Bruce Kreitler: Surviving in the shade and skip the Dicamba – Abilene Reporter-News

Bruce Kreitler, Special to the Reporter-News Published 5:00 p.m. CT April 12, 2020

Having been in a lot of yards lately, and also having observed the effects of our very plentiful rainfall, I notice that weeds are doing very well this year.

Just a couple of things I want to point out about big broadleaf weeds in a yard, before I move on.

First of all, if you do any kind of post-emergent treatment, do those as spot applications, directly on the weeds.

Secondly, don't use anything with Dicamba as one of the active ingredients. You can check the front of the product container, be it bag, bottle,= or box, and somewhere (albeit in small print), it will say active ingredients, with a listing of them below that heading. If you have trees and shrubs, and one of those active ingredients is Dicamba, use something else.

I do feel obligated to mention that my recommendation against Dicamba in a landscape is not based on any industry-wide information or research. Also, I get a lot of pushback from other people in the industry concerning my dislike for Dicamba.

Many professional applicators are using it, and they consider their use as successful, so my opinion is not too popular. I will say that I know of a couple of pros, who are using limited amounts of Dicamba, and do seem to be doing OKwith it.

Bruce Kreitler(Photo: .)

However, that is much different from the over-the-counter formulations available to the general public. Having been in a lot of yards where trees and shrubs are not doing well, and finding out that the one thing in common those yards have is some kind of use of Dicamba, I have decided it's just best to keep Dicamba, in any form, out of those yards.

Anyway, what I wanted to mention this week is shade, and plants in shade. Since one of the things that I spend a lot of time on is helping people grow large shade trees, I get to talk to a lot of people about the effects of that shade (other than making things cooler and more tolerable in the summer).

Generally, when trees, such as live oaks and cedar elms, are planted asshade trees, there are other plants in the same area that require full sun, or at least a fair amount of sunshine. As time goes by, and we move into the future, those trees grow, and one big result of that is that they slowly extend their shade umbrella (which is the goal), and that area of shade slowly consumes the sunlight that other, smaller plants need.

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A typical example would be crape myrtles. Crape myrtles are easy to establish, easy to grow, colorful plants, that happen to need full sun. A crape myrtle that is slowly overtaken by a larger plant, such as a tree, will just as slowly, do worse and worse.

When that happens, people, who are used to having an attractive plant there, will want something to replace it. Of course they will want something just as colorful, but there aren't a lot of "color" plants that can produce their color without plenty of sunlight.

What I would like to recommend for shaded areas, where some kind of bush or shrub is desired, or needed as a replacement, are hollies. There are lots of different kinds of holly bushes, and in my experience, most of them do OK in the shade.

Granted, they do better in full sun, but most of them do passably well, even in fairly heavy shade.

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Bruce Kreitler: Surviving in the shade and skip the Dicamba - Abilene Reporter-News