The high population of aphids this year was caused by our wet and humid spring weather. The fastest way to get rid of them is to drench the soil beneath the tree with a systemic insecticide diluted in a bucket of water.
Bob Morris
Bob Morris is a horticulture expert living in Las Vegas and professor emeritus for the University of Nevada. Visit his blog at xtremehorticulture.blogspot.com. Send questions to Extremehort@aol.com.
Grasshoppers start cute and small with small appetites and jump from plant to plant. But as they grow bigger, their increased appetites cause more and more damage to landscapes.
Tomatoes stop setting fruit when air temperatures stay consistently above 95 degrees. The tomatoes that set earlier continue to grow and mature when it stays hot. If the air temperature drops below 95 for a couple of days, new flowers will again set fruit.
California or Mexican fan palms can make a mess in the yard. But date palms are different. Male date palms are less messy than female date palms.
Slime mold fungi are particularly disgusting because they are gelatinous and, over time, change color if they’re left undisturbed. Slime molds can lay atop the grass and smother it.
Prunely a tree severely opens the canopy to damage by intense sunlight. This in turn can cause branches to sunburn.
If rabbits ate the trunk of a tree in a complete circle around the trunk, it’s a goner. Let it sucker from the bottom and start a new tree from the suckers.
Plant landscape trees in wet soil and keep plant roots wet during planting. The soil should stay wet for the first couple of days while these plants are getting established.
This is the time of year that leaf-footed plant bugs increase in numbers and infest your fruit trees and your vegetable garden. Cordless hand vacuum cleaners work great for sucking them up.
Adding woodchips to the soil as an amendment has gained popularity largely because of social media. Woodchips applied to the soil surface as a mulch is OK, but mixing these into the soil can lead to problems if you aren’t careful.
Crop rotation has been around for more than 150 years as a good management technique for reducing disease and fertilizer problems, whether you grow a small number of plants or large numbers.
Asparagus usually grows well here, but there are some differences among the varieties. Stay away from heirloom varieties such as Mary Washington because they don’t produce enough spears in any climate.
Although large pine trees provide shade, they require excessive watering to remain healthy.
Many people contacted me about whether they could plant seeds or put transplants into the ground because of this unusually cold weather. My answer was the same to them as it is here. It depends.
