Dealing with Grubs and Delays
By Ken Lain, The Garden Guy

The major challenge of gardening is timing. Get the timing right and your gardening successes jump dramatically. My goal with this column is to make sure the work you put into your garden is timed correctly. That’s why each week I alert you to gardening tasks and issues that are paramount to the season

Another challenge of gardening is identifying potential and obvious problems. One of my claims to fame as a garden center owner is that I know how to deal with all garden pests, whether insects, vermin, or weeds. As a result, lots of people come to me with gardening issues. With every other customer coming into the garden center this week the question has been about grubs. Now, I am here to tell you that our gardens and landscapes are under a grub attack!

Grubs have become epidemic in our local landscapes. This week customers have reported grub damage so severe that smaller perennials have simply fallen over with no roots left, shrubs have died back, trees turned an off color and their leaf tips have died back. These tragedies are all indications that grubs have eaten the roots completely off of plants.

Grubs are simply the larvae forms of beetles. There are dozens of beetle varieties that live most of their lives in this worm form, living up to five years in the soil before emerging as an adult beetle. The tightly curled white worms living in our local soil can grow up to three inches long. The females know which type of soil is best for their young and they find that the loose, organically rich soils of a cultivated landscape are the perfect incubators.

If you’re unsure if grubs are squatting in your landscape or garden, dig a couple of holes around the bases of your plants; if you find even one grub you have issues. You never will have only a few grubs. Like roaches, for each one you see there are many, many more that you don’t see. If you are to protect your plants from the silent assault of root-devouring grubs, you need to get on this problem NOW!

Hi-Yield’s "Kill-A-Grub" is a fairly new product that wipes out grubs for a year with only one application. It has really done a great job at keeping my landscape free from these pesky insects. Spread just as a granular fertilizer, it begins killing grubs as rain and irrigation release the product from the granules. It truly is our gardens’ front line of defense against grubs.

If you’re not sure if the worm you’ve found really is a grub or if you discover another interesting insect living in the soil of your landscape, bring the sample bugs to us at the garden center. Whether you ask either me or my impressively knowledgeable staff, your show-and-tell find can be identified. We can then tell you if treatment is necessary and, if so, what is appropriate.

I hope that all of you will consider my staff and me a useful, convenient garden resource. Just remember to bring garden samples in a sealed jar or plastic baggy so possible diseases and pests are not spread to the plants at the garden center or, even worse, throughout the community.

That’s enough of the technical side of gardening for today. This week’s garden photo is of a gilded silver berry, Elaeagnus x ebbingei. My great affection for this plant is undeniable because I have several in our yard at home. With its brilliant coloring, this plant can be a bright spot in any landscape. Especially against darker backgrounds, it adds welcome color late in the year when most flowering plants are finished blooming. Because it grows to six feet tall and equally round, I've used the silver berry as a hedgerow or privacy screen. It is an excellent low water replacement for red -tipped photinia and when established needs only occasional watering.

Far more than just a low-water-use plant, this evergreen has numerous characteristics many of us want to incorporate in our landscapes. Its spring flowers are small but intensely fragrant, the two-tone colors attract the eye, and brightly colored berries adorn this bush through early winter. If you need more color in your landscape as we head into fall, I highly recommend this shrub as a top performer.

I have been as discouraged as the other merchants on Iron Springs Road during the much-needed road improvement. Construction dominated three spring seasons and just as we think it's over the city wants to do even more work. Not only did we lose half of our garden center customers because of the construction, but also the day-to-day road issues have proven frustrating and wearing on all of us on my staff. If you are one of the folks I lost over the years please visit and say "hi" again. You'll be impressed with the new road and all the new changes to the garden center.

One of my frustrations with the drawn-out Iron Springs Road project is that, because of construction delays and disputes that continue even today, I’ve had to postpone landscaping the entry to the garden center. I believe that a garden center without an exceptional landscape is like an auto mechanic driving an old beater car or a homebuilder living in a small apartment. Well, fall is the ideal time to add new landscaping and I think I am going to plant around the new Watters sign and let the city deal with the consequences. Keep a close eye on the amazing new landscape I'll be planting over the next couple of months…with or without the city’s blessing.

Until next week, I’ll see you in the garden center.

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