FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
Plain Living w/BillFInch 8.11.2024 Beans, Fire Ants, Tomatoes and End of Summer planning
(upbeat music) - It's time for "Plane 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. Hey, welcome back to the Gulf Coast, Sunday morning, it's an Alabama Sunday morning. Boy, do I want to make things really easy for you. Do I, I don't know. It's like I have to make you think sometimes. 'Cause you know what, gardening's about thinking. That's a really cool thing about gardening. I was out yesterday and I realized, you know why I hadn't been thinking right? I'll tell you why I hadn't been thinking right. I hadn't been in the garden long enough. Working the garden long enough, you start thinking right. You get ideas. You get things in your head. You know, you say, "Well, that's not a bad idea." But I want to make it simple for you. So we started this list of aphorisms, sort of proverbs, we're going to call them for Southern gardeners. And last week was our first sort of installment and I'm thinking about others. I'm working on them. I'm brushing them off, you know, and I'm kind of sanding them down, making them look nice around the edges. But I'm going to talk about a couple of them today. Oh, we got a lot of fun things to talk about today, but I want to talk about these two first. The first is, this is really important. And I'm just going to give it to you. Don't make a mountain out of a molehill. And this is quite literally, maybe not quite literally, but nearly quite literally, something that we're doing in our gardens. And it's got to do a dirt. It's got to do with the vegetables that we grow. It's got to do with these beds that we're making. And you've heard me do this again, but I just want to go back when it comes to building raised beds. And you know, this whole raised bed thing idea has gotten in folks heads. I don't know why, you know, it's this internet thing. It's like, you know, it's like some conspiracy theory. I think this is, you know, I think this is Russian interference. Making everybody think that a raised bed's got to be three feet high. What's crazy? Listen, don't make a mountain out of a molehill. Does it help to raise your beds? Yes, it does help. And I can tell you why it's really important in places in Alabama for so many reasons. And the reason is we get, you know, the driest place in Alabama is going to get more than 50 inches of rain a year. You know how much the Seattle airport gets? 38. We get a lot of rain. Mobile's getting 70. Northeast corner gets 65. And it's just, it's crazy rainfall. And it's pretty well distributed throughout the year, but we get these really heavy rainfall events. And it just saturates the soil. And it's a big problem for diseases. It means that there's no oxygen soil. It means the soil gets compressed more easily. It means that we eat up organic matter more easily. I could go into it over and over and over again. Our problem with our soil is that it stays too wet, even when it's dry. Those wet periods are the core of our problem because they've compressed the soil. They've killed the roots. The roots aren't well adapted to dealing with even short droughts. All these problems. So what do you do? Doesn't help to dig deeper because in a lot of cases, you want to crack the soil. You want to get it down reasonably good. But a lot of cases you get down 12, 18 inches and you're at the water table anyway. Sometimes in Mobile goodness gracious. It's like water table six inches below the surface. So yes, just, but all you need is six inches. Raise the soil six inches and don't do it with something crazy. Just do it with organic matter. That's what it's supposed to be. Just put your leaves on there. We can talk about it. You call me if you don't know how to do that. We'll get to it. Six inches is great. What happens when you do it two feet, three feet? What happens when you make a mountain out of what should be a molehill? You lose your garden. You're going to lose control over so many things. You're going to lose control. It's going to make moisture problems even worse. Oh, and you should call me to ask me why that is. Because you wouldn't believe me for me just saying that, would you? But I want to stress that when you build these big tall beds, I don't care how you encapsulate them. Everybody says, "Oh, should I use treated?" You don't need any of that. If you have to ask me the question of what you're going to lie in your beds with, you're doing your beds all wrong. Because beds that are created and raised just right about six inches, maybe up to 12 inches, maybe I would give you that. But really, it's more like six to eight inches. You don't need to line them with anything. The dirt's not going to fall out. And particularly with the organic matter, it's just fine. And you know, whatever you think you're going to stop there, burn you to grass with, well, it ain't going to work. It's very hard to do that with most of the conventional advice. Back to the raised beds. Raising that soil just a little bit, do it with organic matter. Let me just say that. And you come back at me, you say, "But, isn't it easier to pick plants when you raise them?" Okay. My tomatoes are seven feet tall. My goodness, why would I want to raise them any higher? My okra. I mean, I'm already starting to get to the point where you have to get on a ladder. What are you talking about? You know, pole beans. Most everything that grows well in summer. And even there's just so few crops that you actually have to lean over for to pick them. So no, of course not. And then it makes it really hard. None of this. It just doesn't make any sense. Don't make a mountain out of a mole hill. When it comes to raised beds, you only need to raise it just a little bit. Use organic matter. Don't come up with any kind of crazy thing. Organic matter, if you leaves are great. Let it moulder down. We can talk about that whole process. That's the second aphorism. The third aphorism is, it's not an aphorism. It's not a proverb sort of. It is a proverb sort of. Maybe it's something not a Leviticus. I don't know. Here it is. The first rule. Steve, I'm going to get this in. The first rule of growing grass. The first rule of knowing how to deal with your lawn is that this is it and everything else derives from it. You cannot have a discussion about anything dealing with your lawn unless you understand the first rule of having a lawn. I want to tell this to everybody who calls me and asks me about what to do about their lawn. I'm going to tell you the truth, and you may never want to talk to me again, which is fine, but I'm going to tell you the truth. The first rule of having a lawn is that you will never, ever, under any circumstance, have a perfect lawn. There it is. It's beautiful. It's a proverb. It's the truth. It's the truth. I don't care what grass you grow. I don't care how you set it up. It will never be perfect. And that is the absolute truth. It's always going to be trouble. And lawns are going to be less perfect than most things in life. At least lawns the way we can see them. Because we have such funky, crazy ideas about what a lawn should be that we imported from someplace that's so unlike us that it can't possibly work here. But that's the other rule. I'm just thinking about these little proverbs that might help us. The first rule of having a lawn is that you will never have a perfect lawn. And once you understand that, it's freedom. You're free. Life is good again. You can be happy. You can enjoy yourself. You can enjoy the yard. You can enjoy the garden. Anyway, keep thinking about these ideas. Add some ideas about the moon. I don't know if we'll go there today. That might be going a little too far. Maybe we'll do that another day, you know. He to August, you get these ideas about the moon. But we'll see that. We got a lot of good things to talk about today. I'm kind of excited about them. Got some good questions. Oh my goodness, bunsaw Williams. So we're going to come back and talk. John is reminding me. It's very exciting about the elderberries. We're going to talk about them. I think it's a great thing to talk about. Keith is sending us a nice good morning. How are you, Keith? Don't roll your eyes at me, Keith. Alright, we're going to be back. You can take all the tea and shine. [music] Welcome back to "Plane Living" for Alabama and the Gulf Coast. Questions on conservation, natural history, and gardening? Talk with Bill Finch. Call 251-3430106 on FMTalk1065. [music] It's just something about sticking your hands in the dirt that makes your mind start working. I can't tell you what it is. But if I tell you what, if I ain't got dirt under my fingernails, I got plaque in my brain. That's the way it works. [laughs] You know, it's like, you got to get dirt under your fingernails. That's the way that it just clears out the plaque. So just a recommendation for you on gardening. Lots of fun things to talk about this morning. I'm pretty excited. I got to get back to elderberries. I do like this conversation. We had an aphorism last week. We had a proverb last week. The proverb last week was, I like this proverb. These proverbs only work in southern gardens, by the way. These are proverbs for your garden. These are proverbs for the south. And the deep south, really. And so the proverb last week was, the work of summer is the joy of winter. I'm just going to let you have that one. And you run with it. But I want you to know, it's work. Getting out in the garden a little bit right now. It's a little hot. Ooh, boy is it hot and mobile. A little hot over much of the state. And it's just one of those things that, but you find the time when you can get the work. The work that you do now is going to pay off so big. And you don't have to do a lot of work now. And a lot of it you can do inside. But there's a lot of planting. This is August is a great time for planting. And there's so many cool season things you can do, but it's not too late for warm season things along the Gulf Coast. And even up to Montgomery and Birmingham. And so, bone saw. Williams asked me. And what are the best green beans to grow a mobile? And I got to say, look. Bone saw. None of this can be ever construed as a replacement for the chili sauce. That's circle K. Okay. Not trying to make that claim. Let me tell you about green beans. This is the second. You can do second round of planting now for green beans. There's a lot. One of the cool things about the south is that I can't give you an easy answer. Because you could do green beans virtually all year long. We go through a little bit of a hiatus in mid-summer with most green beans. Now, there's some exceptions. And we'll talk about that if you broaden your definition of green beans just a little bit. And maybe we will. You know, I think I'm just going to take this whole second. We're just going to talk about green beans. We're going to talk about what I mean by green beans, what you can grow. Let me start off by saying, when you're starting in spring, there's so many good ones. There's purple green beans. Some of the purple pole beans are really good. Louisiana purple. Great little early pole bean. Cocoa pole beans are really great. If you get them planted early enough, I like them. They're good flavor. They do well. Rattlesnake pole beans are going to take longer. They are absolutely delicious. They're much more heat tolerant than the first two. They're great. It is kind of a standard. Rattlesnake pole bean. Selma zestae, if you can still find it. Selma zebra, it's sometimes called. It's like a, oh, it was like a selection that was made in back in the 50s, I think. Maybe 40s. It was nearly lost and it shows up every now and then. I actually prefer it to rattlesnakes, but it's quite good. Quite delicious if you can find it. All these are good for that first round of beans. They will produce, generally the purple beans come on first and generally like blue cocoa. They do really well in the early springtime. They're delicious. They're good. They're really nice beans. They don't stay purple after you cook them, but that's okay. They're fine and really good. It makes it easier to pick them because you can see them. Then the rattlesnake pole beans come on and they are absolutely delicious. Really wonderful things. Selma zestae, Selma zebra is all those are great. The things that aren't great for mobile are things like Blue Lake. You can just ignore all that stuff. You can ignore what people in Minnesota crow for the most part because it ain't going to do well for you. Also, it tells you don't waste your time in spring with bush beans. It's just don't waste your time. You've got to do pole beans. Pole beans is the thing in spring. Makes most sense. You can do the bush beans, but it takes so much space. Really what you want is something that produces over a longer period of time. Most bush beans are just going to go boom. That's it. Then you've got a second season. We're talking about that right now. Well, it's the last season of the year. We're talking about that right now. That's another group of beans altogether. What you want are some beans that are really shorter season beans that don't take as long to produce. You can play at them right now. Look for things. You want something around 60 to 70 days for planning right now. I would even experiment with things like some of the mountain pole beans. Like greasy cut shorts. You can drag greasy cut shorts. What a great name. What a great news experiment. The one problem with planning this time of year with beans. I'm going to talk about beans here for a second. Is Mexican bean beetle? Bean beetles. It's wrong to call it Mexican bean beetle because it's southeast United States bean beetle. It's just here. Probably has been here for a very long time. The bean beetles really start getting bad about this time of year and they can really decimate your plant. What do you do about beans this time of year? If you're wanting green beans, here is where. Listen. Listen to me. Bone saw. If you're wanting to grow bush beans, this could be a good time. The reason is you want a shorter season bean. You're not going to have forever for these beans to produce. It's going to stop short. I think this is probably the best time to grow those bush beans. They actually don't deal well with the humidity. They're going to mature in October and November. Here's one I'm going to suggest and it's a pretty good one. Wade bush beans. Wade bush beans. They have a thicker leaf. They are not as bothered by the bean beetle. Wade bush beans. Give it a shot. Give it a try for planting this time of year. If you're planting in spring and when it's spring and mobile, it's March, not late March. More like early March, it actually starts in February. But it's a little too cold the first few weeks of spring. So we plant, you know, kind of getting towards the middle of spring. We plant the beans when the ground's warmed up good. That's when you plant those other beans that I talked about, the Louisiana purples, the blue cocos, the rattlesnake beans, the elmazestas, all of them are fine. But this time of year, try that wade bush bean. If you can find it, it's several people that still sell it. Wade. It's got a thicker leaf. It's more resistant. Now, I want it because I just said, I'm going to take this whole 15 minutes. Talk about beans. And I am. So there's something in between and this is really fun and this is really important. There are a lot of other beans out there besides green beans in the traditional form. And one of the beans that actually works. There are a couple of beans that are a little better during the meat. The first is what we call asparagus bean. And you can treat it just like a green bean. A little bit different flavor, but not too different. And most people who are used to flavorless green beans will say, "Oh, gosh, I actually tasted something here." It's a good bean. It's asparagus bean, long pod beans. They're actually more closely, they're not actually beans. They're actually peas. They're more closely related to southern peas, fuel peas, but they grow in poles. And they're really great and they're much more tolerant of heat. I think it's a little late for most of them now, but they're really good to kind of get you through that bean gap in between the rattlesnakes and the later season bush beans that you can plant. And two others I want to talk about, because I know you didn't ask for all this bone salt, but you're going to get it. Winged bean. And winged bean is a really cool bean. It is a tropical bean. We can do it fairly well. Go with look for a winged bean that doesn't have a day length attached to it. And I think several people are selling those types of winged beans now. I know that Baker Creek seeds are selling them winged beans, and they can be planted. They should be planted by end of March, 1 April in Mobile, maybe towards the end of April in North Alabama. And they're really great. They're very heat tolerant. They're going to grow through the heat. They have no problems with the heat. They have no problems with the humidity. And they produce a ton of beans. Now these beans have wings on them. You pick them when they're young, but you can stir fry them. You can cut them a little pieces. They're so good. They're so great. They have a great flavor. They have a wonderful flavor. Is it going to taste like green beans that you get at the grocery store? No, because the green beans that you get at the grocery store don't have any flavor. Other than whatever oil and fat you cook them in. These are going to actually have a little bit of flavor. Like a great stir fry. Oh, and I didn't talk about butter beans. Dad, gum it. We got pretty far down the road. We're going to be back. 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 2513430106 on FMTalk1065. Okay, just so you all know, we're going to make Steve listen to a long discussion on Lima beans before the show is out. Let's not forget it. He's going to have to listen to it. It'll be good. It'll be good for you too. It's good. Good discussion. So, another thing to think about is these winged beans. And maybe a lot of you hadn't heard. Look them up. Look them up on the internet. They're kind of, they're interesting looking and something like that. But I don't see anything like that when I go into Publix. Oh, right. Don't worry about it. Life is not defined by what you find in the grocery store. Grocery stores have what they have for a lot of funky, crazy, insane reasons that have nothing to do with what's good for you. And nothing to do with what's good. Don't let that define what you do. Look at these, look at these beans. Look at the winged beans and look at them and think about it. They're quite good. They fill a gap in the garden that's quite good. And then the Lima beans come on and we're going to talk about that. And we're going to do that before the show is out. The full tomatoes and I'll do this about flat green beans. This is probably, flat pole beans. This is probably the time from a maturity standpoint that the flat aromas are going to do better. You knew them in early spring. They're not going to last long. And I would probably do them as a pole. But you might try the flat beans this time of year. The problem is going to be the bean beetles. I can't tell you which of them are going to have the most problem with the bean beetles. Aggressive growth can help getting started. And maybe if you're lucky by the time. But that's going to be the one problem. Because a lot of those flat, a lot of the flat pole beans, the aromas and other things do seem to be a little more susceptible. It's like their leaves are more tender or something to the bean beetles. But that's just a one problem. But give it a shot. Give it a try. I don't have, I mean there's a bunch of them out there. Look for something, heat tolerant. Look for something that doesn't take too long to produce would be better this time of year. Oh, we got a lot of interesting questions I'm going to try to get to. But Tommy hasn't no doubt an interesting question to because we haven't talked about bananas in a long time. Tommy, what's up? You there, Tommy? Yes, this Tommy, you put me on hold. Yeah, no, you're here. You're on the air. You ain't on hold anymore, Tommy. You're talking to the world here. Okay, look. First thing I want to go, I'm going to congratulate you on your award. You got about two or three weeks ago. Great. Thank you, Tommy. Thank you. And that's, you know, and I say, listen, that's, that is, I got to give credit to Sean and to our listeners for doing that. It's just incredible that that happened. And a really remarkable thing that we were recognized for having the best, especially shows. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, yeah. Y'all done a good job down there. Oh, there. Oh, what I wanted to ask you is I have a banana tree. It's about seven feet tall. We're going to be okay if I just cut all the leaves and lims off of it and cut it back to about six or seven feet. No, no, because here's the thing about bananas. They have, they do not re-sprout from the trunk. They only re-sprout from the base. So if you cut the tip off your bananas, if you cut that tip off, if you cut any of that growing tip off, the whole banana plant is going to die and it's going to re, well, the whole trunk is going to die and it'll re-sprout from the base. So if you won't lose the banana, you won't lose the pot if you do it, but you're going to lose the trunk. So if you're going to cut a banana back, and, you know, I'd want a good reason for doing it, but if you were going to cut it back, you would want to cut it really the only place that makes sense to cut it back is just to cut it off right at the base where it's growing out of the ground. And the, so, no, you can't cut it back like you would a tree, and it's probably not even good to do trees this way all the time, but bananas are more like grass. They don't, they're more closely related to grass than they are to trees. And so it's like when you cut the top off, the only thing it can do is re-sprout from the base. Okay. All right. It'll make it sense. Oh, yeah. Another plant. What about runner? If they did a big survival, or freeze? Oh, yes, sir. So here's the great part. And here's a great thing about bananas. Depending on which banana you have, Tommy, you could get fruit next year. And this is why I tell people you could get real bananas off your tree. But to do that, usually, it means that that trunk has to survive the winter. So if you cut that trunk back when the leaves brown out, which they'll, they're probably going to do after the first hard frost in, say, December. Maybe early January, but usually in December, you're going to get a hard frost, and a lot of the leaves are going to get tip burned. They're going to get ugly looking. If you cut that trunk all the way back, you won't get bananas. If you leave the trunk, and just maybe just trim off the ugly leaves if you don't like them, just but leave the trunk. And that trunk's about six feet tall, seven feet tall, there's a great chance you're going to get bananas next year. So there's a virtue to leave in that trunk there, even when the leaves get burned. But I just, but back to your specific question, that banana is going to survive the winter in the ground. So everything in the ground is going to come back, no matter what. You can cut the top back, you can do everything else, it's going to survive the winter. But if you want bananas, try to save at least one trunk for the next year, and it will produce bananas. All right. Okay, that was my question. I showed a picture, and then I'll keep the bill woke up. All right, thank you, Tommy. You got, hey, Tommy, if you got any more questions about bananas and what you do when you just call us back. Okay. You know, we don't, you'll know this. I mean, we used to talk, it seems like we talked more about bananas at some point. We ought to talk more about bananas. We had some cold winters, it kind of spooked everybody. And I, you know, I think we're going to have these outbreaks of cold still for crazy reasons. But in general, our winters are getting warmer. And it's really only a few nights that we have to protect the bananas. And if we can protect them on those nights and just bring them through those few very few cold nights, we can get bananas. And sometimes you'll get lucky and you don't even have, even if you don't protect them, they're going to be fine. If you want more information about bananas and what you do about it, you give me a call. It's easier for us to talk about it when it gets to the end of the year and everybody's out there cutting down their bananas. But before you cut down the banana, call me. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about why you're cutting it down. Let's talk about what you lose when you cut it down. You're going to remember this. You're going to remember this. Call me back before you cut that banana down later this year. There it is. It's getting a little bit late to plant those fall tomatoes. I would say on the Gulf Coast, this is my experience. If I can get a fresh tomato planted generally around the 1st of July, I usually can do a better job of making a decent number of tomatoes. It's getting to be a bit late. I can just about guarantee you, I feel confident in saying that it is way too late to start them from seeds. If there are some big tomato plants, pretty robust tomato plants that are already out there that you can put in the ground, you might do okay. You'll at least get some green tomatoes on the Gulf Coast, which are quite good and interesting. You might get a few ripening tomatoes. It's just, I think it's, I don't know, somebody challenged me here. Jim, anybody out there who's planted their tomatoes in the middle of August and been successful in collecting ripen tomatoes for more than two or three days. Let me know, because that would be valuable information. It seems to me that with most varieties you want to start earlier, you definitely don't want to get a variety that takes a lot of days to produce if you're going to produce this time of year. So, you know, a quick growing cherry might be a really good thing, but starting them in, starting them a little bit earlier is better. I think it's going to be a little trickier now, a little bit trickier. Could you put it in a pot? Yes, I think that's one way to do it, but remember that the days are getting shorter and that can be, that's going to slow those tomatoes down. They're going to be a little bit slower. They're going to be a little bit slower. Okay, so this is good to hear. Finally acquired a taste for jelly palm fruit like tart lemonade. You know, they are a little tart, but there's a mango quality in there. There's a quality. Now, the jelly has too much sugar, it said, how to collect ripe fruit easily, ripe ones fall around, hard to catch, well, they keep well in the fridge, finally have all poverty. So, let me tell you about my jelly palm. I didn't ever have a jelly palm in my yard. I didn't need to have a jelly palm in my yard, because there were jelly palms all around. And I would go out on my bike. Don't tell anybody I did this. And there was this jelly palm sitting right next to the road and all these fruits sitting there on the jelly palms, otherwise known as pendo palms. And no, people didn't see these in the grocery store and so they thought, well, I don't know. I just had a big pack on my bike and I just had a little plastic bag and put a bunch of them in there, picked them up off the ground if they weren't too, you know, too cruddy looking. And mostly they weren't. And I put them all in the plastic bag, I put them on bike, took them home, made nice things out of them. And that's something, it's really good, free lunch. It is absolutely free lunch. Just a incredible thing, free dinner too. Jelly palm and it's not, they're not too sweet, they're not too sweet, they're not too tart either. They're more like a mango and like a mango is tart. Now, there's different qualities in different, some of them are sweeter than others, some of them have a little more tartness, some have a little more tanning. It varies because there's a lot, they're not selected, but they're all fine, none of them are bad, they're all good, they all make great little things and just take them home and make cool things out of them. They got seeds, you have to deal with seeds, but they're not bad and they're really cool and you can make things and you don't have to add much sugar. Gosh, you know, I could think of all kind of pastries. Jelly palms would be great in pastries, don't make them too sweet. And just a really cool thing, there it is. How will they keep them in the fridge? They see, I think they're probably okay, I think I kept them in the fridge. They don't, they don't rot out too quickly, but I think they do fine in the fridge. I wouldn't keep them, you know, forever. Cool things, Jelly Palms, there it is. So we could talk a lot about that, but Mary wants to know about camper trees and I'm ready to talk about camper trees. My niece bought a home with her family in Fair Hope, a small backyard, but it has several camper trees in it that are certainly a nuisance. Is there any way to attack them? Yes, ma'am, and we have to wait for the music before we can start attacking. So what we're going to do is we're going to take this break and you hold on, Mary, and we're coming right back. 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. It's a Gulf Coast Sunday morning, I should say. It's an Alabama Sunday morning. It's hot, but you know, the work of summer is a joy of winter. That's what they say. We should be saying it more. Mary, let's talk about these camper trees. So camper trees present a number of issues. One, their leaves are glossy and they have a wax on them, which means that they are very resistant to a lot of normal herbicide treatments. So that can make it a little tough if you're trying to use things like Roundup. If you cut them back, if you've already cut them back, have they been cut back yet or are they just still just growing there? They're still just growing there. They just didn't know what to do. So here's what I would suggest. Here's what I would suggest. I've done this many ways. I've done it without a herbicide, but it can take many, many years of chopping. Yeah, just repeatedly cutting them back because they're going to sprout like crazy once you cut them back. So here's what I would do. There is a herbicide called Trichlopear, T-R-I, Chloropear, T-R-I, C-L-O-P-Y-R. And there is a water-based formulation of Trichlopear. You don't need a lot of it. You just need a little bitty bit. And you put it in a little spray bottle and you put some goggles on so you don't get it in your eyes. And you put on some rubber gloves because that's always a safe thing to do with any chemical. You probably should put on rubber gloves when you put gas in the car too. But put on the rubber gloves. It's a good idea. And put a little spray bottle. And when you cut those trees down, take that spray bottle and spray it right around the edges of the trunk. About the first two or three inches around the trunk. As soon as you cut that tree down and spray it on all the trunks that you cut down. And you're going to have much less sprouting. Maybe no sprouting at all. Around two or three inches, you say, of the base? Yeah, around the trunk. So imagine you're cutting that trunk off, say the trunk six inches. You don't have to get it in the center, actually, because it won't absorb well in the center. But you definitely want to get it on a little band. You know, about as deep as a knuckle of your thumb. You know, the first knuckle of your thumb, a little band all the way around the edge of the trunk. And just spray it on there. Squirt, squirt, squirt. On every time you cut it off and do it as soon as possible after you cut it off. Cut it as low to the ground as possible. And then spray that trifle to your spray bottle two or three inches. Right. What was the two? What was the two or three inches? Two or three inches. Just a little band around the edge. Gotcha. Gotcha. Just a little two or three inch band around the edge. And it doesn't matter whether you put it in the center. And you only have to do that once, probably. And every time you cut, just spray that around there. And it's going to really reduce sprouting enormously. If it does sprout, you might have to, you know, you'll have to cut it off and just spray it again. There's going to be a ton of seeds. And that's the unfortunate thing. There's going to be a ton of seeds that the camper trees have already left. So they're going to come up and you're just going to have to pull those out. It's going to keep happening. If your neighbors have camper trees. Forget it. It's going to still be there. Yeah. And really, the young trees are easy to pull out. And they're easy. Just. And so, but it's those bigger trees that you definitely want to get rid of. And you can use that triclope here with it. Listen, Mary, just to be clear, there are two types of triclope here formulations. And I'm not going to give you trade names. But just look for the triclope here on the label. You don't really want anything else but the triclope here. You don't want anything that does anything else except for the triclope here. And, but you, you want the one that you mix with water. You don't want the one that you mix with oil. You want the triclope here that you use with water. Got it. Got it. All right. Listen, if there's any question about trade names, you can call me back. Because sometimes, and I don't know where they're going to buy it. And, and, and sometimes you don't always find it at, you know, don't hippo or wherever people go to buy stuff. It's, it's. And I, but if they have any problem finding it, they could probably get it on the internet too. But it's just, but let me know if there's any problem with trade names or anything else. And, and, but that will work very well. Very good. I've got it written down and how to do it in the spray bottles and the, and the gloves and places too. Yeah. I think it's good to put goggles. The only big problem I see with this is that you don't want to put this stuff in your eyes. And you don't want to get it in your eyes. You don't want to get a lot of chemicals in your eyes. You don't want to get gas. And, and so because you're in a little spray bottle and you could be careless, it's, it's always a good idea to wear safety goggles when you're spraying this. And that's, I would recommend that the gloves should be sufficient. Got it. Got it. And very helpful. Yeah. And, and, and I think that's going to work really well. This is probably a good time to do it. Some, some plants respond better to this in spring and sometimes in fall, but I think fall is probably going to be a good time for these guys. So if you want to cut it now, spray it now. I think it should work pretty well. We'll attack it. We'll attack it. All right, Mary. You feel free to comment back. Thank you so much. Any other questions? Yes, ma'am. I love your profile. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Uh, gosh, I gave such a, such a straightforward answer there. Did you all appreciate that? No, no philosophizing. Just said, boom. Here it is. Uh, and sometimes you can do that. Can't do that with lawns. You got to have the philosophy alone first. Cause the expectations are expectations. So here's another, here's another one where, gosh, I can't just give a really straightforward answer. How do I kill the fire ants growing in my satsuma tree pot without poison myself when I eat the fruit? They bite me when I pull the weeds, which come in the pot and I just do not want a fire bed anywhere on fire ant bed anywhere on my property. Thanks. So here you go. So here's the first thing. We got to manage expectations. And I just got to say, if you want me to figure out how to keep you from having fire ant beds anywhere on your property. Ain't going to happen. You could, I don't care what you do. You could eliminate fire ants on every bit of your property. And unless you've got 10,000 acres and you've eliminated all the fire ants in 10,000 acres, good luck. If you manage to do that, you'll have about a two or three year head start. But at the end of two or three years, the fire ants are going to be back. Cause you ain't controlling them outside of your property and fire ants move. And so it's a, you know, I can never say that there's a real good formula for getting rid of fire ants on your property in the long haul without, there just isn't a good way of doing it. And the more you, you know, you have to adjust to some fire ants on the property, I can't help you there. What can you do about getting them out of a container? Well, we're going to come back, take a break, we'll come back and we're going to talk about fire ants in containers. [Music] [Music] 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 FMTalk1065. Yeah, all right. Welcome back. It's the Gulf Coast setting morning. It's in Alabama Sunday morning. Seems like we've got lots of fun things to talk about and some not so fun things to talk about, but you know, it's useful anyway. Like fire ants. So we were managing expectations on fire ants and the question was, you know, can I get them? You know, there was this implication that I've got zero tolerance for fire ants and I don't want them anywhere in the ordinary. And I just said, look, and it can happen. One of the things about fire ants is that the reason they sting you is that they don't really like to be bothered. And what that means is they really don't like to be bothered. And so you often see fire ants showing up in the places where they're bothered the least. And they're bothered the least by things like flooding and other things. And so they like containers because one of the things that kind of works is moving that container around. It'll drive them crazy. It'll drive them absolutely t-total crazy. Just move the container around a little bit and do it daily. It's going to drive them crazy. They'll find someplace else. There's another thing you can do. And here was the thing. The question was, how do I do this without, how do I do this without poisoning myself? And a lot of the fire ant things that are, their nurseries are required to put in there to get rid of the fire ants. In fact, are taken up by, that can be taken up by the plants and it is not a good thing to do at all. If the pots are not too big and they're fairly maneuverable, one of the things I would recommend doing is soaking them. So if you can get a bucket, the plants will tolerate this water. The plants will tolerate it for a while, but the ants drive the ants crazy. So if you can do that with your container, just put it in a bucket of water so that that water comes up to the top. You see what I'm saying? It's going to drive those ants crazy. Will it get rid of them the first day you do it? Maybe. Maybe. Will it do it the second or third time? Probably. They just don't like to be disturbed. And that's why they bite you so that you won't disturb them. But the more you disturb them, for whatever reason, the more prone they are to move. So all those crazy remedies that people had, "Oh, I'm going to put grits on top of the ants." And the ants are going to eat the grits and they're going to explode! [laughs] We need to document this. Exploding ants. Eating grits. Oh, Lord have mercy help us. Well, if the grits ever worked, it's because the ants suddenly don't want you pouring something on top of their house. What do you put grits on top of my house for? So they're going to move somewhere else. You didn't kill them. They just moved. And so somebody says, "Oh, we're going to take, we're going to take, what is it?" Club soda. And we're going to pour it on there because, oh gosh, I don't even want to get into it. It's so bizarre. The club soda is going to, what is it? Oh, it releases carbon dioxide. That's what it was. And the carbon dioxide is going to deprive the ants of oxygen and they're all going to die. Well, they're doing that. They do it because you pour club soda on top of their house. And they don't want some sticky club soda on top of it. So they're just going to move. They didn't die. They just moved. So you can do the same thing with water. You can do the same thing with don't. This is why I say this repeatedly. You do the same thing with don't pay your own champagne. You pour enough don't pay your own champagne onto a fire ant mound and they're going to move. Very effective. Just as effective as grits. Just as effective. That's club soda. And you can feel really good about it because it's nice and expensive and you like doing expensive things in your yard. On the other hand, you could use water and water is very effective because it drives the ants crazy. They are resistant to water. They're from the Amazon, these fire ants. And so they know how to do it, but they don't like being in the same place and they don't like it happened repeatedly. And so if you want to, if you want to get a whole, if you want to get a fire ant bed out of your garden beds, you just come by every couple of days, every day for a while and just spray that bed. I guarantee you they're going to move. Won't happen the first time, but second time, third time, they're going to move. It drives them crazy. Maybe it's the third or fourth time, but they hate it. They hate to be continually disturbed. So there you go. That's how to, does that help? Does that work at all? Take your containers and put them in a larger bucket, a wash bucket or wash bucket with water in it and just set it in there so that the water comes up nearly to the rim. That's one way of doing it. It's really a great way of doing it. Move the container around if it's too big and just move it every day. Make it a point to move that container around. Just roll it around. It'll drive those ants crazy. They'll hate it. So disturbing ants, that's the way to do it. There are some insecticides you can put in that container, but they are pretty toxic stuff. They're not for consumption and nurseries are required to do it on ornamentals, but you have to apply it a long time before anything's eaten. I just wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it if I were you and just disturbances as good as anything. Well think about other ways to disturb ants and containers. I'll think about it, but the water is pretty effective. Pretty sensible. Moving the pot around is pretty effective, pretty sensible. All those things can work. Does it sound too easy? Fire ants hate cinnamon, says Cliff. I have heard this before, and it may be true. I don't know. I just don't know. They don't mind, I will say, that Fire ants don't mind, CinemaMumCam4i, which is in the same genus as some cinnamon comes from. So depending on which tree cinnamon comes from, Camper trees are cinnamon trees. That's right. They're closely related to one of the trees that cinnamon comes from. Feel the bark off. I haven't noticed that Fire ants really mind Camper trees, but they might mind the fact that you're putting something odd in there, and it could be anything odd. You can try the cinnamon. Again, I would say you can try dome cherry. Don't, oh how do you spell it? Don't paring y'all champagne. Can I say it right? You can try the champagne. See if that doesn't work, but it also makes sense to do something that's not too expensive to do. And if it is cinnamon, I would like to know which cinnamon it is that is a problem, because cinnamon comes from lots of different types of plants that aren't even really clearly related. But I'm curious, just let me know which cinnamon you think is the best and most effective, and it's probably not too expensive, and if it's cheap cinnamon, that's even better. If it's cinnamon with lead in it, because you know that's what they were doing, with the cheap cinnamon, maybe it's the lead that's the problem. I don't know, but I would be careful about cheap cinnamon, I guess. Let's see what else we got. So, Carol. All right, Carol. Carol at Montsville has asked me about this door spruce. She's had it for 15 years. I sent her a text, but she didn't read her text. That's okay, so we're going to talk about it on the show. Carol, it's going to be really hard for me to tell you what cultivar that is, because there's a lot of them floating around out there. My suspicion is that the cultivar came from McMinnville, which is just north of you, the big nursery industry up there. And so, I kind of looked around at some of the varieties they're growing. They're growing a lot of paisea ABs, which is the... Oh, which one is that? Let me think, what's the common name for it? Norway spruce. And believe it or not, the Norway spruce is more tolerant than some of the other spruces of tolerant of heat, I should say. Paisea. Yeah, we're going to come back here. I'm not sure I can tell you the cultivar, but we'll look. We'll look here in just a minute. We'll come back and talk. And there's a backwards on town that's all that our business is. 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. Gulf Coast Sunday morning, Alabama Sunday morning. Okay, let's get back to some questions here. What were we on? So, I'm going to, I guess... I don't know about the cinnamon thing. Clint's big on it. And I respect Clint. Cliff, I'm sorry. And I respect his thoughts on this. I will say I don't think there's anything special about cinnamon. It's a foreign thing. And there's many different kinds of cinnamon. And they come from different places. That also makes it more problematic. So whatever is chemically in one cinnamon might not be in another. I don't know about that. I'm not sure about it. You can certainly try, but it's probably at least as effective as grits are. I'll put it that way. And grits are effective. Not because they're grits, but because they're kind of a foreign thing and it drives the ants crazy. And it's because you're over there paying attention to them and doing crazy funky things to their house. And so it's disturbance that the ants don't like. When you're dealing with a fire ant mound, I'm not sure about that. There's a lot of information out there that suggests that cinnamon is not probably what it's cracked up to be when it comes to fire ants. It's this spruce. So I've got to get back to the spruce. That was the other thing. So, Carol, here it is. I think it's either Norway spruce or it's... Orientalis, Pascia Orientalis, which would be the Asian spruce, one of the Asian spruces from the northern climates. I don't see a lot of Asian spruce being grown in McMinnville. You know, if I had to... I'm going to call it Pascia abs, which is the species. I am going to continue to look, but am I going to be able to identify for certain and for sure, just by that image, which one it is, probably not. Probably not. But again, I think I would look in McMinnville and look at the nurseries there and see which ones have a spruce that most resembles one in your yard. And that may be a good clue because probably it came from those nurseries in middle Tennessee. Might have come from a good old... Our good old friend, I think Don Shadow, the late Don Shadow. Great guy. Don had a bunch of weird plants and we don't even know. I'm not even sure what happened to all of them. Now, folks, we're talking to Carol and she's in Huntsville and if you were in Mobile, let me make a note. You're in Mobile. Carol's in Huntsville. You're a long way apart. Please do not take any information I give to Carol as something you should act on in Mobile. Because it's a different place and I don't think you're going to be able to grow any spruce worth a toot in Mobile. Birmingham's a little different. My Montgomery's more like Mobile, but no, I don't recommend any spruce. There's some great evergreens for the Deep South. Are you going to be able to find them? Not as long as you shop at Don't Hippo, right? Low down Depot, whatever you want to call it. No, they're not going to be out there. And it's a real shame. A lot of the nurseries that used to provide things that were good for the hot south. These some really cool evergreen trees are just not there anymore. It makes it harder and harder to talk about ornamentals because we've let Don't Hippo take over the market. And it's killing us where it comes to ornamentals and plants and trees and everything else. I try to help the best I can, but it's a tough situation. I just remind people of this all the time. Do you want to remedy that situation? You want to sell your life over to Don't Hippo? Or do you want to have a real garden that isn't determined by somebody in some accounting office in New Jersey? Right? Let's think about how you avoid that. There are two ways. There are two ways. One, support your local, support your locally owned nurseries and encourage them. Secondly, even the locally owned nurseries are going to have a hard time. Excuse the hounds. Sorry. They heard some coyotes. Hope you're not hearing them. If you need to work with your local botanical gardens. Now, Huntsville, oh, heavens to Betsy, Huntsville, Huntsville got a botanical gardens. I don't think they do propagation there anymore. That's a shame. I don't even know that they encourage it. Birmingham does a pretty good job of encouraging local growers and developing for local growers. That's a great place. Another great place is the mobile botanical gardens, and you need to support them for really heat tolerant things in South Alabama. You're really going to have to support them because we're not going to have the growers anymore. My best friends are out of the business. They're going out of the business. They're tired of this. They're tired of fighting home dome tippo. They just don't want to do it anymore. Carol's got it. Carol's got it. She's going to McMendville to see what you can find there. If you go on the internet and a lot of those nurses at McMendville will show you what they have, pictures of them, you might be able to find it there, or you might be able to look up the varieties they have to see which dwarf Pisces they have. There you go. All right. When you speak about camphor trees, camphor trees, are you talking about the redneck version of popcorn trees? No. I don't know what the redneck version of popcorn trees would be other than popcorn trees. Popcorn trees are the same as tallow trees, which used to be safe in Suburferum and now it's something else. Try a dachom. I forget. Anyway, it's no. We're not talking about that, which is another plague, tallow trees, popcorn trees, another big plague, camphor trees have evergreen leaves. They're very, very fragrant. It's interesting. If I think if cinnamon worked, I think camphor tree bark, strip the camphor tree bark, put it into your pot and see if that works because it's basically cinnamon. I don't know. Does that work? I don't know. I don't know that it would. It might, but camphor trees are different. They're evergreen. They have a very strong fragrance. That's what we're talking about with the camphor trees. I guess some garden salmon, some don't. It's always good to hear from David. David has got his may pops coming in. Oh, that's good. He's going to do fun things with him. His googooza, and we got to get googooza back in the rotation just because of David Hubble. My sweet googooza. It really honors the fact that the Gulf Coast is not about just gots Irish heritage. It's part of it. Maybe even relatively small part. But this great Sicilian heritage along New Orleans and in Mobile and in Mississippi. A huge, huge component was the Italian influx and the things that came with that, like googooza. And of course David would want me to mention the German heritage along the Gulf Coast too. And you know, there's the Chinese heritage and there's the Vietnamese heritage. And there's certainly the Spanish heritage and there's the Mexican heritage. And there's the Caribbean folks. It's Africa. It's every place in the world. It's right here on the Caribbean. It's really cool. It's part of who we are. It's what makes us neat. All of these different groups coming together along the Gulf Coast. And one of the evidence of that is googooza. C-U-C-U-Z-Z-A. Googooza, that's of course. David, did I say it right? Googooza. That's how the song says it. There you go. We got to get that back in the rotation Steve. Just to let you know, somehow we got to do it. Could you tell me the best way to transplant a grape or musket I'm buying? You dig root stock and take cuttings. I did talk about it Wayne. I would do cuttings on those in general. If it's been around for a while, it's going to be really hard to dig it up successfully. Cuttings are not hard on those. You can layer it. Lattering a vine can be pretty easy. You know how to do that. You kind of lay the ground down. You do a little bit of it when we lay it down. You let the leaf come up. I'm going to interrupt it here, but we'll be back. [music] You get plain talk on plain living. Let's talk about living and growing in that deep self. With Bill Finch, call 251-3430106 on FM Talk 1065. All right, welcome back to Cofka's Sunday morning's Alabama Sunday morning. I think I got to talk about this just a little more because it wasn't representative. I am so thankful that I grew up in a place where I could learn about as many different cultures as I possibly could because the Gulf Coast and even Mississippi is surprisingly diverse. Neither Alabama nor Mississippi like talking about diversity, isn't that a shame? But in truth, they are, and we forget how diverse that heritage is. It's really cool. There's all these crazy weird theories out there that the South is settled by these Scotch-Irish folks. It's part of it. It's big. It's important. But you know, it's like even in Northeast Alabama where it's supposed to be all about the Scotch-Irish. I'm talking to folks who I'm talking to the guy yesterday who lives in the Austin house. It's right. It's not too far from Russo-Hala, which is otherwise known as Russo. I mean the French, the German, the English, the African, the Kosati heritage, the Uchi heritage. They're all part of this world up, you know, in Northeast Alabama. And it's crazy to say that it's gots Irish, just. And it's even crazier along the Gulf Coast, which is really fun. So I think about how much I've learned about gardening from the Cambodian gardeners who came in. And I am so thankful to have had that opportunity to get people who were just off the boat, as we like to say. And back on the boat in many ways along the Gulf Coast. They took a lot of those jobs and then they developed into successful business people in a lot of other ways. Cambodians, Laotians, Vietnamese, all of those communities. What a great opportunity. And I remember what a privilege it was. What a privilege it was to be introduced to those Cambodian gardens and to see how they worked and to understand. Oh, you know, gardening wasn't invented in Germany. And not it says David is not anything wrong in German. But just to say, I got it too. I got shoppers back there. But just to say that we are part of a diverse heritage and we have a lot to learn from a lot of people. From different places. And in many times, in many times, I think seeing those Cambodian gardens from those immigrants who were just come. Who hadn't yet been indoctrinated into the normal European way of doing things. It was so interesting. And it changed the way I saw gardening in the south. And I realized, gosh, here's what's going on. Here's what works better. Someday we'll talk about that a little more. But there's fridge heritage. I mean, it's all over. It's just crazy, we've got all these cultures and they're all coming together and it is so wonderful. It's so delightful. How did I get here? But we're talking about good goods. We're talking about the Italian heritage in the south and how important that was. And it's something we forget about. It really is important, those immigrants who came in repeatedly and refreshed us and taught us new things. And made us better. It's going to say, made me better. Thank goodness. All right, here we go. Oh, I got to talk about tomatoes. Steve's going to get mad if I don't talk about this tomato question. And in fact, I should. So there's a beautiful tomato plant. It has been, it has weathered the summer. It's in Mobile apparently. It's somewhere in Mobile or Baldwin County. And the question is, what do I do to make this better for fall? And here's, so you know, the great thing about it, you plant the right tomato and you don't have to do much. And this tomato weathered the, it's weathering the heat. It's weathering July. It's weathering August. It's looking really good. And it's weathering it because it's a small, fruited tomato and they're much tougher. And I, they're, they're just much tougher to disease. It's doing beautifully. It's still setting a little bit of fruit. Isn't that amazing? Yes. Even on the Gulf Coast, you try to do that with a big tomato. It is very hard to pull off. But these smaller tomatoes with the better taste, it's going to do them really well. Get, so you got goose grass or you got digitalis. You got, what do you call that? Crab grass, growing around, pull, pull it out. It's usually pretty easy to pull out. It's good. You can use it as a mulch. Just use it as a mulch around the plant. That way you'll feel like you've done something useful. You mulch it, mulch the plant with all this grass. You got to pull out around it. You do that. It's a good thing. Make it easier to pick. It won't look so messy and you'll feel better about the whole thing. Right? So that's good. You, you probably, you might need to give it a little bit of a, of a, of a boost. You know, I, I always stress that nutrients like things like nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium, the things that we put in fertilizer are not what plants eat. They're just grease. But at this point, the grease is running low. It's like, you know, you've been running the engine a long time in your car and you got to add a little oil or the engine ain't going to work. And so that's what you got to do. You got to add a little bit of oil right now. And that oil is going to be, that oil is going to be a little bit of nitrogen. A little bit, I would, you know, I don't think I'd do 13, 13, 13. But something with it, you could do, you could do, I, I, yes, you could do cotton seed meal, be fine. It would, if you're going to use a fertilizer, I would use one that has a big number. It has three numbers on that fertilizer. I'd use something that has a relatively, a moderately large number to start and a big number on the end and a small number in the middle. There you go. Something like, oh, it could be anything. It could be 5, 0, 5. It could be 10, 0, 10. It could be 12, 0, 6. Or 12, 3, 6 or 12, you see what I'm saying? There's a lot of fertilizers that could work, but cotton seed meal works great. A little bit of blood meal is going to be fine too. It won't have much potassium, but just a little bit of grease for the wheels. Right, to keep it turning, what's going to drive the production? Sunlight. Sunlight is the gas that keeps plants going. It's not nitrogen. Nitrogen is like the oil that keeps the engine lubricated, but it is not the thing that keeps plants. Sunlight. Your tomatoes have plenty of sunlight. The day's are going to be decreasing because the day length is going to be decreasing. But you're in great shape. I mean, that tomato is doing fine. There's nothing to do. You know, the problem with tomatoes and growing them over a long season is they don't have anything to climb on. So what can you do? You can kind of bluff it up and maybe put something on there for it to climb on, but at this point it's getting a little late. It's kind of hard to do. So you're going to have to just manage that sprawling growth. And next year you'll know better that you can get tomatoes like that to survive. Okay. There it is, but it's looking good. I don't know what to tell you, except it's just looking good. Maybe give it a little bit. My mother called this a sweet shrub. Can you identify it? It says jar head. Well, if it is a sweet shrub, and I'm going to have to pull it over. Huh. Does that look like a sweet shrub? Well, sweet shrub is generally, that is not sweet shrub. And I think what you've got there is a weed that came up where the sweet shrub was. What that looks like is some kind of bacorous. That's a weed that has grown up. Jar head, are you going to shoot me for calling that a weed? I don't think, I think that, oh, jar head. I don't think it's what used to be there. I think that whatever was there has been lost and what you've got right now is bacorous. Or something, it's a weed that looks pretty shrubby but is not actually the thing itself that you're talking about. What she talked about is sweet shrub. Is osmanthes. It's a beautiful plant. T. olive, I think, is probably what she meant by sweet shrub. She could have meant, there are a couple other things called sweet shrub or sweet booby bush. Sometimes it's called, literally. But that's not what you got there, jar head. Something happened to what you wanted to have. Boy, this is going to be a tough one, jar head. We're going to have to shop around. Take some pictures of some other things around this bush to make sure that it's not hiding in there somewhere, but what you definitely are talking about right there is not something your mother was growing. I'm going to be really certain about that. It's kind of a weedy thing. Alright, what else we got? Steve, are you mad at me for missing anything else? I got it to Michael. Michael, I did miss Michael. Tomato from late June, I was hoping I didn't start too early. No, I don't think you did at all, Michael. I think you started just about right. I think you can make something of this tomato. It needs some grease for the wheels. It looks like the soil is probably not great, but it definitely needs some grease for the wheels. So you're going to need something for that to climb on to, and it's going to need some sunlight. It's going to need some grease for the wheels. Sunlight's the gas, but you're going to need some oil to keep the engine running. Sorry for the car metaphor, but you know, it's the way we think. So you need, the oil is going to be fertilizer, and I would just go, because it's in a container, I would just go get you some, what do they call that stuff? So just powdered miracle grow, or peters, or any of the, any of the, you know, those blue powdery things that you mix in water, they all work just fine, mix it up in water, feed that plant on a regular basis. Because it's in a container, it's hard to use, it's harder to use natural forms of nitrogen, and I would just say it's probably safer, and miracle grow has got a good formulation. I would just say, I mean, they've, they've kind of learned, and they know that you can get some toxicity if you have a big middle number, so they don't have a big middle number, and it's just fine. So I would get something like miracle grow, and, and get it going. Make sure that it's getting the sunlight it needs, which you can do by adjusting the plot. The most important sunlight right now is that morning sunlight. You can actually give it a little bit of shade, because it's in a container. You can give it a little shade of midday, if you like, because it ain't using the light at midday very well right now. It will need a lot of midday sunlight as fall progresses, however. So the cooler it gets, the more, and the shorter the days, the more of that midday sunlight it needs. Right now it doesn't need it. That midday sunlight is a little bit stressful, but it looks a little anemic, looks a little atolliated, like it's not getting quite enough sunlight. So tell me, you know, let me know where it is, Michael, because it looks like it's not getting quite enough sunlight, and it also needs a little bit of fertilization. All right. Felicia wants to know when to fertilize Camilla's and hydration's. Thanks. We got to talk about it when we come 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. All right. Felicia wants to know when to fertilize Camilla's and hydration's, and here's the great thing, Felicia, do it with cottonseed meal, and it don't matter when you do it. Really, honestly, it doesn't. And it's really safe, really easy way to do it, cottonseed meal. Are you going to get cottonseed meal at the domedipo? The domedipo does not carry cottonseed meal in any kind of form that you would want. It's only carries things that they can make a lot of money selling, regardless of whether it's good for you or your garden. So, no. You go to a seed and feed store. There's several in Mobile and Baldwin County, and ask them. I tell them I need a bag of cottonseed meal. You sound like you know what you're talking about when you ask them. Say, I need some cottonseed meal. I know you're selling it for, you might be selling it for cattle feed, but it's all right. You just tell them it's all right. I need it for my garden. I want a 40 pound bag or a 50 pound bag, whatever they're selling in. And you get it's not going to be that expensive. And you can start putting it on lots of things in the garden. Use that on your commillas and your hydrangeas, because it's really safe to use. It doesn't cause a lot of problems. How much do you use? Oh, about a bucket. And how big's a bucket? Oh, I don't know. That's a good thing about it. I just really love that about cottonseed meal, is you're not going to screw up too bad no matter what you do. Because it works the way good fertilizers should. It's a relatively slow release thing. And it works only when the organisms in the soil take it in and convert it into a form that plants can use. So it's done at a great rate. It is hydrangeas and commillas respond really well to it. I would, for a really, for a 7 or 8 foot tall commilla, I mean, you could use a gallon bucket easily. That'd be about right, I reckon. Gallon pale, maybe even a 2 gallon pale for a really big one. You wouldn't have to do that every year because it'll last for a good long while. And then if you got a smaller hydrangea, shoot. You know, I'd say 4 cups. That's about, that'd be fine, probably. They don't need a lot of fertilizer, honestly. They don't need a lot. They actually do really well. If they've got some mulch, they're fine. But just every now and then you certainly could fertilize it. And it would be a little healthier. And commillas honestly don't need a lot of fertilizer. They're not producing fruits. And this is good. They're not producing heavy fruit. So they don't need as much fertilizers as other plants. So if you're going to fertilize your commillas with cottonseed meal, do it once every 2 or 3 or 4 years. No need to do it all the time. Mulch is pretty important. Mulch itself breaks down. There it is. I hoped all that helped. Did it. Jarhead, I don't know. Jarhead, I just, I don't want you to be upset with me. But what you got there is, is baccorous. Grownslebush, which I feel certain your mother did not grow on purpose. So I think something got mixed up and somewhere along the way. And what you've got is a pretty weedy thing. Now it has some interesting little flowers that come on that the butterflies love in fall. But it spreads around. But that's baccorous. That is a picture of baccorous. B-A-C-C-H-A-R-I-S. Alima folia, some people call it Grownslebush. There's got to be another name. I don't think anybody I've ever heard says, oh, well that's Grownslebush. That's what the books say people call it. I just call it baccorous. And it used to be only along the coast in certain environments. It's now spreading everywhere. It's kind of native and just, but just kind of a nuisance. All right. I'm catching up here with everybody. One of my charities is growing in an earth box. This is from Clay in Birmingham, 12 feet tall. Still growing so I'm burying ripe tomatoes and setting you fruit. You may get through the August heat and have an encore fall tomatoes in September and October. The water reservoir is the key to beating the heat. Yes, in a container. I will tell you that in the ground, there's a water reservoir there too. If you've prepared your soil right, and that's what you want to do is you want to create soil that has a water reservoir. But that the water table doesn't sit too high during the wet period. And that brings us back to the, you want a mole hill, not a mountain. I got a lot of friends who have really high raised beds. And I really respect them and I really like them and I really love them. And I think they're probably having more problems with their vegetables than they need to because they got these super high raised beds. And I just challenge you to think, is that how they say it nowadays? I encourage you to think about why you're raising that bed that high. And whether you really need to do it because once you do it, you've disconnected it from the earth. And that creates all kinds of problems. I mean, literally it's actually a physics issue. It is a pure physics issue. It's not just a touchy-feely issue about disconnected from the earth. I'm talking about it's a physics issue because it's disconnected from this great blob of soil that's sitting on the top of the surface of the earth. And when you start doing that, you get huge drainage issues. You also mean it makes it much harder to add organic matter. And for the most part, there are a huge number of plants that you don't want to make them any taller. Dead, gummy. I got tomatoes and beans. I can't pick because I'm so stupid because I put the... I don't know. I do this every year. I put the trellis too high rather than too wide. It needs to be about head high. And I leave some little things dangling up there. And I can't pick it. So you don't want to make it any taller. So many of the things that we grow well need to grow on this. Acra. I mean corn, tomatoes, squash. But when you grow it up on a trellis, which are cucumbers, all these things, you don't want to grow them up. You see what I'm saying? Because they're not... you see what I'm saying? Be careful about that's what with the mountain out of the molehill thing is. Now clay is doing real well with the earth box. And I can't challenge that. You can do real well with good garden soil too. I do want to encourage that. It's a good thing. It's easy on the planet. It's how the planet's been providing us food for a long time. It's a good thing to do. You just got to have the organic matter. It means you don't have to go to Don't Hippo and buy organic matter. You can get it right off your street and make great stuff out of it. There it is. Gosh, we had a bunch of proverbs to follow through on today. And that mountain in molehill was one of them. The grass was the other. Oh, dear. And now everybody's afraid to ask for any grass questions. Because they know I'm going to say the same thing. Because it's the proverb that's true. The first rule of growing grass is you're never going to have a perfect lawn. There it is. That's the first rule. It's period. If you don't understand that, nothing else matters. It's just going to be your life's going to be a misery for the rest of your life. There it is. First rule. And what was the other thing that I said? Oh, this other little proverb. The work of summer is the joy of winter. And that's what you need to be doing right now, folks. Man, I am doing it as fast as I can. I got some seeds coming up out here. I'm kind of excited about it. I got them in containers. I'm not ready to put them in the ground yet, but I got a lot of stuff started. I got broccoli. I got cabbage. I got, oh, I got some Brussels sprouts. I got some cauliflower. I just think cauliflower is, I think, why am I doing this? But, you know, it's kind of fun and my wife likes cauliflower. You can make people happy sometimes, even if it's not the most efficient thing in the world. So I got some cauliflower. I'm getting ready to sow some arugula. I am getting ready to sow radishes. I'm getting the beds ready for all of this. I got some carrots that I need to get in the ground. Oh, and I'm getting the beds ready for that. I've got a whole system for doing that. So, and, you know, I got, there's some flowers that I can be putting in. I'm going to be doing that. It's not too late to do that. The work of summer is the joy of winter. You got one more week to listen to me say this. So you call me back next week so you talk about what that means. Good to talk to everybody. Oh, this world alone. There is no sin as toil danger.