Speaker 1: Welcome to Katie r. H. Garden Line with Skip Ricord's.
Speaker 2: The crazy.
Speaker 3: Gas can use a shrimp just watch him, as well.
Speaker 4: As many good things to seep bats in quick.
Speaker 5: Gas. You did sass backing, not a sign credit basis
Speaker 5: and gas.
Speaker 4: The sun beamon of between.
Speaker 6: Gas.
Speaker 4: Start well, good morning, Good Sunday morning. Congratulations, you are awake.
Speaker 4: Your eyes are open at least one of them, I hope,
Speaker 4: maybe a cup of coffee in the hand. You're listening
Speaker 4: to garden Line. I'm your host, Skip Rictor, and we're
Speaker 4: going to spend the next four hours answering gardening questions
Speaker 4: talking about the topics you are interested in. If you'd
Speaker 4: like to give us a call seven to one three
Speaker 4: two one two five eight seven four seven to one
Speaker 4: three two one two fifty eight seventy four. I've got
Speaker 4: a number of things I would like to talk about today.
Speaker 4: I'll start doing that. Uh. First of all, with all
Speaker 4: this rain we've had, we're seeing a number of things
Speaker 4: going on in the landscape and our gardens and whatnot.
Speaker 4: First of all, in the lawn it has just rained
Speaker 4: and rained and rained so much that the lawn grass
Speaker 4: is stayed wet. You know, I'm always telling you don't
Speaker 4: overwater your lawn. Don't overwater your lawn. Most people water
Speaker 4: too little, too often, meaning they squirt the lawn every
Speaker 4: day with a little bit of water. It doesn't soak
Speaker 4: into the soil very well because it's not a volume,
Speaker 4: and then the next day they get squirkeed, it gets
Speaker 4: squirted again and that builds up disease. Well, rain has
Speaker 4: done the little sporting today for these last weeks, but
Speaker 4: it really hadn't just been squirt It's been a deluge
Speaker 4: and the soil is very, very wet, and by it
Speaker 4: staying wet, we're seeing an increase in gray leaf spot
Speaker 4: on Saint Augustine, which is Saint Augustine being the primary
Speaker 4: long grass in our area. So gray leaf spot looks
Speaker 4: like if you're standing back just kind of looking at
Speaker 4: your lawn, you see leaves or grass blades that is
Speaker 4: that are very yellow. They're all yellow, and as you
Speaker 4: get up closer and look, you see that there are
Speaker 4: spots on those leaves, fairly rounded, roundish type spots oval
Speaker 4: to a round that are black, and that is gray
Speaker 4: leaf spot. And what it does is that if you
Speaker 4: get enough spots on a leaf, it will cause the
Speaker 4: entire leaf to die and turn yellow. We also are
Speaker 4: seeing a little bit of summer rhizoctonium, which, other than
Speaker 4: the fancy word rhizoctonia, basically it's like the disease that
Speaker 4: causes brown patch, which is now called large patch in
Speaker 4: the fall, those big round circles you're familiar with. There
Speaker 4: are several versions of that disease, strains of that fungus,
Speaker 4: and there's some that can occur in fairly warm weather.
Speaker 4: Although we've had a nice break from the heat here,
Speaker 4: we're seeing some of that too, and it doesn't necessarily
Speaker 4: show up as circles. It could, but it just shows
Speaker 4: as kind of a melting away of the foliage of
Speaker 4: the grass plant. And so what do we do well,
Speaker 4: The best way to manage diseases is to treat before
Speaker 4: they appear, to prevent them. Once you have leaf spots,
Speaker 4: once you have rotted leaves that are shriveling up on
Speaker 4: the plant, you can spray, but all that is going
Speaker 4: to do is prevent additional infection. So our goal would
Speaker 4: be to whenever we know we're having a lot of problems,
Speaker 4: we can do some preventative sprays. In general, I don't
Speaker 4: like to recommend preventative sprays because it just just spray,
Speaker 4: sprace bray all the time to prevent what might show up.
Speaker 4: But that's what you're seeing in your lawns. I can
Speaker 4: tell you this. If you just keep mowing and we
Speaker 4: get some sunshine and the rain stops, which apparently it
Speaker 4: is now we're going to have a nice sunny week,
Speaker 4: then those diseases are gonna go away. Because diseases are
Speaker 4: very connected to environmental conditions, temperature and moisture being the
Speaker 4: two big ones. So my suggestion at this point would
Speaker 4: be just to hold off, and it's probably going to
Speaker 4: come right back and be fine. That's what I expect.
Speaker 4: There are some fungicides that you can use, and if
Speaker 4: you're dealing with an issue and you need a recommendation,
Speaker 4: you can give me a call. We'll talk about those.
Speaker 4: But just to just to kind of summarize, you're probably
Speaker 4: seeing some of that you can spray to stop additional infection.
Speaker 4: I don't think we're going to get a lot of
Speaker 4: additional infection, so I myself probably would hold off being
Speaker 4: the best recommendation. All right, Well, let's see, we're gonna
Speaker 4: also talk this morning about some things that we're seeing
Speaker 4: in the vegetable garden. I mean, I don't know how
Speaker 4: many of you vegetable garden the you know, we can
Speaker 4: grow a lot of wonderful, wonderful vegetables that are helping
Speaker 4: us to have a healthier life. That's the bottom line.
Speaker 4: Help them. First of all, getting out in the garden
Speaker 4: and growing things helps you have a healthier life. Just
Speaker 4: being in nature, having that relaxed enjoyment of seeing things grow,
Speaker 4: and just having success, which you can have. That is important.
Speaker 4: But when you eat those fresh vegetables, then you definitely
Speaker 4: have a healthier life, and so do your kids. By
Speaker 4: the way, if you are a gunna garden, if you're
Speaker 4: thinking about gardening, if for no other reason, do it
Speaker 4: for your kids. When kids grow up growing vegetables, they're
Speaker 4: more likely to eat vegetables. And when they eat vegetables
Speaker 4: instead of a junk food that permeates our lives, they
Speaker 4: have a much healthier life. Most of the big disease
Speaker 4: issues we deal with as human beings here in America
Speaker 4: are related to our diet in one way or another.
Speaker 4: That is a huge elephant in the room that we
Speaker 4: can fix very easily. So anyway, grow your own vegetables.
Speaker 4: They'll be fresh, they'll be what do we we used
Speaker 4: to say, fifteen hundred miles fresher. In other words, they
Speaker 4: didn't get shipped from California or Florida or wherever to here.
Speaker 7: And you can do that.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of good advice that you can get
Speaker 4: online if you go to the Aggie Horticulture website Aggie Horticulture,
Speaker 4: just search for it. There is a section when you
Speaker 4: get the front page, there's a section on vegetables, vegetable gardening,
Speaker 4: and there is a free publication on every vegetable you
Speaker 4: might want to grow and then some. So if you decided, well,
Speaker 4: I want to grow tomatoes or I want to grow
Speaker 4: squash or whatever, you can download or just stared at
Speaker 4: it at this green or printed out or whatever you
Speaker 4: want to do a free, multi page, full color publication
Speaker 4: that will help you do that. And I would highly
Speaker 4: recommend that that's a good place to start, and it's free.
Speaker 4: Can't get any better than that. But vegetable gardening is
Speaker 4: not difficult if you follow a few simple principles. First
Speaker 4: of all, we want to make sure and provide vegetables
Speaker 4: lots of sunlight in order for a plant to grow,
Speaker 4: it needs energy in the form of carbohydrates, and carbohydrates
Speaker 4: come from the leaves when the sun shines on them.
Speaker 4: That's the leaves of the food factory of the plant.
Speaker 4: We talk about fertilizers is plant food Well I even
Speaker 4: say that term, but technically fertilizers are not plant food.
Speaker 4: Carbohydrates or plant food. Fertilizers provide the building blocks for
Speaker 4: the leaves to create carbohydrates. So technical point there, but
Speaker 4: I think worth noting. So whenever our vegetable gardens get
Speaker 4: good sunlight, they are going to have plants that thrive
Speaker 4: better and produce better. Within all the vegetables you'd want
Speaker 4: to grow, you can sort of divide them up into fruit, roots,
Speaker 4: and leaves. That's a general division with a few exceptions.
Speaker 4: So anything that produces fruit that would be tomato, a squash,
Speaker 4: a pepper, an eggplant, a green bean, those are all fruits.
Speaker 4: Or anything that produces roots like a carrot, a turnip,
Speaker 4: a radish, a beet, those are all roots. A sweet
Speaker 4: potato those need the most sunlight because it takes a
Speaker 4: lot of sugars, a lot of carbohydrates to produce those fruits.
Speaker 4: If it is just a leafy grain for example, lettuce, spinach, kale,
Speaker 4: and collars. Or how about in the summertime, leafy greens
Speaker 4: would include malabar, they would include something called molokia. Uh,
Speaker 4: there's even an edible person lane that can be a leaver.
Speaker 4: Those can grow in less sunlight because it doesn't take
Speaker 4: as much carbohydrates to produce the parts we're eating the leaves.
Speaker 4: That doesn't mean they want to be in shade. It
Speaker 4: just means that they will grow in less sunlight than
Speaker 4: the roots and fruit vegetables will. All right, we're going
Speaker 4: to take a little break after those comments. If you'd
Speaker 4: like to give us a call. Seven one three two
Speaker 4: one two fifty eight seventy four. Welcome guard Line. Good
Speaker 4: to have you this morning. Glad you're listening. And hey,
Speaker 4: if you've got some gardening questions you would like to
Speaker 4: talk about. Maybe you've never gardened before and you would
Speaker 4: like to get going on something. We make some suggestions
Speaker 4: for that, and just give us a call. Seven one
Speaker 4: three two one two fifty eight seventy four. When we
Speaker 4: went to break, I was talking about lawns. I was
Speaker 4: talking about vegetable gards. I want to go back to
Speaker 4: the lawns. And make a couple of comments about that.
Speaker 4: Regarding our lawns in the summertime is when we have
Speaker 4: our main lawn insects that we have to deal with,
Speaker 4: and that would be things light grubs and chinch bugs,
Speaker 4: and as we get later in the summer, especially the
Speaker 4: sod webworm that tends to come and go some years
Speaker 4: almost nothing, some years really really bad infestations. You just
Speaker 4: never know what's coming. But Night of Fuss makes a
Speaker 4: product called Bugout Max and it is a granular. You
Speaker 4: put it out on your lawn, spread it like you
Speaker 4: would your fertilizer, and then watered in and the chemical
Speaker 4: on it goes into the thatch and soil region and
Speaker 4: anything in that region it's going to kill it. And
Speaker 4: that would be like ants fire ance crawling through it
Speaker 4: would be killed. Fleas. Did you know there are fleas
Speaker 4: in your lawn if you have pets. If you have
Speaker 4: pets with fleas, as your dog goes outside, the fleas
Speaker 4: fall off. There's they lay eggs, they hatch out into
Speaker 4: larvae that make pupa and then become adults and then
Speaker 4: hop back on the next train coming by train being
Speaker 4: your pet. And so you can control them in that
Speaker 4: stage in the lawn. That's important. Part of controlling fleas
Speaker 4: and ticks is to deal with them outside as well
Speaker 4: as dealing with them inside or on your dog. But anyway, chinchbugs,
Speaker 4: we should be seeing chinchbugs pretty soon here, especially as
Speaker 4: it gets hot and dry, which it will at some point,
Speaker 4: and then sideweb worms too. Night fussbugot Max does all that.
Speaker 4: It takes about forty eight hours and it's pretty much done.
Speaker 4: It's work, and then it sticks around through the summer season.
Speaker 4: It doesn't just go away fast, and so that's going
Speaker 4: to cover you. One application now will cover you through
Speaker 4: the rest of the summer season. So anyway, I think
Speaker 4: that is something you might be aware of. Night Fuss products,
Speaker 4: by the way, are widely available. We can find those
Speaker 4: things at all kinds of sources throughout the Greater Houston area.
Speaker 4: Your feed stores, your ACE hardware stores, your Southwest Fertilizer examples,
Speaker 4: those very widely available, easy, easy to find products like
Speaker 4: the bug out Max. You know, we're always rows on
Speaker 4: the lookout for what's going on in our gardens and
Speaker 4: our landscapes. I think that there's a saying that the
Speaker 4: best fertilizer is the footprints of the gardener. Now what
Speaker 4: does that mean, Well, it basically means is for your
Speaker 4: plants to grow and be successful. When you're out there
Speaker 4: working among the plants or just walking among the plants
Speaker 4: in the garden, you notice things, you can see things
Speaker 4: to take care of and to do, and that's what
Speaker 4: that means. I would say the best pest control is
Speaker 4: the footprints of the gardener too. If you wait until
Speaker 4: pests have hit a major outbreak and there's fifty percent
Speaker 4: of the foliage has gone on some plant that they
Speaker 4: chewed up, it's a little late to get benefits. Even
Speaker 4: if you killed all the pests at that stage, you
Speaker 4: still have a plant with half the leaves. It needs
Speaker 4: to do what it's doing. So heading out and checking
Speaker 4: things and watching things. You know, if you see an
Speaker 4: area of your lawn that's looking like it needs water,
Speaker 4: and you water it and it doesn't respond. Back, drop
Speaker 4: down on your knees there, look among the grass blades
Speaker 4: and the that's and the runners on the ground for
Speaker 4: little black and white bugs about maybe an eighth of
Speaker 4: an inch long. That would be chinchbugs, And that would
Speaker 4: be one of the examples. They typically start at a
Speaker 4: curb a driveway, a sidewalk, some other some type of
Speaker 4: a masonry like structure that's in the full sun too.
Speaker 4: That's typically where we see the first of the chinchbugs
Speaker 4: when we're going to have an invasion. But anyway, get out,
Speaker 4: check your plants, your lawn, make sure that you are
Speaker 4: staying on top of things so you can catch it early.
Speaker 4: When you catch a problem early, that allows you to
Speaker 4: be able to use safer products, some of the organic products,
Speaker 4: some of the super low talks products work best when
Speaker 4: pests are in a younger stage. They have more effectiveness
Speaker 4: at that stage than when let's say a stink bug,
Speaker 4: for example, is already an adult stink bug. It has
Speaker 4: wings and it's flying all over the place. It's harder
Speaker 4: to kill those, and so the earlier you catch things,
Speaker 4: the better off you're going to be. You probably have
Speaker 4: heard me talk about a product that I really love
Speaker 4: and that is Medina's has to Grow Supergrow plus. I
Speaker 4: know that's a lot of words. Medina makes a has
Speaker 4: to grow line regular has to grow. There's has to
Speaker 4: grow for lawns, which is an excellent product for use
Speaker 4: in fertilizing your lawn. The ratio is ideal for lawn fertilization.
Speaker 4: And then there is also has to grow super Grow
Speaker 4: Plus that's a newer one. It's a sixteen zero two
Speaker 4: and the zero's okay. Most of our lawns have all
Speaker 4: the phosphorus that they need. That's why it's always recommended.
Speaker 4: It's a very low number on the bag. But this
Speaker 4: one is a bottle. It's a quart size. You hook
Speaker 4: it to a garden hose, you spray. It takes about
Speaker 4: ten minutes to cover the four thousand square feet a
Speaker 4: bottle of supergrow Plus will cover and it will give
Speaker 4: you a really nice quick boost. It's got a little
Speaker 4: bit of slow release in it as well, but it
Speaker 4: has things like molasses and humic acid that stimulate microbial activity.
Speaker 4: It's got a keylated form of iron which helps the
Speaker 4: yellowing areas turn green. It's got seaweed extract in it
Speaker 4: as well. It's just a good concoction to provide your
Speaker 4: lawn a boost. And so if you got a lawn
Speaker 4: that's struggling in some areas, hook up a bottle of
Speaker 4: Supergrow Plus to your garden hose and go over that
Speaker 4: area and see the results you get. I'd say go
Speaker 4: over the whole lawn. But it's a great way to
Speaker 4: get a good quick boost to your plants. And Medina
Speaker 4: has many products in the market. Of course, supergrow Plus,
Speaker 4: I would say, their newest one, to my knowledge, is
Speaker 4: formulated to promote and to enhance the plant growth there
Speaker 4: in your lawn. Our phone number if you like to
Speaker 4: give us a call and ask a question on guard
Speaker 4: Line is seven one three two one two five eight
Speaker 4: seven four seven one three two one two fifty eight
Speaker 4: seventy four. By the way, if you're looking for supergrow Plus,
Speaker 4: it's it's widely available and a lot of kinds of places.
Speaker 4: You're going to find it at feed stores. You're going
Speaker 4: to find it at garden centers. You're going to find
Speaker 4: it at ace hardware stores. You're going to find it
Speaker 4: at places like Southwest Fertilizer. They have it there. Of course,
Speaker 4: they always have everything there at Southwest Fertilizer. I don't know,
Speaker 4: if you've never been in the place, you need to
Speaker 4: go just to see, because you'll go, oh, I didn't
Speaker 4: know I could get that right here. I didn't know
Speaker 4: that was even on the market. Southwest Fertilizer carries every
Speaker 4: product that you could possibly need. If you hear me.
Speaker 4: If you hear any product name come out of my
Speaker 4: mouth on garden line, it's going to be at Southwest Fertilizer.
Speaker 4: Because that is how Bob does things. He stays on
Speaker 4: top of things and when something new comes out, he
Speaker 4: gets it. We talk pretty often actually about new products
Speaker 4: and what was working, what we're seeing on the market,
Speaker 4: and he just stays up the date on it. So
Speaker 4: and also if you need tools, eighty foot wall of
Speaker 4: tools at Southwest Fertilizer. And I always am promoting this
Speaker 4: one because I talked about a long time ago about
Speaker 4: these folding kneeling benches and they are cool. I mean that,
Speaker 4: first of all, they'd make a great garden gift for
Speaker 4: anybody who's a gardener in your list, and especially anybody
Speaker 4: north of forty which somewhere. Do you remember the first
Speaker 4: time you woke up in the morning sore and you
Speaker 4: didn't know why? Sorry, I started to laugh. I've been there,
Speaker 4: done that. Well, when you're gardening and you go down
Speaker 4: on your knees to do something, stand up, walk across
Speaker 4: you and go down on you, up and down and
Speaker 4: up and down. You wake up the next morning in
Speaker 4: the pre natal position, not able to get out of bed.
Speaker 4: This folding kneeling bench is nice because you unfold it,
Speaker 4: it clicks into place. You sit on it and you
Speaker 4: can do work down lower real easily. And if you
Speaker 4: need to kneel down, you just turn it upside down
Speaker 4: and the legs become handles and you go down on
Speaker 4: your knees do your work, and when you get ready
Speaker 4: to get up, you just grab those handles, those legs handles,
Speaker 4: and you stand up so easily. And I'm telling you
Speaker 4: it will change your gardening life. I love that product,
Speaker 4: and Bob's got it there at Southwest Fertilizer, by the way.
Speaker 4: They're on the corner of the Seet and Runwick in
Speaker 4: Southwest Houston. If you want their website, it's Southwest Fertilizer
Speaker 4: dot com. They're open today. If you need to get
Speaker 4: out there and get something too, like that kneeling bench.
Speaker 4: Check it out. That is one of the tools that
Speaker 4: one went from I almost hadn't even heard of them
Speaker 4: to definitely and the top five tools I have of
Speaker 4: all my gardening tools, that that is in the top
Speaker 4: five because it just is that important, it helps that much.
Speaker 4: All right, Well, we're hitting another heard break here for
Speaker 4: the news. I will be right back if you'd like
Speaker 4: to call in. We got an open board and you
Speaker 4: could be the first up. Seven to one three two
Speaker 4: pine two kt rh. Good Sunday morning, So glad to
Speaker 4: have you with us here on Garden Line. We are
Speaker 4: here to answer your gardening questions, to help you, as
Speaker 4: I like to put it, have a more bountiful garden
Speaker 4: and a more beautiful landscape. That's what it's all about.
Speaker 4: You know, a lot of people garden as their number
Speaker 4: one hobby, and then there are a lot of people
Speaker 4: who dabble in gardening here and there, and then there's
Speaker 4: folks that think I can't do that. I tried to
Speaker 4: grow a plant once and I killed it. Well, don't
Speaker 4: worry about that, because I like to say, there is
Speaker 4: no such thing as a brown thumb. There is just
Speaker 4: an uninformed thumb, and we informed thumbs here on garden Line.
Speaker 4: And as you inform a thumb, it gets greener and
Speaker 4: greener and greener. That's how it works. Because listen, it's
Speaker 4: not rocket science. It's biology. It's plant life, okay. And
Speaker 4: if you follow some simple principles Number one, preparing the soil.
Speaker 4: Number two, putting a plant where it wants to grow,
Speaker 4: the amount of sunlight it wants to grow. In making
Speaker 4: sure that's good drainage, choosing plants that want to do
Speaker 4: well there, and then providing general care, you will find
Speaker 4: that your thumb is getting greener and greener as you
Speaker 4: go along. The reason Grandma seemed to have a green
Speaker 4: thumb is Grandma just need to do the right things.
Speaker 4: That's the bottom line. There's no magic in this. There's
Speaker 4: no magic in this. And listen, there is also no failing.
Speaker 4: Stick with me here for just a minute. You don't fail,
Speaker 4: you give up. That is how gardening goes south. You
Speaker 4: give up. Everybody loses plants. Everybody has seasons that don't
Speaker 4: do as well as others. Everybody learns things the hard
Speaker 4: way here and there. But as you continue to learn
Speaker 4: and to grow, it just gets better. So if you
Speaker 4: tried before, try again. Give us a call anytime. We
Speaker 4: are here to help, and we absolutely I tell you
Speaker 4: this can help you have success with what you want
Speaker 4: to grow. So a famous horticulturist once said, to be
Speaker 4: a good horticulturist, she got to kill a lot of plants.
Speaker 4: And I have remembered that through the years of the
Speaker 4: decade since I heard that, and it is so true.
Speaker 4: It is absolutely true. Don't be afraid of losing things.
Speaker 4: Landscapes and gardens are like etches sketches. Remember the etch
Speaker 4: of sketch. You had two knobs and one went up
Speaker 4: and down to draw, and the other one went left
Speaker 4: and right to draw, and inevitably your brain would not
Speaker 4: click right and you'd do the wrong thing. And now
Speaker 4: you've messed up your drawing. What did you do? You
Speaker 4: took the etch a sketch, you held it upside down
Speaker 4: over your head, and you shook it and when you
Speaker 4: put it back down, it was a blank slate. We
Speaker 4: have things called rototillers that help us get a blank
Speaker 4: slate when we need to fix something. Seriously, though, we
Speaker 4: can always go in and redo and improve and it
Speaker 4: just gets better, it does. It just gets better. So anyway,
Speaker 4: our phone number seven one three two one two fifty
Speaker 4: eight seventy four give us a call. We're going to
Speaker 4: go to the phones now and talk to James in Spring.
Speaker 4: Welcome to guarden Line. James.
Speaker 7: Yes, sir, I was the leading the Jim Oak Tree
Speaker 7: from the roofline for insurance purposes. Do you have somebody
Speaker 7: that can do that.
Speaker 4: Absolutely Uh the Martin spoon More at Affordable Tree Service Martin, Martin, Okay,
Speaker 4: spoon More. Let me give you, let me just let
Speaker 4: me just give you a phone number, all right, Okay,
Speaker 4: get here in front of me. Uh seven one three
Speaker 4: six nine nine two six six three seven one three
Speaker 4: six nine nine two six sixty three. If you want
Speaker 4: to go see the website. It's a f F Tree
Speaker 4: Service dot com. Le me, okay, guarden line listener and
Speaker 4: get you up, you know, up in the line there
Speaker 4: towards the front of the line because he stays busy
Speaker 4: and so just make sure and let him know your
Speaker 4: guardline is he does put those up toward the front
Speaker 4: of the line.
Speaker 7: Okay, Well, I see you.
Speaker 4: Thank you, sir, you've bet Thanks for the call, and
Speaker 4: good luck getting all that tree situation under under control.
Speaker 4: All right. Yes, you're listening to garden line seven one
Speaker 4: three two one two kt r H seven one three
Speaker 4: two one two k t r H. That is the number.
Speaker 4: Have you noticed have y'all noticed the Texas sage blooming
Speaker 4: around town? Texas h. It's a silvery green leafed plant.
Speaker 4: Some some cultivars are greener, some are silk more silvery
Speaker 4: but has these beautiful, typically pink blooms there. There's variations there,
Speaker 4: but we used to call it, or we do, called
Speaker 4: the barometer plant. That's one of the little slang words
Speaker 4: for it, because it tells you, you know, whenever we
Speaker 4: get rainfall and stuff like that, you see you see
Speaker 4: the plant burst out in blooms, and boy is it
Speaker 4: looking good around town? Is it's a beautiful pink color.
Speaker 4: I've grown those numerous times. It's a native plant. It
Speaker 4: grows wild. You head out, you know, past San Antonio
Speaker 4: to Uvaldi and you're going to see it just as
Speaker 4: a wild brush out that way. But breeders had brought
Speaker 4: it in and made a nice plant out of it.
Speaker 4: And as long as you give it good drainage. It
Speaker 4: does not want to be in a swamp. But if
Speaker 4: it has good drainage, it will perform well. And I
Speaker 4: like the way that it just comes into bloom. Some
Speaker 4: people share it to make it boxy, which is what,
Speaker 4: for some reason we want to do to all these shrubs.
Speaker 4: You shouldn't do that. You should do some just selective
Speaker 4: pruning to keep a kind of more natural mounded shape
Speaker 4: and it looks a lot better and it blooms a
Speaker 4: lot better by the way I saw it. Plants for
Speaker 4: All Seasons. Plants for All Seasons on High FM two
Speaker 4: forty nine Tomball Parkway. It's just north of Luetta. If
Speaker 4: you're going north for a Tomball you exit Luetta crossover Luetta.
Speaker 4: It's on the right hand side. But Plants for All
Speaker 4: Seasons has a bunch of those there, and they just
Speaker 4: look really, really good. The nice thing, well, one of
Speaker 4: the nice things about Plants for All Seasons is they're
Speaker 4: always going to carry plants that will grow here, that
Speaker 4: will perform here. And they also are very knowledgeable, and
Speaker 4: so folks that have green thumbs you probably already know
Speaker 4: about Plants for All Seasons. It's a go to place.
Speaker 4: If you have a brown thumb and want to turn
Speaker 4: it green, well, all right, go to Plants for All
Speaker 4: Seasons and they'll help you do that. They'll provide advice,
Speaker 4: they've got great products. They just are true lawn and
Speaker 4: garden experts at Plants for All Seasons. Here's a phone
Speaker 4: number two eight one three seven six sixteen forty six
Speaker 4: two eight one three seven six one six four six,
Speaker 4: or just go to the website Plants for All Seasons
Speaker 4: dot Com. Simple as that. But check out when you
Speaker 4: go by there, check out their Texas Sage. It's also
Speaker 4: called snizo ce n i z o. That's another name
Speaker 4: for it. Remember how remember the song from Gene Audry
Speaker 4: Back in the Saddle Again. In fact, well let's play
Speaker 4: that for our next bumper song. Back in the Saddle Again.
Speaker 4: He sings about the sage in bloom smells light like perfume,
Speaker 4: deep in the heart of Texas. I love that, all
Speaker 4: right there, but I digress. Well, we're here to answer
Speaker 4: your gardening questions and help you have success. And we've
Speaker 4: been talking about a number of things today, like what's
Speaker 4: going on in the lawns, what you're expecting to see
Speaker 4: a disease and insect wise. Right now, now is the
Speaker 4: time in the vegetable garden. Earlier trying to talk you
Speaker 4: into having a vegetable garden. Now is the time to
Speaker 4: be planting some of the warm season crops for fall.
Speaker 4: So if you want a fall tomato planting, you need
Speaker 4: to get it in in July. This is a time
Speaker 4: to get it in. Sooner is better than later. You
Speaker 4: can plant pepper still, you can plant eggplant still, you
Speaker 4: can plant coming up here typically I'll do this more
Speaker 4: in August, but I'm planting things like cucumbers and summer
Speaker 4: squash for example, like zucchini and yellow squash, putting all
Speaker 4: those types of things in. As we get a little
Speaker 4: further into August, we're putting in potatoes for a fall crop.
Speaker 4: The regular potatoes you can plant for a fall crop
Speaker 4: in those seasons. There's plenty of information. There's lots of
Speaker 4: good information online here locally in Houston for different groups
Speaker 4: that have their planting schedules for vegetables. So it makes
Speaker 4: it easy to stay up on things. If you have
Speaker 4: thought about ground vegetables, but you're thinking I don't own
Speaker 4: a rototiller and I don't have a back forty to
Speaker 4: till up. I've got a yard and I don't want
Speaker 4: to till it up. Then just there's other ways to
Speaker 4: do it. And when we come back from this next break,
Speaker 4: I'm going to talk about some of the secrets of
Speaker 4: excess in growing vegetables in containers. I'll be right back.
Speaker 4: Welcome back to garden Line. We're back in the saddle
Speaker 4: again and ready to take your gardening questions. If you
Speaker 4: have a question, give us a call seven one three
Speaker 4: two one two k t r H seven one three
Speaker 4: two one two kt r H. We'll be happy to
Speaker 4: address it. And I said before I went to break
Speaker 4: that I would when we come back, I would talk
Speaker 4: about gardening in containers, vegetable gardening specifically, But this applies
Speaker 4: to a lot of types of gardening in containers. So
Speaker 4: what are we going to suggest for that? Well, first
Speaker 4: of all, remember when you put a plant in a container,
Speaker 4: it's entire access to moisture to nutrients is from the
Speaker 4: soil that's in that container. In the ground outside. It
Speaker 4: can send roots far and wide and reach a huge
Speaker 4: lume a soil to get moisture and nutrients from. So
Speaker 4: if it gets a little dry, it's not going to
Speaker 4: be as effected in a container. If you've got a
Speaker 4: pretty good sized plant and the containers a little on
Speaker 4: the small side, maybe by the end of the day
Speaker 4: it's already in drought stress on a hot, sunny summer day.
Speaker 4: So what we need to do is give the plants
Speaker 4: as big of a container as we can practically give them.
Speaker 4: They do better in larger containers. Now their exceptions to that. Certainly,
Speaker 4: with the seasons changing, the container size won't be as
Speaker 4: big as it would need to be in summer to
Speaker 4: supply it. But you don't want to have to remember
Speaker 4: to water. And I've had containers that were small enough
Speaker 4: to where I was watering twice during the day just
Speaker 4: to keep the plants going well. So container size is important.
Speaker 4: Quality container soil is also very important. You want a
Speaker 4: soil blend that is going to drain well but still
Speaker 4: hold moisture adequately to supply the plant. Good nutrition is important.
Speaker 4: Remember the only place that plant can get all the
Speaker 4: twenty plus nutrients it needs is out of the soil
Speaker 4: in that small, confined space of a container. So providing
Speaker 4: quality fertilizer and gradual amounts over time. You can do
Speaker 4: that with small applications of fertilizer, or you can do
Speaker 4: that by providing a slow release fertilizer that releases gradually
Speaker 4: over time for you. But those are keys. The last
Speaker 4: thing is sunshine. Set your containers where it gets the
Speaker 4: right amount of sun. If your plants struggle in the
Speaker 4: blazing heat of summer, then give a morning sun with
Speaker 4: some afternoon shade. If you can find a spot around
Speaker 4: the property like that, that is another tip that can
Speaker 4: help you have success. But you can grow almost any
Speaker 4: vegetable in a container that you can grow in the ground.
Speaker 4: There are very few exceptions, and with crazy sized containers
Speaker 4: you can even take care of those exceptions. But it's
Speaker 4: not that difficult to do. And I think it just
Speaker 4: really an enjoyable hobby to get out to garden to
Speaker 4: grow things you haven't grown before. And so there you go.
Speaker 4: We're going to head out to the phones now and
Speaker 4: go to Spring and talk to Barbara. Hello, Barbara, welcome
Speaker 4: to garden Line.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 8: I have a schu Mark red oak. It's thirty years old. Well,
Speaker 8: during the storm it got beat up really bad. It
Speaker 8: got topped and one side got completely torn off. So
Speaker 8: saber tree came out and they did tell me that
Speaker 8: it can't be saved. So I'm going to have it
Speaker 8: taken out and stunt ground. Okay, now I want to
Speaker 8: put grass back in that area. So do I have
Speaker 8: to take all those chips away and fill that hole
Speaker 8: with dirt?
Speaker 4: Well, first of all, I would ask the company to
Speaker 4: do as much of that as they can. Some even
Speaker 4: have a little type of vacuum type things that pulls
Speaker 4: up the loose sawdust and whatnot. But as much as
Speaker 4: you can get out you should for two reasons. Ruby One,
Speaker 4: as that fresh wood starts to decompose, it ties up
Speaker 4: nitrogen in the soil. You can fix that by adding
Speaker 4: extra nitrogen, so that's not the end of the world.
Speaker 4: The other thing is, as it decomposes away, that soil
Speaker 4: is going to sink. Just the fact that they've loosened
Speaker 4: it up by grinding down into it. It's fluffing up
Speaker 4: the soil to do that. And that soil is going
Speaker 4: to sink anyway. And then if it also has wood
Speaker 4: in it, it's going to decompose away and sink even more.
Speaker 4: So leave it or mound it up a little bit
Speaker 4: like a picture's mound. Leave it mounded up a little
Speaker 4: so that when it does sink, it ends up more
Speaker 4: close to level.
Speaker 8: Right, Okay, okay, well I'll just yes, yes, that helps
Speaker 8: me a lot. Thank you very much. I appreciate it,
Speaker 8: you bet, Barbara.
Speaker 4: Thanks for the call. You take care. Good to have
Speaker 4: you with us today. I was talking about containers and
Speaker 4: the importance of soil, and Landscaper's Pride makes some quality
Speaker 4: soils that you can put in containers. They are designed
Speaker 4: for that. The thing I like to most talk about
Speaker 4: this time of year with Landscaper's Pride is the multous
Speaker 4: because when the sun comes out and it is baking down,
Speaker 4: it may be ninety five degrees outside, and the soil
Speaker 4: is way hotter than that. It's like the sidewalk or
Speaker 4: even worse, a dark hardscape like asphalt. You know, it
Speaker 4: gets blazing hot. Well, soil is dark, it absorbs the
Speaker 4: radiation from the sun and it heats up too much,
Speaker 4: and plant roots anywhere in the top three inches are
Speaker 4: really struggling to even survive in that kind of temperature.
Speaker 4: When you put a Louisiana excuse me a Landscaper's pride,
Speaker 4: a black velvet melts down, beautiful naturally dark multch a
Speaker 4: hardwood ultch down which is shredded hardwood. A pine bark
Speaker 4: mults down, which is a very resistant to decomposition malts.
Speaker 4: It sticks around for longest. Most popular one pine bark
Speaker 4: cedar mault cybers molts. All of those from Landscaper's Pride
Speaker 4: Landscaperspride dot com. Keep your soil most wherever sunlight hits
Speaker 4: the soil nature points a week and the summer sun
Speaker 4: gets the soil too hot for those roots up near
Speaker 4: their surface, especially for shallow rooted plants like our vegetables,
Speaker 4: our flowers and our ears. All right, well, enough of that,
Speaker 4: we're gonna be talking about dirt for a while. We're
Speaker 4: gonna go to a break. Our phone number is seven
Speaker 4: one three two one two k t r H. I'd
Speaker 4: like to be the first ones up when we come
Speaker 4: back from break. That would be a good time to
Speaker 4: call and get on the boards. I also want to
Speaker 4: remind you that if you go online, my schedules are
Speaker 4: on my website, and that would be gardening with Skip
Speaker 4: dot Com. Gardening with Skip dot Com. There you'll find
Speaker 4: the lawn care schedule and the lawn Coast Disease and
Speaker 4: read out and skip paper everything you need to know
Speaker 4: and they're free.
Speaker 1: Welcome to kt RH Guarden Line with Skip Rictor's.
Speaker 2: Just watch you as many things to.
Speaker 6: A s.
Speaker 1: Sunmon.
Speaker 4: Welcome back to the garden Line on a nice Sunday morning.
Speaker 4: Glad to have you with us today. We're going to
Speaker 4: talk about all kinds of things related to gardening and
Speaker 4: if you have a question, if you can help turn
Speaker 4: your thumb greener and greener. That's why we're here. I
Speaker 4: want you to have a beautiful, bountiful gardening landscape. That
Speaker 4: is the goal. Well, let's start by just heading straight
Speaker 4: out to the phone. So we're going to go to
Speaker 4: Northwest Houston and talk to Malcolm. Hello, Malcolm, Hey, Skip,
Speaker 4: how you doing this morning? Good? Very good? Thank you.
Speaker 2: Hey.
Speaker 9: I I don't have a question, but I've got some
Speaker 9: information that may be helpful to you and in your audience.
Speaker 9: The iPhone has a function that if you take a
Speaker 9: picture of a plant. You take the picture, then you
Speaker 9: pull it up. There's a little eye symbol down at
Speaker 9: the bottom that I guess for information that you push
Speaker 9: that and it'll help identify it'll look up and identify
Speaker 9: the plant.
Speaker 4: Okay, interesting fact.
Speaker 9: And so I mean a lot of a lot of
Speaker 9: things you see out out in the garden, you know,
Speaker 9: weeds and plants that neighbors gardens and stuff. You don't
Speaker 9: necessarily know what they are. But if you take the
Speaker 9: picture of it and use that function, it'll it'll it'll
Speaker 9: tell you at least you'll try to tell you what
Speaker 9: what it thinks it is.
Speaker 4: That is that is interesting. You know that there there
Speaker 4: are so many really cool new things that we get
Speaker 4: to enjoy because of these technologies. And I'm looking at
Speaker 4: my my iPhone right now and seeing, uh, yeah, there
Speaker 4: you go. It just works well.
Speaker 10: You find what I used?
Speaker 4: Yeah, what what I use for plant identification. There's a
Speaker 4: lot of apps out there that you know, or plant
Speaker 4: identification apps. I was, gosh, they're just a lot of them,
Speaker 4: and I've tried different ones and some of them are okay.
Speaker 4: A lot of them don't live in Texas and so
Speaker 4: they there data set is a little bit different than ours.
Speaker 4: But the one app that I find very helpful is
Speaker 4: Google Chrome, Google Lens, l E N S. And so
Speaker 4: if you have even on an iPhone, if you have
Speaker 4: the Google app there, when you go to it, there's
Speaker 4: a little square with the Google colors, you know, those
Speaker 4: primary colors, and if you click on it, you can
Speaker 4: either use your phone when you're looking at a plant
Speaker 4: to do the same thing, or you can go find
Speaker 4: a photo that's in your photos and it'll do that
Speaker 4: and it'll get you. I found it to be pretty accurate,
Speaker 4: especially if you if the picture really shows the plant
Speaker 4: you're talking about. You know, I keep point it at
Speaker 4: the woods because there's a plant in there somewhere. You want.
Speaker 4: It's not going to know what you're looking for. You've
Speaker 4: got to take the picture of the plant.
Speaker 7: Good detail, that.
Speaker 4: Would be true. Also of the function you mentioned the
Speaker 4: iPhone a little eye at the bottom of the bottom
Speaker 4: right of the screen. Yeah, it does very healthful.
Speaker 10: Yes.
Speaker 9: And it works with bugs too, So if you got
Speaker 9: a bug, a certain bugger thing, you can identified bug.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it does. And in fact I found entomologically it
Speaker 4: to be almost better than it is with plants. It's
Speaker 4: really really good. And if it doesn't give you the
Speaker 4: right answer, it puts you in the ballpark. So then
Speaker 4: you can do a search, like maybe it gives you
Speaker 4: a genus and that plant looks close, but that's not
Speaker 4: quite it. Well, then you can go search for that
Speaker 4: online and actually find the one that it is. It's
Speaker 4: it's scarily effective.
Speaker 9: Thanks for the good show man. I just want to
Speaker 9: pass up all my kids. They know everything about phones.
Speaker 9: They're the one that told me about that.
Speaker 2: And.
Speaker 4: I appreciate. I appreciate that because I guarantee you every
Speaker 4: gardener needs these things. Often. I know you're you're in
Speaker 4: somebody's yard and it's like they have a beautiful plant
Speaker 4: and you want it, uh, and you don't know what
Speaker 4: it is, and they're not there to ask or whatever,
Speaker 4: and yeah, I mean it just there's a lot of
Speaker 4: times when we use those, so that's that's a good thing.
Speaker 4: By the way, it's these aren't just plant functions.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 4: If you are in a store and you see someone
Speaker 4: walking around with shoes you like, uh in discreete and
Speaker 4: just uh discreetly, uh just kind of point your phone
Speaker 4: down there and it'll tell you what they are and
Speaker 4: where to get them.
Speaker 9: Be careful with that one. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they even do. They even do bill exactly, like
Speaker 4: especially famous areas, like you're in Europe and you see
Speaker 4: this building and you point your phone at it and
Speaker 4: it'll tell you, oh, that's the big Ben clock in London,
Speaker 4: Texas or whatever. I'm London, Texas, London, England. So yeah,
Speaker 4: all right, good, good points. Thanks man. I appreciate that too.
Speaker 4: You thank you you as well as well. Yeah, you
Speaker 4: guys have got to try these things out. Malcolm just
Speaker 4: mentioned the little eye at the bottom right of the
Speaker 4: screen if with an iPhone, but whether you have an
Speaker 4: Android or an Apple device, you can use Google lens also,
Speaker 4: and it's just just if you do a search for it,
Speaker 4: you see what the little emblem looks like. But all
Speaker 4: Google emblems have those primary Google colors in them. But
Speaker 4: it's a little square almost like a little TV set
Speaker 4: kind of thing. Uh, And it works super well. And
Speaker 4: for those of you on Android that don't have the
Speaker 4: iPhone with the little eye lower case eye on the bottom,
Speaker 4: Google lens is definitely one you need to be using.
Speaker 4: It works very very well. All right, you're listening to
Speaker 4: garden Line. We are just enlightening and enlightening and enlightening
Speaker 4: this morning on things related to plants. Seven one three
Speaker 4: two one two KTRH. That's our number. If you'd like
Speaker 4: to give us a call, we look forward to talking
Speaker 4: to you. If you've not fertilized your lawn this summer,
Speaker 4: I would recommend you consider the Nitrofoss Superturf product. Superturf
Speaker 4: is the silver bag from Nitrovas that makes it so easy.
Speaker 4: In fact, I can't think of another fertilizer product that
Speaker 4: I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of them
Speaker 4: that is in a silver bag like that. But I
Speaker 4: can tell you this round the Greater Houston area, if
Speaker 4: you see a silver bag that is Nitrofus Superturf and
Speaker 4: super Turf's designed to release the nitrogen slowly over time,
Speaker 4: and it's going to feed all the way up until
Speaker 4: it's time for your fall fertilization of the lawn by
Speaker 4: feeding gradually and reduces you're mowing up to twenty five percent.
Speaker 4: And it also avoids promoting disease problems like we were
Speaker 4: talking earlier today gray leaf spot, or when cooler fall
Speaker 4: weather arrives, we'll be talking about large patch or brown patch.
Speaker 4: Those are promoted by flushes of nitrogen. Super turf gradual
Speaker 4: release helps avoid that. And you can find super turf
Speaker 4: all kinds of places, a number of places, for example,
Speaker 4: ACE Hardware, a Memorial Drive, ACE Hardware City, it's called
Speaker 4: on Memorial Drive, the Kingwood, Ace Hardware, or perhaps there's
Speaker 4: an Oh, the one in Katie and the one in
Speaker 4: oh my gosh, I just want blank out there, Plantation, Ace,
Speaker 4: Adam Richmond Rosenberg. They all carry nitropostproduct. In fact, ACE
Speaker 4: Hardware in general is going to carry these nitroposs products
Speaker 4: like superturf. They have an excellent supply. And while I'm
Speaker 4: talking about a ACE Hardware always has everything you need
Speaker 4: to provide a beautiful garden and a bountiful landscape if
Speaker 4: you want to enjoy the outdoors, and that includes the
Speaker 4: patio where you need one of the nice barbecue products
Speaker 4: that they have there at ays like Trager, like Big
Speaker 4: Green Egg, like Weber, they have that there, a string
Speaker 4: of lights to create that ambiance around an outdoor sitting area.
Speaker 4: They have that there. But all the fertilizers, all the
Speaker 4: pest control, weed control, disease control products. Right now, we
Speaker 4: just had gully washers of rain coming through and when
Speaker 4: that happens, fire ants to escape the excessively saturated soil
Speaker 4: build their little mounds up. You see the little piles
Speaker 4: of dirt showing up in the air. I say they
Speaker 4: push them up. That's not really pushing, but you get
Speaker 4: the idea that's going to happen. I've already got two
Speaker 4: that popped up in my yard. I did not know
Speaker 4: I had fire ants. I just I didn't know it.
Speaker 4: I hadn't seen them. And after the rains, I see
Speaker 4: where they are. Now, well, what am I going to do.
Speaker 4: I'm going to put a bait product out in. Ace
Speaker 4: Hardware carries those bait products. So go to Ace Hardware
Speaker 4: find the supplies you need. There's forty stores in the
Speaker 4: Greater Houston area. Just go to Acehardware dot Com find
Speaker 4: the store locator and it's as simple as that. Well,
Speaker 4: it's time for us to take a break. If you'd
Speaker 4: like to get on the on the board seven one
Speaker 4: three two one two KTRH And when we come back, Elizabeth,
Speaker 4: you'll be our first stup doctor Guardline. Good to have
Speaker 4: you with us this morning. We are going to head
Speaker 4: straight out to the phones and talk to Elizabeth in
Speaker 4: Oak Forest. Weokome the garden line.
Speaker 3: Elizabeth, good morning, Skith. How are you doing.
Speaker 4: I'm well, thank you.
Speaker 3: Yes, I'm driving from Houston to Galveston and I've driven
Speaker 3: out of the rain and it's beautiful out here. It's
Speaker 3: dry on the roads, so that's good. So Skip, I
Speaker 3: have been gardening in Houston for decades and I am
Speaker 3: battling Cat's claw, this invasive, diabolical line. And I have
Speaker 3: a friend who feorizes it came somehow with Hurricane Ike,
Speaker 3: because you know, decades ago, we didn't have cat's claw.
Speaker 3: We had you know, a little bit of trumpet vine,
Speaker 3: and you know nut grass and Johnson weed and dollar
Speaker 3: weed and all the stuff or Johnson grass. But how
Speaker 3: do you suggest we combat this stuff? Because I moved
Speaker 3: temporarily and took my pot plants with me, and by hockey,
Speaker 3: I accidentally transferred some cats claw to that yard, and
Speaker 3: I spent a lot of time trying to kill up there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, just so to make sure we're talking about the
Speaker 4: same plant. This has yellow flowers, bright yellow flowers, and.
Speaker 3: It's got little claws.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Kind it has leaves or like in sets of two,
Speaker 4: like a pair of leaves right on the vine with
Speaker 4: the little structure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a little football shaped leaves, a nice darker green,
Speaker 3: not goloss through flat.
Speaker 4: Okay, all right, with the yellow flowers is a big
Speaker 4: distinguishing thing on them for most people. Well, okay, it
Speaker 4: has underground storage structures. Yeah, a sweet sweet potato for example.
Speaker 4: They're not that big, but they're like that. I guess
Speaker 4: they might get that big cast cloud is extremely aggressive,
Speaker 4: as you know. Uh, And what you gotta do is
Speaker 4: you gotta you gotta cut off the top growth and
Speaker 4: go ahead and just as much as you can just
Speaker 4: get it out of the garden.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 4: There are seed pods that will drop the seeds, and
Speaker 4: that's probably came in with your pop plant. There was
Speaker 4: a seed that comes or something like that. But you
Speaker 4: you are gonna then want to dig up those tubers.
Speaker 4: Now I've never tried, you, I've never tried using a
Speaker 4: brushy wheat control product on it. I think I would
Speaker 4: think that if you put a product containing Triclo peer
Speaker 4: t R I c l O P y R, that's
Speaker 4: the ingredient, and you'll find it in things that say
Speaker 4: like they're a poison ivy killer or a stump and
Speaker 4: brush killer. Those typically have Triclo peer in them. If
Speaker 4: you take Triclos straight and get you a little foam
Speaker 4: brush from hardware store, you know that little the kind
Speaker 4: that have a little wooden handle that they use for painting,
Speaker 4: but it's a piece of fuel on the end, and
Speaker 4: dip it in the product straight and paint that on
Speaker 4: the green stems down near the ground. Do about a
Speaker 4: foot up and down on the green stems everywhere you
Speaker 4: see it. It will soak in if they're a little slick.
Speaker 4: Sometimes it helps to put a little bit of oil
Speaker 4: mixed in with it. Some people will use he drops
Speaker 4: the diesel oil, but that's just to make it stick.
Speaker 4: The oil is not to kill the plant. But anyway,
Speaker 4: it works on almost every woody thing I've ever tried,
Speaker 4: even Chinese tallow, which is hard to kill with herbicides,
Speaker 4: but just painted on so we're not spraying things everywhere
Speaker 4: and killing other things you don't want to kill. But
Speaker 4: I would do that and it'll translocate down. If this
Speaker 4: is an established plant, it probably has enough underground storage
Speaker 4: tubers to where one little application of that is not
Speaker 4: going to completely kill it. You don't have to do
Speaker 4: it again. Good hand hand digging and or painting that
Speaker 4: product onto the stems, up and down the stems. Those
Speaker 4: are the two things that I would recommend, and then
Speaker 4: just be in diligent because you're going to see it
Speaker 4: popping up, just like the seed probably came with that
Speaker 4: pot you took. You're going to see it popping up.
Speaker 4: So you just have to watch for it and shut
Speaker 4: it down before it has a chance to get established.
Speaker 3: Well, I think all my neighbors have it too, and
Speaker 3: everybody's yard guys are constantly whacking it away with a
Speaker 3: weed whacker. But it's still just it's.
Speaker 8: Do you do you know what?
Speaker 3: Do you know what I'm talking about? Hit it this
Speaker 3: in Houston before.
Speaker 4: Ike, so you know, uh, yeah, people have had it
Speaker 4: here and there for years. It's been around it's not
Speaker 4: native here. It comes from like more tropical areas south
Speaker 4: of US, you know, the West Indies, Mexico and down
Speaker 4: on south of Brazil and that way. But it is
Speaker 4: it is persistent here because it can take cold temperatures.
Speaker 4: The top parts will take it down to I think
Speaker 4: it's about an eight zone eight a point. I'd have
Speaker 4: to check that to be sure, but I know here
Speaker 4: it survives, and then there's no getting rid of it
Speaker 4: unless you take these measures that I'm talking about.
Speaker 3: All right, well, I'm sure do appreciate it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you might want to the things I've told you,
Speaker 4: jot them down and share them with neighbors that are
Speaker 4: willing to listen. Just because somebody has it. Then you're
Speaker 4: gonna the seeds have they don't have I don't know
Speaker 4: if it's wings, but they have a way of kind
Speaker 4: of floating and going outward. You know how like an
Speaker 4: maple tree, you know, has those wings, and so they're
Speaker 4: like a little helicopters that float around as they drop down.
Speaker 4: There's something sort of like that. And so your neighbor
Speaker 4: having some up in a tree, if the wind's right,
Speaker 4: you're they're going to give it to you.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, we it's everywhere. Well, thank you, I really
Speaker 3: appreciate it. You have a great rest of your weekend already,
Speaker 3: all right.
Speaker 4: Bye bye, thank you for the call. Yeah, oh gosh.
Speaker 4: You know, there are a lot of plants out there
Speaker 4: that have nice features. I mean, if you want something
Speaker 4: that can take reflected heat, blazing hot temperatures and cover
Speaker 4: a wall and grab onto it and give this nice
Speaker 4: covering of green everywhere. Plus you get a few yellow flowers,
Speaker 4: that's catclaw. But I wouldn't recommend planting it for reasons
Speaker 4: that you just heard as we talked to Elizabeth. We
Speaker 4: have other plants that have wonderful features. But you know,
Speaker 4: when you put it in a blender and mix it
Speaker 4: up and pour it out, the bottom line is, don't
Speaker 4: do it because all the bad stuff that these plants bring.
Speaker 4: Remember Chinese tallow, I say, remember remember when it came in.
Speaker 4: For some of you who have been around for a
Speaker 4: few decades, when Chinese sallow came in, it was initially beekeepers.
Speaker 4: When they love it because it makes some of the
Speaker 4: best honey. It's an excellent plant for that. It has
Speaker 4: one of the few plants that has really good, dependable
Speaker 4: fall color. Another asset of Chinese tallow, But on a
Speaker 4: balance scale, it is incredibly negative and the negatives are
Speaker 4: just outweigh the good things. It doesn't live a long time,
Speaker 4: and the landscape it recedes and it takes over. Entire
Speaker 4: Southeast Texas has had a problem with the invasive woody
Speaker 4: weed called Chinese tallow for a very long time. But
Speaker 4: just remember that check on plants before you get them. Now,
Speaker 4: you go to a reptable, reputable nursery like the ones
Speaker 4: we talk about on Guard nine. They are not going
Speaker 4: to sell you a Chinese teleplant. They're not. But there
Speaker 4: are people that will provide them, whether sharing them with
Speaker 4: friends or I've seen you know, a little I don't know,
Speaker 4: homemade garden centers. You know, they pop up and they
Speaker 4: just sell stuff they shouldn't sell. Anyway, Just a little
Speaker 4: warning about some of the plants. They can be invasive
Speaker 4: or they can have other negative negative effects we don't want. Well,
Speaker 4: speaking of a beautiful landscape. Piercecapes pierceescapes dot com. That's
Speaker 4: their website, and that's where you need to go because
Speaker 4: I'm going to tell you about Peerscapes. But you got
Speaker 4: to see Peerscapes, okay, And the website shows you that
Speaker 4: when you go to the website, you are going to
Speaker 4: see all the things that they can do. They can
Speaker 4: fix irrigation systems. You got a poorly drained area, you
Speaker 4: should know it if you do, because it's rained and
Speaker 4: rain So those spots where the water just stands, it
Speaker 4: doesn't want to drain. How many times have you read
Speaker 4: a description of a plant that said requires good drainage?
Speaker 4: About ninety five percent of the plants out there need
Speaker 4: good drainage. Well, Pierce Scapes can fix that area. Do
Speaker 4: you want hard scapes? Do you want landscape lighting? Do
Speaker 4: you just have some flower beds that you want taken
Speaker 4: care of, You want them to be beautiful. Twelve months
Speaker 4: out of the year, Peer Scapes will come out. They'll
Speaker 4: do seasonal color changes in those beds. They'll mult them,
Speaker 4: the'll fertilize them, they'll eat them, they'll check the irrigation.
Speaker 4: They offer that quarterly maintenance service as well. So the
Speaker 4: bottom line is purescapes dot com. If you prefer to
Speaker 4: give people a call rather than you know, go to
Speaker 4: websites and things, well, here's a number two eight one
Speaker 4: three seven oh fifty sixty two eight one three seven
Speaker 4: oh fifty sixty. All right, you are listening to Guardline
Speaker 4: and if you would like to call in, our phone
Speaker 4: number is seven to one three two one two fifty
Speaker 4: eight seventy four seven one three two one two fifty
Speaker 4: eight seventy four, give well a call, get you on
Speaker 4: the boards and we will answer your questions that you
Speaker 4: might have. I've I've talked about a number of different
Speaker 4: things today. One thing that I have not meant well.
Speaker 4: I talked about gardening and containers and vegetables and containers.
Speaker 4: You can also grow flowers and herbs and containers. And
Speaker 4: if there are there's different ways to go about herbs.
Speaker 4: Some people go all out. They have a they develop
Speaker 4: a beautiful herb garden that is geometrically balanced. It has
Speaker 4: a very nice design. You know, there's one called a
Speaker 4: not knot design where you have these it's like there's
Speaker 4: a knot of lines that go through the garden and
Speaker 4: plants are planted in those areas and it's so aesthetic.
Speaker 4: It's so aesthetic. You don't have to grow a whole
Speaker 4: herb garden to have herbs. And when I come back
Speaker 4: from break, which I'm about to take here. When I
Speaker 4: come back, I will talk about growing herbs and containers.
Speaker 4: So stay tuned. If you'd like to give us a call,
Speaker 4: you can be first up when we come back. Seven
Speaker 4: one three two one two KTRH. Welcome back to guard Line.
Speaker 4: Good to have you with us this morning. We were
Speaker 4: talking before break about, by the way, our phone number
Speaker 4: seven one three two one two kt RH. We were
Speaker 4: talking before break about growing herbs, and I was saying,
Speaker 4: you don't have to have a beautiful herb garden to
Speaker 4: grow herbs in. If you don't do that, that's fine.
Speaker 4: They're very gorgeous. You see some beautiful designs and whatnot.
Speaker 4: You can grow herbs and containers, and you can grow
Speaker 4: herbs in flower beds. You can grow herbs and vegetable beds.
Speaker 4: So let's start with the vegetable beds. At the end
Speaker 4: of my vegetable rose, I will often plant some herb.
Speaker 4: Maybe it's chives. When chives bloom, they attract tons of pollinators.
Speaker 4: The pollinators love their blooms, and that's one reason I
Speaker 4: do it. Maybe it is a groundcover type herb like
Speaker 4: a regano or a bush like rosemary, which also has flowers,
Speaker 4: by the way, especially the trailing types. But those are
Speaker 4: just an addition so when you're out there. I used
Speaker 4: to have a row I called my tomato sauce row.
Speaker 4: It was paste tomatoes, you know, the little globe or
Speaker 4: oblong oval tomatoes. And I had a regano on one end.
Speaker 4: I had basil on the other end. And so basically
Speaker 4: you could just go down the row harvesting, bring it in,
Speaker 4: and you were ready to go on making your pizza,
Speaker 4: pizza paste or whatever you want to create. Anyway, you
Speaker 4: can also plant herbs again, like I said, for flowers
Speaker 4: in the vegetable garden to help support pollinators. That is important.
Speaker 4: One vegetable garden I had there wasn't room for things,
Speaker 4: and I was confined, and so I wanted to save
Speaker 4: all my space for growing stuff I could eat, because
Speaker 4: that's why I had that garden. So I used large
Speaker 4: buckets and hung them on posts on the fence that
Speaker 4: went around the vegetable garden. And I had a little
Speaker 4: drip line that went down the row, and each bucket
Speaker 4: had a little drip emetter in it and it would
Speaker 4: come on automatically. It was on a garden hose timer.
Speaker 4: And so those buckets, which remember containers need watering more
Speaker 4: often they would get watered every day with a small
Speaker 4: amount of water and they would bloom. They would hang
Speaker 4: down there. I had herbs that could pick there, but
Speaker 4: I also was bringing in pollinators. In fact, there wasn't
Speaker 4: just herbs in it. I used some trailing flowers that
Speaker 4: have that are very attractive to pollinators and are beautiful
Speaker 4: in a ornamental type bed like a flower bed for example,
Speaker 4: or lining a path. Herbs like chives make a good
Speaker 4: product to line a path. You could use it like
Speaker 4: you would use loriope. You know how they put loriope
Speaker 4: around beds and things. Herbs that are trailing. I mentioned
Speaker 4: to regano time is another example, and there are others
Speaker 4: would be good as a ground cover in certain areas.
Speaker 4: Maybe you just want some groundcovers to go around the
Speaker 4: bottom of rose beds. You know, as long as they
Speaker 4: get decent amount of sunlight under there, something like a
Speaker 4: regino could grow in an area like that. So I
Speaker 4: guess what I'm trying to say is recognize that herbs
Speaker 4: are versatile. Rosemary is one of the most drought tolerant
Speaker 4: plants that we have in our landscapes. So you need
Speaker 4: a little evergreen shrub and you have good drainage. Must
Speaker 4: have good drainage. Rosemary would be an option, and there
Speaker 4: you go. You just go out there and you can
Speaker 4: pick your herbs right from your landscape. Herbs also do
Speaker 4: welling containers and containers. You can grow any kind of
Speaker 4: herb that you want to grow, as long as a
Speaker 4: container is big enough. You can have something upright in
Speaker 4: the center, like lemongrass that grows upward and makes a
Speaker 4: very tall plant. If it was a large container, you
Speaker 4: could plant something trailing around the sides of it. Another
Speaker 4: good example is pineapple sage. It's a type of salvia
Speaker 4: with beautiful tubular red blooms that attract hummingbirds, and the
Speaker 4: foliage smells like pineapples. It's really really nice. Now I
Speaker 4: could go on and on giving you examples, but I
Speaker 4: guess what I'm saying is, let's let the herbs get
Speaker 4: out of the vegetable garden or out of the herb
Speaker 4: garden and go wherever we want them. Maybe there's just
Speaker 4: two herbs that you care about. Maybe it's basil and rosemary.
Speaker 4: Maybe that's all you care about. Grow those. Basil loves
Speaker 4: summer heat, it loves containers, It has blooms that do
Speaker 4: attract beats and pollinators. So wherever you want to put it,
Speaker 4: go for it. As long as it's sunny and warm
Speaker 4: and well drained, Basil's going to be happy, all right.
Speaker 4: Just a few tips there on herbs. If you'd like
Speaker 4: to give us a call here on guardline, all you
Speaker 4: have to do is doll seven one three. That's seven
Speaker 4: one three two one two kt r h. Suppose that
Speaker 4: seven one three two one two kt r ah. Well,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna while we're while we're discussing different kinds of
Speaker 4: plants and different uses for different kind of plants, I
Speaker 4: want to talk a little bit about hanging baskets. Now,
Speaker 4: you are very familiar with beautiful floriferous hanging baskets. For example,
Speaker 4: when we get to summertime, boom and Villa is a
Speaker 4: wonderful plant for hanging baskets. It's blooms last and last
Speaker 4: and last and last. You probably provided proper care and
Speaker 4: in a good sunny spot, and it will do very
Speaker 4: well for you. Another good hanging basket plant is Scavola.
Speaker 4: Scavola is also called fan flower fan flower. Now you
Speaker 4: can get variations on color in it, but primarily Scavola
Speaker 4: is a blue to purplish, a purplish blue flower, uh,
Speaker 4: and it is very heat tolerant. I was kidding with
Speaker 4: someone recently and said you could throw scavola on a
Speaker 4: barbecue pet when you put your burgers down, and when
Speaker 4: you opened it up, the scavola would still be thriving. Well,
Speaker 4: that's an exaggeration, but my point is it never gets
Speaker 4: too hot for scabola. It can get too soggy for scabola.
Speaker 4: If you don't have good drainage, it will rot in
Speaker 4: a heartbeat. But if you give it good drainage, it
Speaker 4: performs well. Scavola another one per Slaine, and I'm going
Speaker 4: to make it two things in one per Slaine and
Speaker 4: moss rose, which is Portulaca. Perce Lane and Portulaca have
Speaker 4: blooms that each last a day, and they are beautiful
Speaker 4: and they come in every color under the sun. In fact,
Speaker 4: you would want to view those up close, because when
Speaker 4: you get a whole bunch of colors on one plant,
Speaker 4: then in one basket. Rather, it's good to view it
Speaker 4: up close. But that can take as much heat as
Speaker 4: Houston summers can give it. It is tough. It needs
Speaker 4: good drainage. Of course, but it's a succulent, so if
Speaker 4: you forget to water it, it's gonna be okay. You
Speaker 4: may not get the bloom production you did. It would
Speaker 4: have if you'd given it some moisture. But it's very
Speaker 4: tough and it can take that. And I could go
Speaker 4: on and on. Don't forget there's foliage plants that can
Speaker 4: grow in containers like Dichondra are silver pony foot. It's
Speaker 4: just like the name describes. It is very silver and
Speaker 4: it trails down and it is beautiful. We have some
Speaker 4: in one of our vego beds where we have a
Speaker 4: bunch of flowers and it just looks beautiful coming over
Speaker 4: the side. Well, there's a few tips to consider. We're
Speaker 4: going to take a break here time for that. When
Speaker 4: we come back, Robert, you will be our first up
Speaker 4: for the rest of you. Seven one three two one
Speaker 4: two kt r H. How many of your Jim welcome
Speaker 4: back to guard Line. Glad you're listening today, and look
Speaker 4: forward to visiting with you about the questions that you
Speaker 4: might have. You know, we've had a lot of storms,
Speaker 4: a lot of storms that have come through and just
Speaker 4: devastated our trees. They've knocked out our power, and a
Speaker 4: lot of people are interested in generators right now. In fact,
Speaker 4: later next hour, early next hour, We're going to have
Speaker 4: a fellow in here that I'm going to pick his
Speaker 4: brain on all kinds of aspects of how do you
Speaker 4: find it the generator you want, what do you look for,
Speaker 4: what do you make sure of, and just kind of
Speaker 4: the overall picture, because I know a lot of people
Speaker 4: are out shopping for generators right now, trying to find
Speaker 4: one so that when the next storm hits, they're ready.
Speaker 4: Quality Home Products of Texas is a company that can
Speaker 4: provide you with a quality generaic generator. But it's not
Speaker 4: just the fact that they provide top of the line generators.
Speaker 4: It's their service, by the way, right now, for I
Speaker 4: forget five hundred dollars off in zero percent interest for
Speaker 4: eighteen months, or if you have an old one of
Speaker 4: those portable generators you drag around and fire up. If
Speaker 4: you want to turn one of those in, I don't
Speaker 4: care what condition is in fifteen hundred dollars off for that. Now,
Speaker 4: this is a company there's that over fourteen thousand five
Speaker 4: star reviews, seventy seven thousand homeowners. We're actually more than
Speaker 4: that here in the Houston area are a customers of
Speaker 4: Quality Home Products of Texas. When you have them come,
Speaker 4: they do everything that most companies don't do. Most companies
Speaker 4: sub out most things. They do it all thems. They
Speaker 4: take care of all the you know, you've got to
Speaker 4: get a permit from the city or the state has
Speaker 4: certain regulations you have to They take care of all
Speaker 4: of the things you have to do. You don't have
Speaker 4: to chase all that down qualityt X dot com or
Speaker 4: phone number seven one three Quality. We're going to go
Speaker 4: to the phones now and start with Robert up here
Speaker 4: in North Houston. Hello, Robert, you.
Speaker 11: Need more Yes, sir, could you discuss fullier fertilization.
Speaker 2: UH.
Speaker 11: To give you some background, I tried using one of
Speaker 11: those dry granular water soluble cans and UH sprayed on
Speaker 11: the leaves and I think I've burned the plants. You know,
Speaker 11: I can't get it to you, but the leaves were
Speaker 11: kind of burned. And UH, do you use an organic
Speaker 11: uh fertilizer or do you use a synth? Doesn't matter?
Speaker 4: In the summertime, it was real hot. Okay, good. Those
Speaker 4: are great questions. And let me give you a quick
Speaker 4: overview of this organic fertilizers are typically things like fish
Speaker 4: and mulsion and seaweed. There are other organic folier products
Speaker 4: that you can put out. They may have other things
Speaker 4: in them, like certain kinds of plant hormones, or they
Speaker 4: may have molasses, and they are a lot of things
Speaker 4: that they can put in those products. Those typically do
Speaker 4: not burn. I guess I don't know if you spray
Speaker 4: them straight without even mixing them and water, if they
Speaker 4: would burn, but nobody would do that. If you come
Speaker 4: anywhere close to the right mixture, they are not going
Speaker 4: to burn your plant. Synthetic products are typically salt based.
Speaker 4: If they are too strong, they will burn. And when
Speaker 4: you're watering the base of a plant with the soluble
Speaker 4: synthetic liquid, that's one thing. When you're spraying that same
Speaker 4: thing on the foliage, it has to be much more diluted.
Speaker 4: And the labels on those products, if they have a
Speaker 4: label for folier application, they will give you a much
Speaker 4: diluted rate for that. In that case, you won't burn.
Speaker 4: But you've got to really watch that. You want to
Speaker 4: spray anything early in the morning when it's cool, and
Speaker 4: that gives it more time to absorb and it helps
Speaker 4: cut down on the sun baking down and contributing to burn.
Speaker 4: There's another reason we spray in the morning. Early in
Speaker 4: the morning, there's little openings on the bottom of the
Speaker 4: leaf called stomates that are open up, and when you spray,
Speaker 4: you want to spray upward from under the plant, not
Speaker 4: just on the top. A gravity will cause the spray
Speaker 4: to fall back down on the top, but make sure
Speaker 4: you coat the undersides of the leaves because you get
Speaker 4: more uptake through there. Some nutrients go into the leaves
Speaker 4: very readily. Some nutrients do not go into the leaves
Speaker 4: very readily, and so it's a matter of the right concentration.
Speaker 4: Spray early in the morning, spray upward from underneath the plant.
Speaker 4: And primarily we're using those folio sprays for the micro
Speaker 4: nutrients that a plant needs. The plant was designed to
Speaker 4: take up nutrients through the roots. That's the best way
Speaker 4: to fertilize a plant. But there are reasons to use
Speaker 4: a folier spray in addition to trying to get nutrients
Speaker 4: in Okay click, could you do both of them?
Speaker 11: I mean, would it be an advantage to using both
Speaker 11: folier in the soil fertilization.
Speaker 4: There are situations where you would do that Folier is immediate,
Speaker 4: and you know, let's say you've got iron deficiency and
Speaker 4: you're trying to get it in a leaf. It's immediate,
Speaker 4: and iron can't be moved around in the plant once
Speaker 4: it's been put into a leaf. That's why new leaves
Speaker 4: show the iron deficiency. The plant can't take it from
Speaker 4: ole leaves and move it to new leaves. So iron
Speaker 4: to be an example of one that you might want
Speaker 4: to do a folier application for to get a quick
Speaker 4: fix on the plant, but you still want to do
Speaker 4: the soil fertilization, and that's important. Another reason I occasionally
Speaker 4: will folier is when I'm checking for a deficiency. See
Speaker 4: there's a certain pattern that magnesium deficiency makes in plants,
Speaker 4: and it's a kind of a green Christmas tree in
Speaker 4: the middle of a not so green leaf. And so
Speaker 4: if I think it's magnesium, I'm mix up a little
Speaker 4: EPs and salts in water at the proper rate, spray
Speaker 4: it on the plant, and if I see a response
Speaker 4: of greening, then I know, yep, that was a magnesium
Speaker 4: deficiency because that's all magnesium self, that's all that's in
Speaker 4: epsen salt. So you can use it as a test saying, oh,
Speaker 4: I need to add more magnesium to my soil too. Now, okay, well,
Speaker 4: thank you for information. I hope that wasn't confusing.
Speaker 10: No, it wasn't.
Speaker 4: Thanks a lot, all right, sir, thank you for the call.
Speaker 4: I appreciate you very much. Good to talk to you.
Speaker 4: That's a good question too. By the way, let's see
Speaker 4: here I did want to mention. Nelson Plant Food has
Speaker 4: plant food in jars. Now, you know about the bags
Speaker 4: of fertilizer. You know we talk about all the time,
Speaker 4: this low and easy, it's the slow release nutrient for summertime,
Speaker 4: last months. But they also have these jars you need
Speaker 4: to buy, the nutri Star jars, hibiscus and flowering tropicals,
Speaker 4: the indoor plant nutri Star, there's the color Star. They
Speaker 4: all come in jars.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: You can refill those jars at local retailers. There's twelve
Speaker 4: that I'm aware of. There's twelve different local retailers that
Speaker 4: carry Nelson product jar refill stations. So you take your
Speaker 4: old plastic jar in. Rather than buying more plastic and
Speaker 4: putting that in the environment, you take your old jar in.
Speaker 4: You go up there, you pull the handle just like
Speaker 4: you're buying peanuts at a grocery store. You know how
Speaker 4: they have those little pool handles and you can refill
Speaker 4: things or fillip bags. You do that and it's much
Speaker 4: more economical way to buy fertilizer. U Plus, it saves
Speaker 4: the issue with that plastic all brings. So just a
Speaker 4: little tip if you love those Nelson products, they are
Speaker 4: available a jar refill stations, and if you send us
Speaker 4: an email here guard Line just some information on different
Speaker 4: places that have it'd be glad to point you to one,
Speaker 4: because I think that's a great, just makes sense, good
Speaker 4: way to go. Well, we're I hear the music. That
Speaker 4: means I've got to shut up here pretty quick. Marty
Speaker 4: and Fairfield. Sorry, we're able to get to you this hour.
Speaker 4: If you are able to hang on, we'll get to
Speaker 4: your next hour. If you need to hang up and
Speaker 4: call back, we'll get you put to the front of
Speaker 4: the line. I appreciate you calling it. I just want
Speaker 4: to remind you that it is the time of the
Speaker 4: year when we are planning our cool season actually warm season,
Speaker 4: butchells to fall and still warm season flowers for the
Speaker 4: fall garden. So don't stop piming just because it's getting hot.
Speaker 1: Welcome to kat r h Garden Line with Scamp Richards.
Speaker 4: Just watch him as a sad welcome back, Welcome back
Speaker 4: to the Guardline. Good to have you back with us.
Speaker 4: We are looking forward to visiting with you for right now,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna get away from the phones just for a
Speaker 4: little bit, and uh, I wanna talk about a couple
Speaker 4: of different things. I have a you know, we've noticed
Speaker 4: a little bit of a damage to our homes and
Speaker 4: our trees during these storms, right and I say a
Speaker 4: little bit, uh, you know, tongue in cheek. It's been
Speaker 4: devastating and people without power, family members of mine. Both
Speaker 4: of the last two storms where they knocked out the
Speaker 4: power seemed like they were the last one to get
Speaker 4: back on and they went like over a week each time.
Speaker 4: What happens when you got a refrigerator full of food?
Speaker 4: What happens when you have a work from home job
Speaker 4: and you got to work. You need a generator. And
Speaker 4: that's what people are doing right now. It is unprecedented
Speaker 4: the number of people that are looking for Okay, that's
Speaker 4: enough of this. I've got to get a generator to
Speaker 4: do this. And when I look out on the market,
Speaker 4: I see a lot of products out there and a
Speaker 4: lot of companies out there, and like any industry, I
Speaker 4: don't care what it is, carpentry, plumbing, gardening, anything like that,
Speaker 4: you got people that know what they're doing or doing
Speaker 4: a good job, and then you got people that are not.
Speaker 4: And I would like to help you as you are
Speaker 4: considering getting a generator with just some basic things that
Speaker 4: you need to know, basic things that you may need
Speaker 4: to ask the person that you're going to purchase that from.
Speaker 4: And I've asked I'm looking for an expert here, and
Speaker 4: I've asked Joey Davis from Quality Home Products to come
Speaker 4: on the show for me and let's talk about having
Speaker 4: success with a quality generator for you. Joey, are you there?
Speaker 2: I am, Yes, sir, I've been waiting here and ready
Speaker 2: to talk.
Speaker 4: Well, thanks for patiently waiting on us. I did want
Speaker 4: to have you on because there's a lot of information
Speaker 4: and a lot of it you've made me aware of
Speaker 4: as we've talked and had our conversation. But I would
Speaker 4: just like to kind of let people know some things.
Speaker 4: You know, we're not of course, we're not here just
Speaker 4: to talk about y'all's products. Of course, I don't know
Speaker 4: anybody that is more knowledgeable about the overall world of
Speaker 4: generators and what's out there and what happens than you. Now, boy,
Speaker 4: has this ever been? Has this ever been? Some doozy
Speaker 4: storms that we've had? Right with the past storm and
Speaker 4: I can't remember what they called that storm, but it
Speaker 4: wasn't a hurricane, but then Hurricane Barrel that came through.
Speaker 4: I bet you guys have noticed a little bit of
Speaker 4: interest in generators.
Speaker 2: Oh man, Yeah, that is an understatement of all understatements.
Speaker 5: It has just been crazy and you know the outages
Speaker 5: that occurred when over three million people were without power,
Speaker 5: and you know, many folks in Houston have generators these days.
Speaker 5: So we were just completely inundated with calls Monday and
Speaker 5: really ever since then. But the problem was is that
Speaker 5: even though we have the most sophisticated phone system available,
Speaker 5: we were literally getting thousands and thousands of calls an hour,
Speaker 5: and there was there's no phone system in the world
Speaker 5: that can handle that kind of thing. The biggest issue
Speaker 5: was it wasn't just our clients that were calling in.
Speaker 5: You know, the majority of clients coming in and some
Speaker 5: of them leading long voice fails. They were what's called
Speaker 5: generator orphans. In other words, after the winter storm of
Speaker 5: twenty one, there were three hundred and ninety two new
Speaker 5: generator companies that sprung up in Houston.
Speaker 4: Now that's say that number again new company. That's like
Speaker 4: when a hailstorm comes through, roofers appear out of nowhere.
Speaker 2: It is exactly like that.
Speaker 5: And the bad thing was these are a post office
Speaker 5: fox companies in other words, they're oftentimes are out of state,
Speaker 5: they have no office here even But what they would
Speaker 5: do is they would contact local electricians, local plumbers and
Speaker 5: get them to represent them and selling and installing generators. Well,
Speaker 5: the problem with that is that you don't know who
Speaker 5: is actually installing your generator. And it is imperative that
Speaker 5: the people that are installing your generator or servicing your
Speaker 5: generator are factory training, factory trained technicians. If not, your
Speaker 5: warranty is null and void from from the get go.
Speaker 4: So we are you're warranty. Yeah, your warranty on the
Speaker 4: equipment is not invoid. If it's not properly according to code.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right. Any code violation whatsoever, it's.
Speaker 4: Null and void.
Speaker 5: And the reality is, you know, we've always used our
Speaker 5: own w two employees they're all all of our service
Speaker 5: techts or factory trained up in Wisconsin for either Cola
Speaker 5: or Generat, so they know what they're doing. But unfortunately,
Speaker 5: this mass influx of you know, carpetbaggers or everyone want
Speaker 5: to put it. They come in after every event like this,
Speaker 5: whether it be the winter storm of twenty one, you know,
Speaker 5: any hurricane that we've.
Speaker 2: Had in the past.
Speaker 5: You know, these these groups, and I'm not going to
Speaker 5: cast dispersions on them, but they come in and they
Speaker 5: you know, they just make money and they go away.
Speaker 2: But what happens is.
Speaker 4: Well that's how that's how it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it really is.
Speaker 5: So those generators are not maintained and might they have
Speaker 5: to be maintained A to keep your warranty intact and
Speaker 5: b just to make sure that they're going to be
Speaker 5: ready when we have an event like this.
Speaker 4: Well, I would say another thing is making sure you
Speaker 4: get a generator that does what you need it to do.
Speaker 4: And I'd like you to talk a little bit. First
Speaker 4: of all, would you mind addressing the issue with the
Speaker 4: portable versus the standby generators. What's the difference and what
Speaker 4: would you use one for? What would you use the
Speaker 4: other one? For so people can kind of think through
Speaker 4: what it is that they might need.
Speaker 2: Sure, And that's a great question.
Speaker 5: First of all, I want to say that, you know,
Speaker 5: growing up in Houston in the sixties, only the hyper
Speaker 5: wealthy people had central AC. Most people had, you know,
Speaker 5: the window units and that was their air conditioning. And
Speaker 5: you know, now, of course every bitt home is being built,
Speaker 5: they all have central AC. It's much the same in
Speaker 5: the generator industry. You know, people usually start out with
Speaker 5: a portable generator that can service portionents.
Speaker 2: Over your home and it's better than nothing.
Speaker 5: But the stand by systems that we sell and other
Speaker 5: companies sell as well, those are set up to automatically
Speaker 5: come on the event of an outage and for you
Speaker 5: not to have to do anything.
Speaker 2: You don't have to worry about there being code violations
Speaker 2: by a portable unit is set.
Speaker 5: You know, the portable units, they are great in a pinch,
Speaker 5: they do have pretty severe limitations and really the.
Speaker 2: Biggest thing is is that they're very dangerous unless you
Speaker 2: really follow.
Speaker 5: Proper protocol on those. So they produce car outside just
Speaker 5: like these stand by systems. However, the standby systems are
Speaker 5: permitted projects and they have to meet national fire safety codes.
Speaker 2: They have to meet local electrical and.
Speaker 5: Plumbing codes as well as national ones, so you know
Speaker 5: you're safe with one of those. You know, people just
Speaker 5: don't really know how to use a portable generator, and
Speaker 5: so you know, we'd really like to talk about that
Speaker 5: that if you've got to use a portable generator, you
Speaker 5: have to make it where you're not going to have
Speaker 5: an accumulation of carbon monoxide in your garage or inside
Speaker 5: your home or anything like that.
Speaker 4: And that's good, good, Yeah, that's really good information. Joey,
Speaker 4: We're gonna I have to hit a little break right
Speaker 4: here before we go to the next segment, but when
Speaker 4: we come back, I'd like to land in the standby
Speaker 4: generators and give people some ideas what they need to
Speaker 4: know about a standby generator, from choosing one to hooking
Speaker 4: it up. I don't know if we can do all
Speaker 4: that that past, but we'll give it away. All right.
Speaker 4: I'll be right back with you in just a moment.
Speaker 2: That sounds great, Seah, thank you very much.
Speaker 4: All right, welcome back to Garden Line. I want to
Speaker 4: jump right back into our interview with Joey Davis. Were
Speaker 4: picking his brain about some things regarding generators and Joey,
Speaker 4: you know, it probably would take an hour if you
Speaker 4: hurried to try to explain stand by generators and all
Speaker 4: the ways that they can work and the things they do,
Speaker 4: and how you size them and all that. But kind
Speaker 4: of in a nutshell, I was really surprised to learn
Speaker 4: that you can set up a stand by generator. Chris
Speaker 4: is going to come on automatically, but you can set
Speaker 4: it up to where it prioritizes certain things in your
Speaker 4: home that you wanted to prioritize, or you can set
Speaker 4: it up to just take care of everything. So would
Speaker 4: you talk just briefly about that?
Speaker 2: Sure, I'd love to.
Speaker 5: So the way these systems are these days that you
Speaker 5: should not always be the case, but the way they
Speaker 5: are now for the most part, they're what's called managed
Speaker 5: load transfer and then enables you to get into a
Speaker 5: generator that powers your whole house and not necessarily rated
Speaker 5: to power your whole house. And what I mean by
Speaker 5: that with manage so transfer, which is literally like ninety
Speaker 5: five percent of our projects and most other companies.
Speaker 2: As well, it acts like a full load transfer.
Speaker 5: Like you alluded to there, but specific two twenty items
Speaker 5: like air conditioning units, dryers, ovens, could be electric water heaters,
Speaker 5: that sort of thing. They're still on the generator and
Speaker 5: as long as you don't use everything at the same time,
Speaker 5: those won't be turning off. And the way that color
Speaker 5: and generact manages it's a little bit different. A color
Speaker 5: just turns off the least important item. If you have
Speaker 5: multiple things managed, a generat will turn off all of
Speaker 5: the items and then start turning them back on in
Speaker 5: thirty minutes. But literally it's the way to go. I mean,
Speaker 5: full load transfer is certainly still available, but oftentimes on
Speaker 5: even a normal sized house, you're up into what's called
Speaker 5: a liquid cool generator to.
Speaker 2: Do a full load transfer. And what I mean by that.
Speaker 5: Yea, oh yeah, they're car range. They mean literally they're
Speaker 5: four to twelve cylinder, they have radiators. They literally operate just.
Speaker 2: Like a car engine.
Speaker 5: So there is some benefits for those, namely they're a
Speaker 5: little quieter. But to your point, the price point is significant.
Speaker 5: The jump between the air cools, which are like motorcycle engines,
Speaker 5: up into the liquid cools. So you know, it's kind
Speaker 5: of a misnomer to think that when you have one
Speaker 5: of these systems, if there's one thing more important than
Speaker 5: the other.
Speaker 2: However, we do prioritize.
Speaker 5: Managed items because like I said, on color, it would
Speaker 5: only turn off the least important item if there's more
Speaker 5: than one, and on GENERAC when they after thirty minutes,
Speaker 5: the you know, the least important, the most important one
Speaker 5: comes back on.
Speaker 2: Now that all being said, we flat out and.
Speaker 5: Never have that happen because we have very specific design
Speaker 5: criteria that we employ to make sure that we don't
Speaker 5: have what's called a management situation unfold where things are
Speaker 5: turning off.
Speaker 2: So we don't just design to code. You know, everything
Speaker 2: is based on National Electric Code.
Speaker 5: There's a very specific formulatic equation that we use to
Speaker 5: design these in terms of how big of a generator
Speaker 5: you can get or how small you can go down.
Speaker 5: We have very specific rules about that, such as the
Speaker 5: AC rule, And I'm not trying to get into all specifics,
Speaker 5: but it's our checks and balances to make sure that
Speaker 5: things aren't turning off, so there's nothing go ahead and
Speaker 5: there's nothing scary about these management of transfer systems. On
Speaker 5: my house, the only thing that I'm managing is the
Speaker 5: AC and I'll never even know that it's managed other
Speaker 5: than I designed it. That way, and the reason for
Speaker 5: that is those other two rules outside of code that
Speaker 5: we use.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I know, you guys do a lot of
Speaker 4: things that are above and beyond compared to the standards
Speaker 4: for the industry. For example, you you have all your
Speaker 4: like your electricians are in house, your plumbers are in house,
Speaker 4: so you don't have to contract out to other people
Speaker 4: and try to get everybody to show up at the
Speaker 4: right time and do what the absolutely I mean you
Speaker 4: handle Yeah, you handle the codes and stuff like if
Speaker 4: you've got to get permission from the city, which you do,
Speaker 4: you'll handle that. And so it's like the homeowner, that's
Speaker 4: a that's a big relief to know that that is
Speaker 4: just all being taken care of. And I think I
Speaker 4: like that that load management because it allows you to
Speaker 4: get a generator does what you needed to do without
Speaker 4: buying a generator that is just humongous and expensive.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 4: And another thing that yeah, another thing I think that
Speaker 4: that is important. There are a number of questions that
Speaker 4: people may need to ask when they're going about that,
Speaker 4: And because our time is too short today, what I've done,
Speaker 4: folks is I've posted the garden Line Facebook page. Go
Speaker 4: to the garden Line Facebook page, and I've posted there
Speaker 4: are a lot of questions to ask, but I posted
Speaker 4: nine questions in a helpful checklist, and just look at those,
Speaker 4: think through them, and as you're out shopping for a generator,
Speaker 4: those are some of the things you need to ask people.
Speaker 4: So we'll save the time by just sending Guardline Facebook page.
Speaker 4: It's right up there. It's very very helpful, and I
Speaker 4: appreciate you know, the knowledge and stuff that you guys bring,
Speaker 4: because I had no idea how how much information is
Speaker 4: really helpful in order to make a good decision to
Speaker 4: not only get the most out of your dollar, but
Speaker 4: to understand what is and what's not included, because you
Speaker 4: guys include things that some companies may not tell you
Speaker 4: aren't included, and then later you find out, well, you
Speaker 4: know that that's not included in what we're doing. That
Speaker 4: would be an extra charge that makes our generator looks cheaper,
Speaker 4: but in the bottom line, it really isn't.
Speaker 2: Well that's still very true.
Speaker 5: I mean, oftentimes people come to one of our reps
Speaker 5: or myself and say, hey, you guys are more expensive
Speaker 5: than X y z or ZYX.
Speaker 2: But in an apples to apples comparison to.
Speaker 5: Your point, including things that they really need, like cell
Speaker 5: based constant monitoring.
Speaker 4: Is that tell about that real briefly? That tell about that?
Speaker 4: That is fascinating, Yeah, it really is.
Speaker 5: So it's like having an iPhone on the generator and
Speaker 5: even if your powers out and the generator won't start,
Speaker 5: we can still communicate to it. We either know what's
Speaker 5: wrong with it and we need to come out with
Speaker 5: certain parts, or more often than not, we can actually
Speaker 5: get them going remotely by doing firmware updates or clearing
Speaker 5: fault codes, things of that nature. It's huge, it may
Speaker 5: it's made a huge for us and our failure rates
Speaker 5: which are really really small compared to.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the next level down, which we see in
Speaker 4: the industry a lot is what is below cell bas
Speaker 4: Wi Fi. How do people say they can talk to
Speaker 4: their generator but not really?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's it's what's called free Wi Fi and monitoring.
Speaker 5: It actually comes on board with all generators. And I
Speaker 5: can't say, because I know Kohler and generator like that.
Speaker 5: There might be some minor players that don't even include
Speaker 5: the Wi Fi. But that's just a nifty app on
Speaker 5: the homeowner's phone. They can see how many hours their
Speaker 5: generator has been running. They can remotely turn it on
Speaker 5: or off, but that does nothing for us. We want
Speaker 5: to be able to have real time conversation with generators
Speaker 5: and the only way to do that is with this
Speaker 5: cell based constant monitoring. And that is monetize for other companies.
Speaker 2: It's just part of the deal with us. We just
Speaker 2: make sure that our generators work. That's our calling cards,
Speaker 2: so to speak. Because these are big investments. You want
Speaker 2: to have not just to lead anchor in your backyard.
Speaker 2: You want to have something that actually functions the way
Speaker 2: that we tell people are going to function.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm. That's good. That's good. Well, in addition to
Speaker 4: like making sure a company is gonna well, asking if
Speaker 4: they'll do will you contact you know, will you contact
Speaker 4: HOA or cities? Are you you know that all the
Speaker 4: rags you're talking about. Will you come out and do
Speaker 4: a pad? I know I've seen generators where the pad
Speaker 4: is thin, likely to break in our moving Houston soils.
Speaker 4: You guys can build a bigger pad so if someone's
Speaker 4: going by with a lawnmower, the pat sticks out so
Speaker 4: you don't bang your generator and do damage that way too,
Speaker 4: And there's a lot of little small things like that
Speaker 4: that I think are important.
Speaker 5: They really are, you know, and they're important to us
Speaker 5: because we really care about our clientele at at the
Speaker 5: end of day day. I mean, that's why we build
Speaker 5: the oversized concrete slabs. We don't put these on what's
Speaker 5: called the gen pad, which is just a very lightweight
Speaker 5: concrete the same size of the generator, and then there's
Speaker 5: no steel. It's just a very short, lightweight pad, which
Speaker 5: is easier. But we don't do the things the easy way,
Speaker 5: you know. We'll form up with two by six's, you know,
Speaker 5: an oversized pad six inches larger than the generator all around,
Speaker 5: and then let that cure break the forms off and
Speaker 5: then you have a real sturdy piece of concrete that
Speaker 5: these generators are anchor bolted too.
Speaker 2: So you know, these are vibrating pieces of equipment.
Speaker 5: They're more like motorcycles than anything else on the air
Speaker 5: cools and then car engines. So those vibrates, you want
Speaker 5: them to be firmly affixed to something really bulky and
Speaker 5: heavy just to keep them from vibrating.
Speaker 2: And plus it cuts down on the noise factor as well.
Speaker 4: Right, and they can some of them can be powered
Speaker 4: by natural gas or whatnot. And every time you add,
Speaker 4: you know, here we have electricity, now ride natural gas. Uh.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of codes, and there's a lot of permits,
Speaker 4: and there's a lot of things that have to happen
Speaker 4: because this thing is set up to where it's set up.
Speaker 4: And I was surprised at how fast they come on. Uh,
Speaker 4: you know, power goes out, and how fast will one
Speaker 4: of these kick on when it well?
Speaker 5: A colar A coler waits four seconds to determine if
Speaker 5: it's an actual outage. A generator waits, generate GENERAC waits
Speaker 5: ten seconds. Both of them then take seven seconds to
Speaker 5: spool up to sixty herbs, so seventeen total seconds for generat,
Speaker 5: eleven seconds for colar.
Speaker 2: So it is a very brief period.
Speaker 5: And then when the power comes back on the power
Speaker 5: company it absolutely doesn't just turn the generator off. It
Speaker 5: waits until the power company is delivering an exact sixty
Speaker 5: heard sign wave for ten full seconds.
Speaker 4: Then they tell us why that's important, tell us why
Speaker 4: that's important.
Speaker 5: Because everybody's experienced from the power comes back on in
Speaker 5: your house, it's on off, on, off, on off. That
Speaker 5: is so destructive to motherboards and all the appliances that
Speaker 5: we have, and see our TVs.
Speaker 2: I mean everything has got a.
Speaker 5: Computer in it these days, and that dirty energy is
Speaker 5: what it de fries so many people's washing machines and dryers.
Speaker 5: You know, the electronics section this acts like a firewall
Speaker 5: against that dirty energy. So your generator generator bay one
Speaker 5: for fifteen or twenty minutes after everybody else's lives come on,
Speaker 5: but that whole time it's protecting you and your electrical
Speaker 5: system and appliances.
Speaker 4: See, these are things that I wouldn't have known. I
Speaker 4: know a lot of people wouldn't know. And I think,
Speaker 4: you know, kind of a bottom line deal here is
Speaker 4: call and talk to people, get the information. Call around.
Speaker 4: But you guys are from quality. Definitely include quality because
Speaker 4: what you're going to find, and this is true when
Speaker 4: you buy anything. You know, you go to buy a
Speaker 4: Chevrolet and then you go over to the Ford dealership
Speaker 4: and you hear and you hear things that you didn't
Speaker 4: hear at the other place.
Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 4: I think they need to get the whole package and
Speaker 4: then make their decision which would company they want to
Speaker 4: go with, which what generator they want to buy and stuff,
Speaker 4: but you don't know what you don't know. And that's
Speaker 4: one reason, Joey, I appreciate you coming on today so that,
Speaker 4: you know, we just get kind of an intro to
Speaker 4: some of the things that people may not have been
Speaker 4: aware of. And I really appreciate it. We could talk
Speaker 4: to you for a day. I mean, there's a lot
Speaker 4: of more information, but go to my facebook page, Guardenline
Speaker 4: facebook page, look at the questions we had here. I've
Speaker 4: got a link to Quality Home on it. If you
Speaker 4: want to, you know, save that link. I know a
Speaker 4: lot of people are buying generators right now. It is
Speaker 4: crazy the number of people that have said that's enough
Speaker 4: these last two storms. I need a generator. And depending
Speaker 4: on what you need, and the folks at Quality Home
Speaker 4: they'll tell you, I mean, if you don't need one
Speaker 4: of these standbys, if what you're wanting to do a
Speaker 4: portable will do, they'll tell you that. But the bottom
Speaker 4: line is get your infrom so that your dollars are
Speaker 4: well spent and then when the problem comes, you've got
Speaker 4: the equipment and the setup that's needed to do what
Speaker 4: you needed to do. Joey, I've run past my break here.
Speaker 4: Thank you, so much for being on. Sorry to have
Speaker 4: to cut off so fast now, it's very very okay.
Speaker 5: I'm really glad you mentioned that checklist, you know, speaking
Speaker 5: about the fact that we don't use subcontractors.
Speaker 2: It's really not specific to us, but that's huge.
Speaker 5: You don't want to use a customer using contractors for
Speaker 5: obvious reasons.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much.
Speaker 4: You bet well, Yeah, thank you. Good to see good
Speaker 4: to talk to you again. Hey, we're going to be
Speaker 4: right back. Take a little break here, and when we
Speaker 4: come back, we'll be back with your gardening question. So
Speaker 4: call in seven one three two one two fifty eight
Speaker 4: seventy four. Welcome, more, welcome, Welcome back to garden Line.
Speaker 4: God to have you with us. I hope that was
Speaker 4: helpful for you. I know, I'm telling you the number
Speaker 4: of generators being sold right now. And I just like
Speaker 4: anything any business, you get out there and you don't
Speaker 4: know what you need to ask, You don't maybe know
Speaker 4: the things that are available or not of available, or
Speaker 4: thing you know, it's the whole deal. I hope that
Speaker 4: was helpful for you, guys. I certainly do. Uh. We
Speaker 4: are back now, ready to take your calls. Seven one
Speaker 4: three two one two five eight seven, four, seven, one
Speaker 4: three two one two fifty eight seventy four. Give us
Speaker 4: a call and we'll visit with you about the things
Speaker 4: that are of interest to you. One of the things
Speaker 4: that happens, you know, we talked about all the rain
Speaker 4: we've been getting, and when that happens to a clay soil,
Speaker 4: especially certain types of clays types we have here, they
Speaker 4: swell up, they actually get bigger, uh, and then when
Speaker 4: it gets dry, they shrink down, getting smaller. That's why
Speaker 4: you see these cracks in the yard. If you have
Speaker 4: you ever been out in the backyard of a certain
Speaker 4: kinds of clay soils where when it's really hot and dry,
Speaker 4: their cracks big enough to lose a small child in.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's an exaggeration, but you know what I'm
Speaker 4: talking about. That's a shrunken soil. And what happens when
Speaker 4: it gets bigger, smaller, bigger, smaller. It cracks sidewalk, It
Speaker 4: cracks foundations, it cracks driveways. Fix my slab. Foundation repair
Speaker 4: is an X. They are experts in properly assessing and
Speaker 4: repairing a foundation. Now. Ty Strickland has been doing this
Speaker 4: for twenty three years. It's a local, small, small business.
Speaker 4: They have the experience that you want. And the thing
Speaker 4: I like about Fix my Slab and Tie is that
Speaker 4: they make sure when they tell you they're going to
Speaker 4: be there, they're on time. Secondly, they price things fair.
Speaker 4: They're going to make sure you get a reasonable fair
Speaker 4: price for the work that they're going to do. And
Speaker 4: then finally they fix it right. You know, Tie is
Speaker 4: a native Estonian, fifth generation Texan. He lives here, he
Speaker 4: knows this area, he knows our soils. If you tell
Speaker 4: him you're a guardline listener, they'll give you a free
Speaker 4: estimate on what it would take. Let me just say this,
Speaker 4: if you see a crack in the brick, if you
Speaker 4: see a crack in the sheet rock inside, or if
Speaker 4: doors are suddenly sticking that didn't stay before something is moved,
Speaker 4: have them come out, do that estimate, take a look
Speaker 4: at it, see what's going on and what might be needed,
Speaker 4: and then you can make your decision. But don't put
Speaker 4: it off. It doesn't get better, it only gets worse,
Speaker 4: and the issues become worse, in many cases more expensive.
Speaker 4: So go ahead and give them a call if you
Speaker 4: see those kinds of symptoms two eight one, two five
Speaker 4: five forty nine forty nine, two eight one two five
Speaker 4: five forty nine, forty nine, or go to the website
Speaker 4: fix myslab dot com Fix myslab dot com. We've talked
Speaker 4: about a number of things today, and I was mentioning
Speaker 4: earlier that slowly fertilizers are important for the summertime because
Speaker 4: they gradually release the nitrogen over time. So when you
Speaker 4: apply them now, they're going to feed all the way
Speaker 4: up into your fall fertilization that three months, some even
Speaker 4: four months out there are going to do that. That's
Speaker 4: not the only way that you can fertilize, though. You
Speaker 4: can take an immediate release fertilizer and you can apply
Speaker 4: it in small doses over a period of time and
Speaker 4: achieve a similar result. And an example would be sweet green.
Speaker 4: Sweet green is a nitroposs product. It's a molasses based product,
Speaker 4: and all organic gardeners know that using molasses stimulates by
Speaker 4: providing carbon stimulates beneficial bacteria and microbes in the soil,
Speaker 4: and that's important. So sweet grain is going to dissolve
Speaker 4: away by the way. The product smells wonderful. That's what
Speaker 4: it's called sweet green, and it dissolves a way into
Speaker 4: the soil. So what I would do is. I would
Speaker 4: take a bag of sweet Green, it's eleven percent nitrogen.
Speaker 4: I would put about half of it on now, let's
Speaker 4: say five pounds right now, and then I would wait
Speaker 4: six to eight weeks and do that again. And by
Speaker 4: doing that, you take an immediate release fertilizer and you
Speaker 4: spread it out over time. I mean, if you wanted to,
Speaker 4: you could put it in three applications out there. But
Speaker 4: sweet grain, if you're looking for a natural based product,
Speaker 4: if you're looking for something that is going to be
Speaker 4: stimulating to the soil microbes that are in the soil,
Speaker 4: that's a product that I think you need to take
Speaker 4: a good look at. And sweet green is you know,
Speaker 4: it's widely available at a lot of different places. I mean,
Speaker 4: you're going to find sweet Green at Ace Hardware stores,
Speaker 4: for example, Ace Hardware all over the place. It's not
Speaker 4: hard finding one of the forty Ace Hardware stores here
Speaker 4: in the area. By the way, when you're in there,
Speaker 4: if you get your sweet Green, remember that this rain
Speaker 4: is also bringing on mosquitos, and when you go into Ace,
Speaker 4: you're going to find everything you need for mosquitos too.
Speaker 4: Mosquitos it just takes some a number of few days
Speaker 4: and they can go. Some types especially, can go through
Speaker 4: their whole life cycle from an egg to a larva,
Speaker 4: to a pupa to an adult, and now they're flying
Speaker 4: around biting you when you're trying to sit outside and
Speaker 4: enjoy your patio in the evening. Well need mosquito dunks.
Speaker 4: Those are the things we put out in water to
Speaker 4: prevent the larvae from growing up. Do you need a
Speaker 4: mosquito repellent? Do you need a fogging machine? What do
Speaker 4: you need for that? They've got it. While you're an ace,
Speaker 4: Make suring get fire ant bait because fire ants are
Speaker 4: also popping to the surface now as they build up
Speaker 4: their soil nests in order to escape soggy wet conditions
Speaker 4: down low, and you can see where they are with
Speaker 4: a bait. You don't have to treat mounds. In fact,
Speaker 4: you shouldn't just treat mounds. You treat all the area
Speaker 4: and your properties. You can go a wide area around amound,
Speaker 4: but those workers are out there feeding, and with a bait,
Speaker 4: the workers will bring it back, feed at the colony,
Speaker 4: feeded the queen, and it shuts everything down. They work
Speaker 4: a little slower than an individual mound treatment, but they
Speaker 4: work longer than an individual mound treatment and always start
Speaker 4: with a bait and then go to the individual treatments
Speaker 4: for any that might have escaped the bait application. ACE
Speaker 4: has got both both the both the bait, both the
Speaker 4: individual mound treatment. They have everything you need. ACE is
Speaker 4: the place for everything you need to have a beautiful,
Speaker 4: enjoyable garden, lawn patio area so that you can get
Speaker 4: outside and enjoy what you've created out in your landscape.
Speaker 4: Our phone number if you'd like to give us call
Speaker 4: seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four
Speaker 4: and we're going to go to the phones now and
Speaker 4: talk to Marty. Marty, welcome to Garden Line, and thanks
Speaker 4: for being such a patient caller. I know we've kind
Speaker 4: of done the yo yo thing with you, like hang on,
Speaker 4: go away, hang on, go away.
Speaker 12: Okay, No, it was very interesting. I'm glad you brought
Speaker 12: him on that. Yeah, it was awesome. It was awesome
Speaker 12: to listen to it. No, don't ever apologize. That's okay. Hey,
Speaker 12: I have a sideyard that I really don't go over
Speaker 12: very often except to mow, and it's been it's where
Speaker 12: the swell is.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 12: They built the house twenty three years ago, and the
Speaker 12: swell where the water runs out to the street has
Speaker 12: been sinking and it has gotten a lot of Virginia
Speaker 12: button weed. So celsius is not my answer, and I've
Speaker 12: sprayed round up around the stepping stones where it comes up,
Speaker 12: and that kills it, but it also leaves, you know,
Speaker 12: blank areas where other weeds will grow. So this whole side,
Speaker 12: I'm thinking that I'd like to build it up with
Speaker 12: some type of soil. If you could tell me what
Speaker 12: type to put in, like an all natural garden where
Speaker 12: you can grow some flowers to be cut for the house,
Speaker 12: just seeds and daffodils and things that are pretty and
Speaker 12: bulbs and just a lot of different plants with a
Speaker 12: little walkway down the middle. So I'm wondering if you
Speaker 12: could help me define number two, number one, how to
Speaker 12: kill the large area button weed, and number two what
Speaker 12: type of bulk soil to bring in. If you need
Speaker 12: to put me on hold for a break, that's okay, okay.
Speaker 4: Well I think we do, and when we come back,
Speaker 4: I'll give you the answers that you've asked for. Thank you.
Speaker 4: That's a very good question, folks. Will be right back
Speaker 4: from break and with Marty's question and the answer to
Speaker 4: Virginia button weed and proper soils. Welcome back to garden Line.
Speaker 4: Welcome back. We are going to continue our question with Marty. Marty,
Speaker 4: you said something about Celsius. Did you say it didn't work?
Speaker 4: It hasn't worked for you.
Speaker 12: No, it's just too expensive to put over on this side.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 12: I just sent you an email too to show you
Speaker 12: what I was looking at. If you can pull that.
Speaker 4: Ut, see if I can find that while we're talking here. Yeah,
Speaker 4: Celsius is the best for killing it, but I unders
Speaker 4: that the good new products come with big price tags.
Speaker 4: So you're going to take that area. You want to
Speaker 4: get rid of all everything in the area so you
Speaker 4: can put kind of gardening stuff in there, right, Yes,
Speaker 4: what you're saying, Okay.
Speaker 12: Yes, I want to build it up with soil, Go ahead, Yeah.
Speaker 4: Hoeing digging it out as an option, Spraying it is
Speaker 4: probably the better option. Using a product that kills everything
Speaker 4: would probably be the best bet because you can have
Speaker 4: a mix of the button we eat and I can
Speaker 4: see the Saint Augustine and other things in that area,
Speaker 4: and then bringing in the soil after that. You don't
Speaker 4: want stuff to push through the new soil you put in,
Speaker 4: so I always like to get a clean slate before
Speaker 4: I start. A quality saw mix you could use. You've
Speaker 4: got a couple of ways that you can go. You
Speaker 4: can contact, you know a place like let's say a
Speaker 4: Nature's Way up in the Conro area, and I think
Speaker 4: that's somewhat close to you. There probably the closest place
Speaker 4: I would I would send you to. They can deliver
Speaker 4: so a mixes and just tell them I need a
Speaker 4: top soil type mix to go in that area. If
Speaker 4: you want more of a bed mix, you can certainly
Speaker 4: do that. That's going to have a lot of organic
Speaker 4: matter in it, like a rose soil would just be
Speaker 4: one example of a bad mix. But just know that
Speaker 4: those are going to sink down over time, just like
Speaker 4: potting soil in a flower pot each year gets lower
Speaker 4: and lower as it decomposes away. So you would need
Speaker 4: to come up a little extra high. But with a
Speaker 4: top soil it would tend to hold its you know,
Speaker 4: it would tend to not sink down as much. Either
Speaker 4: way would be fine to go, so top soil I
Speaker 4: probably would. How much how high do you want to
Speaker 4: come up there?
Speaker 12: Well, it's really Louise is. He knows me from yours
Speaker 12: gone by the ground up. So yeah, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 12: just want to want to build it up, and.
Speaker 5: I can't.
Speaker 12: I can do a lot of the building in the
Speaker 12: middle and over to the fence part, but I don't
Speaker 12: want to build up too much on the house side
Speaker 12: because of the wheakholes.
Speaker 4: Yes, but I just but okay, does that area stand
Speaker 4: in water.
Speaker 10: Well?
Speaker 12: Because yes, it has gotten to that point where it
Speaker 12: has depressed so much that it is sort of standing
Speaker 12: in water, which is why the Virginia button we has
Speaker 12: taken over.
Speaker 4: Okay, so you do have the options. Number one. I
Speaker 4: don't know where the downspouts are and how that all
Speaker 4: flow works, but that'd be something to consider. But I
Speaker 4: have an area in my yard that was kind of
Speaker 4: load towards the back fence like that, and I put
Speaker 4: just a treated wood two by ten or something across
Speaker 4: there and used that as a back bed, and then
Speaker 4: I filled the whole thing in so that I could
Speaker 4: raise it up a little bit without piling soil up
Speaker 4: against the fence, which is not a good plan. But anyway,
Speaker 4: that'd be another option, not the only way to do it,
Speaker 4: for sure.
Speaker 12: Okay, And okay, And then you were going to tell
Speaker 12: me how to kill the Virginia button weed over a
Speaker 12: large area. I can't do the I can't do the
Speaker 12: till Okay.
Speaker 4: I can't do type Life of type products will do it.
Speaker 4: And I know people have their opinions about rund up
Speaker 4: or whether they want to use it or not, that's
Speaker 4: up to you. But Glavas type products kill the grass,
Speaker 4: They killed the broad leaf weeds. They kill a lot
Speaker 4: of things. And the roundup, Yeah, that round up is
Speaker 4: an example. There's there is a cleanup is another brand.
Speaker 4: There's a whole bunch of brands of glyphas now. In fact,
Speaker 4: roundup has actually moved on past glyphasate and most of
Speaker 4: the round up you see in garden centers now is
Speaker 4: a different ingredient than glyphasate. Silk all round up, confusing
Speaker 4: is all get out. But yeah, you'd have to. That's
Speaker 4: why I say glifeasay because it you know, you would
Speaker 4: find it somewhere else. There are other things. I mean,
Speaker 4: you could spray a broad leaf weed killer in there,
Speaker 4: and then you could spray a grass killer in there,
Speaker 4: but then you're putting two products instead of just one.
Speaker 4: But if you the Virginia button weed isn't going to
Speaker 4: come back from underground, So I don't know if you
Speaker 4: have somebody that you know come in there and scrape
Speaker 4: it all off, that's another option you could do. Saint
Speaker 4: Augustine doesn't live underground either. You scrape off the top
Speaker 4: and it's gone.
Speaker 12: I'm a little old for all that.
Speaker 4: Well that's okay, that's okay, I'll just okay, I'll yeah,
Speaker 4: you need you need some grandkids that are misbehaving, because
Speaker 4: you know, when I was growing up, when I misbehaved,
Speaker 4: I had to go pull weeds in the garden. And
Speaker 4: I'm not going to say anything other than we had
Speaker 4: the most weed free garden. And you can figure out.
Speaker 10: Why that might be.
Speaker 4: But anyway, all right, Mark, Okay, Well anyway, thank you,
Speaker 4: I recommend since you have that relationship with Louis at heirloom. Yeah,
Speaker 4: heirloom can get you through orange rock and molts. They
Speaker 4: can get you the top soil. They can get you
Speaker 4: various kinds of bed mixes too, So no heirloom heirloom soils.
Speaker 4: Louise is at a John John and Ian Ferguson are
Speaker 4: at Nature's Way, and I'm telling you both those companies.
Speaker 4: You say you a good product.
Speaker 12: All right, thank you so much.
Speaker 4: Thanks to the calling you take care of all right. Bye, okay, folks,
Speaker 4: Well that was a that was a good segment, Madam Montgomery.
Speaker 4: We weren't able to get to you this segment, but
Speaker 4: we will put you up first when we come back
Speaker 4: if you can hang on a little bit longer. Back
Speaker 4: with you as well. Appreciate you guys listening in today
Speaker 4: the Garden Line. We're here to help you solve problems.
Speaker 4: We're helping you to identify plants. We're helping you diagnose
Speaker 4: disease and insect issues, whatever kind of whatever you need,
Speaker 4: We're happy to do that. Try to point you in
Speaker 4: the right direction because you know, gardening is the best
Speaker 4: hobby that there is.
Speaker 3: It just does.
Speaker 4: I may be biased, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.
Speaker 4: It is a great hobby. So we wanted to be
Speaker 4: fun and unsuccessful.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Katie r. H. Garden Line with Skip rictor.
Speaker 4: It's just watch him as we may see.
Speaker 1: A sign.
Speaker 4: Garden Line. Welcome back. Good to have you back with us.
Speaker 4: We have got another hour to go here to that
Speaker 4: and we're happy to take your call if you've got
Speaker 4: a gardening question at seven one three two one two
Speaker 4: k t r H. We're gonna just make haste and
Speaker 4: run straight out to Montgomery, Texas to talk to Matt
Speaker 4: this hour. Hello Matt, and welcome to garden Line morning.
Speaker 10: Skip.
Speaker 2: How's it going?
Speaker 4: It's going well? How can we help the good?
Speaker 12: I got a.
Speaker 13: Having a tremendous amount of mushrooms in front yard backyards.
Speaker 13: I know with the increased rain, I mean there there,
Speaker 13: you could be a causation of it, but just didn't
Speaker 13: know if there was something in the soil. I mean,
Speaker 13: I look around. None of my neighbors have have any
Speaker 13: of the the amount of mushrooms that I'm having. And
Speaker 13: you know, as I as I as I see them,
Speaker 13: I'm pulling it up by the roots. But anything else
Speaker 13: I can be doing, treating it or just just continue
Speaker 13: to pull them up.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, we just say on mushrooms, just ignore
Speaker 4: because ninety nine point nine percent of them are not
Speaker 4: a concern. And then the mushroom itself is just the
Speaker 4: fruiting body. So you know, it's not like you would
Speaker 4: spray the mushroom or anything. Uh, It's part of nature.
Speaker 4: And when we go through these periods this last crop
Speaker 4: is because of all the rain we had and there
Speaker 4: was a little bit of a dropping temperature from all
Speaker 4: the cloudy weather and rain. We'll see another big crop
Speaker 4: of mushrooms. And we get into fall, get a little
Speaker 4: cold front in and cools off and get some rain
Speaker 4: with it. They'll be back. It's just fungi that are
Speaker 4: growing underground that when they when conditions are right, they
Speaker 4: send up their fruiting structures, and that's what we see.
Speaker 4: There's not a good spray for them anyway. Okay, aren't
Speaker 4: very good.
Speaker 13: We'll keep pulling them up.
Speaker 4: Yeah. What I like to tell people is since we
Speaker 4: can't do anything about them, get you a golf club
Speaker 4: and have some fun.
Speaker 2: Well, we pull them up and bring them to the chickens.
Speaker 4: Oh really, chickens eat them. I had never heard that one.
Speaker 4: That's good to know. I guess they're not boiled all right, man,
Speaker 4: Thanks Matt. I appreciate you Yanks. Take care. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 4: the nature is constantly a work. What we see in
Speaker 4: nature is not even scratching the surface of what's going on.
Speaker 4: Like you look at the soil and you know, clear
Speaker 4: off all the plants. Look at this soil. You say, well,
Speaker 4: that's dart right that you don't see what's going on there,
Speaker 4: But what's going on there is a whole nother world
Speaker 4: of microbes. Do you know that? Okay? Fun fact nerd
Speaker 4: alert fun fact. If you take a pinch of quality
Speaker 4: garden soil, you know rich gardens, put a pinch of it,
Speaker 4: a kidney bean sized pinch in your hand, you have
Speaker 4: literally hundreds of millions of microbes right there. If you
Speaker 4: put a little pile of soil in your palm. Sometimes
Speaker 4: you see these pictures and somebody's holding a big handful
Speaker 4: of soil. We'll put a pile half that size in
Speaker 4: your palm. You have more living things in your hand
Speaker 4: than there are people in the face of the earth.
Speaker 4: But that's soakin. For just a minute, soil is alive.
Speaker 4: There's bacteria. There's a type of bacteria that are that
Speaker 4: are beneficial to plants. There's bacteria types that fix nitrogen
Speaker 4: out of the air into a formed plants can use.
Speaker 4: There's bacteria that produce antibiotics. There's bacteria that produce and
Speaker 4: by the way, we have those as products. By the
Speaker 4: way they're available. Have you ever used an antibiotic cream
Speaker 4: on your arm? You know the the neomycin, neomix, and polysporin,
Speaker 4: those those kinds of things. Those ingredients are actually produced
Speaker 4: by soil bacteria. Now in a pharmaceutical company, they're growing
Speaker 4: them in a big vat. They're creating them in a
Speaker 4: big vat. They're not raising a bunch of bugs to
Speaker 4: make them. But soil bacteria produce those antibiotics, that kind
Speaker 4: of antibiotic. Soil bacteria produce insecticides. That's where BT comes from.
Speaker 4: It's a naturally occurring soil bacteria. That's where the BT
Speaker 4: for mosquitoes, the BT israeliensis form comes from. That's a
Speaker 4: soul type of bacteria. They're bacteria that do all kinds
Speaker 4: of things like that. There are fungi that are constantly
Speaker 4: going through breaking down stuff no other microbe can break down.
Speaker 4: We're talking about bone, we're talking about fingernail, We're talking
Speaker 4: about growing up against a rock and producing an acid
Speaker 4: to dissolve the rock and release those minerals. They're fungi
Speaker 4: that can do that stuff. They're the heavy lifters in
Speaker 4: the soil. They're just all kinds of beneficial organisms. Anyway,
Speaker 4: it's alive, so well, it's alive, and it does a
Speaker 4: lot of things to make itself better and it helps
Speaker 4: us to decompose organic matter.
Speaker 2: What.
Speaker 4: So, there's a lot of life going on out there
Speaker 4: in the landscape and we just don't think about it
Speaker 4: unless you're kind of a nerd about it like I am,
Speaker 4: and it's something you think about a lot. Uh, there
Speaker 4: is just a lot going on. That's not even getting
Speaker 4: into the arthropods that are in the soil and what
Speaker 4: they do, the earthworms in the soil and what they do.
Speaker 4: It's just it's just really really cool stuff. All right. Well,
Speaker 4: our phone number if you'd like to give us a call,
Speaker 4: we got some time here seven one three two one
Speaker 4: two kt RH seven to one three two one two
Speaker 4: kt r H and give us a call. Be happy
Speaker 4: to visit with you about the kinds of questions that
Speaker 4: you might have.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 4: These storms have knocked down a lot of trees that
Speaker 4: have led to a lot of power outages, which is
Speaker 4: what we were talking about earlier. We're talking about generators
Speaker 4: and how to pick a generator? Want to ask about
Speaker 4: a generator? H Martin spoon Moore. An Affordable Tree Service
Speaker 4: is our go to guy here on garden Line for
Speaker 4: maintaining your trees. And right now, what that might include
Speaker 4: is doing the selective pruning to help the wind pass
Speaker 4: through the trees more efficiently, to take a little bit
Speaker 4: of the stress off the trees, to make them safer
Speaker 4: during heavy winds. And that's not just somebody runn up
Speaker 4: there with chainsaw on hacking stuff off. It's knowing what
Speaker 4: you're doing that is important. And a quality arborist knows
Speaker 4: what they're doing. I can't stress enough the importance of
Speaker 4: proper tree care. Maybe you have broken limbs, maybe you
Speaker 4: have narrow branch angles. Those are the ones that typically split.
Speaker 4: You drive around town, you see a split tree and
Speaker 4: you look at the split, and almost always right up
Speaker 4: at the top is a black area where a narrow
Speaker 4: branch angle has pressed bark against bark, and you can't
Speaker 4: It doesn't join, It doesn't heal across there, or create
Speaker 4: tissue across there. It just becomes a black area. As
Speaker 4: those branches get bigger, they push each other apart and
Speaker 4: it's just waiting for a little push from the wind
Speaker 4: to split open. Well, Martin can work on things like that.
Speaker 4: He can train trees. He knows how to train trees,
Speaker 4: He knows how to work around trees. Are you're going
Speaker 4: to put in a slab you're a tree? Are you
Speaker 4: going to put in a trench near a tree? You
Speaker 4: need to call Martin and have him come out for
Speaker 4: all those things. I know right now, you know, storm
Speaker 4: trimming is the big topic of the day. But he
Speaker 4: can do it all seven one three, six nine nine
Speaker 4: twenty six sixty three seven one three six nine nine
Speaker 4: two six six three Or go to his website it's
Speaker 4: Afftree Service dot com. And I guarantee you he is
Speaker 4: very busy right now with all the things that have
Speaker 4: been going on. But tell him your guardline listener, get
Speaker 4: up higher in the list. There takes you up in
Speaker 4: the list and he treats his garden line listeners very well.
Speaker 4: And when when you do that, have him come out.
Speaker 4: Have its scheduled and let's have him take a look.
Speaker 4: He charges to come out and take a look at
Speaker 4: your trees. I can't just run around looking at stuff,
Speaker 4: you know, just because people are curious. So it costs
Speaker 4: one hundred and fifty to have him come out, But
Speaker 4: if you hire him to do work, that one fifty
Speaker 4: goes right into the work, so you don't lose it.
Speaker 4: It's not us for coming out. Uh, it goes into
Speaker 4: the work that you have him do a FF tree
Speaker 4: service dot Com seven one three six nine nine twenty
Speaker 4: six sixty three. You are listening to garden Line. Our
Speaker 4: phone number is seven one three two one two fifty
Speaker 4: eight seventy four. Seven one three two one two fifty
Speaker 4: eight seventy four. I'll be right back. Welcome back, Welcome
Speaker 4: back to garden Line. Good to have you with us. Hey,
Speaker 4: if you got a question there we have here. We've
Speaker 4: got two more segments, three more segments left to go,
Speaker 4: uh before we shut things down for the weekend until
Speaker 4: next weekend on guarden Line. So give us a call
Speaker 4: at seven one three two one two k t r H.
Speaker 4: Seven one three two one two k t r H.
Speaker 4: This is your chance. I uh. We talked about a
Speaker 4: lot of things today. We've covered everything from lawns to
Speaker 4: trees to UH. Certainly we'd spent that time talking about generators.
Speaker 4: And you know how to make a good choice, and
Speaker 4: you know anything you purchase I don't, I don't care
Speaker 4: what it is. You need to do your homework ahead
Speaker 4: of time, and I highly recommend that whoever you end
Speaker 4: up purchasing something from, get the facts and it always helps.
Speaker 4: My way of doing it is always I'll talk to
Speaker 4: two or three people and I'll hear something from one.
Speaker 4: Then I'll ask them, well, what do you do about that?
Speaker 4: Or what do you think about that? And I'll hear
Speaker 4: their answer, and you know, just get the facts that
Speaker 4: is important. Caveat emptor anymy know what that means Latin words,
Speaker 4: caveat emptor means let the buyer beware. That is a
Speaker 4: good point on anything from automobiles to you name it
Speaker 4: that you purchase. Well, I wanted to spend a little
Speaker 4: bit of time today talking about summer planting. When it
Speaker 4: gets hot, the enthusiasm for gardening tends to wane. We
Speaker 4: see it every year and I can see a number
Speaker 4: of calls that come into guard Line. It varies through
Speaker 4: the year, but the fact is that summer is a
Speaker 4: time when there is still plenty that we need to
Speaker 4: be outdoing. There's watering specifics, there's fertilizing specifics, there's planting specifics.
Speaker 4: We have plants that grow in the heat of Southeast Texas,
Speaker 4: just fine plants that when it comes to gardening, for example,
Speaker 4: there are a number of greens that I like to
Speaker 4: grow in my garden that come from areas that are
Speaker 4: as sultry, hot and humid as Houston typically places like
Speaker 4: certain parts of Africa or certain parts of maybe India
Speaker 4: or that region of the world, and you get these
Speaker 4: things like Malabar, for example. Our black eyed peas are
Speaker 4: from that area. They grow through the summer just fine.
Speaker 4: There are Molechhia is another green that does well in
Speaker 4: that there's edible perse langes. Anyway, there are plants that
Speaker 4: can take that. When it comes to flowers, Angelonia loves heat.
Speaker 4: It just blazes through the heat. I mentioned Scavola earlier
Speaker 4: that does well. There are things like the Helianthus calls
Speaker 4: sun believable, like unbelievable, but was sun at the beginning
Speaker 4: sun sunbelievable over a thousand blooms during the course of
Speaker 4: a season on that plant. That just blooms and blooms
Speaker 4: and blooms and blooms and blooms of blooms and blooms.
Speaker 4: Got some in my garden. It's doing well. There's pirates
Speaker 4: pearl that is a white, small, white flower, but the
Speaker 4: little short, bushy like plant just covers up with those
Speaker 4: unbelievable flowers. Excuse me. Pirates pearl flowers. I see all
Speaker 4: kinds of beneficial insects on these two as well. Zenias
Speaker 4: do good through the summer heat. Salvias are many Salvias
Speaker 4: just bloom all the way through summer heat. Salvia is
Speaker 4: my favorite genus plant of flowering plants. It is because
Speaker 4: there's so many. They're just so many. But just because
Speaker 4: it's hot outside and it's probably get a little hotter.
Speaker 4: Now that we get this cloud and rain that's moving
Speaker 4: on opening up the sunshine, it's still time to plant.
Speaker 4: Have to do when you plant in the summer is
Speaker 4: remember to pretend that that plant is still in its
Speaker 4: pot underground. So imagine if you bought less about a
Speaker 4: gallon plant and you set it in a hole in
Speaker 4: the ground and covered it up with soil. All the
Speaker 4: roots would be in that pot still right, and they
Speaker 4: all they would stay that they couldn't go beyond that.
Speaker 4: When you take it out of the pot and plant
Speaker 4: it the same way, pretend that that pot is still underground.
Speaker 4: That tells you where to water. You water right at
Speaker 4: the base in small amounts. Over time, as that thing
Speaker 4: begins to grow roots out into the soil around it,
Speaker 4: you're wetting larger areas you always want to wedd a
Speaker 4: little beyond where the roots are always. But you can
Speaker 4: keep a plant alive, just like if you set that
Speaker 4: pot on your patio and went on every day and
Speaker 4: water did a couple of times. I mean you could.
Speaker 4: You can do that. You can still plant. And there
Speaker 4: are plants that will bloom well in late summer and fall,
Speaker 4: and you ought to get some of those in. Maybe
Speaker 4: I'll talk about some of those late summer and fall
Speaker 4: bloomers here in a little bit. Right now, I'm going
Speaker 4: to run over the and we're going to talk to
Speaker 4: Bill and Conroe. Hello, Bill, Welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 7: Good morning, Skip, thanks for taking my call. And I
Speaker 7: I've taken my backyard. I've killed all of the Sant
Speaker 7: Augustine and Bermuda mix and all of the other stuff
Speaker 7: in there. I've just letting it settle and kind of
Speaker 7: tilling it up and moving and anyway it's ready, getting ready.
Speaker 7: I probably have to be thinking about waiting till the
Speaker 7: end of August before I put anything down, just being
Speaker 7: easier to manage, I think without the heat that I
Speaker 7: expect in August. So is there a different variety from
Speaker 7: Saint Augustine and bermuda that is shorter that I can
Speaker 7: walk on without hurting it. I'm not thinking of putting
Speaker 7: green quality, but how about croquet quality.
Speaker 4: Okay, oh boy, that's a good question. Well, first of all,
Speaker 4: I think your idea to wait until August is not
Speaker 4: about idea because even though you've sprayed it and killed everything,
Speaker 4: you see, the bermuda is not all gone. It'll be
Speaker 4: sprigs that come back up, and then you'll have to
Speaker 4: spray them again, and then maybe even a third time,
Speaker 4: because it's just the nature of the beasts that usually
Speaker 4: one spraying doesn't kill everything because there's some that hadn't
Speaker 4: even maybe stuck its head up yet for you to spray.
Speaker 7: So n't gotten the nuts edge is the nuts sedge
Speaker 7: is definitely coming back.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, the nuts edge the forget round up on
Speaker 4: nuts edge. That's not the way I go about I've
Speaker 4: almost finished a publication that's going on my website about
Speaker 4: nuts edge, and that's one of the things I'll tell
Speaker 4: you in there. Uh, manage is a good product. If
Speaker 4: you can find manage, there is a sedge ender. It's
Speaker 4: also a good product for nuts edge. But definitely that's
Speaker 4: gonna take maybe even at least the August, you're gonna
Speaker 4: spray it. It's gonna go down, and then you're gonna
Speaker 4: see it we sprout again and you're gonna spray it
Speaker 4: and go. So you need to stay with that particular
Speaker 4: thing to knock out as much of it as you can.
Speaker 4: But I'll let y'all know when when there's publications up
Speaker 4: there and you really need to read it. I'd be
Speaker 4: great anyway. What I would you know you could do
Speaker 4: as zoisa. There are some soisas. It can be mowed
Speaker 4: very short as a lawn grass, and they do well here.
Speaker 4: There's some type that have a little wider leaf. It's
Speaker 4: only about a third as wide as Saint Augustine, but
Speaker 4: it's it's wider than the fine textured zoysias, which have
Speaker 4: a leaf. It's skinnier someone skinnier than bermuda grass. It's
Speaker 4: a very narrow little leaf. You can mow it low
Speaker 4: if you want to mow regularly, can keep it down
Speaker 4: at a lower rate, and it makes a beautiful lawn
Speaker 4: or and it would be a good croquetlawn even if
Speaker 4: you moted at a higher rate. There are some other
Speaker 4: good groundcovers that you could use, like uh frog frog
Speaker 4: fruit would be one, but it's not foot traffic tolerant.
Speaker 4: So if you walk around a lot you're going to
Speaker 4: it's not going to do well. So I think you
Speaker 4: if you want to switch out, switch over to one
Speaker 4: of the Zoisias palisades. There is an example of one
Speaker 4: with wider leaves. There are other good ones. Those are
Speaker 4: a variety of so idier palisades. Zoysia has a wider leaf.
Speaker 4: I has developed it in as well as some other
Speaker 4: southern uh you know, extension services here in the south.
Speaker 4: It's widely used about the south.
Speaker 7: And you drill these from seed.
Speaker 4: No, you need to have sod and you need to
Speaker 4: solid sodom don't don't plug them. Their spread rate is
Speaker 4: slower than Saint Augustine and Bermuda, and so don't plug them.
Speaker 4: Just solid sod.
Speaker 7: Areas of them, all right, And that Zoysia will take
Speaker 7: care of, will handle the heat in the sun and all.
Speaker 4: That absolutely does. I've got I've got palisades in my
Speaker 4: yard and it does very very well. A little bit
Speaker 4: shade tolerant, not quite as much as Saint Augustine, but
Speaker 4: it's good. That's pretty good as close. And then there's
Speaker 4: a fine texture one called xeon ze o n. There's
Speaker 4: there's a bunch of cultivars of both types of zoisiograss.
Speaker 4: I'm just giving you a couple that I'm familiar with it.
Speaker 4: But the fine textured one is just beautiful, just beautiful. Look,
Speaker 4: I'm o mind a little bit high. I'm starting to
Speaker 4: mow it back down lower now, just to experiment and learn.
Speaker 4: But I'm a little higher and it looks like kind
Speaker 4: of a little mini meadow out there. So that's kind
Speaker 4: of cool, is often but but normally though we would
Speaker 4: we would keep it and maintain it with the regular mowing.
Speaker 4: That's the way you get density. You start fluctuating and
Speaker 4: letting it big and cutting it back, you lose density.
Speaker 7: Is it susceptible in a big way? To new to
Speaker 7: from my neighbors kind of coming into it.
Speaker 4: There is not an available over the counter option for
Speaker 4: controlling Bermuda grass and other turf grasses like Zoisia or
Speaker 4: Saint Augustine grass. Uh, they're just not and then they coexist.
Speaker 4: That's the way it is.
Speaker 7: So you either I guess there's a commercial one, but
Speaker 7: you can't. You can't buy any Texas for I've seen
Speaker 7: I forget what it's called. There is a.
Speaker 4: Product, well, there is a there is something that some
Speaker 4: landscapers can get that they use that helps kill the
Speaker 4: bermuda out of the Saint Augustine. I don't think it's
Speaker 4: okay to use in Zoysia. I'd have to check that.
Speaker 4: But anyway, with that, I don't even want to open
Speaker 4: up the hopes on that one.
Speaker 7: It's a pea because everybody would love that.
Speaker 4: You got to you got to have a professional that
Speaker 4: does it. If you bought a bottle of it, if
Speaker 4: you could find ten neighbors who wanted to do it too,
Speaker 4: you could put the cost and make it somewhat reasonable.
Speaker 4: But you see what I'm saying, it's there's I like
Speaker 4: to just say there's not an option. Although yeah, anyway, yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 4: very good, Thanks skipping, all right, take care of Bill.
Speaker 4: Good luck with that, and sounds like you're off to
Speaker 4: a good start with that, making sure you get rid
Speaker 4: of all of it before you put more in. You know,
Speaker 4: one option I didn't think about this to tell Bill,
Speaker 4: but one option would just be to go to the
Speaker 4: go to the bermuda grass, to go with the dwarf bermuda.
Speaker 4: One of the semi dwarfs, not the golf course green type,
Speaker 4: but something like for a football field or for a
Speaker 4: golf course fire away. There are those. You just have
Speaker 4: to permuted, be ready for it to crawl into your
Speaker 4: flower beds. All right, we're gonna take a little quick
Speaker 4: break for the news. Brian in Cyprus. She will be
Speaker 4: first up when we come back. Well, Frome the garden line.
Speaker 4: Good to have you back. We got another half hour
Speaker 4: left today. Looking forward to talking to you about the
Speaker 4: things that are of interest to you. You know, I
Speaker 4: was recently in a Wilbird's Unlimited store and I'm always
Speaker 4: just surprised at how the products that they have and
Speaker 4: the quality of the products that they have. Now, I've
Speaker 4: told you before I buy my garden or my garden
Speaker 4: my bird seed there from All Birds Unlimited. And I
Speaker 4: do this for this reason. You don't get a bunch
Speaker 4: of junk in the bag cheap bird seeds. Got a
Speaker 4: bunch of red bebes. The birds kick it out, they
Speaker 4: don't want to eat it. Now, you got a weed
Speaker 4: growing on the ground underneath it. Wabirds Unlimited, they have
Speaker 4: what they put in the bag the birds want to eat. Now,
Speaker 4: maybe if it's you know, sunflower holes are going to
Speaker 4: crack that open to get the seed inside. And you
Speaker 4: can even buy hullless mixes from All Birds where you
Speaker 4: don't even have that coming out of the feeder. Nesting
Speaker 4: super Blend one of the best mixes you can buy.
Speaker 4: They have several different mixes. You go in, you tell them, look,
Speaker 4: here's the birds I most want to attract. What is
Speaker 4: the best blend. And what they're going to do is
Speaker 4: also consider the season that we're in, because the best
Speaker 4: blend depends partially on the season that we're in. They've
Speaker 4: got wonderful feeders. My favorite feeder came from All Birds
Speaker 4: and it is the squirrel excluding feeder. It is very effective.
Speaker 4: I took a little video of a scuare. I need
Speaker 4: to post that to Facebook too, a little video of
Speaker 4: a squirrel climbing up and they got mad a long
Speaker 4: time ago because they figured out they couldn't get in it.
Speaker 4: But every now and then they still climb the pole
Speaker 4: and you know, give it a try, but it ain't
Speaker 4: gonna work. It's a great feeder. They have bird houses.
Speaker 4: They have you know, like a bird bath. They have
Speaker 4: all kinds of quality books and the main thing is
Speaker 4: you walk in there and no matter what you want
Speaker 4: to ask them, they're going to give you good advice.
Speaker 4: There's six Wildbirds stores in the Greater Houston area. Go
Speaker 4: to WBU dot com, forward slash Houston, WBU dot com
Speaker 4: forward slash Houston, find the wild Birds near you and
Speaker 4: go visit. Today. Be a good day to do that.
Speaker 4: You know, Wilbird's unlimited. They just it's just the place
Speaker 4: to go. It's where you can trust what you buy
Speaker 4: and trust what you hear when you walk in the door.
Speaker 4: Let's go now to the phones. We are going to
Speaker 4: go to see who's next. Here. We have Brian in Cyprus, Texas.
Speaker 4: Hello Brian, Hello skip hire you. I'm doing well. Thanks?
Speaker 4: What's up today? Very good?
Speaker 6: So, my Saint Augustine is still recovering from last summer's damage.
Speaker 6: And while it's recovering nicely with all of the wet
Speaker 6: weather that we've been having, unfortunately the broad leaved weaves
Speaker 6: had really taken hold. And I read on the labels
Speaker 6: the the post emergent herbicides. You can't really begin to
Speaker 6: address it because the temperatures are too high, or they're
Speaker 6: alternatives other than purely just bending down and trying to
Speaker 6: pull them all.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there is there is primarily one alternative. It's not cheap,
Speaker 4: but it's a very effective and it can it can
Speaker 4: be in the lower nineties. And this product is not
Speaker 4: going to hurt your Saint Augustine what I would do though,
Speaker 4: even with this product, I'm about to tell you you
Speaker 4: want to do it early in the morning at the
Speaker 4: coolest time the day. That way it dries up before
Speaker 4: the sun comes baking out there. I mean, who knows,
Speaker 4: it may be a day we're going to go to
Speaker 4: ninety eight degrees, and so you just want to be
Speaker 4: careful with it. But the product is called Celsius, which
Speaker 4: is a good name because that's like celsius, like the temperature,
Speaker 4: and it works well. You buy it in small packages
Speaker 4: and you just use it as efficiently as you can.
Speaker 4: You got some neighbors that are willing to go in
Speaker 4: with you on it, that may be another option. But
Speaker 4: it's very effective even against some of the hard to
Speaker 4: control stuff like Virginia button weed and dollar weed and whatnot.
Speaker 4: It's effective against a wide range of things.
Speaker 10: Very good.
Speaker 6: I'll give it a shot, Thank you so much.
Speaker 4: Yeah, just take two check books so you're ready to
Speaker 4: go when you go to buy. I shouldn't put it
Speaker 4: that way. It's not that bad. I've purchased small packs myself.
Speaker 4: But it works well. All right. You take care and
Speaker 4: thanks thanks Brian for the call. Let's see here. You
Speaker 4: know that's true, folks. The old stuff that's been around
Speaker 4: since dirt, those products are not expensive. They've been around,
Speaker 4: their mass produced. It's easy to do it when you
Speaker 4: get something that a company has spent millions upon millions
Speaker 4: of dollars trying to develop, even more than that, Well,
Speaker 4: when they finally get into the market and try to sell,
Speaker 4: they got to recoup that. And so those new specialty
Speaker 4: products that do things that the old products didn't do,
Speaker 4: they're going to be more expensive. It's just a nature
Speaker 4: of business doing that. But I'm telling you some of
Speaker 4: them have some features that we can't find in other products.
Speaker 4: Let's go now to Charlie in Friends would Hello, Charlie,
Speaker 4: Welcome to garden Line.
Speaker 10: Good morning to you, skip. Thank you for taking my call.
Speaker 10: My problem is that there was an orchard at the
Speaker 10: home we bought, and of course lost it in the
Speaker 10: freeze of a couple of years ago, and it's about
Speaker 10: one hundred and thirty by forty, I would say rectangular
Speaker 10: full of weeds. But underneath the weeds all this black
Speaker 10: cloth that folks would put in to try to retard
Speaker 10: the weeds in that time. Now the weeds have come through.
Speaker 10: But I suggest that that's my wife the weed rototillate,
Speaker 10: but it's got black paper all underneath. There was too
Speaker 10: heavy to a lift. So how to what's your best.
Speaker 4: Idea of how to.
Speaker 10: Get rid of all that stuff and prepare it for grass.
Speaker 4: You know, there are certain times in life when I
Speaker 4: wish I had a time capsule, like back to the future,
Speaker 4: where I could go back when they're about to put
Speaker 4: that stuff down and say stop it, don't do that.
Speaker 4: That's about it. I hate that cloth for the reasons
Speaker 4: you're describing. You know, rototiller is not gonna pick it
Speaker 4: up if it's got enough soil on it. You Trying
Speaker 4: to pull and lift it up is not a practical
Speaker 4: way to go, and that just creates a problem because
Speaker 4: that's really what we need to do, is lift it
Speaker 4: up and get it all out of there. Y yeah,
Speaker 4: tiller is just going to be a mess. So there's
Speaker 4: really not a good solution at this point. Uh That
Speaker 4: doesn't involve a lot of work, you know, like excavating
Speaker 4: soil to get down where you can lift that fabric up,
Speaker 4: and there's roots tangled in it and everything else. So
Speaker 4: about all you can do is just go over the
Speaker 4: top of it, uh, you know with your planting.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 4: And that's not ideal.
Speaker 10: But you just got to suggest putting fresh soil and
Speaker 10: then then trying to put in our grass.
Speaker 4: Like I heard. Yeah, how deep is how deep below
Speaker 4: the surface is this fabric?
Speaker 10: Tell me about it? About an answer to.
Speaker 4: Oh, okay, oh no, I wouldn't put the grass on
Speaker 4: top of that.
Speaker 10: Oh boy, you wouldn't put I'm sorry, I wouldn't.
Speaker 4: Put the grass on top of it.
Speaker 2: Uh huh.
Speaker 4: First of all, my first answer is there's not a
Speaker 4: good answer, okay, And I'm gonna give you. I'm gonna
Speaker 4: give you the answers that are not good answers. I know,
Speaker 4: to try to pick it up with your hands is difficult.
Speaker 4: They are different. I've used all kinds of ingenuity to
Speaker 4: try to deal with stuff like that. I mean, you
Speaker 4: could you could get dig out some where you could
Speaker 4: really attach to it, you know, twist attach a rope
Speaker 4: real tight to it where we'll pull and then use it.
Speaker 4: Come along to pull it out. I mean, I don't
Speaker 4: know how to go about it. I don't know what
Speaker 4: to tell you. Spading forks, come along, whatever you can
Speaker 4: do to kind of loosen things. But you just can't
Speaker 4: put turf grass over it. If unless it is a
Speaker 4: really cheap product that tears are one that allows roots
Speaker 4: to readily go right through it. If you put three
Speaker 4: or four inches of soil on top and plant it,
Speaker 4: you might get by with that. That may be okay,
Speaker 4: Well I tell you I don't like any of these
Speaker 4: other answers other than removing it in some way, shape
Speaker 4: or form. Figure not a way to do it.
Speaker 10: Wow, Okay, thank you, old Raggy.
Speaker 4: Did I make your day?
Speaker 7: I'm okay.
Speaker 10: I sank you very much, so appreciate.
Speaker 4: Bottom bottom line. Yeah. Bottom line answer Charlie, I hope
Speaker 4: you heard is you could try throwing three inches of
Speaker 4: soil over it and then planting on top of it
Speaker 4: because you already have an inch under it, just to
Speaker 4: get a good start there. I think that might work.
Speaker 4: But removing it and using ingenuity is not a happy answer.
Speaker 4: But that's that's something else. Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 10: I appreciate thank you sir.
Speaker 4: You bet yeah, you know, I tell you there are
Speaker 4: situations in gardening where there's not a great solution, just
Speaker 4: not a great solution. All right, we run a little
Speaker 4: over here. We're going to take a break. We'll be
Speaker 4: right back with your calls. Seven seventy four. Welcome back
Speaker 4: to the garden Line. Good to heavy with us. We're
Speaker 4: in our last segment of the day. We'll be back
Speaker 4: next Saturday and Sunday from six am to ten am.
Speaker 4: If you have friends and neighbors that haven't listened to
Speaker 4: garden Line, tell them about it so they can tune in.
Speaker 4: You know, I like to listen to KTRH using my
Speaker 4: phone app, the iHeartMedia app, and you can just put
Speaker 4: in your pocket and care around while you're doing gardening
Speaker 4: work or wherever you're going. You can have it with you.
Speaker 4: If you're not near a radio, you can have it
Speaker 4: that way. It works really really well. And thank you
Speaker 4: for being a listener too. By the way, hey, I
Speaker 4: wanted to talk a little bit about Nelson Watergarden. I've
Speaker 4: mentioned them many times in the past and talked about
Speaker 4: what an outstanding nursery. There are lots of plants, a
Speaker 4: great selection By the way, they got a really good
Speaker 4: sale on fruit trees and on citrus trees right now,
Speaker 4: So if you've been thinking about getting one, now's the
Speaker 4: time to get the best dear you're going to get.
Speaker 4: It's a really good sale that they have going on.
Speaker 4: But you know, they specialize in water gardens. That is
Speaker 4: kind of their forte that's what they started with, and
Speaker 4: they're nationally known for. And when you go to Neilson
Speaker 4: Water Gardens and Nursery, you are going to find a
Speaker 4: unbelievable supply of everything related to water. If you will,
Speaker 4: for example, you want a disappearing fountain. I think those
Speaker 4: are one of the coolest things that ever was, and
Speaker 4: Nelson invented that. You see these beautiful pottery urns, glazed
Speaker 4: pottery with water coming at the top. The sound of water.
Speaker 4: You need the sound of water in your backyard. We
Speaker 4: put a little multi tiered fountain in in our yard
Speaker 4: and I just like to sit. Is so relaxing. It
Speaker 4: is like therapy out there. To sit and enjoy the
Speaker 4: sound of water, especially on a hot summer day, brings
Speaker 4: in birds too, and beneficial insects a supply of water
Speaker 4: as well. Many of them do do you want a
Speaker 4: water garden, you know with lily pads or other water
Speaker 4: plants with koi or goldfish or other fish like that,
Speaker 4: Nelson Water Garden and Nursery is the place to go.
Speaker 4: Here's the number two eight, one, three, nine to one
Speaker 4: forty seven sixty nine or goat to water Nelsonwatergardens dot com.
Speaker 4: Nelson Watergardens dot com. They're just north of I ten
Speaker 4: on Katie Fort Ben Road out in Katie. Think of
Speaker 4: it as your West Houston destination garden center. That's Nelson
Speaker 4: Water Gardens. And while you're out there, by the way,
Speaker 4: they have a lot of good products too. They have
Speaker 4: a good selection. For example, Microlife. I know you have
Speaker 4: heard of Microlife unless you've been living under a rock.
Speaker 4: Microlife has all the granular fertilizers you know, for your lawn,
Speaker 4: for your soil, for your plants that we've talked about.
Speaker 4: I just want to tell you a little bit about
Speaker 4: some of their liquid fertilizers. One of the ones that
Speaker 4: I use the most is Microlife Biomatrix. It's an orange label,
Speaker 4: liquid comes in a gallon, comes into quurt It's a
Speaker 4: seven to one three ratio fertilizer. I have good boost
Speaker 4: and nitrogen. I use it on houseplants because that foliage
Speaker 4: that's leafy, green growing, and you need a good nitrogen
Speaker 4: boost for that. It's excellent for that. I've had excellent results.
Speaker 4: You can put a in your garden. You can use
Speaker 4: it watering plants in. As a matter of fact, if
Speaker 4: you were going to water plants in, you might want
Speaker 4: to try Microlife Maximum Blooms. That's a pink or reddish
Speaker 4: label that does very very well, Microlife Maximum Bloom. If
Speaker 4: you want to boost for plants. I bet you never
Speaker 4: heard of this product, Microlife Soil and Plant Energy. Microlife
Speaker 4: Soil and Plant Energy is a superb combination of humic
Speaker 4: acid and molasses. Molasses is like rocket fuel for beneficial
Speaker 4: soil microbes. You're going to boost the energy and the
Speaker 4: supply by putting that carbon in the soil. With Microlife
Speaker 4: Soil and Plant Energy and also that humic acid benefiting
Speaker 4: your soil. You know, you make your soil better, you
Speaker 4: make your plants better. And Microlife Soil and Plant Energy
Speaker 4: is an outstanding liquid. You can mix it in water,
Speaker 4: you can spray it. It's not going to burn plant.
Speaker 4: You can spray it on the foliage, plant it's not
Speaker 4: going to burn them. It does very very well. I
Speaker 4: would recommend it, especially as something that you apply to
Speaker 4: your soil around your plants from microlife. Well, let's see here,
Speaker 4: what are we looking at. We might have time for
Speaker 4: a real quick call if someone wants to call in.
Speaker 4: Got a few minutes left before we put this one
Speaker 4: in the books. I appreciate you listening to Guardland. We've
Speaker 4: talked about a lot of different things today, and I
Speaker 4: just want to really urge you to not let summer
Speaker 4: stop you from being a gardener. The early morning hours
Speaker 4: are cool, you can get out, you can get some
Speaker 4: stuff done. It just it doesn't take a lot of
Speaker 4: work to keep things going out in the yard, not
Speaker 4: in the garden. And now with plant sales going on
Speaker 4: all over the place, this is a great time to
Speaker 4: put some plants in. I know we talk about spring
Speaker 4: planting and winter planting and fall, which is the best
Speaker 4: planning season of the year, But what about putting some
Speaker 4: color in for the next few months. You know, September
Speaker 4: is a summer month, right. If you've been in Texas
Speaker 4: more than one summer, you know September is a summer
Speaker 4: month here. So if you put something in. Now, you
Speaker 4: got August, you got September, you got October, sometime into
Speaker 4: November before we really get some cooler weather arriving where
Speaker 4: we would start looking at cool season color. Why not
Speaker 4: establish some colorful foliage like colius, like copper plant, like
Speaker 4: persian shield, beautiful silvery purple color. Oh, it's gorgeous, like
Speaker 4: some of the colorful cannas, the phasion or the tropicana.
Speaker 4: Why not do some color, or why not do some
Speaker 4: flowers like angelonia, like marigoles. You put maragoles in still,
Speaker 4: you know, I like to plant my fall maragoles in
Speaker 4: late summer, and the spider maight population starts to decline
Speaker 4: as we go into the fall season, and they just
Speaker 4: glow in the cooler fall temperatures that I have to
Speaker 4: fight against the fire ants that are out there. Well
Speaker 4: my fire ants, Okay, spider mites is what I was
Speaker 4: trying to say.
Speaker 2: For that.
Speaker 4: Well, let's see here, let's see a call coming in.
Speaker 4: We're gonna try to do a real quick answer here
Speaker 4: for them. If we can get them back here on
Speaker 4: the line, be a fast one. But summer is a
Speaker 4: season where we can still plant and there's a lot
Speaker 4: of heat tolerate. You go to these outstanding garden centers,
Speaker 4: them Omipop, the independent nurseries that we talk about on
Speaker 4: garden Line. You go out there and talk to them
Speaker 4: and say, what can I plant now that'll give me
Speaker 4: three months of color. There's no sense in summer being
Speaker 4: a sea of green, and drive around town look at landscapes.
Speaker 4: It's a sea of green, green grass, green groundcovers, green shrubs,
Speaker 4: green trees, green vines. There's nothing wrong with green. Green
Speaker 4: isn't the only color. It's not the only color. All right, Well,
Speaker 4: I hear the music. I'm just gonna keep talking about it. Actually,
Speaker 4: I want to tell you about something else. Coming up
Speaker 4: is an event that you need to know about. It's
Speaker 4: called OBA Palooza. I love that name. Oba O HbA.
Speaker 4: That's the organic horticulture if it's alliance. It's an organic
Speaker 4: group here in Houston, made up of commercial companies, made
Speaker 4: up of individuals interested in organic gardening, made up of educators.
Speaker 4: I love to go to OBA events. They are always
Speaker 4: always outstanding. I can promise you top notch speakers this event.
Speaker 4: I take too long to name all the speakers there.
Speaker 4: They're gonna have two headliners. They're gonna have three concurrent
Speaker 4: sessions going on. You can to pick where you want
Speaker 4: to go Saturday August tenth. Saturday August tenth, that's coming
Speaker 4: up at the Greater at the United Wates Greater Houston,
Speaker 4: My Wildwide. You go from eight am. They put thirty
Speaker 4: three m Go to oba ohbaonline dot org to get
Speaker 4: your tickets