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Hello and welcome to down to earth. You'll see our guest horticulturalist Oggie is back
with us today. Our question this week is from Gail, who has a fruit tree, a peach tree but
she would like to know if she can prune right now. Normally you would not prune any fruit
trees right now, or any other tree really very much as well, but fruit trees especially
because you are pruning out some of the buds for next year but more importantly you pruning
out some of the growth if you prune it up improperly your encouraging it to grow, so
you don't want to do that. This particular tree has very heavy limbs and it does need
a lot of correcting. You'll notice that it is growing a lot on one side, has a bunch
of branches down on the ground. So gale does need to go out and balance the tree, kind
of bring it back into balance. So what you need to do if you are going to prune this
time of year is remove all of those limbs that are a hazard, the ones that are on the
ground are a tripping hazard so you do need to prune those all the way back to the source,
all the way back to the branch that they came from or the main trunk. When you do that you
don't encourage the tree to branch any further, breaking buds if you cut all the way back
to the source so that's the proper way to prune this time of year.
Our plant this week is Cedar Sage, Salvia roemeriana. This is a perennial salvia, its
native to the Edwards plateau, under Ashe Juniper trees. So it does grow very well for
us in the shade. It gets 1 to 2 feet tall and then would have a 1 foot flower stock.
It does great in the shade as I said and it does need very well drained soil since its
native to that rocky plateau. You don't want to overwater this plant especially if you
have it in a little bit of a heavy soil, it has beautiful heart shaped hairy leaves unlike
some of our salvias that have smaller leaves. It has gorgeous tubular crimson flowers and
it does flower all summer long from early spring through late summer. As I said it's
a perennial so it dies to the ground in the winter, and its hearty to zero degrees. Some
of these last winter we may have lost because we got down so much colder than that. It does
establish very quickly, filling in beds by reseeding prolifically. As I said its native
under Ashe Juniper trees, which is where it gets its name Cedar Sage because we commonly
call junipers "cedar" around here. TO do in your garden this week its still time to plant
some cool season vegetables ad herbs, such as carrots and radishes and lettuces and spinach
even lemon balm, cilantro and chamomile, those are some great herbs for us to grown now that
its cool season. We'd love to hear from you! Please visit klru.org/ctg
to send us your question of the week from your garden.