Meet Mike in Warrenton, Saturday, Sept. 5
Mike will get you right back out in the garden when he tells you all about “The Second Season; Garlic, Pansies, Salad Greens and More” in a free talk at 1 p.m. at the Lee Highway Nursery, 7159 Burke Lane, Warrenton, Virginia.
Three Sure Cures for a Mossy Lawn
Rick in Spotsylvania writes, “I have patches of moss showing up all through my lawn. I understand that moss will grow in shady spots, but I have moss in areas with direct sunlight! It’s gradually taking over more and more of the yard. What can I do to prevent this?”
Three things, Rick.
First, add lime or wood ash to raise the pH of your soil back up to neutral. Moss is a sure sign that your soil has become highly acidic, which is a common problem in our area. Most people turn to lime to correct this problem, but hardwood ash from a fireplace or wood-burning stove does the job just as well, and people who burn wood always have a lot of this otherwise useless stuff to get rid of. If you go this route, use about 1.3 pounds of wood ash for every recommended pound of lime.
Second, stop over-watering! The kind of moss you describe can only thrive in a constantly moist environment. Lawns need to dry out between waterings, so if you have sprinklers going every day, shut them off. Then when you really need to add water, water deeply and infrequently. Don’t water more than twice a week, and not at all if we’ve had an inch of rain in the previous week.
And finally, raise the cutting height on your mower. Moss thrives in spots where the grass is cut too short. Your grass should be three inches high after you mow it, three and a half inches in shady spots.
Use flowers to destroy a tree stump
We’ve gotten some great tips in the comments on our weekly entries at the Garden Plot website lately. On the problem of what to do with the stumps left behind after big trees are cut down, a listener whose online avatar is “Chuckles the Clown” had a great suggestion.
“Turning a stump into a flower container is a decorative way to hasten its decomposition. Hollow out the stump and then drill a few drainage holes in the sides near the base. Fill the hollowed-out area with potting soil and plant it with colorful annuals.”
Chuckles even suggests petunias and dwarf snapdragons for stumps in sunny areas, and impatiens and coleus for ones in shade. Chuckles adds—and I agree—that using the stump as a planter will keep it looking nice and speed its decay.
Bravo, Chuckles! Looks like I’m not the only clown in town!
Yellowjacket nest do’s and don’ts
We got a lot of comments and follow-up questions about our yellowjacket advice at the Garden Plot website a couple weeks back. My answers, in brief:
No, yellowjackets and other hornets do not re-use their nests. At the end of the season, the queen will fly out of the dying nest, find a safe place to overwinter and then start a new nest somewhere else the next spring. The old nest will remain vacant and can even be dug up and taken to school as a great display project.
Don’t pour boiling water on the nest! You’ll almost certainly get stung within seconds of applying the first drop. And then you’ll get badly scalded by the boiling water you spill all over yourself as you start to run away.
And ditto to the extreme about using gasoline. To quote your mother, “What ARE you thinking?! Don’t you have the brains that God gave geese?!” Do not pour gasoline on a yellowjacket nest or anywhere else besides the intake of a gasoline-powered device. Gasoline is not a pesticide, and it is wrong, wrong, wrong to use it for any such purpose. And it is a federal crime to do so, and maybe state and local too (and yes, I would dime you out in a New York minute for foolishly endangering the water supply of a huge area). Many non-toxic alternatives are discussed in that week’s Plots, so go back and read them if you’re tempted to go Troglodyte.
And finally, we heard that the Adolph’s meat tenderizer we use to treat bee and wasp stings has become unavailable and/or hard to find (meat tenderizer containing papain, a form of papaya, will completely inactivate insect venom if applied quickly to the area of the sting).
So if you can’t find meat tenderizer whose list of ingredients includes papain or papaya, buy a real papaya at a grocery store, mash it up and keep it in Ziploc bags in the freezer until needed. If you or yours gets stung, rub the frozen papaya on the sting and it will deactivate the venom. It may be a little messy, but it will soon feel like you were never stung, and the cold may feel good as well.
Are you a good mulch? Or a bad mulch?
Jack writes, “I live very close to the Frederick County public brush drop-off, which produces mountains of mulch. Is that stuff good to spread around shrubs, etc? I worry that the stuff people drop off is diseased, treated with chemicals, etc.”
These municipal composting sites produce two different kinds of material, Jack: wood-chip mulch and compost.
The wood mulch will still have the issues I always warn about, such as breeding artillery fungus and other nuisance molds, but it is way superior to the store-bought kind, as you can be certain it was made just from tree branches. Store-bought wood mulch (especially the nasty dyed mulches) might contain wood trash such as insecticide-soaked pallets from overseas, or old treated landscape timbers. That kind of wood wouldn’t get past the gate at a municipal site.
To test their compost, take a bucket home and put it in two plant pots. Just water the first pot and observe it for ten days, watering occasionally. Plant some fresh seeds in the other one and water that as well (pea or bean seeds would be the best choice as these plants are very sensitive to herbicides, but use whatever seeds you have that are the freshest and that germinate quickly).
If the first container doesn’t grow any plants after a week or two, you can be confident that the compost is weed-free. And if the second one grows healthy-looking plants, it’s a good sign that it’s nicely free of herbicide residues.
Note: Most “bad compost” comes from places that accept grass clippings. The persistent herbicides used to treat many lawns these days can be deadly to other plants, even after they’ve been turned into compost. That’s just one of the many reasons why clippings should always be left on the lawn, where they can only do good things.
A clay spray could save your lilac from hornets
Christine up in Woodbine writes, “How effective is kaolin as an insecticide? I would like to use it on my pole beans and apple trees next year, as I had a real problem with Japanese beetles eating their leaves this summer. I would also like to try it on my lilac bushes now to see if I can keep the European hornets from eating the bark.”
Sprays made of micronized kaolin clay, such as Surround from the mail-order supplier Gardens Alive, are a great non-toxic way to keep insects off your plants. Clay sprays also prevent disease from taking hold. I couldn’t grow my organic peaches without a couple of rounds of Surround every season!
And your timing on the lilac issue is perfect. Those big, scary hornets just started attacking my lilac as well! They’re not actually ‘eating’ the bark; they consume and then regurgitate the stripped bark to make their distinctive football-like nests.
I intend to give the bark of my lilac a nice protective coating of micronized clay first thing in the morning, when the hornets are moving slowly in the still-cool air. It will give the lilac a flocked appearance, but that silvery-white coating is pure protection for the plant.
