Episode 45: Remember To Mark Your Spring Bulbs!

About This Episode

In this week’s episode of Ask Grumpy, Steve Bender, also known as Southern Living’s Grumpy Gardener, helps a reader with a lantana invested by white flies. Plus, Grumpy’s tip of the week that have us preparing for spring.

Question Of The Week

My lantana is infested with white flies, and the plant looks awful. What should I do?

Grumpy Gardener Answer: Get yourself a shovel, dig up the plant, and throw it out with the trash. It's not gonna be that big of a sacrifice, you see, because it's at the end of the blooming season. Pretty soon you're going to get a frost. It's gonna kill the flowers back, and the foliage, and who knows? The lantana, depending on where you live, may not even survive the winter. The reason why you want to just get rid of this plant as soon as possible is because white flies are some of the toughest pests to get rid of. They will lay eggs, and they'll have juveniles and adult insects on the plant all at the same time. They multiply like crazy, and if you don't get rid of that plant, they may, over winter in your garden, and comeback. And then you'll have white flies again next year, and they get on practically everything. So rather than trying to spray and save the plant for maybe another two weeks and not succeeding, just get rid of the plant. Put it in the trash can. Don't put it in the compost. Put it in the trash can and get rid of it.

Tip Of The Week

Mark your spring bulbs.

The reason why, when you're planting your spring bulbs you mark them, is so you know where they are, so that come the spring or early spring before they come up, you don't dig down trying to plant something else, and dig up your bulbs and destroy them, okay? So now here's something you can do that's really simple. You can put little tags with the names of the bulbs, the variety: daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, whatever.

Another thing is, if you're planting several different colors of bulbs, you can get something like these colored golf tees. If you got yellow bulbs here, and you got blue bulbs here, and red bulbs over here, you can put that down. So you might want to say, "Okay, I want to kind of coordinate all of my colors in the spring. I want to know where the bulbs are in the ground. But I also want to know what color they're going to be when they come up." So, when you plant your bulbs, and now is a really good time to do it. Put a marker out there so you'll know what kinda bulbs you have, and what color they're going to be, and you'll get lots better results, and you won't dig up and kill your bulbs.

About Ask Grumpy

Ask Grumpy is a podcast featuring Steve Bender, also known as Southern Living’s Grumpy Gardener. For more than 20 years, Grumpy has been sharing advice on what to grow, when to plant, and how to manage just about anything in your garden. Tune in for short episodes every Wednesday and Saturday as Grumpy answers reader questions, solves seasonal conundrums, and provides need-to-know advice for gardeners with his very Grumpy sense of humor. Be sure to follow Ask Grumpy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen so you don't miss an episode.

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.