Speaker 1: Welcome to Katie r h Garden Line with Skimp Richard.
Speaker 2: It's crazy trip. Just watch him as well.
Speaker 3: Us so many botis to supatasy not a sorry class gas.
Speaker 4: Well, good morning. Yeah, it's me live. I uh. Isn't
Speaker 4: been a low break here during the holiday season. I
Speaker 4: hope you have had a wonderful time with family. Hopefully
Speaker 4: got some rest. Here we go first guard Line show
Speaker 4: of twenty twenty five. We will be here for your
Speaker 4: calls as we always are. If you would like to
Speaker 4: give me a call at seven one three two one
Speaker 4: to ktr H seven one three two one two k
Speaker 4: t RH. We'll talk about whatever is of interest to you,
Speaker 4: what is pressing in the gardening world of your backyard
Speaker 4: or your front yard. Right now, we will be having
Speaker 4: a great season. I have determined, just decided by myself
Speaker 4: that this is gonna be one of the best gardening
Speaker 4: years ever. I mean it. I really am looking forward
Speaker 4: to this gardening season. You know, every year throws us
Speaker 4: its own curve. Some years it's awfully hot and dry.
Speaker 4: Some years it just doesn't seem to want to quit
Speaker 4: rain in some years it tends to give us a
Speaker 4: pretty good coal snap. We got one of those coming
Speaker 4: by the way, but not too terribly bad. We'll talk
Speaker 4: about that a little bit as we go on through
Speaker 4: the show today. But no matter what happens, there's a
Speaker 4: lot that we are in control of when it comes
Speaker 4: to gardening in the weather that once we understand how
Speaker 4: to properly take care of plants, meaning get plants what
Speaker 4: they want, that's kind of what it amounts to. We'll
Speaker 4: talk about having a green thumb. A green thumb isn't
Speaker 4: there's no such thing as a green thumb. I like
Speaker 4: to put it that way because it makes a point,
Speaker 4: and that point is that it's not like some people
Speaker 4: just have a green thumb. And if you feel like
Speaker 4: your thumb's been brown and every time you try to
Speaker 4: grow something it doesn't work, you have these problems or
Speaker 4: issues or things, don't worry about that. We will fix it.
Speaker 4: Because a green thumb is i'll just say, a myth
Speaker 4: And if you want to think of it as a
Speaker 4: green thumb, well, let's do it this way. Then there's
Speaker 4: no such thing as a brown thumb. There's just an
Speaker 4: uninformed thumb. So we will inform your thumb and amazingly
Speaker 4: it will start to turn green. That's how it works
Speaker 4: garden line seven one three two one two kt r H.
Speaker 4: I'm your host, skip Rictor and really looking forward to
Speaker 4: twenty twenty five. Out in the garden. We are entering
Speaker 4: that season where everybody gets gardening fever. You know, people
Speaker 4: that aren't really even into gardening when spring comes here
Speaker 4: and it's just on the doorstep. When it hits, people
Speaker 4: get gardening fever. And gardening fever causes us to want
Speaker 4: to go out and buy and plant and do all
Speaker 4: kinds of things. And I think that's great. I think
Speaker 4: that's great. But if you're going to do it, let's
Speaker 4: do it in a smart way. How about that? What
Speaker 4: does that mean? That means don't just grab a plant
Speaker 4: that doesn't belong in the greater Houston area. Plant something
Speaker 4: that wants to be here. Maybe you just move from Colorado.
Speaker 4: I love blue spruce, they don't grow here. Maybe you
Speaker 4: love that blue Colorado columbine. Yeah, I know, you went
Speaker 4: ski in, you saw a seedbacket, whatever. Just put it
Speaker 4: on the shelf and enjoy looking at it, because that's
Speaker 4: as close to a Columbine flowers you're going to get
Speaker 4: here in Texas. From the blue Colorado are the ones
Speaker 4: that are. You know, all those multicolors that they'll sell
Speaker 4: up there. We have two native columbines down here, the Hinkleys,
Speaker 4: which is a yellow, beautiful columbine yellow. And then our
Speaker 4: native that's in central Texas is a small red columbine
Speaker 4: that's a native here. Plant those they'll grow. See what
Speaker 4: I'm talking about. Maybe you move from the Midwest. Oh
Speaker 4: my goodness, for cythia anywhere really, anywhere further north in
Speaker 4: the country. Forsythia is gorgeous, the first harbinger of spring,
Speaker 4: just about in the springtime. Don't plant it here, it's
Speaker 4: not for here. Do you like lilax? You know that
Speaker 4: fragrance of lilacs. Just let your memory tell you how
Speaker 4: wonderful they smell. Because they don't belong here, but lots
Speaker 4: of things do. And by planting plants that want to
Speaker 4: grow here, you can have success. That is step one.
Speaker 4: Plant something that wants to grow. Step two is prepare
Speaker 4: the soil. Actually, that is step one. We always talk
Speaker 4: about brown stuff or green stuff on garden line. Make
Speaker 4: that your number one New Year's resolution this year. If
Speaker 4: you want to be a gardener, number one resolution is
Speaker 4: to choose things that want to grow, but plant them
Speaker 4: in soil they want to be in. So for example,
Speaker 4: we have native plants like Central Texas native, the Texas
Speaker 4: Mountain Laurel, beautiful clusters grape like clusters of blooms that
Speaker 4: have a gaudy grape, bubblegum, grape, kool aid, whatever fragrance
Speaker 4: to them, a wonderful, wonderful plant. We also have plants,
Speaker 4: excuse me, their native to the eastern parts of the state,
Speaker 4: more acidic soils. Those two plants, even though they are
Speaker 4: both Texas plants, don't want to be in the same soil,
Speaker 4: and so you got to give them what they want.
Speaker 4: And that makes it even easier to have success is
Speaker 4: you're not trying to swim up stream. You're actually planting
Speaker 4: things in the soil they want to be in. So
Speaker 4: that's number one New Year's resolution. Get out there and
Speaker 4: fix your soil. Now's the time to do it. Anytime
Speaker 4: in the cool season, soil is dry enough to work,
Speaker 4: it's a good time to do that. Raised beds are
Speaker 4: always a good idea because you can always add water,
Speaker 4: but you can't take it away when you have excess
Speaker 4: soggy wet, which I've gotten some of my right now,
Speaker 4: I've got an area I'm trying to redo and I'm
Speaker 4: just having to wait on the soil to dry out
Speaker 4: enough to be able to work it. But you can
Speaker 4: always create raised beds, you can always amend the soil,
Speaker 4: you can provide more organic matter for your soil. All
Speaker 4: of that kind of stuff will help you have success.
Speaker 4: And that's what we want you to have. I want
Speaker 4: you to have success in your garden, and so we
Speaker 4: will harp. I'll be a broken record on preparing the soil,
Speaker 4: preparing the soil, taking care of the soil, getting it right,
Speaker 4: making the plants feel at home, all of the above.
Speaker 4: And when we do that, we will have success. It
Speaker 4: just sets us up for success. Now, there's a lot
Speaker 4: of different things that can happen that you know will
Speaker 4: throw you curves and challenges. I don't mean just you know,
Speaker 4: you prepare the soil and nothing goes wrong. Well, there's
Speaker 4: a lot more to it, but seriously, that is step one,
Speaker 4: and that's where most people go wrong. Most people go
Speaker 4: wrong by not preparing the soil ahead of time. So
Speaker 4: courage you to do that and I'll perhaps I'll spend
Speaker 4: a little time on that today. I know I will
Speaker 4: week by week. Here as we go through here on
Speaker 4: Garden Line. Well, thanks for listening, thanks for rejoining us
Speaker 4: here in twenty twenty five. We're coming up on a
Speaker 4: little bit of a break here. If you'd like to
Speaker 4: give me a call, get on the board. We can
Speaker 4: visit with you about the kinds of questions you might
Speaker 4: have seven to one three two one two five eight
Speaker 4: seven four. That is seven one three, two one two
Speaker 4: fifty eight seventy four. If you have a question that
Speaker 4: might involve a photo, give my producer Jonathan a call
Speaker 4: and get an email so you can send me a
Speaker 4: photo and then call and we'll talk about it on
Speaker 4: the air. Sometimes, you know, you're describing a weed and
Speaker 4: what I'm picturing and what you're describing isn't the same thing.
Speaker 4: Or maybe it's a flower or a fruit or something.
Speaker 4: Go ahead and just let you know, send me a photo,
Speaker 4: Let's let me look at it, then let's talk about it.
Speaker 4: Because I guarantee you this other people will have the
Speaker 4: same questions that you have. Well, I'll be right back
Speaker 4: in just a moment with your questions and with more
Speaker 4: a garden Line. Come back to Guarden Line, folks. Get
Speaker 4: good to have you with us this morning. Welcome back
Speaker 4: to We're welcome back. Welcome to twenty twenty five, the
Speaker 4: best gardening year you will ever have experienced. This is
Speaker 4: it being positive. Gardeners are optimists. We absolutely have to be,
Speaker 4: because you know, we take these little dried pieces of
Speaker 4: detritus that just look like, I don't know, just wood chip,
Speaker 4: tiny wood chips, and we put them in the soil,
Speaker 4: knowing that a tomato or a petunia is going to
Speaker 4: come out of that thing. It's actually going to come
Speaker 4: to life, grow and produce stuff that we really want
Speaker 4: to see or eat or whatever. That's an optimist. We
Speaker 4: believe in the future, and twenty twenty five is going
Speaker 4: to be a great gardening year. I can just tell
Speaker 4: you that we're going to start off by going straight
Speaker 4: to the phones and this hour or segment, and we're
Speaker 4: going to go to talk to Michael in Montgomery. Hello, Michael,
Speaker 4: Welcome to garden Line. Hello. Hello, I'm here, all righty,
Speaker 4: Well there he is.
Speaker 5: Hey Mike, how are we doing this morning?
Speaker 4: Are you well? I'm good. I'm a little rusty. I
Speaker 4: forgot to push the right button to get you on,
Speaker 4: so I'm just talking to myself instead of you.
Speaker 6: Good.
Speaker 5: Have you got a problem.
Speaker 7: I planted a six foot red maple last year in
Speaker 7: place of my oak that died and its plant and
Speaker 7: it's bloomed leaves and everything. But now with Paul, it
Speaker 7: dropped its leaves and everything. And with this freeze coming around,
Speaker 7: do I have to wrap it as a security?
Speaker 4: You know, red maple is a hearty tree for our
Speaker 4: area and we don't have to worry about it for cold,
Speaker 4: but in your situation there I would. And here's why
Speaker 4: we've We've been pretty warm these last few weeks, and
Speaker 4: plants that can become very cold hearty when they hear
Speaker 4: and off as the weather gets colder and colder gradually,
Speaker 4: they can be very uncold, hardy when suddenly a freeze
Speaker 4: comes and they're not ready for it. Now, nine chances
Speaker 4: out of ten, youre tree's gonna be fine, but just
Speaker 4: to be safe with it, I would wrap up the
Speaker 4: trunk around the base of the trunk. There are some
Speaker 4: some wraps that you can put around them to protect
Speaker 4: the sun from warming up those trunk tissues. And what
Speaker 4: happens is the sun will warm it during the day
Speaker 4: and a brand new This is true with red oaks,
Speaker 4: it's true with grape myrtles and several other kinds of
Speaker 4: trees up. The sun shines on that trunk and it
Speaker 4: warms up warmer than the air around it, Just like
Speaker 4: if you stood outside on a cold, cold winter day
Speaker 4: that you could feel the warmth of the sun on
Speaker 4: your face. Well, that's what happens. Those tissues start to
Speaker 4: flow sap a little bit, and then that night it
Speaker 4: freezes and you get freeze damaged, typically on the southwest
Speaker 4: side of the trunk. So normally I don't recommend trump
Speaker 4: rock trunk wraps, but for that I would. You could.
Speaker 4: You could use different things to do it, but there
Speaker 4: are some papers you can wrap around to kind of crinkly.
Speaker 4: There's some plastic wraps and things, but I like the
Speaker 4: paper wraps. Just until that tree gets a year or
Speaker 4: so on it, a year or two on it more,
Speaker 4: and that trunk starts to get a little heartier. Then
Speaker 4: the bark gets a little thicker and it's not so
Speaker 4: likely to suffer that southwest injury on a freezing night.
Speaker 6: Awesome, Thank you very much for your advice.
Speaker 4: I'll get to work today. You bet all right. You
Speaker 4: take care and fortunately this freeze is going to be
Speaker 4: fairly mild. And so I'm I think if people that
Speaker 4: are listening going, oh my gosh, I got to wrap
Speaker 4: all my trees. No, you probably don't, but on a
Speaker 4: brand new, thin trunk tree. Yeah, well thanks for the call, man,
Speaker 4: I appreciate it. Thank you, all right. Yeah, for those
Speaker 4: of you listening, just keep that in mind. You know,
Speaker 4: it's like, you know, if you were to say, you know, skipped,
Speaker 4: are we gonna get damage to all our tree trunks
Speaker 4: this freeze? Well no, probably not not at all, but
Speaker 4: there's a possibility. And when a tree is young, it's
Speaker 4: it's a paper thin bark. I mean it's very very thin,
Speaker 4: you know, it doesn't have those deep ridges. It's very smooth,
Speaker 4: and a maple tree bark is not smooth normally, but
Speaker 4: when a hung it is. I was in Atlanta, Georgia walking.
Speaker 4: They have a I don't know what they call it.
Speaker 4: It's like a beltway that goes around the city, but
Speaker 4: it's a walkway. It's a big, giant wide sidewalk, you know,
Speaker 4: maybe fifteen feet wide or something. It goes around the city.
Speaker 4: You can walk the whole thing, and walking through I
Speaker 4: just noticed every little tree had a wound. On the
Speaker 4: southwest side at the base, I say, little tree. Now,
Speaker 4: those things the first time I went there were probably
Speaker 4: the size of a of a golf ball, and I
Speaker 4: saw the wounds in. Now these things, I've been going
Speaker 4: for several years, but probably a lot of them are
Speaker 4: four to six inches thick, and when you look at them,
Speaker 4: you can see that old wound where the southwest injury
Speaker 4: occurred when they were a little thin trunk, thin barked
Speaker 4: young trees. And that's exactly how it happens. People call.
Speaker 4: When I used to work with the Agrove Extension Office,
Speaker 4: people would call and go, so, I've got this split
Speaker 4: near the bottom of my tree trunk, and I would say,
Speaker 4: is it on the southwest side? And there would be
Speaker 4: this pause where, you know, nobody knows off the hand
Speaker 4: what size side of the trunk. They have to stop
Speaker 4: and think, okay, this is north and suddenly they'd go, yeah,
Speaker 4: like how did you know that? And who cares what
Speaker 4: side it is. That's exactly what happens. A nice mild
Speaker 4: winter day and the sun at the latest part of
Speaker 4: you know, what's the hottest time of the day. Look
Speaker 4: at the temperatures through the day. The hottest time of
Speaker 4: the day is going to be around four o'clock, okay,
Speaker 4: somewhere around there, depends on the day, in the coal
Speaker 4: front coming through or something. But anyway, that's the warmest
Speaker 4: part and it warms up and with the sun shining
Speaker 4: on it, it warms up even more more than the
Speaker 4: rest of the tree trunk around all the other sides
Speaker 4: of the tree, and so that's where the sap starts
Speaker 4: to flow. And so then a coal snap that night.
Speaker 4: Typically that's going to happen when it gets down, you know,
Speaker 4: mid twenties, lower twenties or even colder. That's where we
Speaker 4: start to get that, even the teens, and you get
Speaker 4: that damage and you don't see it right away, but boy,
Speaker 4: you do see it when it starts to grow in
Speaker 4: the spring. And will the tree survive, Yeah, the tree
Speaker 4: will make it fine. But now you've got this big
Speaker 4: wound that's got to heal over. Perhaps you get some
Speaker 4: decay into the inner bark there is that splits open
Speaker 4: and exposes the inner bark. So why not just avoid it.
Speaker 4: It's easy to avoid. And the way we do it
Speaker 4: is put a little wrap around the tree. I've known
Speaker 4: people to paint the bases of their trees white. The trunks.
Speaker 4: Parts of the trunk white to reflect some of that heat.
Speaker 4: That helps a little bit. Looks kind of strange, although
Speaker 4: you go to some places like in Mexico, it's very
Speaker 4: popular even in large tree trunks and parks and stuff,
Speaker 4: you know, painted white on the lower part. But there
Speaker 4: is a place for that. I have known people to
Speaker 4: put some aluminum foil around the trunk, just wrap it around,
Speaker 4: just kind of crump it and so it stays there,
Speaker 4: just to reflect that sunlight out to keep that trunk
Speaker 4: cool rather than encouraging it to grow. Oh, let's see,
Speaker 4: it was it two decembers, three decembers ago. Now, we
Speaker 4: had a period where, especially for those of you up
Speaker 4: in the northern part of the listening area. When I
Speaker 4: say that, I mean you know, like Tomball up to
Speaker 4: College Station in Huntsville and everything up as you go north,
Speaker 4: A lot of crape myrtles got killed to the ground
Speaker 4: for the same reason. It went down to the upper
Speaker 4: teens in December, and they were not ready for it.
Speaker 4: They were not hardened off, and some flat to the
Speaker 4: ground and they came right back out. Of course, the
Speaker 4: base survives that you lost the above gund growth and
Speaker 4: it was the same principle going on there. They weren't
Speaker 4: ready for it. Crepe myrtles grow much further north than here.
Speaker 4: You know, the one of the major crate myrtle breeding
Speaker 4: programs in the country for decades past has been up
Speaker 4: in Beltsville, Maryland. That's a little further north than here. Well,
Speaker 4: that's the USDA breeding program. And so if they can
Speaker 4: grow up there, why are we having them killed to
Speaker 4: the ground here for the reason I just described. So,
Speaker 4: better safe than sorry is what I say. If I
Speaker 4: flipped a coin and had to say is it going
Speaker 4: to be needed or not? I would say no. But
Speaker 4: I wouldn't risk my own trees if I wasn't sure.
Speaker 4: So there you go. That's my advice. I'd rather spend
Speaker 4: a little time going out there and protecting the trunk,
Speaker 4: and then even if I didn't have to, Right, all right, Well,
Speaker 4: we got some cold weather coming last time I we
Speaker 4: were looking at temperatures down in the upper twenties for
Speaker 4: those of you who are up north of the Houston area,
Speaker 4: and for those of you that are down kind of
Speaker 4: even horizontally even across you know, with Houston, sugar Land
Speaker 4: and across there, we're looking probably down around thirty degrees
Speaker 4: twenty nine degrees, and that'll vary. I can't predict the weather.
Speaker 4: The people that predict the weather sometimes miss. But anyway,
Speaker 4: so we've got to do a little protection for that
Speaker 4: possibility of getting some pipe damage. You know, they say
Speaker 4: the three peas or plants, pipes and pets, and you
Speaker 4: got to take care of all three of those, of course.
Speaker 4: And when it comes to plants, if you've got plants
Speaker 4: that are very sensitive to cold, we have plants that
Speaker 4: are perennials here and in a mild winter they'll just
Speaker 4: come right through without being killed to the ground. And
Speaker 4: in a hard winter than they could be killed all
Speaker 4: the way to the ground or killed out right, depending
Speaker 4: on the plant. You know, Perennial is a geographical designation.
Speaker 4: Let me give you an example. You know, yellow bills esperanza,
Speaker 4: beautiful yellow blooms. Had those around for a good long time. Now,
Speaker 4: those are a good tough plant. But you go up
Speaker 4: the Dallas and they're not you go to Dallas, they're
Speaker 4: gonna be killed the ground and could be killed outright.
Speaker 4: Same with Pride of Barbados. Barbados Pride, some people call
Speaker 4: it red bird of paradise gorgeous summer bloomer. But you
Speaker 4: get cold enough and it's not a perennial kill it
Speaker 4: out right. So you got to take care of your
Speaker 4: plants depending on where you live and how cold it gets.
Speaker 4: And Ace Hardware has got you covered. They have the
Speaker 4: plant frost blankets to protect your plant. It's a thick
Speaker 4: woven material spun bound actually material. They come in different forms,
Speaker 4: but you put them over your plant and secure them
Speaker 4: to the ground and that holds the warmth of the
Speaker 4: soil rising up to protect that plant. It's very helpful,
Speaker 4: especially for frost because frost can't form on the leaves
Speaker 4: when you got that cover over it. They have fawcet
Speaker 4: covers to go over your faucets. They have something called
Speaker 4: the freeze miser fatt protection. It's a little short thing
Speaker 4: you screw onto your faucet. You turn on the faucet
Speaker 4: just wide open and no water comes out. But as
Speaker 4: it gets cold, it starts to let water trickle through.
Speaker 4: And when you have water trickling through, the water doesn't
Speaker 4: just sit there to freeze. No, it's not going to
Speaker 4: take you through tim below zero, but it'll take you
Speaker 4: through the kinds of freezes typically that we have here.
Speaker 4: They've got pipe wrap as a type of insulation to
Speaker 4: go around your pipe. You plug it in, Well, there's
Speaker 4: the insulation for your pipe, but there's also an insulating tape,
Speaker 4: and there's wires that you can plug in that provide
Speaker 4: just a little bit of heat to protect pipes and things.
Speaker 4: In fact, there's a couple dozen different things that Ace
Speaker 4: Hardware carries to help you prepare for the cold. So
Speaker 4: I'm going to be talking about some of those other
Speaker 4: things as we go through the morning, because we got
Speaker 4: that coming up today, are coming up soon, the freeze.
Speaker 4: Once you get through this weekend, I got a little
Speaker 4: rainy weather ahead of it, and then sky's clear, and
Speaker 4: when the sky's clear, the temperature can drop a lot further.
Speaker 4: And that's what we're going to be experiencing all right.
Speaker 4: Time for me to take a little break. I'll be
Speaker 4: right back. If you'd like to give me a call
Speaker 4: and get on the line seven to one three two
Speaker 4: one two kt r H. Hey, welcome back to Garden Line.
Speaker 4: You got a question we can help you with today, Well,
Speaker 4: here's a number seven one three two one two kt
Speaker 4: r H. Be happy to visit with you. About the
Speaker 4: things you need to know to have success in your garden.
Speaker 4: Gardening is fun. It's supposed to be fun, and I
Speaker 4: want you to have success. I don't want you to
Speaker 4: be discouraged. I don't want you to feel like you
Speaker 4: have a brown thumb. You don't trust me. You do
Speaker 4: not have a brown thumb. I promise you you don't.
Speaker 4: All you need to do is get that thumb educated
Speaker 4: with some good info, and you can absolutely have success.
Speaker 4: Gardening is not rocket science. I don't even know what
Speaker 4: that means, even the rocket science anyway. Nothing's rocket science
Speaker 4: if you know what you're doing. Not even not even
Speaker 4: rocket science. So just give us a call seven one
Speaker 4: three two one two fifty eight seventy four. If you
Speaker 4: want to send me a photo, I headed ahead of
Speaker 4: the call. That's fine. Just call my number here seven
Speaker 4: one three two one two fifty eight to seventy four
Speaker 4: till Jonathan. You want to send a photo, He'll give
Speaker 4: you an email. Send it to me, we can talk
Speaker 4: about it. I'm not able to answer all the emails
Speaker 4: by typing out the answers to them, but I do
Speaker 4: appreciate when you can send a photo. Being able to
Speaker 4: talk about the question that you have and having something
Speaker 4: visual to look at so I can help you diagnose
Speaker 4: or help you identify or whatever it is that you're
Speaker 4: trying to do. Well, let's see here. I was discussing
Speaker 4: the importance of coal protection in you know, someone's saying, well,
Speaker 4: ACE Hardware, where do you? Where is my ACE Hardware? Well,
Speaker 4: they're all over the place. Just go Acehardware dot Com,
Speaker 4: find the store locator and if there's all there all
Speaker 4: over the greater Houston area, you can find one near you.
Speaker 4: For example, you go up to Porter, Texas, j and
Speaker 4: R ACE Hardware right there in Porter up in Willis
Speaker 4: all seasons, ACE up in Willis, down in Clearly Kilgore
Speaker 4: Lumber and Clear Lakes an ACE hardware store. And then
Speaker 4: Cyprus says right there in Cyprus, Texas. Those are all
Speaker 4: examples of ACE hardware stores that are near to you.
Speaker 4: I was outside the other day looking at my bird
Speaker 4: feeder and I hadn't seen a lot of birds come
Speaker 4: into it, and I was going, you know, what's wrong
Speaker 4: with that? And what happened is it's one of those
Speaker 4: feeders that when something sits on it, if it's too heavy,
Speaker 4: the bird feeder closes. It's it's the squirrel excluding feeder
Speaker 4: from Wabbird's Unlimited. Squirrels can't get in because when they
Speaker 4: sit down on it, it you know, closes the door.
Speaker 4: They can't get to the food. But anyway, the food
Speaker 4: had kind of gotten stuck up in there. I don't
Speaker 4: know if some moisture or whatever had kind of gotten
Speaker 4: it stuck. And I kind of bumped on it a
Speaker 4: little bit and it dropped right down, and it just
Speaker 4: reminded me check those feeders out. I'm using Wildbird's Unlimited
Speaker 4: Winter superb Blend in my feeders. I sometimes mix a
Speaker 4: few other things in there. You know, depending on what
Speaker 4: birds you want to attract, there's different kinds of seed
Speaker 4: that are most attractive to them. But wibirds Unlimited Winter
Speaker 4: Super Blend is important because it has the fat and
Speaker 4: the protein that birds need for fueling. You know, the
Speaker 4: days are shorter, the temperature a little colder. Sometimes the
Speaker 4: weather's inclement, and they're not out able to do the feeding.
Speaker 4: They're looking for a lot of those things that went
Speaker 4: to seed in the fall have now been picked over.
Speaker 4: The birds are getting hungry, So go buy Wildbirds unletit
Speaker 4: me get you some of the Winter super Blend or
Speaker 4: one of their other you know, just talk to the
Speaker 4: folks there. They are so knowledgeable. I love going into wildbirds.
Speaker 4: It's like you're going to visit a friend because you
Speaker 4: talk to him and say, hey, I'm interested in this,
Speaker 4: and they're enthusiastic. Listen, they've got the they've got the
Speaker 4: wild bird bug themselves, and they feed at their houses.
Speaker 4: They know what they're talking about and you can just
Speaker 4: strike up a conversation and they can talk to you
Speaker 4: about it. You know, it's not all about just buying
Speaker 4: a product, it's about learning how to do it. They
Speaker 4: want you to have success because birding in the backyard
Speaker 4: is a lot of fun. You know, you may not
Speaker 4: be the guy with the you know, the stereotypical birder
Speaker 4: that's got the little safari hat on and shorts and
Speaker 4: these binoculars and walking around looking at birds in the
Speaker 4: wild and songs that's fun, by the way, too. But
Speaker 4: in the backyard you just feed them and you enjoy
Speaker 4: the music. It's as simple as that, and warbirds can
Speaker 4: help you do just that. Let's go out to the
Speaker 4: phones now. We're going to head to pair Land and
Speaker 4: talk to Belinda. Hey, Belinda, welcome, to garden line.
Speaker 8: Oh, thank you, skip.
Speaker 9: I have a big problem. I have two six trees,
Speaker 9: two palm trees, two palmer ranit trees, and two citrus trees.
Speaker 9: I have mult around them, okay, and I was going
Speaker 9: to get the hay. But do I need to get
Speaker 9: those big heavy covers that go all the way over
Speaker 9: the turry?
Speaker 10: No.
Speaker 4: The most sensitive of those that you mentioned is your citrus, okay,
Speaker 4: and those I would I would do. The primary protection
Speaker 4: for that is one where if you can put a
Speaker 4: cover over the whole tree, that's good. But a cover
Speaker 4: needs to drape all the way to the ground and
Speaker 4: be secured to the ground with soil or rocks or
Speaker 4: bricks or boards or whatever holds it down securely, because
Speaker 4: you want to create dead air space underneath it for
Speaker 4: the warmth of the soil to rise up and make
Speaker 4: a difference on the kind of cold we're going to
Speaker 4: Our cold is going to be pretty minor considering you know,
Speaker 4: when we're just talking about you in the upper twenties,
Speaker 4: that's minor freeze compared to when you get mid twenties,
Speaker 4: low twenties and teens, and so that'll be enough. I
Speaker 4: don't think your fig is going to need anything unless
Speaker 4: it's a brand excuse me, your plum and palm granite.
Speaker 4: Unless they're brand new trees, very very thin bark and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you may want to protect them a little bit. Uh,
Speaker 4: but they're probably going to be just fine. And then
Speaker 4: the fig if it's in a growing state, can get
Speaker 4: some cold damage. If not, it's going to come through
Speaker 4: just fine. I'm not worried about figs right now myself
Speaker 4: on the kind of cold that we're about to have.
Speaker 6: Okay, so just a sitress, I have one big enough
Speaker 6: to cover it.
Speaker 8: Okay, I'll do that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, thank you, you know, even thank you very much.
Speaker 4: I appreciate you call.
Speaker 6: Hey, thank you.
Speaker 4: So you know, this freeze is a I'm going to
Speaker 4: call it a minor one. You know, last time I checked,
Speaker 4: even heading all the way up to Huntsville, you're maybe
Speaker 4: twenty eight something like that is what last was said
Speaker 4: to be. That's a freeze. But remember there's there's freezes
Speaker 4: that they come and they stay frozen for a long time.
Speaker 4: Each day. We're warming back up into the maybe forties
Speaker 4: in most places, and so there's not a long period
Speaker 4: of time where those plants are frozen, and that makes
Speaker 4: a difference. And so this is a kind of phrase
Speaker 4: where it's not maybe we're preparing and warming up for
Speaker 4: a significant one later, but for right now this is
Speaker 4: a moderate one. So still protect and just remember what
Speaker 4: I'm saying about one plant doesn't apply to another. You know,
Speaker 4: you're talking about like figs or or more cold tender
Speaker 4: than Belinda's plum, for example, or palm grantite. Those those
Speaker 4: are not as cold tender as fig But just depending
Speaker 4: on where you live, do what you need to do,
Speaker 4: take care of it. Let's we're going to go, actually
Speaker 4: I have to take a break here. We're going to
Speaker 4: come to Marty in Fairfield right when we get back
Speaker 4: in the meantime, if you'd like to give me a call.
Speaker 4: Seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four.
Speaker 4: Welcome back to the Garden Line. Glad to have you
Speaker 4: with us today. Thanks for listening in. I'm your host,
Speaker 4: Skip Richter, and we're here to answer your gardening questions.
Speaker 4: Do you got a phone, You got a phone, you
Speaker 4: got a question? Well seven one three two one two
Speaker 4: kt RH. It's as easy as that, and let's just
Speaker 4: start by going straight out to Marty in Fairfield. Hello Marty,
Speaker 4: Welcome to garden Rainski.
Speaker 8: Happy New Year.
Speaker 11: I have two spider lilies that are overgrown. They're about
Speaker 11: four to five feet tall, and they're hanging against each
Speaker 11: other in the middle of a walkway and I wanted
Speaker 11: to see it. I called you a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 11: and then you were on vacation. But is it okay
Speaker 11: if I dig them up and before the freeze and
Speaker 11: put them in some soil and some big pots, And
Speaker 11: just because they always tend to freeze back and I
Speaker 11: really want to separate them before they freeze back, and
Speaker 11: wondered if it would be okay.
Speaker 4: You can do that or let them freeze back and
Speaker 4: separate them at that time. Either way is fine, They'll
Speaker 4: do fine. Let me just make sure we're talking about
Speaker 4: the same plant. Is this a white blooming flower, shaggy
Speaker 4: white blooms, yes, strappy petals, Okay. Sometimes people refer to
Speaker 4: like a type of like chorus as spider lily too. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that one.
Speaker 8: Looks like a big star.
Speaker 11: It's it's it's a spider little not yeah, not like
Speaker 11: a spider plant. A spider lily and big bulbs, Yeah,
Speaker 11: big bulbs. Dig leaves long, dark green. It's beautiful when
Speaker 11: it blooms.
Speaker 7: But they have gotten.
Speaker 11: Yeah, they've gotten really crowded, and I just I don't know,
Speaker 11: I've been lazy about sending them out, so I wondered
Speaker 11: if it would be okay if I went ahead and
Speaker 11: did it.
Speaker 12: Before the freeze.
Speaker 4: You can do that now, just you know, bring them
Speaker 4: inside and don't leave the bulbs just sitting out and
Speaker 4: cold for now. But they're just a little bit underground
Speaker 4: when they grow. They're not super deep bulbs, but they
Speaker 4: are protected by the soil. But yeah, you sure can.
Speaker 4: You can do that and guide them and then.
Speaker 8: Plant some land.
Speaker 4: You can put them right back in the ground if
Speaker 4: you want. You know, in our warm climate, we don't
Speaker 4: have to worry. If some further north they may plant
Speaker 4: them in the spring more. But you can plan them
Speaker 4: now if you like, and reset them, or you can
Speaker 4: keep them inside. Just remember if they dry out then
Speaker 4: it's kind of like you let them get frosted back.
Speaker 4: Then they'll just have to come back out again.
Speaker 8: Okay.
Speaker 4: Amarillis is the same way Amarillis. They are in their
Speaker 4: cold weather state. I've got some that are still showing
Speaker 4: good strappy foliage. Or do you or your amarellas still
Speaker 4: have green foliage?
Speaker 11: Yes, all of them do.
Speaker 6: They're beautiful.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah they are. And uh you know they're they're
Speaker 4: gonna balloom a little a little bit later when it
Speaker 4: warms up. But if you, if you, if you can
Speaker 4: keep them from getting killed back, I think they'll you'll
Speaker 4: have a little bit stronger plant. They'll do a little
Speaker 4: bit better for you. Either way. Those are both tough,
Speaker 4: very tough plants.
Speaker 11: Nope, all right, okay, thank you, all.
Speaker 4: Right, thank you. You know, the rule on guarden line
Speaker 4: is our advice is free. But when you divide all
Speaker 4: these bulbs, you just need to bring half of the
Speaker 4: ones you dig up and leave them at the station
Speaker 4: and we'll call it even.
Speaker 11: Okay, you don't have any room in your garden, just
Speaker 11: like me.
Speaker 4: That's that true. That's the truth. Garden We don't ask
Speaker 4: that question. We just buy the plant, come home and
Speaker 4: figure it out. That's right, all right, folks. That is
Speaker 4: so true of gardeners.
Speaker 13: Oh bye.
Speaker 4: That's why I say gardeners are plant collectors. A lot
Speaker 4: of times. You know, there's some people that they do it.
Speaker 4: Let's just say, right, you know, they go out and
Speaker 4: they they come up with a plan, They have a
Speaker 4: designer design the landscape and do all that and it's
Speaker 4: beautiful as gorgeous. It's a showplace. And they've only put
Speaker 4: the plants in. They're going to plant that need to
Speaker 4: be there. They don't overcrowd them and things. And then
Speaker 4: there's the rest of us, the plant collectors. Our places
Speaker 4: look like a bomb went off in a garden center
Speaker 4: and everything rooted where it landed. It's just we see
Speaker 4: a plant we got to have there. You know where
Speaker 4: am I going to put it? That's silly to worry
Speaker 4: about that. Buy the plant, take it home, then figure
Speaker 4: out where to put it. But you know what, it's
Speaker 4: your yard. It's toeing you and the hoa. So I
Speaker 4: guess in the backyard, you do what you want to do.
Speaker 4: The hoa has an opinion about the front yard. Believe me,
Speaker 4: they do well. As we're getting out there and taking
Speaker 4: care of our plants. You know that the most important
Speaker 4: thing is to build the soil. And one of the
Speaker 4: ways that we improve our soil is with products from
Speaker 4: microlife like microlife micro grow bioinoculant that is one that
Speaker 4: is loaded with all kinds of good microbes, that are
Speaker 4: part of keeping plants healthy. I actually a week doesn't
Speaker 4: go by that I don't read some research article about
Speaker 4: what some microbe has now been discovered to be able
Speaker 4: to do. There are microbes that cause roots to grow
Speaker 4: in certain directions. Can you believe that there are microbes
Speaker 4: that get into the root system and cause the top
Speaker 4: of the plant to be better at resisting disease? Can
Speaker 4: you believe that there are microbes in this case the
Speaker 4: fungi that link one plant to another, that communicate from
Speaker 4: one plant to another about hey there's a bug eating us,
Speaker 4: watch out, get ready for it, and all kinds of
Speaker 4: other things. It's an amazing world. Microlife's built around those
Speaker 4: kinds of things. It's taking advantage of what nature is
Speaker 4: already doing and helping you do a better job of
Speaker 4: that in your yard. Micro grow bioinoculant is a maroon bag,
Speaker 4: a burgundy bag, very beautiful bag. Of course I'm biased,
Speaker 4: but anyway, it is loaded with sixty three different beneficial
Speaker 4: micro organism strains. Now, all the microlife products are going
Speaker 4: to have MicroB xenum. I mean they just do. They
Speaker 4: keep them stocked with all kinds of good things. The
Speaker 4: micro grow biinoculant. Don't think of it as a fertilizer,
Speaker 4: think of it as what it says, a bio inoculant,
Speaker 4: those kinds of things that are helpful to your soils
Speaker 4: or your plant's root system. Now there's also micro grow
Speaker 4: liquid AF. These are two different products. They both have
Speaker 4: a dark kind of a burgundy colored label, a little
Speaker 4: different in shade. But micro Grow liquid AF is loaded
Speaker 4: also with eight extremely dominating beneficial mica grobes that live
Speaker 4: in the soil and help your plans. Hey, where do
Speaker 4: you get microlife? Everywhere? It's pretty much everywhere, feed stores,
Speaker 4: garden centers, hardware stores, Southwest fertilizer down Southwest Houston. Okay, well,
Speaker 4: there's the first hour of twenty twenty five in the books. Boy,
Speaker 4: we got a lot more to talk about. And I'm
Speaker 4: telling you this is going to be your best garden
Speaker 4: you ever. Trust me on this one. Believe me on
Speaker 4: this one. Just keep listening in. Don't forget my website too.
Speaker 4: By the way, gardening with skip dot com. I remember,
Speaker 4: I'm going to talk about some new things that are
Speaker 4: up there on the website when we come back give around.
Speaker 1: Welcome to kt r H Garden Line with Scared Director.
Speaker 2: It's just watch as.
Speaker 9: Well.
Speaker 4: Good Saturday morning, Good Saturday morning, and welcome to twenty
Speaker 4: twenty five. Welcome the Garden Line. I'm your host, skip director,
Speaker 4: and we're here to answer gardening questions. That's what we do. Uh.
Speaker 4: I guess we'll even allow some uh gardening bragging, you know,
Speaker 4: if you want to, if you want to talk about uh,
Speaker 4: I don't know. You just got through planning a whole
Speaker 4: bunch of wonderful fruit trees for your backyard, or just
Speaker 4: got a whole bunch of new bulbs in that you're
Speaker 4: fixing the put out there. Yeah, we'll do that. By
Speaker 4: the way, for those of you who are not from Texas,
Speaker 4: fixing is a word. Fixing is a word. It means
Speaker 4: I'm about to I'm about to do it. If I
Speaker 4: sometimes I forget. You know, you grew up someplace and
Speaker 4: use certain kinds of terms and lifeguage, and you recognize
Speaker 4: other people don't always do that. I had a friend
Speaker 4: from New Jersey when I went to college. It lived
Speaker 4: the same arm as Randy and I as a matter
Speaker 4: of fact, back in the day, and I remember the
Speaker 4: first time he goes fixing, what do you mean fixing
Speaker 4: and it's like, I mean, I'm about to do something
Speaker 4: didn't realize. Not everybody talks like that anyway, just an observation.
Speaker 4: But we are here to help you have a good success.
Speaker 4: And what I like to say is I'm here to
Speaker 4: help you have a more beautiful garden and a more
Speaker 4: bountiful garden and the same uh. At the same time,
Speaker 4: gardening is fun, and gardening gives us a connection in
Speaker 4: nature that we are made. We're designed for nature, we
Speaker 4: really are. It is our happy place. It's where we
Speaker 4: find relaxation. It's where we find a lot of reward too.
Speaker 4: You know, there is something when you grow your own
Speaker 4: tomato and you picked that thing right off the vine
Speaker 4: and you enjoy that fresh, homegrown flavor that is so rewarding.
Speaker 4: When you smell the fragrance of a wonderful flower, that
Speaker 4: just I mean, it's just like nature's perfume that is rewarding.
Speaker 4: When you esthetically look out there and you see a
Speaker 4: well trimmed lawn and a beautiful landscape, there's something esthetically
Speaker 4: rewarding about all that. And gardening gives you all that
Speaker 4: kind of stuff. Now, how do you end up having
Speaker 4: all that? Well? Number one. You start with the soil.
Speaker 4: And I'm a broken record on this, but brown stuff
Speaker 4: before green stuff, meaning you fix the soil and then
Speaker 4: you plant the plant. That's how it works. Brown stuff
Speaker 4: before green stuff. And if you go into a garden
Speaker 4: center today, which I think would be a great thing
Speaker 4: to do it just come home with some soil bags
Speaker 4: some Maybe you're starting seeds and you need a seed
Speaker 4: starting mix. Maybe you are putting in a bed and
Speaker 4: you need a quality bed mix. Maybe you need some
Speaker 4: multch to go on top of the soil to pert
Speaker 4: tech the base of the plants. We're talking earlier about
Speaker 4: some coal damage and some plants are very cold sensitive.
Speaker 4: But when you throw a good thick layer of mulch
Speaker 4: over the top of them, it's like putting a blanket
Speaker 4: over you. I mean it holds in the warmth of
Speaker 4: the soil and it protects the crowns of those plants.
Speaker 4: Where do you do that, well, Cianamal should be a
Speaker 4: good place to do it. It's kind of the one
Speaker 4: stop shop for everything that's let's just say everything brown.
Speaker 4: When it comes to brown stuff, the composts for the soil,
Speaker 4: the soil blends like the vegionorbics from heirloom soils. They've
Speaker 4: got that there. They carry products from landscapers Pride to
Speaker 4: they carry products from heirloom soils. Of course. They also
Speaker 4: are a place where you're going to find fertilizers from
Speaker 4: nitrofoss from Nelson, plant food from for example, azamide and microlife.
Speaker 4: They carry all of that, and then products from Medina
Speaker 4: as well. They deliver within twenty miles now. They're located
Speaker 4: down south of town on FM five point one, near
Speaker 4: where Highway six and two eighty eight are south of Houston.
Speaker 4: Go to the website Sienna multch dot com Sienna mulch
Speaker 4: dot com. There you can find it where they're located.
Speaker 4: You can find it when they're open. By the way,
Speaker 4: they're open today Saturday from seven thirty to two, So
Speaker 4: good day to get out and do that. Get that
Speaker 4: stuff at your house on the ground, in the soil,
Speaker 4: on top of the soil, whatever you need to do
Speaker 4: with it, and get ready because planting season is upon us.
Speaker 4: It is still a good time to plant woody ornamentals
Speaker 4: and perennials to give them a head start on the spring.
Speaker 4: Those spring gardens, whether it's flowers or vegetables or herbs.
Speaker 4: Get the soil right, because whenever that's dry enough to
Speaker 4: work the soil, there's a good time to work the soil.
Speaker 4: It is, it's always good. You always amend and improve
Speaker 4: your soil. I don't care how good the soil is,
Speaker 4: you're always in time going to be needing to do
Speaker 4: some amendments and improvements on the soil, unless you're just
Speaker 4: growing native plant in a soil that it's very adapted to.
Speaker 4: In that case, yeah, I get it. You get it
Speaker 4: set up, and you forget it. But for a lot
Speaker 4: of things, including containers, you've got to keep improving the
Speaker 4: soil in order to keep that at its top functioning ability.
Speaker 4: Because plants live in their roots they do. Quality soil
Speaker 4: means it's got organic matter. It means it's got nutrients,
Speaker 4: and remember all of this is available cinemals. And it
Speaker 4: also quality soil means that it drains well, that excess
Speaker 4: water runs right through it, but that it holds some water.
Speaker 4: It's not just like a sand that water runs right through.
Speaker 4: It holds water, but it also drains the excess water.
Speaker 4: Cinamals cannot You do all of that, and if you're smart,
Speaker 4: you will get that done because I'm telling you the
Speaker 4: the the wise gardener, I'll put it that way. The
Speaker 4: wise gardener knows that you get the soil right and
Speaker 4: it makes you look good. It makes your thumb look green,
Speaker 4: if you know what I'm talking about. All right, that's that.
Speaker 4: Speaking of the animals and products and things, you know
Speaker 4: that cienumalch also carries Nelson plant food products. Now, Nelson
Speaker 4: is a it's just a long term, outstanding purveyor of
Speaker 4: some quality blends of nutrients for your plants. You know,
Speaker 4: there's a Nelson plant food for just about every kind
Speaker 4: of plant you want to grow, from lawns to things
Speaker 4: like let's say hibescas or things like plumeria or things
Speaker 4: like roses. Nelson has their color Star line, probably one
Speaker 4: of the most popular lines now for almost forty years.
Speaker 4: Color Star is an all purpose plant food. So you
Speaker 4: put it down on anything. Just think about this way.
Speaker 4: If it gives you color, put color Star on it.
Speaker 4: That's easy to remember. So all the flowering plants, annuals
Speaker 4: of perennials, even shrubs and trees that can you can
Speaker 4: use it on that it acts quickly, but it also
Speaker 4: has organic nutrients sources to slowly release into the soil
Speaker 4: over time, so about every three or four months, put
Speaker 4: your color Star down on your color beds. You can
Speaker 4: also get it with a funge side involved in a
Speaker 4: mixed in call Colorstar Plus to help with the root
Speaker 4: issues that you might have. A color Star has been
Speaker 4: popular for landscapers for a very long time, and even
Speaker 4: out of state. You know, they ship that stuff all
Speaker 4: over the country to people that have discovered it and
Speaker 4: now they use it and again landscapers. Professional landscapers no
Speaker 4: to use color Star all from Nelson Plant Food. Nelson
Speaker 4: Plant Food is a Houston area homegrown basically homegrown company
Speaker 4: that produces whatever kind of nutrients you need for the
Speaker 4: plants that you want to grow and have success with.
Speaker 4: It's time for me to take a little quick break.
Speaker 4: I'll be right back.
Speaker 10: You know.
Speaker 4: They welcome back to guard Line. Glad to have you
Speaker 4: with us this morning on the first show of twenty
Speaker 4: twenty five. You're welcome to the best gardening year you're
Speaker 4: going to have that you've ever had. How about that?
Speaker 4: That's saying a lot, isn't it. I just think it is.
Speaker 4: That's how I look at it. I tell you what,
Speaker 4: when I buy a seed. It's going to be the
Speaker 4: most bountiful harvest I've ever had. When I buy a
Speaker 4: fruit tree, I can just already taste the fruit. I mean, listen,
Speaker 4: you got to be an optimist as a gardener, and
Speaker 4: we do everything we can to have success. The bottom
Speaker 4: line is that's a fun part of gardening because you know,
Speaker 4: even when things don't work out like you want, you
Speaker 4: just adjust. You just adjust and you figure it out,
Speaker 4: and it's okay. If this year ends up being a
Speaker 4: little hot and dry, that's all right. We know how
Speaker 4: to water plant if it gets a little cold. We
Speaker 4: know how to protect plants. I'm going to come back
Speaker 4: and talk about plant protection here in a little bit.
Speaker 4: Right now, I'm going to run out to the galleria
Speaker 4: and we're going to talk to Forest. Hey, Forrest, Welcome
Speaker 4: to garden Line.
Speaker 12: Hey, thank you, Skip.
Speaker 10: I'm sure you'll cover a lot of these freeze questions.
Speaker 10: But I've been growing a couple of citrus trees, a
Speaker 10: lime and a lemon that I picked up at a
Speaker 10: Buchanan's Container grown, and my plan was to bring them
Speaker 10: in for this freeze we're about to have. But I
Speaker 10: just wanted to get your thoughts on the rule of
Speaker 10: thumb on growing citrus and chill hours and that sort
Speaker 10: of thing, how cold they can get.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a that's a good question for us.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 4: The bottom line is limes and lemons, especially limes, are
Speaker 4: are not very cold hearty at all, and so it
Speaker 4: went in doubt. I would bring them in just because
Speaker 4: you know, you don't want to take a chance on it.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 4: There there are variations on protecting a plant, from leaving
Speaker 4: it out there figuring it's going to be okay, to
Speaker 4: bringing it up close to the house. I've got some
Speaker 4: houseplants that are sitting outside my house underneath the eaves,
Speaker 4: right up against the house, and they're still looking good.
Speaker 4: And they haven't you know, we we haven't had a
Speaker 4: hard freeze, but we had a minor freeze, and so
Speaker 4: just that protected spot helped a lot. And then the
Speaker 4: next step would be to bring them into protect a garage,
Speaker 4: or to cover them up and put some heat underneath them.
Speaker 4: I think any of those things would be fine. If
Speaker 4: it were mine, I wouldn't take chances on leaving them out.
Speaker 4: Once we drop below freezing, you're gonna get some damage
Speaker 4: to a lime and then probably to a lemon. Too.
Speaker 10: Okay, great, I appreciate that, thank you, sir.
Speaker 4: Yeah, do you have a dolly you can strap them
Speaker 4: too and wheel them in real easily without hurting your back.
Speaker 10: Oh, I got a whole system set up because I
Speaker 10: also grow up plumeria in containers. I've been bringing plumeria
Speaker 10: inside for years, so I got I got the drill
Speaker 10: for sure.
Speaker 4: Good, that's good. Yeah. But when I first discovered that
Speaker 4: you didn't have to pick plants up and carry them
Speaker 4: around and you could put them on a dolly, that
Speaker 4: was good information. Right there. My dolly has a strap
Speaker 4: attached to it so that I just go up to
Speaker 4: the plant and the strap's already there to wrap it
Speaker 4: around the pot so it sticks, stays on the little
Speaker 4: dolly lip, you know, and you can move it around
Speaker 4: with you. Well, good luck with them, thank you, sir.
Speaker 4: All right, yes, sir, you take care. Thanks for the call.
Speaker 4: Appreciate that.
Speaker 6: All right.
Speaker 4: You're listening to Garden Line our phone number if you'd
Speaker 4: like to give me a call seven one three two
Speaker 4: one two ktr H seven one three two one two
Speaker 4: kt r H. I was talking about plant protection, and
Speaker 4: I do want to mention a couple things about protecting plants.
Speaker 4: First of all, when when you're wanting to protect a plant,
Speaker 4: a cover over the top of the plant to create
Speaker 4: dead air space is very important. Now, creating dead air
Speaker 4: space means dead air space connected to the soil. So
Speaker 4: here's what I mean. Don't wrap the top of a
Speaker 4: plant like a landscape lollipop. Allow the cover to drape
Speaker 4: straight down to the ground, as if you put an
Speaker 4: umbrella over it, and where the rain would drip down
Speaker 4: off the umbrella, that is where the cover goes straight
Speaker 4: to the ground. Secure it there so the warmth of
Speaker 4: the soil can rise up underneath that cover. You create
Speaker 4: dead airspace, and you make a difference in the cold
Speaker 4: temperatures and the rate of cooling inside that cover. We're
Speaker 4: gonna have freezes coming up here that are going to
Speaker 4: be fairly brief. It may if you live far enough north,
Speaker 4: you're going to have two or three days of freezing,
Speaker 4: but it warms up during the day into the forties,
Speaker 4: goes back down again. All you need is a little
Speaker 4: bit of protection, slow the cooling and you're good. If
Speaker 4: you want to add one more measure of protection, you
Speaker 4: can put a clamp light underneath. Now, these are those
Speaker 4: aluminum shielded light fixtures that have a clamp, so you
Speaker 4: can attach them to the side of a container. You
Speaker 4: can attach them to the trunk of the plant, but
Speaker 4: don't shine the light on the trunk. Shine the light
Speaker 4: down toward the soil and that it'll rise up underneath
Speaker 4: that cover and make a huge difference and protect them. Now,
Speaker 4: if it's going to be seventeen degrees, no, not one
Speaker 4: little incandescent bulb is not going to do that. But
Speaker 4: even just a bright one hundred and fifty watt bulb,
Speaker 4: you don't have to have a heat lamp in. Those
Speaker 4: will provide enough warmth to make a big difference underneath
Speaker 4: the cover. If the cover is not secured to the ground,
Speaker 4: wind is going to blow. It's going to displace that
Speaker 4: air that you've warmed, or that the soil warmth that
Speaker 4: has risen up to warm the air, and you're gonna
Speaker 4: be right back down just as cold as it is
Speaker 4: outside the cover. You gotta secure it to the ground.
Speaker 4: However you want to do that, soil, bricks, boards, whatever
Speaker 4: works for you. Make sure it's secure to the ground.
Speaker 4: You gonna have some breeze. You really need to make
Speaker 4: sure that that cover stays down there on the ground.
Speaker 4: And then that little addition of one heat lamp for
Speaker 4: minor freezes like we're having now, is enough. I put
Speaker 4: one hundred and fifty watt flood light bulb in mine.
Speaker 4: You can use a heat lap bulb. You're not going
Speaker 4: to need that much heat. Now, if you're trying to
Speaker 4: cover maybe a satsumetry that's a feet tall and you're
Speaker 4: going to get heat under that, well okay, yeah, but
Speaker 4: we're not going to have satsuma freeze damage kind of
Speaker 4: weather in this particular type of freeze, other types of
Speaker 4: a lot of other types of ceterric. Yes, we will.
Speaker 4: So anyway, provide that protection and you can make a
Speaker 4: huge difference, and you just have that on hand. I've
Speaker 4: got mine in the they're in the garage. If the
Speaker 4: clamp light is clamped to the wall and the bulbs
Speaker 4: in it, it's ready to go. And whenever I need them,
Speaker 4: they just come right out and go straight out there.
Speaker 4: Make sure to protect those electric connections. If you were
Speaker 4: to have rain, which we're not supposed to have rain
Speaker 4: with the cold that we're having, it's supposed to to
Speaker 4: get dry before we have the cold. But if you
Speaker 4: do you got to cover that connection. It's electrical connection there.
Speaker 4: Don't drop a connection into dry grass either. Should you
Speaker 4: have some sort of a spark or something like that,
Speaker 4: you can set grass on fire underneath there. So you
Speaker 4: got to you got to use your head on that stuff.
Speaker 4: But by the way, I've got a publication online at
Speaker 4: Gardening with Skip dot com. It's protecting plants from frosts
Speaker 4: and freezes. It's a publication I wrote with one of
Speaker 4: our specialists at Texas A and M Horticulture Department a
Speaker 4: number of years ago, and I think it really covers
Speaker 4: well frosts and freezes, how they occur, the information about
Speaker 4: them you may not have been aware of, and that
Speaker 4: leads you to how to protect them correctly. And so
Speaker 4: I just gave you one little example of what's in
Speaker 4: the publication there. Just take it out, check it out.
Speaker 4: It's like nine pages of color pictures and all kinds
Speaker 4: of Information's very good. Gardening with Skip dot com. Will
Speaker 4: you write that website down because I refer to it
Speaker 4: just about every show, because I'm always putting something up
Speaker 4: there to help you to have success, and in this case,
Speaker 4: it's that publication. Go check it out. It's free. You
Speaker 4: tak me down on that price. It's free. You can
Speaker 4: download it, you can look at it online. You can
Speaker 4: send it to your cousin and Tim Buck too, who
Speaker 4: has a question about freezing just downloaded. Email it to him.
Speaker 4: Let them know about her. Just send them the link
Speaker 4: to it. If you want to go about that that way.
Speaker 4: Gardening with Skip, that's me gardening with Skip dot com.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna tomorrow, I'm gonna spend a little bit of time,
Speaker 4: a little more in depth talking about my predecessor in
Speaker 4: this chair, Randy Lemon. You know, garden Line has been
Speaker 4: around a long time, even before it was called garden Line.
Speaker 4: Do he Compton probably the first in about five of
Speaker 4: us now that have had been hosts of garden Line
Speaker 4: through the decades, goes back to the nineteen fifties. Randy
Speaker 4: was prior to me, was in this seat for over
Speaker 4: twenty five years, and Randy uh was well beloved and
Speaker 4: well known throughout the greater Houston area. A scholarship was
Speaker 4: set up a while back for Randy at Texas A
Speaker 4: and M for a horticulture student. If you knew Randy,
Speaker 4: you knew how proud he was of our university, that
Speaker 4: he and I I went to. And also how proud
Speaker 4: he would be to know that a scholarship was set
Speaker 4: up in his name there for horticulture student. You probably
Speaker 4: are one of the many, many, many people that benefited
Speaker 4: over the years from Randy's advice here on garden Line.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna tomorrow talk a little bit more about the
Speaker 4: scholarship and about Randy, but I just wanted to mention
Speaker 4: it today. Tomorrow, I believe, is the two year anniversary
Speaker 4: of Randy's passing. That came as a shock to all
Speaker 4: of us, everyone in the greater Houston area gardening world,
Speaker 4: and it's it's been something that well, like I said,
Speaker 4: it was just a shock. You know, you never you
Speaker 4: never would expect something like that all although we all
Speaker 4: know our time here on earth is is not infinite.
Speaker 4: But Randy was bigger than life.
Speaker 12: He was.
Speaker 4: He was quite a character. And I can tell you this.
Speaker 4: I didn't know him before college, but I knew him
Speaker 4: in college and back in the day, and that'd be
Speaker 4: about nineteen a eighty eighty, maybe nineteen eighty, I think
Speaker 4: it is when I first met Randy. Randy was a
Speaker 4: very special individual, a good friend and a good friend
Speaker 4: of the horticulture world here in the Greater Houston area.
Speaker 4: If you would like to consider, I asked you, would
Speaker 4: you consider making a donation to the scholarship fund in
Speaker 4: remembrance of Randy. It's really easy to do. First of all,
Speaker 4: the easiest way is just go to my website and
Speaker 4: it tells you how to do it there. I'll tell
Speaker 4: you briefly right now, but the bottom line is, just
Speaker 4: go the website and I'll tell you. If you want
Speaker 4: to give online, you go to a website called Texas
Speaker 4: A and M Foundation websites txamfoundation dot com. There is
Speaker 4: a little more to the RL than that, but on
Speaker 4: my website, I tell you how to find and send
Speaker 4: the money to the right place. If you want to
Speaker 4: do it by check, you can mail the check to
Speaker 4: the Texas A and M Foundation. In the memo you
Speaker 4: gotta write Lemon Scholarship. Lemon has two ms L E, M,
Speaker 4: M O N Scholarship, but that's the Texas and M Foundation,
Speaker 4: and the address for that is also on the website
Speaker 4: Gardening with Skip dot com. It's the most recent thing
Speaker 4: that I've put online on the Gardening with Skip dot
Speaker 4: com website. Would you consider that? Would you join me
Speaker 4: in considering supporting that scholarship. Time for me to take
Speaker 4: a quick break here. When we come back, I'll be
Speaker 4: back with your gardening questions. If you'd like to call
Speaker 4: and get on on board with that, just kive Jonathan
Speaker 4: call seven one three two one two k t r. H.
Speaker 4: We'll get you online. We'll talk to you about the
Speaker 4: things that are of interest to you, and I'm going
Speaker 4: to continue to talk about cold protection for plants, how
Speaker 4: to protect your plants from cold. We'll be right back.
Speaker 4: All right, here we are. We're back with garden line.
Speaker 4: We got your gardening questions is coming. You just got
Speaker 4: to give me a call seven one three two one two,
Speaker 4: Kate Age. I want to continue talking about cold protection,
Speaker 4: cold protection for your plants, and just basically I'm giving
Speaker 4: you some principles to think about. I talked a while
Speaker 4: ago about covering a plant, how to cover them properly,
Speaker 4: and the fast way to just say that is no
Speaker 4: landscape lollipops. People that put a cover around a let's
Speaker 4: say a little small tree or shrub, and they bring
Speaker 4: it all the way and wrap it around the trunk.
Speaker 4: That's like a lollipop, right, And that all that does
Speaker 4: is keep the warmth of those branches in, but that
Speaker 4: they're going to cool off too fast. It'll slow cooling
Speaker 4: a little bit, but not much. Taking it all the
Speaker 4: way to the ground and allowing the warmth of the
Speaker 4: heat to rise up, or putting a heat lamp underneath it,
Speaker 4: or a light underneath it. An incandescent bulb is a
Speaker 4: heat lamp. They produce a lot of heat if you're
Speaker 4: a touched one, you know what I'm talking about. Providing
Speaker 4: that extra warmth underneath that helps a lot. Now, there's
Speaker 4: several variables in how much protection you're going to need.
Speaker 4: Number One, coals are going to get. The colder you get,
Speaker 4: the more more heat you're going to have to produce
Speaker 4: in order to protect that plant. Number Two, how cold
Speaker 4: hardy is the plant. Some plasts don't need protection at all.
Speaker 4: There are plenty cold hardy they don't have to worry
Speaker 4: about that. Some you know, you take a lime tree,
Speaker 4: for example, it's going to get down twenty eight degrees.
Speaker 4: You got a problem for sure, So you got to
Speaker 4: protect those a lot. So it's the how colds are
Speaker 4: going to get, How cold hardy is the plant? Another
Speaker 4: one is what kind of freeze is it? Now, there
Speaker 4: are several types of freezes too, specifically radiant and convective
Speaker 4: freezes that I talk about in the publication that's online
Speaker 4: at Gardening with Skip dot com. But one of them
Speaker 4: is just a cold, still night and heat is radiating
Speaker 4: up from the soil. It's radiating up off of the plants.
Speaker 4: That's why we end up getting frosts on the leaves
Speaker 4: of the plants. And those are easy to protect because
Speaker 4: you cover them up, you provide some warmth, and you're good.
Speaker 4: The freeze where you get a cold blue northern wind
Speaker 4: blowing through that just super chills things quickly, you know.
Speaker 4: You know that when you walk outside and it's cold
Speaker 4: and the wind is blowing, you cool off way faster.
Speaker 4: And those we definitely have to create cold, dead air space,
Speaker 4: and we definitely need extra warmth to provide the protection
Speaker 4: for them. Some things that are important to consider when
Speaker 4: you're protecting your plants. Now, dead air space is your friend,
Speaker 4: use the warmth of the soil, and then finally provide
Speaker 4: extra heat as needed. And I do that with clamp
Speaker 4: on lamps. If I were if I had a Let's
Speaker 4: they had a citrus tree, something a little bigger orange tree,
Speaker 4: or even a setsuma. If it's gonna get cold enough,
Speaker 4: I may put a couple of lamps under there, or
Speaker 4: three lamps under there. I may use an actual heat
Speaker 4: lamp bulb that generates a lot of radiant heat underneath there,
Speaker 4: but don't shine it against the trunk. You can damage tissues.
Speaker 4: Those things get really hot. Turn all those on and
Speaker 4: hold your hand about three feet away and just you know,
Speaker 4: to the side, not above it, to the side, and
Speaker 4: you can feel that radiant heat coming out. We're going
Speaker 4: to send it down and warm the soil, and that
Speaker 4: will rise up underneath the cover and provide a lot
Speaker 4: of protection. Most of my freezes a little flood light
Speaker 4: one hundred and fifty white bulb. I know people that
Speaker 4: use little mechanic lights, you know, those little things that
Speaker 4: are in a cage and you hang them up underneath
Speaker 4: the hood. When you open the hood of your car,
Speaker 4: you hang them up underneath there so you can see
Speaker 4: down those mechanic dumber of lights. Something like that with
Speaker 4: a hunter white bulb is good. If you just have
Speaker 4: a little let's say, a small lime tree or something
Speaker 4: in a container or in the ground that you want
Speaker 4: to provide a little bit of protection when we're going
Speaker 4: to get down to what twenty nine, twenty eight, someplaces
Speaker 4: only thirty degrees depending on where you are in the
Speaker 4: listening area. And that's enough. But it's a matter, it's
Speaker 4: a relative thing, and so keep that in mind when
Speaker 4: you're protecting plants. And do look at that publication online.
Speaker 4: I took a lot of time to write that with
Speaker 4: one of our anim specialists, very knowledgeable fellow, and we
Speaker 4: put together a really helpful publication that you should just
Speaker 4: have it printed out or at least save it to
Speaker 4: your computer so you can look at it. And it
Speaker 4: reminds you of the different things. You know, what people
Speaker 4: ask questions like what about water? I see people spray
Speaker 4: plants with water, and the ice breezes and the ice
Speaker 4: insulates the plant. And the answer bottom line is that no,
Speaker 4: that's not true. That's not true. If you want to
Speaker 4: get nerdy, I'll be very brief with this, but very briefly,
Speaker 4: ice and water changes from liquid to solid. Each milli
Speaker 4: liter of water cubic centimeter of water gives off one
Speaker 4: calorie of heat. That's nerdy stuff. That's for your next
Speaker 4: garden party. So you can impress people and bore them
Speaker 4: to death. Okay, so one centimary. So as long as
Speaker 4: there's liquid water freezing on the surface of the ice
Speaker 4: around the plant, the interior temperature doesn't go below, not
Speaker 4: much below thirty two degrees. But the minute you have
Speaker 4: liquid water freeze, stop having liquid water freezing, and it's
Speaker 4: just ice. That temperature plummets, just like the ice was
Speaker 4: in there. Because ice does not insulate in the sense
Speaker 4: of protecting the interior buds from going colder. The ice
Speaker 4: gets colder, the buds get colder. So for ninety nine
Speaker 4: percent of the home garden situations, putting ice putting water
Speaker 4: on plants in a freeze is not a good idea.
Speaker 4: Even up breaking limbs, you end up with all other
Speaker 4: kinds of issues, sometimes even worse, because all right here
Speaker 4: we go, I said one nerd thing. We're gonna give
Speaker 4: you one more. Because when it switches and now you
Speaker 4: have the ice thawing and changing from ice to liquid water,
Speaker 4: it pulls a cat of heat out. When water goes
Speaker 4: through that state, change from liquid to ice, solid to liquid,
Speaker 4: you're either gaining or losing a calorie there. And so
Speaker 4: if you got to the morning, and let's say it
Speaker 4: was thirty degrees thirty two degrees. It's starting to thaw there,
Speaker 4: and you quit sprinkling, and that ice began to melt,
Speaker 4: the interior would actually get colder. Now you're thinking that,
Speaker 4: how can ice be melting on the surface and the
Speaker 4: interior getting colder. Well it does, And I'll give you
Speaker 4: one quick example that suddenly making ice cream makes sense.
Speaker 4: Remember when you had the old hand crank ice cream makers,
Speaker 4: what did you do? You filled them with ice, and
Speaker 4: then what did you put on the ice? Salt? Remember
Speaker 4: that you had to sit on those things, so that
Speaker 4: whole still while somebody cranked it, or you cranked it
Speaker 4: while someone sat on it. Why do we put salt on?
Speaker 4: Salt melts the ice? Why do we want to melt
Speaker 4: the ice make an ice cream? Because when the ice melts,
Speaker 4: it draws heat out of the ice cream on the
Speaker 4: inside of that han crank ice cream maker. That's why
Speaker 4: you put salt on, because it makes the ice cream colder.
Speaker 4: See what I'm saying. You get ice on your plants,
Speaker 4: the sun comes up and you start to thaw, you're
Speaker 4: not out of the woods. In fact, it can get
Speaker 4: worse on the inside where those buds are all right,
Speaker 4: I try not to do too much nerd stuff for you.
Speaker 4: But chew on that one for a while. I think
Speaker 4: it's pretty cool. Stop, pretty interesting. We're gonna take a
Speaker 4: little break here. I'll be right back with your gardening
Speaker 4: question seven one three two one two ktr H. All right,
Speaker 4: welcome back to garden line. Hey, if you want to
Speaker 4: get me a call, talk about whatever's of interest to you.
Speaker 4: What are the kind of questions? Maybe you got a
Speaker 4: gardening there's a good one, maybe a gardening resolution. What
Speaker 4: do you want to do different in twenty twenty five
Speaker 4: than you've done before? Now I'm not a big New
Speaker 4: Year's resolution person. I know it's all that we think
Speaker 4: if we decide we're resolving something that therefore we're going
Speaker 4: to do it, and it happens. And I mean, you know,
Speaker 4: everybody knows what happens to New Year's resolutions by about
Speaker 4: the second or third week in January. But seriously, what
Speaker 4: would you like to do different in gardening? What would
Speaker 4: you like to grow that you'd never grown? Let me
Speaker 4: encourage you to do something different, try something new. Have
Speaker 4: you never grown vegetables? Okay, get you a five gallon bucket.
Speaker 4: Drill holes in the bottom get you a tomato plant,
Speaker 4: put it, fill it full of a quality of veggie
Speaker 4: and herb mix from heirlooms, soils or something like that,
Speaker 4: maybe a quality mix from nature's way, and grow you
Speaker 4: a small tomato plant in that bucket. You could do that.
Speaker 4: You can do it with a klopenion pepper if you
Speaker 4: like calopenias. Maybe since we're in the cool season, how
Speaker 4: about a broccoli plant. My wife just picked the first
Speaker 4: broccoli from some plants she planted back in late fall
Speaker 4: and brought it in yesterday. The fatted broccoli and enjoyed it,
Speaker 4: roasted broccoli and the oh my gosh, that was good
Speaker 4: last night.
Speaker 6: You can do that.
Speaker 4: Why not do it? You don't have to have a
Speaker 4: whole garden to do it. You just need to, like
Speaker 4: I said, just to make a point, a five gallon
Speaker 4: bugget with holes drilled in the bottom of it. You
Speaker 4: can do that. Or you can get you a really
Speaker 4: nice container, or you can go all the way and
Speaker 4: make a nice garden. Raise bed. I hope you go
Speaker 4: all the way on it. But seriously, what is your resolution.
Speaker 4: Maybe it's to mulch and not be dealing with weeds
Speaker 4: all the time, or here's a good one. This isn't
Speaker 4: a fun one, but it's a good one. I'm gonna
Speaker 4: not let nuts sedge show its face this year when
Speaker 4: it comes up as three to five leaves. I'm gonna
Speaker 4: follow Skip's guide online Gardening Skip dot com the nutsedge
Speaker 4: guide and end depth the look, and they'll tell you
Speaker 4: exactly how to shut nutsedge down before it proliferates and
Speaker 4: gives you all kinds of headaches. Maybe that's a resolution
Speaker 4: for you this year. Maybe I'm going to redo the
Speaker 4: lawn and I'm gonna make it a nice, dense lawn
Speaker 4: so I'm not constantly having to fight weeds all the time.
Speaker 4: Maybe that's a resolution. Maybe it's to grow a new
Speaker 4: kind of houseplant, something different, something beautiful. Perhaps it's to
Speaker 4: put in herbs in your flower beds or your vegetable gardens,
Speaker 4: or to make an herb garden. Watch your resolution for
Speaker 4: this year. How about a fruit tree? Oh my gosh,
Speaker 4: those are so good. We have fruit trees that are
Speaker 4: challenged to grow, and we have fruit trees that are
Speaker 4: easy to grow. I love citrus because citrus number one,
Speaker 4: you get to eat the centrus. But number two, the
Speaker 4: fragrance of the blooms is outstanding, and I'm planning a
Speaker 4: satsuma this year right off of our patio. I've got
Speaker 4: the spot already ready to go. I just need to
Speaker 4: get out there and get it done. But I'm gonna
Speaker 4: put a satsum in because I enjoy the fragrance of
Speaker 4: citrus blooms in general. Some are more fragrant than others,
Speaker 4: but they're all good and it's just fun to do.
Speaker 4: What's your New year's resolution? If you will give me
Speaker 4: a call seven one three two one two k t RH,
Speaker 4: let's talk about it. Or if you just have questions
Speaker 4: and things, we can visit about that too. You are
Speaker 4: listening to guard Line and we're here to help you
Speaker 4: have a bountiful garden and a beautiful landscape and more
Speaker 4: fun in the process. Bountiful garden, beautiful landscape, more fun
Speaker 4: and the process. The cold is coming. We're gonna have
Speaker 4: a little, our first significant, little coal snap of the year.
Speaker 4: For those of you who are used to living up north,
Speaker 4: it's like, wait, it's not even going to get to
Speaker 4: the mid twenties. What are you talking about? Well, okay,
Speaker 4: it's cold for here, Okay, so what are we going
Speaker 4: to do? We can grow things you can't grow up north,
Speaker 4: you know. I mean, how many avocado trees and citrus
Speaker 4: trees do you see even in northern Texas? None? Right,
Speaker 4: So we can do those, but we've got to protect them.
Speaker 4: So go by Ace Hardware Store. They've got everything you're
Speaker 4: going to need for it. You know, I was talking
Speaker 4: about those clamp lights and the bulbs that you put
Speaker 4: in them. Whether it's a flood light one fifty WI,
Speaker 4: whether it's an actual heat lamp, you can get those.
Speaker 4: You can also get the plastic covers, the tarps that
Speaker 4: go over plants to make sure you create that dead
Speaker 4: air space underneath. Now we've got to deal with water
Speaker 4: protection too. Those of you are going to get into
Speaker 4: a little harder freeze. You're going to want to have
Speaker 4: something to cover your faucet, like a faucet cover or
Speaker 4: maybe the freeze miser. That's right, freeze miser. It's a
Speaker 4: whole the thing you screw into the faucet, then you
Speaker 4: turn the faucet on. It doesn't allow any water through
Speaker 4: until it gets cold, and then it starts to trickle
Speaker 4: water through, and moving water is it's much more reluctant
Speaker 4: to freeze. Gotta get much colder to freeze moving water
Speaker 4: than stagnant water, and so as a result, you get
Speaker 4: your pipes through on a very very cold night. They've
Speaker 4: got tape for wrapping pipes that they have, the foam
Speaker 4: covers over pipes. They've also got the little wires that
Speaker 4: you put around your pipes, like an electrical type of
Speaker 4: a tape that just barely warms it enough to protect it.
Speaker 4: They have everything else you need. You need some duct tape.
Speaker 4: Do you need something for maybe, you know, de icing
Speaker 4: the windshield to your car if you've got the frost
Speaker 4: freeze or whatever is on it, and it's not just
Speaker 4: this freeze, it's the ones coming up as well. Do
Speaker 4: you need to keep your hands warm. They've got some
Speaker 4: really good gloves as well as handwarmers. Also in there,
Speaker 4: fireplace logs, the firewood. Do you need a propane heater.
Speaker 4: There's always a good kerosene for a backup or for
Speaker 4: those kinds of heaters. Whatever you need is that ACE Hardware.
Speaker 4: Remember it's the three p's that we worry about. Plants, pipes,
Speaker 4: and pets. You got to take care of those, and
Speaker 4: ACE Hardware's got you coverage. Just go to Acehardware dot
Speaker 4: com you can find the ACE Hardware store near you
Speaker 4: that is going to be your source for everything when
Speaker 4: it comes to cold protection, and that would include let's
Speaker 4: say you're in Alvin, Patco East Hardware down there, up
Speaker 4: in Brennam, Brenham Ace Hardware, Katie Ace Hardware west of town,
Speaker 4: Hamilton Hardware off Highway six, your Bear Creek down south
Speaker 4: off Highway six, Hamilton Hardware is an ACE store. And
Speaker 4: then out in Orange for those of you, first of all,
Speaker 4: thanks for listening out in Orange. Child's building supply ACE
Speaker 4: Hardware out there in Orange, Texas. We're going to heading
Speaker 4: out of the phones and talk to Loretta out in
Speaker 4: Texas City. Hello, Loretta, good morning.
Speaker 5: Yes, I have always wanted a bird of paradise, so
Speaker 5: I was wondering how easy or how difficult.
Speaker 12: They are to grow?
Speaker 4: All righty, you know what, Loretta, I am looking at
Speaker 4: my clock and I just saw I'm running out of
Speaker 4: time here, so I'm going to start to answer you,
Speaker 4: but we're going to get some music here and then
Speaker 4: I will finish your answer after the top of the break.
Speaker 4: So I'll let you know that upfront. Are we talking
Speaker 4: about a bird of paradise? Is like the tropical type
Speaker 4: that have the little kind of flower that comes up
Speaker 4: and goes horizont or are we talking about the kind
Speaker 4: that has big orange and yellow flowers in long, tall clusters.
Speaker 6: A small one where it kind of goes all horizonal horizontal.
Speaker 4: Okay, good, Yeah. Those are very cold tender. If they
Speaker 4: if you get them in a protected place near a house,
Speaker 4: they can do fine with very little protection except in
Speaker 4: a very very cold freeze. You you can grow them
Speaker 4: in containers, or you can grow them in the ground.
Speaker 4: They just need decent drainage. They're not that difficult to grow.
Speaker 4: They like a lot of sunlight that they don't have
Speaker 4: to be in the full sun. They just hang on
Speaker 4: and when we come back we'll finish answering your questions.
Speaker 1: Welcome to kt r H Guarden Line with scan Arcters.
Speaker 2: Just watch it as so many SI.
Speaker 4: Alrighty, already here we go. We are back with garden
Speaker 4: Line and your phone calls, and we're gonna no delay
Speaker 4: and head straight out to the phones. We were having
Speaker 4: a conversation, uh with Loretta, and we were talking about
Speaker 4: the bird of Paradise. Loretta, we're back. So I mentioned
Speaker 4: you know that it is somewhat cold tender, but in
Speaker 4: a protected spot you down in Texas City there, you
Speaker 4: should be okay with it. If you want to do
Speaker 4: a little covering up when we're going to have a
Speaker 4: really hard cold freeze, that's good. I would use a
Speaker 4: plumeria fertilizer on it. We have a number of good
Speaker 4: quality primary fertilizer. I know that both Nelson and Nitroposs
Speaker 4: make a plumeria blend. It's got a lot of the
Speaker 4: middle number phosphorus and a good amount of the potassium
Speaker 4: in it, which is a good blend for that particular
Speaker 4: kind of plant.
Speaker 5: Okay, do they like a lot of water or just a.
Speaker 4: Little consistent You know they don't. They're not a drought plant,
Speaker 4: but they're not an azalea either, or a hydrangea that
Speaker 4: you've got to just keep from drying out at all.
Speaker 4: They're pretty tough. I've seen some that you people planted
Speaker 4: them under the eaves of their house and they kind
Speaker 4: of got the water that rainfall provided and did pretty
Speaker 4: good with that. But that was a kind of unique
Speaker 4: situation where the demands were a little bit lower. But
Speaker 4: I would just say moderate, a good soaking every now
Speaker 4: and then ought to be enough.
Speaker 8: Okay, you said they like a lot of sun, so
Speaker 8: the west side of the house would be a good place.
Speaker 4: The west would be fine. You may get a little
Speaker 4: bit of a you know, the leaves may get a
Speaker 4: little bit ratty on it, but they be okay there.
Speaker 4: I've seen them growing in kind of a half day
Speaker 4: sun doing pretty good, and I've seen them growing in
Speaker 4: more sun than that and doing pretty good too.
Speaker 8: Okay, all right, that gives me something to think about.
Speaker 5: I appreciate it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you bet well. Good luck with those. Those are
Speaker 4: gorgeous plants. I wish you well and.
Speaker 6: I've always loved them.
Speaker 4: You bet Thanks for the call. We're going to go
Speaker 4: now to Mike and Bay City. Hello Mike, Welcome to
Speaker 4: garden Line.
Speaker 14: Good morning.
Speaker 15: Yeah, I got a couple of little issues I'd like
Speaker 15: to ask you about. One of them is wood ashes.
Speaker 15: What I do with them, Like I've read things that
Speaker 15: he probably is not supposed to put it places because
Speaker 15: it just builds up like an alkalinity or something, either
Speaker 15: in the garden or yard or anything.
Speaker 4: So is that correct anything, Well, it is partly correct.
Speaker 4: Wood ashes are like any nutrient, you can have not
Speaker 4: enough and you can have too much. They are high pH.
Speaker 4: So if you were going to grow azaleas or blueberries
Speaker 4: or camellias, I wouldn't put a wood ash anywhere near them,
Speaker 4: for sure. If you've got plants you're growing that are
Speaker 4: already in the pH range, they want to be in
Speaker 4: a lot of vegetables and things want to be around
Speaker 4: neutral to slightly acidic. I wouldn't use too much wood
Speaker 4: ash is there. So if you have a soil test
Speaker 4: and you know where you are on pH, that guides you. Now.
Speaker 4: They do contain phosphorus, and they contain potassium and other
Speaker 4: nutrients that can be helpful to plants. So a moderate
Speaker 4: amount of wood ash is fine. You just have to
Speaker 4: you know, it really starts with what's already in your soil,
Speaker 4: and then you weigh them out and spread them accordingly.
Speaker 4: There is information I don't have anything on my website,
Speaker 4: but there is information out there as to how much
Speaker 4: wood ash, like how many pounds per hundred or a
Speaker 4: thousand square feet can you put?
Speaker 16: Uh?
Speaker 4: So so, but yes, and moderation, Yeah, what about in
Speaker 4: a compost?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 15: What about putting it in compost? The same thing you're
Speaker 15: gonna you don't know how to mix it?
Speaker 4: Yeah, same thing. You just you know, you're sprinkling a
Speaker 4: little bit on there, but a little bit goes awful
Speaker 4: long way because compost is a pretty small thing, and
Speaker 4: so uh, just be careful that because you go too
Speaker 4: far and you got real high pH and that creates
Speaker 4: its own problems.
Speaker 15: I got you, Okay, Well I got another question. Okay, okay,
Speaker 15: go ahead if you got something else on that, but.
Speaker 4: Go ahead, go ahead, all right.
Speaker 15: Uh we can't get together here. But I got an
Speaker 15: orange little orange tree. I'm trying to. It's still in
Speaker 15: a pot and decided when to plant or whether I
Speaker 15: want to. And it's got some problems on the leaves,
Speaker 15: like they kind of are curling on the edge, which
Speaker 15: makes me think it's a bug or something, but I
Speaker 15: can't find any but it gets you know, like rusty,
Speaker 15: well it dies in that curl in his rusty looking
Speaker 15: you know color wife, And they're curling like that, and
Speaker 15: so I can't tell if it's I don't know if
Speaker 15: it's a fungus or a bug. Are you able to
Speaker 15: that's in that in.
Speaker 4: Section I can. That's a common insect here for Centrius.
Speaker 4: It's called a citrus leaf miner miner like coal miner,
Speaker 4: and that's what it does. A little fly lays an
Speaker 4: egg in the leaf and then the larva hatches out
Speaker 4: and choose between the upper and lower surfaces, just like
Speaker 4: a coal miner digging through a sema coal in the ground.
Speaker 4: They chew through there and that causes the leaf. Sometimes
Speaker 4: they get a little silvery. You usually see a little
Speaker 4: bit of a squiggly trail, and it does cause them
Speaker 4: to curl like that, and the if you've got a
Speaker 4: small plant, it's worth treating them for Generally, as a
Speaker 4: citrus gets older and tougher, you you don't have to
Speaker 4: worry about them as much. They'll do a little damage,
Speaker 4: but they're not going to affect production much. But if
Speaker 4: you use a product called spin No said, it's an
Speaker 4: organic that soaks into the leaves and kills the larvae inside.
Speaker 4: It's s p I n O S A D. Spin
Speaker 4: No said, yeah, And you spray the new flushes of
Speaker 4: growth with those mic The old, tough, leathery leaves don't
Speaker 4: get affected by citrus leaf minor. It's the tender new
Speaker 4: flushes of growth. So when you get a little flush
Speaker 4: of growth, just spray. I'm squirt them with SPO spinosaid,
Speaker 4: and it'll it'll minimize any kind of damage that those
Speaker 4: would cause.
Speaker 15: You know, you know one thing about this, I didn't
Speaker 15: see any leaf minor, any kind of leaf minor thing.
Speaker 15: It's just the only o case. You know, you would
Speaker 15: think you'd see some of that on some of the
Speaker 15: other leaves, but ever about lack on maybe one leaf
Speaker 15: on every third branch here. Okay, it's but it's just
Speaker 15: rolled up and it looks like it's been eating underneath.
Speaker 2: You know, in that role.
Speaker 15: But no mind, let's do this, Mike, the same thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well it may be something else. Take some pictures
Speaker 4: of it, Uh, take it a picture of the rolled
Speaker 4: up leaf, Take a picture to unroll them, kind of
Speaker 4: show me underneath where you say it looks like it
Speaker 4: may have been eating. Take some good, close up, well
Speaker 4: focused pictures. I'm going to put you on hold and
Speaker 4: Jonathan will give you an email and send me those
Speaker 4: pictures and we'll take it from there. Thank you. I
Speaker 4: got to run for a break here. Yeah, unfortunately, I'm
Speaker 4: right on a break, so I just wanna let's see
Speaker 4: Laura and Nan and Louis. We are coming to you
Speaker 4: right when we get back from break, all right, welcome
Speaker 4: back to the Garden Line. Good to have you with us.
Speaker 4: We're gonna get right to our callers here who are
Speaker 4: patiently waiting online. We go to Laura. Hello, Laura, welcome
Speaker 4: to garden Line.
Speaker 5: Thank you, sir.
Speaker 13: I heard you speaking earlier about the Santa Suma bee,
Speaker 13: a very.
Speaker 2: Whole, whole hardy orange tree.
Speaker 13: But what do you recommend for the limit and the grapefruit.
Speaker 6: You know, there is to protect when there's fall.
Speaker 13: They're going to figure out something that's got to have
Speaker 13: the best resistance to the cold.
Speaker 4: Okay, Well, grapefruit trees and lemon trees are not super
Speaker 4: hardy citrus, and so those as species themselves are not
Speaker 4: as hardy. We got to give protection for them whenever
Speaker 4: we're going to get good cold weather, when it's going
Speaker 4: to get down, Oh, I don't know. You know, let's
Speaker 4: say below the upper twenties for sure. You know, maybe
Speaker 4: when you get around twenty nine, if it's just for
Speaker 4: a short period of time, you're probably okay on those.
Speaker 4: But it just depends on how long it is and
Speaker 4: what condition the plants are in, you know, because plant
Speaker 4: hardiness itself, even as a plant gets older, Laura, it's
Speaker 4: a little better able to take the cold. You know,
Speaker 4: you take a satsuma, which is cold hardy, pretty cold
Speaker 4: hardy once it's established, but in the first three years
Speaker 4: it's not as cold hearty as it is as it
Speaker 4: gets older. So it's a function of all those things,
Speaker 4: plant health, plant age, and then where it's located, and
Speaker 4: how fast the temperature drops, for example, would be another thing,
Speaker 4: and how long it stays cold. So when it comes
Speaker 4: to ponderosa lemon, that's a pretty hardy lemon as far
Speaker 4: as lemons go. But it's a big, old, giant lemon.
Speaker 4: It makes a huge tree and for most people it's
Speaker 4: just not practical. It's more of a novelty. But in general,
Speaker 4: the grapefruit that you mentioned and lemon trees are going
Speaker 4: to need some protection.
Speaker 13: All right, sir, I appreciate your time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, hey, Laura, before I'll let you go, where are
Speaker 4: you located? It doesn't stay here on the board, Oh okay, helping, Yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: all right, Well that you you can have some cold
Speaker 4: weather there. Yeah, all right, we appreciate it, Thank you
Speaker 4: very much, Thank you man. I appreciate that. Now we're
Speaker 4: going to go to Galveston. Talk to Luise Hey Luise,
Speaker 4: Welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 17: Good morning Skip. Just a quick question, is there any
Speaker 17: is there any benefits to adding coffee grounds to your lawn,
Speaker 17: of which I'd been doing the past uh two week intervals.
Speaker 17: I've been collecting spent coffee grounds, spreading him, adding a
Speaker 17: little water after. But I'm not sure I'm seeing any benefit,
Speaker 17: any difference in the grass itself.
Speaker 4: Nothing fast. So coffee grounds are often used maybe in
Speaker 4: a container or in a in a garden bed, you know,
Speaker 4: where it's a smaller area. In a lawn, we like
Speaker 4: to do things to the whole lawn other than just spots,
Speaker 4: So if the coffee grounds made it green, you would
Speaker 4: end up with green spots wherever you're put in the
Speaker 4: coffee ground, right, They do have quite a bit of
Speaker 4: nitrogen that can be released over time as they decompose,
Speaker 4: and they are slightly acidifying, so there's nothing wrong with
Speaker 4: them as long as they're used in moderation. But I
Speaker 4: don't think in a lawn you're going to see a
Speaker 4: significant difference. Just to do the fact, you know, if
Speaker 4: you had a couple of wheelbarrows of coffee grounds, well
Speaker 4: maybe maybe so, but I would use them in smaller
Speaker 4: planting bed areas where maybe they can make where you
Speaker 4: can use a little higher quantity per square foot. Okay,
Speaker 4: thanks very much, appreciating you. Bet good luck with that.
Speaker 4: Good luck with that. All right, Now, we're going to
Speaker 4: go to Jersey Village and talk to Dan. Hey, Dan,
Speaker 4: Welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 6: Good morning. I have questions about candy dullus. I'm saying
Speaker 6: that right. But they're lilies in a general man and
Speaker 6: sold them. Do I cut them back now? Or I've
Speaker 6: done it in the past and the spring after the
Speaker 6: cold weather cut them back and the colis come back.
Speaker 4: What's the best way you can do that? You can
Speaker 4: cut them back if you get a little ragged stuff
Speaker 4: before the fresh spring growth comes out. They're really kind
Speaker 4: of cool. They're kind of like BlackBerry lily is they
Speaker 4: look candy lily and BlackBerry lily look a lot of
Speaker 4: like little beautiful little flowers kind of in a oh,
Speaker 4: I don't know, a coral orange yellow, sometimes a little
Speaker 4: bit lavender direction, but with the spots on the petals
Speaker 4: and things are very beautiful and they're not hard to grow.
Speaker 4: So I've had them before where I didn't do anything
Speaker 4: to them. I just I just put them out there
Speaker 4: and let them do what they're going to do, and
Speaker 4: they'll do just fine. They're they're real, They're real, easy,
Speaker 4: easy plants.
Speaker 18: Yeah they are.
Speaker 6: I've got over one hundred foot of them, So I
Speaker 6: just I love them. That create good privacy and everything.
Speaker 6: But either cut them back, can mult over them, or
Speaker 6: or just leave them alone? Or what kind of fertilizer
Speaker 6: would you throw them to and enhance.
Speaker 4: Just you know, just a moderate amount of a complete fertilizer.
Speaker 4: You don't want to push them with too much nitrogen,
Speaker 4: just a moderate amount. How taller? How tall are yours?
Speaker 12: Oh?
Speaker 6: Anywhere from four to six foot?
Speaker 12: Now?
Speaker 4: Are we talking about candy lily? Or are you talking
Speaker 4: about a tiger lily?
Speaker 16: Uh?
Speaker 6: Well they have the orange flower. You're talking about candy
Speaker 6: lily or cannae lily. I don't know how the what
Speaker 6: they're actually called.
Speaker 4: Okay, well let me ask let me ask you this.
Speaker 4: Are the individual flowers about the size maybe a tennis
Speaker 4: ball or less, or are the individual flowers more like
Speaker 4: a baseball softball?
Speaker 19: Uh?
Speaker 6: They grow on to shoot, you know, they kind of
Speaker 6: a whole bunch of flowers on it. They're not individual
Speaker 6: fly it kind of on one.
Speaker 4: Shoot, yeah, I get that. I'm just saying, like, if
Speaker 4: you were to pick one of the flowers out of
Speaker 4: the ones along the huote, one of the flowers, is
Speaker 4: it more like, Okay, I think you're talking about a
Speaker 4: tiger lily. I think you're talking about a tiger and
Speaker 4: that's that's a little that's okay, that's that's all right.
Speaker 4: That's that's just a little bit different of a creature.
Speaker 4: And I'm assuming you're said they're orange, yes, is that right? Yeah? Okay, well,
Speaker 4: those are very popular on tiger lilies. The petals tend
Speaker 4: to curve backwards, with the little filaments and anthers sticking
Speaker 4: out in the middle beyond them. But the petals sort
Speaker 4: of curved back. Sometimes they almost look like a falling
Speaker 4: star or something. It's very very unusual. But those those
Speaker 4: are really uh, they're they're also not that difficult to grow.
Speaker 4: You probably need some sort of port for the stems
Speaker 4: on them. Have you noticed you're just producing little look
Speaker 4: like black berries where the leaves and stems and flowers
Speaker 4: come together.
Speaker 6: They don't. They they're okay on a rod scents basically,
Speaker 6: and they just kind of lean against that. When I
Speaker 6: have twelve. I'd just tie them up a little bit
Speaker 6: if a need to. Okay, they start leaning too much, well,
Speaker 6: because they are pretty top heavy at times.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure you're talking about tiger tiger lily.
Speaker 4: If you're going to fertilize them, you something with more
Speaker 4: potas or phosphorus the middle number, but not a lot
Speaker 4: of nitrogen. They're already kind of a lanky growing plant,
Speaker 4: and you don't want to you don't want to push
Speaker 4: them with a lot of nitrogen. So a food that's
Speaker 4: made for plume areas would be a good choice for
Speaker 4: your tiger lilies, or just a yeah, just not too
Speaker 4: much nitrogen the first.
Speaker 6: Number, gotcha, all right, thank you very much.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and when they bloom, when you get blooms this
Speaker 4: next year, take a picture or two and email it
Speaker 4: to me. I'd love to see those.
Speaker 6: Okay, I'll get them all going at once. It'd be
Speaker 6: It's quite a sight.
Speaker 4: It is quite a sight, that is true. Well, hy Dan,
Speaker 4: thank you, thank you very much for the for the
Speaker 4: phone call. Appreciate that you know Jersey Village. I lived
Speaker 4: in Cypress for a number of years. When I was
Speaker 4: in Houston area. In the Cypress area, rather, and one
Speaker 4: day it dawned on me what Jersey Village was named for,
Speaker 4: and it dawned on me what Darry Ashford Street was
Speaker 4: named for, and so on. It finally is like what
Speaker 4: the big dairy production area up do there. In fact,
Speaker 4: if you got onto RCW Nurses, which is where two
Speaker 4: forty nine comes into belt Way eight, the beautiful giant
Speaker 4: sycamore on the property down there. David Williamson was telling
Speaker 4: me that that used to be a dairy right in
Speaker 4: that area. And I still have those giant, beautiful sycamores
Speaker 4: there from back in the day. But I think Houston's
Speaker 4: grown a little bit since then. So it's, you know,
Speaker 4: as it's gotten bigger year by year, just a new
Speaker 4: spreading ring around the city each year gets bigger. It
Speaker 4: sort of ate the dairy industry as it grew out
Speaker 4: from there. But that was kind of interesting to me.
Speaker 4: Sometimes you think, well, I should I should have wondered
Speaker 4: about that a long time ago. Jersey Village and Darry
Speaker 4: Ashford all that kind of thing. All right, we're listening
Speaker 4: to Gardenline. I'm your host, Skip Richtor our phone number
Speaker 4: if you'd like to give me a Cafinally got those
Speaker 4: calls cleared out. I don't like people to have to
Speaker 4: sit and wait very long if I can control it.
Speaker 4: But we now have wide open seven one three two
Speaker 4: one two k t R H. If you've got a
Speaker 4: gardening question that we could help you with, we would
Speaker 4: be happy to do that. You know, Southwest Fortal has
Speaker 4: been around since oh gosh, I think nineteen fifty five.
Speaker 4: In fact, I was just I was just the other
Speaker 4: day looking into you know, garden line. We trace our
Speaker 4: lineage back to the Dewey Compton days, which is in
Speaker 4: the nineteen fifties, and it went on from there. But
Speaker 4: Southwest Fertilizer began in nineteen fifty five and it's been
Speaker 4: a guardline sponsor since those Dewey Compton days. It's in
Speaker 4: Southwest Houston, as you would expect, it's a corner of
Speaker 4: bus Net and Runwick. When you go into Southwest Fertilizer,
Speaker 4: you're going to find every kind of supply you need
Speaker 4: for anything you want to grow. And so we're talking
Speaker 4: about controlling pests, controlling diseases, fertilizing plants, quality tools to
Speaker 4: get the job done. They got a ninety foot long
Speaker 4: wall of tools there at Southwest fertilizer for you to
Speaker 4: choose from corner of Businet and runwick again. If you
Speaker 4: want to just go to the website at Southwest Fertilizer
Speaker 4: dot com. Southwest Fertilizer dot com. Do you need weed protection?
Speaker 4: Do you want to kill existing weeds? Do you want
Speaker 4: to prevent weeds? Do you want to get seeds? Great
Speaker 4: supply of seeds, including a bulk seed bin where you
Speaker 4: know that's one of the most economical ways to buy seed.
Speaker 4: You're gonna plant beans or corner or something like that.
Speaker 4: You just get your little scoop out of the bulk
Speaker 4: seed bin, put in a little envelope and you're good
Speaker 4: to go. And I mean, Bob carries a lot of
Speaker 4: quality things like that, quality pruning tools. We are in
Speaker 4: pruning season. Time to get going on the pruning. Stop
Speaker 4: by there. Grab some of this fill coal with Barnel
Speaker 4: and Corona, other quality selections. If you're an organic gardener,
Speaker 4: you're not gonna find a bigger selection of products that
Speaker 4: are organic in this Greater Houston area, then you'll find
Speaker 4: a Southwest Fertilizer. If I endorse something on guarden Line,
Speaker 4: it's gonna be at Southwest Fertilizer. They have great service,
Speaker 4: they've got excellent advice, real friendly. And when you got
Speaker 4: friendly service, quality products, and great selection, you're not gonna
Speaker 4: do better. And that's exactly how I would describe the folks.
Speaker 4: Southwest Fertilizer, corner of Bussinett and Redwick, Southwest Houston. Time
Speaker 4: for me to take a little break here. When we
Speaker 4: come back, we're going to go to spring Branch and
Speaker 4: talk to HRDA. Look forward to doing that. You hang
Speaker 4: on Hurda and we'll be right back with you. Hey,
Speaker 4: welcome back to guarden Line. It's glad to have you
Speaker 4: with us today. Well, let's say back out to the phones.
Speaker 4: We're gonna go talk to hurt now in spring break.
Speaker 4: Hello Hurta, Welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 8: Thank you, good morning. My questions about foxtail fern.
Speaker 19: How cold tolerant are they?
Speaker 4: Well, you get a good hard freeze and you can
Speaker 4: burn them back to the ground, but they'll come right
Speaker 4: back out of the ground, so they should be just
Speaker 4: fine in our area.
Speaker 16: Oh good, good, Well, I'm going to cover them when
Speaker 16: I cover my cheffelera.
Speaker 6: I know I have to cover that one.
Speaker 15: By the way, A happy New Year.
Speaker 12: And blessed to you, you and your family.
Speaker 4: Well, thank you very much. We're gonna have a good
Speaker 4: twenty twenty five, aren't we hurt.
Speaker 6: To Yes, sir, we're looking for alrighty.
Speaker 4: Well, thank you for colling, Thanks for being a listener.
Speaker 4: You take care of alrighty, alrighty, bye bye, all right,
Speaker 4: let's head out to Cypress. Now we're gonna talk to Susan. Hey, Susan,
Speaker 4: welcome to garden Line. Alrighty. We're gonna see if we
Speaker 4: can get Susan there back on the phone and put
Speaker 4: her on hold here and we'll come back to Susan
Speaker 4: here we get her back on the phone. There's a
Speaker 4: number of different things that I promote when we're talking
Speaker 4: about garden Line, and I want to I want to
Speaker 4: just say something. I get to choose who is a
Speaker 4: sponsor and is not a sponsor on garden Line. I
Speaker 4: do so when you hear me talking about a company,
Speaker 4: it's a company that I believe in. Either I've seen
Speaker 4: the research on their product, or I've used and or
Speaker 4: I've used their and I know that it works. And
Speaker 4: a good example of that is Nature's Way Resources. You know,
Speaker 4: John Ferguson years ago founded Nature's Way Resources as a
Speaker 4: student of the soil. He knew how nature works, putting
Speaker 4: the soil in place in a form, in a situation
Speaker 4: with microbes and nutrients and drainage and all of that
Speaker 4: that makes success. And he built his company around that.
Speaker 4: Now his son in his CEO of Nature's Way Resources,
Speaker 4: and nothing has changed in terms of doing things the
Speaker 4: right way, creating soils that turn what would we would
Speaker 4: be calling natural waste in some of the best composts
Speaker 4: in Multius that you possibly can have. That team out
Speaker 4: there has been doing this for years. They know how
Speaker 4: to do it. They know how to make quality products
Speaker 4: that help you have success. And if you want your
Speaker 4: thumb to look green, go out to Nature's Way and
Speaker 4: get some of the stuff they make. That's brown, and
Speaker 4: that is compost and that is multius for on top
Speaker 4: of the soil, and that is special bed mixes for
Speaker 4: everything from acid living plants to vegetables and herb plants
Speaker 4: to flowering plants. They've got a blend for everything you
Speaker 4: possibly could need. Ian continuing his father's mission on creating
Speaker 4: a healthy environment for generations to come, because all things
Speaker 4: begin in the soil. I saw a quote one time,
Speaker 4: That says mankind. Despite all our artistic pretensions and successes,
Speaker 4: Mankind owes that success to a six inch lratopsoil in
Speaker 4: the fact that it rains and in Nature's way. That
Speaker 4: is the kind of quality mix that they make because
Speaker 4: it does all begin in the ground. It is brown
Speaker 4: stuff before green stuff. Sabi Nature's Way resources. They're up
Speaker 4: on I forty five on the way to Conrod, just
Speaker 4: where fourteen eighty eight comes in from Magnolia. You just
Speaker 4: turn right if you're going north on forty five, cross
Speaker 4: over the railroad tracks Sherwood circles right there. That's where
Speaker 4: you will find Nature's Way resources. And that is where
Speaker 4: you will go home with. Whether it's a trailer or
Speaker 4: a bunch of bags in the back of your car,
Speaker 4: you will go home with some of the best stuff
Speaker 4: that you can have to set you up for success.
Speaker 4: We're going to now head to Cyprus, Texas and talk
Speaker 4: to Susan. Do we have Susan?
Speaker 13: I hope, So how are you?
Speaker 4: I'm good, Susan, Welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 13: No thanks. I was lazy and never put down my
Speaker 13: pre emergent in November. What should I do at this
Speaker 13: point in December. In January, what should I do now?
Speaker 4: Well, you should wait and watch if you see a bunch,
Speaker 4: is this a lawn or what are we talking about?
Speaker 13: It's a lawn and I'm already seeing weeds come up
Speaker 13: that I didn't have last year.
Speaker 4: So what should I do at this point? Okay, give
Speaker 4: it just a little bit longer. Once we get a
Speaker 4: little further into January and the weeds get a little larger,
Speaker 4: you can use a post emergent urgent weed control product
Speaker 4: on them. Those post emergent products kill existing weeds. Now
Speaker 4: once the weather gets warm and we're up, let's even
Speaker 4: the upper eighties, some of those products can be stressful
Speaker 4: to your Saint Augustine, so we want to do it
Speaker 4: before it gets too far along. You also want to
Speaker 4: do it before those weeds begin to bloom and set seed,
Speaker 4: because then they're they're more difficult to control, or in
Speaker 4: some cases they've already made seed, which sentences you to another.
Speaker 12: Year of this.
Speaker 4: So you know, make sure they're up and growing and
Speaker 4: while they're still young. A post emergent weed control product.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of different blends in the market from
Speaker 4: various companies that you spray on your lawn and it
Speaker 4: controls them. There are also some fertilizers that have a
Speaker 4: post emergent in them that you can use. You just
Speaker 4: need the If you're going to use one of those,
Speaker 4: you need the weeds to be wet. So if it
Speaker 4: hadn't rain, just rained, you need to sprinkle your lawn
Speaker 4: to get just enough to get the weed surface wet
Speaker 4: so those granules stick to the weed and you can
Speaker 4: go about it that way. Also, you said to.
Speaker 13: Be careful with post emergion in Saint Augustine. What about
Speaker 13: post emergent in Bermuda?
Speaker 4: Not as much, but I said, I was saying, be
Speaker 4: careful if if the temperature, you know, is in the
Speaker 4: upper eighties or above. So that's why we you know,
Speaker 4: when you're in the heat of summer, it's it's a
Speaker 4: difficult time for most post emergents to use, most post mergents.
Speaker 13: So okay, okay, So I should wait for the weeds
Speaker 13: to get a little I should wait for the weeds
Speaker 13: to get a little more developed in January and then
Speaker 13: put down post emergent as long as it's cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, because here's why, the more of a weed
Speaker 4: you get, the more leaf area there is to get
Speaker 4: the spray on, and you know you would if you
Speaker 4: spray them all let's say spray them in late November
Speaker 4: or December, Well you would have new seeds that come
Speaker 4: up and then you do spraying again. So I'm kind
Speaker 4: of waiting a little bit, but not too because those
Speaker 4: weeds sit there as very tiny weeds, and all of
Speaker 4: a sudden they take off growing and they're already starting
Speaker 4: to grow a little bit. So just don't delay too
Speaker 4: long on them.
Speaker 13: Thank you very much, have a great day, all.
Speaker 4: Right, Thank you, Susan, appreciate the call. Well, it looks
Speaker 4: like I'm coming up here on another break that just
Speaker 4: keeps sneaking up on me. But I guess they say
Speaker 4: time flies when you're having fun. Kromit the frogcess times
Speaker 4: fun when you're having flies. But that's a whole nother discussion.
Speaker 4: We're going to take a break. When we come back,
Speaker 4: Christine and Paarland, you will be our very first up.
Speaker 4: All right, welcome back here. We are continuing on in
Speaker 4: the garden line. Glad you're listening. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 4: Welcome to twenty twenty five. This is the best gardening
Speaker 4: year you are ever going to have. Just stay tuned.
Speaker 4: And let's do this together. Gardening is not rocket science.
Speaker 4: I don't think rocket science is rocket science. If I mean,
Speaker 4: if you know what you're talking about, well they say
Speaker 4: it's not rocket science. Well, if you're a rocket scientist,
Speaker 4: I don't think it's difficult at all because you already
Speaker 4: know what you're doing about. That's the same thing with gardening.
Speaker 4: We're going to help you out here. We're gonna help
Speaker 4: you have success, and you're gonna have a good time
Speaker 4: doing it, because that's what it's all about, is having
Speaker 4: a bountiful garden, having a beautiful landscape, and having fun
Speaker 4: in the process. So stick around here we go. We're
Speaker 4: gonna go to Parland now and talk to Christine. Hello, Christine,
Speaker 4: welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 16: Good morning.
Speaker 4: How are you today, I'm well, thank you. How can
Speaker 4: we help?
Speaker 20: Well, what you can do is we we had since
Speaker 20: Bugsy leaved last year and my husband she breaked everything.
Speaker 13: Out and down fertilizer.
Speaker 20: We plugging on containment to see over the summer and
Speaker 20: screening summer. Really Christmas decorations up and we're cleaning up
Speaker 20: any founts, bugs all over Christmas decorations and.
Speaker 13: We're like, oh my gosh, you can't bugs again.
Speaker 20: If you put down the triathline treatments right be for
Speaker 20: you know, so the winch started and fertilized, and we're
Speaker 20: just trying to figure out what you can put down
Speaker 20: on the line to stop this bugs from coming up
Speaker 20: or at least get distinch bugs because it is slightly brown.
Speaker 12: But not circular.
Speaker 4: Okay, okay, well, so good news. Those are not chinchbugs
Speaker 4: you're seeing around the Christmas decorations. Chinchbugs can't take the
Speaker 4: weather we're having. They're not out in any numbers. But
Speaker 4: there are a lot of bugs that look like chinchbugs.
Speaker 4: So you're seeing some other kind of insect. But it's
Speaker 4: not a lawn concern. Uh. If you will go online
Speaker 4: to Gardening with Skip that's my website, Gardening with Skip
Speaker 4: dot com. There is a lawn pest, disease and weed
Speaker 4: management schedule and you can look at it online or
Speaker 4: you can print it out. I'd suggest you print it
Speaker 4: out as well as the lawn care schedule. If you
Speaker 4: look on there and you it's a January through December schedule.
Speaker 4: So you just go from you know, left to right,
Speaker 4: it'll tell you exactly when chinchbugs typically appear, and that
Speaker 4: is June through September. Okay, Now, by the time we
Speaker 4: get in, you know, to September, they're already heading downhill.
Speaker 4: But the summer months, especially as we go from July
Speaker 4: to August, that's kind of the worst chinchbug season. But
Speaker 4: that's when we do our treatments for them, and the
Speaker 4: schedule tells you exactly when to treat and what do
Speaker 4: you use, so if it comes back next year, you'll
Speaker 4: be ready to go.
Speaker 13: Okay, all right, thank you very much for your help.
Speaker 17: We really appreciate it.
Speaker 4: Well, thanks for listening to garden Line. And you just
Speaker 4: keep your eyes out for those little boogers now that
Speaker 4: you know what they look like, catch them early before
Speaker 4: they do that much damage again, and you'll be in
Speaker 4: good shape. Thanks Christine. We're going to go now to
Speaker 4: Austin County and talk to Doris. Hello, Doris, welcome to
Speaker 4: garden Line.
Speaker 15: Thank you. How are you today?
Speaker 4: Well, I'm good, I'm good. It's the best gardening year
Speaker 4: I'm ever going to have, so I can't not be good.
Speaker 8: Okay, what can I put on my crpe myrtles?
Speaker 15: Because of the blacks stuck that's on the trunks.
Speaker 4: Okay, this time of the year, there's about the only
Speaker 4: thing that you can do would be to spray a
Speaker 4: dormant oil on those trunks and branches. That's crape myrtle
Speaker 4: bark scale that's causing that. The little white things that
Speaker 4: are in and among the black stuff, that's the scale
Speaker 4: insects or oil smothers scale. Now, having said that, crpe
Speaker 4: myrtle scale is one of the scale that we have
Speaker 4: more difficulty controlling with the oil sprays. Once the plants
Speaker 4: begin to push, sap and grow, there are drenches that
Speaker 4: you can put around the base of the plant. You
Speaker 4: drench the soil and not just a spray, but literally
Speaker 4: in like a watering can or a bucket, and the
Speaker 4: plant takes it up and it gets in the plumbing
Speaker 4: of the plant. And that way, when that scale tries
Speaker 4: to suck the juices out of the plant stems, it
Speaker 4: gets the poison and it kills the scale. But that
Speaker 4: we're a little early for that because the plants aren't
Speaker 4: actively taking up a lot of stuff right now.
Speaker 6: Okay, what's the name of it.
Speaker 4: Well, on the dormant oil would be the one that
Speaker 4: I would use now, and you've got to get good
Speaker 4: coverage all around the plant. In other words, every surface
Speaker 4: of the branches, trunks and branches needs to be sprayed
Speaker 4: with oil that would be dormant oil. When we get
Speaker 4: into the drench, you're going to use a product. I'm
Speaker 4: gonna do you have a pin or pencil handy there?
Speaker 2: Yes, I do, okay.
Speaker 4: The first there's two ingredients, and either one works. The
Speaker 4: first one that I would suggest is called dino tepheron
Speaker 4: and it's spelled d I n O like dinosaur d
Speaker 4: I n O t e f u r a n
Speaker 4: dino tef fern. The second option is in mid oh cloprid.
Speaker 4: It's I M I d O c l O p
Speaker 4: r I d em mid oh clo prid. Either one
Speaker 4: of those, not both, either one. You're going to find them.
Speaker 4: You go to a you know, a good quality garden center,
Speaker 4: ace hardware stores out those fertilizer any of those kinds
Speaker 4: of places, and just tell them I need something with
Speaker 4: one of these two products in it, and that will
Speaker 4: be what you use and follow the label.
Speaker 14: Instructions and you do this what in the springtime.
Speaker 4: Then in the springtime, when your crepe myrtles start to grow,
Speaker 4: you know, maybe got six ten inches of new shoot
Speaker 4: growth on them. That would be a good time to
Speaker 4: go ahead and get those down.
Speaker 6: Okay, And if I do it now, I use the
Speaker 6: dormant oil and spray Dorman oil.
Speaker 4: Now, yeah, that's what we do for scale in general.
Speaker 4: We do the Dorman oil because it smothers the scale.
Speaker 4: But Dorman oil you have to cover every surface because
Speaker 4: any spot you miss with a living scale, it won't
Speaker 4: hurt that that scale won't be controlled.
Speaker 15: Okay, okay, all right, good luck, door, Thank you very much.
Speaker 15: Have a great garden year.
Speaker 4: All right you as well, thank you very much for that.
Speaker 4: All Right, let's see here we are. We are now
Speaker 4: going to go. I think I have time. We're going
Speaker 4: to try to take a call here from Marie in Baytown.
Speaker 4: We're running short on time, but let's see if we
Speaker 4: can help you out.
Speaker 19: Okay. I just have a quick question. I still have
Speaker 19: about fifteen to twenty great fruits on my tree, and
Speaker 19: I was just wondering do I need to pick those
Speaker 19: now before it gets cold or can they stay on
Speaker 19: the tree a little bit longer.
Speaker 4: See you are in Baytown. I think you're going to
Speaker 4: be okay, you know you're I think your temperature. What
Speaker 4: are you looking at getting into about thirty or do
Speaker 4: you know what your prediction is.
Speaker 19: Down there they're saying about thirty.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I think you'll be okay. I don't think
Speaker 4: that it's going to be both thirty for very long.
Speaker 4: And I think you're going to be okay on it.
Speaker 4: If you want to pick a few, you could, but yeah,
Speaker 4: that's my that's my best guess on it. I'm not
Speaker 4: a weather man, Okay, all right, thank you, all right,
Speaker 4: thank you very much. Appreciate you, Bet, I appreciate your call.
Speaker 4: Cameraon up in Conrad. We're going to hold you till
Speaker 4: we come back from break, so I'll have time to
Speaker 4: uh properly answer your question. Just hang on with us
Speaker 4: and we'll be right back, folks. Our number is seven
Speaker 4: one three two one two five eight seven four seven
Speaker 4: one three two one two fifty eight seventy four. Now
Speaker 4: I mentioned my lawn care schedule and my lawn pest disease,
Speaker 4: and we'd management schedule, folks. Timing is important on everything,
Speaker 4: and so if you print these schedules out, they are
Speaker 4: on my website. If you print them out, the schedule
Speaker 4: is from January through December. It tells you, you know,
Speaker 4: when does brown patch occur? When did chinchburgs occur? When
Speaker 4: does sid webloms occur? When do I apply a pre
Speaker 4: emerging harbs? It's all on the schedule. Gardening with Skip
Speaker 4: dot Com.
Speaker 1: Welcome to k t r H. Guarden Line with Skip Ricord.
Speaker 2: It's so crazy than just watch him as.
Speaker 4: All right, welcome back, welcome back to your guardline. Good
Speaker 4: to have you with us. I don't know what happened,
Speaker 4: but somewhere halfway through the show today somebody left the
Speaker 4: gates open. So we're going to run back out here
Speaker 4: to the phones and let's see. We're going to start
Speaker 4: with Cameron up in Conroe. Hey Cameron, welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 12: Hey morn Skiffer, you sir, I'm well, thank you good.
Speaker 12: Just a real quick question I've got they didn't ignore.
Speaker 12: You're growing out back of the house, probably the foot tall,
Speaker 12: growing wild and I really don't have that green of
Speaker 12: the thumb, but I'm I like to replant in another
Speaker 12: location in my yard so that way you could grow up,
Speaker 12: grow big. I'm on a heavy black gumbo soil. What
Speaker 12: do you recommend for taking care of this thing this year?
Speaker 12: In movement.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, magnolia's are happiest in our acidic forest
Speaker 4: soils of the southeast, and so when you put them
Speaker 4: on a black gumbo, they may or may not do
Speaker 4: pretty well. They need good drainage first of all, So
Speaker 4: if it is a heavy clay like that, somewhat of
Speaker 4: a mound to help the soil drain away from the
Speaker 4: surface would be helpful. Anything that makes the soil, you know,
Speaker 4: a little better drained is going to be beneficial to them.
Speaker 4: They like it a little bit on the acidic side.
Speaker 4: Although they can take higher pH they prefer it a
Speaker 4: little on the acidic side. So adding a lot of
Speaker 4: composted materials to the soil, loosening up that clay a
Speaker 4: little bit, getting it on a good mound. You might
Speaker 4: even see a benefit from putting some expanded shale in
Speaker 4: a very large area around them. And it takes quite
Speaker 4: a bit of shale to do that, but that helps
Speaker 4: open up that clay soil provide a little bit better
Speaker 4: internal drainage. But those are all be things in your power.
Speaker 4: Keeping a mulch on the soil all the time. You know,
Speaker 4: in the forest, the leaves fall on the ground, pile
Speaker 4: up and just rot year after year after year, making
Speaker 4: the soil better and better. So do that around your
Speaker 4: magnolia tree and as wide of an area as you
Speaker 4: can to try to make it as at home by
Speaker 4: creating that forest floor environment as you can.
Speaker 12: Okay, alright, perfect, and probably looking at an early spring
Speaker 12: to do this, or.
Speaker 4: Well, the sooner you move it, the better. Now, the
Speaker 4: sooner you move at the better. Get as much of
Speaker 4: the roots as you can. They don't like it and move.
Speaker 4: But if it's still pretty small, you may successfully move it.
Speaker 4: But you need to do it soon because summer's coming,
Speaker 4: and the more months it has to get a root
Speaker 4: system established, re established, the better off it'll be when
Speaker 4: when the heat arrives.
Speaker 12: Okay, perfect, Well, i'll all right after after this freezing
Speaker 12: weather this week, I'll get to.
Speaker 4: It, all right, sir. You take care, Thanks for the call.
Speaker 4: We're gonna go now to Alvin and talk to Frank. Hey, Frank,
Speaker 4: welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 5: Morning, Skip. I was calling about grafting trees the time
Speaker 5: of year. I just got a little kit from Amazon,
Speaker 5: and uh, I'm waiting to get some wound dressing healing,
Speaker 5: you know, wound dressing and also uh It says something
Speaker 5: about having to like put some spray or clean up,
Speaker 5: like anti microbes or whatever. I don't know if they
Speaker 5: equipment or where you do the cut at, but I
Speaker 5: was looking at the you know, the procedure, and is
Speaker 5: it the good time of the right time? Should I
Speaker 5: wait a few weeks a few months to grab the
Speaker 5: con trees and uh some fig trees?
Speaker 4: Okay? Well figs we yeah, figs, we are real. They
Speaker 4: don't graft. You can take a fig branch, one of
Speaker 4: those dormant little branches the size of one of your fingers,
Speaker 4: cut off about an eight intersection of it, and stick
Speaker 4: it in the ground a little root and grow. I mean,
Speaker 4: they're very easy to do, figs. So you don't need
Speaker 4: to graft the fig. I guess you could. I've never
Speaker 4: I've never even heard of grafting a fig. I don't
Speaker 4: know why you would, but most people just just stick
Speaker 4: them in the ground and root them as far as
Speaker 4: the pecan.
Speaker 5: Very good.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that.
Speaker 4: No, yeah, say on the pecans. I would think about
Speaker 4: this just a minute. The do you have an existing
Speaker 4: pecan tree you're grafting them onto that? That's a large trail.
Speaker 5: Describe to me what, yeah, what what you'd call the
Speaker 5: root stock and I have one of those, and then
Speaker 5: I have some other trees that are the paper shell
Speaker 5: you know there that are a hybrid that's going to
Speaker 5: grasp some of those limbs onto my rootstock tree, which
Speaker 5: is it's just a native picon. It makes a little
Speaker 5: small one sometimes and and.
Speaker 1: It does real paper.
Speaker 4: Okay, so if you have a little seedling coming up
Speaker 4: it's still small. Let's say the tree itself is the
Speaker 4: size of your little finger, then you can you can
Speaker 4: use a different kind of graft on that. Uh that
Speaker 4: like a whip graft even on those as pecans get
Speaker 4: a little bigger or as you're what we call top
Speaker 4: working a tree, meaning you got a tree and you
Speaker 4: got all these branches, you want to find a branch
Speaker 4: it's about the size of a coke can, a soft
Speaker 4: drink can, and cut it off there and do what's
Speaker 4: called an inlay bark graft on those that that's the
Speaker 4: best way to go about that particular graft. And have
Speaker 4: you seen how to do those somewhere?
Speaker 5: Yes, I've seen some YouTube videos about Okay, you've got
Speaker 5: to make a little split and then you slip it
Speaker 5: in between there and then wrap it.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, very very important to follow that carefully. If
Speaker 4: you go to the Aggie Horticulture website, just do a
Speaker 4: search for Aggi Horticulture. Go to the fruit and nut
Speaker 4: resources page. There is specifically something for Texas inlay graft
Speaker 4: and Texas four flap graft. Those are two different graphs
Speaker 4: I said the whip graft. Actually the four flap would
Speaker 4: probably be your better way to do if you have
Speaker 4: very small stock, like the size of one of your fingers.
Speaker 4: But anyway, those are the two that we primarily do
Speaker 4: in Texas for pecans wrap. You want your graft would
Speaker 4: to be You want your graft would to be dormant
Speaker 4: with the inlay bark graft. But you want to wait
Speaker 4: until the tree you're grafting it onto, the sap has
Speaker 4: started to flow. Like right now, if you went out
Speaker 4: and tried to peel back the bark on that existing tree,
Speaker 4: the bark is firmly attached to the wood, but once
Speaker 4: a app blows, the bark peels like you're like you're
Speaker 4: peeling a banana. It just comes right off. That's the
Speaker 4: stage where you do the inn lay bark graph. But
Speaker 4: but the wood you're using needs to be dormant, stored
Speaker 4: in the in the refrigerator to to stay.
Speaker 5: Dormant, very good and regarding like wound dressing. And then
Speaker 5: I don't know what it's like. An antiseptic that they
Speaker 5: were talking about is just for the tools, yeah or yeah,
Speaker 5: I would not.
Speaker 4: I would not. I would not use worry about anterceptic
Speaker 4: on the wound. Uh, I mean, you know it. I've
Speaker 4: never for for printed pecans, I've never I mean, grafting pecans,
Speaker 4: I've never uh, you know, dealt with antiseptic on the tools.
Speaker 4: I mean, you could spray them with some life soil
Speaker 4: if you want to do that, that'd be fine, but uh,
Speaker 4: the main thing is making the graft properly. Uh you don't,
Speaker 4: you don't. You can use things like grafting wax and
Speaker 4: whatnot to it, but bottom line is just uh you know,
Speaker 4: just get you, uh, a plastic bag to wrap around them, uh,
Speaker 4: and you tie it to the branch and you tie
Speaker 4: it up on the grafted piece so you create a
Speaker 4: complete air tight section underneath there to hold the moisture
Speaker 4: in and then wrap the whole thing with foil. This
Speaker 4: is all in the publication that's on Aggie horticulture. Wrap
Speaker 4: it in foil to reflect any sunlight outside of that
Speaker 4: clear bag.
Speaker 5: Okay, so we're not really in the season for doing that. Yeah,
Speaker 5: we need to get other side of winter time.
Speaker 8: Yeah probably what worried?
Speaker 4: Yeah, get your get your graft wood now, but but
Speaker 4: store it in the fridge and then do the graft
Speaker 4: in spring when the when the sap starts to flow
Speaker 4: and growth starts to appear. Hey, I got to run.
Speaker 4: We're on against a hard break. But good luck with that.
Speaker 4: And if you have any other questions on it, follow up,
Speaker 4: just give me a call back sometime. All right, folks,
Speaker 4: I've got to run to a break. When we come
Speaker 4: back from break. We are going to talk to Dennis
Speaker 4: and Gary after the break. Who can tell me the
Speaker 4: name of the band? So send them that The Wonders
Speaker 4: aka Theaters. You have to look that one. Ups. They
Speaker 4: spelled Wonder O n E one was one, so when
Speaker 4: people looked at Wonder it looked like okay, you heard
Speaker 4: it here first on Garden Life. Let's go to Gary.
Speaker 4: We're going to talk to Gary now on Guarden Line.
Speaker 4: Welcome to the show. Gary, Good to have you with us.
Speaker 18: Hey, good morning, Stip.
Speaker 4: How are you doing. I'm well, I'm well, how can
Speaker 4: we help?
Speaker 3: Hey?
Speaker 18: Yeah, So I've got some fruit trees I'm wanting to plant.
Speaker 18: I picked them up at a box store there. Uh,
Speaker 18: there's a couple of peach trees, a couple of plum trees,
Speaker 18: and a big and pretty elementary question I guess is
Speaker 18: when's the best time of the year to plant those?
Speaker 18: Is it now or wait till we get closer to springtime?
Speaker 7: Now?
Speaker 4: Absolutely, now, get them in the ground. Yeah, sooner you
Speaker 4: get them in the ground, the sooner they're able to
Speaker 4: start put it producing the root system they'll need to
Speaker 4: go through this first summer. So when you pull them
Speaker 4: out of the container, if you see roots circling, if
Speaker 4: you can kind of tease them out of there and
Speaker 4: dig a hold of to accommodate them. Don't wrap the
Speaker 4: roots up in the hole. They don't unwind underground, of course.
Speaker 4: And if you need to cut a root, go ahead
Speaker 4: and cut the root. It's okay to cut it. Within
Speaker 4: two weeks it'll be sprouting new side roots from behind
Speaker 4: the cut, and it'll be a much better established tree
Speaker 4: as a result. So don't if you've got circling roots,
Speaker 4: unwrap them or cut them more likely going to have
Speaker 4: to cut them.
Speaker 18: So what about the frequency of water in them at
Speaker 18: this time of the year, is it is it important
Speaker 18: that you water them on a pretty frequent basis.
Speaker 4: This time of year. A good watering in when you
Speaker 4: plan them should be sufficient. They're going to be dormant
Speaker 4: if they have mari lost their leaves, they will this week.
Speaker 4: But you shouldn't have to water them until they begin
Speaker 4: new growth, and then you can begin to provide some water.
Speaker 4: Just always remember the first months, even the first summer
Speaker 4: after planting, the roots are still quite confined. They haven't
Speaker 4: fully stretched out into all the soil around them, and
Speaker 4: so regular watering is a little more important for a
Speaker 4: newly planted tree during its first two or even three years,
Speaker 4: especially the first year.
Speaker 18: Okay, And so I've got a mixture of soils out
Speaker 18: there in my property. Some of it's clay and then
Speaker 18: there's some of it's more loamy. I guess would be
Speaker 18: better to plant and the loamy obviously, but that's something
Speaker 18: I was wondering too.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they like a sandy loam soil that is their
Speaker 4: absolute favorite. Not everybody has that. And we can make
Speaker 4: peaches grow and a lot of other things. But if
Speaker 4: you were to if you were to say, what what's
Speaker 4: the best soil for peaches, it's sandy loam. And that's
Speaker 4: why the biggest peach producing regions of our country are
Speaker 4: of our state. Excuse me, are up in the Mahaya
Speaker 4: area where there's a band of sandy loam soil that
Speaker 4: comes through there, and over in Fredericksburg and areas that
Speaker 4: have sandy loam soils. That's their favorite.
Speaker 21: Okay, well, appreciate your help and then answer my questions.
Speaker 21: Thank you all right, Gary, thanks for the call. Appreciate
Speaker 21: that you take care. Let's see we're going to go
Speaker 21: now to Cove, Texas and talk to Dennis. Hey, Dennis,
Speaker 21: welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 14: Thank you skip my question. I have two red tip
Speaker 14: shrubs that I prume once a year whenever the weather
Speaker 14: gets cold and it's going to stay cold, so now's
Speaker 14: that time. And I always tram the tops back to
Speaker 14: the eve of the house. So that's that's at eight
Speaker 14: feet and typically I'm taking off own average about a foot.
Speaker 14: Usually get up, you know, about nine feet, and I
Speaker 14: take that off and the width I don't really have
Speaker 14: a set marker, but because i'm trimming from a step ladder.
Speaker 14: I usually wind up trimming the width so that I
Speaker 14: can reach the center on top, you know, and stay
Speaker 14: safely balanced on the step ladder. And what I've noticed
Speaker 14: this year is that the shrubs seem to have spread
Speaker 14: width wise much more than they've ever grown before. And
Speaker 14: while I still would I would estimate be taken off
Speaker 14: about a quarter of the total wood of the tree.
Speaker 14: Because the foliage is typically only on the outside of
Speaker 14: the tree. On the interior branches aren't really any leaves,
Speaker 14: I'll be taken off a lot more of the leaves
Speaker 14: I think, percentage wise I normally do. Is that a problem, Dennis.
Speaker 4: I missed the species of plant we're talking about.
Speaker 14: Okay, so I don't know this is the real name.
Speaker 14: We call them red red tips. It's the shrub. The
Speaker 14: leaves are mostly green, but the ones on the end
Speaker 14: of the branches are red.
Speaker 4: Yes. Yeah, that's red tip fatinia. So you can print
Speaker 4: that as much as you want and it'll come back
Speaker 4: from it. What happens on all plants pretty much, especially
Speaker 4: the shrubs than things. They tend to grow more outward
Speaker 4: at the top and end up shading their base as
Speaker 4: a result, you know, as the top gets whiter, think
Speaker 4: of a capital V. It grows like a capital V,
Speaker 4: and so the top shades the base and you lose
Speaker 4: your foliage, which you want to have foliage all the
Speaker 4: way down to the ground. So you kind of have
Speaker 4: to work to keep the top at least vertical the
Speaker 4: side's vertical, if not a little bit narrower at the top,
Speaker 4: like I mentioned a capital V, think more toward to
Speaker 4: capital A, not not like a Christmas tree shape, but
Speaker 4: just get the top narrower and that allows good light
Speaker 4: up and down all through that shrub, and as a result,
Speaker 4: you have good foliage all through the shrub. So don't
Speaker 4: be afraid to hack back as much as you need
Speaker 4: to do that, because that shrub is constantly going to
Speaker 4: be fighting you trying to be top heavy, and we
Speaker 4: need it to not be top heavy for the aesthetics
Speaker 4: of a nice full shrub.
Speaker 14: Okay, that answers my question.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much, Yes, sir, thank you for the call.
Speaker 4: Appreciate that very much. Good good question, very good question,
Speaker 4: good point. Earlier I was, you know, talking about the
Speaker 4: importance of taking care of your plants, making sure that
Speaker 4: you've got adequate soil, adequate nutrition, you know, adequate organic
Speaker 4: matter content. It is important to when you take care
Speaker 4: of a plant, to provide the roots what they need
Speaker 4: because in a sense, plants grow in the root, They
Speaker 4: live in their roots. I like to put it that
Speaker 4: way because we sort of forget about the below ground part,
Speaker 4: but keeping the roots happy is important. The Medina, the
Speaker 4: folks at Medina makes something called humate humic acid. And
Speaker 4: what is humic acid, Well, that's basically the final stage
Speaker 4: of decomposing organic matter. So we have organic matter like
Speaker 4: leaves and grass clippings and things. It decomposes into what
Speaker 4: we would call compost, and then that decomposes into what's
Speaker 4: called humus. It's the final stage, and the humic acid
Speaker 4: is one of the natural ingredients that are in humus. Humus.
Speaker 4: Uh does a number of good things for the soil,
Speaker 4: and the humic acid helps with soil structure, It helps
Speaker 4: with the way that the plant has access to nutrients
Speaker 4: in addition to the fact that they're they're nutrients in
Speaker 4: it in and of itself. But you make humatee I'm
Speaker 4: having trouble saying. Humate humic acid from Medina is the
Speaker 4: kind of thing you just mix a little in a
Speaker 4: gallon of water, and when you plant a plant, you
Speaker 4: just pour it on the root ball. As you replace
Speaker 4: the soil, apply it again, give it another good drench.
Speaker 4: It is very helpful. I will soak seeds in humus
Speaker 4: or humic acid rather, and all you have to do
Speaker 4: is put about a tablespoon per gallon of water of
Speaker 4: the humane humic acid and then soak the seed until
Speaker 4: that penetrates the skin and the seeds swell up, and
Speaker 4: then plant them right away. Don't let them set like that.
Speaker 4: Plant them. So I'll typically do that the night before
Speaker 4: I'm going to go out and plant. And that's one
Speaker 4: of the quality products there from the folks at Medina.
Speaker 4: Medina also produces something called has to Grow six twelve
Speaker 4: six now has to Grow six twelve six is a
Speaker 4: high quality products. Got the six percent nitrogen, twelve percent sassium,
Speaker 4: six percent excuse me, twelve percent phosphorus six percent potassium.
Speaker 4: That is very useful to a plant trying to develop
Speaker 4: a root system, to a plant trying to produce blooms
Speaker 4: and foliage. Phosphorus very important for that. And it also
Speaker 4: contains Medina soil activator, which we know been around a
Speaker 4: long time. One of the most famous products from Medina
Speaker 4: there is also present in the Hastigro six twelve six. Again,
Speaker 4: I will use it when I'm transplanting. I will use
Speaker 4: it anytime that you're wanting to apply a drench into
Speaker 4: the soils, even a folier spray. You're not going to
Speaker 4: burn with that. Just two examples of quality products there
Speaker 4: from the folks at Medina that are widely available here
Speaker 4: in the Greater Houston area and have been for ages.
Speaker 4: Do you know I was just reading about Dewey Compton
Speaker 4: or earlier and he talked about Medina products that goes
Speaker 4: back to the nineteen fifties. Medina's been around a while,
Speaker 4: It's been proven for a very long time, and gardeners
Speaker 4: already know that. Now it's time for me to take
Speaker 4: a little quick break. For gosh, we're coming up. I've
Speaker 4: got another minute or so, so I'll just go a
Speaker 4: little bit longer. We'll come back to your call though. Hey,
Speaker 4: by the way, if you'd like to give me a call,
Speaker 4: the phone number is seven to one three two one
Speaker 4: two KTR eight seven one three two one two KRH.
Speaker 4: Earlier I mentioned that tomorrow we were going to talk
Speaker 4: about more about Randy Lemon. The host of Garden Line,
Speaker 4: Dean Nelson, is going to come on the show in
Speaker 4: the morning and we're going to talk a little bit
Speaker 4: about a scholarship for Randy and just some memories of Randy. Actually,
Speaker 4: today is the anniversary of both Randy's birthday and his
Speaker 4: passing two years ago. They came as a shock to
Speaker 4: everyone in the gardening world here in Southeast Texas, and
Speaker 4: we'll be talking more about that then. I just want
Speaker 4: to remind you, though, one more time, that Randy's scholarship
Speaker 4: is still around at A and M. They've got it
Speaker 4: funded to a level now where there is some funding
Speaker 4: going to New A and M horticulture students. New A
Speaker 4: and M horticulture students can receive the Randy Lemon Scholarship.
Speaker 4: We want to get it funded better. I just think
Speaker 4: we can do better than this. You can go online
Speaker 4: and you can donate on line toward it. You can
Speaker 4: do it by mail if you'd like to. There's a
Speaker 4: lot of details to that. I make it real simple
Speaker 4: on my website. Just go to gardening with Skip dot
Speaker 4: com Gardening with Skip dot Com. The top item on
Speaker 4: there is the Randy Lemon scholarship. It tells you how
Speaker 4: you can give. And if you're one of the folks
Speaker 4: that listen to Randy for years that appreciated the help
Speaker 4: that he provided you, why not consider making even a
Speaker 4: small donation toward that scholarship. I know Randy would be
Speaker 4: so proud to know that we were doing this now.
Speaker 4: And thanks to Dean for getting that all set up.
Speaker 4: By the way, all right, I'm gonna take a little break.
Speaker 4: When I come back. We're going to go out to
Speaker 4: Humble and talk to Gary. Hey, welcome back to the
Speaker 4: garden Line. Welcome back. Good to have you with us.
Speaker 4: You are listening to the first show of the year
Speaker 4: twenty twenty five, and twenty twenty five is gonna be
Speaker 4: the best year you've ever had in gardening. I'm just
Speaker 4: predicting that right now. It's gonna be my best year
Speaker 4: of gardening. You know, the fun thing about gardening is
Speaker 4: gardening is like the old etch sketches. I've used that
Speaker 4: analogy before, but how many of you remember an etch
Speaker 4: of sketch? You know, you had two knobs, one went
Speaker 4: up and down, one sideways, and you tried to draw something,
Speaker 4: and inevitably you went left when you should have gone
Speaker 4: right or whatever, and it messes up the drawing. What
Speaker 4: do you do? You turn it upside down and shake
Speaker 4: it and you get a blank slate. Again. That's gardening.
Speaker 4: Every year is a blank slate. In fact, halfway through spring,
Speaker 4: if you don't like the way that garden looks, you
Speaker 4: can just get you your rototiller, the equivalent of a
Speaker 4: shake in the edge of sketch. You get to start
Speaker 4: over again. It's okay. You can't fail at gardening. You
Speaker 4: only give up. We're not going to give up. We're
Speaker 4: going to have the best year ever. And I really
Speaker 4: believe that. I think it's gonna be a good year.
Speaker 4: Right now, we're going to go out and talk to
Speaker 4: Gary in Humble. Hello Gary, Welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 8: Thank you sir. Good morning. Say. I planned a myer
Speaker 8: limit about three years ago, and about a year and
Speaker 8: a half ago or so, whatever it was, it froze back.
Speaker 15: Completely.
Speaker 8: And then I started seeing some new sprouts above the graft.
Speaker 6: And now it's five and a half.
Speaker 8: Feet tall and but no blossoms at all. And I'm wondering,
Speaker 8: do I need to protect this or do I let
Speaker 8: it freeze.
Speaker 4: Well, let's see, you were an humble. It's gonna be
Speaker 4: a little on the cold tide. I think I would
Speaker 4: cover it up. I just protected a little bit at
Speaker 4: the very least. If it's from above the graft, yes,
Speaker 4: if it's above the graft, it will produce. It absolutely will.
Speaker 4: From below, then you've got a rootstock.
Speaker 8: Yeah, But it's like I say, it's five and a
Speaker 8: half foot tall now and not a blossom anywhere all year,
Speaker 8: and it's been that, and you're.
Speaker 4: You're sure, okay, well it's all right? Are you sure
Speaker 4: it's coming above the graph though?
Speaker 8: Right, I'm pretty sure there.
Speaker 6: I could see the line there.
Speaker 8: It's about an inch above. But yeah, yeah, because it
Speaker 8: did grow full and but there's no blossoms in the
Speaker 8: all year. So I'm wondering is it worth.
Speaker 6: All the time?
Speaker 4: Even a rootstock is capable of blooming, but it just
Speaker 4: doesn't produce quality fruit. Is the growth on it more
Speaker 4: thorny than your mar lemon was?
Speaker 8: It's about the same, But like I say, no blossoms,
Speaker 8: there's a lot of leaves.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I you know, if it's not a lot more thorny,
Speaker 4: I still think it's worth waiting and seeing, unless you
Speaker 4: just want to hurry out I didn't.
Speaker 8: I don't think there's any thorn, so I don't recall
Speaker 8: seeing thorn.
Speaker 4: Okay, I think you've got a lemon tree that's going
Speaker 4: to settle in and start blooming for you here before long,
Speaker 4: I do, so I just stick with it system, Okay, okay,
Speaker 4: I need to produce exactly that's it. You got it.
Speaker 4: Good luck with that, And if it ever produces lemons
Speaker 4: for you, you just bring me half the produce to
Speaker 4: the to the radio station and we'll call it even
Speaker 4: Thank you, thank you, sir, Bye bye. Someday that joke's
Speaker 4: going to get old, but not to me. You asked
Speaker 4: my kids. I think jokes are hilarious that have ceased
Speaker 4: to be hilarious. You know when I when my kids
Speaker 4: were like age six and under, I ruled the room
Speaker 4: even maybe seven and under. Somewhere along the line, I
Speaker 4: became less funny. Isn't that amazing how that works? Well,
Speaker 4: the way I like to put it is, I'm gonna
Speaker 4: tell jokes that make me laugh, even if they don't
Speaker 4: make you laugh. One of us has got to have
Speaker 4: fun here. Thanks for being a listener to garden Line. Hey,
Speaker 4: you probably have noticed that here in the Houston area,
Speaker 4: we have a heavy clay soil. We call it gumbo
Speaker 4: soil because it's a thick black clay. Not everybody does.
Speaker 4: You may have sandy soil or sandy loam where you live,
Speaker 4: but by and large, our Houston black clay is predominant
Speaker 4: in this area. And when you have a clay that
Speaker 4: has a high shrink swell potential, what that means is
Speaker 4: when it's wet, it swells. When it's dry, it shrinks.
Speaker 4: When you have that, you'll notice in the summertime, when
Speaker 4: it's dry, you get these big cracks in the yard.
Speaker 4: You know, big old cracks open up in the soil
Speaker 4: because it's dry and it's shrinking, and then it gets
Speaker 4: wet and it closes back up again. Well, that wrecks
Speaker 4: havoc on your sidewalk and on your driveway and on
Speaker 4: your home foundations. And you may notice that your doors
Speaker 4: are sticking. They didn't stick before and I was under
Speaker 4: sticking again, or maybe there's a crack in the sheet
Speaker 4: rock or there's a crack in the brick on the outside.
Speaker 4: Typically goes see those at the base of a window,
Speaker 4: kind of going from the back one corner of the
Speaker 4: window down to the ground, but they can to curl
Speaker 4: all over the place. Well, that's a sign that you
Speaker 4: got a foundation issue, and Fix my Slab Foundation Repair
Speaker 4: is the go to place for that. Ty Strickland is
Speaker 4: a native Houstonian. He's a fifth generation Texan and he
Speaker 4: knows our soils. He understands this issue, and he knows
Speaker 4: how to assess it and what to do about it.
Speaker 4: The things I like most about Ty's work number one
Speaker 4: is an honest fellow. Number two, he shows up on
Speaker 4: time when he tells he's going to show up. That's
Speaker 4: part of being honest by the way. He fixes it right.
Speaker 4: And he charges a fair price. And what more can
Speaker 4: you ask for any kind of a service industry coming
Speaker 4: to your house, especially when they're dealing with the foundation
Speaker 4: of your home. And he's been doing this for twenty
Speaker 4: three years. He knows what he's doing. You give him
Speaker 4: a call, tell him your guard line listener. Free estimates
Speaker 4: for garden line listeners. You can go to the website
Speaker 4: fixmyslab dot com, or you can call him two eight
Speaker 4: one two fi five forty nine forty nine two eight
Speaker 4: one two fi five four nine four nine Fix my
Speaker 4: Slab Foundation Repair listen. If you think you may have
Speaker 4: a problem, don't be at ostrich. Put your head in
Speaker 4: the end. Call him if it's not a serious issue,
Speaker 4: if if it's okay, there is such a level of
Speaker 4: concern that's not worth worrying about. He'll tell you that.
Speaker 4: But it's not going to get better, so don't put
Speaker 4: it off. Go ahead and give Ty a call. Two
Speaker 4: eight one two FI five forty nine forty nine. All right, folks,
Speaker 4: We've got one more segment in the first show of
Speaker 4: the year coming up, and I'll be right back with
Speaker 4: your calls at five. Excuse me seven one three two
Speaker 4: one two k.
Speaker 6: T r H.
Speaker 2: I love the.
Speaker 4: Welcome back to guarden Line. I'm your host, Skip Rick here,
Speaker 4: and we're here for our last segment of today, the
Speaker 4: first garden Line show of twenty five, which is going
Speaker 4: to be the best gardening year we've ever had. I
Speaker 4: really really believe that. You know, nature throws us curves,
Speaker 4: but that's okay, we just continue on. We were resilient.
Speaker 4: Gardeners are resilient. You know, gardeners have to have faith.
Speaker 4: First of all, I mentioned this earlier. But to take
Speaker 4: take a handful of seeds, I mean they look like detritus.
Speaker 4: They look like debris on the ground, little chips of
Speaker 4: wood or whatever they are, and they look dead, and
Speaker 4: you put them in the ground, you give water to them,
Speaker 4: and a miracle starts to happen. Water soaks into the
Speaker 4: seed and starts a chain of biochemical reactions that ends
Speaker 4: up with you getting a tomato or a petunia flower
Speaker 4: or whatever kind of seed it is. Is that amazing?
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, someone once said that anybody can
Speaker 4: count the number of seeds in an apple, but only
Speaker 4: God knows the number of apples and a seed, and
Speaker 4: that you know it's really true. I mean, think about that,
Speaker 4: that one little seed in the case of an apple,
Speaker 4: just countless, countless production from it. All right, I'm gonna
Speaker 4: get a little This isn't nerdy, this is philosophical. But
Speaker 4: somewhere years ago, you know, the guy Johnny apple seed
Speaker 4: that went through the countryside just scattering seeds everywhere, and
Speaker 4: all these apples came up here and there and yonder,
Speaker 4: well people would find one. That's a haphazard, just genetic occurrence.
Speaker 4: That's what seeds are. Just like people are all different genetically, well,
Speaker 4: apples are all different genetically. Any kind of seed is
Speaker 4: going to do that. So they would find one and
Speaker 4: they would go, you know what, this is a really
Speaker 4: special apple. Let's take cuttings and let's graft them, and
Speaker 4: let's name it, and that way we can produce more
Speaker 4: of it. That's how the first red Delicious apple occurred.
Speaker 4: And many of the oldest apple varieties were just hap hazard,
Speaker 4: same with pecans pecans years ago. Some day I'll tell
Speaker 4: you the story of pecans, but that's a whole nother story.
Speaker 4: But anyway, so red Delicious just and other varieties. Now
Speaker 4: we breed varieties like that intentionally by crossing apple parentage lines,
Speaker 4: but they just occurred and someone said, oh I like
Speaker 4: that one. I'm gonna save that one. So think about this.
Speaker 4: I don't know how many Red Delicious apple trees have
Speaker 4: been created over the years. I mean, you know, we
Speaker 4: don't grow those down here in Texas, but apple producing country.
Speaker 4: That's kind of like an old standard variety that for
Speaker 4: years ruled the roost because it was longer, and it
Speaker 4: was darker red, and it just it just had features
Speaker 4: that were desirable. A seed sprouted, even if it was
Speaker 4: an intentional collapse. Of course, one seed and one apple
Speaker 4: produced the first red Delicious tree, and after that it
Speaker 4: was a matter of grafting and grafting and grafting to
Speaker 4: where there's thousands and thousands and thousands of acres of
Speaker 4: genetically the same red delicious apples because in nature, one
Speaker 4: seed sprouted and it had the superior qualities that someone
Speaker 4: chose to select. So I just find that to be amazing.
Speaker 4: I find plant genetics and just the you know, you
Speaker 4: cross this, you cross that, and there are people that
Speaker 4: do that as gardeners.
Speaker 12: I do.
Speaker 4: I do that with Okra myself, creating new varieties and things.
Speaker 4: So it's kind of a fun fact something to think about.
Speaker 4: Maybe get you excited about doing some plant crossing yourself.
Speaker 4: We're gonna go out of Bay Cliff and talk to Sue. Hello, Sue,
Speaker 4: Welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 16: Hello, Skip, How are you?
Speaker 4: I'm good? I'm good. How can we help? Well?
Speaker 16: I have the long skinny egg plants and the black
Speaker 16: beauty egg plants and they're just loaded with fruit. Are
Speaker 16: they gonna be okay? Or do I need to try
Speaker 16: to cover them?
Speaker 4: Well, if it gets below freezing, they're gonna or if
Speaker 4: it gets close to freezing, they can even have frost damage.
Speaker 4: And so you're going to need to cover them. Anything
Speaker 4: you put over them that drapes down to the ground,
Speaker 4: secure it to the ground to kind of hold some
Speaker 4: airspace underneath there. You ought to be able to get
Speaker 4: them through this freeze. Okay. If your area drops below
Speaker 4: let's say thirty degrees for sure, then you're probably going
Speaker 4: to need some source of heat underneath there. But what's
Speaker 4: going to happen in these coming freezes this week is
Speaker 4: it's going to drop down below freezing and then it's
Speaker 4: going to come right back up when the sun comes
Speaker 4: out in the day. We'll be up in the forties
Speaker 4: and so we don't have to survive for twenty four
Speaker 4: hours below thirty two degrees. So we're just protecting them
Speaker 4: a little bit, and that ought to get them through. Okay.
Speaker 16: My second question the button. I have a calamandon that
Speaker 16: is the chopped fruit all over it and they're starting
Speaker 16: to turn orange. Should I go ahead and pick them?
Speaker 16: I know nothing about this fruit.
Speaker 21: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Klamandan is a little it's an orange like thing with
Speaker 4: very small orange choice on it. It's used. It's ornamental.
Speaker 4: First of all, people people love, uh the just the
Speaker 4: ornamental factor, but they're also edible. They're just not the
Speaker 4: you know, the best tasting orange type thing that you
Speaker 4: could have. But I think they're attractive and I would
Speaker 4: cover them in the kind of cold weather that we're
Speaker 4: we're looking at having. So I think that's I think
Speaker 4: that's worthwhile. Is it in a container?
Speaker 8: Yes?
Speaker 10: It is?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 15: Do you know.
Speaker 4: Me get you a dolly or something like that. Kalamandan's
Speaker 4: are actually pretty cold hearty, you know. The more I
Speaker 4: think about it, I think in your area, I think
Speaker 4: I don't think you're have to bring it in or
Speaker 4: cover it now that I'm thinking about it. Because they're
Speaker 4: they're one of their parentage is come quiet and come
Speaker 4: Quiet are hardy down into the teens. I think Klimanda
Speaker 4: is going to take it down pretty well down into
Speaker 4: the twenties and be okay. So I think you're gonna
Speaker 4: be all right with it. I'm gonna adjust my statement
Speaker 4: a little bit as I think about that.
Speaker 16: Klamanda, Well, I think it's confused because it's got flower
Speaker 16: buds on it.
Speaker 4: To you, oh, flower buds too, I don't know how
Speaker 4: will be.
Speaker 16: By And it's on the new growth. You had a
Speaker 16: collar call while ago that had some new growth had
Speaker 16: some curly leaves and stuff. You know, I never found
Speaker 16: a leaf minor either, but I did find it like
Speaker 16: a little web in there that I scraped out. But
Speaker 16: that's where the new flower buds are at. I was
Speaker 16: going to cut the tips off.
Speaker 4: You know, those are nice plants. They stay kind of small,
Speaker 4: especially in the container. You know, they stayed rosed and small,
Speaker 4: and so people liked to grow the because they you know,
Speaker 4: it's easy to it's easy to do. But calm kalamandin
Speaker 4: is is pretty cold hearty. So I think you're gonna
Speaker 4: be okay. As far as the blooms themselves, I've never
Speaker 4: I've never looked into that, Like sometimes a plant will
Speaker 4: be hardy, but the blooms are not. But I think
Speaker 4: you're going to be all right. If you want to
Speaker 4: be careful, just put them on dolly running in the
Speaker 4: garage and bring it back out. But I don't think
Speaker 4: that's needed for a Kalamandin in the freeze. We're about
Speaker 4: to have.
Speaker 16: Okay, because I just got it this past spring. You know,
Speaker 16: it's fifty percent off. So I brought it home and
Speaker 16: stuffed it in a container, and it immediately started blooming
Speaker 16: and bearing these little fruits. And I was like Okay,
Speaker 16: I thought, how do you like again.
Speaker 4: How do you like the bloom fragrance?
Speaker 8: Oh?
Speaker 16: It smells good.
Speaker 4: M yeah, a nice thing. The nice thing about a
Speaker 4: container centrus like that is you can put it right
Speaker 4: beside where you sit outside in the patio and just
Speaker 4: it's like you have perfume just wafting over.
Speaker 16: All my guarden is and jasmines, and and my citrus,
Speaker 16: because I've got lemon, lisbon lemon and Orlando TAngelo also
Speaker 16: in a in.
Speaker 4: A my goodness to it. Well, you just got all
Speaker 4: kinds of not so common fruit centrus fruit growing around there.
Speaker 4: Send me a picture though sometimes when they're especially when
Speaker 4: they're in blooming and things. I'd love to earn fruit.
Speaker 4: I'd love to see that. Well, thank you for the call.
Speaker 16: Make sure of the kalamando, but I'll get it to
Speaker 16: tomorrow maybe.
Speaker 4: Okay, Well, I'm gonna put you on hold and maybe
Speaker 4: our produci will pick up and give you an email
Speaker 4: where you can get that to me if you need that.
Speaker 4: Thanks for the call. All right, folks. Music means I
Speaker 4: gotta quit talking today. I'll be back in the morning though,
Speaker 4: first thing, six o'clock. Hey, I'm gonna get up early.
Speaker 4: So I can be on the air. You get up
Speaker 4: with me, we'll talk by the way. Tip for the wise,
Speaker 4: it's easiest to get through on phones earlier in the
Speaker 4: morning when there was later on. All right, take care