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♪♪♪
Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast.
If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, well, you've come to the right spot.
♪♪♪
Today I'm joined by America's favorite retired college horticultural professor Debbie Flower,
and we are going to spend the entire episode answering your garden questions.
We'll be going into mind-numbing detail as well as frivolous scenic bypasses over such queries as,
what's the easiest way to apply fertilizer around fruit trees when the area is covered with mulch?
What are some lawn alternatives that are low maintenance and drought tolerant?
Why aren't my carrots sweet? Did the rain do that?
And then finally the question for which there is no definitive answer,
how can I keep the squirrels out of my garden and orchard?
Good luck to us.
We're podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon jungle in suburban purgatory.
It's the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast brought to you today by SmartPots and Dave Wilson Nursery.
Let's go.
♪♪♪
We like to welcome America's favorite retired college horticultural professor,
Debbie Flower to the Abutilon jungle here in suburban purgatory to help us answer garden questions.
She's here, she's here!
So today's episode we're going to answer your garden questions.
There are a lot of ways to get your questions into us.
You can call or text us the question at 916-292-8964-916-292-8964.
If you go to Garden Basics.net, there's a cue box there, a contact box where you can leave a question.
Email? Sure, I'm old fashioned.
Send it to Fred at FarmerFred.com.
And one of my favorites, we like to hear your voice too.
If you could, leave us an audio question.
You don't have to make a phone call.
Go to SpeakPipe.com.
That's SpeakPipe.com slash Garden Basics.
And leave us a question there.
People do that, Debbie, I so like that.
I love it when you get questions.
It's always fun to hear people's voices and their concerns,
and it's illuminating to know what's going on in other people's gardens.
Our first question comes from Bakersfield, California, which as the caller will allude to,
it's a kind of a hot place.
Hello Farmer Fred, this is Jill from Bakersfield, zone surface of the sun.
And I have a question about fertilizing fruit trees.
On the directions, granular fertilizers always say, apply directly to soil.
However, I surround my fruit trees with a thick layer of wood chips.
So if I want to fertilize them, do I have to remove all the wood chips?
Or can I just sprinkle the fertilizer on top of the wood chips,
and the fertilizer will get to where it needs to go?
I look forward to your response, and I sincerely hope that it involves the least amount of work on my part.
Your wish has been granted.
Here's Debbie Flower with the easy answer.
Yes, I am a lazy gardener when I can be.
And when I fertilize my fruit trees, which are also mulched with arborist chips,
I just throw the granular fertilizer on the surface.
The bag will tell you how much for how many square feet or number tree
or whatever, and I just throw it on the surface.
The caveat is it needs to be watered in.
Granular fertilizer is soluble in water in general, or this type that we're talking about is,
and you want to get it down to the soil so that it can get into the root zone.
So after throwing it on the surface, I will water it in or hope for a great rainstorm.
Now here I am with the harder news for you.
It involves a bit of work.
Why do I want to waste fertilizer on mulch?
I would rather feed the soil.
So I will rake it back, and since I got the rake out, maybe just lightly score the soil a little bit.
Put down that fertilizer.
If it's a granular fertilizer, I'll water it in.
If it's a liquid fertilizer, I won't do anything except put the mulch back over,
just like I would with granular after getting done watering it.
Probably the number one reason I don't rake that away, obviously is laziness,
but the root zone of a tree is two and a half to three times away from the trunk as the plant is tall.
That's on average.
Obviously it's only going to grow where the roots get water and oxygen.
So if you only irrigate out to the drip line, there will only be roots out to the drip line,
especially in a hot dry place like Bakersfield, California.
So if you know where your roots are, raking the mulch away from the root zone can be a fairly economic way of doing it.
If you don't and the roots are traveling, they'll travel to the neighbor's yard.
If there's water and oxygen over there, they'll travel to the next tree.
If there's water and oxygen over there.
So I can put fertilizer in more places more easily by just putting it on top.
And we're both assuming, I think, that these trees are being irrigated with a drip irrigation system,
not a spray irrigation system.
I wouldn't bet on that.
Okay.
If it's a spray irrigation system, then broadcasting the granular fertilizer on the surface and turning on the irrigation system would wash it in.
But you're right.
Some of those nutrients will get tied up in the mulch.
The mulch is an organic component.
It has what's called a high cation exchange capacity on its surface.
And that will hold on to some of the nutrients.
And it may increase the rate of decomposition of that mulch.
There is a widespread practice here.
Maybe it is where you live as well.
It's called backyard orchard culture where you're keeping your fruit trees at maybe five or six feet tall and wide.
Mm-hmm.
Will your roots stop on a fruit tree if you do that above the surface?
There is a relationship between the size of the canopy above the surface, the canopy being the top of the tree, and the roots below the surface.
It is not necessarily one to one, and they don't mirror each other.
You have a lollipop tree above ground.
You don't have a lollipop set of roots below ground.
There is an amount.
The top of the plant provides the food to the roots.
The roots provide the nutrients to the top of the plant to make the food that go to the roots back and forth, back and forth.
And so the amount of one influences the amount of other.
So yes, if you keep the plant smaller, you will have a smaller root system.
And of course this begs the big question, which is, if you're mulching under your tree, why are you fertilizing the tree?
Well, that's a good question.
Fertilizing is done to stimulate growth.
Fertilizers often apply when you see deficiencies, which we have citrus here, and in Bakersfield you could have citrus as well.
And citrus will often show deficiency symptoms.
And there are special citrus fertilizers that address the nutrients needed to correct those symptoms.
So deficiency symptoms, and when the plant shows new growth, those are the two times that you could apply fertilizer.
But if you have an organic mulch that is breaking down with some speed, then that mulch is releasing nutrients to the soil.
The problem in hot places is that the organic mulch will break down and a lot of the valuable nutrients, which are primarily nitrogen, become gas.
They volatilize.
If there's regular rain, if you live in a place that gets summer rain, winter rain, all year round rain, and the mulch is breaking down and the nitrogen is being given off as gas, or some of it is.
When the rain comes, that washes it back to the earth.
In a hot, dry place like Bakersfield, a lot of the nitrogen that breaks down becomes a gas and floats away.
That's what nitrogen does.
It is what nitrogen does.
So it might mean there is a need for fertilizer.
But again, I would want to see it when I see nutrient deficiencies.
In the case of nitrogen, that is old growth turns yellow.
So the growth that's closer to the main stem, closer to the inside of the plant turns yellow and the new leaves, which will happen regularly.
That's how plants grow.
That leaf used to be in the sun.
Now it's in the shade.
So it's not doing it.
The plant a lot of good.
The plant will strip it of the nitrogen in it and drop the leaf.
But if a lot of them are turning yellow and the new growth is very small, smaller than characteristic, that's a nitrogen deficiency.
If you see deficiencies, that's a time to apply fertilizer.
If you're not getting as much new growth as you want, you're going to apply fertilizer.
But in backyard, citrus culture, we're not looking for a lot of growth.
I would imagine mulch doesn't break down as quickly in a dry environment like Bakersfield that I think their annual rain totals.
Their annual rain total is somewhere at like seven or nine inches.
That's the limiting factor.
If they water that mulch regularly with an overhead irrigation and it's hot, it'll break down faster.
But if they don't water the mulch, if the mulch is not wet and hot, it will break down slowly.
Right.
So you may not get the nutrients you need out of it.
Unless you're using spray irrigation.
Unless you're using spray irrigation, right?
All right.
So there you go.
I hope that helps.
We probably raised more questions than answered.
But call back.
Yeah, call back.
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We're answering questions on today's episode of the Garden Basics Podcast.
Here's one sent by email from Joanne of Sacramento who writes in,
We no longer have a lawn, but we would like a small grass-like area.
Do you have any recommendations for lawn alternatives that do not need as much water and as low maintenance,
meaning we could use a weed trimmer to trim it down?
Oh, that's a question that's been plaguing me for the last six years, trying to get 250 square feet of being something not grass.
Not lawn.
And my husband also wants the same thing and I tell him he's looking for a unicorn.
Yeah, I think so, especially if you have mitigating factors like I do, which are two dogs.
Yes, you have dogs.
And I tried a note, what's called a no-mo lawn.
And it was kind of a twinkle in people's eyes.
At the time, there were no pre-made seed mixes yet when I did it.
This was like 12 years ago.
They were just beginning with sod.
There was a sod available.
My husband didn't want to go sod.
He wanted to go seed.
So I sourced the individual types of grass that were used in the sod and they are all fescues.
Fescues are tough grasses.
They are relatively drought tolerant.
There are fescues that grow in shade and fescues that grow in sun, but they are bunched for the most part.
They are bunched grasses, meaning that they send a shoot up in the center as it gets older and older.
It gets more and more shoots around that center shoot.
Other grasses are what we call stoleniferous.
And I used to tell my students that means they steal space.
So they send a stem out across the surface of the soil, root places and send up leaves at places.
So they take over a lot of land relatively quickly.
And some are also what we call rhizomatous, which means they have a similar stem that travels under the soil
and sends shoots up from there.
So our lawn ended up being all bunch grasses.
And this is many years later.
And it is a lumpy mess.
A lumpy man.
Yes, it is not something people choose to sit on or walk through.
My cats love it because there are low spots and high spots.
And so they hide in the low spots and then they jump out at each other in the high spots.
Looking at it for the most part is pretty.
When it gets very hot and dry, it's not so pretty.
Fescues are cool season lawns. That's the other thing to know about grasses.
Some are cool season.
They look beautiful when the weather is cool.
But when it gets hot, they go dormant.
Others are warm season.
They look beautiful in the summer.
And when it gets cold, they go dormant.
And dormant means brown.
In the old days here in California, when people had primarily bermuda grass lawns, speaking of stolens and rhizomes,
it was a warm season grass.
It would turn brown in the winter so they would over-seed it with either a perennial rye or an annual rye for it to remain green throughout the year.
That was one sort of solution.
Problems with rye grass, especially perennial rye, is if you get a raise in the humidity, you end up with a rust problem.
These orange spots that you can easily transfer to other parts of your yard.
And it's a more water and fertilizer needing lawns.
Right.
So people have shied away from bermuda lawns.
And as a result, they don't have a use for rye as much anymore.
So they're looking at what you'd planted.
And I had tried it too without much success.
And you're right.
It's very lumpy.
I have seen these no-mo or mow-free varieties en masse at a mature stage.
And from a distance, they look nice.
Yes.
But I imagine they can't take foot traffic.
Right.
Well, they can.
You can walk through it.
It's just not comfortable because it's so uneven.
You could twist your ankle.
You could twist your ankle, right.
Right.
So a lot of breeding has gone into improving bermudegrass is one to make it a finer texture.
The sort of wild bermudegrass that we have as a weed in our gardens here in California and other warm places.
It is a warm season grass.
It's kind of rough looking.
And so a lot of breeding has gone into creating, they call tetraploid, which means they have four sets of chromosomes.
And so that's what they've ended up with.
And most of the higher quality, heavily bred bermudegrass is that have a finer texture and a longer green season.
They can take hold better.
Start with the word tiff.
Tiff.
T-I-F.
No, okay.
Tiff green and tiff this and tiff that.
And University of Georgia did a lot of that breeding because it's a warm place.
They get more rain than we do here, but it's a warm place.
Another grass that the University of California has been working on is buffalo grass.
And I've been trying to convince my husband that we should at least interplant our nomolog with buffalo grass.
So the low spots and the bare spots have something in them.
He's, I haven't gotten through to him yet.
But the one thing I've been looking at is the flower.
And they don't discuss much about the flower because the flower and bermudegrass can be on regular weedy bermudegrass.
Can be annoying and very bad for allergy sufferers.
In the tetraploid, the tiff bermudegrass is, they don't have pollen in their flower.
They do have a flower, but they don't have it any pollen, so it's not as much of an allergy problem.
And then there are other non-grass substitutes, right Fred?
Let's back up.
Yeah. A minute here.
Buffalo grass turns kind of ugly in the winter.
True. It has a dormant season.
It's a warm season.
All grasses have a dormant season.
They're all lawn grasses.
I beg to differ with you. The putting green my wife wants is green year round.
Tell us about that.
It's like the one I see at my neighbors on the way to the gym, right?
Well, I mean, we've had areas of when we lived, when we had acreage and she wanted a putting green, that was no problem.
We call it hardscaping and it was artificial turf.
Okay.
And really maintained its color, its shape, its uniformity and resistance to dog damage for years and years.
And there has been a lot of improvement in that as well.
They used to say they're incredibly hot and they've addressed that in the artificial turf industry.
So for a small green area, as the one I pass on the way to the gym, looks, it's quite pretty.
Another, it was a poor Joanne. We haven't really given her a positive answer yet about substance.
It's a tough one.
Yeah, but we're weighing the pros and cons of it.
So we've talked about buffalo grass.
We've talked about the mofrey or no-mo fescue clumping grasses.
And then there was the latest miracle, Carapia, K-U-R-A-P-I-A, which is just a modern name for lipia.
And if you ever had lipia or your parents had lipia, they could tell you tales of how it would grow at night and strangle poodles.
Yes, it does take over if it is allowed so that edging would be very much required.
There might even be some pulling involved.
Tell me about it.
I planted it.
It didn't want to grow where I wanted it to grow, but it loved to be in the mulch and it grew towards the raised beds.
And all of a sudden it crawled under the raised beds and through the raised beds.
And by your right, you can grab a handful of it and pull a big bunch of it all at once.
Because it really is quite the, as you would say, stoleniferous.
Stealing space.
Yes, and it does just that.
And it has little flowers to that attract bees, and for some people that's a drawback.
Right.
But you can mow it more regularly to keep the flowers down.
Does it flower a long season?
In the warmer times of the year, I noticed that the Carapio would bloom attended to bloom most in the summer.
Mm-hmm.
When the bees are most active.
Yes, bees need warm weather to be active.
But Carapio was touted as the ultimate drought tolerant ground cover that could be used in extreme weather, heavy slopes,
irregular watering, irregular pH, and foot traffic.
In zone 7b and warmer.
In USDA zone 7b and warmer.
Yes, exactly.
Now what it doesn't list is dog damage.
It would have been perfect if it did.
But no, it got...
Dog urine is powerful stuff and it's maybe you train the dogs to go elsewhere.
Yeah, you could build a dog run and keep them isolated to one spot or you have a new full-time hobby of following them around with a water end can.
Yes.
Where they wear diapers.
Where they wear diapers.
Yes.
All right.
And it really does like full sun.
There was just too much shade where I had it too that I think it was slow to take off.
And where it did take off going towards the raised bed, that's where there was more sun.
And probably more water or not?
Yeah, I think under the mulch.
Yeah, there would be more water.
Insulated under there.
Yeah.
And a lot less dog urine damage.
Right.
But yeah, I was doing some work on the raised beds right now and I'm pulling away a lot of
from the raised beds, just getting it out of the way.
So once you have it, you always have it.
It could be.
Yeah.
Yeah, like potato patch.
If I didn't like a neighbor, I guess I could go over a night with a bucket full of it and just scatter it on their yard.
Another plant in that same or similar ilk is perennial clover.
Yeah.
That's available as pellet seed from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply in Grass Valley Grow Organic.com.
And it's pellet is important for clover because they need to be inoculated with certain bacteria.
And so that's already in the pellet.
So you can start it from seed.
It is stoleniferous, not as aggressive as the Bermuda grass is stoleniferous.
It does bloom.
It blooms white and it does attract bees.
It uses less water than grass does.
It does need some summer irrigation and it may die back during very hot times of the year.
So depending on how much shade you have in summer, you may have some dead spots.
If people follow me on Facebook, you know that my neighbor's giant 60 foot cedar tree fell into my yard and destroyed a perfectly good looking experiment going on in that patch where I had clover growing.
And the clover through the cool season I planted it last September and it looked good all winter and it seemed to resist dogs very well.
And I was anxious to see what it would do in the hot weather.
Now we won't know.
Oh no.
Because of clean up and repairs to damage and things like that.
And also there's a lot of cedar sawdust around.
Things have changed.
Well things have changed.
Yeah, but I got a lot of free mulch.
Yeah.
Oh, that's good.
Yeah.
Well, no, it's not free.
No, not in this day.
No, that's true.
It's not free.
I think I've done it chipped and you have to pay somebody for that.
Well, yeah, you have to have somebody remove the tree from the yard.
Yeah.
Basically.
So there's that.
Any other solutions?
Yeah.
Cutting green.
Yes.
The man made plastic one.
Yes.
I have a plant called Daimundia, D-Y-M-O-N-D-I-A.
I have it growing around my greenhouse.
The only way I know it's available is in small containers.
And so I bought a few small containers, put them in bigger containers, grew them on, and then put them in the ground.
Now it's getting quite some water because the irrigation system in the greenhouse goes on right now only once a week.
But it's getting that water and there is a drip system that is actually turned off right now.
But in the summer it gets dripped water and it gets some shade.
But we had it at school in a near-gated full sun planter and it took over.
And it knits very tightly.
You can walk on it.
I walk on it all the time.
It stays very low.
It is, although it does need some water, it is drought tolerant in that the leaves are fuzzy and they're sort of gray colored, especially on the back.
It blooms with little yellow flowers that I'm not aware of bees visiting.
It almost looks like ice plant without the flowers.
Yeah.
It makes a great ground cover.
Is it walkable?
I walk on it, yes.
I don't walk on it daily or play kickball on it or anything.
So it can take some foot traffic and I don't know how it reacts to dogs.
It's a zone, USDA zone 9 and higher, so it is not for a lot of the country.
But it is evergreen.
So it's green, spring, summer and fall.
And I tried it in parts of my lawn and it just didn't establish probably because I didn't irrigate it correctly at establishment, which is always a problem when plants go into the ground.
Reading about Daimondia briefly here on the internet, which, as you know, knows everything.
Daimondia ground cover for lawns requires full sunlight or light shade.
It performs best in sandy, well-drained soils.
It performs poorly in boggy, poor draining soil.
It's susceptible to gophers.
And Sacramento area, there can be gophers.
Joanne said she has clay soil.
I wouldn't let that stop me from trying something that does best in well-drained soil.
You just have to adjust your irrigation so you don't have standing water in the clay, which means you put a little bit of water on, let it soak in, put a little bit more on, let it soak in.
And this is all done in one day. Put a little more on, let it soak in until you've got water down at least six inches of foot would be better because the roots of the plant will go where the water and oxygen are.
And that's going to, the deeper they go, the more protected from drought and heat they will be.
The last suggestion would be a meadow or a mix of plants, including some grasses, some yarrow potentially.
I don't think time would do well in your situation because it definitely needs excellent drainage.
You can't walk on time too much.
And you can't walk on time, yeah.
So some sort of a, you could include clover, a variety of things, but it's not going to be a smooth look.
It's going to be lumpy and you'll have flowers in places at times and flowers in other places.
And then things like yarrow, of course, the flowers die back and you have dead stocks sticking up.
So it would take a little more maintenance.
Going back one second to this diamondia, there's an article in the University of California about the popular variety, which is diamondia margarette, margarette, that's named after Miss Margaret Dryden diamond, a horticulturist who has been here.
A horticulturist who first discovered it beside a road along the western cape of South Africa in 1933.
Wow, I didn't know that. That's cool.
Yeah. And silver carpet is its common name for that.
Says it's showcased in coastal gardens.
Well, there's a hint for you.
Yeah, I agree.
I have been to South Africa and it gets warm at the Cape.
I'd say warmer than the California coast.
But higher humidity?
It was humid.
Yeah.
Okay. So maybe this plant likes it humid.
Maybe I have it in part shade and it's done extremely well.
And as I said, we had it in full sun at school and it started.
There were some raised beds, a student project, a student built raised beds out of cinderblock and it started climbing the cinderblock, but that was irrigated.
So I think to use it here in the Sacramento region in full sun, it needs regular irrigation, whatever that is and what for Joanne, that's going to be infrequent a surge irrigation surge, meaning water.
Letting it absorb, watering, letting it absorb, watering, letting it absorb.
You need a good timer that allows you to turn on that station three, four, five times in one day with time in between each onset so that the water can be absorbed in.
Right. It says here on this University of California publication,
Dimondia tolerates both heat and light frost, but temperatures below 28 degrees can be fatal.
Okay, that's why it's the zone nine and above.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But where she is in Land Park, I would think that would not be a problem.
Well, it's going to be warmer from all the asphalt.
Right.
It's an urban situation.
You're going to have a lot of reflected heat at night.
Yeah.
Joanne, good luck.
I really like this putting green idea more than more.
If it's just a little green spot you want to look at, I think that's a great idea as well.
Yeah. And they're much more natural.
I know there are people hating me right now for saying this, but I think it has its place, especially with water becoming harder to obtain and more expensive what you can obtain.
Yes.
It's going to become a more likely scenario.
I'm not certainly not for a whole landscape, but in patches.
For a putting green.
Yeah.
For a putting green something.
It's hard scaping.
It's hard scaping.
Right.
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On that note, let's go to the next question.
Alrighty.
Hi, Fred. I have a question about this rain kind of wiped out the carrots. They're very pale and they don't have a lot of flavor.
If one just leaves them in the ground longer, will they return to normal or is it just a lost crop? Thanks.
Well, we didn't get a name or an address, but we kind of figured out the lots of rain clue, and we did have lots of rain here in Northern California and Central California and Southern California.
Yeah, over the last month or so.
From Christmas on, for about, I think it was eight weeks. We got 11 inches here in Sacramento.
Yeah, something like that.
It's a lot of rain.
Yeah, I would think the carrots would enjoy it unless they're in heavy clay soil.
Yes, I would think she didn't talk about them getting mushy, which would be rot. She just talked about them not tasting well and being kind of pale, which would indicate to me that they need some nitrogen.
Nitrogen moves very readily with water. It's why it's the number one nutrient we apply to the garden because as what we use water in the garden for things to grow, that washes the nitrogen out of the root zone.
And with all of that rain, 11 inches of rain took all the nitrogen out of that soil that was around the carrots.
And so adding some and leaving them, yes, for a while, will allow them to create more sugar, create more plant food so the top should green up and the carrots themselves should color up.
And become sweeter again. How sweet, I don't know at this point.
Yeah, I think what she may have done is pick them too soon.
And maybe they hadn't reached maturity yet.
That's another possibility.
So yeah, give it time.
Give it time.
Yeah, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
And fertilizer. Give it time and fertilizer.
Okay, you've just extended this episode another 10 minutes.
What would you feed carrots that are nearing maturity?
Some fertilizer.
Some nitrogen.
It could be lawn fertilizer, but be very careful with lawn fertilizer because, number one, you don't want lead and feed.
Yeah.
And you're looking for nitrogen.
You're looking for nitrogen.
Yes, you are.
Okay.
Go ahead and warn people about chicken manure.
Chicken manure right out of a chicken coop, right out of a chicken, or even dried for decades, but not composted is so hot it will burn the plant.
What about stear manure?
Stear manure is a much lower nitrogen content.
It's much more an organic source for the garden.
Daisy Ma, who we both know here in Sacramento, one of the great gardeners here, used to get the barn sweepings from the Sacramento Police Department horse barn.
And put them in.
She worked in a public garden, put them in the public garden, and it made her garden the tilth or workability of the soil wonderful.
But the amount of nitrogen, it was enough to grow what she was growing for sure.
She was growing ornamentals.
When you're growing food and removing it from the soil, you're taking some of that nitrogen with you and you typically need a little more nitrogen refresh than stear manure will provide.
I think when it comes to using animal manures, be it chicken, steer, or horse, would be to compost it.
Absolutely.
Compost it.
The horse manure is so unprocessed in the gut of the horse that anything that is eaten, any weed seed will come out the other end and be viable and will grow in your garden.
The chicken manure is way too hot to use, meaning it has way too much nitrogen, it'll burn most plants.
The cow manure, and I have used a garden in the past, cow manure right out of the barn.
Cows have a four-part stomach, so the seeds, they were production cows, they weren't necessarily on a field, they weren't necessarily able to eat a lot of seed, but they had no seed in it because the cow stomach will destroy any seeds.
I had it delivered, I was working full time, and I had it delivered wet and sloppy in my driveway, and the guy didn't want to deliver it because of my name, my last name being flower, and apparently they get a lot of crank calls.
People ordering delivery of cow manure to people they're not real happy with, and so my neighbor had to convince them that yes, this is something that I really did want and did order by myself, and it was so it was delivered, and I wheelbarrowed it all over my yard and it did wonderful things for my garden.
I did it in the fall, so there was some time for it to mellow before I planted any annual crops.
Months. Months, yes, and rain, it was in Portland, Oregon, so it was quite a bit of rain.
Explain the part where, why your neighbor had to vouch for you because you weren't home?
I wasn't home, I was working full time, yes, I wasn't home.
I could see why I wouldn't drop off a lot of horse manure on somebody's...
It was cow manure, yes, okay, on to somebody's driveway without making sure they really wanted it, and I wasn't there to talk to.
Okay, all right, fine.
One in every three bites of food that you take comes courtesy of a bee.
Without their pollen gathering efforts of flowers, fruits, and vegetables, our diet and our gardens, let's face it would be rather boring.
But how does an entire hive of honeybees find all that pollen in the flowers, which could be a mile away?
Today, and beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast, we talk with Dr. James Nye of the School of Biological Sciences at UC San Diego.
He and his team have been studying how honeybees communicate with each other and how their elaborate dance moves are interpreted by the other honeybees in the hive.
Basically, if you're a honeybee and you know where all the good pollen is, you just shake your booty and do the waggle dance.
Really, it's a thing, the waggle dance.
What is this intricate dance of the honeybees that lets their hive mates know not only where the pollen is, but also how to get there, and the quality or abundance of the pollen?
It's a rather fascinating tale.
It's in today's Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter.
For current newsletter subscribers, look for the issue entitled, How Honeybees Say Come and Get It.
If you're already a subscriber, it's probably in your email waiting for you now, or you can start a free subscription or read it online.
It's free, and I'll tell you what, I might even include a link to a Casey in the Sunshine Band video, just for old times' sake.
Find the link to the newsletter in today's show notes, or sign up at the newsletter link at our homepage, Garden Basics.net.
Now we can move on to the next question.
Okay, here on this all episode questions of Garden Basics, Jennifer from Fair Oaks, which is a suburb of Sacramento County.
She writes in,
Hello, I am a mom of seven.
Stop right there.
You're a hardworking woman.
You have time for gardening? God bless you.
Jennifer writes in and says, Hello, I am a mom of seven, living in Fair Oaks, and I am brand new to this gardening thing.
I have attempted in the past with no real thought to it, and of course the end result was a lot of money and time wasted with no results.
I decided this year I'm going to do it right, and start a small garden with my kids for our family to learn from and enjoy.
Good. That's good.
Yeah, that's wonderful.
Start small.
Yeah.
She says, I have been diligently listening to your podcast.
I have a few questions for you.
Squirrels, as you know, are here in Fair Oaks.
Squirrels are everywhere.
I have read that physical barriers are best, but unsure as to what kind and really where to begin.
We purchased our home a few years ago and had no idea we had large cherry tree in our backyard because the squirrels eat the cherries before they even have a chance to come to fruition.
Or ripening.
Do you have any advice in addition to physical barriers for our new garden, how we can also protect our cherries?
Thank you so much for all your tips and tricks.
Thank you, Jennifer, for writing in.
No, really.
It's true.
It's like.
Physical barriers are what you're going to have to use to get that fruit to yourself.
And that means netting the tree before you want it to be, you want it to be pollinated, which is an early process on cherries early in the season, and then net it because if you net it first, then the bees will never get in there and you'll never have a fruit and let them form under the netting.
She didn't say how big the tree was.
I would assume it's pretty big if she's been there several years and it came with the house.
So the first process may be pruning it.
Cherry trees in general aren't pruned very much, but pruning it to bring it down in size so you can get a net over it.
Bring it down to seven feet tall or so.
At max, yes.
It's difficult to find, at least I have had difficulty finding step-by-step directions for that to bring a big tree down.
And I don't know how many arborists are trained in that. The typical way of keeping a small orchard tree small is to prune after harvest.
You can speak to that probably.
In the world of cherries, that means you're done harvesting by June, usually here in California a little bit later, but not by much in other parts of the country.
And the big threat, if you're pruning down a cherry tree, you're exposing a lot of bark and branches to sun.
It has not seen before.
Cherrywood, very thin bark, can get sunburned easily.
So you'll do want to whitewash it if you are bringing it down.
And bringing it down gradually would be the best bet.
A whitewash is usually a 50% mix of water and 50% interior white latex paint.
And just slather that on the tree after you've brought it down by one-third.
Generally, it's recommended you bring down, if you're resizing, say, a 20-foot tree, let's say, to make the math easier, a 21-foot tree, bring it down in thirds.
So the first year you cut it back to 14 feet.
Take it back gradually.
And the cuts need to be thinning cuts, which makes it difficult.
The diameter of what you're removing to take over as the leader.
If you just randomly, although this is done in some, I watch a pecan orchard in Arizona when I visit there with my husband to see his relatives.
And they go in with, it looks like a pizza cutter on the top of a cherry picker truck.
And they just whack the top out of those pecans.
And it works for them.
Look at that on cherries too here.
Yeah.
So those random cuts can be done, but to have a nice looking, strong, safe tree, it's better if you can do as many thinning cuts as possible to make this process happen.
During this process, I might just net branches so that you get some cherries.
That's not a bad idea.
I like that.
And they will chew through plastic.
If a squirrel is hungry enough, they will chew through plastic.
So chicken wire has been recommended on some sides.
But that would be easier to do if you're just protecting branches.
Well, that's true.
You could make circles around branches.
I planted a Buckeye.
The first one, seed, I planted, guess who got it?
The squirrels.
Yeah.
So the second one, I put wire around and closed the top with twist ties and put it in the ground.
And so far, I have germination.
So it has kept them away from that.
The other is, this is used in bird feeders sometimes hot pepper on the seed.
Birds themselves apparently can't taste hot pepper, but squirrels can.
That to me would be very tedious.
How do you get it to stick to the cherry and do you have to reapply it?
But anyway, that's used to eat hot cherries.
Well, I'm assuming you can wash it off for the human, but you've got a point there.
You've got some new jam, hot cherry jam.
Yeah.
You want some cherry sauce with your taco?
Yeah.
Cherry salsa.
Yeah, cherry salsa.
That probably exists.
Oh, it probably does.
Yeah.
So that, I just thrown it out there.
It's the way that people protect their bird feeder, bird seed from squirrels.
But squirrels are incredibly creative when it comes to getting food.
So the other is having another source of food for them someplace.
Yeah.
That's a common technique for controlling pests, especially for legate type.
On one site, they suggested that basically you have several desirable fruit trees that
squirrels like on the perimeter of your property.
And then if you have that one special tree that you really want to protect, well, then
you can throw a plastic net over it.
And the squirrels won't bother chewing through that plastic when you've got all this yummy
food elsewhere in the yard.
So if you're willing to sacrifice everything else in your yard for one tree, go for it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
By the way, there is a difference between tree squirrels and ground squirrels.
Yes.
In California, the law states that tree squirrels, if you need to hunt them, you need a pretty
permit from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
If it's a ground squirrel, there's no law.
Right.
So to speak, there are laws, but there's no right as far as how to take them out.
Yes.
And actually there are laws on how to take them out too.
I did not know that it.
I just learned that it is illegal to drown a squirrel in a swimming pool.
I didn't know that.
Not that I would do it, but yeah.
Yeah.
With four legate things, exclusion is really the best control.
Yeah.
And go into detail at the University of California site called Tree Squirrels.
They have a lot of advice there.
And I would suggest if you live in California and you're trying to control squirrels, refer
to that page.
We'll have links to it in today's show notes on both tree squirrels and ground squirrels
because it goes into great gory details that I don't want to go into.
Oh, really?
I didn't know that.
The Eastern Fox squirrel can be taken, killed at close range with a pellet gun.
That's what I was thinking, that they are not protected as the gray squirrel because the
gray squirrel is native.
We had lots of ground squirrels at the ARC horticulture area and we have student help
and it would change over time.
Students would only work for us for a while for experience and then they'd go on and get
a different job.
And we had this one guy who had no problem whacking them over the head and it got to
the point where he would just look at them and yell and they would turn around and run.
Word was out.
That I think is the most effective squirrel deterrent.
My dogs are out of ear shot so I can tell the story.
If I look out the window and I see squirrels running along the fence, all I need to do
is yell out the word squirrel.
They take off, they run down the stairs, they go outside and they go barking towards
the fence and the squirrels, you know, they go, what do you want?
But they go away briefly.
Right.
And that's, I thought of that.
That was the first thing I thought of when I read her question was a pet.
I have cats.
My cats are in draft or cats during the day and squirrels are only active during the day.
It's not that they chase, well, yes, they do chase the squirrels.
They never catch them.
The squirrels are much less active in the yard when the cats are around.
If they, you know, they're not dumb.
They're very smart as a matter of fact, very agile.
And those are some other tips too to reduce the populations in your neighborhood of squirrels
is to maybe take out a tree or two.
They love the oaks.
Yeah.
And make sure that there aren't branches tickling your rooftop that they can walk on and find
a way into your home and be protected.
Yeah.
By finding a hole that leads to your attic or whatever.
Yes, there's an attic or a problem, but it happens.
Yeah.
So those holes along your house to keep them out and don't build a freeway for them.
Right.
Yeah.
Keep your trees trimmed and off of buildings and areas that you want to protect.
And I have to say since the windstorms hit here back in January and my line of sight
to the east now is three less trees, just fewer squirrels around.
Well, they nest in trees too.
So probably some of their nests are gone.
Yeah.
Well, there's plenty of trees here in suburban purgatory.
Right.
They can find a new place to live.
Yeah.
But fewer in your area because fewer trees in your area.
And then again, all I have to do is yell out the word squirrel.
And the brigade comes.
Yes.
And things happen.
All right.
Hey, thank you for sending us your questions.
We appreciate it.
You can again leave an audio question like people do at Speakpipe.
Go to speakpipe.com slash garden basics and yell at your computer without making a phone
call.
You can call or text us the question at 916-292-8964.
You can fill out the contact box at garden basics.net or email sent it to Fred at farmerfred.com.
Debbie Flower, America's favorite retired college, horticultural professor has the answers.
Debbie, thank you so much here.
Welcome Fred.
Always fun.
Well, working on the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter this week, which is all about how
honeybees communicate to each other the location of flowering fruits, vegetables and ornamentals
via the waggle dance, it reminded me, Hey, we have a garden basics episode from way in
the past that tackled the topic of how to be a home beekeeper.
We talked with one of the world's foremost bee authorities, Dr. Norman Gary, on how you
can become a successful backyard honeybee hobbyist.
This guy is kind of crazy about bees and he's rather famous in these parts for entertaining
crowds at the California State Fair by playing the clarinet while covered head to toe in
bees, living, buzzing, flying bees.
Well, they must like him a lot.
And if you want to raise bees for a hobby, you'll like him a lot too.
Check out our conversation recorded back in 2020.
It's episode 30 of the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast.
You'll find a link to this flashback episode in today's show notes or wherever you get
your podcasts or at our homepage, Garden Basics dot net.
The Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast comes out once a week on Fridays plus the newsletter
podcast that comes with the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter continues and that will
also be released on Fridays.
Both are free and they're brought to you by SmartPods and Dave Wilson Nursery.
The Garden Basics podcast is available wherever podcasts are handed out and that includes
our homepage, Garden Basics dot net.
And that's where you can also sign up for the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and
podcast.
That's Garden Basics dot net.
Or you can use the links in today's show notes.
And thank you so much for listening.
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