If you are taking a trip yet this winter to escape the snow and cold weather, here is an important tip.
When traveling and staying at a motel, never leave your medicines, cash, checkbook or Travelers checks in your motel room while you are gone for the day.
We always want to trust the cleaning maids, but it only takes one dishonest maid with long fingers to make it rough for others.
I can’t prove it, but some of my pain pills disappeared from our motel room on a short trip recently. Hopefully this will not happen to you; just be aware of your surroundings.
I have planted perennial hibiscus plants, but they emerge slowly in the spring, sometimes not until even late June. Is there anything to hurry their emergence?
Once they emerge, they do grow fast. With all of the snow this winter for cover, one would not have needed to cover these hibiscus plants last fall.
But we never know from year to year how much snow we’ll get and how early it will come.
Many years ago I recommended no covering for these flowers, then we had a couple of years with little snow, and many gardeners (including us) lost many of their perennial hibiscus plants.
This is the main reason we now recommend covering these plants every fall.
The past several years we have used cedar wood chips for cover. We also add some 10-10-10 granular fertilizer in the fall before the snow begins.
My house plants are showing disease. What should I be spraying them with?
The old standby we keep using is the product Orthenex. Follow instructions on how to mix and apply onto your house plants. In the summer roses also need to be checked on a regular basis, for both insects and disease.
The first spraying in the spring should be about the time the rose plants are leafing out.
The leaves looked so ugly on my “naked lady lilies” last spring. Why were they so slow in blooming?
As soon as the green leaves have dried up, the lone stalks of the lilies will begin to appear. They do get tall, at least two feet tall, and are usually pink in color.
If you want to move these plants, wait until the flowering is complete. Plant about the same depth as they were before. Put them in a sunny area if at all possible.
I didn’t have many apples on my trees last season. What was the problem?
The main reason this may have happened is that we had below average temperatures. Many trees bear fruit every other year, so this may be a lean year with few apples from your fruit trees.
There may have been a lack of bees to pollinate the trees, or maybe your fruit trees were flowering at the time we had two straight nights of freezing temperatures in mid-May and the flowers simply all froze.
I planted some fruit trees several years ago, yet they haven’t grown much. What do I do to make them grow faster?
Patience is the key here. For at least the first two years, the tree’s root system is what mainly grows. If you have the dwarf fruit trees they should begin to produce the third or fourth season or earlier.
If you have the regular or standard tree, it could be to the sixth or seventh year before you get your first production.
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Hank Wessels is a Master Gardener in Watonwan County. He welcomes questions and comments from readers. He may be reached at 601 1st St. SW, Madelia, MN 56062, hwdw@madtelco.net or (507) 642-8479.
