- From the seed-starting studios of Lehigh Valley Public Media in Bethlehem, PA, it is time for another germinating episode of chemical-free horticultural hijinks, You Bet Your Garden.

Millions of first-timers have turned to gardening to escape isolation and to have a reason to get out of their jammies.

I'm your host, Mike McGrath.

And on today's show, we'll continue to reveal how to successfully grow your own plants from seed.

Well, maybe.

Otherwise, it's a fabulous phone call show, cats and kittens.

That's right.

Potential guests are busy pampering their peppers.

So we will take that heaping helping of your telecommunicated questions, comments, tips, tricks, suggestions and astonishingly amazing aberrations.

So keep your eyes and or ears right here, true believers, because it's all coming up faster than you not having to go back to the garden center to say you're sorry.

Right after this.

In life, we have many kinds of partners, school bus partners, business partners, even gardening partners.

Shouldn't you have one for the most important aspect of life, your health?

Lehigh Valley Health Network, your health deserves a partner.

- Support for You Bet Your Garden is provided by the Espoma Company, offering a complete selection of natural organic plant foods and potting soils.

More information about Espoma and the Espoma natural gardening community can be found at... - All right, let's take another fabulous phone call.

Miles, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Thank you very much, Mike, how are you doing today?

- I am just ducky.

Thanks for asking, Miles.

Uh-oh, Ducky's mask has falling off.

Got to get it back on before Dr Fauci raids the place.

There you go.

How are you, Miles?

-Oh, doing OK. We just had a little more snow yesterday, and obviously the ground is frozen.

- Yeah.

- I have this tree in the backyard and I said I'd better call my cos he'll tell me what to do, if anything.

- OK, where are you?

I'm in northeast Philadelphia and I'm back to the beautiful Pennypack Park.

- All right.

What can we do for Miles in the northeast?

- Well, I have a tree about 15 feet from the house.

I call it the Immaculate Tree because it grew by itself.

- Right.

- It's about 15 years old, about 12 feet tall.

And I believe it to be a maple.

It could be a sweet gum.

It could have grown off a seed from one of my neighbors.

And I noticed three weeks ago something disturbing, which is oozing from the main trunk of the tree.

When I went out to further investigate it, and I did a little social media research, I did notice a couple splits in the bark, and that's where the oozing is coming from.

So my question is...

I love this tree.

It has green leaves.

They turn yellow in the fall.

And I don't want to lose it to a bacteria or anything else.

What would you suggest I do?

- OK, so let's determine... Those are two very different trees.

Do the leaves look like maple leaves?

Like, you know, the uniforms of the Canadians.

- Yes, they do.

- At the end of the season, do you notice little helicopter pods flying around underneath it?

- Definitely not.

And it doesn't have those spine balls that the sweet gums have that you can break your ankle on either.

- OK. All right.

Well, we're going to proceed.

Why did you think it might be a sweet gum?

- Because when these homes were built, the city of Philadelphia was gracious enough to alternate in the front of the home, and this is in the back, sweet gums at one house, pin oaks at the next.

Most of the neighbors have since taken them out cos they go through the water lines, break up the concrete and other issues.

- Right.

- But that's why I thought the two were most likely.

- OK, what you have is very common with trees in the wintertime.

It's a version of sunscald.

Even, especially today, you and I live in the same basic area of Pennsylvania, isn't it amazing how it can be 24 degrees outside, but you're in your car and the sun is shining on you and you got to crack a window because it's so hot?

So that's what happens to these trees, the south side, generally, facing the sun, gets this blast of surprisingly warm sunshine.

And then, of course, as soon as the sun goes down, everything freezes solid, and this often causes a crack in the tree.

Is the crack simply a lateral straight up and down?

- Yes, and they're two of them, and remarkably, Mike, where are they facing?

Southwest.

- Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I know what I'm doing.

So the most important thing for you to do, which is the hardest thing for gardeners to do, is nothing.

This is a perfectly natural phenomena, and it will not harm the tree.

If you want to do anything, once the season gets underway and springtime finally occurs, you can go out there and scrape off any leftover sap.

And if you had a good experience with it, look it up.

Maybe you can play with it and make your own chewing gum and, you know, go into business.

But don't try to use anything to fill in the cracks, don't do anything to try to repair the tree.

The tree knows how to repair itself, internally.

And if you want to avoid this happening in the future, as we get into winter next year, you might want to paint that portion of the tree with white latex paint.

Now, we're going to wait until these wounds have healed over naturally.

But the latex paint, the white paint, will reflect the sunshine off the tree, and it is used to prevent sunscald in professional orchards.

- Excellent idea.

I would never think of that, and that's why I called the expert.

I have been gardening for 40 years, but I don't have the training, the credentials and the background and life experiences that you do, Mike.

I thank you very much.

And I'm very wary of this because I've lost one other tree and probably my apple tree because we've got woodpeckers.

But there's no bullet marks on this tree.

- Right.

- So I've been watching for that on all my other trees.

- All right.

You sound like you have a plan - Thank you very much.

- My pleasure.

You take care.

- Be well.

- Time for another phone call.

Tom, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Hey, Mike, thanks for taking my call.

- Well, thank you for making it, Tom.

How are you doing?

- We're doing fine here, I hope you're doing well, too.

- I'm just ducky, thanks for asking.

Where is Tom doing well?

I'm in New Orleans and my question today is about the crepe myrtle trees in New Orleans.

- Oh, OK. What section of New Orleans are you in?

- I'm in the Garden District.

- Oh, that's just what I was hoping for, those magnificent old homes with those big porches and all the botany surrounding them, that is... You know, tourists just stick to the French Quarter, but the Garden District is the place to go see.

So what's wrong with your crepe myrtles?

- Well, Mike, last week, I heard a story on our local news station where they interviewed the extension agent, and he said the crepe myrtles in New Orleans were being infested with bark scale, an insect that produces honeydew.

- Mm-hm.

- And that leads to the formation of a black fungus.

- Mm-hm.

- So he recommended that you treat the trees with a root drench of imidacloprid.

- Oh, my goodness!

- So I looked that up.

And it's this... - Oh, my God.

Yeah, it's a systemic neonicotinoid.

- Yeah, it's an insect growth regulator.

It is one of the many chemicals that is felt to be responsible for the decline of bees in America.

And because it is a systemic, it would be taken up by the roots and it would go straight to the flowers on top.

And then all the wonderful pollinating insects that feed on those flowers would die.

And that's not even the basic recommended treatment for bark scale.

What I would recommend, and I think any sane horticulturalist would recommend, is... See, you're in New Orleans.

So normally I would say what's called dormant oil, which you spray on trees in the wintertime in places that get really cold.

But luckily, over the years, lighter oils have been developed, sometimes called summer sprays.

And these are even better than dormant oil.

Dormant oil is a petroleum product, but it's considered OK for use in organic agriculture because it's such a great alternative to poisons.

But the summer sprays, the light horticultural oils, are refined from vegetable oil, so they couldn't get more natural.

And any good horticulturalist or arborist would be happy to spray the trees with a light horticultural oil, which in your climate, you can you can spray any time.

So there's no need to go to poisons.

And the oils, this treatment for this kind of insect, has been used for centuries and we know it works.

I'm just surprised that you're having an outbreak of this kind of insect.

It makes me think something's wrong with the environment.

- Well, you know, I took a walk around my house, and there must be 30 or 40 crepe myrtles and I saw a row of about three that had this kind of...it wasn't really a black fungus, but it was some kind of almost like a moss growing on it.

And those are the only ones.

So, I mean, most of the trees around where we live are clear.

So I don't really know what the infestation is about.

- Yeah, I mean, I can't help you there.

Somebody may have overreacted.

There may be one section of New Orleans where conditions are ripe, where something went wrong, people sprayed excessively and killed natural predators.

But if you don't got a problem, don't fix it, you know?

But if you do have bark scale show up, just remember, the answer is to spray the tree with a light horticultural oil.

- OK, and is bark scale deadly to the tree?

- Not in general.

Generally, it's just another insect in the company of hundreds of thousands of other insects.

It is great food for birds if they can get to them before the scale develop their armor about them.

And just natural predators generally keep them under control.

But, no, I've never heard of scale being anything other than a cosmetic issue.

- OK. All right, well, great, thank you very much for the call.

I appreciate you answering the question.

- All right.

Thank you, sir.

And you have a good season.

All right.

Let's take another phone call.

Mike, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Yo, Mike, how you doing, man?

- All right, Mike.

How are you, sir?

- Mike, I got to tell you, I'm pretty ducky.

- I missed my cue!

I am ducky as well.

Yeah, it's been a long day.

What can I tell you?

All right.

Where are you, Mike?

- Well, originally I am from Glenside, Pennsylvania, right outside of Philadelphia, but I am currently residing in Dallas, Texas.

OK, that's a very different kind of a climate there.

What can we do... - Absolutely.

- ..for Mike?

- Well, I had a question about pepper seedlings.

I was looking on the internet and I keep seeing people talking about popping off their pepper seedlings to try to promote outside branching and other growth.

I currently have seedlings going right now.

They're about eight, nine weeks old.

And I'm starting to see a bunch of flowering.

So my question was, is it appropriate to top them off, or do I just leave them, or should I be pinching the flowers back, or what exactly should I be doing with them?

- Just congratulating yourself on the fact that you've done an excellent job so far.

One of the things I love to do and I love to talk about is perennializing pepper plants.

I grow all my peppers in medium-sized spots.

Spots?

Spot A Pots!

No, don't grow them in Spot A Pots - they'd get too big.

I grow them in medium-sized pots so that when it starts to get chilly, I bring them inside to an insulated porch, hang a big light over them, and they continue to flower and fruit for me throughout the winter.

So there is absolutely nothing wrong with you allowing the flowers to exist.

And then almost certainly, because peppers are very much self pollinating, you'll start to get little baby peppers.

So the only thing that I would suggest in your case is that you be exceptionally careful when you transplant them outside Dallas.

When is your normal outside planting date, like May 1st, something like that?

- Typically, I believe our last frost date is right around March 17th.

And last year we had a pretty, pretty mild winter, so I had everything out right around March 14th.

So I started them early December, planning on 12 weeks for them to get out.

And I'm planning on right around the 17th.

But obviously, you got to play it by ear, see what the weather's like.

- Exactly.

So if you...if that's worked for you in the past, that's good.

But as you're contemplating taking them outside, look at the ten-day forecast and only look at the nighttime temps.

If you see anything below 50, do not take peppers or tomatoes outside because you'll actually stunt their growth.

You know, these are really... - OK. - These are really tropical plants that thrive in warm weather, and the nice thing about peppers is they're not sprawly like tomatoes.

You know, they're very well-behaved.

So it's not that big a deal to keep them inside until the nights get a little bit warmer.

But when you do decide to take them outside, I don't know if you do this already, but I recommend hardening off, you know, taking them outside, even if it is just taking them outside and leaving them in their containers for a day or two to get acclimated to the different... - I typically harden them off for a week, increasing the time, you know, each day a little bit.

And then by the end of the week, I'll leave them out overnight and also keep an eye on them to see how they're reacting to the, you know, the outside.

- Very good.

And then the only thing I would suggest is you have really soft hands when you plant the peppers.

Once they do have flowers on them and fruits on them, they're a little more sensitive.

And you also want those, you know, peppers even in your region are a very long-season crop, especially if you're going to let them get ripe and not pick them green.

So be very gentle when you plant them.

And if you want to do what I do, plant a couple of them in pots and plan to bring them back inside over your excuse for a winter down there, because peppers are something you don't... - I actually... - Go ahead.

- I actually...

I did five peppers plants in five-gallon buckets last year, and I've been taking them, whenever it gets down to about 35 or 37, I've been taking them, putting them in the garage, and I'm still actually getting fruits off of them right now.

- Yeah.

I would ixnay the five-gallon buckets.

They are ugly.

That's much too big a container for pepper plants.

So whatever you're filling the buckets with, you're wasting it.

And it's really hard to get good drainage.

And they are ugly.

I mean, they are the modern version of planting in an old toilet you got sitting out by the road.

So, you know, I would say, you know, I would say reach into your wallet once the moths stop flying out and go and buy just a couple of quart-sized pots and fill them with good quality potting soil.

And then they're so much easier to bring in and move out.

All right, man?

- OK, great.

- Sounds like you're doing good, though.

- I appreciate you, Mike.

- My pleasure.

You take care.

- Thank you, sir.

- Bye-bye.

All right.

It is time for the Question of the Week.

Now, when last we left Luke and Leia, they were hot on the trail of their friend Han Solo, frozen in Carbonite while they desperately try to figure out who is actually related to who in this movie.

Oh, wait a minute.

That's the wrong part three.

For instructions on how to plant your seeds and how to provide the light they need, see episodes one and two at your local theater or the Gardens Alive website.

We now address the third act of our passion play, making sure you avoid finishing up like that skier experiencing the agony of defeat on the opening of The Wide World Of Sports.

All right.

We have sprouted plants that are under lights.

Now what?

Ah, now, grasshopper, you must become one with the green, or at least pay more attention than you do to most of the other things in your life.

Have you ever cleaned either side of that car's windshield?

Seriously, how can you tell if it's day or night outside?

Eh!

Watering.

This is the trickiest part.

And the same as with houseplants, weight, or the lack thereof, is your best indicator.

If your containers feel heavy, back off.

If they feel light, water them well, ideally by sitting them in a sink filled with a few inches of water for an hour.

If this is your first dance, avoid watering from above and never let your starts remain saturated completely for days at a time, or they will fall prey to damping off disease, which indicates that you were a poorly piloted helicopter parent.

As the great 14th-century master of swordsmanship Miyamoto Musashi explains in his classic work, The Book Of Five Rings, understand the process and train well in this perspective.

And,, yes, 14th-century Japanese swordsmanship and seed-starting are very close to being the exact same thing.

To quote the master, "This must be studied diligently."

Feeding.

If you have started with a clean potting mix that contains no fertilizers whatsoever, natural or synthetic, be assured that seeds begin life as plants with a large energy reserve.

In fact, very little of a seed contains the genetic information that will produce either a pepper, a tomato, a marigold or a morning glory.

Most of the seed contains the nutrients that will get those baby plants off the ground for the first month or so.

Trust the plants.

At around week three or four, after germination, begin watering with a dilute liquid organic fertilizer, worm castings or compost tea.

Let's say you do this every other watering.

More often for slow-growing plants and less often for vigorous plants with a healthy green color and the desired short and stocky appearance.

That's right, cats and kittens, you now have to make decisions based on your own observations and instincts.

As we have said in the previous episodes on this subject, relax.

And if you fail, learn from that failure and do it better next year.

Plants whose potting soil contains natural nutrients, like worm castings, can go longer without being fed by you.

Plants whose potting soil contains hazardous chemicals like Miracle-Gro or Osmocote will be cursed by the gods and do not belong in any rational being's garden.

Potting up.

Plants that stay relatively small, like peppers, can probably stay in their original containers, unless those containers were really teeny tiny small.

Plants that grow big and fast like tomatoes and pumpkins will benefit from potting up into larger containers around week four or five.

With most plants, you should place fresh potting soil in the bottom of the new container and then fill in the sides to keep the plant at the same height.

With tomatoes - and only tomatoes - place the bottom of the root ball at the bottom of the new container and then fill in the sides.

Continue to do this through any such exchanges up to and including actual planting.

Always plant tomatoes deeply.

Timing.

Both the essence of comedy and seed-starting.

The only plants I start early are the ones that take a frustratingly long time to get to a decent size, like peppers and eggplant, which I have begun starting in January in my USDA Zone 6.

Aggressive growers like tomatoes should not be started early, as they will become too big to manage.

Depending on your own personal USDA growing zone, most plants should be started from seed approximately eight weeks before it will be safe to transplant them outside.

That means a mid-March starting time for me.

It'll be a little later if you live in a lower zone, which means colder winter temperatures, and a little earlier if you live in a warmer zone.

I would call you warm zoners cowards at this point, but I am officially sick of shoveling snow storm after snow storm and I now fantasize about joining you down in the Carolinas.

Heck, if I could afford San Diego, I'd be there in a New York minute.

Your local county extension office, various websites, and that creepy guy down at the end of the block with 15 junked cars under the high-tension lines next to his house will offer various opinions on your last average frost date.

This number is useful for seed-starting, but not for planting.

Do not move your babies outside until you get close to that date and the ten-day forecast predicts nights that remain reliably in the 50s.

Well, that sure was some interesting information about starting healthy starts, now, wasn't it?

Luckily for you, the Question of the Week appears in print at the Gardens Alive website.

To read it over at your leisure or your leisure, just click the link for the Question of the Week at our website, which is still and will forever be... Gardens Alive supports the You Bet Your Garden Question of the Week.

And you will always find the latest Question of the Week at the Gardens Alive website.

You Bet Your Garden is a half-hour public television show, an hour-long public radio show and podcast, all produced and delivered to you weekly by Lehigh Valley Public Media in Bethlehem, PA. Our radio show is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

You Bet Your Garden was created by Mike McGrath.

Mike McGrath was created when he awoke one morning to discover that he had been turned into a giant cockroach.

Yikes.

My producer is threatening to sabotage my starts if I don't get out of the studio.

We must be out of time, but there's plenty of time for you to send us your e-mail, your tired, your poor, your wretched refuse teeming towards our garden shore at...

Please include your location.

You will find all of this contact information and hopefully our new phone number at our website... ..where you'll also find the answers to all your gardening questions, audio of this show, video of this show, audio and video of previous shows, details on how you can get your own little lucky duck, and our internationally renowned podcast.

I'm your host, Mike McGrath, growing pepper plants indoors, dreaming of spring and chopping up ice dams on my roof.

Except next time, I won't stand directly in front of the freezing cold burst of water I have just released.

And if I remember to do that, I expect to see you again... ..next week.