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

I'm Chris Cooper.

Just when the garden gets going, the bugs arrive.

Today, we're gonna talk about pests of tomato and squash.

Also, lilies are a great way to add a pop of color to the garden.

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 Frank Hale.

Dr. Frank is a UT Extension entomologist, and Joellen Dimond will be joining us later.

Doc, welcome to the show, we're glad to have you here.

- Yeah this first time here.

- Yes.

- This is great, thanks Chris.

- Thank you for being here.

Let's talk about vegetable pests, all right.

Specifically, let's talk about squash pests.

- Sure, I brought a squash plant here today just to show you.

We often use transplants, put 'em into the garden and guess what?

The insects are just waiting for these plants, okay.

And one thing we often see attacking the leaves are these little cucumber beetles.

So they can smell a squash plant pretty far away and they zoom in on it, so many times, you'll see the leaves just tattered.

So one thing I might suggest, there's a thing called a floating row cover, or cheese cloth, something like that.

You can actually cover tender plants, but still let the light in, but kinda exclude these pests and then that way you don't have to use so much insecticide 'cause otherwise they could eat the plants almost to the ground.

- Wow, 'cause they pretty much, what, skeletonize the leaves for the most part?

- Yeah, they look all skeletonized.

You can see feeding between the vein or even more feeding than that.

- Okay.

All right.

- Another thing, you might wanna keep the row cover on for awhile because we have other pests that will get on squash.

Squash bugs over winter around your garden, a good thing to do is lay down flat boards around the edge of your garden.

Lift those boards up in the spring, you'll see that over wintering squash bugs will be there.

You can just tap those boards into a bucket of soapy water and get rid of 'em because they're gonna move into the garden and start layin' their bronze-color eggs.

So if you see those eggs, Chris, what do you do with 'em?

- Get 'em off.

- Yeah, you squish 'em with your forefinger and your thumb and just crush 'em or tear off the part of the leaf that they're on because those are gonna give rise to the little nymphs and they're gonna be little gray bugs and before you know it, you can be covered up with squash bugs.

Another pest we have is called the squash vine borer.

It's a clear-wing moth borer.

It's related to dogwood borers and peach tree borers.

It's a red moth and most moths fly at night.

This one flies during the day.

It likes the bright sunshine and once that squash starts trailing out, growin' a little bit, it's gonna lay its eggs on the vine.

So until the plant maybe is just startin' to.

It's gonna take a while for the squash plant to start blooming.

Up 'til then, keep that floating row cover on it so it doesn't lay an egg because the caterpillar that arises from that egg will tunnel into the vine, devour it from the inside and about the time you have squash producing, the vine might just die.

- Wow, just collapses.

- Now when you have this, try not to put the row cover over the flowers.

If it starts bloomin', you gotta have a entryway for the bees to pollinate it.

Squash bees and other native bees.

- That goes, too, for the squash bug, going back to that practice, good sanitation would be something else you would recommend as well?

- Yeah, cleanin' up debris and stuff around the garden, but puttin' those boards down, they're gonna need a place to overwinter, fence rows and overgrown places like that.

Same for you know Colorado potato beetles will do the same thing on potatoes.

They move out from the weedy areas back into the garden.

- Wow.

And these are considered to be the major pests of the squash, right?

- Yeah, that's the main thing.

I think the worse thing, truthfully, has to be that squash vine borer 'cause it can kill the whole vine.

We can use insecticide sprays for that, but it's difficult because you have a plant that's blooming at the same time and you really don't wanna spray the flowers when a plant's blooming 'cause that could hurt the bees.

So you have to be very careful and maybe spray the base and up to, stop where the blooms are.

You know you don't wanna spray blooms.

- Good stuff.

Now let's talk about tomato pests.

Everybody likes to grow tomatoes, right?

- Yeah, everybody has at least one or two tomatoes, maybe a pepper thrown in there.

I brought a tomato plant today.

It's goin' good.

When they put those in the ground, sometimes you find 'em the next day and they've been clipped off.

Now what could do that?

- It's the cut worm.

- Cut worm, exactly.

A lot of these cut worms don't even over winter here, but they fly up on these spring storm fronts that we have, so the moth lives down south like the black cut worm, they lay their eggs on weeds and things and then as soon as you start tillin' your garden and plantin' your vegetables, guess what, they're lookin' for somethin' to eat.

They're nocturnal feeders, so they're under clumps of dirt in the soil during the daytime.

They come out at night and then they clip a plant and pull it back into their underground den to feed on.

So some people will get around the plant, put a little circle with aluminum foil.

That will kinda deter the cut worms a little bit.

Some people, organic, they might put within that circle, they might put diatomaceous earth or something irritating the insect.

So those are some things.

And of course we have insecticides you could spray.

You wanna spray the soil around the plant and the base of the plant so that when they walk across the soil at night, they pick up the insecticide.

- Okay, how about that.

Now what about aphids?

- Yeah, aphids, they can fly.

Some aphids fly and they'll move in from wild host plants, weeds and such, they'll land on usually the terminal of the plant, these new tender leaves.

And aphids can give rise to other aphids very quickly.

The female can either lay eggs or she can give rise to live young, so live birth.

So you have lots of aphids very quick.

Their life cycle is very fast and so you can start out with just a few wing forms that come in, they start layin' eggs or givin' birth and then you have lots of aphids.

So I like to, if I see aphids on a plant and I haven't put it in the ground, I take it, lay it on it's side and wash it down with soapy water with a hose, a really strong jet of water so you just blast the aphids off.

And you could really still do that still when they're in the garden.

If you see a tomato plant in the morning, just blast the top of it and you see some aphids and just physically remove 'em.

And then let the lady beetles and other predators.

So a lot of people, they want to do, the first thing is use an insecticide, but I say caution with aphids because if you just wait a couple weeks, lady beetles will lay their eggs there, they're lemon yellow eggs.

They lay 'em on the leaves amongst the aphids.

There's also a type of fly called syrphid flies or hover flies.

They'll lay a single white egg right there where the aphids are and the larva is predacious.

It'll just tear 'em apart.

There's a lot of good beneficial insects.

If we don't use a lot of insecticide in the garden, we can really build up good numbers of these insects.

- Good, I'm glad you mentioned that.

Good, good.

Yeah, go ahead.

- I was just gonna say the next thing is protecting the fruit.

So we have a plant.

We've got good size on it, it's flowering.

There's lots of different caterpillars that will lay eggs on the fruit or on the leaves nearby.

Probably the big one you see is the tomato or tobacco horn worm and they have the little tail-lookin' thing at the tail end and these caterpillars will get several inches long when full size and often you don't see 'em when they're small.

They kinda camouflage.

One time, not too long ago, I had tomatoes on my deck and guess what, we had corn earworms, we had horn worms, we had yellow-striped army worms, we had southern army worms.

There's a whole bunch of caterpillars.

- And all of this, you said, was in the city.

- Yeah, this was right in suburbia and then they find your plants.

So the moths are out at night.

They lay their eggs on the leaves of the plant or on the fruit and then they hatch out in a couple days and those caterpillars might feed for a couple weeks.

So when they're tiny, they don't do that much damage, but maybe by the time they get an inch long when they're about a fourth or fifth instar or stage, they can do a lot of feeding damage.

So usually, you can pick off, you just have a few plants, you can pick 'em off every day, but you have to be out there almost every day because they can do a lot of damage and they're hard to see.

Insecticides can be used.

One of the safer products for caterpillars is Bt.

Stands for Bacillus thuringiensis.

It's a bacterial toxin.

It's very safe for humans to be around and pets, but it's very toxic to caterpillars.

It paralyzes their mid-gut and then they stop feeding almost immediately and then they soon die, but it won't hurt your beneficial insects, your lady beetles, syrphid flies and other things, green lace wings, for instance.

So Bt is one of the safer things for gardeners to use.

We have a publication at UT Extension Publications.

It's called "You Can Control Garden Insects."

You might wanna check that out online.

- It is a good publication.

- Yeah, it is.

It has some pictures of what the insects look for and also control recommendations.

- Okay.

And also some on the beneficial insects.

- Doc, we're glad you're here.

That's good stuff.

- All right, thank you, Chris.

- Thank you.

We can tell you love this stuff.

- Oh, it's great.

What's better?

- Thank you.

[upbeat country music] - This is a lovely specimen of coral bark Japanese maple, grown for this brilliant red twigs which makes it a distinctive plant for winter interest.

And it's a great plant for the South.

It's very sun tolerant.

It was planted a little bit high, which is good for a Japanese maple, but this heavy staking can be an issue.

And let's talk about the fact that often when you have a plant with a large canopy, you're gonna need to stake it for blowing over.

There's a few options, though.

A staked plant, especially when staked this tightly, is not gonna be able to move in the wind.

And it should be able to move in the wind in order to build up strength.

It's a thing called taper.

And every time it blows there's a little bit of cambium tear, and it'll get stronger and stronger.

Since this is not able to move in the wind, it actually makes it weak, so that when we remove these it's more likely to flop.

So if you absolutely have to stake, you should certainly make this a little bit looser so that it can still do some blowing around in the wind.

Stake it just tightly enough to keep it from blowing over.

And the padding here on the bark is a good idea.

An option would have been to take these stakes, and rather than tying the tree to it, if you had simply hammered them through the root ball at three different points, at angles so that you're actually nailing the root ball into the firm ground below.

Then the tree is able to move in the wind and build up that strength and taper over time.

If you do have to do this, maybe a year, possibly more before you can remove the stakes, and hopefully by then the roots are well integrated into the ground, and the maple's ready to be on its own.

[upbeat country music] All right, Joellen, let's talk about lilies.

- Lilies, yes.

- So what do we need to know about lilies?

They're beautiful, by the way.

- Well, like the iris we talked about before, but the have gorgeous, large blooms, very showy in the landscape and in bouquets and you see 'em in weddings, in flower arrangements all the time.

Very showy.

One of my favorite flowers because of that.

I just love them.

- Yeah, I have a lot at home.

Yeah, I just love, love the colors.

- I've planted a lot of them and enjoyed a lot of them over the years.

But we're gonna talk about a few that do well in the Mid-South area.

In fact, this area and the area around Tennessee and zone 7, one of the greatest areas for lilies to grow in the ground so we need to take advantage of that.

- Yeah, by all means.

- The first one we're gonna talk about is the Asiatic lily, which is the ones you see in these containers right here and you can find them very easily in garden centers.

They come in containers or they have 'em in bags that you can buy and plant yourself.

Very easy to grow, very readily available.

And so they come in lots of colors and sizes.

You can see, I mean, they're just gorgeous.

Now if you want to cut them and bring them inside, you see the pollen on the ends here?

That stains really, really badly, so if you're bringing them inside, you're putting them in a bouquet, it's nice to just take your fingers and get rid of them, just pull them off and then they won't have that dark stain everywhere on your clothes or anything else.

Otherwise, it is pretty on the flower.

I like it.

Well, that's the Asiatic lilies and their hybrids.

There's one called.

We're gonna go from the earliest blooming ones to the latest blooming ones, which is lilium candidum, which is the Madonna lily.

It blooms in the fall and it's only white and it's very, very fragrant.

So that's a good one to have.

- In the fall.

- In the fall.

So see you have lots of lilies that bloom almost all summer long.

Then there's lilium formosanum, the formosa lily.

It blooms in the summer, usually June, July.

But it can be six to seven feet tall.

- Wow.

- Yeah, so gotta leave some room for these.

Then there is the one that you see everywhere.

In fact, it is brought over from Asia, but it has naturalized in North America, and that's the tiger lily, lilium lancifolium.

And that's a beautiful one to have in your yard.

It will naturalize, it'll do very well, but it has smaller flowers than these, but they usually hang down and they're orange with little black spots on them.

Probably people have noticed in the landscape more, I mean out in nature than they have in their own yards, but do very well and there are other colors they've developed for that too.

- Before you go any further, naturalize, you used the term.

What does that mean?

- That means that it has escaped and it has gone and you can see 'em in ditches and around on nature walks in the woods.

They like that.

Then there is the Easter lily and it has its own, it's longiflorum and its hybrids.

Now we see 'em blooming at Easter and it's a trumpet lily 'cause it has a long stem that looks like a trumpet and there's lots of those trumpet lilies, but the Easter lily is one that you know you can plant it in your yard and it will grow here and come back and bloom the next year in June.

So it works really well.

Of course, of all the trumpet lilies, the one that is most popular is called Regale.

And it has maroon on the back side of it and white on the inside and of course it's very tall.

It's six, seven feet tall.

So very regal plant.

Then you've got the Oriental lilies.

The Oriental lilies are more sturdy than the Asiatic and the trumpets.

And they have done a cross.

Of course, the most famous one of these Oriental ones is the Stargazer.

And you see that at the florist all the time.

It's pink and then it has the white edges on 'em.

Very popular.

But they've crossed the Oriental lily with trumpet lilies and they call them Orienpets.

- Orienpets.

- Yes, Oriental and trumpets, so Orienpets.

And so they are much sturdier and there's a lot of different colors and types of those too.

But what do they like to do?

Where do they like to grow?

They like sun.

- Full sun, right?

- Like full sun, they like partly shady area.

But they like well-drained soil, and they do not like wet soil.

So if you're having problems with them for diseases or insects or anything, it may be the environment that you have them in.

Give them room.

Don't bunch them up close together.

Give them some space so the air can move between them because you don't want the botrytis, the leaf disease that gets on them 'cause if you have that, you can preventively spray that the next year with a fungicide, but you know, environment is probably the best key to be having success with the lilies.

Is give them enough space, don't crowd them.

- Space, well-drained soils.

- And well-drained soils.

Yes, now and when you buy them like this, just remember that lilies are a bulb, but they don't have the papery covering on them like a normal bulb would, so that means the outside dries out very fast and you don't want that to dry out because that's part of the bulb that's gonna grow.

So when you get these, plant them as soon as you get them and try to keep them moist.

And they do reproduce by, you know, the bulbs just keep getting more and more on each side, but sometimes they have little spots on the end called imbricate bulbs that come on the leaves and you can take take those off and they'll reproduce by that all, too.

They're very interesting.

There is one insect problem that they have and that's the red lily beetle.

I have never seen that here on my lilies, but apparently it lives its entire life cycle on a lily so you're either gonna see eggs or you're gonna see the bug itself or you're gonna see its nymph stages, but they say the best way to control it is with neem oil on the nymph stage.

- Nymph stage, okay.

- You can use insecticides too, but it's pretty easy to control with neem oil if you want to, if you see them, but just inspect often.

- But you haven't seen.

- I've never seen them here, but they say they're a problem, but I've never seen them.

In fact, the only trouble that I keep havin', which is why I bought me some more is that the voles like to eat the bulbs.

So now that I've got these new lilies that I wanna plant in my yard, I'm thinking of getting a wire cage and planting them in a wire cage to keep the voles.

- That's how you're gonna deal with the voles.

- I'm gonna make a wire cage to plant them in so that the voles can't get to them.

- Ah ha, smart, smart.

- Mm hm.

- Didn't realize we had that problem with voles.

I need to pay a little bit more attention to mine.

All right.

Okay.

But I do like the lilies, though, and they're easy.

- They're not difficult, no.

Huh uh.

I've never had any problems with 'em.

I've just enjoyed them.

- Good deal, well, we appreciate that, Joellen.

Buy more lilies, folks.

- Buy more lilies.

- Yeah, you would enjoy that.

- They're beautiful.

- They're beautiful.

Thank you again.

Good stuff.

[upbeat country music] - Here we are in the butterfly garden since we've trimmed it.

And notice that all of the parsley and the oregano is startin' to bloom and attracting bugs.

We've got the butterfly weed that's startin' to bloom and we have some Rudbeckia that's coming back and getting ready to bloom.

We're gonna add our annuals to all of this.

This year, we'll be adding some white and purple petunias to attract butterflies and bees.

As always, we're gonna be putting zinnias in because this is a nice flat surface that butterflies like to land on and get nectar.

We also have lantana like we did last year.

Butterflies love lantana.

And we have some smaller zinnias that are kind of an orangy red color that we'll use to fill in.

And we will also be putting our sand and water back in for where the butterflies can come get a drink.

All right, we've finished planting all the annuals to attract the butterflies and the bees and when these herbs get finished blooming, we'll trim them back.

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

Y'all ready for these questions?

These are real good questions.

- We're ready.

- Yes.

- You ready?

All right.

Here's our first viewer email.

"How do I keep the cut worms out of my squash?

"It seems every year I get the squash growing "only to be killed by cut worms.

Thanks."

And this is from Tommy from Chatsworth, Georgia.

So, Mr. Tommy, guess what?

We have our entomologist here, Dr. Hale.

So what do you say, Dr. Hale?

- We have cut worms whether it's Tennessee or Georgia.

We have lots of 'em.

The moth lays its eggs on weeds and such.

The little caterpillars are nocturnal feeders.

They hide during the day, then they come out at night and clip the plant.

So we like to, just a simple thing you can do is just get a toilet paper roll.

You can cut that off and then wrap that with some aluminum foil and sort of fit that around the base of it.

If you wanna add some diatomaceous earth within that ring or around it, that irritates the insects.

They don't like that, so that would help.

Of course, insecticides can be applied.

Since they're active at night, you do it in late afternoon to the soil around the base of the plant.

- The toilet paper roll, how about that?

- It's good.

- Yeah, that's a pretty good idea.

We gotta conserve, you know.

[laughs] - That is good stuff.

So there you have it, Mr. Tommy, from our bug guy.

So how about that?

That's good stuff.

All right, here's our next viewer email.

"My old magnolia tree loses a lot of leaves in the spring "and has very few flowers during the summer.

what does this very old tree need?"

And this is from Linda in Holly Springs, Mississippi.

So yeah, it's an old tree, so she says "What does this very old tree need?"

'cause it's losing the leaves, Joellen.

- Well, you know, I have a question, a couple of questions.

One is, you know, it's old, but are the trees around it old also?

So has it gotten more shade that it hasn't had before?

So maybe that's why it's not blooming as much.

It is an older tree.

Maybe it needs nutrients.

A lot of older trees benefit from deep-root feedings, so you know, but you would have to get somebody to do that that has the kind of equipment that you can do that.

- Certified arborist.

- Yes, a certified arborist would have that.

Then, you know, just keep it as healthy as you possibly can because if she sees no other signs of decline, I mean, maybe it just is in a natural decline of that particular tree, but trying to make it as healthy as possible is probably the best bet.

- Do you wanna add to that, Dr.?

- Well, southern magnolia is evergreen, so it's always gonna be casting off old leaves.

So just, if they're objectionable to you, get a rake, rake some out.

If you have dead branches or some die back, prune 'em properly and just let a little air in there and I think they should be fine.

I think you're right about the sunshine and blooming.

They might need more sunlight.

Could be too shady.

- 'Cause we don't have a picture to see, you know, which tree it is 'cause it might be shaded out.

- But it's still a wonderful tree whether it blooms a lot or not.

- That's right.

- Very good.

- It's actually the state tree for Mississippi.

Yeah, I just learned that.

- So there you go.

- All right, thank you for the question.

Here's our next viewer email.

"Can you please tell me what this is?"

And this is from Caroline.

So I think we know what that is.

- Yes.

- What is that?

- It's lilyturf or monkeygrass.

- Liriope.

- Liriope.

- Liriope, yes.

- Liriope.

A lot of people plant liriope, especially if they have areas.

You know, I've seen it in areas that are poorly drained.

I've seen it in areas that have bare spots, areas that, you know, soil is eroding, so you can pretty much grow it-- - And it does great job everywhere.

Sometimes, some of the varieties are a little more aggressive and that's probably escaped somewhere that she didn't want it.

But there's nothing wrong with it.

Some people either love it or hate it.

- Yeah, I know a lot of people that hate it.

Go ahead, Doc, anything you wanna add to that?

- Well, there's a little insect, a scale insect, that sometimes gets on it.

It attaches low down on the thing, but I don't think it hurts it a lot.

Occasionally, you could apply a systemic insecticide to control that if you had a problem with it.

It might cause it to look unthrifty and not grow in as well as it should.

- They do have a lot of foliar diseases, too, but that's why the one thing about why it's called lilyturf monkeygrass is 'cause you cut it once a year in February and you get rid of it and you collect all of that and then get rid of it and then you don't have those diseases still hanging around to infect the plants for the next year.

- 'Cause if you don't, they look all tattered and torn.

- Yeah, good sanitation.

You know, actually removing it from the garden.

That's a good idea.

- It's a good idea?

- Yeah, I like it.

- It's a good idea.

All right, so there you have it Ms. Caroline.

It's liriope or monkeygrass.

All right, so Joellen, Doc, we're outta time.

It's been fun.

- That was quick.

- It's fun.

- We need more questions.

Keep 'em comin'.

- Keep 'em comin'.

- Keep 'em comin'.

- Keep 'em comin'.

- Thanks, Chris.

- Thank you.

Remember, we love to hear from you.

Send us a 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.

To get more information on tomatoes, squash or lilies, head on over to FamilyPlotGarden.com.

We have links to Extension publications on these topics and many others.

Be sure to join us next week for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

Be safe.

[upbeat country music] [acoustic guitar chords]