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Jill and Rick Van Duyvendyk answer all your gardening questions in Garden Talk on 650 CKOM and 980 CJME every Sunday morning at 9 a.m.
Here are some questions and answers from the March 23 show:
Read more:
- Garden Talk: How can I deal with aphids in 2025?
- Garden Talk: Tips for caring for classic houseplant Benjamina ficus
- Garden Talk: Tips for planning a thriving home vegetable garden
- Garden Talk: What should I do now to get my Sask. garden ready for spring?
These questions and answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Q: Are ladybugs available to buy this year?
A: There will be none available this year. Ladybugs are harvested out of the forest and farmed in Western Canada and California, and with all the fires the ladybug population needs time to repopulate.
To keep ladybugs in your yard be diligent when cleaning up this year. Don’t just throw the leaves into the compost. Make sure you leave them on the ground until you start seeing budding of leaves on trees and plants. If the ladybugs have a place to go, they’ll be good.
Q: How can I get rid of fungus gnats?
A: They live in damp places and soil. When you water plants inside they get damp and there’s nowhere else the bugs can go. Outside there’s lots of different places they can go so you don’t see them.
Put a little fan up in any seed starting or house plant area to get air movement. The bugs do not like that and the air movement is going to dry out the top section of soil where the larvae live as well.
If you have a really bad infestation, you have to deal with it in the adult stage and the larvae stage. For adults use sticky traps or suck them up as much as you can with a vacuum cleaner.
To deal with the soil, you can use nematodes in a shaker, or a pot popper and apply them onto the top of the soil and keep it moist. They are little bugs that eat the larvae and they’ll do their work for you. Fungus gnats have a 10-day life cycle.
You can also take a slice of an apple or potato and set it on top of the soil and leave it overnight. Remove it in the morning and you’ll see them on the bottom of the potato.
You can also use diatomaceous earth on the top of the soil which will do dry out any bugs coming out of the soil and help them from laying their eggs again.
Q: Several spruce trees planted in September went brown over the winter. What can I do to prevent that?
A: That’s because we had a few warm spells this winter. What happens is that as they poke through the snow, they are exposed to the sun reflecting off it and drying the needles out.
The buds on the end of those plants should still be fine and will pop out new
growth unless they didn’t root. There’s always a chance you could lose a few to transplant shock or that they didn’t get rooted enough to sustain themselves over the winter.
Q: When is the best time to spray for the fruit trees for fruit flies?
A: Not until the end of June or first week of July after they finish blooming. The only thing you can really spray with is a pyrethrin but you can put out some fake apples or a lime tennis ball and coat it with a sticky substance called tangle foot, but you’re not going to catch all of them.
Webs on chokecherries. (Submitted)
Q: What are these webs on chokecherry trees?
A: Tent caterpillars make these web-like nests. They’ll disappear as the weather takes care of them, or you can blast them with a water hose.
The caterpillars are not in those nests right now, they’ve already laid their eggs on the branches. To prevent it from happening again use BTK insecticide on the leaves. It doesn’t affect any other insects except for caterpillars. It won’t hurt ladybugs.
Q: How do I get rid of snow mold on my lawn?
A: Take a leaf rake and lightly ruffle up your grass. Wear a mask if you have any allergies to mold or dust. With the regular winds we have right now it’ll dissipate by itself. You don’t have to spray anything or do anything else. Don’t use a hard rake because it will rip the grass out.
Q: What do I need to do when moving pear, apple and cherry trees this spring?
A: When you move them, take as much root as you can. Move them as soon as the ground is the frost free and before they have leaves. If you’re in a spot in Saskatchewan where you can start digging right now, move them right now.
Add some H-Start fertilizer or Super 8 probiotic, and mulching is important to keep the moisture around them and keep the weeds down. Use three inches of mulch are on the plant except for right against the trunk where us should use half to one inch against the trunk.
See Dutch Grower’s Soil Health & Microbes: Using H-Start here.
Q: When’s the best time to use a plug aerator on my lawn?
A: Any time the ground passes the sock test — walk on your grass wearing socks and see if your socks are wet— once the frost is gone. If it’s too wet, you’ll just rip your lawn up and it’ll plug up the machine.
Q: When should I start cucumber seeds in the house?
A: It really depends on the variety. Always look at the maturation date on your seeds — anything over 80 days, you should be starting right now but for a 50 to 60-day cucumber seed, wait until mid-April.
The other thing with cucumbers indoors is to make sure you have a garden fungicide on hand because they do tend to get powdery mildew. While they’re germinating, you want to keep them quite moist, but once they get sets of leaves, you don’t want to start putting trellises inside the house.
Q: When is the best time to prune a cotoneaster hedge and how can I keep it free of disease?
A: Pruning it can keep it free of disease by removing old and dead wood and needs to be done before spring growth starts. You can prune down to the ground or halfway down. Clean your pruners quite often because if you think you have a disease like fire blight. Use rubbing alcohol or bleach in water and put some vegetable oil on after cleaning so they don’t get rust.
Q: When should I repot and prune a hibiscus?
A: Now is the perfect time to prune it because it’s just starting to actively grow. If the roots are quite wound up around the bottom when you remove it from the pot, move it into a pot about one to two inches bigger in diameter.
Some people even prune all the new growth right off their hibiscus right down to the old growth and let it come back the next spring. It also gets rid of any aphids or any bugs that might be in that new growth. Use a 20-20 fertilizer but hibiscus don’t like a lot of the salts in a synthetic fertilizer, and the salts sit in the bottom of your pot. They prefer an organic fertilizer.
Q: Is it too late to plant tomato seeds?
A: No. Look at the seed package and if the growing time is about 120 days you want to get them going right now. If the growing time is 50 to 60 days then wait a couple weeks.
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