From the somewhat soiled Universal Studios at Lehigh Valley Public Media in Bethlehem, P.A..

It is time for another wasted episode on chemical free horticultural high jinks.

You bet your garden.

I'm your host, Mike McGrath.

Deer eat your plants and then poop on your property.

Is this end result of your devoured hostas safe to use in the garden?

On today's show, we'll discuss disease, deer, prion proteins and more.

Plus, your fabulous one call question comments, tips, tricks, suggestions and concisely connected considerations.

So stay right where you are.

Cats and kittens because it's all coming up faster than you thinking more deeply about your poopy preferences than ever before.

888492 9444.

Brian, welcome to you about your garden.

Hi.

Thanks for taking my call.

Well, thank you for making it, Brian.

How you doing, man?

I'm doing well yourself.

I am just ducky.

Thanks for asking.

Where is Brian Doing well.

I'm doing well in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

What can we do you for today?

Well, I'm having some issues with shrubs in my backyard this past year.

I planted a few small azaleas from a local nursery.

They're planted on the river birches, which I know are water hungry.

But they showed growth throughout the summer, and then late in the summer, started to dieback branch after branch until there's pretty much no living leaves left on the plant by the end of the winter.

There's.

They're still alive.

They're trying to push out new buds, but it's really, really limited to a few branches.

And I'm having another issue with an Enoki Cypress that's also started to turn yellow and brown at the tips where this year around this year it'd be normally like a little bit like green be seeing new growth.

So I'm not sure.

I guess I'm concerned I might have imported a blight, you know, not into my yard, but at the same time.

No, there's no there's no crossover between those to what you call them.

One is a genus Genesis's of plants.

Um, let's see.

You installed the azaleas last spring?

Yes.

How late?

Uh, I mean, about about late April, maybe early May.

Okay.

And were they in bloom at the time or what?

They were.

They were showing bloom, and they were really healthy, so I didn't have any concern at the time.

And they finished that bloom cycle.

Right.

And did you do anything right?

No, I. I kind of I wanted to encourage them to continue to grow.

They were quite small, so I didn't do any sort of pruning or anything like that.

Here's a big bad secret.

Pruning stimulates growth.

If you want a baby plant to grow faster, you do intelligent pruning, which with a spring bloomer like azalea means right after the flowers have faded.

Okay, so we Americans tend to think of pruning as a way to reduce the size of a plant.

European gardeners know it's the way to increase the size of a plant.

So this is a new plant over here.

The azaleas.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the cypress has been there for how long?

Oh, it's quite large, even for a dwarf.

So previous owners planted it easily ten years ago.

Okay.

And this is the first year you've seen the signs of yellowing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've never seen this before.

But then again, I've only been here for a few years myself.

Okay.

Um, are they mulched?

They are.

Oh, is this.

Oh, I think they gave me pictures.

Oh, you're.

Yeah.

Yeah, I sent a couple of pictures.

Yeah.

Oh, my goodness.

Your azalea looks like in an ad for care or something like that.

Please send is not good.

This little azalea will go to bed hungry tonight.

What?

What is that?

What the heck kind of mulch is this?

It looks like chipped up pallets.

Yeah, it's wood.

Mulch from just a standard bag.

No.

Okay.

Yeah.

This definitely.

I mean, arborist wood mulch, freshly cut tree limbs and stuff like that would not have this sickly gray color.

Didn't you, like, think about after you put it down.

This looks like the dog's breakfast.

Yeah, it's.

It's looking pretty bad now.

Yeah.

Okay, so your azalea has three problems.

The first is you got to rake up and dispose of that wood mulch.

The second is, is it the best time after after it blooms or after all the other azaleas in your area have bloomed?

You got to move it.

Azaleas and rolling greens are two of the thirstiest plants we have in our gardens.

And a fully grown river.

Birch is going to be a bully and beat up on it and steal all of its water.

So that's three strikes and I don't bother sitting down on the bench.

There's a bus to Allentown coming around for you.

So but that I think I think you could save it.

The third thing is you have to acidify the soil for the azalea.

So when you replant it, fill up at least half the hole with milled peat moss.

You know, in the big containers, they sell a garden centers.

All right.

They make cute little bales now and then mulch an inch of more milled peat moss on top of the soil and cover that with an inch of compost.

The cypress look like fluorosis, which can be a P-H imbalance and or a lack of iron.

I don't normally advocate soil tests because most of the time the plants can tell us, Oh, and it's the cypress mold stores that growing your treated lawn or anything.

It's pretty much the same awful mulch.

If you want to try something without getting your soil tested.

I would buy a little bag of elemental iron at your local independent garden center and sprinkle that around at about half the rate it says on the bag, and then cover that with an inch of compost.

I think there's a darn good chance it would perk right up.

Excellent.

Thank you.

All right.

You take care and good luck to you.

Bye bye.

Eight, 8492 9444.

Eric, welcome to You.

Bet Your garden.

Well, thank you.

Well, thank you, Eric.

How you doing?

I'm fine.

I'm calling from State College, Pennsylvania.

What can we do for You?

For a couple of weeks ago, you had a segment on raising tomatoes and about putting eggshells in the tomato whole.

Mm.

And at that point, I remembered that I had and saved any egg shells this fall or spring.

How dare you?

Yes, that's what I thought, too.

I blame it all on my wife.

You know how that goes.

Uh huh.

And Eric, I can tell you right now, she's right.

Okay?

Yes, she is.

She knows that too.

But anyhow, I had to buy some bone meal for some other plant.

And thinking about bone meal, which is mostly calcium.

Uh, according to the paperwork, it says it's a lost or any bone meal is it's in K is 315 zero and the calcium is 12%.

I smell that.

Can I number that.

That's a good number.

Can I throw that in the tomato hole.

Yes.

Bone meal is a byproduct of slaughterhouses and rendering plants.

After the rest of the cow has been used.

They take the bones and they sterilize them.

They cook them pretty, pretty hot, and then grind them into a powder.

Um, which almost always goes to horticultural use.

But back in the day it used to be used to make bone meal supplements for people to try and get their calcium.

So I like that.

15 Is it just bone meal?

That's what the containers look for a meal with, as I said, 315 zero.

Well the 15 in the middle the phosphorus is um is excellent.

That should produce lots of flowers.

And again since you failed to save your egg shells, I would put.

Well, let me, let me how, how big a bag did you get?

Um, £5 and how many tomatoes you're going to grow.

6 to 10.

And how much of the bag is left?

Oh, most of it.

Oh, okay.

So I can't decide in my head whether to recommend a half a cup or a whole cup, a bone meal into the planting hole.

So let's split the difference and make it three quarters of a cup.

And that sounds like a reasonable explanation.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

I was told there would be no math today, so.

Oh, I'm sorry.

We.

So, just to repeat, for those who didn't catch it, tomatoes should always be planted deep in a deep hole.

You don't need to have a lot of greenery showing up top.

But the more of the stem that's buried underground, um, that stem will grow auxiliary roots that will reach out to greater numbers of nutrients and be able to absorb more water.

See, you plopped the plant into the ground with the roots right down at the bottom.

You add your calcium amendment, whether it's bone meal or eggshells, and then you've very important to fill in the hole with the same soil.

You don't want to amend the soil in the hole because you want those roots to grow out into the surrounding soil and not be safe and nuzzled in that little protected area and then put some compost on top of the soil.

Then every time it rains, your tomatoes will be fed composting.

But yeah, I like I like the numbers you ran now and give us a call at the end of the season and tell us how your tomatoes did.

Excellent.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Oh, my pleasure.

Take care of yourself.

You too.

Goodbye.

Eight, eight, eight, 492 9444.

Ashley, welcome to you.

About your garden.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Well, thanks for being had.

Ashley.

How you doing?

Doing pretty good.

Stressed and blessed.

It's a it's a sunny day.

Can't complain.

Oh, where is it?

It's sunny day right here in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

All right.

What can we do you for, Ash?

Well, so I compost.

Not necessarily to garden, but I compost to keep the waste out of my house so that I don't have to take the garbage out as often.

And every once in a while, you know, like I can I can kind of show that I've created some dirt, I've actually done something, but I get a bag of worms from Uncle Jim's worm farm and when I when I get that bag of worms, I put it in in the spring and then over the winter, they kind of stop eating.

And I don't know if they hibernate or if they die.

But my question was, do I need to keep buying worms in order to keep vermin composting, or do I just wait for them to kind of wriggle back up to the surface?

Well, I mean, you got to keep Uncle Jim in business.

Jeez, Uncle Jim's worm farm.

I see a guy standing there with a pitchfork, but you can't see his shoes now.

Oh, what kind of composting are we doing?

Tell me where your kitchen waste is going.

So it's.

It's kind of a two pronged thing.

So this this may make some of your more seasoned composter bulk, but I put just about everything into that compost.

I put any any food waste that comes from the kitchen goes into a goes into a 55 gallon drum.

And I've dug a hole in the backyard, put holes in the drum and then put the drum into the ground.

And so that's that is what I'm putting all of the stuff in.

So this is an outdoor worm bin, for lack of another word.

You're not putting in shredded brown material, correct?

Yeah.

And I'm presuming these are red wiggles, the bait worm.

That's what they are.

Yep.

Okay.

Yeah.

You're going to keep Uncle Jim in business because they are not meant to be used outdoors when sold for vermin composting, which is such a stupid word.

Vermont composting.

It sounds like you're taking rats out to dinner or something.

I just, you know, I don't.

I don't get the worm, but, um.

Yeah, they can't survive winter time temperature in this part of the country.

There are, actually.

Yeah, but if you didn't wish to send Uncle Jim's kids to college anymore, all you'd have to do is set up a worm bin inside, and then you wouldn't have to be going out in the snow or the rain or anything like that.

And all you would do is, you know, put your garbage into the indoor bin and then cover it with shredded newspaper and you'd get a much higher quality compost than you're getting now.

You'd be getting real worm castings, which are the bee's knees when it comes to feeding plants.

And it's a very gentle nutrient.

So you can use it on house plants indoors, let it dry out, put it in the little gift boxes, give it to your friends over the holidays, you know, But yeah, if you're going to keep it outside I'd you could try surrounding the above ground part with hay bales all the way to the top to try and instill laid it.

Elliot Coleman did something like that back in the nineties.

Oh but you know, in reality you're probably best with fresh worms or do a bin indoors.

All right.

Thanks for having me.

Oh, thank you again for being had.

You take care.

Now, as promised, it is time for the question of the week, which we are calling of poop prions and pesky parasites.

Kate in Montgomery County, P.A.

writes I've loved your show for years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

That's what all the girls say in a recent episode.

You mentioned composting deer poop.

I'm deeply worried about this, as my understanding is that the poop can pass along chronic wasting disease by healthy deer eating the feces of infected deer as they graze.

Chronic wasting disease is pervasive in our deer herds, which are overpopulated and thus said great risk of contracting rampant diseases of this kind.

A year ago, a hunter decided to set up a post in my father's backyard without asking permission.

The hunter spread feed to attract deer, and the area was soon an inch deep in deer pellets.

I finally persuaded the hunter to move on, but the feed and pellets remained.

I have been leery of foraging that area ever since, but I'm even more concerned about the idea of using compost and included deer feces.

My understanding is that there are no reported cases of humans getting chronic wasting disease, but researchers are still worried that it could eventually happen.

Anyway, I'd really love to hear more information from you on this.

Well, so would a lot of people, Kate.

As many elements of this infection are still poorly understood as the Centers for Disease Control explains, chronic wasting Disease is one of several, quote, transmissible spongiform form encephalopathies.

I think TSC is a family of rare progressive neurodegenerative disorders that affect both humans and animals.

Although I want to be quick to point out here that human crises are not chronic wasting disease and there is no evidence that animal to human transmission has ever occurred, even to hunters who eat lots of potentially infected deer meet the most prevalent human TSC is Crutchfield Jacob disease C j d a rapidly progressive, invariably fatal neurodegenerative disorder that affects approximate one person in a million worldwide.

Back to the CDC, the causative agents of theses are believed to be prions.

The term prions refers to pathogenic agents that induce abnormal folding of specific cellular proteins found most abundantly in the brain.

The functions of these prion proteins are still not completely understood.

So in a nutshell, chronic wasting disease is caused by an abnormal protein found in the brain of deer and related species like elk.

Although transmission from deer or elk to humans has never been observed, hunters are cautioned not to handle obviously wasted deer and not to eat the brains.

That last part seems eminently doable.

I have personally in the past included deer pellets.

Although they look more like marbles in my compost piles, I rationalized that I was getting even with those relentless appetites on legs.

After all, those marbles were once my hostas.

But after reading way too much research on this topic over the past week, I will probably stop this practice out of an abundance of caution.

I suspect that these marbles might be made safe if I were to integrate them in my hottest this compost pile and keep it hot.

Well, really hot.

But you know, there's plenty of other poop to be had out there.

So I will leave those sleeping marbles where they lay.

Oh, and remember, kids always wear gloves and wash them well after handling any kind of poop.

One final comment as we proceed to a similar question slash comment.

Slash what some guy wrote to us outside of disease concerns poop from herbivores with herbs and not soft paws is the safest manner to include in your pile.

Do not ever include manure slash feces of carnivores and omnivores like dogs and cats.

There be parasites aplenty in there.

Okay, now we move on to John, a former rabbit rancher who lives near Cincinnati who writes, I just heard you warn against using soft, pawed herbivore manure in your compost.

And I mostly agree, with the exception of rabbit manure, as far as parasites are concerned, the rabbits I'm thinking of are either farm raised or household pets and are usually kept out of contact with actual soil.

With some simple engineering, you can collect and use these black pellets of manure in the garden without aging them and they make my veggies grow.

Great.

I bring this up because there are many folks that might have gotten confused by your statement and now be afraid to use rabbit manure.

If I'm wrong, I'm willing to learn why, as I'd rather not harm myself or anybody who eats my veggies.

Hopefully I don't sound too crazy.

Well, you are way low on the crazy scale, John.

Of which first place will always be held by Murdoch of the original 18.

To quote be a Barack s, a.k.a.

Mr. T. I pity that fool.

Anyway, rabbits that are not allowed to roam in the garden, calling Mr. McGregor should not have the opportunity to come into contact with parasites despite their soft paws.

And yes, rabbit pellets make a great natural fertilizer, as does sheep poop.

Doubly so because sheep are vegetarians and they got them parasite defensive hogs.

Same goes for goats.

And let us not neglect gerbils whose poop is also perfect for your pile wood shavings included.

Or the famous bagged fertilizer quote cricket crap.

Crickets are raised in huge numbers to feed humans and reptiles and their abundant waste product makes a fine fertilizer.

Well, that sure was some hopefully helpful information about your potential poopy preferences, now, wasn't it?

Luckily for use, the question of the week appears in print at the Gardens Live website.

Do read it over at your leisure or your leisure.

Just click the link for the question of the week at our Web site, which is still and won't forever be.

You bet your garden dot 0rg 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 of Life Web site.

You bet.

Your garden is a half hour public television show available for viewing on PBS, 39 PBS Passport and our Web site.

It is also an hour long public radio show and podcast.

And all of this stuff is produced and delivered to you weekly from the Universal Studios at Lehigh Valley Public Media in Bethlehem, P.A.

Our radio show is distributed by PR X, the Public Radio Exchange.

You Bet Your Garden was created by Mike McGrath.

Mike McGrath was created when lightning struck the projection booth while the amazing colossal man and attack of the 50 foot woman were accidentally being shown simultaneously at the Lincoln Drive in on a hot and steamy midsummer's night.

Yikes.

My producer is threatening to poach my poop if I don't get out of this studio.

Can I say that?

we must be out of time, But you can call us anytime at 8884929444.

Or send us your email, your tired, your poor, your white shit refuse teaming towards our garden shore at ybyg@wlvt.org.

Please include your location.

I'm your host and executive producer, Mike McGrath, and I'll be ripping out my tomato plants because I planted too many scenes in each container just like last year and the year before that.

I'll be doing that until I can see you again next week and the year before that.

And the year before that and the year before that.