Great Garden Questions from Subscribers - Selling Your House is Easier Than Removing Pampas Grass

Welcome to HortTube. My name is Jim Putnam. This is the Sunday garden question and answer video that I do pretty much every Sunday and have for a long time. You can ask gardening questions down in the comment section. All these Q&As are in a playlist called Garden Question and Answer on the channel if you want to go back and look at any of the question and answer videos that I've done. Did a live Q&A as you're watching this back on Thursday evening, and I'm going to do a few more of those. This had about 326 people, I think, was about the peak that I had in there at one time. The video is available to watch on the channel, and a lot of people have watched it since the live part was finished. But a great turnout. Thank you guys for participating in that. It's about an hour and 10 minutes if you haven't watched that video yet. The weekly garden planner's $40 off for the month of September, and you use the code SEPTEMBER to get the $40 off. Thank you guys who have signed up for it. I put up the three weeks of October up on there, if you haven't checked recently. I got up week one, two, and three this week, and maybe as you're watching this, I will have put up week four, but I've got a few things going on this weekend that may get in the way of having the fourth week of October put up on there. But it will be next week, if not. The 18th video in the tour series went up this week, and so that is complete, and that's also in a playlist called Complete Garden Tour, if you want to go back and look at those videos in that series. And again, I just mentioned the live Q&A, and we're back in the garden, and a couple videos have gone up back in the garden here. It was a bit out of control when we got back from being on the road for six weeks, but we did come home to this, this came in the mail. Look at this incredible painting of Holly on this rock, laying, she somehow got her facial expressions, because she always seems a little bit sad in a way, and she's laying on the new brick patio back here, and flowers behind her, but this is unbelievable. Susan Anderson, there was a card with it. Thank you so much. It's Susan, it's suandersonillustration, one word, suandersonillustration.com, but thank you so much. This is just a beautiful painting of Holly. And then we also had this container. I showed this in the live Q&A the other night. These folks had visited the garden, and their children had come as well, and they painted this pot for us and left it out here, but it's a beautiful container that we will, it's almost one of those too nice to use kind of things, so it may be that it's a prop like this, because it's beautiful. And thank you guys so much for doing these kinds of things. You know, they mean a lot to us, but thank you. Thank you so much. Let's see. I, weirdly, last Sunday's question and answer was 37 minutes long when I put it up, and then somehow it only played the 27 minutes on YouTube, and I had, for the first time in seven years of filming, actually erased the original footage from the Q&A. I was trying to clear up some space on my computer, and we were on the road, and I didn't have my backup drives with me, and I was like, you know what I'll do is I'll just erase all the Q&A footage, because the videos are already up, and it won't matter. And I did that, and not realizing that my Q&A was gonna be messed up, so I couldn't recover from it, so that was weird. So I'm gonna answer a few questions that were at the end of that video, and then we'll start the questions from the last other couple Q&As that we haven't pulled questions from. So let's jump in and get started on that. It's not the most, normally I'm not on the back porch, I'm out in the garden somewhere, but I've got piles of stuff everywhere. We've been cutting stuff back all morning. The video that will have gone up yesterday will be from a lot of that. We'll show a lot of those cutbacks, but not all of them. Let's see. Somebody asked, how can I use zoning other than by using plants rooted, that are rated for my zone? So, you know, the USDA horticultural zone map is divided into five degree increments of average low temperature. The 10 degree increments of average low temperature, actually, if you're just going from zone two, three, four, five, six, but then it was subdivided into A's and B's for five degree increments. And so we were in zone 7B before the newer USDA map came out, and now we're in zone 8A, firmly in zone 8A, actually 8A goes way back to the west and north of us as well, which is kind of surprising. So yeah, but that's the only thing the map is actually good for, is your average low temperature in your area. It's not really going to be helpful for those in the southwest where, you know, you may get a run of 90, 100 degree days every summer with low humidity. You know, that's not going to be helpful. Your low temperature is not helpful for that, right? Picking plants for that. It's not helpful for, it's helpful for the one thing it's helpful for. It's a starting point for cold tolerance for plants, but there are a lot of other factors, you know, humidity, soil type, lots of other factors, but it's a beginning point, right? It's a tool we can use. You can use the Sunset Western Zone Map for heat zones. If you're out in the west, that's probably very helpful, but it's a starting point that you can go with. But I think at the end of the day, the best way to learn the plants that will grow in your area is observing, going to the gardens near you, going to places that are close by, observing really nice gardens in your area, or close to your area, and seeing what other people are doing, what other people are able to do, and then finding some unusual versions of those same things. You don't necessarily have to copy what other people are doing. You can find, you know, unusual versions of the same plants that just, that you know grow in your area. Some people are going to be more risk averse, you know, than others, meaning that they just definitely don't want to have to deal with the winter causing them problems, or having to cover things, or, you know, maintain things that way. And that's fine. And then there's me who has got all, I got all kinds of things out here that I'm pushing the boundaries on and hoping that they survive the winter, and I'm prepared to cover a few of those things. It's just going to be, you know, different versions for different people, really. But it's just a starting point, and it's only the average low temperature. And of course the low temperature on a plant that a plant will tolerate is super important to know. But there's a lot of other things we need to know about them as well to make sure they'll actually grow in our area, our soil, our heat, all those kinds of things. Let's see. Any way to keep a potted standard gardenia alive? I'm reading out of my notebook as always. Standard gardenia alive in zone six. So they bought a gardenia on a stick, basically. So a standard is just a single stem trunk, and then it has the gardenia up at the top. So a few things here. Number one, a lot of times those standard gardenias that you would buy in the spring from maybe one of the box stores, even the garden centers, they're typically going to be tropical gardenias. So that's one thing I would like to point out, that those are not going to be, like if you're in zone six and you had one of, you know, frost-proof gardenia or radicans gardenia or Scentamazing, which I have out here, those are zone seven hardy gardenias, and they're not going to need a lot of protection in zone six to keep them alive through the winter. Maybe they just need to come in the garage a few nights or covered, you know, kept from freezing solid for sure. But in all likelihood, a gardenia standard is going to be one of the tropical ones. And the reason they use the tropical ones is because they just bloom and bloom and bloom and bloom and bloom, which is great. That thing's nowhere near cone tolerant. And even my zone, those are going to die. They're the larger leafed gardenias, large, really large flowers. And again, the reason they're used is because they just, they bloom nonstop when it's hot and humid outside. So I don't think you're going to be able to keep that one alive just in your garage. You're probably just not going to want that one to drop below freezing at all. The big problem with bringing gardenias inside the house is you need additional lighting. The low humidity is problematic. And typically when we bring gardenias in for the winter, we end up with spider mites, mealy bugs, several other issues, white flies. It's like everything attacks them when they're under stress in dry air and, you know, less light than they would probably want. So I think you're going to have a difficult time with that one, but it's going to need to come inside in all likelihood, if I'm correct about it being a less cold hardy variety that's on that standard. Let's see. Somebody got a new house three years ago in Fort Worth, Texas, zone 8B. They have a little gem magnolia with asters around it. The magnolia is spindly and thin, even though they water and compost it. When transplanting asters away, they found landscape fabric. So should they remove it? If so, will the magnolia roots be damaged? So yes, that's probably what has been hurting that magnolia overall. And obviously, you know, zone 8B, I don't know how much sun this thing is getting on its roots and that kind of thing. And Fort Worth is not exactly, not exactly cool in Fort Worth. I'm traveling, as you're watching this, I'm in Dallas actually, or on my way to Dallas. And so, and I was looking at the forecast and it's 97 degrees in Dallas today as I'm filming this. It's like, oh my gosh. So it's a tough, tough neighborhood, but yeah, that almost and certainly that landscape fabric is causing problems. If you're gonna remove landscape fabric from roots, the fibrous roots of the plants will have woven their way into that fabric. And I'd probably do this in the winter time when it's gonna be less stressful on the tree, but you need to get as much of that material out as you can. There might be some pieces that you end up leaving just because you realize you're gonna do more damage than you wanna do. So there might be a, there's probably gonna be some remaining pieces of landscape fabric here, but this is the kind of regret I'm talking about with landscape fabric. I've made two videos over the years about, the first video, I was very diplomatic, said the pros and cons of landscape fabric. It's almost all cons. And then the second one, I was less diplomatic about it and just showed how, you know, the regret that a lot of people have having used landscape fabric, you know, and eventually you have weeds on top of it. And then it's very difficult when somebody buys a house and they don't realize it's there. And it's, you know, at that point, five, six, eight inches deep, just ongoing problems that you can have with it. But anyway, yeah, I would get what you can out and just make a reasonable judgment that you're not gonna hurt the roots, you know, too badly, but you're gonna hurt some fibrous roots, but doing it in the winter should be less stressful overall. May have to do some additional watering on it next spring and keep an eye on it. This person has wood chips, compost, and shredded leaves to spread. Should they layer all three or use each for different purposes, depending on the plants? And so what we did in this garden was we put down a layer of compost first and then we put the wood chips on top of that. Then leaves have dropped on top of that over the years. I wouldn't layer all three. I would just use the compost. The compost can go down first. So use the compost everywhere. And then you can put the wood chips over top of it or you can put the leaves over top of it, but I probably wouldn't just layer all three. One alternative I would throw out is we have the paths here are wood chips. And so you could put the compost down everywhere and then use your wood chips to create the paths in your beds and then use the leaves as the mulch in the planted areas. And that may give some differentiation in color and look pretty good overall, just separating the different materials. But just put the compost down first. Somebody has fire chief arborvitae and sea green junipers that need to be transplanted. When? And they're only one year old. So I would plant them during the dormant part of the winter time. Maybe February would probably be a good time to move them pretty easily if they've only been in the ground for a year that should go over pretty well. I probably wouldn't dig them up right now, even if it has gotten slightly cooler in your area. Sometimes in the fall right now is when some of these conifers actually put on some growth and so they could be actively growing right now. So I would do it in February and it should transplant easily since they're only a year old. So somebody, this is a good question. Somebody bought slender silhouette sweet gums, which are these super upright, narrow sweet gums. They were in a video of a formal garden down in Loxley or Fairhope, Alabama that I did a couple of years ago. The gentleman, the landscape architect had kind of surrounded this property with them. We see them all over the place, this upright, narrow sweet gum. It's not sterile, so it still gets the little gumballs, but it's nothing in comparison to what a large sweet gum does, dropping them everywhere. I don't think it's anything to worry about on the slender silhouette, but a lot of people just don't like them. They grew up with them, stepped on them barefoot and everything else and don't want anything to do with the gumballs on a sweet gum. But I understand that. But on this one, it's just not anything to worry about. They went back to purchase more and the tags were different. Some say they only get three to five feet wide and some say five to 10 foot on the same plant. This is an issue with making tags that kind of fit everyone, right? I imagine the thing will get 10 feet wide if it's allowed to grow for the next 25 years without being pruned. But if I see them normally about 10, 12 feet tall, they're only about three feet wide. So what is the answer? How far out should a tag say that the plant gets? I mean, because I'm gonna scare people off with most plants. If I tell you my dwarf blue spruce is going to get 12 feet tall in 30 years, but I can maintain it at three feet tall for the next 20, if I was maintaining it, which of those is correct, right? I mean, which is, I don't wanna scare people off from buying it. But if I put a number on the tag for the size that's like 30 years from now, it is gonna scare people off potentially from buying that plant. So sometimes I don't know the right answer. I wish the tags said, and I've said this before, maintainable at. So I think that would be the appropriate way for us in the future to tag plants. So I could say maintainable between three and 10 feet in width, okay? So if I never maintain it in 30 years, it might be 10 feet wide. But if I do maintain it, I can keep it three feet wide. And that's a reasonable amount. So rather than it being the, this is the exact size the plant will get, let's put maintainable at. And then the folks that wanna maintain them, do some pruning on them, can see that they can keep them that smaller size, the three by three size if it's a little round meatball. But others that don't really wanna do any maintenance and don't want something that's gonna get six by six ultimately can see that in the future, some at some point it's gonna outgrow the space. So I wish it was maintainable at rather than fixed sizes because the plants don't have, I've said this a bunch of times, they don't have off switches. There's no plant in this garden that read the tag that it came with. They're gonna get bigger ultimately. But they are maintainable. Most of them are maintainable at a certain size for a reasonable amount of time, 20, 30 years, something like that. But so both tags are kind of correct. You could maintain it between three and five feet for as long as you want. The other tag is basically saying, sometime way out in the future, and I mean way out in the future, it is gonna get a probably a little wider than what it looks like it's gonna get the day you bought it. Okay, that was the questions that I had answered in the other video that didn't end up in the video last Sunday. I don't know how that actually happened. So moving on to some questions that were asked in the other two Q and A's since then, somebody has down in coastal Georgia, they have a butterfly deciduous magnolia, made it through the hot summer now showing brown spots. Is it too much rain or fungus or both? It's some sort of leaf spot issue that I'll see on deciduous magnolias quite a bit. A lot of our bigger leaf things, big leaf hydrangeas and other things do get leaf spot issues, especially as the summer goes on. They seem, it seems like the larger the leaf, sometimes the more vulnerable they are to our high humidity issues and getting leaf spot. I wouldn't worry about it in any way, shape or form. It's gonna happen toward the end of the season. Typically, you're gonna get more and more humidity as August comes on. We were super, super dry. I'm assuming similar to us, if you're down in coastal Georgia, we were super, super dry early and then it got super humid and wet. And that super humid, wet conditions probably kept those leaves wet for an extended period of time during the days and allowed some sort of fungal leaf spot to grow on there. It's no big deal. It's just, if you compost your leaves, make sure you have a hot compost and you can throw them in the hot compost. Otherwise, make sure you're getting those leaves out from under the plant when they drop off. So, and that will help control it some, but not totally. Just don't worry about it. It's gonna leaf out clean in the spring. It's gonna be fine. It's gonna bloom. It's gonna do its thing. And then, you know, toward late summer, things, some plants are gonna look a little tough. You know, it's just the summer works on them and the summers are gonna be different, summer to summer. Hopefully, we'll get a little more. Hopefully, we could take all this crazy amount of rain we've gotten in August and early September and spread it out backwards just a little bit and, you know, have more of a normal rainfall and humidity. Let's see. Okay, Houston has two growing seasons. Should plants be fertilized again in the early fall? You know, again, I just fertilized once in the spring. I think even though, you know, Houston gets so hot during the summer that most things probably go into a bit of a dormancy. And so, you're probably gonna get a little bit of growth coming out of that summer dormancy and you've got this long fall. And I'm sure plants are adapting to that in ways where they're dormant in the peak of the winter and they're dormant in the peak of the summer as well. But I wouldn't fertilize things again. I would just put them, make sure they're just kind of staying in their natural, you know, I would fertilize in the early spring and that's it. But just make sure you're continuing to mulch. Make sure you're continuing to add organic material to the beds. There's nothing, nothing was refertilized in this garden and it grew like crazy through this rainfall and into the early fall. I just don't think you're gonna need it. But I'll let you, you know, again, I'll let you judge that. But I think if you're maintaining your soil properly, and that's the hardest thing in a place like Houston, is that you're going to get such hot summers that the soil life is gonna be much harder to keep alive. You know, this symbiotic relationship between beneficial fungi and bacteria with our plants is much harder to sustain in extremes. And so making sure you're keeping the soil kind of moist and during those peak summer periods of time and keeping it mulched I think is bigger than any kind of fertilizing that you could do. Let's see. So somebody said, please include mature views of the plants when doing the garden plants videos that are coming up. Yeah, I'll try to as much as possible. Sometimes you're doing such a new plant that there isn't a great example of it. I mean, we shot the skylight better boxwood video this morning for garden plants video. And you know, I may have one of the bigger skylights better boxwoods in the country right now. It's Belgium breeding. So I'll try to find a photo from Belgium with it larger when I include it. But again, some plants are so new that there just isn't a lot of mature specimens to actually even get photos of. Somebody has the contractor fill topsoil in their landscape. How should they fix this? Top down, just like I did here, whatever kind of soil you're inheriting, first of all, you could get a soil test done and make sure that whatever they brought in isn't going to actually cause you significant problems. So if I'm questioning the soil that the builders used in some way, I would get a soil test done. Just make sure there's nothing just off the charts. And I don't wanna get you into the minutia of trying to correct a slightly low magnesium amount in your soil or a slightly low calcium amount in your soil. I don't wanna get down in those trenches. What I want you to get from the soil test is find out that your pH isn't three or nine or eight, up to the absolute extreme edges of one edge or the other of sweet or acid soil. And make sure that you've got nine times more potassium than you'd ever want or none at all in the soil. Those things we might wanna correct, the extremes. But if everything is pretty close to an optimal amount or within a reasonable range, then that's one thing I would do. So check that off the list first. Do a pH test and do a basic soil test with your extension agent for your state or one of the mail-off ones from Amazon, whatever you wanna do. Get that done. And then from there, if everything is pretty, I mean, if your pH comes back and it's six, between five and seven and a half, you can work with that. And if nothing is just completely so out of whack, then I would just get to work putting some compost down, putting some wood chips down. If you can get wood chips in your area, that's kind of ideal. And get working on recreating the forest floor on top of that topsoil that they brought in. Recreate the forest floor. Chunky stuff on top, humus layer in between, whatever the soil is under that. Okay, and I get these kinds of questions. So these are the unanswerable kind of questions. Somebody had a barberry nandina hedge they're trying to dig out and they keep sending up shoots if they don't remove all the roots and nandina keep coming up, what can they do? There's nothing you can do other than keep digging it out. Unfortunately, that's just gonna take a minute. That might be an area, if you haven't replanted it yet, that might be an area that I take a tiller through because I think you could probably get a lot of that root material out of there. I don't do a lot of tilling here, but barberries and nandinas are fairly shallow rooted. So if you went through with a tiller and tilled about five, six inches deep, I think a lot of that root material would come up. It's gonna be a bouncy ride through the bed, okay? Just letting you know, I've done a lot of tilling in this life and it's gonna be a bouncy moment, but it will pull up a lot of those roots and help you get that thing pre-prepared for future plantings. Somebody's in Birmingham, Alabama, asked if it was too late to plant hardy hibiscus. Not at all, especially in the South for sure. And the hardy hibiscus are typically wetland plants anyway when you see them growing in the wild. So I'm not worried about them staying overly moist in the wintertime like I am other things, but do plant the crown up just a bit so it doesn't stay drowning in water during the wintertime. Allow it to put its roots down into the soil. So somebody asked if the plants on the high line get supplemental water. So we did that video from New York City week before last. And I've got one more video coming from that that we start at Little Island and work our way down the river some more. And we're gonna do a couple more videos, city videos, where I've done these, I've spent 40 years in this business and I've done a lot of tours of these cities like Chicago and New York and San Francisco and New Orleans and other places that have great gardens within them. Kind of as my, just something I do when I visit the cities. And I wanna go back and do some of those video content. So when you folks visit these cities, they can see that there are actually gardens within these cities that are quite nice in these urban spaces and allow the city to be quite a bit more livable overall. So on the high line, yes, because it's an elevated rail. It's definitely irrigated. They definitely have to irrigate that some because it's elevated and so parts of it are very windy, which is nice because those grasses and those perennials move around in that breeze, but it would dry them out big time. And there's not a lot of depth to that soil. So they're definitely having to do some irrigation on that. Let's see, can raised bed soil mix be used to top dress rather than compost? Looks like it would work. Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure that that raised bed soil mix, the main difference between it and just a compost is it's probably gonna have some bark or something in it that's slightly more chunky so that that's raised bed would drain. So I almost like, that's a good material to use. Yeah, to top dress your vegetable garden or annual beds or whatever. I'm sure it's gonna, that would work well for that. Somebody's in zone eight in Arkansas. Should I dig up my elephant ears? And then how do I store them? There are a lot of video content on YouTube for storing elephant ears and dahlias and caladiums and a lot of the things that folks in colder areas have to dig up. Here in zone eight, you're zone eight Arkansas and I'm zone eight in Raleigh. I leave all of those things in the ground and if they've established themselves for any length of time, they all come back for me. So if they survive the first winter, they'll survive long-term. And so I'm gonna leave that up to you in terms of the risk. Imagine your zone eight Arkansas probably has some cooler overall. We may have the same average low temperature, but I bet you spend a little more time with a little more wind, something under the ground isn't gonna be impacted all that much by the wind. I'll let you decide on that. You're right on the edge of where you can dig up elephant ears or leave them. Most people in zone eight across the board can leave them in the ground. Again, they need to survive that first winter. And then after that, they're very reliable coming back. Somebody's got some azalea leaf scorch. How should that be dealt with? So just the top of the, from that super dry period of time in the high heat that we had, it just burned the outer leaves on them. What should they do about them? Should they physically remove them? I think that any of that dead material on the tops of plants helps protect them in the wintertime. So I wouldn't prune any of that stuff off. And then I think you're probably still gonna get a few flowers in the spring. So I would just wait till the thing flowers in the spring and then do some general pruning on it to get it back in shape. Or if you don't think it's gonna get any flowers on it, just prune it in February or March before it would normally spring flower. But I leave that material on the top. Here's my funny answer for this video. How do I get rid of five clumps of pampas grass? You move. You put a for sale sign out at the road and you sell that house and you move down the street somewhere away from the five clumps of pampas grass. It really probably has to be burned out. You know, they can, I don't wanna say this necessarily because I don't know if you're in a place where you can burn them, but they need to be cut back super, super hard. And then you could probably get a stump grinder, you know, have somebody with a stump grinder come in and grind a lot of it out. Again, they can be burned out. They can be, they could be covered for some period of time and allowed to rot out for some period of time. But what a pain. Oh my gosh, they're so hard. And they, you know, the thing with pampas grass here is for a few years, they'll look pretty good in the clump and then the center of the clump starts dying and then you just get this weird outer grass on the edges of it where this dead middle part of the clump is. It's just a pain, but I do joke and say, I would move, get away from the pampas grass. You would need to cover it for some period of time to rot it if you don't have any other physical way to remove it. I'll do about six or seven more here before we wrap this up. This person already has pine straw on beds. They want to switch to hardwood mulch. Do they need to rake away the pine straw? Do they need to put down compost before the hardwood? No, and I rotated back and forth between pine straw and hardwood mulch at the old house. And the reason I did that is I never wanted my hardwood mulch to get too thick. Sometimes it doesn't break down as quick and I just rotate in with pine straw while I waited for that hardwood mulch to break down. So once the pine straw is kind of thinned a bit, you can hardwood mulch right over the top of it. That's what I did for 23 years in the old house and had no problem. I would say that once every fourth mulching, I used pine straw and that kept my hardwood mulch from ever getting so thick that it ended up with dry sockets in it and that kind of thing. So again, you can rotate back and forth, but do let the pine straw break down a good amount before you put the hardwood mulch on top of it. Is it a good time to transplant burning bush? You could transplant burning bush probably 12 months out of the year. They're pretty hardy plants. You just dig it up, cut it back about a third probably and transplant it on any day of the year you wanted to. They're like, you know, they'll out-survive humans for sure. But when it's dormant would be the best time. So if you're asking me what the best time is, it's gonna turn flame red here in the next few weeks and then it's gonna lose its leaves and anytime while it's dormant is the best time. But again, they're gonna out-survive, but it's gonna be the burning bush and the cockroaches when we're gone. And then same thing with sunshine ligustrum. They wanted to know when to move it. Now it's more of a leafy evergreen that may be doing some growing right now. And so probably more in the dead of winter is when I'd move the sunshine ligustrum or coming out of winter on the other side of it. This person wants to move a panicle hydrangea. How far can they cut it back without damaging it? So we cut our panicle hydrangeas back to about 18 inches in the winter time. They don't have any problem coming back from that. So I would wait till the thing is dormant, cut it down to about 18 inches, and pop it out of the ground and move it. You won't have any problem moving a panicle hydrangea. Did our sweet starlight hydrangea, this is another panicle hydrangea, thrive? And did we get any pink color? Yes, before we were leaving. And I didn't, that's a little, there's a little piece of video missing from the 18 videos and it's next to where the top of the driveway out there and that's where that sweet starlight hydrangea is. Yes, I only had about six flowers on it this year because it was a small plant when I put it in. They did get some pink hue to it. I don't know how pink that ultimately became because we were not here to see it. And now they've browned out at this point. But they did have some pink hue to them before I left. And I took a photo and sent it to the Southern Living Plant Collection. And if I can find it on my phone, I'll put it here. But I don't know. I take too many photos. Somebody in North Carolina, have daffodils coming in October. Do they need to pre-chill them? No, you don't really need to pre-chill your daffodils. You'll get enough cold in the ground if you go ahead and get them in the ground after you plant them. And I worry a little bit about pre-chilling daffodils just because they may decide to come up as soon as you put them in the ground if you give them any time in the refrigerator. And so I would just go and get your daffodils in the ground. As a follow-up question for that, somebody bought tulips from Costco in Atlanta. Should they plant or refrigerate them? Those you do need to refrigerate. They will not have been cold treated at this point. So the tulips need cold treatment. The daffodils, you'll get, they need cold treatment, but you'll get adequate cold, cold enough for daffodils in the ground in North Carolina. Okay, I'm gonna do, let's find one more here to do. Let's see. And then somebody said, they love the New York City urban gardening and we consider doing other cities. And the answer to that is definitely a yes. Steph has talked about a bunch when we're on the road that I should do some sort of summary every couple of weeks while we're on the road of all the things that we've gone and seen, maybe use some of the photos that I've taken. And she's probably right. And I just have not followed through and made one of those videos. I think it would probably be interesting because over the course of a two week period of time or so, we'll visit, you know, six or eight gardens, a bunch of garden centers and all kinds of things during our travels. And I probably should make some sort of video like that. So one more for this week. Again, the weekly garden planner's $40 off for the rest of September. And as you're watching this video, this will be like the 22nd, right? So a week and a half or so left on that sale. Somebody has an osmanthus fragrance blooming quite a lot, about three months in the ground, yet it has no fragrance and they're super disappointed. So number one, there are times where I cannot smell my osmanthus out here. And I think, you know, as it starts to bloom, as the days get shorter, we'll start to get our flowers on our osmanthus. It's a little early for them at this point in September, but September, I'll see a few flowers. October, I'll see a few more. I think they're a lot more fragrant in October. And I think they're a lot more fragrant in March than they are in April before it gets hotter and it kind of slows them down. So I think it needs slightly cooler temperatures to really have the fragrance kind of radiate through the entire garden. But the main thing I wrote this question down for is the, I planted something three months ago and it's not performing perfectly for me. Those are the kinds of questions I get constantly. And those questions are always, the answer is always going to be, if the plant is still looking okay and it's not declining in some way, walk away. Just water it when it needs water and just walk away. The plants are not going to give you everything, fragrance, color, flowering, whatever it is that you're asking that plant to do. It's not going to, sometimes something will immediately start growing and all things are perfect. Most of the time, that's not the way it works. It takes a bit of time. Sometimes there's a little bit of a dip in the plant. As long as you're not needing to rescue it for some reason, then just walk away. And by rescue it, I mean, it's obviously some sort of discontent. It's declining in some way rapidly. That would tell me I need to put it back in the pot really quickly, maybe try to recover it in the container for a while, or I've put it in a spot that's too wet, or I missed watering it, something, I need to rescue it. But if it's blooming and all things seem normal, then leave it alone. Everything will work itself out. I think that overall, the fragrance on my osmanthus, and I probably could walk over there now, ours are 12 feet tall, and find a few flowers at this point, because the days are getting shorter, but I may not smell it until it's October. Again, October evenings out here in this back garden, there's nothing but this fragrance of osmanthus. So it'll come when it comes, it's not without fragrance. So anyway, thank you guys so much for participating in the question and answer videos and watching the content. If you're not subscribed, I never am one of those channels that goes, subscribe to the channel. But if you're not subscribed, hit the subscribe button. And thank you guys so much for following on.