- Hi, thanks for joining us for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Plants are great when they bloom, but what about plants that do something great every season of the year?

Also, we're going to talk about pond maintenance That's just ahead on The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

- (female announcer) Production funding for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South is provided by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund and by viewers like you, thank you.

[upbeat country music] - Welcome to The Family Plot.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Joining me today is Dr. Kelly.

Dr. Kelly's a retired professor of horticulture, and Mr. D. will be joining me later.

Dr. Kelly, good to see you.

- Yeah, good to be here as always.

- As always, gonna be fun.

- A lot of fun.

This is gonna be fun.

- We do a lot of laughing.

- Yes, we do.

Yes, we do, and learning all at the same time, right?

So let's talk about plants with multi-season interests.

So where do you wanna start with that?

- Well, there's so many.

I just picked 10 of my favorites, and the first one on my list is the rabbiteye blueberry.

It grows down here.

It's native, and people love 'em because they have pretty fruit.

They have pretty flowers in the spring.

They even have a pretty fall color.

They have a red orangey pretty fall color.

And then in when they totally defoliate in the winter, they have a little exfoliating bark.

So you're talking about a plant that's pretty year 'round in some aspect or the other.

And then you get the bonus of eating the blueberries - And you can eat 'em.

- Yeah.

- Okay, I like it.

- And then my second plant is the oakleaf hydrangea.

It's another native, and it has those pretty blooms, you know, spherical kind of blooms in the spring or early summer.

And then in the fall, it has the pretty red kind of colored foliage.

And then in the winter, if you leave those flower stalks there, they're kind of pretty.

You know they just dry.

Yeah, they dry right on the plant, and they're just pretty buff colored.

And then the bark is exfoliating as well for the winter interest on the oakleaf hydrangea.

And the other one I've got, I just put the genus of maples because there's so many out there that we can pick from.

And people don't notice a lot of times in our native woods, or even in their garden if they have a maple tree.

In the early, early spring, it's one of the first to bloom.

And you miss that a lot.

You know, you start looking up and you say, "What is that little frilly stuff?"

Well, it's the maple blooms.

And then later, you know, in the fall, you have the seed, the samara.

But anyway, the winged, you know.

And then of course, we have the beautiful, beautiful fall foliage.

- Love it.

- You know, it can just be any color imaginable.

And some of the maples kind of are.

They keep their color all the way during the summer.

I've got a maple that comes out purple, stays purple.

Japanese maples are all real interesting too.

- Yeah, they are, they are.

- You know, they're kind of expensive, but there's a lot of our just bigger trees that big maples that are awfully pretty.

The other one's ornamental grasses.

People say, "Well, they look kind of dead in the winter."

Well, they are kind of dead, but it's pretty because this is what I like about the ornamental grasses, like the maiden grass, which is Miscanthus, muhly grass, one of our natives.

The switchgrass is a native, but they have a cultivar called Shenandoah Red that's really pretty.

And the thing about the grasses in the garden, in the wintertime, of course, they're pretty all summer, you know, they come up with a different colored foliage or variegated foliage depending on what kind of grass you got, and then in the fall, you know, they can get kind of go through a little bit of fall coloration, especially the Shenandoah Red switchgrass.

But then you have the flower plumes that come up, you know, and they're real... You know, people talk about, these garden designers talk about motion in the garden.

Well, in the winter, you get the wind, breeze.

It makes those little tassels just go back and forth and, you know, all, of course, the leaves are all brown and dead, but they're pretty, So that's one of 'em.

I like the ornamental grasses for that reason.

They're pretty year 'round.

Sourwood is one of our native trees.

I really like sourwood.

- Do you?

[laughs] - I really do.

I hunt 'em down if I'm out hiking in the woods, you know.

They're called lily of the valley tree, because in the summer or spring or whenever they have these blooms, they'll come out like fingers, and you can smell 'em.

You can walk around, you go, "[sniffs] What's that?"

And you look up, you know, and it'll be a sourwood.

So the tassels stay on, and then they just stay there and dry up.

Of course, you get sourwood honey.

Man, yeah, the bees love those flowers.

And you get that really great honey.

Then in the fall, it's like one of the first right along with black gum and sweet gum that color up.

They color up, one of the first ones, one of the trees in the woods know to color, really bright, pretty red, you know.

So they're multi-seasonal too.

You got your flowers.

You got the dried flowers.

You got the fall color.

And then the tree itself is just a pretty, pretty tree.

It's more of an understory.

It doesn't get really big like a big oak or something.

So it's more of an understory.

- That's good.

- And this Henry Lauder's walkingstick, - I was surprised to see that on your list.

- That's a weird one, yeah, yeah.

The first time I laid eyes on that thing was at the President's Garden at Mississippi State University.

And I saw that thing and I thought, what is wrong with that thing?

Because it's contorted.

I mean, the name of it is Corylus avellana 'Contora'.

Really interesting looking, looks like a puzzle.

And the fall foliage is pretty.

It's kind of a purplish red, and the blooms are pretty.

It's got a lot of attributes that, of course, in the winter, you see this crazy contorted plant.

Everybody goes, "What is that thing?"

So anyway, I like that one, Henry Lauder's walkingstick, which is a hazelnut.

The English call it a Filbert, which I think is kind interesting.

Anyway, the other one is a Chinese or lacebark elm.

That one's really amazing.

It's got some of the most fascinating bark, just pretty yellowish.

I don't know.

I don't even how to explain it.

It's all mottled, and the older the tree gets, the prettier it looks, and it has pretty fall foliage.

And it's just a nice form tree.

They use 'em a lot in the medians at Mississippi State in the fall like now, wow!

Yeah, they're pretty, pretty fall color, pretty bright yellow.

Okay, the next one we're gonna talk about is the Washington hawthorn, and it is a small mid-size tree that's got a nice shape to it.

And you see it in Corinth, my hometown, around entrances to factories because it is a small tree, and it's got a nice, you know, shape, rounded shape.

And it has pretty white flowers in the spring in umbles.

You know, they're just not real showy, but you get the whole tree in flower, it's pretty showy.

But the prettiest thing is in the winter when that thing totally defoliates and every branch is packed with these really pretty red berries.

- I've seen that.

- So, yeah, and the birds like 'em, but they wait till they're about starved to death so that they won't eat 'em until the end of the winter.

It's really interesting.

[Chris laughs] You know, they eat all this other stuff, and then you go out there and you see all these birds eating up your hawthorn berries.

The other one that I like is the Kousa dogwood.

- Yeah, it's a good one.

- It's an interesting dogwood.

Of course, it's not the native.

It's one that was imported, but it's got some really interesting characteristics.

Of course, it's got the dogwood bloom, but the petals, well, on these, they're like this shape.

They're pointed.

Yeah, they're pointed, and they're pretty white.

And it blooms really prolifically in the spring.

But then in the winter, you know, it has kind of a okay fall color, nothing to like, you know, flip over backwards about, but the pretty thing is those fruit.

It has these big strawberry red fruit that stay on the tree 'cause I don't think anything eats 'em.

No, I hadn't seen them, anything eating 'em.

I don't know if squirrels eat 'em or not, but anyway, it's a real pretty big berry.

You know, on our dogwoods, they're really tiny about like my little fingernail, tiny.

But on this Kousa, they're big like a strawberry.

Anyway, interesting.

And then, of course, there's all our crab apples.

You know, crab apples, they kind of tend to be sometimes disease-prone, but, gosh, when they flower, wow!

When they flower, they just take over the yard, you know, just a big flush of pretty flowers.

I picked this one called Prairifire.

And I looked at the pictures and I thought, man, that thing's...

I've got a couple of crab apples in my yard, but not this one, I got something or another one, but I don't remember the name of it.

And then you get the fall color, They have pretty fall color, and then you get the fruit, you know, for the winter.

So to me, those are my picks.

- Those are your top 10.

- Yeah, top 10 I'd say.

And then there's lots of others.

- Oh yeah, there's plenty of 'em.

- You know, there could be... People could, you know, come up with some more, I'm sure.

- And all of these are relatively easy to grow, everything, easy to care?

- Yep, yep, yep, yeah.

Yep, I have nearly every one of these.

- Okay, we'll have to come out to your yard to see that.

- Oh, I don't have old Henry Lauder, though.

- Oh, you don't have the Henry Lauder?

- No, I don't have him.

- The contorta.

- Yeah.

I'll need to get that one.

[laughs] - Dr. Kelly, we appreciate that.

That's good information.

- Sure.

- It's fun as always.

Fun as always.

Thank you much.

[upbeat country music] Let's talk a little bit about Virginia creeper.

Virginia creeper is a native perennial woody vine.

It has five leaflets, five leaflets, not three.

If it had three leaflets, it would be poison ivy.

So again, this has five leaflets, Virginia creeper.

It has beautiful fall foliage, as you can well see.

It has little adhesive discs on its tendrils, which allows it to stick to just about any surface.

It will develop a fruit.

And of course, the birds and the wildlife enjoy the fruit.

It grows in full sun and full shade, can be used as a ground cover as well, but if you having a problem with Virginia creeper, here's what you do.

Just mow it, pull it, get your weed eater out, and just knock it out that way.

No need to use any chemicals.

So again, Virginia creeper, five leaflets, not three.

[upbeat country music] All right, Mr. D., let's talk a little bit about pond care, pond maintenance.

- You know, the University of Tennessee has a real good publication that if you've got a pond, I encourage you to... You can go online and get it like I did, and you print it off.

But it's 50 pages, so you better have plenty of ink and plenty of paper.

- Right.

- But it is chock... Do y'all have any of these at the office?

- We have a few, yeah.

- You have a few at the office?

That'd be what I suggest you do.

Go by the office and pick one up.

But it's just chock-full of information about ponds.

And ponds require different levels of maintenance depending on what you use your pond for.

If it's just for aesthetic purposes and you don't do a whole lot of fishing out of it, then pretty much all you really need to do is keep the bank clean.

And keep in mind that whenever you put anything in that pond, like if you blow grass into the pond, when it breaks down, it utilizes oxygen.

The plankton, - Good point.

- That can interfere with the food that the fish need.

So, blow your grass away from the pond or use a mulching system so that you don't blow anything into the pond if you can help it.

If you have weeds and need to control the weeds, there are several herbicides depending upon the type of weeds that you have.

This is not really the best time of the year to control weeds in a pond during the, you know, late hot summer.

Really the springtime is a better time to use herbicides.

If you need to and you feel like you have to, don't go out there and treat your whole bank area or around the pond at one time.

I wouldn't treat.

If they're floating weeds, I probably wouldn't treat over a third of that pond at a time.

- Can you give us an example of a floating weed?

- Duckweed.

And, you know, it's an example of a floating weed.

And there are submerged weeds and then emergent weeds.

There's some that grow on the edge of pond that you can use glyphosate and, you know, different herbicides.

I've got several here on weed control, and that is probably... You guys, is that the number one call you get at the office?

- Yeah, I know Booker does.

There's a lot of that.

- Weeds control and algae in the pond.

In that area, yeah.

- Right, well, some examples of the floating weeds, I mentioned duckweed, watermeal.

Water hyacinth is another floating weed.

There's several algaes out there, planktonic, filamentous, chara.

The submerged weeds would be like watermilfoil, naiad, elodea, pondweeds, Hydrilla, and then the emergent weeds are the ones that are kind of on the edge in shallow water, American lotus, cattail, smartweeds, water primrose, water lily, and willows.

And if you have a lot of shallow areas, you're gonna have a lot of these emergent weeds.

And if you have a pretty steep bank and goes down to four feet, you know, three or four feet, you're not gonna have a lot of these emergent weeds.

So you might need to keep that in mind if you're constructing a pond or if your water gets low and you can do some cleaning out around the pond.

But, you know, you use different herbicides for different kinds of weeds.

On the floating weeds that we talked about, you can use 2,4-D, diquat or a couple of the more common herbicides that you would use according to label directions.

Most of the agricultural chemicals that are out there are not good for ponds, and you don't want even that runoff from an agricultural field to get into a pond, but these herbicides that I'm mentioning have been cleared by EPA and they're safe for the aquatic organisms, the fish, and things like that.

The submerged weeds, again, some of them, 2,4-D will work on watermilfoil.

Diquat is pretty much labeled for all of those submerged weeds.

And was that endothall is another common herbicide for submerged weeds.

And then I see fluridone, and strictly, I'm just looking.

- Right.

- I'm on page 19 I think of this publication.

- It's nice chart.

- It has all of these weeds and herbicides listed.

- Right.

And while you're looking at that Mr. D., how do you spray for like submerged weeds and some of these other weeds that you're mentioning, though?

Just right over the top?

- Just put it out in there, but you need to follow the label, and you need to understand if you're treating a floating weed out there, so you're basically putting a certain amount of herbicide in that pond, you need to know how much water you got in that, how many acre feet of water.

And then the back section of this publication, it tells you how to figure that.

- Okay.

- Let me see if I can find that.

Right there, look that.

- Oh, sure does.

How about that?

- You know, it has some examples, and it tells you how to do, you know, the algebra that you use to figure, and there's probably, you know, a little geometry in there too, you know?

- Shapes.

- But it tells you how to figure how much to put out there and you can just spray it, you know, with hose and sprayers or anything like that, get it out in the water.

The emergent weeds around, you just go around the edge of the pond and spray with your regular, you know, backpack sprayer or sprayer.

- Right.

- But again, this is not the ideal time of the year to do that.

And keep in mind, if you have a lot of dead material that goes into that pond, as it decomposes, it's gonna, you know, take up oxygen.

So you might want to try to kind of rake some of that out and, you know, put it in your compost pile or something like that.

- Then what we frequently ask for is how deep the pond, whether they look at it like how deep your pond, how many acres do you have, acre pond or one or two acres there.

That'll tell you how when you start using the chemical how to measure it out.

- Right, right, you just need to know that.

If you are a serious fisherman or you're producing catfish in your pond, then you need to actually do a soil test to collect mud samples from the bottom of the pond, let it dry out because you need the pH, you know, between, what, 5.2 and 6 or something like that?

So you might have to lime your pond.

You may have to fertilize it because you're fertilizing the algae that the fish feed on, but you only do that if you're very seriously about producing a certain number of pounds of fish.

If you're just, you know, catching a bass every once in a while, you probably need to do a population survey every once in a while to determine what you've got, and you can do that by seining.

You know, y'all got one of the best fish specialists in the country, Ron Blair.

- Yeah, Ron Blair.

He is a UT Extension fish specialist.

I know he has a lot of other irons in the fire, but , you know, he's a good man to go out and put in a pond, let him go around, and do some seining to do a fish survey.

But, you know, you can do that to try to determine whether or not you need to restock, but, you know, if the pond was just for aesthetic purposes primarily and want the grandkids to fish every once in a while, I would keep it mowed, mow around the edge.

I'd make sure I keep, so have some mosquito fish or the Bti - Good point, yeah.

- Or the Bti in that pond because they do produce mosquitoes and snakes like.

There are a lot of water snakes.

- I was gonna get to that.

- So that's another reason to mow around the edge.

You know, if you let it grow up around the edge and have you little narrow path going down to the edge, you may have some visitors.

There may be other people that like that.

- Yeah, hate snakes.

I don't hate 'em, I don't like 'em.

- It's a amazing ecosystem.

It's its own little ecosystem.

And you got water birds and interesting things, turtles and frogs and things like that that are all part of it, and it's pretty neat, but it does require a bit of maintenance.

So you need you one of these books.

- Yeah, come by the office and get you one of those books.

Myself and Book would be more than happy to help you out.

Thank you, Mr. D. It's good information.

- All right.

[upbeat country music] - At what time does a gardener decide what plants are worth saving and which are too far gone to even try to resuscitate?

For example, this one right here, I'd say it's a goner.

There's no green growth whatsoever.

That one we can yank up and replace.

This one right here, well, I'd say if 89% of the canopy is dead that that one is not worth saving either.

You know, you could just buy another plant and it could catch up with these others, and you could save a lot of time.

So that one goes too, but now these three, that's a little better chance of maybe these recovering.

And what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna cut off the dead, and then we can kinda see what they look like.

Oh, it's easier to do this.

There we go.

Now some of this is weeds.

So we're gonna pull that out so you can get an idea of really what's left of the plant that's still growing.

So see that one's not so bad.

That one's pretty good.

All right, let's look at this one.

Now, see, that one's not bad.

See, we got a pretty good little canopy.

Then let's look at this last one.

There we go.

Not too bad.

I think these are probably gonna make it, they're probably gonna come out next spring.

Put a little fertilizer on them, and they should come out and do okay.

[upbeat country music] - All right, here's our Q and A segment.

Y'all ready?

All right, these are some great questions.

Here's our first viewer email.

"What is this on my zinnia leaves?"

And this is Pat from Covington, Louisiana.

So what do you think about that, Mr. D.?

- It looked like Alternaria leaf spot to me is what it looks like, and that's a really common problem on zinnias.

And there's several fungicides out there that'll help you with that.

Other than if you're overwatering or watering at the wrong time and that kind of thing, the cultural things that you may be doing wrong, avoid doing that.

You know, make sure you don't water late in the day so that the leaves stay wet all night long, and water early enough so that they have plenty of time to dry off.

But the fungicides, a lot of them, chlorothalonill is a good fungicide for Alternaria leaf spot, mancozeb, myclobutanil, thiophanate methyl, copper, you know, all of those fungicides.

Just check the label, and be sure you follow the label directions.

And if you start spraying with the fungicide, now you're not going to clear up the spots on those leaves.

They're there, as long as the leaf is there.

You possibly can prevent it from spreading.

And then next year, if you'll start, you know, spray a little bit early or spray earlier, you can prevent it from spreading.

You can't cure the problem that you already have, but you can maybe prevent it from spreading or prevent it from happening.

- Yeah, it's very common.

- Yeah, it's very common.

- I love zinnias.

- I do too.

- And no matter what I do, I always get a little bit of that, especially late in the season, you know?

- And when it's hot, humid, that's when you see it the most.

- And one thing I found out, I like to save my seed, you know, from my big pretty flower ones that are pretty red or different colors, and I'll save the seed.

Rarely do they come back true to form.

But anyway, I like to save the seed, and I found out, though, that I seem to get progressively worse, and it is carried in the seed.

- Seed, ugh.

- The pathogen is carried in the seed and on plant debris.

So again, clean up your plant debris because those pathogens can overwinter.

And I'm gonna have to, I guess, quit collecting my seed, or either I might be better with spraying because the seed can be contaminated.

- Oh, that's good, Dr. Kelly.

That's good, that's good.

All right, there you have it, Pat.

Appreciate the question.

All right, here's our next viewer email.

"My blueberry bloomed a lot in the spring, "but never made a berry.

How do I get berries?"

And this is Sandra.

So, Mr. D. likes those old blueberries, right?

- I like blueberries.

- How do we get 'em, Mr. D?

And it sounds like that is a rabbiteye-type probably.

If you're in the southeastern United States, that's the most common blueberry grown, and they do require cross pollination.

And the more different varieties you have, the better off you are, but you need at least two different varieties, and they really need to bloom at about the same time for it to work.

- Well, that is good because, yeah, the information we got, she only had one plant, right, and does need to be pollinated.

So you just answered those.

- Yeah, cross pollination is better fruit set, for sure.

- That's right.

Now, if it's a highbush type in more northern areas, they do tend to be self-fruitful.

And I can think of one reason that a highbush type could have a lot of blooms on it and have no berries at all, and that would be a late freeze.

A late freeze could take all the blooms out.

I mean, I can't think of any other reason.

- Exactly, that's everything that I had had thought about too.

And, for an example, all of my rabbiteye blueberries, this spring when they bloomed in full bloom, we had that really, really cold weather.

And for the first time ever, I had no fruit set.

- None.

- It killed all of the blooms.

- I had that happen last year on mine.

- Really?

- And this year, I had a frost.

I live about 80 miles north of Memphis.

And so I had that late freeze, but I wasn't in full bloom-- - Did you cover 'em up?

- At that time.

No, I did not.

I did that one time, one time, and it didn't get below freezing that night.

So I never again, never again am I gonna do that, but actually, I think it helped my crop this year because I had a very heavy-- - Well, that's great.

- Blueberry crop.

- And they were bigger.

- Man, I didn't have any.

- It just kinda took a few of 'em out.

- Took a few, okay.

- I thought about covering 'em up.

I knew the cold was coming too.

- And you didn't cover 'em up?

- No, I'm too sorry, I reckon.

Too cold.

[Chris laughs] - You gotta practice what you preach.

- It's too cold, I know it is.

- It's not easy.

- It's too cold ole weather.

- I mean, my rabbiteye types are probably- - Yeah, they're big.

I bet you they're eight feet tall.

- Eight, ten feet tall.

- Yeah, that's a pretty good size.

Yeah, and it produced pretty well, huh?

- Oh, I had great crop.

Best crop I've ever had this year.

- How many bushes you got?

- Four.

- Ah.

- And I think we had like 25 gallons.

- Wow, gallons, man.

- Those four blueberries - Making me hungry.

- That is pretty good, getting Dr. Kelly hungry.

[laughs] - No, they're good.

They're good.

- They're good for you too.

- Yeah, they are good.

So there you have it, Sandra, thank you so much for your question.

And there's your answer from Mr. D. himself, right?

Still eating on blueberries.

All right, so Mr. D., Dr. Kelly, thank y'all so much.

Fun as always.

Fun as always.

Thank you very much.

- Great time.

- Remember, we love to hear from you.

Send us an email or letter.

The email address is questions@familyplotgarden.com, and the mailing address is Family Plot 7151 Cherry Farms Road, Cordova, Tennessee 38016, or you can go online to familyplotgarden.com.

That's all we have time for today.

Thanks for watching.

The gardening season is pretty much over.

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[upbeat country music] [relaxed guitar strum]