you know, I'm not. It definitely wouldn't be my first choice to
double up on it. But you're either if you got those existing weeds,
then you're either going to have to do the tillback or just spray them themselves.
But do you have have you seen my schedule online? I do.
Yeah. We're at the feed store and we were buying our and Normost stuff
and we come back with time. Yeah, that we had. We just
went ahead and put it out, but uh, I'm not going to actually
put the teal bag over the Saint Augustine. It's just going to be we
have six acres, so it's going to be, you know, out over
the other part that does not have the Saint Augustine in it. Right now,
Okay, where did you put the silver bag over Saint Augustine or over
the other Yes, over the Saint Augustine And some of it went out though
there, but I just want to make sure in case some gets into the
Saint Augustine's not going to hurt anything. Okay, that's it. Well,
good luck with that, take care. Thank you so much. You bet
appreciate the call. Con yep. For those of you who are wondering what
we're talking about on schedules, if you go online to gardening with Skip dot
com. Gardening with Skip dot com. That's my website. It's just getting
started and now that I'm officially retired from my career job, spending more time
with horticulture in general, hope to get a lot more to things up there
on the website. But right now you can get the lawn care schedule and
the lawn pest disease and we'd management schedule. So the way I like to
refer to them is how to take care of your lawn, how to deal
with the things that want to eat your lawn or kill your lawn. Those
are the two schedules and they're very helpful. They're organic and synthetic options on
there. It tells you exactly when to apply things to be timely and gives
a lot of additional information that is important for you to know to have a
good, healthy, dense lawn, which is what we're looking for. So
when you get all these products we're talking about, you know, all the
colors of bags from all the different companies and things. Southwest Fertilizer has all
that. They have all of that and a lot more. If you're looking
for something to control insects or spider mites, if you're looking for something to
control diseases, root rots of the roots or foliage blights and leaf spots.
If you're looking for something that'll prevent weeds or something that will kill weeds,
that you have Southwest Fertilizer. They have everything everything you could possibly need.
They always stay up to date when new things come out, they look into
them, make sure they're going to work right, and then they bring them
in. You know the three sixty tree stabilizer. I was talking about it
earlier. They've already got them there at Southwest Fertilizer. Bots got them ordered.
They're on the shelf. They just that's how they do business. And
you can go in there with a problem, a question, a picture,
a plant. They can help you. They can direct you right, and
that's what they're gonna do. Uh. Southwest Fertilizer is in Southwest Houston.
There's no surprise there. They're on the corner of Bisonette and Renwick Bisinet and
Renwick. You can go to the website Southwest Fertilizer dot com. But just
know this that when you go, there's nothing you need that they don't have.
If they don't have it, you don't need it. That's the way
I like to put it. Southwest Fertilizer. Our phone number is seven one
three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two one two fifty
eight seventy four. We are here to answer your gardening question. Happy to
do just that. Have you been to the RCW nursery recently? You need
to go by. Now. They're right there at the corner of where belt
Way eight and Highway two forty nine called Tomball Parkway where it comes together.
Easy access from anywhere to get to them. But I'm telling you right now,
the color is outstanding. And the thing that caught my eye most at
RCW was the bougainvillias. Now they have a lot of other color. I
mean. RCW is known for having a wide selection of roses, just pages
and pages of roses. They are known for their trees, which they grow
themselves, that are all excellent plants. They're grown right, They're varieties that
belong here. But oh my goodness, the color they have. You know,
things like petunias. They've got things like calibricoa, and all the daisy
like flowers that we enjoy, Rudbeckia's and others in the spring. But those
bougainvillias are outstanding. Do you want a hanging basket boogainvillia? How about a
standard? Do you know what a standard is. It's a plant that's not
normally a tree that they prune up to a straight trunk with a little we
call it a head on top where all the flowers are. They're roses that
are standards. It's like a little mini tree that's a rose on top,
bougainvillias, many tree with a booga via flowers on top. RCW Nursery easy
to find. RCW Nurseries Plural dot com. RCW Nurseries dot com two eight
one four four zero fifty one sixty one. And they also have the products
that I recommend on Guardenline that you need to establish these plants successfully in your
landscape, and they'll walk you through that on how to have success because they
want you to have success. That is very important to them that their customers
are happy that they find their landscapes are doing what they want them to do,
because they know that'll bring you back for more of the same good stuff
that you got. The first time I went to a garden center a while
back, and I was looking at some of the house plants, the indoor
plants and things in all year is a good time for indoor plants, right.
I was looking at some of the indoor plants and I just was amused
by the containers. It used to be a flower pot was a flower pot,
a houseplant pot was a houseplot pot. Now we've got pots that look
like faces. And so you plant a string of fill in the blank to
come out of the top, it looks like hair coming out of the top
of it at all, kinds of whimsicles that it just adds another fun aspect
to it. Hey, let's take a break our number seven one three two
one two KTRH. I'll be right back and Lynn and Darryl you'll be the
first up. Welcome back to garden line. Good to have you with us
today. Uh. If you live down south of town and you need a
supply of compost and moltch, or maybe you want to put on a rock
patio, a beautiful flatstone rock out there, perhaps create a little drainage way
using river rock. Where do you go? Where you go to? Sana
malt Cena Maltz has got all of that top quality materials at cienamlts. They
deliver within about twenty miles of their location. And where are they located.
Well, it's on FM five twenty one. It's near Highway six and just
north of Rose Sharon. Here's the website Sienna Mulch dot com Siena Multch dot
com. Do you need the fertilizers? I recommend they have them all do
you need things like bags of multch materials, composts. They've got bags from
Landscaper's Pride and Heirlooms soil. They've got the liquids from Microlife and Medina.
In other words, the brown stuff, remember brown stuff before green stuff.
Everything you need to make that soil a very hospitable place for plants to thrive,
You're going to find it. Ciena Mulch Sienna Mulch dot com. They're
closed today, closed on Sundays, but they're open Monday through Friday from seven
thirty in the morning till five and on Saturday from seven thirty to two pm.
You can go pick it up yourself, or within twenty miles you can
have them deliver it for you. Let's go to Lynn in Spring now.
Hello Lynn, Hi. I have a list of items that I will be
using for my rose garden, and I'm not sure if if I need to
add or remove some things. I have like the plant mix it's the Kellog
plus Organic. I have the Texas Native cedar mulch. It's organic, shredded
covered, natural color and aromatic. I have the black cow manure. I
have the Healthy Soil compost, the landscaper's pride. They say, dude,
that three to one ratio. And they also told me that I need to
use the soil that I dig up from the hole and use that in the
little mix, warm castings, the micael rise a root group, rot group,
and the microlive six two four acid, the fire and the microlives.
There's zero four humus plus. And I have the organic roastone rose food.
So I'm not sure if I need all of that or I need to remove
some things. I know you talked about medina plant food, so I need
a shatto some and maybe at that. Okay, So the last thing was
it rose food or roast soil? The last thing roast? Okay, that's
a fertilizer. Okay, okay, I think that's a fertilize. What was
the very first thing you said on your list? It was the planting mix
Kellogg. It's the name brand is Kellog plus organic. Is that a fertilizer?
I believe that is. Let me take a look. Okay, Well,
first of all, the stuff that you mix into the soil is fine
to do. Not all of it is the stuff I would recommend that you
put out. But if you bought it you can't take it back, then
go ahead and use it. That would be the manure, the black cam
manure, for example. And then you mentioned something else that was right right
before, the black calmner I believe. But anyway, those soil amenimus.
Mix them in is deeply. You can get them in the soil. Have
you ever grown plants in this spot before? Well, yes, it was
the no coulross. Yes, okay, So I always suggest people use rose
soil, and there's blends of that available. That's a good one for growing
roses. Now, the micro life products that we talked about that you talked
about there, that's fine, go ahead and put them down, and when
you mix everything up, you can just mix them in with it. They're
also okay to apply to the surface. But if you're making the bed up,
go ahead and mix them in and have it in the soil when the
plant goes to sending roots out into that area. There was one of them
that was a mulch on top. That's fine, that's at the very end.
After you've planted your roses. There are a couple of things in there
that, like I said, the one I wasn't sure what that first one
was, but Okay, I have the warm castings. Do I really need
it? Well, you don't need it, but it's good for the soil.
Ribcastings are excellent to mix in. That's that's a type of compost if
the same same purpose, So you could do that, I would, I
would shift more. If you're going to do the roses the microlife fertilizer,
that's the acidic that you mentioned you have, I would continue to use that
as a fertilizer then on your roses. Each time you need to fertilize,
just put that out. It'll be fine, okay, okay, and make
sure make sure it drains wealth a raise beds the way we do that,
and then make sure they get good sunlight and you should have good success.
Great, thank you so much. All right, Lynn, thank you.
I appreciate appreciate your call very much. UH. For those of you wanting
to put a container in indoors are out whether it's a house planner or an
outdoor patio container, jungle land. Jungle land is a soule mix for containers
that contains a potting salt. Think it was a putting soil that you would
do outdoors. That would be the vegetable and the flower and vegetable version of
jungle land. In doors, there is the version with the crystals that soak
up water and hold that water to allow the plant to go further between waterings
successfully. You know, jungle lands available everywhere you find nit frost products.
Now, that's not hard to find night frost products here in the Greater Houston
area. How about Alspaw's ace up in the Woodlands, They're going to have
that. How about plants for all seasons? On two forty nine, they're
going to have those products, plants and things up in Brenham. We'll also
have products like the jungle land from my nitrofis. I want to head to
Darryl in Northwest Houston now, Hello Darryl O, good morning, Skip Corner.
Hey. I asked some questions about some outdas. Are they a long
lasting plant? I've planted some years ago my father I've given me and they
last seven or eight years at the most, and they just die. And
I've had them since and they last the same thing, and then they just
you know, after a certain lengths of time, they just start looking bad
and die. Okay, Well, any plant can fall prey to something Althea's
as a shrub, they should be around for longer than seven or eight years.
So I don't know what all was going on. There could be a
drainage issue, could be a root ride, it could be something else going
on. Well, I've got them in several different areas of my yard.
Now I've got some in the front driveway. I live on the corner in
the front driveway. They're doing great now. They had one by the back
driveway. It didn't do it for years. It was a solid white woman.
I loved it, but it just which. I have some seeds started
from it, thank goodness. But okay, they just all of them,
They just they get the leaves get kind of a yellowish like almost spots to
them, And I don't know I should I be fertilizing them more or Althea
leaves turn yellow when like they go through drought and then they get watered again.
They can turn yellow. They can turn yellow when something is not good
in the roots, soggy wet conditions. Perhaps if the old leaves are just
gradually losing their green, that's a nitrogen to fish. But when you see
healthy green leaves everywhere, and some leaves just bright yellow. That's that's a
water thing and the soil going on. Okay, should fertilize them with anything?
Yes, I would. I would on those use a lawn type fertilizer
will be just fine for them. You can go buy you can buy hibiscus
food for example, you know, like sixty four will be fun it.
You know what I think if I were doing those as, I think I
would use. If you're going to use microlives, I would use their their
acid loving it's kind of a pink bag, a sixty fin type, but
it's a it's a pink bag. I would do that one on the outfias.
I think they will perform a little better with that. Okay, sounds
good? Wy yes, sir, thank you very much. Hey, when's
the last time you're out at Warren's Garden Center. Warren's Garden Center, yep
out in Kingwood. Warrens always stocks everything you need. I mean, we're
talking about ball so we're talking about shrubs. We're talking about beautiful, gorgeous
flowers. Their annual color right now is outstanding. Do you like succulents?
Do you like plants that have colorful foliage? Do you want beautiful spring blooming
trees and roses. Yes, yes, yes, all the above. All
those spring booming, blooming trees you've been enjoying around town, like red bud
and Chinese fringe tree and saucer magnolias. Get one, get it planted now,
so next spring you can have those kind of blooms. We're in.
Southern Gardens is just a place where you can always find what you're looking for.
So it's good to go out there and visit. Same with Kingdom Garden
Center too, just down the street, just down the street. Well,
I want to remind you that my schedule is online. If you want to
fertilize or do test control in your lawn, it tells you what to use
and when to use. It makes it really really easy. Next Saturday,
Next Saturday, what day does that? Sixteenth of March? At eleven a
m. To one pm. I'm going to be at Buchanans and the Heights
Buchanans Native Plants and the Heights on Eleventh Street, eleven am to one pm.
I'll be there. I'm going to be there just to answer your guarding
questions, Bring me samples, bring me plants, just come say hi that
they have at Buchanans everything you could possibly need and we can get you set
up on the products and the plants to help you have success. Plus it's
just fun to get to meet the listeners. Katie r H. Garden Line
does not necessarily endorse any of the products or services advertised on this program.
Welcome to kat r H. Garden Line with Scamp Richt. It's so crazy,
just as so many good things to set Welcome back to guard Line.
Glad to have you with us on a gorgeous Sunday. Look outside, Oh
my, oh my, sunshine, blue skies, nice weather, good temperatures,
little breeze out there. It's a good day to be out, good
day to be out and about. For those of you who didn't get out
to the Anti groz Impourium yesterday, they're still going today with their spring Shindig
that they have going on out there. I was out speaking yesterday at the
event. Got to meet a lot of folks. That was a lot of
fun too. By the way, thanks thanks for having us out there.
But it's still going today. They got vendors out there, and it's just
always a good day to go visit the Rosenporium. It's just really nice out
there. By the way, I just was looking at my official National Gardening
Holiday calendar. Yeah, I have one of those, and March twelfth is
Plant a Flower Day, so that would be if I'm adding things up right,
that would be on Tuesday, Plant a Flower Day. I'm going to
officially change that to today this afternoon. Go get you some flowers and plant
them. Why don't we just make it Plant a Flower week or month because
it's a good time to be doing that. Lots of beautiful color. Everything
must bloom in the spring, so this is just a fun time to get
out and do that sort of thing. We're going to go to Missouri City
and we're going to talk to Jane right off the bat here. Hello Jane,
Yeah, good morning. I needed to Ian. I had two bags
of fertilizer. Actually one is the SKA the Niprofoss barricade and I have a
spreader. It's a Scott's Easy Green and the dial goes from twenty two to
thirty two. What do I set that on for the barricade and then the
Niprofoss red bag. I believe on the barricade we're going to go one notch
up, one above one quarter, So like you, if your spreader had
ten on it, probably three. If your spreader had you know, five
on it, probably maybe two. Uh. Just here, here's the thing
about spreading anything. There are a lot of particle sizes, there's a lot
of spreader brands, and it's just it's frustrating to try to figure it all
out. I would always go a little lighter because ideally, if you want
the best coverage of the barricade or of a fertilizer, you would fertilize like
nor south and then turn sideways and fertilize east west, so you'd only use
half of it on each path. And that way, if you mess up
a little bit, you're still okay. It's not like you get halfway across
the lawn and now all the barricade's gone and you realize I put it out
twice as much as I should over there, and I don't have any over
here. So I would go light because you can always go back over it.
So that's what about the go ahead? What about the fertilizer. Which
fertilizer did you say you had? I was focused on I had the red
bag, red bag, the Imperial, Yeah, terferial, the same kind
of thing. Just follow follow the instructions on you said you had a what
was the brand of the It's a Scott Easy Green spreader and the guide on
the bottom is between twenty two and thirty two. The numbers twenty two and
thirty two. It says that a quarter that just like you're saying. It
says that on the bag twenty two on the no on the little dial on
the bottom, it starts at thirty two, and I can move the little
dial to thirty two, twenty two to thirty two thirty two. You know
what, I'm not going to give you a number on that because I need
to make sure I'm right. And again it with all these different brands of
spreaders. Right, you're down in Missouri City. You know what I would
do. I would call Southwest Fertilizer and I would talk to them there.
They deal with that every day, day in and out. I don't think
they sell that spreader, but they can give you at it a long long
time. Yeah, yeah, I know a good guide. I just I'll
just tell you this though, janey uh uh go easy, go light,
because you can always call back over it. It's it's always better to go
under what you think, because by the time you get halfway across the lawn,
you'll know my backyard. I'm getting my big tree, my oak tree
trimmed on Thursday. Would you fertilize before like today and then water it in
or would I wait, you could do either way. Either way is fine,
there's not a problem. Yeah, your choice, all right, you
bet? Good luck with that. Yeah, that night Fuss Imperial is an
excellent, excellent fertilizer. It's a red bag and it's the one we use
for early green So you want to get out there early now and the grass
is growing, it's alive, it's awake, it's it'll turn green. As
it warms up, it starts growing faster and faster, and then we switch
over to the slow releases at that time. This is early green up time
for Imperial, and gosh, you can get imperil all over the vice.
I keep telling you these night frost products. Kingwo Ace Hardware has got them,
the Arborgate up and Tombull's got them. Shades of green down on Genoa
Red Bluff, South Houston. Yep, they got them too down there,
easy easy to find, very very important too. You know, the the
garden centers are just looking so good right now. It's fun to get out
and to see all the things going on. A and A Plants and Produce
produce up in Montgomery, for example, they absolutely have loaded up on collar
and it's a beautiful place to go visit. You know, A and A's
three acres. You can wander through. We got we got all the plants,
and then you've got all the bling, you know, the things from
chimney is to other things. You decorate little metal arches that go over walkways
and just it's a way to turn your whole outdoor area and do just a
wonderland of plants and cool stuff that you like. ANA Plants and Produce is
on the east side of Montgomery on one oh five. They're easy, easy
to find. They also have a landscape crew that'll go out there. If
you're up in the in the Lake Conroy area, for example, they can
come out and do some clean up on your home beds around the area.
They keep my schedule there at the counter, easy to find, seven days
a week, nine to five. So this afternoon there's something to do.
An A Plants and Produce and go bring home some beauty and bounty for your
landscape. I'm want to go now to Richmond and talk to Mary. Hello,
Mary, all Rick Scamp I'm sorry, all right, I have a
question about little pecan tree. It's out seven years old. We had it
in a pot until about two years ago, a big thirty gallon pot,
okay, and we planted it in the ground and we planted it up,
you know, because it rains a lot out here in our area and sometimes
it gets kind of wet and mushy. Huh. So it's about two feet
up off the ground level. But anyway, it's starting to get little spots
of moss on it. Okay, Hey, I'm gonna take I'm gonna take
a quick break and when I come back, I'll go into that and answer
your question. Mary. Just hang on one second. We'll be right back.
Well, welcome back to Garden Line. Glad to have you with us
today. Listen, if you need to find a place to get the supplies
you need for your lawn and landscape ace hardware. Now you hear me go
through the day. We're talking about this fertilizer or that fertilizer, or this
weed control or that weed control. Maybe you're dealing with chinchbugs, this coming
summer, and you need to know where to good stuff Ace Hardware. ACE
Hardware has forty stores around the Greater Houston area. They're easy to find.
Go to ACE Hardware dot com. Ace Hardware dot com store locators on that
page store locator find the one near you. And with forty there are mini
near you. It's easy to find a good Ace Hardware store. And they
carry everything you need for your lawn, for your landscape, for your home,
for that backyard patio. It's just it's the one place, as they
say at ACE, Ace is the place, and ACE is the place for
everything you need to have a beautiful lawn and a bountiful landscape. For sure.
I'm going to go back now out to Mary, and we left Mary
with some moss center pegan tree trunk and Mary. That is an organism called
lichen l I c h E N liken and it's actually kind of an algae
and fungus thing growing together there. It's it's not damaging your plan, but
it is a sign that number one, there's good humidity in the area,
but that the canopy of that pecan tree is not very dense, so it's
allowing a lot of sunlight through and the growth of the pecan tree has slowed
down a lot. Probably it's because the pecan was in a pot for so
long, which really slows growth to a crawl. I would just recommend you
ignore it and you start fertilizing that pecan tree and watering it is needed when
it gets hot, and get it growing fast and it will not be something
you need to worry about. Okay, so good, thank you so much.
Get you a lawn fertilizer that does not have weed control in it,
and for every inch of trunk diameter, give it two cups of fertilizer,
spread out in the bag area a big area around it. And I would
do that about every six weeks between now in August, just to keep that
tree going and give it a good watering, keep the weeds away, put
mult around it, and that it'll hit the ground running and we'll get we'll
get. We won't worry about the liking, right, Okay, Well,
thank you so much, you bet, thank you, Mary. I appreciate
I appreciate that a lot uh the folks at Peerscapes know how to turn any
landscape into a show place. And so maybe you're looking at the results of
last summer's heat and drought, and it's just discouraging. It's depressing to look
at. Let peerscapes turn it around. Maybe you've got a backyard and it's
a nice yard, but you really want to entertain guests out there, and
whatever level of taking it to the next notch you want, peerscapes can do
it. Do you want a patio area, a rock patio. Do you
want perhaps a water feature in the back ear? Do you want landscape lighting
that takes it up another step? Do you want a barbecue area? Do
you want a fire ring out in the yard? Made a brick for example,
that you could get around and really enjoy, or brick or rock could
be made a beautiful rock Piercescapes can do all that. They can get your
irrigation system back in shape. And most systems need work. They're not efficient,
they're not working right. Have pearscapes look at it, Go ahead and
get with them. They stay busy, they do a great job. They
stay busy, and you want to get a hold of them and get scheduled
so that they can come out and get that done at your place. Peerscapes
dot com, Peerscapes dot com two eight one three seven oh five zero six
zero. Go to their website and see their work and you'll see why I
say they can transform your place, that is for sure. I want to
go out to Spring now and we're going to talk to Jim. Hello Jim,
Hi, Skip, how are you? I'm well, sir. How
can we help today? Hey? I'm going to starting tomorrow, I have
a contractor coming in to resaw my entire front yard. All right, I
pretty much had I took a beat and last year in the heat wave and
everything else. Yeah, that's neither here nor there. So my question Skip
was around, he's going to till up the entirety of the front yard and
you know, and and calmb out all the clumps and the and the little
bit of grass that is still there. Yeah. I was wondering at this
time, should would it would be applicable for me to go ahead and add
some fertilizers into the dirt or barricade or asthmite, or do I wait for
the saw to go down and then do all that on top of the sawd
if you had a soil test that and you don't have time for it now,
But then we would say, yeah, I add these nutrients according to
the soil test. Do not put barricade down until a long time from now,
because if you put it down and then lay saw it on it side,
the side's trying to put down roots and the barricades in the way.
That's why it does. So don't do that. You could put fertilizer down,
but you don't need it right now. Get the they're doing what they
should do it up, smooth it out, lay the sod. Make sure
the sod is going to need water. Probably the first week. I typically
will put water down like twice a day, very little, just a little
quarter inch of water, just to keep the grass alive while it gets some
roots in the ground, moving them to once a day and then twice a
week and so on. But it needs time to it needs to be kept
a live until it can get roots. But you're only half inch long when
it comes in with sod down into the ground. After it's been in for
a couple of weeks, you ought to be able to grab a piece and
when you pull on it, it doesn't just lift up like a throw rug.
You can tell the roots are pegging down in the ground. At that
stage, you could begin fertilizing with one of the fertilizers on my schedule at
gardeningwth Skip dot com and follow the label put them out at the right rate.
Yep, I do, I do. I do religiously. Hey,
Skip, real quick, go ahead. I'm sorry, no, I said,
good, real quick before I jump off. I heard you yesterday talking
about to a gentleman who had some light green grass grown in his backyard,
and you told them to pull out a piece of it and hold it up
to the sun and take a look and see if you had streaks in it.
Yes, and if you did, then you probably had a problem with
some iron. Yes. I did that because I have some light green areas
in my backyard and the streaks are there. Okay, So what's the best
way to put some iron into the soil. There are kelated iron products that
you can put out and they last a little longer because they're kelated, meaning
the soil can't tie them up so fast. That is one option. There
are other forms of iron that are not keylated that you put out and for
a little while they'll help, and that Iron Height is one brand of those.
There's a lot of other products, and Nitrophoss has some iron based products
as well. Put those down to get the iron to the root system.
Now, if most of the time you probably don't have an iron deficiency in
the soil, it's that the grass isn't getting the iron that's there. And
that can happen because the soil is cool and it's a little damp. We
see iron deficiency in the spring that just goes away on its own by summer.
And it also can happen when you have a little bit of take all
root rot, which kills roots of the grass. And as it kills roots,
the plant can't take up the iron it's taken up at the tip of
a growing root, and so that would mean you know, you put iron
down, but plant doesn't have the roots to take the iron that's there up.
So that's kind of what you have to discern. If it's a spring
only thing, then it's probably just a cool temperatures and extra wet will cause
an iron deficiency. Okay, okay, I think it might be the ladder.
Okay, but I'll pay attention to it. Thank you so very much
for your for your feedback. I love love the show. Well good,
I'm glad, I'm glad you do. Thanks for being a listener appreciate that
a lot lawns can be a challenge. But I'll tell you when we when
we want to have success with plants, we learn that rather than looking at
how do you fix this, how do you fix that? How do you
fix this? How do you fix that? We learn how do you make
a plant happy? How do you grow it? And I say all the
time, you start with the soil. So when the plant gets in the
ground, it's like you took it to Disneyland. It's happy. It's like
I've got good drainage, I've got good water holding capacity. Every nutrient I
possibly could need is there, and supplies that are adequate. Do you see
what I'm saying That that's how we make them happy. And we run into
a lot of problems on plants. We're talking about lawns right now. Turf
grass that's stressed, take all root rod is all. It's worse in a
stressed turf grass. And so how do we how do we create the conditions
to make the plant as happy as it can be? And that's why all
these steps along the way are important because over time, things like compaction happen
to your soil, which does not make your grassroots happy at all. But
you can errate to maintain a loose soil with good oxygen and good supply.
You can do compost top dressings, you can provide the nutrients it needs,
the humates that get out in the soil, and help with that as well
improving on the soil structure. That is helpful. Now, if you've got
a lawn full of weeds, and I mean I'm talking about all those cool
season weeds. If you see a weed right now, it's a cool season
weed. The worm season weeds are barely starting to germinate well. Tourchtar Weedenator
by Nelson's is designed for that because what it is is it is a very
slow release fertilizer product that's going to feed your lawn for the next two or
three months. But it has a post emergent broadleaf weed control. So with
those what do we do We soil the weeds barely. You don't have to
wet the soil, just barely put water enough to get everything on top of
the ground damp and then when you throw the product down or apply it with
your fertilizer spreader, it sticks to the weeds. Give it a week,
give it a day or two to kind of soak into those leaf tissues and
then water the thing to get the fertilizer down to the soil. At that
point, and those plants have already taken in what's going to kill them in
the turf Star Weedenator. Turf Star Weedenator is widely available. It's very effective,
and it's designed to control the weeds first now, but then to give
you a gradual feeding over time, which makes the lawn look great. It's
got twenty percent nitrogen and a lot of that. The majority of that is
in a form that's not going to release until the soil warms and soil microbes
become active to start to break that down and release those nutrients. One gets
what it needs. That's how it works. It's important to know how things
work in order to have success. I mentioned that I'm going to be at
Buchannan's Nursery next Saturday. That's Saturday to sixteenth, from eleven to one pm.
I'll be there answering your gardening questions. We'll talk about whatever you want
to talk about plant wise. Bring me samples to identify or samples to diagnose.
Put them in a plastic bag. Before you bring them in. And
if you have photos on your phone, maybe you've got an area that you've
got some questions about. Take some photos, take them from a distance,
take them close up, and make sure they're in sharp focus, because my
answer is only as good as the focus of the photo. If it's too
blurry, I'm not going to be able to help. Let's talk about it.
Let's find out what's going on. And while you're a Buginnan's, you're
going to find every kind of solution and plant that you cannot live without.
Trust me, every time I go in there, it's like, oh boy,
here we go again. I'm glad I got room in the car.
When are you going to Buchanan Buchanon's next Saturday? Cool into one? I
know, I know. It's eleven Street in the Heights, So it's round
the middle. It's the middle of the whole list every yes, you know,
if you're listening in Huntsville or Galveston or Corpus CHRISTI bu Canon's is just
a short drive over. We're right in the big middle of everything. Nikki,
we got news. I guess you've got some information that we can't live
without. I keep telling you that the most breaking news of the day is
it's time to get out there and fertilize and do we control in your lawns?
That's that is like breaking news. Okay, very critical since I've said
that was going to be my lead, but yeah, right, you just
did. I was born at night. It wouldn't last time. All right,
here you go, Welcome back to garden Line. Folks were talking gardening
today. We are here every Saturday from six am to ten am and every
Sunday from six am to ten am. So that means what we got less
than thirty minutes left than today's show. If you got a question and it
can't wait till next Saturday, that'd be a good time to call. Seven
to one three two one two five eight seven four. We've got an open
line right now, open lines right now. As a matter of fact,
a little perfect storm. It's kind of interesting how calls come in. Sometimes
you go board full of calls, and then other times, for some reason,
it just kind of gets quiet for a little bit. Well, I've
got a question. Now's the time you can get in without waiting. I
was talking about lawn care and taking care of things and planning for spring and
what not. Through today, And I want to tell you about a garden
center that you probably have not heard about. If you listen to Garden Line,
you've heard me talk about it. But that's Orges Hidden Gardens. Now.
Jorge is down there in Alvin, Okay, down south of Highway six
on Elizabeth Street in Alvin. And I've been watching Jorges Garden center grow over
recent months and year. You know, it started off very small, and
he just keeps getting bigger and bigger every time I go. There's more stuff.
I mean, it is full of all kinds of plants, lots of
different kinds of fruit, plants, plenty of vegetables, herbs, flowers,
all kinds of things like that. If you're looking for trees and shrubs to
plant in the art, he's got those two. He's one of those garden
centers that carries the three sixty tree stabilizer as well and the fertilizers that you
hear me talk about. Orge. It is going to carry those kinds of
things. So whatever you're looking for, you ought to give them a checkout.
Those of you down south, it's pretty far down south there, so
anyone living around the Alvin area. Alvin Santa fe Dickinson Hillcrest, al Gooo,
maybe Alta Loma or Arcadia. You've got a hometown garden center right down
there by you, and you need to go down and visit them. They're
open on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from eight am to four pm.
They're open on weekends. That's when they're open for business. He does other
things during the week taking care of landscapes and whatnot. But during the weekends
the garden center opens up, and so things like, hey, how about
a Peggy Martin Rose. I've got one of those, one of my favorite
Roses. Orges got the Peggy Martin Rose. He's got geraniums, crate myrtles
and things like that. Go check them out again. They're on the Elizabeth
Street in Alvin. It's hard word for me to say, just south of
Highway six. Orges hidden gardens. Well, I said, call and here
we go, William and Laporte. We'll start there. Hey, William,
how are you today? I'm doing good. I appreciate the show. Thank
you. I need bushes now across the back of the yard. The backyard
I had odi anders. You know a couple of years ago, the deep
freeze frozen back to the ground. Right, So I thought, i'll you
know, take too long for him to regrow. I dug them all up.
I planted new ones and they're still small, right. I hadn't had
a chance to get me. Guess what happened. They've all frozen back to
the ground. So I want something that will not freeze back. You know,
I live in the port now. I know about the red tipped patinas,
and you know they're nice because the you know, the new leaser red.
Is there a like a hedge bush that grows a five or so feet
tall. If it grows taller, I can keep it, you know,
shortened, so it doesn't you know, get too tall. Something that I
can plant back there that grows, you know, fairly quickly, that's just
not going to freeze back to the ground like we had this last year.
I would try Southern wax myrtle. It's a kind of a light gun a
light green bush. But if you share it, it will be very dense,
very dense. But any any shrub gets denser because you share it.
That that's the key. It'll get about the size you're talking about U.
And I think it'll work well. It'll put up with some wet conditions.
It can put up with some dry conditions, you know, for a while
early on, you're gonna want to keep fertilizing it with a lawn fertilize.
Just use your lunertizer as long as it doesn't have weed controlling it, right,
use that on your shrubs and water them regularly, especially through the first
summer or two to get them established fast. But that that would be a
good one. Of course, there's one hundred different shrubs you could plant,
but I think southern wax moreles a native through the region, and I think
that you would have good success with that. Okay, yeah, And I
had planned for I do this just to you know. We got moss nursery.
We got another nursery around the corner. Go and look and see what
they've got. You know, is there anything that grows? And I was
just at AGB. I don't know how big they get, and I didn't
see a name on the buckets, but they're bushes. But they had little
flowers growing starting to grow on them. I couldn't describe it, but is
there anything that would grow in these bushes? About three quarters of the line
they get full sign As you start getting down towards the end, they start
falling under the shade of a tree. So we go from full sign to
like filtered to one end is starting to kind of get just shade. Okay,
had anything planted on the shady part, but they are definitely full so
pretty much full sun. Yeah, well, I think you probably would switch
species as you get into the shade because something that flowers in the sun is
not going to bloom well in the shade. Something that's dense in the shin
sun is going to be less dense as you get into more shade. For
flowers, I wish I could if you had a color of the bloom or
size of the bloom or anything on those shrubs you saw, I could probably
tell you what that was. Well. To me, they kind of looked
like the flower that grows on lantana, only a little larger, you know,
the red and orange. I mean, that's okay kind of what they
look Okay, that maybe like a nixor or something. Yeah, I'm not
gonna be able to guess for sure on that. I will say this though,
as you were talking, I got thinking about what about like a knockout
rose. Those are very disease resistant. They will get five feet tall if
and you can shear them to make a hedge if you want. They're very
forgiving of that. And the more you cut back a rose, the more
bloom terminals it has. Just put your good rose mix in there. Give
them good drainage roses. You know, want a good soil to grow in.
That's just another option. They're not fully evergreen, but you know they
they're beautiful. Yeah, all right, man, I do I appreciate the
advice. All right, sir, good luck out there. Appreciate that,
thanks a lot. I appreciate that very much. Yeah, soil, soil,
soil, soal, that's very important. In fact, let's head out
now to Brenham and we're going to talk to Ed. Hello. Ed,
Well, skip question. Mushroom compost in a vegetable garden. You can do
that. You can do that. You want to use it sparingly. It's
a very potent stuff. Uh So I would say, if you haven't gotten
a lot of organic matter into the soil, I would put a couple of
oh you do, okay, Well, I'd probably put an inch an inch
of much mushroom compost only and then rototile it end deeply. Now it can
have a little bit of an odor, but that goes away. As soon
as the microbes start to work on it, that odor will go away.
But I had someone sitting on top of the ground and oh my goodness,
was it was ripe. But I'm telling you make stuff grow, that's for
sure. All right, Well, i'll try that next year then, okay,
Yeah, you have a big vegetable garden, not that big eights about
ninety okay, well, so you can use that. It is a higher
pH material, the mushroom compost, so some people will avoid that and go
with something a little more acidic, you know, in terms of the garden.
But unless you're just dealing with already got a high pH problem and then
you're just adding a lot of mushroom compost, it's not going to be a
problem. Put a soul for down to try to bring that PHDW that can
help. Yeah, over time, over time, that'll help. All right,
Well, good luck growing vegetables out there and broun them. You know
the role on guardline. My advice is free, but I just expect half
the produce dropped off here at the station and I will call it even bring
a pick up. Thanks for being a good sport. I appreciate you take
care of it. Bubba bubba. Yeah. When we're talking about quality products,
Nature's Way has. If your soil needs it, Nature's Way has got
it. In other words, mushroom conbos, you know, blends, we
talked about those. But if you go to Nature's Way, you're going to
get a quality mix, like a vegetable mix or herb type mix. You're
going to get a rose type mix. You're going to get just composts.
You're going to get micronutrient blends. You're going to find the fertilizers left the
micro life that you would put in. Uh. They know how to make
the soil right. So if you're putting in a vegetable garden, a flower
bed, anything you're gonna grow, call Nature's Way. They're on Sherbrooke's Circle
and south of Conrod, just off forty five, right there where fourteen eighty
eight comes in Nature'sway Resources dot Com and the phone number nine three six two
seven three twelve hundred. They've long been a leader when it comes to making
the brown suff stuff awesome, so your plants can be gorgeous and productive.
We'll be right back. Welcome back, to guard line. Glad to have
you as always. What are we gonna talk about today, Well, let's
find out. We're gonna go to Jim in Cyprus. Hello, Jim'll skip.
Well, I'm good. What's up with Jim? I got a very
beautiful green yard. But it looks closer. Look it's all clover. Oh
okay, all right, oh boy. Well the clover's gonna be dying down
on its own soon. So that's one option, is just let it die
down. If you've got a big yard and pulling the clover out is not
an option, then spraying it would be an option. Here's what I generally
do. I generally don't have like weeds over the whole yard. So when
I see something like clover, it comes out of one spot in the ground,
a little taproot, and I can just go in there with a little
corner of a hoe or with my hands, pop it out and get all
the seeds that are on it, because it's already blooming, probably probably already
has some seeds forming, And that is the best way, because you get
all that out of there, you can spray it and kill it. But
if they're already formed seeds, they're just going to go in the ground and
you'll be back next year. You'll have to use a pre emergent in the
fall for it. But those are your options. So if you want to
go ahead and spray it, you can do that, or you can pull
it get rid of it. But either way, the lawn then can come
on through and have a good shot at it. I hope you're in fairly
good shape, so if it is, I'll bounce back well unlock everybody else.
I had some you know, a drought. But what I spray it
with? You got two options. One you could put down a product.
It's a fertilizer that has a post emergent weed control in it. Just a
minute ago I was talking about the Weedonator from Nelson's Weedator has a long release
fertilizer, a slow release fertilizer. They'll fertilizer for the next two or three
months, but it also has a product that will kill the existing weed the
clover. And what you do is you wet the clover just a little bit.
You don't don't put a lot of water out to what the soil,
just get the foliage wet and then you run over it with your fertilizer.
Spreader with the weedonator in it. It sticks to those clover leaves, soaks
in. You give it about a day or two and then water it in
and move it into the soil. But at that point time the weeds have
already taken it up and it will move forward to kill them. So if
you're not able to physically remove the clover plants, the weed and eat are
applied like that would work. That's from Nelson's. It's from Nelson Garden,
Dolon, Nelson Plant Food, the FURTI and so you're in Cyprus. I
I think you probably are going to be able to find that at some of
your your Ace hardware stores, for example, they're up in that area.
I think when when when it says Cypress, can you be a little more
specific as to where you are a wolf of Highway six Copperfield area Highway six,
Yeah, south of Yeah, well you are. Let's see you're you're
not to go ahead, there's a barker I can get to. Yeah,
M and D M and D A is up there, just just northeast of
Cypress and Luetta. I think you're are you talking about? Well, I
don't know's there's several Ice Hardware is up in that area over. If you're
from near Jones Road, there's Cypress Ace on Jones Road too. Yeah,
okay, I appreciate it. I'm sorry call to ask a damn question,
but I don't get to listen at all. No, it's not a dumb
question at all. A bazillion people have the same question you have, so
good luck with that. Hope you see a nice green lawn that's not wheat
by the way. Uh I don't. I don't know if you'll find this
funny. I do. A friend of mine in Mississippi says he gets rid
of all his weeds by taking his glasses off. And uh, I think
you said you talked about having a beautiful green lawn. Take off your glasses
and it looks great. That's not a real solution, but at least it's
a funny way to look at it from the back door. Looks beautiful till
you get close and look at it, so you know, it's only like
sixty one hundred feet, but it's well. And when that clover starts dying
down and turning brown, it's not going to be a very pretty green lawn,
but it'll be gone. And that fertilizer are recommended to you there.
That'll get the lawn going to fill back on. So all right, so
thank you doing wait very long to put fertilizer out. No, after that,
you don't need to fertilize again until probably May. All right, Jim,
thank you. I appreciate you call a lot. Hey have you been
to in Jenny Forest done in Richmond? Do you know about it? If
you don't, you need to because if you're in Richmond, you're heading toward
sugar Land Way and chenned Forest is off to the right. It's on FM
twenty seven fifty nine. Now in Chenned Forest is always getting in new shipments.
They always have color. It just and there by the way, every
weekend they got some kind of educational program going on. I mean they really
do. Just always something going on there and Chanted Forest. I believe next
weekend is gonna be a program by John Panzarella on citrus and avocados, for
example. But you go by there, you're gonna find color, You're gonna
find herb, you're gonna find vegetables, every kind of plant you can imagine.
And Danny and Klay Lenderman, they know what they're talking about. They
are welcoming to the guests, they point you in the right direction, they're
patient with your questions, and it's just another reason to go to this destination
nursery down there just outside of the Richmond Rosenberg area. That's Enchanted Forest,
Chanted Forest, Richmond TX dot com and Channitforest, Richmond, TX dot com.
Let's go to a Tesca cita. Now we're gonna talk to Evana.
Hello, Evanna, good morning on this beautiful day. I have got very
quick questions. I'm looking for crape myrtles and I'm looking for leef compost for
lon top dressing. Where can I go in this area great myrtles and leaf
compost. Let's see a Teska sita trying to pull up here. I think
you may be a little bit outside of B and b's service area. You
might want to give them a call. I think you're a little bit outside
of that service area. But B and B is a supplier of the not
only deep tiner, the core aeration. But excuse me, my brain went
sideways for a minute. But the leaf will compost that goes on on on
top of that. So if you, if you can, if you can
get a hold of them. I think it might be worth an ask.
I'm just trying to gosh, B B and B landscape pros. Let me
let me pull in here in just a minute. I'm gonna check their service
area. I think, yeah, you're going to be outside. I'm sorry,
I'm sorry you're you're outside of that. It's as what was the other
thing you were saying you wanted. So I'm looking for nice of red or
watermelon color. Yeah, the watermelon is really easy to find. That's a
real common, common type of crape myrtle, several varieties like that. I
think your best bet is gonna you're just in the back door of Kingwood there,
so just run over to Warren's Garden Center or Kingwood Garden Center and Kingwood
and they're gonna have the other one was Lawrence Warren with a W. Warren
like Warren's Garden Center and Kingwood Garden Center. And sorry about the false alarm
there on. I was, I was thinking the wrong direction for you.
And I don't have anyone that I work with that is a core errator leap
mold compost applier in your area. There probably are some, but I don't
know who they are. And I couldn't vouch for them, and I would,
I would. I don't thank you very much, all right, Evana,
have a good one. You too, you too, and yes,
you're right. It is an absolutely wonderful day. We don't forget. Next
Saturday, eleven am to one pm, I'll be at Buchanan's Native Plants and
they're giving away eight different prize giveaways, all kinds of cool stuff that you
I know you would enjoy getting. Ken is always a fun place to go.
But I'm going to be there answering your gardening questions. I love to
meet the listeners, So come on out and see me. Say hi,
and any kind of questions you have, let's go. You got me to
I one on one there, Let's talk about the things that are of interest
to you. Let's solve those problems, the areas where you need more color,
or a struggle with a planet that isn't growing right, or you need
a suggestion for something. We can cover all that other stuff. Hey,
we've had a lot of fun today on Guardline. Remember you can listen to
past shows on the podcast in the meantime. See you next Saturday morning,
sharp, six am.