Stop Killing Weeds With Sugar

About This Episode

The Grumpy Gardener answers a reader’s question on pruning magnolia trees. Plus, Grumpy’s gripe of the week about poor gardening advice.

Question Of The Week

"We moved to Lampasas, Texas, last summer and inherited 17 southern magnolia trees that were planted along a wrought iron fence to create a privacy screen. They were beautiful, healthy, and bloomed well. Now the former owners are telling me to, quote, top the trees in early spring so they'll grow wider and not taller. Is this advice on the up and up?" - Frank.

Grumpy's Answer

I just cringe because I always think about those landscape guys that you see with a little pickup truck by the side of the road and they come in with their chainsaws and they just lop the heads off of some tree and shrub and it makes it look absolutely terrible. So let's not use the word top. We do not want a flat top on a southern magnolia. Now, if you want to encourage the trees to bush out a little bit more, if you wanna control the height at all, yes, you can prune them. The way I would suggest doing this is to get yourself a pair of loppers and you can shorten branches or even the main trunk, but do not cut in the middle of the trunk or in the middle of the branch, between where the leaves are, or else you're gonna leave an ugly stub and it may die. If you're going to cut, what you want to do is you want to either cut something back to the main trunk or, preferably, cut it back, a branch, to where it joins with another branch and there's some foliage there. That way, you maintain the natural shape of the tree and you don't have any ugly stubs sticking out

Gripe Of The Week

Now, you know why you should listen to Ask Grumpy? Because the stuff that you hear coming is going to be legitimate information. It's going to be accurate, and the problem that I see a lot today, especially stuff that's online, on websites and the internet, I don't know who writes these things, but they know absolutely nothing about horticulture, okay? So, I was just surfing through my phone, looking at different garden sites and I saw an article about how to get rid of this terrible weed in your lawn, called nutsedge or nutgrass. And a lot of people, you probably have seen this in your own yard. It has these long, tall leaves that kind of form an arch as they go up, and then it gets these big stems in the middle with these yellow burs in the middle that will stick you. And it's very invasive, it can take over your whole lawn. Now, there are products out there, specifically labeled, that will kill this stuff without hurting your lawn. But apparently, this one website, that on advice of our attorneys, I will not mention, they don't like using chemicals that work, so what they do is they scurry around the house and they look for whatever they can find that doesn't work, and that's what they tell you to use.

This is what they say. And then they want you to pour sugar all over your lawn, maybe about an inch-deep layer. And so, and this will kill the nut grass, right? Well, how does it do this? Well, what they say is that the sugar will bump up all the microbial action in the soil and those little, hungry microbes will be so busy eating all the sugar and the nitrogen that comes out that they will leave no nitrogen, no food whatsoever for the nutsedge and it will die, okay? Grumpy has problems with this.

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.