Ask Monty’s 4/15/11: African Violets, Hydrangeas, and Selecting the Right Grass for your Lawn.

By Dennis on April 15, 2011

Ask Monty’s:

“I have a huge, beautiful African Violet that is very healthy.  How can I grow new plants from it?”

Irene
Forest Lake, Minnesota

 Irene:

It’s as simple as removing a healthy leaf with the stem attached and burying the stem in moist, well drained potting soil, leaving just the flattened round leafy blade above the surface.  Water it thoroughly and put it in a warm, bright location.  I even put the container in an open, clear plastic bag to increase the humidity level around the cutting to further encourage the stem growing roots.  I used to have an old neighbor lady with quite a green thumb who had incredible luck with just putting the leaf stem in a glass of water with the leaf hanging over the lip of the glass.  Once the stem started sprouting roots she’d then stick it in a small pot of potting soil and off they’d go!

A more aggressive approach would be division by carefully splitting apart the plant itself between the plant’s crowns, keeping the roots intact and then replanting them into individual pots.  Be prepared to see your plants suffer a little shock for awhile, but with good care they’ll snap back.

Don’t forget to either root dip your cuttings and/or water them in with Monty’s 4-15-12.  All you need is a weak solution (one-two drops per cup of water).  This will stimulate root development and almost completely eliminate transplant shock. (See more detailed information here)  After the plant has rooted well, you can start feeding with Monty’s 8-16-8, 4-15-12, or 2-15-15 – depending on the current growth stage of your plant.  One note for AFRICAN VIOLETS, the leaf surface and flowers are very susceptible to spotting. For that reason African Violets are one of the few plants we DO NOT RECOMMEND using Monty’s products as a foliar application.  Instead you can either wick feed or feed through the roots by mixing 1-2 drops per cup of water and pouring on the soil when you water. Check out our PDF on the care of African Violets, here.

 Ask Monty’s:

“I transplanted hydrangeas from pots into my flower beds two springs ago but I haven’t seen them bloom yet in their new home.  Is there any hope of their blooming this year or did I waste my time and energy?”

 Gwen
Owensburg, Indiana

 Gwen:

Patience is the key here and I think you have proven that.  Plants moved from containers to larger bedding areas will spend the first couple of seasons putting down roots and getting comfortable in their new environment instead of blooming.  Once established and no longer needing the excess energy to stabilize their root system, they will shift into a flowering mode.  Make sure you’re not using a fertilizer with excessive nitrogen, which can also retard their natural flowering attributes.

To explain this, let’s think like a plant for a minute. The presence of N tells a plant it is time to grow. So you can end up with a plant that has a lot of showy foliage and can become quite large, but never blooms. This results in what gardeners refer to as a ‘leggy’ plant.  This can also cause more than just aesthetic problems; the excess growth can lead to damage during heavy winds.  Your plants have natural cycles: germination, growth, reproductive, and dormancy. It needs to go through each of these phases to maintain good overall health.  By understanding this and allowing the plant to go through its natural ebb and flow you will get the best results.  That is why Monty’s Fertility products come in three “flavors”; each one is designed for specific needs of the plant during each one of these stages of development.  This season, try using Monty’s 2-15-15 at least once a week on the foliage.  I think you will be amazed by the results.  Check out our PDF on Hydrangeas, here.

 Ask Monty’s:

“There are so many different types of grass on the market.  How can you even begin to know what to choose for your lawn?”

 Joel
Mt. Airy, North Carolina

 Joel:

There are a lot of variables to consider when choosing the right grass for your lawn, and the top one evolves around where you live.  If you are newly landscaping or starting from scratch, it’s always best to drive around your area and see what lawns have the look you’re after and make note of it.  Your local nursery, a good landscaping company or your local extension office are going to be excellent, professional reference points for you.  Many larger towns and cities even have arboretums that not only feature plant variety, but label them for guests and lawn grasses are often incorporated into their design. 

Keep in mind though, if you want your lawn to look like a golf course, it comes with a price and a great deal of maintenance.  Grass grows best in the spring and the fall when it is cool, so keep that in mind when you’re looking at other lawns too.  Cool-season grasses are hardy enough to survive freezing winters and hot summers and include varieties such as fine fescues, perennial ryegrass and bluegrass.  Warm-season grasses are your tropical climate lovers and include St. Augustine, Zoysia, Bermuda grass and centipede grass.  There are also transition-zone grasses for hot summer climates and chilly winters that blend both your cool-season and warm-season grasses, but types a little more versatile include tall fescue or buffalo grass.

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One of the Worst Gardening Chores Made Easy

By Dennis on April 1, 2011

Most people, when you ask them why they don’t garden; or if they do garden if you ask what they hate about it will tell you weeding.  I am no different.  I hate weeding, that is one of the reasons i con my kids into helping me do it.  Well, my plan backfired on me.  My oldest child, my son, is now working a ‘real job’ and is graduating this spring.  So, I was faced with a thirty percent reduction in my work-force.

I happened to see a commercial on TV for a Mantis Tiller.  Now, with a background in media, I am naturally skeptical of ads; especially for over-hyped tv products. But, I was desperate for some other option other than chemicals or spending 1-2 hours a day out in my veg garden weeding. I finally gave in, if nothing else, to help me keep the morning glories at bay until my veg crops can get big enough to out-compete them.

This is not an endorsement of their product.  I do not sell them, Monty’s does not sell them nor are we suggesting you should buy one.  However, since I did purchase one  and since this blog is all about gardening, I thought I would share my experience.

I purchased the model that came pre-assembled.  All I had to do was pull it out of the box tighten the handles, fill it with a fuel/oil mix and go.  My garden is too small for this size tiller but I believe it will still come in handy for weeding/cultivating. I have not planted my garden yet because it is still a bit cold and way too wet so I decided to experiment with the new tiller in these flower beds. On this day I would be using it for two purposes 1) to renovate two flower beds 2) to edge my yard with the optional edger attachment.

The two flower beds were suffering from years of relative neglect and from encroaching Bermuda grass.  I love Bermuda grass.  It is hardy, it chokes out other weeds and looks good once it is warm enough to green up.  However, it has one problem.  It grows from rhizomes and refuses to stay where you want it.  It will invade everywhere and can be a real nuisance in flower beds.

You can see for yourself the job the tiller did on the front flower bed…total time, about 10 minutes.  The bed is a mixture of compost I have laid on top since last summer and native, moderately heavy clay soil.

After using the Mantis in this limited setting, these are my thoughts.

Starting – I have a gas weed trimmer and this is easier to crank than it.  Though, I recommend the quick-start option. If you let the tiller set and cool for even five minutes, you will have to re-prime it and use the choke to get it started again.  Otherwise it starts quickly.

Ease of use – Very easy, and very light.  It has a black handle by the engine and I was easily able to carry it where ever I needed it, one handed. (there is another grip if you want to use both hands. The speed controls are located on the right handgrip and easy to operate with your thumb and index finger. The thumb-controlled safety switch guarentees that you will no accidentally engage the tines.

Effectiveness – Very effective.  It chewed through everything:  Small roots, Bermuda grass rhizomes, thatch and compacted soil.  The trick is to keep it moving in a back and forth motion.  If you want to go deep, it will easily go down to about 7-10 inches.  The only drawback is that it does tend to pile up dirt behind it so you need to keep it moving.  This little tiller made the job of getting rid of the Bermuda grass and working my compost into the clay soil a snap.  I am looking forward to seeing what it does on morning glories in the veg garden this summer.

If you do have Bermuda grass, the rhizomes do tend to get wrapped around the tine axle. I had to clean mine off by disassembling the tines between flower beds.  However, that said, the cleaning process only required removing two cotter pins and took all of about 3 minutes.

As an edger – Okay, so maybe it was too much to hope for.  Once you start asking any product to do something other than that which it was originally designed, you run into some problems.  First, the optional edger attachment is easy to put on (see removing tines in the paragraph above).  It did cut through the soil and grass fairly easily and did establish a decent, if not perfect, edge.  In fact, it probably put a more consistent edge on my lawn than my weed trimmer does.    The biggest problems were in design.  It does not have a guide or a guard so it is hard to keep it next to the driveway/sidewalk without occasionally hitting the pavement.  I can see where this could lead to chipping and scarring the edge of the concrete, given time, and for some (me) that is unacceptable.  So If I were to give it a grade as an edger, I would say B-.

All in all, it is light, and it is effective.  It is a purchase that I am glad I made.  Though I would not count on it for heavy tilling or tilling extremely large areas (My garden plot is 150′ x 75).  I think it might be able to do it, but at only 9 inches wide, it would take forever.

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White Clover, White Clover Let the Nightmare Be Over

By Dennis on June 2, 2010

This summer I have watched as white clover has taken over lawns across my region.  It has been like a rapidly advancing army of white Lilliputians bent on landscape domination.  I even sprayed some this spring hoping to fight back.  I did have some early success, but the stuff came back with a vengeance.  So I did some homework on the plant and this is what I learned.

First, white clover is your lawns way of saying, “Help!”  White Clover is a legume and as with all legumes it is capable of pulling nitrogen from the air and ‘fixing’ it or attaching it to its root system.  This Nitrogen is then available for the plant to use, but some of it gets broken down and added back to the soil.  In nature, white clover and other Nitrogen fixating plants move in when there is a shortage.  It is part of the whole miracle and awe of nature and a way to keep things balanced. Nature is using the clover to provide needed Nitrogen.

That said, the best way to control clover long term is to do a soil test and make sure that your lawn has everything it needs.  A good fall application of 19-19-19 fertilizer will have time to break down and get fully assimilated in the fall and winter months and reduce your problems next year.  By applying in the fall, you can also help insure that the application of nitrogen will not burn your lawn, and that you have adequate moisture to help the nutrient break down.

In the short term, you can use a broadleaf herbicide like 2,4-D, dicamba, and MCPP/MCPA.  A few words about these products: they are a broadleaf herbicide and will kill or injure almost any broadleaf plant. The good news is that they are safe for most lawns, the bad news is they can wreak havoc on flowers, shrubs, and trees.  Spot treat rather than broadcast, keep your sprayer nozzle to more of a stream or drip and keep it as close to the ground as possible to prevent drift to plants you like. Use when you know temperatures will remain below 85 degrees as excessive heat will reduce effectiveness and could volatize the chemical (convert it from a liquid to a gas).  Once it is volatized not only will you be watching the money you paid float into the air, but it can resettle on nearby plants and cause damage without you ever knowing it happened until it is too late.  I have seen an entire commercial tomato farm taken out by volatized 2,4-D.  The farm next to it was a beef operation; the farm sprayed his pasture for weeds.  However, the product volatized, drifted, and settled on the tomatoes; within a week every plant the tomato grower had was dead. So be careful and read and follow label direction.

If you are using 2,4-D I also recommend using a new product from Monty’s called NanoBoost.  It is will increase the effectiveness of 2,4-D and glyphosate based herbicides by helping more of these products get into the weed.  Learn more here.

Here are some brief tips on controlling white clover:

  1. Do a soil test.  Check for pH levels and Nitrogen levels
  2. Apply needed nitrogen in the fall.
  3. Spot treat clover patches with 2,4-D or other herbicide. Follow all label directions
  4. Herbicide treatments will be most effective in the fall, though summer applications can be made if temperatures will be below 85 degrees.
  5. Apply herbicides and fertilizers when the lawn is well-watered and not stressed as they will take in more of the products.
  6. Fertilizer regularly and encourage a good stand of healthy grasses.  Clover tends to move in to fill voids.

Editor’s Note:  I know that there is a growing group of proponents of ‘clover lawns’ who are anti-herbicides and pro-clover.  The above will be an anathema to them.  I believe in working with native grasses as much as possible which is why I am letting the bermuda take over what once was a fescue lawn. But I just personally can’t abide the clover invasion.

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More Uses for Grass Clippings

By Dennis on May 1, 2010

Short entry today.  Storms are moving in this evening and I have a lot of work to do.  Weather man says we are expecting 4+ inches of rain.  We’ll see.

Anyway, mowing season is in full swing and I have found another use for grass clippings.  My son and I are using them to create paths so we can walk through our garden, even after a rain, without bogging down in this god-forsaken E. Tennessee clay.  Additionally we are using it around the tomatoes to help suppress weeds.

One word of caution that I learned the hard way last season.  DO NOT try this if you have a Bermuda grass lawn and your grass has formed seed heads.  The seeds will germinate and you will spend the rest of the summer fighting to keep Bermuda grass out of your garden.

The benefit of using the grass clippings like this is that it does give us the paths and the weed barriers that I am looking for with the added benefits that I can till it in in the fall to add organic structure into the soil, plus unlike using bark mulch, which is expensive and semi-permanent, I can reconfigure the layout of my garden each season so that I can easily rotate my crops to keep disease and insects in check.

Happy gardening.  I’m back to work.

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What can I over-seed my lawn with?

By Dennis on October 8, 2009

A family member sent me a post on my facebook account this afternoon asking me this question.   I wrote him a response (he lives in TN, so my answer was geared to southern climates) and thought I  would share it here since many of you may be wondering the same thing.  He specifically wanted to know if he should over-seed with tall fescue, a staple of southern yards.

 Tall fescue is a cool season grass, so it does well in spring and fall, and holds up pretty well late in the winter. But come summer it will brown off quickly in our hot drought conditions.

Bermuda is another common grass in this area.  It does very well late spring to very early fall and is green all summer but it is nasty brown from Oct-about May.  Plus, if you like to go barefoot in the spring, forget about it.  The rhizomes this stuff uses to reproduce get hard when they brown off and hurt tender feet.  But, you will have a nice lawn for summer BBQ’s. It looks really nice, it will get good and thick and it leaves a nice edge if you like to edge your lawn.  It will also hold up to wear and tear from kids and pets.

Bermuda problems part two.  You can’t get rid of the stuff.  Since it reproduces with rhizomes (runners) and seed heads, it will eventually choke out everything else and it will get places you would rather it did not.  It will come up through weed barriers and it will invade gardens.

Here’s what I do.  I seed mainly fescue, then over-seed in the early spring with Bermuda.  It will eventually take over, but until that happens it gives me year round color and keeps weeds at bay.  Once it does take over, tear up the yard, rake as much of the bermuda out as you can, sow fescue in the fall then lightly sow bermuda the following spring and repeat the process in another five years. It’s a hassle but it works

BTW..one last note on bermuda, DO NOT Compost with it or Mulch with it.  The seeds are very hardy and they will germinate in your flower beds.

If you don’t like the downside of bermuda, and you don’t mind brown grass in the summer or high water bills.  Then go with a rye/fescue/bluegrass mix for the yard and Saint Augustine (thick bladed, shade loving grass) in heavily shaded areas or around trees. I hope this helps.

If you have other thoughts or recommendations, feel free to share them in the comment section. I would love to hear your suggestions on southern lawns.

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