FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
Plain Living w/Bill Finch 7.21.2024 Talking New Season of Gardening, Muscadines and Radishes
It's time for Plain Living for Alabama and the Gulf Coast. With nationally recognized nature writer and award-winning horticulture and nature expert, Bill Finch. Bill shares his knowledge of conservation, natural history, and gardening. Let's talk about living and growing in the deep south with your personal garden and nature consulted. Here's Bill Finch on FM Talk 1065. Hey, good morning. It's an Alabama Sunday morning. It's a Gulf Coast Sunday morning. It's the start of the second season of gardening along the Gulf Coast. And we need to talk about that a little bit more. There's a lot you need to be doing right now. Oh, I'm thinking about feeding myself. Which I do multiple times a year, even as I'm eating well out of the garden. And about the time I'm eating well out of the garden, I think, hmm, I guess I better get ready for the next big season. So there's a lot that'll be happening. There's a lot that you can develop for September, October, November, December, January, February, March. That happens right now. And that sounds like a lot of the year and it is. This is July has got to be one of the more important planning and planning seasons for your garden, particularly for your vegetable garden, but also for your flower garden. So you need to start thinking about that. We'll think a little bit about it this morning. I also want to emphasize it's the time you have to begin purchasing things. And right now, because of the demand for things, it may have, it may have be a little bit more subdued than it was during the peak of, you know, COVID. When boy, it was really hard to get things. And not just because of the, not just because shipping wasn't working, but mostly because gardening stuff was in big demand, I guess because people didn't have other things to do. I don't know why. But I think that's subsided a little bit. It's a little easier to get things now. And the supplies are a little better. But I will tell you that if you're wanting to order garlic, if you're wanting to start ordering bulbs for spring, you need to start now, if you want to order onions for any little onions, you need to start now. You also need to order a lot of your seeds. So boy, you know, I'm making a list of things. I did get a lot of things earlier, which makes me feel better. Like broccoli cabbage, I just got to plant it, I just got to sow it, which I need to get on the stick, I got to get this stuff done. But I've got the seeds, but you may need to begin thinking about those winter seeds now and buying them, purchasing them. You call me if you have questions about that, which winter seeds, how you can do it. Oh, there's some that I do moderately well and some that I don't do moderately well. But there you go. We'll talk about them, we'll do the best we can. There's some really great things that are really easy that are pretty consistent like radishes. We got to start thinking about all those things. We got to start thinking about garlic, onions, bulbs. It's that second season. So we're going to talk a lot about that. If you're on the Gulf Coast, generally you have to get started earlier. But in this case, you can get started a little bit later on some of those cool season things. If you're in North Alabama, you got to get started right now. Right now, as my dad would say, does that sound stampy enough? Right now, you've got to get started or you're not going to have enough time to get your plants big enough before short days and cool weather slows them down. So we'll be sure to talk about that, broccoli, cabbage, all those things. You know, there's another thing you can do this time of year, particularly if you're on the Gulf Coast. But even if you're in North Alabama along the Gulf Coast, it's easy, easy to start. Another crop of peas, another crop of okra, getting a little late for tomatoes. But if you got a big tomato, it might even be worthwhile plop it into the ground, seeing what happens. Isn't that cool? You could probably even make eggplants at this point if you had some nice big plants. One of the other things that I start doing this time of year, you can consider this, is starting peppers. Some of the short season peppers will produce, but what I really like are the perennial peppers from South America, it's really easy to start in this time of year. You may or may not get a lot of production before the end of the year, but what you do is you keep them in a pot, grow them out inside, and then you can plop them in the ground next year and they will start producing early and you will have more peppers and you know what to do with very early in the year. Great time to start peppers, it's harder to start peppers in winter. That's true for all peppers, so you can do that again. You can start another crop of beans as well, there's always, there's always a season, every season is a season for planting beans, there's lots of them you can try, look for some of the shorter season ones, I even, you know, sometimes I even recommend trying some of the beans that are from farther north that like greasy cut shorts, which are popular in the mountains, and they can, you're going to plant them now, they're going to struggle a little bit in the heat if you're on the Gulf Coast, but they'll have time and they can be producing pretty good beans in October and November because that's going to be the kind of temperatures that they're used to. Good thing to do, good thing to think about, all these things you can be doing, you call me if you have any other questions about what it is you need to plant. You know the other thing I'm thinking about right now is rain. Maybe we'll talk a little bit more about it, we've got a lot of it, and I have observed my garden, got a little dry, got a little dry, it's a dry spill, and it was tough, it was tough to plant, it was tough to, you know, plants were yellowing, and I could water and it helped a little, but I really had to water a long time, and then the rains came and boom, it just flipped it, and we often say rains do things for gardens that watering out of a hose doesn't do, and I've often thought about why that might be. I don't think, you know, in the old days it was really about, oh there must be lots of nitrogen in that rain when it falls and it makes things greener, maybe, maybe, but there's something else that goes on, and this is really important because I think if you understand this, it means that even when you water, even when you water with your hose in the garden, you can imitate the effects of rain, because what happens with rain is that you get enough of it, with oftentimes when you water with the hose you don't water enough, and so you're only wetting a really thin area, which might keep that plant alive for just a little while, but it doesn't reach deep enough that the roots can move into the soil, that it mobilizes all of the nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium that might be in the soil, it helps to move it around, it helps the roots to absorb it, because it's spread out through the soil, but the roots can't reach all of that, or it may be too dry for the roots to even uptake but when you get enough rain, or when you water long enough, what happens is that water sinks into the ground, 3 inches deep, that'd be great, 4 inches, 5 inches, 6 inches, sometimes if it gets 3 inches it's probably going to move on down a little bit, that's the key, because then the roots can reach, it's not just the water they're reaching, but suddenly all of that nitrogen, all of the stuff that usually goes on in the soil that provides plants with the stuff they need, the grease they need to keep the wheels of photosynthesis turning, all of those things, suddenly they come back to life, because they're throughout the soil profile, and suddenly it's all available, and suddenly those yellow plants aren't yellow anymore, isn't that interesting, isn't that weird, but that's the way it works. Seeing the rain, seeing it come back, watching its effect on plants, thinking how much of a difference it makes in terms of soil structure, in terms of plants ability to move around in the soil, in terms of nutrient stability moving around, reminds me of how we should be watering, deep, and long, and not so often, we'll be back. FM Talk 1065 with Plain Living for Alabama and the Gulf Coast, call 251-3430106. Here again is your personal nature expert, Bill Finch. Welcome back, it's Gulf Coast, Sunday morning, it's an Alabama Sunday morning. We did, indeed, win a nappy, and Jim and Georgetown points out, we all won that. That's the kind, I guess, because we have enough listeners who are interested in this kind of thing, and we're all sort of focused, it's on what we do here. And we work together, you know, it's some mornings I have to talk a lot, two hours. That's okay, but even I would get tired of hearing myself talk for two hours, I do. But what's great is, is that we often hear from you, and we get to listen to you, and we get to talk about what you're doing in your garden, and we get to talk about your questions. I think that's what makes this show work. That's what makes it work, so we all want it, and there's another thing, I mean, Sean played a big role in this, I'll have to say, Sean put this up, made it work, but you know, you voted, apparently a lot of you voted, and that made a big difference. That's great, that's wonderful, we should thank ourselves. It probably means this show has a little bit more life, which is good, I guess, if you like it, we'll be here for a while. So we want a nappy, if for those of you who don't know what a nappy is, it's an award given by LanYap, which is a sort of a weekly news magazine in Mobile, based in Mobile, and that was great, that was wonderful. We will, we're going to be talking this morning about things you need to be thinking about for your garden this time of year, and it's really important that you begin starting your plants. You know, is there anything you need to start this early on the Gulf Coast, yes, yes. In terms of winter vegetables, some take a long time. It is not too early, it is not, if you, if you want to try Brussels sprouts. Now, I'm not, I'm telling you, Brussels sprouts are weird, and I can't figure out why they work in some places and not in others, but if you're going to try, but I've grown them, and I think you can probably grow them on the Gulf Coast, but here's what I would recommend. You got to, you got to start now. So I would get those Brussels sprouts sown as soon as possible. If you've got some cabbages on the Gulf Coast, and this is true for North Alabama as well, if anything in North Alabama, I'm admonishing myself, it would have been better to start those Brussels sprouts, maybe even the first of July, rather than waiting till the end of July, but it's not too late. Give it a shot, don't go with a super long varieties, there's some that work better than others, and cabbages, long-season cabbages. Probably a good thing on the Gulf Coast to start those, now definitely a good thing to start them if you're in North Alabama, North Alabama being, well, north of citronel. As you move farther north, it's certainly better to get some of these things started earlier. When you're in that hot, hot coastal belt where first frost is going to occur very late, you're okay. You can wait a little bit because you know it's going to stay hotter longer. As you move farther north, you need to get them started earlier, earlier. But listen, folks, those of you on the Gulf Coast, even you have to get things started now. I heard to actually get radishes started now. Radishes are incredibly heat tolerant. They're a lot of fun. Now, these are not breakfast radishes, which I'll acknowledge I have a big problem with. They never quite do for me what I hope they're going to do. Not those little baby radishes they serve in restaurants, you know? These are the big radishes, the big robust radishes, the Korean radishes, the Chinese radishes, really beautiful, big, fall radishes. Great time to start planting them. You can plant them directly in the garden and oftentimes they'll come up just fine. Get you some extra seeds if you're going to start this early and start them in sequence. Don't plant all your seeds at one time. It's rarely necessary, particularly this time of year, to plant everything at one time if you're going to sow it in the garden. Sow it in phases. It's not too early to start carrots. And I'm just thinking, is there much difference between North Alabama and South Alabama in terms of carrots? I don't think so. What you're going to have to do in South Alabama is really shade those carrots. You're going to have to do it in North Alabama too. You're going to have to really shade those carrots to get them to germinate. They actually deal with the heat reasonably well when they're first coming up, as long as they stay plenty moist. There are lots of ways to shape. One thing you can do, let's find something. Let's say you've got some peas. Let's say you've planted peas and your peas are about to poop out. You could come back and sow carrots under those peas. Now you don't want to have to pull the peas up later because you're going to disturb your carrots, but that's okay. They'll grow underneath those peas. They'll get a little bit extra moisture. You have to make sure you've got plenty of moisture on those carrots, but that shade will help. It's one way to do it. A lot of other people will sow their carrots under, say, a board. So they'll, well, you sow them and then you put a board under it, and that works too. So them under a little bit of mulch that you pull up and check on periodically. If you use the board method, if you use the board method, if you use the mulch method, you've got to check because when they finally do come up, they need to see the sawn. So you want to check every now and then pull it up, look at it, see if they're coming up pretty good, and then continue to water them. You can even use a little bit of shag cloth on them. Another great way to do it. But it's a good time, and you don't have to start them all at once. You can start a little bit now, a little bit later, a little bit later. But throughout Alabama, almost any time between now and first of October, planting carrots is going to produce a pretty good harvest, just did a staggered time at a different time. All these things, good to be thinking about what to do. So give me a call this morning if you've got questions about other things that you might want to plant. Johnny in Grand Bay says two inches of rain this morning. It's watching this rain work that really, really makes me think about what rain does. And you know, it's good for you to understand that too. Have you noticed when it gets dry, I mean, this is really important that even sandy soils get incredibly hard to dig sandy, moderately sandy, so they just get, they clump up. You would think, God, only clays are going to clump up, some of you. But no, that's not true, because even those sandy soils will clump up when it gets super dry. And what that means is that your plant roots really aren't finding, they're not moving through that soil. They're not finding nitrogen. They're not finding the soil life that they usually associate with that brings nutrients up. It's an important thing. You know, I noticed that, and it can work in the reverse sometimes with too much rain. And some of you may be seeing that, the yellowing that we see with too much rain. And I, you know, I want to attribute that to root rot, but it's actually simpler than that, maybe, in a lot of cases. It may be that the roots are okay, but in fact, the associations that those plants usually have with soil life aren't happening, because there's not enough oxygen left in the soil for those things to happen. I noticed that with peas in particular. Peas get really sop and wet, and they will just turn yellow when they're coming out of the ground. You think they're going to die, and then it stops raining, and they do just fine, and suddenly, boom, they're green as they can be. What's going on? And in fact, my peas did really well through the really dry spell, but they didn't do as well during the wet spell. Again, it's, can those roots begin to develop a relationship with all those things in the soil that they need, and peas get their nitrogen from a relationship with bacteria and the soil. They form root nodules on the roots that help them to process nitrogen and move it up. Just look like they needed fertilizer really bad when it was so wet, boom, it dried out a little bit. Those nodules developed, peas did fine, they're producing now. There it is, thinking about how water affects the soil, when it's super saturated and there's no oxygen, when it's super dry, and there's no water to move things around. We'll be back. FM Talk 1065, home for plain living for Alabama and the Gulf Coast. Let's talk about living and growing in that deep south, with Bill Finch. Call 251-3430-1006. Alright, welcome back, it's Gulf Coast Sunday morning, it's an Alabama Sunday morning. Gives a call, we'd love to talk. I listen every week, love what you do, uh, uh, uh, listen to recess. I see scuppernongs everywhere this year. Is that normal? Are they the same as muscadines? Please educate me. Alright, let's, let's get into the muscadine thing, because a lot of people are beginning to eat them, uh, they're starting to ripen, uh, they're really good, uh, I smell them in the woods the other day, you know, you just go by and you say, muscadines, hmm, hmm. Let's go back and look at muscadines for a minute. Can we, let's just talk about them. Uh, for a long time muscadines were grouped with grapes broadly, uh, in a, in a lat, the Latin name group, the scientific name Vittis, um, however you like pronouncing it, V-I-T-I-S. Um, it's, um, which is the grape group. Now, and, and I will say, let's come back to that grape group. Alabama has a lot of grapes in that group. A lot of grapes, fox grapes, possum grapes, river grapes, riparian zone grapes. I mean, it's just an amazing thing. Summer grapes, do I say, fox grapes, just a bunch of grapes. And it's, you know, the south is one of the great centers of grape diversity, uh, we got all kind of grapes. Southern grapes, by the way, saved the European grape industry, uh, and a lot of European grapes now have southern genetics in them because of the disease resistance of southern grapes. Grapes. Cool thing to think about. There's a lot of them out there. We ought to talk more about those southern grapes than we, we can, uh, but you want to talk about muscadines and I love muscadines. I love that fragrance. I love eating them fresh. So what is a muscadine? One of the ways you can tell a muscadine from a grape is that muscadines have that rotund and that's part of their Latin name, rotundifolia, round foliage, whereas grapes will be lobed generally, muscadines generally have that rounded foliage. So if you're just, that's not the prime thing that distinguishes muscadines from grapes. But if you're growing, going in the woods and you look, you can kind of see that pretty quickly. And now we know that there's so much difference in muscadines and grapes that muscadines now have their own genus, their own grouping that is different than grapes, muscadynia. Isn't that cool? There are a couple of muscadynia, two or three species of muscadynia. And mostly what you're going to see is the one rotundifolia. Within that group of muscadines, there are, there is one of the cool things about muscadines is there's a lot of genetic variation within species. This is important. I keep telling you, sometimes we don't know species well enough. And then when we think we do, we often make too much of them because there is as much variation within species, sometimes as there is across species, muscadines have a lot of variability within that species. In terms of their growth rates, in terms of what their fruits look like, in terms of the color of their fruits, in terms of the taste, in terms of the fragrance. All these things can vary dramatically from plant to plant, even in the same place. At some point early on, oh, back in the early, early days around Virginia and North Carolina when people were just coming ashore, they found a muscadyn that unlike most of muscadines were dark, most muscadines were dark purple, but they found another muscadyn, a particular vine that had bronze, kind of a pale bronze yellow golden color. And that one, they named scupernong. At some point scupernong, which is not a new species, not a different species, it's just a different color of muscadine. At some point that was propagated and shared, so the variety scupernong, which would be like an apple variety, it would be like the difference between gala, oh, what kind of apples do you know now? Red delicious is a variety, and gala is a variety. You see, those are not very good, I don't mean to indicate, but those are two you probably know and have run into. Those are two varieties, and that's just what scupernong and is, is just a variety, just like red delicious is a variety of apple, that's not a different thing, just a variety with different qualities. Over time, people found other bronze muscadines are selected for bronze or pale colored golden colored muscadines, and because people were so used to the name scupernong, they called all of those pale muscadines, golden muscadines, bronze muscadines, they call them all scupernongs, which is probably not useful, because in fact they were different cultivars like triumph, which is a great or noble, both of which are great, isn't noble or golden, I think it is. Those are both great golden bronze muscadines, and they have their own particular odor and their own particular flavor, and they're different than scupernong. Scupernong as a cultivar is not one of the best, I will say, I mean, you can do a lot better with some of the other bronze varieties like triumph, and you can call it a scupernong if you like, just to continue to confuse yourself and other people, but there you go. Scupernong is just like an apple variety, just like red delilishes or yellow delishes or whatever those other common varieties that you know, you see what I'm saying? It's not a new thing, just a variety, and again, I would say if you do indeed come up with a cultivar, a variety that is officially named scupernong, it's not the best of the bronze varieties. Try something like triumph, I don't have all of the list of bronzes in front of me, and I'm not sure I'm going to peel them off the top of my head, but I'll look some up, I'll mention them in the next round. So there are some great bronze varieties out there, there are some great purple varieties, and our bronze are purples better. What it asks me, I like them both, they're both very good, there is a slight difference in flavor. It tends to be if people want dry wines, Jim and Georgetown can comment on this, they tend to go for the bronze varieties, nobles one, if I'm remembering correctly, and so they like those drier, less sweet, maybe bronze varieties, but triumph is great too, and it's a little bit sweeter, and sometimes the purples are the sweetest of all, but sometimes the sweetness is, there's more to muskadons and sweetness, so you like a, sometimes you could say the bronze have a little bit more balance in some of those flavors. So there it is, there's a lot of muskadons out there. They're beginning to ripen now, what else do you need to know about muskadons out here? So David B is sending me some information, I'll read through it David, turn me on and see what I'm going to get to that, muskads are actually included in the USDA table grape standards as American or Nebraska type, yeah, and that's right, so Nebraska was the contributed, and that makes sense, it's going to be a little bit foxy, a little bit musky is the idea, but for me muskadons, hear that musky, I don't know whether it's related or not, I'll have to look it up, but for me the muskadons don't have the really musky foxy flavor that some of the American grapes have, it has a very distinctive different flavor, some people love it, some people don't like, like it as much as regular grapes, I love it, we don't have seedless muskadons, isn't that interesting, I guess the reason we don't have seedless muskadons is that the skin of the muskadon is always a little bit thicker, so you're always having to deal with that, you don't swallow it whole, you know you're eating table grapes and you just kind of throw them in your mouth and there's no seeds and the skins are very soft and all that's fine, but muskadons have that tougher skin, and so when you're eating fresh you know what we used to do is you kind of put that skin in your mouth, you pop the skin, spit the skin out with the seeds, right, that's the way you do it, and it's not like you're shoveling a hamburger down, you know when you're eating muskadons it's the experience, it's getting that, and that's one of the cool things, I think because you get that full skin in your mouth, if you try to squirt it out of the skin, you get that skin in your mouth, you chew on it, you're getting flavor out of the skin, you're getting flavor out of the pulp, and you have to hold it there just long, and if you can't swallow it right away like you're eating a hamburger, and then you get those, you spit the seeds out and you spit the skin out, meanwhile all that flavor has had a chance to coach your tongue, and the top of your mouth, and it's getting back up into your nostrils from the back of your throat, and you got it on the front of your mouth too, and it's that experience, that's what makes muskadons so good, so if we ever had a muskadon that you could just pop in your mouth the way you pop grapes in your mouth and swallow it whole, and you know, I don't think it would be as good, I don't think it'd be as good, it's the muskadon eating experience, it's so good, if you want to process them so that you can't eat them quickly, you can certainly do that, but man, eating muskadons fresh, there's just something about it, something about it, Jim do you use the skins in your muskadons, Jim and George down, right, you process it with all the skins and then you strain it out, I'm sure you do, right, you must, and then we, and then you make the muskadon line, and getting that skin in there is so, it's so thick, you can't really swallow it easily, but boy does it have a lot of flavor, and you just kind of chew on it, and get those flavors out and then you have to spit it out, is that something they do on the streets of New York, I don't think they do, did they do that in Paris on the street quarters, I don't know, but we do it in the south, and it's a fine thing, chewing on that muskadon, chewing on the skin, spitting it out, doing all this for my friend Chris who loves muskadons, don't know if he's listening today, but boy I'm working on his muskadons for him, trying to get it going, Chris loves them, got way too many of them, keep telling him, but he'll, he'll figure it out, he loves those muskadons, I'll tell you to, I often think, I often think, if I were in prison, and what would be my last meal? You get plain talk on plain living, let's talk about living and growing in that deep self, with Bill Fitch, call 251-3430-106 on FM Talk 1065. Yeah alright, sounds like that's music, sounds like we're back, sorry for me disappearing into a big tin room, which happens every now and then, we were talking about muskadons and scupronongs, I guess you got all that, hope you did, just a quick sort of lesson in muskadons and scupronongs, and I have missed my opportunity, I'm gonna, over our next break, I'm gonna look at some of those bronze varieties, we're gonna find the bronze varieties, I'm gonna talk about them, and just kinda reach out a list of some of the bronze varieties, I did get a message, and this is great, so we got a lot of great common names, and you know, I think about my mid-Mississippi heritage, my mid-Alabama heritage, my south-Mississippi south-Alabama heritage, and north-Florida, and uh, so we got a little bit of an echo, Steve, is that okay, can you hear me okay, folks, alright, there it goes, Steve just give me a nod, if you, if we're, if we're sounding okay, good, good, something, something weird happened again, first was my fault, uh, so if, if you're, this, this, incredible heritage, one of the words we use, we have a lot of words for muskadons, and if you can raise your hand, if you're familiar with this, and I'll know where you're from, if you use the word, bullis, now, I just got a message, uh, Perry said, Bill being a river fisherman from grande, you know how long, legacy catfish love, bullis, bullits, just like they love cotaba worms, and yet a little known fact for a lot of people, so it's funny how these words get, it's interesting words, so bullis, B-U-L-L-A-C-E, which sounds like bullets, but not really, it's bullis, B-U-L-L-A-C-E, that's the old southern word, bullis, and I guess if you drop the T on bullet, it sort of sounds like bullis, bullis, it's, um, a bullis is a big purple muskadon, how do I know this, because my daddy told me, that's the word people used to use for muskadons was bullis, which is an old, old, old English, French word that used to meant a big purple plum, and when they saw these big purple things in the woods in south Alabama, they didn't call them muskadons, they called them bullis as originally, and now people continue to use that word bullis, and what Perry is telling me is catfish love bullis, bullis is, just like they love cotaba worms, which is another one of those things, so cataba, a cotaba is actually, is a weird term, it's a name for cotaba Indians, which don't live down here, and which have nothing to do with another thing that we have called cotaba, cotaba, which is our local muskogan word, I think, for these trees, muskogi word, cotaba trees, and those cotaba trees have cotaba worms, cotaba, which I guess if you drop the L sounds a little bit like cotaba, anyway, cotaba, bullis is cool things, cotaba worms, cotaba worms for fishing, there it is, interesting about words, interesting about words, and both of them are great for fishing, I can imagine they are. Alright, let's see, Johnny and Graham Bay, muskadons are scuppered on, mock apple pie uses everything except the seeds, tastes like, tastes like nothing else, lots of recipes on YouTube, Johnny and Graham Bay, yep, and there you go, mock apple scuppered on pie, and probably better than most of the apple pies you are going to be able to make out of apples in south Alabama. I built my mother lived in Copeland, Alabama, and she told me about bulluses I did not care for them particularly, so assuming your mother in Copeland was indeed talking about muskadons, was she, the big purple muskadons were, was she, did she use the word bullis for something else? I don't know, that's always interesting. My dad used the word bullis, I know it was for muskadons, because he told me so, there you go. Bill, getting ready to make moss point grilled baba ganoush, that is great, looking stuff there, eggplants, beautiful peppers, a little bit of, oh, beautiful peppers of all kinds, is that, you know, it just, it's just peppers and eggplants, it looks beautiful. Is it too late to plant hard stem squash? Probably not, probably not, probably not. I think your production might get cut short, but if you get them in right away, I think you'll be fine, I think you'll be just fine. They tend, some of them, like the Korean ball squash, do really quickly, trombone chino takes a little bit longer, but the Korean ball squash, and you might have a little bit of advantage, I don't know, put some in the ground and put some in pots, see which gets to, you know, the one in pots might get to size a little better, but then it'll have to establish, put it in the ground, and then put it in the ground, see which one does better. But no, I don't think so, Rusty, I think on the Gulf Coast you can still do it, I think it might, farther north you might be running out of time, yeah, yeah, it's Philip, my mother in from cope, my, and ferret, my mother from Copeland, that told me about the most, I did eat some of them, they were large purple muskadans, so yeah, I mean, some people love muskadans and some people don't love muskadans, they have a distinctive rich, is that fair, it's a rich, rich flavor, but I love that flavor, love the way it feels in your mouth, hmm, it's distinctive, it's not really like grapes, somewhat reminiscent of grapes, but not like grapes, it's why I think sometimes making grape wines, I mean, you almost have to think I'm not making a muskadan, my muskadan wines are not grape wines, they're not at all, they have a very distinctive quality, a very distinctive flavor, that is quite nice, I can't drink wines, like some people can, for a variety of reasons, but I love the flavor of muskadan wines, I don't like them over sweetened, what you can do, you don't need to add extra sweet to me, to a muskadan wine, but they can be very good, but there's so many other great things you can do in muskadans as well, yeah, we're going to be talking a little bit more about, muskadan is going to be a little bit more about your yard, throughout the morning, you just feel free to give us a call this morning, 2513430106, 2513430106, and we're going to be talking about what you need to be ordering this time of year, and we'll be back. It's time for plain living for alibelas, it's time for plain living for alibelas. For plain living for Alabama and the Gulf Coast, with nationally recognized nature writer and award-winning horticulture and nature expert, Bill Finch, Bill shares his knowledge of conservation, natural history, and gardening, let's talk about living and growing in the deep south, with your personal garden and nature consultant, here's Bill Finch on FMTalk1065. Yeah, yeah, so we got on this subject of muskadans and scapernons, which I'm happy to do, I've been thinking a lot about them lately, it's that time of year, it's also I'll remind you the new season of gardening for the Gulf Coast and for the rest of Alabama, it's the time when you need to begin thinking about fall, getting a lot of things planted, particularly if you're in North Alabama, you got to get things seeded out, you got to get them ready to go, boy, if you're in South Alabama, you've got to get all your seeds assembled, you got to get it done, you got to order your garlic, which Jim in Georgetown's already done. I've kind of picked mine out, but it's going to be gone, it'll be gone, a lot of varieties are getting harder to find for reasons I'm not sure why, but you have to get those varieties really early now. We were coming back to the idea of where names come from with muskadans and scapernongs, scapernong is just a muskadan, just plain old muskadan really, in fact it's not one of the better muskadans, but people get to, with these common names, people kind of get things turned around. The name scapernong comes, which is a great sounding name, is it not a lovely sounding name, scapernong, and you know, I'm reading here that people enjoy mispronouncing it in many different ways, and that's what happens when things get passed around, scuplin, sculp whatever, but it's named for the scapernong river in North Carolina, and that's when according to this account, the Florentine explorer in 1524, Giovanni de Verrazano, Verrazano, was exploring the scapernong river apparently and wrote about a white grape in his logbook that was probably a scapernong, and at some point somebody, so that name kind of went to all varieties of these whitish or bronze muskadan grapes that were just a color variation, there's a little bit of a flavor variation, but they're all the same thing, all the same species basically, a lot of variation within muskadans, and when they took that color or they called it scapernong, the name stuck because it's such a cool name, it's sort of like huckleberry, which is a great name, and if you want to sound, you know, if you want to sound like you know what you're talking about, that you're a person of the woods, you feel much better calling blueberries, huckleberries, even though blueberries are huckleberries, huckleberries just another name for blueberry, it's an old name, people say there's a difference, but no, there really isn't, not in any conventional sense, you can call any blueberry you want a huckleberry, nobody can prosecute you for it, you're not going to be wrong, you probably need to be a little more specific because there's a bunch of blueberries out there, in fact there's two genera of blueberries out there, two different groups of blueberries, oh probably at 30 species in south 35, somewhere in there, a bunch of them, so you need to be a little more specific sometimes, but all blueberries and huckleberries, scapernons are all muscadons, but not all muscadons are scapernons, how is that? And so the name scapernon kind of gets kicked around a lot, I did tell you that I was going to remind you that scapernon is not the best variety, and in fact, it's maybe one of the most popular varieties, but as several websites including Mississippi State points out, scapernon is extremely popular because of name recognition, it's just a name people remember, and it was a cultivar, it's not a particularly good cultivar, there's so many other good white or bronze grapes, I made a mistake in the last hour by listing one is noble, which is not, it's a purple variety that's good for winemaking, Carlos, let me go back and say that if you're looking for bronze white muscadons, which can make very good wines, Carlos is one of the classics, and Carlos makes a good white dry wine, it's a bronze grape, good fry is great, I've had it before, I love it, I love eating it fresh, Higgins is really been around for a long time, really good, Magnolia, Summit, Triumph, there's others out there, Granny Val, I don't know where Darlene and Doreen came from, somebody's out there naming their kids, naming grapes for their kids I guess, are their mothers, are their grandmothers, I don't know for somebody, but all these are bronze grapes, bronze muscadons that are very good, probably better than Scuppernong, and something you should think about if you're looking sterling is another one, I should mention, they're all great, I don't know how to tell you, I haven't grown all of them, I've eaten a large number of them, Triumph has always been in my mind, I just remember the first time I ate Triumph, and it was so incredibly delicious, and I don't think I've ever been disappointed in Triumph since then, I'm not saying that Triumph is better than all of those others, I think I like it a little better than Carlos eating it fresh, is it better than Summit, I'm not sure, but it's a good one, and I, it's just a lot of fun, there you go, Scuppernong, muscadons, good things to eat, let's see, can you give us some recommended radish varieties from Will and Fair Hope? Yeah, so I got it, in fact I'm sitting here looking at some right now, there's a bunch of them out there, I really like this Korean radish, which I thought was good, and a lot of other people liked it, you hear all those seeds, a lot of other people liked it, it was, and it's not as, it's not quite as hot as some varieties, but it's got, it's just got enough heat to make it a little interesting, very good flavor, and let me get to the cut, it's Chiangdu, C-H-E-O-N-G-Doo, Chiangdu, it's a Korean radish hybrid, it came from Kitizawa, the Koreans do radishes really well, and these will be a big radish, and I really liked it, it was productive, it made a nice size radish, it was good, it's a good one to start with, there is, what are some of the others, Bora King was hotter, it's another, I think Bora King, I'm not sure whether that's a Japanese, I don't know where it's from, but it's a good winter radish, and the green radishes from China, what is that name of that radish, and I'm gonna think of it here in just a minute, starts with an L, you know you gotta remember all these foreign words sometimes, the Starburst radish did well, it's a little more sensitive spirits, but it's a beautiful radish, it is really beautiful when it's grown, all those are great, there's so many fun radishes, where do you go, let me just suggest, if you're really interested in some of the winter radishes, a great place to start, a great place to start radishes with Kitazawa seeds, there are other places that sell radishes that are really good, I don't mean to suggest that, but Kitazawa is a great place to start, Kitazawa seeds, and they're imported in lots of Asian radishes, radishes are not native to the US, but these Asian radishes are particularly good, Kitazawa seeds, take a look at some of their radishes, have fun with them, play with them. Welcome back to Plain Living for Alabama and the Gulf Coast, questions on conservation, natural history, and gardening, talk with Bill Finch, call 251-3430106 on FMTalk1065. Welcome back, Gulf Coast's Sunday morning, Alabama's Sunday morning, the Kitazawa seed site does not want to cooperate, luobo, green luobo, l-u-o-b-o, green luobo is another radish that I really like, and you'll see it sold in several places, you gotta remember where all the vowels and consonants are, I got the L and I got the B but I couldn't remember all the vowels, luobo, green luobo is a radish that I recommend, along with a lot of others from Kitazawa seed, Chengdu, which is a Korean radish hybrid, which many varieties, that one did really well for me over the past two or three years, I really like it, and a lot of other people like it too, which is good, some radishes are a little bit hot for folks. One thing about radishes, I will tell you, is don't be afraid of the heat, what happens with radishes is once you cut them, when you first cut them, they're gonna be extremely hot, it's the best ones, they're gonna have some heat, not extremely hot, but they can have some heat, not all radishes, but a lot of them have heat, but once they stay cut, they start, once they're cut and they're exposed to air, they start losing some of that heat, a few varieties will retain the heat even after they're cut, and they can almost be used like horse radishes, which are a different thing, because they'll retain that heat, but so if you've got, if you're serving, so here's, you know, you got some cheese and you want some, I don't know, what do you call them, party kind of things, that you can pass around on a tray with a little cheese on it, there's nothing like radish with all cheese on it's really good, orders, yeah, whatever you call them, yeah, Steve says they're orders, so if you've got the little orders and you're passing around, so the radishes are really good, you just cut them, so if you want to cut some fresh, so you can have a plate where you cut them fresh, put the cheese on there, and you know they're gonna be nice and hot, if you want them to be less hot, you cut them, say 30, 40 minutes an hour before serving, put the cheese on it, those are gonna be much milder, in general, there's a few exceptions, but that's almost always the case, there it is, am I helping on the radish varieties, am I getting you excited about radishes, the other thing I'll say about radishes is that all of them produce really good greens, and I like those radish greens, when you're kind of hungry for greens after a long summer without them, you know the traditional European greens like collards and kale, those are all European kind of things, radish is another one, but they're part of our diet, and when you go through a long summer without them, having those radish greens to put into soups and stews and just to eat on their own, scramble them up with eggs, whatever you do with your radish, with the greens, radish greens are quite good, and you're gonna think gosh, because a lot of those radish greens have, they're covered in little hairs, tiny hairs, a lot of plants are, but you know what, that all just cooks off when you cook them, and they're quite good, some radishes don't have those hairs at all, you can actually eat them in salads, in fact you could eat the ones with hairs in salads too, except probably some of them will be funny about that, don't mean to dwell on the hairs on radish leaves, but there you go, it all cooks off, they're quite good, they're quite delicious, and those little hairs on leaves are probably one of the fullages not as affected by bugs as some of the other European greens, but great stuff, love radishes, and this is the time to start planting them, this is kind of where we got started, it's where we got started this morning talking about sort of the transition from one part of the year to the other, alright, so what else have we got this morning, not a lot of activity from folks out there, maybe it got a little hot, maybe a little hot, so this is a good question from David B, whatever happened to WIC herbicide application for weed control, I spent a lot of windshield time this past week, couple weeks traveling around and the only thing I'm seeing regardless of agriculture, highway or yard is either ignoring or just burn earth approach to weed control, WIC application works well in my opinion is somewhat selective in herbicide treatment, totally random but what you spend a lot of time driving, okay, so WIC application, it's, and there's many kinds of WIC application, one of the things, let's, here's where I, it could work pretty well with co-gon grass, because you know co-gon grass is going to be on top and gets a little taller than other things and you can use a WIC to basically ride over that and WIC the tops of those leaves so that you don't affect things underneath the co-gon grass as much, works well with Johnson grass, which gets a little taller than other things, you know, I don't know David what happened to WIC application, it's good, it works, it's pretty specific, it, you don't use as much herbicide as you would with other kinds of applications, my neighbor was trying to control his Johnson grass and I suggested some ways to do it and he, he used to broadcast, spray, and he used a lot of herbicide and he said boy this is expensive and I thought, well you know a WIC would have been better, particularly with the Johnson grass, there you go, I don't know what happened, I don't know why, I think people just aren't as aware of application techniques, this is not something and you know, here's an interesting thing, if you're wanting to make a living selling herbicides, you don't really care how efficiently people use it, can I say that out loud, it's, it's the wonderful world of making money at everybody else's expense, somehow we think that's normal, you know, it's, it would be nice to go back to a day where we provide money for service that we think is fair and good to other people, there it is, that's, that's a harder thing to do, that's a harder thing to do, communism, you know, with kind of this enforced, okay, capitalism is another kind of enforced, you know, we're gonna make money no matter what, even if we sell you a sorry product sucker, but if we had that idea, we want to sell a product at a price that's fair to everyone, including the buyer, what a cool thing, venture capitalist firms come in and they say, all we care about is whether you make a profit, we don't care what you're selling, we don't care, you know, as long as the customers, as long as you've duped the customer so he doesn't know, so he'll keep buying this if he has to, even if he's wasting his money, that's okay, we don't care about that, we just care about a profit, we only care about the bottom line, we only care about the stock price, and this has been the ruin of many a company, I think it's been the ruin of American manufacturing in many ways, as we cared more about just the back end of money, not about the product we were offering, not about whether people were happy about it, Amazon is a new way of sort of intervening in that process and says, oh, we just want to give you the cheapest price possible, we don't care about the quality of the product, we don't care about whether the company survives, it's a problem, we get into trouble, and then we don't really understand all the different ways we could be working with this, with all the rain we've had, our St. Augustine grass is doing well, also the pasture is doing better this year, I've been cutting both sides again, here's a couple of picks, Tony and Foul River, yeah, and it certainly helps, and it's with St. Augustine, sometimes you'll get diseases, I do think Moors spread those diseases around, and sometimes it's kind of good as we get more rainfall just to do as little as you can to spread disease around, and it doesn't hurt to actually not mow for a while, let it get a little taller, at 4 inches you could actually let it get 6 inches tall without any problems, if you have a mower that cuts at 5 inches, wow, that would be great, I think 5 inches is probably the optimal height for St. Augustine, how many Moors out there do that, I also think that when you're cutting just the very tips at 5 inches, which is what you're mostly going to end up doing, you're probably less likely to spread disease, we'll be back, welcome back to Plain Living for Alabama and the Gulf Coast with Bill Finch, ask Bill about gardening and nature in your backyard, call 251-3430106 on FMTalk1065. Alright, welcome back to Gulf Coast, Sunday morning, it's an Alabama Sunday morning. Let's see here, we're going to talk a little bit more about muscadons, because that's where we are, and that's where everybody's head is, and that's where we are, have we got Tony, I'm listening, tell me what's going on, hey man I wanted to talk about the grass just a little bit longer here, you said a long time ago about cutting the St. Augustine higher, and that's been the single thing I've done that's helped the most, so the lawn is looking really good this year, the only thing is for the past few weeks you've been talking about just not cutting at all or cutting it at 5 or as high as you can, that's a problem for us down here in Foul River, because with it that high, you can't see what you're walking on, in other words like a snake, so I'm cutting it at about 4 and that seems to be working, and with this rain we get, man I have to cut every 3 days or it's up higher than 5, but that seems to work. So here's what I would say, here's what I would say, I wouldn't build my life around the potential for stepping on a snake, because the potential for that is very low, even in I grew up on Dog River, and there's a lot of snakes there, there's no question, and I survived it and the grass is pretty high on the banks of that all the time, but here's what I would do, here's what I would do, because people are obsessed with snakes and I recognize that it's something we learned and we ain't going to unlearn it, I reckon. It's the poisonous ones that concern me and the close calls I've had over the years. Yeah, yeah, so you know I just, oh boy, do I get to talk about snakes, but here's what I'll do, here's, so first I'm going to, first thing I'm going to deal with your impressions, so we're going to, we're going to say, so here's one way to think about it, you're not walking, mow yourself some paths that are a little bit lower, you see what I'm saying, and that way you don't have to feel obliged to mow everything super low, which is wasting a lot of your time and it's not necessarily healthy for grass. So mow yourself some paths and that way if you are concerned about it, I will tell you that I have been, I've been as close to snakes as almost anybody except for perhaps snake handlers in some of the North Alabama churches and her pathologists who spend a lot of time picking up snakes. And I, so let me tell you, because I had gotten over my fear of timber rattlers a long time ago, they are, they just, they're so insution, I mean, they just, it's amazing. You can sit down right next to them and just talk to them and they'll be fine, they're, they do not want to bite people, they just don't. Copperheads a little different. Yep. That's, that's what we've got. Copperheads and watermarks. Little snappier and I, but you know, it's amazing. Even I haven't even managed to get bitten by a copperhead, though I've stepped over so many cotton mouse, cotton mouse, cotton mouse, I was scared to death of because that's the way we were taught. When I was taught that cotton mouse are more aggressive, that, that is, so I'll just leave it there and say, so I had to walk through a swamp with my plant hunting buddy Al shots a number of years ago and I still had this sense that cotton mouse were somehow different and it was a swamp right on the edge of the delta. It was a black water swamp and we were looking for orchids, it wasn't the tip. There actually aren't many cotton mouse in the delta itself. You rarely see them in the delta because of the flooding there, but on the edges they're really thick and in those black water swamps. I knew there were going to be a lot, a lot of cotton mouse there and I thought, and I thought, because I had these, I would have these dreams about stepping on snakes wherever I stepped, right, because that's what we were taught and they were all going to bite me. This was like, and suddenly every tree I walked around, there was a cotton mouth and there was a cypress swamp and there were a lot of trees and it was unbelievable. I must have seen 20 easily 20 cotton mouse in probably an hour's time. They all sat there and looked at me and I walked over some of them and they all sat there and looked at me, so just a thing, I'm not saying it's impossible to be bitten by a cotton mouth, I'm just saying, in fact, I've known people who were, but I like your idea of the patterns. It's not common. Yeah. The next time it's time to cut, I'll just cut a path to the clothesline and I'll cut a path out to the garden and we'll just kind of see how that goes, but like I'm saying, what I've been doing this year has really been doing well. I have very few weeds because it, you know, this is the same I was seeing, you know, deals with the weeds itself. Would it be in so high? What I'll see is with this coke on grass out in the pastures, that's why I'm cutting the pastures, I've got to get this coke on under control so that, you know, we have decent grass for the horses, they won't eat the coke on it. They won't touch it. Yeah, they won't eat the coke on. I've got spots in the pastures that I'm just having to go out there and just keep mowing and then slowly, but surely it seems to be going away. It does. So it's, it needs those, it needs lots of blade surface, more than most plants. So Bahaya, what is replacing it, is it Bahaya? Bahaya. And honestly, I like the Bahaya, it looks pretty, the horses love it. I mean, it just, it's meeting all the needs. Yeah, and that's what's going to happen. And if you've got coke on and you've got horses, the best thing you can do is keep it mode, let the Bahaya come on, it reduces the productivity of the pasture just a little bit to do it, but, you know, it's, it's an interesting thing to determine what's the perfect height. And I think most, you can get a, with bush hogs, you can set those bush hogs really low. I'm not sure you need to and you might experiment. No, I'm not doing that. You're using a bush hog. No, I'm finished, I'm finished mower and I've got it set on about six inches. Oh, that's perfect, so that, and it does, now when I do hit a patch of coke on, I will go ahead and drop it down an inch or so, just to get a little bit more of the coke on cut down. You know, right, right. And that's fine. And so it's, that's the defeat of coke on is, it loves a lot of light and it cannot, and it needs a lot of blade surface. So I know that nursery men around, yeah, nursery men. So the nurseries got really scared. My friend Martin Vandergees and told me this, when the, when the state told them that they had to control coke on around their nurseries, because coke on was everywhere. It made this perfect sense that they had to control it and I understood that. And my friend Martin and a lot of other nursery men said, oh, well, it doesn't seat in. Well, it turns out it does seat in. And so it was, it's a problem. Oh, yeah. But what they did was, rather than spraying, they just mowed. And what happened was, if you mowed regularly around your nursery, you were able to convert those coke on past, past, past just to be, yeah, it's not quite a native thing. If you were looking for a native grassland, you weren't going to get it. But it is, if you've got horses, it's better, certainly better for those horses. I've heard you say that before. I just didn't know if you had any other recommendations or things I could do, but it sounds like I'm doing what I need to do. So I'll just. Yeah. So that's going to make a ton of difference. If you want to speed, if you want to take it out a little bit faster, you can certainly use a herbicide on the coke on itself. Well, that scares me because the horses are on those pastures and I don't want to take a chance on a horse, you know, getting around some type herbicide. Yeah, it probably was round up, it won't hurt, but some types of herbicides that can be a problem, but you're making it work. So don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Okay. And I really can't tell you. You said you were going to get back to those radishes, you were going to start talking about the radishes again. Yeah. And that's good, but you couldn't give me a truck load of radishes. I do not like them. I love radishes. I love radish. I love people. Yeah. So it's. But I tell you what I love, I love those purple mustard, those big purple mustard that you talked about. We grow them and put them on that turkey sandwich, that's the best turkey sandwich you'll ever get. Oh, yeah. They're great. And they got that bite, you know. Yeah, that's right. They are good. You know, mustards, we've had a problem with yellow margin beetles. Have you had a problem with that, Tony? No. The beetles. So. But all we do is mulch. I mean, that's all we grow in is mulch. So I would say things are bound to nothing. I mean, you know, in any weeds we got, you can pull them out with two fingers. I mean, it's just nothing but the birdie, you know, leaves and sticks and horse manure, basically is what we're using for compost and that's what our garden is. All right. Yeah. All right. Tony, good to hear from you. Yep. All right. Thank you. See you later. Thank you. All right. Thank you. All right. I'm here. We got. Vanna. Are you there? Yes, sir. Okay. I'm listed. Just wondered how I can prevent my sego leaves from turning yellow. I only have one that's doing it right now, but I don't want it to happen to any more of them. One that is starting to turn, someone at a nursery told me to toss Epsom salts around the bottom of it. Well, I did, but it hasn't held. So I wonder if there's a way to prevent that. Is there some liquid I can use or spray on it or what should I do at the base of the tree perhaps to keep it because I've got about eight segos and I don't want this to happen to you anymore of them. Yeah. So let me ask you, and I'm just as out of curiosity, is the one that's having the most problems? Is it in the wetter place? Well, not necessarily, except that it's close to the overhang of my roof. But I have gutters and downspouts, so it shouldn't be there. It's close to the neighbor's trees, but they don't really, you know, you're kind. So here's the interesting thing. So let's talk about it. I'm curious as to why some plants develop this and some don't. And I'm not sure I can explain why. So I wanted to ask, I sometimes think it has to do with moisture. But, and here's where your nursery person got it wrong. There are many chemicals out there and there are two chemicals that you should not confuse. One is magnesium, the other is manganese and they're very different. When he told you to use Epsom salts, he was telling you that your plant had a magnesium deficiency, but in fact, your plant has a manganese deficiency. So I'm going to tell you what to manganese, yeah, so we got to take, we got to do this little thing and we come right back and we're going to figure out how to fix your manganese deficiency. Good. Thank you. FM Talk 1065 with plain living for Alabama and the Gulf Coast call 2513430106. Here again is your personal nature expert, Bill Finch. All right, welcome back. So here we go. Van, are you still there? Yes sir. So there, isn't it, isn't it interesting? So we, Epsom salts are easy to find. So if it would be easy to switch diagnosis because to Epsom salts, that would be really simple because manganese, what the heck is manganese? Everybody's heard of manganese and salts. But manganese is the deficiency that palms tend to have and that manganese deficiency can be caused by a lot of things. It may not even be that your soil has, your soil may have plenty of manganese, but you may have, it may be overly wet and so your roots aren't picking it up as well. It gets, or it may be tied up. If in areas around a foundation where the foundation leeches lots of lime, it could be that the lime from the foundation is making that soil a bit more alkaline and tying up the manganese. So there could be a lot of factors there. So there are a couple of ways of dealing with it and they all involve manganese and getting more manganese to that palm. There are some manganese formulations you can sprinkle on the ground and they're probably okay. I think for a quick hit, however, it's probably better to spray your leaves with a manganese formulation, a formulation that's got manganese and it's, so there are, what are they called? I think they call them palm nutrition, Southern Ag has one. Let me look it up here real quickly. Yes, if I can spray, I've got a sprayer that's no problem. Yes, so it's a palm nutrition manganese, okay, it wants to give me food stuff. I don't care about food stuff, I want to, so there's, there's some tree spikes, I haven't seen those before, they're about 20%, they're manganese sulfate and they're probably fine, but there's also something called palm nutritional spray from Southern Ag and you can probably get it on Amazon or lots of other places, you may be able to find it locally, I would certainly try and it's about 2.5% manganese, 1.5% magnesium and 1% iron and it's designed to address a lot of issues, but it works, it works and we'll, we'll, we'll get that magnesium to manganese, excuse me, to the palm and you can spray it on the palm. So you might do a little bit of both, see, you can get those spikes, put them around the plant, probably don't need a lot of them, just put them around the plants, got a little extra manganese in them, you'll see those on the internet or you may find them locally available and look for some of those palm nutritional sprays, just make sure that the primary active ingredient is manganese, M-A-N-G-A, manga and magna, yep, so there it is. Okay and spray the whole leaves and everything with it. Spray the leaves and not just the ones that are looking bad because they're not going to absorb a lot, spray the others as well and it can take a little bit of time but it is worked every time I've tried it and it might take a couple of sprays but over time and probably whatever's causing those plants not to be able to absorb manganese, manganese is still there, still probably wet, a little bit wet underneath that palm or it's a little bit alkaline there, it's not going to be easy to change that so periodically you're going to have to add extra manganese. Okay and these spikes you say would be useful also. Probably I haven't used them, I haven't used them, the advantage I would certainly try it, I would try it to see if it doesn't work over the long haul a little bit, I mean if there is a problem in the soil no matter how much manganese you add it's still going to get most of it's going to get tied up, I won't go into all the boring details. So I'm not sure but spray first and then you might put that a little spike in the ground to see if that helps as well. Okay thank you so much. You're welcome Van, good to hear from you. Thank you, you too, bye bye man. So yeah there it is, is anybody else seeing that problem with their segos, there's a lot of other problems that segos have? Vanna you have the easy problem to solve, the problem that is very solvable right now, there's some other big issues with sego palms that we're going to have as time goes on particularly with the new pests that are attacking sego non-nutritional deficiency but a pest that turns your sego into a white flocked Christmas tree bizarre looking stuff, bizarre looking stuff and that one's really hard to resolve but this one is, this one's pretty easy. I really was looking forward to a chance to talk more about muscadides and I think we're going to get it here right at the end, yeah I think we're pretty well caught up. Tara I don't know how to kill St. Augustine grass in the mondo grass, it's hard. I think you'd have to have a border between the two where the, you couldn't have the St. Augustine going right up to the mondo grass and never expect the two to intermingle, they're always going to do that. I think you want a little bit of a barrier of soil and I would say 12 inches of bare soil could do it, I don't know, on the other hand in many cases mondo grass or monkey grass for sure will certainly take over the St. Augustine with Tom. So let's talk about grace for a second, the, you know, there's so many, here's one way to tell a muscadine, there are many ways to tell a muscadine from a grape and one is to look at the tendrils and if you're ever uncertain in the woods and this is a really good thing, muscadines, the tendrils are single, they just have a single little wrap and it comes right out with a grape, all the true grapes, the tendril is, oh I don't want to use this word bifid, that is they split at the top, they make a little tea at the top and there are two tendrils that come off at the top, in that neat, so muscadines only have one tendril coming off the top, so even if you don't see the leaves and even if you don't see the grapes and the fruit and even if you don't taste them and you want to know the difference between a true grape and a true muscadine, isn't that really interesting? The tendrils on the true grapes are split into two or into three pieces, whereas on muscadines they're always just one tendril. There's some other things, I mean I do think the bark on muscadines is usually tighter than the bark on grapes, other things grapes tend to shed their, they tend to shed their bark and it comes off in little strips, right, all those things, so what about grapes? I mean we've got so many, I wish I could talk about all of them, we've got one of my favorites is summer grapes, we've got so many different kinds, some of the summer grapes have made very, very good wines, so I think if I remember correctly, oh gosh, and I'm just getting cranked up, well we'll be back, we'll talk about grapes a little more in the future. Thank y'all for listening! (upbeat music)