Garden Questions from Subscribers - Moving Fig Tree, Adding Lime, Old Compost, Winter Pruning

Welcome to Heart Tube. My name is Jim Putnam. This is the garden question and answer video that I do most Sundays. Holly is out here in the garden. I'm sure she'll walk behind me at some point. She has been, my 15-year-old husky mix has been like a puppy recently. It's really been kind of wild. So thankful for that right now, but she's just all over the place nonstop. The Learn to Garden video series got two new videos on it this week. I said I was gonna put up a lot of content during the month of December. I'm two in, you'll be seeing this on like the 10th, so that's not a lot really, but I'm hoping to get up at least two videos a week for a little while on that. One was on ground covers this week and one was on bulbs. And then on those videos, I link the other videos that I have on the channel to kind of organize it in one place where you can look at the bulb video that I have on the Learn to Garden video series and then go and look at just how to plant daffodils or how to plant tulips or how to plant whatever, how to maintain the bulbs, whatever it is. Same thing with the ground cover video, just all the other videos I've done on ground covers linked below it, or at least most of them. And so just trying to organize that. It is $60 off during the month of December using the code DEC60. Just go over to my website, horttube.com, and you can sign up for it there. Thanks to everyone who has signed up for it thus far, and I appreciate it. Once you own it, you own it, and the new content that comes on it, you don't have to pay anything for that. And I'm planning on putting up content through 2024. So it will continue to expand. I'm still missing a lot of pieces. I went through it the other day, just trying to figure out maybe the next 10, 12, 15 videos that I'm going to put on it, just kind of filling in gaps between design and installation and maintenance of a garden. So that's kind of the goal there. Lots of content has gone up since I got back from traveling. We've had just tons and tons to do out here. Japanese maple has been moved right here. I don't know if it's in the frame or not. I just, I can never tell. This little screen I'm looking at, it's this big and it's six feet away. Certain things have been removed from that area. Azalea transplanted, all kinds of things going on. Still have to clean up leaves out here and get those ground up into mulch, get my paths cleaned back up and differentiated from the rest of the beds. Lots of things going on out here. Pansies have been planted in the front garden with tulips and then some with daffodils and some with daffodils here. More videos on that coming up in the next few days and all the maintenance and cleanup that's going on out here as well. Anyway, lots of content. And the other thing is I still have lots of your photos, your before and after photos. I think there's been 11 videos. I asked for photos for the before and after garden videos, before and after photos from you guys. And I've already put up 11 videos and I probably have enough photos to do another eight, nine, 10 and so there was one comment about, I hope I see my photos one day or whatever. You will, but I take a break between doing those before and after videos, but I still have lots of your photos and thank you so much for participating in that. I still enjoy, I still enjoy seeing them. If you want to send them in, this is the email address right here, horttube at gmail.com. You can send in before and after photos of your garden and they'll eventually show up in a video, I promise. Okay, let's see. Let's answer some questions from last week's video. Somebody said they planted a dwarf ginkgo and a crab apple tree and they weren't particularly root bound, meaning the roots weren't just like circled around. You know, sometimes when you pull something out of a container, some of these pansies I planted back here, you'll see in the video, just terribly root bound because they had been in the pots for a long time and I was buying them late in the season, kind of late in the season. And so they were very root bound, so I broke them up some. They said these trees weren't particularly root bound, but after I talked about root washing trees last week, taking all the soil off of them, making sure all the roots are going out and you know, and not circling anymore, they were concerned that they had not spread the roots on them at all and wanted to know if they should dig them up. I probably wouldn't dig them up and go through all of that at this point. But, and knowing that they weren't particularly root bound, they'll probably be okay, but definitely if you're, I talked about last week, you know, somebody came down and said they root wash everything and that's totally fine. I just don't bother on perennials. They'll regenerate roots pretty quickly. Shrubs for the most part, you know, I don't worry about it all that much. There are some plants I would though. I mean, another one that popped into my head after I shot that video, talking about root washing trees, Ilex cronata or Japanese hollies. So compacta hollies, soft touch hollies, helleri hollies, you know, hugendorn hollies, that red sky holly that I put in the video last week. I see a lot of times they'll die one branch at the time in the future. And I always have thought that that was, they were planted and they were root bound when they were planted. And those roots are then killing one another over time. And that's what's happening with those. So those seem to be sensitive to it. But if I had already put it in the ground, I'm probably not going to dig it back up unless I remember it being really root bound and I didn't break it up. That might be a different story. So somebody has a camellia and they have what they call atomic growth on it. Just big spiky, tall growth coming up on it. Let me turn around to right about here. Let's see. This is a October magic orchid camellia. I think it's in the frame. I hope I'm in the frame right now. And it's got this growth that happens late in the season sometimes where it'll just spring up, but it doesn't have any flower buds on it or anything. And it's very leggy. This one's getting plenty of sun. So it's not in too much shade. It's very full down here, has lots of flower buds, lots of flowers. It looks good in every way possible, except for it has this spiky growth on it. This kind of stuff can just be cut off whenever you want to cut it off. You can leave it and eventually these would branch and it would fill in. But for me, I'm going to take these stretched, these stretched branches off of it for sure. Hopefully that was in the frame. I'm guessing, I'm guessing it was. Yeah, I'm going to take those branches off for sure. And it just cut them back and you can cut them back into the interior of the plant just slightly. And that will, that will have it looking full again. I don't know why they do that, but most camellias, you know, toward the end of the season, they just shoot up some really rapid growth, tall and narrow. If it's happening more, I only have six branches to cut off of that thing, plus a couple other little wild branches that probably need to come off of it. If it's happening more than that, it might be in too much shade. Somebody's in zone 7B, Mississippi. They said, when overwintering marginal plants, at what temperature should you bring them into the garage? So, you know, by marginal, I'm guessing you're saying they are hardy in zone 7B, but barely, you know, so it's something that's hardy maybe in zone 7 to 9 and you're in zone 7B. If it's in a container and that container can freeze solid that night, I'm probably putting it in the garage. So I'm not going to worry about a particular temperature, but if it's going to go below 32 and stay there for 32 Fahrenheit for any length of time during the night, for one hour, two hours, three hours, in these bark mixes, in these containers, they freeze really quickly. It doesn't take very much cold to get them frozen solid. So if you have something that's only hardy to zone 7, you're in zone 7, it's in a container, that thing's going in the garage for sure. If it's, you know, if it's something that's hardy in zone 5 or 6 and you're in 7, maybe I leave that thing out a little bit. Maybe I give that a little more cold before I react to it. But the main problem is, is if it stays frozen for any length of time. So the temperature, temperature does matter because there is definitely a temperature that will kill the roots on a particular plant. And every plant has a temperature at which point the roots will die. And so that might be 25, it might be 15, it might be five. I don't know what plant it is, but there's definitely a exact temperature that will kill those roots. But the other thing that could kill them is a sustained freeze of their roots. And so for me, anything that's marginal, if the container could stay frozen solid for any length of time, put it in the garage. That would be my suggestion. I've got another question coming up about something stored in a garage, but it's more about a tropical plant than a marginal plant. So a marginal plant's just, it's supposed to be hardy for me. Or it's almost hardy for me, and how should I protect it? Tropical's a completely different subject, really, because any cold could do damage to them. Any significant cold could do damage to them. Somebody asked if their salvia flops over. Does that indicate not enough sun? Yeah, usually. The other things that could happen is sometimes people can over-fertilize, kind of over-love something and have it really stretch, you know, grow a lot of green growth and stretch and get kind of floppy as well. So that's another thing. But generally speaking, that's a sunlight-related issue. But you can definitely love a plant and have it grow and flop, you know, as well. So, you know, be careful with that. But I think, yes, probably it's not getting enough sunlight. The beauty of salvia, though, is that mid-season you can cut them in half and they'll just flush back out. Most salvias are just going to, you know, if you just go out there and literally just cut them in half and, you know, three weeks later, they'll be back in full bloom. The salvia that were along this bed edge now where these pansies have been planted, this was salvia all summer. They got cut like two or three times, those summer-jeweled salvia. Just cut them right in half, and a couple weeks later, they're back in bloom. We just do a few of them at the time so that there's always some blooming for the bees that are on them. But they respond really well to just being cut in half. So if you have one like that, I bet you could try that for a season, see if that'll thicken it up and help it be a little sturdier. But if it continues to be floppy, probably needs more sun. Okay, so somebody said they were looking at a fancy compost bin, and this was a husband and wife having a conversation. He was looking at a compost bin that was on sale, but still fairly expensive. And then he was looking at a garbage can and just putting holes in the bottom of that to compost in. And the wife apparently said that I would never spend that much money on anything. I probably wouldn't ever buy any kind of those rotating ones or any kind of fancy compost bin. My composting, and I've talked about it since I got here, when I am gonna put a compost bin back here, but it will be out of some non-treated wood when I do it back there, which eventually will cave in and it will be part of the compost. And then I'll just build a new wall around it. But my compost since I've been here has just been a cold compost. So everything's just piled on top of itself, but it's in too much shade back there. So it just never heats up enough. It's also kind of dry. It stays kind of dry back there and it would need to be wet more occasionally to get it to really compost well or heat up. So I just been cold composting and I just go back there and flip it over occasionally. It's just a literally, a cold compost is just a pile of organic material. So anything I've cut off of anything, anything you see me pull up in this garden and have it in a wheelbarrow, it ends up on a giant ugly pile back here. And then I can flip, but I can go back there right now and flip that thing over and find that half of it's broken down, but it never got really hot. So when you do a cold compost though, you're not gonna kill any disease problems or any of the problems that hot composting can help solve. So I don't put any diseased leaves or anything like that in that pile, because I'm just gonna, anything that goes into that pile is coming right back out of that pile, like it was in all likelihood. So I'd just be spreading stuff around that I wouldn't want to, but any clean foliage, dead annuals that died from frost, any of that stuff just goes into the cold compost pile. I probably have to have my compost pile over here in a sunnier area near the vegetable garden at some point if I wanted to have a really well-working composting system that's building up heat and doing what it's supposed to do and breaking the material down faster. A cold compost also breaks down very, very slowly in comparison to hot composting. But yes, I would, she is right. I would not be spending a whole lot of money on probably anything for the garden. I mean, a lot of the purpose of this channel is to show how to do this in a big way for the least amount of money possible. Okay, so somebody asked how many miles did we log on the two-month road trip? Somewhere between eight and 10,000. I pull a Jeep with my RV, and so when we get there, the Jeep is driving, and then we're driving the Jeep around when we go spot to spot to spot. But we went all the way to Oregon, down to south of San Francisco, and then started an angle toward Phoenix and then home. So that alone is 5,000, between five and 6,000 miles, probably, just that circle. Then you add, you know, you didn't do it in a perfect circle, you zigzagged, and the Jeep drove miles as well. So it's probably, I say eight to 10, but maybe nine to 10 is probably more accurate. So it was a lot, a whole lot of miles. I hope to travel in the future and slow down just a hair, and I wanna visit some of your gardens and some other places and just slow down, just a hair, because that was almost manic. Even though it was two months, it's still almost manic, that many miles. So somebody has clay soil. They did a soil test. Their pH came back 6.8. All the surrounding area around them would be more typical, 5.5 to six, something like that. Somebody had put lime down it, on it over and over and over and over again. They've had this property for like five years, and the pH hasn't fallen all that much. I have talked about when you lime to raise your soil pH, it eventually will fall back to where it was originally. When you use sulfur to lower your pH, eventually it will just come right back up. Those are all temporary fixes. They don't last forever, but they do, if somebody's limed year over year over year over year, then it's going to have some, it's going to take a little while for it to drop down. They are using Holly Tone now, which has some sulfur in it, which will help. They talked about some white pines failing. This was in, I think, Western Virginia, some white, and wondered if that had something to do with the pH. My guess probably is not. I've seen white pines are failing all over Western North Carolina and up into Virginia, and that seems to be related to our 2.5 degree increase in our 15 in the last, in the new agricultural zone map, the 2.5 degree difference in average nighttime temperature that everybody in the country, almost everybody in the country seemed to be impacted by. That's a very narrow band that those white pines grow in, in their native range, and they are, I know they are struggling in places, so I don't know if it's more related to that. This is just going to be time related. 6.8 is not bad. They had some blueberries. Blueberries would definitely prefer a pH like five, something really low. So that's, you know, if you're doing blueberries and those kinds of things, I'd continue to maybe try some sulfur around them, maybe to help them out. But your other things in your garden, 6.8 is not a bad pH at all, and most things can take up the nutrients they need, 6.8 without any problem. Had to put Holly in the house. Somebody planted vinca minor. So there's vinca minor and vinca major. Vinca major just has a larger leaf, and vinca minor has a slightly smaller leaf, little blue flowering, evergreen ground cover. You guys see all over the place. Lots and lots of folks can grow it. There's variegated versions of it too. I typically use the variegated vinca in containers, in some of our spring container planting videos, because they are good color, and they're easy to grow, and you can't kill them. You know, again, they'll be one of the last things to survive on the planet in the apocalypse, for sure, will be vinca. They got vinca minor spreading vigorously through their bed, as you would expect, and it's up in their other perennials. They wanted to know if it would have a negative impact on their other perennials. Yes, on most things, probably. There are some perennials like, you know, day lilies, or something like that, that could probably tolerate it without any problem, but most things are not going to want vinca, you know, growing them, you know. It can choke most things out. So, and they said they should, they create some sort of barrier. You need to create a barrier for the whole section, and not plant by plant. I don't think you could defend it plant by plant. I think you need to have a barrier where the vinca can, you know, where you just keep the vinca away from your other flowering perennial things. That's not to say that there's not somebody out there that has vinca running all through their perennial borders, and they're able to do okay, but I think for the most part, most things are not going to be happy with that type of evergreen ground cover perennial running up through them, and them performing their best. Okay, that one's a tough, that one's one that can get out of control. It's like, it starts to get out of control, and then it can really get out of control, you know, as it establishes itself more and more. And there are a lot, I could give you 50 examples in this neighborhood of vinca that's out of control, that's, you know, between, and it was planted by one neighbor, and now four neighbors own the problem. It's not as bad as English ivy, but it's, you know, it's right up there. Tends to be more vinca major that runs more wild. The vinca minor's a little bit slower, so you probably contain it a bit more, a bit more easily. Let's see, is the large loropetalum just one plant? Okay, so let's swing, we'll do another, get everybody. Okay, hopefully that was slow enough. Here is, and the camera's really crooked. Here's the loropetalum they're talking about. This is Carolina midnight loropetalum. Yes, it's just one plant, and it is at least 12 feet tall, maybe 14 feet tall. You can't see the top of it. It needs to be pruned, but yeah, it's just one plant. They asked how far from a fence you would plant it. If it can, four feet or so. I mean, it's no, the thing is, you know, I've got a osmanthus on each side of it. It's only, you know, eight feet wide, but it's 15 feet tall. So I think four feet from the fence would be an adequate amount to plant it from a fence. But if you can find that Carolina midnight, I really do like it, and it's got an almost, almost red flower, which is super interesting. Now we have another angle. Okay, but this'll do. Let's see, so somebody had bought the Learn to Garden video series. Actually, they got it as a Christmas present, and I'm just gonna sell you on the Learn to Garden video series by somebody's comment. She was amazed how much additional information is contained in the videos, and appreciates that the YouTube videos are linked below. So thank you very much. Whoever purchased it for you, and thank you for acknowledging it in your comment. Let's see, somebody has moss creeping into their grass, and should they lime? So again, I don't recommend any changes to your soil, any chemistry changes to your soil that are not backed up by some sort of soil test. So it's probably a very low pH. It's also probably very compact. Usually it's very compact, shady soils. Shady, compact, and low pH soils where we'll see the moss growing, but there are exceptions to that. I see moss growing on the side of concrete, where the concrete's full of lime, and you just wonder how it's growing on there. So there are exceptions to where probably different mosses can grow in different spaces. So I would get a soil test done, and then if your pH is really crazy low, then you can lime at that point. Keep in mind, again, lime is a temporary fix. It's going to go the other direction. And then maybe you get a soil test done, and your pH comes back at 5.5, and you want it to get it at 6.5, maybe you could lime a couple of times, and then come back and take another soil test in a couple of years. So make sure you're... It's not, now I'm on the lime train, and we're going to lime forever like the other person had, you know, where it went too far the other way for the things that they really wanted to grow in their garden, and the native things that are in their garden, you know, like those white pines. You know, the native things didn't want the soil changed at all. Okay, so somebody has a fig, and in one season it's gotten very big very quickly, and they want to know the best way to transplant it, because I said they were difficult. Should they cut it back before moving it? So yes, I would cut it back before moving it. I think though, it had only been in the ground this year, so I don't think it would be that difficult to move after only one year. More difficult than other things that have been in the ground for one year. This Japanese maple, I planted it from that container into the ground maybe a year ago, could be a little more than that, and it popped out of the ground pretty easily. So most things, it takes two or three years for them to come very, very hard to get out of the ground. Figs are much faster than other things though. So you'll struggle with it a bit, but I'd cut the thing in half and pop it out of the ground while it's dormant and move it. If you're in an area where it's marginal, so in zone seven, you may want to wait until late winter to do it. If you're down in zone eight, B, nine, 10, and you want to move your fig tree, I'd do it anytime it's dormant. Would probably be fine. Let's see, somebody made a comment about whether they should have a black fence versus a white fence. Cause I've talked about, they were in Florida, so they had some other concerns as well. But I have talked about a white fence being reflective. So if you're going to plant plants in a sunny location with a white fence or a white house backdrop, you need to make sure those plants are really super sun tolerant because the sun hits that white fence and reflects onto the back of the plant and it can really cook them. And I've seen a couple examples in consultations of this, where the backs of the plants against white fences are really burnt pretty badly. A black fence is going to absorb heat. And so the black fence is going to be hot to the touch for you to touch it, but it won't be as reflective. So, you know, I'll let you decide that. It can be, you know, black fence can end up leading to some maintenance maybe on it because it's, you know, it gets so hot that if it was a wood fence and you were painting it black or something like that, you probably would be potentially painting it more often and that kind of thing. Cause that heat is probably going to have some negative impact on it. So, you know, for me, it would totally depend if the white fence is out in the full sun and you're going to be planting plants up against it. You know, again, it could have some negative impact, but I tend to like white fences. They're pretty striking. They're easy to garden in front of because everything just kind of pops off of them. They were worried about algae being on it. Obviously, if you're in Florida, you're going to get algae on everything and the white fence is going to show it more quickly than the black fence is. Although it's going to be on both of them, the white fence is going to be very obvious that the algae is on it. But again, I like a white fence. You're just going to have to think through the plants that you're putting it up against it that they're really super heat tolerant and can hold up to that reflective light. Okay, so during the video with Tony this past week, with Tony Avent this past week on the zone map, somebody, he said plants are hardier during dry winters versus wet winters. We just happened to be standing near a bunch of agave and some other, he's got a ton of Southwest natives there and South African natives and Australian natives and a lot of plants he likes to try here in the Southeast that like drier conditions. And so we, but I think based on where we were standing at the time in the garden, he was thinking about that. So yes, things like agave, I've talked about some of our dormant grasses when they're initially planted and the soil's really worked up and the soil can stay really wet around them. There are some things that struggle in wet winter conditions. And so that's the things he was talking about. But in general, the video that I put up almost immediately after that video was about how dry it is in my garden and how I'm going to be watering. So those two things could look, were definitely counter talking points. There are a select few number of things that most of you are probably not growing in your gardens that would prefer a drier winter. And that would definitely be things like agave, yucca, you know, cacti, if you were growing any cactus, that kind of thing would prefer a dry winter. Most of these other leafy evergreen plants, deciduous plants, your bulbs that are under the ground and other things would prefer some moisture during the winter months. And having them be drought stressed, which the things in this garden are, hopefully raining as you're watching this on Sunday, it's supposed to rain on Sunday, is not a good combo with really cold air. So yes, he did say that, but I think he was just, again, we were standing there with those agave and other things at that time, which he was, you know, referring to. Okay, so somebody used, they used compost to grow their vegetables and grow bags. Can it be reused so that compost be dumped back in their compost pile and reused? Yes, but you know, compost is different than soil. I've talked about this a bunch on the channel. You know, soil is, you know, the clay or sand that your soil, your actual soil is made out of, the non-organic matter part of your soil, is ground up rock dust. And it contains all the nutrients, a lot of the nutrients that your plants need, whether that's, you know, phosphorus or potassium or, you know, magnesium or calcium or whatever it is. Okay, that's where it resides. Your compost has those things because they were the things that were in the leaves and the grass clippings and all the other things that your compost was made out of, but it runs out of steam, okay? It doesn't, it's that rock lasts much longer. So you've lost nutrients from your compost. So you can make that up using organic fertilizers or you can make that up using some rock dust or something like that. Adding it back into your compost will actually regenerate, will regenerate it from your other compost, you know, will help it too. But you will have to make up for some loss in nutrients in it. And there's another question coming up about that. Somebody has a climbing hydrangea that's too dense. It has multiple branches crossing one another. This is one of those, you know, climbing hydrangeas is one of the hydrangeas that we typically say prune after flowering. So that would be hydrangea macrophyllus, hydrangea quercifolia, oak leaf hydrangea, big leaf hydrangeas, climbing hydrangeas. They bloom on old wood, so you prune them after they flower. So they're saying, well, if it's only, you only prune them after they flower, I can't really see the inside of this plant except in the winter while it's dormant. Should they prune it now? I would 100% prune any plant that's in jeopardy of hurting itself, no matter what. So sacrificing flowers, who cares? I mean, you need, if you're trying to save the plant, if you've got crossing branches that are gonna do damage to one another, or the plant's not gonna be able to breathe, you know, air is not gonna move through it readily, you need to thin it, whatever you need to do. And you're not gonna cut off all the flowers because you're not cutting everything, but you need to go in there and thin those branches out while you can see inside the plant. You can prune a plant, and, you know, make sure this is, you know, make sure I say this, when you say you're supposed to prune a big leaf hydrangea after it flowers, that's to make sure you have flowers the next year. But you can prune it in the wintertime, you're just not going to have flowers except on the re-blooming ones. You're not gonna have flowers, but it won't hurt it if it needs to be pruned, you know what I mean? If you need to cut it in half and move it to some other place in your garden, you know, you can absolutely do that. You're gonna lose some flowers, but you're not hurting it by pruning it. That's not, you know, winter is fine to prune almost pretty much anything while it's dormant. It's just some things you're gonna be removing flowers on, but it doesn't mean it hurts it to do it, just gonna have less flowers. But you need to, any plant that needs rescue pruning, you need to do it. So a plant that, a tree that, you know, an ice storm could just break it apart because it's so wispy, prune it sooner than later. Anything like that that could be damaged by a storm, be damaged by whatever, damaged to itself by crossing over one another, get those things done sooner than later. So somebody makes their own container media to plant using old soil, peat moss, compost, cow manure. So this is a similar question to reusing that compost up at the top. They wanna use azomite or rock phosphate and wanted to know if that was a good idea. I would definitely use, you don't need the rock phosphate if you used azomite, because azomite's a mined product. I think it's mined in Utah and it's basically rock dust, just like I just talked about. So it's basically a rock dust that happens to have a lot of mineral content in it, a lot of the different minerals that plants need. And so you can use azomite in your organic soil mixes where you're only using compost or peat or coconut coir or whatever the heck it is you're using. Compost is typically more what I use and pine bark, if I have pine bark available. And then you can use that basically rock dust to make sure that those nutrients are available in the soil. So that person up there with the compost question, same thing, you could add that to make up how much nutrient loss there was from your plants during the growing season. So somebody asked about, I talked about again, root washing last week and they wanted to know if it reduced the possibility of having invasive worms introduced into your garden. Yeah, sure, any washing, as long as you're disposing of that material off your property, if you're not disposing of the stuff you washed off of the roots. It's kind of funny, we got these invasive jumping worms and a few other invasive worms, but folks up in the North, all the worms are invasive. The Europeans brought earthworms from Europe. We have European earthworms. It's kind of funny, everybody's talking about invasive worms. And if you're in Vermont, every worm's invasive because they weren't here, they were brought here. The Europeans got here and went like, what's wrong with this soil? There's no worms, and then they brought worms. And worms are good at creating soil structure, breaking down big material into smaller material than fungi and beneficial bacteria can break them down further. And then the nutrients are available to your plants. So they have benefit to the soil. Unfortunately, they can also then break down everything. And so they don't ever stop, right? They can go into a forest floor and just break everything down in the forest floor and release all that carbon that's been stored on the forest floor. Cause they just, I mean, that's what earthworms do, right? That's their job and their role on earth. So those introduced worms have had some negative impact as well. But yes, anything that could potentially be gotten from a plant being purchased, and that could be, you know, fire ants got to Wake County, which Raleigh's in Wake County, before almost anywhere in the state of North Carolina. Some trees were brought from South Carolina up to Raleigh, or for Cary for a landscape job. And Wake County was in the fire ant quarantine and nowhere else in North Carolina was in the quarantine at that time. It was so weird. It was just like one county and then the whole state pretty quickly got them. But they did move in plants. And so we do unfortunately move diseases and insects and other things that way. Okay. Somebody has a lime tree in their garage. This is the one I was talking about where we're talking about a tropical plant. You know, they have basically a tropical plant, a lime tree. Most citrus is, you know, pretty tropical, zone nine, eight, you know, nine, 10, 11, with some exceptions. There are some ponceras and other things that are zone seven hardy. But for the most part, citrus is pretty, not very cold tolerant. So they put their lime tree in the garage in zone 8A and it has lost their leaves. Is it dead? Well, I wouldn't know if it's dead. The only way you'd know that is if the branches are still pliable, you can go bend the branches on it. You know, if they are, it's got some chance of leafing back out. I would consider your lime tree a house plant in the wintertime, you know, where you are. I don't think the garage is gonna be potentially quite warm enough. Number two, it is a full sun plant and that garage is gonna be pretty dark unless you're putting some additional light on it. So if you were putting some sort of heat light, you know, a light that not only had light, but also heat with it, you could probably keep it in the garage. But I think you'd be better off in a very bright window inside. And then taking it out, honestly, it can stay outside in zone 8A, probably some good portion of the winter, your lime can stay outside. It's, you know, 60 degrees and 38 or something, you know, like the next seven days on my forecast here, it could be outside right now. Just, but keep in mind, I would use it as a house plant in the future. Somebody has bulbs in their freezer and wanted to know how long they were gonna be good. You definitely don't wanna put them in your freezer. I hope that they're in your refrigerator. If they're in your refrigerator, they can stay there for quite a long time, as long as they're in a breathable bag. I've talked about this in some of the videos. Let me grab one real quick. Colorblends and the other bulb companies send out the bulbs in these types of bags right here. And the reason for that is they breathe, you know, there's water in that bulb and it's slowly losing that water. And if it was in some sort of plastic bag, that water would rot the bulbs from inside out. So make sure they're in a mesh bag in the refrigerator, usually in one of the crispers down in the bottom is where I typically keep mine. Definitely not in the freezer. I don't wanna freeze them solid. You know, but they'll be good for a long time. They'll be good. I mean, you could probably plant them. I've had bulbs that I've left in the refrigerator till January, February, and then planted them. Some of them had rotted at that point or shrunk to the point where they weren't as good as they were originally. Somebody asked if it's too late to transplant a Rose of Sharon. Rose of Sharon is another thing that's still gonna be on the planet with the Vinca when we're all gone. You can transplant that Rose of Sharon anytime you want to. You can park your car on it probably and get away with it for some period of time. But yeah, anytime during the winter time, while it's dormant, you can move your Rose of Sharon. You can give it a little bit of a haircut off the top if you want to at the same time. Somebody has a raised bed and they got some weedy compost. And so weeds just started coming up from everywhere. Can they kill them with black plastic? Yeah, you can put black plastic or clear plastic. You know, I use clear plastic a lot of times when I... During the summer, I'd use clear plastic because again, really, really hot. In the winter, black plastic is probably the way to go. If you keep most of them covered for some period of time, it'll kill them. Somehow Bermuda will outlast you and your efforts to kill them with plastic, kill Bermuda with plastic. So I put up that Red Sky Holly video after I got back home. So I had unboxed that plant here at the house. Then a few months after that, I had gone to Athens, Georgia and interviewed Dr. John Reuter, who's a professor at UGA about that plant. And then months and months and months passed, I showed the one that's in the garden over here. And so I put that video together over a year. So it was just three little pieces of video, but it took a year to put that video together. Then I put it up and then I didn't put how tall it gets, what zones it grows in, or anything on that video. It was so ridiculous, so ridiculous. I do that occasionally. You know, like, oh, how did you forget the, you know, anything that matters was not included in that video. So it's gonna get the same height as any other Sky Pencil. I've seen them 12 and 15 feet tall, but for the most part, you're probably best maintaining your Sky Pencil six to eight feet, something like that, so they don't flop over. And then they're hardy in zones six to nine. Some people say five on Sky Pencil, but I don't know. Maybe if somebody's in zone five and they have a Sky Pencil Holly doing well, you can let us know down below. But I think six is, you know, probably the best idea for Sky Pencil Hollies. Let's see, so somebody needs an evergreen screen for their neighbor, you know, between them and a neighbor in Johnston County. They have some Leyland Cypress, and they'd like to add some other things. I have tons of videos for screening plants on the channel, and there's an entire playlist for screening plants. If you go to my main channel page, you'll see a tab called Playlist, and then you can pull up the screening plants. Pretty much everything I would have ever covered would work in your Johnston County landscape, but I love Osmanthus. In fact, I put up a video earlier this year. There's 13 different screening plants along this bank over here. So when you go and pick these things out, whether it's Osmanthus, Hollies, Elysium, the Sunshine Ligustrum that's over there, any of the Laura Petalum I just showed, that Carolina Midnight would be a great choice. Do a mixture of things. That way, if you lose one thing, you don't lose everything in the line. Thank you guys so much for participating. You can ask gardening questions down below the video, and I pick from those each week. And also don't forget that the $60 discount on the Learn to Garden video series runs through the entire month of December, and it's capital D-E-C-60, basically December 60, that you can get the $60 discount. It's the biggest discount I've offered off of it before this month is over. Hope to have put up at least eight videos, two a week through the end of the month, and I'm gonna do the same thing through January and all of next year. And once you own it, you own it. You don't have to pay anything more for it. So thank you guys very much for watching and participating.