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Q: My azaleas turned almost brown this year with very tiny holes in them. From a distance, they look whitewashed. I have eight of them in the front of my house, which gets the afternoon sun. Help!

A: Me thinks you've been visited by lace bugs. These are the arch nemesis of azaleas. These two go together like politicians and tax-cut promises. This is such a common problem that I seldom see azaleas that haven't been attacked at least a little by lace bugs.

Continue reading "Whitewashed azaleas" »

Q: I have planted 'Detroit Dark Red' beets four times this year and three times last year. They germinate fine, then one by one they fall over dead. When I pick them up, there is no root, and the stem is blackened where the root was. When all is said and done, I harvest only about 2 percent of what I planted! Any ideas?

A: At least you're a persistent bugger! That sounds like a classic case of rhizoctonia, a soil-borne fungus that rots beets at the soil line and causes them to flop over dead, dead, dead.

Continue reading "Beets keeling over" »

Q: I was told that red raspberries could not be planted close to black raspberries because neither would produce fruit. If this is true, how far apart would they need to be planted?

A: I never heard that one, but I suspect it's a partial truth related to pollination.

There's nothing I know of that one raspberry could do - other than spreading a serious disease - to prevent the fruiting of another . But since raspberries produce most of their fruit thanks to the cross-pollination of bees, you'd get little to no fruit if you had just one black raspberry and one red raspberry. The flowering times wouldn't overlap, and I'm not even sure that the two are close enough botanically to cross-pollinate anyway.

If you plant two or more of each kind and don't do anti-bee things like spray insecticides all over the place, I think you'd have plenty of both fruits even if you planted the two groupings next to one another.

An excellent source for more info on raspberries is Penn State's small-fruit production web site at http://ssfruit.cas.psu.edu/Brambles.htm.