Q: Will ginger grow in Decatur? — Larry Heintz, email
A: Ginger lily (butterfly ginger), Hedychium coronarium, is a beautiful, fragrant perennial that graces many Southern gardens. It's usually winter-hardy if covered lightly with mulch. This plant is not the same as edible ginger, Zingiber officinale. Edible ginger is a bit less cold-tolerant. Best success comes from growing it in a large container that is stored indoors during winter.
Q: When should I aerate my zoysia grass every year? — Elaine Zambroski, email
A: You should aerate when the soil is so hard that air can't get to the roots and the roots can't expand. How to test? A few days after a rain, try to push a Phillips head screwdriver into the soil. If it's hard to push the tool in the dirt more than an inch, then your lawn needs aerating.
Q: I have access to pine shavings with no manure. I want to use it in my rose garden for weed control, but I am worried it will change the soil pH. — Cherry Williamson, Alabama
A: Contrary to popular belief, pine chips, pine straw and pine shavings have little effect on the pH (acidity and alkalinity) of soil. Garden soil has a great capacity to resist immediate pH change, so a mulch of pine shavings would have little effect.
Q: My peony plants flower for about a week before something causes the flower buds to not open any more. They are showing some browning around the edges. — Carol Dew, Atlanta
A: It sounds like a thrips problem. Thrips are tiny insects that chew delicate flower tissue and can cause peonies' blooms not to open. Spray the flowers with spinosad (Captain Jack's Dead Bug Brew) now to kill as many thrips as possible. This may not help with flower opening, but it can reduce the number of insects. Next spring, consider applying a systemic insecticide when the peony sprouts appear.
Q: A couple of weeks ago, our fescue lawn was diagnosed with having an invasive winter grass called Poa trivialis. The grass has consumed over 60 percent of my lawn. What can I do? — Richard Ferrer, email
A: You are not going to like my answer.
Poa trivialis, roughstock bluegrass, and Poa annua, annual bluegrass, are both cool-season grasses. Both die out or go dormant during summer heat. But Poa trivialis is much harder to control, because it is perennial. There is some research on new herbicides that can suppress roughstock bluegrass, but there's nothing selective enough to kill it and not your lawn grass. Killing everything with glyphosate and reseeding is your only option.
It’s hard to tell you what exactly to do now in very late spring. You could kill everything and then reseed with fescue, but the fescue won’t survive July heat without strict attention to watering. Or, you could simply mow the bluegrass until fall, pray for a mild summer that doesn’t cause it to go dormant, then kill the existing bluegrass and fescue in September and reseed with fescue at that time.
About the Author
