Problem Solving in the Landscape - February 13, 2021

I want to thank you all for coming this morning.

My name is Don Williams, as you can see by the handout.

My wife and I, my wife is sitting in the back.

She can also answer any questions that you might have, but we own Botanical Concepts here in Vero Beach.

We've been in business for 20 years and we service pretty much all of Indian River County.

We do go into Brevard County a little bit. I want to start out by reading something.

I wrote this book last year called, How to Ruin Your Garden and Other Ways to Suck at It.

It's kind of funny, but it pokes fun at gardening, pokes fun at the things people do in gardening to set up a landscape.

So let's start off by reading something.

I think this will be good to preface what we're going to talk about. How do you think the plants feel about all of this? Maybe they have feelings too.

After all, the sensitive plant, yes it's a real plant, leaves curl up when it is touched by somebody that can't keep their hands to themselves.

Ask yourself, do plants have eyes and ears?

They can't see or hear you when you're coming to chop off their limbs.

They tolerate a lot of abuse, moved around, dug up, thrown in your trunk, starved to death, let go thirsty, leaves falling off as they bake in the hot sun and generally ignored.

Plants must be tough.

They can't run away.

They can't hide from your lack of care.

They don't like being talked about behind your back by your neighbors and they hate it when the dog squirts on them.

Do plants have a social life? Think about it.

They hang out in groups, show off their blooms when treated right, but treat them wrong.

They drop their leaves when ignored and go into shock when cut back too hard.

They don't have a brain, but they communicate in ways we do not understand.

You want grief, they will bring it on.

Do you talk to your plants? Do you make them feel better with your empty promises of better care? Maybe you should.

You might feel better and they might bring you more pleasure or give you so much grief.

Plants are like the Venus flytrap.

They grab your finger in retribution and not let go.

So don't stick your fingers where they don't belong.

Treat your plants right and you will all get along just fine.

When Tina asked me about the seminar back in November, she said, what do you want to do? I did one on landscaping a couple years ago and we talked to so many customers both on our jobs and my wife goes out and does consultations with people.

So we thought, let's do something that identifies the problem and offer some solutions.

So here in our climate in South Florida, gardening offers many challenges and I'm sure most of you here today have challenges and that's why you're here.

And the rain, the heat, the cold temperature, hurricanes, I mean lately all the cold weather is throwing its or roaring its reary head on plants.

So I want to apply, you've heard of Occam's razor?

And I want to apply that to plants today.

So Occam's razor is attributed to an English

Franciscan friar, William of Occam, back in the 13th century.

In my basically take on

that it says the simplest explanation to a problem is usually the right one.

And I think sometimes people think there's a more complicated problem than there really is.

And it usually is the more basic step to what the problem is.

So I recommend stepping back and taking

a look at it.

Thinking about what's going on around the plant before jumping to any conclusions of what it might be.

So as I said in the book there, plants communicate in various ways to us.

They wilt, their leaves turn yellow, they drop when we're not treating them right.

So after installing a new landscape and the honeymoon is over and you go on with your life and do other things, there are two basic thoughts to keep in mind.

The first is be forewarned so that you can identify problems before they do permanent damage to your plants.

And then second, know what to do to solve the problem before devastation sets in.

So how many of you would say here today you're a green thumb gardener? No? A couple? Well we can all be green thumb gardeners.

Okay, the first thing that I find so important,

and I don't think it gets thinked about a lot of times, is choosing the right plant for the right situation.

Now how many times have you bought a plant, you walk into the garden center, you buy a plant because you really like that plant.

And like the anthurium, it's a beautiful plant, but it's not meant to be planted in the yard.

This is more of a table plant, pot in a patio and so forth.

So plant performance isn't necessarily how it's being taken care of, but was it the right plant for the right situation.

So thinking about before you buy the plant, are you going to plant it in the shade, part shade, or sun?

If you plant a plant that wants to be in the shade and you plant it in the sun, chances are it will not do, not perform as you wanted it to.

What kind of soil is it going to be planted in? Is it sand, is it loose soil, or is it hard pan? I find that if you live out 58th street or west, or in a gated community where they've dug out ponds, chances are your

soil is going to be hard pan.

And plants do have more difficulty growing in that kind of soil.

Now irrigation, do you have an irrigation system, or are you going to water by hand?

If you're going to water by hand, that's going to require a more diligent effort to make that plant grow.

Is the plant tired or unhealthy looking? Is it fresh, is it full, is the color good? So if we look at the picture on the bottom, the corotin, corotin number one is a plant that just doesn't look that healthy.

It's kind of crooked in the pot, and I'm going to tell you right now, that plant will never perform like you want it to.

It just won't do it.

Where corotin two is a nice fresh looking plant, the color is good, and it's full.

Chances are the root system is well developed in the pot, and planted right in the ground, it will do just fine.

No, I seriously doubt there's not going to be any chance for it.

I mean I've seen them in the landscape and they just sit there.

Not that they'll die, they'll just sit there and not really do anything.

So watering.

So when I visit clients, the most common problem that I see that usually occurs is they're not getting sufficient watering.

From the start of the landscape to continuing care, water is the most important factor for success.

So let's talk about signs of water stress.

Leaves turning yellow, falling off.

And you can see that commonly in hibiscus, gardenias.

Now, there

is an exception to that.

All this cold weather we've had, hibiscus are turning yellow, and the leaves are dropping off.

Now we were at a job a couple days ago, where the lady had right off the pad, she had some beautiful pink hibiscus, just nice green color, beautiful.

And I was looking at them, and then she says, well what's wrong with my other hibiscus? And I turned around, and she had these big trees with trunks this big, and it had been cut back so many times that all that was coming up with it was growth about

this high.

So why is that plant dropping its leaves? Because the plant is just weak.

It's tired, it's old, and it just can't support itself, so it drops those leaves.

We'll answer questions a little bit later, sir.

It's all the way up.

Does it sound better if I yell a little louder?

I think it's the wind that's causing that.

So back to water stress.

Is the new growth wilting? Or the new growth, the very lush growth at the top, is it kind of looking like that? It's kind of weeping over.

Are the leaves turning brown? Are the edges crispy? There's another sign that it's not getting enough water.

The color of the foliage will turn pale.

And again, hibiscus is a good example of that.

When it's not getting enough water, that foliage color will turn a little bit pale.

And then, are the plants slowly declining?

Over a period of time, the plant will slowly decline.

Now, as I just said, environmental factors can also do that.

Extreme heat or extreme cold temperatures like we've had.

So what's the solution to that? If you have an irrigation system, check your irrigation system to make sure the pattern is right and is getting adequate coverage.

The sprinklers will clog up.

I was at a job yesterday.

We put in some new plants along a sidewalk, and

I didn't see any sprinklers along the edge that would spray out.

There was one over here, and it would come out, and there was a palm tree this close to it.

And, you know, it's just not going to get there.

So she was going to have her irrigation guy come in and check that.

So if you do a new landscape, how often should you water? I recommend, and Busy B recommends, to every day for the first week, every other day for the second week, and then every third day for the fourth week. day for the third week.

And then by that time if you have irrigation, your irrigation system should take over and do that.

The only time you'd have to add a little bit of water is under extreme heat conditions.

Now, if you don't have an irrigation system, then you're

going to have to do due diligence and keep providing water periodically.

I hear often

that it rained.

Well, did it rain hard enough to penetrate through the mulch into the soil?

That's the thing I see the most.

Or we get a lot of, the people are gone during the summer, they have no irrigation system, and they come back and they're disappointed because the rain could be enough or we just didn't get enough consistency in the rain.

But watering,

watering is the key and I just see a lot of problems with that.

Insect problems.

Here's a good one.

Florida has over 12,000 different insects that invade.

So these creepy crawlies

are, they just cause infestations.

Now, what causes those infestations? I'm often asked why, where did they come from? Where did these bugs come from? So here's some things.

High humidity creates an opportune environment for insects to develop.

Transfer from other plants by wind, rain, or direct contact.

And then natural lifestyles.

Caterpillars being

the specific one, natural lifestyles.

So I want to send out something for everybody to look at.

And the first one is scale.

And this is a gardenia that has severe scale.

And what

it also has, when you look at the leaves, they're black.

And that black is a sooty mold fungus.

The scale has a secretion that's sticky and that sooty mold fungus grows on the leaves.

Once it's at this point, we end up taking all the plants out because there's just no way you're going to bring that around.

It's very difficult to control.

In small, in small if it's not that bad, you can use an insecticidal soap to help reduce that.

So what is scale?

Scale is a small armored insect that grows along the midrib of the plant, underside of the leaves, and sometimes on top of the leaves.

It's difficult to control because it is armored.

There's a hard shell on top of it.

The guy that's doing the damage is doing its damage through its piercing sucking mouth parts into the plant, getting the juices.

And it eventually weakens the plant.

Common plants it's found on is crotons, magnolia, gardenia, hibiscus,

arboricola, and other plants.

So what's recommended for care? Insecticidal soap or a scale.

systemic insecticide.

Systemic insecticide is probably the best.

You pour it into the soil or spray it on the plant.

It's taken up through the plant or up through the root system and it goes up inside the plant.

And when the insect feeds on that, it generally kills it.

Honestly, if the infection is just too bad, it's almost too late.

Now, another

thing you can do is you can also trim away.

If it's just starting, the best way to deal with it is just trim away the part that's there rather than getting out the pesticides.

Just trim away the part that doesn't look good.

Here's one of my favorites.

The next one, aphids.

Aphids are little guys that sit on top of the leaves.

There's always a bunch of them.

There's a couple dozen on each leaf.

And they sit there and they suck the juices out of the plant.

It doesn't kill the plant, but the new growth will be distorted.

The leaves will get curled up, turned up.

They come in a variety of colors.

And my favorite is on Podocarpus.

Who said Podocarpus? Podocarpus, early spring, summer time, they'll get aphids

and they're blue.

I'm a blue guy.

I like blue.

But I can't say I really like aphids the damage they do, but they do.

Next one on page 7 is mealy bugs.

And this is common particularly

on indoor plants, but you will find it outdoor also.

And it looks like cotton on there, kind of fuzzy looking.

And you'll see this quite often.

This is the unarmored scale.

And it is easier to control, has a white powdery appearance.

And again, any contact spray like 7 or Busy Bee has other different sprays that you can spray on things, generally gets that under control.

You can also hose it down and get it off the leaf.

Or again, cut that portion

of the plant away without having to spray chemicals.

Caterpillars. They are voracious

feeders. And once we get into spring, you'll start to see them coming.

It's one of the most serious of agricultural pests.

They crawl around plants, they chomp on the leaves, they chew on the leaves, and sometimes they'll leave their little droppings after they have done their business.

They come in a variety of sizes, large and small.

And some of them will sting you.

I don't know if you've ever touched a caterpillar and stung you, but the saddleback caterpillar will give you a good stinging pain for a while.

I was trimming

some hibiscus last year, and for some reason I didn't have my gloves on.

And I reached in there, and it nailed me.

And it becomes quite painful for a little while.

I gotta talk louder? That's better? Can we put the speaker on your little cart back there? Caterpillars

are relatively easy to control.

Let's see.

I call it diapel dust.

I don't know if you

know. Busy Bee didn't have any diapel dust.

Diapel dust is Bacillus thuringiensis.

It's a natural control, which works quite well.

Sevin dust works very well for caterpillars.

The key to it is putting the dust on the plant early in the morning.

What it does, the caterpillars, they feed on it, and then that kills them.

Okay. Leaf miner, page nine.

This is an interesting

one. And this starts every spring, every summer.

I had a citrus tree in my yard, and every year the leaf miner would come on it.

And it's just devastating, because the leaves curl up.

Very difficult to control.

Very difficult to control.

The larval stage of the insect

crawls in between the layers of the leaves and leaves these tunnels.

So, commonly bougainvillea,

citrus, tomato. The only thing that really works well is a systemic. There's the soap.

Which one's systemic? The only thing that really works well on them is the systemic spray.

The problem is you can't put systemic on citrus.

You don't want to uptake that through the fruit into your system.

Again, what I usually do is I trim away the infected portions

of the leaves.

And that tends to do a lot better to get rid of it.

Yeah, the insecticidal

oil, not really.

It's not going to get on the insect itself, because it's in between the layers of the leaf.

Now, fertilizing.

Here's one that, I was a grower for 20 years.

And here's the one that's kind of a pet peeve to me, is fertilizing.

And to me, second most to watering, this is the most important.

Now, I've seen, if you live in a gated community,

I've seen the yellow palm trees.

I see a lot of yellow palm trees.

And most of them are the foxtail palm.

And all that is, is just simply it just never got fertilizer.

And they turn yellow.

Very difficult to bring that palm tree around.

I've seen it done.

It takes a regimented system and application of fertilizer to do it.

Once it gets too bad, you're just

never going to bring it around.

One sign of poor fertilization, and you may have seen

this, is on palm trees, the new growth at the top comes out all gnarly looking.

And that's called frizzle top.

And that's a manganese deficiency in the palm trees.

If you do a

good fertilization program, you shouldn't need to worry about having to apply extra manganese.

Now, pygmy date palms, which are pretty common, the lower leaves will turn orange.

That's magnesium deficiency.

Fairly common, but will not hurt the palm, will not kill it.

off and so signs of nutrient deficiency.

Does the plant look healthy? Are the leaves healthy? Do they have good color? Is it pale? Are the flowers the normal size? Are the flowers coming out and they look stunted and you know like hibiscus come out, nice big flowers.

I've seen them come out where they're just a little bit smaller.

Does it look good? So what signs or what causes signs of nutrient deficiency? Infrequent fertilization program.

I recommend every three months fertilizing with a slow release fertilizer.

Busy Bee sells the Formula

Bee and it's a slow release fertilizer.

Every three months, not recommended to do it in the months of December, January and February.

You don't want to cause new growth to come out and if we get a severe cold blast, it could damage the plant with that new growth. Poorly developed root systems is another thing I see, particularly in that hard pan soil that I've seen in some of the communities

out west of town.

The soil is just so thick and so hard that the roots don't have a chance to get developed and if the root system is poor and the roots are not developed, it will not uptake that fertilizer and the plants will turn yellow.

One of the plants I see this commonly is on Axoras.

And Axora is one of the ones that wants to have good fertilizer.

Heavy rain.

If you apply the fertilizer and you get a heavy rain and it washes away, you're going to have to reapply it again.

Or using inexpensive or quick release.

I'm not big on organic fertilizers.

I know organic is important and I understand that, but organic fertilizers are quick release fertilizers.

You won't get three months out of an organic fertilizer. They just don't have the longevity.

With the slow release, they're in little prills.

They're little prills and those prills have a coating to them.

The good fertilizer is inside and it releases slowly.

But you should get a good three months out of that fertilizer.

Pruning. Let me start off by saying not all plants in the landscape want to be shaped in boxes, shaped into balls, squared off to look like boxes or cut back hard.

Not all plants want that.

If you live in a gated community,

chances are you have that going on in your yard.

Many of the customers that we talk to in the gated community, they shape their head and they can't understand why that's done.

I know why it's done. It's just efficient for the maintenance company to go in there.

So if you like your trees to look like lollipops, you're planting beds with flat tops like a marine haircut or even a Disney topiary, then pay no mind to whatever I got to say.

Now, all plants require a trim sometime, whether to keep them the height or the shape that you desire or removing of dead or dying fronds or leaves.

So in the picture, the podocarp

is in the box shape.

This was right next to the garage, right between the sidewalk.

And okay, I guess they got to have something there, I guess.

And then the ligustrum, the ball

shape of the picture on the right-hand side, I got to give kudos to the guy that's trimming them because he does a heck of a good job.

But I have a ligustrum tree and I like that more loose look to it that looks really like a tree instead of a ball shape in my yard.

But again, putting the right plant in the right situation also helps that situation along.

I don't mind doing trimming, but a lot of the trimming we do is by hand.

We rarely do anything with the hedge shears.

We like to keep natural.

I do have some jasmine at home, wax jasmine, that forms a half circle of a hedge.

And I do use the trimmer to do it, but I do it lightly.

I like to see a little fluff to things rather than that sculpted look.

Now, what happens on a hedge if you keep trimming it hard and hard and always hard? The picture with the arboricola hedge, it's a beautiful hedge where it is.

It's over in a Publix near where I live.

But what's happened to it is so much trimming up the side constantly, it now leaves the stems of the plant and that will never fill in.

The only way to solve that is to put a new plant in there.

And then there's the live oak power trim, power line trim.

You've seen that, where they go along and trim the trees.

I got this picture, I thought, that's one of the best ones I've seen yet.

Of course, if they had not planted trees that grow up into power lines, they wouldn't have that situation. So the problem with pruning this way is the plants will eventually thin out on the tops and the sides of the plants, leaving holes with permanent

loss of leaves.

I was on a job last year and we were doing some new landscaping to the house and they had a podocarpus hedge, seven foot tall.

The point of it was to provide screening outside the kitchen windows, but

they trimmed it this wide.

And I swear to God, I'm telling you the truth.

We were there

during the work and the maintenance company came in and he took his shear and he went up the side of the plant.

And I'm standing there in awe because I'm like, it didn't need to be trimmed.

But I think they're so used to coming and trimming, they just naturally go through the whole property and trim it that way.

The picture at the bottom of page 12 is an oak tree.

And you can see what they've done

to that.

That's called hat-wrecking.

When I took the picture and gave it to my wife to put in the computer for this program, she said, that's sinful to do that to a tree.

The problem with that is it weakens the tree.

And what else is going to happen? It's going to grow out of that, but it's going to grow into tight balls on each of those stems and eventually be so thick that it could cause a problem in a hurricane where it could blow it out of the ground.

The problem that happened there is they put that oak tree about 10 feet from the house and you just can't, you got to give plants room.

Next page, page 13.

Proper pruning of a hedge.

And I drew a little diagram there and I see the wrong type a lot in landscapes.

And it's not easy to do, to prune it as the diagram on the right says.

Because you're going along and you're trimming the side and you're naturally going down.

The picture on the bottom is a hedge in Orkut Island.

And the landscaper

that's doing that is doing a beautiful job with that hedge.

You can see the rolled shape to it on the top and it just generally goes down.

The reason it's done that way is to keep light, adequate light on the side of the plant and so it stays full.

We planted some Exoras next to a hedge of dwarf oleanders where they had just done that.

It had been trimmed wrong for so long it was bare and she wanted something to be planted in there to fill in that space.

Page 14, when to prune.

There is pruning and then there's hard pruning.

Plant pruning, and again I prefer to do plant pruning with hand trimmers, not the shears, is shaping.

And this can be done year round in Florida.

Hard pruning or cutting back up

to one third or one half of the plant should only be done in the warmer months from March 15th through October 15th.

Now how often and how you go about pruning bushes can depend

on the look you want, whether you want a formal look or an informal look.

Personally I like an informal look.

And a more informal look doesn't require sculpting and it doesn't require as much trimming as the formal look.

So now I'm often asked, can I cut a palm tree back?

And it's generally what happens is it's been planted too close to the house and they want to cut it back.

You can't cut a palm tree back.

What happens is if you cut that stem of the palm tree back it dies.

So the better solution is to plant it properly.

Now there is an exception to that.

I have cut back smaller stems on Eureka palms and when I say smaller

it's usually things like this and the new bud does come out.

But you can't do that to a large stem.

So again, properly planting a palm tree is the important thing.

So, I thank you very much. We're going to have quite a bit of time for questions here.

On page 15, my wife does a blog called Gossip from the Southern Garden.

And I already told you about the How to Ruin Your Garden book.

A couple years ago I wrote a book, Pocket Guide to Florida Landscaping.

If you're looking to landscape your home, and you want a simple reference of the steps you need to take to landscape your home, this is the book.

It's not a tabletop garden book that has all kinds of information in it.

And quite honestly, I don't know many people that really read the whole thing anyways.

But it's available up at the registers at Busy Bee, both of them are, or in print at Amazon.com.