From the festive studios of Lehigh Valley Public Media in the Christmas city of Bethlehem PA, it is time for another Holly Jolly episode a chemical free horticultural hijinks, You Bet Your Garden.

I'm your host, Mike McGrath.

I'm always telling you not to prune anything at this time of year, but the holidays are bearing down on us like a tailgating truck driver, so how can we safely take cuttings from our evergreens and holly?

On today's show, we'll reveal the timing for holiday green success.

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

That's right, potential guests are busy appropriating information from AccuWeather, so we will take that heaping helping of your telecommunicated questions, comments, tips, tricks, suggestions and merrily mandated mystifications.

So keep your eyes and/or ears right here, true believers, because it's all coming up faster than you swinging your swag, right after this.

- 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 espoma.com.

- Welcome to another thrilling episode of You Bet Your Garden.

I'm your host, Mike McGrath, and we're right in the middle of the holiday season, cats and kittens, which means that we want to harvest holiday greens from our gardens.

Who wouldn't?

It's been a great year for holly berries.

You can take some sprigs and branches off of evergreens as long as they don't mar the look of the finished tree.

But you're not supposed to prune anything this time of year.

What will we do?

We'll stay tuned for the Question of the Week.

But first, your fabulous phone calls at 888-492-9444.

Suzanne, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Well, thank you, it's always a pleasure to speak with you.

- And it's always a pleasure to hear...

I don't know, to hear myself speak.

- And how are you today?

- I'm just Ducky!

Thanks for asking.

- Is Ducky he wearing his mask?

- Ducky is wearing his mask.

He's going to get his third shot as soon as it's available.

It's a special shot for waterfowl, so it's hard to get.

- Wonderful!

- When Ducky goes to a concert, he buys three seats and he sits in the middle.

- All right.

- Where are you, Suze?

- I'm in Willamette Valley, Oregon.

- All right, what can we do you for?

- Well, we are plagued with oxalis.

We have five acres here, but we don't just do anything with quite a bit of it, but we have huge areas that my husband has been trying for four years to get a decent lawn going and the oxalis is choking it all out.

We have four beautiful dogs, and so I refuse to let him use herbicides.

It's too big to solarize, and I'm wondering what we might do.

you mentioned corn gluten meal, and the University of Washington did a study on it and said it doesn't work here.

So I don't know what to do.

I wonder, if we have it tilled, would that do anything?

- If you have it tilled, it'll get worse.

- No way.

OK, well, thank you.

That's encouraging!

- Well, you know, I got my thinking cap on here.

What kind of grass is your husband trying to grow?

Well, we did a mix of perennial rye and of fescue.

I think it was tall fescue.

- Right?

OK. - It did reasonably well until the oxalis choked it out.

- Yeah.

- It is ridiculous.

There's too much of it.

- The good news is you can beat this.

The bad news is you're going to have to redo the lawn.

- OK. - Yeah.

The fescue is a great grass, but it's a clumping grass that does not spread, so there's always little holes for these weeds to take hold.

I would suggest...

Boy, I'm not up on lawn care in Oregon.

Do you know what zone you are?

- Oh, well, we've been 8, but we're we're morphing with global warming into 9B.

- Really?

- So it rarely freezes here.

But this summer was hot as Haiti, so... - Right.

Boy, I think I got a grass for you.

- All right.

- Now, because your temperatures are normally high and you don't get a freeze, I think zoysiagrass would be green for you at least ten months of the year.

And then it would turn tan, maybe in the middle of, quote, "winter".

But the thing about zoysiagrass is once it gets established, it is impenetrable.

No weed can survive in zoysiagrass.

And I've had the personal experience of people planting... Zoysiagrass planted by plugs, you get these big rolls of sod and you cut the plugs and you plant them.

I would even suggest that you could cut everything out there down to where you see a little bit of dirt blowing out the back of the mower.

Really scalp it.

And then at the right time of year, and your county extension service is going to be the best to determine that, but I'm thinking very early spring, you would install the plugs.

Keep them watered, and by the end of the year, you may see some oxalis, but you'll see that the zoysia has spread.

It's perfect for your climate.

It was developed in Florida.

And by year two, you're not going to see much weeds at all.

And by year three, you're going to have a lush, solid lawn that is very slow growing and really doesn't need to be fed.

All right?

- Well, thank you very much.

- My pleasure.

- I appreciate your time.

- Good luck to you.

- It's always a pleasure.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

- Bye-bye.

At 888 492 9444, Andy, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Thank you for having me.

- Well, thank you for being had, Andy.

How are you doing?

- I'm doing good.

I'm excited.

- OK. Good, and where is Andy excited?

- I'm in Norman, Oklahoma.

- All right.

What can we do you for, Andy?

So two years ago, I put in my first raised bed and I was really happy with the results, and so I put in two more raised beds this year, and the two raised beds I put in this year performed really, really well.

But the brace bed from the year before, my plants literally, like, were emaciated and dying.

I had to transplant them out of that first raised bed and into the second two.

And so now that I'm at the end of the harvest season and I have my beds empty, I wanted to know what I really needed to do to prepare them for next spring so that all three were productive.

- OK, let's start with what did you fill them with?

- Um, the first year I used just a hodgepodge of organic dirts and fertilizers, and the second year I bought two square tons of zoo compost from our local store, and that really worked out fantastic.

- Zoo compost?

- Yeah, from the Oklahoma City Zoo.

It's just compost that they collect from the zoo.

- I forget which zoo was one of the first to actually brand theirs.

They called it ZooDoo.

- That's fantastic!

- And it was almost all elephant poop, which is highly fibrous.

- I couldn't tell you.

It was a pretty good mix match of dirts.

And it wasn't hot, and I pretty much took my seedlings straight into it and they did just fine.

- That's great.

So you know your mistake, you just told me.

- Oh, what is it?

- I don't need to be Columbo with you.

The first bed was poorly prepared.

You know, you can use organic fertilizers if you like, but you must rely on fertile soil to begin with.

There's an old line in my business - feed your soil, not your plants.

So I think you just need another load of ZooDoo.

- OK.

So if I just really top off the three beds, that will put in enough, I don't know, appropriate stuff for my plants?

- Well, let's go back a little.

You said you bought two trucks or two yards?

- It was two tons.

It was basically two scoops in the back of a truck bed.

- Right.

- If that makes sense.

Like, two full scoops.

- And that was all composted exotic animal manure.

- Yes, it was all composted exotic animal manure.

And that's all that I put in those two beds.

- OK, good.

- That's what I used.

See, one, people misunderstand the concept of manures.

It's not just the stuff the animal was done with.

It's always mixed with bedding.

There's always straw to keep the floors clean or, you know, something like that.

So the bedding is dry brown material and the manure is wet green material, no matter what color it is.

And that's a perfect combination to make good compost.

And I would think there wouldn't be a lot of bird manure or horse manure in there, so it wouldn't be overly high in nitrogen.

It sounds like the perfect combination.

- OK. - Working backwards, your two newer beds.

Yes, I would add a fresh inch or two inches of your ZooDoo.

And then... Tell me again how you did the first bed.

You found some bum walking down the street with a bag of dirt on his back or something.

- Well, the first bed, it really took me a minute to understand the difference between, like, cubic meters of dirt and what you get by the pound in the bag.

And so I probably bought... Oh, my gosh, I bought so many bags of dirt .

- I mean, is that what it said on the bag?

It was a white bag that had been stamped in big black letters, "dirt".

- Right.

So what if it was just like a cream bag that said organic fertilizer?

And I probably got probably six of those in there and then I got a couple of more bags that were, um, enriched organic dirt.

I understand that I didn't want to get like Miracle-Gro growing medium stuff, right?

- Right.

- And I knew that I wanted to create a proper bed.

And so some of it was actually dirt and some of it was organic manure, and I just kind of mixed it all together.

It was a real hodgepodge of different bags of stuff until I got to the full height of my bed, because I made a really deep bed.

It ended up being about 16 inches deep.

- That's perfect.

That's absolutely perfect.

I would get rid of at least half of it and spread it around other plants or give it to some unsuspecting person walking by.

And then don't mix it up, but add fresh zoo manure on top.

- Right on the top and don't mix it in.

- No, no, you don't want to start.

You're going to start having weed seed problems if you do that.

- OK. - All right?

- Really appreciate your time.

I enjoy listening to your show.

Thank you for your help.

- Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Helen, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Hi, Mike.

- Hello, Helen, how are you doing?

- I am fine, and I'm calling from Edmund, Oklahoma.

- What can we do for Helen in Oklahoma?

OK. Our neighborhood has an armadillo that is terrorizing us.

And the reason why I know is I went out to get the paper early one morning about three weeks ago, and there he is, digging in my yard.

- Mm-hm.

- How dare he?

Anyway, I shooed him away and he ran down the street to somebody else's yard.

- Good, good.

- But I want to know, is there anything we can do to prevent this from happening?

He must have been there all night.

I have holes all over Bermuda grass.

Is there any treatment you can do to get these guys away?

- Bermuda is a lucky choice in this case, because you know that's going to regrow.

All you got to do... - Oh, yeah, I know.

- All you got to do is throw a little bit of dirt in there and tamp it down with your foot.

Armadillos are like above-ground moles.

They are carnivores and they only eat fresh meat.

So poisoned Gummi Bears and things like that aren't going to make it.

They got to dig up a worm or a cicada larva or lawn grubs.

Do you have lawn grubs?

- Yes.

I didn't realize we did, but somebody else discovered the grubs in their yard where it was kind of dug up.

- OK, well, that's something we can do something about.

How much longer do you have before you start to get frosty?

- Well, what's interesting is they just predicted frost next week, but, you know, it was 80 degrees yesterday, so you never know.

- OK. Because there are a number of effective, nontoxic grub killers.

Gardens Alive, which again helps support the show, but they're the only reason I know about this stuff, I think they funded the research, they have two versions.

One is Grub-Away, I think, or one is Grub-Be-Gone, something like that.

But it's the latest form of BT, Bacillus thuringiensis.

- Oh, yeah.

- Called BTG for galleriae.

Why?

I have no idea.

But when the grubs are feeding on your lawn, you know, in the fall or late summer, early fall, when you don't see no Japanese beetles any more, that's when the grubs are breaking out of their eggs underneath your lawn, and they'll feed on the roots of it.

And then they'll burrow down beneath the frost line.

And I'm thinking we probably just missed the timing.

But then there is another weapon.

Now, they don't feed on the way out in the spring, so you can't get them to ingest any of these particles that would kill them.

But they also offer BTG in a liquid form for spraying on roses and grapevines and other Japanese beetle possessed plants.

You know, they love to feed on...

Boy, they love those roses.

So in the spring, here's the way to use Japanese beetle traps.

In the spring, as the weather warms up, go to a hardware store, buy a single Japanese beetle trap and set it out wherever you normally see Japanese beetles.

And check it every day.

As soon as you see the first beetle in the bag, close the bag up, get it out of there, take it down to the basement and wrap it in 14 zip locks and use it again the following year.

Never have Japanese beetle traps around your plants.

They just attract more Japanese beetles.

But this is how farmers use things like this, as indicators.

You know, they don't want to wait until they notice damage.

They want to find the first fruit fly, the first beetle, the first nasty insect that comes in.

So they have monitoring stations that have a pheromone scent, and the first insects of that species to arrive, they'll check the traps every day, soon as they see it, then they'll start spraying.

So even in conventional agriculture, it's a good thing because they're not wasting pesticide, at least.

- Right.

- Same goes for you.

This might not be the worst time to order it.

You know, maybe they won't ship it until the spring.

You might be able to find it at a hipper garden center.

But again, you know, I only know of it through GA.

If you wipe out all the Japanese beetles, you shouldn't have too many grubs in your lawn, but I would still recommend that you put down the powder grub killer in August.

All right?

- Well, I'll try.

Yeah, I'll try several of those methods so we don't have to fight with these guys next year.

- OK, good.

And on upcoming show, I have a bottle of armadillo repellent at home I'll bring on the air, so you'll have to watch the TV show that week.

- OK. Take care, and thanks for your time.

- My pleasure.

Take care.

As promised, it is time for the Question of the Week, pruning for holiday greens.

Now, one of the biggest bits of misinformation, I always have to try and correct it this time of year, comes packaged in the inevitable fall gardening story.

What?

What?

It hit me first.

Come on, you.

Cleaning up your landscape for winter, yes, you should remove or at least shred any leaves that are smothering your lawns and/or plants.

And, yes, you should remove and compost your pitiful dead tomato, pepper plants and such, but you should not neaten things up by pruning.

Yes, some of your plants are overgrown.

And, yes, there is the odd shoot that looks like your boxwood is flipping somebody the bird.

And now that the summer garden is done producing, bloom time is over, the World Series is in the rear-view mirror, you are easily bored.

Add a beautiful, sunny day to that, and suddenly you find yourself in front of a plant, pruners in hand, ready to do what you're going to call "straightening up" but the plant would call simple assault.

Pruning done outside of the dormant period will stimulate new growth.

Simple physics.

You want the plant to stay small and cute, like your damaged memory thinks your children once were.

The plant, however, wants to be as big as possible so that it can absorb the most solar energy and maybe get served in a bar.

Pruning stimulates growth.

Prune at the worst possible time of year, which is now, and that new growth will be stimulated at least for those of us in USDA Zone 8 and cooler, just as winter is coming around the corner.

That causes two bad things to happen.

One, you're forcing the plant to grow when it's trying to go dormant.

Energy that was being sent down to the roots is now spent in the name of useless new growth.

In a bad winter, that diversion alone could kill a plant that would have otherwise survived if left unmolested.

But wait, there's more.

That new growth of fresh sap will freeze solid on the next night in the twenties, perhaps even bursting under the strain.

Hey, that rose looks pretty bad.

Maybe I should prune it again.

When should you prune?

You can prune the branches of anything in the dead of winter.

Fully dormant plants can't be stimulated.

But don't hack anything back to the ground or you'll expose the crown to severe winter injury and you will ruin the show on spring bloomers if you prune them in the winter.

Azaleas, rhododendrons, flowering apples and cherries, lilacs, forsythia and the like should only be pruned right after their flowers fade.

Now, summer bloomers like roses, butterfly bush, hardy hibiscus and crepe myrtle should be pruned a couple of weeks after their new growth appears in the spring.

But Christmas is coming!

And holly and evergreens provide perfect live decorations.

Can't we use the plants in our yard for this?

Yes, you can, but you have to cheat.

And remember, as I always tell the children watching the show, cheaters always win.

Now, timing is everything.

You want to wait until we're in December.

Otherwise, the cuttings are going to dry out.

And then wait for a nice, cold stretch, at least two nights below freezing followed by two more nights below freezing.

The actual days don't need to be below freezing, but it's best if they're too cold for you to be enjoying the collecting of these greens Harvest entire branches of evergreens, prefrebly... "Prefrebly"?

..preferably from the lowest parts of the trees.

You can cut the branches down to the size you want later.

Same with plants that produce nice berries like pyracantha, winter berry, beauty berry and such.

Holly berries, of course!

But this chore can also be turned into a plant rejuvenation.

Julia in Berwyn, PA, writes?

Yes, it can be saved, and in the saving, it's going to give you lots of holly branches for holiday decorations.

I was given a blue holly many years ago.

By the way, it turns out that just the leaves are kind of blue.

The berries are the standard red.

And, yes, I was disappointed.

Anyway, it has grown well but has defied all my attempts to make it look like it has a somewhat decent shape.

It looks more like a broken umbrella somebody jammed into the ground.

Also, many years ago, I had a guest on the show from one of our local Philadelphia area arboretums, who explained that it's not unusual for hollies to lose their shape or go brown up high.

And the answer is highly aggressive pruning.

My allegedly blue holly has a perfectly shaped baby holly growing out of a low side branch, and sometime during the first frigid week before this Christmas, I'm going to use a bow saw to take the broken umbrella part down.

I am assured that my little holly will then grow and flourish.

My guest said that they sometimes cut really ugly ones down to a stump and they do regrow.

They might not look great for a couple of years but will soon be a recognizable, nice holly.

So, remember, Julie, fortune favors the bold.

Well, that was sure some practical advice about holiday pruning, now, wasn't it?

Luckily, you can read the info over at your "leesure" or your "lesure" because the Question of the Week appears in print at the Gardens Alive website.

Just click the link for the Question of the Week at our website, which is still and will forever be youbetyourgarden.org.

Gardens Alive supports the You Bet Your Garden Question of the Week, and you'll always find the latest Question of the Week where?

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 Swamp Thing met Man Thing, then Mikey made three.

Yikes, my producer is threatening to hack away at my holly on a warm and sunny day if I don't get out of this studio.

We must be out of time.

But you can call us any time at 888-492-9444 or send us your e-mail, your electronically tired poor, your wretched refuse teeming towards our garden shore at ybyg@wlvt.org.

Please, please include your location!

You'll find all of this contact information plus answers to your garden questions, audio of this show, video of this show, audio and video of recent shows and links to our internationally renowned podcast.

It's all at youbetyourgarden.org.

I'm your host, Mike McGrath, and I'm sharpening my pruners and watching the weather so that I can swing my swag when I see you again next week.