Xtremehorticulture

Xtremehorticulture of the Desert

Grey Colored Beetles on Zucchini Most Likely Squash Bugs

3 Comments / melon dying, squash bugs, squash dying /

Q. Every year my zucchini plants are infested with grey-colored beetles that destroy my zucchini.  How do get rid of the beetles? Squash bugs on the underside of squash leaves. A. These are most likely squash bugs. You can verify it by visiting my blog and checking the picture I posted to confirm it. It is not just zucchini they will attack but other squashes such as winter squashes, melons and sometimes cucumber. It is reported that butternut and acorn winter squashes are somewhat resistant.             You can plant late, in June, after their infestation time has passed. However you may have a hard time getting the fruit to set when temperatures are very high. Squash bug damage and infestation on squash             You can hand pick them as you see them. You must do this as they appear soon after planting and get rid of them as soon as you see them. Do this for about three weeks and the numbers will be greatly reduced.             Thirdly, you can vacuum them with a handheld vacuum cleaner. They will be on the undersides of the leaves so look for them there. 

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Fruit Tree Selection for Nevada at 5000 feet

Leave a Comment / fruit tree selection, high elevation, Mt Charleston /

Q. My friend and I would like to plant a few fruit trees on some property at Acoma Siding in Nevada. It is near Barclay, Nevada, east of Caliente about 20-30 miles. I was wondering if you had some advice on types and varieties of fruit trees that may do well there. I believe it is in the 5000′ elevation. A. This advice would also apply to property in southern Nevada on the way up Mt Charleston and other higher elevations.             Your best bet will be to plant on the side of a hill, if you can do it, to avoid late spring freezes. The major limitation for you is minimum temperatures and late spring frosts. To avoid these as much as possible planting on the sides of hills and avoiding low spots where cold air can accumulate would be safest.             Without knowing your exact low winter temperatures it would be safe to assume you are in apple, pear, sour cherry and plum country. Perhaps you might also try berries such as raspberry and other cane fruit. The best website for general growing information on fruit selection for colder spots of the West will be Dave Wilson Nursery and can be found at http://www.davewilson.com             Stay with fruit with a higher chilling requirement, probably around 800 to 900 hours, and check their requirements for pollination. Some apples might be Rome, Delicious, Northern Spy, Harrelson among others.             European pears might include Bartlett, Comice and D’Anjou. But higher chilling hours may be one indicator that they will probably perform better for you. On apples, have them on a dwarfing rootstock such as M111.             Because you are in a very arid climate with desert soils, mulch the soil and add plenty of soil amendments at the time of planting. That should get you going.  

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Bottle Tree With Dying Branches

5 Comments / bottletree, sunscald /

Q. Our bottle tree branches are getting dried and  one side of the branches died 2 years ago. I am enclosing photos of the tree. Can you tell what is wrong with this tree? We love this tree very much. Is there any way to keep the tree from dying? Bottle tree with dying branches.   A. There are two main problems that can develop on bottle tree; those are sunscald on the smooth branches and trunk if put into very intense sunlight and root death due to too much or too frequent watering. Trunk of bottle tree             We must also remember that their smooth green trunk and limbs get brown and furrowed with age so there is a natural progression from green and smooth to brown and furrowed. This must not be confused with brown and dead or dying.             Some of the pictures you sent seems to show much of the dead parts of the limbs are on the upper surfaces of the limbs which kind of points to sunburning. This can lead to limb dieback. Upper canopy of bottle tree.             It is important for this tree to maintain a full canopy to shade the limbs. Most of this type of damage might be on the side facing the most intense sunlight which is on the upper sides of limbs particularly on the south and west sides of the tree. If someone got in there and pruned them improperly this could cause a lack of shading and sunburn with limb dieback.             The other possibility is root rots due to frequent irrigations and not letting the soil dry out between irrigations. This plant comes from semi-arid (but not necessarily desert) regions of Australia. They will tolerate lawns but the soil must drain quickly.             All you can do now is to remove dead limbs, keep it watered adequately but not excessively and fertilize once a year in the early spring. Surface wood mulches will help as well.

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I Planted an Apple Tree. Now What Do I Do?

Leave a Comment / anna apple, fruit tree care after planting, young fruit tree care /

Q. My husband went out a couple of weeks ago and picked up a Pink Lady apple and I have planted it.  I have it planted how you recommended and I have it mulched the ground  except for the 6″ next to the trunk. I have it securely staked it and I am watering by hand everyday. What next?  Food, or what to make it do well?   Anna apple at UNCE orchard in North Las Vegas in October A. I would not water daily but probably every two or three days. If you are doing it by hand you should put a moat around it about four feet wide and 4 inches deep. Fill the moat twice when watering.             If you have drip irrigation going to it you should still handwater the first couple of weeks before you transition to your drip irrigation. This will help to settle the soil around the roots, remove any air pockets and moisten the soil outside the root system. After transitioning to drip, you will not need the moat UNLESS you use the adjustable drip emitters. Bare root fruit trees planted, staked and protected from rabbits with chicken wire. The trees are surrounded by a moat or basin for holding water. These are watered with an irrigation bubbler. They were then mulched with green waste, chipped trees removed from Las Vegas landscapes. The mulch is kept away from the trunk several inches to prevent collar rot of the tree.             If you added plenty of compost to the soil when planting it probably will not need anything else applied to the soil this season. If you were skimpy with the compost in the planting hole then add a fertilizer application now or no later than about mid-June. If you are an organic grower, use a compost addition to the irrigation moat or compost tea as a fertilizer source.             However if organic sources are not that important to you then you try using some liquid fertilizers, such as Miracle Gro or similar product. Dilute this fertilizer into a five gallon bucket and use the five gallon fertilizer solution for one of your waterings in the moat. If you do not have a moat, try some fertilizer stakes pounded in next to the drip emitters. Fruit tree fertilizer stake with plastic cap for hammering into the wet soil near a drip emitter.             You will remove the stakes holding the tree roots still (not the fertilizer stakes) at leaf fall this winter. Staking the tree to stabilize the roots during one season of growth is all that is necessary.             If you have rabbits in the area you will probably need to add rabbit protection in the form of a cage around the tree. This will require chicken wire that is two feet wide with one inch hex openings or smaller. Cut a piece three feet long and circle it around the tree into a cylinder, tying the ends together to keep the cylinder from coming apart.             Bury the bottom a few inches below the mulch and stake it to the ground. This helps to keep rabbits from going under the cage.             You can prune lightly any time but removal of larger pieces of the tree structure should be done in the winter. It is too late to remove large wood from the tree. If you do, you run the risk of sunburn damage to the trunk or limbs.             Some pruning you can do now includes removing small limbs that are broken, weak or are competing with other branches. If there are branches growing directly above another branch, remove the weakest or less desirable of the two.             If there is one branch growing into another branch, remove or cut back the one which is interfering. If there are branches that are growing straight up or straight down, remove these. These are all cuts you can do now. Removal of branches is usually preferred over just cutting them back. Birdseye view (from above the tree) of the scaffold limbs radiating from the trunk like spokes in a wheel.             If growth is excessively long, I usually cut them back as well to about 15 to 18 inches. This will help initiate fruit producing spurs if the tree is a spur producing tree like apple, pear, plum or apricot.             If you would like to keep the tree smaller than it would normally get, this next winter remove the center, if it has one, from the tree at around waist height or below leaving five or six limbs radiating from the trunk. After pruning this winter, paint the tree with diluted white latex paint (50/50 with water). Paint all the trunk and all major limbs to help prevent sunburn.

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Orange Tree Dropping Fruit

Leave a Comment / citrus, fruit drop, navel orange /

Q. My orange has lots of blossoms, they begin to set the fruit, but when the fruit becomes the size of a pencil eraser, the fruit drops off the tree. What is going on? I watered it, and applied fertilzer.   A. I have two questions that might shed more light: 1. Is this tree planted less than three years ago? and 2.  Is it a Navel type orange? Sometimes it takes a few years for the plant to come into enough maturity to set and hold the fruits. . . . And dropping fruits is a common complaint with Navel Oranges. . . They set fruits and when the heat hits or the first dry wind and they slough off most, if not all their fruits. . . With time more and more will fruits will make it to maturity. . .. Most people are disappointed with the quantity of Navels but not the quality.   Terry Mikel

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Yellow Vomit-Like Thing Could Be Mushroom Related

7 Comments / decompose organic matter, garden mushrooms, puke, vomit /

Q. I found this thing in the picture I sent to you under my Joshua tree this morning. It is about 6 inches long?  Is it mold?  I only water three times a week for 5 minutes Yellow “Thing” Under Joshua Tree A. I get a picture of this once a twice a year, usually in the spring when it is cooler, there has been rain and there is plenty of wood chips for it to feed on. This is called a slime mold. Kind of resembles vomit. Slime mold on wood mulch at the orchard. They can range in colors from yellow to orange and are related to mushrooms in a very loose sense. Like mushrooms they are a decomposer and feed off of decaying organic matter like wood mulches or undecomposed organic matter in the soil. We see them in the orchard a lot feeding off of decaying wood mulch. Slime mold in a lawn. It is feeding on decaying grass either as thatch or clippings or both. No treatment is necessary. It is a good guy since it breaks down woody debris. Does not attack living plants. If you want to be an industrialist, destroy it with the back of a rake and rake it into the mulch and soil. It will probably come back at some time but like a pest would but it is a pest only because we are afraid of it. I will post pictures of some on my blog.

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Fungus Gnats Can Be Controlled With Special Bt Formulation

Leave a Comment / Bt, Bti, different types of Bt, fungus gnat /

Q. I recently transplanted two house plants and now  have gnats coming out of the soil and infecting my entire house.  Is there any way to kill these little buggers or do I have to get rid of all the dirt and start over? A. Fungus gnats can be a serious problem with houseplants as they can feed on plant roots as well as the decomposing organic matter left in potting soils. The life cycle of fungus gnats (egg, larva, pupation and adult) are fairly short, perhaps two to three weeks. The destructive stage is the larva or worm stage. The pesky stage is the adult which can fly and be bothersome. These stages are overlapping so they will not all be flying at once but some will be in the egg stage, some in the larva stage, some pupating and some flying. You can attract the larva living and feeding in the soil to decaying vegetable pieces like small pieces of potato. You can lay pieces about the size of a French Fry on the soil surface and these larva will start feeding on them. You can collect these pieces and dispose of them and it will help get rid of a few of the buggers. Let me point you in the direction of an organic product that may work for you. This is supposed to be available at hardware stores and home improvement stores. It was originally labeled for controlling mosquitos but is now approved for fungus gnats. This is an “organic” product made from Bt (a bacterium) with a homeowner trade name of “Mosquito Bits”. There have been a few other homeowner products made from this Bt for indoor plants in the past but they have disappeared from many marketplaces I assume because the homeowner didn’t know about them and how to use them. Mosquito Bits is a formulation of a special Bt for controlling fungus gnats. A word of explanation. As I said, this is a Bt product. I have mentioned Bt in the past but this one is a DIFFERENT form of Bt so it will not work to use the Dipel or Thuricide product that you would use for grape leaf skeletonizer, tobacco hornworm, tomato fruitworm and other garden pests. This form of Bt is rather unique to certain types of insects such as mosquitos and fungus gnats. The commercial formulation of this product is called Gnatrol. Apply this product according to the label directions. Below I have pasted a document that explains the different types of Bt and how they might be used.

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Since We Cannot Burn Bermudagrass in Early Spring Anymore We Are Forced to Use Equipment to Keep it Looking Good

Leave a Comment / bermudagrass, bumpy lawn, burning, dethatch, vertical mowing, verticutting /

Q. (Response to an eariler posting I made regarding a bumpy bermudagrass lawn). I have a TruCut reel mower. I think the lawn is flatter than the impression I gave you in my earlier question. The bumpiness might be more from uneven thatch, thus thin spots. I aerated it several times last year. Maybe I need to feed and mow more often. It can also be due to weight imbalance with speed of the mover, thus with a front throw, I notice that when the basket is fuller, the bouncing is less. The lawn has never been as nice as I want. I feel the peak season is short in this climate.   A. Las Vegas sits in what educated turfgrass professionals might call the “Transition zone”. The US has three major turfgrass growing regions; climate suitable for cool season grasses like bluegrass, a climate suitable for warm season grasses like bermudagrass and this odd area in between these two climates we call the “transition zone”. The transition zone is capapable growing both warm and cool season grasses equally POORLY. Kind of reminds me of those tools that are 8 in 1; they can do eight different jobs but none of them very well. Kind of like a Swiss Army knife or a Leatherman.   I was just looking again at your response to my eariler email and question on bumpy lawns.  One benefit of overseeding is that the process of overseeding helps to eliminate some of the thatch because you must dethatch the lawn sufficiently so that the seed used in overseeding can make good contact with the soil for good germination.   Burning a berumudagrass hayfield primarily for weed control at the Batesville Station of the University of Arksansas. Photo courtesy of the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension (http://batesvillestation.uark.edu/3_.jpg) Many years ago common bermudagrass would be burned in the winter to get rid of the dead surface grass and in the process any thatch accumulation. It is still recommended that bermudagrass hayfields be burned for numerous reasons including thatch removal and reduction of insects and diseases. Years ago bermudagrass lawns were also burned in the rural areas of Nevada and probably still are in some places. This is smart for several reasons that I will not get into here. We didn’t have thatch when bermudagrass was burned in the winter. Because we cannot burn dead grass any  more due to local ordinances and safety issues, this dead grass remains and adds to the thatch layer. Dethatcher, vertical mower or verticutter. It can be used for several things but commonly used to remove thatch from thatchy lawns or turfgrass areas. Bermudagrass can be a heavy thatch producer. We now substitute a gasoline-driven machine (called a dethatcher, vertical mower or verticutter depending on who you are talking to) instead of burning the dead grass. This of course uses petroleum, adds pollutants to the air and leaves this bermudagrass thatch that we have harvested for dumping somewhere. Or burning. Aren’t we smart?

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Lots of Variabilities in Garlic Size Could be Due to Many Things

Leave a Comment / garlic small /

Q. My last load of mushroom compost with chicken poop had redwood chips in the load.  The guy who delivered it didn’t clean his truck bed before hauling over my load of compost.  So, I’ve no idea if this contributed to the smaller garlic bulbs OR if i did something wrong OR if was the early 90 degree weather W/ the cold/freeze snap we had 4 times this spring. Spacing was 4″/6″ apart in a  triangle grid; the other bed was 6″/6″. I used a tape measure to mark off the beds. The garlic was screaming to be pulled; some of the bulbs had already begun to split. The Polish White (no photo) usually grows medium bulbs; I have small and extra small bulbs.  Just a few with normal size. Since the size of the bulbs was consistently inconsistent in both beds, I bet you anything it was the compost.  I found out much too late that the ‘organic’ fertilizer store I used was not the correct place.  There are two in town.  One with high quality compost (I used it the year before.  Last years harvest was exceptional), and the other with inferior compost (I used this year by accident).  Live and learn. Oh, and when I was prepping the beds, I forgot to use the blood meal.  May have been better that I forgot.  I have others tell me they’ve gone out and found their beds torn from animals smelling the blood.  We have all sorts of wild life out here.  Readers garlic. Good quality but some irregularities in size. This can be caused by many things.   A. This was a question submitted from Texas. Okay. Here’s the deal on size of garlic. Planting larger cloves results in larger bulbs. Use the smaller ones for cooking or drying.                        Spacing. They should be no closer than 4 inches apart if you are pushing size. I use drip tape and I plant on either side of the drip tape in triangular spacing to give them more room.                        Bulb size is diminished with salinity. If your chicken manure was pretty hot or the compost was somewhat saline expect smaller bulb sizes.                        C:N ratio. If the carbon to nitrogen ratio (amount of nitrogen in the compost) is too high it will diminish bulb size. Ideal C:N ratio is around 20:1. If it gets above 40:1 you have to supplement with additional nitrogen.                        Harvested too early. I couldn’t tell from the pic but what told you to harvest the garlic? What are the indicators you use to harvest? The bulbs look a bit young but what I could see of the tops there appeared to be some dieback. In northern California they let the tops fall over. We can’t do that in Nevada but harvest when about 1/3 of the foliage is brown which is early for other places.                        Not enough phosphorus in the bed. Did you apply phosphorus at the time of planting? I supplement with nitrogen through the growing season by sidedressing with my favorite N fertilizer. If organic you can use blood meal or guano or fish emulsion. If not organic then sidedress with ammonium sulfate.                        You should know the quality of your compost. They should provide a copy of the test results. Usual problems with compost are salts too high, C:N ratio wrong or too high, high concentrations of toxic minerals such as boron, compost unfinished and needs time to finish. It should not be hot in temperature when delivered. Compost is finished when it has cooled down and the microorganisms have begun to die off.                        A little bit of redwood shouldn’t hurt. However, it does have a stunting affect. We see this in redwood beds when flowers are grown close to the boards.                        Remember to supplement the planting hole with phosphorus…bone meal…not blood meal. Then sidedress with nitrogen every 30 days. Others will say not to sidedress. Try both. Apply nitrogen (blood meal or equivalent) every 30 days along the row a few inches from the bulb on half the plantings. Liquid would be better such as compost tea if you are organic. If animals are a problem maybe use compost tea applications.  

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