xtremehorticulture – Page 165 – Xtremehorticulture

Leafhoppers Are Pesky on Grapes Now

Leave a Comment / How to control Gnats on grapes, how to control midges on grapes, organic control on grapes / xtremehorticulture

Q. I have a lot of midgets or gnats in the leaves of my grape trees. I don’t know what to do to kill them. If I touch the leaves these insects will fly all over me. A. These are more likely leafhoppers and not gnats or midges. I have had others report these as gnats too but after confirming their presence with some pictures they agreed they were leafhoppers. Leafhopper damage on grapes Leafhoppers are very small and jump rather than fly. There can be hundreds, if not thousands right about now on grapes. They cause some leaf yellowing, black specks on the leaves and fruit. The biggest problem with them is they are a nuisance. They will jump in your face and mouth when you walk by a grape vine. Here are some posts on my blog about leafhoppers on grapes http://xtremehorticulture.blogspot.com/2011/10/grape-leafhopper-damage-or-fleabeetle.html http://xtremehorticulture.blogspot.com/2015/04/leafhoppers-hornworm-and-skeletonizer.html http://xtremehorticulture.blogspot.com/2013/07/grape-leaf-problems-leafhoppers-and-iron.html http://xtremehorticulture.blogspot.com/2012/06/leaf-munching-on-grapes-whiteflies.html Not much will work on them when they are adults like now. You can try soap sprays but I would not do much until next year. A couple of applications of Spinosad in late April and May to the undersides of leaves and tops will knock the populations back along with horticultural oils applications while it is cool in the late spring.

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Figs, Blueberries and Strawberries for Las Vegas

Leave a Comment / what varieties of blueberries, What varieties of figs, what varieties of strawberries, what will grow in Las Vegas / xtremehorticulture

Q. Can you give me any particulars as to growing a fig tree, blueberry bush and strawberries? It would be helpful if you have any information as to the varieties of each. One of the yellow or white figs A. Figs do very well here and any variety will grow. They love this climate. You will get two crops every year if you prune them correctly. Yellow figs like Kadota are milder in flavor and usually preferred for cooking. While the purple and “black” varieties have a stronger flavor and used for drying, jams and preserves. Figs will not be productive here without plenty of water so the biggest mistake people make is not keeping the soil around the roots moist. Use wood chip surface mulches to preserve soil moisture. Treat them like any other fruit tree except for pruning. Blueberries are more difficult to grow in our climate and are not a good plant for the desert. People do grow them here and they do produce but require extra care and good gardening techniques. Don’t grow them unless you want to put in the effort. Blueberry growing in Las Vegas at a home residence Grow them in containers or tubs because the soil is easier to manipulate. I discourage people from planting blueberries in this climate unless they are an accomplished gardener. Learn the basics and then you can try exotics like blueberries. Surprisingly good at lowering pH If they simply must have them then they should have a very high percentage of quality compost in the soil and the soil covered in wood chip mulch. Expose them to as much sun as possible with protection from late afternoon direct sunlight. Focus your selections on southern highbush types with a low chilling requirement. There have been no trials conducted in our climate so I can only guess at which varieties to try. Though varieties I would look closely at include Misty, Sharpblue, Sunshine Blue and perhaps Southmoon. Misty is one of the better ones in a desert climate. Your selections should be self-fruitful. The soil will be much easier to manage because if adding some acidifying agent such as finely ground soil sulfur, aluminum sulfate or Organic Magic. Organic Magic That drops the pH very fast compared to sulfur. Strawberries are in between these two in difficulty; not as easy as figs and not as difficult as blueberries. They require soils similar to tomatoes for good growth; a well-drained vegetable soil with plenty of compost. Quinault Strawberry starting to set fruit in a container with surface mulch of pine shavings growing at Viragrow Like any fruit crop, give them as much light as possible but protect them from late afternoon sun. They are shallow rooted so water them like you would most vegetables. Fertilize them just after then finish producing which varies with the strawberry whether it’s an Everbearer or main crop type. Varieties are important. Stay with the Everbearing varieties rather than main crop types when selecting for home gardens. Use a surface mulch to keep soils moist and avoid letting the soil get too dry in the summer months. There is lots of general growing advice on the internet on things that are not as critical when growing in the desert.

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How to Submit a Question

Leave a Comment / How to ask a question, what is your email address / xtremehorticulture

There are two ways to submit a question to be answered on this blog. Remember, pictures are extremely helpful when submitting questions. Close-ups of the problem are great and necessary but include a second picture further away so I can see the landscape environment. Send Me an Email. The first way to send a question is to send me an email directly at [email protected] Use My Blog to Send a Question. Another way is to send it on a new link I just put on the blog. 1. You don’t have to type your name where the first arrow is but I do like to personalize my answers. I never used names if I publish a post. 2. Your email address at number two will be required because you will get a response from me. If your question is unique, it will most likely get posted on my blog unless you tell me not to. 3. Where the third arrow is please ask your question with as much detail as you can provide. I get readers from all over the world so tell me where the picture is from. This helps me to answer the question. My focus is desert horticulture but I will take a stab at it if it’s not. Fill in the boxes with your name (1), email address (2) and your question (3). Mention where your question is from so I can figure in your climate in the answer. That makes a huge difference. Pictures help!

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How to Search Xtremehorticulture Blog

Leave a Comment / How to search a blog / xtremehorticulture

Q. Once on the Extremehort website, is there a way to search all the previous articles with one search attempt? A. Just to clarify for some others out there so my answer does not cause confusion, I do not have a website. I have an Internet site that is a blog. You are on it right now. Unlike some other blogs, mine is not a personal blog but an informational blog. People write questions to me and (most of the time) I respond with some sort of answer. Searching My Blog. There are over 1400 questions on this blog that date back to 2010. You can search all of these questions in my blog through the use of “keywords” that you can type in the search box. Type keyword or keywords where you see the arrow pointing (1). Put your cursor there, left click in it and type. When you have entered your keyword then left click on Search (2). Here is the search box for my blog. Enter in the keyword where you see the arrow and number 1. Tell it to search by clicking on the search button where you see an arrow and number 2. After you type in the keyword or keywords and tell it to search, all of the posts that contain that keyword will appear. In this example below, the keyword “tomato” was entered in the search box. After it was entered, the blog was told to search by left clicking on “Search”. I entered the keyword “tomato” in the search box and told it to search by clicking on the Search button. The search results pop up right away. This is only the first page. There are eight pages of posts (2) that you can look at. You can go to more pages by left clicking on one of the numbers at the bottom of the search (2). You can left click on the title of a post (1) and the post will appear. This is the search that appears after I typed in “tomato” in the search box. The first post that came up, “Tomato Plants with No Fruit, What’s Happening?’ can be opened by clicking on the title (1). At the bottom of the search are the number of pages of posts that were brought up. Each page will contain several posts. Here is the post that appears when we left clicked on the title of the first post on the first page, “Tomato Plants with No Fruit. What’s Happening?” After reading this post, we can make it disappear and go back to our tomato search (2) by left clicking on the “x” of its tab located at the arrow (1). We can repeat this process of going back and forth between posts and the “tomato” search by opening and closing tabs. We can close the search by left clicking on the “x” on tab 2. We can go back and forth between posts and the search by left clicking on tabs. Clicking on the “x” closes the tab (1). Clicking on the center of the tab (2) opens the tab. I hope this helps a little bit in searching Xtremehorticulture of the Desert.

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Get Alerts When Something New Is Posted

Leave a Comment / How do I know when something new is posted, how do I make a comment to a post, how do I subscribe to your newsletter / xtremehorticulture

Q. How do I find out if you have posted something new on your blog? A. Some people want to know when there is something new posted on my blog. There are two ways to get notices about new posts; sign up for my newsletter or subscribe to posts and comments. Sign up For My Weekly Newsletter. I receive somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 visitors to my blog every month. I have a weekly “newsletter” sent to about 1500 email addresses each week. This “newsletter” tells people the titles of new posts that were made during the week. You can look at the titles and see if you want to get the answers. The newsletter is sent out through Mail Chimp. This is how to subscribe to my “newsletter”. Type in your email address in the box with the arrow pointing at it and left click on “Subscribe”. You will be taken to Mail Chimp and you can subscribe. I NEVER share email addresses. You can sign up for my weekly newsletter by typing your email address where the arrow is pointing. Sign up for Posts or Comments or Both. You can get my posts on my blog as soon as I post them by signing up for posts. People can make comments to posts. In fact, I encourage it. The purpose of this blog is to share information. The only way to sign up for posts or comments is if you get the app for NetVibes, My Yahoo, or have an Atom processor (cell phone). Comments to posts are screened by me but the only time I don’t allow them is when they are strictly advertising and there’s no educational content. You have a company or represent one? Go ahead and post a comment and I will approve it if it adds to the body of knowledge here. Here is how to get alerts that a post or comment has been made on my blog. You will get alerts whenever a post is made or comment to a post. Here is how to sign up for posts or comments.If you want to receive an alert when a post is made, type in your email address where the arrow (1) is pointing. If you want to receive alerts when comments are made to a post, enter your email address where the arrow (2) is pointing.Follow the directions after you enter your email address. You can sign up for my posts on the blog or comments to a post if you subscribe. You must download or have an app for Netvibes, My Yahoo or an Atom processor on your cell phone.

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What is This Groundcover With Pretty Pink Flowers?

2 Comments / evening primrose, groundcover with pink flowers, primrose / xtremehorticulture

Q, There’s this flower in the neighborhood that looks delicate but doesn’t seem to be affected by the wind. Would you know what it is? A, Yes, this is Mexican evening primrose. Oenethera spp. It is available locally and common in desert landscapes. Used in informal landscapes. It can be invasive where there is water available. It looks pretty but the usual question I get is how to get rid of it. It tends to look not as pretty after a couple of seasons of growth. Most weed killers will not touch it. Contain it and don’t let it spread everywhere. Cut it to the ground after it finishes blooming. Proceed with caution. Some information from New Mexico State University

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Long-Winded Explanation on How to Irrigate Landscapes

2 Comments / how many minutes should I set my irrigation clock, how much do I water, How often do I water, how to adjust watering / xtremehorticulture

Q. I read your piece in the LV Review/Journal regarding the subject. You recommended not increasing the length of watering time when it get hotter, but increasing the number of days one waters. How much time or number of days is adequate? I have: Heavenly Bamboo, Gold Spot Euonymus and Golden Euonymus, Box leaf Euonymus, Pinkie Hawthorne, Med Fan Palms, Variegated Mock Orange, Pineapple Guava and more. I live in a newer neighborhood where our plants are 1-3 years old and the landscaper put our drips on for 10 minutes twice per day when they were installed. I can understand this when the roots are shallow, but 3 years later I’d think that is too much. Presently, I have two drips systems and have both on for 15 minutes 3 times per week for all plants. A. These are very difficult questions to answer for a specific person because they are site-specific. The difficulty in giving you precise watering information is because of the soil at your site and how your irrigation system was designed. Whenever you have a site that has a number of different types of plants growing in the same location, it’s difficult to answer with any kind of precision. I will try to answer your email as specifically as I can and in general terms. Distribution of water. When we water plants we fill the soil with water that surrounds their roots. The water should be distributed beneath the plant so that the area receiving water is about half of the area under the canopy of the plant. In very general terms, this means spacing drip emitters usually about 18 inches apart from most soils. If irrigation basins surround the plant, the basins must be level even if the soil is not. In soils with a lot of clay we can space emitters much farther apart. In soils that are mostly sand, the emitters must be placed closer together. So we strike a happy medium at about 18 inches apart. Make sure you have enough emitters for plants and make sure they are spaced far enough apart to spread the water applied to the soil more evenly and over a greater distance. Emitters can be located from six to 18 inches from the base of the plant. So for instance a 1 gallon plant would only require one drip emitter about 6 inches away. A 5 gallon plant would require 2 to 3 emitters about 12 inches away. A 15 gallon plant might require 3 to 4 emitters about 12 to 18 inches away. A 24 inch box plant might require 6 to 8 emitters scattered 18 inches apart under the canopy. Basically we want the water delivered to the plant so that it spreads as evenly as possible over the roots. How many minutes. As I said above, when we water plants we fill the soil with water that surrounds their roots. The number of minutes to run the cycle depends on how deep the roots are and how fast the soil fills with water from the emitters. We generally figure that lawn roots are watered 10 to 12 inches deep, most annual vegetables and annual flowers are watered to the same depth as a lawn at 10 to 12 inches deep. There are exceptions in the vegetables such as onions, garlic at 6 inches deep. Small shrubs we figure have roots 12 to 18 inches deep and need water delivered to this depth. Big trees and shrubs we figure have roots 18 to 24 inches deep and need water delivered this deep. Depth of root system of different plants and depth of watering based upon their size We set the minutes on our irrigation clock after we find out how many minutes it takes to get water to these depths. The only real way to determine the number of minutes needed is to run the irrigation for a certain number of minutes and “see” how deep the water goes. We can “see” how deep the water goes after a certain number of minutes using a little trick. This is the trick: “Sharp objects pushed into wet soil are pushed in much easier than the same sharp object pushed into dry soil.” So we run the cycle for, let’s say, 10 minutes. We wait another 10 minutes so the water finishes draining and push along sharp object into the soil next to the drip emitters in several locations. By “feeling” the resistance it takes to push these objects into the soil gives us the approximate depth that 10 minutes of water delivered. If the irrigation is not deep enough, we increase the number of minutes until we get the depth we want. This sounds complicated but once we do this we seldom need to change the number of minutes on the irrigation clock. This is because irrigating plants is like filling the gas tank on a car. If we drive the car until half of the gas tank is empty, we will fill the gas tank to the brim. I am willing to bet that if we fill that gas tank at the same pump each time, it will take the same number of minutes to fill half the gas tank every single time. This is the reason we can leave the minutes unchanged when we irrigate provided we use half of the water that we put into the soil each and every time before the next irrigation. How often? This refers to the number of days we irrigate each week or every two weeks or every month. The unit of measurement (week, two weeks, monthly) depends on the irrigation clock. For simplicity let’s use weekly. I know this looks complicated. This is the general water requirement for plants on a daily basis for different months of the year in Las Vegas Nevada. We know that plants use more water in the summer than they do the winter. Remember we are filling a gas tank so we

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Summer Tomatoes: Prune Tomatoes Back or Start New Ones from Seed

1 Comment / fall gardening, how to grow tomatoes, how to produce tomatoes in the fall, how to produce tomatoes in the summer / xtremehorticulture

Q. All the tomatoes are harvested. What do I do with the vines? Trim them back for fall? Pull them up and buy new in the fall? Your suggestions please. Comment: in the hot desert we have two seasons of tomato production; spring production until July and late summer until the late fall. Here, desert tomatoes stop producing during the summer months until temperatures dropped back down to the 90s again and produce until late in the fall, usually mid December. A. I will try to make a short video and some pictures to describe this. If your tomatoes look healthy, I would cut them back after you have finished picking the fruit. How you cut them back will determine how they will perform for the rest of the summer and into the fall. By leaving healthy tomato plants that we like intact and pruning them back we save a lot of time trying to reestablish new transplants or starting them from seed. Transplants are difficult to find this time of year. It makes more sense to start new plants from seed directly in the garden. Pruning tomatoes. When you cut tomato plants back, always cut them to a strong side shoot. Be careful about cutting back the tops of the plants too drastically. If the plants were very bushy or if there is still fruit on the interior of the plant, cutting them back too hard can cause sunburn to the interior stems and any fruit remaining. Sunburn to the fruit will ruin them of course and sunburn to older stems will cause a lot of problems and the plants may die in our hot summers. When you cut the tops back, make sure their is enough leaf cover to shade the interior stems and of course the fruit as well. Cutting the tomato plant back at the sides is less damaging. Always make sure any cutting tools are sharp and sanitized. Fertilize the plants right after cutting them back. Sunburn on tomato fruits Learn a new word: imbibition. Now is an excellent time to start tomatoes from seed directly in the garden for a fall crop. Soak the seed in water-soaked paper towels overnight before you plant them. This is called pre-germination. Pre-germination helps bypass the first obstacle in seed germination and that is keeping the seed moist. If the seed is kept moist, the first stage in germination called imbibition can occur quickly.The biggest problem in planting seed this time of year is the soil drying out quickly and preventing imbibition or killing a young emerging seedling. Pre-germinating the seed, or making sure the seed has imbibed water, gives the seed a jumpstart. See a seed imbibition video Plant directly in the garden. Plant pre-germinated tomato seeds 1/4 inch below the surface of the soil or lay the seed on top of the soil and cover with a 1/4 inch layer of topsoil. Soak the area with water and cover the seeded area with a very light mulch of pine shavings, finely shredded newspaper, vermiculite or peat moss. This very light surface mulch will keep the soil moist between irrigations and encourage germination without suffocating the seedlings. Shredded newspaper is probably the most problematic of the group. Soil temperatures are great for germination during the summer months if the soil is lightly shaded with a mulch. Once they have germinated and produced their first set of true leaves, you can move them to a new location and pamper them.

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Will Clematis Grow in the Mojave Desert?

Leave a Comment / What vines will grow in Las Vegas, what vines will grow in Pahrump, will clematis grow in the desert / xtremehorticulture

Q. I recently moved to Pahrump and would like to grow some vines to cover the east facing side of my home. I am considering Clematis which the nursery says will grow in my zone but I am concerned that it is too hot here. Will they grow? Do you have suggestions for vines other than trumpet vines? Trumpet vine A. Clematis will grow in Las Vegas as well as Pahrump. However, it is one of those plants that struggles in our desert soils and our desert climate. It will handle our desert climate as long as it has a good growing environment and not planted in a real hot location. It will perform best facing east or north. If on the South or West side, do not plant it close to anything that reflects heat during the summer. It will require a little bit more gardening knowledge on your part to grow this plant. Amend the soil thoroughly where you are planting it. Dig the hole wide but only deep enough to accommodate the roots of the plant. Use a good quality compost or soil mix in the backfill surrounding the roots. Cover the soil surrounding the vine with 3 to 4 inches of wood chip mulch. Stake the plant the first season of growth. Fertilize only in the early spring with the general fertilizer. Prune the vine to accommodate whatever growth you’re trying to achieve. Water it deeply and infrequently as you would any tree or shrub which does not originate from a desert. The key to growing this plant is planting it in the right location, amending the soil properly at the time of planting and the use of wood chip mulch on top of the soil. Star Jasmine trellis at a front entry Other vines to consider include American Ivy which is also called Virginia creeper, Australian Pea-Vine, Banksia Rose, Carolina Jasmine, Cat’s Claw, Coral Vine, English Ivy, Euonymus, Grape, Honeysuckle, Japanese Ivy, Star Jasmine and Chinese Wisteria.

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