FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
Plain Living with Bill Finch. 6.23.2024 Talking Olives, Snake grass, and Sesame
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 hot Sunday morning, no matter where you are, it's going to get hotter. We may have a little bit of rain, that'll be a little bit of relief, and then it's going to get hotter again. It's that time of year. It's that time of year when many of you will begin to think to yourself, "Why am I here? Shouldn't I be someplace else? Shouldn't I have chosen someplace else?" I've been thinking about that because I was thinking the other day, "Why am I here in this place in a place? What am I doing here? Should I be someplace else?" For me, it's not the heat that does it. The heat makes me feel welcome. It's not that it's not hard. It's not that it's not hot. It's not that I don't feel a little even dizzy with the heat at times. It's just that it makes me feel like, "Well, I'm here. This is where I've been. This is what my body's used to." It's not the heat. Sometimes it's just the accumulation of things that make you think, "Gosh, should I be here? Should I have done something else?" It happens. It happens sometimes. It happens in so many ways in our lives. But it also happens with the landscape because when we think about where we are and what we're doing here and how we're going to get there and where we're going to live and where we're going to move, we kind of have this idea that it's going to be a little bit -- oh, it's like one of those teen romances, right? There's got to be this perfect person out there and I'm going to fall in love with this perfect place and everything is going to be fine. And then June 20th happens. Please tell the Gulf Coast. What makes them play special? You know, I want to say this in case I don't say this enough and I probably don't. Boston is special. Massachusetts is special. Michigan is special. Ontario is special. California is special. Texas is special. All these places are special. Alabama is special. You know, I think about all of the places that I've been to. I never go to a place. This is my problem. Don't ever -- oh, man, you don't ever want to take me on a tour. You don't ever want to go with me. People who've been around me learn this because I feel like, gosh, I really got to understand this place. I got to participate in it and I got to -- oh, man, that's -- can that be fixed? I'm not a good tourist. Every place is special. I think about Andalusia, where I went briefly. I think about Manila, where I went for a while. I think about all the places I've lived in Alabama, many, many of them, and in Mississippi. And I feel like each of those places was incredibly special, incredibly important. I miss every one of them. I want to be in every place. If they're all different, they're all special. It occurs to me that when you're here long term and you get to this sort of, oh, this is late June, it's coming up and it's already hot and it's going to be July and it's going to be hot every day and I'm not even going to feel like getting out in the garden. What am I doing here? I've got to suggest that the only places that are really special, the only places that will ever be special to you, ever. No matter how pretty you thought they were, no matter how much you thought you were going to enjoy the fact that the winters were mild, no matter how much you thought that the winter -- you thought that the -- you were going to enjoy the fact that the summers were going to be cool and ashful, no matter all of those things. The only place that will ever be special is the place that you're willing to sit down and understand and appreciate and listen to. It sounds like a relationship, doesn't it? And that's what it is. Living where you are is a relationship. It's something you have to build. You don't do it well sometimes. We tend to look at the -- we tend to look at the ephemeral things. We tend to -- but really digging down and understanding a place. Not even going in and saying, "Oh, I'm going to change this." That's not even the first job. The first job is just simply understanding, "Here's where I am. Here's why it's different. Here's what's really cool about it. Here's what's not the same as other places." The specialness of this place is not just this quick little look that I had when I first got here. It's all these other things that I'm beginning to see all around me, the seasons. The way the clouds form. The way the birds fly, the way the birds come in and when they go. That's what makes a place special. That's what makes it special. I'm sorry. It's our Sunday sermon. All right. I'm telling it to myself because I keep thinking this. This is what makes a place special. And I realize it's only when I engage with that place in a really understanding way. We try to understand how it's different and what to do there and how it needs me and how I can help that place to maintain its coolness, its uniqueness, its diversity. If you're a Bible believer in a sort of person, it's God-given merits. What makes that place special? That's what makes a place special, is understanding it. That's what will make it important to you. That's what I've been thinking about this morning. You know we've got lots to talk about. You feel free to give me a call. We're going to talk about how to deal with June and July and August in Alabama. I've been thinking a lot about mulches. We're going to talk about mulches today, what makes a mulch work, what makes it not work. And I saw a thing the other day where adding organic matter to soil can increase the water holding capacity of that soil by about several thousand gallons per acre. Really extraordinary. That's only half of it and that makes a huge difference as we get into this really hot weather, which is going to drought the soil. We're going to get some scattered showers, I hope. I hope that much hasn't changed about the seasons on the Gulf Coast. We're going to get some rain probably next week to release some of this. We did a little bit this past week. We'll talk about that, but we'll talk about how to properly apply mulches. Thinking a lot about that, we'll talk about how to water. This is going to be important coming up. How not to water, all of these things are important. We'll even talk about your tomatoes. We'll talk about your lawns, whatever you need to talk about, you feel free to give me a call. You've got some pictures of cool things you saw because you want to understand where you are. You want to understand, what in the world is that? I've never seen that before. You sent them along. You just text them. We'll take a look at them. We'll try to figure out what they are. How's that? All right, good show this morning. Looking forward to it. I hope you'll give us a call. Two, five, one. 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 FM Talk, 1065. All right, welcome back. Gulf Coast, Sunday morning, Alabama, Sunday morning. Thinking about why I placed this special, Jim sent me a message. He said, "This time of year, the way the doldrums overnight, yield to that first sea breeze is cool." Also the big, anvil head thunderstorms are cool, and they really are. You had to look for them on the horizon the way they build up. Oh, I used to look for them when I was out in my little sailboat and my little stouter out in the bay. And thinking, "Hmm, you know it's funny because you just don't know. You don't know about those big, anvil-headed storm clouds. They may just sit there on the horizon and be pretty." Or suddenly they may move over you, and the bay gets choppy very fast. Chew. And you're in a 12-foot boat, chew, mmm, mmm, mmm. But it's what makes a place special. It's knowing that. It's knowing how all that works. So you know, I think a two about the old expression, and I'm going to modify it a little bit here. It's not what this place is going to do for you that makes it special. It's what you can do for the place. And that's a funny thing, and I've been thinking a lot about that, because in the old Alabama conception what that meant was, is that we had to change the place. We had to make it like someplace else. We had to make it look like someplace else. We're still doing that. That's not the old, that's the old and the continuing into the modern. Alabama, nothing good about Alabama. When it's one of the richest places in the whole world, incredible. And I don't just say that lightly, or because we got a radio show here, I've got a radio show here because it is one of the richest places in the world. And it needs our help, because the world needs our help. It needs Alabama. And we haven't figured that out yet. It's a really important place. It's not changing it to make it look like someplace else. It's not just going in and bulldozing it or getting rid of the weeds. It's not any of those things. It's understanding that place. It's seeing how it operates. It's taking time to see how it operates. That's what makes it special. Taking time to see the birds. Taking time to understand, hey, Robins, they don't come here and spray. They come here in winter. Ain't that cool? They leave in spring. What are the birds of spring? What are the birds of summer? Oh, those big seabirds that are in there now. What a cool thing to see them if you haven't looked for. They're beginning to move in. It's interesting. What's different? What makes this place special? What makes it special? Understanding that is the first big job. And then when you understand it, then making an effort to say, gosh, how can I help protect this? Because it is special. You want a place to be special. You got to protect it. You got to protect it. Or it won't be special anymore. Just some thoughts. Let's see. What else we got this point? Some mulches, because I think we don't understand them sometimes. They're very useful, and they're going to be really useful with these kinds of temperatures and this kind of moisture. I wrote a column the other day talking about the fact that you're going to need to water now. There's going to be some occasions because of this excess heat where you may need to water, but you don't want to water every day, for sure. You don't want to water every week, for sure, because the more you water in these kinds of temperatures, and the more rain it gets, and you're going to get rain virtually every day. If it doesn't dry out, if the blades don't dry out, you're going to have terrible diseases. And you're going to have lots of weeds that actually love that constant moisture. This is a great chance to get rid of weeds if you will turn off your irrigation system and let the heat and let the dry spells do their business, but you want to watch the grass, you want to watch your plants, you want to watch for signs of drought, we can talk about those, how to tell when they really need moisture, and then water. When you water well, don't just go out there and sprinkle things. It doesn't help at all. In fact, it encourages disease when you do that. It makes things worse. What you want to do is a deep watering, and then you don't want to water for another two or three weeks. That's what I said, folks. You want to do a deep watering. If you've got really sandy soil, you might have to squeeze the time in between waterings just a little bit, but not much. It's not much different. You want to water well so that the water goes in deeply at least three inches. At least three inches, you want the water to have penetrated three inches when you water. You're watering every day and you're watering for fifteen minutes or thirty minutes or even an hour, and it isn't going. It isn't going three inches deep. You might have to water more. You've got any questions about that you give me a call, and then we'll talk about mulch, which makes a huge difference in whether you actually ever need to water. Big thing, we just got to apply the mulch in the right places and in the right way. Let's see what else we got here this morning. Let's see, should I cut the branches that come from close to the ground on my mire's lemon? I'm scared there won't be many leaves left if I cut them. Also, the same question for the grapefruit. Now, I'm going to try to pull this picture up because, listen, there's a big difference between mire's lemons, big difference between mire's lemons, and grapefruit, and here's one of the differences. Let's see if I can see it on your grapefruit. Let's see, and the question is, is the plant grafted? It looks to me like your mire's lemon is not grafted. I can't quite tell, but it looks like your grapefruit was grafted, and it may have lost part of its ... I'm going to have to look, yes, let me look at this picture real quickly. Listen, let me, while I'm looking at these pictures, let me try to say this. It's for you. With citrus and a lot of other plants, there's a thing called a graft, and I can see the graft on this grapefruit. Oh, I can see it well. What that graft is, it's the operable part of the plant. The plant that you're going to get the fruit from is grafted or welded onto the roots of another type of citrus, and the citrus underneath, the thing that it's welded onto, the root system that it's welded onto, will not produce fruit that you want to eat. It's not going to produce grapefruit, and in fact, it can become rather weedy. I'm looking at this picture of your grapefruit, and it looks to me like you're getting a lot of thorny growth from that base, and it doesn't matter if you leave those leaves on to the health of the plant. Well, it does matter. You're worried about taking off too many leaves below that graft, but in fact, if you don't take those leaves off, you will never have a grapefruit. So here's the trick. Anything that's coming up, let me just keep it simple, and say that anything that's coming up in the first 12 inches needs to be clipped off right away, and it hasn't gotten too bad yet. It's going to get worse if you don't go ahead and clip it off. If you don't want to clip it off too close to the base because you don't want to leave a big gap next to the trunk, just leave a couple or three inches. That's OK, and you can go back and get that later. Let it heal over just a little bit. But you've got to clip that off, everything in the first 12 inches, every leaf. Now on the Myers Lemon, what's interesting is it's probably, I can't be absolutely sure because I can't see it clearly, it's probably not grafted. So compare the two, look at the grapefruit, on the grapefruit, about 10 inches up, eight to 10 inches above the ground, you'll see a little knot, a little swelling that's wider than the things below it and above it. That's the graft, that's where it was welded. So you know the grapefruit's welded, absolutely. Myers Lemons are sometimes not welded, they are on their own roots, and there's a lot of advantages to that with Myers Lemon if it's in the ground. I don't see that weld on your Myers Lemon, but then again I'm not at your house, I'm only looking at your pictures, which weren't designed to tell me whether it was grafted or not necessarily. And so it's OK on the Myers Lemon if it's not grafted to leave all those sprouts coming from the base. Hope that wasn't too confusing, you're going to have to treat them differently, you're going to have to treat them differently. The top of your tree, yeah, and I can't tell the yellowing appears to be that there was a problem, there is some type of problem with that grapefruit, and I can't tell what it is. And the only way I can tell is for you to trim it back just a little bit and for me to see what the root system looks like if it's buried too deeply, that's right. All right, we're going to be back, go ahead and trim those branches off and send me a picture if you can't do it this week, send it next week on that grapefruit, and let's look at that grapefruit a little bit harder, I need to figure out what's going on. 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 251-3430106. All right, let's get back here, got a picture of Wayne, let me go to Wayne first, Wayne sent me a beautiful picture of a plant, pine land hibiscus, that's a hibiscus Wayne, you may know that, it grows not in the wettest areas, but it tends to grow in the pine lands. It's a good, it's a good remnant of what our longleaf forest used to look like and there are very few remnants really left, but you know sometimes if you quit mowing, you get to see this beautiful stuff come up like this beautiful pine land hibiscus, it doesn't happen everywhere. But if you've got some remnants left, that's really cool and Wayne said it's really nice to know that, and you know that sometimes, sometimes really understanding a place, letting a place be special is about not doing things other than thinking and looking and observing. Isn't that cool? Thinking hard and if you see something you don't know, look it up, you can give me a call but you know I'm not that smart, I try to pretend to be, but I'm not that smart, you could look stuff up too, you could be really knowledgeable about where you are, I'm just an old boy from Mississippi in Alabama, I mean how could I be very smart, I'm not, I just look around and I want to know things and I want to look them up, that's, you could do the same thing. So give it a shot Wayne, Wayne, beautiful thing, that is hibiscus acculiatus, A-C-U-L-E-A-T-U-S, I go into those Latin words sometimes so that we can really pinpoint what it is we're looking at because sometimes, sometimes the official science word, it's not like oh there's nothing holy about it really, it's not like citing the Latin mass, it sort of is I guess, it's about trying to understand exactly what it is we're looking at so that we don't get all confused with common names because common names can confuse us at times and sometimes you'll see that plant called a mallow, M-A-L-L-O-W which is a European common name for relatives of hibiscus, Europeans didn't have hibiscus to the best of my knowledge and most of the places where English was spoken and so they really have a word for hibiscus but let's call this hibiscus, that's what it really is. It's a pine land hibiscus really beautiful, really cool. Thank you Wayne for doing that, thank you for sending that. What do I do about this fungus, somebody says in Silver Hill with an olive tree, I want to know first and this will help and you can message me or you can call in whichever, let me know if this tree isn't a pot. First, that is not a fungus, it's a scale, it's called which is an insect, believe it or not, it's an insect with a hard covering, if you squish it you'll kind of see that it's got innards and kind of a juicy innards. It affects olive trees, it probably affects ash trees as well but probably not as much. Usually, usually the scale insects that appear on olive trees and their relatives don't do a lot of damage usually and they're just considered a little bit of an aesthetic issue but not a huge issue even in production areas where they're growing olives for production. So should you worry about it at all? You know here's what I'm going to say, you could probably control a lot of that by spraying a horticultural oil. Just use the horticultural oil for several reasons, I don't want to go into it because I don't think it's that important but a horticultural oil is the thing, just an oil, that's all it is, it's a refined oil, summer horticultural oil, it goes by a lot of different names and I'll have to think of the trade names which are not coming to me right now because I got more fun things in my head. But there's a summer horticultural oil, oh why do they call those things? Anyway, you'll find them in the stores, look for summer horticultural oil, I'm sure that the folks that low down people know exactly what you're talking about, of course they won't know what you're talking about but look up summer horticultural oil on the internet before you go to the store, go to a place that knows what summer horticultural oil is like a balloon and buy some summer horticultural oil and you can help, it can help, about every 10 days spray it on there. Now it helps if you can do it when the youngins are hatching out and I don't know when the youngins hatch out on olive trees particularly but let's just try that and see if that doesn't help a little bit. You can also, you can also just pull those scales off pretty easily if you don't like them and if they really bother you it doesn't look like it's a terrible infestation yet and the horticultural oil will control the youngins and there will be predators that will deal with those scales as well as usually as summer progresses. If your ash tree, if your ash, if your olive tree is healthy that's a big if. Let me just say this about olive trees. Do you know where olive trees are native? I kind of do. I went to the Mediterranean once to the areas where olive trees are raised and where most of your olives would have come from and the areas that that was developed for and let me tell you it ain't Alabama. It is very dry. It is very dry and summer is extremely dry and there is almost and one of the things that that means is that these trees are kind of naive to the kinds of issues we have in Alabama. If there was ever a tree that I could say really doesn't belong in Alabama. Oh I don't know there's a lot of them but I would go to olives pretty quickly. I know that's all we talk about and I know that's it but it's going to be a hard tree to grow. Now if you grow it in a container it's probably going to be happier and what's interesting is I will say I'm thinking about an Andalusia if I said it right and a thing about a place called Grazalema in in Spain where I went where actually they get a lot of rainfall in winter not much in summer but a lot in winter. And one of the places that I often saw people growing their olives in the home landscape was in a container raised above the rest of the ground because olives don't like wet soils. So your olive trees may be stressed by overly wet soil and that's one thing if your leaves are yellowing it may have nothing to do it may have nothing to do with these little boogers on the trunk. The little black things the scale insects it may be for another reason. So let me know if it's in a pot it's in a pot that's good. So it's it's salvageable make sure that the soil in that container is extremely well drained. That's it just needs to be if you haven't changed the soil out in a while change the soil out because it will not like compacted soil. If you have any questions about how to do that you give me a call let's talk about it let's talk about the size of your pot you send me a picture of the size of your pot you tell me how long it's been in that pot and we'll decide whether we need to up it up but olives are tricky olives are tricky in this climate it doesn't they do not like this much rainfall they don't like these humid nights they're very tolerant of the heat but they're not going to like during the day but they're not going to like the high heat at night and they're not going to like the humidity at night so just some things to think about. All right does this this all make sense I hope so for the person with the olive tree. Let's see what have we got here. Shelby and Foley can you tell me what this is came from a job site in Gulf Shores. Good it's it is a prickly pear. It's uh it's probably one of our native prickly pears a puntia o-p-u-n-t-i-a it's a really cool thing it has some nice fruits uh it has little hairs that are that are pointed on those pads you know but can you uh can you use the pads to eat yes nebulis if I said it correctly our pear pad or prickly pear pads essentially uh that you sometimes get in and you burn those you burn the little hairs off you can actually eat the pads but prickly pear o-p-u-n-t-i-a is used to be part of the environment in Gulf Shores it's really interesting there was a um says something about time I like to think about time a lot and I like to think about how things have changed about so let's say 18,000 years ago not really that long ago as time goes because time's pretty old there was a the seas were much lower than they are now and so Dauphin Island and just abundant evidence of this and Dauphin Island and the Delta were down Dauphin Island was a series of hills in a big flat landscape that wasn't had no water around it it was just a series of hills and the Delta itself was south of mo was actually south of Mobile Bay out in the middle of the Gulf wow when that happened there was a uh it was drier and particularly in Florida and and as you moved closer to the coast which was 80 miles south of where it is now there was probably a really dry margin that ran all the way from Texas and Arizona Arizona and Texas Texas was very dry all the way back to Florida and there were lots of cacti cactuses in that margin along the coast as things got cooler I'm sorry warmer and wetter you only ended up with little spots where these cacti were and so you ended up in South Florida with some places with lots of cactus that remain from that connection between the two and you have little places with opuntea which are which is our prickly pear sort of uh sort of a reminder of what it was like 18,000 years ago all right there we go Shelby did that help FM Talk 1065 home for plain living for Alabama and the Gulf Coast let's talk about living and growing in that deep south with Bill Finch Call 2513430106 all right welcome back Gulf Coast Sunday morning Alabama Sunday morning let's get back to this olive tree it's in a pot it looks as good as an olive tree is ever going to look on the Gulf Coast and it looks pretty good I will say you know there was an old olive tree that I watched for years and years it was it kind of comes and goes and it was um I'm not sure what happened to that tree I think they cleared it out for a parking lot but it did persist for a long time it was on a really dry spot on a bluff not a bluff it was a no I don't know it was where the street it was the banks of the street were much higher uh and I think that was that was on spring hill or I think it was spring hill avenue am I thinking right yeah maybe it was dolphin street I can't remember but it was it was there for years and the the banks of the road were pretty high and so the soil was pretty dry it probably was held by the fact that there were live oaks on either side of it it was getting a little bit of sunlight and it was surprisingly it did surprisingly well but boy that soil was dry and it uh and it wasn't being compacted and there were several reasons why it wasn't getting mowed around it didn't have a bunch of trucks running around it and it was all it did did okay for a number of years and so can olive trees grow here under very special circumstances yes it is not the easiest tree to grow you got to think about it you got to really think hard about it um and having it in a pot and having it in that you got it you got it looking really good it looks great you got olives on it that's really cool you're going to tell me how you process those olives which is the second challenge with olives right is figuring out what am I going to do with these olives I mean I can't just eat them straight off the tree in fact you can't you got a process but they're kind of cool and you got them and the tree looks good so what you need to do with that but but you don't want the soil in that container to deteriorate too much and the olive will be a little tolerant as long as it it gets reasonably well drained but during periods of high rainfall it could it'll be a problem and say the third or fourth year in that pot so you want to I would say it's okay this year but next spring next spring you call me let's talk about how to move that into a different pot and here's why i'm saying you're gonna have to move it into a different pot because i'm looking at your clay pot it's about split open so yeah it's a beautiful clay pot by the way and it's a perfect looking clay pot for an olive it just seems so suited to an olive tree but it's probably going to crack and continue cracking so you may not be able to put it back in the same pot let's talk about what kind of pot you want to put it into and let's figure that one out and I think you can wait until next spring to do that let's wait until next spring no need to do it now a little bit stressful to do it now and I just no need to do it but I think next spring you'll probably want to do it it's kind of like it'll be in that same pot for three or four years soil's going to get really compacted over that time there's going to be oh there's a lot of problems that can develop but we'll talk about it and we'll talk about how to fix that is that good enough is that good olives and I'm so proud of you for actually doing really well without olive tree I want to see it I want to see it survive I want to see it survive you sent me a picture of another plant in your garden I think that's what I would call a smart weed I don't know why they're called smart weed I think the smart must be I don't know why they're called smart weeds but they're it's plugging I see let me think about what family it's it's near but it's a smart weed you can look it up and you'll see a lot of I'm not sure there's a bunch of smart weeds we have they spread from the they spread pretty vigorously from the roots and from runners probably want to just pull it up it can be a little bit of a nuisance of course there's a lot of nuisance plants sitting around it is well but that's a smart weed that's what you got here all right I hope that helped but but let me know and hold on to that olive for another year the scale insect let's come back to the scale because that's what you asked me about let's just go over it one more time the scale insects probably not going to hurt the tree a lot you can gently just pull those scales off if you want with your hands those are the adults that'll keep them from reproducing and some of them may already be dead you'll know which ones are dead and which ones are alive the surprising number may actually be dead as the heat comes on but if you want to make sure you use a horticultural oil gosh what are the names of those horticultural oils that they sell locally you know the names keep changing because it's uh but you want to summer horticultural oil spray it late in the day on the tree don't spray it in the heat of the day spray it late in the day you don't want to really spray it on the leaves particularly on the tops of the leaves no need to do that what you really want to do is take a little sprayer and spray it underneath the leaves and underneath the branches and then on the trunk summer horticultural oil and do that about every 10 days you'll for three weeks are four weeks to make sure you got enough 10 day spans in there so for the next month about every 10 days that horticultural oil it will it won't get rid of the predators that get rid of the scales but it will control the scale's ability to reproduce it's a very safe thing to use and and a great way to deal with it thanks for the olive tree compliments no one appreciates it i appreciate it's actually really beautiful you know i said all those terrible things about olive trees which are absolutely true and then you come up with an olive tree that looks really pretty good and it looks pretty good because it's in a pot it's at a container which is how i think you're gonna have to grow them here i think the same is true for things like blood oranges too by the way which also come from a Mediterranean style climate they can they can survive but there's so much better in a container for a lot of reasons and we can talk about why that is and there are some citrus that are just lines are better in a container and lines are you know fundamentally like Persian right they're Asian Persian but they're from dry climates they're not from wet climates and that's one of the reasons there are a lot of other reasons why you'd have to grow a lime in a container lemons are mostly the same way except for Myers lemons which are hybrids they're not true lemons they're actually hybrids between a lemon and probably an orange maybe a satsuma is something in that something over there in that group and that interesting very different flavor than a typical lemon i like Myers lemons i like the difference in flavor and for a lot of desserts i think they're much better and for a lot of cooking they're much better all right so that'll help let's see let's see you may not know that in living there goes a complete orchard of olive trees olzer harv said it novels produce they have a machine that goes through the press process bottles are sold on a reserve basis only expensive but all natural yes we're gonna see how those do you know it's interesting if if we were going to produce an oil that was well adapted to the Gulf coast what it's funny because we never think about where we are we always think about where everybody else is i'm sorry to do this but i'm going to do it we always think about oh well you know Italy's got it figured out well Italy's got it figured out for Italy Italy's got it Spain's got it figured out for Spain we haven't got it figured out for Alabama if there were an if there were a tree crop for example that was really well adapted and produced an incredible oil for Alabama what would it be uh well oh something that could tolerate humidity something that light high rainfall something that we probably may already grow well here for a variety of reasons come back talk about that maybe in our next hour my girl my girl don't like 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 one oh six five yeah olives uh you know it's uh there was a vine and olive colony that was going to develop in Demopolis you there was a great weird movie with John Wayne um what was the name of that movie see if I remember the name of that movie it's about the vine and oil colony in Demopolis I always thought what a weird movie because it had these pictures of these mountains in the background in the movie you know sort of fake Hollywood mountains in the background and I thought Demopolis there's some hills in Demopolis they're quite beautiful but not it was weird and uh you know it was typical John Wayne movie with all kind of weird premises uh but the vine and olive colony failed for a lot of reasons probably not so much well the olives were probably one of the reasons but probably not the only reason maybe not even the biggest reason but we've been trying to grow olives here for a long time because we import ideas from Europe and good good you know that's great but think about where we are think about where olives are from and think about the differences in those two areas and so one of the things so if we were thinking about where we were if we thought this was a special place and if we understood it was a special place what kind of olives would we be growing well there's I'm not the only person a lot of people have been saying for a long time John Ruder at at uh at uh at Tifton uh formerly from Tifton now University of Georgia uh has been saying for a long time let's think about Camilla oil Camilla oil is uh is one of the world's great oils it's used widely it's probably you know oils there's nothing magical about oils I mean we make olive oil out to be a big deal and I use it and it's a great oil it's not there's nothing magical about it it's good on popcorn by the way it's really good on popcorn if you got a decent olive oil no problem with that it's got a nice flavor but it's not magical in the sense that there are a lot of oils that are actually quite good for you Camilla oil is probably as good as olive oil in almost every way uh but because we yeah because of our European mindset because we you know where we're from we're kind of stuck on the olive oil thing but we could grow Camilla's great here we can Camilla oil really great why didn't we spend a lot of money doing that because we know that Camilla's grow really well here and we know that they're well adapted to humid climates and we know we could produce a really good Camilla oil here we know it it's it's really good and it would be a market that we're not competing with places it could probably grow the olive oil better than we can this is kind of funny so it's it's very typical so everybody's got to grow corn everybody's got to grow soybeans we can never grow corn and soybeans at the same scale at the same level of productivity as they do in the corn and in the corn belt and yet and yet so thinking about where we are how do we do something that really makes sense for us that really makes sense for us jarhead i'm not getting that photo you keep trying but it ain't coming in so jarhead wants me to identify a tree and i'm happy to do it i think i'm going to do it david uh he just we got to get the picture in and i'm not sure why it's not coming in maybe it's just a little large that is my guess i can't figure it out but i i see you keep trying yeah they're not showing up maybe it's something on my end i'll i'll wait for them maybe they'll show up here jarhead pretty soon sorry about that neem oil is at one of the horticultural oils this is a really tricky question no it isn't uh it's different very and and there's some so there's a lot of reasons to believe that neem oil is greatly overrated for a lot of reasons uh and but but it is not a typical horticultural oil sometimes if neem oil works it's because it works like a typical horticultural oil except for one big difference a few big differences one is expense um and it really it we don't know anything i think i'm a little worried about phytotoxicity and other things so a summer horticultural oil is what you need to use neem oil is not something i would trust as a substitute for summer horticultural oil in some cases it might work as well well or almost as well but it may have some downside it may have some problems and if it does what they say it does one of those problems and i'm not sure it does but if one of those problems may be that it affects some of the some of the uh predators that would normally be helping your plant by getting rid of the scales but no i would just avoid neem oil i would just avoid it i really don't know of a good use for it uh right now so just uh just something to think about just something to think about um all right now i got it now i got it that's privet oh that's that is privet jarhead uh it is a it is an obnoxious beast i wish i had a solution for privet that's chinese privet uh and i do if you i do there are some ways of treating it right now it's a little difficult i do wish we there is an opportunity to import some predators that are probably quite specific to chinese privet and we should be doing more research i i hate to say why it is that we're not doing more that research and the reason we're not doing more that research is that there are people who sell privet who don't want that research to happen apparently uh and and maybe it's just the bure i don't know why maybe the bureaucracy itself is part of the problem but we should i wish we could do something about privet but jarhead that is exactly what it is jerry i'm gonna guess exactly how's the oil excreted from the bud and based on your timing i think you may be talking about chamea oil let me let's let's talk about chamea oil for just a second what a great thing it is i love cooking with chamea oil it's a high heat oil it's really good it has a great aroma i love the aroma of it uh it doesn't add a lot to the flavor like most good oils once they're cooked they don't add a lot to the flavor you can get if you get a raw one you can get a bit of flavor that you could use on its own and that's fine it's got a great flavor but when it's when you're cooking you're not you're gonna get an aroma but not so much a strong flavor when you're through cooking with it but it does seem to i really like the roundness there's a kind of a roundness to things that i cook with chamea oil that i don't get from things like avocado oil which is a problem from a lot of perspectives olive oil can't really be used for high heat cooking at all it's very limited in that way uh it just it burns and it's not a high heat cooking oil so you have to use peanut oil which does have a flavor which is okay sometimes and not okay at other times uh no matter how they refine it but chamea oil is really great where do you get chamea oil well it's from the fruits it's from the fruits which look like nuts that hang on the tree and you'll see them on your chameas at times even even our native even the chameas we grow for ornamentals sometimes reduced fruits the trees that are used for chamea oil are a special group of chameas that it's a special species called olefira and it means oil bearing olefira fira meaning bearing ole which is related to olives in some sort of way because you know that's where language comes from but olefira oil bearing we'll be back fm talk 1065 with plain living for alabama and the gulf coast call two five one three four three zero one oh six here again is your personal nature expert Bill Finch all right berry could that be a Myers lemon i i can't tell honestly it looks kind of not uh it looks kind of not but it's sometimes hard to tell citrus when they're young like that and when you do really know the origin i don't see a graph it could be it could be something from a graft i can't tell uh i really honestly i can't tell at this point let it get a little bigger uh with it forms fruit we'll know for sure right Darryl you've been very patient Jim you've been patient but Darryl i'm going to get to you first Jim hold on just a second let me get to Darryl first tell me tell me what's up Darryl uh just a question Bill i see all these things growing in ditches around i live in south into the county that look like elderberries from pictures i've seen of them are they elderberries uh more than likely yes elderberries are quite common here they got that big white flat topped flower yes that comes yes and then it's followed by those little purple fruits make double sure that it's elder berry it's got the leaves are compound on elderberry do you know what that you know what i'm saying when i say compound so uh no let let me let me let me try to let me see if i can explain it a simple leaf just means that the leaf emerges from a twig one leaf at a time a compound leaf is like a hickory leaf or a pecan leaf imagine can you imagine what a pecan leaf looks like actually when a pecan leaf falls have you ever noticed a pecan leaf or hickory leaf when it falls it doesn't fall one leaf at a time it's like the whole leaf falls and you've got a bunch of little leaflets so elderberries that way it's got a compound leaf so there's a lot of little leaves on that stem emerging from the trunk uh but yes it's a very common it is extremely common it's producing fruits everywhere and those fruits are quite good to use i would cook them some people have a reaction to i i have heard and i have to be cautious when i say things like this i have heard that some people have a reaction to the fresh fruit and it's not like terrible but it's a stomach ache but cooked nobody seems to have a reaction and they're really good elderflower beer is some of the best beer i've ever had. Jim are you working on that? Jim and Georgetown so elderflower beer is really great so yes that's elderberry and what a cool plant and it is weedy it is it comes up everywhere in moderately wet soils but it's it's a really neat plant it can can is it possible to propagate it to where i could put it on my property and grow it enhances or is that a bad thing to do well i would say throw it within 10 feet of dug dirt and you're going to have a bunch of elderberries so it's very easy maybe too easy and and you can throw some fruits out and you'll have it on your property if it's really easy to grow it's for some people it can be a nuisance i will say it could be a nuisance in fence rows and other places where it's hard to eradicate but if you can use the flowers and fruits it will seem like much less of a nuisance so yes hey hey listen darrell just make sure that make look at some pictures of sambuchus look at uh look at pictures of elderberry and make sure they match what you're seeing there are a few things that could be confused and if you want to be sure you can take a picture of these plants with your phone and text it to me next week i'll do that all right thank you sir all right good to hear from you Jim what's up hey it's Tim they'll enjoy your show yeah thank you yeah that's okay uh you know listen to you on a podcast usually so i don't get a chance to call in but i was driving this morning and i heard you mention throwing things that make sense for our area and i had read i was i'm a member of a farm bank that uh is a co-op for people that borrow money for forest land and they always have board members and they usually list what they grow for their farm the people that are running for the board and they'll list the row crops like you mentioned corn and soybean and peanuts or some of them are catfish growers well there was one that had that listed uh he was in shorter alabama which is i looked it up somewhere up around Montgomery yeah i know shorter well yeah and he was growing sesame and yeah i wondered if that was for the seed or or what the deal was there so i thought i'd call in and ask yeah i cook with sesame seed a lot it's it is a great crop it's from india it is it is from an area that that has more humid conditions uh and i have grown it i've actually grown it and it's very pretty uh i i think it's probably quite viable as a crop i don't know if it's as viable on the Gulf coast as it would be farther north where summers tend to dry out a little bit towards the end of summer which is when you want to harvest the sesame seeds but i think it is a potential crop for the gulf coast for for alabama at least it's it may be that mid-summer is too humid for it here uh because even though it tends to like humid conditions when it's getting started it likes drier conditions when you want to harvest it but yes it is a very interesting plan and it comes from a part of the world that has a climate somewhat similar to ours uh from from india and yes i thought often we should maybe experiment with sesame and i've experimented uh not at any massive scale only in my own garden uh and uh and i harvested the sesame seeds uh which is reasonable and easy to do um so yes it's kind of cool i did not know we had a farmer doing that uh that's really interesting we'll have to we'll have to talk to him sometime has he been doing it did he save been doing it you don't know because you just saw it on a list wonder if he's been doing it for a number of years i don't know i can find his name uh believe i still have the the magazine that they send out uh with the you know financial statements on the co-op in all that uh i'll see if i can find that and i'll send it to you yeah that's that's cool um so yes it is it is you know and we can experiment with things like that to see if they if they make sense for us i do think sesame makes slightly more sense than olives um and i i don't know i'll have to think about if if there any pest of sesame any but he would know he would know if he's been growing it or she uh but yeah what a cool thing to think about sesame on a side on a side no years ago i planted a several uh tea camellias of cinensis yeah based on your recommendation and i've tried making tea a few times that it works pretty well there's also the uh you know the fruit that's on there that usually just drops to the ground if i wanted to make a little bit of oil out of that well would i do just crush it with something yes so that's right and so they use a press and it's uh i think most of it is cold pressed as they like to say uh in in china we uh and and john ruder i think had a way of cold pressing he had come up with a cold press system that we just needed to we probably have to import a cold press here to do it but yes it is it is pressed kamia cinensis can produce oils uh and jim ruder has told me that before it it is maybe less successful than olefira but it is capable of producing oils as well so uh so yes if you can get those if you can get those fruits to hang on there long enough to mature they're probably not going to be as big as the olefira but then you press them and it's just a you know you could use just a wheel press like um well they make several for crushing seeds and getting oils out of seeds and and that's it's just a it's just a big sort of screw type press that they use in china i think to do that i'll check into that well thanks a lot joy yeah yeah good good to hear from you jim yeah in that interesting um it really is interesting to me and i'm glad jim's thinking about it tim i'm sorry uh tim i i sorry we we got the name wrong and initially and uh so it is interesting what crops are well adapted here how many people grow sesame here not a lot i like sesame there's a lot of really cool sesame and i have it tried but one or two varieties the flowers on sesame are actually quite pretty it's a pretty plant to grow i'm not sure i feel good about saying that it will grow well along in mobile and in ballwood county because of that summer rainfall i think there might be some problems that's my suspicion but i think if you get it into drier areas where the summer does tend to dry out after july and we get rainfalls less often and you get tend to get drier conditions and always in september or if you can match it up so that you harvest it in october on the gulf coast or up north it would probably be a really pretty good match uh for the gulf coast and here we got a farmer proving it i mean he's growing it uh so that's interesting got another caller here uh thomas you you there i'm gonna say we have just a couple of minutes before the break maybe only a minute uh but uh let's get started what's up yeah i've got uh a confederate rose that i planted i got two of them one of them is doing great the other one is hardly growing at all and they're not but about a hundred foot for me all right jim uh katomas hold on i'm gonna come back right after this break and we're gonna talk about it fm talk one oh six five home for plain living for alabama and the gulf coast let's talk about living and growing in that deep south with bill pinch call two five one three four three zero one oh six well you know jim made me want to think more about uh sesame which i'm gonna do um it's um it loves heat that's the thing about sesame it really loves heat and it's very tolerant of hot nights all that's good it's just a question of harvesting and uh that that would be a trick but uh it's it's itching needs a dry drop period i bet we could time it i got got to look at photo period and other things with that but that's good tomas let's get back to your confederate rose question uh you have two confederate roses you were telling me and they are about a hundred feet apart and one is doing really well and the and the other isn't doing really well uh and that is so we can just that's not unusual that's very typical and it says something about the growing conditions in which each is growing so let's let's sort this out first off are is one growing near a tree and one not growing near a tree ones in the shade half of the day and ones in the sun a little bit longer than half a day how close are they to trees in feet the one that's doing really well is probably 30 foot from a tree yep the one that's not doing well and there's really no trees probably within 60 foot of them so we probably eliminated trees so we're going to look at compacted soil and and do just one of the trees so without trying to figure out the difference in the two let's just talk about what it would take to make a confederate rose grow well one is their grass growing up towards where the where the rose where where this high viscous is and by the way a confederate rose is a type of high viscous i don't know we it's called a confederate rose because it's from malaysia and and it seems to refer to the malaysian confederacy believe it or not has nothing to do with with with the confederacy here in the south but it is uh but it's a high viscous and it it likes it likes good growing conditions it grows pretty well but it won't is it growing in the middle of grass is grass growing right up to the trunk both of them yes yeah so i would say the grass growing around the trunk is probably not a good thing in general so let's try to remove some of the grass away from the trunk because it is definitely competing with the roots in both cases but there's maybe some other things going on with the one that's not doing well my suspicion is is that the soil around the one that's not doing well is a bit compacted so so here's what i would do how tall is the one that's not doing well um yeah yeah maybe nitty high and the other one is almost four foot high yeah so let's let's do this and and this will help both of them i promise because the one that's four foot high will be 12 feet high if you if you give it if you if it's happy so let's remove the let's remove the grass from as far away from that plant as you possibly can and try to keep that grass away from it and by by how far away is far away if you were to take it away three feet on either side it would make a huge difference but at least two feet on all sides remove the grass okay and then take a fork have you got a garden fork no but i can get one yeah and make sure it's a good strong garden for four times you know what i'm saying wiggle it into the ground lean back on it and crack that soil all around that tree that that that uh high viscous the confederate rose and not not too close to the plant come out about two feet and just crack the soil all the way around the one that's not doing well and then throw some mulch on it just throw as much mulch on it as you like any leaves and other things just throw it on there and and when you crack that soil all around it do it out you know do it a couple of rounds around it and and that's going to i guarantee it'll grow a lot better because probably the soil is compacted there and it's having a hard time getting out in the roots the soil is probably drier there when it's dry and wetter there when it's wet so it's kind of the worst of both worlds but i guarantee you i can almost guarantee that it's going to do better if you do those two things remove the grass and crack around that plant just a little bit and then a third thing add a mulch mulch can be leaves just throw some leaves around it you got a bag of leaves you cleaned up some leaves throw the leaves around it um and and it'll it'll take off and do really well okay and these dry spells that we're having now i haven't watered these plants at all this year how often should i water them when we're and i haven't had rain and probably a week and a half two weeks yeah so how much you water is going to depend on how deep your soil is and and how how much the roots can extend out from the plant it's certainly it's certainly after a couple of weeks it can help to water a plant particularly if it's new most plants will easily survive a couple of weeks without rain as long as they're being watered well when you're water so when you water that plant what you want to do is you don't want to just take a little hose over there and sprinkle it while you're you know while you're saying in the Yankee Doodle what you want to do is you want to you want to leave that hose drip there for just a little while you know at least 10 or 15 minutes to get the water down deep so that it goes at least three inches deep once it gets three inches deep you won't have to water for a while a couple of weeks usually unless you get rain in which case you won't have to water in a couple of weeks so how much you rain but how much you water depends on how much it rains of course but i think the problem right now is could be relieved greatly by cracking that soil and that means when it does rain or when you do water that water is going to get to the places it needs to get it's going to sink down into the soil rather than running off if the grass isn't going to absorb it all right now the grass is taking up all the water that you put there because it's a lot more competitive for water than the hibiscus is so cracking will help a lot and then when you crack it go back and water it water it good water it for 15 30 minutes just leave the hose there and it doesn't have to be on super high because you don't want it to run off just leave it on for you know leave it on a little sprinkle for for 15 to 30 minutes get it nice and sop and wet and then you probably won't have water again for a while maybe for the rest of the summer all right thank you sir you're welcome okay kim i'm listening what's up hey thank you for taking my call um we live in the landfare area that old marsh i guess it was years and years ago and we have really formal box with all along the front that snake grass is taking over is there any way to eradicate the snake grass i guess is called snake grass this growing in between them i have no idea what snake grass is uh describe it to me it's it's growing real real tall it's getting up to three or four feet tall and it's real thin like just real thin blades it's some type of grass my mother calls it snake grass okay yeah we we can call things anything we want to call them there's no official common name registry but of course then nobody else may know what we're talking about so it's always a problem so you got grass in your beds i'm if it's thin grass and it the blades aren't very wide i'm gonna guess it is the grass that i always mispronounce as bermuda and and how do other people say it how normal people say it bermuda no they how do they say it how do you say bermuda is that i say bermuda bermuda i do yeah so any rate uh mewd uh bermuda bermuda is probably what you got it could be it could be um panicum reppins it could be torpedo grass if it's a wet spot i just don't know uh but landfare sounds like it's probably bermuda bermuda is a pain in the butt oh i'm not supposed to say that out loud but it is and it is really it's getting hard to get rid of it's like your i went in between every bush on my hands and knees and just yanked them all out and they were hard to get out a nice deep you know hard to get out rooted and they're all back they're all back and it's typical bermuda so what happens is is that they move in from the grass even if you get them all which you may have done i don't know it's which is hard to do they're going to move in from the grass next to it so one of the things i say and i it's not my fault that we have that we introduce bermuda grass bermuda grass and so you know i'm just here like the rest of us saying oh my gosh what do we do now and but but here's the truth if you don't have a barrier that's about anywhere and i'm looking at my space in my hands it's at least two and a half to three feet wide that bermuda grass is going to just go right into your bits so one of the things i recommend is is is is putting a nice barrier where it's easy to pull it out when you see that bermuda doing it or an area where you can spray the bermuda grass if it's getting into your into your plants but it will always reenter from the grass it comes in from the grass area really quickly and gets back into your beds you could put a barrier there but the barrier is going to have to be pretty stout uh it's going to have to be a barrier we've got a three-foot sidewalk and then a bed full that has nothing in it that's we've just covered with a mulch type and nothing grows in there except just regular weeds but it's so so i i just don't want to i'm at the point where i'm to just need to i want to rip up all of these beautiful established well you know really healthy boxwoods but it just looks terrible having that snake grass run off through it yeah yeah so it's so you can't spray there isn't a herbicide that you can spray there isn't a herbicide you could spray on the grass that wouldn't affect the bushes that's the problem there are some sprays that don't affect grass that will affect the bushes but not vice versa and so it's it's really hard and because your bushes are evergreen i can't tell you to uh i can't tell you to spray in winter which sometimes and it just wouldn't work anyway it's it's hard and i don't want to suggest that it will be easy so it's not reinvading from the lawn if you have a barrier there that's really good and that makes it a bit easier you're just going to have to persist listen hold on just a second Kim because i have some optimistic ways of looking at it let's let's come back in just a minute you get plain talk on plain living let's talk about living and growing in that deep self with bill fetch call 251-343-0106 on FM talk 1065 yeah all right welcome back gulf coast Sunday morning Alabama Sunday morning uh i want to say i'm looking up this our our farmer in shorter tim thank you for sending me that uh i wonder if i've run into him before i may have i back in the days when i maybe his his dad or his family back in the days when i scattered cotton when i was younger maybe nobody said old anymore any rate he's he's he's a really interesting guy in the and uh been former of the year got a lot of acreage and growing sesame which is uh i'm really i'd love to talk with him about it sometime really interesting thank you Tim so Kim let's talk about this thing that your mama call snake grass which i'm going to call bermuda grass that just gets into beds and just drives me crazy and it it has started more than one one argument in my family i can tell you and i think god i didn't do this it's not my fault the bermuda grass is so bad so what do you do about it and it is true it's hard kogan grass bermuda grass bermuda grass vahaya grass they're all can be really difficult i i think bermuda may be the hardest of all in in beds but one thing about bermuda bermuda is that it is a it is a c4 grass that means that it is a grass that needs a lot of sunlight and anything you can do to keep the sunlight off of it helps a lot and it will not tolerate it will not tolerate uh shade or pulling for a long period of time here's how a lot of weeds react and perennial weeds are one of them we go in we pull everything out of the bed and we think that's it and the weed has plenty of reserves in the roots and so it sticks its head back up again and it does just fine because it starts photosynthesizing really quickly and everything's fine but if you were to on that second round when it starts to put its head back up again after you've gotten rid of most of it if you quickly go in and get that out it's gonna do much worse because it can't tolerate going that long without sunlight it uses up the reserves in its roots so really hit it hard when you when you pull it just make sure you hit it hard and don't be intimidated because if you're intimidated on that second round it's gotcha it'll just eat you yes it's hard it's hard because that's in between 20 you know really tightly knit boxwoods it's really hard to get up in there hard to get in there and see it but you know the the shadier it is and the farther it is in there the more poorly it's gonna do because it needs lots of sunlight to really grow well okay mulches can help but they probably won't solve the problem i do find that leaves are a better mulch than say pine straw or other things that we put on plants like that the leaves tend to suppress the bermuda grass better and cogongrass better so but nothing's going to substitute for pulling it there's another thing that i used and i had some i had some plants that we're trying to get in including bermuda grass under some blueberries and i thought i'd experiment and they make these little felt circles for putting around plants and they're permeable to water i would not use plastic and i wouldn't use them long term but it can really help to suppress and help you with that bermuda grass growing right next to the plant but it's a little felt circle and it's got a little opening that you may have to cut just a little bit to get it to fit around the plant and it's like a skirt that goes around the plant water goes through it it's black you don't notice it and it it has worked pretty well to deal with grasses that love lots of sunlight like okay zorja and and bermuda grass uh and you'll you can try that too oh i wish you didn't have bermuda grass i wish i didn't have bermuda grass it's just such a pain and it just makes me want to say things i shouldn't say on the air but it it it's it's a pain and and remember that it loves light it needs light badly so don't be intimidated when it comes back just go right after it okay and and uh and find find someone young to go after it too that always hits yeah that's true okay maybe i'll work on that yeah all right thank you so much for your time all right all right oh yes it is a it is a problem uh so jim in georgetown says he's thinking about growing sesame now it's a beautiful plant jim it's really cool time it i i it's photosynthesis sensitive so i've got to look at the timing on this and this is why i would love to talk to this grower in shorter um i i i don't know whether i i i i assume it's a long day plant um i i don't know i i don't know i i mine did just fine in terms of blooming and producing fruit and and i'll have to look it up to see a little bit better but i do think jim here's the key to me it you want to harvest it during a dry season it seems to love coming up in wet conditions and that reminds me of india and places where it would grow where you get the monsoon or you get the you get the floods from you know you get the spring floods and it's coming up in those floods and you get this sort of monsoon season or in the metatraining climate a wet wet wetter season but then it seems to like to mature in it and it's very tolerant of that very tolerant of high night temperatures but then when it comes to producing the fruits you want it to be a little drier so our our dry season is barring hurricanes or tropical storm our dry season is going to be uh late september october in the early november right so that would be the timing i would do for harvesting it when you're thinking about growing that how's that how's that ah let's see luch about cucumbers varieties doing very well good to know my cucumbers are doing terrible clay i just want to say i always feel like i should tell you these things i don't know why i think they're doing poorly because there's not enough organic matter in the soil and we had all that rain and i do think it caused a big problem for some of those cucumbers i think the soil got just too wet and stay too wet for too long that can happen and i think it i think it hurt them pretty bad i got to figure that out next year i got to do better got to get more organic matter it's what happens when you have a newer garden and you you just haven't had a chance to build it up yet all right um let's see what what did i miss today so uh i got i got a kudos from steve for talking about olives that's good uh and uh we'll we'll talk maybe more about olives if i've been unfair to olives well if you've got some thoughts you you give me a call next week we won't have time to talk about it if you know anything about growing cameas or for oil what a great subject john ruder and i would love to make that work i wish i had time to make john ruder did some great selections those of you who are farmers out there you want something really cool that i think it's going to work great in south alabama probably most anywhere in south alabama think about camea oil what a great thing john ruder has done some incredible work incredible work on it and yeah we could use it's going to need a little bit of help like any new commodity it needs a little bit of a push you got to get the processing facilities you got to do all that but it's quite possible and there's some great you got some great advocates who could really help so if any of you farmers out there who are really interested to do something it's a perennial crop that's the cool thing you got to figure out how to harvest it but john's got that figured out and it means you don't have to replant it every year and it's it's it's it should be prolific for a long it camea's live a long time i mean we used to see camea forest before they all got wiped out hey it's been kind of fun we'll try it again next week give us a call next week thank you for listening [Music] the face blue mountain nose