50 Biggest Gardening Mistakes To Avoid

Skip Richter ansswers your questions all morning long!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Katie r. H. Garden Line with Skip Rictor.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
It's the crazy here in the bassis gas they can
use a shrimp.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
Just watch him as world goods. The gasses and gas
can you vera?

Speaker 4 (00:20):
So many people thinks the superb basic quids, the gasses
like gass and again you date the samos gubbles back
kicking not a sound and the glassies.

Speaker 3 (00:32):
And gas can you sun beaming down? Betweeen has it
in the basses and gas? Baby?

Speaker 5 (00:41):
Can you d.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
Starting and treating in the basses like gas became you date?

Speaker 6 (00:50):
Everything is so clean you can see and every thing
here is Sunday you can hand.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
It's range.

Speaker 7 (01:15):
Baby, last show. So hey, welcome to garden Line. Welcome

(01:45):
to garden Line, folks. Glad you're tuning in today on
a wonderful Sunday morning.

Speaker 6 (01:52):
Good to have you with us.

Speaker 7 (01:54):
I'm your host, Skip Director, and we're here to help
you have a beautiful, bountiful garden and landscape and to
enjoy yourself as you do that. Gardening should not end
in frustration. Although we do have our challenges out there,
it shouldn't end in frustration. And so what we would
like to accomplish here on the show is to help

(02:14):
you have success. If you want to give me a call,
if you've got a question you'd like to discuss, I'd
be happy to do that. Here is a phone number
seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four
seven one three two one two five eight seven four.
You can give me a call. We'll talk about whatever
it is that ails your garden or is ailing you

(02:35):
at the time, uh, and try to help you over
the hump there. I had a number of email questions
that came in. It'll be some follow up calls today
on those. And if you have a question that would
benefit from a photo being included, you can call my producer,
get a email, and send a photo and then follow

(02:56):
up with a call. That's how we have to do
it here. I'm just not able to open up and
things to the what ten million people around the greater
Houston area now just you know by email in and
me type out answers. Time doesn't allow that, unfortunately, But
I will be happy to take a look at photos,
follow up with a call.

Speaker 6 (03:14):
We can talk about it.

Speaker 7 (03:16):
And photos help me a lot. Sometimes you describe something
and I'm trying to my picture it in my mind,
it's just not quite jiving, and get a photo. It's like, ah, okay,
I see what you're talking about, So get a good photo.
Make sure it's in sharp focus. Fuzzy photos get you
fuzzy answers. Sharp photos get you, hopefully a nice, sharp,

(03:36):
correct answer, and you can send those to me, send
more than one if you like. If there's an overall
problem or a problem on a plant, sometimes it helps
to have a photo that is of the whole plant
so I can see it in its setting, what might
be going on around there, and then a photo up
close where I can see the problem up close, whether

(04:00):
a spot on a leaf, a bug on a branch,
or whatever. Anyway, just kind of reminding ebody of that.
Yesterday I started talking about fifty common landscape and gardening
mistakes that I've seen over my years as a horticulturist.
That's spending twenty five years excuse me, thirty five years

(04:21):
with the Texas A and m Agrolife Extension Service, and
then a number of years both as a garden writer
on the radio. And you know, I've been to a
lot of places. I've seen a lot of things. Emails
drop ins to the Extension office people bring in there

(04:42):
the plant questions in with them in a bag, and
as a result, I've kind of accumulated some of the
things I think are more common landscape mistakes. And there's
a saying that says, learn from the mistakes of others.
You don't have time to make them all your yourself,
or at least that's a paraphrase of it, And that's true.

(05:04):
We can learn from our own mistakes, hopefully, although sometimes
it seems so many folks don't. And that has included
me on more than one occasion. But if you take
all the questions that I've had over the years, i'd
like to know that number, by the way, I know
it's quite a few. And the things that are repeated

(05:25):
over and over again, the mistakes I see people make
that lead to problems, either to wasted time, wasted effort,
wasted money, disappointment, lack of results. I'm going to go
over some more of those today. We got through fifteen
of them yesterday, so I got fifty on the list.
We're going to get moving and probably stay with us.
But don't hesitate to interrupt me if you have a question.

(05:47):
This is not meant to be a monologue. Number sixteen,
harvesting vegetables too late. This is a minor one and
not everybody who has a vegetable guard. But some vegetables
have a peak ripeness. Some vegetables will ripen after harvest,

(06:08):
but most do not continue to ripen after harvest. One
that will ripen after harvest is tomatoes. So tomatoes, you
know that you can pick them when they're what we
call mature green, and they will continue to ripen indoors
on the counter. But most vegetables will not do that.

(06:29):
Some vegetables from the time the bloom falls off, you
can eat them like a string bean, a green bean,
or a squash, for example. You can pick it right
after the bloom falls off and eat it. You're not
gonna have much to eat, but the point is it
doesn't have to ripen in order for you to be
able to eat it. Other vegetables, when they get passed,
they aren't very good. And a good example of that

(06:50):
is green beans. Green beans that are young and tender wonderful.
They get old, they get stringy, and they just don't
taste the same. They're not good at all. We like
to pick broccoli before the heads expand and you start
getting blooms. Although if you have a broccoli a head
that is opening up and blooming, you can still eat it.

(07:15):
You can still eat those blooms. It just gets the
main parts of the stem, the stalk of the broccoli.
Harvest gets a little bit tougher and stringier, but they
can be harvested a little later at a cost of
some quality. There there are other vegetables that fit in
these categories. Cool seasoned peas like snow peas and sugar

(07:36):
snap peas, and the English peas that we shell out
for the whole piece. Those definitely don't need to go
too far or you start to lose quality. So find
out what the vegetable you're growing, find out what stage
of harvest it should be at, and follow that, because
it's very disappointing to grow your own fresher vegetables. It's

(07:59):
supposed to be about a thousand to fifteen hundred miles
fresher than what you can get in the store and
end up with a lower quality because harvesting a little
bit too late. That's an example of one. There's another
one planting too large of a garden. Now, when somebody
gets into gardening, they get in with both feet, and

(08:19):
I'm that way about things. You know, I decide I'm
gonna grow vegetables, for example, or something like some decision
like that, and it's like, all right, I'm gonna have
a garden this see is it one or two acres? Well, don't, don't.
Every square foot of soil you put into a vegetable
garden is a square foot of soil you're gonna be

(08:40):
weeding and watering and mulching and all that kind of thing.
You can grow a lot of vegetables in a small space.
It could be a little two foot wide three foot
wide raised bed. It could, you know, just be maybe
sixteen feet long. You can grow a lot of stuff
in there. So start small and grow yourself into a

(09:02):
better vegetable garden, size one that suits you. Better learn
what you're doing, Get that soul right, you know, that's
the kind of thing. Don't start too large or you
end up getting overwhelmed. It gets weedy, and you don't
even want to go out there. By June you're like,
I ain't going back out there again. Vegetable gardens don't
need to end up that way. Start smaller, and if

(09:24):
you want some at tips and advice on that. You
can give me a call. We'll talk about that as well.
Time for me to get to a break here though,
we'll be right back with your your calls in just
a moment.

Speaker 6 (09:35):
Hey, Well, like your guarden like this. Good to have
you with us this morning.

Speaker 7 (09:42):
As we approach our holiday season coming up. And you know,
I know this time of year, our brains are on
a lot of other things other than the garden, but
this is a good time to get out there and
get some things done. I appreciate getting outside sometimes just
for the fresh air and whatnot. I jokingly, one of

(10:04):
these days, I'm going to make a list of things
to do between Christmas and New Year's and and it's
based on the fact that there's certain times and people
in situations where.

Speaker 6 (10:16):
You kind of need to get out of the house.

Speaker 7 (10:18):
You know, family shows up, certain let's just say certain members,
but family kind of wear on you maybe a little bit.
You kind of need an excuse to get outside, like oh,
you gotta go plant those onions. So that would joking
around there a kind of, but there's a lot of
things that they get done during that season. You know,

(10:39):
Tulips is a good example. We're going to be. If
you purchase tulips, those are typically one shot wonders, meaning
you put them in, they pop up, they bloom, and
that's about what you're going to get out of them,
which is okay. We do that with tomato plants too, right,
they one shot wonders. But with the tulips, it's a
very short season. It's important to keep those things stored

(10:59):
in their tight or very cold and then plant them.
And after you plan them, because we're so warm down
here in the winter, they're going to sit down there
and put some roots down in the ground there and
then they're going to pop out and do the blooming.
And after Christmas for New Year's is a good time
to start the tula planting. You can do one planting
to another one a couple weeks later if you want,
in early early January, but that would be my suggestions

(11:22):
is between Christmas and New Year's be kind of an
ideal time if you want to get out and do
some sort of a thing like that. All Right, we're
going to get back to this list of fifty common
gardening mistakes. Planning too large of a garden was our
last one, number eighteen. Planning too densely, in other words,
not thinning what you plant. Now, this applies primarily to

(11:44):
the root crops in a vegetable garden. You can plant
anything too densely. I mean you put zenia seeds out
there in a flower garden too densely. But you gotta
thin things out. And thin out means to pull up
the things that you're not going to leave, so that
the ones you leave have a better spacing where they
can do what they're supposed to do. With things like carrots,

(12:06):
for example, you get them too crowded and they just
don't develop good root system. You know, they're crowded and
it doesn't work very well. So you gotta fin them out.

Speaker 6 (12:18):
Now.

Speaker 7 (12:18):
For most things, you can just pinch them off at
the ground or pull the little seedlings up when they're young,
and everything will be fine. With carrots, if you damage
that single little tiny thread like tap root that comes
out of the seed and goes down anywhere in there,
you damage it, you're going to have a mal formed carrot.
Maybe it'll branch into two carrots. Have you ever seen

(12:40):
that before? Go on line. There's a lot of people
that post them because they look almost like humans, legs
coming down, but if you damage that root, you're going
to affect that That's why we don't do carrot transplants.
If you put a carrot in a transplant cell somewhere,
that root's going to hit air and burn off, and
then that's as deep as that part of the carrot

(13:01):
can go, and you end up with the carrot plants still,
but not a carrot that you want to eat. So
when you plant densely with carrots, I use scissors and
just cut them off right at the ground, just little
scissor snips and you can snip and just snip them
off right down there at the ground to avoid damaging
the adjacent root of the one you leave when you're
getting rid of the one that you don't want to keep.

(13:23):
Root crops should be spaced out about the width of
the mature root apart. So let's say you have a
carrot and you're expecting it to get about an inch
and a quarter let's say, in diameter. And there's a
lot of different kinds of carrots to get different size
and shape. But then you would want your seedlings to
be about an inch and a quarter apart. They could

(13:44):
be further than that, and that's okay, but no closer
than about an inch and a quarter. Radishes, beats, turnips,
all of those the same thing. Think about how big
that is going to get, and make sure you leave space.
Don't hesitate to then plants out. That also applies to
seeded flowers too, and you just want to give them
room in that case for the plant to be able

(14:06):
to grow and develop, and so too densely is not good.

Speaker 6 (14:09):
So what do you do?

Speaker 7 (14:10):
You can some things, transplanting is good because that way
you can plant them exactly as far apart as you want.
For some things, when you plant the seed, if it's
too small for you to put the seeds exactly close
to the right space, and you always plant them a
little closer because you're going to pull some up. That way,
you know you get a good crop and not too

(14:31):
few in there. You can use a herb shaker. Have
you ever bought herbs in a little jar with a
plastic lid that pops open and then you have those
little holes in it for shaking the herbs out onto
your food. Well, you can put seeds in there and

(14:51):
you can use that as a shaker above the ground,
especially when you're not planning in a row, but you're
just planning a group of plants across the bed, and
they tend to scatter out a little bit better if
you're careful with the way you do it. So that's
just another technique that you can do. But don't plant
too densely without thinning. You don't want that failing to
multi flour and vegetable beds. Oh my gosh, do yourself

(15:15):
a favor. Once seedlings come up, maults around them, and
even before they come up. What I will do is
I'll malt everywhere except where the seed was planted. If
it's a little road, then there'll be a little valley
in the molts where you can see bear dirt in
there where the seedlings are going to come up. Because
of course malts keep seeds from coming up, and so yeah,

(15:38):
just make sure and get a mulch on early, because
nature will plant weeds on bear soil. Wherever sunlight hits
a soil, nature plants weed. So why give yourself a
weeding job when you could just get out there, plant
the seed, plant the transplants, whatever, and put a multch
down right away. A finer textured malts blocks light better
than a coarser textured malt. But sometimes, like in a

(16:02):
vegetable garden, you don't want big chunks of wood out
there on the surface, like in a flower bed maybe
or a shrub bed. But maltch mult multch now number twenty.
Not controlling weeds early, now that kind of goes with
the one I just said, failing to mulch. But when
you do have weeds, it is so easy when they're young,
to just slice a hole right underneath the surface with

(16:25):
almost no effort at all, and just wipe out the
weeds by cutting them before they get established. Once those
weeds are strong and they're a plant, it's harder to
chop them out. And plus I don't like hoeing my garden.
It's just I just think that's too much work. But
there are some nice hoes that are made to travel
horizontally under the surface, so instead of chopping down at

(16:48):
a forty five degree angle, like when you picture someone
using a hoe in the garden to chop down, you're
just slicing right under the surface and slicing those weeds
if you're having to pull them much easier to do that.
You can even use your fingers to just scratch through
the soil with a little brand new sprouted weed seeds
and get them out of there. But once they're established,

(17:09):
good luck. You got some work on your hands. So
you don't want to do it not controlling those weeds
or another purchasing infested disease or stunted plants. It may
be a good deal, but it may be a good
deal for a reason. When you're looking at it for sale,
you want check your plants. You don't want to bring
home pests. You know a plant, bring home a plant

(17:29):
full of avids, or a plant that already has disease
spots on it, or a plant that just is stunted.
I always tell you go to our garden centers and
the independent garden centers. I know some of you shop
in places where plants are mass sold and shipped all
over the place to all the chain stores around. They

(17:50):
don't get taken care of. Typically if they've been on
the lot for very long at all, they're starting. You
know your little tomato seedlings are going to be purplish
colored under the leaves, a sinus stress, phosphorus efficiency. Buy
a good, strong, healthy plant so it can hit the
ground running. That is important, and don't bring diseases home,
and the most important one, perhaps of all, is nematodes.

(18:11):
If you pull a little plant out of its container
and you look at the roots and you see little
knots on the roots, you know, like a string of pearls,
but a little bb sized knots or smaller on the roots,
don't take that plant home. You're bringing nematodes home. And
once you get them in your soil, you got them
and there's no there's no real way to get a
good way to get rid of them. So they say,

(18:31):
don't look a gift horse in the mouth, Well, you
do look a purchased plant in the root system before
you bring that thing home. And I'm not saying every
plant needs to be checked like that, but just don't
bring stuff home. Check over the plants, make sure they're healthy.
Go to a good, dependable independent garden center like you
hear me talk about here on garden Line. Those folks
take care of you, and they take care of the
plants they have. We're going to take a break and

(18:53):
be right back, and so.

Speaker 6 (18:57):
They have back with this in an on garden Line.
I'm your host, skipt Ricker.

Speaker 7 (19:01):
We are going through the fifty common gardening mistakes that
I came up with, things that I've seen over the years.
I'm sure there's some missing from this list that I
would someone said, well what about this, yep, that belonged
on the list. But fifty is a lot already, So
here we go. We just talked about not buying plants
that are infested or diseased or stunted, that have issues.

(19:25):
Make sure you get a good, healthy plant. Number twenty
two choosing betting plants with the most blooms, the largest blooms.

Speaker 6 (19:33):
For example.

Speaker 7 (19:34):
I know I am tempted by this, just like you are.
You go in and there's a flt of plants there
at the garden center, and there's one that just has
a big old bloom on it, or bloom a bunch
of blooms on it, and that's the one you want
to bring home.

Speaker 6 (19:49):
But think about this.

Speaker 7 (19:51):
When you buy a plant, you're bringing home a baby,
and you're going to grow that plant into a bigger plant.
That's when you want all the blooms to be on it.
If a plant is trying to produce blooms and it's
a scrawny little thing, a lot of energy goes into that.
You would be better off pinching those blooms off and
planting it and fertilizing it and watering it and getting
it growing, and it will bloom and you'll have a

(20:12):
better show in the long run. But even from the
standpoint of buying the plant, you don't necessarily need to
have any blooms on it. If it's in a vegetative
state and it's ready to grow, you're going to get blooms.
So that's just a tip. This isn't like night and day,
Oh my gosh, you made the worst mistake in the world.
I'm just giving you a tip, and that is that.
Remember it's like a fruit tree. No, you don't buy

(20:36):
fruit trees because they have blooms on them. But if
you buy a young fruit tree, for the first three years,
your job is to grow the biggest tree you can
so you can hang a lot of fruit on that tree.
When you allow a tree to have fruit on it
early on, too early on, the energy that would have
gone into a bigger tree for a lot more fruit

(20:58):
next year goes in to producing those few fruit that
you couldn't live without. Right now, I understand the temptation.
I get it, I get it, I get it.

Speaker 5 (21:07):
I know.

Speaker 7 (21:07):
I'm just telling you think about that when you put
too much energy, When a plant puts too much energy
into trying to put them on bloom or fruit or whatever,
early on, that energy could have gone to growing a
better plant, and in the long run you would have
a better blooming plant. You would also have a better
fruit production plant. That's not without exception, but in a

(21:29):
general purpose way.

Speaker 6 (21:31):
That is true.

Speaker 7 (21:32):
Number twenty three planting seeds at the wrong depth. How
deep do you plant seeds? Well, first, let me talk
about the exception here. There are a few seeds that
need sunlight in order to germinate. The red rays of
the sun. I don't mean you look at the sun
as reddish. I'm talking about in the spectrum, the rainbow
of colors, that is, in white sunlight, the red spectrum.

(21:54):
There are certain seeds that need that to germinate. You
bury them, they don't get it and they don't sprout
as well. Is the prime example of that. There are
some flower examples of that. It will tell you in
the packet how deep to plant them. But just know
that a few the exception, but a few seeds need
sunlight in order to germinate. They go on top of
the soil. You got to keep them very moist then

(22:16):
in order for them to not start to germinate and
then dry out. Most seeds, if you don't know how
deep to plant them, plan them three or four times
the width of the seed deep. So let's take a
pento bean. What is a pindo bean? About a third
of an inch, so you would plant it an inch
or inch and a third or so deep. You don't

(22:36):
have to go out there with a ruler. And I'm
just saying as a general guy, the bigger the seed,
the deeper you plant. But about three or four times
a width of the seed when you don't know, that's
a good way to guess. But again, look at the
seed packet. It'll tell you number twenty four. Inadequate lighting
when starting seeds indoors, Folks, we are entering the season
to do that. When I get through, when I get

(22:58):
just past the Christmas is when my lights are well,
they're on now because I'm doing grun some other things,
but that's when I turn on my indoor lighting and
start my seedlings. If a plant does not receive a
lot of light when it's germinating, you're going to get
spindly weak seedlings at break and don't turn into robust plants.

(23:21):
If you start them outdoors, they get plenty of light,
but indoors it's hard to get them enough light. And
I have nice plant lights. Maybe I'll talk about that
sometime on the show, but I have nice plant lighting
that I've purchased. It's worth it because you can grow
what you want to grow underneath it, from starting transplants

(23:42):
to maybe even keeping a houseplant going in when you
need to kind of give it a little energy and
boost it up and get it going. Inadequate lighting when
starting seeds indoors is a huge mistake people make. I
see the vast majority of people trying to grow plants
indoors from seed are getting spindley seedlings. They put them
by a window, they lean to the window, they turn

(24:03):
them around, they lean back toward the other side where
the window now is, and you just got to get
good lighting. And that there's too much to go into
on this one point a fifty that I'm making, But
good quality lighting is adequate volume of light that means brightness,
and adequate quality of light that means the spectrum primarily

(24:26):
the reds and the blues in a mix or what
you want for plants, red more for vegeta or for
production blooms and fruit fruiting, and blue more for vegetative growth.
That doesn't mean you put them under a blue light
if you have a houseplant, because it's all vegetative. It
just is saying that each white light wavelength has the

(24:49):
things that it does in a plant. All righty, plant
and trees and shrubs too deeply, Listen, there is a
line on at the base of a plant that has
been in soil that shows you exactly where to plant it.
It's right where it was growing here in our soils
here we do have a lot of heavy clays. We've

(25:09):
got a lot of soils that don't drain as well.
And it is better to plant them a little too
shallow than a little too deep. And so what I
will do Number one, dig the hole only as deep
as the root system. If you dig a whole two
feet deep and put a one gallum plant in it
or a five gallon plant in it, even the loose
soil at the bottom of the hole, even if you

(25:29):
try to pack it down, is going to settle in.
And that plants can end up too deep set it
so the top Listen to this.

Speaker 6 (25:35):
This is the way you know.

Speaker 7 (25:37):
I mentioned the soil line on the stem. Here's a
better way. The topmost root on that plant should be
right at or even slightly above the soil line. So
sometimes when a plant is being grown, as it gets
bigger and bigger, they're repotting it, and sometimes it gets
set a little deeper in a pot. And so you

(25:58):
may have soil, you know, on the trunk at a
certain line. But then when you take it out of
the pot and you scratch away that soil, the topmost
root may be two or three inches deeper than that,
or it may not. But just make sure the topmost
root goes at the soil line. That's a good way
to know for sure. Planting trees and shrubs without checking

(26:19):
for and cutting circling roots. If you leave a tree,
ors especially one and a small container like a one
gallon container, if you let a circling roots stay there,
it will get bigger and bigger over time. The trunk
will get bigger and bigger over time, and at sometime
the two come together. The root embeds in the trunk
because bark cannot heal across the bark, and that root

(26:42):
becomes an anaconda wrapped around the trunk, choking it to death.
Cut the roots. Anytime a root's going in a circle
and needs to be cut, I'll take a box cut
her knife on a lot of plants and slice vertically
down through the root ball. When I get them out
of the pot, in three or four places around that
plant to get it. Sometimes you'll find there's a circling

(27:03):
root inside. Maybe it grew in a small container and
then it was moved to a bigger container, and that
small container the root and run around in a circle.
Get in there with your snippers, cut it, get rid
of those cut They will heal fast. They I mean,
excuse me, they will re sprout fast, is what I'm
trying to say. When you cut a circling root, you think,
oh my gosh, I'm killing my tree.

Speaker 8 (27:23):
No you're not.

Speaker 7 (27:24):
Come back two weeks later and there'll be little white
roots coming out from that cut that you made. It
is much much, much, much much if I could say
amount of time, so I can't say much twenty four
more times, but it's much better to cut those roots
and to stick them in the ground and then wait.
If this is a Christmas season. So if you have

(27:46):
one of these living Christmas trees, those are notorious for
having roots going around in the park because you're trying
to grow a big tree in a little pot and
make it a pretty little quote Christmas tree. Look, you're
gonna have to cut those roots. I'm just telling you.
All right, that's it. Let's take a little break. We'll
be back with some more of the fifty common gardening
mistakes I have already. Welcome back to garden line. You

(28:09):
can tell me who that is singing, probably the mystery
of the morning. Curious if you know. By the way,
I should give you a phone number so you can't
call seven one three two one two five eight seven
four seven one three two one two fifty eight seventy four.
Number twenty seven of the fifty common gardening mistakes. Planting

(28:30):
a large plan under a window. Now large means higher
than the bottom of the window. Uh, this is done
all the time, and in fact I see it, like
when you enter neighborhoods developments, you know that it'll be
that like this is the Lost Pines development thing over here.
The sign is there, and then they put shrubs underneath

(28:51):
that they grow up and you can't read lost pines.
Development that happens, but under a window it happens all
the time, and it's hard to find small plants. They're
not a lot of really small plants. When it comes
to shrubs, there's a lot of them to get bigger,
but higher windows. You know, they're they're fairly low. So
when you put a large plant under them, what are
you gonna do. Are you gonna block the window and

(29:12):
you can't see out, or you're gonna end up just
printing the heck out of it constantly trying to keep
it small enough. Think about how high that plant needs
to be. Now, maybe it's a corner of the house,
and you want a big statue statuary of a plant
that's you know, just this bold, evergreen statement there. You
want a taller plant on something like that, But what

(29:32):
size does the plant need to be? Pick a plant
that's at size and you'll be really glad you did.
Down the line along with that number twenty eight planting
trees and shrubs too close to the home or a
sidewalk or a power line. I talked about this yesterday,
but I have pictures that in a program I do

(29:52):
called it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Landscaping mistakes and it's like, you know, at the time,
you hear there's this sidewalk going up to the house
and there are these little shrubs that are outside the sidewalk,
maybe foot away from the sidewalk or so, and it
just looks really nice when you plant it, and then
things happen. Time passes, they grow and have a picture

(30:13):
of shrubs that are so encroaching the sidewalk from both
sides that you have about one foot walk area between them. So,
as I was joking about yesterday, the family that comes
to visit you, they got all whole hands and charge
fast and sprint down the sidewalk to burst through the
gauntlet that leads them up to the front door. It

(30:34):
could be a big shrub that rubs against the easier house.
It could be a lot of things to certainly trees.
You know, the trees are gonna have branches that reach
out in all directions. And we always want to plant
them too close because they're small and they look lost
out there in the yard. Just remember they grow up.
Don't plant them too close. If you plant them too
close to a power line, you get free printing by
the power company, and you will not like what they do.

(30:57):
Their goal is to keep branches out of power lines,
not to have a beautiful tree. It's not and so
that's up to you. Plant a smaller tree or planet
further away. Number twenty nine planting fast growing trash trees.
A common question I get is, hey, I want a
tree and I wanted to grow fast and give me

(31:19):
shade soon. What would you recommend? Well, here's what I
recommend that you remember. These words grow fast, die young,
grow fast, dye or grow fast, fall apart young. A
lot of the fastest growing trees or trash trees. We
used to have the Arizona ash in every neighborhood back

(31:40):
in the sixties and even seventies, and they just fell apart.

Speaker 5 (31:44):
You know.

Speaker 7 (31:44):
They about the time they should have been a really
quality tree adding value to the home, they were getting
prune to look like a hat rack. Branches were splitting off.
It's just a mess. Plant a quality tree and care
for it to get the most rapid growth you can
from it. There are some species that do grow fairly fast,
not as fast as fast tree trash trees, but they

(32:07):
grow pretty fast. Red oaks go pretty fast. The les
spark elms grow pretty fast. There's a lot of trees
out there that you can get good growth rate. But
when you open up the used to be the newspaper supplements,
you know where it's royal palomio grows. I don't know
how many feet a year, and a giant purple flowers. Yes,
it does. It does all that, and it is not

(32:28):
worth having. It's a trash tree. Don't plant those good
good qualing one all right here. It is buying the
largest tree you can find, especially with the bear root
back when we had more bear root trees being sold.
A bear root tree that is giant is going to

(32:48):
get in the ground and it has lost ninety five
percent of its root system in being dug, and it's
going to be stunted for a while before it finally
gets going. A young tree that's smaller, that has a
good percentage of its root system still around, that can
hit the ground running, it'll do well. Same thing is
true with a container that's way too big, a tree
that's way too big for the container it's in. It's

(33:10):
sat there too long. The roots are going around and
around and around, and it may be three feet taller
than the one beside it, but it is probably not
the best one to choose. All right, how's that we
are going to start. We got all the way through
twenty nine. There no, actually we got through thirty. When
we come back, we're going to continue with fifty common
gardening mistakes in the garden in the landscape and your

(33:34):
calls at seven one three, two one two five eight
seven four. I know this is this happens a lot
on the radio. I start talking about a topic and
if we were just listening, and it's like, oh that's interesting,
Oh that's interesting, and then they don't call. So I
guess I should shut up and threaten to sing them
that make the phone ring.

Speaker 1 (33:58):
Welcome to KZRH Garden Line with Skip Richard.

Speaker 3 (34:04):
Crazy gas trim. Just watch him as so many good
things to seep basic.

Speaker 4 (34:22):
Gas again you disga not a sound glasses gas.

Speaker 3 (34:32):
So beamon of twee.

Speaker 7 (34:39):
Ready to go starting all right, Welcome back, go, Welcome
back to your garden line. We're going through fifty common
gardening mistakes here on garden Line.

Speaker 3 (34:51):
Uh.

Speaker 7 (34:52):
And this is kind of a little list that I
do occasionally through the year. Well I say occasionally, like
once every year.

Speaker 6 (34:58):
Or two.

Speaker 7 (34:58):
Uh that I have a compiled after thirty five years
of as a county agro horticulture agent, agro life extension
and forty plus years is in gardening and professional gardening,
advising gardeners and companies and things like that on horticultural topics.
And I've seen it all. Well, you never see it all.

(35:21):
I've seen a lot of it. Occasionally I still see
a new one. The mistakes that people make. Let me
just not sound too arrogant in that statement and say
the mistakes we all make, not all fifty hopefully, but
a lot of these are things I've done myself and
kind of learned the hard way, or maybe I kind

(35:41):
of knew better, but I still did it.

Speaker 6 (35:44):
You know that kind of thing.

Speaker 7 (35:46):
So avoid these and have success.

Speaker 3 (35:48):
Enjoy it.

Speaker 7 (35:48):
You listen, You spend time, you spend money, and you
place your hopes on the line when you put in
a garden, when you put in plants, when you put
it in a landscape, when you buy a plant, and
why waste that? Why not enjoy success and the rewarding
feeling of success when you garden. Help Let me help

(36:11):
you avoid that. Here's another one, number thirty one failure
to mulch a wide area around new trees and shrubs. Now,
the tree or shrubs that got in the grass is
not going to die if you take decent care of it.
But trees are from forests. Forests have leafy, mulched, decomposing
organic matter, forest floor environments for their roots. They don't

(36:35):
have meadows for their roots. Trees hate grass. Grass hates trees.
Bottom line, trees shade out grass. Grass competes with for
water and nutrients with trees. The wider and area you
mulch around a tree or shrub, the happier that tree
or shrub is. I interviewed a tree one time and
I said, how close do you want grass to come
to your trunk? And the tree took its branches and

(36:57):
pointed out three blocks down and said somewhere further than that.
They don't want to compete with grass. So if you've
put a little one foot mulch around a tree, well,
I mean, I guess that helps keep the lawn more
and weed eat are away public enemy number one to
young tender tree trunks. But why not branch out or

(37:19):
reach out as far as the branch spread or further.
Now there's a point where it doesn't esthetically look right
in your yard. You know, you got a little broom
mop handle sized tree and you're having a mulch circle
ten feet out in all directions. Tree like that, by
the way, but that didn't look right. So go as
wide as you can esthetically. But just know this that

(37:41):
every square foot around that tree that doesn't have grass
on it or weeds, which happens when you don't mulch
on it is areas where the mult is decomposing, the
soil is getting better, the tree roots have moisture and
nutrient access that is not in competition with any grass.
Your tree will grow. I saw a picture of a

(38:02):
pecan orchard back when I was getting a horticulture master's
and horticulture degree at A and M. And it was
an orchard where they it was a bermuda grass field,
and they had killed all the bermuda grass in one
section of the field and then left it in the
other and mode it real short, but left it and
they planted pecan tries through both sides.

Speaker 6 (38:22):
The ones.

Speaker 7 (38:23):
This was then several years later, the ones that were
in the bare soil where no wheat, where it was
cultivated and no weeds could compete were twice as big
as the ones that were competing with the bermuda grass.
And so my point isn't to just have bear soil
and have to ho ho ho all the time around

(38:45):
it to keep the weeds out. It's tumult. That's what
trees really want, is their roots covered with mulch. All right,
I beat that horse to death. But anyway, that is
so so true improper tree staking or waiting too long
to remove the wires. A well grown tree is a
tree that is able to be planted and in most

(39:09):
cases to grow without a steak at all. But if
you want to be extra sure and provide a little support,
you can do that. But you need to do a
couple things. Number one, you need to allow that tree
to move some. If there's no movement, there's no natural
strengthening of the trunk that occurs when plants are stressed.
Like our muscles, when they're stressed, they get stronger. You

(39:32):
work out, you wear them out, you give them a rest.
You work out, you wear them out, you give them
a rest, and you get stronger and stronger. That's how
it is with tree trunks, too. So allow it to
move a little bit if you're going to stake it.
But again, a well grown tree and properly planted tree
doesn't have to be tied down. I see these three
wire tie down systems where you think the tree is

(39:53):
a rocket about to launch out if you don't hunker
it down real tight.

Speaker 6 (39:58):
No, don't do that.

Speaker 7 (40:00):
You do steak, don't wait to if you use wires
number one, don't But if you do, don't wait too long.
Take those wires off the wire. Those things cut into
the tree trunks. That's even true of some of the
commercial products. The little plastic looks like plastic chain that interlocks. Uh,
it can choke. And what happens in commercial sites is

(40:22):
you know that the bid was to come plant these trees,
and but there's no plan to take care of them
after that. And so they were, they were staked in,
and now the trees are being strangled to death by
what they used to stake them. Don't do that well.
One reason I like the three sixty tree stabilizer. I
think it's a great way to uh uh set that
strap loose and allow some movement with the tree. After

(40:44):
a tree has been staked in for about six months
to a year at the most, you should be able
to remove, uh the support, the support that you had.

Speaker 6 (40:55):
So there you go.

Speaker 7 (40:59):
Number thirty three lack of adequate watering for new woody
plants during the first season. All right, Now, if you
were to plant an acorn in the ground and let
it grow until it is a six foot high tree,
and you could go underground and see everywhere the roots were,
those roots would be hanged, would be reaching out beyond

(41:21):
the height of the tree in all directions. If you
go to a garden center and buy a six foot
oak that grew from the same kind of acorn, all
the root system is wrapped up in that pot. They're
giving it water, they're giving it nutrients or keeping it
going and growing fast and good. But now your whole
root system is in that pot. That's one reason I

(41:42):
say cut circling roots. But when you put it in
the ground, that little pot sized cylinder of roots is
going to dry out fast because that's the only place
that can get water and nutrients. And so therefore you
gotta take care of it. You gotta water that area regularly,
way more regularly than if you had a tree that
grew in that spot originally. And you've got to provide

(42:05):
extra nutrients. You continuing to water a little larger area
as you go, but you need to take good care
of it, especially during that first summer. Just realize it
takes a while for that root system get to get
back out to what would be a natural expanded reach.
By the way, did you know that a mature tree
the roots they've washed roots out of the ground on

(42:26):
different species, and different species are a little different. I
know with pecan trees, they've they found them two and
a half times the height of the tree out in
all directions. Stop and think about that a minute. A
giant pecan tree, Look how tall it is. Now, go
out from the trunk that far two and a half times.
There's pecan roots that reach out to there. Not as
many roots is near around under the branch spread, but

(42:47):
there's roots. That is a resilient tree, and that's what
we're trying to grow ourselves into. We're going to take
a little break here and we'll be right back. I
got a couple of calls here. We're going to head
to Randy and Neederland and Jeane in Chapel Hill. They
welcome back. Welcome back to Guardline, folks. Good to have
you with us. Your ACE Hardware store has got you

(43:08):
covered for all of your holiday shopping. We're talking about
the Christmas decorations inside and outside that like the various
types of light strings, even the thing that they call
lights by the foot. I think that's a great idea extension, cords, timers,
you name it. And then the gifts, Oh my goodness,
so many quality gifts at your local ACE Hardware store

(43:29):
for the do it yourself are in your list, for
the people that want to create a beautiful home, kitchen decorations,
for decorations of the living room, for beautiful you know
what the farmhouse look. I was in an ACE harbare
store recently and was just checking out the things that
they had and the decorations that were That farmhouse look

(43:53):
was a whole section of a store like that. That's
the kind of thing they have. It's not all farmhouse,
of course, but I'm just saying it. Don't think about
a hardware store and picture nuts and bolts and wars
and light bulbs and plumbing. Ace is all that, but
ACE is also a wonderful place to buy a quality gift.
You need to join the ACE Rewards program because that

(44:15):
helps you get better deals it also builds up as
you shop there good value that you can save on things.
So there you go, simple as that. Let's see here,
Let's run out now to Neederland and talk to Randy
this morning. Hey Randy, welcome to garden Line.

Speaker 9 (44:33):
Good morning. I've got a question Skip about the grow
lights that you were talking about a few minutes ago.
When I go to buy one, what should I be
looking for written on the box that tells me that
I've got the correct light? Went, and it seems like
there's about forty different kinds.

Speaker 7 (44:56):
That is the wild That's a good question, Randy, because
it is the wilde West. When it comes to proper
lighting and descriptions. Everything that you see in lighting in
the in the in the store, you know, is for humans.
We talk about lumens and lumins. Is the brightness to
our eyes, That's all it means. We talk about watts,

(45:17):
that's the energy usage. That's all it means.

Speaker 6 (45:20):
Uh.

Speaker 7 (45:20):
And what we need to know is what is the
light quality and what is the light intensity for our plants?
And if you're going to buy a really good light,
they should show you a spectrum like the rainbow with
the little lines, you know, hip what peaks and valleys,
you know, as it goes across from the red to
the blue and plants light. Good plant lighting is primarily

(45:42):
in the red and the blue in the spectrum. It
doesn't just have to be red and blue. It can
be it can look like white because it has all
the colors. But a good quality will light will show
you things like these are letters that make no sense,
I know, but like pp figh, that's photosynthetic. Uh, photosynthetically

(46:06):
active lighting is very important and that you should have
some signs of that. I wrote an article. I'm gonna
try to stick this on my website. It's it's too
long to describe on the air, but it talks about
plant lighting and the idea, and part of it is
getting good quality light. Part of it is getting a
bright enough light, and then part of it is putting

(46:27):
your plants close enough to the light. I used to
grow seedlings for tomatoes in the spring garden stardom indoors
under a shop light with the old fluorescent tubes, and
I'd put a cool white, which is the bluish light,
and a warm white, which is the more like an
incandescent kind of yellow glow light. In each shop fixture,

(46:50):
two four foot chop fixtures with a light excuse me,
a blue and a red and blue and red kind
of thing, and that worked adequately. Now, if you're trying
to grow tomatoes and harvest indoors, and that's not nearly enough.
But if you can at least get a very daylight
bright blue that shows in that part of the spectrum,
and then one that's a warmer light and mix those

(47:13):
two in a fixture, or mix the fixtures, you can
pretty welcome close enough at least to get by growing
seed links and things.

Speaker 9 (47:22):
Yeah, sir, OK, all right, I appreciate it, Thank you, sir.
I'll you said you're gonna put this on your website.

Speaker 7 (47:32):
I will get it up on the website. I started
working on it the other day. I have it written.
I just haven't, you know, fixed it up so it
can go on the website. But I'm gonna I've got
a couple of things to put up on the website.
Someone else has already reached out and said, hey, would
you put these fifty things you're going through up on
the website, So I'll try to get those done. Thank you,

(47:52):
thank you, yes, sir, thank you appreciate it.

Speaker 6 (47:57):
Bye. Bye.

Speaker 7 (47:59):
All right, let's go out to Chapel Hill now and
we're going to visit with Gene this morning. Hey Gene,
good morning.

Speaker 10 (48:06):
I have a question about transplanting trees. We have some
wooded property that has a lot of small Eastern red
ceedars and we were wondering if we could dig some
of those up and transplant them successfully, and how would
you suggest that.

Speaker 5 (48:26):
We do it.

Speaker 7 (48:29):
Yes, they don't like being transplanted as they get old, larger,
so go for the smallest ones you got, maybe something
a foot high or something like that. Dig and get
as much of the root system as you can and
move it to its new spot right away and watered in.
Don't let those roots dry out at all if you can't.

(48:50):
If you're not like digging one and then planting it
right away, at least get those roots very moist and
wrap them in something to hold that moisture into the
roots system, because drying out of the roots is really
bad for them. But the percentage of the roots you
can get.

Speaker 10 (49:12):
Yeah, these trees are small, maybe maybe two feet tall maybe,
but there's a lot of different sizes. Would it make
sense to put them in a pot for a while
till they got themselves calm down a little bit, or
is that just another move that they wouldn't like then
when I put them in the ground eventually.

Speaker 7 (49:33):
Well, they would prefer to go straight in the ground.
But you know, if you're going out there and you're
planting and then you've got let's say you're putting five
in a row down a fence line or something, and
two or three of them die, then you got to
go back and do it again. And this is the
time of year to get it done, when the demands
are as low as they're going to get. So if

(49:54):
you wanted to do some of that, but maybe pot
up a few as backups to go back in there,
or oh, put them all in pots where you can
take care of them. But you don't want to delay
getting unplanted. So the time in the pot is you know,
it's good for a backup for hedging your bet. But
I would I would try to get them in the ground.

Speaker 6 (50:12):
If you could.

Speaker 10 (50:14):
Okay, very good, Thank you so much.

Speaker 7 (50:16):
Sounds like some work for my husband. Oh okay, so
let me ask you this. How many are you wanting
to plant? Is this like a long fence line in
the country, or is this like a couple of trees
in the yard.

Speaker 6 (50:29):
Or what have you got in mine?

Speaker 10 (50:32):
Well, it could potentially be a long fence line, but
I don't think we're going to do it all at
the same time. So maybe let's say just a half
a dozen or so right away.

Speaker 7 (50:42):
Oh okay, all right, there are and I say this
because other people are listening that are going, hey, I
might want to do a fence line. There are places
where you can buy bundles of bare root eastern red
cedar by like you get a hundred of them, and
they're very inexpensive to buying a pole tree, for sure,

(51:03):
just typically a few dollars per per plant. However, at
this point in the season those places are almost always
all sold out. But the Texas Forest Service used to
have a nursery where they may still have one. They
didn't grow red ceedar to my knowledge, but they grow
other what they call conservation bundles, you know, where people

(51:25):
are wanting to just reforest the land a little bit
and things like that. And it's a very good way
to go if you want. If you'll hold my producer
will give you an email, And if you'll email and
request this, I can send you a list of companies
that I've run across through the years that do sell
bundles of trees, you know, for where again you're just

(51:47):
paying a few dollars a tree. Sometimes these companies will
sell you little what is the word it's it's like
a it's like a transplant of a tree. It's not
in a big container. It's a small container that is
designed for growing a good root system. Those are much
more expensive than the bear root. But I'll send you

(52:08):
that list if you want. Just hang on as we
hang up here, or you don't hang up, and I'll
be happy to send you that and you can call
them and check it out. Maybe you'll say, hey, we can,
we can do the whole fence line at that price.

Speaker 10 (52:21):
Okay, okay, well, thank you so much. I appreciate the information, all.

Speaker 6 (52:26):
Right, Geene, But you don't hold here all right? There
you go.

Speaker 7 (52:30):
Yeah, conservation bundles, it's another way to go for those
of you listening that have property out there. You know,
if you were to go to a garden center and
buy twenty gallon trees and put one hundred and down
a fence line, oooh boy good. You know that that
takes two check books. But when you're planting a whole
bunch of trees like that. I always remember, the smaller
of the tree is the younger. If you give it

(52:52):
out of quate water, the better it's going to do.
And if it's been a pot and developed a good
root system for that, you're gonna have to continue to
water tmpert. The last thing I did on my fifty
was lack of adequate watering for new trees during the
first season. I put a berm around my trees, a
berm of soil, a doughnut of soil around them outside

(53:12):
of the roots cylinder, so you're not just putting it
right where the roots are, but a little beyond that.
You can fill that with water and all the water
has to go straight down in the soil there, it
can't run off, and you do get a good soaking
that way, and you can continue to help your trees,
especially during that first year when most trees that are

(53:32):
going to be lost can be lost during that first
year because they don't make it far past planting if
they have loss of roots or inadequate water going forward.

Speaker 6 (53:41):
So just a tip on that.

Speaker 7 (53:42):
Let's see if we can get another one done here.
Choosing containers that are too small for vegetables and flowers.
Radio you see TV shows that show like someone put
a rosemary in an old boot full of soil and
grew it in there. We live in a very hot climate,

(54:03):
and we need as much soil volume to hold moisture
and nutrients as possible to get our plants through unless
you're gonna go out there and water that boot three
times a day to keep it adequately moist The bigger
your container, the easier it is to care for, and
the less likely it is to go into stress. And
if you're going to grow like a tomato plant and

(54:24):
it wilts at the end of the day every day
and you water and it perks up, me think you're
okay what you're actually doing in that stress, it's not
gonna set fruit and develop fruit well. And so bigger containers,
the bigger you can have, the better off your plants
are gonna be the vegetables and the flowers.

Speaker 6 (54:39):
That you're going to grow.

Speaker 7 (54:41):
All right, So there's another one. We got to go
to a break right here. I'll be back and we're
going to continue. Starting at number thirty five, the top
fifty common gardening questions that I've heard and dealt with
over the years. Are common gardening mistakes rather that you
can avoid. I'm sitting here talking to you, and then

(55:03):
I realized I got the micro on you, so I'm
talking to myself. My dad used to say, it's okay,
it's okay to talk to yourself, but if you start
answering yourself, we're gonna worry.

Speaker 6 (55:21):
That's true.

Speaker 7 (55:23):
Hey, Nelson Nursery and Water Garden out there in Katie
is your West Houston destination nursery. It's an outstanding place
right now. By the way, they've got some special deals
twenty five percent off all the plants, including Christmas trees
and poncetnas and Christmas cactus interior plants. And they have
beautiful ones there, decorated Norfolk pines, you know, decorated for

(55:43):
the holiday. All the aquatics also, So there you go,
Nelson Nursery and Water Gardens. You need to check that
place out. And while you're out there, check out the
disappearing fountains, the unbelievably beautiful disappearing fountains, and go to
their website. Listen, it's Nelsonwatergardens dot com. And I want

(56:05):
you to look at the information that they have on
the website on how to build it like, they'll tell
you how to install a disupring fountain. If you're do
it yourself and you want to buy the pieces parts
and put it together, they can help you do that
or just have them come out and do it. Either way.
But there's nothing like, nothing like the sound and beauty

(56:26):
of water in one of the gorgeous fountains, and their
pottery is some of the most stunningly beautiful pottery I've
ever seen anywhere. Nelson Water Gardens and Nursery out west
of town. Head out ten turn north in Katie Turn
north on Katie Fort Ben, Katiefort Ben Road, Nelson Watergardens
dot com. Let's head out now to full shirt and

(56:50):
this morning we're going to visit with Jennis. Hey, Jennis,
welcome to garden Line.

Speaker 5 (56:56):
Hey, good morning here. I enjoy your program and I
have a question for you. I sent you some pictures
about my citrus.

Speaker 7 (57:07):
Alrighty was that today.

Speaker 5 (57:11):
Just just a few minutes ago?

Speaker 7 (57:12):
Actually, okay, let's see here. I'm gonna have to do
a reload. They didn't come through yet where it is?

Speaker 5 (57:22):
Oh, maybe they didn't problem.

Speaker 7 (57:25):
Well, my email, my email went offline. Thank God, just
a second, I'll check. Tell me a little bit about
the pictures though, while I'm trying to find these and
pull them up.

Speaker 5 (57:37):
Okay, I have an orange and a grape actually it's
I said orange, but it's a mandarin and a grapefruit tree.
And they've been in the ground probably twenty or twenty
one since that time, and for the past two years,
the same thing happens. They bloom and they produced fruit,
but the fruit has bruises all over it, and it's

(57:59):
a dark and I actually left them on this year,
and I sent you some pictures from June the fifth,
and then some other pictures from November the fifteenth, and
the mandarins, I decided to pull them off because they
looks so ugly, and the process of doing so, the
skin pulled away and they it looked like good fruit
inside and ate some of it. It was so sweet,

(58:19):
but the outside of the fruit looks absolutely terrible, nothing
that you would want to eat. And then my grapefruit
tree only has one grapefruit that survived and it's still
growing and it's but it's bruised just like you have.
Until you see the pictures, it's hard to explain and
I've grown sitters before and I've never had this happen.

Speaker 7 (58:42):
Yeah, I didn't. I didn't get them. When you say bruising,
are you talking about kind of a browning of the surface.

Speaker 5 (58:49):
It almost looks like a mildew on the outside, but
the peels are like indented, like they would have been
damaged some way. I took pictures and showed them that
in Channa Gardens and they told me that he was
They thought he was from birds, But I don't think
birds would do that. The birds.

Speaker 7 (59:10):
Yeah, birds will peck and little pecks out of the
citrus rne just on the outside, and with a whole
bunch of them, you just get this kind of area.
But it's very pitted because they've pecked little sections out.

Speaker 3 (59:24):
Uh.

Speaker 7 (59:24):
And that's a possibility. If your fruit is good on
the inside, that's a good sign. We're not going to
worry a lot about that.

Speaker 3 (59:31):
Uh.

Speaker 7 (59:31):
There there are a number of different things that can
affect Ceterus fruit, and and the photos by the way
that I think we may need to check the email
address because I'm not seeing I'm not seeing, uh, your
your emails in here. Okay. It could be a couple
of things There's also something called rust citrus rust, and

(59:51):
it is a it is a browning of the outer
skin that it just has a I don't know how
to just cribe it, but it's almost as if you
kind of rubbed it with sandpaper, maybe just a tiny bit,
and then it turned brown out there. It's another possibility,
but none of these affect the inside. If they don't
affect the inside, the only negative would be that if

(01:00:14):
they grow that you may get cracking because that skin
is less supple in some place.

Speaker 5 (01:00:19):
Right, I did get that on some of them. Yes, Well,
what should I do? I really want you to see
the pictures, So should I Okay, check back with your
producer or what should I do?

Speaker 7 (01:00:32):
Yeah, let's do this. I'm going to put you on hold,
and the producer is going to check that email address
because that's got to be the problem, and we will
if you can resend it. I'll what I'll do if
I get it, I'll mention on the air that I
got I got that email, and then.

Speaker 6 (01:00:49):
Feel free to call back.

Speaker 7 (01:00:51):
It's it's a slow day on so you're gonna have
trouble getting through, all right, Okay, here you go. I'm
putting you on hold and he will get you that address.

Speaker 6 (01:01:01):
Citrus.

Speaker 7 (01:01:02):
All right, So where were we we did containers or
to Oh boy, here's a good one. Thirty five Choosing
poorly adapted fruit species and varieties for this area. I
was in a big box store, no matter which one
happens in lot of them, and I was seeing fruit
for sale that does not need to be sold here,

(01:01:25):
like raspberries, black cap raspberries. They don't have a chance
here in our area, but they're being sold here. High
bush blueberries, not southern high bush, regular high bush blueberries
being sold in Houston. They don't grow here. They don't.
They don't make it here. What are some other examples, Oh, grapes,
conquered grapes, you know, Welch's grape juice, Mogan David wine,

(01:01:48):
that's conquered grapes. They grow here, kind of a lot
of issues and the berries ripen about one at a
time per in the cluster. So yeah, that's not a
good one either. Choose varieties that are adapted here. Go
to your independent garden centers where they're going to only
sell you stuff that grows here. They'll tell you if
you need a second variety for a cross pollination by

(01:02:11):
the way, that is number thirty six is not planning
a pollinator variety for some fruit, so they get the
good variety that grows here, get the right chilling hours
in some types of fruit like peaches and plums and
pairs and apples, especially peaches and plums. Excuse me, peaches
and plums and apples. That's the right chilling for our area.

(01:02:36):
And then if you need a second variety, by it,
because like the old ranchers say, you can't raise cattle
if you shoot the bull. So you got to have
two varieties in order to get fruit on some of
these things, not at all, but on some. So those
two mistakes, Oh, what a disappointment to have a tree
in the ground several years and then someone tells you, oh,
you got to plan another one, or that one doesn't

(01:02:58):
grow here.

Speaker 6 (01:02:59):
Well, there you go.

Speaker 7 (01:03:00):
We're gonna take a little break and we'll be right
back with your calls, are right, folks. I want somebody
to tell me who that is singing? That ought to
be an easy and we post some weird stuff here
on online at times that cracks me up. Who knows
who that is? First two guesses don't count, meaning it's
so easy, all right, folks. Here's a phone number if

(01:03:23):
you would like to give me a call seven one
three two one two five eight seven four seven one
three two one two fifty eight seventy four. While Birds
Unlimited is a wonderful place to go for not only
all the supplies that you need for attracting and keeping
birds in your backyard. That would include feeders and houses

(01:03:45):
and quality bird seed that they actually want to eat,
not full of the red bebies, as I usually say.

Speaker 3 (01:03:52):
Uh.

Speaker 7 (01:03:52):
The Winter super Blend, by the way, is the one
to be buying right now. It's the best one to
be buying right now. There's a lot of other great
blends and people using all of them various times of
the year. Win are super blends, got that extra fat,
extra protein in order to fuel those birds during these
shorter days and as it gets cold, less food out
there available for them. Wild Birds Unlimited it's also the

(01:04:16):
place to go for some wonderful gifts. If you have
someone on your list and what am I going to
buy them? They have everything, well, they don't have everything.
They don't have everything unless they shop all the time.
At Wildbird's Unlimited. There's a Wildbird's Unlimited store in clear Lake,
one in Cyprus, when in Houston on the west Side,
one in Houston on Southwest bel Air, one in Kingwood,

(01:04:40):
and one in Paarland. Six stores. You can go to
WBU dot com forward slash Houston and that's where you'll
find your closest Wildbird's Unlimited store.

Speaker 6 (01:04:54):
All right, there you go.

Speaker 7 (01:04:56):
Let's see here we have genus in full sure and Jenis,
I did receive the photos and oh my gosh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:05:08):
That bruising was being kind.

Speaker 7 (01:05:11):
There.

Speaker 6 (01:05:12):
There are a number of.

Speaker 7 (01:05:13):
Different things that are going on on those fruit, and
in fact, it's hard to tell everything for sure. I
see a little bit of by the way on the tree,
the citrus leap minor, but that's not a big, big problem.

Speaker 5 (01:05:24):
Yeah, I knew that I had that. They don't really
hurt the trees, but.

Speaker 7 (01:05:28):
Not so much. No, And there is some city mold,
which means you got some kind of insect that is
sucking the sugary sap and excreting it out onto the leaves.
Could be scale or something like that.

Speaker 6 (01:05:40):
The fruit. Though there's more than one symptom.

Speaker 7 (01:05:44):
There are some symptoms that could be a disease called
septoria rot, and so that's a possible it could be
a serious infestation of that. There is also some symptoms
that can be due to what they call fido toxicity
that's burned from chemicals. I kind of doubt you've sprayed

(01:06:06):
anything that would do that on your tree. I'm just
seeing on the symptoms that, okay, that look like that.
I don't see the rots. There's several rots that occur
on citrus, and none of these things look like a
rot of the citrus. There's a condition that causes the

(01:06:26):
there's about three or four conditions that cause the scarring
of the outside part of the fruit. But the thing
that's throwing me is the bumpiness, the wrinkled and crinkledness
of the fruit. To the degree that you have it,
everything I can think of is just not going to

(01:06:48):
do it. To the degree that you have it on there.
You were going to say something.

Speaker 5 (01:06:52):
I'm wondering if I should just pull up the trees
and forget about it, or see what happens next year.
It's happened two years in a row, young trees.

Speaker 6 (01:07:01):
Oh to you?

Speaker 5 (01:07:03):
They were planted either twenty or twenty one.

Speaker 6 (01:07:07):
Did you say it was a satsuma or a mandarin.

Speaker 5 (01:07:10):
It's actually a mandarin and it's a mandarin. Yes, I
didn't send pictures of the grapefruit. It only has one
on it, and you know it actually looks better than
the mandarins.

Speaker 7 (01:07:19):
So yeah, I need some time to look at this
and see if I can, if I can come up
with anything on it. And I've never seen citrus in
Houston so damaged.

Speaker 5 (01:07:33):
I know, I'm not grown citrus in other houses. Just
you just plant it and don't worry about it, and
you know it produces. And I've this is just driving
me crazy.

Speaker 7 (01:07:44):
Yeah, it doesn't look like you know, we have two
major centrius problems that are not prevalent in the area,
but they're here and we are under quarantine because of it.
Citrus greening is one and citrus canker is the other.
And it doesn't look like either of those. So that's
good news.

Speaker 6 (01:08:00):
That's good I guess, right, Yeah, I need to yeah
as if.

Speaker 7 (01:08:06):
Yeah, I let me think about this and look at it.
Have you sprayed anything for weeds around the tree, broad
leaved weeds in the lawn or anything like that.

Speaker 6 (01:08:17):
No, No, okay, have you have you.

Speaker 5 (01:08:21):
A weak coller?

Speaker 9 (01:08:22):
I like it.

Speaker 5 (01:08:22):
I put down them. I put like barricade down in
my yard. But I don't and we spraying weeds. I
pulled the rest of it, don't.

Speaker 7 (01:08:32):
Yeah, okay, yeah, this isn't due to that. Have you
sprayed the tree for anything? The tree itself with things
for not spy have?

Speaker 5 (01:08:47):
Well, I guess I did spray. I did spray with
the fruit. I did spray with the fruit and uh
uh that spray in the spring after they No, I
didn't I sprayed my I strayed my peaches. I've never
I did not spray my citrus. Yes, I did not.

Speaker 7 (01:09:01):
Okay, Well, let me work. Let me work on this one.
If I can come up, all right, if I can
come up with anything, i'll i'll I'll get back with you.

Speaker 11 (01:09:12):
Okay.

Speaker 7 (01:09:13):
Well, thank you so angles to take Yeah, you bet,
thank you.

Speaker 5 (01:09:18):
If you don't think it's you don't think it's bruising
from birds.

Speaker 11 (01:09:20):
Do you?

Speaker 7 (01:09:25):
No, I'm looking around for the kinds of damaged birds
can cause there there could be some on there, but
I'm not seeing that as as a prevalent thing on these.

Speaker 5 (01:09:36):
As a major problem. Okay, Well, thank you so much,
and Merry Christmas to you and I'll keep well.

Speaker 7 (01:09:45):
If it's any consolation, you won the Stump the Chump
award today.

Speaker 11 (01:09:49):
So.

Speaker 7 (01:09:53):
Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 5 (01:09:54):
Okay, Yeah, we're gonna.

Speaker 7 (01:10:00):
To look into this one. That is interesting.

Speaker 6 (01:10:03):
I got something to do during the top of the
hour news.

Speaker 7 (01:10:07):
We'll be back, folks.

Speaker 5 (01:10:09):
Welcome to Katy R. H.

Speaker 1 (01:10:11):
Garden Line with Skip Ricord's shoes.

Speaker 2 (01:10:15):
Crazy Gas can use a trip. You just watch him
as we'll go.

Speaker 4 (01:10:25):
Gas us many birthdays to sup Basic gassa not a
sun credit basis Gas.

Speaker 3 (01:10:43):
The sun beamon of between.

Speaker 7 (01:10:50):
All Right, we're back. Welcome back to the garden Line.
An interesting morning. Glad to have you with us. If
you've got a gardening question and I can help with, well,
give me a call. Seven one three two one two
fifty eight seventy four seven one three two one two
five eight seven four. I am working my way through

(01:11:12):
fifty common gardening landscaping type mistakes that I see and
have dealt with. The last thing we did was number
thirty six. It is not planting a pollinator variety for
some fruit trees, and number thirty five was done with it.
And that is choosing poorly adapted species and varieties for
the area, which includes the right chilling hours with some

(01:11:32):
types of fruit. Number thirty seven incorrect training and pruning
of fruit trees and vines, And we could say that
for landscape trees also, but let's just let's talk about fruit.
If the fruit has a bunch of seeds inside, like

(01:11:53):
an apple or a pear, the fruit tree specifically apples
and pears. Quincy would also follow into this, but noegros
quinces anymore. Anyway, that tree is trained to a central leader,
single trunk in the center, and has branches coming out
along that central leader every food or foot or two,

(01:12:16):
so you've got a section of branches, and then maybe
a foot and a half two feet higher, there's another
section of branches and so on. That is the traditional
central leader type of training. If it is a pit
type fruit, that would be peaches and plums primarily, but
it would also apply to cherries and apricots, which don't
generally do super well, especially the cherries do not. But

(01:12:41):
then it's trained to more of a bowl or chalice shape.
So I'm planning a peach tree. Actually early next week.
I've got a tree I'm going to put in the ground,
and I'm gonna cut the top off down low, and
it'll form several branches coming out, and I'll train those
word at about a forty five to sixty degree angle,

(01:13:05):
maybe more like sixty degrees to form the main scaffold
branches of the tree. And it'll be open in the
center so sunlight can shine in. The whole reason for
pruning is two things. We want structural strength. We don't
want a branch it's going to break easily. But we
want to put light near the fruit. Carb light shining

(01:13:27):
on leave. Let's just use peach as an example. This
true of your other fruit. When light shines on the leaves,
the leaves can make carbohydrates, carbohydrates or sugars and things.
And if you want a peach that tastes good and
that has good sweetness to it, also you gotta have carbohydrates,
which means you got to have sunlight on the leaves.
It takes I don't know, it takes a number of

(01:13:48):
differently at least ten different leaves to fuel A peach
tree is probably more than that, but a peach fruit
rather so within an area of the branch, you need
to have plenty of leaves. Now, if that branch is
down in the interior, of a tree and the top
is overshadowing it and not allowing light through. You're not
going to have peaches in that area, and you're not

(01:14:09):
gonna have quality peaches in that area. So we train
to get sunlight in. Basically, as gardeners growing vegetables and fruit,
what we're basically doing is we're harvesting sunlight. And the
way we plant and rose, and the vegetable garden that
not necessarily rose, but the way we scatter our plants
in a vegetable garden, the way we scatter our trees

(01:14:30):
in an orchard and prune our trees in an orchard
is to harvest sunlight. So if you want to think
about it this way, I don't think this way when
I prune, but it's true, and that is that when
you have a fruit orchard and you look on the
ground everwhere sunlight's hitting the ground, that's a lost opportunity

(01:14:51):
to capture sunlight and grow some fruit, make quality fruit.
So our goal is to scatter out our plantings and vegetables,
to space out our fruit trees and print our fruit
trees so that all as much area as possible is
capturing sunlight and therefore grown as fruit, so proper training

(01:15:14):
and printing. If you go to the Aggie Horticulture website
Aggie Horticulture, just do a search for it. There's a
section for fruit plants and in that section you can
pick every kind of fruit you might want to grow,
from avocados to peaches, plums. Everything is in there. Citrus
is in there, pairs of course are in there, per

(01:15:36):
semons and so on. You click on the it's free publications,
you can print them, you can look at them online,
whatever you want to do, and they will tell you
how to pick trees, whether you need chilling hours, how
many chilling hours you have where you live for that
particular kind of tree, whether they need pollinators, and how
to print them. And so I would take advantage of
that if you're going to buy a tree before we

(01:15:57):
put in the ground, or after you put in the ground,
at least before you go very far along the line.
Pruning begins at planting in one form or another, and
it's certainly the first three years of a fruit tree's
life is critical to do proper pruning because you have
a strong structure of a tree that will produce for
you very very well. So probably overtalk that one but

(01:16:20):
very important number thirty eight not scouting for plant problems early.
You need to always be looking at your plants. This
could be flowers, it could be shrubs, trees, fruit, vegetables, herbs.
When you search for problems, if you catch it early,
early detection and early action is very important. If you

(01:16:43):
wait until a plant has lost eighty percent of its
leaves to then call and say, well, what do I spray?
You know, my thought is we'll spray on what it's
all gone. There's nothing to put the spray on, hardly left.
The earlier you catch it, the better your control can be,
whether it's insects or diseases. And if you are an

(01:17:06):
organic gardener, the number of spray options are much more
limited for organic growing, and so if you want success
in organics, it's even more important to catch it early.
Because when things are small we have options for controlling them.
As they get older, we don't. Let's take stink bugs
for example. You learn what stink bug eggs look like,

(01:17:28):
and you go through your plants, let's says tomatoes, and
when you see stink bugs or leaf of of bug
eggs on the plant, you just snip them off, wipe
them off thumb and forefinger, crush them whatever you're going
to do, and you wipe out a whole population there
that you never had to spray for. If you wait
until they're nymphs, you still come in with soapy water
and swap that branch. They tend to kind of cluster
together when they're young and little herds, and you swap

(01:17:51):
the branch, knock them into some soapy water, and you
control them again organically, naturally. Wait until they get wings
and they're flying all over the neighborhood and there's not
a great organic spray. There's some that'll do okay, but
you're you're wasting your time, even if you're not an
organic gardener. Waiting that long is not smart. The sooner

(01:18:13):
you get out and scout, the sooner you see a problem,
and the sooner you can deal with it, and the
better your results are going to be. Okay, don't just
occasionally go look at your plants, take a walk through them.
That's important. Same is true with your lawn, Same is
true with your lawn. All right, So we're going to
take a little break here and we'll be back. If

(01:18:33):
you got to call seven one three, two, one two,
five eight seven four. All right, welcome back to guard Log.
Good ahead with us as always, then when your hosts
get brickner and we're here to answer your gardening the
questions seven one, three, two, one, two, five eight seven four.
Right now, I'm going through fifty common gardening mistakes, and

(01:18:58):
let's see here. Scouting for plant problems, detecting it early
and taking action early very important. Number thirty nine spraying
without an accurate identification of the pest, disease and weeds.
Companies that make pesticides will often put a picture of

(01:19:19):
a very dead bug on the bottle and you look
at it.

Speaker 6 (01:19:25):
You don't know what you're looking for.

Speaker 7 (01:19:26):
You don't know what you got, and so you go
through and you go look, this one kills bugs really dead,
and that is not the way to pick out a pesticide.
Number one, it may not be a pest. Just because
the bugs in your plant doesn't mean it's guilty. Okay,
six legs does not mean it's guilty. It could be
a beneficial insect, or it could be something that has

(01:19:46):
nothing to do with anything, neither beneficial nor a pest.
You need to identify it because each past there's certain
products that work better and your options organic and synthetic
may be different diseases the same thing. Not all fungicides
work against all diseases, not all herbicides work against all

(01:20:10):
weeds or at the stage that you have of the weed.
That's what we do so much up here on Garden Line.
I identify the problem, tell you what and when? What
and when very important. You got to get a good,
good identification in order to know what you're going after.
And that's why our independent garden centers are so good.
You can take them, put it in a baggy and

(01:20:32):
take it in and show it to them and say, hey,
what is this and what do I do?

Speaker 6 (01:20:35):
They'll tell you.

Speaker 7 (01:20:36):
Southwest Fertilizer outstanding, Bob and Aaron and the whole team there.
They are set up for people to walk in and
come and ask and what is this and what do
I do? And they have so many options and the
specific options. You know, there's certain things where you need
a certain kind of product in order to be effective

(01:20:57):
in controlling it. And then how do I use that
us they'll tell you. At Southwest Fertilizer, they'll they'll help
you with this. That's why they've been around for fifty
years now. Celebrating their seventieth anniversary. Because of that kind
of service, friendly service, every kind of product. The selection's
outstanding and quality, you know, quality tools, quality products. If

(01:21:19):
you're an organic gardener, this is your place because they
have the largest organic selection of any place in the region.
Southwest Fertilizer, So you need accurate identification paest, weeds and disease.
That's one way you can do it.

Speaker 6 (01:21:31):
Right there.

Speaker 7 (01:21:31):
They're by the way there on the corner of Business
and Renwick in Southwest Houston, number forty. Not having your
soil tested periodically all right, all the time on guard line.
I'm saying, here's a good fertilizer, here's a good fertilizer,
here's another good fertilizer. And they're all true, they are,

(01:21:51):
But a soil test is what you ultimately need. It's
like when you're not doing well and the doctor orders
blood work and maybe they look at levels of this
or that or the other. You know, are you low
on are you low on vitamin D?

Speaker 3 (01:22:06):
Or you know what.

Speaker 7 (01:22:06):
I'm saying that all the things they look at. Your
soil is the same way, and the plant response is
similar in the same way too. When you have a
soil test. They will tell you the nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur,
all of the trace minerals, micronutrients like zinc and manganese
and iron and on and on down the line, so

(01:22:29):
that you know exactly where you are, then you can
fertilize accordingly. I saw a red tipotinia the other day
and it had magnesium deficiency. And I can tell that
just because I know what it looks like on a
red tip. But if someone had that plant looking like
that and they didn't know to call garden Line or
go to the county agri Life Extension office to get help,

(01:22:52):
they wouldn't know what it needs. But a soil test
would have told them your magnesium is too low in
the soil here and you need to add it. And
that way you fertilize smart, and that way you don't
try to control something that's a nutrient problem with a
pesticide or I've seen all kinds of things like that.

(01:23:13):
Number forty very closely related is by the way, when
you don't have a soil test, you could actually be
making a problem worse. When you have too much phosphorus
in your soil, it and the pH is a little
on the higher side. It ties up iron and you
get iron deficiency. But it's not because there's not iron.

(01:23:34):
You may have lots of iron in the soil, but
the plant can't get it because the phosphorus and pH
are high. See what I'm saying. So somebody who is
putting triple thirteen on their lawn, you'll never hear me
say that, or triple ten. It's always at three one two,
four one two. That's the best ratios you can get
when you're guessing, because nine ninety five percent time that's
the right one to use. But if you jacked up

(01:23:55):
your phosphorus real high, and you'd have iron deficiency.

Speaker 6 (01:23:58):
But that's not the problem.

Speaker 7 (01:23:59):
The problem is misfertilized, which brings us to number forty one. Overfertilizing, underfertilizing,
and mis fertilizing. So we know what over and under is.
Too much Nitrogen promotes disease problems. Aphids love the succulent
growth of overfertilizing and nitrogen underfertilizing. Well, obviously plant doesn't

(01:24:21):
get what it needs, that's clear. What is misfertilizing. Misfertilizing
is fertilizing in the wrong way or in the wrong time,
or some other form of that. So misfertilizing would be
like applying fertilizer in the wrong locations, applying fertilizer in

(01:24:42):
in ways that don't get the nutrient to where the
roots are and where it needs to be. It could
be fertilizing at the wrong time as well, if you
are if you're trying to promote, you know how, in
my schedule in the lawn, we're doing basically a three
one two four one two kind of ra show through
the season on the lawn, and then we get to

(01:25:04):
fall and we drop that first number nitrogen down and
move them the last number potassium up. And it's because
of this season the grass is growing into we're getting
it ready for winter, and so misfertilizing it wouldn't be
the end of the world if you use the three
one two in the fall, but you probably get a
little bit more brown patch by pushing it with too
much nitrogen that late in the season. And so that's

(01:25:26):
what I'm talking about, fertilizing the right way with the
right product at the right rate, at the right rate.

Speaker 3 (01:25:31):
And we love to.

Speaker 7 (01:25:33):
Think in terms of if a teaspoons good A tablespoons better,
all right, but not necessarily, and in many, many cases
it is very important to not misfertilize or over or
underfertilized to give the plants what they want, all right.

(01:25:53):
Number forty two use of snake oils and trusting testimony,
claims base quote evidence alone.

Speaker 6 (01:26:02):
So what does that mean?

Speaker 7 (01:26:03):
Well, snake oil is just a generic term. Just because
something for sale doesn't mean it works. And when you
see claims that are just way too exaggerated, it's probably
not true. I can't paint with a brush to cover
everything with a little statement. But in general, there's a

(01:26:25):
lot of things out there that are purported to be
true and people will swear by them and so on.
It doesn't mean they work.

Speaker 6 (01:26:33):
Okay.

Speaker 7 (01:26:34):
The second part of that trusting testimony or claims based
quote evidence alone, there should be there should be somebody
that can support the effectiveness of a product. Maybe it's research. Now,
you know, fertilizer company is not going to put research
reports out there because nobody's going to read them or care.

(01:26:55):
Typically I would, but most people don't. But there ought
to be some kind of like that. Maybe evidence is
your neighbor has done it, you've seen it, maybe you've
tried it in your lawn and you've seen the results
of it. Well, that that's legit. But I see so
many claims that are just based on yeah, here's Jane

(01:27:18):
Doe or or Joe Smith that says, yeah, it worked
for me. Who's Joe Smith?

Speaker 6 (01:27:25):
And what does he know?

Speaker 7 (01:27:26):
I don't even know. I don't even know who that is.
And so that doesn't mean he's a liar, it's untrue.
It just means that alone is not proof that something works.
There needs to be something more than that. And here
on Garden Line, I try as much as I can
to find research on it or to do it myself
so and I know how to do it in a random,

(01:27:47):
replicated way where it's not like, you know, I tried
it this year and it worked. Tried something else next
year and it didn't. That's not a fair comparison to
do it that way. But be skeptical. I'm not trying
to say that all these products out there everything's junk.
No it's not. But be skeptical and don't just believe anything.
I saw a picture one time of her product, and

(01:28:09):
there was this lady standing in an agfield holding two turnips,
and it looked like your typical scene that you would
see like someone in Eastern Europe that is on a farm,
and just the way that they're dressed and stuff. She's
holding two turnips. One of them looks like a basketball,
one of them looks like a golf ball, and the
one on the left of basketball. They used Product X

(01:28:32):
on right. That doesn't mean anything. It just doesn't. I'm sorry,
it doesn't mean anything. Visually You're going, oh, I need
Product X, but I'm just seeing to be skeptical. All right,
there you go. I probably beat that horse to death,
but I see a lot of it. Social media is
one of the worst places, in some situations to find

(01:28:54):
that kind of thing. Number forty three Planting a landscape
without a plan. Ah, I do it all the time,
and I'm telling you not to. I'm a plant collector.
Plant collectors find a plant they want at their house,
and they buy it, and they go home and try
to figure out where to put it. A landscaper says,
what do I want this to look like? What is

(01:29:14):
the design?

Speaker 6 (01:29:15):
Do I have home?

Speaker 7 (01:29:16):
Do I have evergreens here?

Speaker 9 (01:29:17):
And there?

Speaker 7 (01:29:17):
Are they balanced?

Speaker 3 (01:29:18):
So?

Speaker 7 (01:29:18):
What are my seasons that I'm letting on and on.
Plant collectors just say I want it, and they take
it home and planet, and therefore our yards often look
like a bomb went off in a garden center and
everything rooted where it landed. You kind of picture that,
all right? That is a plant collector yard. Start with
a plan. You have so much better results. And I'm

(01:29:38):
probably over confessing there. I mean I do do landscape
plan things, but anyway, start with a plant so that
when you end up, you end up with something beautiful
and your money has been well spent and you get
years of years of beautiful returns, dividends on the money
and time you spent putting it in. All right, there

(01:29:59):
you go, uh, time for another half of the hour.
Break here, and we're going to dive back in. We
got hit number forty four when we come back. And
by the way, I'm going to get these posted online.
But you also can listen to pass shows on garden
Line and you can go back and re listen, or
if you have a neighbor that wanted to hear it
and didn't hear it, tell them about going to listen

(01:30:19):
to the past shows and extra and a weed free
lawn all year to here. Ever, can tell you.

Speaker 6 (01:30:24):
Who God is.

Speaker 7 (01:30:26):
All you need anything done to your trees, you need
to call Martin Spoon Moore from Affordable Tree Service. It
is tree pruning season. That doesn't mean every tree needs pruning,
but it does mean that if you're going to get
it done, now is the best time to do it.
And Martin Spoon Moore knows how to do this. Should

(01:30:47):
just have to give him a call and get on
the schedule so he can book you in and show
up at your place to take care of your trees.
Whether it's training and a young tree, whether it's pruning
and older trees. Martin knows how to do it. Seven
one three, six nine nine two six sixty three. Now
with every tree you have, Martin prune right now. This
is a deal going on for a short time. You

(01:31:08):
get a free deep root feeding on that tree to
keep your trees healthy all year long. Give Martin a
call seven one three, six nine nine two six sixty three.
When you call him, you're gonna either talk to Martin
or his wife Joe. You might also talk to his mom, Judy.
I have when I call talk to Judy a while back.
And if it's not one of those three, you call
the wrong place because there are other places with affordable

(01:31:31):
in the name Affordable Tree Service. So when you want
seven one three six nine nine six six three, let's
head out to Brazoria and talk to Ralph this morning. Hey, Ralph,
welcome to garden Line.

Speaker 12 (01:31:47):
How would do an h question for you've been doing
a lot of reading online in the Gulf Coast region.
If you want to propagate a acron for you know,
oak cree, should I put those acres in the refrigerator
for a few.

Speaker 7 (01:32:03):
Days the refrigerator gets some moist. You can use moist
sand or even like peat moss or something if you want,
but just put them in the refrigerator moist, not soggy wet. Uh,
you could put them. I'll put mine in a in
a ziploc bag, you know, leave a little air in

(01:32:23):
there with it, h and just let them sit and
they'll probably need to give them about We'll check them
after a few weeks, but it depends on some varying factors.
But they by within a month. There they may even
be sprouting in the refrigerator actually at about refrigerator temperatures.
But if not bring them out and plant them, they'll

(01:32:45):
be fine. Now rough. Another thing. If you're just doing
a few of them, I just put them in a
container and wet them, and you know, plant them in
a container and then set them outside and outside will
do the same thing. I would put them in the
shade so they don't get the sun baking down on them,
but that moist chill it will help with their germination
and you can have good success. Just remember to put

(01:33:05):
something over them because squirrels will come dig them out
of those pots you put out there.

Speaker 12 (01:33:10):
Alrighty, thanks you et.

Speaker 7 (01:33:13):
All right, Ralph, you take care. That's true with other things,
like a peach seed. One time I had some peach seeds, which,
by the way, I do not recommend planning peaches from seed.
It's better to get one that's been improved by proper
breeding than just take random. But anyway, I put some
peach seeds in a fridge like that, and a few
weeks later I pull them out and the roots already

(01:33:36):
coming out of the peach pits. So yep, they're ready
to do it.

Speaker 6 (01:33:39):
All right.

Speaker 7 (01:33:40):
We talked about a couple of things, so testing over,
Miss Nicol, Where are we planning a landscape without a plan?
All right, here's our next one number forty four. Not
using drip or microsprinkler irrigation where possible. Every time you
wet the foliage, you grease the potential for disease problems.

(01:34:02):
Disease spor fungal spores are sitting on the leaf surface
like a like a weed seed sitting on top of
dry soil. It's not going to sprout, But when you
wet it, that seed swells up with water and it germinates,
puts root down into the soil and it takes off,
and now you gotta wheat. That's how fun fungi spores
also can work. A coating of moisture over the fungal

(01:34:27):
spore helps it to germinate.

Speaker 6 (01:34:29):
It puts a the.

Speaker 7 (01:34:32):
Disease equivalent of a root down into the leaf, and
that's how it infects the leaf itself. And so uh,
very few exceptions pottering miilities not that way, but a
lot of diseases, uh just that water. You get a
coating of water on with the right temperature for a
period of time, and you got a disease. So every
time you spray your foliage with spray or irrigation, you

(01:34:54):
increase those kinds of problems or potentially you can plush
it if you're water has any kind of residues in it,
like lime or whatever. Now you got all those spots
on the leaves where the water dried and left behind
the mineral content that was in it, and that's not
very attractive. Drip irrigation is the most efficient way to water.

(01:35:16):
Microsprinkler just think of it as a little tiny short
steak maybe six inches high, and it squirts water in
all directions in a little star spray pattern. It's not
like the typical sprayers, and that puts it down low.
It goes on the ground, It goes in the soil
where the roots are, which is what you're trying to

(01:35:37):
do is get the root rich wet when you irrigate,
and so microsprinkler and drop is a better way to
go for many, many, many things. So if you got
a vegetable garden, if you've got flower beds, I have
it in my fruit trees. I've got microsprinklers in the
fruit trees because they wet a larger pattern. But when
the water comes on, it wets exactly where I want
the water to be.

Speaker 6 (01:35:56):
It does a good job.

Speaker 7 (01:35:57):
So when you're possible, go ahead and do that number
forty five. This is one that may be hard one
for me to convince you up, but I'm gonna go
ahead and try anyway. Not keeping a gardening journal of
some sort. And there's all kinds of there's apps out
there where you can record everything. There's software that does that.

(01:36:19):
You know, for your computer, you could just use a
piece of paper and write it down. But I like
the fact that a computer stores things and can also
store pictures and even even audio if you wanted it to.
I mean, you could be out in your garden and
just you know, just do the little recording of hey,

(01:36:41):
it's such and such day, and this first time I
saw stink bugs this year, or whatever whatever fits your preferences.
But a journal is important. I like to keep mine electronically.
A lot of apps out there that can do it
specifically for that. Or you could just you know, have
a word file even where you're typing some things in
maybe an Excel file where you get your little chart.

(01:37:04):
And then if you see a picture of some some
little eggs on a leaf, take a picture of them
and put it in the journal. Just post it in there,
and then later when you see it, hatch out take
a picture of what hatches out and put it in there,
and now you can refer back to that three years
from now and say, what were those eggs that? What
does think bug egg look like? See what I'm saying.
A journal is so important. It keeps track. You know

(01:37:26):
what you did and when you did it. You know
what you sprayed and when you sprayed it. And boy,
if you call garden line, sure helps me to get
to the bottom of some things. So keep a gardening
journal really important. Let's take a little break here and
we'll be back with more of your calls at seven
one three, two, one two fifty eight seventy four. How
did I get this far in the holiday season without

(01:37:49):
playing a Western swing song? Thankfully?

Speaker 6 (01:37:53):
Straight thrust it.

Speaker 7 (01:37:58):
All right, folks, we're back garden Line. I'm your host,
Skip Rictor, and we're here going through fifty common landscape
and garden mistakes you don't want to make, and hopefully
with the comments I'm making today, it will help you
avoid them. Hey, if you are interested in this list,
and I know that you haven't been listening for two
days NonStop, at least most people haven't. But if you

(01:38:22):
want to go back and hear these you can listen
to pass shows of Garden Line.

Speaker 6 (01:38:27):
A couple of ways.

Speaker 7 (01:38:27):
You can go to the kittrh website, find the garden
Line section and listen to pass shows there. Secondly, if
you have an app that I use iHeartMedia app for this,
but iHeartMedia, but you can find garden Line and follow
the show and then you can listen to pass shows
on the iHeart Media app as well. So a couple

(01:38:49):
of options there. You don't have to be driving down
the road with a computer on your lap. You can
just connect your phone and get it playing for you.
Just an idea. Hey number forty six, Oh boy, here
comes a big one. Not reading and following the pesticide label. Now,
what is one of the things they say about us guys,

(01:39:12):
is we never ask instructions. Right. We can be lost
driving through a cow pasture and somehow we got off
the interstate and now we're bumping along through a pasture
and we won't ask somebody for instruction for directions, right,
You got to read the label. You got to read
the label. It tells you what you need to know.
And first of all, it's a legal matter. You know,

(01:39:33):
there's things that you can and can't spray a product on.
Several times, I've been without a good recommendation for people
to call because, yeah, there's something that will control it,
but it's not. I can't tell you to use that.
I can't tell you to break lawn use something according
not according to the label. You got to follow the label.

(01:39:54):
If you don't, you're either going to be underdosing and
getting lack of results because you didn't put enough on,
or you're going to be overdosing, which is the bigger problem.

Speaker 6 (01:40:05):
You know, we got it.

Speaker 7 (01:40:06):
If if a tea spoons good or tablespoons better, which
is not true, and then you cause problems. So let's
take a product like a pre emergent herbicide for your lawn.
Those weren't great at the label rate. They will prevent
the weed seeds from coming up, and they will not
do significant damage to your lawn at that rate. But

(01:40:27):
when you start doubling tripling them, now things change. Now
you do damage to your lawn. And when you don't
follow the label, you may not know that it has
to be watered in in order to move into the
sole surface and be effective. If you don't follow the label,
you may be using it a herbicide on your lawn,
on a on a type of grass that you can't

(01:40:47):
use it on. Just because it's okay for bermuda, that
means it's okay for Saint Augustine, or for zoisia, and
on and on and on down the line. Listen the
labels there for a reason. If the label amount was
not the best amount to control a problem, why wouldn't
they tell you to apply more. You're selling a particular
pesticide could be organic, could be synthetic. And if I

(01:41:10):
tell you, if I'm the company selling it and making it,
and I tell in three times as much as better,
then I would tell you that because I'm as sell
more pesticide, right they If they give you an amount,
that's the amount that research has shown works without causing damage,
and you got to believe it, leave the label. So

(01:41:31):
box of mine. Hopefully you were listening. I just know
a lot of people don't because I see the results.
Let's go to Beaumont this morning and we're gonna visit
with Donna. Now, Hey, Donna, welcome to garden Line.

Speaker 13 (01:41:45):
Good morning.

Speaker 5 (01:41:46):
I have a question.

Speaker 13 (01:41:48):
My daughter gave me a Pride of Barbados last year,
and I have it in a fairly large pot, and
it's not real big. It's probably about a foot tall,
and it's got some branches out to each side. But
in the winter, is that hardy to stay out? Or
what should I do with it in the winter time?

Speaker 7 (01:42:09):
Okay, well, pride to Barbados. That is well established in
the ground and the winter will come back the next year.
Most years for you there an orange or Beaumont rather Texas.
If you multch the base to prevent that crown of
the plant, you know where the stems and the roots
come together, to prevent them from getting too cold, it's

(01:42:32):
even better. You're going to lose the top part almost
all winters here that is not hardy enough at all.
But the plant will survive now in a pot, though
the soil gets colder. So the soil temperature in your
ground and the winter is going to be around fifty
to fifty five degrees somewhere in that range, although the

(01:42:53):
very surface could get low colder. But when you put
it up in a pot now on a night where
it gets down cold, that crown is going to get
much colder and you could kill the plant completely. So
I would recommend since it's in a pot, keeping it
in the pot, and just bringing it into a cool area.
You could put it in a shed or garage or

(01:43:14):
something that's not going to get super cold. Keep it
moderately moist, you don't have to water it all the time,
and then plant it out once we start to warm up,
not sooner than about probably mid April next year, put
it out in the ground, and in the meantime, if
it starts to sprout, get it out and get it
some sunlight. But it's not going to want to grow
when it's cool.

Speaker 5 (01:43:34):
So that is what I would suggest.

Speaker 7 (01:43:36):
That's a good plant.

Speaker 13 (01:43:37):
Okay, well, thank you very much.

Speaker 5 (01:43:38):
I appreciate that you bet.

Speaker 7 (01:43:41):
Give it lots of sunlight. Yes, ma'am me too, dond
thank you, byebye, lots of sunlight. It's one of my
favorite plants. Pride Barbados also called red bird of Paradise,
but I don't like that name. I use it sometimes,
but I don't like that name because people think about
a bird of paradise would which is a very different plant.
So prid of Barbata is a good name.

Speaker 6 (01:44:03):
For it, for sure.

Speaker 7 (01:44:05):
Oh let's see, we're going to give you one more here.
Mowing too low are very infrequently. If you cut a
Saint Augustine lawn too short, it's going to struggle. You
may even get some sunburn on the runners.

Speaker 14 (01:44:18):
Uh.

Speaker 7 (01:44:19):
It just it's going to struggle. It's not made to
be a golf course green. You need to mot it
about two and a half inches. Three inches is even
better probably, Uh, you got it. You don't mow too
low number. Also, the lower you mow, the more off
and you have to mow infrequently. That's not good. You
grow a bunch of grass and you cut it way back.
Grow a bunch of grass and cut it way back.

(01:44:40):
I know that's good because on the summer hot day
you're not out there mowing so often that that is
more stressful to grass than regular frequent mowings. If you
can mow grass every five days, that would be a
great lawn turf schedule. Not for golf course green, but
lawn turf be fine schedule. How often. I know five

(01:45:03):
days isn't practical, it's seven days for so often.

Speaker 1 (01:45:10):
Welcome to kt r H Garden Line with Skip Rickard's shoes.

Speaker 3 (01:45:15):
Smell the crazy here. The gas can use a trim.
You can just watch him as the world god gassis gas.

Speaker 4 (01:45:28):
That are so many good things to sup back basic
in the gay the gasses like gas and again you
did favos grobles back, but they're not a sund credit
glassies and gas and.

Speaker 3 (01:45:44):
The sun beamon of between the gases gas starting.

Speaker 7 (01:45:55):
Hey, welcome back to the guard Line. Welcome back to Guardline.
Good have you with us? If you've got a gardening question.
We're in our last hour of the weekend. And by
the way, I should let you know this, I'm going
to be taking a little break for a couple of
weeks here for the holidays, and so I'll be back

(01:46:15):
in January. We got some good shows, what we call
best of shows. The Guardline will continue on through there,
but your opportunity to ask a question is either in
the next hour or about the tenth of January. I
believe it will be back in the saddle again. So
here you go seven one three, two, one two five

(01:46:35):
eight seven four seven one three two one two fifty
eight to seventy four. Give me a call. We'll visit
about the things that interest you. Let's go back to
our list of the fifty common landscape and garden mistakes,
Number forty eight mixing too many colors when you're viewing
a landscape bed from a distance rather than using large
spas of colors. So if you take a little flower bed,

(01:46:58):
or let's say it's a container, a patio between two
chairs or people are sitting, and you look at it
up close, you can have one hundred different colors in there.
It's all interesting and pretty look at. When you put
that way up against the house and someone's add at
the road taking a look at the landscape, all those
colors just sort of muddle together. It's like a pixelation,
you know how we pixelated things. When you back up,

(01:47:19):
it looks different than when you're up close. And it's
better to use a large swathe of color so that
gets noticed. And so maybe you have a band of
red flowers and a band of white flowers or something
that are through there. So and that's true of foliage
colors and other things. To use large swaths as you're
visiting a little bit further away. Not a huge point there,

(01:47:39):
but it is one that will help you have a
create a better effect that you're trying to do. Let's
head out to Kingwood now we are going to talk
to Joe. Hello, Joe, welcome to guard Line.

Speaker 11 (01:47:50):
Good morning. Skip had a quick question for you. I've
got a lot of dollar a weed proliferating in my
lawn and just wanted to know should I go ahead
and treat it now or wait until spring.

Speaker 7 (01:48:05):
Well, you can do some treating now. Remember dollar weed
is a slick leaf, and so you need to have
something in there to help it stick to the leaf
and that works. That is probably the best thing that
you can do is put a spreader sticker in there
when you apply. Now, there's a number of different products
out there that can be used on dollar weed that

(01:48:27):
are effective, and then there's quite a few that aren't,
so you want to be real careful with what you choose.
But the trimac types of wheat control tend to be
pretty effective against the dollar weed as a post emergent
broad leaf weed control.

Speaker 11 (01:48:42):
Would Ultra be a good product to use this time?

Speaker 7 (01:48:48):
If I need to check the label on the Ultra,
Is this the Saint Augustine lawn?

Speaker 6 (01:48:54):
Yes it is.

Speaker 7 (01:48:56):
Yeah, If it's labeled for use on any turf grass, yes,
just check the label. Because we've got a number of
different products out there that have mixes of ingredients and
I don't have an Ultra label right in front of me.
You could do that also also products the image and
meze Quin is also listed as a potential dollar weed controller.

Speaker 11 (01:49:21):
So all right, thank you, Skip having Merry Christmas to
you and your family.

Speaker 7 (01:49:27):
You too, Joe, And anything you can do to keep
that area a little on the dryer side will help
slow that dollar weed down to it loves when it's
in a swamp.

Speaker 6 (01:49:35):
All right, there you go.

Speaker 7 (01:49:37):
That was Joe and Kingwin Plants for All Seasons, great
nursery right where pretty close to where Lueta comes into
FM two forty nine, which is Tomboll Parkway. It's on
Tomball Parkway, just just a little bit north of Luetta
full service retail and garden center. You know, when you
go to Plants for All Seasons, you're gonna get expert advice.
You're gonna get plants that need to want to be here,

(01:50:00):
that need to be planted in this region.

Speaker 14 (01:50:02):
Uh.

Speaker 7 (01:50:02):
And anytime that you're there, you always got to go
in and check out the gift shop. They have a
beautiful gift shop right now. Is in the other day
looking at some of the tools and things that they had.
Nice selection of seeds, just a it's a good thing.
It's time for holidays shopping. There's some good gifts inside there.
I'm telling you there's things I'd love to get on
my list, from plants for all seasons beautiful pottery as

(01:50:25):
well on the outside, so take advantage of it. Plants
for All Seasons dot Com is the website, and here's
a phone number two eight one three seven six one
six four six two eight one three seven six one
six for six. I have a couple more on the

(01:50:46):
list of fifty that we're going to go through here.
And I got some other things I'm gonna visit about too,
unless you guys just cover me.

Speaker 6 (01:50:51):
Up with calls.

Speaker 7 (01:50:54):
Let's see number forty nine. Here's a good one. Not
considering all four seasons when landscaping, that is a good point.
In the spring, everyone's a gardener. In the spring. Everything
wants to grow and bloom and be pretty. That's easy.
Well what about when summer comes and it's blazing hot

(01:51:17):
outside and some of those flowers that bloomed and did okay,
and the spring now are like going, yeah, I don't
do Texas in summer and they stop. What are you
going to have bloom in? Then? What kind of foliage
are you going to have. By the way, foliage is
good for summer. Colored foliage is a way that we
get color in the landscape in summer when are blooming options.

(01:51:37):
We have them, but they're just not as many. And
then fall we have things that only bloom in the fall.
You should put some of those in your landscape. And
then what about winter winter interests like the beautiful bark
and branch structure of a crape myrtle, or how about camellias,
those a sanquas in December and the Japonicas january to

(01:52:01):
those regions, that's a good one to do. How about evergreens?
Where are your evergreens? Are they all clumped together on
one side of the yard, or do you have any
at all? Evergreens are a great way to still have
color in the cool season. So think about all four
seasons when you're doing your landscape. You remember how I said,
us plant collectors, we just get a plant we want
and we plant it. We don't think about that kind

(01:52:23):
of thing. It helps to think about it. You have
a much beautiful, more beautiful landscape as a result of that.
So let's do let's see here, Let's see number fifty.
Oh boy, here it comes believing everything that you hear

(01:52:44):
and read on TV, the radio. Am I making sense here?
In print media, in social media and on the internet.
And I realize I'm a garden writer, write for Texas Gardener,
which by the way, is a great magazine.

Speaker 3 (01:53:03):
You need.

Speaker 7 (01:53:05):
I do radio here, and so I'm telling you don't
believe everything you read and hear because it's not true.
It's just not true. There's so much it's not I'm
gonna elaborate on this one a little bit more, but
let me just say this. If I say something on
garden Line, well, I think it's right, but you ever
ever write in the world to check it out and

(01:53:25):
make sure it's true. And you should think that way
because I don't know, I can be wrong. There you go.
Let's go to a break and we will continue. I'm
gonna comment some more on that one. Here we go, John,

(01:53:49):
We're on the home stretch today on garden Line another
see one two three segments. If you'd like to give
me a call seven one, three, two, one two five, eight,
seven four. I'm want to go back to that number fifty.
Believing everything you hear read on TV, radio, print, social media,
the internet, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I
know that you are not quite that gullible, of course,

(01:54:11):
but a lot of times, you know, you get to
hear in somebody and if they speak in a way
that sounds like they know what they're talking about, well
they must know what they're talking about, and they probably do.
There's a lot of good information out there, a lot
of people that do know they are they well represent
what they're saying. However, there's a couple things. First of all,

(01:54:31):
there are people that claim to know stuff that don't
know what they're talking about. That includes medical types stuff.
I bet it drives doctor's nuts to have people that
are out there making claims that just absolutely are not true,
but it is what it is. However, there's also folks
that may know something that's true in a certain area,

(01:54:53):
but they over apply it to other areas, and so
sometimes you get things said that don't fit where you are,
the plant that you have, the situation that you're growing in,
and do you have to watch for that. I was
online yesterday, I believe it was, and one of my
number one pet peeves is clickbait on social media. I

(01:55:16):
hate it, hate it.

Speaker 6 (01:55:17):
I hate it.

Speaker 7 (01:55:18):
I hate it and I try not to click on it.
Sometimes I click on it just because I got to go,
what on earth that these people talking about? But it'll
be things like if you don't plan a tomato this way,
you're doing it all wrong. All right, So so you
got it? Well what way is that?

Speaker 12 (01:55:37):
You know?

Speaker 7 (01:55:38):
You got to find out what it is? And they won,
they got they got you to click. They you know,
add revenues there we are. So just just the clickbait
stuff is nonsense. But oftentimes when I when I look
into things that are kind of clickbaiting, I see that
what they're saying is true, but they're in New Jersey
and they're talking about something that it doesn't apply here,

(01:56:00):
or it isn't done that way here, or that's not
true like it's time to fertilize your lawn or whatever.
Well not with a cool season grass and versus a
warm season grass in the different seasons that we have.
And so there's also the thing where it's a truth
that's over applied. You know it's true to a degree,

(01:56:21):
but you make it like, for example, insecticidal soap will
kill small, soft bodied insects like spider mites and aphids,
and so someone will say, if you've got problems eating
your tomatoes like sninkbugs, just you soap. Well, no, no,
you can't. That's not gonna kill snak bugs. I guess
if you caught them when they were brand new and

(01:56:43):
you had a decent I don't even think that would work.
But seriously, it's it's not practical advice. You's got to
follow carefully. I'm not trying to say everybody out there
but me is making is spouting things that aren't true.
I'm just saying there's a lot of it out there,
a lot of it. I see it in print, I

(01:57:05):
see it in the radio. I hear it on the
radio when I drive around Texas in other parts of
the country, I often listen to garden radio shows because
I'm always interested and there's some good ones and then
there's some that I don't know quite what they're thinking,
but be skeptical and check things out. People call all

(01:57:26):
the time with questions like hey, I heard this is
this true? And boy, I'm always glad to get questions
like that, because I don't want you to waste your
time and money. All right, that was fifty There you go,
let's go out to Magnolia and talk to Dwayne. Now, Hey, Dwayne,
welcome to Garden Line. Hey, how you doing today. I'm well, thanks, Yes, sir,

(01:57:51):
I'm here. If you have a radio lost daway. If
you have a radio on in the background when you
call folks, don't listen to the radio. There's a natural
delay on there. I don't know that that's what Dwayne
was doing. I'm just saying sometimes I hear a radio
in the background and it's like, yeah, that throws us off.
We're trying to work on some sort of a delay problem.

(01:58:13):
I'm working with the engineers trying to figure out why
there is a delay on the phone.

Speaker 6 (01:58:18):
That there is.

Speaker 7 (01:58:20):
But some calls are fine, some calls are not so Dwayne.

Speaker 6 (01:58:24):
If you if you.

Speaker 7 (01:58:26):
If we lost you there, please feel free to call back.
Medina has a number of excellent products during planting prime
time in the fall and winter. It's the best time
plants so many things. Mendina has to grow six to
twelve six plant food. One of my favorite products. For
this you mix it up. I mix mine in a

(01:58:48):
watering can. Now, there's other ways to use it. It's
a folio feed. It can be used on all kinds
of things where you're not planting, you're just fertilizing and
so on. But I like it for the fall planting
time or any planting time, anytime of the year, because
you can mix it up in a watering can and
you can drench that root ball that you just put
in the ground. I don't know why we call it
root ball, because it's really always a root cylinder. But

(01:59:11):
unless you have a ball and burlap tree, which you
don't see as much anymore anyway, I digress. You drench
that root cylinder and then about a week later, I'll
do it again, and about a week later, I'll do
it again, and that gives a good dose of that
six twelve six hash to grow Medina plant food into
the root system and the twelve that's phosphorus, the middle

(01:59:32):
number very important in root development. And so we got
a new plant, we need those roots to come out
of the root cylinder and head out into the soil
and to successfully establish so that plant makes it through
the first summer or makes it into any kind of
demands on it for nutrients and water.

Speaker 6 (01:59:51):
So there we go.

Speaker 7 (01:59:51):
Medina hash to grow six twelve six very good product
like other Medina products, and widely available like other Medina
products all throughout the listening area. If you're listening to
me on garden Line, you have got Unless you're listening
in Timbuctoo on a computer, you've got Medina products right

(02:00:12):
there near you. Well, you are listening to garden Line.
I'm your host, Skip Richter, and we're here to help
you have bounty and beauty. That is what we're trying
to accomplish. I want you to have fun with your gardening.
I want you to enjoy it. And in order to
do that, any kind of questions you have, you're welcome
to send a picture and then follow it up with

(02:00:33):
a call. We'll talk about the things that are of
interest to you. Now, this is a season of the
year where we're doing a lot of decorating inside and
have you thought about what in the landscape might you
plant for future holiday decorating seasons? What might be good

(02:00:55):
for that? And one of the things that's very common
are burying plant plants that produce berries.

Speaker 6 (02:01:02):
Now the.

Speaker 7 (02:01:05):
I just want to blank on a plant's name, think
of it in just a second. Anyway, there's a number
of shrubs that we can grow here that do really
well for berries. The hollies are examples of that. The
one I couldn't think of was American beauty berry. It
has kind of the I don't know what color that
you'd call that kind of a purple pink. There's probably
a name for that anyway, berries on them that are

(02:01:27):
really really attractive when the leaves swallow off. So that's
one Holly's of all kinds, you know. Burford Holly's probably
one of the ones been around a long long time
and planting a lot. It has berries on it. Yopon
can have berries on it. Remember this about Holly's. Holly's
are one of the minority of plants where the plants

(02:01:50):
are either male or female. So either they produce flowers
that with the pollen for pollinating, or they produce flowers
sat berries, and you go couruse. You gotta have both
and then some bees to cooperate in the process. So
if you went out in the countryside and you dug
you up yopine and brought it home and it was
a male plant, you'd never see a berry on that plant,

(02:02:13):
So you gotta have both. In most neighborhoods, there's some
other hollies where they can get some cross pollination and things,
but you want to have both. But there's so many
good hollies, and hollies are greenery during the cool season.
Two then there are the the plants that are more
like a conifer.

Speaker 3 (02:02:31):
You know.

Speaker 7 (02:02:31):
Maybe of course there's is there anything from pine trees
to the various kinds of spruce and whatnot, to things
that are somewhat like that, like a u a Japanese
u has those long strappy leaves that are kind of
needlelike like that, to junipers and arbor vite. There can

(02:02:52):
be a shrub they can grow, to cedar someone called
earlier we talked about eastern red cedar, and all those
plants are good for bringing in greenery for the holidays.
Magnolia trees bringing in a branch with some magnolias for
decorating us and it lasts a long time, but that
would be another beautiful evergreen that you could bring in.
The little magnolia pods with the seeds in them are

(02:03:14):
also attractive like that. So there's a number of plants
we should and could be planting in our landscape that
are great for those kinds of holiday decorations. So whatever
kind of thing you're looking for, consider that when we're
in the Thanksgiving season, that's kind of the time where
we'd love to have some fall leaf color, which here
we don't really have that at Thanksgiving for the most part,

(02:03:36):
and so that's not going to be helpful. But you
could plant and choose to plant things like pumpkin and
gourd of various types, the little miniature, decorative, exotic pumpkins
and things. I have a whole bag of seed. We
bought a bunch of those, from the mini pumpkins to
the various warty and weird gords that are out there,

(02:03:56):
and I collected all the seeds from those. Now probably
what I'm to get is a weird duke's mixture of
all kinds of things. But those are growing in the
ground next year, and we're going to plant those out
just for fun, to put them out there in the garden.
So what do you want to plant for decorating? Another
reason to consider something to plant. I get a lot
of calls here about planting for hiding a view, and

(02:04:19):
that is a whole another discussion. But making sure you
put plants in that will form an evergreen screen through
all twelve twelve months of the year to hede a view.
How tall does it need to be to hide the view?
So think about where you're sitting, where you're standing, and
what you don't want to see. And the closer the

(02:04:40):
screen is to you, the shorter it can be and
still block the view. The further away it gets, the
tallar it's going to need to be. Any want to
pick plants like that? Here we are in the best
planning season of the year. Do you have Maybe you're
in a new neighborhood and there's nothing out behind the
house or to the side of the house or something,
but there will be and that'd be a good time
to get some then started, so you have your screening

(02:05:02):
plant well in its way by the time the unsightly
view arrives. We're gonna take a break, be right back,
all right.

Speaker 9 (02:05:11):
Here we go.

Speaker 7 (02:05:12):
Got hap Hotter left the garden Line today, So if
you've got a question, that would be a good time
to call, as they say, or hold your piece until.

Speaker 6 (02:05:20):
January.

Speaker 7 (02:05:21):
We're going to head out to Orange, Texas and talk
to Prince. Now, Hey, Prince, welcome.

Speaker 8 (02:05:26):
To garden Line. Good morning, Skip, Merry Christmas to you
you as well, Thank you, sir. My question is is
it too early in the year to take a cutting
from a fig tree.

Speaker 7 (02:05:43):
It's not if you can protect it from freezing. In fact,
you know, sometimes we get freezes it'll actually kill some
of the branches up in the fig tree, and so
it'd be good to take your cuttings. Now if you
have that ability, you can take a bunch of cuttings
about eight inches long what I would recommend, and wrap
them in a moist paper towel, put them in a

(02:06:04):
ziplock or something in the refrigerator and just kind of
keep them at that temperature. And then whenever you want
to pull them out and do the rooting, you can,
or you can just go straight from the tree to
the ground. You just need a spot that's protected somehow
for it. Okay, that answers my question. Thank you very much, sir. Yes, sir,

(02:06:26):
do you know what kind of fruit a fig tree
you have? Off?

Speaker 13 (02:06:31):
Oh?

Speaker 7 (02:06:32):
I don't they taste good? That's all I know.

Speaker 6 (02:06:37):
That's the kind to have. That's my favorite variety.

Speaker 7 (02:06:41):
So there you go. Thanks a lot, Prince. I appreciate that.

Speaker 6 (02:06:45):
Thank you, sir. Here we go, you bet.

Speaker 7 (02:06:49):
Did you know that we used to have a huge
fig industry here in the Greater Houston area. We did
hundreds of acres of figs. Nick can if you have
one fig tree one hundred acres of hundreds of acres
of an acre of figs, you might be going, Okay, well,
how did you you know when they're ripe?

Speaker 6 (02:07:08):
What do you do?

Speaker 7 (02:07:09):
Well, they were shipped out of this area. This was
a big fig producing area. And I think I may
be wrong about this, but I think it was in
the fifties that we had a frieze that was the
freeze to beat all freezes, you know, kind of wiped
out a big section of it and it's never recovered
well from that, So maybe I need to check out

(02:07:29):
when that was. But it's kind of interesting, interesting history
there on our Gulf coast in figs. This was also
a place where a lot of strawberries were grown, the
big strawberry production area. Of course, that all moved to
California in Florida, which is where they can be more efficiently,
productively successfully grown on a commercial basis now, but at

(02:07:53):
one time that was it.

Speaker 6 (02:07:55):
So there you go.

Speaker 7 (02:07:56):
Fig trees. You know, I get a question sometimes from
someone who wants to grow organically and not spray, and
they said what are some things some fruit that I
can grow without spraying, And a fig would be an
example of what The only real problems spray wise we
tend to have with figs would be a disease called

(02:08:20):
big rust, and it can diffoliate the plant in a
bad year, and some varieties are worse than others. But
it causes the leaves fall off, and when that happens,
you lose the carbohydrate production. So that's not good for
the plant. There's not really a good home remedy for
it in terms of sprays, or's not. I go buy
this sponge aside and it'll get rid of it. But

(02:08:41):
you can grow figs without spraying. It's a good one.
Another one per simmons. Per simmons have some leaf spots,
but doesn't really shut them down at all. No big,
significant problems with per simons, And that would be another
one that if you needed to, you could grow without spraying.
Now we are starting to see the development of some
kinkers and canker type things on the trunks and branches

(02:09:05):
and whatnot of per simmons. They're very difficult to deal with.
So I say that in the sense not of well,
first of all, you're not gonna there's not a good
spray for controlling all of that. But per simons so
far are still pretty good at that problem. If you
live next to a place where persimons have been ground
for a while, you might have that to have to

(02:09:26):
deal with that a little bit more so than normal.
That's a good one to do. What are some others
for fruit? Blueberries? Blueberries do have a number of foliage diseases.
There's a few insects that will affect them, but we're
starting to see more diseases in blueberries that are making
it very difficult to grow some of my favorite blueberries here.

(02:09:49):
But in general that's always been one that we grew
without a lot of spring. So maybe you'll plant them
and do fine, won't have a problem. And then again
sometimes problems do show up. But fruit in general is
a little bit of a chat to do that. You
can grow pecans if they're disease resistant, and if you
consider pecans across the Great State of Texas are the

(02:10:12):
national fruit of Texas, okay, the state nut of Texas,
state tree of Texas, that is the pecan, and some
are very susceptible, susceptible to diseases like scab. Scab effects
the shuck, which affects the kernel filling inside the nut.
Scab effects the foliage. And when you have bad scab infection,

(02:10:33):
you're just not going to get pecan kernels. You'll get
a pecan tree. It looks ugly when it gets all
the leaves that are diseased and falling off. But so
you gotta choose varieties that are scab resistant. Now, I
told you earlier about the Aggi Horticulture website. If you
go to the Aggi Horticulture website and find the fruit
and nuts section and click on pecans, there's more than

(02:10:55):
one click for pecans, or more than one thing that
they put up there. You can see recommended varieties for
pecan growing here. If you're going to plant one, pick
a variety that is for the eastern part of the state. Basically,
there's a line through Texas and it kind of runs
down Interstate thirty five give or take out west. Where

(02:11:15):
it's dry. You can plant things that are scab susceptible
because it just doesn't stay wet out there all the time.
You come over here and you better have scab resistance
and the ones that you choose pecans. Since we're talking
about this, happened to be another plant that is separate
in terms of the flowers on the plant. Not male

(02:11:36):
and female plants as with hollies, but separate male and
female flowers. This is a fun fact. So when families
gathering and maybe staying too long, you can start droning
on about horticultural fun facts. And here's one. Pecans have
separate male and female flowers that do not open at

(02:11:59):
the same time. By a male flower in a pecan
that's a cat can looks like a little pipe cleaner,
and it releases the dust of pollen that floats on
the air everywhere. A female flower on a pecan is
a little tiny miniature pecan with the receptive end where
it can get pollinated. I'm going to continue this mystery
in just a moment. We're gonna take a quick break

(02:12:20):
and we'll be right back. Hey, I got time for
one more call before the show's over today.

Speaker 6 (02:12:23):
If you're in.

Speaker 7 (02:12:24):
If you can't wait, I can picture snoopy dance. And
do you know that Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, was
rejected as an illustrator.

Speaker 9 (02:12:39):
He was.

Speaker 6 (02:12:42):
A hard time.

Speaker 7 (02:12:43):
Maybody don't want to carry his cartoons. People felt that
one of the things be felt they were too religious,
because you know that like the Peanuts Christmas Special that
they do, which is basically a story that covers the
story as it appears in the Bible. But he sure
did make a lot of people wrong when you created

(02:13:04):
the Peanuts characters Charlie Brown, Lucy Lionis Pigmin and of
course Snoopy, the nfemus Snoopy. You're listening to Guardline. We're
about shut things down here in the next bit. Ace
hardware stores are open and ready for you to stop
in for all kinds of things. You know, Winner is here,

(02:13:25):
and we're going to get some cold weather eventually. It's
been kind of warm right now, but that doesn't mean much,
you know how it's gonna end up. They got the
indoor portable heaters of all types. They have other kinds
of heaters too, of the electric types, for example. They
also have like kerosene heaters where you're heating up a
large space like a garage or something like that. They've

(02:13:47):
got the propane attachments excrews right into the top of
a propane tank and it is a single or double
burner heater. They can put out a lot of heat
on those boggers, and if you got a little bit
greenhouse something like, some of those can be hopeful for
heating up a bigger area like that. Many many types
of heaters available from the folks at ACE your Ace

(02:14:09):
Hardware store. They also have one of the hottest new items.
I do not have one of these.

Speaker 6 (02:14:14):
I need to.

Speaker 7 (02:14:14):
I guess I need one of these. But it's called
the turtle box speaker and it just kind of a
normal looking little thing carried around. It is a outdoor speaker,
waterproof speaker, and I'm told the sound is just amazing.
But that is one of the hottest items that you're
going to see out on the market, and Ace Hardware

(02:14:36):
Store has them all kinds. Just go to local Ace
haard restore, ask them call first, ask them if they
carry the turtle box a lot of them. Do another thing.
How about the solo stove bonfire or the yukon or
there's these things called solar stoves. Just picture an aluminum
cylinder with some holes in the bottom for air, and
they put out a significant amount of heat and a

(02:15:00):
the outdoor fire that's safer because it's contained and Ace
Hardware store carries Oas brands as well. So if you
want to create something out on the patio for people
to gather around, or maybe there's even a pit stand
by solo that it looks like a little fire table
out there works truly well, that's your local Ace Hardware store.

(02:15:20):
Stuff that you need for decorating, for gift giving, or
for just personal enjoying.

Speaker 6 (02:15:25):
If you go to Ace.

Speaker 7 (02:15:26):
Hardware Texas dot com, don't forget Texas. Ace Hardware Texas
dot com. You will find the Ace Hardware stores near you.
Stores like All Star Ace and Magnolia Aspas ACE on
Kirkandall Up in the Woodlands, All Seasons Ace up in
Willis on I forty five North. Maybe you're on the

(02:15:47):
east side, you got Deer Park ACE on Center Street.
You Valdi ACE on your Valdi Road, and Child's Building
supply out there in Orange. A couple of calls from
out in the Orange area today. Down south and the west,
there's Plantation ACE on Mason Road in the Richmond Rosenberg area.
Keep heading southwest and you got Wharton ACE and Feed
on Richmond Road, Bay City ACE on Seventh Street, Victoria

(02:16:11):
Port Lavaka and Rockport all have ACE Hardware stores part
of our ACE Hardware Texas dot com. Who I'm leaving
out the east side, All right, let's just do some
how about Crosby ACE on FM twenty one hundred K
and M. There's an Itasca SITA on Timber Forest and
a Kingwood K and M on Kingwood Drive. J and
ours ACE up in Porter, Texas on thirteen fourteen, Kilgore

(02:16:34):
Ace cor Kilgor, clear Lake Number ACE on East Main
League City ACE on West League City Parkway, Pacawace on
West Willis and Alvin. Let's go down to Kema just
south of Keema actually bakel of ACE on Grand Avenue
and Chalmers Ace in Galveston Broadway Street. The west side.
We got Hardware City on the World Drive, Hamilton, which

(02:16:54):
is as hard Run Highway six north from the Bear
Creek area Langham Creek on five twenty nine, the backs
of the Copperfield neighborhood, Sinco ACE on South Mason Road
and Katie Katie Hardware on Pinoak Road, Full Sure Ice
down in full Shure high Way three fifty or FM
three fifty nine. Those are some of the many ACE

(02:17:15):
Hardware stores that are out there. You just need to
go check them out. In fact, I would recommend today'd
be a good day to run out and check out
your local ACE Hardware store see what they have. Here's
the website though, to find yours Acehardwaretexas dot com. We're
going to go now to Houston and talk to Alex
this morning. Hey Alex, welcome.

Speaker 6 (02:17:32):
To garden Line.

Speaker 11 (02:17:34):
Hey, good morning.

Speaker 4 (02:17:35):
How are you.

Speaker 7 (02:17:37):
I'm doing good. I'm doing good. How can we help
the day?

Speaker 14 (02:17:41):
Yeah, So, I'm just kind of looking for some advice.
I have a willow tree in my front yard I'm
looking to cut down and then replace potentially with a
like a Chinese pistash. I believe it's how you pronounced this,
but I don't know the best of the year to
maybe a cut down the tree and be plant a
new tree of that sort.

Speaker 7 (02:18:05):
Good question, Alex. Anytimes fine to cut a tree down,
you know, there's not a better time for that. Willow trees,
you know, get the old stump out of there and whatnot.
Then when you're gonna do the replant. Chinese pistache can
be a nice tree. I'm gonna give you the pros
and cons of Chinese pistache. They often have decent fall color.

(02:18:27):
Decent fall color. Now I've got one in my yard
that does not have good fall color, and I've got
two neighbors that have ones that have a beautiful orangeish
red fall color. But that's kind of how it is.
You're talking about seedlings that each have their variations. Chinese
pistache is another tree, as I was talking about earlier,
that are either separate, that are separate male and female trees.

(02:18:50):
So the male trees are the better one to have.
The females produce clusters of little fruit that falls. It's
a little bit on the messy side. So if you
can a male tree, most people don't know which one
they have for sale, but that would be better. But
those are the pros and cons. It's a little bit
of a brittle limbed tree, but it's a medium sized tree,

(02:19:11):
not too large, and so it has its own pluses.
Yeah for sure.

Speaker 14 (02:19:18):
Yeah, no, good to know the brittle limbs.

Speaker 6 (02:19:20):
Maybe concerned.

Speaker 14 (02:19:21):
I'm having that issue with the willow tree as I'm
just picking up almost as many branches as i am leaves.

Speaker 6 (02:19:27):
Yeah, and yeah, so I don't know if I'm going
to be in that same situation.

Speaker 7 (02:19:33):
Yeah, Chinese pistache. It does have that a little bit
of limb drop. I don't know, not too bad though
some trees are real bad about that.

Speaker 11 (02:19:42):
All right, good notes, Well, I appreciate your.

Speaker 7 (02:19:44):
Health, all right, good luck. Have fun platting that thing.
Get it in as soon as you can, because every
day it has before summer is a good thing. I'm
talking about pecans. I forgot to tell you. The pecans
have separate male and female flowers on the same tree.
One produces pollen, one that produces the nuts that receive
the pollen. But a typical pecan either it releases pollen

(02:20:07):
first and then the nutlets are receptive, or the nutlets
are receptive first and then it produces pollen. There's two
names protogenist pretenders. For those, go to the agriculture website.
Look at the pecan publication. It'll tell you what kind
it is, type one or type two. If possible, you
want to have two different types. Now you don't have
to have two in the same yard. There's so many

(02:20:27):
pecans around the area that drifting on the wind, there's
probably good pecan pollen. But if you're going to plant two,
plant one adanch there you go have a wonderful Christmas season.
Talk to you next January.