FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
Plain Living w/ Bill Finch 8.25.2024 Talking Pines
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 FM Talk 1065. Hey welcome back, it's a Gulf Coast Sunday morning, it's an Alabama Sunday morning. It's a week when we've gotten a warning from the governor that we should be worried about our pine trees, southern pine bark beetle is running through Alabama, the populations are building up in big numbers, and we're seeing a lot of damage. So it seems like, you know, why am I going to talk about pine trees at a time when we're basically being told, oh man, duck and cover, because the pine bark beetle's coming. Let's talk about them real quick, because there's a lot of misconceptions out there. I was in a conversation the other day with somebody who said, oh you can cut all your pine trees, but if you want valuable trees for wildlife, you got to leave your oak trees and I thought, good golly. This is somebody who doesn't spend much time thinking about what goes on in the woods. Our native pines, and we're going to talk about what that means in just a minute, harbor a ton of insects that are beneficial. And they also, not all of them, but many of them encourage much of the diversity of our forest in ways that oaks never could. And people say, well, oaks got acres. Oaks have acres, how many weeks out of the years, folks? How many weeks out of the year to oaks produce acres? And how much difference does that make in a place like Alabama, where deer and squirrels and other things, they got to have food all year long? Three weeks. Oaks have acres. I love oaks, they're really cool, and they really play an interesting role, and we should think about them, they're oaks that we plant way too many of, and it's going to eat us alive. But we're not here to talk about oaks, we're here to talk about pines, because pines are really an interesting part. Pines are the dominant forest in Alabama. Always have been. Well, always, let's go back to say about 8,000 years ago, gets a little sketchier, pre-8,000, but they've always been here a lot, I mean, they're pretty dominant here. And it's really important to understand their huge role in maintaining the wildlife, the diversity of the forest, and in defining what Alabama is. Those pine forests, let me say, this is really important for you to understand that those pine forests did not look like the pine plantations you're seeing now. And they didn't look like many of the pine forests that are being consumed by pine bark beetle. There were some important differences. And this is something you should understand, and it's important for you to understand in your own yard, and I'm going to tell you why. Listen, there were seven species of pines that were native to Alabama, seven. I hope you can name them all. You should. You should be able to. Well, you should at least be able to name five. I'll give you the other two, or a little trickier. But we've got the pine that is now the most common pine, and that was once one of the least common pines, lob lolly pine, it's got different names in different parts of the state, depending on where you go. A lot of people don't use the word lob lolly, it's okay. But it's the common pine. It's very common. It has cones that are sort of intermediate in length, not too big, not too small, lob lolly pine. And it's the pine that we use for timber. It's been planted widely. It used to be uncommon, and that's a really important thing to understand. It used to be just uncommon, and only in little bitty areas of the state, could you even say that it was moderately common? And it tended to prefer very moist soils in areas that didn't get a lot of fire, and oh, a bunch of other things. If pine was another pine that was probably the most prominent pine in Alabama, it grew everywhere. It was the most prominent pine, certainly in South Alabama, and up in the mountains, up into, oh, say, up to Cherokee County, along the Blue Ridge, east and west of Birmingham, and all the way south, it was probably the dominant pine in many places. And longleaf was as different from lob lolly as a pine could be, because it had always grown in large masses. It had many protections against insects, and we're going to talk about what some of those protections are. It's not exactly how you might think of it, but it's really important to understand that because it tells you a lot about what you can do in your yard. Flash pine, which is very common in South Alabama now, along the coast, it too had areas where it was dominant. And if you can see these beautiful native splash pine forests right along the Gulf Coast, that really incredibly good at weathering storms, I'm really amazed. And splash pines are some of the most common trees in the older parts of Mobile. And they do pretty well, amazingly well, shortly pine, an incredible pine, a beautiful pine, the straightest of all the pines, incredibly straight, it was no taper, beautiful, gosh, I can look at a distance and I can see the color of those shortleaf needles. They're so beautiful, the texture. It's a beautiful thing, very horizontal stem structure, a beautiful pine, a spruce pine, another pine we should know more about. Sand pine, a pine that grows right along the coast, pine pine growing in parts of Central Alabama. All of these were part of our world, but now it's been taken over by lob lolly pine. And one of our problems with pine is that we see, we see pines as somehow lob lolly is typical. It's not at all typical. And these pine bark beetle outbreaks are not typical either. It's pretty clear that these pine bark beetle outbreaks are increasingly the result of the way of the types of pines we grow and the way we manage our forests. And we're going to talk about that and we're going to talk about, listen, we're going to talk about something else today that I think is really important. People are always asking me, what tree should I grow in my yard? What tree? If you don't want a garden, if you have no interest in gardening, if you have no interest in lawns, and you're perfectly content with bare dirt, plant a live oak. You go right ahead. You're going to say, God, what's wrong with my lawn? Why can't I grow anything? Go plant a red maple. See what happens. I could go down a long list. If you want a tree that you can garden around, you probably should think about pines. And not a lot of pines. And you should think about the right kind of pines because long leaf pine, for example, in short leaf pine and slash pine too are all trees that evolved with a to encourage other growth around them. And it's one of the reasons why in that native forest, they were pretty resistant, I suspect. This is why. They were pretty resistant to things like pine bark beetle. We're going to talk a little bit about that. Growing pines, I don't know why, you know, if people who, it was a prejudice people had for a long time. And it may be because when people move to the city, they thought that only country people love pines. I don't know. It was like, but we're going to come back. We're going to talk a little bit more about that. And about why pines are good for us and how we should be growing. We'll be back. FM Talk 1065 with plain living for Alabama and the Gulf Coast, call 2513430106. Here again is your personal nature expert, Bill Finch. Hey, welcome back. We're talking about pines. We're talking about Alabama and why pines are so important to Alabama. Not necessarily the pines we see now because that's a result of planning. It's the result of industry. It's the result of, it's our industrial forest, as it's sometimes called fondly. It is, it's not much like our native forest. And so if you look at those pine forests a lot of times, you don't really get a sense of what it should look like. You want to see what a native pine forest looked like. A great place to go is the Mobile Botanical Gardens. Take a look, it would surprise you and scale that up, scale that up to hundreds of thousands of acres, millions of acres, literally across Alabama. It's likely that pine forest, pine dominated forest, forests that were almost exclusively pine, I would say covered probably more than half, if not 60 to 65% of Alabama originally. And looking at areas where pines may have been not the dominant tree, they would have been in there as well, but this is where the pines were dominant. They were really important and they did pretty well for thousands and thousands of years without the kind of disease problems we have now. So what happened? What happened? Well, we changed the species. We decided that the two most common pines in Alabama, long leaf pine and short leaf pine weren't good enough for us and we can go into the reasons why. They didn't grow fast enough to make good pulp and of course you care greatly about whether you can grow good pulp, don't you? So we settled on something called lob lollie. It was easy to grow in a nursery, it was easy to plant, didn't have a deep root system because it wasn't going to grow long enough to blow over. Think about that. We increasingly moved to lob lollie and lob lollie has gotten us in a lot of trouble. I love lob lollie. It's a neat pine in its place, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about two pines, long leaf and short leaf, a highly recommended manure yard. We decided that they weren't going to be our favorite pine anymore, our most common pine and that got us into a lot of trouble. Look at the mobile botanical gardens. You get a sense of what this long leaf forest was about. A good pine forest isn't just about the trees. In fact, a good pine forest is maybe better called a savanna. You know what I mean by savanna? We talk about savannas with Africa where you have scattered trees and lots of grasses, lots of animals using those grasses. That's a savanna. The same thing was happening in Alabama. Longleaf pine was probably the center of grass diversity, not probably. Longleaf pine forest was the center of grass diversity in eastern North America, maybe across the whole continent. It's a little hard to measure exactly, but there's no question that longleaf pine was a huge center of grass diversity. I'm talking about hundreds of grass species. Hundreds! Amazing. Something much still there. It's really cool to go to the mobile botanical gardens and see some of those. Not all of them survived in that little small postage stamp of forest that we have there, about 35 acres. But there's some really cool grasses that you can see there. Sunflower flowers were incredibly abundant. There's no question in my mind that pine forest in Alabama represented the center of sunflower diversity globally. Sunflower diversity in those forests is incredible. Shortly pine may have actually had more diversity. In shortly pine you tended to see a little more common in North Alabama. Little diversity, those pine forest were responsible for those areas where we talk about there were 40, 50, and 60 species of plants per square meter. I'll call it a square yard. It won't make any difference. They'll still be there. All of that diversity, incredible diversity, the area of the size of a beach towel. Not even a big beach towel. You might be embarrassed to actually go on the beach wearing nothing but a beach towel that size. It's amazing that kind of diversity and amazing, you know, amazing that it existed here in Alabama, unlike, and that's probably the highest diversity known in North America. That incredible diversity for square meter that was associated with those pine forest. Why did that happen? And it's because those pines, unlike lob lolly, unlike oaks, unlike many other trees that you want to grow in your yard, those pines developed so that they could encourage other plants to grow underneath them, wildflowers, and it became a benefit to both. Live oaks basically have a philosophy that it's me and nobody else. And if you go into the, if you go into a lot of live oak forest, you can, particularly some of the ones that are maturing, you kind of get that sits. It's just me and nobody else. I don't want anybody else here. I want to take all the nutrients. I want to take all the moisture, nobody else. But a lot of the pines evolved in a way that they actually encouraged more plants underneath them. And because of all those plants and insects, it's why they were the great centers of wildlife in Alabama. It's why quail was so important there. It's why turkey were so important. So my grouse was so important in the shortly forest in the mountains. It's when we had elk, and we did in Alabama and North Alabama, they were in those forests. When we had bison, they utilized us, longly forest, just like the use of prairies. We had all those things. We had horses, native horses, cool native horses, because horses evolved in the southeast. And why did they evolve in the southeast? And Texas, why did they evolve here? Because of those grasses, because of the forest that allowed those grasses to develop. Now we wiped out those horses when we came, and we lost a lot of that Savannah diversity. But you need to understand that that diversity is still here, and it's really cool. Now think about what that means in your own yard. Think about what that means in your own yard. One of the cool things, and you can see this at Mobile Botanical Gardens, about pines. Go to Mobile Botanical Gardens sometime and look at the live oaks, and then look at the longleaf pines growing next to them, and look at where the limbs are, and look at what's growing underneath them. And I noticed this really, just really strikes me in the chameleon garden. There are a bunch of live oaks lining the road. Somebody thought, oh, this would be really nice. And the chameleon garden kind of goes under those oaks. The chameleas are doing terrible there. They're doing terrible there. And you look and you realize, gosh, they're getting no, no light at all. Not only are they competing with the roots of a very root aggressive tree, but the fact is they're getting no light at all because those limbs on the live oaks are so low, and the leaves are so dense that they intercept every bit of light, and the most important light isn't what's overhead. During most of the year in Alabama, the most important light is the light that comes from the sides, and live oaks intercept every bit of that. Now go look at the longleaf next to it. And look at where the limbs are, and look at the light shining through, not just from on top, because that's not the important light. The important light is what's coming from the sides, what's coming from the edges, and I want you to look at how longleaf pine allows a flood of light in there. And that's why Mobile was once the azalea city, I'm convinced. It's why Mobile was so famous for its camellias, and it's why a lot of times we're very disappointed now with our azaleas and our camellias and our cartinas, and so many other plants, because we have lost that sense of what kind of trees we should be growing to encourage diverse and beautiful and happy gardens, because we forget what kind of trees created diversity in the Alabama forest. Talking a little bit about that, so why, why, why are we having these pine bark beetle outbreaks, and that's something I'm going to talk about just a little more in the next hour, but you feel free to give us a call, 251-3430-10625-1343-0106. We'll talk about pines, we'll talk about anything else you'd like to talk about, just give us a call, 251-3430-1006, and we'll come back, we're going to, we're going to look at this because the pine bark beetles are coming, they're beginning to affect yards throughout the state, 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. All right, welcome back, it's a Gulf Coast Sunday morning, it's an Alabama Sunday morning. So you know how to identify pines, can you identify the pines in your yard, you're curious about what they are, give me a call, we'll talk about that this morning, it's important to do, it's good to know because depending on the type of pine it is, you're going to have to, you may have to think about it a little differently, and you might have to treat it a little differently, it's good to understand those things, we talked about long leaf a lot, we talked about it a lot last week, but give me a call, if you want to know how to identify the pines in your yard, let's, we'll talk about it, we'll talk about it, or anything else in your yard, we're generous that way, or in the woods, but we got to think it about pines this morning, because we got a pine bark beetle outbreak coming, and we're hearing a lot about it, the governor even said, "Watch out for the pine bark beetles," yes, she went before the old state and said, "The pine bark beetles are here, you got to watch out for them," she didn't have a lot of recipes for how to deal with them, which is kind of interesting, and in fact, nobody really does have a good recipe for dealing with an outbreak like this one once it occurs, but you know, there's a good chance, and I think everybody, most scientists would agree, that these kinds of outbreaks have been occurring for a long time, at least in the 20th century, but that they didn't used to occur with the same frequency and over the same massive area that they do now, and a lot of the reason why they occur is not only about the species of pines that we plant, which is loblolly, dominantly, almost exclusively in these industrial forests, but also about how those forests look and how they're managed, because when you go into a pine forest, I want you to think, not the one at the mobile, I want you to go to the one at Mobile Botanical Guards and I want you to look at that, and then I want you to find another pine forest that's in the wood somewhere, and I want you to look on the ground and tell me the difference, because at Mobile Botanical Gardens, what you're going to see on the ground, beneath those pines, are more different kinds of plants than you would even be able to describe. It's just going to be amazing. There's going to be asters, there's going to be blazing stars, there's going to be grasses, there's going to be sedges, there's going to be eucalypt relatives, there's going to be subaudia plants you haven't even heard of before, growing in this incredible understory underneath pines. Oh I want to go on, wild petunias, things that people send me pictures of when we find these little remnants of lonely pine forests, sometimes pitcher plant bogs, incredible diversity. Now let me tell you what happens when you have that many wildflowers under your pines. You've got all sorts of insects, many predatory insects, they're preying on other insects, and one of the cool things about a lot of native longleaf pine forests when I go into them, and this happens for many reasons, but it's really kind of interesting. I don't ever worry about shiggers, that interesting, I don't worry about shiggers, I don't worry about ticks, I rarely get, I rarely get mosquito bites in big native longleaf pine forest, even though it's full of wetlands, and even though mosquito diversity is really really high in longleaf pine forests, all kinds of mosquitoes, many of those mosquitoes don't bite people at all, but there's lots of other insects there, and it's that whole community that seems to keep pests, things that we now consider pests, like pine bark beetles, pretty rare. There's probably something else about that savanna community that makes it very difficult for many reasons for those pine bark beetles to move in mass from tree to tree, and there's probably something about longleaf itself, which tends to resist those pests, but it's the whole community that's at work, and that's the cool thing, and right now what we've created, because we have this idea that forests are just about trees, and they're really not, what we've created is nothing, is forest that are nothing but lob lollies and pine straw, lob lollies and pine straw, miles and miles and miles, the only thing more preposterous than that, and more dangerous in terms of promoting disease that I can think of right now, are lawns, which have no diversity, and which promote lots and lots of problems. But think about that, let's think about that. Now, if you want to have pines for your yard, don't plant them super thick. There's no need for that. You just need a few pines. One of the great garden riders used to say that trees are like tigers. I'd say they're more like gorillas, and it's nice to have a gorilla in your yard, but you probably don't want too many gorillas, but pines, you can enjoy two or three or four, and you're going to have a pretty good situation. I would not recommend lob lolly right now, because lob lolly is very prone to diseases and insects and lots of other problems, and not just the pine bark beetle. I'm not even sure pine bark beetle is going to be the big problem for pines in the long run, and I have a feeling that one of the reasons pine bark beetle is so, the outbreaks are so bad right now, is because other diseases have weakened those pines even further, and the heat and the brief flashy droughts, they're making it worse, making it worse. Give us a call this morning, let us know what you think about pines, let us know if you need help identifying the pines in your yard. Actually, we have Bill on the lawn. Yeah, good. Yeah, so who's calling? Bill. Bill, how are you Bill? I'm very well a long time no talk. I wanted to lend a little credence to your warning about the pine bark beetle. Before here, moving here, I lived in an area in the mountains in Southern California. It was devastated by the pine bark beetle. It was a beautiful oak and pine canopy over large swaths of the area, and when that pine bark beetle started hitting those trees, just basically turned gray and withered and dyed, and it would hop from tree to tree, and there was no the time cure. In fact, I lived in an area called pine hills, and it was sad to see. The other thing is the oaks. At least we had the oaks, but then all of a sudden, the golden spotted oak for a beetle started coming in from Mexico, so, but people should be concerned, because once that pine bark beetle takes hold, I don't know how you control it. Yeah, so the simple answer is you really don't once you have an infestation, and a lot of people will ask, and a lot of people will panic. There is no way, because those insects are in the whole column of the tree, and they're moving pretty fast, and by the time you see red flagging, by the time you notice that there's a little bit of red at the top of the trees, the damage is already done, because it's not just the beetles. It's a fungus that they introduce in the tree called the blue stain fungus, and that blue stain fungus helps them a little bit. It's a little bit incidental to their work, but it helps them a little bit, and they have to do their work quickly before that blue stain fungus kills the whole tree, which is the blue stain fungus probably does as much damage as the beetles themselves. And so the problem is you would have to stop both the beetle, which is very probably nearly impossible to do, because you'd have to spray the entire tree, and you would have to stop the fungus, which is very, very, very hard to do. So there's no cure once we get those beetle outbreaks in here, and if you see the red flagging bill at the tops of the trees, I'll just tell this to all of our listeners, what we call red flags. At the tops of trees, you'll see at the very tips you'll get a little bit of red, and it starts right at the very tip. Once you see that, it's a good sign, and you better get an arborist looking at it pretty quick, because there's a chance that tree is going to die. It's not you're going to not going to save that tree, but you may be able to use that tree at least for lumber, which we might hope, and you would be able to get it out before it starts dropping limbs. Older pine trees that have lost, that are dying, that are dead, are probably maybe even less of a threat than the living trees for at least a little while, but they'll start falling apart on your house, and you need to think about that. You don't want them to get too creaky, because then the arborists don't want to take them down, because they might start falling apart as you're taking them down. So there is no cure for that other than to think about, gosh, what were the, how do we plant pines in a more sensible way, and what pines can we use so that we don't get these outbreaks? And right now, lob lolly has been the big carrier. Out west, it's a little different, and it's the forest have gotten thicker because of fire suppression, and that's probably encouraged pine bark beetles to move out west, along with the fact that, oh, I don't know if I can use the word out loud. Let's just say the temperature has changed out west, and we're getting more hot spells, more droughts, and won't say why, just say that's happening, and so we're seeing the movement of species that didn't used to occur in those forest out west, because those forests have changed in many ways, and so they're becoming very vulnerable to things like pine bark beetle, which, you know, people didn't talk about pine bark beetle in the west very much in the past. People certainly didn't talk about a lot of the, a lot of the pests that used to be in Central and South America moving up as well, and there are other diseases as well, so California is its own thing. I could talk about that for a while. I could talk about that for a while, but, well, I wish you wouldn't. I moved here for a reason, but, you know, that area where I lived was a lot of folks derived their income from logging and firewood, and everything in the state came in, and bands exporting any of the lumber out of their pine or oak, they quarantined it, so it was nowhere for it to go. Right, and I don't think we'll see those quarantines on pines here for a variety of reasons. I'm quite sure we won't, and there's almost no way, even if, what a forest just do when there's a pine bark beetle outbreak. We'll come back and talk a little bit about that here in just a minute. 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 FMTalk 1065. Yes, so, Bill, for Mobile's on the phone, we're talking about pine trees. Bill, I think, I think one safe thing to say, and I feel good about saying this, is we don't need to be planting any more lob lollies, and there are a lot of reasons why we shouldn't. Here's another funny thing, spooky thing, however you want to look at it. When we decided that we were going to focus on planting just lob lollies, we decided to do something called improving lob lollies, and anytime you hear somebody talking about improving a plant, particularly a plant that's going to stand over your house, you better run the other direction, because those improvements meant that we ended up with a genetically identical plant, basically, across the whole range, and it didn't have a lot of resistance to pine bark beetle, because that wasn't something anybody selected for. It didn't have a lot of resistance to a lot of other diseases. It didn't have a lot of genetic diversity, because they really only wanted a tree that grew fast. They didn't care whether it lasted a long time. They didn't care whether it fell on your house. They didn't even think about whether it would fall on your house. They didn't think about whether it would be susceptible to pine bark beetle outbreaks, and these super fast growing trees, which are really not even good for wood, they're great only for pulp, are now dominating our forest, and when you buy a lob lolly, that's what you're buying, because nobody has a native lob lolly, a native Alabama lob lolly, is now probably one of the rarest trees in the forest, because most of the things we plant are these weird clones, and that's made them very susceptible. They're also susceptible to a lot of other diseases. So the short story now is if you're planning on planting trees for the long haul, do not plant lob lolly. You can use them as nurse trees. You can do. They have some uses, even the ones that you plant that come from a nursery, but you better be very careful. Longleaf is a very different tree, and it is very resistant to pine bark beetle outbreaks. It doesn't mean that it'll never have a pine bark beetle outbreak, because we have so much lob lolly that it basically creates these pine bark beetle population explosions, and eventually they can even overwhelm the populations get so big they can even overwhelm longleaf, but I will say that pine bark beetles, I don't know if anybody has ever known of a pine bark beetle infestation, southern pine bark beetle infestation, to have begun or developed in a longleaf pine forest, because they're very resistant to it. So that's good to know. It's funny what you say about the lob lolly. In the early 60s, my dad built real authentic colonial reproduction homes, and he used to bring, I said, tearing the tenements down in New York, which I'm sure were built sometime in the 19th century, he would bring in the use brick and these gigantic beams and posts that he told me were lob lolly pine. And he said, try to drive a nail in it. I couldn't drive a nail in that. It was so dense and so hard, it was just incredible. So let me tell you, that was not lob lolly. Okay. So long, and there are many reasons why we know it wasn't lob lolly. Longleaf pine built New York. Longleaf pine built New York after the 1870s, 1880s. Almost all of the pine that we see in New York, they built London, it built the London warehouses, it built Victorian London. It built cities all across the country, Chicago, and it was because longleaf pine, which was the dominant pine in the south when all those buildings were being built up to about the 30s. It was dominant, it was everywhere, and the wood was incredibly strong. It had strength properties that were comparable to the very best oaks, and not all oaks have good strength properties. Water oaks have sorry strength properties, for example, but wide oak, when well grown, is very strong. But longleaf could actually be even stronger than wide oak. And when it was filled with resin, because the trees were very old, it would be like it was so incredibly dense. My dad, my dad's family decided they were going to build an oak house in Mississippi. They wanted to build it the best way. This was back in the 20s. And so they bought all their lumber, good lumber from a local mill, and they needed something to put the house on, because there aren't any rocks in that part of Mississippi. And they didn't have center blocks. So they took longleaf stumps, and they rolled them up and put them under the house in sometime about 19, I'd say 19, sometime between 1917 and 1925. I went to look at that house, and the oak, which had no ground contact at all, was all rotting down. The longleaf stumps were so hard, you couldn't drive a nail on them. They had no signs of rot whatsoever. And that's longleaf, and that's what built New York. And we've lost that really high quality wood, but that was all longleaf. It was a famous story. There's a book you might get called Longleaf Far as the Eye Can See. It's from University of North Carolina Press. It's got some really beautiful pictures, incredible pictures that my wife took. And one of these days you might get around to reading the text, because the pictures are going to occupy you forever. But it's a great view of what the longleaf pine forest was like, and how important it was. And there's a bit of writing there about the history of how that tree was used that you might enjoy. Longleaf Far as the Eye Can See. You know, well, let me change my story a little bit. Back in the '60s, when my dad used to bring in these longleaf pine beams and posts, they were so hard, couldn't drive a nail on them. That's right. You got it right, Bill. So that's the story you got to tell from now on. And it's incredible. That was good southern longleaf. Can you comment real quickly on what's happening to the ash forest in the upper Midwest? Yes, it's not to happen. It's not to happen. It's not to happen. It's about to have a real disease and bug problems. It's about to happen in Alabama. I will, we won't have time to talk about it a lot this hour, but I promise I will talk about it in the next hour. I'm dealing with it on many levels, and that's something I will talk about since you requested it. Good. I'm happy to do that. Bill, good to hear from you. I bought a lot of lumber. I used to build furniture and cabinets and things like that. And I noticed my price for ash was going through the roof. And I did a little investigation. But yeah, I'd be interested in hearing it. So thanks for taking my call. Yeah. All right. Good. Good. We'll talk about it. Listen, we've got, yeah, we've got lots of questions here that we're going to get to. I remember growing up in Spring Hill and in Longleaf Forest, even had quail the first few years in the 50s, then Hurricane Frederick's tornado cleaned out the pines, broke them in half. How to compare Longleaf and lob-lolly. You know, it's interesting. It's a big question. Longleaf is probably pretty resistant to a lot of damage. And my uncle, Francis Lee, back away now on Chillingers Road used to say, oh, man, all these, all these longleaf in my yard. He said they got broken off and, you know, and what I was going to tell him was if you had had lob-lollies, if you had had had a lot of other trees, they wouldn't have broken off. They didn't damage his house, by the way. He just had a lot of cleanup to do. They would have fallen on the house. So it's kind of a useful thing to think about. Hurricanes could do a lot of damage and they can do a lot of damage to any tree except perhaps palms. Even live oaks can be severely damaged. Water oaks will fall flat on your house and just do tremendous damage during hurricanes. But yes, it's something to think about those pines. And we can talk about how to reduce the likelihood that your pines will get, will get broken off. And there's some ways of thinking about that. We'll try to do that in the next hour too. What else we got? I grew up in central Georgia. What time was the, what kind of pine was used for the turpentine business? We'll come back and we'll talk about that too. 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 self with your personal garden and nature consultant. Here's Bill Finch on FMTalk1065. All right, we started a few fires this morning. I'm not ready to put them out yet. We're gonna watch him burn just a little bit. We talked about pines and we've talked about disease in pines. We've talked about what the best kind of pine is for your yard. We talked about how to distinguish pines and we're gonna get back to that in just a minute. But we have some other, we got some other fires that we're gonna start before the hour's out and I'm gonna let you start them. So I'm gonna give you a match. You know, as we used to say, I'm gonna give you some match and some gasoline and you start a fire. Not literally. Don't do it in your yard. Hey, I did not say to do this in your yard. This is figuratively, we're doing this on the show. Funny thing. You know, there was a, we were, we were looking at some pine lands to purchase and preserve in North Baldwin County and in North Mobile County. And in both cases, the locals said, you know, if a bunch of conservation is burned by this, we gonna burn them out. We gonna burn them out. And I said, okay. As soon as we buy this land, I'm gonna bring you a can of gasoline and a box of matches. Hey, right. Some people will get that. So we started some fires this morning about pines and it's good to know about pines and it's good to know about how they're good for your yard and it's good to know about some of their vulnerability vulnerabilities too and lob lolly. And I've got some pictures. Most of the pictures that people have sent me this morning are probably lob lolly. Let me tell you a little bit real quickly about how to tell the difference in pines. Longleaf pine is the most distinctive and I'm gonna start there because when you look at a longleaf pine, it doesn't, it looks kind of weird because there are no twigs. That's the first thing that I notice. It's like every branch tip ends. It's as thick as your thumb. I mean, there's nothing that's like a pinky sized. There's nothing that's little thin branches. There are no twigs on, there are no twigs on a longleaf. Big thick branches and long needles coming out from those branches. Looks like pom-poms on the ends of the, ends of the branches. The, the, the needles don't cover, don't cover the branch. They're all right there at the tip and they're so long they kind of come out and lean over like a pom-pom would. See what I'm saying? There's some other things. There are other ways of distinguishing longleaf but that's it. It's just like these big, big branches with no tip, with no twigs, no twigs at all. The big pom-poms of leaves really quite distinctive and they self-prune readily. This is another important thing to understand and that means that with a longleaf, you won't see a lot of branches in the lower part of the canopy. They're mostly going to be concentrated in the upper part of the canopy as the tree matures. There's some other things to think about. But let's, that's a good key for the longleaf. La-blali is at the other end and the other thing I need to tell you about longleaf, of course, is that it's got really big cones and if you grew up in the south and you had to make turkey, you had to make turkeys for Thanksgiving out of pine cones. Did you have to do this? I did this. I remember this distinctly in Mobile. We made big pine cones and it was cool. The turkeys were cool because the pine cones were so super big and this was a big pine cone and longleaf has really, really large pine cones that will be as long as your hand in most cases and maybe even longer and really wide and they're really distinctive big pine cones. So that's the longleaf. La-blali is at the other end and La-blali, La-blali has much smaller pine cones. They're not shortly sized but they're smaller than your hand pretty consistently, smaller than your hand and not as long as your hand, La-blali pine cones. They also have prickles so La-blali pine, pine cones tend to have more prickles than slash and we'll get to that in just a minute but that's it and let me tell you something else. This is important. La-blali has three needles, they say perfascal but when you get a little cluster of needles, you know what I'm talking about? You get a little cluster of needles? Sometimes they'll have two or sometimes three. If you see consistently that those needles are in threes then you know that it is either a La-blali or a longleaf and I've already told you how to discover longleaf. It looks like it has no twigs. La-blali will have three needles but it will have lots, it'll be very twiggy and the branches will be all up and down the tree and the needles will be all over the tree and the needles are so short they don't have much bend to them either so they don't look like bomb bombs. There you go. La-blali slash is in between the two. Slash is going to have a cone that will be almost as long as your hand in many cases. It won't have a lot of prickles on the cone. That's another good way to tell. Slash. It will have needles that are in groups of twos or threes so on the same branch, on the same tree, you'll see needles that are in groups of twos, you'll see needles that are in groups of threes and that's a pretty good way to tell slash. La-blali tends to hold on to its pine cones for a long time. Slash and longleaf don't hold on to their pine cones for a long time so if you see a lot of pine cones in a tree, an old forester told me taught me that trick, you can bet that it's either a short leaf or a La-blali and short leaf is pretty easy to distinguish. So there you go. That helps. A lot of the pictures I've been shown this morning have been of La-blali. Is that a bad thing? No, no, no, not necessarily. Those are probably native La-blalis for the most part and they're probably a little stronger and they may be more resistant to disease attacks than some other trees. There may be some slash mixed in with them and there may be some longleaf even mixed in with them or shortleaf but most of the pictures I've seen this morning have been of La-blali. You can check the needles, you remember how I told you to do it. If you think you have La-blali, if I tell you I think your tree is a La-blali and you want to prove me wrong, then you go out and look at the needles on those trees and if you see the branches are consistently three needles, then you know it's La-blali unless it has really big cones and thick, thick branches. There you go. And if the needles are in groups of twos or threes, then you've got slash or you've got short, you've got slash or you've got shortleaf. So there you go. Does that help? You remember and all that? We could get back to it. And we're talking about diseases, we're going to talk about some diseases that are affecting trees this morning because Bill wanted me to talk a little bit more and I've had several calls David from has been talking about the fact that he's seeing a lot of hardwood trees. What we call hardwood trees are broadleaf trees dying, not just the pines in Alabama. We're going to talk a little bit about that. There's a guy who wants to know ants have invaded my okra. How do I keep that out? Is the invasion because of weakness in the okra? No. And it's always important to understand that when you start seeing ants in your okra, it's because we got fire ants. And of course you're going to be able to get rid of the fire ants in your yard, right? Well, good luck folks. You know, fire ants have been around for a long time and there have been a lot of efforts over many years to get rid of them and I haven't seen a lot of success because if you get rid of them in your yard, they're going to re-invade from the neighbor's yard pretty quick. And even it's even hard to get rid of them in your own yard, even if it's a small yard and the smaller your yard, the more likely you are to be re-invaded. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about okra and ants and why that's happening as soon as 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. Yeah, now Carol, that looks like a slash fine to me. If you're it's a blot, now I'm going to look at it again. It's hard to tell. See if you, Carol, sent me a picture of a pine. I think everything I've seen to this point has been lob lolly. Yeah, I, let's, Carol, look to see if you see any two-needled groups of two-needled. If you do, then it's a slash. If you don't, it's probably lob lolly. Let's, we'll talk about that. What else have we got this morning? Just a few things to think through here. Oh, we were talking about okra. Sorry, let me get back to that. So this is a problem I get questions about every year and I don't want to be glib about it because it's tough. And you know, as soon as I say, oh, well, here's how to fix it, then I'm going to get a problem in my okra and I'm going to realize it's not as easy to fix as I suggested. Here's the thing with okra and ants. I get ants in my okra virtually every year. So far this year, I've not got, I don't know why I haven't gotten them. It's kind of odd that I haven't seen them yet, but they'll show up. The reason that the ants are in the okra, there's one reason that they're there. Sometimes they're attracted to the, they seem to be attracted to the flowers and to the juices and the flowers, but mostly they're there because they're tending aphids. And there are aphids on the tips of those okra. And the ants are tending that and they're doing a little bit of damage in between and they're very annoying as you try to pick them off. They're probably not going to do a lot of damage to the okra itself. A lot of damage to okra that I used to attribute to ants. I don't think it's actually the ants. I think it's something else. I think you, but what's going to happen is you're going to try to pick that okra and those ants are going to bite you and that's going to drive you crazy. So you can use gloves. The other thing that happens is you got these, you got the aphids and they're up there milking. Yes sir, I'm telling you the truth. They're milking those aphids for well, how do I say this? Honeydew was the polite way that I'm supposed to say it. It's aphid poop and they're using that aphid poop because it's pretty sweet and it's got lots of minerals in it that they use and they take it back and they're milking those aphids and they're also protecting those aphids. So what do you do? Because you're not going to easily quickly get rid of the ants. Now I'll come back in just a minute, but you're not going to easily get rid of the ants. I just, by putting out a poison, I promise and you don't necessarily want to put out a poison around the place of your plants because a lot of times it can be translocated through the plants. It's a problem, particularly some of the really, really effective immediate ant killers. So you don't want to put that in your vegetable garden. I highly recommend doing everything you can to get rid of the aphids and one of the things you can do, and it works, I'm going to say it works, 75% of the time, is you can take a hose and spray the tops of your plants where the ants are clustered and where they're guarding those aphids. And you can wash the aphids off and it's going to reduce the number of ants that come to those plants. And if you do it once, you'll see a little bit of effect, but you're going to have to do it two or three or four times every time you go out to the garden to pick your okra. Before you pick your okra, go ahead and blast those okra plants with a little bit of water. Hard stream right at the top, you know, well, spread out a little bit, but just something you're trying to knock those aphids off. And it can work pretty well. It can work pretty well. If the ants are going after your flowers, it'll still work. And that's not going to generally be a big problem. The problem gets to be when you have a lot of ants that are tending aphids. So use that spray. What do you do about getting rid of fire ants? That is a long, long, long story. But a lot of people have had some success with something called SpinoSad. And there are some SpinoSad baits for ants that are pretty safe to use in your garden. SpinoSad. It's a bacteria and it's a good bait and I hear good things about it. I haven't used it actually, but I hear a lot of other people saying they've had good success. It takes a while for that SpinoSad to work. So just as a word of warning, you're probably not going to see, you know, you're going to have to wait out three or four or five or six weeks before you start seeing any significant effect from that SpinoSad, but it works over the long haul. It works over the long haul. And it can keep the ants a little bit at bay around your garden. You can try spraying around the base of your plants with the SpinoSad. I don't know how well that's going to work. I think you'd have to do it a lot. That's my opinion, but it can keep the ants out of your garden beds and a little bit at bay if you use that SpinoSad products. And you can look at various SpinoSad products, but I'm telling you for the immediate needs, spray the tops of those plants with water. It gets rid of the aphids and ants are also inside of the ochre fruit. So this is one of those freaky things where ants will occasionally go into fruit. It happens with eggplants, and it happens just bizarrely, and I see it happens in some places, and it doesn't happen in others. First time I've heard of them getting inside the ochre, so they're actually now eating the ochre. So, you know, I would say, in this case, try the sprays with the water to see if you can knock some of those ants off. And let's also try a SpinoSad spray around the flowers. Try SpinoSad spray around the flowers and where the ants are. And I think that may help. I think that may help. So try the SpinoSad. It's pretty safe to use. I would wash the ochre, but it's not really toxic to people. And just wash the ochre before you use it. But try the SpinoSad sprays. There are a lot of products out there. Monterey makes a SpinoSad spray. Try that one, see what happens. It's bizarre. Ants will sometimes attack fruit and just out of the blue. This first time I've heard that with ochre, Sean, by the way. I've heard it with eggplants. It's happened to me with eggplants. It drives me crazy. I've never heard it happening with peppers, but it just bizarrely, they will attack certain fruits. And then the next year, they won't do it. I don't, I can't even explain that. But I think in that case, maybe because it's not about the aphids, I think, and it's just about that they found the fruit appetizing. Try the SpinoSad spray, see if that helps. Origin of the name, Slash Pine. You know, Slash was an old Southern word that meant a thicket. It was an old word for a thicket. To the best of my knowledge. I don't know why Slash Pine came to be associated with a thicket, really. I'll have to look that one up. I mean, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to find it. But Slash was, it's had several trends over the years. It sometimes meant the leavings from a forest when you were going through and you were cleaning things out. That was Slash. But it also had an older meaning that meant thicket, if I remember correctly. And I guess some Slash Pine forest were thickets. Most of, excuse me, most of the original Slash Pine forest that I see now aren't thickets. And there's some great ones left. Well, they're a little shrubby, but not too bad along the marshes. I guess as the Slash Pine went farther inland and as you got it along stream beds, and the Slash Pine tended to stick along the stream beds, do you want me to reconstruct all this? I'm doing it. A Slash Pine occurred along stream beds, which is mostly where it occurred as it went farther inland. Those would be thickets. You would get all kind of shrubs in there and they would be pretty cool stuff. Some of it pretty rare. And so I think maybe that could be the origin. But I don't talk to those folks very often. You know, the people who made these names up, I just don't get to talk to them. I wish I did. I would like to know back in the 17th and 18th century. Let's call it the 18th century. When people started making up names like Slash Pine, I wanted to say, "Why you do that?" 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 251-343-0106 on FMTalk 1065. All right, welcome back. Gulf Coast Sunday morning, Alabama Sunday morning. We've got lots of conversations going on here. We had a conversation about Ochre. We're going to get back to Pines, apparently. Somebody said that Fred Nation used to say that Slash used to mean an open wet area. It could be. If that's the case, there really isn't a strong there isn't a strong etymology for that. I don't know. Let's assume the two words are related, slashing through something. That's the word that I most often heard growing up. When you were left with, when you slash through an area to clean out the understory, you called what was left, "slash," right? That was left over from the slashing. That was the slash. We call that, but after a while, as words tend to do, they kind of evolve. If you believe in words can evolve, I think they do, like many other things. They turn into something else, and in this case, the slash became the material even before you slashed it. I would hear locals talk about, "Oh, there's some slash in there." I don't know. Is there another word that means an area that looks like it's been slashed of everything so that it looks like an open pitcher plant bog, and there was the lob lollies, there was a slash growing there, slash Pines growing there? I don't know. Words. It's interesting. I love words. I love thinking about how they got to where they are. I think we don't really know how they got to where they are, in part because those folks don't talk to us anymore. The folks that made that up, they're bad about that, man. They just kind of clam up. Sad thing. Yeah, I was told that slash would go better on wet sites than longleaf, sure. And that's a good point. We're talking about Pines, and I will say for West Mobile and for many parts of Baldwin County, I highly recommend that you study longleaf because it's going to be the classic tree, and it's a good tree for you to think about. I always, if you're worried about hurricanes and you should be, you should be. You don't want a tree blowing down on your house. And so when you're looking at these Pines, one of the things you want to think about is making sure that that canopy is not too dense, and it probably helps to have somebody like Chris Francis, who's a really good arborist to come in and thin that canopy out just a little bit if it's gotten extra thick. And sometimes even longleaf can get extra thick because it's open grown and because it gets fertilized by people doing the grass and lots of other things. All of them, longleaf slash lob lolly, can all benefit from a thinning in the upper canopy. Clee Formwald used to suggest that to me, and I think it's doable. It's something very much to think about, and I think that keeps those hurricanes from leveraging those trees over. I will also say don't plant a tree right next to your house. Just don't do it. If you're going to plant a tree next to your house, make sure that its maximum height is under 50 feet. And make sure that the limbs aren't too heavy, because those are the kinds of trees that can do damage. And in fact, I think smaller trees are going to protect your house better than the longer, larger trees during hurricane. Just something to think about. But in the yard, out from the house, just a little bit, think about longleaf and how good it can be in west mobile and on the upper parts of Bowen County. But let me say, if you live in the wetter parts of Mobile, like Midtown Mobile, which used to be a a wet savanna habitat, and it still acts like it. It still acts like the old wet savanna that it was. Flat wet flatwoods, some people might call it. Slash pine does pretty well there, and particularly because the drainage has gotten poor. Slash pine does pretty well, and I've seen some very old slash pines that have survived many hurricanes in Mobile, and they're great trees in those situations. And I highly recommend them. Slash pine, if you can find a source for native slash pine, rather than improve slash pine, you'll do much better. Start small, don't start big, start with a small tree. They're going to grow very fast. They're going to grow very fast. And if you start with a big tree, and I mean by a big tree, a tree that's taller than your waist, you're going to run into some root issues that you don't want. But slash pine does much better in those areas, I think, than longleaf even. But after a while, if they're big trees, think about thinning the canopy. If you've got some concerns about big trees, big pine trees in your yard, you give me a call, let's talk about it. Let's talk about what thinning that canopy can do to keep from leveraging that tree and forcing it to break off or pulling it out of the ground, because in an open-grown situation, those canopies can get much thicker than they would naturally. All right, let's see what, let's see what we've got. Slash pine is named after the slashes. Swampy ground overgrown with trees and brush that constitute its habitat. Yeah, so that's kind of my original thing, is that it really is wet ground that's gotten thick, thick with bushes. And that's, you know, it'd be terrible to have to agree with wiki, but I do. Thanks, David, for backing me up with wiki. So yeah, it's, you know, we call the areas that we wanted to clean out, slash. And I think that's it. And slash pine grew in wetter areas where you tended to have fewer fires that would be the wettest areas where the fires were less common, because the water was standing part of the year when the fires moved through. And so you ended up with more shrubs in those areas. Sticker. It wasn't opened up by fire, like some of the other areas. That's it. That's it. I'm particularly in the uplands. Where would I recommend finding longleaf ponds to purchase? It can be hard to find. I just acknowledge longleaf pine are sold in big numbers for planting out. And there is no provision for providing smaller numbers of longleaf pines unless somebody's very interested in doing that. You're not going to find them reliably at a local nursery. And that's because, and certainly not, you know, dumned hippo and those kind of big box stores, it's, you're going to find them at mobile botanical gardens or at some of the botanical gardens locally. That's most likely the place and you don't want big plants. You want small plants. You want plants that are a year old for longleaf because that taproot is so big. That's the way to do it. If you've got, you know, one of the cooler things is if you've got longleaf and you want more, you need to learn how to look for the young longleaf and you need to understand the conditions in which they're going to likely germinate. And we can talk about that if you've got it. All right, let's see here. Barry's got to Bill, what are these? Barry, I'm going to have to look a little bit closer. I'll do that in just a minute and I'll call that picture up when I can look a little bit closer. Yeah, so slash pine, definitely. Of course, Sean knows that. Sean, the slash pine's going to grow much better on wetter sites. And that's why I'm recommending for midtown mobile. It's, it, they do better because of soil stay wetter and there isn't the depth because the water table's often so high there isn't the depth that allows longleaf to really anchor in well. And I don't, they just, longleaf just doesn't do as well in midtown on most sites in midtown as the slash pine does. But please, somebody call me and ask me about printing that, thinning those tops out. All right, so, so this is, this is good day from Gulf Shores. Bill, I don't know. I thought slash pine was named for slash the former guitarist for Guns N' Roses. You didn't make me laugh. You didn't make me laugh at all. There it is. So John, John, you know, I'm talking to you. Will we ever get, will we ever get longleaf seedlings back at mobile botanical gardens? I don't know. I just don't know. And it's, it's, it's a big thing. It's hard to do. Keelville used to do that for us. You remember? And Keelville's not around to do it, but maybe we can find somebody at, at some of the local forestry groups that are doing that are planting longleaf to, to, to lay out some longleaf forest so that we can have them for the October sale. And these are one year ceiling. That's all you need for, for longleaf. And they're going to be in a grass stage for two years. And then they're going to grow typically, it's about two years in a typical yard. And then after two years, they're going to grow three, six, nine feet the first year. It's amazing how fast they can grow that first year when they come out of that grass stage. It's, you know, it could be any of those numbers, but it's going to grow at least three feet, often closer to six feet. And I've seen nine feet out of grass stage in the first year in a really good situation where all the growth conditions are being met. So just one thing to think about is, is that they grow really, they jump really quickly, but you got to start small because they got a big, they got a big taproot. This is a problem with a lot of trees. And the reasons we can't have the best things in life, where plants are concerned, is because we want to grow them out to big sizes and nurseries. And that means trees that have big taproots that are firm and that are drought retolerant that are great for your yard, you can't get them because they don't grow well in pots to large sizes. So get over that. Just generally get over it. Can I grow a black walnuts in West Mobile? Not well, not well at all. I think I'm not saying you can't do it. I'm just saying I wouldn't, there's so many better choices. Walnuts will be somewhat from South Alabama will be somewhat tolerant of the heat in South Alabama. They're not going to like the soils as much. They tend to like really rich soils. And you're probably going to get a tree in your yard. They're probably better choices. I mean, I'm not saying you can't. I'm just saying they're probably better choices, better choices. Like now, Paul Paul's. Now that's something. That's something. Let's see what else we got here. Um, lots of pines. Did I, did I get to you about all of those, all of those pine issues? Did you understand what we were talking about with different kinds of pines? I did say I was going to talk about some of the problems we're having with other trees besides pines. We are having a big problem with pines now, mostly lob lollies, but it will spread to other pines. We'll talk about that when we come back. We're going to talk a little bit about what's happening to some of the other folks is some of the other trees as well. 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. Hey, welcome back. It's Gulf Coast Sunday morning. Wow, that happened quickly. So some great memories from Spring Hill in the 1950s, seeing long leaf taproot on the edge of a gully. The taproot was at least 20 feet long and mirrored the tree trunk for that length. And if you've ever seen a pig on the dryer soils in West Mobile, if you've ever seen a taproot for long leaf, it's immense. And once it gets, once that taproot gets in, it is well developed and it doesn't always get well developed. And we can talk about that. It's going to break off if you get a hurricane. It's going to break off way up in the canopy. It's not going to tip over because that it is so well anchored. And that's just, that's something to think about. So it's a really well anchored tree in West Mobile. Let's see, what else have we got? We planted a couple hundred, C.D. Carl says a couple, we planted a couple hundred long leaf pines up clear springs and they are coming along beautifully. Good, C.D., good to hear. Brendan Atmore got me a bundle of long leaf pine seeds. He thought they may have come from the prison. I was unaware that the prison was doing it, but Atmore has one of the largest long leaf nurseries around. And they grow lots of long leaf there and it's Isco. International Forest Seed Company is now the owner of that nursery. It used to be a state nursery. But it's now owned by Isco. And I don't think that was associated with the prison, but maybe I just missed that. Maybe I missed that. But we're going to, I'll pester people to see if we can get some more of those. There we go. We've got a caller. And Jarhead, you and Gene always take the last 15 minutes, but you got in on the early part of the last 15 minutes. So we might get this question answered. Well, if it's two short questions, Bill, and one of them is about something I know you love, and that's live oak. I have a couple in my backyard, which they're probably over 100 years old. And you know, I really don't have to worry too much about sending them out at the top because every time I get a storm in here, they thin themselves out a little bit. Right. But have you ever heard them referred to as hurricane deflectors? Well, I have made the case that they can be, and certainly they are. I think they work best at a large scale rather than as individual trees. But yes, I think any kind of tree canopy that's fairly stable is very effective in breaking up the wind of the hurricanes. The key is not to have those trees over your house. Exactly. Because you're going to lose some limbs as you have seen. You know, it's interesting about and I tell people, if you've got at somewhere around a 75 to 125 years old, live oak changes character. It ceases to be as dense. It's more open and more diffuse, and it catches the wind less well, and it also allows you to grow things under it. But most people can't wait that long. So there it is. I will say that we see a lot of, because of open-grown live oaks, tend to have some weak joints in some of the major limbs. So even though the tree may not go over in a storm, you can lose a lot of limbs, and you may lose those limbs even on a day. In fact, Cleve Formwald used to tell me, we see more losses of limbs on days when there's no wind. It's just amazing how often that happens. And Cleve had all kind of theories about why that was, but you'll have this quiet summer day. It'll be a little bit humid, but there's almost no wind, and you wish there was a wind, but a limb just suddenly you'll hear it in the neighborhood go blam. And it was just... I've heard that heard it many times. Yeah, and it just was a limb falling. Yeah. But my other quick question, and I will give you time to see if you can get somebody else on it. Across the street from me, there is a pine tree, and this thing is it's been here since before Frederick. It's straight as a board. I don't know why the power company has a harvest to this thing, because it would make a great powerful. But I've always worried about it falling toward my house, even though it's across the street. This thing is probably 150-foot tall. So, yeah, if it fell, it would probably get close to my house. But I would just wonder how deep do you think the taproot would be on that old pine tree? Well, if it's a long leaf, and it's in a dry area, not in Midtown, but in a dry zone, that taproot could be pretty deep. But there's no guarantee of that. So, one of the things to look at in terms of trees coming over from the roots, too, is where the root damage has been. If it's on the other side of the road, the root damage has been on the roadside, so it's more likely to fall the other direction, slightly more likely to fall in the other direction. It's hard to predict in a hurricane, but there it is. Look at the canopy, too, and if it genuinely is a long leaf, and it generally has a deep taproot, you still want to look at the canopy, because it's been growing in the open, and that canopy may be a little denser than normal, and you can send somebody up if you're worried about it, and just have them thin that canopy just a little bit, and you'd have to cooperate with your neighbor to get it done, of course. Well, it actually belongs to the city, and it's probably within 20 feet of a ditch. Yeah, and so, well, so express your concerns just to the city forester, and get, you know, say, look, I'm a little concerned about it. What do you think about it? Is the canopy too dense? Bill Finch said to me that he's worried that my canopy may be too dense, and to take a look at it, and get them to take a look at it. They've got a lot of things going on. Would they mind if you paid for somebody to do that work? No. And if you think it's to your house. But if it does follow, it's taken out power lines, communication lines, telephone lines, internet lines, and everything else that's right up on a power pole that's sitting about 10 feet from it. Yeah, and I guess the fact is, if we, yes, we try to make good decisions about trees. If we tried to take out every tree that was a potential threat, we wouldn't have many trees left in mobile. So, yeah, so it's going to be a tough call for them. But yes, I don't know. So, Jarhead, what you need to do next week is send me a picture of that tree. Let's just take a look at it real quick, and thank you for that. And, and Jarhead, are you, are you in West Mobile, mostly? Where are you? I mean, Sarah Lynn. Sarah Lynn. And so, are you on a hill in Sarah Lynn, or are you in some of the flats in Sarah Lynn? I mean, I mean, the lower parts of Sarah Lynn. So, we don't get the high winds that they get, say, five or six miles up to left road. Yeah, and I'm also kind of interested to see what that will help me determine what kind of tree it is. Why don't you send me a picture? Can you send, Jarhead, take a picture of that tree this week and send that, send me a picture of the tree next week so I can kind of get a sense of it. Can you do that? You do it with your phone and just text it to me just like you. Yeah. And let's look at it and let's get a sense of, you know, how much do I need to worry about this tree? And I can't guarantee you, but I'll give you an assessment. Okay. As to as to how much more work you need to do to think about that tree. All right, Bill. Well, you know, great spending and, uh, we'll get you next week. All right. Thanks. Thanks. All right, folks. It was good. Hope you learned something. Hope it was useful. We'll be back next week. You can take all the tea and china. Put it in a big brown, back from me.