support for conversations live get your garden on comes from the environmental programming endowment the gertrude j saunt endowment and the james h olay family endowment and from viewers like you thank you and welcome to wpsu's conversations live get your garden on i'm anne danahe gardening's popularity continues to boom at a time when we're looking for something enjoyable to do that's close to home gardening is a great choice whether you're ready to grow vegetables looking for tips on pruning trees or trying to decide which flowers to plant we have two experts here to answer your questions tom ford is a penn state extension horticulture educator he works with commercial horticulture operations and growers in cambria county his areas of expertise include greenhouse and nursery production and fruit trees tom butzler is also a penn state extension horticulture educator he works with commercial horticulture operations and landscapers in clinton county his areas of expertise include vegetable production and beekeeping you too can join tonight's conversation our toll-free number is 1-800-543-8242 our email address is connect wpsu.org tom butzler and tom ford thank you for joining us thank you thank you i know a lot of gardeners myself included are really ready to get out there this year more than ever tom butzler can you start us off by talking about what we can be doing right now what can we be planning in the garden or at least getting ready to plant while we still have some of that cool rainy weather right so um you know this weekend it is going to start warming up we've got some bright sunny days ahead the air temperatures are going to start warming and therefore the soil temperatures are going to start warming and we can safely go in for some early season crops such as uh peas and lettuce and in another week uh with these warmer uh temperatures days continuing uh we go with carrots and beets so we can get into the garden this weekend out of that or excuse me tom ford on the tree side of that is now also a time when you can start looking at your trees maybe taking a look at at pruning your trees or even replanting or moving them around yeah you definitely want to you can you should really be thinking about doing your looking at your landscape and thinking about planting new shrubs and trees for the spring but there's some things that you know may temper your enthusiasm a little bit especially with young trees because we will be seeing the cicadas later on we'll talk about that probably a little bit later on uh tonight but cicada injury could be a reality for young trees what we should be thinking on is if you have fruit crops if you have apples if you have peaches this is a great time to get the apple tree spooned in a few weeks okay as we get a little bit more advanced into the season probably prior to bloom or right after bloom you could consider to prune something like your peach trees so right now is the ample time to come back in at least start thinking about pruning your fruit crops when we get to order metals becomes more problematic we typically do not like to prune oak trees in the spring because of the risk of the spread of oak wilt we also do typically do not do a lot of spring pruning in order metals because a lot of the ornamentals will bleed if you end up pruning a maple tree even though bleeding the sap running out of that maple doesn't really hurt that tree too much that sap running unfortunately it may drip for weeks and it can be very disconcerting to many gardeners so you want to be careful about what you're pruning and not just get going with everything in the garden take a careful look at it when it comes to planting seeds i was looking at some of the seed packets i had the other day and it seems like okay i can plant them now maybe moving into april a little bit but tom butler it also says the warning about frost danger so how do you know when it's okay to get the carrots in or do i need to worry about the possibility of a frost yeah so you mentioned seed packets and those are a great source of information because they give you some guidelines on you know when it's safe to go in and to the garden and plant some of these things and when you should hold back so uh you know right now we talked about peas and carrots and you know broccoli and cauliflower coming up soon our cool season crops but we do have to be careful with our warm season crops such as our tomatoes there's eggplants cucumbers and so we need to be aware of what we call this this this frost-free date it's gonna vary on you know where you're where you live you know the further south maybe into the valleys we're looking at you know in late april early may in central pennsylvania i like to think the ballpark of our last frost uh date middle may but as you get into the higher elevations and up onto that new york border you know you may be looking at late may even at higher elevations maybe you know that first of june so those are important things to be aware of people last year were over eager just excited to get out in the garden like they are this year and they went in with their tomatoes and their peppers a little too early because of over excitement and we got a cold spell that came in and it hammered those tomato plants now the garden centers may have like that because people then had to go buy some more plants those warm season crops can't handle those type of conditions so be aware of the weather how it's playing out but also as we started talking about earlier this conversation look at those seed packets okay so even if it seems like it's warming up as we move into may and it seems like okay summer's here you should you have to kind of control yourself and be careful and wait until it's really safe to get them in yes and there are ways to cheat the system um you can gain a week or two uh by playing around with the microclimate around those plants um so yeah i don't as you can see in this picture here i mean there's these are covers that you can put over the plant um that retain the heat just a couple degrees and that is enough for some of these warm season plants to make it through a little bit of a cold snap so there are ways to kind of play with the environment a little bit there's plenty of fact sheets and literature out there to see the way to correct way to do it but yes to be careful okay well it looks like we have a caller and this is from marlene in morrisdale hi marlene thanks for calling and what can we help you with well thank you for taking my call and my question concerns mushroom manure uh how much i have box gardens and how much should you put on your garden could you sprinkle on your garden someone told me you can use too much and it can burn your plants or should you put it in the hole with the plant which should you do or should you sprinkle it on and then dig it in great question okay who wants to field that question what's the best approach to using manure in the garden go ahead tom you you're good on the footprint yeah with with mushroom substrate it can contain a high cyber salts level and so if you're going to use it it's a great nutrient source but you have to use some discretion you have to use relatively small amounts of the product i would never mix it in the planting hole because you can actually cause water to move from the root system to dilute the salt in the media or in the soil so what i would typically do is broadcast about a quarter of an inch right across the soil surface of your box gardens and then sort of scratch it and mix it into the soil probably no more than a quarter of an inch okay it has plenty of nutrients in it and the second thing you're looking for looking at is is you want to mitigate that salt issue and you know there are some loads that you know that come in that well look really relatively low salt levels some will be higher salt levels so you know it's hard to you know paint this with a very broad brush but i always rather say air on the side of caution use it very judiciously we hope that answers your question and i have a follow-up question to that is there a particular type of mulch or manure that's better to use so she was talking about using mushroom is there a particular kind or does it vary by plant um when you think about we're going to look at two different things animal manures are used typically as a nutrient source and we can you know poultry manure has got its properties horse manure has its properties our biggest thing is we really want to usually try to incorporate a manure that has been composted rather than manure that has been stockpiled or manure that is fresh and it's not just the nutrient issues sometimes we're also worried about food safety because unfortunately animal agriculture livestock can shed e coli can shed salmonella and we don't want a food safety issue even in a home in a home garden so we try to do is to you know apply manure in the fall of the year to the cover crop that's growing and probably do not apply any manure in the spring of the year when we think about mulch though mulch is typically just an organic matter source there's no animal manure in it or anything else so a lot of depends on what are our sort of plan of attack and what we're what we're doing in a a vegetable garden we may use straw i would not use hay because that's more weed seeds in a landscape setting we're typically going to be dealing with hardwood bark or pine bark harvard bark is is cheap it's readily available from our hardwood industry it too should be composted but it will have over time a ph around 7.2 which may not be the best when you're dealing with acid loving plants personally i like pine bark pie bark has higher lignin content it's more stable typically in the environment and the ph usually isn't as high usually around 6.5 even if it's composted okay great information and it looks like we have another call and this is from millie in indiana hi millie thanks for calling and what can we help you with i have a problem with flowers that have petals like the coneflower daisies anything that has petals and something eats off all the petals but it has happened now for the last three years but before that i never had any problem what could i do could i anything i could spray it or what is your yeah sounds sounds frustrating that's a great question what can she do to try to ward off either the animals or insects that are eating her flowers i guess so one question for millie i mean can are the leaves completely gone or can you see but the center will be fine it's just the pedals disappears the whole pedal disappears so it's eating all the pedals and leaving the center yeah one of the things that can do that is actually uh we'll see spot a cucumber beetle especially the daisy flowers coneflower the echinacea some of the the daisies as well but a lot of times they'll just do a little bit of notching but they'll also go ahead and consume the pedal leaving the center as well the problem is is the insecticides that you use to control some of these insects unfortunately will impact pollinators so that's kind of again uh tom butzler is a kind of an expert with pollinators but a lot of the insecticides we would use could be problematic uh and when you're dealing with an adult beetle like that that could be again an issue because they're not going to be as sensitive to chemistries the material that we would maybe look at on the home garden standpoint may be like a natural pyrethrin because it breaks down in sunlight very quickly it will give you pretty quick knock down but the insecticidal soaps are not going to give you very much control as far as any type of adult beetles um and then the other products that we'd use unfortunately would be very pollinator toxic so that sounds like a tricky question is there any approach did she just try to plant some different types of flowers or do you have one she was talking the one she was talking about that the example she gave are perennials so she would have to remove those i mean she could go to some annuals i guess my i i i think you really need to find out what is going on so this may mean to monitor or scout your landscape you know whether you're in a commercial setting or a homeowner setting the idea is that you're getting out into that landscape on a regular basis to see what is going on so i you know it could be an insect problem i don't know maybe the deer are coming in and and feeding or maybe something else is going on but before you start applying any type of pesticide you really need to figure out exactly what you're dealing with so yeah i i i yeah that's great advice so try to figure out if you can monitor it all take a look and see what's doing the damage and then take it from there that's it maybe go out once in the morning maybe once in the afternoon maybe in the evening when the sun's dying heat doesn't build up so you know go out kind of on a regular basis and monitor the situation well we hope that helps and it looks like we have another call and this is from jane in johnstown hi jane thank you for calling and do you have a question for us yes we have a dwarf macintosh apple tree and its trunk was scraped by deer this past fall my husband read online that the scraped area should be washed with dish detergent is that correct or is there something else we should do or nothing at all another great question i know i have that issue sometimes the deer comes along and it scrapes it what's a good approach for handling that well definitely don't scrub it with disc detergent okay the dish detergent is not going to do anything um a lot of times they have uh the surfactants they may actually help penetrate into the tissues a little bit but that's some advice to ignore um better off just letting sort of nature take care of itself plants usually will try to produce what they call a suberlin layer after it's wounded and that superintendent layer will protect it you won't do anything to enter to interfere with that suburban layer that forms the only thing i may consider doing is if i have some real loose tattered bark i may take a sharp knife and trim off any loose bark but that's the extent i'm going to let the plant heal itself none of the asphalt based tree coats tree paints or anything like that will do anything to protect that tree but definitely don't use any dish soap well i hope that helps as a follow-up to that is it a good idea to have a protector around the tree if you're worried about a particular tree is that something you can do to try to prevent the deer you can um we kind of are a little hesitant with some of the plastic tree guards that we see sold in some of some of the garden centers because they trap moisture up against the bark and they can actually encourage dogwood borer on apple and peach tree borer in peach cherry plum nectarine so we don't use the plastic guards if we were to do something i would get very fine like hardware cloth or some steel mesh come out three or four inches from the trunk and create a cylinder to protect the bark the other thing that you can do is there are repellents a lot of the commercial orchard folks will use human hair placed in like uh mesh bags even nylon stockings and hang them in the orchard or or take deodorant soap drill a hole in deodorant soap and looks like you're decorating for christmas but you're going to put one or two bars of deodorant soap in every tree and the odor both the deodorant soap gives off as well as with yummy hair gives off usually keeps the deer away okay well great advice and we hope that helps and for those of you who are just joining us i'm anne danahe and this is wpsu's conversations live get your garden on we're talking with tom ford and tom butzler and we're taking your calls and questions if you have a call our toll-free number is 1-800-543-8242 and we're ready to take those calls or emails at wpsu connect wpsu.org so one of the big issues that we are seeing across pennsylvania is the spotted lanternfly tom busser can you tell us a little bit about this what to look for and what type of damage it's doing yeah spotted lanternfly news flash it's on the move right so you know this was found a couple years ago several years ago now in southeastern pennsylvania and there was a concerted effort to really limit its movement and spread and um you know it it's tough to contain these invasive insects and plants and so forth and it has since spread throughout pennsylvania i think we're at about now 39 counties all the way over to the western border with ohio and up to the new york border and in fact it's uh you can see in the picture there the the the counties that are highlighted in purple represent uh the infestations up to um a couple months ago these areas are quarantined and nine other counties the ones representing blue were added to this quarantine so you can see how extensive has spread since its initial find in berks county so not only is it spread throughout pennsylvania it's in about nine different states delaware maryland new jersey connecticut and so forth and so you know there is a lot of effort to try to prevent this from from moving so you can see the um the slide there that's been put up on the screen um showing some of the life stages and some of the things you need to be aware of um on where this female will lay her a's and so really there's a big effort to try to educate the public because we humans are very very efficient at moving these um insects around they're not the greatest flyers they will move on their own uh but for the spread that they have had throughout pennsylvania and the surrounding states it's we have done a very good job of moving them around if you do see it if you're one of the counties that doesn't yet have them what should you do should you call extension or should you just try to kill it what what steps should you take all the above so yeah so there there are some hotlines you can call your extension educator in your county or the extension office they'll direct you to where you need to report that pda has a site pennsylvania department of agriculture has a site where you can report that and also you do want to kill it if you can scrape off the egg mass kill the adult you might want to save that specimen in case you know they need some evidence or you want to further investigate okay great advice and we do have another call and this is from simon in half moon township hi simon thanks for calling and what can we help you with yes thanks for taking my call i was wondering is it too late to spray grubs for japanese beetles and if so other than using a grub a product such as grub x is there a manner in doing so that would not uh make your garden inhospitable to other insects and i will hang up and listen to the uh answer thanks for the question so getting rid of some of those pests but not being inhospitable to good insects yeah when you're when you're thinking about white grubs um we're out of the window to really treat white grubs right now um they're basically they're they're still probably deep in the soil profile they'll move up as the weather gets warmer they're gonna go ahead and pupate and then we're gonna see them start to emerge typically in that june period with peak flight sort of the end of june first of july or so so usually the treatment for white grubs usually is during that peak flight period and so that's usually that late early july period and we usually use on we think about chemical pesticides we typically use like a imidacloprid which is a neonicotinoid insecticide that's usually the material of choice for uh most individuals there is also another chemistry out there called acceleran that is used on the market in the marketplace as well the problem is you can't use accelerated vegetable garden and the emit clovery material is not something used in a vegetable garden or around edible crops in that respect either as far as materials are labeled for grubs but there are some things you can do we look to our neighbors to the north we go across the line into canada the only grub treatment that they actually allow are actually beneficial nematodes so if you wanted to garden on the softer side and you wanted something to apply for white grubs typically right around the first week of august you could bring in specific beneficial nematodes and apply them as a drench to the soil where you have that wake or a problem if you do that with beneficial nematodes you can usually achieve a similar to success similar levels of success that you would see typically with some of the chemical pesticides there is also a bt formulation in a product i believe it's called grub gone that is relatively newer to the marketplace that has a label for white grubs that can be soil applied as well but that would be the two we'll say the most environmentally friendly products to use we want a garden soft or i will say organically but at least bio based we're going to use beneficial nematodes or the grub gone product which is a bt formulation okay or i i got a family of skunks they're looking for a home they'll clear them up real quick so skunks will take care of your grubs oh yeah they'll take care of grubs they might make your lawn look a little unsightly as they're digging up the grubs but they'll take care of them okay well that's good to remember that they have their their plus side too if you if you have a family of skunks good to know looks like we have another call and this is from sue and state college hi sue thanks for calling and what can we help you with hi um this year my asparagus patch will be 14 years old and i've noticed in the last few years that the stalks are getting a little more crowded and spindly i did get a soil test from penn state to apply different fertilizers for this year but i'm wondering if there's a life expectancy of asparagus okay great question asparagus who wants to feel that one well we'll let tom because tom just gave a asparagus presentation to several hundred people the other day so yeah asparagus does have somewhat of a limited life expectancy but usually 15 years 20 years is pretty much the max but usually what i would do first it's not something that i would want to um uh you know dig the asparagus patch up at this point in time what i would probably do is follow the soil test they they have a actually a great need for phosphorus they're one of the crops that needs phosphorus and even when we plant new crowns we actually recommend broadcasting super trouble super phosphate in the furrow when we plant asparagus so the phosphorus may be you know may need to be pushed a little bit more in that respect they don't respond to nitrogen as well so unlike a lot of other crops that have nitrogen nitrogen needs that's not something they need either not too much so other thing i would do is let them go do a very limited harvest this year no more than say one week or two weeks and then let them go to full fern and let them go to full fern and then see what you get next year but limit your harvest this year no more than two weeks and then ideally from here on out maybe you only go to with about a four to five week harvest don't go beyond a four to five week harvest with it let them recover a little bit okay great well we hope that helps sue and we were just talking a little bit about asparagus earlier it is a super popular plant this year right is it are there actual shortages of it most definitely uh we were talking as tom alluded to we had a webinar this week with asparagus growers and folks that want to put asparagus in this year and crowns are hard to come by um so it's a situation they have not seen this much popularity for asparagus crowns since the the 1970s and the other thing is is that the traditional jersey series of cultivars will be leaving the marketplace which also is going to foster some shortages so uh from the jersey giant jersey centennial cultivars jersey supreme a lot of them are going to go by the wayside the patents are off they're not going to reprod not going to put them in the marketplace anymore so we subtract all those varieties of the marketplace coupled with extreme demand it spells major shortage wow that's good to know so if you're thinking about growing asparagus you might want to try to get them as soon as you can it looks like we have another call and this one is from sharon in stormstown hi sharon thanks for calling and do you have a question yes and mine also relates to asparagus i've had an asparagus patch i've been harvesting it now for about six or seven years um you know i let it have the first three years to to just develop and then but last year i noticed i had asparagus beetle for the first time and they they really um took over the crop i mean i i didn't really get nearly as much and i'm wondering what i should do to prevent that happening this year yeah great question tom ford a lot of a lot of times with asparagus a little depends also on what your what your approach to guardians gonna be um as soon as you let an asparagus plant go into fern it attracts the beetles and they'll start actually laying eggs on the spears so the first thing is is that when you're in the harvest period okay don't let anything go to go to fern until you finished harvesting then let it go to fern so we don't want to see where you're harvesting spears and letting some stuff go to fern because that's going to create more problems for you once you go to fern okay the larvae will start the eggs will start to hatch out the larvae will start feeding on on the fronds so ideally on the organic side maybe a product like pyganic it's a natural pyrethrin labeled in vegetable gardens it should give you con sort of control on contact if you hit the asparagus beetle larvae once they go to the adult stages a little bit harder to control and that's where it's become a little bit more of a challenge because we're going to find a few lesser chemistries available so my real recommendation would be is early season while they're in fran while they're in fern and you've got larvae present probably consider a natural pyrethrin like gigantic and matter of fact an insecticidal soap would also probably work on the soft larvae because they're kind of more like a small grub like insect that's feeding on the fronds so usually an insecticidal soap should also work on contact okay that sounds like some great advice and we have another call and this is from bill in martinsburg hi bill thanks for calling and do you have a question hi thank you for taking my call i have a laburnum vasiay tree and i need to move it now there are two issues one is that um well i'm putting a line pull too close to it so i need to move it and the other is last year i forget exactly what but it needed to be pruned back a lot so at present it's maybe the step the main trunk is maybe three feet tall and then a branch up maybe five six feet it is a lie that's showing buds now but i'm wondering um i i assume that now would be a good time to move it but i don't know if there's any special things i need to do so this is the viburnum what yes what what should he do how old is this how long has it been planted oh it's all three or four years old i think okay so you know it moving um you know woody ornamentals uh can be done uh the sooner the better and it's in its life cycle or age um you know if it's been real well established it's got a really extensive root system i think you know if possible it'd be better to move it in the fall that way it has the winter kind of get acclimated and then it's you know it also has the spring to acclimate moving it now um you know it has a shorter period of time to acclimate before we get into the you know into the the deep growing season warmer weather and it could stress it out um but yeah certainly you can move it now um if you do wait to the fall maybe what you want to do is some root pruning now where you would maybe dig on one side and on the opposite side and and prune those roots so you allow the interior of that root ball to really become dense with future roots and then you dig in the fall on the opposite other two sides plus the two that you dug now and you've got a nice condensed uh root ball and the the uh woody ornamental would be better able to survive but yeah you could you can move it now um you're just going to have to pay pay uh you know special attention to it once we get into the warmer weather would that mean making sure to water it if we have a dry spell or what would be the best bet if he does need to move it now yeah absolutely you're going to have to pay a lot of attention to it the whole growing season not just the first couple weeks or months with water you know if we had a summer like if we have a summer this year like we had last year that plant is going to hurt um because you don't have that extensive root system to mine that surrounding water in that soil profile so you're really going to have to pay attention to that water now if it was like two or three summers ago where we got record-breaking rainfall yeah i mean you're you're good to go um but yeah i mean you can move it now if possible i think moving something that's established would be better um with a fall move okay good to know and we have another call and this one is from ted in pine grove mills hi ted thank you for calling and do you have a question for us yes i do uh i have a question on my vegetable garden about four or five years ago i had a soil test done and the nutrient levels were pretty good as well as the ph i've done tested it since i'm wondering if there's a whether one should annually you know apply so many nutrients like 10 10 10 or something or lime to maintain without going to a soil soil test yeah that's a great question how do you know what to put in every year do you need to get it tested every year or what's the best approach i personally like to be prescriptive i like to see a soil test done on a regular basis we know that with many of our vegetable crops how much phosphorus how much potash they will utilize every year we can predict for the most part based on yield how much nitrogen they will use as well too so to me a soil test is the best way prescriptively for us to be able to make those recommendations okay so if that's possible do the soil test yes and you were just seeing a video there for those folks who could see the screen of how penn state manages their soil tests it's a bag and you fill it up with soil you fill out a form and then you send it off and i think um is it nine dollars or twelve dollars tom it's nine dollars nine dollars um and that way uh you know you you get a reading on the ph tom uh talked about that earlier in the show on the ph range and you know you like it around 6.5 6.8 unless you're growing as you mentioned potatoes um and then it also gives you some indication on your phosphorus and potassium levels so usually it's a pretty quick turnaround time uh with penn state's lab there are other outfits entities that that do that so you know you know you can go elsewhere too for that but as tom said it gives you an idea of what to do for the upcoming growing season instead of walking into it kind of blindly yeah one of the dangers you run into is if you apply nutrients just because out of the habit we'll see the phosphorus and potash levels get so excessive and we also may see that calcium becomes too high and ph becomes too high so instead of doing something good for the good for the crops you actually may limit yield because of having too high of nutrient levels that's great to know because i know there's kind of a natural instinct or at least i have it that you just want to you want to fertilize it you want to put compost on it you want to water it but it sounds like you can overdo it in some cases right and tom said limiting yield so you can limit severely limit yield and you know for nine dollars i mean you can make that up by having this really bountiful yield so nine dollars is not much for um greatly increasing the yield in your vegetable garden there's there's one statistic that always scares me and they say that eighty percent of plant mortalities in the landscape is due to us people so when you think about that we probably kill more plants with kindness than anything else that's a good way to think about it good to know well if you're just joining us i'm ann danahee and this is wpsu's conversations live get your garden on joining us tonight are penn state extension horticulture educators tom butzler and tom ford our toll-free number is 1-800-543-8242 and we're ready to take your calls you can also send us questions by email at connect wpsu.org and it looks like we have another call and this one is from carol in clarion hi carol what can we help you with i have moved to a house that has a garden with many old-fashioned flocks in it which have been growing a number of years the roots are untangled and i'm just having trouble with um with mildew i've tried uh buying buying a mildew spray and i've tried making my own mildew spray and nothing seems to work and i'm almost i don't know if there's any plants that you can buy that are resistant to mildew i'm having a lot of trouble with mildewing my flock in your flocks is that right yes and my they're all fashion flocks really pretty flowers anything she can do yes there are some garden flocks cultivars that are supposed to be powdery mildew resistant that are on the marketplace but they're going to be the newer cultivars the flower types will be the same the habit will be the same so that's something that think about you may decide to go that route um i can't give you the cultivars off the top of my head sinclair adam who's a fellow horticulture educator he's based in the lebanon county office uh sinclair were probably the most knowledgeable as far as which perennial cultivars may or which fox cultures may be the best ones to try but one of the the products that's available on the on the home gardener side that's a relatively safe material is basically a product called i think it's either calorine or armor carb it's a potassium bicarbonate product and potassium bicarbonate is material that can give us some control as far as powdery mildew and that may be one thing that you can work with rather than make your own i'm always leery of these these remedies that you find on the internet or remedies that somebody recommends in an article someplace you really want a product that is officially legally labeled as a pesticide for that product or for that that pest or that disease and there are potassium bicarbonate products out there that are labeled for control for powdery mildew on floral culture crops like phlox yeah two other quick comments on that is it sounds like it's a very established planting so the other thing you might want to do is thin out some of those plants you increase the air movement around there and that might reduce the disease pressure a little bit not eliminate it but in addition use some of those products that tom talked about so with that increased air movement and those products and and use those products early on if you wait until this uh this fungal disease gets a strong foothold you're behind the curve and it's really hard to control so i talked about earlier about going on around your landscape scouting monitoring if you get it on earth early enough you may have a better chance of controlling that plus the thinning well we hope that helps and we have another call and this one is from wendy in williamsport hi wendy thanks for calling and you have a question yes hi thanks for calling go ahead hi yes i have a question about my hydrangea bushes i have about five of them planted around my property and they were beautiful and blooming when i planted them and um they're about three years old and i ever since i've not had a single bloom on any plant they get beautiful and green but i don't get any flower blooms oh gosh that must be really frustrating because those are really beautiful anyways i love them i wonder if those are hydrangea uh what is that macropholia big leaf hydrangea and um oftentimes they get hit in the spring um with a cold spell cold snap and it ruins the flowering potential for that season so i'm wondering if that's what you've got going on um i don't think there's be a fertility problem or a nutrient problem um so i i don't know tom that that's my first guess on it yeah when you think about big leaf hydrania usually um most of them or we'll call a zone six plant that they bare flower flowers on last year's wood so anything that would create any injury to last year's would if you aggressively prune in the fall of the year or you prune in the spring or we have any type of severe winter weather or cold snap in the spring anything that kills those flower buds ruins your floral display on macro filler for the year there is an exception to the rule if you purchase what we call our a ramontant that's r-e-m-o-n-t-a-n-t cultivar like endless summer the romantic cultivars bear bloom on macrophylla on both old wood and new wood so if you're in the williamsport area select headless summer that's the one i typically would recommend in your corridor and no matter what weather you'll have you will see blooms every year with endless summer but there are other romantic cultivars out there beside endless summer but now this summer is the easiest one for us to get a hold of but like the old nico blue that's out there that one the buds get knocked back pretty much most years so but endless summer loretto canberra county zone five top of the mountain there's an endless summer there and what they call the assisi gardens no matter what happens they bloom every year well that's great to know could she also take steps such as covering up the bushes if it is going to have a cold snap would that help yeah it's not necessarily a colson it might be protecting them throughout the whole winter tom alluded to the winter issue and so i've done this in the past at a previous house where um i would surround it with something to hold in leaves um it was kind of a um a metal structure around the plant and then i filled it up with leaves and that was enough to buffer those cold temperatures and then those flower buds survived winter some of those early spring kind of moderating or you know widely fluctuating temperatures and that worked out fine so yes okay so a couple different options well we hope that helps and it looks like we have a call this is from john in winburg hi john thanks for calling and do you have a question yes we live on our yard is in a nearby to the woods and we have a lot of moths in there and i was just wondering if you get the ph test done because we already applied a lot of lime should we use herbicide and kill all that moss or can we take care of it just by using lime yeah i you know with moss you're going to get that for a couple different reasons that you might have moss one is that you've got that sort of fertility kind of out of whack for a good grass growth and development but the other thing is that it you have excessive shade or you've got an area of of the yard the lawn that stays wet for long periods of time and so i don't know if those could be possible situations too or a combination of those three so yes you know do a soil test you may need to add lime you may need to limb up some of the surrounding trees because you talked about near the uh the forest situation so if you limb up some of the leaves or remove limb up some of the trees or remove some of the trees you're to allow more sunlight to penetrate and then you know maybe do you have some ground water or spring nearby that's keeping that soil excessively wet so typically those are the three reasons you're you're seeing moss there we hope that helps and on the topic of lawns is now a good time to put seed in the lawn is it too cold or is this a good time no in actuality if you can go ahead and get your seed down get it down now the earlier the better as far as getting grass established the other thing that will be coming to fruition very shortly will be that if you are dealing with crabgrass um usually it's about the mid-april period april 15th april 20th we'll be putting our crabgrass pre-emergence down but the one thing to remember is if you're putting grass seed down you cannot usually utilize a crabgrass material most crabgrass materials also will prevent desirable turf grass seed from germinating okay good to know and we have a call with a question about the spotted lanternfly hi barbara thanks for calling and we understand you have a spotted lanternfly question yes thank you and danahe uh mike so your guests mentioned that humans are really great spreaders of the spotted lanternfly and could they explain how we can stop being big spreaders of the spotted lanternfly question yeah it is a good question it really it all comes down to education can you identify the different life cycles you know the egg stage the adult stage the nymphal stages you know there are a lot of people that don't know what this insect uh looks like you know they're not paying attention and they're not really interested in the natural world around them um and so when they see something like this don't give it a second thought so usually in these quarantine areas for a lot of these business not a lot of these business these businesses that are moving in and out of these quarantine zones they have to go undergo training do they know what these lot various lifestyle stages look like uh do you know they're required to walk around their vehicle inspect you know under the uh the wheel wells to see you know if there's some hitchhikers there that that's really what it comes down to is is that our population understands what this insect looks like and that's really the key if if you know what it is then you know you can identify you know movement the material in and out of these quarantine zones okay so if you if you're going out of county if you're going somewhere where they might be present just take the time to take a couple minutes and take a look at your car make sure it didn't jump in your bags or hitchhike into your car and make sure you remove it before you go back home exactly if you look at some of those fact sheets and one of them you had up on the screen earlier that female will lay her eggs on almost anything railroad ties um uh uh car tires if the car has been stationary for a while uh for a while um barbecue um what do you call the when you do your grilling the equipment yeah equipment and you go to a tailgate up at penn state you know something that's been sitting under a tree where the spotted lanternfly has been active for a while she'll layer eggs on almost anything and then you go on vacation people are moving this year because they just want to get out and about and you know that's really going to aid the spread if we're not careful right people are enjoying the nation the national and state parks more getting out and about hiking walking so just take a couple minutes and make sure you're not bringing it back with you and carrying it with you very good to know and we have a call from bob in state college hi bob thanks for calling yeah well thanks for putting me on here do you have a question yeah um i've got a sort of a general question about uh opinion of state college borough compost we've got composting in state college borough do you have anything in particular i don't know the the compost that the borough sells um i don't know if our guests know specifically about that compost um can you give us some general ideas about what makes for good compost is he talking about the material that's coming out of the waste facility where they're taking some of the sewage and mixing it um are you talking about the borough state college bureau yeah has its its own composting program yeah i'm not i'm not real familiar with particulars i mean are you asking about quality oh yes maybe we could talk generally what makes for a good compost yeah anything yeah tom butzler what what should you look for when you are buying compost i i mean you know i i guess you know you kind of eyeball it because you can't really do a chemical analysis just standing there but you know it's got to feel good light kind of airy fluffy it's going to have a smell to it kind of an earthy smell to it and hopefully when this composting is going on they've done it correctly you want a correct carbon or a ballpark correct carbon nitrogen ratio meaning you know your browns which would be leaves for example in your greens which would be grass clippings or a waste coming out of the kitchen you know from you know vegetable dishes and so forth and then you know it's composted right where they've turned that pile on on a regular basis they've added moisture at the appropriate time so that these microorganisms can kind of thrive in this compost pile start breaking things down uh and then you got a product that can be suitable for um the garden now one thing you know i don't know what's going on in in the state college area and i don't think this is so much of a problem anymore but at one time there was an issue and tom was really heavily involved with this an issue of using grass clippings that have been treated with some herbicides worked its way into uh these compost uh facilities and programs um went through the whole composting process and then were given or sold to folks for their gardens and that herbicide was still there it not it had not completely broken down and we saw some damage to certain vegetable crops with exposure to this compost that still contained that herbicide but i'm not sure exactly what's going on uh you know over in centre county with that okay that's good to know so you want to be careful what is going in the compost always good to keep that in mind and it looks like we have another call and this one is from mary in state college hi mary thank you for calling and what can we help you with okay thank you for taking my question i'm calling because for years i've grown heavenly blue morning glories and they've been beautiful and maybe perhaps for the last five years the vine grows and they're nice and healthy but i don't get any bloom sometimes it's september or even october just a few before the fourth and i've tried growing them from seed or from plants you know that i've bought from a nursery and i've also tried different places in the yard to see if that made a difference but they i only will get a few blooms way at the very last minute so to speak okay that sounds frustrating anything that she might do differently if she is a heavy fertilizer that will create issues for because they'll stay in a vegetative state and they'll delay developing and developing blooms so the morning glories are like a weed as long as you provide you know excess nitrogen to them in a lawn situation if there are any fertilizer in the lawn at all if the soils have had a lot of compost supplied to them they will basically stay vegetative and you'll limit blooms so back off the fertilizer don't put any fertilizer near the more angular at all try to find a poor site even if you have a site that has uh very poor soils fight your morning glory okay so they want poor soil we hope that helps mary and we have another call this one is from mike in spring mills hi mike thanks for calling and what can we help you with hi yeah this is mike i'm a beekeeper first in a gardner second and my question is on neo-tonicanoids if i said that right and uh the effect of neonicotinoids on bees i know you had mentioned in putting it in your garden so what are your thoughts great question maybe before you talk about it you could just for the people who aren't familiar with that explain what that is okay so it's a class of insecticides that um people are using in vegetable duct production agronomic production and the the insecticide is often systemic we'll use it as a seed treatment we'll use it as a drench it's taken up through the vascular system of the plant for the plumbing system of the plant and it's it's expressed in all plant parts so that when insects feed on it they're exposed to this pesticide or this insecticide and that's in contrast to using insecticides where you're spraying the whole plant or the whole field so it's a different way to get that insecticide uh to interact with the insect and so there yeah there is a lot of research going on with this and there is concern of these insecticides um even the even though they're systemic in the in the plant that your honeybees not even just honeybees pollinators are interacting a little bit with uh this uh systemic insecticide uh through the pollen or the uh uh the nectar and so at least in vegetable production one of the things we're you know we're recommending is that if you are using an a a neo-neck insecticide is it maybe use something that's that's your seed treatment so that yeah it goes into the plant but by the time that plant is flowering it is so well diluted or diluted or not there that it's not going to be a problem we do want to avoid things like maybe the drenches where you're just putting in excess material and then it's there around when that vegetable plant is flowering and there might be some interaction between the pollinator um and the uh systemic insecticide so yeah there's a lot of research going on with that you know there are some neonics that are a little safer than others for pollinators and there's some literature out on that but yep it's of of concern okay well that's great information and we have just a couple of minutes left and i thought we could end today with you talking about what both of you are looking forward to doing this growing season tom ford why don't you start us off we have a just a little bit of time left what are you looking forward to doing well actually i have a six-year-old grandson that spends a lot of time with us so we're just exposing him to raise bed gardening last year he took a great interest with tomatoes and peppers and squash and got his little uh we'll say entomology course late summer when we were dealing with tomato hornworm and he was fascinated by the little wasp eggs lining the tomato horn worm and he was monitoring his tomato plant every day uh looking at the uh the worm as it would engulf a few tomatoes here and there so i'm looking forward to continuing that with him this summer that's great and tom butzler how about you what are you looking forward to doing well just like anybody else get outside and here's the thing about plants they're all around us so you've heard the adage before you know take time to stop and smell the roses you know oftentimes the plants just blend in the black background they're beautiful they could be beautiful in flower beautiful bark or look at as tom alluded to the battle going on between some of these insects and the predators that are trying to control them so take time to smell the roses this year tom butzler and tom ford thank you both for joining us thank you thanks we've been talking with extension educators tom butzler and tom ford i'm anne danahe thank you for watching and listening and please join us on our next episode of conversations live cooking at home on april 29th [Music] you