From the spring blooming Univest Studios at Lehigh Valley Public Media in Bethlehem, PA, it is time for another colorful episode of chemical-free, horticultural high jinks, You Bet Your Garden.

I'm your host, Mike McGrath.

Can we forget about all the doom and gloom for a bit and discuss instead the saviors of springtime?

On today's show, we'll reveal how to keep amazing avatars of April, like forsythia and daffodils, blooming year after year.

And, of course, we'll take your fabulous phone call questions, comments, tips, tricks, suggestions and ridiculously rarefied ramifications.

So, keep your eyes and/or ears right here, cats and kittens, because it's all coming up faster than you having a perennial garden of spring, 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, from the Univest Public Media Center in Bethlehem, PA.

I am your befuddled host, Mike McGrath.

Coming up later in the show, your spring bulbs and forsythia and everything are looking beautiful right now.

What can you do to make sure they look just as nice next year?

We'll answer that after we answer a couple of your fabulous phone calls.

Dan, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Thank you, Mike.

- Well, thank you, Dan.

How are you doing?

- I'm doing fine.

- And where is Dan doing fine?

- I'm on the peripheral of the Lehigh Valley, not too far from... You would recognize Emmaus.

-Oh, sure.

- A town like that.

- All right, Dan, what can we do you for?

- Well, you just mentioned forsythia, and I have to admit that my forsythia is looking great in terms of all the yellow flowers.

But I have 120-foot-long hedge, which is over growing my driveway to the extent that I have to drive off the driveway.

And I really need to move it back, and this is probably sounding sacrilegious, but I almost need just to cut it back at the base.

I mean, this hedge is several feet wide.

I want know the best way to do it and, if possible, when I cut some of the larger branches, I'd like to re-root them and plant them elsewhere, and I'm not sure how to do that.

- OK.

So, it has gotten too big in the sideways position?

- Correct, it's just overhanging the driveway and you can't go around it.

- OK. And you realize, of course, that it's in full bloom right now.

- Yes.

The other part of the question would be one, when would be the best time to do that?

Wait till next fall or...?

- No, no, no.

You never prune anything in the fall.

Even though you desperately want to do.

What you want to do is wait till all the flowers are gone.

OK?

And then you've got a blank slate.

I would suggest you get some carpenter's tools and make a line down the driveway and follow that line for pruning above ground.

Don't go low, but follow that and take off as much of the forsythia as is incurring on your car.

Forsythia spreads by tip rooting.

So, if you want to keep it under control in the future, you have to look... You know, all these little things that come up out of the ground, these branches and then turn around?

If you don't take them out - and you can take them out whenever you see them - it's just going to grow back the way you want.

But if you keep... And not hacking it back, I don't I don't want to hear any chainsaws.

You say it's a long thing, so I could see hedge clippers being involved.

But take it back to the edge of the driveway, as you perceive it, or as close to the edge of the driveway as it can help your cars.

And then, is there a problem with it on the other side or is it just one?

- No, it's just the side overhanging the driveway.

And unfortunately, I think some of those tip rooted things, you know, ten years ago, are now rather large, thick trunks.

So, I'm going to have to, unfortunately, and I hate to admit this, do some damage to my lovely hedge.

It will grow back, but I may be, you know, having...

It might have to be a multi-step process and all.

- But, yeah, but, Dan, if you haven't pruned it in ten years, you got ten years worth to catch up on.

- I agree.

I just retired, so I got 20 years of deferred maintenance.

- OK, I hear that.

So, I would start with what I said.

Now, if one of these shoots, one of these advantageous roots is coming up out of the ground, and it's definitely going to lean in the direction that you're trying to clean up, just prune it off at the very base of the plant.

Just the act of pruning will improve the look of the forsythia.

It'll fill in even more.

And then, you know the old story, it's an every-year job.

Every year, after the flowers fade, you get out there and you prune and you'll have a fabulous-looking hedge with no damaged anything.

- How easy is it to re-root some of that stuff?

You know, if I put it in a in a bucket with some magical solution that you can come up with, which I don't know about.

- Well, first of all, you can't root plants in buckets of water and have them take in the soil.

You can hydrate them a little bit but, after that, they need to be growing in soil.

And no offense, man, the last thing anybody needs is more forsythia in the world!

If you took one of your cuttings and you drove over it with a dirt bike and then got out and beat it with a clawhammer, threw it underneath a Mack truck and threw it down somewhere where it could smell grass, that's it, baby.

That's all you need.

So, this is not one for overplanting.

- Well, thank you very much for your information.

I love your show.

- Thank you, sir.

- All right, take care, bye-bye.

- Number to call... Dave, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Hello, Mike, how are you doing today?

- Better than expected, Dave, I'm sitting up, taking nutrition.

How are you?

- Oh, I'm just outstanding.

Waiting for spring to kick in fully here, but all's well, thank you.

- And where is all's well?

- All as well is in Plumstead Township, just north of Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

- All right.

And I got a dirty picture of a tree in the ground here... - Ooh!

- ..that they're telling me to look at.

- That would be mine.

- OK, so what's up with this?

- Well, this tree, Mike, is three and a half years old, just about.

It was labeled a baby blue eyes spruce, which I bought and planted at the end of 2018.

And, as you can see, it's lost its frosty-blue color that attracted me so much to it.

But more important than that, though, I can't get it to grow.

The overwhelming majority of the branches don't shoot out buds.

The tree stays alive, it stays green, but it's pretty much the same size as when I planted it.

- Come on!

- And the first rainy season is about to start.

- You got a no-work bonsai and you're complaining?

(DAVE CHUCKLES) - That's about what it amounts to.

- OK, so our TV people can see this picture.

It's inside a split-rail fence.

There's some weeds and old leaves around, but it is buried in - and I mean buried - in a very dark-colored soil.

What is that soil?

- OK, that is black-dyed mulch.

That was added later when I eliminated all... - Excuse me?

That was added later, the black-dyed mulch.

- Oh, BLACK-dyed mulch.

I thought you said lactide mulch, which would have made more sense.

Yeah.

- Anyway, that was added later so that no competing plants would grow around the bottom of the tree.

But, no, it's... And the kind of scruffy material you see in the back there, those are irises with a bunch of leaves from last season floating around.

- All right.

Now, did you buy this in bulk or in bags?

- This tree... - No, the mulch.

The mulch.

- Oh, the mulch?

This was bought in bulk.

- Mmm-hmm.

Whatever made you decide to go for black-dyed mulch?

Because I can tell you exactly what's happening here.

- Oh, good.

- The tree is buried too deeply.

The material that it's buried in is some sort of trash wood, like pallets leftover from shipping that are chipped up.

And then because they kind of don't look so pretty, they spray them with some godawful color, never seen in nature.

Didn't you notice the smell of the mulch?

- Could be.

The mulch is actually left over from, I'm going to say 2020, so it's lost all of its smell.

It's just there.

- Except for the fact that it's still wood, and it's still absorbing nitrogen from the soil in which the tree is trying to grow.

- Ah.

- Do you think you could hustle this puppy out of the ground?

- I could try.

- If you can...

The smartest thing to do would be get this thing out of the ground, rinse off the roots and transfer it to a bed of just topsoil, or even just remove a piece of lawn and put the thing in, but no wood mulch, you're starving the tree to death.

- Oh, OK. - And make sure it gets really well watered after you move it.

And don't ever buy dyed mulch.

If you feel you're really into wood mulch and it's going to make a nice appearance, get what is called arborist's mulch.

That's just the tripped up - tripped up trees!

Chipped up trees from the trimming crews that are clearing the power lines.

- Very good.

- And plant high.

Not low, like this.

- Too low.

I think that's the main problem, Mike.

The mulch is just an afterthought.

The first couple of seasons, it had no mulch around it.

It was just growing out of a piece of lawn.

The mulch was last year's afterthought, but I'll get rid of it.

- OK, yeah.

What, was that trying to finish it off before you had to buy it dinner one more time?

- Well, I'm trying to finish it off so nothing else would grow around it and compete for nutrients.

- I don't think that's the problem.

As you can see, it's Death Valley there.

- Oh, yeah.

- Yeah.

Get that tree out of there.

Get a couple of friends over and rock it and rock it so you can get it out, wash off the roots, put it in another place and use that for your fire pit.

- All right, I will give that a shot, sir.

I appreciate your time and for taking my call.

I love your show, we watch it all the time.

Thank you.

- Thank you.

John Paul, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Hey, thanks for having me on.

- Well, thanks for being had, John, how are you?

- I'm pretty good.

- And where are you?

- I'm in North Wilmington, Delaware.

- What can we do you for?

- Well, I've recently upgraded my yard quite a bit via a move and I went from a small, little postage stamp and I'm the lucky property manage, owner, of about an acre of wooded forest that's all cleared.

And my daughter and I, we counted the trees in our back yard and came up with about 117, which is super-awesome.

But I'm thinking about 50 of those are sweet gum trees and they drop so many gum balls.

It's overwhelming.

- When I was growing up at Bridge and Torresdale, in Philadelphia, we called them itchy balls, for no good reason.

And of course, they were the ultimate projectile.

You didn't have to go buy stuff, you just took a basket out and there was this enormous tree near Marguerite's house.

Oh, must have dropped thousands of them.

So, what's the matter, you don't like walking on them?

It's like acupressure, right?

You're relieving all those nasty symptoms in your feet.

- Surprise, acupuncture.

- Yeah.

You know, there's got to be, the people who make things like super squirters or paintball guns, they have to have an itchy-ball thrower.

You know, you load up 100 of those and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Maybe I've been... - I've got a nine-year-old son and I'm kind of wondering if this is a good idea or not.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, he'll put his eye out.

I've been watching too much TV news.

So, what have you been doing with them so far?

- So far, I'm just blowing them off of the lawn area and just back into the wooded area, which has all the leaves from last fall, and everything is getting kind of mixed together.

- Well, there's nothing wrong with that.

I mean, because if it was not going to be subject to degradation, your property would probably be 500-feet deep in itchy balls.

- Oh, for sure, yeah.

- Yeah, and you are returning some of the most valuable part of the plant to the soil, you're turning the seeds and the husk and everything back in.

But boy, just as I said that, there's gotta be something out there, some machine that crushes them up or, again, shoots them at your enemy from a high wall, something like that.

But what I have recommended for people who have too many of these things is to get a garden vacuum.

This is not like, you know, a leaf blower or a leaf sucker or anything like that.

It kind of is, but instead of a cone on the end, it has a long snake, like they use in drainage?

- For sure, yeah.

Yeah, I know what you mean.

- Yeah, and it's got a cute little handle, so you can push it back into your shrubbery and then dump it out someplace.

- I think that's the thing, I thought I would have a whole mountain of these things if I got one of those.

- Well... You know, why don't we - meaning you - do that and check it in a year or two?

It is nature's duty to decompose wood into soil once again.

And if you made just a pile of itchy balls, you could keep it well watered over the summer and accelerated, it would make great compost.

Or you could put up one of those roadside signs, "World's largest itchy ball pile.

"Come see it.

"Refreshments for the kids."

- Oh, that sounds fantastic.

- Yeah, "free itchy balls to take home."

And then you'd show one itchy ball that appears to be the size of an asteroid, you know?

So, that's all I got.

- That's sounds great, I think we could probably... - Oh, no, actually another trick that was taught to me is spreading them around slug-prone plants, either on the top of pots or down at the bottom of the pots or in the garden bed, make a ring of them around your garden bed.

Slugs obviously can't cross over them, because they'll get pierced.

- Well, all right.

- All right.

- That sounds like something we could do leading into gardening season.

- Yeah.

Fun.

And don't forget to have an itchy ball fight with your eight-year-old and, Mom, Mom, he's going to wear glasses.

He's going to wear protective glasses.

- Oh, we'll all have the goggles.

- Yeah.

All right.

And then you need... - Well, thank you, sir.

- Yeah, you need an ump to count the hits.

All right, you take care, man.

- Take care, thank you.

- Bye-bye.

Well, we hope you've been waiting with bated breath - whatever that means - for the question of the week, which we're calling... We begin with Mary in Telford, PA, who writes... No, Mary, that is not the answer.

I have two huge forsythia in the very front of my front yard, and they are blooming so brightly that they're overshadowing the spring bulbs behind them, despite the fact that they also bloomed, out of confusion, last November.

They have never been fed, unless you count the road salt they're exposed to most winters.

I have no idea how old they are.

They were big when we moved in 35 years ago and they have never failed to put on a remarkable show.

Actually, there were three out there originally, but they formed a wall that was cutting off all the air flow to my roses, so my friends and I spent a month - no exaggeration - digging the middle one up.

If it had taken much longer, we were considering dynamite.

Dynamite is an organic input, right?

OK.

It took three of us to haul the root ball out and roll the monster into a nearby wooded area, where it continues to bloom every year on its side.

Now, I just went out to take a closer look at my plants and, yes, the biggest concentration of those amazing yellow flowers does seem to be on the new growth.

But I don't see any kind of real bare spots, so I suspect that yours is the victim of improper pruning.

And I agree with you, people who try to prune forsythia into a boxwood head shape should be imprisoned.

It is one of the ugliest, saddest and most misguided sights in all of horticulture.

Anyway.

Forsythia, obviously, is a spring bloomer.

And as with other spring bloomers like azaleas, rhododendrons, flowering cherries, lilacs and the like, the time to prune them is right after the flowers fade, because shortly after that, they'll begin to set the buds that will produce next year's show.

I typically use hand pruners to cut back the tallest stems after they're finished blooming, and the sideways ones that make it difficult for our mail carrier to get close to the mailbox.

Then I'll step back and look for what I suspect Mary is describing, some old, thick wood in the center of the plant.

I'll remove some of that with a bow saw, and that's it.

Over the course of the summer, new shoots are going to spring up all over the plants.

It is these unruly shoots that tempt people to "tidy things up" in the fall, which is a mistake for two reasons - one, you're cutting off the parts that would have produced the most vibrant show in the spring, and two, forsythia is not supposed to be tidy.

It is a wild-child riot of golden shoots that explode in all directions.

It can't be trained any more than you can train a house cat.

We move on to Michael, in parts unknown, who writes... No, you don't want to do anything with spring bulbs until the leaves have lost all of their green color.

That's why we chose this question for this show today.

Many people rush to cut off those leaves, which starves the plant of the energy it needs to grow another flower, deep inside the bulb.

The result the following spring is all leaves and no flowers.

And tying the leaves up is almost as bad.

Plus, having bulbs in bondage may reveal more about you to your neighbors than you might have intended.

Anyway, after the leaves have lost their green, you can safely dig them up, but the word dividing doesn't exactly apply here.

That term is typically used for herbaceous perennials, like hostas.

When their distinctive leaves emerge in the spring, you can dig them up and divide them into multiple plants.

A classic method is to use two garden forks to pull the plants into sections.

Some people will split their plants apart with a sharp shovel or, more excitingly, a machete.

Yeah!

Once, when I had to divide a really huge hosta, I dug it up and used a chainsaw to cut the monster into quarters.

Cowboy gardening at its finest!

And because hostas cannot be killed, all of those sections flourished when we replanted them.

Spring bulbs are another story.

Were you to chop a big tulip or daffodil bulb in half, you'd get two dead half bulbs.

But bulbs that have been in the ground for years will often have babies, little bulblets that grow next to the parent bulb.

Carefully dig these bulbs up and carefully and gently snap these babies off.

Carefully!

Then you can either return the mother bulb to the ground or store it indoors in a cool, dark spot and then replant it after Halloween.

Plant the baby bulbs in a nursery bed and they will grow bigger over time and eventually flower, but only if you let their greenery turn brown naturally.

You got it?

Well, that sure was some timely information on taking care of your spring bloomers, now, wasn't it?

Luckily for yous, the question of the week appears in print at the Gardens Alive website to read it over 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 YouBetYourGarden,org.

Gardens Alive supports the You Bet Your Garden question of the week, and you 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 from the Univest Studios at 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 an experiment using gamma rays on garlic went south and he had to ask Aquaman for help digging him out.

Yikes!

My producer is threatening to burst my blossoms if I don't get out of this studio, we must be out of time.

But you can call us any time at... Or send us your e-mail, your tired, your poor, your wretched refuse, teeming towards our garden shore at... You'll find all of this contact information, the answers to all your garden questions, audio of this show, video of this show and our podcast, it's all at that website...

I'm your host, Mike McGrath.

I could be a hologram for all I know, but if I am, couldn't they have done better job on my hair?

Oh, I guess science has only advanced so far.

Anyway, I'll wash my hands, wear gloves, plant more peas and see you again next week.