Do Not Follow All This Advice!

Horticulture Hotline 12/11/17

By Bill Lamson-Scribner

A Few Ways To Kill A Tree

Since we are in the planting season for trees and shrubs in the Lowcountry, here are a few things not to do!

Buy a tree on sale that has been starved for water, food, and is pot-bound.  The tree will probably have a weak structure; this is why no one has purchased it.  Get that real tall 3-gallon plant that should be in a 15-gallon pot.  To be sure you are buying a root bound plant; make sure there are big roots coming out of the holes in the bottom of the pot.

Set the tree in the back of a pickup truck or on the roof of your car with no protective covering for the foliage.  Drive 70 mph home with the wind battering the tree (this is good practice for hurricane season), or decide to do other errands while it sits in your truck all day.  When you get home, the tree will be defoliated and further dried out.

After you have cut away the plastic container, be sure you have nice circling, woody roots.  Dig that million dollar hole.  Go 5 feet deep and 5 feet wide and amend with fresh cow manure from your friend’s farm and leaves you picked up in plastic bags from around your neighborhood.  Once this organic stuff begins to decompose, it will rob your tree of more nutrients and settle.  Settling is a guarantee that your plant will be planted below existing grade, starving it for oxygen.

Plant your new specimen tree near your house, between the driveway and the sidewalk that leads to your front door so it will be easy to keep an eye on it.  This way when it gets older, it can rub up and damage your roof and the roots can damage your sidewalk, driveway and foundation of your home. 

Planting near a down spot is nice for the free water off of your roof.  During rainy seasons, this will also help the tree drown. 

When you plant the tree, make sure the soil goes over the root ball so the tree looks like a telephone pole or pencil coming straight out of the ground.  Make sure that the flare of the tree is below grade.

When you get the tree in the hole, you need to stake it.  The old garden hose cut up with wire run through it is still a popular way to kill a tree.  Stake it in three directions tightly so that the tree doesn’t sway in the wind, thus guaranteeing that the tree will not become strong enough to support itself.  Mark your calendar three years from the day you staked it.  If the tree hasn’t already died, the guide wires from the stakes should have girdled it by now.  If you want to make sure you kill the tree, put tree wrap on it as well.  This wrap will constrict trunk growth and hold moisture rotting the bark.  This soft bark makes a good place for insects to enter the tree and fungus to rot the tree. 

On the serious side, large patch / brown patch fungus exploded over the last week of foggy, misty, or rainy days. If it is 100 % humidity, you can adjust your irrigation accordingly. There is a yard I see all the time that I have never seen large patch / brown patch in over 40 years. A new person purchased the house and put irrigation in and now the front yard is covered in disease.

Everyone has already done a soil test – right?, So you know what your yard needs to be it’s healthiest this year.  Using horticultural oil or Neem oil to smother over-wintering insects is an environmentally friendly way to control these pests. Neem oil will help with certain fungus as well. 

Always read, understand and follow product label. The product label is a Federal Law.

Questions From The Radio Show

Horticulture Hotline 12/04/17

By Bill Lamson-Scribner

Prevention and protection is the only way to be successful in controlling certain pest. Boring insects, sod webworms, “the nasty rascal, the chinch bug”, roaches, and termites are just a few of the many. Fungus is another pest best controlled preventatively.

On the radio show, “The Garden Clinic”, Saturdays from noon to 1:00, on 1250 WTMA (The Big Talker), this week David and I (The Super Garden Hero was doing good deeds elsewhere) had 2 questions about borers, so I decided to write a little about them today.

Borers are generally moths or beetles as adults. They fly around in the spring and lay eggs on leaf petioles (where the little stem that comes off a leaf attaches to the main stem), cracks in the bark, or wounds in the plant. With the recent hurricanes we have more cracks in the bark and wounds.

Generally, when the egg hatches, a larva emerges and tunnels inside the twig, tree, or vine. The larva is the part of the life cycle that does the damage by eating the cambium and effecting the flow of nutrients up and down the tree. Since larva get inside the tree, it makes it very difficult to control with spray or dust applications. The borer overwinters as a larva and emerges generally in the spring as an adult.

Treating the tree with a systemic product like Dominion or Safari as a ground drench as well as spraying the tree with Bifen XTS and Pentra-Bark to protect the tree from adults that are laying eggs and an oil product to suffocate eggs is a good strategy for high value trees. Depending on the borer, you would target your spraying when the adults are active (usually in the spring). Always read, understand and follow product label and consider a professional. Trees are expensive to remove and replace, and they are valuable to the landscape in many ways.

Prevention is critical with borers because once they are inside the tree or plant, the plant protects them. If you have borers, using certain fertilizer and watering techniques can help you keep the trees alive until you can manage the borers to an acceptable level. With certain borers in certain trees you can outgrow the damage.

Pest Management Professionals do a great job of protecting our homes from termites. You would not want to watch your house get eaten up then think, “hey, I might have a problem with my house. The second story toilet just fell through the floor with my mother-in-law on it.”

Termites do a lot of damage very quickly. The cost of protecting your house to prevent the damage is very low. If you have a reputable Pest Management Professional do the work, their insurance should cover any damage unless you violated the contract (example – added on a porch and did not let them know).

Termites are one insect that should be left to a professional to control. Termites attack what is generally our highest price asset – our home.

Brown Patch, moles, roaches, rats? Is this warm weather setting us up for winter kill?

Always read, understand and follow product label. The product label is a Federal Law.

Get Winter Weeds While Young - Ryegrass Anyone?

Horticulture Hotline 11/27/17

By Bill Lamson-Scribner

One big question to answer this time of year is do I want to grow ryegrass in my lawn, paint my lawn green, or let it go dormant? The football fields, baseball fields, and golf courses look so nice this time of year. Green grass all winter would be nice.

While driving through neighborhoods, I see a lot of houses for sale. Ryegrass or green paint could separate your house from the multitude of other houses that are on the market.

For the very low cost of seed and fertilizer or paint, if you could sell your house one month earlier saving you a monthly payment, wouldn’t it be worth it? What about a year earlier?

Ryegrass gets a bad reputation because people misapply it. I often get asked, “doesn’t rye kill my centipede?” If you manage the rye correctly, you should have no problems. The ryegrass question is like buying a dog. If you base your decision on the few untrained pit bull stories and never purchased or adopted a dog of any type because of these stories, it would be too bad. I write this as my mixed, pound hound dog, Ol’ Boy, softly snores under my desk at my feet.

The 3 biggest mistakes I see with rye grass that give it a bad reputation are:

1. Put out at too high of a rate, so it chokes permanent grass.
2. Use cheap rye with lots of weed seeds and poor color. Light green grass and no additional fertilizer so dog urine spots (dark green grass) become your fertilizer program.
3. Not managed in the spring chemically or culturally, so it competes with permanent grass.

If you decide you want to put out ryegrass, now is the time to check your trusty application chart. Have you put out preemergent herbicide this fall? If so, when and at what rate? If you have recently applied preemergent products, you may want to try the paint or wait until next year. You could put out something to deactivate the preemergent so you could rye, but that will just add to your cost.

If you are painting or not using rye, you can attack some of the nasty winter weeds that will compete with your turf grass next spring without having to worry about the rye grass. Who wants to be “mowing weeds” late winter / early spring?

Chickweed and other winter weeds are visible now. Remember it is easier to kill them now when they are young and actively growing than to wait until they are flowering.

Always read, understand and follow product label or hire a professional. The product label is a Federal Law.