332 Q&A Whiteflies? 1st Tomato? Planting Citrus?

Show Transcript

332 TRANSCRIPT Q&A Whiteflies, etc.

Farmer Fred

Welcome back to the Tuesday edition of the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. Unlike the Friday edition, we're dedicating the Tuesday podcast to answering your garden questions. Stay tuned to find out how you can get your garden question into the program. So come on, let's do this.

Q&A HOW TO CONTROL WHITEFLIES, LEAFHOPPERS ON GRAPES

Farmer Fred

We're on the road. We are at Red Barn Nursery in Davis, California. So you can probably guess who I'm talking to here. It's Don Shor, the proprietor here at Redwood Barn Nursery. We're standing, of course, near the tomato plants because. All right. Let's answer some email, Don. Toni from Loomis writes in and said… Loomis, by the way, is located in the Sierra foothills here in northern California, she says, “First off, I love your show. I'm a novice gardener at best, and I make it a point to learn something new each and every week from your show and your thoughtful guests. You've helped my black thumb turn brown. I'm still working at becoming green.  I have a white fly problem. We have approximately 60 head-pruned wine grapes that are four years old. Whiteflies have progressively taken over. Neem oil hasn't worked and it's difficult to get into the middle of the vineyard once in full bloom due to its density. It's just not working and the white flies are having a heyday. We pruned the vineyard and the whiteflies are already appearing from the ground. I purchased two products: Monterey Takedown Garden Spray, which is pyrethrins and canola oil, and Bayer Advanced Fruit Citrus and Vegetable Control, which is Imidacloprid. The Bayer product says to use only once a year after bud break. The vines, in this case, are still dormant. Since I have white flies already showing up, can I use the Takedown spray now and the Bayer product after a bud break if needed? I'm hoping the Takedown spray will be enough since I prefer organic practices. I do understand the Bayer product is far from organic. I also purchased Bio-care traps and have just put those in the vineyard for added protection. I appreciate your advice on how to manage this persistent problem.”

Farmer Fred

Don, grapes. Whiteflies or leaf hoppers?

Don Shor

That's the first question. Has she correctly identified the pest? My guess is she's dealing with leaf hoppers which are much more difficult to control than whiteflies. And she probably should head over to UCANR .edu, our favorite integrated pest management site, and read about leaf hopper management. I'd be really surprised if whiteflies are out this early in the season on plants that are just budding out. They're a mid to late summer problem.

In our own nursery yard we manage them by vigorously rinsing off with water. We don't have a vineyard. So that may not be the most practical solution but it really does work if you're persistent at it. We're talking whiteflies here. Do a vigorous rinse early in the day, if possible. Two, three, four days in a row. So you knock down not just the adults but also blast off the eggs and a couple of the instars. But you have to do it repeatedly for three to four days and very vigorously. People are often afraid they're going to hurt the plant with the volume of water, the blasts that they're doing.

No, you won't hurt the plant and you will hurt the whiteflies, if that's what she's dealing with. So I'd suggest a correct identification on the pest first. Master Gardeners, and Cooperative Extension folks could probably help with that. Make sure she's not dealing with leafhoppers, which are more challenging.

Farmer Fred

The differences I've learned growng grapes between whiteflies and leafhoppers: Leafhoppers are noisier because they make a big thunk when they land on the leaves.

Don Shor

Well, they also are more directed in their flight. Whiteflies, you walk out there, they're a cloud of crazy flying things. But they're the more common problem for home gardeners on their tomatoes, for example. Leaf hoppers can be a real nuisance in a vineyard and can actually carry disease problems. So we do need a correct identification. I would strongly prefer the pyrethrin spray to the Imidacloprid spray for a variety of reasons, primarily the impact on beneficials. Pyrethrin is a quick thing, some impact on those you spray it on. But, that's it and it tends to be transitory whereas the imidacloprid is likely to do some harm to pollinators and other beneficials. I realize that's not a huge concern in the vineyard since grapes are not bee pollinated but there's other beneficials that are out there.

Farmer Fred

Yeah with whiteflies a good way to monitor it and I think she's using it are yellow sticky traps. But for leafhoppers, is it yellow sticky traps or blue sticky traps?

Don Shor

That's interesting. There's a lot in the literature about that. I think the easiest way to monitor for those is walk through the vines and shake them as you walk by, because they will fly up very quickly when you have a problem with them, and you'll be able to catch a few and identify them. And I really come back to that again. Because if they're leafhoppers, some of them are actually migratory. They're going to come through the valley and be a problem for a while and then not. And then back again.

Others are really problematic in terms of the diseases they spread. So she might want to go up to a higher octane pesticide in that situation. But I'd have to check which ones are going to work best on leaf hoppers. Both are both very challenging pests to deal with. The whiteflies, I think, she'll actually find, interestingly, easier to manage than the leaf hoppers because they may be moving in from nearby vegetation. Persistence is key. Persistence and diligence and vigor. Vigor. Take your kids pressure washer. This is really fun on a hot day. Go out there with that, and blast those plants off vigorously. You control the throttle. You're not going to defoliate them. But you'd be surprised how much of a force you can use with a pressure washer and how little damage it does to the plants and how much damage it does to the pest you're after.

Farmer Fred

As I mentioned, we're here at Redwood Barn Nursery, standing next to the tomato display here. And you have one in your hand that I've never heard of before. Extreme Bush.

Don Shor

So you are going to take this home and plant it in your extensive Folsom farm. Or as I understand, maybe in a small pot in your Folsom backyard.

Farmer Fred

Okay, and you mentioned this one gets about two feet tall and wide.

Don Shor

Yeah, this is a big deal right now. These more compact growing tomatoes. Honestly, those of us who've been growing tomatoes for a long time don't have a lot of experience with these, with their flavor, how they produce and perform. But you'll start noticing more and more of these dwarf, dwarf indeterminate, truly determinate tomatoes in garden centers, because we know there's a lot of home gardeners who want to grow a tomato that don't have 13 acres or even half an acre, they may just have a container.

Farmer Fred

What size tomatoes does it produce?

Don Shor

Normal size. Yeah, this is not, a lot of these miniature tomatoes are miniature fruit. I've been growing some of them just for fun and they're like, all right, this is a novelty. You'll get one nice harvest and that'll be your salsa for the summer. These are full -size fruit.

Farmer Fred

I see fruit trees behind you from Dave Wilson Nursery, it looks like. They should find a home.

Don Shor

Yeah, we've got a lot of fruit trees left over. Bareroot season was a little slow this year. Most of your garden centers have a pretty good inventory on peaches, plums, nectarines, persimmons, all that kind of thing. The only things we're sold out of? Jujubes. They're really hot these days. Why? There’s a particular demographic that knows them and likes them and they're really good for you and they're really easy to grow. I will say that. Please, any of you thinking about Jujubes out there, be aware they're very thorny. You need a formidable barrier, they're an excellent choice and a beautiful plant and very drought tolerant, very productive. I've just been surprised how their sales have been going up and up year after year.

Farmer Fred

And if I recall correctly, it takes two to tango when it comes to jujubees, the Ling and the Li.

Don Shor

That was true. There are self -fruitful jujubes. And there's actually some that you can just pick and eat right off the tree. Whereas the Li and the Ling, I think it was, you had to dry them to really get much benefit from them. Chico, a bunch of others that have come on the market, you can pick right off the tree. This is just sweet. There's no depth of flavor to a jujube, but they're really high in iron, really good for you. So anyway, we're sold out of those.

Farmer Fred

If you have them, garden with a box of Band-aids on you.

Don Shor

Be careful, yes. Put them where you don't want people walking through the brush.

Farmer Fred

Don Shor is here at Redwood Barn Nursery in Davis. I'm going to go home with a tomato plant. Don, thanks for answering the white fly question.

Don Shor

I tried.

SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT THE GARDEN BASICS PODCAST

Farmer Fred

Okay, here's your garden to -do list for the day. Spend some quiet time in the yard. Walk, converse, smell, and touch all your plants. Enjoy the texture, the aromas, the color combinations, the structure. Admire the naturally amazing artwork of plant leaves. Check both sides of those leaves for eggs or insects. And if you're checking for eggs or bugs on your plant, make sure that they're the bad guys and not the good guys before you shoo them away.

Take a seat out there, watch and listen to the visitors to your yard, from insects to birds to four -footed creatures, some of whom may be of dubious benefit. And if you would please help spread the word to your gardening friends and family about the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. Leave a thumbs up or a comment on the show at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can do that at our homepage as well, GardenBasics .net.

And if you subscribe to our newsletter, leave a comment, share and a thumbs up as well at the newsletter Beyond the Garden Basics. It's on Substack. By the way, that's where you can find the pictures of what the most beneficial insects look like, including their eggs. And that will be in the April 26th and the May 3rd, 2024 editions of the newsletter Beyond the Garden Basics. You can find a link to all of these in today's show notes. And as always, Thanks for listening.

Q&A SHOULD YOU PICK OFF THE FIRST TOMATO?

Farmer Fred

We like to answer your garden questions here on the Garden Basics podcast. To help us out, Debbie Flower, retired college horticultural Professor, joins us. And Debbie, we get a question from another Debbie. Debbie M, we'll call her, and she writes in: "Is it true or is it a myth that you should pick off the first tomato you see growing on your tomato bush? Not sure where I got this information from, but I was always under the assumption that if you didn't, it would stunt the production of more fruit. Inquiring minds need to know. Thank you so much for your always excellent advice." Well, Debbie M., don't you like tomatoes? Why would you pluck  the first tomato?

Debbie Flower

Yeah, if the plants been in the ground, the plants been able to establish the root system. And tomatoes do that very quickly. They're pretty fast growers, there's no reason to take that first fruit off. If the plant is just put in the ground and it has a tomato on it, I might be inclined to remove it, just to allow that plant to establish a bigger root system. But if it's big enough to have a fruit on it, the plant I mean, then it's probably got a big enough root system to support that fruit.

Farmer Fred

We've talked in the past about doing some other juvenile tomato pruning, yay or nay. One we talked about recently was, and you can fill me in on the correct botanical names, pruning out the "armpit hairs" of little tomato plants in order to, I guess, spur more flower production.

Debbie Flower

The axillary bud.

Farmer Fred

Thank you.

Debbie Flower

So yes, that's the armpit hairs you're referring to. But  they arise actually above where the point where a branch meets the stem. And it becomes another stem that has the ability to grow leaves and flowers and fruit on its own. And plants. Depending on how you're pruning your tomato they can get very bushy. If you have it in a cage and you allow all of these axillary buds to form they can get very bushy. When I was a student at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and that was a long time ago. So Rutgers' advice may have changed, I haven't checked, but we were taught to remove all of those axillary stems, and we trained our tomatoes to a single stick. And the evidence suggested that we got earlier fruit production. However, we did not get more fruit production because we've removed a lot of fruiting wood and a lot of green stuff that makes the food that fills the fruit. So it was for early production. And we had a much shorter growing season in New Jersey, especially all those years ago than they do today, or we do in other parts of the country. And so the goal was to get tomatoes fast. But other than trying to get your very first tomato very fast, which we we did by staking it to a single, pruning it to a single stem, and staking it to a stake or thinning out what's inside your tomato cage. Those are the  only two reasons I would remove the axillary buds.

Farmer Fred

All right. Then another very popular tomato removing idea is to prune out the flowers that first appear on a tomato plant. I get those questions every year. Along the lines of, "Should I prune off or snip off or pinch out the first tomato flowers that appear in order to get more tomatoes later?" The thing is, those early flowers, because of fluctuating weather, usually fall off by themselves. You don't need to help.

Debbie Flower

Yeah, and if the plant is is big enough and healthy enough to produce flowers, I wouldn't remove them. There. I am not aware of any scientific evidence that says removing early flowers, or early fruit leads to more fruit or flower production later in the season.

Farmer Fred

Cornell University, Dr. Philip Mingus of Cornell says "tomato yields per plant may be lowered by pruning, removing the leaves or shoots does not conserve food for the crop, it tends to reduce the total food supply, use training methods that require little pruning." So basically, what he's saying is what you don't like tomatoes,

Debbie Flower

it's not worth doing.

Farmer Fred

Yeah, I attempted to try to track down where this myth of pruning tomato flowers came from. And you know how it is when it's like the seven blind guys trying to identify an elephant, or the grade school game of "pass it on" where somebody starts a story. And that person's supposed to tell another person and then you compare story A with story Q or however far down the line it gets, and they're usually radically different stories.

Debbie Flower

Right? We called that "telephone" when I was a kid.

Farmer Fred

Okay, that's good. Yeah, that's right, you had telephones as a child. But Texas a&m University had a paper on greenhouse hydroponic tomato culture in the winter, and pointed out that the growing point is allowed to grow for at least five to seven leaves above the last fruit truss to help prevent sunburned fruit, remove the flower buds above the last fruit truss, to ensure no additional fruit set. So I can easily see some gardener reading that and then trying to recall that story, maybe to the next gardener he meets. And, he talks about that one sentence: "remove flower buds above the last fruit trust to ensure no additional fruit set," but leaves out the fact that it was a greenhouse tomato grown hydroponically in the wintertime.

Debbie Flower

That's a very specific situation and probably a very specific type of tomato that's being grown in that situation.

Farmer Fred

Gardener B then tells Gardener C, Hey, I just heard pruning tomato flower buds is recommended by Texas a&m. And  then gardener C goes online and writes something along the line of, "remove flower buds on tomato plants to increase the number of tomatoes" or something like that.

Debbie Flower

If you take the flowers off, you're not increasing the number of flowers or fruit. You're decreasing the number of fruit by removing flowers. Exactly.

Farmer Fred

Language is a virus, as I'm fond of saying. To get back to Debbie M's question, no, Debbie, you don't have to take off that first luscious tomato. You've worked so hard to earn that first tomato. Keep it, let it grow. There will be more. Yes, I can think of no reason to prune tomatoes unless they're, as we mentioned earlier, running outside of the cage that they're in or their boundaries and are threatening to strangle your toy poodle.

Debbie Flower

Right. They can get big.

Farmer Fred

Yeah, that they can. Well, I hope that helps. Debbie, thanks for your help. I appreciate it.

Debbie Flower

Oh, you're welcome, Fred. Thank you.

WANT TO LEAVE US A QUESTION?

Farmer Fred

You want to leave us a garden question? You'll find a link at GardenBasics .net. Also, when you click on any episode at GardenBasics .net, you're going to find a link to SpeakPipe. You'll find it in the show notes. And when you bring up SpeakPipe on your computer or smartphone, you can leave us an audio question without making a phone call. Or you can go to SpeakPipe directly. That's SpeakPipe .com slash GardenBasics.

You want to call or text us? We have that number posted at GardenBasics .net. It's 916-292-8964. 916-292-8964. Email? Sure, we like email. Send it along with your pictures to fred at farmerfred .com. Or again, go to GardenBasics .net and get that link. And if you send us a question, be sure to tell us where you're gardening, because all gardening is local. Find it all at GardenBasics .net.

Q&A PLANT CITRUS ON MOUNDS?

Farmer Fred

We like to answer your garden questions here on the Garden Basics Podcast. Chip from Plumas Lake, California up north of Sacramento emails us. He says, “I’m here to pester you again. You told me years ago to plant my fruit trees on top of mounds instead of the craters that I had been doing in before. Thought it would, the craters, would collect more water. Well, I'm onto planting my 22nd fruit tree and it's some citrus trees. Shall I plant them on a mound also or should I plant them even with the ground?”

Farmer Fred

Quentyn Young is here, Sacramento County Master Gardener and orchard specialist. Quentyn, we're standing in your citrus orchard here at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center. And golly gee, Willikers, not only are these probably planted on mounds, but they look like they're planted on a slope.

Quentyn Young

Yeah, these are on what we call our citrus row. They are on a hill, so they are on a slope. But I definitely recommend planting on a mound. Right, you get better drainage? Much better drainage. You want to keep the crown of that citrus tree above grade. And it also allows you to amend the soil with either pumice or using a cactus succulent mix, but you definitely want to amend our heavy clay soil.

Farmer Fred

So there's no confusion when we talk about the crown of a tree, it can be very confusing. Your first reaction would be to look up. But actually on a tree, you look down for the crown.

Quentyn Young

Yeah, you want to see where basically the trunk meets the roots. It's a little bit different where a little bit higher, you would see the graft union. But again, I can't tell you how many landscape trees I see planted in depressions and yards that just sit in standing water all winter long and it just makes me nuts. Citrus trees especially need that good drainage.

Farmer Fred

So yeah, especially with citrus and especially up in Plumas Lake, which is a former rice growing area in the Sacramento Valley. So it's a kind of a heavy clay soil.

Quentyn Young

Definitely mounds. And that's pretty much all of Sacramento. Yeah, we have heavy clay soil. So mound up, build a little raised bed, maybe three by three, four by four. That's another option.

Farmer Fred

There we go. Quentyn Young, Master Gardener, thanks for some citrus enlightenment.

Quentyn Young

Thank you, Fred.

Farmer Fred

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred comes out every Tuesday and Friday. It's brought to you by SmartPots. It's Garden Basics. Available wherever podcasts are handed out. For more information about the podcast and transcripts of the podcast, visit our website, gardenbasics .net. And that's where you'll also find out about the free Garden Basics newsletter, Beyond the Garden Basics, on Substack. And thank you so much for listening.