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... - Brit, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Hi, Mike.

- Hello, Brit.

How are you doing?

- I'm doing great.

How are you doing?

- I'm just ducky!

Thanks for asking.

Ducky hasn't had a lot... Oh, and now his mask is falling off.

Dr Fauci... - Oh, no.

- I know.

Dr Fauci would never approve.

You know, there you go, Ducky.

Now you're federally clean again.

Ducky is one of the first.

He's going to get the vaccine because he's an essential part of the show, more than I am.

- He's not afraid of needles?

- No, no, no, no.

And where are you?

- Grand Rapids, Michigan.

- So what can we do you for?

- Well, I got one of my favorite things to get in the mail in the winter just last week.

I got a seed catalog.

- Yeah?

Mm-hm.

- And I was looking through and I noticed one of the plants that I had gotten last year was a Minnesota midget melon.

- Ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha ha!

- I'm from Minnesota, so I had to get some - and grow some.

- Yeah.

- And they turned out great.

Softball sized melons.

Kind of like a cantaloupe.

- OK, good, good.

Now, when you say kind of like a cantaloupe, do you mean a netted melon, you know, kind of has the appearance of netting for its rind?

- Yes.

With orange flesh and that sweet scent when you cut it open.

- Yes.

Exactly.

So just to be correct, first, there is no such thing as a yam at Thanksgiving and Christmas-time.

Nobody in America has ever eaten a yam.

They're all sweet potatoes.

And your cantaloupes are part of a misnaming that occurred maybe 100 years ago.

A true cantaloupe, believe it or not, is even more florid than what you grew.

It's considered to be the ambrosia, but when it's a netted melon, they're called musk melons.

And that's for the...and that's for the fragrance.

But of course, if you ask somebody for a musk melon, they'll look at you like you're nuts.

Just keep calling out cantaloupe.

OK, so you did good growing miniature musk melons.

- Yep.

And I was looking at the listing for it because I'm going to have them again.

And I noticed at the bottom it said resistance to fursarium wilt.

- Yes.

- So I was thinking part of why I'm building a second raised bed this coming spring is that I have somewhere to rotate my tomatoes to.

- Gotcha.

- Am I shooting myself in the foot by growing these melons in the bed that the tomatoes are currently evicted from?

- No, not at all.

Not at all.

- OK. - There are two basic soil-borne wilts... ..W-I-L-T-S... ..in the United States.

Up where you are in the frozen north, it is verticillium.

It is not fusarium.

Verticillium persists throughout the north, down even past me, starting to get into almost the Washington DC area.

After that, it changes over, and fusarium wilt becomes more dominant, so it really doesn't apply to you.

There may be some crossover protection.

But I'm, you know, I'm not familiar with melons being that susceptible to soil-borne wilts, but anything that it says it's naturally resistant is a bonus.

It can't be negative.

And is it the same catalog, same company you bought the seeds from last year?

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

You should do fine.

Did you do anything special to make sure you got mature melons?

- I did have them growing up.

I'm getting a trellis for next year.

But this last year I used some old tomato cages to support them up off the ground.

And then when the melons started getting to any kind of decent size, I had some older onion bags that I used to make nets for them and support them.

- Perfect.

Perfect.

Now, what I will mention, because, you know, you have a short growing season, as we're approaching the time that you're thinking about planting them, remove any mulch from the bed.

If you've got shredded leaves or straw or anything like that, just hoe it off to the side.

This will allow the soil to warm up much better than if the mulch were to remain in place.

OK?

- Yeah.

Thank you very much.

- All right.

And good luck and thank you for the tip.

I'll recommend that to people who want to grow melons in cold climes.

- Thank you very much.

- My pleasure.

You take care.

- You too.

- Bye-bye.

Hi, I'm Mike McGrath, host of You Bet Your Garden right here on PBS39.

And I have a very special offer for our television friends.

We have obtained a sizable number of little Lucky Duckies.

So if you're a fan of the show and you're a fan of Ducky and you'd like to support public television and PBS39 and specifically the show, we are prepared to send you your own little Lucky Duck for a generous pledge of $60 or more.

You'll also get Passport, which will allow you to watch millions of previous PBS shows, and you'll know you did good by your old Uncle Mike.

So to get all the details, visit our website - youbetyourgarden.org.

Thea, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Thank you, Mike.

How are you today?

- I am just ducky, thanks for asking.

Ducky always likes to get into the show here.

How are you, Thea?

- I'm doing great, thank you.

And where is Thea doing great?

- In Santa Rosa, California.

- What can we do for you today?

- We are just... As many fires as we've been getting, I've become really worried with the impact of the ash fall and the smoke and the... ..just the environmental impact of the smoke and ash on the garden.

You know, the edibles and the ornamentals.

This year, the fires started so early, it was August.

And just as we were in, you know, hitting the ground running, we were harvesting our tomatoes and our peppers and all of that.

And, yeah, I'm concerned.

I don't know what to do.

I don't...

I mean, I can wash the vegetables, of course, and the leafy greens, but I don't know what the long term impact is and I don't know how to support my garden under those conditions.

- And you've seen a decent amount of ash that you've had on the surface of the soil and on your veggies?

- On the surface of the soil, on the veggies.

That's ash.

It's, you know, charred leaves, bits of paper, you name it.

You can see there's quite a bit that comes drifting down.

- This is not volcanic ash.

If it were volcanic ash, that would be a different conversation, because there are noxious gases and noxious elements, toxic elements that come out of the volcano.

But what you're talking about is...

I would call it hardwood ash, except with most of your trees, it's going to be conifers, right?

Yeah.

So... What?

I don't think there is any direct harm from the ash landing on your garden in terms of uptake of nasty materials.

But your soils are already tend to the alkaline side where you are because of the lack of rain.

You know, you get a lot of rain, you tend to have acidic soil.

If you live in a dry region, it tends to be alkaline.

So I would say, even though we obviously have this ash all around and it's very worrisome, I would say the issue for me would be the pH of your soil.

- OK. - If it were already tending alkaline and then it got dusted with any kind of wood ash, it could become more alkaline.

So if you started to see plant distress, I don't think it would be the ash directly, but the chemical reaction of it further increasing the alkalinity of your soil.

So, I mean, this is something that you could treat with peat moss or elemental sulfur.

If you get a soil test done and it comes up, you know, over seven, because you want to bring it back down to around 6.5 - just slightly acidic.

But I mean, I wouldn't be surprised with this amount of ash, and give the ash a year or two to really biodegrade into the soil.

You might wind up at eight or something like that, and really have to remediate it.

But there are nutritious elements in hardwood ash, for instance, Where I live and on the East Coast, where there's a lot of rain, we urge people not to "lime their lawns" , but to seek out somebody with a woodstove and use the wood ash to raise the pH up to a healthy level because wood ash, as opposed to lime, has all these wonderful micronutrients in there.

And any ash that hits your garden in August, it's not going to be absorbed by your plants whatsoever.

The ash is fairly inert.

It takes time for soil microbes to break it down and really incorporate it into your soil.

And, you know, there's always the possibility of a little bit of bad material got into the fire.

But I would say overwhelmingly, as you know, this is a natural process out west, and over time, it actually can remediate the soil and make the soil more hospitable to pioneer plants that emerge after the fires.

So I would say the ash itself being physically present is a dodge.

But I would urge you to keep an eye on your pH because it can take some time to get that pH back down if it's very alkaline and you would want to get ahead of the curve, as opposed to, you know, seeing your plants suffer.

- OK, great.

Thank you.

- My pleasure.

You take care now.

- You too.

- Bye-bye.

Carol Ann, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Thank you.

- Well, thank you, Carol.

- How you doing?

- I'm doing good.

- And where is Carol Ann doing good?

- I live in Virginia Beach.

- What can we do you for?

- I moved in here, I guess it's been about four years now and we bought an older house with a well-established garden.

The house was built in 1949.

So the trees and everything were, you know, magnificent.

But the first summer we were here, we noticed that the lawn would just die out in specific spots.

So we would re-seed in those spots and the first summer we waited for the fall.

And by the time the fall came around, because our summers are so hot, we were using the in-ground sprinklers, but the lawn just completely died front and back.

And we also lost some really old, you know, a rose bush, two rose bushes that were super old.

So it was kind of unusual because we were watering.

We get these areas where it dies out, where it looks like sand.

- Yeah, well, you're at the beach.

- I know, but there's like places where the lawn dies and there's no topsoil, it's just sand, and it's kind of compacted down.

- Yes.

Yeah, that's... That's perfectly normal for your region.

- Yeah, but not for my lawn to die.

- Well, you know, I am not anti lawn.

I think that lawns, if they're not chemically treated, are great.

I's a huge expanse of plants.

They're channeling rainwater to slow down.

They're putting oxygen into the air.

But sometimes the... ..the situation that they're in can be stressful to a lawn, and I know how hot it can get in like late July and August in your region.

Now, how close are you to the water?

- We're probably about maybe like ten blocks.

- And what type of grass have you been using?

- Well, the back is very shaded, so we would use shaded grass.

- What kind of a sprinkler system do you have?

- We have an in-ground sprinkler.

- And how were you using it?

- We would have it on a timer and we would usually set it for like in the morning, like early morning, about five.

- Good.

- And it would go off maybe, I think, depending on how hot it was.

- We have a rain gauge, so it wouldn't come on if it rained.

- Right.

- But I would say about 20, 30 minutes it would stay on in the morning.

- OK, that's your problem.

Especially with sandy soil, which again is very natural where you are.

That whole area was a sandbar at one point.

- Yeah.

- What you need to do, you're starting at exactly the right time of day, like five o'clock in the morning.

But what you want to do to help the grass survive the hot weather is to run it for literally four hours.

The roots of grass don't even know that they're being watered for the first 20 minutes.

So it's a cheap tease when you turn it off that quickly.

Have you ever considered changing over to a warm season grass?

I presume you're sowing fescue or something in the fall?

- Yeah, honestly I'm really not sure because we just have, you know, we're going by what they're recommending with the lawn services.

- Well, they're recommending whatever they have lots of.

So in in the Virginia Beach area, especially where you are, I would say that you would do better with a warm season grass like zoysia or Bermuda grass.

And these things would be installed in the springtime and they would be installed via plugs... - Right.

..that you would put in the ground, and they both spread.

Now, any warm season grass is going to go a little tan and dormant for a couple of months in the wintertime.

But as far as I'm concerned, that's a beautiful look for the beach.

You know, all the dune grasses, those are all warm season grasses.

It's going to be self-sustaining.

I think the big problem is the type of grass.

- All right.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate the call.

- All right.

As promised, it's time for the Question of the Week.

Doug in Drexel Hill writes... You would do the country a great service by constantly reminding your viewers and listeners not to plant bamboo on their property.

I recently went through a hellish experience with a neighbor who has a legacy planting of bamboo that was started by his father.

That bamboo has been invading my property for 15 years.

Thankfully, our township just passed a bamboo ordinance.

However, the impenetrable barrier requirement of the ordinance does not specify a depth, like must be 30 inches or more deep.

My neighbor, after being cited by the township, removed the existing bamboo and installed a two inch deep barrier.

This small of a barrier will never work, but the ordinance was not written to require a prescribed depth.

Please remind township officials that they need to be more specific with the requirements of such an ordinance.

In addition, no-one should ever be lauding the merits of bamboo.

For instance, I am extremely disappointed at Penn State University's large bamboo display in their otherwise beautiful arboretum.

They use an elaborate containment system that prevents the bamboo from spreading, but failed to let visitors know about the need for a barrier that is 25 to 30 to 35 inches deep.

For a university to promote bamboo without describing its extreme confinement needs is negligent.

Arboretums need to educate visitors about the requirements necessary to contain bamboo if a homeowner wants this invasive species on their property, Please inform your legion of followers - that would be you out there - that bamboo is bad when the bamboo grower is not willing to install proper barriers.

Well, if this was another topic, I'd be tempted to be cute and say something like, Gee, Doug, don't hold back.

How do you really feel about running bamboo?

But this is not another topic.

This is more like looking at a baby Godzilla and saying, Aw, isn't he cute?

I'm sure the neighbors won't mind if we bring him home.

We have a big backyard.

Fast forward and the neighbor's home is now up on stilts that they did not install and / or the local high-tension lines have been declared an endangered species.

If Godzilla is indeed the king of monsters, a sentiment we highly endorse here at You Bet Your Garden, running bamboo is the king of the monstrous invasive plants.

But first, let's back up a bit.

There are two basic types of bamboo.

The "good" bamboo is most commonly known as clumping bamboo.

Like fescue and ornamental grasses, the clumps will get larger and wider over time, as do many of us.

But they will not travel outside of their clumpdom and cause a shed 20 feet away to rise up, fall down and go boom.

That superpower belongs to "running" bamboo, also known as spreading bamboo, arrow bamboo and many other names I cannot speak on the network of Mr Rogers.

These tropical but winter hardy plants form a dense underground root system that shoots combs up out of the ground at varying distances from the mother plant.

Comb is the proper name for the stalks you see above ground, which all terminate in a common root system.

So when you see a "forest" of bamboo, you're looking at one big plant.

Think of all the branches of a big tree, but the tree is somehow underground.

Those aren't 100 different trees.

There are 100 branches of the same plant.

Except that oaks and maples don't get up and walk around.

Neither does running bamboo.

Actually, it runs like its rhizomes are escaping a mugging, except that it's the mugger!

If running bamboo is planted next door, it will not stay next door unless there is a water-filled stream, river, canal, or trench in between 0 as with vampires, bamboo cannot cross over running water - there is an impenetrable barrier to advancement, like a sheer cliff or other rocky outcome, a professional rhizome barrier is installed to contain it, or you live next to a Pennsylvania Dutchman who will mow down the new shoots on a weekly basis and remark, Say now, this ain't too bad.

I've had worse.

I inherited a large stand not too far from my house.

But there's a stream in between our houses.

And despite the stream sometimes going dry in the summer, the bamboo has stayed on the other side for 35 years.

There are giant rock outcliffs behind the stand.

Our local road is in front of the stand and although some shoots do get through, the township cuts them out and tars them over.

And on the other side is my excellent neighbor Willard and his invincible mower.

Hey now.

No problem, says Willard.

OK, so where does this leave us, as more and more cities and municipalities are banning bad bamboo?

Doug's neighbor is wasting his time with a two inch barrier, as that is clearly not adequate to control these Asian triffids.

Their bamboo ordinance, which I just read, may not specify depth, but it also does not bail out completely.

Its specific language requires "sheathing of a sufficient depth to prevent "the encroachment onto neighborhood property".

Simply said, if and when your new stuff still pokes up on Doug's side, his neighbor gets popped to the tune of 25 bills a day and he has to pay for the removal of the new bamboo, and a new bamboo barrier.