And now, the Christmas edition of the Ask the Garden Geek Podcast. You have your Christmas lights up, you have the tree up, you have all the Christmas stuff, you know, out of the attic or wherever you keep it, and scattered all around the house, did you buy a poinsettia plant? I didn't buy a poinsettia plant. I hadn't bought one since my mother passed away 20 years ago, because that was something I did for her every year.
I would show up at her house before Christmas with a beautiful poinsettia. And my mom knew exactly what to do with it. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Ask the Garden Geek.
My name is Michael Croes. I am your host, and I am here to talk about December and gardening and Christmas and all that could type of stuff. How are you doing this year? Are you keeping it together?
I'm kind of keeping it together, but yeah, I think I could be doing better. Definitely be, you know, could be doing better. I have five children, and on Christmas, I will be with one of those five children. That would be my youngest son, Zach, and his girlfriend, and we will fix something to eat here.
I want to do a rib roast. I need to go to Aldi and buy a rib roast. But that's what I want to do. I don't do turkey.
By the way, if you know who John Morgan is, the attorney for, you know, who owns Morgan and Morgan, the largest law firm in the world, go look up on or just just Google his video about why you don't need to eat turkey at Thanksgiving or Christmas. It's funny. I like it. And I don't do turkey anymore, man.
I have not done turkeys since about seven or so eight years ago when my daughter lived in Kansas and she came here for Thanksgiving and she brought, you know, her oldest son. And she, yeah, she, I think that was, I think she was pregnant when she came with a river by my second grandchild from her. But anyway, she showed up and she made turkey right here in my house and she tried to kill every damn one of us. I swear to you, she tried to kill every damn one of us.
Because that turkey, there was something about, I got sick as a dog, Zach got sick as a dog. We all got sick as dogs. And she had to go back to Kansas. And she left the day after Thanksgiving to go back to Kansas and her son was sick.
She was sick. And it was just, I have not had turkey since nor do I have any interest in having turkey. Again, I'm done with it. So there, but she is now living in Michigan with three of my grandchildren and doing very well as a matter of fact.
So I won't be with her. My oldest son will be with his mother, stepfather. My second oldest son is in New Jersey, where he will be with his wife and children and mother in law. And let's see.
My next youngest son, Jamie, lives with the lovely ex Mrs. Croes, the last ex Mrs. Croes, and he will be spending Christmas with her. And let's see.
What else? Oh, is that all of them? Yeah, that's all of them. So I will be here with Zach and his girlfriend and we will be doing Christmas.
And that is that I put up my, you know, I put up the Christmas lights while Zach and I put up the Christmas lights outside and his girlfriend wanted a real tree. So I said, okay. So I kept trying to buy a real tree, but Zach said, no, she wants to get it and she wants to pick it up. She hasn't done that yet.
And I don't know if she's going to have time to do it. I was at Sam's club. They before yesterday, they had them there, real Christmas tree. She's going to buy one.
Zach was with me. She's like, nope, nope, nope. She's going to do it. So if she does it fine, if not, I've got a fake one out in the laundry room that already has the lights on it.
So I'm giving her until Christmas Eve and at Christmas Eve, if she doesn't come up with a tree, that puppy's going up. I've done all my Christmas shopping and the only people I bought Christmas presents for was my favorite ex-wife. That's ex-wife number two and I have her present right here and I bought it from an artist who made it. It's like really cool.
I'm not going to say what it is because she listens to the podcast and she would not want to know. It's cool. I got that. And then the grandchildren, I got them Christmas presents, all of the grandchildren.
And I am, you know, I am pretty thoughtful when it comes to Christmas presents. I'm pretty thoughtful. I generally take my time and I get presents for each of the kids or anybody I'm buying a present for. Then I think that they would enjoy that I think would make them think of me as they kept it.
And I, that's what I do. I'm pretty good at it. I am actually pretty darn good at it. And I try to be thoughtful about that.
So that was that. So anyways, we wrap up the year. Let's talk just a little bit about, you know, what we want for Christmas. A stress-free garden.
It's a gardening show. Yeah. Gardening should be very light in December. There's not much to do.
Not a lot of really, you know, interesting things going on right now. I did some pruning because I like to do pruning. I have a viburnum odor to some of them. It's not mine.
It's my next door neighbors. And she hasn't maintained it in years. So I've gone out and I trimmed back all of the viburnum odor to some of them that comes up to my house so I can get on the side of my house to do maintenance. And it was a lot.
I mean, I haul all kinds of stuff out to the street. So and what else? Oh, I planted some plants. I did that.
And in Florida, you can do that. You can plant plants in December. I planted two Calusias, that favorite ex-wife, ex-wife number two, bought for me. And she helped me plant them.
So they're in my front bed. So that's good. But I just generally keep it very, very light. How about the lawn?
How about that lawn? We have not had any frost. So the lawn is still green and I fertilized the lawn in November, I think. And I didn't fertilize it a lot.
I always had a guy's house yesterday who had Argentine bahaya grass that was filled with weeds. And I said, how often are you watering this? And he goes, I'll water every other day. I said, stop.
I said, stop. I said, stop. Do you see all these weeds? Yeah, that's why you got them because you're watering.
And Argentine bahaya grass does not require much water. As a matter of fact, I forbid you to water again until April and then in April, you made water once a week, just once a week after that in the hot summer, if it's starting to turn brown, water it. That was basically it. So, but all the lawns look good, except they're not growing as much right now.
So that's good. The only maintenance I did was edging the lawn. I'm going to tell you something, even in the winter, a fine-edged lawn will make people not pay attention to other things about the lawn that aren't perfect. Oh, there is that.
And if you don't have snow where you are, you're not going to be mowing your lawn, but you might want to go out and edge it. Don't take the line term around there and just give it a nice edge. It'll look good. That's just, you know, a lot of people myself included like to prune in December.
It's, it's, it's okay to do it, but you really don't have to. The pruning time was actually November, but one of the things you might want to start thinking about is your soil, all right? All of your soil that is on your whole property because nothing is more important than the soil. Absolutely.
Nothing is more important than the soil. A healthy soil is going to give you healthy plants. So there's some products out there that I like that I'm going to be playing with this year that our liquid products, I'm not going to name them now because there's so many of them and I'm trying to, this is what I'm trying to do, you know, this is the exciting part of my life. I wish I had to like, but anyway, this is, I, I'm going to determine which one of those products I'm going to use and in late January where I live or maybe early February, I'm going to put those all over my soil on my whole property and they're full of microbes and minor elements and organic matter and just all kinds of stuff like that.
And I'm going to let it work into the soil to let it do magical things to the soil. So that's what I'm going to be doing. And then the other thing, because I, again, don't have a life, I've been thinking about hopes for the new year as far as the garden is concerned. So that's what's going on with me and then Christmas is coming and you know what we do on Christmas day.
You want to know what we do on Christmas day at the end, towards the end of the day before it gets dark. You know what we do? It's a close tradition. Well, it's a Michael Crow's tradition.
The rest of the process think I'm nuts. The Christmas lights come down at the end of the day, the tree, if we're using my artificial one is put back in the box if we're using a live one, it gets taken out to the street because Christmas this day is on Thursday and the trash people come on Monday. So that's going to sit out to the tree out to the street and I want to deal with needles all over the place and my cats will calm down and all the Christmas decorations get put away at the end of the day. And now everybody tells me, no, no, no, you got to keep them up to the first of the year.
And no, I don't because I look at that is just putting that away and getting ready for the new year. And you know what I'm going to be doing for New Year's Eve? I'm going to be in bed before 10 o'clock because that's, you know, I'm old now and that's what I do. I go to bed.
For midnight on New Year's Eve and I don't know how long. I think the last thing I did the last time I went out for New Year's Eve was I took my daughter and this was, oh, she was a teenager. I took her to a bare naked ladies concert at the hockey stadium in Tampa, the hockey arena in Tampa on New Year's Eve. That was the last time I was out on New Year's Eve for a New Year's Eve party.
I don't think I could stay awake to go out. You know, I just don't think I could stay awake to go out. And I certainly don't want to be driving on New Year's Eve because as the last Mrs. Croes used to lovingly say, that's amateur night because the real drunks drink at home.
I don't drink, but the real drunks drink at home and they don't go out on amateur night because you know, you're going to get a good chance of getting plowed over by an amateur drinker. So that's, that's, that is, um, that is kind of what we do. Well, it's been an interesting year. I'm glad that I asked the Garden Geek is back and we will be back right after the first of the year.
I'm glad that you know, this podcast will come out the first week of January where we're going to talk about all kinds of things for the New Year and I'll share more stuff with you and I'll complain about relatives. I don't know. Do I have any relatives to complain about? No, not really.
All right. I have a cousin in Michigan who doesn't talk to me. I'm going to complain about her. She needs to be talking to me.
Dammit. And I know she's listening to this because she listens and I'm going to tell her right now that I love her very much and she should call me. Anyway, we'll see you all next year. Mary, Mary, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.