- Hi, thanks for joining us for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Peonies, Japanese maples, apples, and muskrats.

These are a few of the questions we are answering today.

It's the Q&A show next on The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

- (female announcer) Production funding for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South is provided by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

[upbeat country music] - Welcome to The Family Plot.

I'm Chris Cooper.

This year's gardening season is over, but just because it's getting colder doesn't mean folks aren't thinking about spring.

Today, we're answering viewer questions we have not had time to air over the past few months.

Let's start with a question about bare patches in a Bermuda lawn.

"Our Bermuda lawn has developed several "bare patches over the past few years, "and they're getting larger each year.

What is this and how do we stop it?"

And this is Suzanne from Bartlett, Tennessee.

So what is it?

And we appreciate the picture.

- Yes, that was a great picture.

I also want to preface this with saying this is not an easy question to answer.

- It's not easy, right.

- There could be several things happening.

My first assumption is that this may be related to grub-feeding under the soil.

My second thought was possibly hunting billbug feeding.

In this area where she lives, we know that that's a common pest.

- We do know that.

- And then third on my list would be to investigate, see if we have any kind of fungal activity happening and trying to compare that to what season of the year it's happening in.

That's really going to help us rule out a lot of different things.

But again, my first assumption is probably grub feeding.

And that's because this area is expanding from year to year.

It doesn't have well-defined edges for how the area is expanding.

It's just kind of like splotchy, I guess, would be a good word to describe that.

And if they want to investigate that a little further, there is a quick field study that we can do.

Essentially, you just measure out one-by-one foot square in your turf grass area.

I wouldn't do it right in the middle where the grass is already dead.

Let's go to the edge where you're seeing that progression happening.

Cut with a razor blade about an inch or two down into the soil on three sides of this one foot square and peel that sod back.

And then we just need to examine that and see if we see any presence of white grubs down in that root zone area.

So that's going to be our first indicator.

And if they're there, then I would say it's very likely that we've got a high threshold of white grubs and we probably need to treat that lawn with an insecticide application to help control that feeding on the roots of that grass.

- Right, okay, I can agree with that.

- I really do think that it's grub damage in that picture, but there are a few other possibilities.

So I'm going to talk about those real briefly.

So hunting billbug damage can sometimes appear the same way that this photo does.

Folks will oftentimes think that it's winter damage or winter kill, right, that maybe it got too cold and had some damage on their warm-season grasses.

But specifically in Bermudas, in zoysia, you would want to look down at the base of those blades and see if there are tiny feeding holes at the base of those leaf blades.

The hunting billbug is actually a little weevil and so it has a little mouth part and it's going to feed right down there at the base of that leaf.

And also if you grab that leaf, it's going to kind of like pull away.

- Just comes right up.

- So that's another kind of identifying factor.

As far as the possibility of different funguses affecting that turf grass, there's a couple things we need to consider.

Is it a warm-season grass?

Is it a cool-season grass?

Because they have different types of funguses that are going to affect each of those.

And then also what time of year are they actively seeing that spot expand?

- Yeah, makes a difference.

- So is that happening in the spring?

Maybe we've got spring dead spot.

Is that happening in the hotter portions of the year?

Probably large patch.

So a lot of different things happening there, and we would need a little more investigation.

- Yeah, and we do have some videos that can kind of help you with your diagnosis.

And I will say because we know this is a Bermuda lawn, if it was a fungus, it would be spring dead spot.

So we know that for sure.

- If it was happening in the spring.

- Bermuda lawn.

If it was happening in spring for Bermuda lawn specifically.

[gentle country music] "I love growing peonies "but why are my plants only producing white blooms when they were originally all red?"

And this is Beverly.

It's an interesting question, right?

- Yeah, it is interesting.

- And don't you grow peonies too?

- I've had peonies for years.

In fact, I still have my mother's pink and white ones, that she grew when we lived in Illinois.

I mean, these are very old plants.

They've never changed colors before.

So that's very curious.

Only thing I'm trying to think what could possibly have happened.

And when you propagate them, did she buy them in a container?

And sometimes when they're potting them up, if they're switching from one right to the next, maybe a little part of a start of a white one was in with the red one.

I don't know, and then it outgrew the red and the red died for some reason or maybe it was a tree peony and the top of the tree peony died, so the rootstock is coming up and it's a different color.

But in all of my years of growing peonies, I've never had them change colors like that.

Now they have been, depending on the weather, you can get a little bit deeper colors sometimes than others, but it's still the same color.

So I'm very curious about what kind of peony and how long and when did she plant it.

But those are the only two possibilities that I can think of why it would change colors.

- I actually like that, so the rootstock reversion, right?

- Mm-hmm.

- Okay, yeah, I understand that.

I always think about environmental stresses.

- True.

- So with that, I think about temperature, I think about light intensity, and I also think about soil pH.

Maybe.

Okay?

Maybe environmental stresses.

- Maybe, maybe.

- Or could it be a fungal issue or a virus that's causing it to change its color like that?

And it's- - I've just never seen- - Hard to tell, but those are the things that come to my mind.

- Yeah, I've just never seen a peony change colors.

So I'm as curious as she is.

[gentle country music] - "My 25-year-old Japanese maples "are losing branches every year.

"Is there something I can do or are they just at the end of their lives?"

And this is Susan from St.

Louis, Missouri.

Nice picture, Ms.

Susan, we appreciate that.

What did you see?

- Well, unfortunately, there isn't anything you can do about it.

The tree is suffering from sunscald.

It's freeze damage.

It could have happened as far back as the freeze of '22 in December.

Could have happened any year since because we've had the conditions suitable for it.

What happens is either the sap has started rising early in the spring, which maples do, or it hasn't gone down in the fall, and we get a very cold night.

That water inside the trunk freezes.

Then the sun comes up the next morning, hits the sunny side, and it melts it and expands while the backside is frozen.

And research has shown that there can be as much as 77 degrees temperature difference between the sunny side and the backside.

So what you get are hairline cracks in that bark where the two meet.

Now what's happened is you can't move food up, I mean down to the roots, You can't move water up and you can't move chlorophyll down, I mean, sugars down.

So the tree is going to slowly go backwards over time.

And I've seen them go 7 to 10 years before they finally give up where there's just not enough foliage being produced to support the root system.

So there isn't anything you can do about it.

This year has been a really severe case of it.

What I tell people now to do is plant them where the sun cannot hit, that morning sun hit them.

Wrap them with either, if it's out in the sun, wrap that bark up to 45 feet with tree wrap or anything that will cover and protect that away from it.

Plant them where they're in the shade of another tree early in the morning so that it doesn't get that quick thaw.

But that's the issue.

It's sunscald and it's become a real problem.

Any tree that doesn't produce a real good thick bark, has papery bark.

We're talking about fruit trees when they're young, Japanese maples.

There's a number of them that are just papery, dogwoods.

You got to protect those early years until they start forming corky bark because it's become such a problem.

Now we get these warm temperatures, sap begins to rise, then we get a freeze.

Or like in '22, we had a freeze when we had no cold weather.

- Yeah, that, mm-hmm.

- So that cold makes the plant want to pull water down into the roots.

We even lost holly leaves because it hadn't pulled the water out of them.

- I did, mm-hmm.

- So you're going to have to do some protection now I think in Zones 6A through probably 8A, 8B, that you really need to be wrapping those yearly.

And then take it off in the spring because you don't want insects in there, you don't want them to stay wet, but I would wrap those trunks particularly even on an old tree because like she said, it's 25 years old, and it's happened in the last three or four years.

- Right, yeah, and just look at the picture again.

Look at that canopy, as you can see, the dieback.

And you can also see the leaves at the end of the branches, to your point.

Anything you want to add to that, Peter?

- I was going to say, if you want to try and keep it for a year or make it look better this year and then replace it later, you can just prune out the dead.

It's going to look scraggly, it's not going to look good, but yeah, you got to replace it.

[gentle country music] - "Why do we have so many apple tree diseases today?"

And this is Kevin.

He says he does not remember having so many diseases as a kid growing up in an orchard in northern Wisconsin.

I appreciate that question.

It's a good question.

- It is a good question.

- So what do you think about that Mr.

D?

Very good question, one of the answers might be that we're a little bit better at identifying the diseases.

- That's what I thought.

- As we get older and more trained.

But I mean, I remember growing up, we had apples and we never sprayed them.

And I thought that all Golden Delicious apple were supposed to have these little black spots all over them called flyspeck.

I didn't know it was a disease called flyspeck.

And I guess I thought most of them are supposed to have worms in them too.

But there are some important differences between apple production back 50 years ago and apple production today.

My uncle had an apple orchard and he had the standard trees, the big standard trees.

He had to work them with ladders, pick them with ladders, and they were spaced out.

And you don't see that today.

Those varieties, some of those old apple Golden Delicious was around then, Red Delicious, all of those were around, but they were on standard rootstock.

And standard rootstock was selected for its resistance to a lot of the diseases that are creating problems now.

Today's apple orchard in your yard, my yard, I wanted a more compact tree.

So my apple trees are on dwarfing rootstock, either M9, or what's the, M26 is another dwarfing rootstock.

Both of those rootstocks are highly susceptible to fire blight and some of the other diseases that are out there.

But we want that, the commercial growers want that.

They have very densely planted orchards to get as many trees as they can in there.

And then another thing is the varieties that we eat.

There are varieties that you like, varieties that I like, and we don't really care whether or not they're disease-resistant.

Many of them are not disease-resistant.

Some of the disease-resistant varieties we may not care for and so we don't plant them.

And that's probably the most important things.

There's other things that part of the, with the densely planted orchards, you have a more dense microclimate and it's harder for it to dry out, and so you have more diseases like moist environments, and harder to get good spray coverage when you have a real dense planting.

So those are issues that are out there.

Another thing is resistance.

There's insect resistance and there's also disease resistance.

Some of the fungicides that we use may have been very, very good at controlling the diseases 20 or 30 years ago and they're not as good now as they used to be, because diseases can, they have a way of evolving.

And a good example is with pecans.

When the Stuart pecan tree was developed in 1925, it was scab-resistant.

Scab, the number one disease with pecan tree.

Today it's not scab-resistant.

It gets scabbed really, really bad because the tree didn't change, but the disease did.

So those are- - That's good, Mr.

D.

- Evolution, blame evolution for some of those things.

But it's a very, very good question.

- That's a good question.

- Very interesting question.

- Yeah, I like that question, yeah.

And too I'm thinking about the weather conditions now as well.

Warm, hot, humid, wet, weather.

- Climate change, we have supposedly hotter and wetter springs, and those are very, very conducive to disease development.

So that's also an issue.

[gentle country music] - "What is the best way to keep bunnies out of our flower beds?"

And this is Maria from Scottsville, Kentucky.

Peter, those ol' bunny rabbits, right?

- Yep, yep, they can enjoy your vegetables or whatever, even your flowers long before you get to.

So probably the best way, though may not be the best-looking way to do it is just put up a fence.

It only needs to be about two-feet tall.

So it doesn't have to be a six or eight foot fence.

It can be chicken wire, so it might be almost invisible from a distance.

But yeah, just make sure it's two feet tall, make sure that it is firmly on the ground or even an inch or two under the ground, like pull a little trench with your hoe and put it down and cover it up.

And so that will stop them from getting in.

So the other option you can do with that is if you're having problems with individual plants, you could just do that same thing, but just you make a cage around the plant.

- So it's harder.

- So you just circle a fence around that plant.

The rest can be open.

Might make it look a little better because chicken wire could be unattractive.

Other options is traps.

You could trap them, you could shoot them, or something else that might be useful, especially if you're more in a suburban area, is to remove habitat.

So they like thick piles of brush, thick plants, weeds, things like that, places where they can hide.

They don't like being out in the open.

And so if you eliminate all the places that they can hide to get to your plants or get closer to your plants, then that also might help reduce the pressure without even having a fence.

- Yeah, look, and there are some repellents that you can use too.

Most of them are all organic, very safe to use in the garden, and primarily they're oils of peppermint or other clove or things like that.

Now for rabbits, they work best if they're sprayed on the foliage versus on the ground.

- Got it.

- Because if they taste it, they tend to shy away from it.

I've even made home recipes with habaero pepper juice and sprayed on it diluted, and it does a pretty good job at repelling some of them.

But yeah, I've got a couple of good recipes for rabbit repellent.

- Oh gosh.

[indistinct] - I assume every time it rains, you have to reapply?

- Yeah, you have to reapply it.

Yeah, you do.

- Yeah.

- Right, so it sounds like to me you fence.

- Fencing, best option.

- Along with your habitat modification, repellents.

So I think if you do a combination of those three, I think it'd be all right.

- That's good.

How am I going to get them out from underneath my shed?

- That's another one.

- A dog is a good repellent.

- I have seven dogs, a good thing.

- And it's not working?

- It's hard work.

- Maybe you need eight.

- And it's not working.

[gentle country music] "How do you get rid of muskrats?"

And this is Sonya from Oakland, Tennessee.

She says they are burrowing in her pond levee.

So Mr.

D, interesting, how do you get rid of muskrats?

- You know, that's a tough one.

Mechanical removal, I understand Joellen has had issues with muskrats.

- Yeah, I have.

- And you've been successful using fences and things like that.

But in the levee or a dam of a waterway, the burrowing can cause that levee to be weakened and it can cause it to fail, ultimately.

But using riprap might help.

You can, in areas where you have those burrows, I would try to.

Traps are pretty effective at catching muskrats.

Several different kinds of traps that work, the leg hold traps and the Conibear traps.

The problem is the burrows are usually underwater.

They're underwater, but if you catch the lake or pond when the levels are low, like now, during dry weather, and we have access to the burrows, sit you some traps there.

The leg hold, what is it?

The number 1, 1 1/2, or 2 leg hold traps will work.

And then the Conibear types will also work.

And even if the water level is above the burrows, you can see under the water, you can actually see their trails, and you can set those leg hold traps or the Conibear traps in their trails.

They are a rat, so the anticoagulant, some of the baits work.

You might need to check legality of doing that.

Some states, muskrats are protected.

- Really?

- Except during trapping season.

- Did not know that.

- Because they are a fur.

They're probably the number one fur, at one time, animal trap for fur in the country.

Not because people like muskrat hides or skins, but it's because there's so many muskrats out there.

But trapping is probably the most effective way of controlling them.

And then if you have issues with them, even after you've trapped them, the riprap, the gravel and things like that, if you put enough of that out, it will deter them from burrowing in those areas, so.

- That's true.

- Wow, so it's going to be pretty tough, huh?

- Yes, it's tough.

- So Joellen, again, you have experience with this.

- Yeah, well, we have a couple ponds with a large acreage, but we were having trouble with coyotes and everything else.

And I like to have my dogs out, so I wanted a little bit of a barrier.

So we put fencing around, and then we had the very back that was not fenced, we kept getting muskrats, we kept getting beavers, and so we finally fenced that back area back in and then they stopped.

- You took care of that.

- Yeah.

- Mechanical removal.

- It was mechanical.

- Yep.

[indistinct] - Yeah.

- Whoa.

- Because they had the creeks and everything else, so they didn't need our ponds because they had other sources.

So they didn't try to get back in.

- It's a barrier.

- You didn't fence any in?

- No, we didn't fence any in.

- Fenced 'em out.

- Well, how about that?

So what kind of fencing was this?

- It was, I think they call it pig fencing.

It's smaller holes at the bottom and gets- - Bigger, mm-hmm.

- Bigger as it goes up on a, I think it's a four-foot fence.

- Wow.

And it worked?

- Mm-hmm, with the barbed wire at the top.

- Hmm.

- Okay.

Some good information here, so yeah.

So it worked, okay.

- Yeah.

- And habitat modification just came to me as something else.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Well, the riprap will help with that.

- Will help with that, okay?

Good deal.

[gentle country music] When is the best time to cut back a Mandevilla vine?

And this is Elizabeth.

She has one she brings inside every winter, and it has lived for years.

So she's doing something right here, right?

But when is the best time to cut it back?

- So I would cut it back, but as you're moving it back outdoors for the next growing season.

We want to do any pruning, any cleanup before new growth starts.

- Okay, got it.

- Okay, because if we don't, we could have new growth growing off of twiny, twiggy, older growth.

So the goal is to leave your most substantial primary vines that are coming out of the base and prune back your other smaller twiggy vines.

You can even reduce the height of it, of the plant overall, to maybe two or three feet.

I don't know how large it was when she overwintered it.

They can vine and get pretty tall.

But that's what you're shooting for, just to kind of clean that structure up a little bit, reduce the overall size, then move it outside so that as it initiates that new fresh growth, it's not essentially just camouflaging the old ugly, right?

- Yeah, right, so it's been growing a lot vigorously during the fall, right?

So what would we do then if we wanted to bring it indoors for the winter?

How would you?

- Well, number one, I'd make sure if we had any pests on it, right?

We don't want to introduce that to wherever you're overwintering your plants.

And you could, I guess, if it was really large, I might go ahead and remove some of the volume then.

But that's not actually the strategic part of the pruning.

That was the practical part of the pruning.

- No, I got you.

I follow.

Okay, all right, well, Elizabeth, we hope that helps you out.

And it is a tropical plant, right?

- Yes, so you're going to have to have some protection if you have winters where it's freezing outdoors.

So definitely she's having to bring that inside.

I know some people can just bring them into insulated garage areas, but then others, depending on how cold it gets, you may need to have a heated environment.

[gentle country music] - "How high is a lasagna garden bed after it has composted over the winter?"

And this is Jack from Rochester, New York.

He also wants to make sure this method would work in his area, which is Zone 6A.

We definitely do appreciate that.

So look, just right off the top, lasagna gardens, it's going to be 18, 24 inches, right?

What's going to happen is when it starts to settle, when it starts to cook a little bit, 10 to about 14 inches, right?

It will work in this area.

It will work, right?

Here's where I think the advantage is in this area: the freeze-thaw cycle will help break down the pile.

I think that will help.

- That's a good point.

- They get a lot of snow up that way.

- Sure do.

- Just though about that.

So moisture, which will help with decomposition.

- It will.

- So I think it'll work.

- I think so too.

- I think it'll work.

So glad you're doing that, Jack.

Yeah, lasagna gardening is wildly popular now, but yeah, you can do it.

- Sure is.

- So yeah, again, it's going to cook down, which it is supposed to do.

And then yeah, once the spring comes, the microbes will be happy.

- Sure will.

- They'll start breaking it down 'cause they'll have moisture.

- They'll have freshly composted.

- And so it'll be good for them.

They'll break it down pretty quick at that point.

And then you can get your plants in that pile and it'll be good.

- Yeah, should be a nice, rich bed ready, ready to go, ready to plant in.

- Remember, we love to hear from you.

Send us an email or letter.

The email address is familyplot@wkno.org, and the mailing address is Family Plot 7151 Cherry Farms Road, Cordova, Tennessee 38016.

Or you can go online to FamilyPlotGarden.com.

That's all the time we have for today.

Thanks for watching and thanks for sending in the questions.

To get more information on anything we talked about today, go to our website, FamilyPlotGarden.com, or you can visit our YouTube channel, @FamilyPlotGarden, where we have thousands of gardening videos to get you ready for next year.

Thanks for watching.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Be sure to join us next week for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

Be safe.

[upbeat country music] [acoustic guitar chords]