Neil Sperry's Mailbag

You may have planted them too late. Sow watermelon seeds about two weeks after your last freeze date in the spring so they can grow and begin to mature before the hottest mid-summer weather. Choose a small to middle-sized variety. Better yet, plant some seeds right away for a fall crop. Choose a variety that matures quickly to be sure you beat the frost. Don't give up. Gardening is a challenge, but the rewards are fun. Good luck!

You can use herbicides containing 2,4-d broadleafed weed killer. Follow label directions carefully to avoid damaging desirable plants nearby. By the way, if it ever matters, Shadow is a form of zoysia, not buffalograss.

There is no preventive. Use Sevin dust around the plants' crowns to control the juvenile bugs. Once they're mature, your best bet is to remove them mechanically. Either hand-pick and destroy them or prop a wooden shingle or small board on a stick beneath the plant. The squash bugs will congregate beneath the shingle in the hottest part of the day. Merely kick the prop out and you'll be able to "squash the squash bugs" where they hide.

Greenhouse growers refer to those as "blind" shoots in their hydrangeas, and they're devastating for the sales value of that plant. If they receive much cold in the winter, the plants will freeze back rather drastically. That, more than anything, will cause failure to bloom. Hydrangeas that have frozen back respond with very vigorous new leaf and stem growth, at the very great expense of their reproductive floral bracts. Your best bet in future years would be to protect the plant just a bit when it's going to be cold.

Assuming you have the true cane (one-inch-wide leaves), you should be able to eliminate it with one of the glyphosates such as Round Up. Spray when the growth is 3 to 4 feet tall, not right after you cut it. Be sure the spray coats the leaves, and protect desirable plants nearby from any drift that might hit their leaves. Do not use the material at full strength unless it's a ready-to-use formulation.

Using a weed killer at a very strong ratio sometimes can burn foliage without actually killing the entire plant as you have wished. You can also dig cane out with a steel-handled sharpshooter spade. If you decide to do that, wait until the soil is well saturated following a rain.

Probably not successfully. The plants will have too much leaf area in relation to the few large roots that will make the move with them. It would be best to find someone who does have enough room for them. I have one that's spent every summer in a very large concrete pot in the shade alongside our driveway. Mine goes into my greenhouse each winter, but to conserve space, I have to use plastic plant tie to draw its leaves up tightly. It's worked fairly well for me for all of that time.

I've not seen it done, but I suspect they would sprout out if you cut them back to 8 to 10 inches of the soil line, but you would need to do so now to allow time for them to regrow. This would be my last choice, however. For the record, the variety Xanadu looks about the same as Philodendron selloum but stays much smaller and more manageable.

Spray it with MSMA. It may yellow your bermuda for a short while, but it will come back very quickly. MSMA kills dallisgrass as well. You need to make your application soon, before the grasses start to slow down this fall.

My own personal choice in exactly that situation has been mondograss (Ophiopogon). It grows to 6 to 8 inches tall. I use dwarf mondograss, but not for large areas. It simply grows too slowly. For variety, I also have purple wintercreeper euonymus and Asian jasmine. Both are outstanding full-sun groundcovers, but they also do very well in shade. So, the answer isn't quite as simple as the question.

Unfortunately, that's not a realistic expectation. Insecticides have much shorter residuals than you are wanting, and chinch bugs are very mobile from lawn to lawn. The practical solution is to learn to recognize them at their earliest appearance, then to apply a good turf insecticide. It's not terribly expensive, nor is it difficult.

Those of us who prefer St. Augustine for whatever our reasons learn to cope with the insects.

Absolutely nothing other than freeze damage and drought. It almost has to have gotten too dry sometime earlier this late spring or summer. The fact that the stems are brown is not good. It may have to fill back in from the edges of the healthy jasmine.

You need to decide, first and foremost, what the very best turfgrass for your needs would be. If you have shade, St. Augustine is the hands down winner. Turffalo is a form of buffalograss. As such, it is drought-tolerant, but it definitely will need full or nearly full sunlight. Bermudagrass and St. Augustine will both invade any buffalograss planting. There is no chemical control to stop them.

Neil Sperry
()