Growing a New Lawn, Fixing A Lawn and Japanese Maple
0:03 Hello everyone and welcome back to the homegrown horticulture podcast. Today I'm going to be answering questions I've received through social media and over the phone about yards and gardens. 0:16 The homegrown horticulture podcast is specifically for the Intermountain West, an area with a very unique climate and very unique soils that's oftentimes forgotten about by national horticulture companies. Because of this, there's a need for local information, and the homegrown horticulture podcast is a source for you to gain that information. 0:38 Our first question is When can I plant warm season crops. These would include things like cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, green beans, corn, eggplants, muskmelons, and watermelon. The first thing I would recommend because this is a regional podcast and average frost dates can vary wildly just within a few miles is to contact a local experienced gardener or farmer. They'll know right when it's time to get those warm season crops in for your specific area. Some other things to monitor are when your average last and first frost dates are, because all of the warm season crops should be planted after the average last frost. For the Wasatch Front in Utah, this is generally early to mid-May. But for our mountain valleys. This is usually two to three weeks later, oftentimes in late May or early June. Along these lines I had somebody ask about a week ago, if they could just go ahead and put all of their flowers and crops in because they checked the weather and we were going to be above freezing daily. And my response to them as sure yeah, you can plan but the temperatures are still too cold for those to actually thrive. And many crops such as tomatoes can actually be damaged if they're regularly exposed to temperatures below about 45 to 50 degrees. So if you're going to plant warm season crops when it's too cool, even if they don't freeze, they generally will just sit there, oftentimes they can get nutrient deficiencies, because the cool weather makes it harder for them to uptake nutrients. If you're going to put them out early, you'll need to use season extending methods that warm the soil up and warm the air temperature up so that they can actually thrive. You need to remember that many of these flowers and crops are native to Mediterranean climate areas, and oftentimes tropical areas where they're never exposed to temperatures near freezing. And so we need to mimic those conditions for those plants to actually thrive in our yards and gardens. 3:30 Our next question is, last spring, we bought some grassy to ove rseed her lawn to thicken the grass up? We never did it. Can we go ahead and put that same seed down. Now, the answer to this is yes, you can go ahead and put that seed down. It will hold for a couple of years and still germinate quite well. I think the more important thing though, is going to be preparing your turf grass so that you can get good germination from that seed you're putting over the top. To do this, you're going to want to ask yourself, why is my lawn struggling? You know, if you're just moving in and it was neglected for a year or two, that's understandable. But if you've lived there and been doing your best to take care of the lawn, and that lawn is still thinning out, then what's going on people oftentimes are sprinkling system is the culprit because it doesn't water very efficiently to where some areas get excessive water and other areas don't get enough. So checking the sprinkling system to make sure that it's irrigating evenly improperly is going to be imperative. After checking this sprinkling system, the next thing I would look at...