Great Gardening Questions - What We Learned This Year

Welcome to Heart Tube. My name is John Putnam. This is the garden question and answer video that I do pretty much every Sunday. You can ask gardening questions down in the comment section below this video and I'll pick from those next week. We also put up a kind of a bonus question and answer video in the middle of the week, kind of catching up on a lot of the questions. Now we've had just a ton of great questions lately and we'll pick from both of those for next week's Q&A. I think we're going to do a live Q&A though next Sunday so be prepared for that. I'll put up some sort of announcement on YouTube that it's coming and so you'll know when that's going to be. But there's going to be a live Q&A coming up. There's a $40 discount on the Weekly Garden Planner for the month and you use the code SEPTEMBER with a capital S to get the $40 off the Weekly Garden Planner. March through September up October is shot and I just need to get it edited. I'm working on it right now and November we're shooting as soon as we get back home. So just trying to stay ahead on the Weekly Garden Planner ahead of those who have purchased it and thank you for those who have. Let's see, I think Holly just laid down behind me. I don't know if you're gonna be able to see her back here but she is out here enjoying the cool morning at Charleston Lake Provincial Park which is kind of right at the end of the top of the east side of Lake Ontario in Canada. It's a little bit north of that. We're heading to Ottawa then Montreal and then heading home. So by the time you're watching this all of that stuff will have taken place. Okay, so let's jump into some gardening questions. We've got quite a few good ones. Again, thank you guys so much for participating. We've been hopping around the parks and shooting. This park is so busy that I just didn't want to disturb people out and about. We're in a very private little spot here. Got the picnic table. Got Holly outside in the cool air. Got Griffin looking at me out the screen, very jealous that he's not out here in the cool air right this second. But I'll get him. He's already had a long walk this morning so he'll get another one. And here's where we are. Let's see, somebody asked a great question. What's the number one thing I learned from gardening this year? And I thought it was a thought it was a good question because you know Steph and I spend a lot of time out exploring, you know, like we're doing now and we spend our thing is definitely a combo between both botany and horticulture. And so we'll explore, you know, the woodland areas like this and then also explore, you know, like more manicured gardens, you know, gardens like we have at our house and that combination. So we learn a lot but I think the main thing that I've gotten more of this year is more of what Ram Gibberson always talks about, about sharing. Like she built the garden in Athens, Georgia to share it. And so I think that this year when we had the open garden it was just really fun sharing our garden, you know, with other people. Sharing plants with other people, sharing people sharing things with us. We're toting a gardenia around we've had since the Pinkman, the Pinkham garden visit back in Norfolk several weeks ago in this trip that we're on. And so I think that's the main thing is that, you know, that we're sharing not only this information or, you know, help but also just opening up the garden, being able to visit other gardens, all the welcoming people that are in horticulture. You know, I think that that's kind of hit home more than ever this year especially with the open garden and 800 people showing up at it and people from California and North Dakota and, you know, Louisiana and other places that came to see the garden. So there you go. Number two, somebody has a kaleidoscope abelia in zone 9a Alabama with very little foliage. It's in full sun, full heat. Is it too much or is it a water issue? I wouldn't really know. When you get, you know, when asking questions about why a plant is thin, you know, I don't know what ups and downs it's had. I will say that the reason I picked this question is some of these abelias, especially these variegated abelia, are pretty root sensitive to heat and that's where growers really struggle to grow them. We can grow these big beautiful kaleidoscope abelia and other variegated abelia in three gallon containers that are like this wide and this tall and they look perfect in the containers and you can flip the container over and half the soil falls off. There's very limited roots. Those containers stay hot and really the roots don't have, they don't grow very well in those conditions. So if you are in full sun, which this is a full sun plant, but if you are in full sun and it's, you know, zone 9a Alabama and it's just and you plant them spaced out, you know, apart, that's going to give a lot of opportunity for the sun to really work on those roots and damage those roots. I don't know, again, I'm always guessing what these things are, but I do know that about all these variegated abelia growers really struggle to fill out a root system on them where that you can flip them out of the pot and then the root ball stays together. It's a real struggle on them and that's, there's really been probably a shortage of most of the variegated abelia, Miss Lemon and Radiance and others. I go into a lot of nurseries that struggle with them. So that could be it, that's just the spacing of them and again this is where we talk about using annuals and maybe perennials temporarily in between these things while they fill in a bit would help with that root heat issue. Somebody has in North Carolina coastal area zone 8b a serviceberry, Autumn Brilliant serviceberry, that they planted in 2020. This year it has a ton of lichen on it and water sprouts. Water sprouts are like vertical branches that all of a sudden start coming off the stems. You have these normal branching like this and then all of a sudden these very vertical pieces come. It's almost like the plant is trying to produce a new leader. Like out of the blue, it's like how do I rescue myself and it'll start growing leaders. So when a tree's under stress frequently we'll see water sprouts on them and the tree's got a ton of lichen. It gets watered with some annuals around it, it's in the full sun. Is the lichen and the water sprouts a sign of decline? Likely some sort of issue, some sort of damage. I don't know what it is. Again I'm guessing what these things are but lichen in general is not a sign that a tree is unhealthy because you know I'm looking there's a sugar maple next to me over here and there's lichen on the side of it. You know sun's coming up over here. There's lichen I can see. It's a small amount. When I see it really overrunning the side of a tree there was a I think a dogwood and a walk around neighborhood tour video a few months back in the neighborhood. It was just one side was just completely covered in lichen. You could see the tree was struggling. It was having a hard time fighting back against a little lichen's okay. It's normal but when it's when you do see it really excessive on the plant a lot of times that is a plant that is struggling to fight off things and then water sprouts are a definite sign. Typically a definite you know I would say a definite sign that there's something going on with the tree. Again I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's underwatered, overwatered, where it's sitting, whether it was a good plant when you bought it in the first place, whether the roots were broken apart when they went in the ground, if it's having some sort of I wouldn't know. Unfortunately you know everything else is a guess but yes it is those are typical signs. Overwhelming amount of lichen and water sprouts are probably not great signs of a tree's health. So somebody said you've mentioned a general dislike for barberries yet you speak well of orange rocket barberry which is then they said it's hard to find. Why the change of heart? And then somebody said orange rock then they said orange rocket doesn't seem to be invasive in Tyler, Texas. Yeah my well number one of barberries are some barberries are very invasive you know up in the northeastern part of the country for sure. My general dislike I don't know that I dislike barberries all that much I mean grew lots of barberries gold barberries I could sell like crazy when those things leaked out in the spring every year at the farmer's market. They just weren't exciting to me right it's just not a plant that's particularly exciting and I've sold you know when you're doing this for again 39 years I've been doing this it's going to take more than a three by three round deciduous red foliage shrub with thorns you know to get you excited probably and so I just think of my almost boredom with them is what I would say as much as anything and then of course the fact you know they're pretty invasive in some places as well. But there are some through selections I'm very careful and I've become more careful in time not to lump all things into a group because there's always horticultural exceptions number one and number two somebody's working on that plant to make it better to make it a better ornamental plant to make it less invasive to make it the color lasts longer on it or be more vivid or be variegated or be something and so I have become more careful in time to take a whole group of plants and just go ah that's terrible because I love that lute and rouge barberry that we have at the house it's a little I mean I would never brag about a barberry but that thing's this tall and this wide in almost three years it's such a good little plant and then orange rocket having seen them I knew it had a great habit but having seen the way Jay Sifford used them up in West Jefferson it just was like whoa that's a whole another level of cool looking at those kind of umbrella shaped barberries out in the middle of that open perennial border open perennial garden meadow he has stylized meadow I think this is probably what I would call it a little different angle the sun was changing quite a bit I think you can see Harley laying back here now somebody's up in zone 8b in Washington in the Puget Sound a lot of the plants they buy are b&b bald and burlap meaning they were grown in a field and then dug up and then wrapped in burlap and sold to them so bald and burlap or b&b you'll see that written I didn't do a lot of b&b stuff as a landscape or some trees but I love I'll put almost any container tree against the field grown tree there's just more of a planted in the ground it just starts growing with the container stuff where the bottom burlap stuff took a little while to re-establish itself after being dug out of the field but with all that said a lot of the b&b stuff has clay-based soil and that was true with all the boxwoods that we had the garden center when I was a kid we sold these boxwoods that were in these clay basically clay bags of burlap he wants to know if he should remove the clay I don't think you'd be able to remove it very easily without doing root significant root damage so I just wouldn't and I but I wouldn't mound them up just a bit to make sure that that's not going to be a source of you know the plants drowning in the future and the clay does have good nutrient you know a lot of nutrients in it so I think you know overall long term it's not going to cause the plants any problem to be in a different soil than your native soil but and I think if you tried to get in there and start pulling clay off those roots you're going to do more damage than good so I'm just going to plant them like they are try to get as much of that burlap cut off as possible that burlap buried down in the ground does not break down as fast as we would like it to it does break down but when you deny something light you give it a lot of moisture it either breaks down poorly or doesn't break down at all you know if it's not given light so I try to get as much of that cut off as I as you possibly could without doing a bunch of damage uh let's see somebody said shout out to the women's plant nerd t-shirt for ladies they're soft comfortable and attractive thank you so much for buying it and thanks for the feedback on it they're over on the website hortube.com um let's see this person seasons in terms of cultural changes like football starting or school starting rather than by weather or climate um you know and they were just we're just saying that that's just kind of how they think about you know summer is when summer ends when you know when school goes back rather than September 20th or you know the start of it being June 20th and uh you know I think that a lot of things um to do with climate are really based on your area I mean summer starts in Raleigh sometimes by the first of May and sometimes it's late May before summer what we can and by summer I mean not like this you know June 20th to September 20th or whatever it is but the it's 95 degrees outside and so that's summer uh to the plants and so there's a definite difference between how we how spring summer fall and winter affect our plants uh based on where we are in the country you know we were up at visiting Erin the Impatient Gardener and she's on Lake Michigan there and Lake Michigan keeps her garden extremely cool through spring she has a hard time just getting started gardening in the spring because that lake holds on to that cold for so long but then in the fall she's getting paid back because the lake warmed up so much during the summertime that makes her falls much longer than they would be in other parts of the air of the same area so you know there's definite you know so her it just moves her seasons around on the calendar a bit and it depends on where you live as to what you're calling summer or winter or fall or spring uh for us we have a very short spring uh typically um we're going to see Jason Isbell in uh Montreal who's one of my absolute favorite uh musicians and uh he said in a song we get a week of spring and then summers blistering uh talking about um Tupelo Mississippi and uh that's kind of how I feel in Raleigh but then we get to pay back with this really long fall of nice cool nights typically a very dry uh season and you can do a lot of outdoor outdoor activities in the fall so just our seasons are different depending on where we live and we have to learn that about how that affects our gardens um you know as well let's see um so somebody had a um horrible um Ohio Kentucky West Virginia drought this summer is it a good idea uh to cut back plants cut off blooms to help plants root uh to get through drought uh I don't know about cutting them back so much but you can if they're flowering things you can definitely take the flowers off in that first year you know maybe even the second year sometimes to help things get through uh it is very difficult to for the plant to try to do both all of the above like we put it in the ground in April and then expect it to put on roots uh flowers and new growth and look good at the end of the season and so I end up with these questions well the plant's thin the plants off color there's something going on with it you know went through a lot trying to do all of those things so in some cases you know if you especially if you live in extreme areas or you're planting something and it's not the the best time to plant it it might be a good idea you know to cut off flowers um and cut off flower buds and that kind of thing and just say hey you can take a year just to get yourself prepared uh for next year let's see so somebody asked about as compost as a form of mulch to help moderate moisture or would they end up with more weeds compost is absolutely a fantastic mulch I mean if as long as it's a from a hot compost meaning that it went you know went through an actual composting process of heating up and making sure that the weed seeds were killed and maybe disease issues were killed any of the material that was in there you know basically having control of it here comes another rv past the spot here so that's important is how the compost came to be and it went through a hot cycle uh otherwise you will be putting weed seeds out do I end up so here's the question I compost the vegetable garden as mulch we also put some wood chips in the path in there which compost over the course of the season but most of the vegetable garden is just covered in compost whereas my ornamental landscape areas with the shrubs and the herbaceous perennials and trees and all that are mostly done with hardwood mulch do I get more or less weeds I definitely get more weeds in the vegetable garden part of that is a little bit of foot traffic I put a little bit more foot traffic probably overall in the vegetable garden because you're in there picking you're in there messing around with it and the compost is going to move a little bit more whereas that hardwood mulch just kind of locks down a bit and creates a better a better ground cover ground covering overall that will prevent light from getting down to the weed seeds and allowing them to germinate again we're still getting weeds everywhere but my hardwood mulch beds have less weeds in them than the compost does that's for sure but compost is a perfectly good mulch because really all we're trying to do is cover the ground and organic material that the beneficial bacteria beneficial fungi can eat and turn into fertilizers and a lot of times in the compost it already is in those forms for our plants to use keep the ground covered to prevent moisture from evaporating you know this was part of their question was it still keep moisture in place yes and it's going to prevent some weeds but you're I think you're going to have a few more overall and when it rains I think that compost is going to move a bit more which is going to allow for some but some more weeds as well somebody planted some brigadoon st john's wort uh correctly and then after rain the root ball is showing um is there um will leaves falling protect the crown or should she cover them with some with some compost I would probably um so it's pretty easy to plant something and then have a heavy rain come along and wash some of the wash some of the material off those roots and expose those roots in some way we can have we can have animals help us with that we can have squirrels definitely help us with that digging around things and exposing roots on things yeah you can come back and compost over those roots or just use your fall leaves to cover them up or if you want to you can put a shovel under them and just kind of replant them pretty quickly as well but I think any kind of anything you get covering those roots a little bit don't bury them too deep um but just get them covered a little bit and again leaves compost mulch doesn't really matter all that much that brigadoon st john's works pretty tough ultimately uh and it'll survive you know a few ups and downs along the way somebody asked will rudbeckia seed heads feed the birds yes uh as long as it's uh not a sterile sterile variety somehow which I don't think most would be but as long as it's that produces seed then absolutely any of our native perennials in your gardens from vernonia to echinacea to rudbeckia you know all of them are going to produce some seed liatris and others are going to produce some seed that the birds are going to come along and take advantage of especially this time of year as they're migrating we're up here in ontario and there's very few I hear birds in the background back here and there's a few but a lot of them have they've flown the coop already so they're headed down my way or by me probably uh uh let's see person removed grass and then put down pine bark nuggets a nut sedge is happy with covering the nuggets with a layer of hard of shredded hardwood mulch discourage seds or help break down and help break down faster I probably wouldn't cover that um those pine bark nuggets uh and hardwood mulch I kind of don't know what to tell you here I think you probably once you know you have a nut sedge problem like this pine bark you know I've talked about this I like really fine pine bark for growing container plants possibly mixing into our clay soils to improve drainage when you're planting something not necessary but um has benefits but I don't really like to use pine bark as um as mulch it doesn't do what the hardwood mulch does you know and just really mat together even wood chips mat together better and prevent weeds much better I think just having different materials um the bark is like cork um the pun there's a pun right here behind me it's like cork and every time it rains it moves around anytime you walk in it it just really moves and shuffles a lot it never really locks into place and so you do get more weed issues through it so I don't know how big of a space this was but there are some sedge killers if you want to use a you know a chemical on the sedge that's a possibility or you know you could cover it for some period of time you could pull these pine bark nuggets back and use that box method that people use for put you know putting down boxes or put a piece of plastic down temporarily uh to kill it and then use the hardwood mulch and then I'd put this bark back you know um maybe use this bark for um for something else but again I just don't overall don't like to use pine bark mini nuggets or nuggets as top mulch especially if you have any kind of slope at all because it will definitely move around and float around and you'll end up potentially with these weed related issues. Nutsedge is one of those weeds that really comes in in worked areas so I don't know how much this bed was worked before but like in my vegetable garden as an example where I'm working the bed all the time that nutsedge just really thrives in spaces that are have a lot of human activity in them being broken up all the time. Um so somebody said wood chips have zero nitrogen even leach it out thoughts on adding grass clippings to provide nitrogens to chips to mix to speed up the benefit yeah almost certainly um some sort of green material uh would help but if they're fresh wood chips like they're just I mean if one of these trees is taken down and you get all parts with the limbs and the leaves and the bark and the wood material it's going to have all it needs to break down pretty quickly if the pile's been sitting around for some period of time the green element in the wood chips has probably dissipated some and so some sort of green material like leaves or grass clippings or something like that would be beneficial to help it break down a little faster so it just really would depend on the age of it but most of the time you're going to get wood chips it's the entire tree they've taken an entire tree down and they've run everything through that chipper and it has that perfect combo of the greens and the browns uh in it the nitrogen thing you know that it needs nitrogen to start to break down but then it releases that nitrogen later so it's not even that it's not that big of a deal but again fresh wood chips I don't think you need to older wood chips it may be beneficial and make but be careful adding grass clippings that may have weed seeds in them I mean I don't know if your your lawn clippings or have crab grass and uh other things in it that may be adding weed seed to your um to your beds uh what kind of bikes do we have and do we like them and are they electric I've got a giant uh that's a hybrid and Steph has um a live which is giant uh bikes for women uh we've really liked them I've had these bikes for years we've had these bikes for years now maybe five years and uh have put a lot a lot of miles on them we carted them all over the country uh now carted them into another country and uh spent a lot of time uh riding the bikes I do like my giant and it's not electric but there are electric bikes everywhere now is like the thing I mean people are just uh have gone all in on electric bikes and so we see them everywhere they're very heavy which would be you know I don't want to have that on my hitch necessarily I see I think people are pushing the limits of their hitches uh with two electric bikes bouncing on the hitches through these you know state parks and things so I'm worried about breaking a weld on a hitch at some point our bikes are super light when I say they're hybrids they're not mountain bikes and they're not street bikes they're somewhere in between so we can do a little bit of these kind of gravelly roads in places without any problem nothing extreme uh but then they also work on the street uh equally as well but I do like my giant bike let's see um so somebody said in the second North Creek video how Arden and Steve were able to have those plant names just roll off their tongues and uh those uh uh latin names of the plants yeah if you you know when you the kind of business they have the people that they're selling the plants to um you know they're it's all in the you know done with the latin names it's not really uh a lot of common names because especially in what they're doing where they're having they're doing uh perennials uh herbaceous perennials a lot of the common names can just overlap one another and depends on where you are in the world uh who you're selling to and that kind of thing the latin name becomes more and more important you know to make sure that that person is getting exactly what they're asking for and not um not now if you do it by some common name you never know um you know what you're going to end up getting