Katie r H Garden Line does not necessarily endorse any of the products or services
advertised on this program. Welcome to kat r H Garden Line with Skip Ricord.
It's crazy gas trim. You just watch him as us so many things
to supop basic, not a sad Hey, Welcome to garden Line. Good
morning, Good Saturday morning. You got plans today, maybe plans to get
outside and threw things up a little bit. There's some fertilizing. If you
haven't gotten that done, make sure that you've replenished your mom. Maybe we'll
talk about that a little bit more, a little bit later. That is
very very important. You know, it's easy to get excited about vegetables and
fruits and flowers and beautiful lawns and all of the things that we enjoy in
terms of creating a little piece of eden around our property. But I tell
you what, sometimes people don't get too excited about the brown stuff, the
dirt, the maltz, the things like that that go into the ground that
set the stage for success and that help prevent extra work. I think I
got your attention with that one. At least I would have gotten my attention
with that one. Nobody likes to be out there doing extra work, especially
when it's one hundred degrees outside and now you got knee high weeds you're trying
to deal with in the garden or something that that's no fun at all.
But we can avoid that. We can avoid that with a good quality application
of malts and just constantly keeping it on the surface of the soil. Nature
abhors bear soil. It just it's if you scratch open a piece of bear
dirt and leave it, Nature's gonna fill it with weeds. The way I
like to put it is, wherever sunlight hits the soil, nature plants a
weed. So how do we use that to our advantage. Well, don't
let sunlight hit the soil in your lawn. Make a dense healthy lawn.
Create a dense healthy lawns through proper mowing, watering, and fertilizing. My
schedules are online and they're free at gardening with skip dot com. You can
find out how to create a dense, healthy lawn and that chokes out the
majority, not all, but the majority of your weed problems. How about
in the garden, the vegetables, the flowers keep mulch over the surface of
the soil. Why deal with weeds? Why get down on your hands and
knes pulling weeds. If you are pulling weeds, one of two things has
happened. Either you didn't mulch, and now they've gotten ahead of you,
So here we go catch them back up again, as we say, regaining
lost ground right. Or it's a perennial weed, things like nut said and
bermuda grass. It comes crawling in and it just takes over. And so
those have to be dealt with in a different way than just mulch. But
staying ahead of them is important because I don't know. My opinion is that
I don't put in flower beds so I can pull weeds in them. I
put in flower beds I can enjoy flowers, and I know you do too.
So how do we do that? Will we do that by keeping a
mulch covering over the swell about three inches deep. It depends on the material
you use. Some mulches are very dense, they block light very well,
even at a more shallow depth. Others a little more chunkier, open,
looser. You need them a little thicker in order to accomplish the same thing.
But however you go about it, go about it. That is how
nature takes care of the soil, and that's how we should too. Well,
you're listening to Garden Line and this is a call in show. If
you'd like to give us a call, how about I give you a number
seven one three two one two five eight seven four seven one three two one
two fifty eight seventy four. If you've not done your summer fertilizing, get
out there and do that, because a good slow release fertilizer application right now
will carry you all the way in to our fall application. A fertilizer,
a good quality product like nitrofoss Is Superturf. That's a silver bag. Nitrofos
Superturf, the silver bag. It's nineteen four ten. Those are the three
numbers. You don't need to know the numbers. If you can just remember
nitrofoss silver bag. That'll do it now. It's designed the chemistry, and
this product is designed to release the right amount of nitrogen over time, for
a very long time, for several months out there, and when you apply
it properly at the proper rate right now, it's going to give you gradual
feeding through the year. Avoid those spurts of growth, and you know,
extra mowing and grass getting top heavy, meaning it's lots of top growth not
as much root growth, which is not a good thing for summer nitrophs.
Superturf feeds gradually to help avoid that. You can find it at a number
of places. You've got to single ranch at the ace out there, they've
got it out there. You can go to a Tascasita ace and they've got
it there. Our Lake Hardware in Clute in Lake Jackson. Lake Hardware Clute
and Lake Jackson, our Gym's Hardware up in Montgomery. Those are all places,
just examples of the many places you can get nitrofoss super turf. We're
gonna I think we'll just go straight onto the phones now. We're going to
head out to Katie and talk to Ralph. Hello, Ralph, skip your
morning. Morning. Hey, quick question. I had my sprinkler guy come
out and adjust the heads and some other items, and he suggested having the
sprinkler set for about ten minutes a day, six seven days a week.
Yeah, I'm thinking he said that a little bit of water instead of heavy
water a couple of times a week might improve the yard. Besides everything else
I'm doing for your schedule. What are your thoughts? I disagree with that
strongly. And here's why. When you put a squirt of water out there
and then the water goes off, a good part of that water with the
grass blades and the thatch and very little got down into the ground, and
if it did, it only got down an inch or so deep, and
that just promotes disease. It wastes water because everything that evaporates away after the
water goes off is lost, and it doesn't wet the soil volume. If
you were to take all those little squirts of water and put them down in
one or at most two applications per week, then after it wet the leaves
and that that's the additional sprinkling that's going to continue on, is putting water
down in the soil, and so you actually get more of your water when
you give it a good soaking. The other reason is when you keep it
wet right at the surface, it doesn't allow oxygen down in the soil as
well. You can't breathe underwater, and so if you give it a good
soaking and then let it dry out for a week or at least a half
a week, then it pulls oxygen back down in the soil. As that
soil, water moves into the plant and out of the soil and opens up
space for air to move in. You see what I'm saying. Sure,
So, a couple of good soakings a week, it's what you would recommend.
Yeah, I would say a half inch twice a week. I try
to go one inch a week when I can. And sometimes, you know,
the shade versus sun clasoil versus sand, there's a variation there, but
in general, the less often you can water, but a good soaking when
you do, you should apply about an inch of water. If you're going
to do it once a week, you should apply about one inch of water
in order to consider the soil soaked properly. All right, Ralph, I
need to add one little thing to that for you. You're not going to
be able to put an inch on at one time. So what you do
is you run the sprinkler for however long it can run before you start going
to get run off, and then have it go off and sit for forty
five minutes and then cycle back on again, and it may take two or
three cycles. Let's say Monday morning is when you're watering early first thing Monday
morning. It may take two or three cycles on that Monday morning, but
it gets the water in the soil that way. It's called cycle and soak.
Okay, okay, thank you all right, Ralph, appreciate it.
Yeah, that is watering properly is really really important. And I hope those
hope those thoughts made sense. I'll repeat them as we go through the summer.
We're going to take a little break right now for a little bit of
information and news, and I'll be right back. Our phone number, if
you'd like to get on the boards is seven to one three two one two
KTRH. Welcome back to Guardline. Good to have you with us. We
are talking gardening today, all kinds of things. How do we help you
have a more bountiful garden and a more beautiful landscape. That's kind of what
we're here for. You can give us a call. It's seven one three
two one two fifty eight seventy four seven one three two one two five eight
seven four and we can do just that. Plants for All Seasons is a
garden center you've heard me talk about many times before, and it's it's one
of those independent garden centers you can call them a mom and pop, you
can call them an independent garden center. It's also a full service garden center.
And what do I mean by that, Well, for example, not
only do they have plants, they have full service advice for you. You
can bring a sample in, you can bring a picture in. You could
say, hey, what is this? Can you identify it? Or my
neighbor has this flower, I want one, what is it? You can
take a picture of a bug or whatever. They do that, but they
also deliver if you need. Maybe you don't have a vehicle that can haul
some of the a tree or a shrub a home. They do that.
They will deliver within a certain range, certain charge. Of course, they
can bring the plants to you, so you don't have to worry about going
to buy a truck. So you can go buy some plants they plant.
They do tree planting services as well. And then they do something that I
think surely you need call custom potting. So if you go there and you
buy a pot or you can bring one in and buy some plants from them,
and they will put it all together into a beautiful little mixed arrangement.
Planting one of those gorgeous things you look and you see them, and you
know they sell them to by the way, hanging baskets and containers. You
see that and you want one of those, will build it yourself or have
them build it for you. That's just examples of what I mean by a
full service garden center. You know, they've been around since nineteen seventy three.
The Flowery family has been advising gardeners in that region for a very very
long time. Really, the whole Houston area. A lot of people go
from some distance to get there. So all you have to do is go
to Plants for All Seasons. They are on just a bus Luetta if you're
heading up Tambo Parkway to forty nine crossover exit Luetta Crossover Luetta, and they're
right there. Plants for All Seasons dot Com. Here's a phone number.
You're gonna write this down. Two eight one, three seven six sixteen forty
six. We're gonna go out to Magnolia now and talk to Jeff. Hello,
Jeff Skip, good morning. How are you. I'm good, sir,
I'm good good. I need your help. I get a couple of
large pine trees that have died. They're probably seventy eighty feet tall, maybe
foot and a half two foot in diameter at least, and I need somebody
that can take those down from the top. They're just too big to you
know, to cut down with the chainsaw myself. Anybody that you could recommend
in that area that you know, license bonded and could safely do that.
Let me let me give you a phone number and name here. You got
a pin er pencil handy, I do, give me just a second.
Yeah, that's fine. So it is important whenever, yeah, whenever you're
gonna have somebody work in your trees, is very important to get somebody that
knows what they're doing, that does good work, but knows what needs to
be prune, what does need to be truned. I know when you're removing
a tree, that is first of all, it is very smart of you
to get those done soon because hurricane season is here now, and uh,
there's nothing those old pines they rot fast and they get weak and they become
a major hazard. All right. So the name is Martin Spoon, Martin
Spoon More. The company is Affordable Tree Service. The website is a fftree
Service dot com, a f F Tree Service dot com. And then here's
the phone number. Seven one three six nine nine twenty six sixty three,
seven one three six nine nine twenty six sixty three. Have Martin come out
and take a look at it, telling me you heard it on guard line
and just see what what is needed. He may notice some things you're not
seeing right now that he can point out to you as well. Skip can
give me that phone number one more time, please, I sure can,
I sure can seven one three six nine nine twenty six sixty three, seven
one three six nine nine two six sixty three. That's it. Thank you
so much. I appreciate all right. Sorry about loss of those trees.
But those, I tell you pines are tricky. They grow in kind of
a spiral shape as they go up and you start cutting the pine, you
don't know which direction it goes. You need a professional, so you're wise
to seek that out. Thanks for the call, Joe, Yes, thank
you, skipping Yeah YouTube, Bye bye. Our phone number is seven one
three, two one two five eight seven four seven one three two one two
fifty eight seventy four. I uh was looking at my lawn fertilizer spreader I
have. I've got one of the push behind kinds and looking at some of
the settings and I'm about to be putting out some other things. I haven't
done azimite this year yet. I'm going to put some azamite out on the
lawn, but also some fertilizing and whatnot. And I got this at Southwest
Fertilizer. I got it from Bob down a Southwest Fertilizer which is on the
corner of Businet and Runwick for those of you who haven't been there, And
by the way, if you haven't been there, you really need to go.
You will see what I mean when I always say this about Southwest Fertilizer.
If they don't have it, you don't need it, because they have
it anything you need and then something. They've got their fertilizers and pesticide,
anything to control. If you're an organic gardener, they've got the best selection
of organic fertilizers, organic insecticide, disease control, weed control, they have
it right there. But anyway, I got this fertilizer spreader from them and
it works really well. And I also have one of the little hang crank
types. That's what I used to put out fire ant bait and it's time
to get that done as well. There. But anytime you go into Southwest.
You're gonna you're gonna be pleased with the results. The people that work
there, the whole team, they know what they're talking about. They're very
helpful, very friendly, carry stuff out for you. It just makes it
easy. It makes it easy to have success. As well as getting some
really cool new tools. They've always got a excellent, excellent supply on hand
of the kind of tools you need, like the one that I keep talking
about, and you may not think of it as a tool, but it's
the folding seat, the kneeling bench. That's another way to put it.
Imagine something that folds up and when you unfold it, you can flip it
one way and sit on it. It's a bench, very comfortable, just
the right height. You flip it the other way and it's a kneeling bench,
so you can kneel down to the ground and then you have the what
was the legs of the bench or handles to get up and down. Man,
that is so convenient, especially you know, if you're having some trouble
with the joints, or if you're just getting up and down and up and
down and up and down a bunch as you're working through the yard on a
on a Saturday like today. Uh it is. You will love it,
trust me, you will love it. I want. I bought one originally
for my my older sister who is significantly older than me, a point I
like to point out as often as I can. Uh. And after I
got to looking at it, I thought, you know what, maybe I
need one of those. You don't you don't have to be up in the
years to benefit from one of those very very handy folding kneeling benches, And
Bob's got them there. It's Southwest Fertilizer, just corner Businet and Runwick.
If you'd like to give him a call seven to one three six six six
one seven four four seven to one three six six six one seven four to
four to go to the website Southwest Fertilizer dot com. You can find it
there. But anyway, I'm getting out my my uh spreader to put out
some different products and things on the lawn. And I'm always experimenting. You
know, you've heard me say this before, but if you hear me talk
about a sponsor and a product, it's something that I've used because I'm not
going to promote something if I don't know that it works. I need their
needs. I'm really good serious, you know, research evidence that this works,
or having done it myself, or there are people that I trust that
I know they know how to apply things and how to evaluate things, and
you know, if they're telling me it works, well, I'm inclined to
give it a shot because I believe them. But anyway, always out trying
to find a new thing that is going to help us do a better job
of gardening. We want to we want to do a better job. We
want our plans to do better, but we also want it to be easier
and we want it to be more successful. We really really do. I
find that when you when you get out and you create a garden following the
simple principles we talk about on garden Line, you just enjoy it more because
when you drive up and you see beauty and color and you know you did
that. When you go out to the backyard garden, like I was cleaning
up some old beds in my garden this week, and you get them cleaned
up, and there's just a gratification seeing that you got it cleaned up,
and now here comes something else that's producing and it's providing fruit. By the
way, We picked all our paste tomatoes this week. It had a whole
bunch of them. They tend to ripen, the cultivars I used tend to
ripen pretty much all at once close to it, And so we were getting
all that picked so we could do I did some dried tomatoes if you have
never taken a paste tomato like Aroma for example, sliced it just under a
quarter inch thick, just a little under, and then seasoned it however you
want. I mean, I've used that everything bagel seasoning. I've used salt
and garlic only you know what do you like? If you like some sprinkle
some dried basil on the tomato, go for that anyway. Then dry it
in a food dryer or an oven. You can figure out how to do
that. And I'm telling you it is just really really cool. It's like
it concentrates the flavor down. So anyway, we're making good use of those.
My wife made some tomato soup as well, and so just getting out
and enjoying the garden. Remember that just because it's summer doesn't mean you have
to quit gardening. We've got a lot, a lot of gardening still to
do this year. We can create the flower beds that have plants that laugh
at our sultry Southeast Texas summers that they can just really take that heat and
that takes a special plant. But we've got those kind of plants that we
can do. I was visiting a Waldbird's Unlimited recently and looking at some of
the seed selections that they have, and they have a wide variety of seeds.
At Wadbirds Unlimited, you're going to be able to find the product that
fits the birds you're wanting to bring in. It's not like every product has
just one bird that it brings in. But whether you're looking for finches or
whether you're looking for like a little tip mouse, or you want to bring
in some cardinals or things. They have blends for all of that. And
wild Birds Unlimited is the kind of place you want to go because when you
buy a pound of seed, you get a pound of bird food. They
don't kick out the little red bebies like cheap bird feed. Nope, they
have quality stuff. Six stores around the Greater Houston area. Take a little
break here for the news and I'll be right back. I want to talk
about birds a little bit more when I come back. Welcome back, to
guardenline. Good to have you with us today. What do you want to
talk about? Well, we'll just make this a show about the things that
you're interested in, and in the meantime, I'm going to talk about some
of the things that I'm interested in. You can give us a call it
seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. I was talking about
birds going into break there and right now is an excellent time to get out
and do the kinds of things that bring birds to your property. For example,
water Now, I know we've had rain this spring, but that's not
going to continue the whole time. Providing a dependable source of water is very
important as the weather heats up. Birds have to have water, I mean,
living things have to have water. So when you provide water at your
place, especially if there's a sound of water. Number one, it's so
soothing to sit out and enjoy the sound of water. But that also attracts
the birds in and they will come to your place for that. Now,
you can also put out quality feeds like I was talking about from Wildbirds Unlimited.
They have the blends. They even have hullless blends. Hull less so
sunflowers for example, they love sunflowers, crack them open, drop the shells,
but then eat the inside. Well. You can buy hullless blends from
Wildbirds so you don't have any mess at all, and which is pretty nice.
But they also have quality feeders and bird houses. In fact, you
know what, it is, time for Father's Day shopping, right, and
I think an excellent option would be to purchase Dad a quality bird feeder from
Wallbirds Unlimited. They have the kind for hummingbirds, They've got the kind for
every kind of bird you can imagine. I like the Cadillact feeder that they
have. That's what I call it the Cadillact feeder because it just does everything.
It is a squirrel proof feeder. You just have to go in.
Say I want to see your squirrel proof feeder. When you go in there,
squirrels try to get into it, they can't, and squirrels are pretty
darn smart. But I'm telling you this stuff works. I've yet to have
a squirrel get into my feeder that I got from Wallbirds, and it's just,
you know, a quality built thing. If anything goes wrong, you
can get parts for it to fix it and stuff. It's not one of
those cheap oot things you end up throwing away when it breaks. This is
quality, which is what you get from Wallbirds Unlimited. It's quality types of
things. By the way, on Saturday the fifteenth, guess when that is?
A week from today, I'm going to be at the Wallbirds in bel
Air, bel Air, southwest Houston. I'll be at the Wildbirds in bel
Air from eleven am to one pm next Saturday. You got samples of plants
you want to bring in. You got pictures of plants or areas of the
landscape you want to ask questions about. Get them on the phone, check
them, make sure they're in good sharp focus. I'm going to have to
identify something. Make sure it's close up and the sharp focus and we'll get
to the bottom of it. Come by and see me at Wildbird's Unlimited.
We're gonna be given some things away there. I know that Medina is going
to be providing some giveaways and we just I just got a lot. I'm
going to give away Texas Gardener magazines too. I've got a little box of
text Gardener magazines. They provide it for us and everybody who shows up.
If you're not a Texas Gardener, subscriber already, come by. Let me
put a magazine in your hand. I think you will be soon after that.
At least let me say this while supplies last. I only have one
box. We're going to head out now to Siena and talk to Romy.
Hello, Ronny nice Ski, thanks for taking my call. Yes, sir,
I have a question about groundcovers. I'm looking at three different types of
groundcovers. One I think is really pretty. I want to use, but
I just don't know if it's going to do well in this area. It's
a lemon coral seedum. Okay, I don't know if it will do well
in this area. You know, I haven't grown that particular and there's a
lot of seedums, and they vary a lot, but most of them do
well here if you have decent drainage. You know, if it's a thick
clay spot a little on the low side so it stays soggy, they will
not do well. But if you if you get good drainage, they do.
They most of them want a lot of sun too, Okay. The
other two I was looking at where it was a creeping jenny and a sweet
potato vine. My only concern with the creeping jenny is that it's really expressive.
So well, have have you had it before? I have not?
Okay, Yeah, I don't think it's that aggressive. I mean, and
it's real simple to trim. It's not like going underground and popping up in
flower beds everywhere like bermuda grass or anything. It spreads on the surface real
nice and low and flat, and it's got a attractive look to it.
But it's pretty easy to keep in bounds. The creeping jenny would be fine
again, decent drainage for it to do well. What was the other one
that you just mentioned, the sweet potato mine. Yeah, sweet potato vine
does fine. And the shark cruise type is very very light green in color
and it actually helps brighten a shady area. It will grow in sun,
but it was also growing shade and it spreads pretty well. The only thing
to remember about it is where it is a sweet potato, it just happens
to be ornamental foliage. So wherever it gets roots in the ground, you're
going to get little finger sized sweet potato swellings that next year will pop back
up and you'll it'll kind of come back in. I'm not saying it's just
perennial plant and forget it. But I am saying that if just be aware
that it, you may be pulling it up later in some places to get
okay, where these are perennials, those are well, sweet potato. We
think of it as an annual, but it it will behave as a perennial.
Like if next year you wanted the sweet potato back, you probably would
still want to plant it because it probably wouldn't fill in it fill in as
nice and pretty and evenly as you want. This Jenny mine came back year
after year that I had. Well, okay, okay, well I'll try
to see them. If that doesn't work, then I can try the other
the other two. Yeah, that that's what I would do. And uh,
A lot of it on the Jenny two is going to depend on on
your your weather and your you know what kind of winter we have and all
that kind of stuff. Okay, all right, thank you very much.
All right, have a beautiful time out there in the garden. Appreciate your
call. Our phone number is seven one three two one two five eight seven
four seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. When you're thinking
about supplies, for your guard. Ace Hardware is the place you need to
think about because there are forty Ace Hardware stores in the Greater Houston area,
so it's easy to find one. You can find them by going to the
website acehardware dot com. Can it get any more simple than that? Acehardware
dot Com. There's a store locator if you tell them, can I use
your location to say? Yeah? Let me Yeah, you can use my
location and it'll just give you a map and you'll have all the all the
lower red dots of the places you can go. So what do we need
to be doing now? We need to be fertilizing for summer. ACE has
that we need to be doing fire ant control. Now. ACE has that
you want to put a good quality bait out at a very low rate.
Follow the label, cover the whole area of your property. You can get
your neighbors to do it to at the same time. By the way,
it works even better. The larger of an area that uses a bait,
whether it's an organic or synthetic bait, whatever kind you go about, the
larger of an area that does it, the better and longer lasting the suppression
will be. So just keep that in mind. Have a neighborhood party.
Maybe be a good thing for homeowners association to get together. And I don't
know you guys figured that out anyway. Mosquitoes, Oh my gosh, do
you need mosquito dunks? You do? You do? If you got any
kind of standing water? Do you need a fogger to kind of clear out
that patio area so you can actually get out there and enjoy some time in
the late day with family and friends. Ace Hardware has all of that.
Acehardware dot Com. Check it out. We're gonna take a little break right
now. We'll be right back. Our phone number if you'd like to get
on the board to be first up when we come back. Seven one three
two one two KTRH. Welcome back to It's good to have you back with
us on Guardline. We got sunshine out there, folks, and a bright,
beautiful sky. What a good day. What a great day actually to
be out gardening. Let's head up to Tomball and talk to David. Now,
Hello David, good morning, sir. Hey, I got two questions
for you. One, back in the spring, you kind of spoke about
a particular plant or flower that put off of a really nice aroma and that's
all I can tell you. Yes, hopefully that'll drinking your brain. And
then the second question is I've got a patch of grass that between the driveway
and property line and not really doing anything with it. Yeah, and uh,
my wife she wants a blue bonnet patch. I know it's kind of
late, but what do I need to do to prepare that land for next
year to cover that little area with blue bonds? All right, let's do
those in a reverse order. Blue bonnets you need to plant in the fall.
I would plant them in September. Uh, and get them in the
ground, and then when we get some rain on them, they'll they'll start
to sprout. Sit there through the winter and come up in the spring.
Don't don't plant them now, or you won't you won't get to enjoy them.
Do I need to feel the soil or just throw the seeds out there
wild? Yeah? If you can mowlo break out the debris and put the
seeds out there, that would be best. Uh. They do grow wild
out there. Uh and and uh, but they need to have a little
bear spot of soil. When you put the seeds out, they kind of
sink in and as you water it, you know, the soil settles in
around them. A little scratching up of that area is fine, but roto
tilling is not necessary. Okay, So that's that's that's blue bonnets. Uh.
Now, as far as fragrant shrubs, goodness, there's so many.
I may have been talking about Texas Mountain Laurel. That is one that has
a great bubblegum fragrance. It grows very slow. Yeah, okay, well
you got to give it good drainage. You know, it grows out of
a crack in a limestone rock in Central Texas, so it will grow here
and bloom here, but you need to get it very high and dry so
that it doesn't sit in a clay swamp. Texas Laurel. What Texas Mountain
Laurel. The cliffs grow the like you grow them, like in big pots
with a hole in the bottom or something. I've never seen one in a
pot. I think that it would not be very happy in a pot.
To be honest, you might give it a try. There are some other
fragrant shrubs out there. Almond verbina is one of the most fragrant shrubs.
But it's a big, gangly thing, so you know it's going to get
ten feet tall and you can do the trimming on it. But boy,
when it blooms, it's got this these white blooms that are strong vanilla flavor.
Does your website have shrubs that shown? I don't, but that would
be a good thing for me to add. Yeah, that would be a
good one. Okay, Hey, but you're up there and you're up in
Tomball, why don't you just go by Arburgate and say what are the most
fragrant plants you got? Because they're going to have some other things up there
too. There's a number of excellent you know, I don't have time on
the call to go through all the different ones, but just go by and
talk to Beverly or Kennon there at Arburgate, you know where they are,
right on the way side of top. Yeah, go by, go by
there, and they have I've been in there a lot of times, and
every time there's some new plant they've gotten in, it's like, oh,
now they carry this here, so yeah, you should try that. All
right, Well do man? Thank you? All right, thank you,
David. I appreciate your call very much. Yeah, Arbrogate has got so
many kinds of things, and with that new parking lot in back off Trishel
Road just twenty nine to twenty Highway twenty nine to twenty go west of Tomball,
not very far out on the edge of town. There on the left
you will see Trishall Road as you're heading away from Tomball and it goes around
behind Arburgate and it makes it so convenient and easy to park. Some of
the best new things that's happened there, and there's been a lot of cool
things happening. It's always something happening at the arbor Gate. Let's let's go
to Anna and Laporte. Hello, Anna, good morning, Skip Skip.
We need some help over here in Laporte. We have been bombarded with the
way worms. Yes, the waves are all over their trees. The worms
are eating all my plants. Yes, and so what can we do well?
First of all, the earlier you do something when webworms attack, the
better. The young small caterpillars are easier to kill than the old ones that
are about to become moths again, but spraying is probably your best option.
There are organic sprays that are very low toxicity. There are some synthetic sprays
that are also low in toxicity that will work pretty well on the webworms,
but you have to get any spray you use on the foliage they're eating because
they eat the poison and that's what kills them. So sometimes if it's not
a big, big plant, you can use a strong stream of water or
a long pole to break open the webs and then spray. But if it's
too high for that, you either have to hire somebody to do it or
just ignore it. They eat the leaves off the plants tend to come back
and it weakens them a little bit, but you know, their nature is
able to bounce back from that. It just looks like, yeah, looks
one of our problems is I have a fruitless smawberry that is oh yeah,
so full of leaves, you know, just beautiful in now they just covered
with the webs. Mulberry is one of their top five favorite. They love
mulberry. They love mulberry's, they love pecans. You know, there are
some others that they love. But I've seen them on all kinds of things
this year. But yeah, that's that's what you do. But just remember
and they'll be back again later in the summer. So watch for them.
And at the first sign of them, that's when they get out you can
spray. It's easier to get the spray of the foliage because they haven't built
those big webs yet. Okay, so what what do you suggest as far
as spraying If you want to do something organic spinosaid s p I M.
Yeah, yes, and you're gonna have to do it about once a week
until you've gotten rid of But okay, but remember, I don't think I
can get rid of them. They're all over their breaks of the house.
Yeah, it's just horrible. Well, we're getting towards the end of the
time, and I think that our spraying is going to be less effective because
now they're they're dropping out of there. They're crawling around looking for a place
to go. Pupaid so they can become a moth and do it all again
later in the summer. Oh so do's become moss. Yeah, they'll become
little moths that that lay eggs and they'll be back. Yeah. Oh I
don't want them on my Yeah. And I've just recovered my yard from in
my yard, you know, the previous year, and so I'm dealing with
all stuff. I got it. I got it. Thank you, you,
bet, thank you, thank you Anna, thank you. I appreciate
that call very much. Let's see, we're going to run here to pair
Land and talk to Kay. Hello, Okay, good morning, Skip,
thanks for taking my call. I have a question. My daughter in law
has has a what was about a six foot tall, gorgeous fig okay,
and it lived under an oak tree in their front yard and it was too
heavy. My son was she couldn't talk him into moving it into the garage,
so it didn't make it. And we actually covered it with freeze blankets
and put Christmas lights in it and everything, but it didn't. It didn't
survive, and after a couple of weeks she was ready to trash it,
and I said, no, no, no, don't do that. Yeah,
k kay, I'm just letting you know. We're just a few seconds
away from music, so we'll see if we can help. But you may
have to hang on to the next hour. That's okay, okay, No,
but I just it's coming back. I talked to her. I said,
no, it'll take two to three months okay for it to show any
signs. And it's coming back. And I wanted to know, should it
fertilize it, should I do anything? Yeah? Modern moderate amounts of fertilizer.
Get you a good quality mix, just on small doses, give it
a little bit. You can use a slow release of course Star color Star
bey excellent. It would be fine. That will be just fine. If
you got someone hand, go ahead and use that, but just small amounts.
Don't overdo it, okay, just once a month or so? Yeah,
probably so, it just depends how big is the container. I don't
know. It's it's a pot of don't I don't know, pretty good size,
well I get okay, Yeah, I would just do like a couple
of teaspoons of color Star about once a month in there, and that ought
to be pretty good. Great, all right, hey, thank you so
much. All right, you bet, thank you. Hey, folks,
Matthew and Marty. You'll be the first two up when we come back.
Just ran out of time this segment. We'll be right back. Welcome to
kt r H guarden Line with Scared Rict. It's just watching as Welcome back,
Welcome back to guard Line. Good to have you with us today.
We're talking about all kinds of things gardening, and I'm gonna run right out
to the phones. Uh. We're gonna start off with Matthew and Northwest Houston.
Welcome to garden Line, Matthew. Good morning, Skip. How are
you doing on this wonderful Saturday. I'm doing wonderful. It's a great day,
fantastic. I had two questions I was hoping you could help me with.
Okay, the first off, so, after this last rain we had,
I was looking at my flower beds, looking at the damage, seeing
what had been done, and I noticed all these runners that looked like many
ature like gopher runners. It was like a small child had gone into the
flower bed and created a scene from caddy shack. And I can't tell what
it was, and it didn't look like it was coming from the plants.
And when I went on Google, the closest thing I could come to was,
I believe it's called a mule cricket. Oh you're talking about little You're
talking about little bitty, little bitty tunnels, like smaller than your little finger.
Okay, yes, okay, yeah, perfect, Yeah. Moul cricket
is probably it that tunnels right under the ground. It tends to push the
swell up a little bit. You see these little raised crumbly mounds trails.
That's mold crickets and they do feed on plant roots. Uh, generally we
don't worry about them a lot. It's not a common thing that every year
we're treating our beds for mole crickets. But they can cause trouble for I
know, golf cour just have to deal with them and things like that.
But yeah, they're they're controllable with any any kind of an insecticide is going
to be pretty effective against them. So I just picked up the nitrofoss bug
out Max take care of that. Oh yeah, do you put that out
at the rate that they recommend and wateredn real good and it'll it'll control uh
pest, especially one like that down in the ground because it's a granule.
Perfect. Perfect. The second and last issue I had since with all this
rank, we have just been inundated with black flies, just the your common
household black fly. What can I do to help treat and kind of manage
that because it's just made sitting out on our patio or being out in the
garden just yeah, deep nightmareage. Do you have some Do you have some
pets around out there? Yes? A small dog, a small dog.
Okay, there are some fly baits that work really well. They're little granules
and you put them in a little tray and the flies get them and it
poisons the flies. I wouldn't want to get that bait anywhere where the dogs
could get to it. I don't know how toxic it is the dogs,
but you definitely don't even want to find out, so just keep them away.
The other thing would be sprays that you put out, But the problem
there is, you know, the flies fly away and then they spray drives
and they fly back, and some sprays are persistent enough, but in general
that's not a very effective way to try to control flies. So the baits
are really your better option if you can find a way to, you know,
put a little tiny tray of something on a shelf. Okay, do
you have a name or a brand that you recommend or a chemical? Yeah,
de bait go into your up in north west Houston. You've got several
ace hardware stores. I don't know what part of northwest Houston you're in.
Are you by Cyprus or Overclimb? I am? I am half mile west
of Arbor Gate? Oh okay, well half min right there. Half mile
west of Arbor Gate is D and D feed out of twenty nine to twenty
and they definitely are going to have lots of fly control stuff because they're dealing
with people with you know, a horse barn and oh my gosh, you
talk about fly heaven. They will have They'll also have little bags that it's
like a bag of some smelly stuff, but the flies go in and drowned
in it, so then you just throw the whole thing away. Those are
also effective, as are the baits, and that may be with a little
pet around, a little bit safer thing. Just remember, if you do
the baits, don't put them in like a little paper plate or something,
because the wind will blow and it'll just blow it off on the ground.
So be a little extra careful with that. Perfect Yeah you know, oh
absolutely, yeah, I'm literally next door to them. Oh well, they
definitely are going to have you set up for everything you need. Okay,
it sounds perfect. Thank you very much for your help. Skip, you
wonderful morning, and you as well. Thank you very much. I appreciate
that. Let's go now to Marty and Fairfield. Hello Marty, good morning
money. Skip. They have a Cherry laurel and it's not happy where I've
got it, and I wonder if I could a pluit out a ground chance
planet. I can put it in a pot if I need to, but
I'd rather put it in the ground. It's my variegated privet kind of took
over its sunshine. Oh okay, so this is a pretty small cherry laurel.
Then, huh, it's very small. Okay, baby, I just
planted it like a year and a half ago. A year and a half,
you know, moving it now is probably possible that its like it.
And if I were you, I would wait until probably early November and dig
and move it. Then you can do some root pruning where you take a
shovel and go straight down in the ground, maybe a foot out from the
cherry laurel and maybe four sides of it. So if you can just imagine
a bird's eye view looking down at the cherry laurel, like you shove the
shovel in straight down on the north side, and then you shove it in
on the south side and east and west, so you're not completely digging it
out, but you're just cutting some roots out. It's not that big.
It's not that yeah, it's not that big. Okay. Well, I
could probably spoil it out by hand. Oh this is small. Okay.
In that case, it just doesn't like where it is, all right,
so dig it up. What I would do is I would slide a shovel
down and I'd go underneath it. Even if you could only get about maybe
six inches or so below it, just go underneath it and then slide it
onto any kind of a tarp where you could drag it to your new spot
to minimize disturbance of the soil when you try to reach over, and if
it's very much so volume picking it up number one, it's it's hard on
your back, but it all falls off the roots anyway. So I like
to use a tarp to drag things around, but maybe it's too small for
that too. What is the best type of location? Full sun? It
likes sun. It'll put up with some shade, but it likes sun.
And the more sun you get, the denser it'll be. But when you
put it in its new spot, go ahead. Well, I thought I
had it in pretty good sun, but it's it's not happy. Well,
it's a it's related to peaches and plums, and those plants hate wet feet.
So if the spot it's been in underground, it tends to be a
little saturated after rains and stuff that could be part of the reason why it
wasn't happy, because those plants love good drainage. So uh, when you
move it to the new spot, just make sure that it's it does have
good internal drainage of the soil too, Okay, and how big should it
be getting I put it in there as a screen between my names. Yeah,
the standard Cherry Laurel gets pretty big. Probably, I'd have to check
it's been ages since I look, but probably fifteen twenty feet, potentially more
like fifteen. But there's a variety called bright and tight, and there's some
other varieties that are more compact. They're not dwarf, but the density the
distance between leaves on a stem is more compact, and so they're going to
grow slower, but they'll also still get up to about twelve feet in time.
Okay, all right, I'll just get it moved. Take you all
right, Marty. Good luck with that. Thank you, all right,
thank you, bye bye. All right, you're listening to garden Line.
Here's our phone number seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four.
I'll be right back. Welcome back to Guardline. Good to have you with
us today. Hey, have you been to Orges Hidden Gardens. Orges Hidden
Gardens is down in Alvin, Texas. Now, this is a garden center
that is south the words south of the Houston area, So any of you
down in that whole region you need to swing by there and check it out.
They are on Elizabeth Road in Alvin Texas. Elizabeth Road in Alvin,
Texas. You go down, you can check out the website if you like.
His website is tech txgrounds dot com, txgrounds dot com. But Hoorhes
Hidden Gardens is going to have an excellent supply right now. There are the
amount of crape myrtles and the sizes of cratemurdles. There a lot of variety
multi stem whatever you're looking for, they've got plenty of them on hand.
They also have some gorgeous eagleson hollies. If you're looking for a really tall
screen, Eagleston makes a very good screen. Ores got plenty of those on
hand as well. And also citrus trees. Citrus in very impressive containers of
a variety of different things. Are you're looking for kumquats for example, there
they've got a kumquat tree that they're going to raffle for father's day. So
you just have to go to you know, go check it out, give
them a call on and find out. How do you how do you you
know, get involved or sign up for the raffle and he'll tell you how
to do it. But Orges Hidden Gardens with all your citrus. If you're
looking for a quick way to get into citrus, grab one of his fifteen
gallon citrus trees. We're talking about meri, lemon, we're talking about limes
and oranges, satsumas. Got it all there, Just Orges Hidden Guardens again,
if you are looking for how to get there. It is on Elizabeth
Road in alvin Texas. We're going to head out now to Montgomery and talk
to Terry. Hello, Terry, good morning, Thank you for taking my
call today. Sure, I have a very large mature oak in my backyard,
and several weeks ago I noticed a pussy like white substance substance oozing out
at the base of the trunk, and I'm just wondering if you know what
that is. I do, I actually do. It is a It is
called slime flux or sometimes sime slime flux fl ux okay, and it's also
sometimes called bacterial what would What happens is bacteria get inside the trunk the outer
tissues, maybe crack a little bit or something that allows them in, and
they get into that sweet sap material that's inside and they ferment it, and
that pressure of fermentation causes it to push out and leak down the side of
the trunk. And so sometimes it's it's kind of a dark, slimy looking.
Sometimes it's white and frothy looking. But that's just the bubble bubbling out,
and it's not a disease of the tree. It's just an infection that's
under the bark, and that build up of pressure can kind of lift the
bark up off the inner inner wood a little bit, So sometimes the wound
gets a little bit bigger. But a good healthy tree is able to we
say, wall that off and close it back over with callous and time.
If it's a very old tree and it's not very vigorous, it's not growing
much, sometimes that will be a little bit of a nagging problem, but
it's not something that's going to infect the whole tree and kill it. Okay,
So I could just leave it alone, I treat it with something.
Well, there's no there's no treating it. You can't get a product to
the bacteria in there, and you may find certain kinds of butterflies and wasps
will hang out because that that basically is like a little wasp beer joint on
the side of the tree, so they can sit there and and drink from
the fermented sap. Okay, well, well, as long as they don't
drive, I'm okay, that's it. That's it. Don't don't drink and
fly, all right? Aye, Yeah, that's kind of interesting. We
see that a lot, and uh, people get very alarmed, especially when
you start seeing all the bugs on it and things. But it's more of
a physical damage than a disease kind of effect. Uh. Earlier I was
talking who is it telling with somebody? Excuse me? That was had a
container tree of fudd leaf and stuff. We're talking about fertilizing and things.
One of the things that if you've got some container plants and you were looking
just to give them a quick boost, you ought to look into Microlife's Ocean
Harvest and they're super seaweed. Those are two products. Ocean Harvest is a
blue container you can buy by the gallon, bye by the court, and
it's a four two three fertilizer, a fish based fertilizer. You would want
to use that outdoors, not inside the house. They've got other fertilizers you
use inside the house, but this one outdoors because it is fish based.
And then the super seaweed is just exactly that seaweed. It's in a green
container again a galloner quart, and both of these contain all kinds of minerals,
hormones of plants, plant vitamins. There's a lot of plant activity in
things like seaweed extract and certainly with fish and mulsion. That's one of the
standard liquid feeds for organic gardeners. So if you're wanting to fertilize liquid organically
a combination, I actually would use a combination of the super seaweed and the
fish and mulsion. Or it's called Microlife Ocean Harvest four two three. Again,
like all Microlife products, high quality, readily absorbed, and easy,
easy to use, just two ounces in a gallon of water, so you
can use it as a foli or spray, or you can just drench your
containers with it every one, two or four weeks, depending on what you're
growing and how much nutrient boost it needs. All from Microlife. If you
have more information on Microlife, Microlife Fertilizer dot com is the website Microlife Fertilizer
dot com. It's really easy to find, gosh, that stuff is for
sale everywhere, easy easy, and it works. I've used it myself,
absolutely does work very very well. You're listening to Gardenline. Our phone number
is seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four seven one three two
one two five eight seven four. Give us a call. Let's talk about
the things that are of interest to you. I earlier was discussing the importance
of planting things that do well in our climate here and for summer, that
means vegetables and flowers and herbs that can take the heat. And we have
a lot of good options for that. You know, Zenias is certainly an
excellent option. Angelonia is a beautiful One of my favorite summer flowers now,
I think is probably angelonia. I love that thing. It's so many color
options, a little bit of ranges, and size. Lantanas. They the
breeders just keep coming up with more lantanas. Some are so compact they barely
get a foot tall. Others get waist high and above you know, you
have a wide range with lantanas and in colors, and they do so well,
so very well. Here. Mexican heather is a little dainty little flower,
but it makes a little We use ours at my house as a border
shrub. I just put in a bed, or I'm putting in a bed
that kind of curves around the driveway and I'm using the the Mexican heather as
the initial border plant, and then it'll have taller things going in behind it.
And by the way, it is an excellent plant for bees. Bees
love the little Mexican heather blooms and in the summertime there aren't as many flowers
for bees, so it's always good to have something that's blooming that can help
them out. Have you been you know, I talk about these garden centers
and I tell you you really need to go. You need to need to
check it out. But if you've been out to Nilsen Water Garden out there
in Katie, Texas, Nelson Water Garden and Nursery is it's just an outstanding
nursery. I don't think I've ever mentioned before the houseplants that they have indoors,
but they have indoor plants that are just gorgeous. In the indoor part
of the garden center and then outdoors, you've got everything you can imagine.
Do you need herbs? They have all the standard herbs and they have unusual
herbs like, for example, have you ever tried cuban variegated oregano? Looks
almost like a little colius type leaf, but yeah, it's a very fragrant
little herb. They have beautiful hibiscus, some with just deep burgundy foliage like
the starry, starry night hardy hibiscus series. These aren't the tropical hibiscus.
He's the kind that die of the ground and then come back again. Big
old dinner plate sized blooms. They've got plenty of that. They've got grapefruits
and lemons and limes and pomelos and satsumas, tangilos. They have figs like
the lsu gold and the purple and a rappah and Natchez blackberries. I mean.
Nelson Water Garden and Nursery is very stock full of the kinds of things
you really would want to find in a garden center to have success at home
with that. That is the bottom line on it. While you're there,
you gotta go just to see too the beautiful water gardens that they have all
the supplies from fish to plants to actually constructing the gardens themselves. How about
starting with just a disappearing fountain coming out of a big, beautiful ceramic container.
Go buy Nelson Watergarden, and Katie, you'll see what I'm talking about.
And when I went there, it is like my job spent half the
time hanging down because I was really surprised at the beauty and just the inspirational
layout of the whole thing. When you walk through there, you will definitely
want to bring water home with you to add beauty and that wonderful sound of
water to the backyard. By the way, Nelsonwatergardens dot com. That's the
website out there in Kate our West Houston Nursery, Nelson Watergardens dot com.
We are going to go now to Spring Branch and talk to Robert. Hello,
Robert, good morning, skipt Hey. I know you've covered this before,
and I did the right thing. I've got web worms and they ate
ninety nine point two four percent of the leaves off of my tree. I've
got sparse here and there. I broke up, broke up, the webs.
Hit them with the spinosat through the water hose because it's a reasonably tall
tree. But now that the worms have kind of run their course, and
I think I got rid of most of them. Man, it was like
a savage attack on my house. They went through everything. So I threw
the spinosat on everything from the yard to the bushes, to the lilies,
to wherever they could go, and then I hit the house with the home
defense type chemical. So I think I basically eradicated to them. I don't
see any live ones now, but I need to know what can I do
to this tree to help it recover, because as much as I broke up
the webs, I've still got web remnants and a multi million car guy up
in the yeah, in the tree. What can I do to help the
tree recover? At this points, sir, it is going to bounce back
itself. You know, it's got plenty of nutrient in the ground. I
mean, if the tree was let's say, not very vigorous going into the
problem, then you might want to do some fertilizing of it. But in
general, the trees were okay going into this, and they're going to bounce
back. So The main thing is just now start watching the trees carefully over
the coming weeks and months, because we should have another one or two webworm
attacks. Hey, Robert, I am hitting a break I have to take
right now. If you want to hang on, we can continue this discussion.
I'm going to put you on hold in the meantime, Murray, you'll
also be first up when we come back. Welcome back to Cardline. Good
to have you with us. Let's see here, we were in the big
middle of a conversation with Murray, and we're going to hop right back in
there. Murray, I think we were talking about the tree had been hammered
pretty good, and I'm basically saying that it'll be fine, it'll come back.
If it was a little week going into the web worm problem, then
maybe a little fertilizer would would be helpful. Are you there? Yeah?
I think you. We were both calling about webworms. Pardon, Oh did
I have the Do I have the wrong? Okay, go ahead, sorry,
but we're both I'm calling about web worms. Also, my phone is
just webworm in today. Let's talk about your web worms. You got to
you got a mulberry tree, I think right, Yeah, yes, sir,
Okay, it's about it. It's only a few years old. It's
about fifteen foot tall. But and this year it's completely covered up with web
worms. Yeah, yeah, you know, it's it's that kind of year.
It's been a bad one, and I expect there'll be another round or
two, and so I think most importantly, it can afford to lose its
leaves and it'll bounce back. It's not going to kill the tree, but
we could have two more waves of webworms this summer, so I would be
extra diligent and at the first sign of a little bit of activity. After
this tree releaves out, you really want to protect that second set of foliage.
You don't want it to have to releaf out twice during the summer seasons
too. That's too much stress. So be extra diligent to just watch and
catch them as early as possible. So I didn't catch what you said to
put on them to get the worms alved. Okay, there are a lot
of insecticides that will work for that. I generally recommend spinosid because it is
an organic product, not very high in toxicity, and it lasts for about
a week out there on the foliage, which is a little bit of an
advantage over BT lasts a little bit longer. But there are many other there's
a number of synthetic perithoid products. Pretty much. If it says it's an
insecticide for use on your trees and shrubs and plants, it'll control webworms.
Okay, I should be got to get something like this at Yes, excuse
me, Yes, you can get it at feed stores. ACE Hardware stores
have it. Well, where are you located in Dayton? Okay, yeah,
you're a little bit further out there. I know we got an ACE
hard rover in Crosby area, but yeah, you probably have some places out
a little closer to you. Okay, So I should go ahead and get
them off now, then I would, And just remember the earlier you treat
them, the more effective the treatment is. Number one, you protect the
leaves that the tree has. You know, if you don't treat them,
it's going to lose all those leaves. So getting something on it is good
for that reason. But also it's just when they're young, they're easy to
kill. When they get older, not so much. Okay, Okay,
all right, thank you sir, Thank you appreciate the call. Murray appreciate
that very much. I talk a lot about the importance of building your soil,
about the importance of doing the brown stuff, the setting the stage,
getting the soil ready so when you put a plant in, you're going to
have success. But equally important it is putting something on top of the soil
because we're entering the summer season, and when you have bear soil, you
have weeds. When you have bear soil, the soil temps can skyrocket and
it makes a huge difference for the plat roots up in the top maybe three
or four inches of soil for sure, where it just gets too hot.
Well Louisiana, Louisiana Landscaper Landscaper's Pride has got a quality group of mulches that
go on the surface and they all do really, really well. For example,
the black velvet molts, that's not a dyed molts, that's a naturally
dark molts that they have a very beautiful black velvety look just like the name
implies. They have a hardwood molts. It's an organic base. It's not
ground up pellets like some cheap old things that you see in certain stores will
be no. This is truly hardwood materials from land clearing kite, you know,
removing hardwood materials, very very high quality, holds together well, it
locks up, it doesn't float away. Pine bark malts probably the most popular.
Very beautiful, very beautiful, slow decomposition with the pine bark malts,
so it lasts a little bit longer. Cedar malts there's another one. It's
gonna take a little longer to decompose again. It locks together really well and
doesn't float away. And then the Cypress Molt cypersmultch is locally sourced from Cypress
Logs, very durable and it you know, when it gets set in place,
it tends to hold its spot pretty well too. The Cypress Mults works
really well and it has a nice light color. So those are just some
examples of the many twenty seven different products at Landscaper's Pride. Go to Landscaperspride
dot com and you can find out more about every one of them and also
where to get them, and they are very widely available. We're going to
now run to Lamarck and talk to Desmond. Hello Desmond, Yes, good
morning, yeah, yeah, good morning, Yeah, thanks for taking my
call. Sure, I've got two questions for you. In the Lamarck area
and also up around clear like especially there's some kind of remediad thing that is
in all the crape myrtle trees and some of the oak trees, especially ones
that are a little bit distressed, and it's killing all of the crape myrtles.
And I didn't know if there was anything that you could spray on on
a crepe myrtle tree that would get rid of that. Yeah, so that's
called ball moss. There's also one called Spanish moss. Ball moss is little
balls that are in the tree, spiky balls, and the Spanish moss just
hangs down in long sheets or ribbons hanging down right, which is okay,
So okay, does men believe it or not? It's not killing the tree.
What happens is the tree gets weak and it starts to thin out,
and that's whatever is the problem with the tree. It could be so something
wrong in the roots. It could be poor soil compaction. It just could
be a lot of things. The tree starts to thin, it's cannot be
a little and the light comes through and the ball moss proliferates. But I've
seen bal moss growing on power lines. So if it was a parasite,
needing the juices of the tree. It wouldn't grow on a power line.
I've seen it on fence posts too, So it's along for the ride.
And it's more a sign that the tree is weak and thinning and they're the
bal moss proliferates. It loves that humid environment. You can spray it in
the spring before the tree leaves out with a copper based spray. You don't
want to do that right now. Copper sprays will burn foliage of a lot
of different kinds of plants depending on the copper. But a good quality copper
based spray sprayed on it in the spring, just you know, as we're
getting into that cool, mild rainy period in the spring, those sprays at
that time are effective. What will happen is ball mus will die and dead.
Baal moss looks a lot like living boss and it eventually just rots and
falls out of the tree. Yeah. Does it spread by a spore because
it does have small flowers. It's a it's a little it's it's more like
a little you know how like dandelions have these little things that float out there
and right, and it's more something like that. It lodges in the bark
and then it gets its start and again it doesn't have It's not like mistletoe
that has roots in the tree as a parasite. It's it's more just hanging
on the outer bark. It'll also grow and get its roots underneath the shingles
on your roof too. It can Yeah, I mean it'll grab on to
whatever whatever it has. But yep, that that would be what I would
use. Okay, so it's called BOMs then ball b A L L ball
moss yep. Okay, all right. And my other question is is there
anything you've come up with that will get rid of doveweed? Yes. After
Howard and Harvey went through, my place was in undated with doveweed, and
I've been spraying. I started off using Blindside and that I would have to
spray it twice and that's got control of some of it. And now I've
been recommended a product called Celsius. Yes, and I wondered if you'd had
any success with that, because doveweed is really really difficult to get rid of.
Yeah, sure is absolutely So let me ask you this, do you
have a lot of it or just a small area of doveweed? No,
I've got well. On the front lawn, I've got to where I can
just spot spray now okay, But on the back I virtually spray the whole
lawn. Mm okay, well yeah you could. You could do the you
could do the celsius on it. Did you say Blindside was the other one
that you did. Yes, Yeah, Blindside is very effective. It's just
a one that's a little harder to find for most people. But there's also
for people that just have a little bit of doveweed. There is a cinnamon
based product, and our garden centers carry it. It's it's just a cinnamon
based and you sprinkle on it and it just turns it black and it really
knocks it out well. But it's a little pricey, and so to go
dusting cinnamon on weeds. If you've got a big area, it's not practical
to use the cinnamon approach. So the others that you're that we've been talking
about, they're they're probably the better way to go. Right, where would
the cinnamon be available most garden centers, I've seen them in ace hardware stores,
I've seen them, you know, just your mom and pop kind of
garden centers that we look at and it's called Agra Lawn a g R I
l A W n Agri lawn. And I'm trying to think of what else
is part of the name. It's got picture of a little fist that's pounding,
pounding a weed on the cover. But yeah, but again that that's
the little dusting here and there. If you've got a big yard full of
doveweed, you're going to need to use these other products. Yeah, well
on the instructions on both of them actually even recommends that for doveweed and one
or two other weeds. Okay, you'll have to probably have to do it
at least twice. Yes, that's true. That is just going to be
true. And the more you can keep it dry by avoiding overwatering, uh,
the better off you are. Hey, I got to run for a
commercial Desmond, but good luck with that. I appreciate your call very much.
Our phone number seven one three two one two k t R H Steve.
You'll be first up when I come back. Welcome back to garden Line.
Thanks for listening today. You'd like to give us a call and maybe
ask a gardening question. Seven one three two one two kt RH seven one
three two one two kt R h H. If you are interested in a
natural based product fertilizer for your lawn that has a very high nitrogen level,
that would be Sweet Green high. I mean eleven percent nitrogen, which for
an organic type product is very very high. Sweet Green is a molasses based
product. When you put a on the soil, that melts away down into
the soil, releasing the nitrogen through biological activity. Microbes love sugary substances.
They need that carbon, and basically Sweet Green is loaded with the kind of
carbon that they need. Now, Sweet Green is a nitrofoss product, so
it's available in a number of different places. It smells wonderful too. By
the way, Sweet Green is available if you got to Katie, Ace Hardborough
and Pinoak, they've got it out there. Ace Hardware CITYO Memorial Drive is
another place. Or go down to Stanton Shopping Center and Alvin or North Taylor.
You can find Sweet Green and nitrofoss products there as well. Sweet Green
ted out Now to Deer Park and we're going to talk to Steve. Hello,
Steve, good morning. Well, I've got a quite a few ag
of panthers in the front yard and last year none of them bloomed, and
this year one of them bloomed. Can you recommend anything I could do for
that? That's a good question. Agapanthus is one of those frustrating plants for
me. It sometimes it just blooms and blooms and people aren't doing anything to
it, and it's just happy in blooming. And other times it's doing what
you described. It needs sunlight. Doesn't have to have full sun. It
likes a break from the full sun. But it needs good lighting in order
to bloom well in a deep deep shade. It's not It needs to be
a good, healthy plant and not over fertilized. You want to go a
little easy on the nitrogen for agapanthos. Don't just push it like you're going
to create a lot of vegetative leafy green growth. You know you want it,
You want it to settle in a little bit. I would use something
like a color Star fertilizer. Nelson's color Star would be a good choice for
agapanthos. But just watch the overdoing of that first number, and then of
course keep it keeping it moist adequately more. Okay, is there much chance
of getting at the bloom at this late neat season or well? I would.
I would hope so, but I don't know all the specifics of you
know, the soil in sight and what it's what all it's struggling with there.
I just kind of threw out some general ideas, but uh, I
would. I wouldn't give up on it just yet. Yeah, well I
don't mind even just the leaves are kind of pretty, but yeah they are.
But you sure would like those beautiful blue uh oh yeah, like blue
fireworks going off above the plants. Yeah, I think they're really pretty.
Another question I heard you talking earlier about webworms. Yes, if you can
see when they're just starting, can you just trim off that branch or a
part of that branch. Yes, you can. If there are a lot
of them, you know, that's maybe more pruning than you want to do
to a plant, but yes you can. It is also an option.
But I tell you, if you catch them when they're really early, it
is easy just to squirt the foliage because they don't have that big web built
all around a big large area of leaves, and you can just squirt the
foliage with all kinds of different insecticides and it will be very effective on shutting
them down. Okay, I had one more question that you got time.
Okay, I've seen on YouTube where they deadhead roses and they say cut them
back to five leafs instead of three leaves because the five leaves make more flowers.
Okay, you agree with that. Well, yeah, it's cutting them
back a little bit further back from the end there's more vigor and that bud,
you know, like the five leaf leaflet that you're referring to, there's
a bud at the base of it that will vigorously push out new growth and
then have flowers on the end of that shoot that comes from that bud.
That's why they say that. Okay, and I got another rose is kind
of a climb and type rose, and I kind of tried to s play
how we pronounced it on the fence, you know, had the three rails
and I'm trying to run it out on each rail. That Is that a
mistake or is that? Will it work? Like, tell me what kind
of rose it is? Again, it's a climbing rose. I don't know
the variety of Yeah, you can do that. Climbing roses in general do
better when the canes the shoots are oriented horizontally. So if you let them
go like and I know you're talking about going horizontally, but if they go
straight up, you end up with blooms up at the top, but no
blooms up and down the shoots. There's actually a type or two of rows
that will bloom better on the shoots like vertically, but in general we run
them like back and forth, you know, go left or right across the
trellis, back and forth because that horizontal orientation you get a better bloom set
in there. And so, yes, you could do that, but it's
going to be a job because there's going to be a lot of new shoots
forming and you're kind of having to bundle them together and get them on those
those rails of the fence, you know, to create the look you're looking
for there. I guess I should let it get a little bit bushy,
huh, or on each each runner, or well you could, you know,
you just kind of have to. Some roses are not as vigorous as
others, and so it depends on the kind of roads you're trying to do
that too. Some of them will work out trying to keep up with them,
okay, and you can continue to fertilize them through the summer or not.
Yes, you can, you should small amounts. Okay, okay,
okay, Well thank you for those answers. I appreciate it all right,
thank you appreciate the call very much. Well let's see here, we are
running out of time for this hour. That one went fast. Archie in
Paarland and Robert up on the northwest side. You'll be our first up when
we come back. By the way, if anybody is familiar with when the
plumerius sale is out in clear like the Plumarous Society, would you give me
a call here on Garden Line and you can just tell the producer if you
don't want to be on the air. But we I need that information.
I've been having people ask about that and I do not know the answered that
question. So Archie, if you have a follow up to that, stick
around. If not, the minute I find out something, I will let
you know. Don't forget Next Saturday, I'll be at wall Bird's Unlimited in
bel Air, Southwest Houston, eleven am to one pm right after garden Line
next Saturday to fifty Welcome to k r H Garden Line with scamp Ricard's just
watch him as World. Welcome back to garden line, Well, wellcome back.
Good to have you with us, Good to have you with us.
Well, I have a guardline quiz. If you listen to guarden line more
than one time, you oughtn't know the answer to this. What is the
most important thing you do if you want to have success with a new planting?
The answer is, prepare the soil first. Yes, soil type is
important, Yes, drainage is important, Yes, sunshine is important. All
of those things. But I'm telling you the foundation for success is the soil.
Plants live in the soil. They do. The top sticks up and
its job is to grab sunlight to fuel the plant. But the roots are
taking up the water, they're taking up the nutrients that the leaves used to
make everything that plant needs and that you want. Maybe what you want is
beautiful foliage, maybe it's fruit, maybe it's flowers. That all happens if
you've got good soil. And Heirloom Soils has put together a combination of options
for quality soil mixes that are like none other. They're fruit berry and centrismex.
For example, you're gonna plant anything that's going to grow fruit there it
is fruit berry, et cetera. SMEs veggie and herb mix. The name
tells it, Cacti and succulent mix. The cactine cyce very gritty. It
drains well. So if you're gonna do plants that don't like to have mukys
wet soil conditions, cact Insculent is designed just for those kind of plants.
They got their works potting soil. They have the roses and bloomers blend.
It's like talking about it. It's a multipurpose rose soil, very very effective.
Not just roses, but anything that you're going to grow that is a
shrub or putizelias and the roses and bloomers blend. They do very well in
that as well. Heirloom Soils of Texas. That's the website, Airloom Soils
of Texas. Go check it out. You're going to find these products all
over the place. You can buy them by the bag, you can buy
them by the bulk, you can have them deliver it. Just go to
Heirloom Soils of Texas com and find out more information. But whatever you do,
get that soil ready so that when you put that wonderful new plant you
just bought in the ground, it hits the ground running. That's the goal.
We're going to go now to the northwest side and talk to Robert.
Hello, Robert, do we get you there? Robert? Oh, yes,
sir, How can we help you? Hey? Hey, I got
a question about our trees and have broken during the storm a couple of weeks
ago. I had a big limb on a Chinese elm laid over okay and
big star right where there where the tree was. Luckily it didn't tear the
whole tree down or nothing, but uh, it didn't feel any park.
I was able to cut it right where it bent down, you know,
and good. But what I put on that? What do I cover that
up with to protect that tree from you know, getting any diseases or anything
else. You know. For for many years now, research and our rubriculture
has been telling us that we don't need to be painting wounds on trees.
It's better to let it be open and dry out those wound paints. You
know, it seems logical that they would help, but actually they end up
holding moisture behind them, and you get more decay behind them, and there
are other issues that they can cause. The only exception of that, Robert,
would be if you had an oak tree and you were in an area
with oak wilt, then we would paint the wounds immediately. But that is
not for the sake of healing. That's for the sake of keeping the bugs
out that spread that disease. So just a good clean cut and made it,
making it at the right spot. You don't want to leave a stub
because that'll die and then you have this dead piece of wood that prevents the
tree from putting callous over to close up that wound. On the other hand,
you don't want to print it right flush up against the trunk, because
that just makes a bigger wound. All right, Chip, I appreciate it.
I almost send you a picture maybe talking about it next weekend to her
and just make sure that what I'm seeing is exactly what you're describing, all
right, appreciate it. All right, Robert, I'm gonna put you on
hold and my producer is gonna give you my email to send that picture too.
I unless there's something different, I won't comment back on it if you
don't hear from me that it was kind of what we had said. But
thank you very much. I do appreciate the call. Yeah, when whenever
trees whenever they break and storm, typically the wound is one that is not
going to heal well at all, very very slow, if at all.
And then whether that tree lives another decade or ten decades, it just is
going to be a weak spot that more and more rots away interior and causes
a weak spot. We say it weakens the structural integrity of the tree.
There's the fancy way to put it, but the bottom line is you want
to get in there and make a good clean and you wanted to close over.
And there's a proper way to prune. For those of you who are
doing it yourselfers learn how to prune properly. Do a Google search for something
called three point cut. Look at how to do a three point cut.
That is the best way to make the pruning cuts where you don't end up
causing problems. And better yet, how's somebody that knows what they're doing.
And that's why we're always talking about affordable tree. Martin spoon Moore here on
garden line seven one three six nine nine twenty six sixty three. That's his
number, seven one three sixty nine nine two six sixty three. Go to
the website aff Tree Service dot com. But Martin knows how to do this.
And so if you're at all in doubt or you don't maybe have quite
the equipment, don't risk going up on a ladder and holding a chainsaw on
one hand for crying out loud trying to do pruning. How's somebody come in
that knows what they're doing, uh, and can do it right and safely.
A lot of things do not end well when you go up on a
ladder and start stretching the limits of safety a little bit. We love feed
stores here on Garden Line and League City Feed is an outstanding feed store down
in League City. When I say outstanding, I like the old time feed
stores. You know, I want to go in and I want several things.
I want to find the products that I need. And at Leake City,
if you hear me talk about fertilizer, it's at League City they carry
that. They're at League City. Do you need stuff to control diseases or
insects or weeds, They've got all of that at League City Feed. Of
course it's a feed store. They got all the feed things. I'm talking
more from a gardening standpoint, but whatever you need, they're going to have
copies of it. They have air copies. They're gonna have products of it,
airloom soils. They carry that there. That's just an example. The
asimitostombout earlier today. They carry that there, and on and on down the
line. Now, Leake City feed is just three blocks, just a few
blocks actually, south of Highway three. Are on Highway three, south of
Highway ninety six. Let me say that again. You're in League City.
You go south of Highway ninety six on Highway three, just a few blocks
and you're right there. So for all of you and all those communities clear
Lake and Webster and Santa Fe and Lamark and Baycliff, San Leone, this
is your hometown feed store. It's open Monday through Saturday nine to six,
closed on Sunday. So today would be a good day to get by there
and get what you need. They carry it out to the to the car
for you too, or the pickup. So that just makes it even better.
Two eight one three three two one six one two two eight one three
three two one six one two. We are now going to go here to
Kim, Hello, Kim, Hi Skip. I was just wondering if I
could do a little plug for our Maria sail today out here in clear Lake.
Well, we had a caller earlier that was wanting to ask about that,
so go ahead and just tell folks, uh, you're having the show
too, right, Yeah, well yes there, Well there's a lot of
Plamerius here and then of course we we have our balloom table that has all
the balloons on it that people can take a look at. We're out here
at clear Lake Park at the Bay Area Community Center at five thousand and two
East Nasa Road in Seabrooks. Seven seven, five eighty six is the actual
address. Well, the simple way is is Bay Area Community Center on Nasa
Road. That's absolutely yes, thank you so much, And it's from nine
to one today and we have about we have twenty five cellars, and we
have everything from you know, the novice up to a serious collector. So
we'd love to have people come out. Like I said, the doors open
at nine for people to purchase plants, and we've got other merchandise and T
shirts and beautiful tumblers and things like that. So any listeners who loves Flumerius
or maybe even wants to just learn more about and we'd love to have you
out here. Well, good, that sounds fun. One of these days
I'm going to get out there. I have I have do not have Plummerius
and I need to get some and so one of these days I'm going to
head out and join y'all out there as well. But I know you guys
have a wide variety. Well that would be fabulous. And thank you so
much for letting us, letting us get the word out and hopefully we'll see
some of the listeners out here today. All righty, thanks a lot.
Appreciate the call, Kim little public service announcement there for those of you who
were asking me about it earlier on that is going on today. There are
always new products and new things coming on the market, and I'm typically skeptical
upfront. I just am because you know, there's always some new thing you
can't live without out there, no matter what the category is. Gardening just
is one example. But Medina came out with a new product that before I
even tried it, I was excited about it. And it's super Grow Plus.
It's part of their hast Grow series. It's a court bottle that hooks
up to your garden hose. Ever's about four thousand square feet. It takes
about ten minutes to do your lawn, but you just took it to a
garden hose and you just like your water in the lawn very very lightly.
It's a sixteen zero two. And the reason I was excited about it is
that zero, that low middle number. That is a good thing if you
have a lawn that's been fertilized year after year after year after year. A
lot of the nutrients can be volatile. They can wash away, they can
nitrogen can go off as a gas. They don't stick around, but phosphorus
does. That's a middle number, and so a lot of parts of the
country now are limiting phosphorus and fertilizers to protect surface water. And so there
are places where you just can't use any particular thing you want without special In
some cases it's a prescription even but getting back to the Houston area, supergril
plus is a great way to green up a lawn quickly. Now it's not
all fast release. About a fifth of the nitrogen is slow release to it.
It also has some other things to help green up, like the keylated
form of iron that helps with that yellowing that we typically see in our Saint
Augustine lawns. It's got things like molasses and humic acid in it and seaweed
extract even so, it's just a great concoction. Has to grow super grow
plus. I'm going to be given away some of that at one of our
upcoming appearances and I'll tell you more about that when we get a little bit
closer to it. But has to grow supergrow plus by Medina high quality,
very high quality product. You are listening to Gardenline. Our phone number is
seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four seven one three two one
two five eight seven four. Don't forget that. Next Saturday, I'm going
to be at Wallbirds Unlimited in bell Air, Texas Wilbirds in bel Air.
I was talking earlier about some Father's Day gifts and the squirrel excluder feeder I
think is one of the best Father's Day gifts. If dad likes to,
you know, get out and enjoy a cup of coffee early in the morning
and listen to the birds and watch the birds and things. This feeder is
cool. It's my favorite feeder that I've got, and I've got a lot
of different kinds of feeders around the house, but Wibird's Unlimited. The squirrel
excluding feeder is a really cool one. Now, they got a lot of
other things here. They've got feeders for every particular kind of bird and seed
that you might have. But come out and see me at bell Air Wildbird's
Unlimited in bell Air. It's one of the six stores here in the Greater
Houston area. By the way, if you looking for a Wildbirds near you
go to WBU dot com forward slash Houston and that's where you can find out
more about them. WBD dot com forward slash Houston. Let's go out to
Mansfield now and talk to Martha. Oh, I tell you what, Martha,
I'm sorry, I pull the call up and I might put your right
back on hold because I just saw I let a brake slip by here.
We'll be right back. Welcome back to the guard Line. Hey, good
have you with us today? We are going to head out now to let's
see where we want to go. I think I went to Brenda and Woodville.
Hello Brenda, Hello, how can we help? Well, we've had
Encore Sobias for about two years and they've not done well. Okay, they
did bloom a little bit earlier this year. But they're real tall and scraggly,
and we were wondering if it's too late to prune them. It is
not too late to prune them, but go ahead and get it done.
They need to be able to regrow new shoots after your pruning and set the
bloom buds for next spring, and it'll they'll be doing that by the time
we get into mid to late summer. So you need to go ahead and
get them prune now so they have time to grow and set the buds.
Okay, when we prune them, do we also need to fertilize them or
just let that go for a while. Uh, you know it kind of
looking how are they looking? If they're looking like they could use a little
boost, I'd give them a boost that there's nothing wrong with that gets you
a good product for acid loving plants. If you have a particular brand do
you like to use, but something for acid loving plants would be a good
choice. Okay, well, thank you very much. All right, thank
you very much. I appreciate that. Brenda. Thanks for the call.
Now we're going to run out to Vents in the Woodlands. Hello Vents,
good morning, Thanks for taking my call. How are you going this morning.
I'm good, I'm good. How are you today? Well? Thank
you. I am calling because it seems as though we've got a phenomenon going
on in our particular subdivision where a lot of trees are beginning to get just
enveloped in these spider web type of masses that just envelop entire branches. And
I was wondering, what is that? And because it's all so high up,
what do you have to do? Do you cut down that branch?
Is if it's left to go without any kind of action on our part?
Yeah, does it eventually take the tree? Okay, you're talking about webbing
on the outer branches right, Just to be clear, Yes, okay,
that's webworms. And I just posted something a while back to our Guardenline Facebook
page on it webworms or we're having one of the worst years we've had in
a while for this early in the year. Normally they aren't a big problem
until a big problem until later in the summer, but this year came early
and you can spray them. There are a number of products that will kill
them. They're just caterpillars, and so you just have got to get the
spray to the foliage they're feeding on, and that's the challenge. If you
can use a long pole to break up the webs, or if you have
a spray stream that's strong enough that will kind of cut through the web a
little bit and get it on the foliage inside. You can control them with
that. They're not hard to kill. You just got to get the product
to them. That's the war. In the event that you cannot. I
mean, this is pretty high up. I would imagine we'd need bring out
a tree service or something to climb on up there. Will it eventually take
the tree? No? Well, okay, now this year we're seeing plants
where all the foliage was lost, but the tree can bounce back and grow
new foliage. But when it's doing that, you really want to watch it
because you don't want it to do that two or three times in the course
of the year, and we could have another two generations still here in the
greater Houston area. So just watch. If the new foliage comes out and
you start to see the very first signs of it, go ahead and get
sprays on it. However, you have to go about doing it to protect
that new set of foliage. Okay, well, I appreciate the info.
Thanks very much. All right, thank you very much. Vince appreciate the
call very much for sure. Let's see, we're going to now go to
talk to Jim. Hello, Jim, Hey, good morning. Hope you're
doing just fine. I am, sir, Thank you good. I've got
some live oaks that need trimming up, and I mean because they hang down
a bit. Okay, what's the best time of year to do that?
Well, winter, late winter is the best time to do the majority of
tree pruning. If you need to do a cut here and there and yonder,
you know, you can do two or three cuts anytime of the year,
but if you're going to do quite a better pruning, we try to
get most of that done in the winter because spring is the time of fastest
wound healing. But it's not a black and white thing like, if you
got pruning needs to be done, now, go ahead and get some of
it done. Don't wait until next winter to do it. Okay, very
good, thank you. Okay, and just where you located, by the
way, Jim, I'm on the energy corridor. Oh okay, all right,
yeah, that's fine. I just was checking. If you're in an
area with oak wilt, that's a different thing. But we don't have as
much of it here as they do in Central Texas, that's for sure.
Okay, all right, sir, good, thanks a lot, Thank you,
sir. Take care. Now we're going to go out to La Bark
and talk to Gail. Hello, Gail, Hi, good morning. I
have I sent a picture yesterday which I think is called turkey tail fun guy.
Oh my huge hackberry tree, and I want to know if it's going
to kill it or not. I did not get an email from you.
I sent it from my phone yesterday. Okay, I don't I don't see
it here. Could you resend No, I'm driving right now, Okay,
yeah, don't do that. Don't do that. What are the first few
letters of the email or would it come from a phone number? You're saying,
I can M G O N. Okay, uh yeah, I'm sorry.
I don't see it here for some reason. Yeah, well it's as
I googled, I mean, I sent. I had that app on where
you can take a picture what you're looking at to identify it. Yes,
and it came a turkey tail fung guy. Okay, well it could be,
but let me let's whenever you're at a place where you can stop and
resend. Maybe use your email and attach it to an email and email it
to me. I'm going to put you on hold and I'm going to get
the producer to make sure you have the right email address. Okay, so
just hang on. He's going to pick up. All right, Thank you
very much for that call. Yeah. We try to do as best we
can with emails, especially when you're described. People are describing something and I
may not picture what you're seeing U, and so the email is a good
way to confirm that I just am not able to in general open up the
emails to just all the questions people would have. There's just absolutely no way
I could begin to to answer those. So we try to connect the emails
to a call. So if you email me, well, I'm going to
ask that you follow up with a call to garden Line. Or sometimes it
goes the other way. You call me and then I say, hey,
I need to see a picture. Go ahead and send me an email.
We're gonna take a break here, it's time for the news our number seven
one three two one two kt r H. I'll be right back and John,
you'll be first up. We go back to the garden Line. We
are gonna head straight to the phones. Here. We got John in Galveston.
First up. Hello John, Hey sir, how are you. I'm
good? Thank you. Yeah. So, four or five years ago and
there was we had an outbreak in our lawns here in South Texas of something
called a sod webworm with with everybody talking about you know these this webworm problem
that we're having right now kind of in every tree we see it's the same
bug and we need to start looking at treating form already or not or okay,
looking for it. That's a good question. No, it's not the
same bug, completely different. The soid webworm doesn't build these big old webs
like you're seeing the fall webworm, which is what tree is in your trees
doing right now. It has a little bit of webbing down in the thatch
of the grass. But if you go online, I have a website gardening
with skip dot com and on there are two schedules. One is the lawn
care schedule. One is the lawn pest Disease and weed management schedule. On
the second one the pest disease and weed in the insect row. From January
through December. It shows when chinchbugs and sod webworms can appear, and then
when we treat for grubs also and so soid webworms typically come later in the
year. We can get them earlier in the summer, but typically you don't
really see the big outbreaks until we get in around August, maybe even September,
but we start watching for them in June. Just repeat the website a
please. Gardening with skip dot com makes it easier to remember. Yeah,
you bet you got Those are free to download. All right, there you
go. Yeah, good question. Webworm and webworm, we have a lot
of confusion. There's also something called a bagworm that's different than what we're dealing
with now, So I'm not going to confuse the issue by describing it.
But yeah, that is that is a factor. Uh, let's see.
We're going to go now to Lake Jackson and talk to Doug. Hello,
Doug, Hey, good morning. I have a Saint Augustine yard and I
have what it seems to be a very active weed that seems to be outgoing
my Saint Augustine. It's kind of a tear drop on each side. It's
like a fern, but it's very small. Okay, okay, okay,
it's not it's not a bern. It kind of looks like a large fern,
but it's very small. But okay, kind of the end is like
a reverse tear drop. And okay, boy, it could be several things.
I really need to see a picture to know for sure, but I
can tell you this, if I were you, I would get a product
called Celsius. Now that the temperature has heated up, Celsius is a little
safer to use. Still apply it early in the morning before the weather really
heats up. Good, but it is good against a wide variety of weeds.
And I you know, you could be talking about a lawn ber weed.
You could be talking about even what's the Virginia button weed? That the
little teardrop thing sounds more like Virginia button weed. But anyway, whatever it
is, the Celsius would be a good place to start in shutting that down.
You mix it out and spray it target directly to the weeds. And
what is the name of that product? Again, I'm sorry, celsius like
temperature cel si U s celsius and it's just celsius. And I can get
that at any loads or I don't know about that. I don't about loads.
If you go to a if you go to like an ACE Hardware store,
you're going to find it. It's a little bit of a drive for
you to come up to Southwest Fertilizer up in Southwest Houston, but they have
it there. But you should be able to Cornelius have it. They might.
You just have to try, just have to call around. It's not
the most common of the products out there, but most of our good garden
centers we'll be carrying it as well as Ace Hardware, and some other places
like the feed stores sometimes do too. Okay, thank you very much.
All right, thanks done, appreciate that call. Okay, somebody left the
gate open. Here we go. We'll going to Crystal Beach and talking to
Riley. Hello, Riley, Hi, Hello, good morning. I have
recently moved down to Crystal Beach and not used to all the sandy soil so
and I have four dogs who are inundated their poor fur with these burrs.
And I researched too late because I realized just recently that I should have taken
care of that in the winter. What can I do to get rid of
these dang birds? Okay? Is this a grassy plant that the birds are
on? It's just like, I don't even know what kind of I think
I have a I think I have a lawnful of just weeds that I'm ow
and pretended to out. Okay, there you go. That's fair enough,
fair enough, it's great, and take off here. But the whole thing
is these furs. Yeah, well, so send me a picture. I'm
gonna put you on hoe when we're done with this talk. Send me a
picture. Let me look and make sure I got the right plant. But
are a pre Well, I'm driving at the moment and I'm not at home,
so I don't have a picture. I don't worry about that. Don't
worry about it. Pre Emergent harbicide, the products called barricade barrack. Oh,
that's right, pre emergent. Yeah, it's called barricade. Yes.
But here's here's what you need to do. Just if you can remember gardening
with Skip dot com, that's me with skip dot com. When you go
there, click on the schedules. Look at the weeds schedule, the one
that has weeds on it. It lists the products, it tells you when
to apply them. It's all there. You don't have to remember anything.
You just print it out. It's free and and get ahead of them.
The more you fertilize, if it's truly grass birds that you have, the
more you fertilize, the more the grass birds don't have the upper hand.
They like drug. The more I'm repeat, I'm sorry, repeat that,
the more I fertilize, the grass birds don't thrive. When you fertilize the
low it oh day like dry, drowdy, poor sandy soil. And so
when you start making the soil where your lawn is going to be happy,
the grasspurs will be less happy. But you got to do the barricade.
Got it to prevent the seeds from coming up. And it's on the schedule
when to apply it, so I won't go into it on the air.
You can just look at the schedule. Okay. Now, so am I
actually making mistake? I'm mowing down as far down as possible so that my
dogs don't get all these birds in their fur. But they're am I making
a mistake because it's only they're getting the so called grass is getting quite brown?
Yeah? Well, it's not great for your grass to mow low.
And the grass bur is capable of just setting its burrs down lower when you
mow it low instead of the grasspurs can be almost knee high. But they
can also set birds down in the two inches above the ground. And if
you know it, so the mowing is not going to make them quit setting
burds. Okay, okay, so it was gardening Skip dot Com. That's
it, got it awesome. Thank you so much, Thank you you take
care. Well, here we are, time for another quick break. Let's
see when we come back, Dan and Steve and Ken you'll be the first
up. We'll be right back. Good to have you back on garden Line.
I'm your host, Skip Richter, and we're here to answer your gardening
questions. If you are thinking about maybe taking that backyard and turning it into
a beautiful outdoor gathering area. Maybe you got a little bit of a patio,
but you'd really like to expand the heart scape, put out some landscape
lighting, perhaps some the sound of running water. That'd be a nice addition
to it. Puercecapes can do all of that, and I want you to
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they make sure that the irrigation is working right. In other words,
quarterly maintenance at pier Scapes two eight one three seven oh five zero six zero.
Let them make having a beautiful place easy for you. We're going to
now go to Nadville and talk to Dan. Hello, Dan, Hell,
let's skip part of you this morning. I'm good, sir. How can
we help great? Listen. I planted a couple of cypress trees about fifteen
years ago at my home and they have grown beautifully until this year. One
of the trees it started to set leaves, the leaves to come out,
or the pines, whatever you call the things, and it just looks like
has stopped and it's starting to turn brown, where the other tree is growing
beautifully. And I don't know what to expect out of this tree. Now.
Wow, I didn't know you could kill a cypress tree. They're tough
old trees. I got knees everywhere. Hey, yeah, I feel your
pain on that one. You know, if the whole tree is doing that,
something's wrong in the root system. And cypress can take soggy wetsil,
so it's not that it's right and poorly drained. They can take that.
They actually do okay. On drought. Uh. Typically, you know,
we get toward the end of August and it's hot and dry. They may
turn bronze and drop leaves and then come out with fresh foliage in this and
again in the fall. But right now there's no reason why they should be
browning leaves. So I don't know what to tell you on that. One.
Probably ought to have a tree person, you know, take a look
at it. You know, Martin Spoon Moore would be one I would.
I would talk to about it and see what he thinks. Okay, okay,
do you have a contact for him or no, I don't. Would
you have that handy? Yeah? Yeah I do. His phone number is
seven one three six twenty six sixty three. I'll say that again, seven
to one three six nine nine twenty six sixty three. Have him come out
on site and look at it. You know, he charges his feet to
come out. But any work you have done that, he goes right into
the work. So that's his name, as mark. His name is Martin
us it. Yeah, Martin Spoon Moore Affordable trees. Yeah either here his
wife will answer the phone. Yeah kind of business. All right, Well
I appreciate that. All right, Dan, good luck, good luck with
that. Yeah wow, what a challenge. Now we're gonna go to Steve
and Cyprus. And how you doing today, Steve? Good good? Gonna
be a hot one today. Oh boy, here we go. So anyway,
I've got some crape myrtles. I've got three full grown crape myrtles that
I transplanted about fifteen years ago. Randy Lemon helped me get those going.
And now the leather on them, their skin on them is turned black and
it's and they're peeling off. But my question is how how do I get
get these things to bloom? Beautiful canopies? Yeah, just no blooms at
all, and I don't want to butcher them. Yeah, well, full
sign is what they want. If it's lest the blooming typically is last.
There is a variation between cultivars or variety on how well and how early they
bloom, So that could be it anything stressing the plant and just keeping it
from having good health and vigor. When you have good vigor, you're gonna
have good bloom production out on it. So you might dig around the plant,
look at the base, see if you see anything binding the trunk,
wrapped around it, strangling it. You might also want to just get you
a good quality turf type fertilizer and put it out all around that plant and
water didn't really good, and get a little bit of vigor in it.
That would be helpful. Some selective pruning is fine, but pruning isn't the
problem. And you're right you don't want to butcher it. That is true.
Okay, I did you know I did trim him last year and they
and they bloomed better. Yeah, I mean they bloomed better. But yeah,
I'll try to fertilize it. And they look healthy as salting as can
be to me. But hopefully some fertilized will kick the in I think.
So you mentioned, you know the black peel off bark. That city mold
is either coming from aphids or from great myrtle bark scale and those kinds of
things can also take some energy out of the plant and reduce the bloom production.
So when you see all that city on there, you got some kind
of insect that's causing that. Okay, all right, okay, thank you
sir. Thanks Steve, appreciate that call. You know, it is storm
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finding out how to protect your home and to protect the things that are valuable
to you as well. Well. We are right up against a break time.
Ken and Tom Ball and Susan, you'll be my free two when I
come back. I just don't have enough time to do justice to your call
right now. So we're gonna we're gonna hold you over if you can hang
on just a little bit, a little bit longer. For us. ACE
Hardware stores, you know, is the place. ACE is a place that's
the motto. ACE is the place you're gonna find everything that you need.
Your fire ant bait is there. Your mosquito control products, whether it's the
dunks or whether it's a foger or you name it, they've got it.
Today's the fertilizers I talk about on guardline, the soils on Guardline. Ace
hardware dot com. Go to acehardware dot com. There's forty of them around
you here find the one near you. I always love going by ACE Hardware
store. You know, each of them is independently owned. You know that,
so it is. It is a brand ACE, and there's a lot
of similarities, but there's also some differences because the owner of the store can
choose to do some very unique things. And that's some of the coolest parts
of us. All right, Well, top of the night, nine o'clock
here about to enter our last hour for the day. If you'd like to
give us a call, our phone number is seven one three two one two.
K T r H will be right back. Welcome to Katie r h.
Garden Line with Skip Rictor. It's crazy gas Trim just watch him as
well, gall Us, so many good things to see that crazy in ways,
gassa not a sun, incredible class Gas. Welcome back to the guard
Line. Glad to have you with us today. What are we going to
talk about? Well, let's go to the phones and find out. We're
going to start off with Ken and Tom Ball. Hey Ken, thanks for
holding on and let's see how we can help today. Good morning. Question
for you. I was gonna do some fertilizing of some uh some as okay,
and I was wondering if that arbor Gate has that chicken poop fertilizer.
Is that good for the azal? Yeah? Be fine that Yeah, it's
anything, it's got roots in it. It's an organic fertilizer, and uh
it will do. It will do just fine for your azalias. You can
do that. You can occasionally, you know, top it off with something
a little acidifying, or you can use a little bit of sulfur. If
you feel like you need to lower the p h any of those alias that
would that would show itself by kind of some pale color on that material,
Well, just just ask them what they have there that's in a set of
fire. They probably have a sulfur or something along those lines. But if
your zalias are not showing yellow or loss of color in this foliage at the
ends of shoots, then you're fine. Don't worry about it. Okay,
Yeah, I know they're green. Yeah, it's it's it's the their organic
fertilizer's part of their one two three completely easy system. Uh. And it
pretty much the I think the way they put it is for everything with roots,
and azelias definitely have roots, so that work. Yeah, sure on
our Augustine grass. Uh. And what height should that be cut? Well,
ideally about two and a half to three inches. If you're in shady
areas and having trouble getting enough sunlight, you can go above three a little
bit, but at some point it just is, you know, it's just
a little too tall. But as far as the grass is concerned, it
about two and a half to three inches is a good height for Saint Augustine
mowing. Okay, if you go below that, is it too short?
I mean, is there a level that's too short? What happens is the
way the Saint Augustine plant grows, it's not made for creating a golf course
green like bermuda would be real, real short. So as you go below
two and a half, at two you're still okay. At an inch and
a half you're starting, you're going to end up having some bare spots and
you're gonna have more weed problems in it. The density just won't be there.
And the shorter you mow, the less of a root system that it's
going to be able to have because you just don't have the talk to support
it. And is there an issue with water the shorter you go, is
it just to take more water or does it matter? Well, the only
thing would be if your root system becomes more limited, then you're going to
have to water more often for the root system that's there. If you have
a deep extensive root system, you don't have to water often at all.
In fact, nature takes care of the majority of our watering when we have
a good turf with a deep extensive root system. Okay, well, thanks
very much, all right, Ken, take care. Thanks lot appreciate the
call. Now we're going to go to Susan in Missouri City. I believe,
yes, thank you. I've got a sego plane that's planted by twenty
years so when it's eleven feet tall, okay, and it's always survived the
winner. But this year it's I took off the frozen leaves on it,
but then it's not coming out again. It has two spikes that grew from
the very top that I fit tall, and now they are bent over like
there. So I thought it was dead. Okay, I noticed there's new
growth at the bottom of the sego Yes, uh huh? Is it dead
or what should I do with? Well, the trunk may be dead,
I can't tell based on the verbal description there. But those things at the
bottom we call pups. They're like little side shoots that come out and they
will. You can. You can let them grow. You can cut the
trunk off if you need to. But you still got a sago going down
there, even if the top was going to die. Well, I don't
want to start over with a small sago again from from what's left of this
one? Okay, do you think the trunk is dead? Can you can
I put you on hold and you get an email and send me a picture
of it. Yes, I think that's better than me guessing trying to picture
what it might look. Okay, let's do it that way, Susan.
Otherwise I could be misleading you with the best of intentions, and I don't
want to do that. Okay, Okay, all right, let's I'm going
to put you on hold and I'm pretty sure we'll get a hold of give
you my email to take it from there. All right, We're going to
go now to Betty and Lake Conroe. Were at Lake Conro. Hopefully you're
not in Lake Conroe right now. Maybe it would be a good day to
be in like Conroe. True, I have a question about venkas. I've
planted them a couple of times, and they just some of them keep dying.
Just the one planet is good and the next one to it in a
few days, we'll just turn brown and die. And I don't know understand,
because I've had them before and they were great. Yeah, you're talking
about the plants that have the red, pink and white flowers. Yes,
yes, the venkas. So I can't tell you for sure because I'm not
seeing the plant. But there's a disease called aerial fight top through a light.
That is, it just wipes out venca. And not everybody has it,
but if you have it, it's very persistent and it just builds up
up, and so next year when you plant venka, they get it and
so on. There's a a variety or a series of vinka called Cora cor
A, like the girl's name. There also used to be one called Nirvana.
I don't think Nirvana is on the market now. It might be,
but Cora and Nirvana were bred to be resistant, so if you plant those
you should be okay, even though it has the phytopthor aerio blight present.
Oh okay, that's good to know. Thank you. That's that's my best
guest. Not much kills a vinka. I mean, neglect does not kill
vinka, and so yeah, I think it's probably that disease. Okay,
thank you so much. I'll do that next year, all right, you
bet, thanks a lot. Appreciate that call very much. Well, I
can see we're bumping right here on a break, so I'm gonna I'm gonna
hold off and when I come back, let's see we'll talk to Gale and
Ed and Larry. In just a mo I want to remind you that I'm
going to be at wild Birds Unlimited in bel Air, Southwest Houston next Saturday,
June fifteenth, So put it on your calendars. Come on and see
me, Grab some pictures, grab some samples. Let's talk about the things,
the questions you might have. You got some photos of a garden area
or a landscape area and you would like some ideas on how to improve it.
We'd be happy to help you with that as well. We'll be right
back. Welcome back to Guardline. Good to have you with us today.
Let's talk about the things that are of interest to you. First of all,
I want to make a point, and that is, if you're dealing
with any kind of a insect pest in your lawn, Nitrofoss bug Out Max
is designed just for that. This is a granule. You put it out,
you watered in, and within forty eight hours it is taking care of
whatever the pests are there. That could be firehants crawling around the surface.
It gets those. It's going to be chinchbugs. If we are about to
enter we actually are entering chinchbug season and we begin to see issues with them,
and there's a summer goes on, it just gets worse. Well,
with the Nitrofoss bug Out Max, it just keeps working. I mean it'll
last through the rest of this summer season. When you put it out.
It's a persistent product that continues to work for you. So you don't have
to apply it and apply it and apply it now. Soid web worms,
we're looking at those again being something to come on as we move on into
the summer season. Well, Nita Fuss Bugout Max is also effective for that.
So night Fuss Bugout Max is easy to find. All you have to
do is go to one of the many places it carries Nita Foss products like
the East Hardbor and Kingwood. The Arborgate up in Tomball Shades of Texas,
which is in South Houston on Genoa Red Bluff, Alvin, Texas has Stanton
Shopping Center, than on North Taylor and Baytown has Fisher's Hardware for example,
one of many many places where you can find Nitrofoss products like their Bugout Max.
We are going to now go to Ed in Cyprus. Hello, Ed,
good morning morning. Did you get those pictures that I sent you of
the trees? I did? Okay, two of them are river birch,
and I called you about those earlier. And then the other two are rosebuds,
even though one doesn't look like a rosebud. Okay, the river birch.
You know, three trunks, and you can see by that photo they
didn't come back very well after I guess the drought and everything else. What
should I My question is the I read your online, your deal about trees
and drought, et cetera. So I think that's what the problem is.
The edges, the top edges and the outer edges of the limbs have not
come back. So I've got what do I do with the trunks that are
likely did? How do I prune those back? And if I do prune
those back, is another trunk going to come out? I'd like the three
trunks, you know the look of that. Yeah, And if I'm going
to have one or two, I don't know if I want it right.
Well, you will get some other sprouting, you know, it'll be way
behind the one that's left the remaining trunk. So I don't know the aesthetics
if you'll appreciate that or not. But they can re sprout from the base
and you can get some more up from the bottom. It could be drought
issues, especially if the tree hadn't been fully rooted in, hadn't had several
seasons to fully root in. Well, that drought's even worse on the river
birch like that. They like to be where they have a dependable water supply,
so that's a possibility. It also could be cold injury. We've had,
you know, we had a real bad cold here a few years ago,
and then we had two Decembers ago. We had a time when the
cold came too early and it wasn't such a severe call, but it was
too early and we saw some damage. Like I said, I think they've
been in the ground a couple of years. Yeah, okay, so they
were big when we started, but they've grown more, you know, up
to they're about fifteen foot tall now. But you know, maybe it was
a combination of those things because it you know, I don't know, two
years is enough to get rooted yep. Well, well good, Yeah.
And as far as the red bud is concerned, the red buds look okay
to me. I don't do you see a problem with them or they look
okay? Well, My question is the one red bud that is sprouting from
the ground. Yes, that one. It must have had a wound or
something when it was put in, because in a strong wind several months ago,
you know, it was greening up and then it broke about two foot
above the ground. And what I found in there was the It was green
kind of on the outer edges, but inside it had an iridescent green beetle.
Okay, so you know, I kind of just gave it up or
dead, and I was going to pull it out, but then it started
sprouting. And what I'm noticing is the leaves from the sprout are so much
bigger, yeah then the other one. So I was thinking, well,
maybe it's come in. Do they grab those trees? Oh, they can
if you have a variety. There's just the standard red buds and then sometimes
there's varieties. But it's not unusual. A sprout from the bottom is called
immature wood, and it is not well it Typically the leaves will be larger
on immature wood when a sprout is coming, that tree will grow up and
it will get older and it will bloom. I would tip the two shoots
that you're not going to keep that are down low, Okay, just cut
the last six inches out, but leave those leaves on them. Those leaves
are making carbohydrates and that tree needs some help right now. And you might
want to steak loosely the one that's coming upward because it's pretty pretty slender and
could easily get blown over. Don't stake it tight. You want it to
move around, but you just don't want it to blow over, you know,
forty five degree angle or something. Okay, and then it'll be the
ones that are I'll get the one that's coming up straight. Then there's I
think a couple or more that are going out sideways. Yeah, or just
tip them, yeah, just cut off at base. No, cut six
inches out of the end of them, and leave the leaves that are on
them. That'll stop them from being dominant by cutting the tips out. But
you'll leave those leaves. At the end of this winter, you can cut
those branches off where they attach, but let's leave them for now. We
call that nurse limbs. We're leaving them because they are providing carbohydrates to support
the growth of that tree. Okay, Well, I appreciate that. I
also appreciate your show. I mean the I am a novice guard, so
everything you say is really interesting. Well, good, Well, I'm glad
you enjoyed it, and that's why we're here. Thanks a lot for the
call. Appreciate that very much. We're going to go now to Larry and
Bastrop. Is this bass drop Texas? Yes it is. Are you listening
on your computer or phone or on the radio on the computer, okay,
I'm just curious. How can we help, Larry? Okay, I have
a severe infestation of pepperbine. My front law has approximately about one hundred shoots
that come up in different lengths. Some of them are one or two foot
tall. Yeah, and I've tried just about everything. But last week I
read online your idea about the little plastic bags with rush killer in it,
and so I put out about twenty of those little plastic bags with the weed
killer just a little bit in the bottom, and it seems to be working.
That's why I'm calling. I have a question. I don't Larry,
I don't remember writing about plastic bags. What what? What is what is
that about? Well, I thought it was on your website. You put
brush killer into a little plastic bag, or maybe a tint of it,
pull and then you wrap it around the vine pepper vine and you leave it
and yeah, now that that wasn't me. Now what I have talked about
is putting it on a sponge and wiping it on there using those little grabber
tools where you you get a jar off the shelf, you know, but
instead of section cups or whatever on them, you replace it with a sponge.
You can do that, or you can cut them off, or you
can just spot spray them with triclop here tr r I c l O P
y R. That's the brush killer. Try close here. But tracopere will
hurt Saint Augustine. So you're gonna some little dead spots if you spray it.
But if you use a wiper applicator, you you don't get it on
your grass. You just wipe it onto the foliage of that pepper vine.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, good luck getting into getting ahead of
it. It is a booger, isn't it? All right? All right,
Larry, thank you appreciate the call. Thanks for listening out there in
bash Drop, Texas. Let's see, we are now heading to Missouri City
to talk to Linda. Hey, Hi, good morning. Well we were
out town and last week before we left our painfull tree, which is old,
but it's so tall all and beautiful, and the princes are even it's
just a gorgeous tree. Well, excuse me. We came back last night
and one of our cars is covered with webworms from these bags of I don't
know what they're called webwork that we're in the tree, and all over our
glass, all over and driveway, the sidewalk, the front door, easily
over a thousand of these caterpillars crawling everywhere. We're concerned that our tree it's
just decimated. If it's going to die, and these critters have gone to
our pear trees, Okay, well it will, it will read The tree
will grow new leaves they lived with webworms. In some years they get completely
defoliated by webworms, and you don't want it to happen. It looks ugly,
but it's not going to kill the tree. Now the webworms are going
to have another generation. These caterpillars will turn into moths that lay eggs,
and there'll be more caterpillars. So you just want to watch a tree that's
lost its foliage and make sure when you first start to see them again after
it regrows new foliage, you want to be ready to spray early, because
that's when you can shut it down before it loses another set of leaves,
which that's starting to get too stressful when it's tried to leave out twice and
had to eetn off twice. So once is okay, let's try to avoid
the second one. So two, you spread with any kind of an insecticide
labeled for controlling insects on your plants. There's a lot of good ones out
there. I generally recommend spinosa because it's an organic product. Uh and it
lasts about a week out there on the foliage. But you have to you
have to spray what the caterpillars you're eating. That's why starting early before there's
big webs you can't get spray inside of. Starting early is important. Okay,
so we should spray the pair of trees since we see they have moved.
John, Yes, you know, go ahead and spray. Break up
the webs with a stick and spray the pair. Linda, I've got a
heart break coming right this moment. Show I got to run. But break
up the webs first, and then spray the foliage with spinos at S P
I N O S A D. All Right, folks, we'll be right
back seven one three, two one two five eight seven four. Welcome back
to garden Line. Ready to go here, got a call, a board
full of calls, so we're going to jump right into the big middle of
it. We're gonna go out to Lamark and talk to Gail. Hello,
Gail, good morning. Okay, I try to send up pictures again.
Did you get him? Yil it not? I don't know. I don't
know what's going on here. I don't either. Okay, do you know
what a turkey tail god looks like? I have. I've never had one,
but I've heard of them. Yes, So okay, that's that's It's
exactly what it looks like on the base of my tree. There's like it's
on two of them. There's two of them on one really healthy looking hackberry
tree. And I wonder, I'm just hoping that I don't have to take
it down, that it's it's not gonna that it's gonna be okay, well,
turkey tail mushroom. It's it's just the they describe it because of the
coloring and stuff, and it it's real pretty, by the way, but
it is. Yeah, but it's a it's because there's a decomposer of fungi
that's working inside inside of the plant causing decomposition. You know, you think
about it. In the forest, you have trees that fall and die,
and that wood gets turned back into dirt by funt fundi basically primarily doing the
work on it. And so turkey tail is just an example of one of
mini fungi that's out there in nature. Uh. And and so I don't
know that yours is turkey tail. There are others that have that. As
you look from the outside towards the center of those little bands of different coloring
a little bit, yes, different shades of coloring. Uh, there are
other fungi that can do that. So it may not be turkey tail.
It may be there are several others. There are some that can be a
disease. Ganoderma g A n O D E r M. A ganoderma is
another one that's not so good. It is a it is a decay organism
that we don't want to have. But you know, I can't I can't
tell you for sure based on this the it was talking about the app was
talking about that the turkey tail is like a beneficial that I mean, they
use it for cancer treatments and stuff. Yeah, harmful to the tree.
So I'm just hoping well in any kind of a shelf type fungi, which
is what this is, it's it's a it's one that sticks out sideways.
It's not a mushroom that comes up in your yard. You know it looks
mushroom shaped. This is a shelf type of arrangement. And any of that
means that something's decaying inside. So if if anything, it's it's the trunk
is weakening as the wood decays inside there. But try and spray it or
no, no that you can't control it. You can't spray it superficially and
do anything. I think I think you would just have to ignore it.
Watch it. Just recognize that's an indication that there's a weak spot there.
So if there's anything that plant can fall on, that just something to be
aware of. Okay, Okay, I appreciate it so much. Thank you
for the call. You take care it all. Right. Let's see we
are now going to go I lost track of things here. Let's see we're
going to go to Ken in Spring, Texas. Hey Ken, are you
there? Ken? I'm good, sir. Hey listen, So I've had
this Virginia button weed problem for the last couple of years. I put down
some granules at one time, I don't remember the name of it. I
tried some spray. What is the best thing to get rid of Virginia button
greed? You know, I'm I generally am recommending the Celsius fungus or herbicide
it because it's the weather's hot now, and when when the weather gets hot,
a lot of the more effective broad leaved weed controls that we spray on
existing weeds can hurt your Saint Augustine when the temperatures are in the upper eighties
and nineties, and so that's why I would try the celsius. Just know
that button weed is not going to be a one spray deal. You're gonna
have to spray later on. You're probably have sprayed again. Anything you can
to drive that area out would be good. So if you've got an irrigation
system, be real hesitant to use it. And very infrequently the wetther it
is, the happier the button weed is. And so we do. Yeah.
Wow, with all the rain, it really came back with a yes.
With the storm, with all the rain going around, I got some
speci side spray that I went to home. People. I've tried that because
I've not got to get up eart in the morning before it gets hot the
spray. That's what I've been doing. I've done it twice. Okay.
I just want to look with there's something really that will really let me get
rid of it. Yeah, I think that Celsius is one that I would
look for. You're going to have to probably go to a let's see where
are you You're in spring there? Yeah you got some you got some Ace
hardware stores that are close to you. Yeah, be real, real,
real easy, you know, to get to spring Ace on Spring Cypress there
would would probably. Yeah, I know that is yeah, all right,
all right, can have a good day, yes, sir, you too.
Thanks a lot. Mary and west Houston done. Hey Mary, Hey
Skip. I called about two things, caterpillars and philodendron. Okay. Philadendron
was zapped by the freeze recent you know this past a few months, okay,
and it is I have put a miracle row and in combination with a
roots stimulator. How long do I have to wait before I see any life?
It was a philodendron that was zap philodendron that I've had is over twenty
years old. I had it, Well, you should, you should be
seeing life by now. I don't. Well I do. I do.
There at the root, below the dirt, below the I see some green
just there. Yeah, the extra patient, it's going to have to have
a living bud, not just living tissues. But I know I don't see
any living buds. Well, if it were mine, I would be patient,
and I would give it through June, maybe a little into July,
just because sometimes there's this tiny little thing that eventually comes back out. But
what about August. Well, if you had to wait that long, you
can. I mean, there's no harm, no harm waiting right, Sure,
Sure, I want to try to sell it because I've had it for
a long time. The other thing is I have an epidemic infestation of caterpillars.
Okay, they're white, they're white, and they're hairy. Okay,
they're everywhere. Now are they on plants or are they crawling across your crawling
on the garbage train trash can They're calling on my philodendron that I'm trying to
resurrect. So what that what that is is, it's webworms that have finished
eating leaves and they're dropping out. Now they're they're gonna pupate and become a
little moth so they can lay more eggs and do this again. Once they're
crawling around like that, it's very difficult. I mean, you can spray
them with a contact killing pesticide, but in general that that's not a real
practical way to go about it. Catching them earlier is important, okay.
And to catch them earlier what I need to spray with you. You can
spray with a number of things. Spinosa is an organic product, but then
there's a lot of insect controls that are synthetic periphthoids that will also work on
them. The key is catch them as soon as you first start to see
them in the trees and make sure you get it on the foliage. Mary,
I've got a heartbreak. I got it. I leave and go do
but good good luck for those you bet. Thank you for the call.
We'll be right back. Welcome back to the guard line. Good to have
you with us today. Let's see we're going to head out to Charles in
Spring. Hello Charles, good morning, Skip. How are you sir?
I'm good, I'm good. Guick question. I sent you some pictures of
a I just called it ever again. I finally realized it's a blue ted
unifer that needs some help. It's been in the ground about three years.
It fell over one time it was chasing the sun. I was able to
pick it up stake it down, and it just doesn't look good. Okay,
if you saw the pictures, well, I got your email. This
was on Tuesday. I believe you sent it. Yes, sure, but
there it says image removed by sender. So I don't have an image.
But that's okay. I have your description. I think number one, if
you can avoid spray in the foliage, that would be a good idea.
Anytime you get the foliage on those things wet, we have more problems with
some blight diseases that can be a problem, and so I would avoid that.
If you can change the watering, if it's been in the ground for
a while so it's gotten established, then I don't think. I think you're
watering it several times a week. Really at the most, it's in just
in my sprinklers says it's in a flower bed, So I'm doing it about
I think two or three times a week. We just minimum water. Yeah,
so a shrub auto need water maybe once every two weeks, maybe once
a week if it's fair early young. But in general they've got a good
root system and they shouldn't need to water that off. It may be staying
a little too wet, and junipers, arborvid's that whole group of plants.
They do not like soggy conditions, and with all the rain we've had,
that could be part of the problem with it. So I'd let it dry
out a little bit and try to wean it from three times a week to
maybe once every ten days eventually. Okay, what about any I'm not fertilized
any kind of nutrients that should give it some kind of food. Ye,
you know you could, but that's not the problem right now, that's not
the need. If you're going to do that, find a tree and shrub
type of product, and there's a number of good ones out there, you
know, for trees and shrubs. Nitroposs makes them, Nelson's make them,
for example, Microlife makes them. It's easy to it's easy to find a
tree and shrub fertilizer, just follow the label on it. But I think
right now I'm more concerned about the soul moisture and the fact that maybe it's
the foliage is getting wet a little chear. It seems kind of dry,
but I'll check it out closer. Next question, real quick. I've been
plagued over the years with torpedo grass. Okay, so the point that I
want up killing, getting rid of well the beds, and reducing my beast
is a smaller size. I still get little little one's coming up, but
they're so deep. Yeah, any suggestions on what to do besides, there's
a factor that you that you wipe on it. Yeah, putting getting a
wiper type applicator, You're probably gonna have to do a homemade one with sponges
and wiping a product. Either I would you could either use glifas, which
is the round up product because anything get it on, or you could use
a grass only killer, which would be there's two different chemicals that just kill
grass. But when you go to your local ice hardware store or something and
you say, hey, I need a grass killer your local feed store,
they're going to have stuff that's just killing grass, not broad leaves. But
you still have to wipe it on or you'll kill your law on that it
gets on. Okay, yeah, torpedo grass is a booger. You got
your work cut out, no kidding. Oh I know. I've done it
for years and I finally gave up. But one last question. When I
if I dig down way down in the roots, is it safe to put
anything like a roundup down at the base of it at all? No?
No. The only time you put roundup is when you put it on green
plant material. Don't don't put it on your roads, don't put it on
the trunk. It just it's just for on the leaves. But be very
careful, be very careful with because it kills anything green you get it on.
Ok thanks so much, sir, have a good one. Thank you.
I appreciate it. Thank you you take care. Thanks all right.
Well, I may have lost access yep, I just lost access to the
phone boards here. Uh I will I'm gonna try to pull those. I'm
gonna try to pull those. It closed. It closed up on me and
so I'm not to pull it back up again. I can do that.
It just take me one second. I didn't want to mention B and B
turf Pros be turf Pros is your go to person if you live South and
a little bit to the west of Houston. They're your go to person to
do compost top dressing and to do deep time aeration. That's what they do
and they are excellent at it. Their goal is customer satisfaction. They do
high quality work. I've seen the work they do, I've talked to them,
and I've seen the ratings. They are so highly rated online because they
really go above to make a personal connection with their clients to ensure that you
are satisfied. Here's the website bb Turfpros dot com. Bbturfpros dot com.
Here's the phone number. Write this down seven one three two three four fifty
five ninety eight. Whether you're in Fresno, Iowa Colony, or coolis Cieno,
as far north and west as Sugarland and Missouri City, or as far
east as Pearland, this is your local place to get quality work done.
And I'm telling you, when you've got an issue with still compaction, when
you've got a loan that's struggling, a cor ooration followed by a compost top
dressing is a quick way to get that thing turned around and back in business.
We're going to now go out to Brenham and talk to Leonard. Hello
Leonard, good morning. Okay, I've got a question for you. I've
got two crape myrtles, one on each end of the front of my house
that's got to be pulled because they're getting into my water system. Okay,
And I was wondering they're surrounded by in a circle box would so I'm trying
to spare them. How deep do I have to go? How far these
are twenty year old trees? Yeah, probably more. Try to get as
far out as you practically can. If you can get about a foot foot
and a half away from the trunk of it, that would be best.
But just dig it up and then be ready take all the cuts that you
make and paint them with a little ome brush with brush killer on it.
Triclo peer is the ingredient tri I c l O underg where you cut the
roots are still on the ground when you're cutting close to the base, because
the crape sometimes can re sprout from down there. But you just when you
make the cut, immediately you just take that spongy brush and dab it in
Triclo peer and then dab it right on the fresh cut service. That's all
don't spray, don't drench, don't just just dab it on the fresh cut
service and that helps reduce the re sprouting. Hey, I've got to run.
I'm sorry, I run out of time on us today here Leonard,
but thank you very much for that call. You know, when it comes
to lawn fertilizing, right now, we need to go to something that's going
to give you a gradual, slow feed all the way up until fall,
and that is Slow and Easy from Nelson Products. Nelson's Slow and Easy will
feed for over four months. I mean it is constantly gradually releasing the nutrients
to make your lawn successful. It's easy to find Slow and Easy. Like
all Nelson products. While you're out look for their nutri Star Plumeria and all
flowering Tropicals really Food. It's an excellent, excellent product. They also have
a Palm and Ornamental Grass's food. They've got nutri Star Rose food. Nelson's
has a wide variety of quality products that will do an excellent job of providing
exactly what you need to have success with your plants. Nelson Plant Food.
Start with that slow and easy though on the lawn. You will be very
impressed with the results. You get well. I don't know how it happened,
but today I felt like I jumped on a roller coaster and after a
couple of clicks going up the hill, when we at the top and went
over, it started moving. I hope you've enjoyed it. I've had a
good time. We're going to be back tomorrow morning, six am to ten
am. Tell your neighbors about garden Line. Tell your family and friends.
They may live somewhere far away, like today, we got a call from
we out in bass Struck direction. Tell them about it. They can listen
in. We happy to help them as well. Well. I just want
to remind you next Saturday. Write it on your calendar. Come see me
at wild Birds Unlimited in bel Air, Texas, Southwest Houston, six fifteen
twenty four, Saturday the fifteenth, eleven am. Bring me some samples,
and hey, I'm going to be giving away some really cool fertilizers from the
folks at Medina