KTRH Garden Line does not necessarily endorse any of the products or services advertised on
this program. Welcome to KTRH Garden Line with Skip rictor so just watch him
as so many buck s. Good morning, Good Sunday morning. You're listening
to Garden Line. We're here to talk to you about things that interest you.
Maybe you got questions about a vegetable garden or herb garden. You want
to do some hanging baskets to kind of spruce up the place, and containers
on the patio. Maybe you got a bug crawling around eating stuff you don't
like that. We've had a few questions about that. I had a number
of them yesterday when I was out at the wild Birds Unlimited in Kingwood,
had a lot of folks come by. Thank you for come by. It's
good to meet you. Appreciate that, and appreciate wild Birds hosting us too.
Out there, number of baggies came through with things chewed on it and
weeds and you know you name it. I guess it's it's the horticultural version
of mm Elazarus. Bring me. You're tired, you're weary, your insect
infested, disease ridden masses yearning to not be sick and have a beautiful landscape
or something like that. I'm gonna have to work on that. My apologies
to Ama Lazarus the butchering of the poem. Anyway, you get the idea.
That's what we're here for. If you would like to give us a
call, the number is seven one three two one two five eight seven four
seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. A little bit later
this morning, I'm going to be visiting with Patrick from Verdant Tree Farm is
going to come in and we're going to talk about everything palms. You know,
this is the this is the time of the year when he gets into
warm weather. That's palm planting season for sure. I mean not that you
can't plant a palm when you want to plant a palm, but it's the
best time to do it. And Patrick is going to help me drill down
to some of the facts about the palms that are available to us, the
best ones to choose, some of the things that you need to know when
you're caring for a palm, to have success with a palm, which palms
are hardier than other palms, all that kind of stuff. We'll pick around
and come up with a number of different things that I think will be of
interest. He is a wealth of knowledge on palms. In fact, if
you're looking for a palm source that it is verdant tree farm. They they
just they specialize in that never Dance carries all kinds of trees. I mean
they have trees all the way up to seven hundred gallons in size. I
mean, if you if you want to drop something for interesting, why right
into the landscape. Not have to wait too long to hang a hammock.
If you will, they can do that. You know, you can go
in there and you pick a tree, so I want that one, put
a tag on it. They'll bring it, they'll install it right. And
planting a tree right is important. There's a lot of problems that happen because
someone who doesn't know how to plant a tree plants it incorrectly. And I
mean it can mean you lose the tree, or it can mean that the
tree just really struggles for a long time trying to get its feet under and
get going. And trees are a big investment. You want to do it
right, and when you do it right, it's one of the best things
you can do to your landscape, because when you've added a tree and you've
done it right, a few things have happened. Number one, you've put
it in a spot where it has room to grow and do what it needs
to do. Maybe it's a small tree like a medium sized crape myrtle.
Maybe it's a giant tree like a live oak that's going to someday cover your
end, both your neighbor's properties. You want to give it a place whereas
to grow. Do you want to planet the right distance? Had a friend
one time when I lived up in Conro, and he showed me a picture
of his yard. He had just planted a bunch of trees. And I'm
not kidding you. The trees were like twelve fifteen feet apart, and they
all look like broomsticks out there in the yard, which is fine, that
was the age they were. But I was just thinking, in two years
that place is going to be crowded. You know, how can you how
can you plant them so close? Because these are species that want to get
large, and if you want to create some sort of a forest environment where
nothing grows underneath the trees, and it just is this big, random bunch
of tree trunks all over the front or backyard. Well, I guess that's
fine, it's your place. But think about how big a tree gets and
pick a tree that gets the size that you want. And that's why I
like a place like Burdepne because you can go and you can visit with them.
They know what they're talking about. You can walk in the office.
You know, it's a free visit in the office for a design consultation.
They'll talk to you about you know, what tree would fit. Bring them
some pictures, definitely, some pictures things. See what's going on, and
let them direct you to the right tree because this is a hopefully for that
spot. It's it's a once in a lifetime decision. Now we have trees
that grow fast and die young, call them woody weeds. They're not worth
having. But then we have some wonderful species that when you're long gone,
that tree will be the most valuable thing in that property, the single plant
that has the most value to your home. Maybe it's planted properly so it's
shading from the western sun, cutting down your air conditioner bills, or giving
you a place on the patio to set in the shade and enjoy that you
want it to be an evergreen. Do you want it to be a deciduous
so that it allows sun through in the wintertime. That is a little bit
easier on the grass trying to grow underneath the tree to have a little bit
of a break from the full shade. Maybe you want a tree with flowers.
What season do you want flowers? You know, we got our trees
that bloom in the spring, lots of those, and then when you get
into summer we got crape myrtles and bitechs and things like that. There's there's
a lot of wonderful options out there. But anyway, go to the talk
to the folks at Verdant verdantreefarm dot com. They have locations now. Pretty
much as you go across town, there's some place for you. If you're
on the west side, you can go out to the Barker Cypress location.
If you're way down south in Parland, there's a Broadway at West Broadway location,
and then up in the heights Yale Street at ten another location. So
it's not hard to find a Verdant Tree farm nearby. But stay tuned because
we're gonna talk to Patrick, And as I said, we're gonna focus on
palm trees and have him teach us a little bit about the best choices for
palms, the best way to plant palm, take care of a palm,
and all of that kind of thing. I'm actually looking forward to that.
That would be kind of cool. If your lawn is kind of struggling along.
I have seen a number of samples. I saw some lawn samples yesterday,
lines that are just struggling. You know, maybe it's a disease.
Last summer's drought was hard on lawns. A lot of things happen to the
lawns, soil compaction, whatnot, and maybe you just want to give it
a boost, you know, kind of give it a quick boost. I
want it to get growing here and fill in, because the faster you fill
in, the more you cover that ground, you know, with leaves or
with grass leaves. That is, so that the soil can't be a source
for a new weed problem because the sunlight is hitting it. Well. Has
to grow twelve for eight. It's a liquid. You hook it up to
a garden hose, a quart bottle sprayed around. Takes about ten minutes to
do your lawn, and you got the nutrients right there. It's got Medina
soil activator and it's got liquid or humates liquid plus in it, and it'll
give you a nice green boost to get things up and growing. You know
you can. You can do that several times a year if you like.
I recommend returning the clippings. If you do that, you can cut down
on the amount of fertilizer of any type that you apply, because the clippings
are providing some nutrition as well. But the Hashtragrow twelve four eight, it's
a good quick way to get in there and get things done and get a
good, good response, especially for a loan that's struggling along at this time
and just needs a little bit of a boost. Well, we're hitting on
a hard break here. Our phone number seven one three two one two five
eight seven four called Josh. You'll get you on the board. We'll talk
to you when we come back. Mama ST. There will be days like
this. There'll be days like this, mamasef mamase, Mama, Mama ST.
There will be days like this. There'll be days like this, my
mamasemazad Mama. When walking the other day, good morning, A little bit
of lighting going on outside. You see you a little bit. It's gonna
be a good Sunday. Looking forward to sitting with some folks today about what's
going on in your garden. What are your questions that you might have our
phone number seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. If you
have not had the chance to be part of a community garden, maybe you
don't have space for gardens? Something you ought to think about, because it
is it's a great way to garden. You know, your backyard. Maybe
it's too shady, maybe so small. You don't want to dig up the
back forty for a garden. You have other plans, you know, for
that area. Community gardens are a great way to go, and we have
a lot of opportunities to do that here. Urban Harvest has a nice network
of community gardens around town. I would consider that to be something well worth
pursuing if you fit into the categories, especially that I was just talking about
out in full share. The Dell Web folks are putting in a new community
out there. It's one of their typical inspired designs, lifestyle programs designed around
you communities. That's what Dell Web's all about. But this one has got
a community garden in it. I'm helping them with it, helping plan put
that thing together. This will be in full Sure, just actually about two
miles outside of downtown full Shure on FM three fifty nine. I think you
ought to check it out. If you want more information, give him a
call. It's two eight one four or five nine zero six zero nine or
Dell Web d e lwebb dot com slash Houston for more information. So you
can discover that dell Weeb difference for yourself. And what a better deal all
the stuff that you get in a community like that, plus a nice place
to garden, and you know it's always going to be beautiful and neat and
just wonderful to walk through and be part of a Dell Web community. Now
that it's starting to heat up, by the way, we're about to end
of the season where we're watering our lawns more and when we I've lived,
when I lived in Cyprus, I had a neighbor that his whole system was
kind of messed up. The heads were misaligned. In fact, one of
the spray heads spray on my car in the driveway instead of on his lawn,
and so I'd turned my car on backwards about two times a week,
just so I could wash the other side, because he watered every day of
the week, just about one or two days, once every day or two,
I think it was going on. It rains in Houston, water stays
in the soil of wall. We don't have to water that much. But
how much do you need to water? Well, I was really excited when
the folks at the A and M. Egg Engineering Department came up with the
systems for determining how much you need to water. And it's called the Evapo
transpiration system. What does that mean, Well, it means how much water
evaporations from the soil, how much water transpires out through the openings and the
plant leaves. Just like we perspire, plants transpire. And by taking the
science of all the weather factors and crunching them in a computer, they can
tell you exactly how much water your lawn used this week. I remember years
ago there were some fires in Mexico and a cloud of smoke way high came
over across Texas. It actually changed by one tenth of an inch a week
how much water our lawns were using. And that was just that one factor.
But these computers, these little weather stations that are all over the place.
They measure solar intensity, they measure wind speed, they measure temperature,
humidity, they crunch it all together and they can they know through science and
research and checking turf grass how much water it's used. And they have a
system now and it's free. It's called water my Yard and you can go
online to water my yard dot org. You can find an app on the
Apple App Store or on Google Play. You can sign up if you want
for email reminders. And I've signed up to it, been using it for
years now, and basically each week I get an email and it says,
you know, you're don't need to water the rainfall in your area has been
sufficient this week. Or it'll say you need to do one half inch of
water this week, or it'll say you need an inch of water this week.
So my old recommendation of how much water does the law need, well
an inch a week. Well that's a good gas, but it's never perfectly
right because was it cloudy, was it sunny? Is it May? Is
it July? You see what I'm saying. Water my Yard cuts all of
that out and you avoid the waste because you know when you put drinking water
on your law, and you get to pay for it as sewer services too,
because they look at the water use of the house, and in a
lot of water systems, the sewage rate is based on how much water you
use. Now, the fact that it went on the yard, not down
in the sewer, that's beside the point. So it's like a double way
to save on your water. Plus, is Houston humid enough? Can we
just go say we don't need to be sprayed more water out there and the
air than we have to to keep our plants healthy. And then there's a
whole thing about water conservation here in Texas, and we're not finding new water
supplies as fast as our population is growing, and so we got to conserve
what we have. And when you waste water, it just has several levels
beyond just an environmental feel good. Yeah, I shouldn't waste water. There's
a lot of practical reasons not to, so I think, you know,
if you've got a yard, I don't know why you wouldn't have the Water
my Yard app on your phone. It's it's simple. You sign up and
you get the emails. You can follow them or not. That's yours.
It costs you nothing, but it'll inform you and you'll understand how to run
your water system. And I would highly recommend that I'd like to get those
guys in here sometime for an interview so they can go a little further into
it than I did. But uh, it's it's a really really good,
good system. By the way, this is National Rosemonth, so we are
in we are in the middle, big middle of National Rosemonth. Now it's
a good time. We think about planting roses in February, and of course
that's a great time to plan a roso's fall. But you can plant roses
year round, and there's no reason if you don't, if you will take
care of the plant, that you can't put a rose in the ground.
You just when we plant in hotter weather, we got to make sure and
keep that cylinder of roots moist so that's it's able to the plant doesn't go
into stress and it can get those roots out in the soil. So you
can plant them now. But if you already got a rose, it's a
good time to I typically a little earlier than this, in fact, we'll
share my roses back. We get a big April typically April, but it's
a wider band than that of bloom. That's kind of the big spring show.
And then they will continue a repeat. Blooming rose will continue to bloom
all through the summer. I'll share them back again typically in August and get
a nice October show as well. Late August to sharing is pretty good.
Roses are just a wonderful plant. It's the queen of the vegetable garden.
You know, we have we have queens of all the gardens, the tomatoes,
the queen of the vegetable garden, the rose. I said vegetable for
roses, it's a queen of the shrub beds and the flowers. When we
get into the fruit trees, yeah, it seems like the peach is the
queen of the fruit trees. And some people may disagree with that, but
anyway, everybody loves a rose. You know, it's our national flower.
It's just beautiful. And we have so many good types of roses. I
mean, can you can find roses that are hybrid teas for cut flowers.
You can get roses that are almost a groundcover, spreading outward like some of
the drifts and other types other series of roses like that that's spread out.
And then there's roses that are just good shrubs. I mean they look good
even if they're not blooming. I like Belinda's Dream, I like Knockout for
those two reasons. They're they're just a pretty shrub. And in addition to
that, you get the benefit of the blooms, so it's kind of like
a win win and you don't have to learn all the science of rose printing.
With a shrub rose. You can just share them back if you want,
and they just come back out again and they look good. By the
way, if you're looking for a place to get roses, you're not going
to do better than Arburgate. Arburgate up in Tomball. They have a nice
selection of roses. They have all the earth kind roses that we talk about.
Agrilife Extension has selected roses by testing them around the state in conditions where
they get no spray. They either they look good or they don't. And
you know, maybe they were a rose found in an old cemetery, surviving
on their own. That's a good kind of rose to have because as my
mentor, doctor Bill Weltsch used to say, or does say, if dead
people can grow it, you can too, And I think that's a pretty
good full proof thing. But Arburgate's got those kind of roses, got a
lot of other types of roses. And while you're out there, you can
grab their one two three system the food for all kinds of plants. It's
a four four two plus calcium one organic. They've got a soil for soil
ads for your rosebed that'll do well, very well. And then they have
an organic compost that you can enrich the soil that you have in. But
you can go to arburgate dot com. If you haven't been to Arburgate.
First of all, welcome to Houston, because if you've lived here more than
a month I and you're a gardener, I would expect you've been to Arburgate.
They're on FM twenty nine twenty just about a mile and a half west
of two forty nine up there in Tomball, But that would be a good
place to stop and check out. You'll find that they have certainly roses and
a bazillion other other wonderful things. We're gonna we're gonna talk about a couple
of common problems when we come back from break here in just a minute.
And I'm going to talk about some of the things that I'm hearing questions about
right now on a guardline. In my work as agrilife extension horticulturist, we
get questions all the time. It's kind of like I feel like sometimes my
week, seven days a week, is just answering gardening questions and I couldn't
be happier than any what do they say, happy as a clam doing just
absolutely that right then, so we'll be back the phone number seven one three
two one two five eight seven four seven one three two one two k t
r H. And now I'm going to turn it over for some real interesting
facts. What's happening around town? To the incomparable Nicky Courtney, we have
a C side is solved. I'm having to work hard it coming up with
new intros for you. Nick Ice my name and six talking myself bows.
Hey, you're listening to garden Line. You're looking forward to talking to you
about whatever is of interest to your regarding gardening. That would be the phone
number you need is seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four seven
one three two one two ktr H. Give Josh a call, get you
on the board and we'll visit with you about some things I wanted to talk
about some of the things that we get questions about this time of year.
One of the common questions that I get is, of course when people ask,
they don't always know what it is. They just say, my lawn.
It's like it's shriveling and drying up. And so when I look at
a picture of it, which is always helpful, a good clear picture,
it is gray leaf spot. And gray leaf spot loves warm, humid,
very humid, shady conditions, and it loves when we overapply nitrogen, when
we apply more pounds per thousand square feet, for example, than we should
over a given period of time. And gray leaf spot is spots on the
leaves of the grass. You know, if you get on your hands and
knees and you're looking at the grass, you see the grass blades and there's
the spot on them that are brown, and eventually, I mean, it
can cause the whole thing to kind of shrivel up and die, just because
there's so much of a disease on that grass blade. And great leaf spot
is something like any fungus. You can spray fungicides to prevent it or to
shut it down. You're never going to bring a dead leaf back to life,
but you can prevent the expansion of it. But whenever we're doing that
is here's a perspective on plant health that I'd kind of like you to consider,
and I'm going to compare it to human health. And I do that
a lot, and I realize there's eight hundred billion differences between plants and people
when it comes to health. But there are some principles that are true.
When we don't take care of our bodies, when we don't sleep enough,
when we don't eat right, when we don't get any exercise, we live
on a couture in a chair at the office, or you know what I'm
talking about, bad diets, and all of that combined as well as other
things we do to our bodies that leads us to being more likely to get
sick. It doesn't make you sick, but it leads to things that are
problems. And with plants, the same thing is true if you don't water
them enough, if you water them too much, if you don't fertilize them
at all and you're trying to get production out of them, if you over
fertilize them, if you water frequently and keep the leaves wet, you're going
to get disease problems. And so there's a lot of cultural practices and environmental
situations that cause us to have problems that lead to the problem. Now,
you wouldn't want to spend your life just taking a thousand medicines every day to
try to fend off every disease that might be there, right, I mean,
that's not the way we go about it. We'd rather avoid the disease.
And so the same thing is true with your lawn. So if you
have an issue with gray leaf spot on your San Augustine grass, that's a
sign of some things. Now, some things are in your control and some
things are not. You can't control how much it rains and how wet it
states. You can't control the temperature outside, and those are all contributing factors
to many types of diseases. But you can control where you would plant grass
and in deep shade. I know, we want grass and shade, And
one of the main turf questions I get is how do I get grass to
grow into the trees, because because we want them both, they don't like
each other, but we want them to grow together. But when you go
into shade, you're going to have more problems with it than you do in
sun It can occur in both places. By the way, it's not just
a shade disease. But another thing but we can't control is howten we water.
And I talked earlier about you know, a neighbor spraying my car water
and all the time, misaligned heads, all that kind of stuff. The
more often you water, the more disease problems you have. That's why we
have more diseases in Houston than they do in Opasso. It's a dry climate
out there. It's a very different climate, and they just don't have the
same number of diseases. So when when we over water, or when we
water too frequently, especially, we create those kind of diseases. So if
you've never seen gray leaf spot, take a piece of plywood, go throw
it on a section or your lawn you don't care about, and leave it
there for about a week and come back, pick it up and take a
look underneath, and you will learn what gray leaf spot looks like. So
what have you done. You've You've created a very high humid environment around those
grass plates by throwing the polywood on top. You know, the air doesn't
blow through and move the water the wet air out if you will. Uh,
and it's shady underneath that plywood, you create the disease. And that's
the example of what I'm talking about. We can predispose plants to problems,
or we can predispose them to less problems. It's you know, not one.
But why create a problem and then have to go spray for it when
you can avoid that? And that would be my thing on gray leaf spot.
If you have it and you need to spray, their number of fund
sides out there that will shut it down and as new grass comes on,
help protect that new grass. But that would be something I would do when
we're getting into a period where it's raining off and on for a long time
it's overcast and cloudy, which is essentially like heading towards shadiness, right,
And so that would just be one where you would periodically after a rain do
some sprain for it. But we try to avoid that when we don't have
to. Speaking of rain, and on the roof, have you ever had
somebody come by and put a business card in your door and say, hey,
you need a new roof and I can help you get insurance to fix
that roof and blah blah blah. Well, throw the cards away. Those
just like Tree Services, throw those cards away and call somebody that knows what
they're doing. And Brinkman Roofing is that kind of company. They've been in
business for fifty years and fifty years your roof is a major investment in your
house, and you need a professional that you can trust with that investment that'll
do a good job. Not somebody that flies through when a storm hits and
then they fly off somewhere in the country where the next storm is hit and
they're gone. You own a company that's lived here and that stands behind their
work. In the case of Brinkman, up to twenty five years now there
are full service commercial residential roof If you want a metal roof, they can
custom to manufacture a standing seam roof right there on your property that fits perfectly.
I talk about him being a good company. Twenty twenty two Better Business
Bureau Pinnacle Award winner go to Brinkman Quality dot Com. Brinkman Quality dot Com
or two eight one four eight oz seventy six sixty three. Yeah, Brinkman
Roofing, It's a company you need to know about and while you're there,
ask them about their timberline solar shingles. I'll talk about those again sometime,
and I it's a pretty cool idea. You're listening to garden Line our phone
number seven one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two
fifty eight seventy four. Another one of the problems that I see a lot
is something called slime flux. Doesn't that sound fun? It sounds like something
that's said in a ghost Ghostbusters movie slime flux. So with slime flux,
what happens is the bark on your trunk cracks a little bit and it allows
bacteria in, and in that sugary sap, they ferment it, and now
you've got this ooze coming out. Sometimes it's white and frothy. Oftentimes you'll
see butterflies and wasps there because it's fermented. It's like a little insect beer
joint right on the side of your trunk. And there's nothing you can do
about it. Just keep the plant healthy so that it'll create a callous and
try to close that over. There's no spray for it or anything. People
get very alarmed. Sometimes it'll leak for a long time, usually with a
healthy plant. It kind of takes care of itself and it goes away.
With an old tree that doesn't have a lot of bigger it can hang around
for a while, but people get very alarmed at what's the stuff coming down
the side of my trunk. That's what it is, Just a butterfly beer
joint on the side. Well, we're gonna go to a break. Got
some calls coming in if you would like to be on the board. Seven
one three two one two five eight seven four. They read stretcher, they
pass the play. We're both preaed. He don't preach late. But he's
getting nam and that's just starling. He ain't eighty five degrees outside. He
just getting mine. Good Sunday morning, on a beautiful Sunday morning outside,
you're listening to Garden Line. We're looking forward to visiting with you about questions
you might have about gardening. If you are interested in a CBD type product
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Com. We're going to head out to talk to David this morning. Good
morning, David, good morning. Can you hear yes, sir? Okay,
I have a problem. I had a lot of work done on my
house and they threw all the debris on the front lawn. I knew they
was going to do it. What it did is I killed all the grass.
It was a bear and waste land. Now. I thought they were
going to do something to the soil before they laid the sawd but they just
laid the sawd on pop of it. So I've been watering it but and
there's no problem. But I wondered, is there any fertilization I should do
or is anything I could put on top of the grass to make that soil
under their better? Now, how long ago did you lay the side?
I would say possibly a month ago. Okay, yeah, you absolutely can
be fertilizing. Now I would grab something that's going to give you a gradual,
slow release. You want something that is gonna, you know, feed
your lawn over time, not just be an immediate release. And I think
one of the things you might want to consider. Nelson's has a line called
turf Star that one of their turf Star products is called Slow and Easy.
It's a twenty two two ten that gives you that gradual feeding that you're looking
for. It'll go for months, literally giving a little bit at a time.
The chemistries of the nitrogen and everything in there. It's beautiful, the
wet it releases very gradually. You don't want to just push them with a
blast a fertilizer at one time. So you can put this down not have
to worry about it. You can put about five pounds per thousand square feet.
That's about the rate you want to put it down. And now that
that turf has been there that long, it should have roots down. I
don't. There's nothing you can do now to fix soil underneath it in time.
If it's a compacted clay, you can certainly do core aeration and a
compost top dressing. But for right now, let's get some good nutrient on
it. You as needed water. When it's not rained for a week,
go ahead and give it a little water, but just be careful not to
overdo it, because then you add the disease issues to the fact that you're
already trying to get this grass on its feet. Now it's having to deal
with disease is because of being you know, over overwatered. So so can
I use liquid or granule? This is a granular and you want to put
that down now if you if you want to do a liquid you know I
was mentioning earlier. The Medina Hastegrow twelve four eight is just a quick response.
So if you needed something, just real quick. But I think with
what you're looking at here, you can go either way. But if you
do the Medina you're going to need to come back and fertilize again sooner.
If you do this slow and easy, you're gonna put it down now and
you're kind of done for the summer. Okay, that'll do it better.
Thank you very much. All right, David, thank you for the call.
I appreciate that very much. Our phone number seven one three two one
two five eight seven four seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four.
I should have mentioned to to David when we're talking to him that down
in Southwest Houston is South Fertilizer, and if you have not been there before,
you need to check them out. They are going to carry a wide
variety of fertilizer. Everything you hear us talk about on garden Line is at
Southwest and then some they even have their own line, the Southwest Premium Gold,
a slow release that they make as well. But they're gonna have the
nelsons I just talked about. They're gonna have microlife, they're gonna have nitrofosts,
and on and on. When it comes to any kind of insecticide,
fungicide, herbicide that you need, it's there, including organic. If you
are an organic gardener, organic landscape person All the products you need are at
Southwest Fertilizer. Why are there? You can pick up some really quality tools.
You're gonna have all the soil amendance we talked about. Go to Southwest
Fertilizer dot com. That's that is probably the fastest and easiest way to find
out. You know, where are they and everything they're They're on the corner
of Bissonette and Renwick and Southwest Houston. But Southwest Fertilizer dot Com is just
a great resource. I was in there the other day taking a lot of
pictures into the news products that are out there, and every time I go,
I'm impressed with You know, if you need a grass killer, they
don't have one. They have several obsens to choose from if you need and
on and on. You see what I'm saying. It's just it's the place
where everything you need you for your lawn, your garden, You're going to
find it there. I love going into that place. While I was talking
about the slime flux and the pressure that builds up underneath the bark, and
we typically get calls on that in the summertime. You know, that's a
that is a common thing that we deal with and the gray leaf spot is
a common problem that we deal with in summer on our roses. Now we're
seeing quite a bit of the black spot if it's not a resistant type of
rose, and this be a national rose month. With the black spot again,
you crowd your bushes together, you have a pop up sprinkler that sprays
them every other day, and you just get a lot more black spot diseases.
So going back to what I was talking about earlier, I'm gonna be
a broken record on this, and if you listen to guard DeLine cultural first.
Cultural first, buy a rose that's resistant naturally so you don't have to
spray it. Plant them with space so the air can move through them and
dry them out faster, and cut down on diseases. Prune them in a
way that opens the bush up if it's a type that's susceptible among the hybrid
tease typically or that way. But fortunately we have some nice resistance now coming
on hybrid tease. But all of those things help out with that black spot
disease on roses. And of course they get the powdery mildew and they have
some other diseases they can get too, But by and by, as time
has gone on, we are getting more and more disease resistant roses. I
think that's a wonderful, wonderful thing. That's one of the things with the
Earth kind. That's that's where it's not a rose breeding program. It's an
aggridife extension evaluates roses under really poor care conditions. And so when you when
you have that kind of thing, you're going to find that, you know,
you just don't deal with problems as much. If you happen to live
out southwest of Houston Enchanted Gardens, which is just it's north of Richmond toward
Katie. Go to Enchanted Gardens Richmond dot com or hunt them down on Facebook.
Got a wonderful Facebook page as well. The Lenderman family has been doing
this since nineteen ninety five. When Enchanted Garden opens, I don't even know
where to begin. They have everything you're going to find herbs, vegetables,
the antique roses, the hybrid roses, trees, they have a nice seed
selection. Every product I talk about, you're gonna find it an antique at
the Enchanted Gardens. Now. They're open on Monday through Saturday eight to five
thirty. On Sunday from ten am to four pm. I always love going
to Enchanted Gardens. They have some beautiful mixed containers now right now, and
it just reminds me that there's no reason you cannot put like the sage,
the herbs sage end with some vincas or some other things. You can mix
rosemary with other things. Go there just for inspiration, and why are you
there? Go ahead and pick up some of those things, because they've already
planted them for you if you would like to just take one home. June
is national perennial month, and boy do they have perennials. And the nice
thing about perennials and got too enchanted is it's you spend the money once and
you enjoy the annual returns on your investment. They've got that meadow sage that
I've talked about before. They've got all kinds of Salvia's. One of my
favorite perennials that are out there, Redbeccia's the Southern hibiscus. That is a
perennial that comes back year after your big dinner plate blooms. You will be
wowed. In fact, they would be a great day's afternoon run out there
to Enchanted Gardens in on the Katie side of Richmond. They are at six
four twenty FM three fifty nine. Were you listening to garden Line. We're
gonna be back here after break. Our number is seven one three two one
two fifty eight seventy four seven one three two one two five eight seventy four.
We'll be glad to answer your questions. Give Josh a call and get
on the boards. I just want to again thank the folks at wild Birds
Unlimited, Kingwood. It was a wonderful time we had out there yesterday.
I always like going into places like wild Birds because I learned something. You
know, I've been doing this thirty four years professionally thirty four years, and
you would think, well, I've heard it all. No, no,
I haven't. I learned so much about birds just visiting with the experts at
Wildbirds that day, and you know, there's wildbirds all over the place here
in the Houston area. But it is amazing the word the world of backyard
bird feeding. KTRH Garden Line. It's not necessarily endorse any of the products
or services advertised on this program. Welcome to k DRH Garden Line with Skip
Rector just watching as any well, good Sunday morning. It is a beautiful
day outside. You're listening to garden line. I'm your host, Skip Ricor,
and we are here to answer your gardening questions. Our number seven one
three two one two fifty eight seven four. Now I'll bet that you consider
yourself to be a compassionate person. I know I do. If you're looking
for a way to put your compassion into action, maybe you drive past people
in street corner and there have a sign. You're wondering, Okay, it's
this legit is it's not legit. I want to help people, but I
don't want to throw money away. I don't want to cause I don't want
to make a problem worse. Even with the way I choose to get of
Star of Hope Mission, I cannot more highly recommend a way to help people
truly and directly. We're talking about folks who, for sometimes no fault to
their own, have just run on very hard straits. But now they are
wanting to make a life for themselves. Star Hopes gives them that chance.
It allows them to have education, to learn how to get a job,
to learn how to hold a job, to recover from substance abuse, to
grow spiritually in their life in a Christ centered environment to learn all the life
management skills in some cases that I guess many of us just kind of picked
up growing up, but they didn't have that opportunity to do that. This
is a Christ centered community that's been in Houston for over one hundred years.
They have facilities for serving meals more than six thousand meals a week, So
for like two dollars and eighty cents, you can provide a meal. I
mean, it's that simple, and they have additional needs because of all the
Mull Institute of Services Star of Hope offers. Go to shmission dot org.
Shmission dot org. You can find more information there, specifically, way more
than I can talk about today, and I'd love to just spend the whole
show talking about it because I believe that much in what Star of Hope is
doing. You can also donate there, and you can find other ways that
you can even volunteer there if you would like to be a part of directly
putting your hands onto the important merciful act of helping someone get back on their
feet and make a life for them and for their children as well. I
want to head out on the phones now We're gonna go to Cyprus and talk
to Sandy this morning. Good morning, Sandy, high Skip. I spoke
with you yesterday about my weed that are growing, and then I put that
weed data on about five to six weeks ago. Okay, well, I'm
not sure if you had a chance to look at the pictures and the email
I sent yesterday, Joe, would it have come from Joe? No,
it would have come from Swatty. But I told you, Um the subject
title says weeds in the grass or something. They did not come through,
Um, Swatty Gallier at SBC Global. No, I'm sorry, I did.
I did not. I did not get them. I'll I could check,
possibly in a spam file or something like that, but I don't.
No, I don't have them there either. I'm sorry. If you would
you try let me. We could either talk about it now, or I
could put you on hold and you could resend them and we could come back
later in the show and talk about it either way. Okay, I'll try
and resend them again, okay, Um, and and see. But if
you have a chance, can I ask you about my oh chuz, Sure,
I've got them in a pot and they're getting big. Enough to it
where the pot's about maybe twenty gallon. I'm a female. I'm a girl,
so you know, my my gallons might be up. It's a huge
pot. Um and I've thought about twelve siblings that I that came up and
now they're getting real big. It's been about a month. Should I pull
some of them out so that they get I'll get some light, and um,
where can I leave them all? Yeah? You said about twenty gallons
and it's okrah right, yeah, and so I would probably leave. I'd
probably leave three or four in there, and four is probably pushing it a
little bit. Okay. Okrew gets really big, and you can if you
get too much in there, it really crowds it, and it just does
it's not as robust and it's just not going to be as productive. Make
sure also in that pot sandy, that you fertilize it with something that's going
to either release slowly over time, or that you do your fertilizations and small
amounts over time regularly to keep it, keep it vigorous in health and growing.
And then finally just watch the drying out. Don't let it dry out.
Okay, And I see a ladybug on here, So is that good
or is that not good? Well, that's a good thing. Sometimes it's
a sign you may have afids on it. That's not a big problem with
okrah, So I think the ladybug may just be checking out looking for something.
But I don't think it's a sign you have a problem. But it
definitely is good to have them around. Primarily primarily afids is what they like
to eat. They do eat some other things. Oh, okay, okay,
I have a Microlife sixty four and the green container that says for all
plants that's multi purpose. That's the one I should put it in there.
Yes, I would put two cups of that mixed. Now you've already got
it planted pre planting. I would have put two cups and mixed them into
the soil in a twenty gallon container. Just sprinkle about a couple in the
ground, kind of scratch it down around the plants and watered in. Really
good you kind of like to get if you get a little under the surface,
it's a little bit better, stays moist and because it has to a
moist and microbes break it down. Okay, I put mulch on it.
I did when I originally planted the seedling. I did what she said,
which I used the job tomato and vegetable plant feet food okay, and then
I used asa mite and warm castings when I had planted it originally. But
now I have mult on it. Can I put the microlife on top of
the MULTA? Should I move it away? Well, you can move it
away, or you could just put it on the mults and then kind of
scratch it in with your fingers and watered and really good at cough fall down
in there. But it sounds like your ocres living the life. O'Reilly if
you've done all that, so you're off to a good start. Sandy,
Yeah, thank you, thank you so much, and I'll try to refend
both pictures, all right, Thank you very much. Appreciate that call.
You know, if you live up in the Carloss area, if you're around
Iola or anywhere up in that part of the country, it's basically, you
know, to the east of Navasota, a little bit outside of town from
all the station in Bryan. Even folks up in that area. No,
we have a lot of listeners up in that area. I will tell you
about Grimes County Feed Grimes County Feed and Farm is one of those family owned
feed stores. That's the kind of feed stores we just love to talk about.
You know, they're full service. They've got everything you need. They're
going to carry these fertilizers you're hearing me talk about all the time, and
then some They got the tree hugger sprinklers too, by the way, on
hand, their garden tools and sprayers. You're gonna get your quality dog and
cat feeds. There the mosquito dunks I talk about, are there? The
pond supplies if you need aquatic herbicides or fish food twice a quarter. They
even are part of a fish stocking opportunity that you would have, hey,
and know everything else that you would expect from a quality feed store. That's
the folks at Grimes County on State Highway thirty. That's two miles west of
FM twenty two forty four, two miles west of two forty four. Stop
by and become part of their family. You're listening into guard Line our phone
number seven one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two
one two fifty eight seventy four. Well it's all right, please please well,
well, good Sunday morning. Beautiful dayni Wow Chamber of Commerce, weather
going on out there right now. You're listening to Guarden Line. I'm your
host, Skipper Richter, and we are here to answer your gardening questions.
It's seven one three two one two five eight seven four if you'd like to
call and be on the air. Now. You may have heard of Dell
Web. I guess if you've been living under a rock, you might have
been able to miss him over the years. I remember, long time ago
dell Web community. I visited out in Phoenix, Arizona, kiddo out there
with family and friends, just seeing this new wonderful place. Well, dell
Web has been doing that now for seventy years. They build communities for active
adults age fifty five and better. And their newest is in Fullscher two Moss
from downtown Fullscher on FM three fifty nine. Now, Dellweb programs and communities
are just unmatched. It's the inspired design. It's those lifestyle programs that are
designed around you. It's a community. It's not just a house to live
in. Now. The cool thing about this new community is they've contacted me
to work with them on creating a community garden on site for residents. So
in addition to all the reasons, I live in a Dellweb community, now,
as a gardener, you've got a space to guarden. You don't have
to dig up the backyard, and you can still go to a really beautiful
place and enjoy that garden. Give him a call at two eight one four
five nine zero six zero nine or go to Dellweb dot com slash Houston for
more information than to discover that Dellweb difference for yourself. I can't wait to
see that come and you know, to be completed the whole thing. I
just I know what kind of stuff Dell Web does, and for them to
do a community garden, that's going to be one heck of a cool community
guarden. I can just tell you that that for sure. You know,
we're entering that season where a storms come and they're often a concern for roofs.
People to summer, hail, storms and all kinds of other things really
take their toll in our roof. If you need roofing services, do not
do not hire the people that go like gypsies from town to town following storms
to fix your roof, because then after that storm they're gone. Talk to
somebody who's been here for years and who will stay here for years, and
who has to build and maintain a reputation to stay in business, and that
is Brinkman Roofing. Brinkman Roofing warrants or roofs for twenty five years of service.
They've been doing this for fifty years here in the community. Twenty twenty
two Better Business Bureau Pinnacle Word Winner. You can go to Brinkman Quality dot
com. That's Brinkman with two ends quality dot com or give them a call
to eight one four eight zero seventy six sixty three. By the way,
they're they're Timberline solar shingles. This isn't a panel that's on your roof.
They can get you a solar shingle that is your roof. How cool can
you get? I mean that that is really, really nice, and I
believe the sunshines are on here a little bit so you can make a little
extra electricity and the process of doing that without having those panels sitting on top
of your roof. Brinkman Roofing well worth a call. You're listening to guard
Line. We're here to answer questions, and one of the common questions that
I get at this time of year is well, it's starting to get hot,
and here in the next month or so, our tomatoes are gonna quit
having fruit because they quit setting when temperatures get up in the nineties, and
then the daytime or the daytime and then the night times you're in the upper
even upper seventies, it just it messes them up, and being able to
pollinate, they don't successfully pollinate. Then the little cherries and grapes they pollinate
okay in the heat, but the slicers especially, they just kind of quit
production. And so here you've got these plants. What do we do well,
we transition to a summer garden. Now, you can keep plants around
until try to get them to go again in the fall. But I would
recommend that when something stops producing, or when let's say, foliage diseases attack
your squash or your cucumbers and get the better of them, transitioned to some
summer vegetables. We've got a lot of good things. You know. Just
a minute ago we talked to Sandy about okra okra. Gosh, you can't
get more summer vegetable than okra, black eyed peas and southern peas do really
really well. And then we have greens, a lot of great greens for
summer weather. If you've never grown malabar before, they call it malabar spinach.
Again, I have my horticle t pep peeves, and one of them
is, why does every vegetable that's a leafy green that's not spinach have to
be called spinach. We got Malabar spinach. We got Egyptian spinach. We've
got oh there's another one. I'm the New Zealand spinach. None of those
are spinaches, but they all take hot weather, so hey, I'm good
with them. Molochia is another good one that does well in the summer.
We've got some good vegetables for the summer time. Eggplants go through the summer
pretty well. They don't set as well in the summer as like I mentioned
for tomatoes, and even peppers don't set well in the heat. But keep
those plants because you make a bigger plant as you take care of it through
the summer. When fall comes, you're going to have the highest volume of
production on a pepper or an eggplant that you have all year because you have
a bigger plant. I like to compare it. Think of a Christmas tree.
Can you hang more ornaments on a small tree or a big tree?
On a big tree? Well? Can you hang more peppers and eggplants on
a small egg plant or a pepper plant, well, a big one.
So take care of those through the summer and it will be a really successful
fall season for you. There's a lot of things we do in the summer
garden. You know you own a malt because wherever sunlight hits the soil,
nature plants a weed. I don't want to be pulling weeds in the summer,
neither do you or hoeing weeds. So keep that soil surface most,
keep it cooler. The plants will do better, these summer tough vegetables.
All they need is adequate soul moisture and they'll do really well. You'll speaking
of adequate soul moisture. I was talking about roses earlier, and you could
still plant roses, but I would not try that without a tree hugger sprinkler.
Now, if you want to go out every day with a little hose
and do it yourself, that's fine. But when you put a tree hugger
around a plant, whether it's a rose, a shrub, or a tree.
They have the seven inch size, the eleven inch diameter, and then
the fifteen inch. You can turn it on just a little bit and you
water that root cylinder that went in the ground because that's where all the roots
are for a little while. Gradually the roots start moving out into the soil
and you turn up the sprinkler. You water on a little larger area.
In a little larger area, you never have to move the hose of the
sprinkler. I mean, you just go turn it on. It's really really
simple. You can go to tree Hugger sprinklers dot com find a retailer.
But all our independent nurseries, garden centers, we talk about the hardware stores
like Ace for example, they're gonna have it. They absolutely are going to
carry, as well as all the feed stores we love to talk about on
garden Line. Treere sprinklers are one of the easiest things in town that you
can find. Well, let's head out to Richmond and we're gonna talk to
Joe. Good morning, Joe, good morning. How can we help today?
Okay, I have Saint Augustine like everyone else in my backyard. So
I used the back half of my yard which gets the most sun every year.
Along about August, well prior to augusty greens up. It's beautiful,
it's healthy, you know, when I've fertile, is it? Everything's fine?
Along about August I start getting what looks like brown patch, but it
could be something else. It's not the classic circle. But and so I
put down a fungicide, a dry funder side, and then I start spraying
it with the wet and I cannot. Every year it just beats me.
It doesn't matter how much fung de side I put down there, it just
gradually spreads, and by September October, just about half my yard is dead.
It's not dead, it's just the grass blades are dead, you know,
and kill the roots. And what is my best way to conquer this
thing? I mean, I spent one hundreds and hundreds of dollars on fungicides
and I can't seem to beat it. Yeah, Well, you need to
identify what it is. When you say it's like a brown patch, is
it circular or is it a regular? It's more a regular than circles.
I've seen brown patch and it's a pretty distinct circle, is right. It
is? Yeah, And you wouldn't have brown patch at the season you're talking
about. So I think if it's a fungus, Yeah, if it's a
fungus, it's it's probably take all root rot and putting the disease control on.
At that time, it's probably already done. It's damage. So even
if you stopped the fungus, which you're probably not going to completely stop it
at that point of the season, it still has done is damage. The
grass doesn't have roots, so it just keeps going downhill despite the fact that
you've been spraying. So it could be that that go ahead, it doesn't
have roots. How does it come back so strong in the spring, Well,
it grows as the runners go out, they put new roots down in
the ground, and so that when the I'm just I'm having to guess here
because the symptom I'm getting as the grass is dying, right, And so
there could be a lot of things. I mean, it could be that
the water sprinklers not reaching that area. It could be that the soil is
more compact it right out there. I mean, it could be a lot
of things, but I think take all is a likely possibility. That's also
chinch bug season that you're describing, So it's a possibility that it could be
chinch bugs, but I think a good diagnosis may be the best, the
best thing when we get to that season. Take all root rot is better
fought in the fall and in the springtime. You can still spray now for
it, and you may want to try that and see if that helps,
But we would rather hit it when it's most active, and that's in the
fall in spring. But we often see the dieback in summer because the demands
are so great that the lack of root system plus I gotta have more water
but I can't get it. That combination causes the grass to start going downhill
as the summer wears on. Yeah, it's just pretty much confines itself to
the back half of my yard. Okay, any well, you know,
I'm kind of grabbing a straws. Why don't you take some pictures of it.
I'm gonna I'm gonna put you on hold and have Josh give it an
email to send that to If it's not doing it now, that's fine that
you'll have the email. As you start into that, let me see some
pictures from a distance so I can see the whole scene you're talking about.
And then some up close and good sharp focus. I'll try to take it
another step forward. Other than that, you probably need to send a sample
into the plant clinic at A and M for them. They'll get it in
there, they'll culture it out on a peat tradition, look at it under
a microscope and really give you the actual answer that just a visual a visual
could it could be several things, but when you get into a plant clinic
they're gonna be able to give more specific Okay, all right, hang on,
don't don't go away. We'll put you put you on hold. You
know, if you have a little piece of property and you would love to
have a nice tractor to take care of it, you need to consider the
Landsdown moved. They have a Caboda L twenty five O one. It's their
Texas edition hydrostatic transmission. You can add things like a rotary cutter, a
box blade, or front endloader to it. If you're thinking about it,
now's the time to do it. Zero down, zero interest for eighty four
months, seven years. Landsdown in Comoda is a great combination. In this
only lasts through June thirtieth, so now's the time to get the best deal.
You're going to find on a Caboda tractor. Go to LM tractor dot
com Lansdown Moody, LM tractor dot com to find the place near you,
the landsdown near you where you can get this deal. Well our phone number
seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. Give Josh a call.
You'll be first up, actually, Joe, unless you know Donnie in
north Shore, you'll be first up, and then whoever else calls and the
meantime first up is Nikki. Good morning, beautiful Sunday morning. This afternoon,
I hope to get outside and do a little visiting in some garden centers
and maybe a little landscape work as well, or maybe house plants. My
house plants are kind of needing a little bit of help from me. But
such a beautiful day, it's hard to be inside working on the house plants.
You know, if you have not put down an azamite application on your
lawner garden this year, this would be a good time to do it.
You only need to do it once, but you get those once in the
season. You do that application and you get those minor nutrients, the trace
minerals, the micronutrients down and that provides everything that that plant is going to
need for the complete nutrient package. You know, most of our fertilizers are
a nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, base are some that all also have micro's
in them as well. But those micros, even though they're needed in tiny
trace amounts, are essential for good plant health, and that's what azamite can
supply. Now. You can find out more information if you go to Azamite
Texas dot com. But you're going to find asmite everywhere that you know.
You find the fertilizers and things that we talk about here. So when you
put a fertilizer application on in the spring, I always say that's a good
time put an asmite down. But if you haven't, now's a good time
to put an asmite down. I actually have some that I'm going to be
putting them off vegetable garden this summer. I haven't gotten around to it yet,
and I need to. But I want to make sure that the vegetables
that I eat have all the different elements that my body needs as well,
not just a few things. We can deplete our soil over time, we
need to make sure and beef it back up. And a product like azamite
can help make that a nice complete package of nutrients for plant health as well
as for people health. Let's head out to north Shore and we are going
to talk to Donnie. Hello, Donnie, Hello there, George, good
morning, Good morning. I want to discuss a couple of things with you.
Yes, I've got a sprinkler system and I bought some petunias. There
are annuals and I'm planning about four four or five inches deep about three four
inches wide, and seem like they're having a hard time when the heavy rain
come and the sun come up the face and uh eats. Okay, when
you say four or five inches deep, you don't mean that the plant is
buried underground. You just mean the bottom of the holes that you dug it
about that deep. Is that what you're saying? Right? Okay, right,
right? Yeah? I you know, making sure they stay moist but
not too saggy wet, And depending on your soil and the amount of sun
and the temperatures are having that that varies on how much you have to water
to achieve that. But that's what you're aiming for. Keep them moist,
but just moist, a little fertilizer watering them in is a good idea.
Usually after I plant something like that, I'll use some sort of a liquid
plant food for a period of time. There's a number of good ones out
there on the market. One of the ones I've been using for my plants
is one of the microlife products. They have more than one liquid. You
put in a little water and you water them in with it, and that
gives them an immediate access to those nutrients so they can you know, they
take them up. That's not a long term slow release. That's just hey,
we're trying to get these things happy and get some roots down. It's
not too hot yet for petunias. It will get too hot as we get
into the heat of summer. You may see them struggling a little, but
it sounds like the location you've got them in is pretty good. So I
would just say moderate water and a little boost of nutrients. Maybe watering with
the nutrient solution would be what I would recommend. What was the name of
the liquid I'm a listening. I'm listening to your show. You've mentioned you
can get a lot of things that a's hardware. Yeah, and in nor
Shore, you're the norse shore there on. I ten just to the east
of six ten. Right, okay, yeah, you've cut an Ace hardware
down the street. It's you Valdi hardware on your Valdi Road just right.
Yeah, that that would be a good one. And they're gonna have they're
gonna have these kind of liquid microlife products. You can go down the line
and you know, look at the different ones and pick the one out you
want, you want for your situation there. But that would be that would
be a good source. I think I would. I would do that because
that gives you a quick way, you know, put it in a watering
can, water the petunias with it. You've got other plants like that,
you can do the same, uh you know it. Microlife has the drys
for a longer term, the dry application like the sixty four and the humates
plus and all those other kind of things as well. But for this we're
wanting to get a good immediate release, okay, okay. And also planets
some I think they're called lili yes, uh huh. And when I bought
them at the store, they was beautiful with the colored flowers at the top.
When I planted them, the flower part fell off, and now the
perennials did not get any bloom. So are they seasonal? No, you
keep them, but just take care of them because they need that foliage to
replenish the bulb underground so that when they come into another bloom season, they're
good and strong and they've got all that energy to send up a stalk with
full of flowers and that that's what we want to do. So take good
care of those things. Even though they're not in their bloom season, they're
in the season where they're preparing for it. So you don't want them to
get stressed this summer. Okay, oh, okay, all right, all
right, thank you sir, Yes, sir, Donnie, thank you for
that call. I appreciate that. Yeah, you're going to find Microlife fertilizers
out there, you know, all over the place. But you can go
to Microlife Fertilizer dot com and find out more about that. And I mentioned
I mentioned the ACE to Donnie. Go to ACE Hardware dot com, go
online, and there's thirty nine ACE stores around the Greater Houston area. And
if you go to ACE Hardware dot com, cook on the store locator and
you can find the one right near you. In fact, there's going to
be more than one right near you. They've got everything you can imagine,
of course, all the gardening products that we talk about, and way way
more. I mean, the selection is wonderful. They're good, friendly associates.
I love going into ACE because I love being treated like that. I
love talking to people who know what they're talking about and can help me,
not someone who gives you this blank stare because you know they just got hired
to sell gardening products and they don't know what a gardening product is. ACE
Hardware is not that way, and you will not be disappointed in your experience
with ACE Hardware's join their reward program while you're on there. You can earn
money on what you buy. I'm part of the Roared program myself, and
enjoy that you're listening to garden Line. We are here to answer your gardening
questions. We're gonna take a little break here before you do. I just
want to tell you that Buchanans Plants and the Heights. You go to Buchanants
Plants dot Com in the Heights, They've got everything that you could possibly want.
I mean, if you want to Plemaria, they've got some of those
in look beautiful by the way they specialize in natives, but they go way
beyond natives as well pretty much. I love their houseplants selection. Oh my
gosh, that place is stocked like none I've seen. Buchanans Plants and the
Heights buchanans Plants dot Com. That's on East eleven Street. Beautiful place to
stroll through. Just a wonderful experience. Check it out and you'll know what
I'm talking about. We're gonna take a quick break here. We'll be back
to answer your gardening question. Seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy
four. Good Sunday morning. I love looking outside and seeing a day like
this. It just tells me that I know what I'm gonna be doing this
afternoon. That is going to be enjoying the outdoors in the garden, maybe
getting some inspiration from a garden center. You know. Whenever I've talked about
this before, here goes one of my many broken record phases where I just
say the same thing over and over again, because that's important. It's most
important, and that is, do not plant a plant without preparing the soil
first. It is a recipe for disaster. To do that. If you
want success, give that plant a place that it wants to be in,
a soil that's got a lot of organic matter in it, a site that
has sun, a soil that has good drainage internally and maybe a raised bed
for the surface drainage as well. Where can you find good so well Nature's
resources, I mean, you know, historically that has been the place here
in the greater Houston area, Nature's Ways up there on I forty five,
just south of Conrow about where fourteen eighty eight comes in, and Nature's Way
has got you know, they're the originator of the rose soil and the leaf
mold compost and those things we talk about so often. On Fungal Fridays,
they have ten percent off their bag products and twenty percent off their book products,
and they have a lot of good quality fungal compost on hand. That's
the only kind of product they make is quality product. At Nature's Way,
one of the largest varieties of native plants in the Houston area. They've got
two acre nursery garden center. They've got lots of native perennials and many many
other kinds of plants there at the garden center. In this summer, their
new hours in the summer or Monday through Friday eight to five and Saturdays from
eight to two, and on Sundays they're close. That's Nature's Way Resources.
You can find their bag products and many of our garden top line garden centers.
Uh, Nature's Way Resources. You're not gonna go wrong when you prepare
yourself first with something from Nature's Way. We're gonna head it out to Katie
and now we're gonna talk to John. Hello, John Well. I had
good morning Skip. I have a question for you on a couple of colias
that I have. Um they're beautiful, uh, and I've grown them before,
but then they die in the fall. But right now I have two
that I'm looking at them right now out in my backyard and they're they're in
pots. Um one is it's really good looking now, but it's got these
uh like sprouts coming out of the top, was little bluish purple. Yes.
Should I cut those blooms? Okay? Thank you? Should I cut
those off? Or keep those? You can leave them? I cut them
off, and there's not it's not gonna kill the plant to leave them.
But once they start blooming, production of those big beautiful leaves, you know,
starts to go down. How you start to get a little smaller leaves
of any growth at all. So I will cut not just the bloomstock off,
but i'll cut you know, a node or two below that is you
go up a coleus stem, You've got what we call a node and that's
where two leaves come out. And then you go up to stem and there's
another node. So go a node or two below that bloom and cut them
off there. What's going to happen is at the base of the leaves that
are below where you cut, you're gonna get two shoots that's s brought out.
And now colius, once it gets its head to bloom, it's gonna
try to keep blooming. And so you're gonna have to keep doing some trimming.
But I think that keeps it. It's freshest and every time you cut
where you had one shoot, now you have two or more, and it
just makes it a fuller, more beautiful plant. Can I replant their like?
Put the blooms in water, absolutely propagate though Okay, right, there's
nothing easier to root than a colius. Tell them well maybe, but no,
I'm serious. You can have a thumb so black that you know,
but it's well purple thumb. People can root a colias the colias at What
you want to do is cut I would say probably two or three nodes,
and the cut just below the lowest node. So take the leaves off the
bottom two nodes, so you've got a node at the bottom of the cutting,
you got a node midway, and then at the top. You leave
the leaves there and put it in any kind of glass of water, just
water, water, and it will root quickly. You'll see the roots coming.
Once you get some good roots on it, you can put it in
in the ground. You can also just stick them in soil to root,
potting soil or something. But I like to do it in water because you
can kind of see it happening and oh yeah, cut a bunch of them
so you can plan them together, you know, make another container with maybe
four or five rooted cuttings starting off. Okay, I appreciate it. Thank
you, you bet, thank you appreciate that call. Hey, do you
live out in the Kingwood area. If you do, you are rich with
garden centers, the Warrens Garden Center and the Kingwood Garden Center to wonderful places
to visit. Kingwood Garden Centers on Stone Hollow Drive, Warrens Garden Centers in
North Park driving Kingwood by the way, I said, if you live in
Kingwood, if you live in Humble, a Tasca Seed, a Porter or
Valley Ranch, New Caney, anywhere out in that direction, those are places
well well worth visiting. They have some beautiful combo planters. That's one of
my favorite things that they have. Also saw the other day they got a
bunch of citrus in too, and so if you want a citrus tree,
now's a good time to get one. And while are you there, pick
up their heirloom soils citrus soil to go with it. So bring them both
home. Maybe you're going to put them in a big container, you know,
grow a myer lemon or a type of lime tree for example, or
even a satsuma orange can be grown in a very large container. Or you
going to grow them in the ground. You can use thatt cent soil to
amend the soil and create a good spot for them. Warrens and Kingwood Garden
Centers out in Kingwood is a place you definitely needed to visit. They're both
open seven days a week, so today be a good day to go out
there, take a look love going out to Warren's Garden Center. Really cool
stuff. Well, you're listening to Garden Line. Our phone number is seven
one three, two one, two five eight, seven four fifty eight seventy
four or two one two KTRH. If that makes it a little easier for
you to remember, we soon coming up here for too long. You're going
to have Patrick from Verdant Tree Farms talk to us about palm species. And
if you've got a palm question, I hope during the eight o'clock hour you
will give us a call and I would like to get Patrick here to help
answer your questions. He is the palm expert, definitely more so than I
am. And any kind of palm questions, you have any issues going on,
maybe you want to put a palm in, what's a good one,
what's a hearty palm? And so on, Let's talk to Patrick about palm
trees, because here's our opportunity to learn from someone who really knows what he
is talking about. I uh, you know, when I'm doing the radio
show down here and then I'm working as Agrolife extension up into College station during
the week, I find that it's hard to get around to making my landscape
like I wanted to look. In fact, the term the cobbler's kids go
barefoot is applies horticulturally sometimes at my house and when when I was looking at
my landscape there that I was thinking, you know, I need help here.
I mean it just it needs number one, it needs some redesign,
just so it has that asthetic beauty. Uh. The analogy I like to
use is um, if you gave me Rembrandt's paint and Rembrandt's canvas, you
would get something that looked like a four year old finger painted on paper.
Right. I am not a Rembrandt when it comes to design. But Peerscapes
is Jason Garrity and his team there. You know that they know they know
how to design, they know how to beautify. Maybe you got a little
simple thing like I just want some friar beds in front of the house.
Maybe you want a total renovation. Maybe you want hardscapes or walkways. You
got a poorly drained area, they can fix that for you. Peerscapes dot
com, peerscapes dot com or two eight one three seven zero five zero six
zero give them a call and let your beautiful be turned into amazing. They
can do that for sure. Let's head out to Sugarland. We are going
to talk to Prayful. How are you this morning, Prayful and how can
we help? Oh? I'm I appreciate you taking my call. Sure,
I have a two three questions. Actually I was trying last weekend. I
couldn't get a hold of you. Anyway. I'm looking for some kind of
organic viticulo my garden. You know, I pull out the weed and they
just keeps coming back right of way. Okay, if it is an annual
weed, not a perennial, you can use. There's a number of different
ds. Some have vinegar as the ingredient. Some have something called herbicidal soap.
You know, we have insecticidal soap that kills bugs but doesn't hurt plants.
There's other types of fatty acid chain soaps that will fry the heck out
of a plant, and those are herbicidal soaps. That's another option. We
have soaps that are made from a number of other compounds that are considered organic.
And if you if you're out in the Sugarland area, if you'll go
to one of our enchanted Our enchanted nursery, enchanted gardens CHENDI forms that that
you're you're going to be able to find those products here. Also in Sugarland
out the plantation ace is out there pretty close to you. There's some other
aces and they are going to have a wide variety of products, including the
kinds of soap that I'm talking about. You just you just want to make
sure that just tell them what I want is organic, and they're going to
be able to lead you to that. But you're you're not very far from
the plantation ace. I'd probably i'd give that one start. No, definitely,
we're's a plantation, yes, and I'm here in music, so I'll
tell you white. If you want to hang on, I'll try to finish
up your call when we come back from break, or if you'd like to
give us a call back, we can do that during the eight o'clock pardon
I'd wait for you, all right, all right, take care our phone
number seven one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two
one two fifty eight seventy four. Just want to remind you we're gonna have
the palm expert on in the next hour, so if you got any palm
questions. Then we'll be the time to give us a call. We're going
to spend the whole hour visiting with Patrick from Verdant Tree, so we'll hope
you hang around and be here for that. Ktr H Garden Line does not
necessarily endorse any of the products or services advertised on this program. Welcome to
ktr H Garden Line with Skip rictor Trip. Just watch him as woolsack ticking,
not a SI. Well, good morning, Wow, what a morning,
beautiful, beautiful outside. You're listening to the Garden Line. I hope
you're having a good Sunday morning. I'm your host, Skip Richter, and
our phone number if you'd like to give us a call is seven one three
two one two five eight seventy four. Now I've got my own little loose
flash here. We I've had to move Patrick to a future hour coming up
this morning, probably next hour. And so all these palm questions that I
was inviting you to call in with, well just hang on to them one
second. We're gonna we're gonna come to come to that. But I'd rather
I'd rather have Patrick here when we when we deal with the palm questions.
But he'll he'll he'll be available to do that. We just had to make
that move. Sorry for that inconvenience for all of you. So, if
you live up in let's say the Magnolia FM twenty nine seventy eight area,
you know, north North Houston up there near just minutes away from Graham Parkway
and Highway to forty nine, Spring Creek Feed Center is a place you need
to visit Spring Creek Feed Well, I'm going to need your drive up.
It's like, Wow, that's cool. I wish I had that place that
of structure at my house. It looks like it just a what do they
call them barn dominiums, I mean, beautiful place. They've got all the
fertilizers we're talking about, you know, all the different lines. They've got
all the garden and lawn supplies and pond supplies that you might need, including
herbicides, fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, its exticides. You get the idea
friendly, courteous staff to greet you. When I walked in there, I
mean I felt like I was getting the grand welcome and they did not know
who I was walking on me. Wasn't like you're some radio hos. I
mean I was just a person coming off the street and they greeted me in
that way. And that's the kind of experience you're going to get when you
go to Spring Creek Feed. Now, Okay, that's nice to be greeted,
But what else do they have? Well, they got pet foods,
They've got Victor Purina, all the pet foods. Are gonna want livestock feeding
products, wildlife feed if you're feeding wildlife. They also have their own frequent
buyer program on select brands of pet foods. So if you're going to buy
some pet foods, sign up for that. You can get that kind of
discount. Dean, Hey, do you need shavings? Do you need betting
materials for your plants? Are you a FA or four H member? Are
you military? Are you senior citizen? Well, there's a discount for all
those groups there. They'll leaven special order things if you if you need them,
they don't have them, they'll special order them for you, and so
you can do that. They also have a delivery service. I mean,
what more could you want. This is Spring Cree Feed Center. It's in
Magnolia on FM twenty nine seventy eight, just minutes away again from Graham Parkway
in Highway to forty nine. If you live anywhere near that area. This
is your feed store. Well, our phone number if you'd like to give
us a call seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. We're
going to head back out here to sugar Land and continue our conversation with Preyful.
Preyful, where were we when we dropped off there? Okay? Yeah,
I was asking about the vehiculer typically to control the weeds that pull them
out. I put a big plot February and then I add some pine bark
multies that typically good or is it? I'm bark mulch is fine? What
kind of garden is this? Is this flowers, vegetables? What it's mostly
shrubs? Oh? Okay, okay, good, Well a shrub area,
yeah, any kind of a course mulch. I like the shredded hardwood mulches
myself. Are those work really well? They lock in well together, They
don't tend to float as much if you do get excess water moving across.
But any kind of an organic matter on the surface is blocking the sunlight from
hitting the soil. It's protecting the soil from crusting from rain. It's protecting
it from erosion. It's keeping the temperature moderated. All the mini mini mini
benefits of mulch. And by the way, when you mulch preyful, don't
take the old mulch out. Just throw a new mulch on top of it
if you need more. You just want to maintain it thick enough to where
it does all the things I was talking about. Sun can't hit the soil
and you out the old one flushed. Do you say that again? Pick
out the old must do not take out the old one. You put the
new mult Think about the forest, you know the forest, Nobody rakes the
old leaves off before the new leaves drop. You want the new leaves on
top of the old leaves because those old leaves are decomposing and making the soil
better and better. And that's how it is in your shrub beds. Just
let that old malts rot. That's it's a good thing that it's rotting.
It's turning the compost for you, and you just have to add more on
top. Yeah. I don't like the fabrics. For a little while they
work, but then they don't. And when you get dirt on top of
them, and we'd start to come through, then they're a pain in the
neck. And so I would just I would just do what they do and
what the forest does when you go about your mulching, and I think it'll
it'll do really well. Yeah, okay, good. And that question is,
and I lost you shrubs you know doing the freeze? Yes, So
what do you recommend for outdoor shrubs you know which normally survived the freeze like
what we normally get now lately? Let me ask what do you tell me
about what you want out of a shrub? Do you want it evergreen?
How big do you want it to be? Do you need very big?
In the backyard? So I don't want too big? Okay? Do do
you? Is it a sunny area or is it kind of shady? Well?
Half of the garden is sunny and half of them is covered by the
oak tree from the neighbor. Okay, Well, as you get into as
you get into a little shadier areas, sometimes people will use the Japanese you
in that area. It's yew, but they get a little taller. You
can trim them and keep them a little smaller, but it is going to
get a little taller. But it's one of our more shade tolerant. Then
then we have um gotten you were saying that you want it to be cold
hearty, right, not not to die back. So so that takes out
a couple of the other good shrubs for shady areas and the sun. You
just have a lot of a lot of opportunities, a lot of good shrubs
that can do there. There's a number of shorter types of holes that can
do well in a shade. Here. Boxwoods do well in a in a
sunny area. They need sun. The hollies in the sun are in a
partial shade, a partial shade area for them. You know, it's hard
to pick out plants for people because there's so many that it's kind of like,
I don't, I don't. I can say a plant and then you
would go look at it and go I don't like that, and so I
you know, it's kind of hard to pick out. But let's see where
are you. You're in Sugarland. You know you are so close to enchanted
gardens just north of Richmond, up in Katie direction from Richmond. I would
go there because there you can walk through, you can see them. They
know what they're talking about, so you tell them like I need it for
this, I need it for that. And they're going to have a number
of shrubs that will do really well for you. And I would totally trust
if they tell you this is a good shrub, it is a good shrub.
And because that's all they carry as plants that do well here and so
that that is probably the easiest. If you want a real dwarf shrub.
The dwarf your pans are really nice. They don't go in too much shade.
They do, but they lose their density. But in the sun they
would do just fine. Hey, I'm gonna have to go to another break,
but I hope that was helpful for you, and I do really appreciate
you. Give them me a call today, prayful. Thank you very much,
our phone number seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four.
Please the feet dence in the twist. That's okay, I'm blowing you one
bit. Well, you're listening to Garden Line and we are here to answer
your gardening questions. Let me give you your phone number and give us a
call if you're interested in talking about whatever related to the garden. That's seven
one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two one two
fifty eight seventy four. We're gonna start now by going out to Katie and
talking with Joseph. Good morning, Joseph, good morning. How are you
doing well? I'm well, thank you. What's up today? Good?
So, I am considering starting a vegetable garden in my backyard and out where
I'm at, I have probably like a an inch level of grass, an
inch level of dirt, and then it is clay hard clay till to the
core of the earth. And I know that I'm going to have to dig
into the clay to put down dirt so I can do this, but I
don't know how far down I need to dig in order to create eight this
garden. So I wanted to see if you had any thoughts on that.
Well, you can, you can improve the soil you have and put a
garden in by using compost, and I would also consider maybe something like the
heirloom soils, veggie and herb bed mix. That's a that's a very good
mix for that as well. If it were me, and pretty much you
know, I used to build gardens in the soil all the time, and
there's nothing wrong with that. It's a lot of work. Um, but
I like putting a raised box down on the ground and gardening in that.
That gets a garden up a little higher. It's easier to deal with.
You can use mulches in between the walkways to keep it weed free. Uh.
And if you've heard this show for long, you know that we love
vego beds. The Vigo vego beds. They're a metal bed that's that's treated
to prevent the metal from from corroding and then they've got the pain on them.
They're they're beautiful. The color options are nice. They're bgeler so if
you want to make a long, skinny one, if you want to make
a square, if you want to make a C shape, you build it
like you want to build it. They're they're easy to put together, very
fast too to put together, so I would probably sorry, go ahead,
Sorry that was echo as an e Charlie. No no v ego as in
like saying lego, but with a v vego v ego. And they're here
in Houston. You can go to I think it's a vegogarden dot com.
Some of our garden centers will sell them. I know you're in Katie.
I've seen them down it in chanted gardens before down that way they carry them
as well. But you can go to vegogarden dot com and when you see
what I'm talking about, I think you'll be as impressed as as I am
with them. But to take a look you kind of get the idea of
what I'm talking about. You can get them eleven inches high. I think
they have a seventeen and you can go up up above that even if you
want to if they're sitting on soil, even the soil you describe to me,
if they're sitting on it, eleven inches is deep enough to have success
gardening. You can go deeper. It brings a garden up a little bit
higher and whatnot. But that's just the option. The other thing I like
about them, Joseph, is they they last forever. I mean, it's
like twenty years plus that they'll be there, guaranteed to las. And you
know with wood and whatnot, you know, you can use cinder blocks and
other things that center blocks will last. But oh my gosh, that's the
visual of it. And then the fact that they take up so much to
your garden for the sides of the bed. When you have an adien center
block. I like Vego for that reason, So check them out and see.
I mean, you can go right in the garden and just mix a
lot of stuff in the ground and build up a raised bed. But again
it's a lot of work. It's usually to put together a box, set
it on the ground, and then just fill it up and then you're done.
You know, occasionally, anytime you have a garden, you were using
a lot of composts, and when you use organic matter, it decomposes a
way. You may have noticed a pot on the patio was full of soil,
and a year or two later it's like half full of soil because that
soil has oxidized or decomposed away. And that's going to happen in any bed
too. So you're you're you're adding soil over time to keep a bed at
the level you want it. But that would be true whether you had a
box around it or not. So I go through a lot of coffee.
Our coffee grounds good for mulch as well or for mixing in with the soil.
They are they are I hear different things, yes and no and maybe
and no. They're good. They're just good. I mean, I wouldn't
put them eight inches deep in the garden, of course, but I would
I would always add coffee grounds. They are a source of nitrogen. They
are a source of organic matter. They are a little acidic, which is
actually a good thing. A lot of our soils you get out on these
clay prairies around here, and they can be a little high on the pH
But they're not going to make your soil to acidic, that's for sure.
But if anything that may help a little bit. Yeah, they're a good
thing. And I like to get around and say your plants will grow faster
because the caffeine will keep them up all night. They just grow and grow
and grow. I doubt it you buy that, but anyway, it's well.
It at least gave me a chuckle. I need a drum and a
single. I need Josh to play a drum and a symbol sound effect for
those super super shot. Yeah, it's a corny joke. There's a collective,
very much collective. Take care of Joseph. You take care. Hey.
If you have any interest in bee keeping, you need to go check
out the bee supply out in Dayton, that's north and east of Houston.
It is it is the source of everything you need to know about keeping bees.
Maybe you decide you know, bees are not for you, but I
think you'll like them. If you're a gardener, your garden will be more
productive when you have your own hives. You just have more bees right there.
And when you get pollination, the fruit set is better and that's why
we get more production from them. And you know, every time there's a
seed pollinated in any fruit that would include things like a squash, the growth
of that thing is plump and normal. When they don't go pollination, you
get misshapen fruit and so on. Lots of reason have bees. But if
the Bee Supply you can get beginner classes and they're held twice a month out
there in Dayton. You can it's kind of hands on. You get some
classroom and instruction. But they have hives, or you can go out and
look at them and you can learn from them. If you don't want to
have bees, go on one of their honey tours. Those are free and
they have them let's see once a month. I believe, And I said
there free. I believe that's right. If there's a charge, it's a
very minor charge. Go to the Bee Supply dot com and know those honey
tours. Take kids along, you know, take a group, a Scout
group, a homeschool group, whatever. You'll get to taste a bunch of
different kinds of honey and experience the difference and different kinds of honey. You'll
get to take the tour. You'll get a little little bit of a lecture
or short presentation in the classroom to learn about bees. I went. I
did it myself. It is absolutely fascinating what you can learn out there.
Let's head out to Southwest Houston. We're going to talk to Caroline. Wello,
Caroline, good morning, Good morning. You had mentioned earlier that there
are several different kinds of climbing spinach, or several different kinds of malabar.
Yes, and a year or so ago I had the red stem malabar,
which I loved, Yes, but I couldn't find that at Southwest Fertilizer.
This year all I had was listed as big round leaf climbing spinach. Okay,
didn't say it was malabar, So I understand that it'll be different,
Yes, but it doesn't seem to have any of the little tendrils that line
around as they're as they're climbing. Okay, And I wondered if you're familiar
with the big, big round leaf. I am. It's a malabar.
It's one of the bread There's the red leaf malabar, the red stem actually
malabar, and then there's the green stemmed malabar, and then there's other there's
other cultivars or varieties of it, and one is big round leaf and the
leaves are a little bigger and they're a low rounder, but it also are.
Yeah. Once malibar starts off almost like a little bush sort of thing,
and then it just begins to vine. And when it vines, the
vines themselves circle and climb. They don't have like a tendril or something reaching
out like some plants to do. It. Just the vine goes around things
and it works well. It never gets too hot and humid for malabar.
Right. Well. I tried to look it up online and I couldn't find
any information. So I'm just being It's just it's almost like it's just growing
in the ground. It's not reaching out to climb anywhere. But maybe I'm
just wait, I need to wait. It will and you know, with
mine I will often. You know, it's fine to have them climb,
but I will often just pinch mine, like when shoe comes out, I
pinch it. It's part of harvesting it. Take the tender end of the
shoot with the leaves on it, and it makes more shoots and more,
and you almost like you make it a little bushy plant by pinching it.
And that way if you want to control how big it gets, that's one
way you can do that. There. It's just two different options. Both
are great to do. Oh good, because the red stem that I had
before said to you, pinch it off and it makes it grow more.
Yes. So so with this little round leaf, I'll just start I'll just
start harvesting a few that are coming out because they're real big. Yeah they
are. And you're gonna see it's going to hit a point where it starts
to send out a shoot and you realize, okay, it's ready to get
going here, and that's when I would do the pinching of it it.
Oh okay, if you want to wait till then, yeah, wonderful.
And I really like the way you answer my questions before I even have them.
Okay, well, because you mentioned earlier, if you've got I have
bell peppers and I have that that are not doing too well right now,
but so you've already said go ahead and take care of them, keep them
through the hot summer and they'll be good for the fall. Absolutely, Yes,
the best bet bepper season is in the fall. I've had halopenias at
Christmas, and I mean it looked literally like a Christmas tree of the red
HELIPI was sinking, Oliver, Yeah, do you got to do that?
Hey, Carolyn, thank you so much. Uh huh bye bye, all
right, I appreciate that. Answering questions. Oh my gosh. Well,
if you are interested in a community for active adults age fifty five and better,
that is Dellweb. Now there's a Dellweb community two miles from downtown full
show on FM three fifty nine, and I'm helping them build a community garden
out there, helping design and create it. I cannot imagine anything better than
a Dellweb community with all the good stuff it has. In addition to that,
you get a community garden with the deal. Wow, you need to
check him out. Dellweb dot com, slash Houston or two eight one four
five nine zero six zero nine. Nikki, that lady said that, I
answer her questions before she asks him. Remember remember the amazing carnal for Johnny
Carson. He'd put a I've talked to you about this before, helped himself,
and he'd say something like mild, you know. Or he'd say something
like he named three presidents one time. There was George Washington, Abraham Lincoln,
and Jimmy Carter. And he opens the envelope. He says, name
three presidents that I've done anything lately. It bless his heart. But anyway,
he was hilarious. Oh he was his jaif well a gift. And
then when people would uh at his joke, he would say something like,
may the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits? And he boy,
he could do a deadpan look back at like nobody else. Oh my goodness,
what a talent. All right, what's happening. We're going to talk
about a new candidate for mayor. Well, good Sunday morning. You are
listening to Garden Line. I'm your host, Skip Prictor, and we're here
to talk to you about whatever you're interested in. We're about to have we
are about to have the opportunity talked with Patrick from Verdant Tree Farm and we're
gonna talk palm trees today. We've got a lot of questions about palms.
If you have a question about palms, give us a call. Be patient.
Josh will may ring a bit, but Josh will get your phone call
and to get you on the board so you can ask your question. We
want to take advantage of the opportunity to visit with Patrick about all kinds of
things. Palms. Really cool to be living in an area where we can
grow palms, and that is exactly where we are. If you're interesting fertilizing
your lawn for summer, you're not going to do better than a product called
nitrofosst Summer Essentials. Now, there's a number of different things that are part
of the Nitrofoss package, but certainly the summer essentials fertilizers are and past control
is what you need. Now when we do that, we're talking about a
fertilizer like the silver bag. You know, the Nitrofoss Silver bag is the
one. We've talked about it a number of different times before. But when
we put down a superturf product like that, you are going to get there's
slow release of nutrients over time, slow release of nutrients over time. That's
the super turf. That silver bag, it's going to feed for weeks and
weeks up to twelve weeks or more depending on you put it down and you
get a gradual release. So it's not just like immediately here at grows real
fast. Now we've got a mo more. Now we have a more shallow
root system that's going to be require more watering. Now we have a plant
that is so lush that it's more attractive to the gray leaf spot problems,
to the chinch bug problems. Now you're spreading it out. This will take
care of you through the summer. And you can get it anywhere you find
nitro FoST products which are all over the place. Maybe Fisher's Hardware if you're
out in Laport, if you're over in Lake Jackson there's lug Jackson Hardware and
Clute. Go out to Montgomery to Gem's Hardware. Maybe up in the woodlands
to Shades of Texas for example, even growers outlets and Willis. You're not
gonna have trouble finding nitrofost products. And that summer Essentials program is a good
one. You know the other things included in it, or an insect control
and a fire act control. But we want to focus on those utilizers.
They will provide the green lawn you want without overdoing all the nitrogen just at
one point in time. Nitrofiles, Summer Essentials. I really had a good
time out at Wilberg's Unlimited yesterday. We were visiting with a lot of you
guys who are listening. Thank you all for stopping by and answering your questions.
If you are a gardener, you also need to be interested in backyard
birding. You know that we do gardening for the beauty and for the ambiance
in the outdoor environment, whether it's a vegetable garden, a herb garden,
a flower garden, just taking care of the yard. But with backyard birding
there are so many opportunities. I was visiting with the folks out in Kingwood
at the wild Birds there by the way. You can get wallbirds seven different
locations here in town. Go to WBU dot com forward slash Houston and you
can find the one near you. There's one out in Katie, there's one
over in Kingwood, Cypress, Pearland, bel Air, West Houston, and
the one in clear Lake is the newest story that they have visiting with them,
I learned so much about birds, the different kinds of seeds and what
different kinds of birds eat and what you're gonna find. I'm gonna put this
on our Facebook page. What you're gonna find is a lot of the cheap
bird seeds around are filled with those I call them red beebies. That's the
milo. It's a type of sorghum, and they just don't do The birds
don't like them. They kick them off on the ground. I mean they'll
eat them eventually, but you want to go with the feed for the birds
that you want. And they have a no mess feed too. You don't
get all the debris on the ground. You just everything in the bag is
stuff that the birds eat, and that is a way to go when you're
in wild birds. Check out their feeders, check out their birdhouses, check
out their books, and especially visit with the folks there because what you're gonna
find is they know a lot about birding. Well, we're fortunate this morning
to have Patrick on the phone from verdap Tree Farm. Patrick, welcome,
good to have you. Good morning we are we are looking forward to picking
your brain on palm. Now. If you were to pick my brain on
palm trees, that would be called slim pickings. But I know that that
you absolutely can tell us all kinds of things. And you guys at verdont
I mean you're kind of like the the primary most what is it palm?
I was gonna say floriferous, that's flowers. But you have more options with
palms than just about any place you can find. We do, we do.
And then when you start talking about we have twenty acres inside Houston,
Yeah, at our Barker Cypress location, that's a lot of palm trees.
That is a lot of palm trees you got. And by the way,
before I forget to say this, you've got Barker Cypress, and down in
Appareland you got the place on Broadway, and up in the Heights you've got
the place on Yellow at Eye ten. Yes, sir, So there's more
than one location where you can get them. And you know when we talk
about ver down all the time, we talk about that you can go pick
your tree out and you can tag it. You guys come and you know
how to plant it. Could let's just start off what is different about,
you know, planting a palm tree than just planting any kind of tree.
I mean, they all go in a hole in the ground. But there's
there's times of the year that are better for palm planting. There's the ways
that you make sure the palm tree stays there. Can you elaborate on that?
We can now, So palm trees are a little bit different than a
regular tree. While a regular tree and there I say it this way is
everything has a better time right in the year. You can really plant them
year round trees, palms, flowers. Yes, it's just the water and
maintenance care that goes into them that depicts weather, putting it in the middle
of summer versus putting it in the fall. Right, Okay, you know
I ask you this long question right before we have to go to break.
I'm hearing in my ear that I've got to take a break, so let's
come back to that. But I also want to talk about the difference in
hardiness. And we've asked folks. If any of you are listening and you've
got a palm question, please call in seven one three, two, one
two fifty eight seventy four. Well, good morning, you are listening to
garden Line on a beautiful morning to be outside We are fortunate here to have
Patrick from Verdant Tree Farms, and we're talking initially about palm, so we're
gonna talk about all kinds of trees here before we're done. But i'd ask
you this, you know, wide open question before we had to go to
break but talking about times to plant, and I think you were kind of
leading to that, you can plant any tree at any time if you do
it right. I've always found it interesting that with trees you want a good
sized root system to kind of match the top to some degree, a bigger
container for a bigger tree. But I seem's going out there and there's just
a little tiny box and a giant palm. Talk to me about that.
So with palm trees, Palm trees are a little bit different than a regular
tree. They don't need to have their root systems out to the drip line
or what we would consider the drip line of the palm tree the drip line
of a regular tree. While that's great for a regular tree, that's not
necessarily the case with a palm. Palm roots systems usually are gonna be anywhere
from three and a half, depending on the sides of the tree, three
and a half feet to maybe four four and a half feet and then likewise
deep, so they kind of stay in this big ball. So one of
the things that when we dig up palm trees, there's a couple ways to
do it, but like like a madule or a sylvester, when we dig
up a madule or a sylvester, we use a trencher, So we trench
the four corners of the tree and we the tree out. So now we
have this really nice route ball that is significantly smaller than what you would think
needs to support that tree. So now you've got a couple of different size
rutballs. You've got some people and we don't. We don't grow everything,
so we have to branch out and we have to bring in palms from other
people. So while we grow a lot of trees, Sylvester's, madules,
mediterraneans, Mexican fans, you know, we can't grow everything. Some people
when they go to dig up a tree, they'll dig them up and they
do smaller trees. Well, when you do or smaller ruble, when you
do that really small route ball, if you look at the top of the
head, you have a small head. Okay, so that a lot or
like say balls and Mexican fans. You crop the head, so you trim
it way down where it's very very close knitted to the center maristem, and
then you come across the top and you chop off the top of that tree.
Okay, and then that allows that new root system, which can't support
all that foliage to kind of get in, give it some nutrients that it
needs, but still provide nutrients, and then plant it and then it roots
itself out. Reason sometimes you see people like tie up the palm tree and
keep the leaves together to cut down on evaporate or loss of water through the
leaves or what's what's going on there? Nopes. What that is is so
the maristem in the center of the tree, where the new fraunds grow out,
that gets very that'll go through like shock. Okay, So when that
goes through shock, it gets very weak. So when you have an open
head, that very center could start to lean on you. Okay. If
that tree starts to lean too far on you because it's going through shock,
it could break and damage the maristem, in which case you won't get new
fraunds. You'll only Yeah, because for most palms, you have one living
bud and that's at the top of the trunk, right, So it's four
to five on some of the bigger trees. Okay, So it doesn't usually
only shoot one out at a time. Sometimes you'll have one six inches out
and you'll have another one start, or you'll have one that's seven or eight
inches not fully opened, and you have two or three more that starts.
So it really depends on the nutrients the tree, whether the tree really needs
to produce a lot because it has a small head, or whether the tree
is already big and fat and nice and happy. It's not going to produce
a lot of fronds because it doesn't need to really grow interesting. All right,
Well that is that is really interesting stuff. And you guys have a
lot of different palms. What would you say, are like two or three
of the heartier palms that you would if someone was concerned about hardiness, Maybe
you're gonna take one up to Lake Conra or something. Sure, what would
be the heartier palms that you would recommend? Two or three? So we
can kind of go backwards. You've got Texas say Ball, and Florida Sayball.
You're going to be in the lower single single digits for cold weather.
Okay, your next one in line with that that we sell is going to
be your Pindo that's going to be somewhere between nine and twelve. Yeah.
I grew up with Pindo palms, jelly palms, jelly palms, and then
your next cold heartiness one is going to be that mule palm somewhere between twelve
and fifteen. Okay. Here's why I say between twelve and fifteen with the
mule pumps specifically, because it's part Queen and part Pindo, So each and
everyone is spliced together by him. Okay, so they're not naturally occurring.
That's the reason why it's a mule mules. You can't get seeds to raise
other mule palms. No, No, it's kind of like a donkey and
horse mule petic. It's kind of like two parents having a bunch of kids.
The kids aren't exactly alike, are they, right, So depending on
how much Queen or how much Pindo is in it is going to depict how
cold hearty the window is. Okay, interesting, I wonder if they're ever
going to come up with tissue culture for those palms. So you could pick
one that's just you know, whatever, and make them all they like.
That'd be nice cookie cutter. Well, that that is good information. Anything
on keeping a palm tree hardier. I mean, is the way you fertilize
or care for it or anything have anything to do with heartiness or is it
pretty much just species? No? No? Um. So so let's step
back. Do you remember the freeze three years ago? Okay? You remember
we were wet, yes, so we had a lot of precipitation. Yes,
So what happened. Why did a lot of those palm trees survive twelve
ten to twelve degrees? Okay, and come back versus this last freeze that
we just had and trees didn't survive. Why is that precipitation is your difference
there? Okay, So when the trees were wet that cold ice weather actually
created a barrier for the rest of that cold. Interesting. So watering a
tree beforehand, um, spraying it down before then covering it up, then
doing some extra work. Those are those are good factors and things to know.
And then we have a whole thing I've put I put it on Facebook
for wrap it, what to wrap it with? Ink lights, how to
wrap it's cloth and then you can come back and do some plastic. You
have that on face on your Facebook pack that on Facebook tree good good too.
Yeah you mentioned the Texas SABLEU. I spend a lot of time during
the week up in College Station and there are a lot of problems up there.
And when we got to seven in February twenty one in our area and
we saw the difference between hardy and not hardy, and Texas Sables came through
like champions. I mean it was it was really nice. Well, I'm
gonna stop and take a quick call. We got a couple of calls on
the line, not a palm call, so let's just see what we can
do. Okay, And folks, if you do have palm questions, I
feel free to call in. We're gonna take a call here from Jaim.
I'm in parallel. Hello, Jim. I've got two questions, kip okay.
Number one, I want to use celsius uh herbicide. I've got a
brand new lawn that just put in just like six weeks ago. It's uh
uh Zorasia Palisades got it and I see it in various places. Some real
tall suggress coming up actually, hey, Jim, I need you to turn
that radio off because it's causing you to cut out. I'm losing connection with
you here. Okay. One second, all right, I made the mistake
of I made the mistake of walking outside without my phone. There you go.
All right, that's that's that may have been why we were cutting out
there. It absolutely was. I do that all the time. So what's
your what's your what's your Celsius question? The Celsius question is I see a
lot of very tall shoots of grass that I suspect or weeds, Okay.
And it looks also like there may be areas where some crab grass is trying
to come out. Okay. Celsius is not gonna not gonna be your product
for that. It's better on the broad leaves. The reason we Celsius is
because it's so helpful to go into hot weather and have something that doesn't just
hammer your grass when the weather gets hot. For broad leaf control, and
Celsius will do that, we can get up in the lower nineties and not
worry about it. But as far as grass control in grass, you're just
up a creek. Other than putting a pre emerging out to prevent those grass
seeds that are weeds from having come up in the first place. Okay,
all right, well it's too late to do that. I have one other
question. I wipe for the commercial. All right, just a minute,
we'll be right back. Hey. Our number is seven one three two one
two fifty eight seventy four. We're visiting with Patrick from Verdant Tree Farms today
talking about trees in general. Have been talking about palms a little bit.
I think we'll spread out and get into some other tree questions. Have you
got any of those? Give us a call seven one three two one two
five eight seven four. In the meantime, those of you that are on
whole right now, Charlie will be trying to get to you. It'll be
sometime into the next segment here, so just be patient with us. We
have the opportunity to visit with a very knowledgeable guest. We want to take
advantage of that time as best we can. Appreciate you guys listening to Garden
Line. We look forward to coming to you after our news break, So
hang on. In the meantime, get ready with your palm questions and with
your general tree questions, and we will hit Patrick with them. When we
come back. KTRH Garden Line does not necessarily endorse any of the products or
services advertised on this program. Welcome to KTRH Garden Line with Skip rictor just
watching as well. Good morning. You are listening to garden Line on a
beautiful Sunday morning, and we are fortunate this morning to have Patrick from Verdant
Tree Farms here to talk about things trees. We were talking about palms for
a little bit here and Patrick, I when I picture a palm tree,
and I think a lot of people are like this. You picture this tropical
desert island and there's sand everywhere. Now, welcome to Houston. When there's
black clay everywhere. How do palms do here in our clay? And any
tips or anything's to be aware of that, you would suggest people that are
considering a palm or that have a palm. Sure, so a couple of
things. So when we go to plant palm tree and we start digging for
the hole, you know, we can't tell you that that clay is going
to drain or not. So one of the things that we do when we
install the tree, we put a two inch PBC pipe in the hole.
It's notched so that's not so you can water the tree at least, don't
water the tree that way. That so you can drop a stick down in
the tube and you can pull it out and you can measure if the bottom
of that three sometimes three to four foot hole and we have to dig for
some of these trees, you can tell if there's any water. So that's
a good idea. Yeah, it's it becomes an underground bathtub and a clay
hole, doesn't it. Right. So a lot of people will look at
the tree and say, and my tree looks sad, it doesn't look healthy.
Let's water the tree. That's the go to. That's what everybody,
you know. And then they call us two weeks later, Hey, my
tree, you know I've been watering it every day. I've been doing this
and doing this. So that's the first question out of my mouth is how
much water sitting in your tube? And usually six to ten inches, if
not all the way full is the answer. So we try to educate people
when we go in to dig that hole that hey, look you're going to
be in clay. This tree right here could be next to a tree five
feet away, whether it's a tree or a pump five feet away. One
hole may hold water and the other hole may drain just fine. So each
tree has to be monitored individually. This is also the reason why we tell
everybody the best thing for watering the tree is adjustable bubblers, okay, because
you can turn one tree down and the other tree is still getting the same
amount of water that it needs because it drains just fine. So that's a
little irrigation pipe that comes up has a knob on it that you can do
that with. That's what you mean by the adjustable boat. Yes, yes,
good, Well, that's good. That's good advice, because yeah,
it isn't all the same. And boy, when we submerge plant roots and
they can't get oxygen, they get in big trouble. Palm trees are yeah.
True. Hey, I had Jim on the line here, Jim,
I want to come back to you in pair Land and see if we can
finish answering your question. Yes, or the other question that I had was
that in various areas throughout where this new side has been installed, there's little
areas that the grass appears to be dead. Okay, I mean a real
light brown, almost like dead pine branches are plant pine leaves Okay. I
did fertilize it six weeks after it was laid with the Nelson's fertilizer, okay,
and I haven't done anything else to it since. All right. Well,
it's good that you fertilized it that and that's a good fertilizer. I
you know, Jim, there's just too many possibilities when the symptom is dead.
You know, it's kind of hard. It could be a lack of
water. It could be when they laid the side that didn't get good side
to soil contact in that area. So there's just like an air gap in
there and the roots air can get in, roots dry. I mean,
they're just a lot of possible. It could be a disease as well.
So I don't know how to tell you. If you wanted to hang on,
I can put you on hold. Have Josh give you an email to
send me some pictures of it from a distance and some good close up ones
showing the symptom as it goes from living to dead. Not just dead grass,
but show me the sick grass. And I'll do my best to give
you a better answer than just it could be at I'll do that, all
right. I'm putting you on hold right now and Josh will pick you up.
We are fortunate today talking with Patrick about tree things. And you know
Patrick, the we talk about planting trees all year, and you can and
do well that first summer, especially the first few months even after planting,
is kind of a touch and go time because that tree, all the roots
are still in that container and at your place, you probably were watering them
pretty often to keep them happy and healthy and growing. Now they go in
the ground and people think, well, the rain the Sowell's moist, but
that rootball gets pumped dry pretty quick. So any advice on success following the
planting keeping a tree healthy, alive, not just alive, but growing well,
the key factor is going to be paying attention to your tree. The
tree is going to start the first sign of it of not getting enough water,
the tree's going to start to wilt. And when that starts to wilt,
if you are paying attention, you can go in and you can water
that tree again. So at that point you can start to nail down a
schedule of how long and when you're gonna water that tree. You can also
use that tube to make sure that you're not overwatering that tree, and the
water is not sitting in that hole. If we planted the tree, y'all
do the tube on all the trees your plant. Pretty much every tree thirty
gallon and above will do. We'll do that. You do tube. And
that's how big is a PBC. It's a two inch PBC pipe? Okay,
good, Now, there's a reason why we use two inch so you
can get a stick in it. So we can get a stick in it.
But two inches also big enough for three foot hand pumps for hand pumping
water out. So it's big enough, just big enough to where you can
take some of them. You have to take the tip off of it,
and you can get the very end of it off. Some of them fit
right through, but you can slide that right down. You can hand pump
and push water away if you find a situation where you're holding a lot of
water. Good, all right. Well, people often ask questions like,
well, how much do I water? Well, it's hard to answer that
question because how hot is it? Is it a sunny days? Is it's
cloudy days? Has it rained recently? What kind of tree is it?
How big is a rootball? I mean just a lot of a lot of
Yeah, butts. That is the hardest question, and a lot of people
think we're dancing around that question, and I'll be honest, we are.
It's I can't tell you, hey, you need to water that tree five
minutes every day so that it gets fifteen gallons of water, because what will
happen is customers will hear that and they won't check the tube, and then
they'll come back and call me up three days or usually three weeks later,
Hey, Patrick, what's going on with my tree? My trees turning you
know colors? And I'll ask them, do you have any water in the
tube? Oh, yeah, I got water in the tube. Good,
well you're drowning your tree. Yeah, but you told me three, you
know, five minutes a day to give it fifteen minutes of water, you
know. So we try to educate customers. It's not a straightforward answer.
It's you really have to pay attention to what's going on, and like you
said, the different soils and different spots within your yard, it could vary
even the same species. Well that's good. Well, we gotta take a
break right now. Hey, if you'd like to give a call talk to
Patrick about something related to your trees. Palm trees, regular kinds of trees
will be happy to visit with you our phone number seven one three two one
two fifty eight seventy four. When we come back, Chris, you'll be
the first up when the day of the ladder seemed impossible. All right,
you're listening to the garden Line and we have with us today Patrick from Verdant
Tree. We're talking all kinds of things trees. I'm going to start by
going out to Jersey Village. Chris, I believe you may have a tree
question. Yeah, Hi, good morning, skipt people up the good word,
Good morning, Patrick. Thanks for all the info you're giving us this
morning. Good morning, good morning. You know there's there's a everyone that
kind of has a different opinion on this question. So I wanted I've never
heard your opinion, Skip. So I have two oak trees in my front
yard, and I want to know is it erosion that caused us the roots
to show at the surface or the roots actually come up because there's not enough
moisture in the ground. That's it. That's a good question. Yeah,
Chris, I've heard I've heard that before. Let you go. Is there
a best time of year to deep root feed in march trees. All right,
well, let's take the first one. So what happens is tree roots
predominantly are in the top foot of soil. You got roots down deep,
You've got tap roots and other things. But when you look at all the
feeding roots, where the oxygen is, whether the microbial activity is highest,
that's all basically in the top foot. Now sand, it's gonna be deeper
in a clay, maybe even shallower, especially if it's a tight water log
clay. But basically they're on top. So imagine a little spaghetti sized root
going a few inches under the surface, and then as that root grows in
diameter, it's pushing in all directions, but there's nothing much on top of
it, but there's a solid soil below it. So as it gets bigger,
you remember the little balloons that they make balloon animals out for kids.
Put one of those three inches underneath some soil and blow it up. What's
going to happen. It's going to push up. It's not that the root
is coming to the surface as much as it's just expanding. And then you
get water sheeting across the top, taking soil away from it. And now
you got a root that looks like you're just sitting on top of the ground,
and people think, well, that root came up. Well, it's
a physics thing and that's why the roots are up there. So when you
get a point like that where you got big roots up on the surface,
I think that's a good opportunity to switch from grass to some other kind of
groundcover, a vinding groundcover or mulch bed that can cover that area, rather
than just trying to cover them with soil, because that runs into problems.
To the other question, I'm trying to think, what was your other question
on the tree you had to follow up? I think we think we lost
him. I can't remember what the follow up question was right now, trees
question, trees. Sorry, it may occur to me in just a minute.
Well, let's go back to Patrick. I want to talk about some
of the tree care kinds of things. We were visiting a little bit at
break, But I would like you elaborate a little bit on some of the
stuff we were talking about. I think it's really good information. Sure,
I actually have a thought on what you're Oh yeah, yeah. So one
of the things that I always tell people, with the roots coming up,
you're better off trying to do some kind of a program for deep root feeding
because you want to entice with the other question that was his other question.
Yeah, yeah, go ahead. So you want to entice the roots to
really go down. Right, So if you're going to do more deep root
feeding of the tree, you're gonna get that tree root trying to come down
to get that feeding on the surface roots. So you are correct. So
when the surface roots coming across and it gets so big, it starts to
show. This is what I tell people from there. At first moment you
think you feel it, dig around and see if you really do feel it.
And so and Randy and I used to talk about this, cut the
root. You can cut one big root system. Randy says every eighteen to
two years. I usually say a year, two year and a half.
Okay, if it's if it's not too big, so you can cut you
follow follow that root back a little ways where it's it's definitely below ground,
follow it, bag cut that tree, pull that root out right, um,
get it out of there, and then replant everything around all back to
level. And you could actually prevent to stay ahead of it. But but
you have to be on top of it. Yeah, and and Paedrick did
say one route. I mean, it's not like you don't cut six of
the tree in a single year. You'd be Yeah, that's why you got
to pay attention. So when you first see and feel that, you got
to be on top of it right then and there. Okay, all right,
well that's good, good information. I'm going to head out to Pleasantville.
Now. Deborah has a question about trees. How can we help Deborah?
If my neighbor has these tint worms bagworms in these weed trees. I
guess they call them a weed tree because they just kind of sprout up.
How do I get rid of those worms so keep the tree from ever getting
them? All right? Just so I'm clear, is this a worm that
is making webs around the foliage or is this a worm where you see the
webbing where there's like a branching and a white branching in a tree, like
around that area. It's making the why branching like big nests, big tents,
but the branches not out around the leaves. Right, Oh, yes,
it's it's everywhere they are on the branches. Okay, that sounds like
a web worm. And you know they love pecans, they love we have
a native black cherry here. They love they love mulberries. That's another one
they get in and it's a caterpillar. So if you can catch them early
and the tree's not too big, you can spray with BT or with spinosaid,
and those are two organic products that work very well against caterpillars. Spinosa
it'll last longer than BTBT lasts on in a couple of days, but you
can catch them early on and do that. If you break up the webs,
wasps will get in there and get them. And then there's you can
certainly hire a tree service to come in and do a professional spraying of those
trees as well. And they have access to a lot of other kinds of
products for that. Well. Okay, yes, I've been trying. I've
tried BET. I didn't need more max. Okay, I also spray on
my side of it. The yard is where they're dropping. Okay, you
got you gotta cover the tree on all those products. You're getting them on
the leaves so the caterpillars eat the leaves and get sick. That's the two
I mentioned products that for example, you know, BT is fine, it's
just if you got to run a sprayer and you got to spray it ever
three days or something. Then you know that's not going to be cost effective
and you're gonna get tired of that real quick. But you know, send
me a picture of it too. That's another option. I can look at
it, just to make sure, because we have several different kinds of caterpillars
that can make a web, and I just always want to not assume,
but actually make sure we're talking about the same thing. All right, Okay,
I will send in the pictures and get permission. All right, thank
you. I'm gonna put you on hold here so we canad a bunch of
calls here. So I think it was gonna keep going with the calls for
just a little while. I do want to mention you're talking about pests and
things. Scott McGrath pest Control. You can go online McGrath metgrath pest control
dot com. They've been in business since seventy four. Scott's dad started it.
It's steel family run and it is the kind of company that I guess,
you know, it's people always remember how things used to be and stuff.
Someone told you they're gonna show up at a certain time, they actually
showed you. They schedule a time, they don't tell you, you know,
I'll come sometime in the next five hours, so you happen to have
to be there at the time when McGrath schedules, they show up at that
time. They're very highly related rated on all the review sites. They do
do contracts. You don't have to sign up for a year with them.
You tell them what you need, they show up and they do it.
They service the entire Houston area. They know what they're talking about. And
here we are in the summer season. There's all kinds of things going on.
Each season has it's it's you know, particular pests and problem They do
not just insects, but they do things like raccoons and termites and squirrels and
rats and other things like that. McGrath Pest Control. You can get a
hold of them McGrath pest Control dot com or two eight one four six nine
eighty two forty. Well, let's see, we're gonna head out to Willis
and we're gonna talk to Mike. Mike has a tallow tree problem. Mike,
I'd say a tallow tree is a problem. But what are we gonna
talk about here today? Yeah, Well, actually I raised the tall tallows
are good for bees. Oh yes they are. That that is that in
fall color. The two good things about a tallow tree, and we won't
get into all the other bad things about a tallow Yeah. But I've got
about one hundred acres and I cleared off about four or five acres, and
I've got one hundred and fifty year old oaks, you know, pines,
and in that area I kept with a bush. But I've got a problem
with tallow trees and stuff growing around the trees where I can't get to you.
It take me weeks to go in there with loppers, which I will
do to cut all that trash stuff around the trees itself. How do you
what do you? Could you spray around those trees to make them so there's
no more trash coming up around the trees. Are you talking about suckers from
the tree or what what do you mean by trash? Um? Taller trees
different types of weeds to um. Now, I can spray around up around
them to kill the grass and most of the weeds. But okay, they've
got they've got you know, actually different types of trees that will sprout up
around Okay, I see what you're talking about. Yeah, so you got
acreage. So what I'm gonna tell you is probably not practical. But when
you have brush coming up around a tree, or tree sprouts coming up around
a tree, you can treat those. You can treat the trunk at the
base, or you can cut them off and treat the fresh cut stump with
something that contains triclopier. That's that's what the ranchers used to keep brush out
of their grass pastures. But you can buy it over the counter. It's
in a lot of different ingredients, poison ivy killer and whatnot. Now,
so someone has, you know, tallows or hackberries coming up along a fence
line or poison ivy, we used tricolopaer for that. If you get out
there and you're going to get on a bigger scale, there's a website.
Do a search for brush busters, and then you know, you can type
in tallow or you can type in something else and it'll tell you exactly how
much triclopier to use. And often they mix it with diesel oil or you
can even use a cooking golf for it to make it stick to the trunks,
which you gotta do it when they're very very young and they don't have
a thick bark, and it'll work pretty good. I can't go into the
details on all the aspects of it, but those websites will tell you what
to do. Just don't get it on a tree you like, yeah,
okay, No, you don't want to spread on the existing tree, just
around them, right, and you don't want to drench the soil and all
that kind of You just need to get like if you cut it off just
that fresh cut, I use a little spongebrush and just just dab it right
on that fresh cut and it'll move down and do a pretty good job.
Or yeah, so that that would be my recommendation on those Okay, okay,
agreed. All right, Hey, Mike, thank you very much for
the call. I appreciate that we've been talking about all kinds of things related
to trees. And one of the things you guys do it for down is
people can come in and they you can advise them on what tree might do
well there. Maybe they bring a picture of the whole place. I think
you'd like to show them some of the trees on the property. Too,
So this isn't they have to come in knowing what they want, you guys
can kind of help direct them to something that's going to fit their knee.
Do you want to talk about that a little bit, Patrick, Yes.
So one of the things that we always suggest is bring a couple of pictures
far away, some a little close so that we can see what we're working
with. And if you don't bring one, a lot of times we can
get on Google and within a couple of years usually it's, you know,
fairly close to what you've got going on at your house. So not a
mandatory thing, it's just better it's easier for us to see. But what
we like to do is we like to walk around and point out things that
we think would work well in that area, and a lot of customers will
say, yeah, no, I don't like that yet, No I don't
like that, and then we'll get to something else so oh yeah, wow,
I like that. That's great. So that's one of the nice things
about having a lot of different trees and then a lot of trees in the
same type of tree, to be able to show you up close and personal,
what you know, what that would be like in your in your yard.
Yeah, I think that's a great idea. We've got a call.
We're gonna come David. We're gonna come to you after break, San Francisco,
California. So how big of a tree expert are you? We're gonna
go out to San Francisco. I believe David will come to you after break
if you got a tree question, A tree question seven one three, two,
one two, fifty eight seventy four. We are here with Patrick from
Burdent Tree and we're gonna be coming back from break happy to answer those questions.
In the meantime, Nicki's gonna tell us everything that's happening around town that
we need to know about. So talk to you if you follow. Good
morning, Wow, what a good day to be outside doing some gardening for
in this case, planning a tree. We've got Patrick from Verdant Tree Farm
with us today. We're doing some tree questions. But I got a I
got my curiosity up. Now we got David out there in San Francisco,
California. David, or you really calling me from San Francisco? Good morning,
Good morning? Hey, you know why your weather guy give uh?
He said he was from Alameda and Burbank and we uh, we have a
very Short Street, Alameda, But I don't see a burbank with it,
so I'm kind of stumped. I don't know if that qualifies as a three.
Uh. I think that was Nikki. Uh. She was just saying
at one time. I think she had lived out in that area. So's
she's talking about the palm trees and how beautiful they are, right yeah,
yeah, yeah, we've got and you know, your your tree guys probably
well aware of this. You know, as the earth is warming up,
you've got all these invasive cretters and what used to be you know, normal
pest control for some cretters is now added by what you know, the expanding
territory of migrating bugs and uh. And trees are able to survive it.
Some trees are and some trees aren't. So you know, as climate change
is happening, those trees have got to move fast because they're going to get
baked. And yeah, but what I was wondering about. I was listening
to one of the Network garden shows this morning, and they were claiming that
the trees seem to be in shock this year and that some of them are
turning autumn colors, you know, even before summer happens. They seem to
be in shock because of this really changeable weather. And I'm wondering if you're
you're familiar with the ozone layer that keeps the ultra violet rays from cookas you
know, like a microwave. The ozone layer needs to be a certain amount
of I'm trying to remember the twenty mile stick or something like that, and
so I'm just wondering if this these tree the erratic behavior of trees right now
is because they're getting hit with too much ultraviolet. Well, I tell you
what, David, you are outside of Patrick's in my area of expertise at
that level. But you know, when you talk about a national story and
stuff and trees turning colors and things, there's a lot of species, and
there's a lot of parts of the country in different things. Here we can
get into some summer droughts where trees start to de foliate a little earlier.
Our cypress are bad about that. Here you can get some fall color from
stresses on trees, on trees that are inclined to fall color, which we
have very few of here that do a real great job of fall color.
But it's going to be a variety of things, and I just don't know
how to give a specific answer. But hey, one last thing you hit
the woman wondered about the bugs in her trees. Yes, there's got to
be some kind of bird or critter that will eat those things like crazy.
So just get on the bird hotline and yeah, I appreciate that. Hey,
thank you for that. Called David. Yeah, I was out at
wah Birds the other day. We were talking about caterpillars and there's actually a
movement to plant more native trees, especially oaks, because they host caterpillars.
And when it comes to birds raising young and nests a songbirds we love to
attract. They need caterpillars. They need that protein and fat source. It's
not our bird seeds that are keeping them alive out there. And so if
we could essentially new call properties throughout every neighborhood and kill every caterpillar, we'd
have a big bird problem because that's what they need. People panic when they
see a worm on a tree, but you know, our trees are pretty
resilient and you don't just have to have a worm free environment in order for
them to do. Just find they especially the native trees. They've lived with
our native worms for a very long time and they do well well, Patrick,
I want to want to We were talking about some of the things that
you guys can do in terms of a service, and you know, picking
out a beautiful tree and planning it and things like that. I like one
of the things I like that you guys do is you do allow people to
tag a tree, to pick the tree they want. So talk about a
little bit about coming out and maybe walking through where they can get a look
at a tree, because you may say, well, this is a x
hundred gallon tree on the phone, but they can't quite get a mindseye picture
of what an x hundred gallon tree might actually look like. Sure, so
yeah, that's why we so perspective is real hard to be to be transferred
in a picture. Right. You can put a cope can or you can
put a person. But you standing next to say thirty five foot tree,
seven hundred gallant tree which we have on site, standing next to that,
understanding how big that tree is is. You know, there's nothing I can
send you a picture of it, but you're you're not gonna understand that unto
you're standing underneath it, looking up at thirty five feet tall. So that's
where a lot of what we try to do is get people to the farm
or to one of our three locations, either in pair Land or in Yale.
Yale is the youngest out of all of those, so we're still moving
a lot of big trees to that location. But here in the next couple
of weeks, we'll start to have a lot of the bigger trees over there,
a lot of big palms stuff like that that people will be able to
see. But getting people to the locations and actually getting hands on looking at
it is what we find the best way to you know, let somebody understand
how big is a tree? Yeah, and see it. And you guys
have huge trees, I mean I think you go up to seven hundred gallanting
even do larger than that in certain situation. That's what you can have on
on the lot, right, Well, I can have bigger, but the
need to have a seven hundred gallon tree. We we don't plant, you
know, larger than seven hundred gallon trees very often, so there's no point
to keeping one on site. And that's a huge tree. That's a big
tree. That's there's a lot that goes into that. There's bracing all the
storms that have come in and stuff like that. You know, we have
one seven hundred gallantree. We had two and we just moved one of those
three weeks ago. It was sold, but it was sold. That tree
was sold almost six months ago. Yeah, the guy wasn't ready for the
trees building a house. And that's what he wanted in is from Wow,
what instant pizza? I mean, he wants something fast. That's that's a
good way to do it. You know, you're talking about storms and things
that we love Affordable Tree service around here and I know you guys grow them
and get them planted and stuff, and then there's the care of them and
here comes hurricane season. You know, do you got dead limbs in your
tree? Do you got a tree limb hanging over your house or your neighbor's
fence, or or maybe the maserati they park in the driveway. It might
be a good idea to have that limb looked at. Right. Affordable Tree
does all that and then someone I mean they do the deep root feeding that
Patrick was mentioning a little bit earlier. They will come out and they will
do that kind of pruning. If you're going to build a house. If
you're going to put a trench in across the yard, have the folks that
Affordable Tree Service come out and take a look at it first, because once
the damage has been done, it's often difficult, if not impossible, to
recover from some of the kinds of things that can happen. You can go
to aff Tree Service dot com or give Martin and Joe a call seven one
three, six nine nine twenty six sixty three. Tell them you're from Garden
Line. That that get they say business, and that puts you at the
front of the line when you're a guardline customer checking in. If you call
and you don't hear Martin and Joe that answer the phone, one of those
two you've called the wrong place with Affordable in the name, you just hang
up. Call again. Seven one three six nine nine two six six three.
Don't wait until a storm is bearing down. Go ahead and get it
done now. The you know when when it comes to fertilizing trees, and
we've got a lot of different things we can use on planting and stuff.
Do you guys have any you know, particular regiment you use in terms of
fertilizing a trap by the way I'm asking that question with about ten seconds left
to go. But yes, so we do sell Nelson's My Food, so
we sell that. We do sell a variety of other specific to palm tree
food. So we have our own special blending and you just do a top
dress over the tree and water it in. Good, we'll put it in,
and the roots underneath the hole as well, so we'll put it down.
Then we'll cover it up with a little bit of soil because we again
we talked about we want to entice those roots. Good. That sounds great.
Hey, you're listening to garden Line seven one three two one two fifty
eight seventy four. We will be right back after this break. Well,
good morning. You're listening to garden Line on a beautiful Sunday morning and we
are here talking trees. Now, we got Patrick from Verdant Tree Farm here
answering some tree questions. I just wanted to talk about a place that a
cause that is very important to me, and that is Star of Hope Mission.
You probably have heard of Star Hope Mission. If you see people that
are homeless in town on the street corner and you're thinking, maybe I should
give him a dollar, but will that that work will that help them,
We'll hurt them. You know, what do I need to do? You're
not going to find a better way to help people in need who are willing
to put in the effort to make a new life for themselves in Star of
Hope. Star of Hope has a place for people to live, where they
get training, where they get food, they get education, how to get
a job, how to hold a job. There's clothing available, so you
can, you know, get dressed up and go interview for a job and
get a chance to get your feet back under you. Maybe a mom living
in a car with your kids and she just needs a way to get started.
And when you hit rock bottom, you you know, there's no bootstraps
to pull yourself up with. You need some help to do that. People
that are willing to put the time into and to be part of Star of
Hope can get everything they need to get back on their feet. They feed
six thousand meals a week. Two dollars and eighty cents will provide a meal
for somebody. Go to shmission dot org or if you want more information,
mission dot org. You cannot just provide help for them, you can also
volunteer yourself and Star of Hope is a good cause. I've my wife and
I've worked for Star of Hope. Gosh, it's been decades ago since the
first time we were involved with Star Hope. We believe in it and I
know the compassion in you wants to see your money well spent. I promise
you it will be at Star of Hope. We're here answering tree questions today
and we have a question coming in Patrick from Jim out in Cyprus. How
are you doing, Jim, how can we help? I'm fine, good
morning morning. Yeah. I've got a couple of large live oaks and they
need trimmed pretty bad, and I'm wondering if I can do that now or
ash your wait a couple of months till they're more dormant. You know,
you can trim a tree anytime. It's kind of like planning a tree.
You plant a tree at any time. There's better times and not so good
times. If they need trimming, now is the time to get some trimming
done. But a good tree service, like the affordable I was talking about,
they are not going to just take eighty percent of the foliage off of
a tree at this time. They know that you can take a little bit,
you can make a cut here and there. That's okay, but you
need somebody who is going to know how much that you can prune and what
really needs to be pruned, because you remember, pruning is permanent in terms
of if you screw a tree up with poor pruning. You know the guy
that puts a business card in your door and says I trimmed trees, don't
use that because when someone knows what they're doing, the tree gets better and
more beautiful and stronger over time. When they don't know what they're doing,
they actually can make things worse. And so as far as can you trimm,
now, yes you can, but in a minimal way and only what
needs to be trimmed. All right, that helps. I appreciate it,
all right, Jimp, thank you. I appreciate your call very much.
If you have a lawn and you are looking for the number one organic fertilizer
in the Greater Houston market, that would be Microlife Fertilizer. They there's a
kind of a double color. It makes it easy to remember, and that's
the green bag and the purple bag. Green bag is a six two four,
it's got that three one two ratio, which is what grass needs.
That's how grass takes up nutrients. And a three one two or four one
two ratio, it's got that in it. The humates plus is the purple
bag and that is like a concentrated compost in a bag. And you knew
both at the same time. If you want to find microlife, go to
microlife Fertilizer dot com. Pretty much. You know, all the garden centers
and feed stores and stuff we talk about here, the ace hardwares and stuff,
they all carry the microlife. It's gonna make it real easy. Look
for the green and for the purple. And while you're there, there's a
whole long line of microlife products that I don't even have time to mention right
now, but lots of good products for feeding your plants, organic fertilizer,
for making sure that it's gradually released. That's what's going to happen when they
MICROBILLI can hardly say the word microbili decompose over time to release those nutrients to
your plants. Well, that's we're talking about. Patrick from for damp Tree
about all kinds of things related to trees. Today, I've got about eight
and a half minutes left in this segment. I'd like to talk to you
a little bit Patrick, if we could about some of the tips that you
would give somebody if they are looking at you know, are what are some
of the species I might want you know? What? Fall colors hard to
come by here? It's really I used to always say that the trees that
produced the best fall color or trees that means you don't want to plant them,
And that would be like the Chinese tallow tree, for example. The
sweet gum tree here in town is a pretty tough one to have success with
unless you've got just the right kind of soil for it. And and there
are of course other examples. But do you have any tips, Like you
got some red oaks you particularly like or that might give a little fall color
in the right kind of time, or do you have some other kinds of
trees that you think, you know what this ought to be planted more.
I kind of like this one. Well, um, you know, one
of the trees that I kind I enjoy I like is the Mexican sycamore.
I like that tree. It's a little bit more hardy, you can stick
it in a little bit more of a wetter environment too wet, but a
little bit more wetter, not quite like a bald cypress. So, but
it's a it's a great tree. Um. The red oaks are awesome.
They're great, um for the Houston area. Um. You know, with
the weather change, you know, we're kind of shifting from carrying a lot
of blueberries. I do carry blueberries, and I still carry bottlebrush, but
we're shifting to the hollies. Okay, the hollies are just becoming your go
too. Yeah. I was out visiting with you about that a good while
back. And there's the Savannah holly, there's Oakland, all kinds of hollies.
What would you say, or two or three of the hollies you think?
Or these are? You know, if you're just gonna go with a
holly, you can't go wrong here. This is pretty good, pretty good
option. Any suggestions? Well, uh, so the Eagleston Holly and then
Nellie Stevens hollies tend to be the two trees that are really awesome. Okay,
Eagleson and Nellie Stevens. All right, and uh what's the difference between
those? Basically the same size, basically the same features. Well, so
the Nellie Stevens is going to be a harder leaf plant. Okay, So
if you tape your hand and you kind of brush it in, you're gonna
poke yourself a little a little bit when you do that, and it's gonna
be a darker green and it's gonna be glossy. Okay. The eagleson Hollie
is going to be a little bit lighter green to that, and you can
take your hand and throw it in there. You can fall into it.
It's not gonna poke you or hurt you. M The eagleson Hollie tends to
be a little bit of a faster grower. M yeah. And it's both
are shapable, but if you accidentally oops with the Nellie, it's gonna take
it a little bit longer for that to recover. People can often call they
want a big screen, and hollies are evergreen. You plant them at the
right spacing and you can make a nice wall about how do you estimate,
you know, let's say you know a holly, a particular variety your species
is gonna get you know, ten feet wide or whatever. How far apart
would you plant those in order to have a good screen. You plant them
close. You got a screen fast plan them far. You got to wait
a little bit, but they'd rather be a little further apart. So how
do you decide so well so that the customer decides that. So we educate
the customer in these cases, we educate them. Look, you could plant
them as close as four or five six feet if you wanted to. That.
It's going to get you foliage closer. Okay, but you're going to
need to make sure that you're on your maintenance with your fertilizer because one's going
to steal from the other. Yeah, they become weeds to each other,
right, so one could overtake the other grow significantly bigger. So you've got
to be on top of that. You've got to feed it. You got
to be there, you know, as I tell customers, you got to
have your coffee, you know, underneath it hugged before you go to bed,
tuck it in stuff, talk to it. Yeah. So um,
but it's it's important to understand what the customers trying to do, and so
we try to educate them on too close, too far? What are you
going to get time? Right? You're saving time? Yeah, and then
you have the quantity of tree, so your price goes up costs more to
plant more. So you know, we work with the customer on what what's
their budget, and then we give them this is what we would think we
would you know, in those circumstances, this is what I would do.
And Holly's a tree that definitely needs to be watered when they're young getting established,
but it also doesn't want to be in a swamp like you're talking about
with palms earlier. That they are not tolerant of very saggy, so either
kind of a raised mound area to drain away some surface water, but just
just kind of be careful with those. I had one customer, yeah that
I love the Hollies, um the real quick. I know we're running out
of time. One of the things that I did want to just popped in
my head. I want to mention to people, when you're removing these palm
trees, for us to come in, please please please call us, give
us the opportunity we do. We can do removals, okay, on the
palms. I don't usually do a lot of tree removals, but here's the
reason why I like to do removals on palm trees, because you're gonna you're
gonna go talk to somebody. They're canna say, oh yeah, we're gonna
cut it down. We're gonna stump grind it. Don't stump grind the palm
tree. Leave me a stump so I can pull it out because I can
dig around and pull the whole rup all out, versus and digging the whole
four foot rup all out. And so when you do that, would you
can you put another tree right back in if you take it out like you
just said, not stump ground, but pulled out. Absolutely, that's a
good idea. That's a question we often get about trees. Well, Patrick,
it is so nice to have you come in today, your wealth of
information. It's good to hear from me. I love to get, you
know, callers, an opportunity to be able to talk to somebody like yourself
and just really appreciate it. Thank you for thank you, Bye, Thanks
for mine. Folks. You got the location out there on Barker Cypress.
By the way, I used to be in the Bear Creek office when I
worked in Houston for a while before the second flood took that office out.
You know what I'm talking about. Y'all are down there in Paarland on Broadway
West Broadway, and you were up in the heights where Yale Streets comes into
I tune. Thanks for being here, Thank you, Goodbye.