Bring landscape back to life this spring
Q: The house I bought has a number of half whiskey barrels planted with sotols. The barrels have begun deteriorating, and the metal bands have started to rust and fall apart. If I replanted into new wooden barrels, is there anything I could do to keep this from happening again? I don’t like the look of the fake plastic ones, but I also don’t want to do this again.
A:
That’s to be expected with wooden whiskey barrels. They’re made from oak, I believe, and the banding only can last so long as well. You could seal the insides of the new barrels with pruning paint and gain several years, but they, too, will eventually fail. However, I suspect the plastic barrels would, too. Plastic’s colors fade, plus the plastic becomes brittle and cracks with age. Your other option would be to switch over to a heavy type of clay pot.
Q: My lawn appears to be a grab bag of nothing but weeds. Should I just tear it out and start over?
A:
No! Give it six to eight weeks to green up and get growing. Unless the surface of the soil is uneven, you’ll get a good lawn faster from the common Bermuda grass that currently exists there (even if it was a St. Augustine lawn in the first place) than if you started over. St. Augustine was hurt by the cold probably more than Bermuda grass, but both were turned completely brown. However, if you dig around in the old grass just a bit, I’ll bet you’ll find green runners. In the few days since you wrote your note, things have probably progressed already. You could use a broadleaf weed killer spray (containing 2,4-D) to kill all the existing nongrassy weeds. It won’t harm the permanent turf. As for the weed grasses, there is nothing you can apply that will kill your time.
them without harming your lawn grass. They will soon die away as it turns warm in April. That’s about the earliest you would want to plant new grass anyway, so just bide
Q: I’ve been successful growing almost all types of vegetables except tomatoes and peppers. The plants do well, but when they start to flower, the blooms fall off. They end up producing few if any fruit. They get plenty of sun and water. Any suggestions?
A:
Be sure you are planting at the right time. No matter where you are in Texas, that’s always going to be one to two weeks after the average date of the last killing freeze for your area. Second, be sure you are
planting small and midsize varieties of each crop. Largefruiting tomatoes (and all bell peppers) are reluctant to set fruit once daytime temperatures climb into the mid-90s. Stick with cherry and midsize tomatoes. With peppers, you don’t have as much choice. Just plant on time in the spring and around mid-july for the fall crop.
Q: I just noticed these borer holes all over the trunk of my oak tree. Can anything be done to save the tree?
A:
I bring you good news! This is the work of a woodpecker, not an invasion of wood borer larvae. Woodpeckers indicate no particular problem nor do they cause a problem of any kind, either. This is a pretty aggressive attack, I will admit. I would apply pruning sealant to the wounded area to lessen the chance of oak wilt fungus moving in. If the bird returns, consider
applying a thin layer of Tree Tanglefoot to annoy the bird into leaving.
Q: Is Milorganite a good type of nitrogen fertilizer to get my Asian jasmine off to a quick start this spring? It is totally brown.
A:
Milorganite is a wellrespected organic fertilizer that has been packaged and sold for decades by the Milwaukee Sewage Department. It lists an analysis of 6-4-2, meaning that it is 6 percent nitrogen. That would be excellent for slow and sustained feeding of the Asian jasmine, but it is far from a fast-release product. It’s also not very much nitrogen for Asian jasmine that was browned by the cold. If you want a quicker green-up you would opt, instead, for any of the many higher percentage inorganic lawn foods with as much as one-half or two-thirds of their nitrogen in fast-release form. Your local Texas Certified Nursery Professional can
show you several good options.
Q: What would be a good fertilizer to use on my Texas mountain laurels (and other landscape shrubs in general)?
A:
Results from thousands of tests run by the Texas A&M Soil Testing Laboratory at College Station over decades have taught us that we should be using all-nitrogen fertilizers on all our plants, from landscapes and lawns to fruit and vegetables if we’re gardening in clay soils. If our soils are sandy, we still would need a high-nitrogen fertilizer, more like a 4-1-2 ratio (16-4-8, 20-5-10, 24-6-12, etc.). The numbers within my parentheses are percentages of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium respectively. The higher the percentage the less of the fertilizer you would need to use.