FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
Plain Living w/Bill Finch 8.4.2024 Topics include: Grapes, Garlic, Peppers and Grasses
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 consultant. Here's Bill Finch on FMTalk 1065. Welcome back. Welcome back. It's a Gulf Coast Sunday morning. It's an Alabama Sunday morning. It's a summer morning, a Gulf summer, an Alabama Sunday summer morning. I think it would be really good. I've always thought, you know, I ought to write a series of proverbs for Southern gardeners. Guys, you don't have the patience to listen to me for a long period of time. So I've got to say things really, you know, really quick. But proverbs are always things you have to think about when they're at their best. So the aphorism or proverb, I was thinking about this week when I was in the middle of the heat, working that soil, my hands covered with dirt. You know, they're still, I still don't got it out from under my fingernails. I don't know what I'm going to do. I guess I'll get a scrub brush. Just dirt everywhere. Dirt, all my pants, all my shirt. I'm sweating. So everything when it gets on your clothes turns, the dirt turns to mud. And then that sounds fun. But I'm getting stuff done, you know? I'm getting the dead gumbar mutagrass, bermutagrass, I'm supposed to say, bermutagrass is driving me crazy and I'm pulling it up and it's just this amazing tangle. I can't tell you what a tangle it is and it somehow gives me pleasure to pull that tangle out of the dirt and get it out of my beds. I'm doing that and I'm thinking, why in the world am I doing this? And I'm thinking, here it is, here's the proverb. The work of summer is the joy of winter. And that's what you should be thinking about right now. The work of summer is the joy of winter. And in the south, in the south, I just have to remind you a lot this time of year. In the south, we can do incredible things during winter. We can have fresh vegetables all winter long. I can't tell you how many people I see, they plant their gardens one time a year. It's crazy. It's like they live in Boston. One is nothing wrong with living in Boston, which I like to say, except it ain't Alabama. But everybody's going like that and they're going to plant their garden one time a year. Just do it once. We're going to do it and know I don't know, whatever the internet tells you you're supposed to be doing. Somebody from Minnesota says, you got, they plan in March, goes to weeds, tomatoes quit producing and they just abandon the garden. Oh man, what a, how we missed it. And the easiest time to garden is winter. But I will say, the joy of winter is the work of summer. So if you're going to, if you're going to make that winter garden work, you got to start it now. So I got a lot of things happening. I got cabbages starting to come up. There you go. I've got, oh, I got some Brussels sprouts coming up. I don't know how they'll do in on the coast. I always encourage people on the coast to give it a shot. I never had much success. They're a little better inland. I got Brussels sprouts coming up. I've got fennel coming up. Now this is something that we don't, but I will tell you, if you're, if you're, if we actually have any fish left out in the Gulf of Mexico after this dead zone quits expanding, et cetera, if you, if there's really good fish and fennel is this incredible thing. Fennel is, is a great crop. I love it. I love it. I love to eat it during winter and you can praise it. You can cook it. It's great. We can do fennel. It needs a cool season. You can't start it in March. You can't do it in March, but you can do it, you know, you can start it in August, get those seedlings up, get them planted out. They'll mature. In fact, on the Gulf coast, you can, you can get them started in late August, put them out in September. They're going to do just fine over winter. You can even start them a little later in central Alabama. You're going to want to start them now, but the fennel is coming up. Pretty cool looking things in the containers. All sorts of cabbages. The broccoli, I got the broccoli coming up. I got some cauliflower. I always, you know, we eat cauliflower and more often than not, I get it from the grocery store because I think, is it worth the trouble? And sometimes I think it is, half the time I think it is. You get to make your own decisions. It's not like broccoli, you can't cut it and expect to see another head come back. That's a cool thing about broccoli is it's not just you're never going for just one head. You're actually going for varieties of broccoli. I hope you find them. We can talk about them. There's a bunch of them out there that when you cut that central head, you get lots of sprouts around it. It doesn't matter whether that central head is very big. You're going to cut it up anyway, right? Don't worry about that. What you want is that for that broccoli to keep producing. Cauliflower doesn't do that so much. It makes a nice central head. It's actually quite good on a lot of things. I like it just fine. Carrots, I got my carrots coming. I always have to talk about radishes and you know you hear a lot about radishes here and this is the time you can get started on radishes. It's a great thing and we're not talking about the baby radishes. I always have to remind people. So the radishes are coming. The radishes are on the way. It's probably not too late to start even snapdragons now and I love snapdragons. If you're looking for flowering plants, that's another great thing to do. Another great thing to think about. You're starting all this. The joy of winter is the work of summer. The work of summer is the joy of winter and you're starting it now. You're going to start it outside. Sometimes it's better to start these things inside because a lot of these cool season vegetables that are going to grow incredibly well over the winter, they don't like getting started in super high conditions. Cabbage is pretty tolerant. Broccoli is pretty tolerant. They'll come up in any temperature, they prefer to grow out in cooler conditions but they'll come up. But one of the things you can be thinking about is starting the seeds inside. What was that growing that? Oh, yes. So I've got some, this is another thing and I should tell you about it. Honey's celery and a lot of you have heard me say, you can't easily grow celery on the Gulf Coast anywhere in Alabama. For that matter, it's got a long season. It's really finicky. It hates hot temperatures, it doesn't seem to fit in anywhere where our seasons are concerned. Now there are people, I will tell you, there are people who've done celery, just traditional celery, and they've done okay, but it's very hard. And it takes a lot of precision and it can be tricky and you're basically going to get one harvest at a particular narrow time and that's fine, that all works. I haven't found that effort useful. And I like celery just fine, I like it signed, but here's the Chinese celery is the thing. David Hubble, have you tried Chinese celery? It's a really cool crop. It does really great along the Gulf Coast. It actually likes wet conditions. It loves moisture, does great in moisture, needs cool conditions, but you know, you can get these seeds, get them started inside because they need cool conditions to get started. Your inside temperatures are probably going to be just fine. Get them started inside. If you're on the Gulf Coast, you can wait a little while because they grow pretty fast, they come up pretty fast, they're incredibly hardy. I think they'll survive just about any temperature in south Alabama and most temperatures in north Alabama, incredibly hardy and really delicious. Now they're much stronger tasting than regular celery, but they taste like celery. And consequently they're really good as spices, but we use them, we wrap them up with parsley, which is also something you should be planting this time of year. Makes delicious stuff. The work of summer, the joy of winter. We're going to be back. We got lots of things to talk about this morning, give us a call to 51-3430-106. You get plain talk on plain living. Let's talk about living and growing in that deep self. With Bill Finch, call 251-3430-106 on FM Talk 1065. All right, we can't seem to stop talking about grapes, and that's a fine thing to do, boy, there's a lot of grapes. The south has a lot of wild grapes, I don't know if you've really thought about it. I'm just looking through the list of them here. There's fox grapes, and there's Simpson grapes, the Florida grape, there's the river, the riparia grape, what would we call that one? The riverbank grape, see a lot of that, and Palmeira, the cat grape, of course, cat grapes, and what else we got? Mustang grape. Boy, that's in South Alabama, too. Which is really an interesting grape. What else we got? Vittis Lebrusca, which is the fox grape, which very, very common, Cenorrhea grape, grape art grape, pigeon grape, you know, these grapes? Can you believe that? Possum grape, a Stivalis, which is a summer grape, which is a silver leaf grape, really a cool grape. Really beautiful, beautiful grape, neat grape, what else we got? And then, of course, we got the muscadines, which are, now we know, are not true grapes there, they're kind of their own thing, and sitting out there, it's a big world of grapes out there that are growing wild in the south. And so, Amy, since we have a picture of a grape, and I'm looking at it because it's always interesting to think about grapes, and I'm going to have to look at it a little more closely, one of the, I'm going to, you know, Amy, one of the things that you look at when you're looking at grapes, and she asked me, is this one edible? And it grew up in a burn pile, and it's clearly a grape, how do we know it's a grape and not a muscadine? Amy, do you remember? This is good for y'all to know, if you're looking at something in the wild and you want to quickly know, is this a muscadine, or is this a true grape? Man, it's useful to know the difference, because all muscadines are edible. All grapes, some of them are not so edible, I mean they're not going to hurt you, but they're not so good, they have kind of a mmm, and it's not, it's just a little too much tan and a little too much something, some of the wild grapes are very, very good on the other hand, and there's some really great ones out there, you just got to know a little bit more when you come to grapes, but it's good to know the difference in grapes and muscadines. Grapes, if you can't tell the difference in the leaves, pretty easily grapes almost always are, have little indentures, they're like lobes on the leaves, kind of like a maple leaf has lobes, you know what I'm saying? Like a sycamore has lobes, so grape leaves are always going to have those lobes, muscadines never have those lobes, they're almost perfectly round in cross-shaped, or in, you know, on the edge, just perfectly round, nearly, little off, little wonky, but mostly round, with a flattened bottom, but grapes have lobes, that's one quick thing, but here's the other quick thing, and you can look at this picture and tell pretty quickly, Amy, that grapes have two or more tendrils at the tip, so those little curved endings, those little curved things that wrap around things, muscadines only have one at the tip, isn't that something? Whereas grapes will have almost always two, and sometimes three, and I can see three on this one, actually, if you look carefully, maybe four in some cases, that's interesting, so that's the first thing we know, and then Amy wants to know a little bit more about, well, okay, so it's a grape, is this one edible, and I got to look really closely to tell what kind of grape this is, and one of the things you start looking at is, Amy, go feel the bottom of those leaves, and I can tell on this one, it's not one of those, it's not one of those that has a, I don't, does not appear to be one that has a glaucous bottom, that is a bottom that looks like it has a little bit of a bloom on it, almost like grapes have a bloom on them, it's a bluish, bloom on them, that does not look like what we're looking at here, it does look pubescent, however, it does look, feel the bottom of that leaf, you feel that, and you see you almost can't see the bottom of the leaf for all the white, now, if I'm looking at, and also I'm kind of noticing that the stems are a little bit hairy, don't get to see the fruit, Amy's not going to make it easy for me, I don't get to see the fruit, so I'm having to do this all from the leaves, and so, you know, I'm cautious, I can't say for sure, it could be, it could be, I'm not, I'm not going to say for sure, but it could be a labrica grape, which generally is quite tasty, it could be a mustang grape, and I'm going to have to look a little more carefully at the, at this, I think, I can't tell, I can't tell from the vine, I'm going to have to look at the vine, but you can, we can tell a little bit more, one of the things you can tell me is where those tendrils appear, you can tell me how hairy that is on the surface, but it could be of the labrica grapes, which are the grapes that were used to salvage, in many ways the European wine industry, they can be quite good, not all of them are great, but some of them can be quite good, or it could be a mustang grape if what I'm seeing is right, if, you know, and I, lower leaf service densely arachnoid pubescent when young, this is the mustang grape, so that means it's going to be arachnoid, that means spider-like, it means like they're all kind of woven together, the hairs on the bottom of the leaves, all these things are things you look at, so you're going to have to get a, you might even get up, you can use, you use the feel of your hand to sort of get a sense of how much hair is on those stems, what the underside is like, and you can give me some close-ups of the undersides of the leaves and maybe we can, we can determine, but yes, I think it might be quite good to eat, and we should try it, we should try it, this one's not going to hurt you, not going to hurt you, it's amazing that it showed up just in a burn pile, but sometimes these things happen, you know, I can't tell, I can't tell why, but that's cool, so we'll see, I'm really curious as to what you end up with and whether it's good. Alright, what else we got this morning? Oh, slow, slow out of the gate, so listen, then I get to harangue a little bit more, the work of summer is a joy of winter, I do worry about, you know, I do worry about these hot days and we've talked about this this summer a lot, that people have become, I mean we live inside spacesuits, we've decided we have to live inside of a spacesuit, they're not well built spacesuits I'll have to say, but they function as spacesuits, we spend a lot of energy keeping those spaces going, we could use less energy and keep them going, we wouldn't have such big bills to keep our spacesuits going, but we live inside spacesuits, and maybe that makes you feel okay, and maybe it means you don't feel like you have to sweat or do anything hard, but I think it's just, I think it's ruining us as people, and let me tell you something about your body and this heat, you're going to go on the television and the television or the TV news and you're going to go on the internet and you know the internet, and people are going to say, oh you can't go out and see, it's got to kill you, it's pretty rare, there are places you can go where the heat is so bad that indeed you could die if you stay too long, we don't live in one of those places most of the time, rarely does that ever occur, and even then it becomes, for the average person you get used to our heat, the humidity is going to suppress the high temperatures, humidity itself can make it harder to sweat, and certainly you want to think about that, and maybe you have to get a little bit used to it, maybe you need to get your body used to it, maybe you want to spend, but don't avoid the outside this time of year, don't avoid it, it would be such a shame, it's not going to kill you, a lot of times, and farmers I know, spend to get up early in the morning, they come in at lunch, they have a big lunch, that's what they want to do, maybe they nap, and then they go back out in the evenings, that's okay to do as well, we'll be back, we're going to talk about the heat we're going to talk about, the work of summer is the joy of winter, we'll be back. 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. Okay, welcome back, Gulf Coast Sunday morning, Alabama Sunday morning, alright, so yeah there it is, I've been up since five o'clock and I'm mowing the grass and listening to you on my earbuds, keep on keeping on Bill, love the show, there we go, it's too bad we have to get up and mow the grass in it, but there it is, it's, you know, and it's always nice to do it with a push mower, makes you feel good, listen, don't be afraid of the heat, don't be afraid of the heat, get your beds ready, you don't have to, you don't have to do everything at once, just go out, give it a whack or two, if you have to go back in that's fine, your body will get used to this heat with time, you have to give it, you have to give it a little bit of, a little bit of time to do it, you might not want to be out at midday, Bill will buy us to tell you all these things, just, we used to do this in the south, we're not, if we can enjoy summer, if we can enjoy summer, goodness gracious, it's like we're trapped in, we're trapped in, we're trapped inside our cabins, it's some kind of snow storm for months on end, except we're not really trapped, we can get out, it's not going to kill us, enjoy the summer, the work of summer is the joy of winter, and you've got to start your beds now, you've got to start those beds right now, so let's, we'll talk a little bit more about that, one of the nice things too is that a lot of what you can be doing right now is not so much, certainly you need to be preparing your beds, we can talk about how to do that, but you've got to be preparing your seedlings as well, if you go to the, you know, those places that you've decided are the only places you can go, low down depot in all those places, if you go there, they're not going to have the variety of vegetables, and they're not going to have them in a timely way, because they really don't understand our seasons, if they do have broccoli, it's often going to be a broccoli that may not produce multiple heads, and you can do what you, get what you need, get what you can, look for the, look to see if some of our local nurseries, our locally own nurseries have plants that are more appropriate for our climate, at the right time, but as a matter of fact, the people producing those plants like bunnies and other places, they don't really care about our market, they may be in Auburn, but they don't, they're really focused on a market with wealthier people farther north or wealthier people much farther south, and they're not really keyed, and so, and there's not a lot of variety, so start your own seeds, and now is the time to do it, seeds, go ahead and get the seeds, if you're on the Gulf Coast, you still have plenty of time, if you're in north Alabama, you need to get those seeds as quickly as possible and get them started. Get them coming up, I have, you know, some of those seeds, they'll need to be checked a little more regularly from moisture, you want to check on that, just make sure it's not too wet, if you, you may want to put them inside, it doesn't really, they don't need sunshine this time of year, they'll need a lot of warmth, in fact they need, they don't want a lot of warmth, put them inside, you don't even have to put them in sunshine inside, just put them inside, get them a little moist, when they emerge, then you can put them outside, and you know what, you don't have to leave them outside all day, that's a cool thing, the light that's going to be really important to them is the light right now, it's that light between, oh, six o'clock in the morning, and about 10, 10.30 in the morning, that's when they need that light most, then you can put them in shade for the rest of the day, they'll do fine, or diffuse light, all that's fine, just make sure they get that morning light this time of year, if you've got plants, and there's some vegetables that you're wanting to plant right now, that are winter vegetables that really do not like hot soil, and Chinese celery is one, I got kind of cranked up on that, boy it's good, I love Chinese celery, it was great all winter, I mixed it with a parsley, it made a great pesto, really kind of up that, just kind of just jumped up that pesto, parsley pesto quality a whole lot, you can use it in soups, you can use it in lots of ways, I'm thinking about mixing it with lots of ways of mixing it with beans to make a bean patty, like a full awful or something like that, it'd be great, all those things would be great, but you gotta start it, you know, you'd start it in really cool temperatures, one of the things I do, this is kind of neat, and my mom was doing this with her orchids, and a lot of people say to do it with orchids, and I guess it probably works with orchids, it's a little tricky, little dangerous orchids, but I actually get an ice cube, I don't put it right on top, I put it kind of, so that it sits up there, just let that ice cube drip in, and cool that soil down, it works during the day, particularly if you're growing them outside, I don't think you need to do that if they're inside, but keep them moist, and the ice cube dripping just, you know, gets that moisture in there, just drip, drip, drip, keeps it nice and moist, really interesting way of doing it, all those things are useful, you know, there's another thing that I think I need to tell you, right now, and that is, start your peppers, and it doesn't matter where you are in Alabama, if you're growing the peppers that I think are doing the best and once again, it just proves they're so easy, they're so simple, and they don't have the problems that other peppers do, that you're not going to get is Johnny and I, Johnny and Graham Bay and I complain, you know, it's like at least one out of five peppers, if not two out of five peppers, or three out of five, of the traditional peppers, like whether it's a jalapeno or a bell pepper, or all of those traditional peppers that come from this annual group that is the Mexican group of peppers, they really don't like these humid wet conditions, and they're very susceptible to a lot of diseases, and we always lose one, I've never lost ever, have I ever lost any of the Caribbean and South American peppers in the Bacottum group and in the Chinensei group, the Chinensei group is the group that includes habaneros, but there's some very mild ones in there, in fact, that don't have any heat at all, they all have that tropical essence of habaneros, which is very flowery, very fragrant, oh, and there's some that are just incredible, like the Grenada seasoning pepper, which is just, just remarkable, I love that pepper, it's so, the fragrance is so, it's outlandish, the fragrance, I mean, you can smell it across the room, the fragrance is so high, the flavor is, is this distinct, it's very, I don't know, it's, it's, you could say fruity or flowery, but that really doesn't capture it. Now, I don't know how many of these you could eat by themselves, I've done it, and they're good, and you could chop them up on a salad and they're great. What is that? And they're not going to complain, it's really quite good, and it's not hot at all, it's spicy in the sense that oregano is spicy, that kind of spicy, you're going to notice it, it's going to have a little bit of an explosion, but it's not hot, Grenada seasoning peppers, but goodness gracious, you put it in beans, you put it, it's just an amazing thing, and that, that pepper, the one fault is, let me just give you this, this one, is that it takes a long time to start producing. But if you start it now, it's really easy to get peppers up and going right now, boom, they're going to love the heat, you don't have to take them inside, you don't have to put ice cubes on them, you just put them in a, in a container, you get them started, right? And then when they get some size, you can put them in a pot or a container, keep them inside over the winter, if, when it gets cold, leave them outside, and it's not cold, they're actually pretty tolerant of cool temperatures, but not freezing temperatures, particularly in a pot. Put it inside on those nights when it gets too cold, and you're going to start with a big plant next year, and that means it's going to start producing May, June, or July, and you're going to have so many of these Grenada seasoning peppers, you're going to freak out. I mean, you're, it's absolutely going to drive you crazy, you're going to have so many of these crazy things peppers, and I don't know what to tell you to do except to just do what my wife does, which is don't wash them, don't do anything, brush them off if you need to pick them off, when you pick them off the vine, put them in a freezer bag that doesn't have a lot of PFAS in it, and put it in the freezer, just, just like that, that's all you got to do, and then when you're having beans, and when you're, when you got beans over the winter, you got all these things, you just throw it in there, and it's like, man, I'm living, but as I like to say, the joy of winter is the work of summer, and you got to do it now, you need to start it now, those peppers, and not just the, not just the Chinese peppers like I'm talking about, like that Granada seasoning pepper, which is a great start, if you don't like anything super hot, but you like it spicy, and you like that flavor, it's probably my favorite, and it is assertive, there is no question it's assertive, there's some like Puerto Rican no burn that are less assertive like the ajidul cheese, if that's how they like to say it, that are less assertive, good, fine, Chinese, but boy do I love that Granada seasoning, but let's just stop there, let's go to this other group called bacatums, the ajis, ajai, generally refers to peppers, not always, but generally refers to peppers in this bacatum group, and they're South American peppers, they're absolutely incredible, sometimes you see them showing up in the Caribbean as well, absolutely incredible peppers, with beautiful flavors, there's so many of them out there, and they're all great, if you like hot, my favorite hot, maybe just generally is ajia omnicolor, ajiaomnicolor, beautiful, beautiful peppers that have just the right, it's just like they pec you, they just little pec, it's like if somebody kissed you and pec you at the same time, that's how they are, they're just beautiful little peppers, really like them, it doesn't linger, the heat doesn't, and there's some other great ones, Bolivian orange, little hotter, little more lingering, beautiful, and then lots of sweet ones as well, Ayisanta Cruz, if you can find it, is one of my favorites, it's just so productive, so productive, there we go, alright let's see what we got here, oh we got lots of people call in, so lots of, you know, something got cranked up, the speaking of muscadine and grapes, if you want to transplant or vine, you have to dig up the root stocker, can you cut root from cuttings, what works best, thanks. Yeah, we're gonna be back, I'm gonna talk about that. Welcome back to Plain Living for Alabama, I'm the Gulf Coast with Bill Finch. Ask Bill about gardening and nature in your backyard, call 251-343-0106 on FMTalk1065. Ah, ah. Keith always seems to think that, I get too excited on the show, I'm sorry. Hmm, doesn't he, every week Keith is saying, you know, you gotta do something about that guy, get the blue torch out, yeah. So anyway, Keith, always good, always good here from Keith, just playing with the Keith, we're in "Agricola", what a beautiful, beautiful name, "Agricola". My favorite's "Dog River Dave", yeah, so "Dog River Dave" sent us something, and Steve's all excited about "Dog River Dave", so I gotta read this to you. Let's get it, where is it, ah, excuse me, that's not it, this is, it was out of town for a minute last summer, I was, "Dog River Dave", was out of town for a minute last summer, and my well-intentioned neighbor decided to do me a favor and cut my very happy, healthy St. Augustine lawn, which has never cut lower than five inches. He absolutely scalped it, and Bahaya grass, Bahaya grass, got a foothold and it's taking over, quickly, what can I do about the Bahaya grass, Bahaya? And what should I do with this body? Oh, heaven's to Betsy, so, you know, this is an issue, isn't it, so I, it's like, we're gonna enforce conformity here, you know, it's just amazing, it's just amazing. We like to talk about independence, it's all about conformity, everybody's gotta cut their crepe murals the same way, everybody got the grass the same way, everybody got plant crepe murals, everybody got plant live oaks, you know, it's just like, everybody got to do the same thing. So, here it is, if you're gonna conform, let me, let's conform the other way and recognize that cutting St. Augustine too low is a danger to your St. Augustine and it'll kill it, and this is a great testament, and if you, if you do stress it, as Dog River Dave is suggesting, you're gonna get Bahaya grass, Bahaya grass, and Bahaya grass means you get those little antennas coming up all the time and then your spouse says, "I thought I told you to mow the yard," and you say, "I did," and she said, "Well, what are all those little antennas coming up out there?" and you say, "It happens because it's Bahaya grass!" So what do you do about it? You know, it's interesting, I do have, in my St. Augustine, because of disturbance in a former lawn I had, I did get Bahaya grass, Bahaya grass, and it drove me crazy, and indeed my spouse said to me, "I thought I told you to mow the grass," irritates the stew out of you, you know? So what do you do about it, it's, if you, there's really, you probably can, if you want to, you can use Roundup to kill the grass, Bahaya grass actually pulls up fairly easily if it's in just a few spots, at least you can set it back and let the St. Augustine and St. Augustine is nice and aggressive, that's the one good thing about it, and it will compete with the Bahaya grass if given half a chance, if you can pull that Bahaya grass back, Bahaya grass back. Let me, if you, you know, that is probably the simplest way of doing it, honestly, is just to take those rhizomes, pull them back as much as you can, let the St. Augustine invade. If you try to cut the Bahaya grass short, the Bahaya grass responds by flattening out and you, you kill the St. Augustine at the same time. So yeah, that's probably the way to do it. The other way to do it is to use, is to use a Roundup. It will kill everything that it touches, but you can start, you know, you can try to avoid the edge where the St. Augustine is and try to get rid of the Bahaya grass in the center of those patches where the Bahaya grass is bad, but nothing will, nothing will ultimately work better than raising your mower back to five inches and getting it back. I don't know what to tell you to do about the body, I just don't know what to tell you. There it is, there it is, alright. One cut Bahaya takes over, come on. Well it can happen, it really can happen and Jim, there certainly Bahaya can be a problem. It tends to get suppressed when St. Augustine grows over, particularly if you're cutting, I mean it's this simple. So, Jim is wondering if just one cut could do it. And I'm going to say yes, because St. Augustine, there could be other factors and there's always a little bit of Bahaya grass in people's lawns, there's always a little bit of Bermuda grass in there, but neither one of them will compete well with St. Augustine if St. Augustine is growing tall and healthy. Sometimes we lose St. Augustine to disease or other problems because no grass is perfect and the Bahaya grass will take over there and that could have been a little bit of that going on. But I will tell you that St. Augustine is so sensitive to low cutting, it is so incredibly sensitive to being scalped that one time and it's gone. And it's true for a lot of, it's true for a lot of warm season grasses that aren't from, but aren't invasive in a significant way. And St. Augustine is slightly invasive, but not majorly. But the bad ones, Bermuda grass, Bermuda grass, and Bahaya grass, Bahaya grass, those are invasive and they are a problem when the lawn is scalped, they respond to that really, really well. They will just jump, it's an amazing thing. You can have Bermuda grass and Bahaya grass mixed with other grasses, you'll barely even know they're there, but you cut it down low and they're just going to jump. Now I'm going to not, I'm going to say there are other issues and I'm never going to say that any grass is perfect. Our whole idea of making lawns, we borrowed from this crazy insane impoverished country, countries that really had very low diversity. So they had only a very few grasses and it was fairly easy to keep those grasses alive because there wasn't much competition. And because, oh, there was a short season, it just went on and on and on. And we tried to make that lawn concept work here and it doesn't, it works fine, it works okay in New England, even though they go to more trouble than it's worth up there too. But it's really hard to make a grass, no grass is going to be a perfect grass here. And I'll just say one last time, the most, it's, it's, I'm just going to say it. The grass that I know, that is probably the easiest grass to maintain in most lawns, is monkey grass. We'll be back saying all kinds of crazy things for the next hour. This 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 consultant, here's Bill Finch on FM Talk 1065. All right Amy, come on, if you got some grapes, show me the grapes so she had some grapes. And I can tell you, it's not Nebraska, it's not Mustang and now that I'm seeing the bottom of the leaf, which is arachnoid, but not so that the white is covering the bottom of the leaf. If you see those leaves with white, just, it's almost like you can't see the bottom of the leaf because it's so covered with white hair. That could be a Nebraska or a Mustang, but that's not what we're seeing here. We are seeing hair on the bottom of the leaf, we're trying to diagnose Amy's grape. It's a wild grape, grew up in a burn pile. And is it edible? Is it good? So we need to figure out what it is because there's a lot of grapes in the south and I'm now going with Simpson grape, based on what you showed me. I don't know a lot about the edibility of Simpson grape, you see it a lot, you'll have to try, it looks like some of those bears are getting pretty ripe, just eating a hurt you, you can give it a shot, sometimes there might be a slightly unpleasant taste to some of those, can't tell you about that, it's a small grape obviously. But I'm like in Simpson grape, I'm like in Simpson grape, and you can go look that one up, if you, unfortunately if you look up Simpson grape, you're going to get an episode of the Simpsons, that cartoon show, you know what I'm talking about. But if you look up V-I-T-I-S Simpson or Simpsonii, Simpsonii, whichever you prefer, Vetus Simpson, you can look that up and do it, I'm going with Simpson grape, and that makes a little more sense, makes a little more sense given where you are and given everything. Now it's cool for the birds, should you keep it, well it's kind of an interesting grape, nothing wrong with keeping it, the birds are going to like it. So there you go, Jim is saying, so Jim agrees with me in part at least, so what Jim is saying, he had Bahia, Bahia, come in on 1.5 acres, and he said even the set of people take it over if you raise the lawnmower a little bit, and certainly with, certainly that's the case of St. Augustine. The worst thing you can do, and I tried this, I'm wrong, I was wrong, is to try to cut that Bahia grass short so that you stress it, it doesn't work, it just flattens out, and then you get any, don't do that, raise your lawnmower, it's a good way to control it, and generally the St. Augustine will take it over. The Bahia grass may actually be a good pioneer for the St. Augustine if you've got tough soils there, if there was something wrong with the soil, the Bahia grass will generally break that soil up a little better than maybe even the St. Augustine would, alright. Let's see here, we have a collar by the way Bill, alright, so we're gonna go, is it too late to start pumpkins from seeds for Halloween? Is it too late to start pumpkins for seeds for Halloween? I think it's a little late, I can't, I think I want to say, what do we want to do, June? 'Cause we, it's gonna take 90 days, basically 90 days, and that's August, September. I guess you could make it, I guess you could give it a try, look for one that produces in less than 90 days, less than 90 days, and see what happens. I will say that you're gonna have a problem with squash vine bores, but maybe this late in the year and it'll be an interesting test, maybe we will have fewer squash vine bores, it'll always, always interesting. I understand that that's the case, it has always worked out for me quite that well, and we got some other questions, but Mary, let's talk about sweet potatoes, which is a great time to talk about sweet potatoes, because it's coming up on harvest time, but what's your thoughts here? I have a sweet potato on my kitchen counter that is sprouting up a storm. Can I plant that for more sweet potatoes, or is that not the way to do it? Yes, that's the way to do it. Yes, that is the way to do it. Can you do it this time of year? Generally, that's not the way it's done. There is a possibility that those sweet potatoes that you plant will survive the winter and produce potatoes next year. Do I cut the end off that has all the sprouts and just leave the rest of the sweet potatoes? Right, you don't want to plant the whole sweet potato, you definitely want to take slips, and listen, here's the other thing, a lot of times it's not like Irish potatoes in that you take a piece of the potato with it, with sweet potatoes in general, they root those cuttings. So, Mary, this is going to be a little bit of trouble if you want sweet potatoes. Well, it's just one sweet potato I'll learn for the next one. Yeah, that's right, so generally, you could plant the whole sweet potato, you're probably, there's a lot of problems with doing that, as I can tell you, because you don't generally get a lot of potato production out of that. You just don't, but if you start with slips, what we call slips, which are the cuttings, the rooted cuttings of just without the potato attached, so what will happen is, here's one way to do it. You can take, you can take that potato, you can put it in the ground and cover it with a little bit of dirt, the whole thing, and you'll start getting little slips, you'll get little sprouts coming up. What you want, and those sprouts will have root hairs on them, and what you want to do is you want to cut those slips off right where they emerge from the potatoes so they're not connected to the potato anymore. See what I'm saying? I see. Yes, I do. And then put those slips out, and those are much more likely to produce potatoes. The question is, what will happen this year, and I don't think you have enough time this year to produce potatoes? So will they overwinter is the second question, and that's an interesting experiment. Sometimes my potatoes have overwintered. I have so far never had great luck getting them to produce potatoes that next year, but that may be because there were potatoes attached to them. So you should experiment, I should not, you wanted to experiment and I'm going to tell you experiment and see what happens. I'm not going to guarantee you it's going to work. That's good. But I would separate the slips from the potatoes, so just get them started. Plant those slips rather than planting the whole potato because otherwise you just end up with a big mess of vines. Now I would also tell you, these vines are going to grow like crazy and they're probably going to spread out, so just give it plenty of room. I will do that, and if I'm successful, I'll let you know. You should call me back, Mary. You should call me back and tell me what happens. I will do that. All right. I thank you. I'll understand what you said. All right. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye. All right, yeah, so we're coming up on the time. It's interesting. It's wet. When it's wet, it's harder to harvest those sweet potatoes. I always like to harvest the sweet potatoes in September and October during a dry spell, particularly in October. In order to do that, it generally means that I want to plant my sweet potatoes relatively late. Could you plant them very early? Could you plant sweet potatoes in March if you wanted? But the problem is you're going to have to pull them out of this soppy, wet soil. There's going to be goop sticking to them. I like to, just like with garlic, I have to have a slightly different plant with garlic. I like to harvest them later in October, and that means planting late. We'll talk about that when we come back. FM Talk 1065 with Plain Living for Alabama and the Gulf Coast. Call 251-343-0106. Here again is your personal nature expert, Bill Finch. Okay, welcome back. It's a Gulf Coast. And in the morning, it's an Alabama Sunday morning. Let's catch up on some questions here. Here's one. I love your show, and my sister's listening from Columbia, Anna today, she has an online plant store. She sent me some dusty millers, and I'm curious the best way to keep them drier than the rest of my plants. They're in a planter now. Also could you recommend some other grasses and shrubs with that silvery color? Thank you. So putting them in a planter is a great way to keep them drier. I think you almost have to put dusty miller if you're on the Gulf Coast. It doesn't last long in the ground. The humidity is so high, the ground stays rather moist, and it doesn't like it. A lot of the silvery, now listen, a lot of the silvery colored plants on the market are designed for northern climates, and where it's drier, and where it's less humid at night, and these plants will melt. So there's a bunch of them out there, lambs ears. Has anybody ever successfully grown lambs ear for more than one year on the Gulf Coast? It was an exceptional circumstance. You can brag on it, but it just doesn't work. They'll do fine over the winter, actually, and they'll do fine into about June, and then they're just going to melt. So you can take lambs ears, you can take dusty millers even, and they probably will survive the winter. So for a lot of those plants that are grown up north, and sage is another one, silver leaf sage, the ornamental sage is with the big leaves, they're all the same. They are basically designed for Mediterranean climates without a lot of moisture in summer, and so they melt, they just melt, lambs ears, the whole bunch of them. But they do great if you plant them in fall and grow them over the winter and treat them as annuals, and just say, "Okay, in June, they're gone, and I got to do something else." If you want silvery colored plants that will survive during summer or for a longer period of time, there's a bunch of them, and they're really fun. They look very different than those Mediterranean plants. They generally aren't silver because they have hairs on them, and it's those hairs that are the problem. If you think about it, they just melt because they collect so much moisture, but we have a lot of silvery colored plants. I mentioned some last week when we were looking at some gardens, "We've got palms, silver palms," silver family palms, silvery, sarinoa-repens, that can be quite beautiful here, and they do have that silvery color, isn't that neat? I like that. It's a neat color contrast. There are things like coladiums which have a silvery color, and you can use those. They're more often whitish, but some of them tend towards silvery. There are some dwarf, and if it's a shady spot, there are some dwarf gingers that have that silvery color. There are a lot of tropical plants that have silvery tones to their leaves, and they can be quite interesting. There's some plants to think about. I'm trying to think there's another shrub. I'll probably think of another shrub here, just a minute that would probably do well for us. A lot of the silvery shrubs are from Texas that I'm thinking about that people grow, and they tend to have problems as well. Another one that I enjoy that I think does pretty well, it's another Mediterranean plant, is cartoons. Again, if you think about cartoons as something you could plant it in late summer, it will overwinter really well, it will look beautiful in the June and July, and it may even survive June and July and come back, but come back the next year. Cardoons are really beautiful plants, they're really big, they're big plants. But for the small hairy silver plants, think of them as winter annuals, planted in October, overwintering, they do great, dusty miller, we'll probably survive almost every winter along the Gulf, because maybe not too much farther north. Probably up to Montgomery, maybe even Birmingham, and then, you know, into May and June, that's a long season, and that's a lot better than people are getting from dusty miller who planted up north, who basically planted in May, and then it's going to get banged up by the first frost in October. You see what I'm saying? So we just got to think upside down with those silvery leaf plants. You can even do sage that way and don't think of them as perennials. Does that help? Does that help? All right, it's the season that you, there it is, all right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't seem to like the mix shade, sorry Bill, but you made me think, okay, I'm trying to think, Jim has got a stream of consciousness thinking going on here, so I'm trying to sort through it. What else approach got me thinking, if Bahia can take over it, maybe that the St. Augustine is in a borderline too sunny of an area, Bahia doesn't seem to like the mix shade where St. Augustine thrives. It's certainly true. I think St. Augustine does well in sunny conditions. I don't think St. Augustine does not like shade. St. Augustine tolerate shade more than most grasses. St. Augustine is slightly more susceptible to take all in some very sunny, very hot, very dry positions. I think that may have as much to do with the soil as it does with the sun, but I'm not sure I can prove that. I don't like making too much out of the shady tolerance of St. Augustine because it's amazingly not shade tolerance in many ways. It's a sea for, it's a grass that does best in sunnier conditions. But you know I said we were going to get back on this, and I am. I'm just going to jump on it again. If you've got some problems of your lawn, I'll just give you this advice, and you have a reasonable rational lawn, not a lawn designed to turn in to make a football field out of or a golf course, but a reasonable rational lawn around your house that's excusable as a lawn, not as a pasture. If you've got that and you've got some problems with your grass, I'm just going to say it for the thousands time, use monkey grass. It mows well, it's a dark, beautiful green, it seems to, once it's established, it just seems to keep Purkin forever. Right now it doesn't have disease, it has a type of root system that is reasonably persistent because of some little nodules, it helps it to get past and drought periods. You don't have to mow it all the time, basically the only reason you mow monkey grass is to keep other weeds from taking it over. And so mowing it once or twice a year is fine. I don't even know what the prime, I think you probably shouldn't mow it too low, I would experiment with that, maybe three inches, four inches, and do it once or twice a year. Does this seem like a dream grass? And yet, and yet, why is it? I think because turf growers couldn't grow it the way they're growing it, which is on these carpets, I don't think it'll work that well doing it that way because the root system is a little deep, but it's that deeper root system that makes it such a great grass. So you're a victim of machines in more ways than you know, you're a victim of the machinery of turf operators and the way they do things and so they're not going to grow this. But you can, you know, if somebody's given away, if you've got a problem area of your lawn and somebody's given away monkey grass, grab it, plant it, it's amazing. It works really well. It does well in shade, it does well in sun. It's some point where, if it catches on, at some point in the distant future, it's going to have the same problems with every other grass, but it's a great grass for areas around your house. And again, this is for reasonable, rational, long growers. This is not for people who have an acre of grass. This is not for any of that kind of stuff. That's craziness. Get a horse. It's just, you know, and then we can talk about some really cool grasses for horses. That's a lot of fun. Talking about centipede grass over an acre, that is not fun. That will never be fun. 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 2513430106. All right, let's get started here because we've got a lot to get to. I've got some gladiolis bulbs. Berry says, "When do I plant? Berry, I can't think of any reason to delay, really." I think they'll be fine now. I don't know. They should start emerging. They'll probably emerge. They'll be fine. Go ahead and plant them now. It won't hurt. You'll probably get some blooms. They're going to bloom April of next year, and I plant them now. Plant them now. I don't need to get digress too much. This says she's got some brown patch in her yard, and she's wondering if it's chinch bugs or sodware worms and how to tell the difference. Well, I'm almost certain it's not chinch bugs. This is the problem with the internet, right? Is it a tropical sodware where you'd see the moths flying up if it were a sod, if it were one of the web worms? More than likely, given the fact that it's raining, it's a fungus, and it just happens. Right now, because it's already turning brown, you can't do much about it. That's the truth. You can stop it from spreading to some degree by spreading a fungicide on the area around it. But you know, what you really want is for it to get a little drier, and I think with the hurricane coming in, the drying's going to help. If you've got a good strong St. Augustine lawn, it'll repair itself. If you have a persistent problem with brown patches, you can do what I say, and plant something that's really easy, that doesn't get fungal diseases like monkey grass. But it's not chinch bugs. I'm almost 100% sure, and if it's tropical sodware worms, it's a little early. I don't think that's what it is. But you would see the moths coming up. You'd see lots of little moths flying around right about now. There it is. Back to garlic. I've got to get back to it. I'm going to get back to it. I promise I'm just catching up all these things. This plant in central Georgia called, a lot of redberries on the flower parts are called gallberry. You know, people could use any name you want. It's just that nobody else may know what it means. And so your family may call it gallberry. I wouldn't call anything with a redberry necessarily gallberry. So I've got to think about what those are sour tart. There could be a lot of things. I'm coming back to that in just a minute. Meanwhile, it's much because of curiosity is because I want to make Stephanie happy. I want to put Stephanie on the phone. Stephanie, are you there? Uh oh. Oh, I'm here. There you are. Stephanie, now you've got to explain this to me because I got the weirdest message from Phil about dirt issues in a garage and I'm thinking, what do I know? This is like, she's not going to make me tell her to sweep the dirt out of the garage. No, no, I had emailed and gotten a response back saying that my boyfriend has something called bare dirt issue. He lives in Pensacola and he's trying to create what he likes to call like a putting green. So he has planted bermudacy and part of his lawn has, that's what he said you were going to say. That's what he said you were going to say. And that part of his lawn has St. Augustine. Did he know he was going to use the word heavens? I didn't know if he didn't know heaven, but he said that you weren't happy with Bermuda. But anyway, he's used like a lot of... He's not happy with Bermuda. That's the problem. So the response that I got back was that I guess he had cut it too short because he got a real mower and that he cut it down really short and the heavy size I know. And then he has like brown patches of dirt is what he has. So the question is, what does he do? Well, does he really want to have a putting green? He wants grass that looks like a putting green. I don't know if he's going to actually put on it, but he wants the soft grass that you can take your shoes off and walk in and it feels amazing and not walking dirt. Do you know what I mean? Like have nice grass about that. Yeah, yeah. Right. So here's the thing. Forget the putting green part. I can tell you what they do to maintain those putting greens and he will never do it. It's incredible. It's they... That's a business. It's a commercial enterprise. It's an artificial environment that he will never be able to reproduce in his yard. And it won't be soft. Putting greens are not soft. If I'm going to wrestle my brother. So here's the standard. What kind of grass do I want if I'm going to wrestle my brother? Okay. Hearing myself in the background. Oh, I'm sorry. But turn that right in and just a little bit. And so if... What kind of grass? And that is St. Augustine is very soft. It feels very good on your feet. It feels good between your toes. It's just a really nice, really nice grass. So... And what would overpower the Bermuda that he already has down? Yes and no. So here's what I would do. Here's what I would do at this point. He's going to have to... How big an area is this? Oh, gosh. It's not even an acre. I mean, it's half an acre maybe. That's a lot of ground. What I would do is I'd start around the house in the areas where you most want it to look good. And forget about the areas that are farthest away from the house if it truly is a half acre. That's a big area. And just start around the house and use St. Augustine's side in general. But here's the recipe. And Stephanie, you're going to have to... Can you translate all this for your boyfriend? I'm writing it down. I'm writing it down. Okay. So here's what he needs to do. He's going to have to crack the soil first. Because clearly there's some compaction going on in the soil. And it's probably gotten worse because we lost some grass and other things. So I would... You can't do that with a tiller. I use a broad fork or a fork and you just wiggle it in the ground and you crack it back. Particularly in the areas where you've got these bare areas developing. You know that those areas are going to have some real problems. And then put... Then come back with pine bark. A lot of people know what I'm going to say because I say this over and over and it works really well. You come back with pine bark each piece no bigger than your fingernail and put it about three inches deep on top after you've cracked. Water that down, let it settle out, spread it out evenly and then put your St. Augustine on top of it. And that St. Augustine will grow very, very well. You cannot mow it with a real mower. There is no grass. There is no way he's going to be able to grow anything with a real mower in this climate in his yard. I just am telling you it cuts it way too short. It's just not going to survive. St. Augustine is lush and beautiful and it's great for wrestling your brother in or your sister. It's great because it's very soft and when you fall on it it just cushions you. But that's because it's three to four inches high. If you try to cut it shorter than that, you're going to have a huge problem. He is none of the high... So let me go back, Bermuda grass from seed is the worst possible choice because it's just common wild Bermuda and it is terrible. It will be a problem. In the places you don't want it to grow, it's going to grow. In the places you do want it to grow, it's not going to grow. It's the worst possible thing. He may want to herbicide out that common Bermuda and get rid of it before he does anything else. Again, don't do the whole yard, just take sections, make certain sections of it nice. I'm happy to talk to him because he's not going to be entirely happy with this, but hybrid Bermuda was from seed is the worst possible thing he could have done or Bermuda from seed. It's probably not even hybrid Bermuda, it's just common Bermuda. Bermuda, I'm supposed to say, it's a real issue. It's aggressive in all the wrong ways, except when it comes to growing in your lawn and you see what happens in your lawn, particularly if you're cutting it short. He needs to choose another grass. There is also a zoysia grass that's a long-bladed zoysia grass that I also could recommend. You can look for some of the longer, wider-bladed zoysia grass is not the thin-bladed ones because they're not cushiony at all. They're not fun to walk on, but the wider-bladed zoysia grasses are soft and they're very nice and you can cut them about three to four inches high. That's what I would recommend. I took notes. And I'm, you know, I hope this works. It will work. It's just a question of whether your boyfriend will believe me, but I guarantee you that Bermuda, excuse me, is not going to work. It's just not going to work, particularly from seed. I'm surprised he got as good a stand as he got from seed. If you're going to grow golf, golf course Bermuda is a clone. It's a hybrid Bermuda. You have to grow it. You have to use it as sod. And I don't recommend that he do that because it's very finicky too, probably even more finicky than the common Bermuda he has. So there it is. Okay. Definitely. Did I help? I don't know how we got the garage in this. I don't know how we got a garage in here and that's, that's where I was so confused. But I'm glad you answered. I appreciate you. And he appreciate you. He listens to you on repeat every Sunday night. So I am sure he will hear it tonight. So, so be free and you call me back because he's going to have questions. I know he's going to have questions and that's okay. So you call me back and it's all right to have more questions because he's, this is an important operation. And you call me back if you need to. I will. We'll do it. We'll do it for him again. Thank you, Stephanie. You're amazing. Thank you. Bye bye. All right. Bye. Yeah, folks. I mean, what can I say? If you ever, ever, ever decide to play at grass, please do not use Bermuda seed. The worst possible, oh gosh, it gives me a headache to think about it. Oh boy, what a mess. I'm surprising it. And listen, I don't think you should use centipede seed either. In fact, I think you generally, if you're on the Gulf Coast, should not use centipede. But seeding is hard with grasses, particularly in our climate in general. The ones that are going to grow from seed are not the Bermuda, oh boy, it's going to be some kind of crazy, terrible Bermuda that you do not want under any circumstances. It's going to be all in your beds. Oh, I'm fighting Bermuda every day. Devil grass, they call it devil grass. You get plain talk on plain living. Let's talk about living and growing in that deep self. If Bill Fitch, call 251-343-0106 on FM Talk 1065. All right, welcome back. It's a Gulf Coast Sunday morning. Oh, longs. We could, we could be talking about gardening. We should be talking about vegetables. We should be talking about winter. Listen, I'm going to say it again. The work of summer is the joy of winter. I like that. The work of summer is the joy of winter. I keep telling myself that. This is when we need to be buying garlic. There's lots of garlic out there and you got to order it. I'm not going to make too big a deal out of it because I haven't ordered my garlic yet, Dad. Gum and I got to get out there and I got to order it before I tell you to do it. So don't you get ahead of me. Don't you get ahead of me. Let me order my garlic first and then you can order your speech, better order it, by the way. If I'm being fair to you, it's going to sell out. So you need to order your garlic. It'll come in in October and November, November really is when it's coming in now and that's okay. Jim and Georgetown doesn't like that. He'd rather it came in a little earlier and I don't blame him. It would be, but it's okay. We're doing fine. Laryopy. Listen, I talked about monkey grass and I'm, so I'm going to talk a little bit. I'm going to talk a little bit more about it. Laryopy. Is that what the laryapa, I don't know what they say in Britain, laryopy is the monkey grass we're talking about. We're not talking about anything fancy. In fact, you want the meanest laryopy you can find. Lily turf monkey grass is what we called it and you want the monkey grass that people are giving away and they're giving it away because they planted it as a border and it spreads. It starts spreading and it gets into the beds and they have to dig it out and it's not hard to dig out that it's not like vermutea grass. But it gets a little bit more and that is a great long grass and it spreads pretty vigorously and you don't have to, you can break those clumps apart. You can just and sprig and it's going to converge very quickly and it's really easy. That's just an amazing thing and amazing thing and it's a great way to begin to deal with areas of your lawn that are very difficult for grass to grow in. I haven't thought about this but a lot of these are from the Ryukyu Islands, the islands in southern Japan where the climate, where there are a lot of plants that do well for us in Alabama because the climate is very humid, it's very similar in many ways to our climate. It gets very hot, very wet and it's so a lot of these, particularly muscarias, probably from a broader area and it's the one that has the really showy flowers by cada is another great one but I don't know that you're going to be able to find these in any volume on the internet and so, but everybody's giving them away and if you see somebody with mucky grass in their yard, just ask them, you know, do you ever have to dig that out, I'll come dig it out for you, I'll get it out of you, just ask because it's so easy and then it doesn't take a huge mount, you can separate those little pieces, sprig them out, it's amazing thing, can you hire somebody to do it, probably not, I guess that's why, you know, I guess that's why it's not working is because we can't have figured out an automated way for you to do it as a sod but for difficult areas in your lawn, get it started there and it'll spread, it's neat, it's good, it's cool, solves a lot of problems, would I wrestle my brother in it, yes, I would let it get a little taller, it'll be fine, it's a good, it's a good grass for wrestling your brother in, it's a good grass for laying around in, it's not a grass I should also say and neither is it a lily, it's its own thing sitting out there, I don't know where it is, it's over there, let's see what family is it in, it plays asparagus, now isn't that interesting, no Lanoidy, it's actually kind of over there with, I'll have to look that up, it's with some weird plants but it's, I guess you could say it's more closely related to asparagus than it is to grass, but don't let that put you off, it's a really great grass, that is not a grass that works really well in your yard, enough said, enough said about that, Beth, that brown patch is a fungus, I just am sure of it, what else have I missed here, I really want to know this plant from central Georgia, if I had any more information about it, little red berries, we call them gallberries and in the fall when they dried out they'd be sour like a sour tart, can you give me the scientific name of what we call gallberries, huh, they're not, I just, I mean are we talking about a sumac, sumacs can be tart and we should talk about sumacs, a lot of them are firing now, maybe that's, maybe I'll talk about that on next week's show, it's a really interesting thing, sumacs make a great lemonade, it's really, they're really tart, if you know what you're looking for, you see those sumac flowers and you don't boil them because they're very soluble in water and all you have to do is just stick those berries clean, it's just don't wash them, just stick them in, stick them in the water, stick them in clean water and then sieve them, sieve them, so that you strain out all of the other stuff and you'll get that juice, if it rains a lot and that's cool, if you see some flowers emerging, they get the, the stuff that really is soluble in water and the delicious stuff gets washed off and rains, another interesting thing I just discovered, so you'll actually see that they taste better after a period of several dry days, a week of dryness, there it is, so maybe that's what it is, I'm guessing and I guess I should talk about that, Clay in Birmingham is saying, "Lady peas are baring well at the moment," I noticed he's, that not to panic, he's not panicking when the aphids arrive because they seem to pick a few pods to infest and leave the rest alone, I do think that is the case and I think they persist on those pods for several reasons, but in part because they get the protection of ants there, he's got some black ants protecting him, I am not sure what, what ants those are, I can't see well enough, oh and I'd be making it up, I'm not that good with ants, I don't think they're carpenter ants, but maybe they are, they're, they're tending those aphids, but you know it's just going to be able to few pods, you could always hose, you could always hose the pods down, if you've got aphids and they're on just a few parts of your plants and they're driving you crazy, you just hose them down, just hose that down and you won't have a problem, if the fire ants, if they're protecting the aphids, they'll sting you a little bit, let's come back because if it just got a little bit of time and I want to remind you that the work of summer is the joy of winter and now is when we need to be in preparing for our winter harvest and our spring harvest, it's the best, it's one of the best seasons in the garden, it's so easy, it's so productive, what you do now will make a difference for a long time, so you've got your kale, you've got your collards, you've got your broccoli, you've got your all cabbages, all of these things, parsley, oh I should not forget parsley, you've got your parsley, you've got cilantro, it's going to do really well this time of year, you call me next week and we'll tell you why cilantro is going to do really well even if it's driven you crazy, when you planted it in spring it's going to do really fine it's going to last for a long time, garlic, the list goes on, maybe I primed the pump here, maybe you'll catch on and next week you'll start asking me questions about these plants and what to do them and how to start them and I'm going to be just delightfully happy, there you go, the work of summer is the joy of winter, see you next week, my ♪ My girl, my girl, don't lie ♪