How To Pick The Perfect Tree For Your Yard, According To The Grumpy Gardener

About This Episode

A reader seeks advice for planting trees in their yard. Plus, the Grumpy Gardener shares a simple planting tip.

Question Of The Week

"We're trying to choose a pair of shade trees to put 30 to 50 feet away from our home. We want to have nice fall color and to be able to grow grass under them. Which should we choose, Chinese pistache- or thornless honey locust?

Grumpy's Answer: Oh, okay, well, both these trees have their good points. They grow quickly. They tolerate heat and drought. They aren't fussy about soil. They cast light-dappled shade, so grass is going to grow underneath them, and they both have good fall color. Chinese pistache turns bright orange and red, and the thornless honey locust turns bright yellow.

The Differences Between Chinese Pistache and Honey Locust

• Size: Chinese pistache grows about 35-feet tall, while the thornless Honey Locust can get twice that big, so you have to plan for that.
• Pests: Also, Chinese pistache is generally pest-free, but Honey Locust has lots of pests, including borers and webworms.
• Seed Pods: And Honey Locust can also drop a lot of messy seed pods allover your lawn. So it's important if you're going to use a Honey Locust to buy a seedless variety, and there is a couple I'll mention here. One is called Moraine, not lemon meringue, like moraine, like for a glacial moraine. There's also one called Shade master, and there's one called Skyline. So if you're going to plant a thornless Honey Locust, I'd look for one of those three. However, if I had to pick between the two types of trees, it would be a Chinese pistache by a country mile. It's yet another case of an exotic plant being easier than a native one.
  

Tip Of The Week

Okay, so this tip is kind of a simple thing, but I use it and I think it works well, especially when I'm planting annuals and perennials. When you start putting these flowers into a bed, and it may be already a mulch bed. You want to get the hole big enough, but you don't want to scatter soil all over the top because then the soil's on top of the mulch, and it makes a mess, and it makes it muddy. Here's an easy way to put them in the ground without making a mess.

1. The first thing that you do after you decide the spot that you're going to put the plant in, take it out of the pot.
2. Make sure that before you plant any of these things that you have watered each pot though because you want the soil there to be moist.
3. Then you take your trowel, and you just scrap aside the mulch on the top, off to the side, and then you dig your hole. And you might wonder, "Okay, so how big and how deep should I make this hole?" One easy way to measure that is every time you take a scoop with your trowel out, you put it in the pot that you just took the plant out. Scoop in the pot, scoop in the pot, scoop in the pot. And pretty soon, you're going to get a hole that's deep and the right size to put the plant in.
4. You just stick the plant in the hole so the top of the roots are at level with the soil, and then you just take all the soil from that pot, and you just sprinkle it all around evenly, around that.
5. Take your trowel and just tamp it down so it's nice and solid and firm around it. And you've made use of an otherwise useless pot, and you have made less of a mess than you would have before.
   

About Ask Grumpy

Ask Grumpy is a podcast featuring Steve Bender, also known as Southern Living’s Grumpy Gardener. For more than 30 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.