FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
Plan Living w/BIll Finch 9.29.2024 The Rainy Season Ahead
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 Gulf Coast Sunday morning. It's in Alabama Sunday morning. We've got some clear skies. I got a, what do we call it, on the air, a posterior call. You know one of them calls. It was an accidental call from a friend of mine who ran the nursery called Woodlanders for many years in Aiken, South Carolina, and I said, "Bob, how are you?" He said, "Oh, I'm sorry." Posterior call, he said. And I said, "Man, it's terrible." He said, "Aiken's just wrecked." He said, "I don't have any power. We can't get around, barely. We have to drive to Camden to get gas," which means by the time you get the Camden you're probably out of gas, Aiken, South Carolina. And he said, "It's like nobody knows." And I'm hearing this from lots of places. I'm hearing it from my old school, where I went to college up in North Carolina in Swannanoah Valley. They're trapped. And you know, it's interesting. It's almost as if the media missed this in a big way. I'm not sure. I think maybe we all did. We all tend to have a tendency to miss this entirely and the thing was, who could have expected it? Well, the truth is we all should have expected it because everybody's been saying the weather service was saying, the National Hurricane Center was saying this rain is going to happen. And not only that, here's the other thing we're not paying attention to. People have been saying for quite a while now, people who really understand the weather, they've been warning, we're going to see an increase in these intensity of these events. And I want to talk about that this morning because it's something we all got to think about. We got to think about it in terms of our gardens. We got to think about it in terms of our houses. It's just amazing. And when you start seeing houses floating down the river, when you start seeing places like Biltmore Village, one of the most expensive places to run a shop, to have a house, when you start seeing that happen, you realize, maybe we're not paying attention. So I hope we're going to pay attention a little bit this morning to what's happening there. And thinking about what's happening in Western North Carolina, it's going to take a tremendous effort, a tremendous effort to fish those guys out of this mess. And not just Western North Carolina, the mountains of South Carolina, the sand hills around Aiken of South Carolina, all of that's in pretty bad shape, not to mention the coast, where if it had come ashore in a more populated area, it would have been lots of news simply because it wasn't an extremely populated area. The houses that were wrecked, the houses that were blown off their foundations, people ignored it. The rain, the water, the surge, it's something we got to think about a little bit more. We thought about it a little bit last week, we talked about it last week, but it's something we need to do when we plan on things with our houses and our yards. I'll tell you something, it's actually showing up. This is not, well, let me put it this way. You know, it ain't like it was when I was growing up. We have seen a 15 to 30% increase in the intensity of rainfall in the Southeast and depending on where you are exactly coastal areas or North Alabama, just almost, there's multiple ways of gauging it and we've seen a 15 to 30% increase. Now listen, let me tell you something, this is not rainfall, this is what you need to hear, it's not annual precipitation, it's the intensity of the rainfall when it comes. How heavy is that rainfall, how many inches fall in 18 to 26 hours? Those are the kinds of measures we need to be looking at for some of the problems we're going to be having going forward and we've already seen an increase 15 to 30% over when I was growing up, when I was born and now we're looking at a percent change with a mildest projection of around 40% or more in some parts of Alabama, somewhere 20 to 30% over the rest of Alabama increase over what we're seeing now. So we're going to see a lot more of this high intensity rainfall and we might not even see an increase in annual precipitation, so that means a lot more of our rainfall is going to be occurring in these high rainfall events, that means the flip side of this, it's going to be bizarre, is more dry weather, more droughts. So imagine trying to garden in that. You know it's already made me rethink, there were certain things you could depend on when I was growing up and that was is that October was going to be pretty dry most years, except when we had a hurricane and you were going to get a good dry out. It's not happening now, we've actually seen the biggest increases in rainfall, just generally in rainfall days, we've seen the biggest increases in September, October, probably early November throughout most of the country, huge increase in rainfall during that period. So I've got to start rethinking, gosh, how do I garden in fall, because I was counting on it drying out, that meant that the tomatoes and things that I had problems with because it rained too much in summer, maybe it's not going to work so well, maybe some other things are going to work so well, maybe I'm not going to be able to dry my beans on the stalk, maybe I can't count on that anymore, it makes a difference in gardening, it makes a difference in gardening, but it also makes a difference in where we live and how we live. And one of the interesting things I think in the Swanano Valley that I think about in western North Carolina, where so much of this flooding happened, in the in older days, even before when I was growing up, that valley was used for farming. And so, just left and forced, our pasture, and it wasn't mowed every day, it didn't have houses, it didn't have a huge concrete pad, it didn't have the Ingalls store warehouse in the middle of the valley next to the creek, which is massive, to the river, Swanano River. And so you didn't hear about the problems with flooding, because it didn't make a lot of difference. But now we've sort of forgotten, we're going to move back to nature, we're going to live along a babbling brook, and built more estates, well that babbling brook, you get this kind of rain, 25 inches of rain, 20 to 30 inches of rain hitting those mountain tops, flowing down those mountain slopes, you got a lot of problems, a lot of problems. I think there's some things we ought to be thinking about, because it won't just happen and build more, and it won't just happen at the same rate that it used to happen. The way we built, the way we have our houses, and the way the climate's changing, all that, who are you going to blame it on? When I was growing up, it was a dead gum hippies who did it all, right, dog barn hippies. We need to think about that, we need to think about who to blame it on, and figure that out as we move forward, but more importantly, we need to adapt. We're going to have to adapt, because these things are already in place already happening. We're going to talk about that, we're going to talk about gardening and all this, we're going to talk about rainfall, we're going to talk about where you find your plants, that's the subject we left untended last week. FM Talk 1065 with Plain Living for Alabama and the Gulf Coast, call 251-3430-106. Here again is your personal nature expert, Bill Finch. All right, welcome back, Gulf Coast, Sunday morning, Alabama Sunday morning. Just I'm super impressed with the rain, I don't know if you saw those pictures as the hurricane was moving off, if it had moved a little further west, we would have been looking at some of those images in Alabama, but it was quite remarkable when it drove up flooding Atlanta, flooding places south of Atlanta, making a mess in Valdosta, Georgia, and then if you haven't seen the precipitation analysis you should look at, you can actually go and look for precipitation analysis, call it the past seven days, and I want you to look at what happens when that rain hit the mountains, it was just amazing, it was incredible image, it looked like somebody threw white paint which is the highest intensity rainfall on the south faces of those mountains and on the east faces of those mountains and to some ground west faces and just intense rainfall and unbelievably intense rainfall, 25-30 inches in many cases and it has an effect and one of the effects was, I want to remind people there were three dams that seemed at some point, they had to evacuate people below those dams, these are not small dams, these are major dams, they are dams that when they break they cause problems well downstream, well downstream meaning many, many miles, hundreds of miles, sometimes downstream depending on what's below them, depending on the dams below them and it could have been catastrophic if one of those had let loose and sometimes you'll hear some of the old dam operators talking about cascades, don't ask them about cascades, you don't want to hear about it, it would be scary, it would be scary, we got to start thinking about these rainfall events, they are something that we'll all be seeing more of and so I talk about it a lot with the garden and it's something I want you to think about, we talk about how to deal with drought but a lot of our problems and most of the questions I answer every week really are about the fact that we're not thinking carefully about how wet it is here and what happens if you plant things too deep, if you don't have enough organic matter in your soil, if you don't have, if your soil doesn't drain and people say, "Oh I got sandy soil, it drains really well," well maybe not, probably not, in many cases it won't drain well at all and that's, we can look at that but that's because we've compacted those soils, we beat them down, we press those sandy soils to the point that if you were to try to drag us, they'd put a shovel in there during dry periods, during moderately dry periods, you couldn't get it in the ground and you think, "I got something at all, it's like clay and it's like concrete, well it's just sand and silt that's been heavily compacted." So we're going to have to think about that, we're going to have to work on that, it's most of our lawn problems, well, let me be fair, honestly the idea of using one grass in a lawn and one grass only and nothing but grass is a flawed concept and you're always going to have problems but people have bigger problems because their soil is so compacted and no matter what they planted there, no matter what kind of grass, no matter what kind of shrub or tree, they were going to have problems because the soil is so compacted so we're going to start thinking about those things, it's about accommodating this rainfall, accommodating rainfall, being prepared for excess rainfall which we're going to see more of, not necessarily on an annual basis but on a daily basis, these intense rainfall events and you know it's, you get these dry periods and you think, "Gosh, you know, I'm going to get six inches of rain, this is going to solve all my, this is going to, man, that's not unusual and mobile, right, five inches of rain in a day, not unusual." And he said, "We've got to solve all my drought problems." Well, you know what, that five inches of rain when it falls in one day, it ends up in the Gulf of Mexico pretty quickly, it doesn't end up in your yard because your yard can't accommodate it, your yard can't absorb it and so it's running into the gutters and so we're doing everything we can and so you're still going to be in a drought condition very shortly after these heavy rains. How do we deal with this? How do we open our gardens to the rainfall? How do we accommodate it so that it doesn't destroy things in the garden? That's the thing we talk about every week. In one way or another, it's an amazing thing and it's the thing I encourage you to think about really, really hard. It's how we're going to have to shape our gardens in the future, how we're going to have to shape our yards, how we're going to have to shape how we build our houses. I think people, a lot of the problems that are going to occur from this excess rainfall in terms of how we build our houses, people aren't thinking about that, nowhere. They're really not thinking about it, they're not thinking about, "Gosh, I need to have some way to throw this rainfall well away from my house so that it doesn't get under my foundation." How do we do that? How do we do that? It's a big question. How do I keep it from flooding my yard? It's really big. How do I keep it from affecting the wood? Steve wants me to talk about building fences and I think that's a good point. It can be a trick here and we should talk a little bit about that. I think I'll spend about 15 minutes talking about that on the show today. How do you build fences in an area that gets this much rainfall when we know that wood is so vulnerable to rot? Well, I guess you could put up a steel fence, but maybe not. I guess you could put up a concrete fence, but maybe not. You got to use wood, how do we use wood effectively in a climate like this? We actually produce a lot of it so it makes sense to use it, but how do we use it? Something we ought to talk about. Hey, listen, let's talk briefly about gardening. While I'm not getting text for some reason this morning, we'll figure that one out. Let's see if I can get anything going here. There it is. You just have to wake these guys up sometimes. What do you do about your garden? Let me talk about it. The water table in places like Mobile is incredibly high and even often in West Mobile because people are building on the edges of pitcher plant bogs, they're building in pitcher plant bogs. It used to be a pitcher plant bogs because we're not paying attention because we don't care because builders don't care. What that means is that soil doesn't drain well, it doesn't perk, and then what we do is we do everything we can to pound that soil so that it perks even worse. There used to be a thing in California they called double digging because they wanted the soil to drain and I think, you know, here's the problem with double digging, in a place like Mobile, double digging means you basically break down about a shovel's depth, say 10 to 12 inches, and then you set that aside and you dig even deeper, 10 to 12 inches, keep it in place and then put that soil back on top so that the top soil stays on top. It almost makes sense in a place like California in a dry place, but it doesn't even make sense in a place like Mobile because by the time you get down below that first shovel full you're at the water table most of the year. So what kind of excess drainage are you going to get? Not much. So we need to use the area that we have to absorb moisture as best we can. We're going to have to recognize that when we build soil, we need to build it up just a little bit, not too much, not doing crazy stuff like building it up a foot, not building it up two feet, it only needs, you know, an extra few inches of soil, even six inches of soil is really the maximum you need. It's going to make a huge difference in how those plants perform. And you do that with organic matter. You don't do it by putting up some kind of contraption that's got sides and building up a wall and putting all that in. You just add organic matter to your soil, it's just that simple. Everything more complicated makes it harder. Just add organic matter. What is organic matter? We talk about this every week. It's really important in a place that gets high rainfall. It's more important in those places and fortunately we produce a ton of it because we get so much rainfall. It's stuff like leaves. It can be stuff like grass clippings even as long as they don't have herbicide on them. All those things work. You're going to have to have a big volume. It's not your kitchen scraps, throw them in there. That's fine. But that's not enough. You've got to have a big volume of organic matter because you're trying to build that soil up two, three, four, six inches higher than what it is now. And that will make a huge difference in how you garden. If you plant next to your house, boy, you sure better be careful because that area is going to be super wet because all that water sliding off your roof is going right there. That is the most compacted place in your yard. The water can't move freely. It's going to settle right next to your house. I don't know what that means for your house, but I can tell you, it ain't good for your garden. Let's talk about what that means when you're putting a garden next to your house. We'll be back. FM Talk 1065 Home for Plain Living for Alabama and the Gulf Coast. Let's talk about living and growing in that deep south with Bill Finch. Call 251-34306. Hey folks, this is about, you know, we're talking about big rainfall events. We're talking about high rainfall events. There's a good chance that we're going to see one of those high rainfall events in Alabama. In the next two weeks, I'm not giving you a certainty, but I'm giving you a good chance. Maybe 40 to 60 percent chance that we're going to see a high rainfall event because there's another one of them storms developing in the Caribbean moving into the Gulf. We could see a lot of rainfall, so we need to be thinking about it. We need to think about what that means. It's interesting. People worry about the salt and what it does from the hurricanes and all these other things, but the big thing that's going to happen is that there's so much rainfall, it just kind of watches everything out, including the excess salts. We don't actually have a problem with salt buildup because we get so much rain and so consistently. We've got to figure it, but the problem is we do have problems with rain. I've got a picture of a yard here that someone says, "Oh, I've got a brown spot in my yard. What does it mean?" I notice that there's a dead tree right across the fence from it. I don't know what that means either. Brown spots can mean a lot of things. The way that one's developing, I might think it could be something like chench bugs. Though I don't know that we're really drawn enough to have a serious problem with chench bugs. I'll look that up. I hadn't really heard of a lot of problems with it. We'll have to look, and I can't tell from just seeing a brown spot. So many brown spots can be a problem. Centipede, gosh, anything could happen with centipede. It's so shallow-rooted. I just don't know. Maybe a closer picture or maybe what are we going to try? Maybe if you could dig the soil a little bit to see what you see, there's actually several techniques you can use to bring insects to the surface. I'll talk about that, but I need to see more than the brown spot because there's so many problems with centipede. Even more problems than you would have with things like St. Augustine. Everything has its problems, but when it comes to lawns, but centipede got a lot of problems. I can't tell. Wish I could. I need a little more information. Maybe some closer pictures of the grass. It helps me to know if it's an insect or if it's a tropical web worm or something else. If you're seeing if you can pull the grass up easily or if it's just the blades that seem to be dying off. Can you check that out? Just check it out. See if it's just the blades and the roots stay intact, but the blades come off, or if you can pull the roots out easily. That's a good cue that something's chewing on the roots, and we need to look at that if you can pull the roots out easily. If it's the blades, I might think, "Well, probably a fungus," and probably it's already done its worst, but we'll have to see and get a little more information there. Here's a thing. I want to talk about rainfall, and I want to talk about the problems it causes, not just the funguses in our yards, not just the fact that lawns don't perform as well in this climate as they do in maybe some other climates because of the high rainfall, not just the fact that high rainfall causes more weeds in yards, which is why we have to be extra protective, and mower yards as high as we can because you want those grasses to shade out the weeds. You also don't want the weeds to see the sunlight at all, and you also don't want to overwater these lawns if they do get a chance to dry out, let them dry out, they can use a couple of weeks of drying out without irrigation. Sometimes three weeks, sometimes four weeks, it can actually help, so what you want to do is you want to depend on natural rainfall as much as possible, and only supplement when natural rainfall isn't occurring, say, over, let's say, a four-week period. That's where you want your lawn to be. You can't get started that way. You have to water it a lot. That's one of the reasons why we say started in fall, started in winter, if you live in southern Alabama, do not start it in spring, do not start it in summer, because you're going to have to water the steam out of that, and you're going to cause all kind of diseases. Be thinking about that water, what that water does in terms of diseases, but I said we're going to talk about what happens next to houses. Here's the thing, I keep stressing this, do not feel like your house, it's like, you know how, oh, I'm trying to think of some example, you know how young kids that kind of hang on to their parents, right, they're afraid to get out in public, they're afraid that, oh, something's going to get me. This is what it reminds me of when I see those shrubs slapped up against a house, and in fact, that's the worst place for a shrub to be, worst place for tree to be, worst place for flowers to be, the first three feet around your house are going to be a huge problem. Inevitably, inevitably, they're going to be a problem, because you're going to have extremely compacted soil, you're going to have poor drainage, it's just inevitable. The builder wanted it that way, he did it that way on purpose. You're going to have chemicals leaching from the house, if you have an older house, you're going to have lead paint from the windows falling on the ground, and from the house itself, it's going to be a high concentration lead paint there, sorry, it's true. That's any house built before say, 19, what year was that, about 1976, 1975, lead paint was going to be an issue. So you've really got to, you really want to not plant next to the house, and rainfall is one of the big things, because it's going to be coming off your roof, your roof, your gutters are not going to accommodate it. In fact, in this climate, I almost wonder whether gutters are a good thing at all, because you'd have to have a super-sized gutter to manage the kind of intense rainfalls we have, and that means water backs up over the gutter and gets on the edge of your roof and causes damage there before falling right on the ground, right underneath the roof. You might as well not even have a gutter, but you do have to think about where that water is going, and you do have to move your plantings outside the drip of that gutter. And in the best case, that's going to be three feet, but you know, you just can't plant next to a house. Now let me tell you what happens when you don't plant next to the house. Your garden grows, and nobody notices that you've planted out from the house. Forget about that first three feet. Nobody's going to see it. Nobody's going to notice it. The only thing they're going to notice is, gosh, this garden is growing so much better. Step off three feet from your house. That's a first simple thing to think about when you're planting your yard. Your bug guy, the guy who is out there trying to poison all your bugs, which you will never successfully do without poisoning you at the same time, he's going to want, if he's doing it right and he's setting up bait stations, he's going to want a clear space where the plants aren't touching the house, where he can walk around the house, where we're not pushing stuff against any framing that might be wood that can allow termites to move in, or that keep it too shaded or too wet. Just something to think about. We live in a high rainfall climate. We're going to see more high rainfall events start thinking about rainfall when you're building your house, when you're building your garden. Come out from the house just a little bit more. Do that just a little bit more. Let's see what else we've got here. We did have, and it's an interesting question in this high rainfall environment. What do we do about building with wood? Steve brought that up, and I think it's an interesting question. The problems with saying, "Oh, well, wood's going to rot, let's don't build with it." You got to find an alternative, and there aren't many. Not at the scale we use, and every other material has big problems. They're super expensive. If you're building your house out of steel, you're going to have big issues with, it's going to be colder and hotter. It's just that steel is going to conduct cold and heat really well. It's really hard to insulate a house like that. It can be really difficult, really hard. It's pretty expensive too. There may be other problems with building with steel, but if we had to build every house with steel, we wouldn't build many houses at all. We're already having a hard time keeping up with the number of houses people seem to want. It's just not going to work. Well, we could build it with concrete blocks, center blocks. They often do that in Florida, that has its own problems. You're not seeing that as much as you used to, and a lot of people don't particularly like that, and you're still going to have to put wood in there somehow. What about building fences? Well, it's an interesting problem. A lot of people say, "Well, put that wood in concrete." Concrete is not exactly resistant to moisture, and you're not going to ever have a problem with the perfect seal between the concrete and your wood, so water is going to be pouring in around the wood itself. You're not going to have a perfect seal that keeps termites and certainly rot and other types of rotting stuff out of the concrete. In some cases, concrete may actually increase the rate at which wood rots. It certainly doesn't decrease it, and I also think that concrete, the way it's poured and the way most people treat it, it just kind of wallows around because once that soil gets really lubricated by our high rainfall events, even concrete tends to move around unless you put it really, really deep. I think wood fences can work really well. I guess you could put, the only thing we could do really, the only thing we could do different is to put concrete and put a steel peg in it, or a steel screw, and then, but boy, by the time you build a fence doing that, you spend a ton of money. It's really hard, and I'm still not sure if that fence needs, because you'd really have to brace it really high without that. So, we're basically back to fence post, and we've got to think about how do we have a fence post that is really resistant to rot. Unfortunately, the industry doesn't think about that very well, but I think treated wood is going to be our solution, and we need to make sure that we use the right kind of treated wood. Thank goodness we're not using the old arsenic compounds. We'll be back. 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 FMTalk1065. All right, welcome back, it's Gulf Coast Sunday morning, it's an Alabama Sunday morning. Who is this, is it John sending me, I'm trying to remember John, John is sending, oh, this is John sending me stuff from the longleaf. So beautiful stuff John, of course John, I don't need to tell John what all these things are, but of course a beautiful tephrosia, devil's shoestrings, the flowers, those magenta red flowers don't seem, so well, they do seem a little devilish, I guess, they're beautiful, and a beautiful, beautiful obelia, maybe glandulosa, that beautiful ruelli, a wild petunia, just beautiful stuff, and what was that when, oh, I didn't mean to do that, but I'm just trying to look at all of John's pictures, because they're so beautiful, little, little, one of the co-malinas, neat stuff John, I'm going to keep looking through them, I hope, I hope all your folks in Georgia are okay, yeah, it's, we're talking about rainfall, and we're talking about what to do about it, maybe it's a subject that we'd rather not talk about, but I really think, if we, here's the thing, if I could get folks to think about rainfall and what it does to their yards, and how to deal with it, that'd be 90% of the questions I answer, and you know what? You wouldn't have to call me anymore, you wouldn't even have to listen to me for two hours on Sunday morning, just an interesting thought, so there is a virtue in thinking about this this morning, and I want you to think about it, what do you do about heavy rainfall, because we're going to have more of it, we're going to have a lot of it. The rainfall that occurred in western North Carolina is the kind of rainfall that really only people in Mobile can appreciate, and Danny, oh boy, does anybody remember Danny? And what that was like, it was a 35th or 7 inch storm I think, it just kind of sat there for days, it was amazing, I actually remember during Danny, I had an old stouter, I don't even know how it held together, it was pretty old, 14 foot stouter, and a really terrible terrible old Johnson engine, it barely ran, but I would drive down, I would ride down roads in my boat, during Danny, I tried to do it, I couldn't go very fast with that motor, so I didn't create a lot of wake, but it was absolutely amazing, places that I had driven down, for days I was using my boat to actually see and photograph and document the damage for the newspaper, when I was working for the newspaper back in those days, really an amazing kind of thing to think about that much rainfall, it can happen again and we need to be prepared for it, we need to be prepared for it in terms of where we build our houses, we need to be prepared for it too, in terms of how we build our gardens and how we build those houses. Once we've decided, gosh, this is a safe place, this is a safe place, safe places, what is a safe place, you know, I'm thinking gosh, people say, well, there's never been a flood here and they point me to a house that's probably 50 years old, 60, 70 years old, but things have changed a lot in that time and we're seeing a lot more rainfall now than we used to and we're seeing a lot more runoff than we used to, those two things are not the same, the rainfall is increasing in intensity and the amount of runoff that occurs regardless of how many inches you get, the amount of runoff that is occurring, it doesn't have anywhere to get absorbed, it's increasing dramatically too because of, well, look at how we're building, look at where we put places, houses and places where once, even in an agricultural field, the water could perk in now, it can't because there's a roof there, there's concrete there, there's a driveway there, all that water goes somewhere and it goes in other people's yards, honestly, that's the classic case in Midtown Mobile, people would build their house up, build a little area up so that it would be better drained and then the yard next door would get more rainfall and they would have to build it up and then the yard next door to them, it doesn't keep working after a while, we've got to think about how to accommodate this rain in a better way, we can do it better with our yards, we can absorb a lot more moisture in our yards if we think about how to do that and that means cracking the soil so that we get as much water penetration in that first six to 12 inches as possible, that's a good thing, that's a great thing and it's really important and we need the tools to do it, rotary tillers don't do it, they allow the soil to collapse into a tighter, denser mess than you did when you put the rotary filler on it, that's true, adding organic matter helps, cracking helps, these are all things we need to think about and it's the things that I've really repeatedly emphasized because I've lived in a place that gets a ton of rainfall all the time, something to think about, we're going to be talking more about it, so Jim and Georgetown, in a great case, something to think about, concrete never fully cures Jim says, therefore moisture will always be present regardless if there's good seal between the concrete and the wood, yes, it does, it absorbs moisture, if you don't believe me, slabs absorb moisture, they do, that's one of the reasons why people put a plastic sheet under that slab before they pour the slab and what you hope when you pour a concrete slab is that it's so dense that it takes too long for the moisture to move up to it, but still that happens, center blocks, gosh, do they absorb moisture, they absorb moisture and wicket right up to the house, these are these are things you got to think about, so concrete isn't a perfect solution to all this rainfall either, we've got to have really important ingenious ways of thinking about how do we deal with, how do we deal with this moisture, if you're using wood, if you're using wood for your fence, you got to make sure that you're using the right wood for it, I wish we grew wood and I think about this all the time, I've thought about it for decades now, how could we grow wood that is naturally resistant to the rot that we have, there are woods that are, red cedar is pretty rot resistant, black locust is probably more resistant, o sage orange is even more resistant, I don't know why, we don't, mulberry is actually amazingly resistant too, we could be using woods that are more, naturally more resistant to moisture and probably in many cases they would be as resistant to rot as some of the treated wood that we have, but we just don't grow at its scale, could we grow at its scale, I don't know, perhaps, maybe, nobody's trying, we're still working with old lob lollipine as the wood of choice and treating the stew out of it, is that treatments bad, now the treatments are not so toxic, it used to be they were pretty toxic, I feel like they're probably pretty safe now for humans and for wildlife they're not going to create a problem, I don't think, I don't think, in our water supply, we'll be back to talk about that a little more. 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. I have to think about the rain, because I have to think about the rain, it rains a lot in Alabama, we get more rainfall really than any other state, no state, I mean there's no place in Alabama, if you all hadn't heard me say this before, there is no place in Alabama that doesn't get almost twice as much rainfall as the city of Seattle, every place gets more rainfall, considerably more, at least 50% more on an average basis in the city of Seattle, and we think Seattle is wet, we get a lot of rainfall, places like Mobile clearly get twice as much rainfall as the city of Seattle, places like Northeast Alabama, they get twice as much rainfall as the city of Seattle. Isn't that amazing? It's really astonishing to see that kind of rainfall and to think about what effect it has, but we need to start thinking about it more, I just alerting you all, nobody likes for me to talk about these things, nobody likes for me to talk about hurricane summer, but we're in the midst of hurricane summer still, we've got another thing brewing in the gulf, it's gonna get here very soon, it's gonna affect our yard, it's gonna affect our houses, we need to think about it, we need to think about where we build, I want to say quickly, if you're looking at insurance maps and you say, oh okay, I'm not in a 100 year floodplain and so I'm safe, or worse, you look at those insurance maps and say I'm in a 100 year floodplain and I don't care, it hadn't flooded here before, oh my goodness, those 100 year flood maps are pretty conservative, that is to say, well, maybe that's the wrong way to say it, those 100 year flood maps don't really account for the kinds of floods you're gonna see on a basis more frequent than 100 years, even if they were right you could have, you could have 100 year floods back to back, you could have them three years in a row, that happens sometimes, these are probability events and they're not based on good data, because we don't have data over many hundreds of years to really back that up, and even if we did, the way it's calculated sometimes is kind of crazy, so there are people who've done them try to do a better job of assessing it, please be careful when you build, please be thoughtful about where you build, if you're building on the coast and you're building anywhere on the coast, how do I put this, within less than 20 feet in elevation, you got a big problem, you got a big problem, you better be thinking about it very carefully, you certainly don't want to build your house on grade in a situation like that, because those areas are going to be very prone to high rainfall events, but even in areas above 20 feet of elevation, we can see big problems with storm surges, because that storm surge can push water back up creeks, even into neighborhoods in midtown, please watch, please be careful, please be thoughtful, and please think about what these high rainfall events are going to mean to where you build, how you build, where you build, even in northeast Alabama, oh man, some of those valleys, some of those places around Birmingham, when we get those huge rainfall events, that water, it builds up in those valleys, it can cause tremendous damage, something we got to think about very carefully, all right, you've heard me say it, give me a call, let's talk about your yard, let's talk about what rainfall happens in your yard, let's talk about how to deal with rainfall in your yard, that would be really fun, if you've got an area that stays really wet, what are you going to do about it, how are you going to deal with that, let's talk about that, I never get that question, you know, and it's the question everybody should be asking, gosh my yard stays really wet, what do I do, what can I plan here that really works, how can I manage this that really works, it didn't got to be a long folks, here's some great questions this morning and we got a couple of subjects we're going to get back to, but here's a good one, I have some Acre and Squash and Summer Squash I've been growing under insect netting, do you think the squash vine boars are done for the year and is it safe to remove to allow pollinators, well there's two questions there, like one is how long can you go without pollination, and you could go a little further if you did hand pollination but that's a pain and you've got big squash, I mean that squash is bursting, busting out the seams of your cover and it's great, so this person was really smart, they covered their squash with insect netting and it works, because squash has got to be pollinated, that means we need insects, that means the insect cover doesn't work anymore, what do we do, there are a couple of generations of squash vine boar in the south, I think in general I think they taper off and fall, I think that the populations of squash vine boar in fall do not seem to be as bad as they are earlier in the year, but the south is a different place, I can't guarantee you won't see squash vine boars, but I've encouraged people to think about it and to try it because I've had some success, I've seen fewer problems with the squash vine boar the later in the season we get and it may be time that you can avoid it, I can't guarantee it, but I think you might have a better time of it now, so you can take the cover off, just watch for them carefully, you know what to familiarize yourself with the squash vine boar moth, that can help, there's another thing you can do, if you want to give it a try, is there yellow sticky traps that there are traps designed to trap squash vine boar, they're attracted to those traps, you might try some of those, they won't get rid of the squash vine boars, but it will allow you to monitor whether they're still active, and that might give you some comfort, but here's the problem, at some point very soon, in fact I'm already, do I already see a squash blossom under there, I think I do, you got to open that thing up, regardless, or you're not going to get any squash, or you're going to have to hand pollinate every squash, which could be a bit of a problem, so open it up, and let us know what you see, I think it's time to do it, and I think it's time to risk the fact that the squash vine boar populations are declining, again there are going to be many fewer, it's going to be much easier to handle, and look for that, if you're out during the day, look for that squash vine boar moth, which is very colorful, look for it moving around your squash vine boar plant, look it up, so you'll know, so you'll know, and then you can look for the eggs on the stems in other places, but I suspect, I suspect their numbers are going to be much lower right now, and we're not going to see the kind of egg laying frenzy that we see earlier in the year, these guys are going to be figuring out how do I over winter at this point, that's what I, that has been my observation, I can't say it's absolutely consistent, because a lot of people have worked with this in the south, you're now working with it, you'll be able to tell us. Good policy to think about how to, how to deal with the squash vine boars. John Olive, what do you think? Do you think there's any credence to the idea that that squash vine boar populations are dropping in fall? I think there is some life cycle evidence that that occurs, I think there is some practical evidence that that occurs, but I'm not ready to guarantee it, because I haven't, as John says, done a double-blind study. I don't have a null hypothesis on this, I just am making some observations and observations can't guarantee what something's going to happen every year. We'll be back. Welcome back to Plain Living for Alabama and the Gulf Coast. Questions on conservation, natural history and gardening? Talk with Bill Finch. Call 251-343-0106 on FMTalk1065. Welcome back, it must be, I've got to guess it was the Georgia Alabama game and the people are still hung over, but feel free to give us a call this morning. Feel free to send us a text, we're getting a few of them and let's talk about what you want to talk about. Listen, I have got plenty of things to talk about too, and some variants, John Olive sent me some beautiful pictures this morning. John, I hope you don't mind me mentioning your name, of the Longleaf area at Mobile Botanical Gardens and they're really beautiful things. It's a beautiful tefrosia, the devil's shoestring, the beautiful wild petunia. If you don't know what a wild petunia looks like, it's absolutely beautiful. I think it's, this color is really, I think, puts a lot of cultivated petunias to shame. It's a beautiful plant, a beautiful butterfly pea, that's the, not the spurred butterfly pea, but the other butterfly pea. Beautiful, a blooming out there. If you haven't seen one, they're really, really cool, typical Longleaf plant. I see them a lot in Longleaf. What else did you have? Oh, beautiful, some beautiful day flowers, just a whole series of beautiful things that John sent me pictures of that are blooming right now and some things, John, the picture is a little small, so I can't tell. I think one of them is a euphorb. Is that a little euphorb with the white flowers all over it? I forget the name of it, but I think it is a euphorb. Really beautiful right now, blooming. I can't see it up close, so I can't quite tell. But just beautiful stuff, beautiful stuff that John sent me pictures of. And you know what, you don't have to go to John's yard to see it. You don't have to go to someplace, obscure to see it. All you have to do is go to Mobile Botanical Gardens. These things are blooming right now in the Longleaf. It's a great time to walk through the Longleaf, to see those flowers rising as the butterflies descend on them. The hummingbirds are going to be coming down towards the coast now. They're going to be reconsitrating along the coast. You're still going to see lots of hummingbirds here. You're actually going to see some of the hummingbirds we call Western hummingbirds will begin to arrive in larger numbers now, and we'll begin to see some of those moving across the Gulf coast looking for those flowers down in South Alabama. The warblers are beginning to move through in North Alabama, in large numbers. Birds are getting around, moved around a lot by these hurricanes. We even had some frigate birds and falcons occurring in various places in North Alabama because of the hurricanes. A lot of bird movement right now. A great time to be in the woods, to see the birds coming through, to see the insects and the butterflies coming through, to see the flowers in bloom, try out Mobile Botanical Gardens. Now, cue up my suggestion. You know, at one point, I was a director at Mobile Botanical Gardens because I believed places like the Botanical Gardens are critically important to helping us understand how where we are and how we live there, how we garden there. And they were also critically important to us finding plants that are going to grow along the Gulf coast. And I'll tell you that it's frustrating for me on the show because there's so many plants that I know will grow great in your yard, and then I can make a great suggestion for. And I know that you're going to think you can go to Home Depot and Lowe's and that they're going to care what grows in your yard and you're going to find it there and you're going to go and you're going to find it ain't there. It's pretty rare that you will find a plant that grows really well, particularly perennials, over the long haul, or shrubs, at your local Home Depot or Lowe's because they don't know what they don't they don't have a clue what grows in Mobile. They don't even care. They don't even want to have a shopping policy that says, okay, Mobile's a very different city than Birmingham, it is. And things are very different here than they are in Birmingham. And so we need to have, they don't do that. They don't, it doesn't fit their business model. And so you've got to go to your local nurseries, but local nurseries are constrained too because they are, you know, how they going to know what to get in, they've got to make a living and you're not necessarily super well educated about what grows on the Gulf Coast or neither is a lot of the population. So how are they going to know what to get in and how are they going to convince you to buy it because, well, let me tell you, this is where the places like the Mobile Botanical Gardens can be very useful. I don't work there anymore. I am a still very much a believer in the potential of places like Mobile Botanical Gardens to change the way you see where you live. That should be their mission to help you understand it and adapt to it and to provide you, let's just get down to the brass tacks of right now, the plants you need to grow well in your yard. And I get, well, this comes up every Sunday, I think, and I say, gosh, this would be a great plant and they'd say, I can't find it. Well, of course you can't. These are native trees that grow very well here, but we've seeded the whole market to Home Depot and Lowe's. And now, so what are you going to do to ensure that Mobile Botanical Gardens and your local nurseries supply these plants? Work with your local nurseries. Your locally owned nurseries, Home Depot and Lowe's are not locally owned folks. Work with those nurseries to find the plants for you. Bend over backwards with them to get them started. That's what you're going to have to do. It's good for you. It's good for everybody else to do that. And work with the Mobile Botanical Gardens. The Botanical Gardens can afford to take more risks than a retail nursery can. Maybe I said that the wrong wrong way. It is part of their mission to take risk that retail nurseries can't necessarily take. And so they're going to, they can, if they're fully supported and if they have your support, they can get plants in. Whatever plant you want, really, there's some great places. Superior trees is a great place to get many of the trees that we've talked about, but they're a wholesale nursery. And they're in Florida. And you'll have to, we'll have to bring in a shipment to the Mobile Botanical Gardens, but you can get those beautiful trees we talked about, like Silver Bell, from Superior Trees. You can get, there's some great nurseries in Louisiana still that are producing a lot of those great native trees. You can get them in from there and to some degree, some of the nurseries in Mobile are still producing those. But you're going to have to be involved with Mobile Botanical Gardens to make sure those trees get purchased. Now I will tell you that places like Mobile Botanical Gardens, they're getting ready for the fall sale. They have a limited, they have a limited budget, they have a limited number of people who can work on it. And they may not have the plants you want this year. If they don't, you need to get involved because it's going to be on you to help get those plants to be on the plant buying list. Say gosh, I really want to be on the plant buying list. I want to know what it takes to get these plants in and I want to do everything I can to help. And we need more people doing that. This is really, really important for you as a gardener. And it's important because as I say, we get a lot of rain and folks that rain isn't going to stop. It's not going to stop. We're going to get a lot more heavy rainfall events and we're going to have to have the plants that are really well adapted to those conditions. A lot of the trees we plant are not well adapted to those conditions or to the strong conditions along the Gulf Coast. So we've got to think about that. Where are we going to get those trees? It's true. But it's also equally true even in places like Huntsville and Birmingham and Montgomery. We're not getting the plants that grow well in those environments. And we're going to have to enlist our local botanical gardens. I think Birmingham does a pretty good job of it. But it could do a better job and if it had your import. Huntsville, I'm not sure they're thinking about it as much as they used to. They don't have their own propagation anymore. And they don't have as many places to buy from as they used to. Time to get involved with Huntsville Botanical Gardens and get them back to thinking about not just weddings, but plants. Yeah. A lot of botanical gardens get stuck on weddings. I'll tell you. And that's fine. It's a good supplemental source of income. But what you really need is somebody who can help you garden. That's what botanical gardens are about. And that's what they need to do first and foremost. Not the big elaborate buildings. That's not what it's important. It's those gardens. And how do they work for you? How can they help you? Get involved in your local botanical gardens. You want to start in the local botanical gardens? You have no idea how much work it is. You have no idea. But we already have some established in places like Mobile and Birmingham and Huntsville. Please take advantage of them. Please get involved. Please remember that botanical gardens are about gardening. And they're about helping you garden. I just want to say that. I can't tell you how important that is. How important that is for your gardening survival. All right. Let's see here. I don't have to explain why pickleball harms people. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. But I am given a picture of some grass that is dying. And we're going to look at it a little bit closer. A little bit more closely. Looks like centipede. We'll see here. 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 251-3430-106 on FM Talk 1065. Okay. Yeah, that's a just down here in that music. So listen, we've got a couple of pictures and of grasses. I am not sure whether they're going to be connected with a caller. But we're going to go to our caller. For Sharon, I'm listening. What's up? Sharon, you there? Oh, Sharon. Hey, I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yes. Now I can hear you. Everything's fine. Okay, I sent you two pictures of a little clump of green grass growing in a in the middle of a dead spot of St. Augustine. And you said something a few weeks ago about the wisdom of having diversity of grasses in the lawn. And that little grass doesn't appear to have any negative characteristics. And I wondered about the wisdom of just letting it stay there and grow. I don't know what it is because it seems to thrive where the St. Augustine can't. Yes. So, interestingly enough, I think that is centipede grass. One of the things I noticed in your picture, and this is an important thing to think about, is up in the upper right hand corner, there is a little piece of something I would call asphalt. Is this right next to a driveway? It's next to the street. Yeah. So, one of the things about areas like that is it can be very stressful on a lot of grasses. It could be that in that small area, how big is the area? Is it just right along the street itself? Oh, no. It's about 50 feet along the street. No, about 40 feet along the street, I guess. Right. How deep into your yard does it penetrate? You mean the dead part? The dead part. Oh, it goes about five feet into the yard where the St. Augustine is struggling. Right. So, here's, it's a very stressful situation. And I don't think it's, it could be a disease called take all. It's stressful for any grass. It can be particularly difficult for St. Augustine. And, and what you have is centipede. Centipede's going to have its own weaknesses. I think it's recovering now that you're probably getting more, more rain. It's not going to be perfect either in that situation. So, I'm not going to encourage you to, I don't want you to think that, oh boy, this centipede is going to take over that whole area. Probably next year, as soon as the drought conditions get severe, the centipede is going to have problems. So, it is good to have more than one type of grass in a yard. It's not a problem. Here's my suggestion. Are you mowing? How, what is the, what is your mowing height there? Okay, my lawn mower will only go as high as four inches. And that's what I mowed. That's great. Yeah. So, that'll, that's very good. And that, that really helps. One of the other things that can help along a driveway or a, or a road like that where the drainage changes next to the road for a lot of reasons. Oftentimes, it's more compacted there. It is, the drainage is poorer. It dries out more quickly because it's compacted. And so, it's a very stressful and it's hot that, that, that, that pavement is transferring all that heat it's absorbing to the surrounding ground. It's just hot. So, it's a difficult process. One, there are a couple of things you can do in that situation. You can use, you can crack the soil to with a fork to make it, to make it a little better. And do you know what I mean by cracking with a fork? Can I tell you what I mean? Yes, I do know you put it into the soil and then just lean back. Hey, you got it. And sometimes you'll have to wiggle it in next to the concrete. And I just, it's amazing what wiggling does. Just kind of wiggle your hand as you're pushing down with your foot. It'll insinuate it into that soil and then you can just lean back and crack it. That will make a ton of difference there. It may not solve all the problems, but it'll solve some. If you continue to have problems there, I don't think any grass is bulletproof in that situation, any conventional grass. Monkey grass, however, may be more, more appropriate for that situation. It may do better there if you want to just mow it right up to the street. And it may do better in that situation than regular grass. But I think definitely cracking it. It is interesting that the centipede survived that. Do you see a lot of patches of the centipede or just a few? That's the only one I see. Yeah, I would say that's the lucky centipede patch. But it's a lawn. It's next to the pavement. I don't know how long it's going to be lucky. It's already showing some signs of chlorosis. So I think it's going to have a difficult time as well. But just you're going to, that soil is going to be really bad next to the roadway. And that's why you're having problems. Crack it just a little bit. Are any vehicles driving on that patch of soil? Not at all. Should I water more frequently that portion? Yeah, and here's the problem. Not necessarily. The problem is that it's a double problem next to the road. Think about this, and this is good for everybody to listen to. When soil gets compacted, what that means is that about three to seven inches down, there's a hard pan. It's just hard as it can be. And that means water doesn't penetrate below that. So that means when you water extra, you're getting all this buildup of moisture right there next to the roots, which drowns the roots. And actually because that water stays around and doesn't drain, it actually creates problems for the grass roots when it's wet because it creates situations in which root rot can occur more readily. And then ironically, when it dries out, that dries out more quickly than anything else. And so it's more susceptible to drought, particularly because the roots have already been rotted by the fact that the water level stayed so high when it was wet, and we go through both of those periods, and both of them are operating. So if you simply water more, you're prolonging the chances that you get brought. That's why I'm saying cracking the soil makes a big difference. Now, if you crack the soil, if you crack the soil, it wouldn't hurt to go back and water that this fall. If we go through a drop here, if we're getting normal rains, I wouldn't worry about it. But just crack it and see if that doesn't help. It will help, it will help those spread and crack it and then just lightly tamp it back down. Don't, don't lean back really hard. You just want to crack it just a little bit because you don't want, you don't want the soil to be really uneven there, but it'll, it'll even out over winter. And I think that's going to help because then the water can penetrate more deeply, and that means there's a reservoir of water that when it gets dry, the grass can call on it, but it doesn't concentrate around the crown so you don't get the rots that develop around the crowns. So it, it works in your favor in both, both directions, but I don't think it needs more water. I think it just needs a place for those roots to absorb water more deeply in the soil. Okay. Thank you so much. All right. All right. Yes. So, and listen, be sure to call me back and let me know how that centipede did and about whether the cracking works. It's, there's several ways, ways of doing that. All right. Let's see. Okay. So what do we got a picture of from Steve? 27 acres. You know, that, that's an interesting place. It looks like I'm not sure where that is. Is it the, I'm not sure where that is. Steve, give me a hint. I can't really tell from the photographs. It is a golf course, and I can tell from the golf course that it was once a, oh, I can tell from the golf course that it was once a, a wetland, which is kind of interesting. I can see the organic matter has collapsed around it. So I'm now trying to guess, maybe I'm not looking at the pictures right, but give me a hint where that is. All right. Let's see. Let's get back to some of these. This, St. Augustine has a circle of dead grass. You know, once you get, once you start seeing dead spots like that in your grass, there really isn't a treatment that you can do in terms of fungus. And, and dealing with fungus can be really difficult, particularly in an area like this that looks to me like it's probably, it's, let me, let me call it up a little better. I can see your shadow. I can see you. Let's see. We've got, yeah, you know, I think there's some, there's some competition areas. There's some competition with the tree going on here. Is it, is it possible that that area also has a lot more traffic? It looks like it might. I don't think there's a major fungus issue going on there. I think there's some tree root competition, and I think there's some other issues. I think in an area like that, the best advice I can give you, if you're, if you want to grow a conventional lawn, is to mow it as high as possible. I wish there were better advice, but that's just the truth. You're going to have to mow it because you're getting shade, and that spot's getting a little more shade, because the tree's sitting there. It's got lots of tree roots that are emerging around it, that are competing with that lawn in many ways. It looks like it might be getting a little bit more traffic, too. So the only way you're going to keep that alive is to make sure that you mow as high as possible. And our last caller, Sharon, was doing it right. She was mowing four inches high. If you can mow any higher, it's, it's beneficial. We, they don't design lawn mowers for the south, in my opinion. But you want to mow as high as possible, at least three and a half to four inches. Mow as high as possible, because you're going to need every bit of blade you can in that area. If you continue to have problems there, and I don't think, again, I don't think that's a fungus issue at all, not at its core. I think it's a, I think it's a compaction issue. I think it's a tree root issue. I think it's a shade issue. Again, if you want a simple fix, monkey grass, there are lots of really fun fixes, too. They're all more complicated. Monkey grass is probably what you're going to have to plant there, or you're going to have to just mow it as high as possible. FM Talk 1065 with plain living for Alabama and the Gulf Coast. Call 251-343-0106. Here again, as your personal nature expert, Bill Finch. Tough questions. You know, uh, oh boy, we're coming into fall. There will be a lot of problems with lawns. You know, one of the interesting things about this moisture thing that I'm talking about, which apparently you're not paying attention to, and I'm encouraging you to think about it, is when we get periods of excess moisture, when we get periods of excess moisture, it begins to cause root damage on trees, on grasses, on lots of plants. And what that means is that root rots and other things may be reducing the roots, limiting the root growth of those plants. And that means, but because the excess moisture is there, you may not see the problem right away, but when it begins to dry out a little bit, the fact that you don't have any roots left means boom. Can I, does that make sense? So dealing with drought on the Gulf Coast and in most of Alabama is really about dealing with the wet periods, making sure that the water gets infiltrated, reducing the chance of root rots and other problems that occur as a result of excess moisture. It makes a huge difference in your lawn. Now, I am not going to be one of those people that's going to guarantee that you're going to have a great lawn because nobody's going to have a great lawn in this climate. Everybody's going to have a problem lawn because it's a weird concept. It's a flawed concept. And I used to say these things make so much difference. I almost could say you're going to have a great lawn. I'm not going to say that anymore. All I'm going to say is that the problems with your lawn are almost always come down to excess moisture, compaction, tree roots and shade. These are the big problems that I deal with over and over and over again. They're the immediate problem. And people say, oh, can I use a different grass? Well, centipede's not a great grass, but, you know, it may survive. If you do the right things, also mowing too tight is also a huge issue. That's a continual problem. So be thinking about those things as we get into winter. And honestly, if you're seeing a bear patch now, let me just say this. If you're seeing a bear patch now, you can't treat it with fungus, fungicide, because it's already had its effect. And right now, you're probably seeing the fungus is probably disappearing. If it seems to be getting worse, it's because it's drying out and you're sort of seeing the effects of the fungus, the fungal work that was done earlier in the year. It's not going to help now. As things begin to dry out, it won't help a whole lot. What I do say about fall is if you're going to rebuild your lawn, fall is the time to do it. Should you rebuild your lawn? It all depends. In most cases, I would say it's hard work to rebuild your lawn. It's very expensive. And if you can make your old lawn work, do it. But begin to minimize the amount of effort you put into the lawn. And that often means minimizing the amount of space you devote to a lawn. If I got a good plan for an acre of lawn, yes, it's called a horse. I'm sorry. That's the way you do it. And you want to have good pasture grass. Let's talk about good pasture grass for your horse. Maybe you need five acres. But the fact of the matter is that you can't really maintain a great lawn over one acre. I don't have any suggestions for it. It's very hard to do. You want your lawn to be useful in small areas where you need to wrestle your brother. That's all I can say. Where you want to play with the grandkids and you want them to, even when they stumble, you want them to fall on something soft, not some hard golf course grass, but on some soft St. Augustine. That's strive for those areas. Quit trying to develop these huge areas of lawn. You're not going to succeed. And I can't help. I'll just be honest when it gets that big. All right. Yes, I'm into the football picks now. I'm not going to be able to help with that either. Need help with identifying shrubs and fruits with blackberry shaped. I need a little more information. Can you take a picture of this shrub? Can you take a picture of this shrub? It really, I'm not sure what blackberry shaped means exactly. Is it a compound fruit like a blackberry with, like a berry with aggregate? Just send me a picture. That's all you got to do. And I can probably help really well identifying it. I did get a call from, I did get a text from someone who has a peach. Be dark. So there are a couple of things about it that I need to be clear about. First off, I would be really surprised if winter cold kill the peach because peaches are pretty hardy. And I can see that happening farther north but not so much down south. There are many things that kill peaches. Bowers, lots of issues. They're hard. Peaches are just plain hard. And a lot of times you'll get the, there could be a whole lot of things that happen. Could be a bad graph that you lost at the graph. But what I'm seeing right now is not the peach you meant to have. What I see is the peach that's growing from below the graph where two types of peaches were welded together. And that means the peach you have is not going to produce large peaches. It's going to produce very small peaches that may or may not be edible. How do you take care of it? I would, it's got way too many branches now. I would, but I would wait for it to start fruiting because you may not ever even see fruit from that tree. If you don't see fruit next spring developing on that tree, if you don't see any fruits and if those, then I would cut it down because I think you're just got a graph that's never going to produce. So I'm not sure I think is what I'm saying you want to take care of it. Let's make sure that you want to take care of it because I think you've got root stock which is not going to produce a good peach. Let's talk about that next spring. When it blooms, if you don't see any peaches, then we're going to have to reassess. It may not produce good peaches. If you do see peaches, let's follow them through and then we'll decide how much effort we want to put into that. All right. There we go. Folks, I don't know. I hope you heard rain. It's going to rain. It's going to rain again. It's going to rain pretty heavy. I think we're probably in for a big bit of rain along the Gulf Coast. In October, the first will probably welcome October with a lot of rain from these storms. It's not necessarily that we're seeing rain on more days. It's that the rain we're seeing is more likely to be heavy rainfall that does a lot of damage to your gardens, to your houses, to your neighborhoods, to your cities. We're seeing more of what's happening in western North Carolina, more of what's happening in upstate South Carolina, more of what happened in Georgia. It's going to be happening all around the state. We need to be thinking about that. We need to be preparing for it. I've tried to help a little bit. It's going to be the course, the subject of discussion. Maybe it'll take years for us to realize that's what we need to be talking about, but boy, I'm trying right now because it ain't going to be years before you see the problems. We'll be back next week. Stay tuned. [Music]