Speaker 1: Welcome to kat r H Garden Line with Skimp Richard's.
Speaker 2: Crazy trip. Just watch him as well.
Speaker 3: Us.
Speaker 4: So many good things to Septsy.
Speaker 5: Not a sor.
Speaker 6: Well good morning, Yeah, it's me live. I uh. It's
Speaker 6: been a low break here during the holiday season. I
Speaker 6: hope you have had a wonderful time with family, hopefully
Speaker 6: got some rest. Here we go first guard Line show
Speaker 6: of twenty twenty five. We will be here for your
Speaker 6: calls as we always are. If you would like to
Speaker 6: give me a call at seven one three two one
Speaker 6: to KTRH seven one three two one two k t RH.
Speaker 6: We'll talk about whatever is of interest to you, what
Speaker 6: is pressing in the gardening world of your backyard or
Speaker 6: your front yard. Right now, we will be having a
Speaker 6: great season. I have determined, just decided by myself that
Speaker 6: this is going to be one of the best gardening
Speaker 6: years ever. I mean it, I really am looking forward
Speaker 6: to this gardening season. You know, every year throws us
Speaker 6: its own curve. Some years it's awfully hot and dry.
Speaker 6: Some years it just doesn't seem to want to quit
Speaker 6: rain in some years it tends to give us a
Speaker 6: pretty good coal snap. We got one of those coming
Speaker 6: by the way, but not too terribly bad. We'll talk
Speaker 6: about that a little bit as we go on through
Speaker 6: the show today. But no matter what happens, there's a
Speaker 6: lot that we are in control of when it comes
Speaker 6: to gardening in the weather that once we understand how
Speaker 6: to properly take care of plants, meaning get plants what
Speaker 6: they want, that's kind of what it amounts to. We'll
Speaker 6: talk about having a green thumb. A green thumb isn't
Speaker 6: there's no such thing as a green thumb. I like
Speaker 6: to put it that way because it makes a point,
Speaker 6: and that point is that it's not like some people
Speaker 6: just have a green thumb. And if you feel like
Speaker 6: your thumb's been brown and every time you try to
Speaker 6: grow something it doesn't work, you have these problems or
Speaker 6: issues or things, don't worry about that. We will fix it.
Speaker 6: Because a green thumb is i'll just say, a myth
Speaker 6: And if you want to think of it as a
Speaker 6: green thumb, well, let's do it this way. Then there's
Speaker 6: no such thing as a brown thumb. There's just an
Speaker 6: uninformed thumb. So we will inform your thumb, and amazingly,
Speaker 6: it will start to turn green. That's how it works.
Speaker 6: Garden line seven one three two one two kt r H.
Speaker 6: I'm your host, Skip Richter and really looking forward to
Speaker 6: twenty twenty five. Out in the garden. We are entering
Speaker 6: that season where everybody gets gardening fever. You know, people
Speaker 6: that aren't really even into gardening when spring comes here
Speaker 6: and it's just on a doorstep. When it hits, people
Speaker 6: get gardening fever. And gardening fever causes us to want
Speaker 6: to go out and buy and plant and do all
Speaker 6: kinds of things. And I think that's great. I think
Speaker 6: that's great. But if you're going to do it, let's
Speaker 6: do it in a smart way. How about that? What
Speaker 6: does that mean? That means don't just grab a plant
Speaker 6: that doesn't belong in the Greater Houston area. Plant something
Speaker 6: that wants to be here. Maybe you just move from Colorado.
Speaker 6: I love blue spruce, they don't grow here. Maybe you
Speaker 6: love that blue Colorado columbine. Yeah, I know, you went
Speaker 6: ski in, you saw a seed packet, whatever, Just put
Speaker 6: it on the shelf and enjoy looking at it, because
Speaker 6: that's as close to a Columbine flowers you're going to
Speaker 6: get here in Texas. From the blue Colorado are the
Speaker 6: ones that are you know all those multicolors that they'll
Speaker 6: sell you up there. We have two native columbines down here,
Speaker 6: the Hinkleys, which is a yellow, beautiful columbine yellow. And
Speaker 6: then our native that's in central Texas is a small
Speaker 6: red columbine that's a native here. Plant those they'll grow.
Speaker 6: See what I'm talking about. Maybe you move from the Midwest.
Speaker 6: Oh my goodness, for cythia anywhere really, anywhere further north
Speaker 6: in the country. Forsythia is gorgeous, the first harbinger of spring,
Speaker 6: just about in the springtime. Don't plant it here, it's
Speaker 6: not for here. Do you like lilas? You know that
Speaker 6: fragrance of lilacs. Just let your memory tell you how
Speaker 6: wonderful they smell. Because they don't belong here, but lots
Speaker 6: of things do. And by planting plants that want to
Speaker 6: grow here, you can have success. That is step one.
Speaker 6: Plant something that wants to grow. Step two is prepare
Speaker 6: the soil. Actually, that is step one. We always talk
Speaker 6: about brown stuff or green stuff on garden line. Make
Speaker 6: that your number one New Year's resolution this year. If
Speaker 6: you want to be a gardener, number one resolution is
Speaker 6: to choose things that want to grow, but plant them
Speaker 6: in soil they want to be in. So, for example,
Speaker 6: we have native plants Central Texas native the Texas Mountain Laurel,
Speaker 6: beautiful clusters grape like clusters of blooms that have a
Speaker 6: gaudy grepe, bubblegum, grape, kool aid, whatever fragrance to them.
Speaker 6: A wonderful, wonderful plant. We also have plants, excuse me,
Speaker 6: their native to the eastern parts of the state, more
Speaker 6: acidic soils. Those two plants, even though they're both Texas plants,
Speaker 6: don't want to be in the same soil, and so
Speaker 6: you got to give them what they want. And that
Speaker 6: makes it even easier to have success is you're not
Speaker 6: trying to swim up stream. You're actually planting things in
Speaker 6: the soil they want to be in. So that's number
Speaker 6: one New Year's resolution. Get out there and fix your soil.
Speaker 6: Now's the time to do it. Anytime in the cool season,
Speaker 6: soil is dry enough to work, it's a good time
Speaker 6: to do that. Raised beds are always a good idea
Speaker 6: because you can always add water, but you can't take
Speaker 6: it away when you have excess soggy wet, which I've
Speaker 6: gotten some of my right now, I've got an area
Speaker 6: I'm trying to redo and I'm just having to wait
Speaker 6: on the soil to dry out enough to be able
Speaker 6: to work it. But you can always create raised beds,
Speaker 6: you can always amend the soil, you can create more
Speaker 6: provide more organic matter for your soil. All of that
Speaker 6: kind of stuff will help you have success. And that's
Speaker 6: what we want you to have. I want you to
Speaker 6: have success in your garden, and so we will harp.
Speaker 6: I'll be a broken record on preparing the soil, preparing
Speaker 6: the soil, taking care of the soil, getting it right,
Speaker 6: making the plants feel at home, all of the above.
Speaker 6: And when we do that, we will have success. It
Speaker 6: just sets us up for success. Now, there's a lot
Speaker 6: of different things that can happen that you know will
Speaker 6: throw you curves and challenges. I don't mean just you know,
Speaker 6: you prepare the soil and nothing goes wrong. Well, there's
Speaker 6: a lot more to it, but seriously, that is step one,
Speaker 6: and that's where most people go wrong. Most people go
Speaker 6: wrong by not preparing the soil ahead of time. So
Speaker 6: courage you to do that and I'll perhaps I'll spend
Speaker 6: a little time on that today. I know I will
Speaker 6: week by week here as we go through here on
Speaker 6: Garden Line. Well, thanks for listening, thanks for rejoining us
Speaker 6: here in twenty twenty five. We're coming up on a
Speaker 6: little bit of a break here. If you'd like to
Speaker 6: give me a call, get on the board. We can
Speaker 6: visit with you about the kinds of questions you might have.
Speaker 6: Seven to one three two one two five eight seven four.
Speaker 6: That is seven one three, two one two fifty eight
Speaker 6: seventy four. If you have a question that might involve
Speaker 6: a photo, give my producer Jonathan a call and get
Speaker 6: an email so you can send me a photo and
Speaker 6: then call and we'll talk about it on the air. Sometimes,
Speaker 6: you know, you're describing a weed and what I'm picturing
Speaker 6: and what you're describing isn't the same thing. Or maybe
Speaker 6: it's a flower or a fruit or something. Go ahead
Speaker 6: and just let you know, send me a photo, Let's
Speaker 6: let me look at it, then let's talk about it.
Speaker 6: Because I guarantee you this, other people will have the
Speaker 6: same questions that you have. Well, I'll be right back
Speaker 6: in just a moment with your questions and with more
Speaker 6: a garden Line.
Speaker 7: Come back to Guarden Line, folks.
Speaker 6: Good to have you with us this morning. Welcome back
Speaker 6: to We're welcome back, Welcome to twenty twenty five, the
Speaker 6: best gardening year you will ever have experienced. This is it.
Speaker 6: I'm being positive. Gardeners are optimists. We absolutely have to be,
Speaker 6: because you know, we take these little dried pieces of
Speaker 6: detritus that just look like, I don't know, just woodchip,
Speaker 6: tiny wood chips, and we put them in the soil,
Speaker 6: knowing that a tomato or a petunia is going to
Speaker 6: come out of that thing. It's actually going to come
Speaker 6: to life, grow and produce stuff that we really want
Speaker 6: to see or eat or whatever. That's an optimist. We
Speaker 6: believe in the future, and twenty twenty five is going
Speaker 6: to be a great gardening year. I can just tell
Speaker 6: you that we're going to start off by going straight
Speaker 6: to the phones and this hour or segment, and we're
Speaker 6: going to go to talk to Michael and Montgomery. Hello, Michael,
Speaker 6: welcome to garden Line. Hello, Hello, I'm here, all righty,
Speaker 6: Well there he is. Hey Mike, how are we.
Speaker 8: Doing this morning?
Speaker 6: Well, I'm good. I'm a little rusty. I forgot to
Speaker 6: push the right button to get you on, so I'm
Speaker 6: just talking to myself instead of you. Good.
Speaker 9: Have you got a problem.
Speaker 10: I planted a six foot red maple last year in
Speaker 10: place of my oak that died, and it plant and
Speaker 10: it's bloomed leaves and everything. But now with Paul, it
Speaker 10: dropped its leaves and everything. And with this freeze coming around,
Speaker 10: do I have to wrap it as a security?
Speaker 6: You know, red maple is a hearty tree for our
Speaker 6: area and we don't have to worry about it for cold,
Speaker 6: but in your situation there I would. And here's why
Speaker 6: we've We've been pretty warm these last few weeks, and
Speaker 6: plants that can become very cold hearty when they harden
Speaker 6: off as the weather gets colder and colder gradually, they
Speaker 6: can be very uncold, hardy when suddenly a freeze comes
Speaker 6: and they're not ready for it. Now, nine chances out
Speaker 6: of ten, youre tree's gonna be fine, but just to
Speaker 6: be safe with it, I would wrap up the trunk
Speaker 6: around the base of the trunk. There are some some
Speaker 6: wraps that you can put around them to protect the
Speaker 6: sun from warming up those trunk tissues. And what happens
Speaker 6: is the sun will warm it during the day and
Speaker 6: a brand new This is true with red oaks, it's
Speaker 6: true with grape myrtles, and several other kinds of trees up.
Speaker 6: The sun shines on that trunk and it warms up
Speaker 6: warmer than the air around it, Just like if you
Speaker 6: stood outside on a cold, cold winter day that you
Speaker 6: could feel the warmth of the sun on your face. Well,
Speaker 6: that's what happens. Those tissues start to flow sap a
Speaker 6: little bit, and then that night it freezes and you
Speaker 6: get freeze damaged, typically on the southwest side of the trunk.
Speaker 6: So normally I don't recommend trump rock trunk wraps, but
Speaker 6: for that I would. You could. You could use different
Speaker 6: things to do it, but there are some papers you
Speaker 6: can wrap around to kind of crinkly. There's some plastic
Speaker 6: wraps and things, but I like the paper wraps. Just
Speaker 6: until that tree gets a year or so on it,
Speaker 6: a year or two on it more, and that trunk
Speaker 6: starts to get a little heartier. Then the bark gets
Speaker 6: a little thicker and it's not so likely to suffer
Speaker 6: that southwest injury on a freezing night.
Speaker 10: Awesome, Thank you very much for your advice. I'll get
Speaker 10: to work today.
Speaker 6: You bet all right. You take care and fortunately this
Speaker 6: freeze is going to be fairly mild and so I'm
Speaker 6: I think if people that are listening going, oh my gosh,
Speaker 6: I got to wrap all my trees. No, you probably don't,
Speaker 6: but on a brand new, thin trunk tree. Yeah, well,
Speaker 6: thanks for the call, man, I appreciate it. Thank you,
Speaker 6: all right. Yeah, for those of you listening, just keep
Speaker 6: that in mind. You know, it's like like, you know,
Speaker 6: if you were to say, you know, skipped, are we
Speaker 6: gonna get damage to all our tree trunks this freeze?
Speaker 6: Well no, probably not not at all, but there's a possibility.
Speaker 6: And when a tree is young, it's it's a paper
Speaker 6: thin bark. I mean it's very very thin, you know,
Speaker 6: it doesn't have those deep ridges. It's very smooth, and
Speaker 6: a maple tree bark is not smooth normally, but when
Speaker 6: a chung it is. I was in Atlanta, Georgia walking.
Speaker 6: They have a I don't know what they call it.
Speaker 6: It's like a beltway that goes around the city, but
Speaker 6: it's a walkway. It's a big, giant wide sidewalk, you know,
Speaker 6: maybe fifteen feet wide or something. It goes around the city.
Speaker 6: You can walk the whole thing, and walking through I
Speaker 6: just noticed every little tree had a wound. On the
Speaker 6: southwest side at the base, I say, little tree. Now,
Speaker 6: those things the first time I went there were probably
Speaker 6: the size of a of a golf ball, and I
Speaker 6: saw the wounds in Now these things, I've been going
Speaker 6: for several years, but they're probably a lot of them
Speaker 6: are four to six inches thick, and when you look
Speaker 6: at them, you can see that old wound where the
Speaker 6: southwest injury occurred when they were a little thin trunk,
Speaker 6: thin barked young trees. And that's exactly how it happens.
Speaker 6: People call. When I used to work with the Agro
Speaker 6: Life Extension Office, people would call and go, so, I've
Speaker 6: got this split near the bottom of my tree trunk,
Speaker 6: and I would say, is it on the southwest side?
Speaker 6: And there would be this pause where, you know, nobody
Speaker 6: knows off the hand what size side of the trunk.
Speaker 6: They have to stop and think, okay, this is north
Speaker 6: and suddenly they'd go, yeah, like how did you know that?
Speaker 6: And who cares what side it is. That's exactly what happens.
Speaker 6: A nice mild winter day and the sun at the
Speaker 6: latest part of you know, what's the hottest time of
Speaker 6: the day. Look at the temperatures through the day. The
Speaker 6: hottest time of the day is going to be around
Speaker 6: four o'clock, okay, somewhere around there, depends on the day.
Speaker 6: In the coal front coming through or something. But anyway,
Speaker 6: that's the warmest part and it warms up and with
Speaker 6: the sun shining on it, it warms up even more
Speaker 6: more than the rest of the tree trunk around all
Speaker 6: the other sides of the tree, and so that's where
Speaker 6: the sap starts to flow. And so then a coal
Speaker 6: snap that night. Typically that's going to happen when it
Speaker 6: gets down, you know, mid twenties, lower twenties or even colder.
Speaker 6: That's where we start to get that, even the teens,
Speaker 6: and you get that damage and you don't see it
Speaker 6: right away, but boy, you do see it when it
Speaker 6: starts to grow in the spring. And will the tree survive, Yeah,
Speaker 6: the tree will make it fine. But now you've got
Speaker 6: this big wound that's got to heal over. Perhaps you
Speaker 6: get some decay into the inner bark there is that
Speaker 6: splits open and exposes the inner bark. So why not
Speaker 6: just avoid it. It's easy to avoid. And the way
Speaker 6: we do it is put a little wrap around the tree.
Speaker 6: I've known people to paint the bases of their trees white.
Speaker 6: The trunks were parts of the trunk white to reflect
Speaker 6: some of that heat. That helps a little bit. Looks
Speaker 6: kind of strange, although you go to some places like
Speaker 6: in Mexico, it's very popular even in large tree trunks
Speaker 6: and parks and stuff, you know, painted white on the
Speaker 6: lower part. But there is a place for that. I
Speaker 6: have known people to put some aluminum foil around the trunk,
Speaker 6: just wrap it around, just kind of crump it and
Speaker 6: so it stays there, just to reflect that sunlight out
Speaker 6: to keep that trunk cool rather than encouraging it to grow. Oh,
Speaker 6: let's see, it was it two decembers, three decembers ago. Now,
Speaker 6: we had a period where, especially for those of you
Speaker 6: up in the northern part of the listening area. When
Speaker 6: I say that, I mean you know, like Tomball up
Speaker 6: to College Station in Huntsville and everything up as you
Speaker 6: go north, A lot of crape myrtles got killed to
Speaker 6: the ground for the same reason. It went down to
Speaker 6: the upper teens in December, and they were not ready
Speaker 6: for it. They were not hardened off, and some flat
Speaker 6: to the ground and they came right back out. Of course,
Speaker 6: the base survives that you lost the above gun growth
Speaker 6: and it was the same principle going on there. They
Speaker 6: weren't ready for it. Crepe myrtles grow much further north
Speaker 6: than here. You know, the one of the major crate
Speaker 6: myrtle breeding programs in the country for decades past has
Speaker 6: been up in Beltsville, Maryland. That's a little further north
Speaker 6: than here. Well, that's the USDA breeding program. And so
Speaker 6: if they can grow up there, why are we having
Speaker 6: them killed to the ground here for the reason I
Speaker 6: just described. So, better safe than sorry is what I say.
Speaker 6: If I flipped a coin and had to say is
Speaker 6: it going to be needed or not? I would say no.
Speaker 6: But I wouldn't risk my own trees if I wasn't sure.
Speaker 6: So there you go. That's my advice. I'd rather spend
Speaker 6: a little time going out there and protecting the trunk,
Speaker 6: and then even if I didn't have to. Right, all right, Well,
Speaker 6: we got some cold weather coming. Last time I ed,
Speaker 6: we were looking at temperatures down in the upper twenties.
Speaker 6: For those of you who are up north of the
Speaker 6: Houston area, and for those of you that are down
Speaker 6: kind of even horizontally even across you know, with Houston,
Speaker 6: sugar Land and across there, we're looking probably down around
Speaker 6: thirty degrees twenty nine degrees, and that'll vary. I can't
Speaker 6: predict the weather. The people that predict the weather sometimes miss.
Speaker 6: But anyway, so we've got to do a little protection
Speaker 6: for that possibility of getting some pipe damage. You know,
Speaker 6: they say the three peas or plants, pipes and pets,
Speaker 6: and you got to take care of all three of those,
Speaker 6: of course. And when it comes to plants, if you've
Speaker 6: got plants that are very sensitive to cold, we have
Speaker 6: plants that are perennials here and in a mild winter
Speaker 6: they'll just come right through without being killed on the ground.
Speaker 6: And in a hard winter than they can be killed
Speaker 6: all the way to the ground or killed out right,
Speaker 6: depending on the plant. You know, perennial is a geographical designation.
Speaker 6: Let me give you an example. You know, yellow bills esperanza,
Speaker 6: beautiful yellow blooms. Had those around for a good long time. Now.
Speaker 6: Those are a good tough plant. But you go up
Speaker 6: the Dallas and they're not You go to Dallas, they're
Speaker 6: gonna be killed the ground and could be killed outright.
Speaker 6: Same with Pride of Barbados. Barbados pride, some people call
Speaker 6: it red bird of Paradise, gorgeous summer bloomer. But you
Speaker 6: get cold enough and it's not a perennial kill it
Speaker 6: out right. So you got to take care of your
Speaker 6: plants depending on where you live and how cold it gets.
Speaker 6: And Ace Hardware has got you covered. They have the
Speaker 6: plant frost blankets to protect your plant. It's a thick
Speaker 6: woven material spun bound actually material. They come in different forms,
Speaker 6: but you put them over your plant and secure them
Speaker 6: to the ground and that holds the warmth of the
Speaker 6: soil rising up to protect that plant. It's very helpful,
Speaker 6: especially for frost because frost can't form on the leaves
Speaker 6: when you got that cover over it. They have fawcet
Speaker 6: covers to go over your faucets. They have something called
Speaker 6: the freeze Miser fatt protection. It's a little short thing
Speaker 6: you screw onto your faucet. You turn on the faucet
Speaker 6: just wide open and no water comes out. But as
Speaker 6: it gets cold, it starts to let water trickle through.
Speaker 6: And when you have water trickling through, the water doesn't
Speaker 6: just sit there to freeze. No, it's not going to
Speaker 6: take you through timblow zero, but it'll take you through
Speaker 6: the kinds of freezes typically that we have here. They've
Speaker 6: got pipe wrap as a type of insulation to go
Speaker 6: around your pipe. You plug it in, Well, there's the
Speaker 6: insulation for your pipe, but there's also an insulating tape,
Speaker 6: and there's wires that you can plug in that provide
Speaker 6: just a little bit of heat to protect pipes and things.
Speaker 6: In fact, there's a couple dozen different things that ACE
Speaker 6: Hardware carries to help you prepare for the cold. So
Speaker 6: I'm going to be talking about some of those other
Speaker 6: things as we go through the morning, because we got
Speaker 6: that coming up today, are coming up soon, the freeze.
Speaker 6: Once you get through this weekend, I got a little
Speaker 6: rainy weather ahead of it, and then sky's clear, and
Speaker 6: when the sky's clear, the temperature can drop a lot further,
Speaker 6: and that's what we're going to be experiencing all right.
Speaker 6: Time for me to take a little break. I'll be
Speaker 6: right back. If you'd like to give me a call
Speaker 6: and get on the line. Seven to one three two
Speaker 6: one two kt r H.
Speaker 7: Hey, welcome back to Guarden Line.
Speaker 6: You got a question you can help you with today, Well,
Speaker 6: here's a number seven one three two one two kt
Speaker 6: r H. Be happy to visit with you about the
Speaker 6: things you need to know to have success in your garden.
Speaker 6: Gardening is fun. It's supposed to be fun, and I
Speaker 6: want you to have success. I don't want you to
Speaker 6: be discouraged. I don't want you to feel like you
Speaker 6: have a brown thumb. You don't trust me. You do
Speaker 6: not have a brown thumb. I promise you don't. All
Speaker 6: you need to do is get that thumb educated with
Speaker 6: some good and and you can absolutely have success. Gardening
Speaker 6: is not rocket science. I don't even know what that means,
Speaker 6: even the rocket science anyway. Nothing's rocket science if you
Speaker 6: know what you're doing, not even not even rocket science.
Speaker 6: So just give us a call seven one three two
Speaker 6: one two fifty eight seventy four. If you want to
Speaker 6: send me a photo, I headed ahead of the call.
Speaker 6: That's fine. Just call my UH number here seven one
Speaker 6: three two one two fifty eight to seventy four till Jonathan.
Speaker 6: You want to send a photo, He'll give you an email.
Speaker 6: Send it to me, we can talk about it. I'm
Speaker 6: not able to answer all the emails by typing out
Speaker 6: the answers to them, but I do appreciate when you
Speaker 6: can send a photo. Being able to talk about the
Speaker 6: question that you have and having something visual to look
Speaker 6: at so I can help you diagnose or help you
Speaker 6: identify or whatever it is that you're trying to do. Well,
Speaker 6: let's see here I was discussing the importance of coal
Speaker 6: protection in you know, someone's saying, well, ACE Hardware, where
Speaker 6: do you Where is my ACE Hardware? Well, they're all
Speaker 6: over the place. Go to Acehardware dot Com, find the
Speaker 6: store locator and there's all there, all over the Greater
Speaker 6: Houston area. You can find one near you. For example,
Speaker 6: you go up to Porter Texas j N R. ACE
Speaker 6: Hardware right there in Porter up in Willis all seasons,
Speaker 6: ACE up in Willis, down in Clearly Kilgore Lumber and
Speaker 6: Clear Lakes an ACE hardware store. And then Cyprus says
Speaker 6: right there in Cyprus, Texas. Those are all examples of
Speaker 6: ACE hardware stores that are near to you. I was
Speaker 6: outside the other day looking at my bird feeder and
Speaker 6: I hadn't seen a lot of birds come into it,
Speaker 6: and I was going, you know what's wrong with that?
Speaker 6: And what happened is it's one of those feeders that
Speaker 6: when something sits on it, if it's too heavy, the
Speaker 6: bird feeder closes. It's it's the squirrel excluding feeder from
Speaker 6: Wabbird's Unlimited. Squirrels can't get in because when they sit
Speaker 6: down on it, it you know, closes the door. They
Speaker 6: can't get to the food. But anyway, the food had
Speaker 6: kind of gotten stuck up in there. I don't know
Speaker 6: if some moisture or whatever had kind of gotten it stuck.
Speaker 6: And I kind of bumped on it a little bit
Speaker 6: and it dropped right down, and it just reminded me
Speaker 6: check those feeders out. I'm using Wildbirds Unlimited Winter super
Speaker 6: Blend in my feeders. I sometimes mix a few other
Speaker 6: things in there. You know, depending on what birds you
Speaker 6: want to attract, there's different kinds of seed that are
Speaker 6: most attractive to them. But Wibirds Unlimited Winter super Blend
Speaker 6: is important because it has the fat and the protein
Speaker 6: that birds need for fueling. You know, the days are shorter,
Speaker 6: the temperature a little colder, sometimes the weather's inclement, and
Speaker 6: they're not out able to do the feeding they're looking
Speaker 6: for a lot of those things that went to seed
Speaker 6: in the fall have now been picked over. The birds
Speaker 6: are getting hungry, So go buy Wilbirds un Let me
Speaker 6: get you some of the Winter super Blend or one
Speaker 6: of their other you know, just talk to the folks there.
Speaker 6: They are so knowledgeable. I love going into wild birds.
Speaker 6: It's like you're going to visit a friend because you
Speaker 6: talk to him and say, hey, I'm interested in this,
Speaker 6: and they're enthusiastic. Listen, they've got the they've got the
Speaker 6: wild bird bud themselves, and they feed at their houses.
Speaker 6: They know what they're talking about and you can just
Speaker 6: strike up a conversation and they can talk to you
Speaker 6: about it. You know, it's not all about just buying
Speaker 6: a product, it's about learning how to do it. They
Speaker 6: want you to have success because birding in the backyard
Speaker 6: is a lot of fun. You know, you may not
Speaker 6: be the guy with the you know, the stereotypical birder
Speaker 6: that's got the little safari hat on and shorts and
Speaker 6: these binoculars and walking around looking at birds in the
Speaker 6: wild and songs that's fun, by the way, too. But
Speaker 6: in the backyard you just feed them and you enjoy
Speaker 6: the music. It's as simple as that, and warbirds can
Speaker 6: help you do just that. Let's go out to the
Speaker 6: phones now. We're going to head to pair Land and
Speaker 6: talk to Belinda. Hey, Belinda, Welcome to garden line.
Speaker 11: Oh thank you, Skip. I have a big problem.
Speaker 12: I have two six trees, two palm trees, two palmegranate trees,
Speaker 12: and two citrus trees.
Speaker 11: I have mult around them, okay, and I was going
Speaker 11: to get the hay.
Speaker 12: But do I need to get those big, heavy covers that.
Speaker 9: Go all the way over the curry?
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 6: The most sensitive of those that you mentioned is your citrus, okay,
Speaker 6: and those would I would do. The primary protection for
Speaker 6: that is one where if you can put a cover
Speaker 6: over the whole tree, that's good. But a cover needs
Speaker 6: to drape all the way to the ground and be
Speaker 6: secured to the ground with soil or rocks or bricks
Speaker 6: or boards or whatever holds it down securely, because you
Speaker 6: want to create dead air space underneath it for the
Speaker 6: warmth of the soil to rise up and make a
Speaker 6: difference on the kind of coal we're going to have.
Speaker 6: Our cold is going to be pretty minor considering you know,
Speaker 6: when we're just talking about you in the upper twenties,
Speaker 6: that's minor freeze compared to when you get mid twenties,
Speaker 6: low twenties and teens, and so that'll be enough. I
Speaker 6: don't think your fig is going to need anything unless
Speaker 6: it's a brand excuse me, your plum and palm granite.
Speaker 6: Unless they're brand new trees very thin bark and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 6: you may want to protect them a little bit. Uh,
Speaker 6: but they're probably going to be just fine. And then
Speaker 6: the fig, if it's in a growing state, can get
Speaker 6: some cold damage. If not, it's going to come through
Speaker 6: just fine. I'm not worried about figs right now myself
Speaker 6: on the kind of gold that we're about to have.
Speaker 11: Okay, so just a citrus, I have one big enough
Speaker 11: to cover it.
Speaker 12: Okay, I'll do that.
Speaker 13: Yeah, thank you, Yeah, well, thank you, you know, even thank
Speaker 13: you very much.
Speaker 6: I appreciate you call.
Speaker 11: Hey, thank you.
Speaker 6: So you know, this freeze is a I'm going to
Speaker 6: call it a minor one. You know, last time I checked,
Speaker 6: even heading all the way up to Huntsville, you're maybe
Speaker 6: twenty eight something like that is what the last was
Speaker 6: said to be. That's a freeze. But remember there's there's
Speaker 6: freezes that they come and they stay frozen for a
Speaker 6: long time. Each day. We're warming back up into the
Speaker 6: maybe forties in most places, and so there's not a
Speaker 6: long period of time where those plants are frozen, and
Speaker 6: that makes a difference. And so this is a kind
Speaker 6: of phrase where it's not maybe we're preparing and warming
Speaker 6: up for a significant one later, but for right now
Speaker 6: this is a moderate one. So still protect and just
Speaker 6: remember what I'm saying about one plant doesn't apply to another.
Speaker 6: You're talking about like figs or or more cold tender
Speaker 6: than Belinda's a plum, for example, or palm grantite, those
Speaker 6: those are not as cold tender as fig But just
Speaker 6: depending on where you live, do what you need to do,
Speaker 6: take care of it. Let's we're gonna go, actually I
Speaker 6: have to take a break here. We're gonna come to
Speaker 6: Marty in Fairfield right when we get back in the meantime,
Speaker 6: if you like to give me a call. Seven one
Speaker 6: three two one two fifty eight seventy four.
Speaker 7: Welcome back to the Garden Line. Glad to have you
Speaker 7: with us today. Thanks for listening in. I'm your host,
Speaker 7: Skip Richter, and we're here to answer your gardening questions.
Speaker 7: Do you got a phone, You got a phone, you
Speaker 7: got a question? Well seven one three two one two
Speaker 7: kt RH. It's as easy as that. And let's just
Speaker 7: start by going straight out to Marty in Fairfield. Hello Marty,
Speaker 7: Welcome to Garden Rains Kid.
Speaker 12: Happy New Year.
Speaker 11: I have two spider lilies that are overgrown. They're about
Speaker 11: four to five feet tall, and they're hanging against each
Speaker 11: other in the middle of a walkway and I wanted
Speaker 11: to see it. I called you a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 11: and then you were on vacation. But is it okay
Speaker 11: if I dig them up and before the freeze and
Speaker 11: put them in some soil and some big pots, And
Speaker 11: just because they always tend to freeze back and I
Speaker 11: really want to separate them before the freeze back, and
Speaker 11: wondered if it would be okay you can do that.
Speaker 6: Or let them freeze back and separate them at that time.
Speaker 6: Either way is fine, They'll do fine. Let me just
Speaker 6: make sure we're talking about the same plant. Is this
Speaker 6: a white blooming flower, shaggy white blooms, yes, strappy petals, Okay.
Speaker 6: Sometimes people refer to like a type of like chorus
Speaker 6: as spider lily too. Yeah, that one.
Speaker 11: Looks like a big star. It's it's it's a spider
Speaker 11: little not yeah, not like a spider plant. A spider
Speaker 11: lily and big bulbs, Yeah, big bulbs. Dig leaves, long,
Speaker 11: dark green. It's beautiful when it blooms. But they have
Speaker 11: gotten Yeah, they've gotten really crowded, and I just I
Speaker 11: don't know, I've been lazy about sending them out, so
Speaker 11: I wondered if it would be okay if I went
Speaker 11: ahead and did it before the freeze.
Speaker 6: You can do that now, just you know, bring them inside.
Speaker 6: Don't leave the bulbs just sitting out and cold for now.
Speaker 6: But they're just a little bit underground when they grow.
Speaker 6: They're not super deep bulbs, but they are protected by
Speaker 6: the soil. But yeah, you sure can you do that
Speaker 6: and guide them and then.
Speaker 12: Plant the land.
Speaker 6: You can put them right back in the ground if
Speaker 6: you want. You know, in our warm climate, we don't
Speaker 6: have to worry. If some further north they may plant
Speaker 6: them in the spring more. But you can plant them
Speaker 6: now if you like and reset them, or you can
Speaker 6: keep them inside. Just remember if they dry out then
Speaker 6: it's kind of like you let them get frosted back.
Speaker 6: Then they'll just have to come back out again. Amarillis
Speaker 6: is the same way Amarillis. They are in their cold
Speaker 6: weather stage. I've got some that are still showing good
Speaker 6: strappy foliage. Or do you or your amarellas still have
Speaker 6: green foliage.
Speaker 11: Yes, all of them do. They're beautiful.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah they are. And uh you know they're they're
Speaker 6: gonna bloom a little a little bit later when warms up.
Speaker 6: But if you, if you, if you can keep them
Speaker 6: from getting killed back, I think they'll you'll have a
Speaker 6: little bit stronger plant. They'll do a little bit better
Speaker 6: for you. Either way. Those are both tough, very tough plants.
Speaker 11: Nope, all right, okay, thank you, all right.
Speaker 6: Thank you. You know, the rule on guarden line is
Speaker 6: our advice is free. But when you divide all these bulbs,
Speaker 6: you just need to bring half of the ones you
Speaker 6: dig up and leave them at the station and we'll
Speaker 6: call it even. Okay, you don't.
Speaker 11: Have any room in your garden, just like me.
Speaker 6: That's that true. That's the truth. Garden We don't ask
Speaker 6: that question. We just buy the plant, come home and
Speaker 6: figure it out. That's right, all right, folks. That is
Speaker 6: that is so true of gardeners. Oh bye. That's why
Speaker 6: I say gardeners are plant collectors. A lot of times.
Speaker 6: You know, there's some people that they do it. Let's
Speaker 6: just say, right, you know, they go out and they
Speaker 6: they come up with a plan. They have a designer
Speaker 6: design the landscape and do all that and it's beautiful
Speaker 6: as gorgeous. It's a showplace. And they've only put the
Speaker 6: plants in. They're going to plant that need to be there.
Speaker 6: They don't overcrowd them and things. And then there's the
Speaker 6: rest of us, the plant collectors. Our places look like
Speaker 6: a bomb went off in a garden center and everything
Speaker 6: rooted where it landed. It's just we see a plant
Speaker 6: we got to have there. You know where am I
Speaker 6: going to put it? That's silly to worry about that.
Speaker 6: Buy the plant, take it home, then figure out where
Speaker 6: to put it. But you know what, it's your yard.
Speaker 6: It's to you and the hoa. So I guess in
Speaker 6: the backyard, you do what you want to do. The
Speaker 6: hoa has an opinion about the front yard. Believe me,
Speaker 6: they do.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 6: As we're getting out there and taking care of our plants.
Speaker 6: You know that the most important thing is to build
Speaker 6: the soil. And one of the ways that we improve
Speaker 6: our soil is with products from microlife like microlife micro
Speaker 6: grow bioinoculant that is one that is loaded with all
Speaker 6: kinds of good microbes that are part of keeping plants healthy.
Speaker 6: I actually a week doesn't go by that I don't
Speaker 6: read some research article about what some microbe has now
Speaker 6: been discovered to be able to do. There are microbes
Speaker 6: that cause roots to grow in certain directions. Can you
Speaker 6: believe that there are microbes that get into the root
Speaker 6: system and cause the top of the plant to be
Speaker 6: better at resisting disease? Can you believe that there are
Speaker 6: microbes in this case the fungi that link one plant
Speaker 6: to another, that communicate from one plant to another about
Speaker 6: hey there's a bug eating us, watch out, get ready
Speaker 6: for it, and all kinds of other things. It's an
Speaker 6: amazing world. Micro Life's built around those kinds of things.
Speaker 6: It's taking advantage of what nature is already doing and
Speaker 6: helping you do a better job of that in your yard.
Speaker 6: Micro grow bioinoculant is a maroon bag, a burgundy bag,
Speaker 6: very beautiful bag. Of course I'm biased, but anyway, it
Speaker 6: is loaded with sixty three different beneficial micro organism strains. Now,
Speaker 6: all the microlife products are going to have MicroB xenom.
Speaker 6: I mean they just do. They keep them stocked with
Speaker 6: all kinds of good things. The micro grow biinoculant. Don't
Speaker 6: think of it as a fertilizer, think of it as
Speaker 6: what it says, a bioinoculant, those kinds of things that
Speaker 6: are helpful to your soils or your plant's root system.
Speaker 6: Now there's also micro grow liquid AF. These are two
Speaker 6: different products. They both have a dark kind of a
Speaker 6: burgundy colored label, a little different in shade. But micro
Speaker 6: Grow liquid AF is loaded also with eight extremely dominating
Speaker 6: beneficial mind grobes that live in the soil and help
Speaker 6: your plans. Hey, where do you get microlife? Everywhere? It's
Speaker 6: pretty much everywhere, feed stores, garden centers, the hardware stores,
Speaker 6: Southwest fertilizers down Southwest Houston. Okay, well, there's the first
Speaker 6: hour of twenty twenty five in the books. Boy, we
Speaker 6: got a lot more to talk about, and I'm telling
Speaker 6: you this is going to be your best garden year ever.
Speaker 6: Trust me on this one. Believe me on this one.
Speaker 6: Just keep listening in. Don't forget my website too. By
Speaker 6: the way, gardening with skip dot Com. I remember, I'm
Speaker 6: going to talk about some new things that are up
Speaker 6: there on the dep side when we come back.
Speaker 1: Take for un Welcome to KTRH Garden Line with Skip Rictor.
Speaker 14: It's just watch you as seats well.
Speaker 6: Good Saturday morning, Good Saturday morning, and welcome to twenty
Speaker 6: twenty five. Welcome the Garden Line. I'm your host, Skip Rector,
Speaker 6: and we're here to answer gardening questions. That's what we do.
Speaker 15: Uh.
Speaker 6: I guess we'll even allow some uh gardening bragging, you know,
Speaker 6: if you want to, if you want to talk about uh,
Speaker 6: I don't know. You just got through planning a whole
Speaker 6: bunch of wonderful fruit trees for your backyard, or just
Speaker 6: got a whole bunch of new bulbs in that you're
Speaker 6: fixing the put out there. Yeah, we'll do that. By
Speaker 6: the way, for those of you who are not from Texas,
Speaker 6: fixing is a word. Fixing is a word. It means
Speaker 6: I'm about to I'm about to do it. If I
Speaker 6: sometimes I forget. You know, you grew up someplace and
Speaker 6: use certain kinds of terms and language, and you recognize
Speaker 6: other people don't always do that. Head from New Jersey
Speaker 6: when I went to college, it lived seam arm as
Speaker 6: Randy and I as a matter of fact, back in
Speaker 6: the day, and I remember the first time he goes fixing,
Speaker 6: what do you mean fixing and it's like, I mean,
Speaker 6: I'm about to do something didn't realize. Not everybody talks
Speaker 6: like that anyway, just an observation. But we are here
Speaker 6: to help you have a good success. And what I
Speaker 6: like to say is I'm here to help you have
Speaker 6: a more beautiful garden and a more bountiful garden and
Speaker 6: the same At the same time, gardening is fun, and
Speaker 6: gardening gives us a connection in nature that we are made.
Speaker 6: We're designed for nature, we really are. It is our
Speaker 6: happy place. It's where we find relaxation. It's where we
Speaker 6: find a lot of reward too. You know, there is
Speaker 6: something when you grow your own tomato and you pick
Speaker 6: that thing right off the vine and you enjoy that fresh,
Speaker 6: homegrown flavor that is so rewarding. When you smell the
Speaker 6: fragrance of a wonderful flower, that just I mean, it's
Speaker 6: just like nature's perfume that is rewarding. When you esthetically
Speaker 6: look out there and you see a well trimmed lawn
Speaker 6: and a beautiful landscape, there's something esthetically rewarding about all that.
Speaker 6: And gardening gives you all that kind of stuff. Now,
Speaker 6: how do you end up having all that? Well? Number one.
Speaker 6: You start with the soil. And I'm a broken record
Speaker 6: on this, but brown stuff before green stuff, meaning you
Speaker 6: fix the soil and then you plant the plant. That's
Speaker 6: how it works. Brown stuff before green stuff. And if
Speaker 6: you go into a garden center today, which I think
Speaker 6: would be a great thing to do it just come
Speaker 6: home with some soil bags some Maybe you're starting seeds
Speaker 6: and you need a seed starting mix. Maybe you are
Speaker 6: putting in a bed and you need a quality bed mix.
Speaker 6: Maybe you need some multch to go on top of
Speaker 6: the soil to protect the base of the plants. We're
Speaker 6: talking earlier about some coal damage and some plants are
Speaker 6: very cold sensitive. But when you throw a good thick
Speaker 6: layer of mulch over the top of them, it's like
Speaker 6: putting a blanket over you. I mean it holds in
Speaker 6: the warmth of the soil and it protects the crowns
Speaker 6: of those plants. Where do you do that, well, Cienamal
Speaker 6: should be a good place to do it. It's kind of
Speaker 6: the one stop shop for everything that's let's just say
Speaker 6: everything brown. When it comes to brown stuff, the composts
Speaker 6: for the soil. The soil blends like the vegion or
Speaker 6: bix from heirloom soils. They've got that there. They carry
Speaker 6: products from landscapers Pride to They carry products from heirloom soils.
Speaker 6: Of course. They also are a place where you're going
Speaker 6: to find fertilizers from nitrofoss from Nelson, plant food from
Speaker 6: for example, azamide and microlife. They carry all of that,
Speaker 6: and then products from Medina as well. They deliver within
Speaker 6: twenty miles now. They're located down south of town on
Speaker 6: FM five point twenty one, near where Highway six and
Speaker 6: two eighty eight are south of Houston. Go to the
Speaker 6: website Sienna multch dot com Sienna multch dot com. There
Speaker 6: you can find it where they're located. You can find
Speaker 6: it when they're open. By the way, they're open today
Speaker 6: Saturday from seven thirty to two, So good day to
Speaker 6: get out and do that. Get that stuff at your
Speaker 6: house on the ground, in the soil, on top of
Speaker 6: the soil, whatever you need to do with it, and
Speaker 6: get ready because planting season is upon us. It is
Speaker 6: still a good time to plant woody ornamentals and perennials
Speaker 6: to give them a head start on the spring. Those
Speaker 6: spring gardens, whether it's flowers or vegetables, or herbs. Get
Speaker 6: the soil right, because whenever that's dry enough to work
Speaker 6: the soil, there's a good time to work the soil.
Speaker 6: It is, it's always good. You always amend and improve
Speaker 6: your soil. I don't care how good the soil is,
Speaker 6: you're always in time going to be needing to do
Speaker 6: some amendments and improvements on the soil, unless you're just
Speaker 6: growing a native plant in a soil that it's very
Speaker 6: adapted to. In that case, yeah, I get it. You
Speaker 6: get it set up, and you forget it. But for
Speaker 6: a lot of things, including containers, you've got to keep
Speaker 6: improving the soil in order to keep that at its
Speaker 6: top functioning ability. Because plants live in their roots they do.
Speaker 6: Quality soil means it's got organic matter. It means it's
Speaker 6: got nutrients, and remember all of this is available cinemals.
Speaker 6: And it also quality soil means that it drains well,
Speaker 6: that excess water runs right through it, but that it
Speaker 6: holds some water. It's not just like a sand that
Speaker 6: water runs right through. It holds water, but it also
Speaker 6: drains the excess water. Cinamals cannot you do all of that,
Speaker 6: and if you're smart, you will get that done. Because
Speaker 6: I'm telling you the the the wise gardener, I'll put
Speaker 6: it that way. The wise gardener knows that you get
Speaker 6: the soil right and it makes you look good. It
Speaker 6: makes your thumb look green, if you know what I'm
Speaker 6: talking about. All right, that's that speaking of the animals
Speaker 6: and products and things, you know that cienumalch also carries
Speaker 6: Nelson plant food products. Now, Nelson is a it's just
Speaker 6: a long term, outstanding purveyor of some quality blends of
Speaker 6: nutrients for your plants. You know, there's a Nelson plant
Speaker 6: food for just about every kind of plant you want
Speaker 6: to grow, from lawns to things like let's say hibeskas
Speaker 6: or things like plumeria or things like roses. Nelson has
Speaker 6: their color Star line, probably one of the most popular
Speaker 6: lines now for almost forty years. Color Star is an
Speaker 6: all purpose plant food, So you put it down on anything.
Speaker 6: Just think about this way. If it gives you color,
Speaker 6: put color Star on it. That's easy to remember. So
Speaker 6: all the flowering plants, annuals of perennials, even shrubs and
Speaker 6: trees that can you can use it on that It
Speaker 6: acts quickly, but it also has organic nutrients sources to
Speaker 6: slowly release into the soil over time, so about every
Speaker 6: three or four months put your color Star down on
Speaker 6: your beds. You can also get it with a funge
Speaker 6: side involved in a mixed in call Colorstar Plus to
Speaker 6: help with the root issues that you might have. A
Speaker 6: Color Star has been popular for landscapers for a very
Speaker 6: long time, and even out of state. You know, they
Speaker 6: ship that stuff all over the country to people that
Speaker 6: have discovered it and now they use it and again landscapers.
Speaker 6: Professional landscapers no to use color Star all from Nelson
Speaker 6: Plant Food. Nelson Plant Food is a Houston area homegrown
Speaker 6: basically homegrown company that produces whatever kind of nutrients you
Speaker 6: need for the plants that you want to grow and
Speaker 6: have success with. It's time for me to take a
Speaker 6: little quick break. I'll be right back.
Speaker 16: You know.
Speaker 6: They welcome back to the guard Line. Glad to have
Speaker 6: you with us this morning on the first show of
Speaker 6: twenty twenty five. You're welcome to the best gardening year
Speaker 6: you're going to have that you've ever had. How about
Speaker 6: that saying a lot, isn't it? I just think it is.
Speaker 6: That's how I look at it. I tell you what,
Speaker 6: when I buy a seed, it's going to be the
Speaker 6: most bountiful harvest I've ever had. When I buy a
Speaker 6: fruit tree, I can just already taste the fruit. I mean, listen,
Speaker 6: you got to be an optimist as a gardener, and
Speaker 6: we do everything we can to have success. The bottom
Speaker 6: line is that's a fun part of gardening because you know,
Speaker 6: even when things don't work out like you want, you
Speaker 6: just adjust. You just adjust and you figure it out
Speaker 6: and it's okay. If this year ends up being a
Speaker 6: little hot and dry, that's all right. We know how
Speaker 6: to water plant if it gets a little cold. We
Speaker 6: know how to protect plants. I'm going to come back
Speaker 6: and talk about plant protection here in a little bit.
Speaker 6: Right now, I'm going to run out to the galleria
Speaker 6: and we're going to talk to Forest. Hey, Forrest, welcome
Speaker 6: to garden Line.
Speaker 4: Hey, thank you, Skip.
Speaker 17: I'm sure you'll cover a lot of these freeze questions.
Speaker 17: But I've been growing a couple of citrus trees, a
Speaker 17: lime and a lemon that I picked up at a
Speaker 17: Buchanan's container, and my plan was to bring them in
Speaker 17: for this freeze we're about to have. But I just
Speaker 17: wanted to get your thoughts on the rule of thumb
Speaker 17: on growing citrus and chill hours and that sort of thing.
Speaker 4: How cold they can get.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's a good question for us.
Speaker 18: You know.
Speaker 6: The bottom line is limes and lemons, especially limes, are
Speaker 6: not very cold hearty at all, and so it went
Speaker 6: in doubt. I would bring them in just because you know,
Speaker 6: you don't want to take a chance on it.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 6: There there are variations on protecting a plant, from leaving
Speaker 6: it out there figuring it's going to be okay, to
Speaker 6: bringing it up close to the house. I've got some
Speaker 6: house plants that are sitting outside my house, underneath the eaves,
Speaker 6: right up against the house, and they're still looking good.
Speaker 6: And they haven't you know, we haven't had a hard freeze,
Speaker 6: but we had a minor freeze, and so just that
Speaker 6: protected spot helped a lot. And then the next step
Speaker 6: would be to bring them into protect a garage, or
Speaker 6: to cover them up and put some heat underneath them.
Speaker 6: I think any of those things would be fine if
Speaker 6: it were mine. I wouldn't take chances on leaving them out.
Speaker 6: Once we drop below freezing, you're gonna get some damage
Speaker 6: to a lime and then probably to a lemon too.
Speaker 17: Okay, great, I appreciate that.
Speaker 15: Thank you. Sir.
Speaker 6: Yeah, do you have a dolly you can strap them
Speaker 6: too and wheel them in real easily without hurting your back.
Speaker 17: Oh, I got a whole system set up because I
Speaker 17: also grow up plumeria in containers. I've been bringing plumeria
Speaker 17: inside for years, so I got I got the drill
Speaker 17: for sure.
Speaker 6: Good. That's good. Yeah. But when I first discovered that
Speaker 6: you didn't have to pick plants up and carry them
Speaker 6: around and you could put them on a dolly, that
Speaker 6: was that was good information right there. My dolly has
Speaker 6: a strap attached to it so that I just go
Speaker 6: up to the plant and the strap's already there to
Speaker 6: wrap it around the pot so it sticks, stays on
Speaker 6: the dolly lip, you know, and you can move it
Speaker 6: around with you.
Speaker 17: Well, good luck with them, thank you, sir.
Speaker 6: All right, yes, sir, you take care. Thanks for the call.
Speaker 6: Appreciate that. All right, you're listening to garden Line or our
Speaker 6: phone number if you'd like to give me a call.
Speaker 6: Seven to one three two one two ktr H seven
Speaker 6: to one three two one two kt r H. I
Speaker 6: was talking about plant protection, and I do want to
Speaker 6: mention a couple things about protecting plants. First of all,
Speaker 6: when when you're wanting to protect a plant, a cover
Speaker 6: over the top of the plant to create dead air
Speaker 6: space is very important. Now, creating dead air space means
Speaker 6: dead air space connected to the soil. So here's what
Speaker 6: I mean. Don't wrap the top of a plant like
Speaker 6: a landscape lollipop. Allow the cover to drape straight down
Speaker 6: to the ground as if you put an umbrella over it,
Speaker 6: and where the rain would drip down off the umbrella.
Speaker 6: That is where the cover goes straight to the ground.
Speaker 6: Secure if you're it there so the warmth of the
Speaker 6: soil can rise up underneath that cover. You create dead airspace,
Speaker 6: and you make a difference in the cold temperatures and
Speaker 6: the rate of cooling inside that cover. We're gonna have
Speaker 6: freezes coming up here that are going to be fairly brief.
Speaker 6: It may if you live far enough north, you're gonna
Speaker 6: have two or three days of freezing, but it warms
Speaker 6: up during the day into the forties, goes back down again.
Speaker 6: All you need is a little bit of protection slow
Speaker 6: the cooling and your good. If you want to add
Speaker 6: one more measure of protection, you can put a clamp
Speaker 6: light underneath. Now these are those aluminum shielded light fixtures
Speaker 6: that have a clamp, so you can attach them to
Speaker 6: the side of a container. You can attach them to
Speaker 6: the trunk of the plant, but don't shine the light
Speaker 6: on the trunk. Shine the light down toward the soil
Speaker 6: and that it'll rise up underneath that cover and make
Speaker 6: a huge difference and protect them. Now, if it's going
Speaker 6: to be seventeen degrees, no, not one little incandescent bulb
Speaker 6: is not going to do that. But even just a
Speaker 6: bright one hundred and fifty wat bulb, you don't have
Speaker 6: to have a heat lamp in. Those will provide enough
Speaker 6: warmth to make a big difference underneath the cover. If
Speaker 6: the cover is not secured to the ground, wind is
Speaker 6: going to blow. It's going to displace that air that
Speaker 6: you've warmed, or that the soil warmth that has risen
Speaker 6: up to warm the air, and you're gonna be right
Speaker 6: back down just as cold as it is outside the cover.
Speaker 6: You gotta secure it to the ground. However you want
Speaker 6: to do that, soil, bricks, boards, whatever works for you.
Speaker 6: Make sure it's secure to the ground. You're gonna have
Speaker 6: some breeze. You really need to make sure that that
Speaker 6: cover stays down there on the ground. And then that
Speaker 6: little addition of one heat lamp for minor freezes like
Speaker 6: we're having now, is enough. I put one hundred and
Speaker 6: fifty watt flood light bulb in mine. You can use
Speaker 6: a heat lamp bulb. You're not going to need that
Speaker 6: much heat. Now, if you're trying to cover maybe a
Speaker 6: satsumetry that's eight feet tall and you're going to get
Speaker 6: heat under that, well okay, yeah, but we're not going
Speaker 6: to have satsuma freeze damage kind of weather in this
Speaker 6: particular type of freeze, other types of a lot of
Speaker 6: other types of ceterric. Yes, we will. So anyway, provide
Speaker 6: that protection and you can make a huge difference, and
Speaker 6: you just have that on hand. I've got mine in
Speaker 6: the they're in the garage. The clamp light is clamped
Speaker 6: to the wall and the bulbs in it. It's ready
Speaker 6: to go and whenever I need them, they just come
Speaker 6: right out and go straight out there. Make sure to
Speaker 6: protect those electric connections. If you were to have rain,
Speaker 6: which we're not supposed to have rain with the cold
Speaker 6: that we're having, it's supposed to to get dry before
Speaker 6: we have the cold. But if you do, you got
Speaker 6: to cover that connection. It's electrical connection there. Don't drop
Speaker 6: a connection into dry grass either. Should you have some
Speaker 6: sort of a spark or something like that, you can
Speaker 6: set grass on fire underneath there. So you got to
Speaker 6: you got to use your head on that stuff. But
Speaker 6: by the way, I've got a publication online at Gardening
Speaker 6: with Skip dot com. It's protecting plants from frosts and freezes.
Speaker 6: It's a publication I wrote with one of our specialists
Speaker 6: at Texas A and M Horticulture Department a number of
Speaker 6: years ago, and I think it really covers well frosts
Speaker 6: and freezes, how they occur, the information about them you
Speaker 6: may not have been aware of, and that leads you
Speaker 6: to how to protect them correctly. And so I just
Speaker 6: gave you one little example of what's in the publication there.
Speaker 6: Just take it out, check it out. It's like nine
Speaker 6: pages of color pictures and all kinds of Information's very
Speaker 6: good Gardening with Skip dot com. Will you write that
Speaker 6: website down because I refer to it just about every
Speaker 6: show because I'm always putting something up there to help
Speaker 6: you to have to success, and in this case, it's
Speaker 6: that publication. Go check it out. It's free. You tak
Speaker 6: me down on that price. It's free. You can download it,
Speaker 6: you can look at it online. You can send it
Speaker 6: to your cousin and Tim bucktoo, who has a question
Speaker 6: about freezing just downloaded. Email it to him. Let them
Speaker 6: know about her. Just send them the link to it.
Speaker 6: If you go about that that way. Gardening with Skip,
Speaker 6: that's me gardening with Skip dot com. I'm gonna tomorrow,
Speaker 6: I'm gonna spend a little bit of time, a little
Speaker 6: more in depth talking about my predecessor in this chair,
Speaker 6: Randy Lemon. You know, garden Line has been around a
Speaker 6: long time, even before it was called garden Line. Doy
Speaker 6: Compton probably the first in about five of us now
Speaker 6: that have had been hosts of garden Line through the decades,
Speaker 6: goes back to the nineteen fifties. Randy was prior to me,
Speaker 6: was in this seat for over twenty five years, and
Speaker 6: Randy was well beloved and well known throughout the greater
Speaker 6: Houston area. A scholarship was set up a while back
Speaker 6: for Randy at Texas A and M for a horticulture student.
Speaker 6: If you knew Randy, you knew how proud he was
Speaker 6: of our university that he and I went to, and
Speaker 6: also how proud he would be to know that a
Speaker 6: scholarship was set up in his name there for horticulture student.
Speaker 6: You probably are one of the many, many, many people
Speaker 6: that benefited over the years from Randy's advice here on
Speaker 6: garden Line. I'm gonna tomorrow talk a little bit more
Speaker 6: about the scholarship and about Randy, but I just wanted
Speaker 6: to mention it today. Tomorrow, I believe, is the two
Speaker 6: year anniversary of Randy's passing. That came as a shock
Speaker 6: to all of us, everyone in the Greater Houston area
Speaker 6: gardening world. Uh and it it's it's been something that well,
Speaker 6: like I said, it was just a shock. You know,
Speaker 6: you never you never would expect something like that all,
Speaker 6: although we all know our time here on earth is
Speaker 6: is not infinite. But Randy was bigger than life.
Speaker 19: He was.
Speaker 6: He was quite a character. And I can tell you this.
Speaker 6: I didn't know him before college, but I knew him
Speaker 6: starting in college and back in the day that nineteen
Speaker 6: a eighty eighty, maybe nineteen eighty, I think it is
Speaker 6: when I first met Randy. Randy was a very special individual,
Speaker 6: a good friend and a good friend of the horticulture
Speaker 6: world here in the Greater Houston area. If you would
Speaker 6: like to consider, I asked you, would you consider making
Speaker 6: a donation to the scholarship fund in remembrance of Randy.
Speaker 6: It's really easy to do. First of all, the easiest
Speaker 6: way is just go to my website and it tells
Speaker 6: you how to do it there. I'll tell you briefly
Speaker 6: right now, but the bottom line is, just go the
Speaker 6: website and I'll tell you. If you want to give online,
Speaker 6: you go to a website called Texas A and M
Speaker 6: Foundation websites txamfoundation dot com. There is a little more
Speaker 6: to the url than that, but on my website, I
Speaker 6: tell you how to find and send the money to
Speaker 6: the right place. If you want to do it by check,
Speaker 6: you can mail the check to the Texas A and
Speaker 6: M Foundation. But in the memo you got to write
Speaker 6: Lemon Scholarship. Lemon has two ms L E, M, M
Speaker 6: O N Scholarship, but that's the Texas and M Foundation,
Speaker 6: and the address for that is also on the website
Speaker 6: Gardening with Skip dot com. It's the most recent thing
Speaker 6: that I've put online on the Gardening with Skip dot
Speaker 6: com website. Would you consider that? Would you join me
Speaker 6: in considering supporting that scholarship. Time for me to take
Speaker 6: a quick break here. When we come back, I'll be
Speaker 6: back with your gardening questions. If you'd like to call
Speaker 6: and get on on board with that, just kive Jonathan
Speaker 6: call seven month three two one two k t r H.
Speaker 6: We'll get you online. We'll talk to you about the
Speaker 6: things that are of interest to you, and I'm going
Speaker 6: to continue to talk about cold protection for plants, how
Speaker 6: to protect your plants from cold. We'll be right back.
Speaker 19: Here.
Speaker 6: We are, We're back with garden line. We got your
Speaker 6: gardening questions is coming. You just got to give me
Speaker 6: a call seven one three two one two k t
Speaker 6: r H. I want to continue talking about cold protection,
Speaker 6: cold protection for your plants, and just basically I'm giving
Speaker 6: you some principles to think about. I talked a while
Speaker 6: ago about covering a plant, how to cover them properly,
Speaker 6: and the fast way to just say that is no
Speaker 6: landscape lollipops. People that put a cover around a let's
Speaker 6: say a little small tree or shrub, and they bring
Speaker 6: it all the way and wrap it around the trunk.
Speaker 6: That's like a lollipop, right, and that all that does
Speaker 6: is keep the warmth of those branches in, but that
Speaker 6: they're going to cool off too fast. It'll slow cooling
Speaker 6: a little bit, but not much. Taking it all the
Speaker 6: way to the ground and allowing the warmth of the
Speaker 6: heat to rise up, or putting a heat lamp underneath it,
Speaker 6: or a light underneath it. An incandescent bulb is a
Speaker 6: heat lamp. They produce a lot of heat if you
Speaker 6: are a touched one, you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 6: Providing that extra warmth underneath that helps a lot. Now,
Speaker 6: there's several variables in how much protection you're going to need.
Speaker 6: Number one, how cold is it going to get. The
Speaker 6: colder you get, the more more heat you're going to
Speaker 6: have to produce in order to protect that plant. Number two,
Speaker 6: how cold hardy is the plant? Some plansts don't need
Speaker 6: protection at all. There are plenty cold hardy they don't
Speaker 6: have to worry about that. Some you know, you take
Speaker 6: a lime tree for example, it's going to get down
Speaker 6: twenty eight degrees. You got a problem for sure. So
Speaker 6: you got to protect those a lot. So it's the
Speaker 6: how cold is it going to get? How cold hardy
Speaker 6: is the plant? Another one is what kind of freeze
Speaker 6: is it? Now? There are several types of freezes too,
Speaker 6: specifically radiant and convective freezes that I talk about in
Speaker 6: the publication that's online at Gardening with Skip dot com.
Speaker 6: But one of them is just a cold, still night
Speaker 6: and heat is radiating up from the soil. It's radiating
Speaker 6: up off of the plants. That's why we end up
Speaker 6: getting frosts on the leaves of the plants. And those
Speaker 6: are easy to protect because you cover them up, you
Speaker 6: provide some warmth in you're good. The freeze where you
Speaker 6: get a cold blue northern wind blow and throw that
Speaker 6: just super chills things quickly, you know. You know that
Speaker 6: when you walk outside and it's cold and the wind
Speaker 6: is blowing, you cool off way faster. And those we
Speaker 6: definitely have to create dead air space, and we definitely
Speaker 6: need extra warmth to provide the protection for them. Some
Speaker 6: things that are important to consider when you're protecting your plants. Now,
Speaker 6: dead air space is your friend. I use the warmth
Speaker 6: of the soil and then finally provide extra heat as needed,
Speaker 6: and I do that with clamp on lamps. If I
Speaker 6: were if I had a let's they had a citrus tree,
Speaker 6: something a little bigger orange tree, or even a setzuma.
Speaker 6: If it's going to get cold enough. I may put
Speaker 6: a couple of lamps under there, earth three lamps under there.
Speaker 6: I may use an actual heat lamp bulb that generates
Speaker 6: a lot of radiant heat underneath there, but don't shine
Speaker 6: it against the trunk. You can damage tissues. Those things
Speaker 6: get really hot. Turn all those on and hold your
Speaker 6: hand about three feet away and just to the side,
Speaker 6: not above it, to the side, and you can feel
Speaker 6: that radiant heat coming out. We're going to send it
Speaker 6: down and warm the soil, and that will rise up
Speaker 6: underneath the cover and provide a lot of protection. Most
Speaker 6: of my freezes. A little flood light one hundred and
Speaker 6: fifty white bulb. I know people that use little mechanic lights,
Speaker 6: you know, those little things that are in a cage
Speaker 6: and you hang them up underneath the hood. When you
Speaker 6: open the hood of your car, you hang them up
Speaker 6: underneath there so you can see down those mechanic dumb
Speaker 6: of lights. Something like that with a hunter white bulb
Speaker 6: is good. If you just had a little, let's say,
Speaker 6: a small lime tree or something in a container or
Speaker 6: in the ground that you want to provide a little
Speaker 6: bit of protection when we're going to get down to
Speaker 6: what twenty nine, twenty eight someplace is only thirty degrees
Speaker 6: depending on where you are in the listening area. And
Speaker 6: that's enough. But it's a matter, it's a relative thing,
Speaker 6: and so keep that in mind when you're protecting plants.
Speaker 6: And do look at that publication online. I took a lot,
Speaker 6: a lot of time to write that with one of
Speaker 6: our anim specialists, very knowledgeable fellow, and we put together
Speaker 6: a really helpful publication that you should just have it
Speaker 6: printed out or at least save it to your computer
Speaker 6: so you can look at it and it reminds you
Speaker 6: of the different things. You know, what people ask questions
Speaker 6: like what about water? I see people's spray plants with
Speaker 6: water and the ice breezes and the ice insulates the plant.
Speaker 6: And the answer bottom line is that no, that's not true.
Speaker 6: That's not true. If you want to get nerdy, I'll
Speaker 6: be very brief with this, but very briefly. Ice as
Speaker 6: water changes from liquid to solid, each milli liter of
Speaker 6: water cubic centimeter of water gives off one calorie of heat.
Speaker 6: That's nerdy stuff. That's for your next garden party. So
Speaker 6: you can impress people and bore them to death. Okay,
Speaker 6: so one centimary. So as long as there's liquid water
Speaker 6: freezing on the surface of the ice around on the plant,
Speaker 6: the interior temperature doesn't go below, not much below thirty
Speaker 6: two degrees. But the minute you have liquid water freeze,
Speaker 6: stop having liquid water freezing, and it's just ice. That
Speaker 6: temperature plummets, just like the ice wed in there. Because
Speaker 6: ice does not insulate in the sense of protecting the
Speaker 6: interior buds from going colder. The ice gets colder, the
Speaker 6: buds get colder. So for ninety nine percent of the
Speaker 6: home garden situations, putting ice putting water on plants in
Speaker 6: a freeze is not a good idea, even a breaking limbs,
Speaker 6: you end up with all other kinds of issues, sometimes
Speaker 6: even worse because all right here we go, I said
Speaker 6: one nerd thing. We're gonna give you one more. Because
Speaker 6: when it switches and now you have the ice thawing
Speaker 6: and changing from ice to liquid water, it pulls a
Speaker 6: calorie of heat out. When water goes through that state
Speaker 6: chain from liquid to ice solid liquid, you're either gaining
Speaker 6: or losing a calorie there. And so if you got
Speaker 6: to the morning and let's say it was thirty degrees
Speaker 6: thirty two degrees. It's starting to thaw there, and you
Speaker 6: quit sprinkling, and that ice began to melt, the interior
Speaker 6: would actually get colder. Now you're thinking that, how can
Speaker 6: ice be melting on the surface and the interior getting colder.
Speaker 6: Well it does. And I'll give you one quick example
Speaker 6: that suddenly making ice cream makes sense. Remember when you
Speaker 6: had the old hand crank ice cream makers, what did
Speaker 6: you do? You filled them with ice, and then what
Speaker 6: did you put on the ice? Salt? Remember that you
Speaker 6: had to sit on those things, so that whole steel
Speaker 6: while somebody cranked it, or you cranked it while someone
Speaker 6: sat on it. Why do we put salt on? Salt
Speaker 6: melts the ice. Why do we want to melt the
Speaker 6: ice if we're making ice cream, Because when the ice melts,
Speaker 6: it draws heat out of the ice cream on the
Speaker 6: inside of that han crank ice cream maker. That's why
Speaker 6: you put salt on, because it makes the ice cream colder.
Speaker 6: See what I'm saying. You get ice on your plants,
Speaker 6: the sun comes up and you start to thaw, you're
Speaker 6: not out of the woods. In fact, it can get
Speaker 6: worse on the inside where those buds are. All right,
Speaker 6: I try not to do too much nerd stuff for you.
Speaker 6: But chew on that one for a while. I think
Speaker 6: it's pretty cool. Stop pretty interesting. We're gonna take a
Speaker 6: little break here. I'll be right back with your gardening question.
Speaker 6: Seven one three two one two ktr H. All right,
Speaker 6: welcome back to garden line. Hey, if you want to
Speaker 6: get me a call, talk about whatever's of interest to you.
Speaker 6: What are the kind of questions? Maybe you got a
Speaker 6: gardening there's a good one. Maybe a gardening resolution. What
Speaker 6: do you want to do different in twenty twenty five
Speaker 6: than you've done before? Now I'm not a big New
Speaker 6: Year's resolution person. I know it's all that we think
Speaker 6: if we decide we're resolving something that therefore we're going
Speaker 6: to do it, and it happens. And I mean, you know,
Speaker 6: everybody knows what happens to New Year's resolutions by about
Speaker 6: the second or third week at January. But seriously, what
Speaker 6: would you like to do different in gardening? What would
Speaker 6: you like to grow that you'd never grown? Let me
Speaker 6: encourage you to do something different, try something new. Have
Speaker 6: you never grown vegetables? Okay, get you a five gallon bucket,
Speaker 6: drill holes in the bottom, get you a tomato plant.
Speaker 6: Put it, fill it full of a quality of veggie
Speaker 6: and herb mix from heirlooms, soils or something like that,
Speaker 6: maybe a quality mix from nature's way, and grow you
Speaker 6: a small tomato plant in that bucket. You could do that.
Speaker 6: You can do it with a klopenion pepper if you
Speaker 6: like calopenias. Maybe since we're in the cool season, how
Speaker 6: about a broccoli plant. My wife just picked the first
Speaker 6: broccoli from some plants she planted back in late fall
Speaker 6: and brought it in yesterday. We killed the fatted broccoli
Speaker 6: and enjoyed it a roasted Oh my gosh, that was
Speaker 6: good last night. You can do that. Why not do it?
Speaker 6: You don't have to have a whole garden to do it.
Speaker 6: You just need to, like I said, just to make
Speaker 6: a point, a five gallon buggy with holes drilled in
Speaker 6: the bottom of it. You can do that. Or you
Speaker 6: can get you a really nice container, or you can
Speaker 6: go all the way and make a nice garden. Raise bed.
Speaker 6: I hope you go all the way on it. But seriously,
Speaker 6: what is what is your resolution? Maybe it's to mulch
Speaker 6: and not be dealing with weeds all the time, Or
Speaker 6: here's a good one. This isn't a fun one, but
Speaker 6: it's a good one. I'm gonna not let nuts sedge
Speaker 6: show its face this year when it comes up and
Speaker 6: as three to five leaves. I'm gonna follow skips Guide
Speaker 6: online Gardening with skip dot Com the nutsedge Guide and
Speaker 6: end depth the look, and they'll tell you exactly how
Speaker 6: to shut nutsedge down before it proliferates and gives you
Speaker 6: all kinds of headaches. Maybe that's a resolution for you
Speaker 6: this year. Maybe I'm gonna redo the lawn and I'm
Speaker 6: gonna make it a nice dense lawns so I'm not
Speaker 6: constantly having to fight weeds all the time. Maybe that's
Speaker 6: a resolution. Maybe it's to grow a new kind of houseplant,
Speaker 6: something different, something beautiful. Perhaps it's to put in herbs
Speaker 6: in your flower beds or your vegetable gardens, or to
Speaker 6: make an herb garden. What's your resolution for this year?
Speaker 6: How about a fruit tree? Oh my gosh, those are
Speaker 6: so good. We have fruit trees that are challenged to grow,
Speaker 6: and we have fruit trees that are easy to grow.
Speaker 6: I love citrus because citrus number one, you get to
Speaker 6: eat the centrus. But number two, the fragrance of the
Speaker 6: blooms is outstanding, and I'm planning a satsuma this year
Speaker 6: right off of our patio. I've got the spot already
Speaker 6: ready to go. I just need to get out there
Speaker 6: and get it done. But I'm gonna put a satsum
Speaker 6: in because I enjoy the fragrance of citrus blooms in general.
Speaker 6: Some are more fragrant than others, but they're all good
Speaker 6: and it's just fun to do. What's your New Year's resolution?
Speaker 6: If you will give me a call seven to one
Speaker 6: three on to KTRH, let's talk about it. Or if
Speaker 6: you just have questions and things, we can visit about
Speaker 6: that too. You are listening to Guarden Line and we're
Speaker 6: here to help you have a bountiful garden and a
Speaker 6: beautiful landscape and more fun in the process. Bountiful garden,
Speaker 6: beautiful landscape, more fun and the process. The cold is coming.
Speaker 6: We're gonna have a little, our first significant, little coal
Speaker 6: snap of the year. For those of you who are
Speaker 6: used to living up north, it's like, wait, it's not
Speaker 6: even gonna get to the mid twenties. What are you
Speaker 6: talking about? Well, okay, it's cold for here, Okay, so
Speaker 6: what are we gonna do? We can grow things you
Speaker 6: can't grow up north, you know. I mean, how many
Speaker 6: avocado trees and citrus trees do you see even in
Speaker 6: northern Texas? None? Right, So we can do those, but
Speaker 6: we got to protect them. So go by Ace Hardware Store.
Speaker 6: They've got everything you're gonna need for it. You know,
Speaker 6: I was talking about those clamp lights and the bulbs
Speaker 6: that you put in them. Whether it's a flood light
Speaker 6: one fifty water, whether it's an actual heat lamp, you
Speaker 6: can get those. You can also get the plastic covers,
Speaker 6: the tarps that go over plants to make sure you
Speaker 6: create that dead air space underneath. Now we got to
Speaker 6: deal with water protection too. Those of you are going
Speaker 6: to get into a little harder freeze. You want to
Speaker 6: have something to cover your faucet, like a faucet cover
Speaker 6: or maybe the freeze miser. That's right, freeze miser. It's
Speaker 6: a whole the thing you screw into the faucet. Then
Speaker 6: you turn the faucet on. It doesn't allow any water
Speaker 6: through until it gets cold, and then it starts to
Speaker 6: trickle water through, and moving water is it's much more
Speaker 6: reluctant to freeze. Gotta get much colder to freeze moving
Speaker 6: water than stagnant water, and so as a result, you
Speaker 6: get your pipes through on a very very cold night.
Speaker 6: They've got tape for wrapping pipes that they have, the
Speaker 6: foam covers over pipes. They've also got the little wires
Speaker 6: that you put around your pipes, like an electrical type
Speaker 6: of a tape that just barely warms it enough to
Speaker 6: protect it everything else you need. You need some duct tape.
Speaker 6: Do you need something for maybe, you know, de icing
Speaker 6: the windshield to your car if you've got the frost
Speaker 6: freeze or whatever is on it, and it's not just
Speaker 6: this freeze, it's the ones coming up as well. Do
Speaker 6: you need to keep your hands warm. They've got some
Speaker 6: really good gloves as well as handwarmers. Also in there,
Speaker 6: fireplace logs, the firewood. Do you need a propane heater?
Speaker 6: There's always a good kerosene for a backup or for
Speaker 6: those kinds of heaters. Whatever you need is that ACE Hardware.
Speaker 6: Remember it's the three p's that we worry about. Plants, pipes,
Speaker 6: and pets. You got to take care of those, and
Speaker 6: ACE Hardware's got you covered. Just go to acehardware dot com.
Speaker 6: You can find the ACE hardware store near you that
Speaker 6: is going to be your source for everything when it
Speaker 6: comes to cold protection, and that would include let's say
Speaker 6: you're in Alvin, Patco East Hardware down there, up in Brenham,
Speaker 6: Brenham Ace Hardware, Katie Ace Hardware out west of town,
Speaker 6: Hamilton Hardware off Highway six, your Bear Creek down south
Speaker 6: off Highway six. Hamilton Hardware is an ACE store. And
Speaker 6: then out in Orange for those of you, first of all,
Speaker 6: thanks for listening out in Orange. Child's building supply Ace
Speaker 6: Hardware out there in Orange, Texas. We're going to heading
Speaker 6: out of the phones and talk to Loretta out in
Speaker 6: Texas City. Hello, Loretta, good morning.
Speaker 12: Yes, I have always wanted a bird of paradise, so
Speaker 12: I was wondering how easy or how difficult they are
Speaker 12: to grow.
Speaker 6: Alrighty, you know what, Loretta, I am looking at my
Speaker 6: clock and I just saw I'm running out of time here,
Speaker 6: so I'm going to start to answer you, but we're
Speaker 6: going to get some music here and then I will
Speaker 6: finish your answer after the top of the break. So
Speaker 6: I'll let you know that upfront. Are we talking about
Speaker 6: a bird of paradise? Is like the tropical type that
Speaker 6: have the little kind of flower that comes up and
Speaker 6: goes horizontal, or are we talking about the kind that
Speaker 6: has big orange and yellow flowers in long, tall clusters.
Speaker 17: Just a small one where it kind of goes all
Speaker 17: horizonal zonal horizontal.
Speaker 6: Okay, good, Yeah. Those are very cold tender. If they
Speaker 6: if you get them in a protected place near a house,
Speaker 6: they can do fine with very little protection except in
Speaker 6: a very very cold freeze. You you can grow them
Speaker 6: in containers, or you can grow them in the ground.
Speaker 6: They just need decent drainage. They're not that difficult to grow.
Speaker 6: They like a lot of sunlight that they don't have
Speaker 6: to be in the full sun. They just hang on
Speaker 6: and when we come back we'll finish not answering your questions.
Speaker 1: Welcome to kt r H Garden Line with Scared Rickard.
Speaker 4: It's so we.
Speaker 20: Just watch as Okay, folks, welcome back.
Speaker 6: Let's get this hour going. We got a lot of
Speaker 6: things to talk about here today. Got special guests coming
Speaker 6: up in just a second. I want to run first
Speaker 6: thing out to wes U and talk to Charlie. Charlie,
Speaker 6: I wanted to see how we could help with the
Speaker 6: question that you had.
Speaker 3: I've got four different kinds of plants in my landscape,
Speaker 3: and I wondered what the cold tolerance is. Do I
Speaker 3: need to cover any of all of them? I've got
Speaker 3: loriat okay Asian jasmine, Japanese you and azilias, and the
Speaker 3: avilias are new two or three months old.
Speaker 6: None of those need covering. In the freezer you're going
Speaker 6: to have done in West u Yeah, this time they're good. Yeah.
Speaker 6: What will happen with the lariope? Yeah, with the loriope
Speaker 6: is sometimes when we get a little cold, they'd get
Speaker 6: a little ragged looking and stuff that happens in the
Speaker 6: summer heat with spider mites. Do and you can just
Speaker 6: cut that lariope off. In fact, i'd recommend you do
Speaker 6: it when we get here into January before the new
Speaker 6: growth starts on it. Just mow it back to the
Speaker 6: ground and get fresh new growth out. If it's looking
Speaker 6: a little on the ragged side. But none of those
Speaker 6: need covering.
Speaker 3: Oh, you can mow it. I didn't realize that.
Speaker 6: Because you know, yeah, the old leaves, after you know,
Speaker 6: a season or two, they start to kind of shrivel
Speaker 6: turn brown. There's issues, So just make it fresh, cut
Speaker 6: it back, you know, come right back out of the ground.
Speaker 6: But don't wait until the new growth starts, because then
Speaker 6: you'll have a bunch of leaves that the top has
Speaker 6: been chopped off of.
Speaker 3: Okay, so what you see just just when it starts
Speaker 3: to warm up, when it starts to grow over that
Speaker 3: be run Mark.
Speaker 6: I would just say you could. You could do it now,
Speaker 6: but I would do it probably mid January something like that.
Speaker 6: When you start to see the fresh snow leaves coming out.
Speaker 6: Get that done pretty quick if you haven't already done.
Speaker 15: It, Okay, I have not.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, Charson, thanks and everything else I mentioned
Speaker 3: is I guess if it was going to get done
Speaker 3: in the color, then thirty I might need to cover it.
Speaker 6: But if we get down in the yeah, there's not
Speaker 6: a practical way to cover Japanese you anyway, but those
Speaker 6: are cold hearty. You're just typically not going to experience
Speaker 6: temperatures where you are that's going to damage those plans.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, all right, sir, one.
Speaker 6: Last thing for you to worry about today. Good luck
Speaker 6: for Thanks for the call. I appreciate that. Hey, I
Speaker 6: have a special guest that I like to bring on,
Speaker 6: and that is mister Dean Nelson from Nelson Plant Food. Hey, Dean,
Speaker 6: are you there, Yes, sir, can you hear me? I can?
Speaker 6: I can. Well, good Sunday morning, do you?
Speaker 4: Thank you?
Speaker 6: Good morning Sunday morning.
Speaker 3: Year.
Speaker 6: Well, happy New Year to you too. You know, I
Speaker 6: have been last weekend and yesterday and I was talking
Speaker 6: about Randy Lemon's scholarship and I wanted to have you
Speaker 6: come on and let's talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 6: I know you helped, well, you basically got that set
Speaker 6: up at Texas A and m I'd like you to tell
Speaker 6: folks about the scholarship and uh, you know, just let's
Speaker 6: just start off with what what is this scholarship and
Speaker 6: how can people participate in it?
Speaker 18: Well, the what first made me start thinking about it
Speaker 18: is as I go to these trade shows, and you
Speaker 18: and I both have been going for I know, four
Speaker 18: years for me, probably less that the same for you.
Speaker 18: But anyway, as you go to these shows, there's less
Speaker 18: and less young people in the horticulture industry. In horticulture industry,
Speaker 18: you know, it's it's not an easy job. You have
Speaker 18: to love to be with plans, you have to love
Speaker 18: to be outdoors. And you start off on the end
Speaker 18: of the shovel when you get out, even when you graduate,
Speaker 18: you know, you're out out there with the folks, working
Speaker 18: with the land, helping improve flowers and plants for your customers.
Speaker 18: And and it's a service. It's basically a service.
Speaker 4: And so.
Speaker 18: Yeah, I'm thinking we need to start bringing more new
Speaker 18: people into this industry. And so the idea I thought, well,
Speaker 18: you know, let's do the scholarship to help help some
Speaker 18: of these kids when they come into A and M.
Speaker 4: Of course, you and I both graduate from A and M.
Speaker 4: And uh so I got with horticulture department and talk
Speaker 4: to doctor Drina.
Speaker 18: He's ahead of the department there and and he's he
Speaker 18: was very.
Speaker 4: Excited about it, he said.
Speaker 18: And I asked him, I said, what would you use
Speaker 18: this for an existing student or you would you use it.
Speaker 4: To recruit somebody? He said, oh, definitely recruit, He said,
Speaker 4: we can.
Speaker 18: We can use the money to find a kid that
Speaker 18: is really dedicated coming out of high school to the
Speaker 18: to horticulture and loves loves plans and people. And uh,
Speaker 18: we can use this to recruit some good, good kids.
Speaker 4: And you know, the past, I don't know. I guess
Speaker 4: ten years I brought in five kids. They graduates my
Speaker 4: and M into the horticulture industry.
Speaker 18: Now, I hired them and trained them for a couple
Speaker 18: of years, and five of three of them are still
Speaker 18: in the industry. One of them actually owns about it.
Speaker 18: I don't know about a twenty million dollar company. She
Speaker 18: worked for me for a couple of years and then
Speaker 18: she went to another job and ended up buying a
Speaker 18: guy out. And so it makes a big difference. One
Speaker 18: person can make a huge difference in this industry.
Speaker 6: That's true. That is absolutely true. And having gone through
Speaker 6: the wart program up there, I can tell you that
Speaker 6: that is that is something that is always needed. You know,
Speaker 6: there's a lot of folks working out in the industry
Speaker 6: that maybe they've picked up information from here and there,
Speaker 6: but not necessarily accurate training and just the basics and things.
Speaker 6: And as an employer, being able to hire somebody that's
Speaker 6: coming out, you know, with the already a head start
Speaker 6: on the industry, sure is a good thing, isn't it.
Speaker 4: Well and and A and M. And of course I
Speaker 4: know Stephen F. Auston has a big program, and I
Speaker 4: think Sam Houston does.
Speaker 18: But horticulture is not an easy degree. How many different
Speaker 18: plants types you have to know and how to take
Speaker 18: care of them, and insects and soil chemistry and biology
Speaker 18: and plants physiology, and it's it's, it's it's fascinating when
Speaker 18: you start looking at what God did that putting all
Speaker 18: this stuff together, it is unbelievable. And that's that's your
Speaker 18: whole job. Your job is, yeah, to help help us
Speaker 18: understand what to do, what not to do.
Speaker 6: You know, And I've told people this before, but the
Speaker 6: way I would put it is, horticulture is not a discipline.
Speaker 6: It is a combination of disciplines. And it's said, be
Speaker 6: a horticulturist, you've got to be an entomologist, a plant pathologist,
Speaker 6: a soul scientist, plant nutrition expert. And I mean, you know,
Speaker 6: I could just keep going and you kind of have
Speaker 6: to put it all together because someone calls up and says, hey,
Speaker 6: my lawn is yellowing, and my brain's going, okay, is
Speaker 6: that an iron deficiency? Why is it an iron? Is
Speaker 6: there a lack of iron? Is the pH two highs
Speaker 6: or too much posphors? I mean you see what I'm saying.
Speaker 6: That the thinking process. But it's fun. I love it, Yeah,
Speaker 6: I think, yeah, a lot of fun.
Speaker 18: Like somebody calls the doctor say, hey doctor, I feel bad.
Speaker 4: Will I need medicine? Bool? How do you feel? I
Speaker 4: just feel bad? Send me something.
Speaker 6: There you go. Hey Dean, I'm up against a quick
Speaker 6: commercial break. Can you hang on and we'll keep this
Speaker 6: going we come back. Thank you so much. I appreciate that.
Speaker 6: I'll be right back. Folks. All right, welcome back. Glad
Speaker 6: to have you back with us here. We're visiting with
Speaker 6: Dean Nelson of Nelson Plant Food and we're talking today
Speaker 6: about Randy Lemon. You know, I talked yesterday about this
Speaker 6: anniversary of being the anniversary of Randy's passing when we
Speaker 6: lost him here in the Southeast Texas area. Such an influence,
Speaker 6: and I do want to say this before I forget,
Speaker 6: and we'll come back to it at the end. But
Speaker 6: if you would like to participate in supporting this scholarship
Speaker 6: for the sake of horticulture students, supporting horticulture students coming
Speaker 6: out in the industry, you can go to my website
Speaker 6: Gardening with Skip dot com and right there top thing
Speaker 6: I've got posted is the Randy Lemon Scholarship. You can
Speaker 6: give online or you can give by check, and it
Speaker 6: tells you how to do all that right now, Dean,
Speaker 6: I'd like to, first of all, welcome back. I'd like
Speaker 6: to just talk about Randy a little bit. He was
Speaker 6: bigger than life and quite the character. I can attest
Speaker 6: to that. He and I used to joke that we
Speaker 6: were never going to tell our kids what happened in
Speaker 6: Moses Hall at Texas and University. That Randy was just
Speaker 6: he ruled the room, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 18: And you know, if I'm a put a little guilt
Speaker 18: trip on your audience here, maybe a little bit. But
Speaker 18: you know, if you ever if called and talked to
Speaker 18: Randy he helped you with your plants, or if if
Speaker 18: you met him at a book book signing and and
Speaker 18: talked with him or sponsored the show, you know, we
Speaker 18: need to put me up some money and remember Randy
Speaker 18: and just get you know.
Speaker 4: Anything to the foundation.
Speaker 18: You know, like you say, he bigger than life, and
Speaker 18: he'd come out to the plant and we'd walk around.
Speaker 4: He's all very interested in how we made fertilizer and
Speaker 4: why we made it.
Speaker 18: And I have some wonderful pictures of us together that
Speaker 18: I just absolutely cherish.
Speaker 4: I get kind of teary when.
Speaker 18: I when I look at him, and uh, but.
Speaker 4: Gosh, I lost my.
Speaker 18: Train of thought here. But he would, like you say,
Speaker 18: he was just bigger than life. And whenever I would
Speaker 18: bring out a new fertilizer product, you know, just to
Speaker 18: tell people how influential he was, I would go around
Speaker 18: all these these retail stores and they would say, well,
Speaker 18: is Randy gonna talk about it?
Speaker 4: Well, what's Randy said about this? Does Randy use it?
Speaker 18: And he liked it, you know, and that he was
Speaker 18: huge And this the Gulf Coast gardening community, there's nothing
Speaker 18: like it anywhere in the country. I've been all over
Speaker 18: the country, you know, selling my products, and there's no
Speaker 18: big garden shows out there.
Speaker 4: There's no big gardening.
Speaker 18: Community like what what what Randy built? And Bill Bill
Speaker 18: Zact and John Burrow before them. You know, this is
Speaker 18: this is something, This is something and you and I
Speaker 18: are all you know, take you especially.
Speaker 4: Are taking into and growing it even more.
Speaker 18: But we're all benefiting from from from what Randy did
Speaker 18: all those years.
Speaker 6: Right, Well, he was, he was larger than life. His
Speaker 6: presence here meant a lot to the green industry. And
Speaker 6: I tell people all the time that you're so fortunate
Speaker 6: to be in gardening here in the Houston area with
Speaker 6: a number of outstanding garden centers, quality products and things,
Speaker 6: and then advice that makes it so easy to have success.
Speaker 6: And for over twenty five years, Randy sat in this
Speaker 6: seat and he educated the greater Houston AARIA and he
Speaker 6: was certainly loved and followed and appreciated. And you know,
Speaker 6: you and I each have a personal connection to Randy.
Speaker 6: And I can tell you this. I'm a product of
Speaker 6: that program that he came out of. And this scholarship
Speaker 6: that you guys have set up up there is really
Speaker 6: important because they'll come a time and I'm not sitting
Speaker 6: in this chair, and there needs to be somebody else
Speaker 6: to come and to take that chair. And just the
Speaker 6: memory of Randy is is I don't know, there's not another.
Speaker 6: As they say, they broke the mold.
Speaker 4: And this is the scholarship is permanent.
Speaker 18: It's a permanent endowment and once we get it, it's
Speaker 18: worth twenty five thousand dollars now and the goal is
Speaker 18: one hundred and that'll that'll generate four thousand dollars a
Speaker 18: year to a student forever. And they'll give it to
Speaker 18: one student until that person graduates, and then they'll find
Speaker 18: somebody else and give it to them.
Speaker 4: But you can also add to it, you.
Speaker 18: Know, if somebody wants to call up and say, I
Speaker 18: just want to add you know whatever to the current scholarship,
Speaker 18: and they'll give it out this year. So we're going
Speaker 18: to fund it's going to be funded at a thousand
Speaker 18: dollars in the fall, and uh, we're just going to
Speaker 18: keep adding to it over the years and get it
Speaker 18: up to where we didn't need it to be.
Speaker 6: Well, I really appreciate the fact that you took the
Speaker 6: initiative to get that set up, and I hope that
Speaker 6: people listening, both the listeners who benefited from Randy, the
Speaker 6: businesses that benefited from Randy's presence and here in the
Speaker 6: Houston area would, as you say, step up with the
Speaker 6: plate and be part of this because we got a
Speaker 6: good way to go. You know, a thousand dollars a
Speaker 6: lot of money. But when you're looking at a college education,
Speaker 6: someone some could you know, not going to become a
Speaker 6: rocket scientist or a physician or whatever, and the future
Speaker 6: of moving into the degree of horticulture help goes a
Speaker 6: long way and maybe makes the difference between a very
Speaker 6: good person making it into the industry and not. And
Speaker 6: so I really encourage everybody listening to my voice to
Speaker 6: consider being part of this, because we need to get
Speaker 6: that thing up, like you said, two one hundred thousand
Speaker 6: in the endowment so that we can be given four
Speaker 6: thousand every year to a student.
Speaker 18: And these kids coming and we go every year to
Speaker 18: the job fair, and these kids coming out at the
Speaker 18: horticulture department are amazing. They are motivated, they love what
Speaker 18: they're doing, and it's just so fun to be around them.
Speaker 18: And so if we can you know, like one person
Speaker 18: like you know, like you or me, you know, makes
Speaker 18: it can make a huge difference in all of Texans.
Speaker 18: You know, in our horticultural experience is just one person.
Speaker 4: You never know, you just never.
Speaker 6: Know, you never know, and it matters. It does matter.
Speaker 6: And I guess you and I both said this in
Speaker 6: different ways, but everybody listening to guarden Line is benefiting
Speaker 6: in one shape or form of from the things that
Speaker 6: Randy set up and built here. I say built here,
Speaker 6: you know, because it does go. He goes back all
Speaker 6: the way, you know. That's Zike and Burrows, you know,
Speaker 6: back to the day when Dewey Compton was doing the
Speaker 6: show in the fifties, and it is unheard of that,
Speaker 6: we have a show that's that's continued this long and
Speaker 6: also eight hours a weekend. That's something you go run
Speaker 6: the great the whole country. You're not going to find
Speaker 6: that guarding show eight hours a weekend, but that's a
Speaker 6: fortunate thing for folks that are listening here. So when
Speaker 6: you know, thinking about Randy, I don't put you on
Speaker 6: the spot or anything, but do you have a favorite
Speaker 6: story of Randy or any any would you? Would you
Speaker 6: tell us one?
Speaker 18: Yeah, we he just wanted we'd come out to lunch
Speaker 18: and we'd out in Belleville and there was a gas station.
Speaker 4: It was a Texi coast.
Speaker 18: It was a shell station back then, and they had
Speaker 18: these big, old, huge, greasy hamburgers. I mean that they
Speaker 18: must have added about four thousand calories.
Speaker 4: And it was during COVID.
Speaker 18: We walked in there and I said, you know, I
Speaker 18: want to, you know, get some hamburgers. Well, okay, but
Speaker 18: it has to be to go. I said, why, well,
Speaker 18: it's we're closed.
Speaker 4: It's COVID.
Speaker 18: I looked in their dining rooms, like about a ten
Speaker 18: by ten space with some one hundred year old chairs
Speaker 18: that are falling apart.
Speaker 4: In the desk, I mean the table. I said, look,
Speaker 4: there's nobody in here. We can just sit down here. Okay.
Speaker 4: It took him about twenty minutes.
Speaker 18: They're all handmade, and uh, he was so thrilled about
Speaker 18: that hamburger and they are good hamburgers. And then today
Speaker 18: people it's nott a shell station. But everybody says, where
Speaker 18: you want to go lunch, just go shelf station. What's
Speaker 18: not a shelf shell station?
Speaker 8: What is?
Speaker 4: I don't know, let's go.
Speaker 6: But he that sounds Georgie.
Speaker 18: And also the last time I saw him, he said,
Speaker 18: I need a part.
Speaker 9: Line from the yard.
Speaker 4: I wanted you to look at it. So and he
Speaker 4: called me all the time about asking me about stuff.
Speaker 4: You know, what about this? What about that? You know
Speaker 4: problems or how to fix this?
Speaker 18: So I walked into this house in Katie and I
Speaker 18: went up there about ten o'clock.
Speaker 4: He in his pajamas. I was laughing at him. I said,
Speaker 4: why are you wearing your pajamasy?
Speaker 9: I'm working on my book.
Speaker 4: I'm about finished with it. He was almost finished with
Speaker 4: his last book.
Speaker 18: So we looked at his his yard and his weeds,
Speaker 18: and he wanted some fertilizer for him and his neighbors.
Speaker 18: But you know, he all he you know, his whole
Speaker 18: life was hordericulture, the books and the people and the customers.
Speaker 18: You know, his whole life was the kids of course,
Speaker 18: and Von you know course.
Speaker 6: Right, absolutely well and Randy. He just loved communicate with people.
Speaker 18: And also you and I think, weren't you at that
Speaker 18: Brookwood tree planning they did for him?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you know I was.
Speaker 18: I was not shocked, but I was very you know,
Speaker 18: they went on and on about what all he has
Speaker 18: done for them over the years. He just has the hardest,
Speaker 18: biggest text helping all those kids.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's true. Yeah, there's there's a tree out of Brookwood.
Speaker 6: If anybody ever goes out there, which I would recommend
Speaker 6: you go, check it out as a wonderful place, wonderful
Speaker 6: program that they have that. I believe our David Williamson
Speaker 6: RCW donated a tree that they planted out there. I
Speaker 6: believe it's a nut tall oak and I look forward
Speaker 6: to going and visiting periodically and just seeing that thing
Speaker 6: grow because that will be a very long term remembrance
Speaker 6: right there. I love that. Yeah. Well, uh, the scholarship again,
Speaker 6: you've made it where it's easy to donate to people
Speaker 6: can go online. You know, I tend to not read
Speaker 6: out the whole u ur L because nobody's gonna be
Speaker 6: able to write it down or remember it. But it
Speaker 6: is the A and M Foundation, Texas and M Foundation.
Speaker 6: The scholarship is called the Lemon Scholarship of two ms
Speaker 6: L E M, M O n uh. And you can
Speaker 6: send a check by mail to them, or you can
Speaker 6: go online and give online. Either way you want to
Speaker 6: go about it, And again I've made it easy by
Speaker 6: just on my website, the very top thing that's there,
Speaker 6: Randy Lemon Scholarship. You click on it and it has
Speaker 6: a direct link in there to go straight to the
Speaker 6: scholarship of people want to want to go about doing
Speaker 6: it that way, and I again I would encourage people
Speaker 6: to do this. Number one, just out of appreciation for
Speaker 6: what Randy meant to this area and to gardeners into
Speaker 6: this area and to horticulture businesses in this area. And
Speaker 6: number two because it's just a good cause. Like you said,
Speaker 6: horticulture as a degree, it's a challenging thing. It's not
Speaker 6: the kind of thing that typically you know, it's gonna
Speaker 6: people gonna get rich, quake off, to say the least,
Speaker 6: but it is something that by supporting it, you're making
Speaker 6: a difference. And what you have enjoyed for twenty five
Speaker 6: plus years of Randy and a couple of years of
Speaker 6: me here doing this, that is all because of the
Speaker 6: horticulture knowledge and training that's been provided to students as
Speaker 6: we speak up there, and like you said, there are
Speaker 6: a lot of good horticulture programs around around the state,
Speaker 6: but this one is dear to both your mind, heart
Speaker 6: and I know certain certainly to Randy's heart as well.
Speaker 6: I got about a minute, Dean, any final thoughts here
Speaker 6: before we have to take a break.
Speaker 4: No, just looking forward to a great year in this weather.
Speaker 18: You know, he's freezing one day and it's hot to next,
Speaker 18: so you never know about that.
Speaker 4: But you know, Raindy was just you know, he's always
Speaker 4: be in our hearts.
Speaker 18: And hopefully every year we can around this time we
Speaker 18: can kind of keep talking about his a little bit.
Speaker 18: And uh, I don't know, just god bleave in the
Speaker 18: United States of America.
Speaker 6: All right, there you go. We're very fortunate. And again
Speaker 6: I want to thank you. I appreciate you coming on,
Speaker 6: uh taking some time out. This has been good. I
Speaker 6: think it's a great thing to remember back you know,
Speaker 6: and also to have the opportunity to do something that
Speaker 6: looks toward the future. And this is a really important thing,
Speaker 6: a wonderful thing. And thanks thanks a lot for getting
Speaker 6: it set up.
Speaker 3: Dean.
Speaker 18: Yeah, and asked everybody get your check book out, so
Speaker 18: don't forget there you go.
Speaker 4: Thank you good?
Speaker 6: All right, yes, sir, you too, Thank you, sir. Well,
Speaker 6: here we are, time for a break. I'll be back
Speaker 6: right after Jared gets and educates you about the news.
Speaker 6: I wonder if Jared's got all his pipes and plants covered.
Speaker 4: Up right now?
Speaker 6: All right, all right, we are back. Nice little visit
Speaker 6: there with Dean about Randy's scholarship up at Texas A
Speaker 6: and M. I hope you guys will consider taking advantage.
Speaker 6: I think that's a great cause. Our phone number if
Speaker 6: you'd like to give me a call seven one three
Speaker 6: two one two k t RH. We'll get back to
Speaker 6: your calls here, so feel free to give us a call.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about the things that are of interest to you.
Speaker 6: I know I'm going to be spending a little more
Speaker 6: time talking about some of the topics we have discussed today,
Speaker 6: different angles on them, like uh, coll protection of plants,
Speaker 6: it's time for proning and and things along those line.
Speaker 6: Seeds start. We spent a little time talking about that
Speaker 6: as well. Just want to remind you if you go
Speaker 6: to our Garden Line Facebook page, and I hope you
Speaker 6: follow us on Facebook, I have posted something there that's
Speaker 6: a publication on freeze protection for plants. It's actually the
Speaker 6: long title. This is an official Texas A and M
Speaker 6: Horticulture Department publication called Protecting Landscape and Horticulture Crop horticultural
Speaker 6: Crops from frosts and freezes. And it's nine pages, full
Speaker 6: color pictures. It's beautiful. Got to just click the link
Speaker 6: on Facebook and you go right to my website where
Speaker 6: you'll find that publication available. Talks about every aspect of
Speaker 6: protecting plants from the cold. What do we do, why
Speaker 6: do we do it, what works, what doesn't work? Should
Speaker 6: you spray prints with water? What are the different kinds
Speaker 6: of freezes that we have? And then the approaches that
Speaker 6: we have to take. If you're going to cover plants,
Speaker 6: how do you do it? What about adding heat? All
Speaker 6: kinds of good stuff. I just think you ought to
Speaker 6: have a copy. If you've got a plant that's outdoor,
Speaker 6: you need to have a copy of this publication on hand.
Speaker 6: So when we have these seasons where we're going into cold,
Speaker 6: you're ready to go. Now, the cold we're about to
Speaker 6: get into is not that bad. I'm not saying it's
Speaker 6: not freezing. A lot of areas are freezing, but it's
Speaker 6: just not that bitter cold. We're not talking about the
Speaker 6: mid to low twenties or even teens here. We're talking
Speaker 6: about a pretty minor cold, and it's going to warm
Speaker 6: up pretty quickly. Have you ever noticed that, you know,
Speaker 6: maybe it gets down to twenty nine degrees at the
Speaker 6: bottom of the night, at the end of the night,
Speaker 6: and then by the time we get up, before the
Speaker 6: sun even comes up, it's already warming back up again,
Speaker 6: and first thing you know, we're right up above freezing again.
Speaker 6: Not that long. So this is going to be an
Speaker 6: easy one in terms of protecting plants, not as big
Speaker 6: of a challenge as we sometimes space. I'm going to
Speaker 6: head out now to Kingwood and we're going to visit
Speaker 6: with Pamela. Hey, Pamela, welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 16: I am an idea you should tell people out Last
Speaker 16: year when we had the freeze coming, I stopped at
Speaker 16: stores like Ace.
Speaker 11: A couple of aces and stuff.
Speaker 16: There was no freeze claw, so I bought some from
Speaker 16: Amazon and it was fifty feet long and ten feet
Speaker 16: wide in a vacuum sealed bag. Well, I opened that
Speaker 16: bag up. Big mistake, big uh. It was like five
Speaker 16: feet high. It filled my fifteen by twenty foot room.
Speaker 16: Try to cut that footed around plants, Yeah, and I did.
Speaker 16: I got it around one of the hydranges yeah, not
Speaker 16: hydrange high biscus.
Speaker 12: And I put the sea.
Speaker 16: Nine lights you know, in there, and I had the
Speaker 16: clips and it's windy, it's it's ter rain.
Speaker 19: This was not fun.
Speaker 11: So now I've come up with the idea.
Speaker 19: That you sew them.
Speaker 16: You sew the sides like, you know, take five feet
Speaker 16: by five feet, so ten feet of the whip and
Speaker 16: of the fifty foot so you knew about five of these,
Speaker 16: and you sew in the sides down.
Speaker 19: And I do.
Speaker 16: My plants are in pots if it's because I can't
Speaker 16: get to the ground anymore and get.
Speaker 8: Up and it's perfect.
Speaker 16: It just goes over everything. Also a cute tanks.
Speaker 8: M H.
Speaker 6: I was gonna say, now are you offering for everybody listening.
Speaker 6: You're gonna give your home address and people bring their
Speaker 6: cloth and you're gonna do all the sewing for them.
Speaker 16: Well, I'm gonna put it in the garage, you know,
Speaker 16: and I've got sudents coming over to help me do this.
Speaker 16: But you can also buy bags of my mulch and
Speaker 16: put up against your sprinkler system.
Speaker 8: Yes, and that will work.
Speaker 6: I appreciate. I appreciate that if there's actually a thing
Speaker 6: called the planket out there, and there's things that come
Speaker 6: in as bags that are that are prease covers that
Speaker 6: are already so together that you can slip over plants,
Speaker 6: so that that's another option for the non seamstresses out
Speaker 6: there that are trying to say this. But thanks a
Speaker 6: lot for the tip ideas there, Penela, appreciate. I appreciate
Speaker 6: you calling in and being a garden line listener. Yeah,
Speaker 6: thanks a lot. You take care. There are a lot
Speaker 6: of ways to go about covering and protecting plants, and
Speaker 6: I'm telling you I have used everything from bed sheets
Speaker 6: to bed blankets, to tarps to plastic to you name it.
Speaker 6: She mentioned bags of least. I know people that take
Speaker 6: a big old ring of wire mesh wire, fence wire
Speaker 6: and put it around something like a fig tree, when
Speaker 6: we're gonna get really cold, and they just fill that
Speaker 6: thing up with leaves to create as much of a
Speaker 6: protected space inside there. It's not the best way to
Speaker 6: do it, but it is a way to do it.
Speaker 6: And remember this, and we're not going to have this
Speaker 6: kind of cold, but I'm just going to tell you
Speaker 6: to remember this. Anytime you've got something like let's say
Speaker 6: a citrus that's grafted, and you've got to protect the
Speaker 6: top of that graft. Even if you lose the whole tree,
Speaker 6: if you protect a few inches above the graft, that
Speaker 6: tree will re sprout and come back faster. You want
Speaker 6: to buy a new one that way, but you got
Speaker 6: to protect it. And so pile soil up, pile and
Speaker 6: I always tell you don't make multi volcanoes, don't do that. Well, no,
Speaker 6: you don't do that for a long term, but for
Speaker 6: a frosty night, you pile soil up against the trunk
Speaker 6: of the tree, make this big ConA soil, or you
Speaker 6: can use very fine textured compost and pile it up there.
Speaker 6: You protect that and even if you lose the top,
Speaker 6: that tree will come back, and it'll come back fast
Speaker 6: because you got this big root system. Now pushing new
Speaker 6: growth to re re establish that top. Time for me
Speaker 6: take a quick break. I will be right back with
Speaker 6: your phone calls at seven one three two one two
Speaker 6: k t RH. Alrighty, alrighty, we're back back on garden line.
Speaker 6: Got lots of plant things to discuss today. We're going
Speaker 6: to go back to phones here in just a second
Speaker 6: if you would like to call seven three two one
Speaker 6: two fifty eight seventy four seven one three two one
Speaker 6: two kt r H. So, when you think about needing
Speaker 6: something to do your gardening, whether it's taking care of
Speaker 6: your lawn or your vegetable garden or flowers or seed
Speaker 6: starting or any of that. Maybe you need a tool
Speaker 6: for pruning, what do you think of? First? Well, how
Speaker 6: about Southwest Fertilizer. You know, every time I go into
Speaker 6: Bob's store there, Southwest Fertilizer, it's on the corner of
Speaker 6: Bisinet and Runwick in Southwest Houston. Every time I go in,
Speaker 6: I see something like, Oh, I didn't know you had that,
Speaker 6: And then my second thought is, oh, why didn't I
Speaker 6: You have everything in here. If Southwest doesn't carry it,
Speaker 6: you don't need it. And whether it's you know, we've
Speaker 6: been talking about freeze protection and things. It's pruning season.
Speaker 6: Do you need a quality saw, a quality handprint, or
Speaker 6: a quality looppers. Don't buy junk from some national chain store.
Speaker 6: Just go to Southwest Fertilizer and grab you some quality
Speaker 6: tool because it's time for that. They carry that kneeling bench.
Speaker 6: It's a sitting bench. You flip it over, it's a
Speaker 6: kneeling bench. It helps you get up. If you're north
Speaker 6: of forty you know what I'm talking about. You gotta
Speaker 6: you can't do that up and down all day without
Speaker 6: paying the price. With the kneeling bench, you can. Bob's
Speaker 6: got that. He's got that there. Do you need a
Speaker 6: fertilizer spreader? Do you need a spreader for putting out
Speaker 6: fire ant bait? Do you need the fire ant bait? Insecticide,
Speaker 6: funge aside, herbicide, fertilizers, they're all there. If you're an
Speaker 6: organic gardener, you're not going to find a bigger selection
Speaker 6: of organic products than Southwest Fertilizer carries in the whole region.
Speaker 6: That that's just a fact. They've been around since nineteen
Speaker 6: fifty five, and there's a reason for that.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 6: You can give them a call at seven one three
Speaker 6: six six six one seven four four, or just go
Speaker 6: to the website Southwest Fertilizer dot com. Tell you where
Speaker 6: to find them, tell you how to call them, and
Speaker 6: mean things. Just get over there and get your supplies.
Speaker 6: Be ready to go. Bob's got you covered. We're going
Speaker 6: to go out to League City now and we're going
Speaker 6: to talk to Steven. Hello, Steven, Welcome to Gardline.
Speaker 8: Hey, Hey, how you doing. Happy to be on the
Speaker 8: show with you today, Thank you, sir. So.
Speaker 4: I have a.
Speaker 8: Question about an oak tree right behind my house. There
Speaker 8: was a big oak tree. It was maybe twenty twenty
Speaker 8: five feet tall and it had grown over the corner
Speaker 8: of my garage. So back over the summer I had
Speaker 8: that cut down and it was cheaper to cut it
Speaker 8: down to about eight feet eight nine feet rather than
Speaker 8: grind it all the way down to the stump. And I
Speaker 8: thought for sure that would have killed it. But since
Speaker 8: that time there have been sprouts that have come off
Speaker 8: the top of it, and there's a decent amount of
Speaker 8: foliage on there. Now. My question is, with the weather turning,
Speaker 8: is that going to finally kill that off?
Speaker 19: No?
Speaker 6: It was it a live oak or red oak, or
Speaker 6: do you happen to know what kind live oak I believe. Okay, no,
Speaker 6: it's going to sprout back. So you're wanting to kill
Speaker 6: the tree, right, that's your no.
Speaker 8: No, Well, I just didn't want it to fall on
Speaker 8: my garage, and that's why I had it cut back.
Speaker 8: I thought for sure cutting off as much as they
Speaker 8: did would have killed it, but it didn't, and I
Speaker 8: don't necessarily want to kill it. I mean, if it
Speaker 8: grows back, it's going to take years and years to
Speaker 8: be a problem again as it was, so I just
Speaker 8: I wonder will this freeze kill it, and then will
Speaker 8: I have a big, you know, eight foot problem back
Speaker 8: there that's going to fall over on one of my kids.
Speaker 6: Okay, no, it's not going to kill it. If it
Speaker 6: is so close to the garage as you had to
Speaker 6: print it like that, I don't know that there's a
Speaker 6: long term future for that tree. Once it's been cut
Speaker 6: back that hard, it's regrowth, it's going to be just wild.
Speaker 6: Hair is going everywhere, and it won't have a really
Speaker 6: great structure. So I would seriously consider removing it. If
Speaker 6: you want a tree there, plant one at a distance
Speaker 6: where you're not going to have to do that kind
Speaker 6: of pruning. To it. That would be my advice. Now,
Speaker 6: if you want, you can have someone who knows how
Speaker 6: to prune come out there and take a look at it,
Speaker 6: but their jaw is going to hit the ground and
Speaker 6: they see it. But they could kind of help bring
Speaker 6: it back to a shape that may stay away from
Speaker 6: the garage. But that sounds like it's close enough to
Speaker 6: be kind of an issue with foundations and who knows
Speaker 6: what else. Maybe well, that way going up into the.
Speaker 8: Garage, the driveway ends and then there's a slope that
Speaker 8: goes down and this oak tree is at the bottom
Speaker 8: of that slope, so it's decently far away enough. Now
Speaker 8: if it'd sell over, it wouldn't hit the garage, but
Speaker 8: with it being as tall as it was, it would
Speaker 8: have taken out the far corner of it.
Speaker 6: Sure, yeah, I got you. Well, live ooks are huge,
Speaker 6: and so it's going to get huge again and it'll
Speaker 6: have even weaker branch attachments because of that pruning. So
Speaker 6: I again, I don't know there's a long term If
Speaker 6: you want to hire an arbist to come out and
Speaker 6: take a look at it, I would call Martin spoon
Speaker 6: Moore from Affordable Tree have him to come out and
Speaker 6: take a look. You know, I can't see it, but
Speaker 6: he will, and he'll be able to tell you whether
Speaker 6: it can be saved or not. If you want to
Speaker 6: get rid of it, you can do that. I can
Speaker 6: tell you how to do that too. If you maybe
Speaker 6: plant a tree that doesn't get so big right there,
Speaker 6: that might be another option. But it's up again.
Speaker 15: I'll take that down.
Speaker 8: What was the name of the company.
Speaker 15: Against affordable tree?
Speaker 6: Okay? And they serve this league city Mark. I think
Speaker 6: he goes down that far. Give him a call. He
Speaker 6: can tell you. Here's the phone number, seven to one
Speaker 6: three six and six twenty six sixty three.
Speaker 8: Twenty six sixty three okay, and then just one one
Speaker 8: other question real quick before I get off the phone
Speaker 8: with you. We have three dogs in the house, and
Speaker 8: this time of year, with him running around the backyard,
Speaker 8: there's a patch of grass that they just they just
Speaker 8: tear up and it doesn't matter how much it grows
Speaker 8: in in the summertime and it does grow back. But
Speaker 8: until it does grow back, they track a bunch of
Speaker 8: mud in the house. And we've tried everything to keep
Speaker 8: them from killing it. Is there anything any fertilizer we
Speaker 8: can put or turf builder down there or something.
Speaker 6: There is nothing that will make any grass you can
Speaker 6: plant tolerant of that kind of foot traffic from dogs.
Speaker 6: They just wear it out.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 6: Bermuda is the most wear and tear resistant, but it
Speaker 6: has its own issues other than going out and putting,
Speaker 6: you know, kind of maybe some patio stones out there
Speaker 6: to kind of extend that out a little further. I
Speaker 6: just don't know a good suggestion on that one.
Speaker 8: All Right, we can try, and I'll give your guy
Speaker 8: a call. I have some trees in the front I
Speaker 8: may have in Prune anyway, all.
Speaker 6: Right, sounds good. Hey, thanks for the call. I appreciate
Speaker 6: et that. Oh let's see here, boy, I don't have
Speaker 6: time to take another call. Carrie and Buffalo rego down
Speaker 6: in Houston. We will have to hold you until we
Speaker 6: come back from the top of the hour news and
Speaker 6: you'll be our first two up if you're able to
Speaker 6: stick around for that. Thank you and everyone listening for
Speaker 6: being a Garden Line listener. We appreciate you being around.
Speaker 6: We do not take that for granted. I know You've
Speaker 6: got a lot of other things you can be doing
Speaker 6: with your time. I hope this is entertaining for you.
Speaker 6: I hope it's educational for you, and I don't know,
Speaker 6: maybe we're helping you have a little bit of success
Speaker 6: at least. That's what i'd like to think, you know.
Speaker 6: Way I like to put it is, we're here to
Speaker 6: help you have a bountiful garden, a beautiful landscape, and
Speaker 6: more fun in the process. That's what I like to have.
Speaker 6: That's what i'd like to accomplish. So let's see if
Speaker 6: we can do all those three. Just want to remind
Speaker 6: you one more time. We have our garden Line Facebook
Speaker 6: page where I have posted a link to the Frost
Speaker 6: Freeze publication protecting your landscape Plans, and you click right
Speaker 6: on it on the Facebook page and get to it,
Speaker 6: or you go to my website gardening with Skip dot com.
Speaker 6: Gardening with Skip dot com, lots of other good information
Speaker 6: information on lighting for seed starting, information on randylant on scholarship,
Speaker 6: and a lot of other things that are up there
Speaker 6: as well. All right, don't take a break, you stick
Speaker 6: around and we'll be right back with your calls.
Speaker 1: Welcome to k t r H garden Line with Skip.
Speaker 2: Rickard's Crazy just watch him as well. Thanks to stay.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 6: Not a sign, All right, Welcome back, welcome back your
Speaker 6: guard line. Good to have you with us. I don't
Speaker 6: know what happened, but somewhere halfway through the show today
Speaker 6: somebody left the gates open. So we're going to run
Speaker 6: back out here to the phones and let's see. We're
Speaker 6: going to start with Cameron up in Conroe. Hey Cameron,
Speaker 6: welcome to Garden Line.
Speaker 15: Hey Moren Skiff, are you sir?
Speaker 6: I'm well, thank you good.
Speaker 15: Just real quick question.
Speaker 21: I've got a they do magnolia growing out back of
Speaker 21: the house, probably about a foot tall, growing wild, and
Speaker 21: I really don't have that green of the thumb, but
Speaker 21: I'd like to replant in another location in my yard
Speaker 21: so that way you could grow up, grow big. I'm
Speaker 21: on a heavy black gumbo soil. What do you recommend
Speaker 21: for taking care of this thing this year?
Speaker 6: And yeah, you know, magnolia's are happiest in our acidic
Speaker 6: forest soils of the southeast, and so when you put
Speaker 6: them on a black gumbo they may or may not
Speaker 6: do pretty well. They need good drainage first of all,
Speaker 6: So if it is a heavy clay like that, somewhat
Speaker 6: of a mound to help the soil drain away from
Speaker 6: the surface would be helpful. Anything that makes the soil
Speaker 6: you know, a little better drained is going to be
Speaker 6: beneficial to them. They like it a little bit on
Speaker 6: the acidic side. Although they can take higher pH they
Speaker 6: prefer it a little on the acidic side. So adding
Speaker 6: a lot of composted materials to the soil, loosening up
Speaker 6: that clay a little bit, getting it on a good mound.
Speaker 6: You might even see a benefit from putting some expanded
Speaker 6: shale in a very large area around them. And it
Speaker 6: takes quite a bit of shale to do that, but
Speaker 6: that helps open up that clay soil, provide a little
Speaker 6: bit better internal drainage. But those are all be things
Speaker 6: in your power. Keeping a mulch on the soil all
Speaker 6: the time. You know, in the forest the leaves fall
Speaker 6: on the ground, pile up and just rot year after
Speaker 6: year after year. Make and the soil better and better.
Speaker 6: So do that around your magnolia tree, and as wide
Speaker 6: of an area as you can, to try to make
Speaker 6: it as at home by creating that forest floor environment
Speaker 6: as you can.
Speaker 15: Okay, all right, perfect, and probably looking at an early
Speaker 15: spring to do this, or.
Speaker 6: Well, if the sooner you move it, the better. Now,
Speaker 6: the sooner you move at the better get as much
Speaker 6: of the roots as you can. They don't like it
Speaker 6: and move. But if it's still pretty small, you may
Speaker 6: successfully move it. But you need to do it soon
Speaker 6: because summer is coming, and the more months it has
Speaker 6: to get a root system established, re established, the better
Speaker 6: off it'll be when when the heat arrives.
Speaker 15: Okay, perfect, well, I'll all right after this freezing weather
Speaker 15: this week, I'll get to.
Speaker 6: It, all right, sir. You take care, Thanks for the call.
Speaker 6: We're going to go now to Alvin and talk to Frank. Hey, Frank,
Speaker 6: welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 9: Morning, Skip. I was calling about grafting trees the time
Speaker 9: of year. I just got a little kit from Amazon,
Speaker 9: and I'm waiting to get some wound dressing healing, you know,
Speaker 9: wound dressing. And also it says something about having to
Speaker 9: like put some spray or clean up like anti microbes
Speaker 9: or whatever. I don't know if they should equipment or
Speaker 9: where you do the cut at, but I was looking
Speaker 9: at the you know, the procedure and is it the
Speaker 9: good time of the right time? Should have wait a
Speaker 9: few weeks, a few months to grab the con trees
Speaker 9: and some fig trees.
Speaker 6: Okay, Well, figs. We yeah, figs, we normally don't graft.
Speaker 6: You can take a fig branch, one of those dormant
Speaker 6: little branches the size of one of your fingers, cut
Speaker 6: off about an eight insection of it, and stick it
Speaker 6: in the ground a little root and grow. I mean,
Speaker 6: they're very easy to do figs. So you don't need
Speaker 6: to graft the fig. I guess you could. I've never
Speaker 6: I've never even heard of grafting a fig. I don't
Speaker 6: know why you would, but most people just just stick
Speaker 6: them in the ground and root them as far as
Speaker 6: the pecan could.
Speaker 9: Very good.
Speaker 4: I didn't know that.
Speaker 16: No.
Speaker 6: Yeah, say on the pecans, I would think about this
Speaker 6: just a minute. The do you have an existing pecan
Speaker 6: tree you're grafting them onto that? That's a lot of
Speaker 6: the trap Describe to me.
Speaker 9: What, yeah, what's what you'd call the root stock? And
Speaker 9: I have one of those, and then I have some
Speaker 9: other trees that are the paper shell all right, you
Speaker 9: know there that are a hybrid that's going to grasb
Speaker 9: some of those limbs onto my rootstock tree, which is
Speaker 9: it's just a native pecan. It makes a little small
Speaker 9: ones sometimes and and it.
Speaker 4: Does real.
Speaker 6: Okay, So if you have a little seedling coming up
Speaker 6: and still small, let's say the tree itself is the
Speaker 6: size of your little finger, then you can you can
Speaker 6: use a different kind of graft on that that like
Speaker 6: a whip graft, even on those as pecans get a
Speaker 6: little bigger or as you're what we call top work
Speaker 6: in a tree, meaning you got a tree and you
Speaker 6: got all these branches, you want to find a branch
Speaker 6: it's about the size of a coke can soft drink can,
Speaker 6: and cut it off there and do what's called an
Speaker 6: inlay bark graft on those that that's the best way
Speaker 6: to go about that particular graft. And have you seen
Speaker 6: how to do those somewhere?
Speaker 9: Yes, I've seen some YouTube videos about it. Okay, well,
Speaker 9: you got to make it a little split and then
Speaker 9: you slip it in between there and then wrap it.
Speaker 6: Yes, yes, very very important to follow that carefully. If
Speaker 6: you go to the Aggie Horticulture website, just do a
Speaker 6: search for Aggi Horticulture. Go to the fruit and nut
Speaker 6: resources page. There is specifically something for Texas inlay graft
Speaker 6: and Texas four flap graft. Those are two different graphs.
Speaker 6: I said. The whip graft actually the four flap would
Speaker 6: probably be your better way to do if you have
Speaker 6: very small stock, like the size of one of your fingers.
Speaker 6: But anyway, those are the two that we primarily do
Speaker 6: in Texas for pecans. You want your graft would to
Speaker 6: be you want your graft would to be dormant with
Speaker 6: the inlay bark graft. But you want to wait until
Speaker 6: the tree you're grafting it onto the sap has started
Speaker 6: to flow. Like right now, if you went out and
Speaker 6: tried to peel back the bark on that existing tree,
Speaker 6: the bark is firmly attached to the wood. But once
Speaker 6: a sap flows, the bark peels like you're like you're
Speaker 6: peeling a banana. It just comes right off. That's the
Speaker 6: stage where you do the inlay bark graph. But but
Speaker 6: the wood you're using needs to be dormant, stored in
Speaker 6: the in the refrigerator to stay dormant.
Speaker 9: Very good and regarding like wound dressing. And then I
Speaker 9: don't know what it's like. An antiseptic that they were
Speaker 9: talking about is just for the tools.
Speaker 6: Yeah or yeah? I would not. I would not. I
Speaker 6: would not use worry about anyseptic on the wound. I mean,
Speaker 6: you know, I've never for for printed pecans, I've never
Speaker 6: I mean, grafting pecans, I've never uh, you know, dealt
Speaker 6: with antiseptic on the tools. I mean, you could spray
Speaker 6: them with some life soil if you want to do that,
Speaker 6: that'd be fine. But the main thing is making the
Speaker 6: graft properly. You don't you don't. You can use things
Speaker 6: like grafting wax and whatnot to it, but bottom line
Speaker 6: is just uh, you know, just get you uh, some
Speaker 6: plastic bag to wrap around them, uh, and you tie
Speaker 6: it to the branch and you tie it up on
Speaker 6: the grafted piece, so you create a complete air tight
Speaker 6: section underneath there to hold the moisture in and then
Speaker 6: wrap the whole thing with foil. This is all in
Speaker 6: the publication that's on Aggie Horticulture. Wrap it in foil
Speaker 6: to reflect any sunlight outside of that clear bag.
Speaker 9: Okay, so we're not really in the season for doing that. Yeah,
Speaker 9: we need to get other side of winter time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, probably what you worried more.
Speaker 6: Yeah, get your get your graft would now, but but
Speaker 6: store it in the fridge and then do the graft
Speaker 6: in spring, when the when the sap starts to flow
Speaker 6: and growth starts to appear. Hey, I got to run.
Speaker 6: We're on against a hard break. But good luck with that.
Speaker 6: And if you have any other questions on it, follow up,
Speaker 6: just give me a call back sometime. All right, folks,
Speaker 6: I've got to run to a break. When we come
Speaker 6: back from break, we are going to talk to Dennis
Speaker 6: and Gary after the break. Who can tell me the
Speaker 6: name of the band? Send them that the Wonders a
Speaker 6: k a. Theaters. You have to look that one up. Eaters.
Speaker 6: They spelled Wonder O n E. One was O ne
Speaker 6: so when people looked at Wonder, it looked like, okay,
Speaker 6: you heard it here first on Garden Life. Let's go
Speaker 6: to Gary. We're going to talk to Gary now on Guardline.
Speaker 6: Welcome to the show. Gary, good to have you with us.
Speaker 5: Hey, good morning, Skip.
Speaker 4: How are you doing.
Speaker 6: I'm well, I'm well. How can we help?
Speaker 4: Hey?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: So, I've got some fruit trees I'm wanting to plant.
Speaker 5: I picked them up at a box store. There's a
Speaker 5: couple of peach trees, a couple of plum trees, and
Speaker 5: a big and pretty elementary question I guess is when's
Speaker 5: the best time the year to plant those?
Speaker 4: Is it now or wait? Till we get closer to springtime.
Speaker 6: Now absolutely, now get them in the ground. Yeah, sooner
Speaker 6: you get them in the ground, the sooner they're able
Speaker 6: to start put it producing the root system. They'll need
Speaker 6: to go through this first summer. So when you pull
Speaker 6: them out of the container, if you see roots circling,
Speaker 6: if you can kind of tease them out of there
Speaker 6: and dig a hold of to accommodate them. Don't wrap
Speaker 6: the roots up in the hole. They don't unwind underground,
Speaker 6: of course. And if you need to cut a root,
Speaker 6: go ahead and cut the root. It's okay to cut it.
Speaker 6: Within two weeks it'll be sprouting new side roots from
Speaker 6: behind the cut, and it'll be a much better established
Speaker 6: tree as a result. So don't if you've got circling
Speaker 6: roots unwrap them or cut them. More likely it can
Speaker 6: have to cut them. So what about the frequency of
Speaker 6: water in them at this time of the year. Is
Speaker 6: is it important that you water them on a pretty
Speaker 6: frequent basis this time of year? A good watering in
Speaker 6: when you plant them should be sufficient. They're going to
Speaker 6: be dormant if they have mari lost their leaves, they
Speaker 6: will this week, but you shouldn't have to water them
Speaker 6: until they begin new growth, and then you can begin
Speaker 6: to provide some water. Just always remember the first months,
Speaker 6: even the first summer after planting, the roots are still
Speaker 6: quite confined. They haven't fully stretched out into all the
Speaker 6: soil around them, and so regular watering is a little
Speaker 6: more important for a newly planted tree during its first
Speaker 6: two or even three years, especially the first year.
Speaker 5: Okay, and so I've got a mixture of soils out
Speaker 5: there in my property. Some of it's clay and then
Speaker 5: there's some of it's more loamy. I guess it be
Speaker 5: better to plant and the loamy obviously, but that's something
Speaker 5: I was wondering too.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they like a sandy loam soil. That is their
Speaker 6: absolute favorite. Not everybody has that. And we can make
Speaker 6: peaches grow and a lot of other things. But if
Speaker 6: you were to, if you were to say, what's the
Speaker 6: best soil for peaches, it's sandy loam. And that's why
Speaker 6: the biggest peach producing regions of our country, of our state,
Speaker 6: excuse me, are up in the Maheya area where there's
Speaker 6: a band of sandy loam soil that comes through there,
Speaker 6: and over in Fredericksburg and areas that have sandy loam soils.
Speaker 6: That's that's their favorite.
Speaker 13: Okay, well, I appreciate your help and then answer my questions.
Speaker 13: Thank you all right, Gary, thanks for the call. Appreciate
Speaker 13: that you take care. Let's see we're going to go
Speaker 13: now to Cove, Texas and talk to Dennis. Hey, Dennis,
Speaker 13: welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 22: Thank you skip my question. I have two red tip
Speaker 22: shrubs and I prum once a year whenever the weather
Speaker 22: gets cold and it's going to stay cold, so now's
Speaker 22: that time. And I always trim the tops back to
Speaker 22: the eve of the house. So that's that's at eight
Speaker 22: feet and typically I'm taking off on average about a foot.
Speaker 22: They'll they'll usually get up, you know, about nine feet,
Speaker 22: and I take that off. And the width I don't
Speaker 22: really have a set marker, but because i'm trimming from
Speaker 22: a step ladder, I usually wind up trimming the width
Speaker 22: so that I can reach the center on top, you know,
Speaker 22: and stay safely balanced on the step ladder. And what
Speaker 22: I've noticed this year is that the shrubs seem to
Speaker 22: have spread width wise much more than they've ever grown before.
Speaker 22: And while I still would I would estimately be taken
Speaker 22: off about a quarter of the total wood of the tree.
Speaker 22: Because the foliage is typically only on the outside of
Speaker 22: the tree. On the interior branches aren't really any leaves.
Speaker 22: I'll be taken off a lot more of the leaves
Speaker 22: I think, percentage wise, I normally do.
Speaker 6: Is that a problem, Dennis, I missed the species of
Speaker 6: plant we're talking about.
Speaker 22: Okay, so I don't know if this is the real name.
Speaker 22: We call them red red tips. It's the shrug.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 22: The leaves are mostly green, but the ones on the
Speaker 22: end of the branches are red.
Speaker 6: Yes, yeah, that's red to fatinia as a coat. So
Speaker 6: you can print that as much as you want and
Speaker 6: it'll come back from it. What happens on all plants
Speaker 6: pretty much, especially the shrubs than things. They tend to
Speaker 6: grow more outward at the top and end up shading
Speaker 6: their base as a result. You know, as the top
Speaker 6: gets wider, think of a capital V. It grows like
Speaker 6: a capital V, and so the top shades the base
Speaker 6: and you lose your foliage, which you want to have
Speaker 6: foliage all the way down to the ground. So you
Speaker 6: kind of have to work to keep the top at
Speaker 6: least vertical. The side's vertical, if not a little bit
Speaker 6: narrower at the top, like I had mentioned a capital V,
Speaker 6: think more toward to capital A, not like a Christmas
Speaker 6: tree shape. But just get the top narrower and that
Speaker 6: allows good light up and down all through that shrub,
Speaker 6: and as a result, you have good foliage all through
Speaker 6: the shrub. So don't be afraid to hack back as
Speaker 6: much as you need to do that, because that shrub
Speaker 6: is constantly going to be fighting you trying to be
Speaker 6: top heavy, and we need it to not be top
Speaker 6: heavy for the aesthetics of an ice full shrub.
Speaker 22: Okay, that answers my question. Thank you very much.
Speaker 6: Yes, sir, thank you for the call. Appreciate that very much.
Speaker 6: Good good question, very good question, good point. Earlier I was,
Speaker 6: you know, talking about the importance of taking care of
Speaker 6: your plants, making sure that you've got adequate soil, adequate nutrition,
Speaker 6: you know, adequate organic matter content. It is important to
Speaker 6: when you take care of a plant, to provide the
Speaker 6: roots what they need because in a sense, plants grow
Speaker 6: in the root, they live in their roots. I like
Speaker 6: to put it that way because we sort of forget
Speaker 6: about the below ground part, but keeping the roots happy
Speaker 6: is important. The medina, the folks at Medina makes something
Speaker 6: called humate humic acid. What is humic acid, Well, that's
Speaker 6: basically the final stage of decomposing organic matter. So we
Speaker 6: have organic matter like leaves and grass clippings and things.
Speaker 6: It decomposes into what we would call compost, and then
Speaker 6: that decomposes into what's called humus. It's the final stage,
Speaker 6: and the humic acid is one of the natural ingredients
Speaker 6: that are in humus. Humus does a number of good
Speaker 6: things for the soil, and the humic acid helps with
Speaker 6: soil structure. It helps with the way that the plant
Speaker 6: has access to nutrients in addition to the fact that
Speaker 6: they're nutrients in and of itself. But you make humte
Speaker 6: I'm in trouble saying. Humane humic acid from Medina is
Speaker 6: the kind of thing you just mix a little in
Speaker 6: a gallon of water, and when you plant a plant,
Speaker 6: you just pour it on the root ball as you
Speaker 6: replace the soil, apply it again, give it another good drench.
Speaker 6: It is very helpful. I will soak seeds in humus
Speaker 6: or humic acid rather, and all you have to do
Speaker 6: is put about a tablespoon per gallon of water of
Speaker 6: the humane humic acid and then soak the seed until
Speaker 6: that penetrates the skin and the seeds swell up and
Speaker 6: then anthem right away. Don't let them set like that,
Speaker 6: plant them. So I'll typically do that the night before
Speaker 6: I'm going to go out and plant. And that's one
Speaker 6: of the quality products there from the folks at Medina.
Speaker 6: Medina also produces something called has to Grow six twelve six.
Speaker 6: Now has to Grow six twelve six is a high
Speaker 6: quality products. Got the six percent nitrogen, twelve percent sassium,
Speaker 6: six percent excuse me, twelve percent phosphorus six percent potassium.
Speaker 6: That is very useful to a plant trying to develop
Speaker 6: a root system, to a plant trying to produce blooms
Speaker 6: and foliage. Phosphorus very important for that. And it also
Speaker 6: contains Medina Soil Activator, which we know been around a
Speaker 6: long time, one of the most famous products from Medina.
Speaker 6: There is also present in the has to Grow six
Speaker 6: twelve six. Again, I will use it when I'm transplanting.
Speaker 6: I will use it anytime that you're wanting to apply
Speaker 6: a drench into the soils, even a folier spray. You're
Speaker 6: not going to burn with that. Just two examples of
Speaker 6: quality products there from the folks at medina that are
Speaker 6: white available here in the Greater Houston area and have
Speaker 6: been for ages.
Speaker 3: Do you know.
Speaker 6: I was just reading about Dewey Compton or earlier, and
Speaker 6: he talked about medina products that goes back to the
Speaker 6: nineteen fifties. Diana's been around a while, It's been proven
Speaker 6: for a very long time, and gardeners already know that.
Speaker 6: Now it's time for me to take a little quick break.
Speaker 6: For gosh, we're coming up. I've got a another minute
Speaker 6: or so, so I'll just go a little bit longer.
Speaker 6: We'll come back to your calls though. Hey, by the way,
Speaker 6: if you'd like to give me a call, the phone
Speaker 6: number is seven to one three two one two ktr
Speaker 6: eight seven one three two one two KTRH. Earlier, I
Speaker 6: mentioned that tomorrow we were going to talk about more
Speaker 6: about Randy Lemon. The host of garden Line, Dean Nelson
Speaker 6: is going to come on the show in the morning
Speaker 6: and we're going to talk a little bit about a
Speaker 6: scholarship for Randy and just some memories of Randy. Actually,
Speaker 6: today is the anniversary of both Randy's birthday and his
Speaker 6: passing to years ago. The came as a shock to
Speaker 6: everyone in the gardening World here in Southeast Texas, and
Speaker 6: we'll be talking more about that then. I just want
Speaker 6: to remind you, though, one more time, that Randy's scholarship
Speaker 6: is still around at A and M. They've got it
Speaker 6: funded to a level now where there is some funding
Speaker 6: going to New A and M horticulture students. New A
Speaker 6: and M horticulture students can receive the Randy Lemon Scholarship.
Speaker 6: We want to get it funded better. I just think
Speaker 6: we can do better than this. You can go online
Speaker 6: and you can donate online toward it. You can do
Speaker 6: it by mail if you'd like to. There's a lot
Speaker 6: of details to that. I make it real simple on
Speaker 6: my website. Just go to gardening with Skip dot com
Speaker 6: Gardening with Skip dot com. The top item on there
Speaker 6: is the Randy Lemon Scholarship. It tells you how you
Speaker 6: can give and if you're one of the folks that
Speaker 6: listened to Randy for years that appreciated the help that
Speaker 6: he provided you, why not consider making even a small
Speaker 6: donation toward that scholarship. I know Randy would be so
Speaker 6: proud to know that we were doing this now. And
Speaker 6: thanks to Dean for getting that all set up.
Speaker 4: By the way.
Speaker 6: All right, I'm gonna take a little break. When I
Speaker 6: come back, We're gonna go out to Humble and talk
Speaker 6: to Gary and Hey, welcome back to the garden Line.
Speaker 6: Welcome back. Good to have you with us. You are
Speaker 6: listening to the first show of the year twenty twenty five,
Speaker 6: and twenty twenty five is gonna be the best year
Speaker 6: you've ever had in gardening. I'm just predicting that right now.
Speaker 6: It's gonna be my best year of gardening. You know,
Speaker 6: the fun thing about gardening is gardening is like the
Speaker 6: old etches sketches. I've used that analogy before, but how
Speaker 6: many of you remember an etch a sketch? You know,
Speaker 6: you had two knobs, one went up and down, one sideways,
Speaker 6: and you tried to draw something. Inevitably, you went left
Speaker 6: when you should have gone right or whatever, and it
Speaker 6: messes up the drawing. What do you do? You turn
Speaker 6: it upside down and shake it and you get a
Speaker 6: blank slate. Again, that's gardening. Every year is a blank slate.
Speaker 6: In fact, halfway through spring, if you don't like the
Speaker 6: way that garden looks, you can just get you your
Speaker 6: roto teller, the equivalent of a shake in the edges
Speaker 6: sketch and you get to start over again. It's okay.
Speaker 6: You can't fail at garden you only give up. We're
Speaker 6: not going to give up. We're going to have the
Speaker 6: best year ever. And I really believe that. I think
Speaker 6: it's gonna be a good year. Right now, we're going
Speaker 6: to go out and talk to Gary and Humble. Hello, Gary,
Speaker 6: welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 12: Thank you, sir. Good morning.
Speaker 19: Say.
Speaker 12: I planned a myer lemon about three years ago, and
Speaker 12: about a year and a half ago or so, whatever
Speaker 12: it was, it froze back.
Speaker 3: Completely.
Speaker 12: And then I started seeing some new sprouts above the graft.
Speaker 12: And now it's five and a half feet tall, but
Speaker 12: no blossoms at all. And I'm wondering, do I need
Speaker 12: to protect this or do I let it freeze.
Speaker 6: Well, let's see you were an Humble. It's gonna be
Speaker 6: a little on the cold side. I think I would
Speaker 6: cover it up. I just protected a little bit at
Speaker 6: the very least. If it's from above the graph, yes,
Speaker 6: if it's above the graft, it will produce. It absolutely
Speaker 6: will From below the grap then you've got a rootstock.
Speaker 12: Yeah, but it's it's like I say, it's five and
Speaker 12: a half foot tool now and not a blossom anywhere
Speaker 12: all year, and it's been that, and you're.
Speaker 6: You're sure, okay, well it's it's all right. Are you
Speaker 6: sure it's coming above the graph though?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 12: I'm pretty sure there.
Speaker 15: I can see the line there.
Speaker 12: It's about an inch above. But yeah, yeah, because it
Speaker 12: did grow full and uh, but there's no blossoms in
Speaker 12: the all year. So I'm wondering is it worth all
Speaker 12: the time?
Speaker 6: Even a rootstock is capable of blooming, but it just
Speaker 6: doesn't produce quality fruit. Is the growth on it more
Speaker 6: thorny than your mere lemon was?
Speaker 12: It's about the same. But like I say, no blossoms,
Speaker 12: there's a lot of leaves.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I you know, if it's not a lot more thorny,
Speaker 6: I still think it's worth waiting and seeing, unless you
Speaker 6: just want to hurry out.
Speaker 12: I didn't. I don't think there's any thorns. I don't
Speaker 12: recall seeing thorns.
Speaker 6: Okay. I think you've got a lemon tree that's going
Speaker 6: to settle in and start blooming for you here before long.
Speaker 12: I do, so I just stay with it system, okay, okay,
Speaker 12: all right, then I need to produce.
Speaker 6: Exactly m that's it.
Speaker 4: You got it.
Speaker 6: Good luck with that. If it ever produces Lendon's for you,
Speaker 6: you just bring me half the produce to the to
Speaker 6: the radio station and we'll call it even. Thank you,
Speaker 6: Thank you, sir, Bye bye. Someday that joke's gonna get old,
Speaker 6: but not to me. You asked my kids. I think
Speaker 6: jokes are hilarious that have ceased to be hilarious. You
Speaker 6: know when I when my kids were like age six
Speaker 6: and under, I ruled the room, even maybe seven and under.
Speaker 6: Somewhere along the line, I became less funny. Isn't that
Speaker 6: amazing how that works? Well, the way I like to
Speaker 6: put it is, I'm gonna tell jokes that make me laugh,
Speaker 6: even if they don't make you laugh. One of us
Speaker 6: has gotta have fun here. Thanks for being a listener
Speaker 6: to Garden Line. Hey, you probably have noticed that here
Speaker 6: in the Houston area we have a heavy clay soil.
Speaker 6: We call it gumbo soil because it's a thick black clay.
Speaker 6: Not everybody does. You may have sandy soil or sandy
Speaker 6: loan where you live, but by and large are Houston.
Speaker 6: Black clay is predominant in this area. And when you
Speaker 6: have a clay that has a high shrink swell potential.
Speaker 6: What that means is when it's wet, it swells. When
Speaker 6: it's dry, it shrinks. When you have that, you'll notice
Speaker 6: in the summertime, when it's dry, you get these big
Speaker 6: cracks in the yard. You know, big old cracks open
Speaker 6: up in the soil because it's dry and it's shrinking,
Speaker 6: and then it gets wet and it closes back up again. Well,
Speaker 6: that wrecks havoc on your sidewalk and on your driveway
Speaker 6: and on your home foundations. And you may notice that
Speaker 6: your doors are sticking. They didn't stick before and I
Speaker 6: was under sticking again.
Speaker 17: You know.
Speaker 6: Or maybe there's a crack in the sheet rock or
Speaker 6: there's a crack in the brick on the outside. Typically
Speaker 6: go see those at the base of a window, kind
Speaker 6: of going from the back one corner of the window
Speaker 6: down to the ground. But they can to curl all
Speaker 6: over the place. Well, that's a sign that you got
Speaker 6: a foundation issue, and fix my slab. Foundation repair is
Speaker 6: the go to place for that. Ty Strickland is a
Speaker 6: native Houstonian. He's a fifth generation and he knows our soils.
Speaker 6: He understands this issue, and he knows how to assess
Speaker 6: it and what to do about it. The things I
Speaker 6: like most about Ty's work. Number one is an honest fellow.
Speaker 6: Number two he shows up on time when he tells
Speaker 6: he's going to show up. That's part of being honest
Speaker 6: by the way. He fixes it right, and he charges
Speaker 6: a fair price. And what more can you ask for
Speaker 6: any kind of a service industry come in to your house,
Speaker 6: especially when they're dealing with the foundation of your home.
Speaker 6: And he's been doing this for twenty three years. He
Speaker 6: knows what he's doing. You give him a call, tell
Speaker 6: him your guarden line listener. Free estimates for garden line listeners.
Speaker 6: You can go to the website fixmislab dot com, or
Speaker 6: you can call him too. Eight one two fi five
Speaker 6: forty nine forty nine two eight one two fi five
Speaker 6: four nine four nine fix my slab foundation repair listen.
Speaker 6: If you think you may have a problem, don't be
Speaker 6: an ostrich. Put your head in this end. Call him
Speaker 6: if it's not a serious issue. If it's okay, there
Speaker 6: is such a level of concern that's not worth worrying about.
Speaker 6: He'll tell you that. But it's not gonna get better,
Speaker 6: so don't put it off. Go ahead and give Tay
Speaker 6: a call two eight one two FI five forty nine
Speaker 6: forty nine. All right, folks, we've got one more segment
Speaker 6: in the first show of the year coming up, and
Speaker 6: I'll be right back with your calls at five excuse me,
Speaker 6: seven to one three two one two kt RH loved.
Speaker 6: Welcome back to guarden Line. I'm your host, Skip Richer,
Speaker 6: and we're here for our last segment of today, the
Speaker 6: first garden Line show of twenty twenty five, which is
Speaker 6: going to be the best gardening year we've ever had.
Speaker 6: I really really believe that. You know, nature throws us curves,
Speaker 6: but that's okay, we just continue on. We were resilient.
Speaker 6: Gardeners are resilient. You know, gardeners have to have faith.
Speaker 6: First of all. I mentioned this earlier. But to take
Speaker 6: take a hand full of seeds, I mean, they look
Speaker 6: like detritus. They look like debris on the ground, little
Speaker 6: chips of wood or whatever they are, and they look dead.
Speaker 6: And you put them in the ground, you give water
Speaker 6: to them, and a miracle starts to happen. Water soaks
Speaker 6: into the seed and starts a chain of biochemical reactions
Speaker 6: that ends up with you getting a tomato or a
Speaker 6: petunia flower or whatever kind of seed it is. Is
Speaker 6: that amazing? I mean, you know, someone once said that
Speaker 6: anybody can count the number of seeds in an apple,
Speaker 6: but only God knows the number of apples in a seed,
Speaker 6: and that you know, it's really true. I mean, think
Speaker 6: about that, that one little seed in the case of
Speaker 6: an apple, just countless, countless production from it. All right,
Speaker 6: I'm gonna get a little This isn't nerdy, this is philosophical.
Speaker 6: But somewhere years ago, you know, the guy Johnny apple
Speaker 6: seed that went through the countryside, just scattering seeds everywhere,
Speaker 6: and all these apples came up here and there and yonder. Well,
Speaker 6: people would find one. That's a hap hazard, just genetic occurrence.
Speaker 6: That's what seeds are, just like people are all different genetically. Well,
Speaker 6: apples are all different genetically. Any kind of seed is
Speaker 6: going to do that. So they would find one and
Speaker 6: they would go, you know what, this is a really
Speaker 6: special apple. Let's take cuttings and let's graft them, and
Speaker 6: let's name it, and that way we can produce more
Speaker 6: of it. That's how the first red delicious apple occurred.
Speaker 6: And many of the oldest apple varieties were just haphazards.
Speaker 6: Same with pecans pecans years ago. Some day I'll tell
Speaker 6: you the story of pecans, but that's a whole nother story.
Speaker 6: But anyway, so red Delicious just and other varieties. Now,
Speaker 6: we breed varieties like that intentionally by crossing apple parentage lines,
Speaker 6: but they just occurred and someone said, oh, I like that,
Speaker 6: I'm gonna save that one. So think about this. I
Speaker 6: don't know how many Red Delicious apple trees have been
Speaker 6: created over the years. I mean, you know, we don't
Speaker 6: grow those down here in Texas, but apple producing country.
Speaker 6: That's kind of like an old standard variety that for
Speaker 6: years rule the roost because it was longer, and it
Speaker 6: was darker red, and it just it just had features
Speaker 6: that were desirable. A seed sprouted, even if it was
Speaker 6: an intentional collapse. Of course, one seed and one apple
Speaker 6: produced the first Red Delicious tree, and after that it
Speaker 6: was a matter of grafting and grafting and grafting to
Speaker 6: where there's thousands and thousands and thousands of acres of
Speaker 6: genetically the same red Delicious apples. Because in nature, one
Speaker 6: seed sprouted and it had the superior qualities that someone
Speaker 6: chose to select. So I just find that to be amazing.
Speaker 6: I find plant genetics and just the you know, you
Speaker 6: cross this, you cross that, And there are people that
Speaker 6: do that as gardeners do I do that with okra myself,
Speaker 6: creating new varieties and things. So it's kind of a
Speaker 6: fun fact something that they about maybe get you excited
Speaker 6: about doing some plant crossing yourself. We're gonna go out
Speaker 6: of Bayliff and talk to Sue. Hello, Sue, Welcome to
Speaker 6: garden line.
Speaker 19: Hello, Skip, How are you?
Speaker 6: I'm good? I'm good. How can we help?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 12: I have.
Speaker 19: The long skinny eggplants and the black beauty egg plants
Speaker 19: and they're just loaded with fruit. Are they gonna be okay?
Speaker 19: Or do I need to try to cover them?
Speaker 6: Well, if it gets below freezing, they're gonna or if
Speaker 6: it gets close to freezing, they can even have frost damage.
Speaker 6: And so you're gonna need to cover them. Anything you
Speaker 6: put over them that drapes down to the ground, secure
Speaker 6: it to the ground to kind of hold some airspace
Speaker 6: underneath there. You ought to be able to get them
Speaker 6: through this freeze. Okay. If your area drops below let's
Speaker 6: say thirty degrees for sure, then you're probably gonna need
Speaker 6: some source of heat underneath there. But what's going to
Speaker 6: happen in these coming freezes this week is it's going
Speaker 6: to drop down below freezing and then it's going to
Speaker 6: come right back up when the sun comes out in
Speaker 6: the day. We'll be up in the forties and so
Speaker 6: we don't have to survive for twenty four hours below
Speaker 6: thirty two degrees. So we're just protecting them a little bit,
Speaker 6: and that ought to get them through.
Speaker 19: Okay, my second question the butt. I have calamandan that
Speaker 19: is the chopped fruit all over it, and they're starting
Speaker 19: to turn orange. I go ahead and pick them. I
Speaker 19: know nothing about this fruit.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Calamandan is a little it's an orange like thing
Speaker 6: with very small orange traice on it. It's used. It's ornamental.
Speaker 6: First of all. People love the just the ornamental factor,
Speaker 6: but they're also edible. They're just not the you know,
Speaker 6: the best tasting orange type thing that that you could have.
Speaker 6: But I think they're attractive and I would cover them
Speaker 6: in the kind of cold weather that we're we're looking
Speaker 6: at having, So I think that's I think that's worthwhile.
Speaker 6: Is it in a container?
Speaker 3: Yes it is.
Speaker 6: Yeah, do you know excuse me, get you a Dolly
Speaker 6: or something like that. Kalamandan's are actually pretty cold hearty.
Speaker 16: You know.
Speaker 6: The more I think about it, I think in your area,
Speaker 6: I think, I don't think you're going to have to
Speaker 6: bring it in or cover it now that I'm thinking
Speaker 6: about it, because they're they're one of their parentage is
Speaker 6: come quat and come quatre hardy down into the teens.
Speaker 6: I think Klimandan is going to take it down pretty
Speaker 6: well down into the twenties and be okay. So I
Speaker 6: think you're going to be all right with it. I'm
Speaker 6: gonna adjust my statement a little bit as I think
Speaker 6: about that. Klamanda, well, I.
Speaker 19: Think it's confused because it's got flower buds on it.
Speaker 6: To you, oh, flower buds too, I don't know how
Speaker 6: cool will be by And.
Speaker 19: It's on the new growth. You had a collar call
Speaker 19: while ago that had some new growth, had some curly
Speaker 19: leaves and stuff.
Speaker 18: You know.
Speaker 19: I never found a leaf minor either, but I did
Speaker 19: find it like a little web in there that I
Speaker 19: scraped out. But that's where the new flower buds are at.
Speaker 19: I was going to cut the tips off.
Speaker 13: You know.
Speaker 6: Those are nice plants, they say, kind of small, especially
Speaker 6: in the container. You know, they stayed a rash and small,
Speaker 6: and so people liked to grown because they you know,
Speaker 6: it's easy to it's easy to do. But calm kalamandan
Speaker 6: is is pretty cold hearty. So I think you're gonna
Speaker 6: be okay. As far as the blooms themselves, I've never
Speaker 6: I've never looked into that, like sometimes a plant will
Speaker 6: be hardy, but the blooms are not. But I think
Speaker 6: you're going to be all right. If you want to
Speaker 6: be careful, just put her on dolly running in the
Speaker 6: ode and bring it back out. But I don't think
Speaker 6: that's needed for a kalamand And in the freeze, we're
Speaker 6: about to have.
Speaker 19: Okay, because it I just got it this past spring.
Speaker 19: You know, it's fifty percent off. So I brought it
Speaker 19: home and stuffed it in a container, and it immediately
Speaker 19: started blooming and bearing these little fruits. And I was like, okay,
Speaker 19: I thought, how do you like again?
Speaker 6: How do you like the bloom fragrance?
Speaker 16: Oh?
Speaker 19: It smells good.
Speaker 6: H Yeah, that's a nice thing. The nice thing about
Speaker 6: a container cetress like that is you can put it
Speaker 6: right beside where you sit outside in the patio and
Speaker 6: just it's like you have perfume, just wafting over.
Speaker 19: Right with all my guardenas and jasmines and and my citrus,
Speaker 19: because I've got lemon lisbon lemon and uh Orlando TAngelo
Speaker 19: also in a in a.
Speaker 6: My goodness to it. Well, you just got all kinds
Speaker 6: of not so common fruit, centrus, fruit growing around there.
Speaker 6: Send me a picture though sometimes when they're especially when
Speaker 6: they're blooming and things. I'd love to earn fruit. I'd
Speaker 6: love to see that. Well, thank you for the call.
Speaker 19: Make sure the calimandon, but I'll get it to tomorrow maybe.
Speaker 6: Okay, Well, I'm gonna put you on hold and maybe
Speaker 6: our producer will pick up and give you an email
Speaker 6: where you can get that to me if you need that.
Speaker 6: Thanks for the call. All right, folks. Music means I
Speaker 6: gotta quit talking today. I'll be back in the morning though,
Speaker 6: first thing, six o'clock. Hey, I'm gonna get up early
Speaker 6: so I can be on the air at six. You
Speaker 6: get up with me, we'll talk. By the way. Tip
Speaker 6: for the wise, it's easiest to get through on phones
Speaker 6: earlier in the morning when it was later on. All right,
Speaker 6: take care