Speaker 1: Welcome to Kati r H Garden Line with skip rictor.
Speaker 2: Essy gas can trim.
Speaker 3: You just watch him as well, go.
Speaker 2: Gasso many both things to seep back passes a gasp
Speaker 2: and again you dass backing. They're not a salmon glasses
Speaker 2: a gas. The sun beamon of teases the gas.
Speaker 3: Starting out treating.
Speaker 4: Well, good morning, good morning, and welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 4: We are glad to have you with us this morning,
Speaker 4: and we're here to talk about gardening. What do you
Speaker 4: want to talk about. We've got a four hours ahead
Speaker 4: of us. We can pretty much cover anything that is
Speaker 4: of interest to you, and we're going to Here's how
Speaker 4: you do it, you doll seven one three two one
Speaker 4: two KTRH and we talk and hopefully give you some ideas,
Speaker 4: some inspiration, solve a few gardening types of problems that
Speaker 4: you might have. That's the way it works here on
Speaker 4: garden Line. I'm going to start off with a few
Speaker 4: thoughts that I've been pondering here these last couple of
Speaker 4: days regarding common questions that I get when people give
Speaker 4: me a call on garden Line. Anytime someone.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: For forty years, forty years I worked with the Agrolife
Speaker 4: Extension Office as a County Extension agent, And for those
Speaker 4: of you who aren't familiar, County Extension is a program
Speaker 4: through Texas and University. Actually it's in all of the states.
Speaker 4: Each state has a lang Grant College, LSU, Oklahoma State, Cornell,
Speaker 4: those are all Lange Grant colleges. Each state has one,
Speaker 4: and the Extension service reaches out and takes the university
Speaker 4: to the people. That's kind of how they put it. Well,
Speaker 4: it's horticultures to My job was to bring research based
Speaker 4: information to folks, and so through emails or questions, through programs,
Speaker 4: all kinds of ways people would ask gardening questions, kind
Speaker 4: of like here on guarden Line. And so over the years,
Speaker 4: I think I've heard just about all the questions that
Speaker 4: are out there. We have a lot of different things
Speaker 4: to wonder about when it comes to, you know, success
Speaker 4: with gardening, and so having heard all those questions over
Speaker 4: the years, I'm kind of familiar with the kind of
Speaker 4: things that people tend to wonder about and ask about.
Speaker 4: And I basically there's more question possibilities and you can
Speaker 4: imagine when you think about horticulture and gardening, covering everything
Speaker 4: from your lawn to the house plants in your house,
Speaker 4: to what's a good kind of orchid? To why does
Speaker 4: my plum tree not bear fruit? See how do you
Speaker 4: properly prune a crape myrtle? To what's a good tree
Speaker 4: to provide shade on the west side of the house.
Speaker 4: It just goes on and on. What's the best to
Speaker 4: mate at a plant? You know? Why do my radishes
Speaker 4: not produce bulbs just tops and all our roots? It's
Speaker 4: that kind of thing. Lots of different kinds of questions.
Speaker 4: So what I would like to start off with this
Speaker 4: morning is pruning mistakes that I see people make, questions
Speaker 4: that I get about pruning and things along those lines,
Speaker 4: And I'm going to talk about nine pruning mistakes that
Speaker 4: I see people make that you certainly can avoid. It
Speaker 4: is pruning season. Mid to late winter is probably the
Speaker 4: prime time to do pruning, but we can do pruning.
Speaker 4: You know, right now is a great time to get
Speaker 4: it done. And when you make pruning cuts on a tree,
Speaker 4: pruning is a invigorous process. And so one of the
Speaker 4: things we want to keep in mind is whenever we're
Speaker 4: doing printing, the tree is going to respond with growth
Speaker 4: in that area and depending on the kind of cuts
Speaker 4: we make, the growth will either be desirable types of
Speaker 4: growth or it may be undesirable types of growth. Pruning
Speaker 4: is something that starts when you put the plant in
Speaker 4: the ground, the tree in the ground, and we call
Speaker 4: it training. During that time, you know, the first I
Speaker 4: don't know, five to ten years, you're doing training on
Speaker 4: the tree, especially the first five years, and then after
Speaker 4: that there is more of a maintenance printing that we
Speaker 4: do to keep things in order. But just like a
Speaker 4: lot of things in life, the sooner you get on
Speaker 4: something and get it going in the right direction, the
Speaker 4: better off things are. If you ignore training during the
Speaker 4: first two or three or four years, you're going to
Speaker 4: have a problem tree or plant. You're going to have
Speaker 4: to do more serious pruning to get back in bounds.
Speaker 4: I like to tell people that to pull out a
Speaker 4: saw is an admission of guilt. Here's what I mean
Speaker 4: by that. If you were to take a tree and
Speaker 4: you have your ham pruners and your loppers, and from
Speaker 4: the time you plant it print it correctly day by
Speaker 4: day by day, the need for a saw goes down
Speaker 4: to very very little, very very little, because you're making
Speaker 4: these decisions and cuts early in that tree's life, and
Speaker 4: it's small wounds that you make with ham pruners and loppers.
Speaker 4: But when you don't do the things you should do.
Speaker 4: Now you're looking at a branch that you know, maybe
Speaker 4: you know the size of I don't know, your arm
Speaker 4: or a leg or something else, and you're basically pulling
Speaker 4: out the saw to make those cuts. Nay, you got
Speaker 4: a big wound that has to heal over there's the
Speaker 4: exposed inner wood where the cake can get in and
Speaker 4: on and on down the line. So if you think
Speaker 4: about it that way, it is not one hundred percent
Speaker 4: true to say I saw pulling out a saw's admission
Speaker 4: to guilt. But it's a true, true concept that I
Speaker 4: think it's worth thinking about before you go out to prune.
Speaker 4: Get some education on the best way to prune the
Speaker 4: kind of plant that you're pruning. Don't look at what
Speaker 4: other people do. And primary point number one is crepe myrtles.
Speaker 4: The way crape myrtles get pruned is ninety five percent wrong.
Speaker 4: Around the Greater Houston area, a lot of it happens
Speaker 4: with landscape crews, and you know, you got guys that
Speaker 4: mowlawns and do all the summer cares of carrying of
Speaker 4: landscapes and stuff, and here comes winter time. Is not
Speaker 4: much of that to do.
Speaker 3: So what do you do.
Speaker 4: You hand them a saw and you say, cut off
Speaker 4: everything about as high as you can reach with those
Speaker 4: are lappers. Cut off everything that you can reach with
Speaker 4: those lappers, you know. And so there we get these
Speaker 4: these topped off crape myrtles that then put out crows
Speaker 4: feed type of growth that are just not They're not
Speaker 4: structurally strong, they're unsightful. That ruins the beautiful structure of
Speaker 4: a crape myrtle, And so everybody else thinks that's how
Speaker 4: you prun. That's also, by the way, how we get
Speaker 4: landscape volcanoes. Those mounds of malts, you know what I'm
Speaker 4: talking about, giant mounds of malts that are piled up
Speaker 4: against the base of a tree. There is horticulturally botanically
Speaker 4: in nature. There is no reason for that. That is
Speaker 4: not done. We shouldn't do that, but that's how things are.
Speaker 4: We did it because somebody else did it. So mature ornamentals,
Speaker 4: when they're established, need very little printing if they were
Speaker 4: prinned well through their life. You remove broken limbs, if
Speaker 4: you've got a disease limb, If you've got some rubbing
Speaker 4: limbs and things, you can do that. But in general,
Speaker 4: our goal is to get the printing done earlier in
Speaker 4: the tree's life and create the strongest, most beautiful structure
Speaker 4: that you can. All Right, that kind of sets us
Speaker 4: up for these nine printing mistakes we're going to avoid.
Speaker 4: I'm going to be going through them through the course
Speaker 4: of the show this day, and in the meantime you
Speaker 4: can give us a call at seven one three two
Speaker 4: one two k t r H and we'll talk about
Speaker 4: your questions. I'm gonna take a little break here and
Speaker 4: i'll be right back with the pruning mistake number one. Well,
Speaker 4: good morning, welcome back, Welcome back to Guardline. Good to
Speaker 4: have you with us today. We are going through nine
Speaker 4: pruning mistakes to avoid. Now I suspect there's probably more
Speaker 4: than nine, but well, we're just going to pick on
Speaker 4: nine today, things that I see often made and that
Speaker 4: we can definitely definitely avoid. So here we go. Pruning
Speaker 4: mistake numero number one, not necessarily the biggest one, just
Speaker 4: the one we're starting with dull, poorly adjusted tools. If
Speaker 4: you want to make a really clean cut and you
Speaker 4: want to make a cut that, let's say, causes less
Speaker 4: wear and tear on your joints, your hands, your elbows,
Speaker 4: your shoulders, spinning on whether using hand punters or loppers
Speaker 4: or whatever. A nice sharp pair of prunters is important.
Speaker 4: That is very important. That kind of cut will heal
Speaker 4: the fastest. Poorly adjusted pruners that are the blade doesn't
Speaker 4: like scissor slide right past the other side of the
Speaker 4: pruners nice and smooth and tight. It ends up stripping
Speaker 4: away wood. And when you strip away wood, when you
Speaker 4: make a cut, that causes the area that heals the
Speaker 4: best to be sort of torn through and it ends
Speaker 4: up being a much lower healing wound where you run
Speaker 4: into all kinds of problems. You want to sharpen your prunters,
Speaker 4: keep them sharp. It's easier to make that cut. And
Speaker 4: you know, if you're done quite a bit of pruning,
Speaker 4: it does take a wear and tear on your hands.
Speaker 4: It does take aware and tearing also in your elbows.
Speaker 4: I used to have a peach orchard and we were
Speaker 4: through that orchard all the time pruning and lopping, and
Speaker 4: I'm telling you you'd be surprised your elbows and shoulders
Speaker 4: get pretty tired on that. I'm a sort of biased
Speaker 4: toward by pass type pruners as opposed to the anvil types.
Speaker 4: So the bypass types again, that's the scissor types where
Speaker 4: the two blades pass by right up against each other.
Speaker 4: The anvil types is where a blade comes down on
Speaker 4: a flat surface on the other side of the prunter.
Speaker 4: It's almost like you're taking a hatchet and chopping down
Speaker 4: on a wood block. That kind of pruning. Those kind
Speaker 4: I find often are more difficult to do a good
Speaker 4: job on pruning with. So keep them sharp, keep them adjusted,
Speaker 4: and certainly you're going to do a better job. Number Two,
Speaker 4: pruning plants that only bloom in the spring in the wintertime.
Speaker 4: So here's what I'm saying. If you have a plant
Speaker 4: that only blooms in the spring, you know, for those
Speaker 4: of you who used to live further north, that would
Speaker 4: be like Forsythia. Down here, we got the azaleas, a spyrieas,
Speaker 4: a flowering quints what we call once blooming roses like
Speaker 4: lady By that blooms in the spring, but it doesn't
Speaker 4: bloom again all year until next spring. You don't want
Speaker 4: to prune those in the winter. Because you're cutting away
Speaker 4: the bloom buds that they have, and they've already set
Speaker 4: their bloom buds. They do that in late summer and
Speaker 4: fall for next year, and so pruning them now means
Speaker 4: you're cutting away your bloom buds. So wait until after
Speaker 4: they bloom and then prune them. Wait until after they
Speaker 4: bloom and then prune them.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 4: Someone may say, well, wait a minute, Like a peach
Speaker 4: tree only blooms in the string spring, but we bloom
Speaker 4: it and we prune it in the winter. Yes, on
Speaker 4: fruit trees, we are not worried about cutting away some
Speaker 4: of the bloom buds. We're most concerned about bringing light
Speaker 4: in because there's going to be plenty of blooms all
Speaker 4: over and we're going to have to thin it anyway.
Speaker 4: So doing winter pruning for those is fine because we're
Speaker 4: trying to have a select number of fruit that get
Speaker 4: large and tasty. Whereas with the ornamental plant, our goal
Speaker 4: is just to have as many blooms as we can
Speaker 4: over it. So if it only blooms in the spring
Speaker 4: aside from fruit, if it only blooms in the spring
Speaker 4: and not through the year, don't proNT it in the winter.
Speaker 4: Wait until after it blooms. Let's see another one, shearing
Speaker 4: or hedging plants that don't necessarily need to be shared
Speaker 4: or hedged. I have seen a number of different kinds
Speaker 4: of plants that are beautiful in a natural shape but
Speaker 4: look ridiculous when they're hedged. One would be the sage
Speaker 4: Soniso Texas sage silver leaf, usually a silver leafed kind
Speaker 4: of plant that blooms the colored a barometer bush because
Speaker 4: it blooms in conjunction with rainstorms that come through. That
Speaker 4: one looks better in a natural form. If you hedge it,
Speaker 4: it just doesn't look right. It just doesn't look right
Speaker 4: at all. A glossy abelia another one that blooms in
Speaker 4: a natural form and looks so much better that way
Speaker 4: than when you hedge it. Now there are plants that
Speaker 4: we hedge. We want to create a hedge a wall
Speaker 4: of shrub. I understand that, But think about the plant
Speaker 4: and how it looks the best, Especially things that have
Speaker 4: arching branches that kind of arch over and weep down
Speaker 4: to the sides, like a spurrea, for example, That would
Speaker 4: look ridiculous hedge. So make that decision. There is a
Speaker 4: there is a difference between a head a heading cut
Speaker 4: and a thinning cut. And here's what I mean by that.
Speaker 4: If you go out and you cut a branch off
Speaker 4: and just lop it off, that's a heading cut. When
Speaker 4: you're through prining, it looks like the top of a
Speaker 4: broom handle. You just chopped it right off there. What
Speaker 4: the plant does in response is it grows a bunch
Speaker 4: of shoots up just below that cut. And you've seen
Speaker 4: this before. This is what happens to craigles all the time.
Speaker 4: Heading cuts. They just lop them off, and so here
Speaker 4: comes this crows foot of growth. Like if you were
Speaker 4: to hold your arm upward and take your fingers and
Speaker 4: then just kind of spread them outward. That kind of
Speaker 4: crows foot of growth going up and out in all directions.
Speaker 4: That's what a heading cut does. If you're making a hedge,
Speaker 4: you want that because where there was one shoot, now
Speaker 4: you got several shoots, and then you hedge those. And
Speaker 4: where you had several shoots, now you have a whole
Speaker 4: bunch of shoots and you create a nice wall of foliage.
Speaker 4: That's for hedges, But when you want to make a
Speaker 4: natural form, you use something called a thinning cut. A
Speaker 4: thinning cut, I'm going to keep using the hand as
Speaker 4: The analogy here is if you hold your hand up
Speaker 4: and your fingers are together, but your thumb is going
Speaker 4: out to the side, and you wanted to remove your
Speaker 4: hand with the part of the fingers, you cut it
Speaker 4: right above where your thumb attaches, and what would be
Speaker 4: left is your arm coming up and then your thumb
Speaker 4: going out. Think of it like a highway with an
Speaker 4: exit ramp. If you put a block, a blockade, a
Speaker 4: barrier on the highway just past the exit ramp, all
Speaker 4: the traffic coming down the highway would have to exit
Speaker 4: that exit ramp. That's a thinning cut. And that's how
Speaker 4: a thinning cut works. You don't get as much stimulation
Speaker 4: of all this brushy new crowsfoot growth there unless the
Speaker 4: sizes of the two are dramatically different. But you direct
Speaker 4: the traffic outward. Now, when you use thinning cuts, let's
Speaker 4: go back to that Texas stage that I was talking about.
Speaker 4: When you use thinning cuts, you may have a couple
Speaker 4: of wild hairs. This is what happened on Azelia too.
Speaker 4: By the way, you get this gangly shoot, this wild
Speaker 4: hair coming out, it's like I want to get rid
Speaker 4: of that. Follow it down to where it joined where
Speaker 4: it has a side shoot and cut it off right there.
Speaker 4: And when you do thinning cuts and you finish pruning,
Speaker 4: you step back and you look at the plant, and
Speaker 4: had you not known that it was just prune, someone
Speaker 4: walking up to it wouldn't hardly notice that had been pruned.
Speaker 4: It would still have that natural form to it. By
Speaker 4: thinning cuts, And that is important. That's what we should
Speaker 4: be doing. If we have to prune a great myrtle,
Speaker 4: that's what we should be doing for that. All right,
Speaker 4: that's certainly true with fruit trees and bushes. Heading cuts
Speaker 4: are almost never a good idea. We do thinning cuts
Speaker 4: on our peaches and apples and pears and fruit in general.
Speaker 4: All right. Number four, where are we on time? I
Speaker 4: got to watch my time here. Number four is letting
Speaker 4: hedges get top heavy. This happens all the time. Hedges
Speaker 4: tend to grow outward at the top. So instead of
Speaker 4: that you know, straight walled hedge that you're making, what
Speaker 4: it ends up doing is becoming a capital V. The
Speaker 4: top gets wider and wider, and when that happens, the
Speaker 4: light can't reach down into the lower sections of the hedge,
Speaker 4: so that hedge that you put up to block a
Speaker 4: view to create a landscape. Wall suddenly becomes see through
Speaker 4: and your neighbor who likes to uh somebaye than his speedo's.
Speaker 4: Now unfortunately we have that unsightly view well because we've
Speaker 4: lost the foliage in the hedge. So what you want
Speaker 4: to do is keep the tops of hedges, at least
Speaker 4: the walls vertical. But it's better to go a little
Speaker 4: narrower at the top. So I'll use I use the
Speaker 4: letter capital V as what happens as it goes wrong.
Speaker 4: Now i'll just say capital A. But of course you're
Speaker 4: not going to make it, you know, like a Christmas
Speaker 4: tree shape. But you want the top being a little
Speaker 4: more narrow. That's what we're aiming for, and that way
Speaker 4: light shines on the top. The top's always going to
Speaker 4: be fine, and the top's always going to be where
Speaker 4: moot growth occurs. But all the lower parts of the
Speaker 4: hedge now get light and they maintain foliage, and you
Speaker 4: have the nice wall that you were looking for. And
Speaker 4: when I use the term capital A, I don't mean
Speaker 4: that slanted narrow at the top, but just a little
Speaker 4: more narrow at the top. That is one of the
Speaker 4: most common mistakes I make. I see it everywhere, and
Speaker 4: plants are going to fight you on this. They you know,
Speaker 4: you cut narrower at the top, and you come back
Speaker 4: when it's time to prune again, and the bottom hadn't
Speaker 4: grown out much at all, and the top is just
Speaker 4: pushing out, and so people keep letting it do that,
Speaker 4: and it just gets worse and worse and worse. This
Speaker 4: happens to boxwoods, this happens to yo pine hedges, happens
Speaker 4: to a lot of different things. You got to keep
Speaker 4: those hedges more narrow at the top. And remember, pruning
Speaker 4: is a stimulating process, so when you cut, it stimulates
Speaker 4: new growth to occur, and you're guiding and controlling how
Speaker 4: that growth occurs, so that whatever kind of plants you're pruning,
Speaker 4: all we've talked about a bunch of different kinds of plants,
Speaker 4: whatever kind of plant your punting, you achieve the goal
Speaker 4: that you're trying to achieve by doing that kind of
Speaker 4: pruning to it. We are about here, time for another
Speaker 4: quick break. I will be back in just a moment.
Speaker 4: We're going to give you continue on with our nine
Speaker 4: common pruning mistakes. As we get to pruning mistake number five,
Speaker 4: I want to remind you that my website, Gardening with
Speaker 4: Skip dot com contains a new publication on growing transplants,
Speaker 4: the lighting that you need to grow transplants. I'll be
Speaker 4: adding to it one about how to grow transplants. This
Speaker 4: one is just about the lighting. We'll be right back
Speaker 4: all right, folks, welcome back to Guardline. We're going to
Speaker 4: jump right back into our list of nine common pruning
Speaker 4: mistakes the people make, and we are hopping back in
Speaker 4: here at number five. Number five is leaving stubs. What
Speaker 4: is a stub? A stub is when you cut a
Speaker 4: branch off, and when you don't cut it off at
Speaker 4: the proper spot, pretty close to where it joins the
Speaker 4: trunk or another branch, and so you leave this little
Speaker 4: stub maybe an inch long, two inches long, sometimes longer.
Speaker 4: But those stubs tend to die back. They don't heal over,
Speaker 4: and now you've got this dead little piece of wood
Speaker 4: that prevents the branch from being able to close that
Speaker 4: wound over. I use the term I used the term heal.
Speaker 4: Trees don't heal, They close over the wound, that's what happens.
Speaker 4: But the stub is in the way and it will
Speaker 4: not close over right, and now decayb comes gets in
Speaker 4: that branch and it then enters the interior of the tree.
Speaker 4: And so now eventually you end up with a hollow
Speaker 4: trunk tree if it goes that far. But don't leave stubs.
Speaker 4: You don't want it'll just die and be a place
Speaker 4: for problems. There are proper ways to prune where you
Speaker 4: don't leave shrubs are stubs. There's inproper ways to prune,
Speaker 4: and so let's just talk about that. In fact, this
Speaker 4: is sort of a it's number five is leaving stubs.
Speaker 4: We're going to make it a little longer than just
Speaker 4: leaving stubs and stretch into a little bit the proper
Speaker 4: way to make that cut when a branch comes into
Speaker 4: a tree. And by the way, I posted something to
Speaker 4: the garden line facebook page, a little video clip where
Speaker 4: I marked on a plant and then showed you exactly
Speaker 4: with the marks on the planet where to print. And
Speaker 4: we're not to print. You don't want to leave a stub,
Speaker 4: But on the other hand, you don't want to flush
Speaker 4: cut right up against the trunk. So if you were
Speaker 4: to look at a cross section of a branch, it's
Speaker 4: a certain size. Whatever size the branch is going toward
Speaker 4: the trunk, and all of a sudden, when it gets
Speaker 4: to the trunk, it flares out where it attaches to
Speaker 4: the trunk. So once it starts to flare, the further
Speaker 4: the closer to the trunk you prune, the bigger that
Speaker 4: wound is getting. So what might let's say it's a
Speaker 4: small branch what might have been like an inch size wound,
Speaker 4: Then as you go closer, may end up becoming a
Speaker 4: two and a half inch size wound. And that's a
Speaker 4: lot larger wound, And of course on bigger plants it's
Speaker 4: even more exaggerated. That larger wound is going to have
Speaker 4: to go further closing over, and we wanted to close fast,
Speaker 4: So that's not good. Also, where a branch attaches to
Speaker 4: the trunk on many types of trees, there is called
Speaker 4: a branch collar, and the tissues in that branch collar
Speaker 4: are the best for healing or for closing over the
Speaker 4: wound callousen closing over that wound quickly. So when you
Speaker 4: cut too close to the trunk, you remove the branch collar.
Speaker 4: So not only do you have a bigger wound, but
Speaker 4: it's going to now heal slower or close over slower.
Speaker 4: In the meantime, So the goal is to follow that.
Speaker 4: In general, every species grows differently. You know, pines are
Speaker 4: different than maples, and maples are different than oaks and
Speaker 4: the way they attach things. But follow the branch toward
Speaker 4: the trunk and right where it begins to fly out.
Speaker 4: That's about where you make the cut. Now, I know
Speaker 4: that's you know, go online look it up. You can
Speaker 4: kind of see there's some good information online on where
Speaker 4: to make that cut. But in general, just a quick
Speaker 4: way is just follow it down and where it's where
Speaker 4: the branch diameter starts to get bigger as it attaches.
Speaker 4: Right about there is where you make that cut that
Speaker 4: leaves the branch collar on. It still is a very
Speaker 4: small wound and it's going to close over much much faster.
Speaker 4: So don't leave stubs, don't flush cut, leave the leave
Speaker 4: the branch collar. Make that cut at the right place.
Speaker 4: That is important. Number six is waiting too long to
Speaker 4: decide which of two vigorous upright shoots to leave is
Speaker 4: the main trunk. Have you ever had a little tree
Speaker 4: and it sort of has two trunks or two branches
Speaker 4: coming up, and it's like either of those could be
Speaker 4: the main trunk and they are in competition, and it
Speaker 4: is a competition on the plant between those And if
Speaker 4: you think that it's hard to decide which one to
Speaker 4: take off, that's why people leave them. It's like I
Speaker 4: don't know which one to leave. I'll come back think
Speaker 4: about it later. Well, it'll be harder later when you
Speaker 4: make that decision. And if you keep leaving it and
Speaker 4: you go a couple of years into the process, now
Speaker 4: you've got When you make that cut, you're gonna have
Speaker 4: a lopsided tree because all the branches from one trunk
Speaker 4: are going one direction and all the branches from the
Speaker 4: other trunk are going the other direction. So when you
Speaker 4: take one of those trunks out, now you have this
Speaker 4: tree looks like it was split cut in half. What
Speaker 4: you need to do is do it sooner. Always, always
Speaker 4: do it sooner.
Speaker 5: Even.
Speaker 4: Let me put it this way, don't worry about picking
Speaker 4: the right one. Pick one, Pick one that you think
Speaker 4: is the right one, and you'll be fine. You'll be fine.
Speaker 4: Just don't leave it. The longer you leave it, the
Speaker 4: bigger the wound will be when you cut it, the
Speaker 4: more malformed the tree will be after you remove the
Speaker 4: one that needs to be removing and the kind of
Speaker 4: wound you make, there's not a branch collar on that
Speaker 4: kind of cut, and it's going to be very slow
Speaker 4: to heal. Make that decision, and if you have to
Speaker 4: use a saw to make the decision, you've waited too long.
Speaker 4: But go ahead and saw it now, don't wait. I
Speaker 4: hope I pressed that hard enough, because that is a
Speaker 4: common mistake people may. Here's what happens if you don't
Speaker 4: remove them. These two branches are growing close to each
Speaker 4: other and in a narrow angle, a narrow V shaped
Speaker 4: branch angle. As each branch gets bigger, it grows in diameter,
Speaker 4: and at some point they start pressing together. And they're
Speaker 4: continuing to grow in diameter. So it's like you know
Speaker 4: two kids in the back seat that are sitting too
Speaker 4: close together and they can keep their hands on it.
Speaker 4: They pushing on each other and fighting. They're just pressing apart,
Speaker 4: and that is pressing, causing a split pressure to form
Speaker 4: there in the branch. Now, when you get a storm,
Speaker 4: it's gonna split. And when it splits, you'll see all
Speaker 4: this black rotting bark on the one that's left upright.
Speaker 4: The other one split off and fell off to the
Speaker 4: side that's that included bark that it can't heal across there,
Speaker 4: it cannot join across there. And so that's what happens
Speaker 4: when you have competing narrow branch angles and you let
Speaker 4: it go and go and go, and if you don't
Speaker 4: make the decision, a storm will make it for you later.
Speaker 4: Think of it that way. I think that probably makes
Speaker 4: some sense there, right, storm will make that decision for
Speaker 4: you later. So that was number six. Waiting too long
Speaker 4: to do that. We're going to come back in a
Speaker 4: while here with some other tips for these nine printing mistakes,
Speaker 4: starting with let's see number seven. But for right now,
Speaker 4: I just want to say, you're talking about printing.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 4: Martin spoon Moore at Affordable Tree, he is an expert
Speaker 4: in knowing how to prunt and when to print and
Speaker 4: when not to print. Martin can come out and he
Speaker 4: can take a look at your trees and see what
Speaker 4: is and what is not needed. A lot of folks
Speaker 4: come out and just because they're there, they're gonna cut something,
Speaker 4: you know, I mean, they're gonna they're gonna do some
Speaker 4: sort of butcher job. I drive down the streets all
Speaker 4: the time and see people that a bad printing service
Speaker 4: if you will, has has done damage to the tree
Speaker 4: that is not it's not going to recover from. You know,
Speaker 4: they look like hat racks sometimes when they get through
Speaker 4: with them. Martin didn't do that kind of work. He
Speaker 4: does proper work. That's why he is very busy because
Speaker 4: he does a good job and people have him come back.
Speaker 4: You can get Martin to call at seven one three
Speaker 4: six ninety nine twenty six sixty three. That's seven one
Speaker 4: three six nine nine two six sixty three and have
Speaker 4: him come out and take a look at your plants
Speaker 4: when you do that call, or your trees. When you
Speaker 4: do that call, you're going to talk to Martin or Joe.
Speaker 4: And uh. If you don't hear Martin or Joe, hang up,
Speaker 4: you call the wrong place. Dallas seven to one three
Speaker 4: six ninety nine two six six three. We are in
Speaker 4: the Christmas season and it is time to find that
Speaker 4: gift for that hard to buy for person on your list,
Speaker 4: and I would suggest Warbirds Unlimited. Warbirds Unlimited has all
Speaker 4: kinds of beautiful bird feeders and bird houses. They have
Speaker 4: birds seed, they have you know, maybe you just get
Speaker 4: one of the little suit cakes with the little cage
Speaker 4: they go in and you put that out there on
Speaker 4: the tree. Maybe you need a hummingbird feeder. There are
Speaker 4: a lot of cool, beautiful gifts that Wallbird's Unlimited. For
Speaker 4: people that are really into birds. There is a book
Speaker 4: by the founder that is outstanding, all about bird. Just
Speaker 4: going to Walbirds. I want the book about birds by
Speaker 4: the founder of Warbirds and it is an awesome, awesome book. Now,
Speaker 4: while you're in there for yourself, grab some of the
Speaker 4: Wallbirds Unlimited Winter super blows and it is the feed
Speaker 4: that is best to be feeding. Right now, I'm gonna
Speaker 4: take a little break and we'll be back with more
Speaker 4: of the nine priunting mistakes. Welcome back to garden Line.
Speaker 4: Thanks for joining us today. By the way, this is
Speaker 4: a call in show. Don't you don't have to just
Speaker 4: listen to me dron on here. You can give me
Speaker 4: a call if you got a question. Seven to one
Speaker 4: three two one two k t r H seven one
Speaker 4: three two one two kt r H. We are going
Speaker 4: through nine common pruning mistakes that I see people make,
Speaker 4: taking them one at a time here as we go through.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 4: I wanted to mention something first though, and that is
Speaker 4: if you are looking for a quality product to take
Speaker 4: care of your soil, to prepare for planting, to uh
Speaker 4: cover the surface of your soil, to make sure that
Speaker 4: it is well malt so the weeds are kept down,
Speaker 4: so that rain and erosion and temperature fluctuations and all
Speaker 4: the things that the weather can give us don't affect
Speaker 4: your plants. Well, do what nature does. Nature puts some
Speaker 4: molts of organic material on the ground, and Landscaper's Pride
Speaker 4: has got you covered on that. They've got a black
Speaker 4: velvet multch. It's naturally black, not dyed. It is a
Speaker 4: really beautiful and as you put it down, it is
Speaker 4: bulky enough to cover properly and just make a nice
Speaker 4: covering on the surface, and the plants thrive from it.
Speaker 4: Look at nature. Nature does not like bear soil. Nature
Speaker 4: is either going to drop dead leaves on it like
Speaker 4: it does in the forest, or it's going to cover
Speaker 4: it with weeds, which we don't want it to do
Speaker 4: in our flower beds and our gardens and things. Black
Speaker 4: velvet molts does it. Cedar malts very. I love the
Speaker 4: fragrance of fresh cedar mults going out and the color
Speaker 4: of it too. Landscaper's Pride has that They also have
Speaker 4: a topsoil material. And I've talked to a lot of
Speaker 4: people this year that have had problems with their lawn
Speaker 4: areas dying out. They're talking about re sotting some things.
Speaker 4: This is a good time go in there with their
Speaker 4: top soil. It's a sandy loam mixed with some compost
Speaker 4: fill in those low spots. Level it out. If you've
Speaker 4: got a garden bed your building up. You know, organic
Speaker 4: matters that decomposes kind of shrinks back down again, and
Speaker 4: that's why the pots on your patio that you put
Speaker 4: you filled two years ago now are about half full
Speaker 4: of soil because it's oxidized away. But this topsoil material,
Speaker 4: with the sandy loam and compost, you've got a good
Speaker 4: solid sandy loam in there. So it'd be good for
Speaker 4: building up into a bed, for refreshing that bed, for
Speaker 4: mixing into the soil, and also, like I said, for
Speaker 4: repairing those areas. Landscapers Pride products are widely available in
Speaker 4: our area. You can go to Landscaperspride dot com and
Speaker 4: find out exactly where to buy them in your area.
Speaker 4: But they are very widely available and they work. I
Speaker 4: was looking at some of the products and things that
Speaker 4: they have at Plants for all seasons, and you know
Speaker 4: they always have whatever is well, look at the name
Speaker 4: Plants for all seasons. They always have whatever you need
Speaker 4: for the season you're in. You know, right now you
Speaker 4: want winter color, they've got it. Blanch for all seasons.
Speaker 4: Maybe you want some bulbs for forcing or for planting
Speaker 4: outdoors for spring, they've got it. Maybe you are looking
Speaker 4: for some decorations for the holiday, well, of course they
Speaker 4: got that, plenty of it. They're seed drag a whole
Speaker 4: wall full of seeds, and it is time to be
Speaker 4: starting seeds. Remember my publication on lighting for growing plants
Speaker 4: plant transplants is on the website. It's free. You can
Speaker 4: go download it and take a look at it and
Speaker 4: grab you some seed plant for all seasons and go
Speaker 4: after it. They also have other supplies that you need
Speaker 4: for seed starting. You know, they've been around since nineteen
Speaker 4: seventy three. They're located just north of Lueta on FM
Speaker 4: two forty nine to forty nine. That is the Tomball Parkway,
Speaker 4: just north of Lueta. You can call them up at
Speaker 4: two eight one, three seven six sixteen forty six or
Speaker 4: go to the website Plants for All seasons dot com.
Speaker 4: When you go in there, you're gonna get good advice,
Speaker 4: You're gonna get good plants, You're gonna get things that
Speaker 4: want to grow here and help solving some of the
Speaker 4: plant problems that may arise down the line with your
Speaker 4: lawns and your gardens and trees and shrubs, plants for
Speaker 4: all seasons. They're experts at that, true lawn and garden experts. Well,
Speaker 4: let's go back into our nine pruning mistakes that people
Speaker 4: tend to make, and we are going to go to
Speaker 4: number seven, and that is not using what we call
Speaker 4: the three cut method when we remove a large limb.
Speaker 4: So I don't know if this has ever happened to you,
Speaker 4: but it happens a lot to people. People are going
Speaker 4: to cut a large branch off and they try to
Speaker 4: do it with one cut, and they go right to
Speaker 4: where you should cut, or wherever they make the cut.
Speaker 4: They start cutting down, and then the weight of that
Speaker 4: branch causes it to fall, and as it falls, it
Speaker 4: strips the bark off the trunk or the branch that
Speaker 4: it's attached to. And now you've got this long strip
Speaker 4: where the bark's been removed that is going to heal
Speaker 4: extremely slow because you've torn through the branch collar and
Speaker 4: torn down the side of the trunk, and it's a
Speaker 4: bad wound that takes a very long time to close
Speaker 4: back over. Instead of doing that, you can use what's
Speaker 4: called the three cut method. Okay, And here's what you do.
Speaker 4: And there are lots of diagrams out there online if
Speaker 4: you just do three cut method pruning to just type
Speaker 4: something like that into your search three cut method printing.
Speaker 4: But basically here it is. Now you know from listening
Speaker 4: to what I said earlier, that you want to prune
Speaker 4: the branch off right outside the branch collar, almost to
Speaker 4: the trunk, but not quite. Okay, Now that's going to
Speaker 4: be the last cut that you make. The first cut.
Speaker 4: You go out from there, and it depends on the branch.
Speaker 4: And the branch may be as big as your wrist,
Speaker 4: it may be as big as your leg, I mean,
Speaker 4: you know, So just go out maybe I would say,
Speaker 4: probably about about a foot somewhere between six inches and
Speaker 4: a foot out, probably more closer to a foot, and
Speaker 4: prune upward from underneath the branch only a third of
Speaker 4: the way through. If you go too far, it's going
Speaker 4: to sag down and pinch your saw and you're not
Speaker 4: gonna be able to get your saw out of there.
Speaker 4: So about a third of the way cut upward, then
Speaker 4: go further out and from the top prune downward. When
Speaker 4: I say further out, I mean like, oh, it could
Speaker 4: be you know, four inches or six inches further out.
Speaker 4: Prune down and what's going to happen? At some point
Speaker 4: that branch is going to fall and break. But by
Speaker 4: making that first cut you prevent it from stripping down.
Speaker 4: It just snaps off there, and now you're left with
Speaker 4: this big stub which you can hold to one hand
Speaker 4: and cut down in the final cut, which is right
Speaker 4: at the outside the branch collar. So one, two three.
Speaker 4: If that didn't make sense, go online. There's plenty of pictures.
Speaker 4: But if this brand is too heavy for you to
Speaker 4: hold with one hand, don't overestimate your ability there. Uh,
Speaker 4: then it needs to be removed with a three cut
Speaker 4: method or you will be sorry. All right, Well, that
Speaker 4: was seven of our nine printing mistakes people make. We're
Speaker 4: gonna come back with number eight and nine here in
Speaker 4: just a moment. I appreciate you listening to the Garden
Speaker 4: Line our phone number if you'd like to get on
Speaker 4: the line with with Jonathan seven one three two one
Speaker 4: two k t R SO and we'll talk to you
Speaker 4: when we come back.
Speaker 1: Welcome to k t r H Garden Line with Skin Rictor.
Speaker 7: It's just watch as.
Speaker 5: Hey.
Speaker 4: Welcome back, Welcome back to the guard Line. We are
Speaker 4: glad to have you with us.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 4: If you uh had issues with the storms that we
Speaker 4: had this year that took out trees and knocked out
Speaker 4: power and all of that, you you probably have been
Speaker 4: thinking about, uh, maybe I ought to get a generator
Speaker 4: for the house. And you know there's the kind you
Speaker 4: have to put gas in and pull out, pull out
Speaker 4: and fire up in order to get them to work.
Speaker 4: And you know, they generally cover a small amount of
Speaker 4: the different things that you would need power for in
Speaker 4: the house. But then there's the whole house generators. Whole
Speaker 4: home generators, a generat automatic standby generator is one of
Speaker 4: those kinds of things. You can get those from Quality
Speaker 4: Home Products. They are the placed to get them. As
Speaker 4: a matter of fact, you know, it's not just the
Speaker 4: generator that you need to be concerned about in your purchase,
Speaker 4: it's the service that you get. And Quality Home they
Speaker 4: rule the roost when it comes to quality service. For example,
Speaker 4: over seventy seven thousand satisfied customers, fourteen thousand and five
Speaker 4: star reviews eight times. They've won the Better Business Bureau's
Speaker 4: most prestigious Customer Service Award, the Pinnacle Award. Twenty twenty four.
Speaker 4: Next Door gave them the Neighborhood Fave Award for outstanding
Speaker 4: service and Products. You can go to qualitytx dot com
Speaker 4: to find out more Quality tx dot com or dial
Speaker 4: seven one three Quality, give them a call, talk to
Speaker 4: them about it. They will come out and they will.
Speaker 4: First of all, they'll help you find the generator that
Speaker 4: works best for what you need. They'll ask you questions
Speaker 4: and you know, figure out what kind of generator, what
Speaker 4: size and all of that, how do you want to
Speaker 4: what do you want it to be able to do?
Speaker 4: And then they'll walk through every stage of the process
Speaker 4: from getting the proper permits and regulations to getting it
Speaker 4: set up. And then of course, as I have already said,
Speaker 4: uh service after the sale. That is the most important
Speaker 4: thing when you were making a purchase, and Quality Home
Speaker 4: Products excels at that you were listening to Guardline, We're
Speaker 4: gonna go out to the phones here. First thing right now,
Speaker 4: and talk to Earl up in or out in Bay Cliff, Texas. Hey, Earl,
Speaker 4: welcome to garden Line. Early there. Yes, I am all right,
Speaker 4: Welcome to garden Line. How can we help today.
Speaker 8: I've got a problem with jungle rice in my Saint
Speaker 8: Augustine Gres. I've had that problem three or four years ago.
Speaker 8: I went to Moss Nursery and they gave me a
Speaker 8: couple of products, but they said at that time there
Speaker 8: was no cure for jungle rice. And I'm just check
Speaker 8: it back two or three years later with you guys
Speaker 8: to see if there is any cure for it now.
Speaker 4: Well, the problem is when you try to kill a
Speaker 4: grass in a grass, grass killers kill the lawn and
Speaker 4: the grassy weed right right, And yeah, I think what
Speaker 4: I would do first is I would consider a pre
Speaker 4: emergent a pre emergent, excuse me. The what what we
Speaker 4: have found is if you can just stop it from
Speaker 4: even coming up from seed, that is probably the easiest
Speaker 4: way to be able to control it. And and once
Speaker 4: it comes up, the next step would be to consider
Speaker 4: doing a wiper type application to the jungle rice. It
Speaker 4: comes up vertically above your lawn, right, and so you
Speaker 4: can you can use a wiper to get the herbicide
Speaker 4: on jungle rice that translocates down and kills it without
Speaker 4: getting it on your lawn grass, So that that would
Speaker 4: be a wiper. A wiper is just a sponge or
Speaker 4: a sponge or some some thing that soaks up the
Speaker 4: herbicide and and then when you brush it against the planet,
Speaker 4: wipes it on there. If you go, if you go
Speaker 4: to my website Gardening with Skip dot com, there is
Speaker 4: a thing on there called Skips Herbicide weed wiper or
Speaker 4: Skip's weed wiper, and it tells you how to build one.
Speaker 4: They're very simple and expensive to build. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 4: it works, and you know, it's a little tedious to
Speaker 4: use on something that's all over the lawn, but the
Speaker 4: bottom line is it will work, and so I use
Speaker 4: it on for a lot of different kinds of things
Speaker 4: that we have to deal with, So that that would
Speaker 4: be Yeah, So that that is what I would try.
Speaker 8: Okay, I appreciate it enough, Thank you very much.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you bet, take care alrighty, you bet? Thanks? All right,
Speaker 4: there we go. Uh yeah, jungle riding. I first, I
Speaker 4: first found jungle rice in Austin, Texas when I was
Speaker 4: a horticulturist over there and uh, you know, we looked
Speaker 4: at it and what is that? I mean? And it
Speaker 4: was coming up like crazy and somebody's lawn. We don't
Speaker 4: see it everywhere, but it is across the country. And
Speaker 4: you know, there's even been uh uh glyfhasate resistant glaf
Speaker 4: states the ingredient and round up. There's even been now
Speaker 4: glyphasate resistant types of jungle rice popping up where people
Speaker 4: are just using glaphasate on it over and over again,
Speaker 4: and you have one that sprouts and it's resistant, and
Speaker 4: the next thing you know, you've got a a lot
Speaker 4: of these weeds that a product that used to work
Speaker 4: does not work anymore. That's true with insecticides, that's true
Speaker 4: with fungicides, that's true with the weeds as well. Another
Speaker 4: reason not to misuse products for sure. All right, Well,
Speaker 4: where were we we were in the process. I'm talking
Speaker 4: about nine pruning mistakes. Nine pruning mistakes that I see
Speaker 4: made a lot and we are now on number eight
Speaker 4: and that is leaving too many branches on fruit trees. Now,
Speaker 4: I know you can overdo pruning, but many people just
Speaker 4: hate to remove branches even that need to be removed,
Speaker 4: Unlike ornamental plants. The goal with your fruit trees is
Speaker 4: to produce a really nice yield, and so in order
Speaker 4: to do that, you gotta do quite a bit of pruning.
Speaker 4: You know, on grapes you may remove ninety percent of
Speaker 4: the growth that occurred that year and go back to
Speaker 4: just some little stubs with buds on them. If you
Speaker 4: look at how vineyards get pruned, even peach trees need
Speaker 4: quite a bit of pruning. Now, your trees are going
Speaker 4: to produce many times more blooms than they need to
Speaker 4: set a full load of fruit, and you got to
Speaker 4: get light into the tree. As light moves down in
Speaker 4: that fruit tree, it will cause bloom buds to set
Speaker 4: all the way down. If you don't let light. It's
Speaker 4: kind of like that shrub I was talking about before.
Speaker 4: If you don't let light in. Now you've got all
Speaker 4: your fruit up on the top of the branch and
Speaker 4: a bunch of dead sticks down in the bottom. You
Speaker 4: open those up. We prune peaches and plums in a
Speaker 4: bowl type or chalice type shape to let light get
Speaker 4: into the bottom. And you're picking peaches from your knees
Speaker 4: all the way up as high as you can reach,
Speaker 4: rather than getting on a ladder to get to the verse.
Speaker 4: Peaches that are on the tree, you got to remove those.
Speaker 4: You got to take out the water sprouts, the tall
Speaker 4: shoots that come from the interior of the tree, the
Speaker 4: suckers that come from the base of the tree, you
Speaker 4: clean those out. You clean those out, and just follow
Speaker 4: the instructions. If you look at a publication on Aggie Horticulture,
Speaker 4: Let's say you want to prune a peach. On Aggie
Speaker 4: Horticulture website, there's a fruit section and a particular publication
Speaker 4: just on all about grown peaches, including pruningum and that
Speaker 4: and guide you on that. But just know this, with
Speaker 4: fruit trees, we do quite a bit of pruning, more
Speaker 4: than most people think that they would want to do.
Speaker 4: All right, it was time for me to take another break.
Speaker 4: I'll be back with our final of the nine pruning mistakes.
Speaker 4: All right, welcome back to garden line. Well, shoot tops, Hey,
Speaker 4: I'm going to continue talking about some pruning things. But
Speaker 4: if you would like to get us call, maybe you
Speaker 4: get a question. All you gotta do is doll seven
Speaker 4: one three two one two k t R eight seven
Speaker 4: to one three two one two k t R eight.
Speaker 4: Simple as that be Canni's Plants and the Heights. Boy there,
Speaker 4: it's so festive there at the holiday season. The decorations
Speaker 4: and things that they have, it's just fun. It's always
Speaker 4: a fun place. They always have great events and stuff.
Speaker 4: Speaking of decorations and things, right now, you can get
Speaker 4: thirty percent off all the wreaths and stems and garland
Speaker 4: and outdoor holiday decor that they have. You know, the
Speaker 4: are the faux wreaths that just they look so real.
Speaker 4: They're gorgeous and if you haven't done all your holiday
Speaker 4: decorating yet, you got to get over there. I mean,
Speaker 4: they have a ton of really nice cool stuff. Really,
Speaker 4: I'm serious. It's the gift shop is unbelievable in there.
Speaker 4: I think those little nutcracker figurines or statues whatever you
Speaker 4: call them, are so cool and they have some of
Speaker 4: the most unique attractive ones that I've seen. They just
Speaker 4: I have a spot on my fireplace mantle I need
Speaker 4: to put something like that, I think, right next to
Speaker 4: the Christmas gnomes that are sitting up there hanging their
Speaker 4: feet off the side of the mantle. Buchanans can get
Speaker 4: you fixed up on then. Of course, Buchanans is all
Speaker 4: about Native plants and all kinds of plants as a
Speaker 4: matter of fact. But there's some great natives for winter.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 4: I was talking yesterday about planting a landscape to bring
Speaker 4: in for holiday decoration. I mentioned the yopon. Well, they
Speaker 4: have the Pride to Houston, which is one of the
Speaker 4: best cultivars of yopon. It up really really well, looks gorgeous.
Speaker 4: It's a nice plant, does well. I mentioned American Beauty Barrier.
Speaker 4: They've got those there, but they have a lot of
Speaker 4: things there. You can get your coral honeysuckle there. The
Speaker 4: Gulf Coast mulely one of the best grasses for our area.
Speaker 4: It does super well there. And even things like inland
Speaker 4: sea oats that have sort of like a their seedhead
Speaker 4: looks sort of like oats, and that's where it gets
Speaker 4: its name, but a lot bigger than oats seedheads. But
Speaker 4: it's a great groundcover, does good in shade. The plant
Speaker 4: seed heads are excellent for indoor decorating anyway. Just some examples.
Speaker 4: Buchanans plants. That's where you go. You ask the question,
Speaker 4: they give you the answer, and you go home and
Speaker 4: have a more beautiful garden landscape and indoors as a
Speaker 4: result of that. By the way, they're located on Eleventh
Speaker 4: Street in the heights here in the Greater Houston area
Speaker 4: or in Central Houston area. Let's see, I was on
Speaker 4: number was I number nine. The final pruning mistake that
Speaker 4: I'm going to talk about right now is over pruning
Speaker 4: a plant. Now, some people get busy cutting and they
Speaker 4: don't know when to stop, and the end result is
Speaker 4: some pretty bizarre landscape plants. It would seem more at
Speaker 4: home in a doctor Seuss book about that. I've seen
Speaker 4: some printing jobs where it's like, Okay, I don't know
Speaker 4: what to say about that. Only prune as much as
Speaker 4: is needed to accomplish a gol of training. Really, maybe
Speaker 4: you need to do some shaping, maybe you need to
Speaker 4: correct some things. Then put down the printers and step
Speaker 4: away so no one gets hurt, including the plant that
Speaker 4: you're pruning. That that is really true. Common examples of
Speaker 4: over pruning and miss pruning are prime example are lovely
Speaker 4: southern crepe myrtles their hack backed every year. I'll advise
Speaker 4: practice that. That is a good example. People don't know
Speaker 4: when to stop. Do you know that you cannot prune
Speaker 4: a great myrtle? Now? During its development and growth. I
Speaker 4: would recommend training. It don't go untrained, because then that
Speaker 4: makes a mess. It grows into a mess. But a
Speaker 4: little training, but then after that you kind of don't
Speaker 4: really prune them. I mean just a little bit here
Speaker 4: and there when something's not quite right, but they don't
Speaker 4: have to be pruned every year like you see people doing.
Speaker 4: Another example is pollarding trees. If you're not familiar with
Speaker 4: the pollarding, pollarding is where you take a nice tree
Speaker 4: and you cut it back to look like a hat rack.
Speaker 4: You got these big giant branches that are just cut
Speaker 4: off on the end, and then you get that crows
Speaker 4: foot of growth that comes out, and then they hack
Speaker 4: them back like that again. And this is done in Europe.
Speaker 4: You can go online to a search for pollarding p
Speaker 4: O L L A r D. It's done as an
Speaker 4: ornamental practice actually, but it is horrible in terms of
Speaker 4: branch structure, the the structural integrity of a tree, and
Speaker 4: I just think it looks ridiculous. So that's my opinion.
Speaker 4: But seriously, you can do some serious self education on
Speaker 4: puning before you head outside with the tools in hand.
Speaker 4: Your landscape plants, your orchard plants will be much more beautiful,
Speaker 4: much more productive for years to come with just doing
Speaker 4: a little bit of education. There's good books out there
Speaker 4: on printing. There's good websites out there on printing, and
Speaker 4: learn about the plant you're going to grow and how
Speaker 4: to take care of that plant. And I you know,
Speaker 4: I could take a whole show just talking about how
Speaker 4: to prine this, how to print that. There are some
Speaker 4: things like, okay, here's an example Nandina. Nandina sometimes called
Speaker 4: heavenly bamboo. The old type got really tall, over six
Speaker 4: feet high, and had berries on it, and it had
Speaker 4: underground little suckers that came out, and it's sort of
Speaker 4: the clump got bigger and bigger. The modern types are
Speaker 4: more compact. They don't tend to spread as fast as
Speaker 4: the other. I see people prune Inndina like a shrub.
Speaker 4: They share it. It looks ridiculous. It does look ridiculous
Speaker 4: if you cut it back then it just looks like
Speaker 4: you chop the top off of it. The way to
Speaker 4: print an indena is to remove the entire shoot at
Speaker 4: the ground. Now in Indina, think of it. It's kind
Speaker 4: of like bamboo and that you've got all these shoots
Speaker 4: coming out of the ground and growing straight up. You
Speaker 4: cut an old shoot that's not attractive, not productive, or
Speaker 4: maybe too tall for where you want it, cut it
Speaker 4: off at the ground, and new shoots will come up.
Speaker 4: So you could prone one fifth of the shoots out
Speaker 4: each year. You could go a couple of years and
Speaker 4: do no printing and then come in and do something.
Speaker 4: But the way to print inn Adena is just to
Speaker 4: cut the whole trunk, whole trunk shoot down off at
Speaker 4: the ground and pull it out of there. And that's
Speaker 4: real simple. But that's very unique to prune. I bet
Speaker 4: we prune bamboo that way too, by the way, But anyway,
Speaker 4: learn not each plant needs to be pruned, and then
Speaker 4: go out and do the pruning. Once you have done
Speaker 4: the work of pruning, you can't put things back. And
Speaker 4: this happens a lot on trees, but bad pruning practices
Speaker 4: or forever that when you truly ruin the structural integrity
Speaker 4: of a tree like that pollarding kind of thing, you're
Speaker 4: never going to get back to a nice, beautiful, well shaped, strong,
Speaker 4: good branch attachment tree. It's just not going to happen again. Well,
Speaker 4: I'm talking about pruning some things. We can also be
Speaker 4: pruning some of our groundcovers. And now what I mean
Speaker 4: by that, well, at the end of winter, before the
Speaker 4: new growth occurs, I recommend with loriope and with cast
Speaker 4: iron plant, for example, that you cut those back to
Speaker 4: near the ground. Over the course of a summer season.
Speaker 4: With some leaf diseases, maybe spider mites in the case
Speaker 4: of the loriiopy, and just the rag and tag of
Speaker 4: summer droughts and heat, they get to looking kind of
Speaker 4: shaggy and not so good. And if you cut it
Speaker 4: all back to the ground in early spring, it's gonna
Speaker 4: start popping up new growth out of that clump. And
Speaker 4: either you're gonna have a mix of old growth and
Speaker 4: new growth, or if you cut off all the old growth,
Speaker 4: now you have a fresh new lariope plant or plants
Speaker 4: or solid groundcover. Some people do and it looks good.
Speaker 4: Cast iron plants the same way. That is a tough plant.
Speaker 4: It can take shade, it can take sun, it can
Speaker 4: take drought. It is just a tough plant. But it
Speaker 4: starts looking ragged and each leaf is a big petiole
Speaker 4: coming out of the ground with a big fat leaf
Speaker 4: on the top. And you can just get on your
Speaker 4: hands and knees down there and cut all those off.
Speaker 4: I know some people that will cut the whole thing
Speaker 4: off and just rake it all out of there, so
Speaker 4: it's like they mot it off at the ground like
Speaker 4: your lawn, and then the fresh growth comes out. I
Speaker 4: know some people that just go in and cut the
Speaker 4: ugliest ones out and keep it fresh looking. It will
Speaker 4: come back and it will look good, and that is pruning.
Speaker 4: For those kind of groundcovers. Some people will mow things
Speaker 4: like an English ivy back or some other types of groundcovers.
Speaker 4: Mow it back to get fresh new growth coming out.
Speaker 4: And the other item that I want to mention in
Speaker 4: along the same lines, or ornamental grasses. Ornamental grasses are
Speaker 4: pruned back to just a kind of a stump. So
Speaker 4: perhaps you have what's called maiden grass or one of
Speaker 4: the mules. You can cut it back to just I
Speaker 4: don't know, maybe four inches six inches depending on the
Speaker 4: size of the plant high above the ground. Take all
Speaker 4: that growth out and fresh new growth comes out. Otherwise
Speaker 4: you got the mix and it doesn't look good. If
Speaker 4: you're going to do that, there's some techniques that work
Speaker 4: a little bit better. I like to take some twine
Speaker 4: and tie the ornamental grass that's spreading all out in
Speaker 4: all directions, tie it up. So you make a column
Speaker 4: out of that grass by tying it in a couple
Speaker 4: of places with twine, and then you just cut the
Speaker 4: grass off at the bottom and you pick the whole
Speaker 4: thing up and it's clean, nice, easy, all tidy. You
Speaker 4: carry it off, do what you're gonna do with it,
Speaker 4: and it looks good. If you go pruning, then now
Speaker 4: you're having to, you know, try to cut through it,
Speaker 4: and you got grass ling and everywhere. It's just a
Speaker 4: messier process. But if you bind it up first, you
Speaker 4: can use a bungee cord or twine or whatever you
Speaker 4: want to do, it really makes it a lot easier
Speaker 4: to do that. And that's just a tip for pruning
Speaker 4: the ornamental grasses. But whether you're pruning a loriapi or
Speaker 4: cast iron or ornamental grasses, get it done before the
Speaker 4: new growth comes. Like with the loriope, if you wait
Speaker 4: until new growth starts, I'll say you do it in
Speaker 4: mid February, you probably already got new growth. Then you're
Speaker 4: gonna have all these stubbed off new growth leaves that
Speaker 4: don't look right. So make that kind of pruning decision
Speaker 4: and get that done sooner rather than later. We could
Speaker 4: go on go on talking about how to prune this,
Speaker 4: how to prune that. There is if you want one
Speaker 4: resource that I can give you as a tip for pruning,
Speaker 4: the University of Georgia Extension Service. University of Georgia Extension Service.
Speaker 4: Do a search on there. I'm not going to read
Speaker 4: the whole urlt you, but do a search on there
Speaker 4: for pruning landscape plants or I think the title of
Speaker 4: it now is Basic Principles of Pruning woody plants or
Speaker 4: Pruning ornamental plants in the landscape those kinds of things.
Speaker 4: Is a really good publication. It explains heading cuts and
Speaker 4: pruning cuts. It explains the proper way to prune to
Speaker 4: you know, successfully cut these things off and end up
Speaker 4: with good results. And it helps you understand how plants
Speaker 4: respond to pruning, so you can make you can prune
Speaker 4: in a more educated way. Well, I'm going to take
Speaker 4: a break now and we'll come back with other types
Speaker 4: of topics as well as a conversation with Leon. You'll
Speaker 4: be our first up Leon when we come back. Welcome
Speaker 4: back to the garden line. I'm going to head straight
Speaker 4: to the phones and talk to Leon. Hello, Leon, welcome
Speaker 4: to garden Line.
Speaker 5: Thank you. How are you doing today?
Speaker 4: I'm doing well. I'm doing well.
Speaker 5: How can help well? I have a Myers lemon bush
Speaker 5: about it? They said it was a tree. We planted
Speaker 5: it and kept getting shorter and shorter till it turned
Speaker 5: into a bush. But this thing is about ten years
Speaker 5: old and it's got The leaves are black, and you know,
Speaker 5: when it's dry, I tried rubbing them and nothing comes off.
Speaker 5: But after a rain or something, you go out there
Speaker 5: and you can rub the leaves and this black stuff, yeah,
Speaker 5: starts coming off. And I checked with the local nursery.
Speaker 5: I said that probably would use some copper fung aside
Speaker 5: and what you know, water the bush real good and
Speaker 5: then put mix up a gallon of it and pour
Speaker 5: around the base. Well I did that and it really
Speaker 5: didn't help. And it said you might have to do
Speaker 5: it every seven to ten days till it's time to
Speaker 5: get the fruit off. Now, well that's back in February.
Speaker 4: First of all, do not do that anymore. Do not
Speaker 4: get copper around the base of the plant. That didn't
Speaker 4: accomplish it will not accomplish that. It's not systemic product.
Speaker 4: And you can cause issues and the soil by overloading
Speaker 4: it with copper. So what's happening on your lemon what's
Speaker 4: happening in your lemon tree? Leon is there are some
Speaker 4: small insects that are sucking the juices, the sugary sap
Speaker 4: out of the leaves or the stem and then they
Speaker 4: basically get the nutrients out of it and essentially just
Speaker 4: pee out a bunch of sugar water. They don't use
Speaker 4: the sugar part of it, and so that falls on
Speaker 4: the leaves is a mist, and the city mold grows
Speaker 4: on that. That's where the black is. The black is
Speaker 4: just a fungus growing on sugary substances on the leaf.
Speaker 4: So the black secondary it does shade out the leaves
Speaker 4: a little and so you have less of little synthesis
Speaker 4: and stuff. So you do want to get rid of it, right,
Speaker 4: So what insect is it? There's a bunch of insects
Speaker 4: that can do that. Aphids can do that, white flies,
Speaker 4: mealy bugs, and scale most likely your on your tree.
Speaker 4: You're looking at white flies or scale insects and they
Speaker 4: could be on the stems or they could be underneath
Speaker 4: the leaves. If you turn some leaves over you should
Speaker 4: see some really flat little things on there. White flies
Speaker 4: look like little fish scales. Now I know I use
Speaker 4: the word scale with white scale. Insects and white flies
Speaker 4: are two separate things. But the white fly pupa look
Speaker 4: like little flat fish scales, very small, like a lowercase
Speaker 4: typed o letter O on the bottom of a leaf.
Speaker 4: And so what you do with those is probably I
Speaker 4: would get a horticultural oil spray, and I would spray
Speaker 4: it upward from beneath the plant and make sure you
Speaker 4: coat all the undersides of all the leaves, and that
Speaker 4: smothers the scale and kills them. It smothers the white
Speaker 4: fly pupa also that are under the leaf, if they're
Speaker 4: part of what's causing it. I don't think you have
Speaker 4: aphids on your citrus, so I will eliminate aphids, which
Speaker 4: also produce or create city mole. But so it's going
Speaker 4: to be one of those two, most likely white flies
Speaker 4: and scale. I don't think it's mealy bugs. Those would
Speaker 4: look as like little puffy, cottony things typically like where
Speaker 4: a leaf comes off the stem some product.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I've kind of looked it over, and you know,
Speaker 5: I really don't see any insects or anything like that
Speaker 5: on there. This doesn't affect the fruit at all, does it.
Speaker 4: No, it doesn't. But the only way that it would
Speaker 4: affect is by cutting down on It's like you shaded
Speaker 4: your your tree with a shade over it, so you
Speaker 4: get less carbohydrate production, therefore less fruit set and the
Speaker 4: sugar and fruit is carbohydrates too. So yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 4: what I There are systemics that you can put on
Speaker 4: the ground and the roots take it up and they
Speaker 4: get in the plumbing of the plant and they kill
Speaker 4: the insects that are sucking those juices out of the plant.
Speaker 4: I don't know if I'm going to eat the fruit.
Speaker 4: I just prefer not to use a systemic insecticide. There's
Speaker 4: some that are labeled for that, but I have to
Speaker 4: mention that they're there. But I think you're going to
Speaker 4: do okay with horticultural oil. You're gonna have to do
Speaker 4: it repeatedly, and remember it's only going to work as
Speaker 4: good as your spray coverage was. So if one leaf
Speaker 4: birks your spray from hitting another leaf, then you're not
Speaker 4: going to get control in those areas where you didn't
Speaker 4: get oil.
Speaker 5: Okay, what I had a buddy of mine down at
Speaker 5: the local hardware store. He said, maybe use nimzol on
Speaker 5: it oil.
Speaker 4: Nim oil is it is a plant based type of oil,
Speaker 4: and you may have some results from that. You may
Speaker 4: have decent results from that too, depends on what you're
Speaker 4: going after. Check also the branches of the plant for
Speaker 4: little bumps or structures that might be scale insects, just
Speaker 4: to make sure out in the twigs and out there
Speaker 4: that there's not that that is another possibility. But again,
Speaker 4: a good oil spray will smother those as well.
Speaker 5: Yeah, have you ever heard of anybody using pine old
Speaker 5: pine of not?
Speaker 4: Well, I've heard of a lot of household cleaning kinds
Speaker 4: of products being used on plants for various things. Sometimes
Speaker 4: they work and sometimes they don't. They're definitely not labeled
Speaker 4: for that. But now I don't I don't think that
Speaker 4: is gonna it'll make it smell nice.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I've got a buddy that that's what he says.
Speaker 5: It's a natural plant or you know, and it's not
Speaker 5: going to hurt anything. We use that, uh back when
Speaker 5: the raspberry and for running rampant. You know, you can
Speaker 5: spray that on them and it would suffocate him you
Speaker 5: know you had to get spray it on them. You
Speaker 5: know it didn't do any good. Spray it out somewhere
Speaker 5: and let them walk through it.
Speaker 4: Right, got you? Okay, Well, I'm going to leave the
Speaker 4: home remedies on the shelf. On just stick with the
Speaker 4: being labeled for those purposes, Haleon. I appreciate your call.
Speaker 5: Where's a good place to get to his own or
Speaker 5: cultureal all.
Speaker 4: Where do you live? Seabrook, Seabrook your a software stores
Speaker 4: done in that area are going to have it. You
Speaker 4: probably can get it at Moss Nursery too, Moss nurseres
Speaker 4: just you're real close to you if you're in Seabrook.
Speaker 4: Some products. Yeah, all right, Hey, I've got to run
Speaker 4: for a break. Good luck with that, and if it works,
Speaker 4: I just ask you to bring half the lemons that
Speaker 4: you grow to the station and we'll call it even
Speaker 4: take care, Bye bye, all right, folks, I'll be right back.
Speaker 4: All right, welcome, welcome back to the Garden Line. I'm
Speaker 4: your host, skip Ricktor and we're here to help you
Speaker 4: have a bountiful garden, a beautiful landscape and more fun
Speaker 4: in the process. That's what it's all about, you know,
Speaker 4: gardening has so many benefits. I know, you know that
Speaker 4: if you eat healthy food, you're going to have a
Speaker 4: healthy life, right, that's important. We can grow fresh food.
Speaker 4: We also know that beautiful esthetics have mental benefits for us.
Speaker 4: Beautiful flowers, beautiful gardens, those kinds of things. We know
Speaker 4: the physical benefits of gardening. You get out, you do
Speaker 4: some exercise, you walk around, you get up, you get down,
Speaker 4: you do things. Gardening is great for that. And you
Speaker 4: know exercise doesn't mean going to the gym only and
Speaker 4: pumping a bunch of weights until you barely can lift.
Speaker 4: When we look at health benefits, have you ever heard that,
Speaker 4: you know you're sitting at a desk all day, just
Speaker 4: getting up, walking around every a little bit is beneficial
Speaker 4: for your health. Well, gardening is walking around a little
Speaker 4: bit and then some very very good And then of
Speaker 4: course the cognitive benefits, everything from fighting depression, dealing with dementia's,
Speaker 4: children with ADHD struggles. There are many benefits that the
Speaker 4: research has shown gardening does provide us when it comes
Speaker 4: to cognitive benefits too, and we could go on and on.
Speaker 4: Plus the social benefits, you know, getting together with gardeners,
Speaker 4: visiting with people sharing things, cuttings and seeds and stories.
Speaker 4: It's just a fun thing. Ask anybody in a garden
Speaker 4: club or master gardener group. They can tell you all
Speaker 4: about the benefits like that. So I think we've got
Speaker 4: one of the best hobbies in the whole world. And
Speaker 4: I would even say best professions too, for those of
Speaker 4: us that have had horticulture as profession our whole life.
Speaker 4: That's what it's about. So let's have some fun here
Speaker 4: on garden line. Give me a call. Seven one three
Speaker 4: two one two kt r H seven one three two
Speaker 4: one two k t r H. Ace Hardware stores are
Speaker 4: always stocked with whatever you need to have success in
Speaker 4: your garden and in your landscape. You know, from fertilizers
Speaker 4: to pest control, to insects, disease and weed management, to
Speaker 4: pruning tools, watering tools. Whatever you need, it's there at
Speaker 4: the ACE Hardware store. But this is the season, the
Speaker 4: holiday season when ACE loads up on really cool holiday lights,
Speaker 4: like there lights by the Foot, where you can purchase
Speaker 4: a string of lights by the foot exactly as long
Speaker 4: as you want it to be. Holiday lights, indoor and outdoor,
Speaker 4: holiday decorations, indoor and outdoor holiday gifts from toys, for kids,
Speaker 4: to tools for the do it yourselfers on your list,
Speaker 4: to gadgets for the kitchen and the home, decorating the home.
Speaker 4: It's all there at ACE Hardware makes it really easy.
Speaker 4: You know, you can find ACE Hardware's all over the place.
Speaker 4: Go to Acehardware dot com and there you will see
Speaker 4: a list in the store locator of the Ace Hardware
Speaker 4: stores near you. Now. For example, you're going to have
Speaker 4: an ACE Hardware Chalmers Ace out there on Galveston Island
Speaker 4: if your way up in Porter JY and R's in
Speaker 4: Porter Jnr's. ACE Importer is another one. Been to that store.
Speaker 4: It's a pretty cool one. Out in the Crosby area.
Speaker 4: There's Cross in the Bay City area. There's a Base
Speaker 4: City ACE. There's ACE all over the place. Wherever you live.
Speaker 4: ACE is the place I was visiting conversation via text
Speaker 4: and email. We need Nelson the other day, and you know,
Speaker 4: Nelson's plant Food just has so many good products, so
Speaker 4: many different lines. They've got a plant food called Nutristar
Speaker 4: indoor plants now the Nutri Star line of fertilizers. There's
Speaker 4: a lot of different specific types of plant food in
Speaker 4: the Nutri Star line. Nutristar indoor plants is everything that
Speaker 4: you need for your houseplants, your indoor plants. You know,
Speaker 4: you think about this, that house plant out in nature
Speaker 4: would have roots going everywhere, drawing from water and nutrients
Speaker 4: and things like that. In a house everything comes out
Speaker 4: of the small amount of soil in that container. That
Speaker 4: putting soil in the container, so supplementing it with nutristar
Speaker 4: indoor plants provides both slow and fast release nutrient sources
Speaker 4: to help maintain vitality, some healthy growth, some good beautiful
Speaker 4: leaf growth. Most of our houseplants we grow for the
Speaker 4: foliage itself. You can apply it once or twice during
Speaker 4: the winter season and then more often during the growing season.
Speaker 4: You know that even though the temperature inside is pretty
Speaker 4: consistent through the year, not fully, but the day length changes.
Speaker 4: In our indoor plants, they grow less in the wintertime
Speaker 4: it's a little cooler, and it also the day length
Speaker 4: is different. So once or twice during the winter and
Speaker 4: more often during the growing season for Nelson's plant food
Speaker 4: nutri Star for the indoor plants. I also wanted to
Speaker 4: mention that Dane Nelson set up a scholarship in memory
Speaker 4: of Randy Lemon. Randy was a legendary Greater Houston area
Speaker 4: gardening guru for many many years here over twenty five
Speaker 4: years here on garden Line. He had that those of
Speaker 4: you who've heard Randy, I'm not telling anything you don't
Speaker 4: know here, but was so entertaining and he provided helpful
Speaker 4: advice that really benefited a lot of people over the years,
Speaker 4: and you may be one of those people. This scholarship
Speaker 4: was set up in Randy's name to honor his life
Speaker 4: and his contribution to the gardening world here in the
Speaker 4: Houston area. And each year a scholarship will be given
Speaker 4: to a horticulture student at Texas A and M. I
Speaker 4: know Randy. He and I both love our alma mater,
Speaker 4: and he would be so proud to know that his
Speaker 4: legacy lives on at his alma mater in the horticulture
Speaker 4: department there at Texas A and M. Would you consider
Speaker 4: making a donation to that scholarship fund. Small amounts, large amounts,
Speaker 4: everything is helpful. We are trying to increase that fund
Speaker 4: because it is an ongoing scholarship that each year is
Speaker 4: going to be given. So the more that we put
Speaker 4: in there, the more it can be provided for students
Speaker 4: to help raise up the next generation of horticulturists. I'm
Speaker 4: a product of that program off and so I'm always
Speaker 4: thinking about, well, who is coming along that is learning
Speaker 4: and being trained and ready to help people have more
Speaker 4: success in their gardening. So I see it as a
Speaker 4: good cause on many different fronts. Now you can go
Speaker 4: online and give, you can send in a check to give.
Speaker 4: And I'm not gonna give you all the details right
Speaker 4: now online because it's confusing to hear all that on
Speaker 4: the radio. Just go to my website, Gardening with Skip
Speaker 4: dot com, and the newest updated publication right there on
Speaker 4: that list, right on the front page of the website,
Speaker 4: is the Randy Lemon Scholarship. Click on that and it'll
Speaker 4: tell you how to give online and how to give
Speaker 4: if you want to write a check and mail it in.
Speaker 4: But please consider that this holiday season, those of you
Speaker 4: who have enjoyed Randy's advice over the years, I think
Speaker 4: it is a wonderful way to continue to or his
Speaker 4: memory and also to do a lot of good for
Speaker 4: some folks that are going through school to get their
Speaker 4: degree in horticulture so they can help other people. Alrighty,
Speaker 4: there you have it. Boy, this morning is flying you
Speaker 4: know time flies. Well, they say time flies when you're
Speaker 4: having fun. I'm having fun now, kurnit the frog says
Speaker 4: time is fun when you're having flies. But that's just
Speaker 4: another way to look at it. Well, I have talked
Speaker 4: about a number of different things this morning. I did
Speaker 4: want to before we go here, mention that Star of
Speaker 4: Hope is a ministry here in the Houston area that
Speaker 4: makes a difference in people's lives. It's the holiday season,
Speaker 4: you know, we're trying to figure out what what is
Speaker 4: the next gift we're getting for somebody or the next
Speaker 4: you know, gathering we're preparing for. Many homeless people are
Speaker 4: just looking forward to their next meal. And you can
Speaker 4: provide a meal for two dollars and eighty five cents
Speaker 4: and Star Hope gives over six thousand meals a week.
Speaker 4: That's a lot of meals. How many will you provide? Billy?
Speaker 4: You can join me in my wife in giving the
Speaker 4: Star of Hope. Just go to s o H Mission
Speaker 4: dot Org, s o H Mission dot Art and put
Speaker 4: your compassion to work for a very good cob. I'll
Speaker 4: be back after the top of the hour and the
Speaker 4: weeks and we'll continue discussions about.
Speaker 1: Gardening Welcome to kt r H Garden Line with skimp Rickard's.
Speaker 2: Just watch him as so many give.
Speaker 3: These to Supt Basic in.
Speaker 4: Welcome back to garden Line, folks. We got more garden
Speaker 4: talk to go. Got two hours more gardening talk to
Speaker 4: go this morning. If you would like to give me
Speaker 4: a call discuss whatever's on your mind regarding your gardening.
Speaker 4: That includes housepens, house plants too, by the way, just
Speaker 4: give me a call it seven one three two one
Speaker 4: two kt r H seven to one three two one
Speaker 4: two kt r H. I mentioned uh the website a
Speaker 4: little bit earlier. I did want to also let you
Speaker 4: know today that I have put up a publication called
Speaker 4: Quality Lighting for growing Transplants. We are about to start
Speaker 4: the transplant growing season. I begin uh in after the
Speaker 4: Christmas before New Year's. Typically try to get my transplants
Speaker 4: started at that time. Uh wait a little bit later
Speaker 4: if you want to, but I like to get get
Speaker 4: them going earlier so I have a bigger transplant when
Speaker 4: it's time to put them out in the garden. Now,
Speaker 4: that requires some space. You know, if you're just growing
Speaker 4: one of those little six pack four pack trays of transplants,
Speaker 4: you can get seventy two of them in about a
Speaker 4: nine by I don't know what are those things nine
Speaker 4: by twenty I believe something like that anyway, tray. But
Speaker 4: when you bump them to four inch pots now it
Speaker 4: takes a lot more time, and then I end up
Speaker 4: bumping some tomatoes up to gallum pots by the time
Speaker 4: I'm done, So I have tomatoes with blims and freight
Speaker 4: on them, and I put them out after the last
Speaker 4: frost danger on average is passed. So that can take
Speaker 4: some space to do that. If you don't have the space,
Speaker 4: then you might want to wait a little bit later
Speaker 4: to start. It takes about six weeks to grow a
Speaker 4: tomato transplant or pepper transplant. Eight weeks is a little
Speaker 4: bit better, but you can do it in about six weeks.
Speaker 4: Many other things are in the six week range if
Speaker 4: you're talking about warm seasoned vegetables like that are in
Speaker 4: the cucurbits like squash, for example. In cucumbers, normally we
Speaker 4: direct seed those right out into the garden, but if
Speaker 4: you want a little bit of a headstart, you can
Speaker 4: do that. But you're only going to give them about
Speaker 4: two or three weeks at the most to grow inside,
Speaker 4: because if they get pop bound, they don't transplant out
Speaker 4: very well. So whatever you're going to grow, count back
Speaker 4: in time and start them at the proper time for that.
Speaker 4: This publication on lighting, I put it up first because
Speaker 4: it is the number one thing I see people do
Speaker 4: wrong when they try to grow their own transplants is
Speaker 4: not give them enough quality light. And when we start
Speaker 4: thinking about lighting, the quantity of light is important. If
Speaker 4: light is too dim, the plants are going to get
Speaker 4: stretchy and lanky and not perform well at all. The
Speaker 4: Quantity of light, the quality of light is important. The
Speaker 4: lighting you buy for your home is a wavelength, or
Speaker 4: there are various wavelengths that are more for our eyes
Speaker 4: and that create I guess mood is a way to
Speaker 4: put it. You know, we have cool white that's kind
Speaker 4: of a bluish light, a very bright bluish light. And
Speaker 4: then we have warm white, like you know, you go
Speaker 4: into a restaurant and you're there in the boot at
Speaker 4: a restaurant and you got that kind of yellowy light
Speaker 4: that's shining. That's a warm white, and it is an
Speaker 4: ambience kind of light too. There's times and places for that,
Speaker 4: but those are visuals for us and lighting for plants
Speaker 4: is different. Now you can use human lighting for plants,
Speaker 4: but you're going to have less performance, and in some
Speaker 4: cases the very poor performance when it comes to the spectrum.
Speaker 4: The quality of the light, and certainly the quantity as well.
Speaker 4: And then finally the duration. That's a third thing, quality duration.
Speaker 4: Those three things, how long do you leave the lights
Speaker 4: on when I'm growing transplants, I, once the seedlings are up,
Speaker 4: I go to about fourteen hours a day, about twelve
Speaker 4: to fourteen hours a day, and that gives them enough
Speaker 4: light to do well. In my publication that I put online,
Speaker 4: Quality Lighting for Growing Houseplants, by the way, you need
Speaker 4: to look at it's really cool. You even have a
Speaker 4: little gift in there that shows how light comes out
Speaker 4: of a light fixture and spreads out as it gets
Speaker 4: to the plant. So the further you get from the fixture,
Speaker 4: the dimmer the light is. And it is dramatic the
Speaker 4: difference it makes as you move from like let's say
Speaker 4: one foot away to two feet away or something. But anyway,
Speaker 4: that publication is there to help you have success with lighting,
Speaker 4: because lighting is so important, and if you've never tried
Speaker 4: grown your own transplants, you gotta try it. I do
Speaker 4: a lot of things with lights gardening wise. For example,
Speaker 4: my house plants that have been outside, I've got too
Speaker 4: many now, they're too big, too many to put in
Speaker 4: my house. It would be a jungle, and I just
Speaker 4: don't want quite that ambiance in the house. So I
Speaker 4: have something that I put in the garage in the
Speaker 4: wintertime underneath a nice light that provides a moderate amount
Speaker 4: of light to keep them going. And so that's one
Speaker 4: way I'm used lighting. I'm using it to grow transplants.
Speaker 4: I'm also using it to start cuttings. When I'm trying
Speaker 4: to root some cuttings and I want to get them
Speaker 4: going good. It doesn't take much light to do that.
Speaker 4: By the way, that's the lowest light level thing that
Speaker 4: we do gardening wises, is just starting the cuttings. They
Speaker 4: they need light, but they don't need bright light shining
Speaker 4: on them like a ceiling does. And I also use
Speaker 4: it This year, I'm going to try to produce some
Speaker 4: things indoors under light. Still, like tomatoes. I grow tomato transplants,
Speaker 4: but what about keeping that tomato and going all the
Speaker 4: way to growing tomatoes indoors? That takes a lot more light,
Speaker 4: a lot higher quality light and I'm going to be
Speaker 4: doing some of that as well this year. But it's
Speaker 4: a lot of fun to do that. It also makes
Speaker 4: good Christmas gifts, good quality lighting heating mat to go
Speaker 4: underneath the tray of seedlings, the potting soil and the tray.
Speaker 4: Some of the trays have little domes over them that
Speaker 4: help hold in the moisture and allow the light to
Speaker 4: go through. Those are helpful. I use those. So however
Speaker 4: you want to go about it, there's a way to
Speaker 4: do it.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 4: I have gardened and started transplants and everything from like
Speaker 4: this official transplant growing tray, to dishes that you get
Speaker 4: from restaurants to take your food home. You know, you
Speaker 4: go to Salata and you get this little yellow bottom
Speaker 4: dish with a clear top on it that clicks down
Speaker 4: you go to the grocery store. You can even buy
Speaker 4: dishes or plastics for carrying food around that have a
Speaker 4: clear top. I've started a lot of things and a
Speaker 4: lot of things like that, and you can do it
Speaker 4: and do it and dig cops if you want to.
Speaker 4: But however you go about it, just have fun doing it.
Speaker 4: And I'm going to also be putting up an article
Speaker 4: on how to grow transplants, not just lighting, but everything
Speaker 4: about growing successful transplants. That's the next one to go
Speaker 4: up on the website at Gardening with Skip dot com
Speaker 4: Gardening with Skip dot com. Well, it is time for
Speaker 4: us to go to our first break this hour. When
Speaker 4: we come back, I'll be entering your calls if you
Speaker 4: would like to give us a call seven one three
Speaker 4: two one two kt RH. Welcome back to garden Line.
Speaker 4: I'm glad you're with us. Hey, anything you need for
Speaker 4: your garden. I'm talking about products to fertilize, products to
Speaker 4: control pests and diseases and weeds. I'm talking about tools.
Speaker 4: I'm talking about fertilizer spreaders. I'm talking about everything, including
Speaker 4: even getting your lawnmower blade sharpened, which, by the way,
Speaker 4: now would be a good time to get that done.
Speaker 4: Is it Southwest Fertilizer Southwest Fertilizers on the corner of
Speaker 4: Bisinett and Renwick in southwest Houston around since nineteen fifty five,
Speaker 4: and boy, I'm telling you they have it. If they
Speaker 4: don't have it, you don't need it. That I just
Speaker 4: like to put it that way because that is the truth.
Speaker 4: If you're looking for a Christmas gift, even go by there,
Speaker 4: talk to them, ask Bob, say, hey, I want to
Speaker 4: see that kneeling bench Skip keeps talking about on garden line,
Speaker 4: the one where you it folds up and then unfolds.
Speaker 4: You flip it one way and it's a seat to
Speaker 4: sit on. You flip it the other way and you
Speaker 4: kneel down on it. And the cool part about it is,
Speaker 4: and anyone over forty needs to hear this. You grab
Speaker 4: what was the legs of it and it's a handle
Speaker 4: to get back up off your knees. Now do you
Speaker 4: go to your knees and back up again? Gardening about
Speaker 4: eight thousand times on a Saturday, and you wake up
Speaker 4: the next day in the prenatal position because you used
Speaker 4: muscles that don't get used enough. Well, kneeling bench fix
Speaker 4: is at It works really well for that. Also, cool
Speaker 4: tools like a soil knife on one of my favorite tools,
Speaker 4: is it soil Myebob's got those there at Southwest fern Lager,
Speaker 4: corner of Bestinett and Redwick phone number seven one three
Speaker 4: six six six one seven four four. We're going to
Speaker 4: go back to the phones now and head out to
Speaker 4: Conroe and talk to Richard. Hello, Richard, Welcome to garden mine.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 10: Grandy Lemon says in his book that I was pulling
Speaker 10: out the other day that for my brown patch used
Speaker 10: two year old leaf mold mult twice a year.
Speaker 5: Is it too late to do it this year?
Speaker 4: No, it's never too late. That you can do leapmomulta
Speaker 4: anytime you want to put it down.
Speaker 10: Marley did a fantastic job, But the.
Speaker 5: Fungus got to me.
Speaker 4: When you use the leaf mold, it got to you.
Speaker 10: No, I say it did a fantastic job because it
Speaker 10: was a new yard. Oh we had a perfect wawn
Speaker 10: until till it's fall.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, this has been a bad year for brown patch.
Speaker 4: I was just driving to the neighborhood the other day
Speaker 4: and just like almost ever long had it in it
Speaker 4: and normally we don't see that. It's kind of here
Speaker 4: and there. But the key on brown patch is number one.
Speaker 4: We can make it worse by continuing to water late
Speaker 4: into the season when our plants don't need as much
Speaker 4: water as they needed during the summer. That more often
Speaker 4: you keep it wet, the more brown patch you're going
Speaker 4: to have. By fertilizing too much with nitrogen going late
Speaker 4: into the season, and we can aggravate it that way too,
Speaker 4: So all.
Speaker 10: Righty, yeah, one, can I ask you one other thing,
Speaker 10: cutting back, uh like abescus and three sisters things like that.
Speaker 10: Once should you cut them back so that they can
Speaker 10: climatize before the freeze?
Speaker 4: Are you bringing them indoors? No, in the garage or something.
Speaker 5: No, they're in the They're in the ground.
Speaker 10: I just wondered how early I should cut them back
Speaker 10: so they're beautiful right now?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Is this hibiscus the kind that dies to the
Speaker 4: ground and comes back out of the ground, or is
Speaker 4: this the tropical type that has the really beautiful flowers
Speaker 4: of all kinds of different colors and things.
Speaker 10: It dies back to the ground.
Speaker 4: Okay, the perennial hibiscus. I would let the frieze kill
Speaker 4: it back to the ground and then cut off all
Speaker 4: the old dead stalks, maults the base of it, and
Speaker 4: it'll come back out in the spring down. If it's
Speaker 4: that type of hibiscus, the perennial hibiscus. The perennial hibiscus,
Speaker 4: the flowers are almost dinner plate size, and they're either red, pink, white,
Speaker 4: or some version of those three colors.
Speaker 10: Yeah, we get nice blooms now and we had a
Speaker 10: three sisters that does real well that. I didn't know
Speaker 10: whether we should cut that back prematurely or let it
Speaker 10: die back.
Speaker 4: Which can you think of another name for that plant
Speaker 4: or a description of it what you're calling because sisters.
Speaker 10: It has a fushi color to it.
Speaker 4: Okay, Mwaian well Hawaiian Hawaiian. Oh, okay, okay, yes, okay,
Speaker 4: all right, well that one. Yeah, I let's see where
Speaker 4: are you. You're up in Conros. You're going to get
Speaker 4: a little bit colder up there. In the past, have
Speaker 4: you cut it back?
Speaker 5: Yes, we just moved here. We used to be up
Speaker 5: on the lake Conrod and we cut them back in.
Speaker 10: But I didn't know that whether assume we should cut
Speaker 10: them back because they look so beautiful right now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there. I would most the base of those really
Speaker 4: well too. I mean I would leave them and then
Speaker 4: when you get cold, that's kind of ruined the than
Speaker 4: if you wanted to cut him back and whatnot, you could.
Speaker 10: Okay, thank you very much.
Speaker 5: Enjoy your program.
Speaker 4: Yeah good well, uh and enjoy your new uh new
Speaker 4: place up there. I don't know how long you've been
Speaker 4: in the new place, but uh, that Conroy area is
Speaker 4: really beautiful. And I love the love it out at
Speaker 4: the lake too. By the way, I know you did too, probably, all.
Speaker 5: Right, thank you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, just remember that Hawaiian tie Okay, yeah, I don't.
Speaker 4: Just remember that Hawaiian tie is not a not a
Speaker 4: real cold hearty plant. So it's more of a tropical Yeah,
Speaker 4: I know. Okay, So it takes a lot of mulch
Speaker 4: at the base to protect it. Okay, all right, Well,
Speaker 4: thank you Richard, take care, Thank you. We're going to
Speaker 4: go now to Tim. Hey, Tim, welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 4: How can we help.
Speaker 11: I have a question about to get a soil sample.
Speaker 12: What's the best way to do a soil sample for so.
Speaker 9: I know what my garden needs or my yard needs
Speaker 9: or whatever.
Speaker 4: Yeah, good question, glad you ask. I should talk about
Speaker 4: soil sampling more.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 4: If you go to the website soil testing, one word
Speaker 4: dot t a m U dot e d u. So
Speaker 4: it's soil Testing dot TAMU Texas and m University t
Speaker 4: A m U dot e d u on. There is
Speaker 4: the pub the soil sampling forms, so you can get instructions.
Speaker 4: On the front page. There's a thing that says sampling
Speaker 4: and shipping instructions okay. And so when you click on that,
Speaker 4: it will it will, it will take you to where
Speaker 4: you ship it, and uh, it's going to have There's
Speaker 4: several soil forms. There is one that says it's just
Speaker 4: the standard soil form that's more for pastures and cattle
Speaker 4: in farms and places like that. There's one called urban soil. Now,
Speaker 4: urban soil just means it's a garden, and it tells
Speaker 4: you where to take the samples, how to collect the samples.
Speaker 4: But the urban soil sample form is the one that
Speaker 4: you want. But basically to make to really simplify it,
Speaker 4: you're going to probably take oh about in maybe eight
Speaker 4: different places around the yard or around a garden. You're
Speaker 4: going to take a vertical core of soil out of
Speaker 4: the ground. So you have the same amount of soil
Speaker 4: from one inch deep as you do from about six
Speaker 4: inches deep, okay, And so you you mix that all
Speaker 4: up and you send that in. About a pint of
Speaker 4: soil out of that send that in for your sample,
Speaker 4: and that gives them a nice blend of soil to sample.
Speaker 4: If you just take a sample in one place, maybe
Speaker 4: it was a place where the neighborhood dog stopped and
Speaker 4: went to the bathroom last fall, and you know so
Speaker 4: that that would be a sample that's not accurate and
Speaker 4: representative of your lawn. So that soil testing dot TAMU
Speaker 4: did et You do the urban Soil Sampling form and
Speaker 4: send it into the lab. The results will come back
Speaker 4: and if you have questions about the results, you can
Speaker 4: either go to your county extension office and talk to
Speaker 4: your county agg or horticulture agent about it, or if
Speaker 4: you want, you can give me a call here on
Speaker 4: Guarden Line. What I'll what I'll end up doing is
Speaker 4: having you send me the form and then then we
Speaker 4: can we can talk about it on the air about
Speaker 4: you know, because I like to answer things where other
Speaker 4: people can hear the answers too. I think they'll right.
Speaker 4: That will be very helpful. Okay, I appreciate it all right, sir,
Speaker 4: Thank you very much. Appreciate your call. You take you
Speaker 4: take care. Uh. Microlife fertilizers are high quality products that
Speaker 4: are designed with nature and mind. You know what how
Speaker 4: does nature? How did the redwood forests become giant trees?
Speaker 4: Who was running through there?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 4: Rototillings, oil and fertilizing and watering and do all the
Speaker 4: things we do well. Nature has a way of taking
Speaker 4: care of plants. You know the Great Plains with grass
Speaker 4: as deep as the horse's belly. When the settlers came across,
Speaker 4: how is the grass growing that well? Well, nature was
Speaker 4: taking care of the soil. And nature can do that,
Speaker 4: and microlife helps you give nature a boost a natural way.
Speaker 4: So you take organic materials, you put them in a
Speaker 4: product that can be microbially broken down and to release
Speaker 4: those nutrients in the ratios that plants need. Microlife has
Speaker 4: products like the green bag, the lawn fertilizer. It can
Speaker 4: be used for anything but lawn fertilizer. That's the green bag.
Speaker 4: That's sixty four. They've got one for acidic plants. If
Speaker 4: you got blueberries or camellias or azaleas or you know,
Speaker 4: Virginia sweet spire, those kinds of things, the acidic product
Speaker 4: works well for. They got ones for fruit trees. They
Speaker 4: got a lot of different products out there on the market,
Speaker 4: but they're all designed with the same thing in mind,
Speaker 4: and that is providing natural substances for microbe activity. And
Speaker 4: by the way, they also these products by Microlife are
Speaker 4: chock full of microbes. You can find more from Microlife
Speaker 4: Fertilizer dot com website. They're widely available. They'll tell you
Speaker 4: where you can get them on there too, But I
Speaker 4: can just tell you this. Garden centers, Ace hardware stores,
Speaker 4: feed stores, and Southwest Fertilized. All these places carry Microlife products.
Speaker 4: That is important. I'm gonna have to go to a
Speaker 4: break here and when we come back, let's see David
Speaker 4: and John will be our first two up. Welcome back
Speaker 4: to garden Line. We are glad you are with us today.
Speaker 4: We've got lots of things to talk about regarding garden
Speaker 4: as we always do. What I'm gonna do right now
Speaker 4: is head out to the phone. Suddenly, I think a
Speaker 4: bunch of people woke up and started calling garden Lines,
Speaker 4: So let's do this. David in Crosby, Welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 4: How can we help today?
Speaker 11: Thank you, Skiff, thank you for taking my call morning.
Speaker 11: I like your comments and uh stuff on your your
Speaker 11: betting plants, especially grown from seas. I like the use
Speaker 11: of a warming pad. I hadn't tried that before. But
Speaker 11: I've got a problem in my guard with nuts edge,
Speaker 11: and I've tried the the betting fabric. I've tried Hay
Speaker 11: straw un till once a week, and and that nuts
Speaker 11: edge is just a just a bear to get rid of.
Speaker 4: And control. Well, yeah, so what I've done that that's
Speaker 4: the answer to that is a little bit involved. And
Speaker 4: so what I've done is online on my website Gardening
Speaker 4: with Skip dot com. I have a publication and it's
Speaker 4: called nuts Edge an in depth Look, and it's three pages, uh,
Speaker 4: but it goes into the two kinds of nuts edge,
Speaker 4: purple and yellow.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 4: There's some differences and and changes the way we go
Speaker 4: about controlling it, and it tells you how to go
Speaker 4: about getting in control of it. And if you look
Speaker 4: at that and kind of understand this creature called nuts edge,
Speaker 4: it helps you better to control it successfully. A lot
Speaker 4: of things people try, they say don't work. And the
Speaker 4: main reason things don't work is because either number one,
Speaker 4: they're not effective or they don't consistently stick with it.
Speaker 4: And so whether you're hand digging it, whether you're spraying
Speaker 4: it with a herd aside, whether you're shading it out
Speaker 4: with there's a lot of things you can do to
Speaker 4: nuts edge, but you have to stay with it one
Speaker 4: year just to kind of learn about this. I had
Speaker 4: one nutsedge plant, and I let it come up in
Speaker 4: the spring and didn't do anything about it. And about
Speaker 4: May I carefully dug it up and it had eight
Speaker 4: daughter plants tubers. You didn't see the plant chet. They
Speaker 4: were underground. The nuts were underground. The tubers eight of
Speaker 4: them that were viable. So by waiting until May, I
Speaker 4: had eight hundred percent increase in nutsedge in that bed.
Speaker 4: One plant becomes eight plants, right, and so that's lesson
Speaker 4: number one, start early. Less than number two is once
Speaker 4: the nutsedge comes up and gets three to five leaves,
Speaker 4: it is already or it is about to start producing
Speaker 4: the daughter plants to the sides, and so you need
Speaker 4: to do whatever you're going to do to it then,
Speaker 4: or you've already gone backwards in time. There's like you're
Speaker 4: killing one, but you're you've already got more coming. So
Speaker 4: there are products that are very effective. There's one called
Speaker 4: sedge hammer that's labeled for lawn use that is very effective.
Speaker 4: One called sedge ender that's very effective. And these are
Speaker 4: all in that publication so you can you can go
Speaker 4: look at them. I also have a thing called a
Speaker 4: weed wiper. How to build one on there? And if
Speaker 4: you look at how to build a weed wiper. That's
Speaker 4: what I use for nutsedge in all my beds. So
Speaker 4: if nutsedge is coming up underneath your rose bushes or
Speaker 4: in your land hannah or whatever, you with the weed wiper.
Speaker 4: You reach it on, you grab the nuts edge, and
Speaker 4: you wipe product right on the nuts edge. So if
Speaker 4: it were a product that we're going to hurt another planet,
Speaker 4: it won't because you're not getting it on the other planet.
Speaker 4: You're not spraying it. But the combination of nutsedge and
Speaker 4: in depth look and the weed wiper will walk you
Speaker 4: through it. Bottom line is start early. When a plant
Speaker 4: has three to five leaves, you need to be doing
Speaker 4: something to it because it's about to increase your woes
Speaker 4: if you don't.
Speaker 5: Very good.
Speaker 4: So what was the website again, Gardening with Skip that's
Speaker 4: me gardening with Skip dot com. Gardening with Skip dot com. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and there's a lot of good good stuff on there,
Speaker 4: all right.
Speaker 11: And the article about the nutsedge was called.
Speaker 4: Uh well, there's two of them on there about nutsedge.
Speaker 4: The longer one that explains it better is called nutsedge
Speaker 4: and in depth look.
Speaker 11: Very good. It's a lot of help. I will look
Speaker 11: that up.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 4: Sir, all right, David, thank you for the call. Appreciate
Speaker 4: you being a listener to Garden Line. We're going to
Speaker 4: go now to John and Katie. Hey, John, welcome to Garth.
Speaker 13: Good Moire, Skip, good Morse, Skip, appreciate your program. A
Speaker 13: couple of questions about peach trees. So I've got.
Speaker 3: Four of them.
Speaker 13: It's my first year growing them, and some of them
Speaker 13: still have leaves and other ones they're dropping leaves. Does
Speaker 13: it make sense to continue to feed them right now?
Speaker 13: Because I mean, okay, yeah.
Speaker 4: Now I wouldn't. I don't fertilize my fruit trees after
Speaker 4: about August. Really you can do it in September. But
Speaker 4: the bottom line is as we go to at the
Speaker 4: end of the year, those trees are they are slow
Speaker 4: in growth, they're getting ready for winter, They're developing the
Speaker 4: heartiness that they will need to go into winter. Part
Speaker 4: of that is losing their leaves and going dormant and whatnot,
Speaker 4: and pushing them with fertilize are kind of goes in
Speaker 4: the other direction. You know, it's saying, hey, put out
Speaker 4: some fresh new growth and that's not going to survive
Speaker 4: a freeze. So we wane down on those at the
Speaker 4: end of summer or early fall at the latest.
Speaker 5: Gotcha.
Speaker 13: It just seems weird because we're almost January and it
Speaker 13: seems like we're in spring.
Speaker 3: Eighty degrees.
Speaker 4: I know. Welcome to Texas, Welcome to Houston area at least.
Speaker 13: Another question is about big trees. So you've described before
Speaker 13: peaches as the queen of the garden. How would you
Speaker 13: describe fig trees?
Speaker 4: That's a good question. I've ever thought about that. I like,
Speaker 4: I grew up eating figs. I love figs. My mom
Speaker 4: would take strawberry jello and make fig jam with not strawberries,
Speaker 4: strawberry jello and figs. So I love figs. What would
Speaker 4: I call figs?
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I need to think about that one. I don't have
Speaker 4: a name for them. They are easy to grow. They
Speaker 4: are almost dizy and pest free almost, and so yeah,
Speaker 4: if you want to grow something organically, figs are a
Speaker 4: good one to do.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I plan on.
Speaker 13: I just ordered some cuttings online and I'm about to
Speaker 13: start to try to root fourteen different varieties and hopefully,
Speaker 13: oh my backyard.
Speaker 4: Have fun, have fun. That's good. That's good. I'd like
Speaker 4: to hear as those begin to grow, how you like.
Speaker 13: Them, fair enough. Another question is tomatoes. When do they
Speaker 13: normally start dying back in the in the grounds.
Speaker 4: Well, with the first frost. Basically they slow grow some
Speaker 4: stuff they're not growing and producing and developing very fast
Speaker 4: right now. At some point we picked the green tomatoes
Speaker 4: up before the first frost and hopefully some of those
Speaker 4: will ripen indoors.
Speaker 13: Yeah, fair enough, because I have I've used the Medina
Speaker 13: hast to grow and that stuff's phenomenal. I still have
Speaker 13: one plant on my backyard. It's got probably over one
Speaker 13: hundred and twenty tomatoes still on it with flowers.
Speaker 4: I still grow good. Yeah, I appreciate that. I'm gonna
Speaker 4: have to run to a break here, but thank you
Speaker 4: very much. I really appreciate that call. You know, the
Speaker 4: folks that Nelson Water Gardens have put together a wonderful
Speaker 4: garden center and nursery in addition to all the water
Speaker 4: garden stuff. Right now, if you buy a Christmas tree,
Speaker 4: you get a free point seta from them. They've got
Speaker 4: some wonderful already wrapped up and decorated houseplants as Christmas
Speaker 4: gifts that are just gorgeous. You need to go see
Speaker 4: those things, of course, they're all about watergardens, but they
Speaker 4: all they also are a nursery and they have all
Speaker 4: kinds of wonderful plants all through the year. Go to
Speaker 4: Nelson Watergardens dot com or drive out there. Just head
Speaker 4: out to Katie. When you get to Katie Fort Benrod,
Speaker 4: turn right, it's just a little bit, uh, just a
Speaker 4: little bit north of iten on the right hand side,
Speaker 4: and you that are there at a very very special place.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna take a break, folks, and we will be
Speaker 4: right back with your calls. Uh when we get back,
Speaker 4: we'll be talking to Daniel and Paula and Bill. Welcome back, folks,
Speaker 4: Glad to have you with us. Have you ever noticed
Speaker 4: that all these Christmas songs are about snow and sleigh rides?
Speaker 4: And I don't know, I've seen pictures of snow before. Okay,
Speaker 4: here we go. Let's see. We are going to head
Speaker 4: out to Cypress, Texas and talk to Daniel. Hey, Daniel,
Speaker 4: how can we help Hey?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm trying to get a Christmas tree and I've
Speaker 6: been looking for Douglas fur and I can't find them anywhere.
Speaker 4: Douglas fur. I am not sure what trees everybody is
Speaker 4: carrying specifically, there's a variation out there. You're in the
Speaker 4: Cypress area, and I have you tried, like Plants for
Speaker 4: All Seasons and Arborgate they're pretty close to you.
Speaker 5: What was the first one you said?
Speaker 4: Plants for All Seasons is on Highway two forty nine.
Speaker 4: Arborgate is on twenty nine to twenty just a little
Speaker 4: west of Tombull, the west side of Tumbull. They both
Speaker 4: carry a lot of Christmas trees, and I would call
Speaker 4: them before you make the trip, although both places are
Speaker 4: fun to visit and just see if they have the
Speaker 4: kind you're looking for, and if they don't, they might
Speaker 4: be able to suggest something for you. But those two
Speaker 4: garden centers do really carry some really nice trees up
Speaker 4: in your area. If you're not successful there, I know
Speaker 4: that Buchanans Native Plants on Eleventh Street and the Heights
Speaker 4: has a lot of really good quality Christmas trees as well,
Speaker 4: not too terribly far from you, but a little further.
Speaker 5: Okay, so arbor Gate and what was the other one.
Speaker 4: Plants for All Seasons? Highway two forty nine and Louetta.
Speaker 5: Okay, they all right, yes, sir? Thanks all right?
Speaker 4: Good luck with that, yes, sir, Thank you. Bye. Let's
Speaker 4: see who's next here. We got Paula in Richmond. Hey, Paula,
Speaker 4: Welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 14: Hi, Hi, thanks for taking my call.
Speaker 15: I have.
Speaker 14: Four quick questions.
Speaker 15: Well one is not quick, so I'm going to go
Speaker 15: to that one first, if that's okay. I live in
Speaker 15: a master planned community and I'm right next door to
Speaker 15: one of the neighborhood playgrounds where there are six very
Speaker 15: large live oak trees, and I noticed there's a very
Speaker 15: big route growing from one of them straight under my house.
Speaker 15: So I imagine if I can see that one, there
Speaker 15: was probably a lot more. So okay, one, what do
Speaker 15: I do about it too? I had to have a
Speaker 15: new floor put in my second bathroom, and when the
Speaker 15: handyman took the toilet off, roots are growing up in
Speaker 15: the toilet pipe. But he said he needed to go
Speaker 15: on and put the toilet back and finish the floor,
Speaker 15: which I understand. And I got a product called root
Speaker 15: killer from one of the big box stores and put
Speaker 15: it in, but I'm not sure if it's working or
Speaker 15: how you know, how often I need to use it. Also,
Speaker 15: I can't find the drain clean out anywhere in the
Speaker 15: front yard where it would be I know where the
Speaker 15: kitchen one.
Speaker 4: Is ring thinking tub.
Speaker 15: We're draining slow, and he used a product that was
Speaker 15: he said, the best drain cleaner. But first he cleaned
Speaker 15: out the hair and there wasn't very much. Or three
Speaker 15: months later, it still smells very bad, like burning hair.
Speaker 15: I have to run water and the stink every day
Speaker 15: to try to reduce the odor.
Speaker 4: And that's all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna cut to
Speaker 4: the chase on this one. I'm good at horticulture, but
Speaker 4: plumbing is not my strong suit. But I can tell
Speaker 4: you this, if you get a plumber in there that
Speaker 4: knows what he's doing, he can find that clean out.
Speaker 4: And I think you're gonna need a rotarutor out some
Speaker 4: physically rotor utter out some of the roots that have
Speaker 4: invaded your sewer line, apparently, and then products that contain
Speaker 4: copper are often flushed down into the system and that
Speaker 4: burns the root tips. It doesn't kill the whole root.
Speaker 4: It just basically kills the tips and ends of the roots,
Speaker 4: and you got to do them periodically. But a plumber
Speaker 4: could also tell you on that what were your other
Speaker 4: I'm running short on time, so let's go to the
Speaker 4: questions that you had real quick.
Speaker 15: Okay, my crate myrtles.
Speaker 14: When to cut them? Because my lawnmen always up them
Speaker 14: back in January. And I know.
Speaker 15: Randy used to always say, don't do crape murder. And
Speaker 15: also they have holes, big holes under the roots and
Speaker 15: big galls or something growing on the branches.
Speaker 4: Okay, I'm not quite picturing the gall on the branch.
Speaker 4: You'd have to send me a photo on that. But
Speaker 4: the crape murder pruning, I was discussing that earlier. And
Speaker 4: you can listen to this show as a podcast. After
Speaker 4: the show, they'll post it to the ktr each website.
Speaker 4: Of the podcast, you can listen to some comments I
Speaker 4: made about.
Speaker 15: I have it pulled up.
Speaker 14: I'm going to do that, okay.
Speaker 4: And the bottom line is you're just you're not butchering
Speaker 4: them back like Ebye does. You're just removing some of
Speaker 4: the shoots that are growing in the wrong directions back
Speaker 4: to where they join another shoot. And you can you
Speaker 4: can go online and there's some really good information if
Speaker 4: you do a search online for crape myrtle pruning. And
Speaker 4: after the search, do you have a pen or pencil handy?
Speaker 14: Yes?
Speaker 4: Okay, right down? S I t e colon dot e
Speaker 4: d u so crate myrtal pruning, and then s I
Speaker 4: t e colon dot e d u. It will give
Speaker 4: you results from extension services around the country on how
Speaker 4: to prune crepe myrtles, and they will guide you in
Speaker 4: the right way. They'll be diagrams, pictures and other things
Speaker 4: to help you do it the right way. That's there's
Speaker 4: no way I could describe it on the air effectively
Speaker 4: in the short time.
Speaker 5: That we have.
Speaker 14: Okay, did you have another follow.
Speaker 4: Up question before we before we go?
Speaker 14: Yeah, my last one. So my flower beds. My house
Speaker 14: is a model at one time.
Speaker 15: It's twenty years old now, and they stuffed all the
Speaker 15: flower beds front and back, including the crate myrtles.
Speaker 14: Too close together, too close to the fences. And I
Speaker 14: have two I think the soil in those beds is totally.
Speaker 15: Depleted because the shrubs and all are now growing so puny.
Speaker 15: And the lawn seems okay because I use the neutripross
Speaker 15: so schedule all.
Speaker 4: Right, So before I run out of time to answer you,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna I would pull out some of the ones
Speaker 4: that are too thick in there, take out every other
Speaker 4: one or something make give yourself something in there. Get
Speaker 4: you a lawn fertilizer, a lawn fertilizer and sprinkle it
Speaker 4: in those beds. Scratch it into the surface with a
Speaker 4: rake or you know, a hoe, just kind of get
Speaker 4: it underneath the surface and watered in really good. You
Speaker 4: if it's trees and shrubs and things, you can give
Speaker 4: it one or two cups per inch of trunk diameter,
Speaker 4: one to two cups per inch of trunk diameter, spread
Speaker 4: evenly all through the bed and watered in really good,
Speaker 4: and that will get your I would wait to do
Speaker 4: that until spring because the plants aren't going to be
Speaker 4: growing much until then. Uh, and then watered in real good.
Speaker 4: I'm hearing the music, so I am going to.
Speaker 14: Have to run all of it.
Speaker 4: Good luck with all of that, I wish you will. Thanks, thanks,
Speaker 4: thank you for here. Call Bill and Kingwood. We just
Speaker 4: weren't able to get to you this hour. You will
Speaker 4: be first up if you want to hang around until
Speaker 4: we come back after the top of the hour. News, folks,
Speaker 4: you're listening to guard Line. I'm your host. Skip Richter
Speaker 4: keep referring to the website gardening Whip skip dot com
Speaker 4: with a lot of information on there and more being
Speaker 4: at it all the time.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Katie r H. Guarden Line with Skip Richter's.
Speaker 2: Just watching as many.
Speaker 3: Thanks to set.
Speaker 8: Us.
Speaker 4: All right, welcome back. We are back in the saddle again,
Speaker 4: ready to do our last hour of garden Line this morning.
Speaker 4: If you'd like to give us a call seven one
Speaker 4: three two one two k t r H. And we're
Speaker 4: gonna have a straight out to Kingwood and talk to Bill. Hello, Bill,
Speaker 4: Welcome to garden.
Speaker 16: Line, Thank Jim.
Speaker 12: This is about the pigs. Whenever I was a child,
Speaker 12: which is about sixty five years ago, we used to
Speaker 12: go to the Devil's River. Every year there was a
Speaker 12: gigantic fig ticket right there on the Devil's River, and
Speaker 12: my family went down there voluntarily, even though it seemed
Speaker 12: like slave labor at this point, because we would pick
Speaker 12: five gallon buckets of pigs, and my mother in camp
Speaker 12: would make big jam unbelievable. So I know your love
Speaker 12: of figs and I love it too.
Speaker 17: It just bound.
Speaker 12: The name I would give now is Nematod victim. Nematod victims.
Speaker 12: That's true victories in my because Nemo Toad just kill them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, they they are figs and okra nematod's will
Speaker 4: walk them all to find figs or okra in your
Speaker 4: in your U, in your place. That's it's true. But
Speaker 4: you know, I mean, there's there's things we can do
Speaker 4: to sort of minimize, you know, the the the problem.
Speaker 4: But it doesn't doesn't totally get rid of it, that's
Speaker 4: for sure.
Speaker 12: Maybe from A and M would be the answer. We
Speaker 12: need to check that would and tell them get moving.
Speaker 4: That's it, and get them get them going here. You know,
Speaker 4: the the nematod if we had a rootstock that that's
Speaker 4: what we do in peaches. We have a rootstock called
Speaker 4: Nina guard that we graft our peaches here on. We
Speaker 4: need a nematode resistant fig. I don't know that one exists.
Speaker 4: I did a This is off topic, but I breed
Speaker 4: Okra and Okra is also hammered by Nema toades. And
Speaker 4: there are a few strains around the world that claim
Speaker 4: some resistance to nematodes, and so I have been trying
Speaker 4: to collect those and test them out. And my thought
Speaker 4: is if I could cross good Okrah with these old
Speaker 4: things from all over the world that are resistant, maybe
Speaker 4: we come up with a nematode resistant. Okra, I'll probably
Speaker 4: be long gone before that happens, but at least it's
Speaker 4: fun trying.
Speaker 5: Well, we should.
Speaker 12: Work that out on pigs too, I mean, that would
Speaker 12: be just a godsendis are so great you just can't
Speaker 12: raise them in certain areas.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well that's true, that is true. Well, sure, thanks
Speaker 4: a lot for your time. Thanks and thanks for that memory.
Speaker 4: Back over near Amistad Reservoir in the Del Rio area,
Speaker 4: right Devils.
Speaker 12: River, probably about fifty miles north on the Devil's River,
Speaker 12: just out kind of in the middle, Well, Dolan's Creek
Speaker 12: comes out of the comes out of the eastern side
Speaker 12: down into the uh down the river there and that's
Speaker 12: right there at that junction where the gigantic thing think
Speaker 12: it probably still is.
Speaker 4: All right, very good, Well, hey, thanks appreciate that.
Speaker 5: Bill.
Speaker 4: You take care all right. If you got a question
Speaker 4: on guard line WUL you'd like to ask me on
Speaker 4: guardline seven one three two one two five eight seven
Speaker 4: four seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four.
Speaker 4: Star of Hope makes a difference in people's lives. They
Speaker 4: literally make a huge difference, not just for people that
Speaker 4: are homeless, uh, but people that are struggling in many ways.
Speaker 4: You know, how about their kids? You know, maybe there's
Speaker 4: a mom it for no fault of her own, has
Speaker 4: lost everything and she's living in a car with her children.
Speaker 4: How about where's she going to get a meal? Where's
Speaker 4: she going to get job training? Where is she going
Speaker 4: to get childcare to be able to have a job.
Speaker 4: Starve Hope handles all of that. They change the family's future,
Speaker 4: the future of the children, and benefit our community as
Speaker 4: a whole in that very way. Do you know? Over
Speaker 4: six thousand meals a week are served by Star of
Speaker 4: Hope Starve Hope Mission here in the Houston area. For
Speaker 4: two dollars and eighty five cents. You can provide a
Speaker 4: meal two dollars and eighty five cents. My wife and
Speaker 4: I are supporters and have been of Star of Hope
Speaker 4: as we've gone through the years, a volunteer and supporting.
Speaker 4: I believe in it. I see it as money that
Speaker 4: is well managed, well spent, and it makes a difference.
Speaker 4: Would you join me, join me and my wife in
Speaker 4: providing help for people in our community through Star of Hope.
Speaker 4: You can go to shmission dot org, Mission dot org
Speaker 4: and give there two dollars and eighty five cents buys
Speaker 4: a meal. And there are many other ways to provide
Speaker 4: help for the folks that Star of Hope is helping
Speaker 4: here in our community. I was talking to someone about
Speaker 4: some Medina products. Someone was called earlier and talking about
Speaker 4: how wonderful the products were, and they're really right. There
Speaker 4: are a lot of great Medina products out there. One
Speaker 4: of the ones that I like to use that I
Speaker 4: find to be very very effective is Medina Plus. Medina
Speaker 4: Plus is Medina soil activators. That's a long time famous,
Speaker 4: well loved product by Medina. It's Medina soil activator fortified
Speaker 4: with the central micronutrients and growth hormones. Get them from
Speaker 4: seaweed extract. So those are all kinds of substances that
Speaker 4: are apart. You know, plants need more than just nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium,
Speaker 4: for example, they need trace minerals, and Medina Plus has
Speaker 4: got the trace minerals in it. It's got things like
Speaker 4: iron and zinc. It's got things like vitamin rival, flavent, diamond, biotin,
Speaker 4: nicotinic acid, and others. It's got sight of kind and
Speaker 4: a natural growth hormone that I was talking about from
Speaker 4: sebeed extract. It helps with bloom set, it helps with growth,
Speaker 4: it helps with establishment. I would soak seed in it.
Speaker 4: Soak seed in Medina plus, dilute it down. Follow the instructions,
Speaker 4: dilute it down, soak your seed in it. When the
Speaker 4: seeds swell up, then take them out and plant them,
Speaker 4: and you will see fast germination and good results. I
Speaker 4: would use it when I'm transplanting to soak the root
Speaker 4: ball of materials that are going to be transplanted, like
Speaker 4: a tree or shrub in the Medina Plus, or to
Speaker 4: just plant and then drench over it very well and
Speaker 4: repeat that drench about twice more about a week apart,
Speaker 4: and you will see a very good early response on
Speaker 4: those plants that you're putting in the ground. One of
Speaker 4: the many good products from the folks at Medina. Let's
Speaker 4: see here, where are we on our top. I believe
Speaker 4: that I'm about out of time, so we're going to
Speaker 4: take a quick break here, and when I come back,
Speaker 4: Mike and Spring and Rachel out in Chapel Hill, you're
Speaker 4: gonna be our first two up. All right, welcome back
Speaker 4: to the garden line. We're gonna go straight out to
Speaker 4: the phones, and let's see where were starting. We're going
Speaker 4: to head to spring and talk to Mike. Hello, Mike,
Speaker 4: welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 16: Hey, Skip, how you doing.
Speaker 9: Well?
Speaker 4: Thank you? Oh hey, sir, I'm here.
Speaker 16: I've planted some asparagus a few months ago that I
Speaker 16: ordered online, and I'm just curious. It's real spinley and
Speaker 16: has some really thin like I guess you call them
Speaker 16: leaves that they're Yes, I don't know what, dude. If
Speaker 16: there's something I can do to it, yeah.
Speaker 4: It's normal. And so what you're going to do is
Speaker 4: continue to fertilize and care for it. The big thing
Speaker 4: with asparagus is keep the weeds away their competition. So
Speaker 4: a good thick molt is very helpful, and then fertilizing
Speaker 4: it through the season. And as you build that up,
Speaker 4: what the asparagus does is it stores down in its
Speaker 4: storage roots system. We call that the crown of the plant.
Speaker 4: That's what you planted, was an asparagus crown. Those roots
Speaker 4: get really thick and they store all the carbohydrates. So
Speaker 4: when you come out of winter, you want to cut
Speaker 4: that asparagus back to the ground and then the new
Speaker 4: spears that come up will have some size to them
Speaker 4: like you're looking for. And then as you harvest them,
Speaker 4: the crown gets weaker and weaker because it's spending energy
Speaker 4: to grow spears, and then you're cutting them off and
Speaker 4: it's never getting them up in the sunlight because you're
Speaker 4: cutting them off to eat. At some point when they're
Speaker 4: about pencil size, you stop harvesting it and then let
Speaker 4: it replenish and go through the season. And that's kind
Speaker 4: of a cycle for asparagus. But the key is to
Speaker 4: get a good strong plant established that can send up
Speaker 4: some better spears than what you're seeing right now.
Speaker 16: Well, they're in a raised mego bed, and so I
Speaker 16: cut them back in the spring.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you can cut that back in the spring. People
Speaker 4: experiment with different things about it. You know, asparagus is
Speaker 4: mostly grown further north than here, mostly and there you
Speaker 4: have a hard winter that kills it back to the
Speaker 4: ground and so when it comes out in the spring
Speaker 4: it's all fresh. Sometime down here, our winters are so mild.
Speaker 4: Asparagus never never gets killed back fully and it continues
Speaker 4: to you know, use energy and stuff in the cool season,
Speaker 4: and we just don't get the volume of harvest that
Speaker 4: you would. You know, if you went up to Kansas
Speaker 4: or Missouri or someplace, okay from the asparagus. So I've
Speaker 4: talked to people who've tried cutting it back at different times,
Speaker 4: you know, to get some fresh growth out. Maybe a
Speaker 4: little bit earlier in the winter, but in general that
Speaker 4: what I told you before is that's kind of the
Speaker 4: process that we do for asparagus.
Speaker 5: All right, I appreciate it, all right, sir, thank you.
Speaker 4: And if you do have success, you know, all I
Speaker 4: ask is that you bring half your sparagus crop to
Speaker 4: the station. That's all I asked, just to thank you, Mike.
Speaker 4: Appreciate that. All right, We're going to run out to
Speaker 4: Chapel Hill and talk to Rachel.
Speaker 18: Hey, Rachel, Hi, Stith, how are you doing.
Speaker 4: I'm welcome, good, thank you.
Speaker 18: So we got some we planted some seat potatoes, the
Speaker 18: red ones, and they produced quite nicely. But the skin
Speaker 18: is really really tough, like we have to peel them,
Speaker 18: as opposed to the ones we buy in the store.
Speaker 18: We don't have to peel those. We can just cook
Speaker 18: those with the skins on. So I was looking for
Speaker 18: a way to eat her.
Speaker 4: Go ahead.
Speaker 18: I was looking for a way to basically plant the
Speaker 18: ones that we get from the store with the thinner skin.
Speaker 4: Okay, So where did you get the potatoes that you
Speaker 4: planted at?
Speaker 18: A yeah, or a local I think like a roadside
Speaker 18: you know where they were selling seet potatoes.
Speaker 14: Okay.
Speaker 4: So that kind of potato does have a very thin skin.
Speaker 4: And what can happen is there's things that happen underground.
Speaker 4: There's a disease called skurf, and there's some other things.
Speaker 4: They can cause the skin to become thickened and rough. Uh.
Speaker 4: And so it's not what I would do is I
Speaker 4: would buy them from a low I wouldn't go to
Speaker 4: the grocery store. Sometimes those are treated with a sprout
Speaker 4: inhibitor and they don't want to the eyes don't want
Speaker 4: to push out buds because they don't want them doing
Speaker 4: that in storage, so they treat them with that. I
Speaker 4: would just go to a local garden center, local feed store,
Speaker 4: you know the places where you get that locally and
Speaker 4: buy your new potatoes from them. There's red kennebec. Red
Speaker 4: kennebec is a common red pontiac is another one that
Speaker 4: you can get locally. Those will be at your local
Speaker 4: places and if you plant those, you should have good results. Now,
Speaker 4: if it keeps happening. We need to get a good
Speaker 4: look at exactly what that potato looks like when it's
Speaker 4: as you describe, and maybe figure out is it a
Speaker 4: disease in the soil or is it something else going on?
Speaker 4: But I think trying fresh next spring. You know, February
Speaker 4: is when you're going to be planting seed potatoes, and
Speaker 4: so just go ahead and get some fresh ones locally,
Speaker 4: and that's what I would do.
Speaker 18: Okay, great, thank.
Speaker 14: You so much.
Speaker 4: All right, Rachel, good luck, and you know when you
Speaker 4: if this all works and you have a good crop,
Speaker 4: then just bring half the potatoes to the station. We'll
Speaker 4: call it even there you go. That's all I ask.
Speaker 4: It's not too much, all right, bye bye, We're going
Speaker 4: to go to Friends with and talk to Alan. Hey Allen,
Speaker 4: welcome to garden Line. Hey skipping, thanks for all you do.
Speaker 4: Got a question about Peggy Martin roses. I currently have
Speaker 4: three growing in pots and I'd like to put them
Speaker 4: in the yard as a hedge row. I just wondering
Speaker 4: what the proper spacing on that would.
Speaker 9: Be, because as you know, they get a little they
Speaker 9: get the long runners on them, and I just don't
Speaker 9: know how close to do.
Speaker 4: They sure do. Yeah, they'll they'll cover a large area.
Speaker 4: I would say probably I would do ten feet apart
Speaker 4: just to make a thicker row. They'll go way more
Speaker 4: than five feet in all the options. But but you
Speaker 4: could you could put them further than that a part
Speaker 4: if you want. I would get them something to grow on.
Speaker 4: Now you could do. You could do like a livestock
Speaker 4: panel that's on posts that's up a little higher in
Speaker 4: the air, if you want to do that, and and
Speaker 4: just tie them to it or weave them through it
Speaker 4: as they grow. That would make a wall of foliage.
Speaker 4: That hedged term you used, it would be more like
Speaker 4: a hedge like growth to it. Okay, Yeah, that's the thing.
Speaker 4: They just need to support. Some people just have a
Speaker 4: single rail like a rail fence, and they tie them
Speaker 4: to that and then they send out their new shoots
Speaker 4: sprawling in all directions from that, and you just keep
Speaker 4: them trimmed back.
Speaker 9: And I've also seen a hedge of those out of
Speaker 9: Nature's way resources and it was free standing. It was
Speaker 9: out in the middle of their garden. It was just beautiful.
Speaker 9: They just without any support, and I just didn't I
Speaker 9: would that would be my preference versus you know the support.
Speaker 9: You know there is a fence behind it, but I
Speaker 9: was hoping to get far enough away from the fence
Speaker 9: that it didn't train on the fence.
Speaker 4: Okay, well you can do that. I would think that
Speaker 4: would be a pretty thick hedge, right that you saw.
Speaker 3: Yes, it was.
Speaker 9: It was wo pretty thick, probably three four foot yeah wide,
Speaker 9: But it looked like they trimmed it and kept it
Speaker 9: as it was kind of a squarish hedge, but it
Speaker 9: was beautiful when it was.
Speaker 4: Okay, well, you could do that. You could certainly do
Speaker 4: that as well. Just just trim the things that are
Speaker 4: growing in directions you don't want it to grow and
Speaker 4: leave everything else. That would be another approach to it.
Speaker 4: I've never tried that. I've never tried it that way.
Speaker 9: Okay, Well, I appreciate your help. And I was a
Speaker 9: little surprised by the ten foot spacing. I would have
Speaker 9: thought it had been closer to three or four.
Speaker 4: But if if well, I mean you can put them closer. Well,
Speaker 4: what I'm telling you is my way would be taking
Speaker 4: all the growth and training those long gangly shoots down
Speaker 4: that fence. Uh. And so I've got one. I have
Speaker 4: a peggy Martin on one corner of an arbor in
Speaker 4: my backyard, and it is already going probably ten feet
Speaker 4: across the arbor and spreading everywhere. And that's just that's
Speaker 4: just that one. And that's after the dogs chooted for
Speaker 4: the ground twice. But that's another story. But anyway, you know.
Speaker 9: Yeah, they just don't they don't seem to do as
Speaker 9: well in pots. So I wanted to get these in
Speaker 9: the ground.
Speaker 4: Okay, Yeah, that's true. No, they do, they do, and
Speaker 4: they will grow vigorously. And if you line them closer,
Speaker 4: you know, than ten feet, you can do that, it's
Speaker 4: just gonna it's gonna fill in faster. So there's there's
Speaker 4: not a magical certain distance that you would plant based
Speaker 4: on what you're trying to achieve.
Speaker 9: Okay, I might try to bring those together where, like
Speaker 9: you said, get a quicker fill.
Speaker 4: The yes, that that would give you quicker fill for sure. Hey,
Speaker 4: thanks for the call. I appreciate it. All right, you
Speaker 4: take take care, bye bye bye. All right, we're gonna
Speaker 4: where we know Okay, I got time. We're gonna go
Speaker 4: to Westbury and talk to Anthony. Hey, Anthony, good morning.
Speaker 17: My rose Bush is doing something really awkward. I have
Speaker 17: one stem from the trunk. It's really shot up. It's
Speaker 17: about five feet tall. I was looking to prune it. However,
Speaker 17: the upper half has very healthy pedals. In fact, there's
Speaker 17: a bloom coming up and there's nothing on the lower half.
Speaker 4: No, no petals, no stems or anything.
Speaker 14: If five pruning.
Speaker 17: It too down, will the pedals start coming up from
Speaker 17: the lower half?
Speaker 4: Is this a climbing rose?
Speaker 8: No?
Speaker 4: Do you know the variety?
Speaker 17: Yes, I've got the car here his works. We're giveaways
Speaker 17: from where I work, and I didn't realize. Uh they okay,
Speaker 17: from one of those box stores. And it's called let
Speaker 17: me see here, Uh for bunda angel face that mean anything?
Speaker 4: Okay, angel face. It's a flora flora flora bunder rose. Okay. So, uh,
Speaker 4: Roses bloom at the end of shoots. So if you
Speaker 4: have one shoot coming up, it's gonna have a rose
Speaker 4: up at the top. That's how that works. Or a
Speaker 4: cluster of roses Flora bundas will produce you They get
Speaker 4: a cluster of roses on it. But if you prune
Speaker 4: that shoot and now three shoots sprout out as a
Speaker 4: result of cutting the shoot back a little bit, then
Speaker 4: you can have three terminals with blooms on them. And
Speaker 4: so as you develop a more bushy rose instead of
Speaker 4: a long lanky shoot, you have a fuller amount of shoots,
Speaker 4: you're going to have more and more blooms produced as
Speaker 4: a result, and they'll be down lower as well. You know,
Speaker 4: as you described this one went way up and out
Speaker 4: of bloom at the top, So you can bring that
Speaker 4: down a little bit. But that's the pruning process. You
Speaker 4: prune it as it regrows, it blooms, and then you
Speaker 4: print it back again. If it's a shrub type rose,
Speaker 4: you just prune it back again. And the more shoots
Speaker 4: that break out and grow from that pruning, the more
Speaker 4: blooming you're going to have on it.
Speaker 17: Okay, so then I should feel comfortable that the stems
Speaker 17: will start to come out where there is it's bear
Speaker 17: stem right now. Absolutely, there's nothing, yes, except on the
Speaker 17: upper half.
Speaker 4: Okay. Yes, you can print it back and think about
Speaker 4: like hybrid te roses in a formal herb gard or
Speaker 4: rose garden. They cut those things back to like two
Speaker 4: feet high, you know, I mean they and they just
Speaker 4: look like a bunch of sticks when they get through.
Speaker 4: But all the fresh new growth comes out and they
Speaker 4: bloom beautifully, so don't be afraid to cut those things
Speaker 4: back to the height that you want. Cut them a
Speaker 4: little shorter than you want, because they're going to grow
Speaker 4: back up a little bit from where you cut them. Right,
Speaker 4: very well. Thank you all right, sir, Thank you appreciate
Speaker 4: the call. Good luck with that. Send me a picture
Speaker 4: whenever you get the whene of you get some blooms
Speaker 4: on that, I'd love to see how they look. That
Speaker 4: would be fun. Well, it is time for me to
Speaker 4: take a break. I will be right back with more
Speaker 4: of your calls. Seven one three two one two kat
Speaker 4: r H. Welcome back, Welcome back to garden Line. Hey,
Speaker 4: if you'd like to give us a call, we have
Speaker 4: got thirty minutes in the show today. I'd be happy
Speaker 4: to help you before. If not, we can wait till
Speaker 4: next week and do it on Saturday or Sunday next week.
Speaker 4: We're here every Saturday and Sunday from six am to
Speaker 4: ten am. Thanks for being a guarden Line listener. And
Speaker 4: tell your family and friends and neighbors, especially the neighbor
Speaker 4: that won't you take care of his landscape, tell them
Speaker 4: about garden Line so they can listen in too. You
Speaker 4: can hear us live on KTRH seven forty am. You
Speaker 4: can listen to us on your computer if you'd aluck
Speaker 4: to do that, or you can download the iHeart Media
Speaker 4: app and listen live on the iHeartMedia app. Oh my gosh,
Speaker 4: I got music going here. I'm trying to shut it
Speaker 4: down and I do not know how to do that.
Speaker 4: Let me there we go, coming in off the side.
Speaker 4: The iHeartMedia app will allow you to listen live. So
Speaker 4: you can take your phone, go out in the garden,
Speaker 4: turn the phone upside down, turn the speaker on loud,
Speaker 4: and listen to Guarden Line while your garden, and who knows,
Speaker 4: maybe you'll take a picture and email it to me
Speaker 4: and call in and we can talk about it. There.
Speaker 4: Other other you know, podcasting types of apps carry Guardline
Speaker 4: as well, of course, but for the live listen, the
Speaker 4: iHeart Media apps the way to go. So just some
Speaker 4: different ways to do that. I've talked about the folks
Speaker 4: that fix my slab foundation repair, specifically Ty Strickland, the owner,
Speaker 4: many many times. You know, I don't know anyone who
Speaker 4: has got the experience and the business perspective that I
Speaker 4: find so helpful. And what I mean by that is
Speaker 4: TI's been doing this for twenty three years. You know
Speaker 4: he's a native Heystonian, fifth generation Texan. Tye knows what
Speaker 4: he's doing. He understands our soils, the way they shrink
Speaker 4: and swell and move and cause problems in your sidewalk,
Speaker 4: problems in your driveway, and worst of all, problems in
Speaker 4: your home foundation. The thing I like about Tye's approach
Speaker 4: to business is he looks at it this way. When
Speaker 4: he shows up for a job, Number one, he's going
Speaker 4: to show up on time. That is important. Had a
Speaker 4: plumber come out to the house when was this just
Speaker 4: a few days a week ago? And he said, I'll
Speaker 4: be there Saturday morning. Well, Saturday morning canan mo went
Speaker 4: Finally late in the day. I call him, Hey, what's
Speaker 4: going on? And he shows up at the end of
Speaker 4: the day. I was lucky even came the same day.
Speaker 4: Ty shows up on time. Tye prices his work fairly.
Speaker 4: That is important fair pricing. And also very important is
Speaker 4: when ty fixes it, he fixes it right. It's not
Speaker 4: like halfway. It's not like he fixed it but it
Speaker 4: broke again kind of thing. He knows what he's doing.
Speaker 4: You can give him a call at two eight one
Speaker 4: two five, five forty nine forty nine two eight one
Speaker 4: two five forty nine forty nine. Tell him you reguard
Speaker 4: one listener free estimates for garden line listeners. So when
Speaker 4: you see cracks in the brick on the outside, when
Speaker 4: you see cracks in the sheet rock on the inside,
Speaker 4: when you got doors that are sticking, that is just
Speaker 4: something's moving. You need to give him a call. Go
Speaker 4: to the website fix myslab dot com. Fix myslab dot
Speaker 4: com to eight one two five five forty nine forty nine.
Speaker 4: Nobody wants foundation problems. I mean, it's like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 4: kind of like me with my plumbing. It's like, oh man,
Speaker 4: I don't want to deal with this. But don't be
Speaker 4: an ostrich and put your head in the sand. Go
Speaker 4: ahead and get it taken care of. What you'll find
Speaker 4: a lot of times too is you may be surprised
Speaker 4: at Tie's assessment. I talked to him a long while
Speaker 4: back about a situation one of my daughters had at
Speaker 4: their house and what we were looking at and all
Speaker 4: the information and stuff, and you know, he said, you
Speaker 4: know what, that is not worth fixing right now. It's
Speaker 4: it's within the range of what is acceptable you know,
Speaker 4: and I wouldn't. I wouldn't go into the time, money
Speaker 4: and expensive fixing it. I was surprised. I thought if
Speaker 4: there was any kind of an issue, you had to
Speaker 4: do something right away on it. Well, not necessarily. Each
Speaker 4: situation is different, and Tyle shoot straight with you on that.
Speaker 4: You were listening to garden Line. We've been talking about
Speaker 4: a lot of folks to a lot of folks today.
Speaker 4: It's kind of quiet right now on the phones if
Speaker 4: you'd like to get through on a call, and that
Speaker 4: would be a good time. This is our second to
Speaker 4: last segment that we're winding up here. It is important
Speaker 4: when you are going to have success in the garden
Speaker 4: to just understand some basic things. Plants need. Plants need
Speaker 4: good drainage, plants need good light, plants need good soil.
Speaker 4: That's first, first of all, soil quality, and need to
Speaker 4: plant things that are adapted to here. Sometimes that means
Speaker 4: it's a species that grows here. That are species that
Speaker 4: doesn't grow here that you don't want to plant. Sometimes
Speaker 4: it's a cult of our variety that grows here. And
Speaker 4: sometimes it just understanding which ones will do best. Sometimes
Speaker 4: it means going, hey, you know what I need to
Speaker 4: have a second variety to pollinate the first briety. Like,
Speaker 4: how about this, If you're going to plant a peach tree,
Speaker 4: do you need two trees so they can pollinate each other?
Speaker 4: There's no a self pollinating If you're going to plant
Speaker 4: a plum tree, do you need two to pollinate each other?
Speaker 4: In most cases, but there are some that are self
Speaker 4: pollinating with beaches. They are all self pollinating with plums some,
Speaker 4: but it never hurts the plant a second variety. Take blueberries,
Speaker 4: for example, a blueberry can produce berries itself without a
Speaker 4: partner plant, but you will get more and bigger berries
Speaker 4: if you put a second variety with your first variety.
Speaker 4: Now why is that? Well, have you ever been into
Speaker 4: a blueberry and seen the little, tiny soft seeds inside?
Speaker 4: You know, there can be dozens of seeds in a blueberry,
Speaker 4: and everyone that gets pollinated makes that berry bigger. Seeds
Speaker 4: give off hormones that make fruit bigger, and so a
Speaker 4: well pollinated blueberry will be larger than a poorly pollinated blueberry.
Speaker 4: That's why we do two varieties for that. Apples generally
Speaker 4: are going to require pollination pairs kind of a mixed
Speaker 4: bag there, but they it's generally good to have a
Speaker 4: second variety, but they can self pollinate. It's not a problem.
Speaker 4: So what do you do when you've got a fruit
Speaker 4: tree that is a lonely Hearts club fruit tree. Let's
Speaker 4: say it is an apple and it needed a variety,
Speaker 4: but you only have one. It needs another one. Well,
Speaker 4: you could go find a neighbor with a different variety,
Speaker 4: cut a little branch off, put it in a little
Speaker 4: pail of water, stick it underneath the tree, or hang it.
Speaker 4: Put in a coke can hang it from the branches
Speaker 4: and let the bees visit that trimmed off branch from
Speaker 4: your neighbors and yours and pollinate itself while you plant
Speaker 4: and get another one up to speed so you can
Speaker 4: have the cross pollination. Right there, Just an idea, a
Speaker 4: way to deal with things when you need a pollinator
Speaker 4: and you ain't got one. Well, it'll get you through.
Speaker 4: But in the meantime, find some that's going to be
Speaker 4: a good pollinator and add it to your planting so
Speaker 4: you can have success. All right, we're going to take
Speaker 4: a little break. We'll be back for our last segment.
Speaker 4: The phone number if you'd like to call seven one
Speaker 4: three two one two kt RH. Hey, we're gonna jump
Speaker 4: right in here on Guardline. We've got a couple of
Speaker 4: calls we're gonna finish up with today. I did want
Speaker 4: to remind you again that if you're looking for some
Speaker 4: holiday shopping, ACE Hardware has got you covered, from kids
Speaker 4: toys to adult toy. You know, the tools for the
Speaker 4: do it yourself, the tools for the in the kitchen,
Speaker 4: for the cooker, the cooking, the chef, the whatever you
Speaker 4: got in there. They just have a lot of things.
Speaker 4: You walk in there and you look at the decorations
Speaker 4: that they have, it is amazing. You're going to find
Speaker 4: so many cool things when you go into an ACE
Speaker 4: Hardware store. Each is independently, open owned, so each has
Speaker 4: its own flavor. They're all Ace. They have the standard
Speaker 4: A stuff, but each has its own flavor, and you
Speaker 4: be really surprised. You know, you can find ACE Hardware
Speaker 4: stores all over the place. For example, there is Wharton
Speaker 4: Feed and Ace down in Wharton, Texas. I was there
Speaker 4: given a talk earlier this year. Plantation out there in
Speaker 4: Richmond and Rosenberg. There's the Sinko ranch Ase in Katie.
Speaker 4: I was at that one as well this year. You
Speaker 4: can go all the way up to Lake Conroe. ACE
Speaker 4: for all seasons. Ace and willis forty of them around
Speaker 4: the area. Just go to Acehardware dot com and look
Speaker 4: for the store locator and find the ones near you.
Speaker 4: While you're there, pick up your holiday lights for indoors
Speaker 4: and outdoors. Pick up your holiday decorations for indoors and outdoors. Because,
Speaker 4: as they like to say, ACE is the place. We're
Speaker 4: going to go. Now to the phones, and I'm gonna
Speaker 4: go to Southwest Houston. We're gonna talk to Sandy. Hello, Sandy,
Speaker 4: Welcome to garden line.
Speaker 19: Oh hi, I have two questions. My peach tree didn't
Speaker 19: get enough water when I was out of town, and
Speaker 19: then when I watered it when I came back, it bloomed.
Speaker 19: Does that mean I want to shake peaches next year?
Speaker 4: Probably? That is a stress response. When they go into
Speaker 4: a late season drought and then they're perked up again,
Speaker 4: they will It's almost like they went through winter and
Speaker 4: they come back out with blooms in the fall. And
Speaker 4: so it's possible that there were a few blooms that
Speaker 4: didn't open that will open in spring, but I would
Speaker 4: I would not expect that, Okay.
Speaker 19: And then I have a very large oak tree is
Speaker 19: probably you know, like sixty seventy years old, and if
Speaker 19: I cut it down, you know it's getting old. Do
Speaker 19: I and I have the stump ground? How long until
Speaker 19: I can plant a contry in that area?
Speaker 4: You can plant one a little off to the side
Speaker 4: at any time you want. When you grind a plant,
Speaker 4: they try to get all the wood chips out, but
Speaker 4: they don't. They get mixed in the soil and all
Speaker 4: that wood initially ties up a lot of nitrogen as
Speaker 4: it begins to decompose. And then that area that you
Speaker 4: thought was level sinks down because as the soil settles
Speaker 4: and as the wood rots away, it just drops the
Speaker 4: level down. So how the mounded up when you're when
Speaker 4: you're done, and that way, when it sinks down, it'll
Speaker 4: end up more on the level. Get as much of
Speaker 4: the woodchips out as you can. Once it is sunken down,
Speaker 4: then you can go ahead and plant in it. It's
Speaker 4: just you don't want to plant a pecan and then
Speaker 4: suddenly now it's too deep because it's it's sunken down
Speaker 4: a little bit. Okay, So the best time of year
Speaker 4: to plant up a country, all right, is well you
Speaker 4: now fall is good winter is good. Spring is Okay.
Speaker 4: You can plant them in the summer, but it's a
Speaker 4: lot more stressful time. It's more touch and go and
Speaker 4: difficult to have success compared to planting in the fall
Speaker 4: or winter.
Speaker 19: Okay, thank you so much.
Speaker 4: All right now, I would say bring me half the
Speaker 4: pecans you get, but I can't wait that long, Sandy,
Speaker 4: So we're gonna let you have this one for free.
Speaker 5: Take care.
Speaker 19: Thank you so much.
Speaker 4: Fight By, We're gonna go out to Hockley now and
Speaker 4: talk to Rob. Hey, Rob, welcome to garden Line, Thanks sir,
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 8: Hey.
Speaker 20: I've got a little a little tree issue.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 20: I bought an Eagleston holly uh about a year ago
Speaker 20: and I've planted in my side yard over there and
Speaker 20: it's about I guess six seven feet tall and it's
Speaker 20: grown a little bit. But over the over the year
Speaker 20: it's looks it looks.
Speaker 4: Kind of puney. It.
Speaker 20: We went through the heat and I said, well, I'm
Speaker 20: not watering enough and then you go over water. So
Speaker 20: so so I took my auger out there the other
Speaker 20: day and just around the outside, I just kind of
Speaker 20: drilled it along where the dirt edge was where it
Speaker 20: was planted and it went down and it's and it's
Speaker 20: it's mostly clay down there. But anyhow, when I got
Speaker 20: to the bottom, it was just it was just soaking wet,
Speaker 20: and and then so I'll pulled up all this mud
Speaker 20: and got and so I said, well to make it,
Speaker 20: I went all the way around it with that and
Speaker 20: I actually pulled it out of the ground. And so
Speaker 20: is that savablele Can I clean it up? And it's
Speaker 20: still has leaves and it's still green.
Speaker 4: It's just yeah, it was just yeah, it is, yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 4: You know, Rob, when you used your augur, how deep
Speaker 4: did you have to go to get to soggy?
Speaker 5: Uh?
Speaker 4: I guess about a flip? Okay, all right, good, well
Speaker 4: that's sunning decent. Yeah, that's some decent depth. Now, Hollys
Speaker 4: don't want to grow in a swamp, so you need
Speaker 4: to set your irrigation to avoid overwatering. But the first
Speaker 4: two or three years of a holly's life it needs
Speaker 4: to be kind of pampered along. I usually tell people
Speaker 4: to hand water them as much as you can because
Speaker 4: they have stiff leaves. And let's say you had a
Speaker 4: sprink order that was in the bed and it was
Speaker 4: spraying water one way, and anything that blocks that spray
Speaker 4: prevents a section of soil from getting the water it
Speaker 4: was supposed to get on it. And with hollyes, you
Speaker 4: want to wet all the way around them with a
Speaker 4: good soaking on a frequent basis to keep them moist.
Speaker 4: And that's why I like canned watering because there you're
Speaker 4: in charge. You know everything's getting watered properly at a
Speaker 4: good depth, and your ideal with the auger is a
Speaker 4: good one. By the way, you can you know how
Speaker 4: we do aeration in our lawns and compost top dressing.
Speaker 4: When you auger out, you could throw a compost down
Speaker 4: in those holes too and let that decompose hollies or
Speaker 4: love a forest floor environment. So adding composts down in
Speaker 4: there just creates more of a rich soil over time
Speaker 4: as you do auguring and compost top dressing and stuff.
Speaker 4: And that's not something everybody the plants a holly needs
Speaker 4: to do, but since you got the auger, I would
Speaker 4: take advantage of that, but mainly keep them moist and
Speaker 4: just remember the first three years until it gets a
Speaker 4: good strong root system established, it's more touching go because
Speaker 4: the roots are confined. The demands are high, especially in
Speaker 4: summer heat this time of year. It's shouldn't need nearly
Speaker 4: as much water. In fact, probably no supplemental water. But
Speaker 4: just kind of watch it and see.
Speaker 20: So can I take around the outside? I didn't go
Speaker 20: out far enough when I made it, But can I
Speaker 20: take a tiller and kind of just go down and
Speaker 20: just till that and make the dirt a little bit
Speaker 20: better for root?
Speaker 4: What I would do? And yeah, instead of that, what
Speaker 4: I would do is get a spading fork and put
Speaker 4: some compost on top of the soil and push that
Speaker 4: fork down. You may kind of wiggle it back and
Speaker 4: forth with your foot on it to get it to
Speaker 4: go straight down in the soil, and then pull back
Speaker 4: on the handle and sort of crack open the soil.
Speaker 4: We're not going to lift it and turn it over
Speaker 4: and bend over and harder back, and we're just cracking
Speaker 4: it open, and the compost will fall into those fissures
Speaker 4: and things. It'll loosen the soil plenty for that, Holly,
Speaker 4: you do not need to do a rototail. And I
Speaker 4: think the way I'm describing it as better even than
Speaker 4: trying to roll.
Speaker 20: It towards that area. Yeah, excellent, excellent, Thanks sir.
Speaker 4: You bet, thanks for the call, Lob. All right, there's
Speaker 4: another guardenline in the books. Folks, the music is playing,
Speaker 4: they say, it's not over until the fat Lady sings.
Speaker 4: I don't have anyone to sing like that for you,
Speaker 4: and you would not want me to, I promise you.
Speaker 4: So we'll just say see you next weekend. In the meantime,
Speaker 4: don't forget the Randy Lemon Scholarship on my website, Gardening
Speaker 4: with Skip dot com.