 Hi, I'm Realtor Sara Morrow with Cell State Ace Realty. Today on Proper Tee Time, we get to hear some pro tips from horticulture consultant and expert Joel Reich. Like me, Joel hails from New England, but has spent much of his professional life here in Colorado. He consults throughout the U.S. and also abroad and he's done so as a Longmont homeowner for 16 years. Joel holds a master's degree in horticulture science and his faculty at Colorado State University. He and his pet snakes spend half a year in Cuenca, Ecuador and half a year here in Colorado. He is especially passionate about mastering mushroom types for foraging, grafting and pruning his way to the perfect apple and finding pockets of feral asparagus clumps that grow around our many ditches across the front range. You'll want to watch this episode from start to finish at least once because this guy knows his stuff and he can help you increase your home's curb appeal and your home's value. We're being here today. Sarah, thanks for having me on. It's a real pleasure. Likewise. So let's jump right in. So why don't you tell us what you do and what you love about what you do? Sure, easy. So I'm a horticulture scientist. I've had experience and training in just about every kind of plants that you could possibly have. And what I do these days and have done for a number of years is I consult, I give good advice to people everywhere from multimillion dollar private companies producing horticultural crops of various types all the way down to people with a landscape that maybe just bought the house and want to know how to address what they've got or the changes they'd like to make over the first couple of years in the house and everything in between. I work with public education groups. I work with community gardens and again, just about everything. Greenhouses, cut flowers, you name it. If it's plants, I like to get into it and that leads me into what I like about it is the diversity. I'm very fortunate that I've got kind of an expansive set of knowledge and I get to do different kinds of things every day with every different client. Wow. So going back to the homeowner piece. Let's say I just moved in and I've got a postage stamp of a yard or I've got three acres for that matter. What are some ways that I can increase the enjoyment and even the value of that property either slowly over time or all at once if I don't have as green a thumb as you do? Yeah, well, first I would say there's a lot of ways you can approach a landscape and here in Colorado, everything, if it's gonna look good, it's gonna have some kind of irrigation and you're gonna have different kinds of irrigation depending on what kind of landscape you want. So the first thing I would say is rather than just start doing things, actually sit down and think, what kind of landscape do I want? Do I want a landscape where I'm growing lots and lots of flowers? Do I want vegetables incorporated or do I just want some trees around a perimeter and a big lawn to play on or just because you like looking at a lawn? So I would really encourage people to actually think deliberately about what kind of landscape they'd like and then start because often the irrigation has to go in first, the irrigation will be suited to what you want and that can be a really expensive retrofit if you haven't thought it out first. That's really good advice. So let's talk about, I just bought a house, I move in, I love it, but spring comes and there's already a lot of life taking up residency where I live. Let's say it's like mint or some other really invasive plant that's everywhere or it's a perennial that I never would have planted or what if it's like mushrooms or I don't know, remnants of marijuana fans even? Like what if there's something that I really just knit and choose myself that I really just want to get rid of? Like how do I identify it and how do I responsibly rid the property of that? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So identification, certainly somebody like me could help you with that. The place I used to work is the Colorado Agricultural Extension Service and they've got a lot of materials online but they also offer free or very inexpensive plant identification services. So you could take pictures or typically they're gonna ask you for a sample, bring it to your local office, there's one in every county and that's part of their job is to identify plants for you. So one, you wanna identify and once you identify what it is, whether it's a plant, a mushroom, a marijuana plant or whatever like you mentioned, there's gonna be a different appropriate way to kill or remove all those things. So it starts with the identification. Many plants, you could just dig them out. A lot of perennials like you mentioned, the shrub that you just don't like, usually digging it out is gonna be easy. For many people, use of an herbicide is gonna be an appropriate choice and that can be easy and there are a wide variety of herbicides out there including ones that are considered organic for people that that's important too. So between herbicides, digging out, there's even other ways you can do things like just simply covering stuff up for a year with a piece of landscape fabric or even a piece of cardboard with some mulch on top of it. You can just start it for life for a year and then it's dead. And mushrooms for what it's worth are really easy to get rid of if you got some mushrooms and there are both fungicides but there's also organic products that would work fungicidally to address mushrooms that are undesired. Wow, cool. So you mentioned CSU although I'm not sure that you use those exact words. Can you talk more about the folks that are gonna help us identify plant life and how to reach them? Yeah, sorry. So I'm referring to Colorado State University and there's something called the extension service which has an office in every county in our state and if you just were to Google CSU extension or CSU extension near me, you would find the local office here in Boulder County it's at the fairgrounds. They're frequently located at county fairgrounds but not always. And again, that's a taxpayer funded organization that, again, part of their responsibility is to identify plants and help people with this kind of horticultural stuff. Awesome, thank you. Yeah, I've used them in my orchard. I sent them some soil samples to get my pH levels right and to figure stuff out if they were very responsive and they've got a whole lab which I kind of geek out on. While we're on the topic of orchards and trees I wanna talk about the relationship between trees and houses. One of the things that comes up in a real estate transaction often is the health of a tree, the safety of the tree, the closeness of the tree and its root system to the home. Can you talk about responsibly planting a tree like how far that needs to be from the house and also can you talk about how to be the best caregiver for a tree that's already there, maybe that's mature or even I've noticed in these new built homes there's already a bunch of trees on the property sometimes all different types that are kind of adolescents. Can you talk about that? Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks for prompting me to talk about this. So yeah, trees can be one of the biggest value points on a property that can also be very expensive when things go wrong and something folks should keep in mind is you might walk or drive around the front range of Colorado and you see all these trees what we sometimes refer to as our urban forest and it's easy for folks to not know that this part of the country is not really a hospitable place for most trees. Before European type settlers came to this area there really weren't any of these trees there was the occasional cotton wood and then maybe a pine around but all of the trees that we grow here have come from different parts of the world and not all of them are really at home here. So we tend to have a lot of diseases a lot of storm damage and so selecting a good tree is really important that's the kind of thing somebody like myself could help you with but I also wanna point out in the scenario of the new house that you've just bought especially in new development very frequently here in Colorado housing developers have a one year warranty on the landscape plantings they put in around houses and often there is an economic incentive for them to put in the cheapest plants planted in the cheapest, fastest possible way and I often get called in 18 to 24 months after a development has sold and people are now living in it and we start to see plants crashing and because they were planted poorly or they were an inappropriate species selection for our region so you might wanna ask about that kind of stuff and be prepared to possibly do some mitigation and some changes early on in the lifespan of your home ownership. Point out that trees if they're planted poorly if you get to it within the first year to 18 months it often actually makes sense to unplant that tree prep the ground and the roots of the tree properly and replant it so there is a certain window though in which you can do that so again, timeliness is important. Right and that's you're referring to a new build not just a new home but a brand new build with a new lawn and Yeah, yeah and so on properties that are a little bit more mature with more mature plantings and trees there are a lot of certainly storm damage and I think anybody can notice that if they looked for it you know, snag branches and broken branches that are hanging at odd angles but there's also a lot of vascular diseases, right? These are bacteria and fungi that infect the vascular system of the trees. One thing I'd always encourage people to look for is signs of any kind of seeping or leaking on the trunk, maybe coming from a branch angle or especially from a place where a branch has been removed you might see some dark or wet staining on the trunk down below that that's an indication that you've got some rot going on inside the tree that can often lead, not necessarily immediately but within a few years to the need to remove the tree which is a very expensive proposition so there's a couple of things you should really look for I'd also encourage people especially on a more established property to test out the irrigation system if there's an in-ground irrigation system they often have problems and anytime you're doing work underground prices can be very high so look for that kind of stuff as well. Thank you for the tip. I want to talk about xeriscaping it seems to be this new trend which I think is great given the scarcity of water that we're experiencing here in Colorado especially. Yeah. Can you talk about what it is, why it is can I still have garden can I still have raised beds if I've like sworn off grass? Yeah, grass, you know it's a conflicted topic in landscaping these days but you're right, xeriscaping has become popular and I just want to clarify it's xera x-e-r-i that comes from the root word xeric which just means low water use it's not zero escaping which some people think oh I just put rocks out there there's no landscaping it's a zero escape. Nor is it zero water. That's right, nor is it zero water and so to address I do think that xeric plantings make a whole lot of sense in a world where we're trying to be more responsible with limited and shrinking water resources and there's a lot of good resources out there to help you design and maintain a xeric garden. Two things I would say though one the biggest pitfall that I see people get into when they attempt to install a xeric garden or say switch a lawn area over to a xeric planting is that they don't address the weeds especially perennial weeds and also the seeds what we call the seed bank of annual weeds in that area so they put a lot of work in in putting in their xeric landscape and then they are plagued by weeds and I would encourage anybody doing this to take a little time between taking out the lawn or whatever the previous landscape was before you install the xeric landscape there's some methods you can use to eradicate the weeds that are there and all of that is much easier you have a lot more options and a freer hand in managing those weeds before you've put in your new plantings and a hardscape so I wanted to mention that and I also wanted to point out to respond to your question with irrigation systems these days it's actually very easy to have a predominantly xeric landscape but if you wanna have vegetables or let's say you wanna have all xeric plantings but you'd really like to have a 10 by 10 patch of lawn to go lay on in the summer those are really realistic options given the way we can break up different zones on a irrigation system so don't think it has to be all of one or the other a lot of times outer areas of a property people like to do in xeric designs and then a little bit closer to the house maybe they've got some raised beds for vegetables or cut flowers or possibly even that little postage stamp lawn so it's all possible it's gonna start with designing the landscape irrigation system to address that proper protest jeez this is rich okay let's talk about this no-mo-may or no-moing if you do have a lot of grass yeah am I over watering my grass now that I'm a coloradan am I mowing too frequently am I mowing too early in the season we're getting so much rain I couldn't even mow this week if I wanted to so if you talk a little bit about mowing and why people wait to mow I don't really get that I don't always completely get it myself my understanding is a lot of the motivation behind this is mow to mow sorry sorry sorry good one sorry I didn't catch that so I believe one of the reasons is people are concerned about pollinators and there are certain wildflowers even weeds that will come up in some people's lawns in May and I know that some of the push behind no-mo-may is to allow those flowers to bloom and provide pollen and nectar forage sources for some of our pollinators I'm a little conflicted I think that there's other better more efficient ways that we could address that I'd also say this especially in a rainy year like this May and early June are when our lawns are growing the fastest we all know our mowers can cut a certain amount of grass but if that grass gets too long it's just going to bog down and you actually can't mow it with your mower anymore so I think maybe looking for a happy medium between letting it grow longer but not so long that you can't then mow it so get on it yeah and I just want to throw out one other thing about mowing letting the the grass clippings mulch right as opposed to bagging them and taking them away is a really good idea it's actually kind of a sad irony that I see a lot in landscape management and lawn management because we're putting fertilizer onto our lawns then it goes into the grass those clippings are actually rich in nitrogen so we take them off we send them to the dump and then we buy more fertilizer and put it on and it's not really a particularly responsible or efficient way to manage the nitrogen cycle in our landscape so I really encourage you to mulch the lawn with the clippings so since you're on the topic of mulch and I do this a lot on my own property can you talk about grass clippings wood chips, pine needles, leaves do these really reduce the necessity of water like the frequency of watering or does it really just help make the property look more buttoned up I love to talk about mulch so first of all the two main things that you benefits that you will get from mulching is one you absolutely can reduce water loss from the landscape and therefore reduce the amount of water you need to add because if you think about it the top of the soil surface is where you're going to evaporate a lot of water up into the air as vapor by putting on mulch down you're actually creating a little bit of a vapor barrier so that that water that that soil surface isn't getting hit by the sun it's not having our dry winds blowing across it that's going to kind of scour water out of that surface so just by its physical presence you are retaining more water in the soil profile so that's the first thing that you get from mulch second thing is mulch can be very effective at suppressing the growth of weeds very careful important distinction here annual weeds these are weeds that are coming back from seed year after year mulch will do nothing to suppress perennial weeds like your can of the thistle or your bindweed they're just going to come right up through it and frankly they might thank you on the way and say hey thanks for mulching because I have plenty more moisture to work with now but for annual seed-based weeds you can really suppress a lot of that growth because you cover them up the seeds don't get exposed to light many of them require a little exposure to light in order to germinate so those are the two big benefits with mulch another thing I'd like to clarify for people is that mulch isn't a thing per se it's more of a verb it's a thing we do so many people have in mind that you go to the store and buy mulch that implies that there's one thing that is mulch when in fact you could use compost to mulch with you could use wood chips or bark chips to mulch with we've also seen a lot of increase in things like recycled tire chips being used as mulch in farming and gardening we often talk about using plastic mulch where you see people cover beds in a plastic mulch which one it's going to retain moisture in the soil it's going to suppress weed growth so it's a mulch even though it's not exactly what most people think of when they hear the word mulch but mulching in general is a great practice awesome appreciate the clarification on that as a mulcher so I recently read that a single almond takes up to three gallons of water to grow to full size so given that and given that we live in a really arid place where we all need to be responsible about our water use what are the five or six veggies or fruits that as a busy professional I'm best off planting in my one or two raised beds well boy that's a big question I would say this though even though vegetables as a group take a fair amount of water because they're producing something for us uh by square footage a vegetable garden doesn't necessarily take any more water than say lawn in many cases you can grow a very bountiful vegetable garden with less water per square foot than a lawn would require so just in that sense a vegetable garden can be considered a water saving planting versus lawn on top of that last time I checked none of us are really eating a lot of grass for dinner but the vegetable garden is actually producing something that you can eat with the water that you're putting in so you can do it with less water than a lawn by comparison and get something delicious and healthy out of it I would also say that drip irrigation is really important I think a very strong argument can be made that the invention and the development and deployment of drip irrigation around the world is probably the single biggest innovation for water savings that's ever happened in human history because you can deliver the correct amount of water but just to where your plants are so not only is it a very parsimonious way to use our water resources but you also can avoid for instance irrigating the areas between your desired plants which in turn suppresses weed growth because you're withholding resources for them to grow in those areas between where your drippers are and then you also asked you know what would be a good or an easy crop or vegetable to grow if you're a busy professional I know a couple of those people who don't have enough time in their life to do everything and I would just say this potatoes and onions they are very easy crops to grow they both like water but again not more than a relatively similar area of lawn wood and they're really really easy to grow and they're things that our climate here is great for there's a lot of potatoes and onions grown commercially in Colorado for that reason and I used to avoid growing those two crops for many years as a gardener because I thought well they're so pedestrian how much better could could a garden potato be than a grocery store potato and the same thing with onions and then it was like 20 years ago I realized what a bonehead I've been because actually they are wonderful and I won't go on and regale you with tails of delicious potatoes and onions but of course they cook up nicely together most meals go well with a side of potatoes and onions and they're they're pretty darn easy so I would I would encourage if you just wanted to do one little plot of something productive try some potatoes and onions pedestrian I love that I'm stealing that this is pretty pedestrian I've seen you on YouTube do some grafting and I admit as an orcharder I look at that like wizardry like magic you made a crab apple peach plum tree out of an apple tree and I guess I'm curious if I'm a new homeowner in a new property could such a tree with a lot of variety if I could get the grafting right become an asset so that's a big huge question that I want to talk about yes grafting is awesome and seemingly a little bit magical I remember the first time when I was about 10 that I was exposed to what grafting was and I was eating an apricot two types of plums and peaches all off of the same tree and I thought wait a minute that's amazing and I was kind of caught up in it since since then and so grafting also I'm a historian as well and I love that grafting is something our ancestors have been doing for thousands of years and so the idea with grafting is you are taking one tree or shrub it's always done with woody perennials and you are adding something else to it okay so as far as the value that homeowners might get from this kind of thing here's a little surprise you probably actually already have some grafted plants in your yard okay for instance if you've got a flowering crab apple it might very well be grafted onto a different type of crab apple root that's very common almost every rose bush that is sold has been grafted and it's a good example of why we graft okay so in developing really lovely showy roses with nice aromas for instance often the plant itself and its root system becomes a little bit of a weakling and it gets prone to all kinds of diseases to you know being fussy about the soils or the climate it's planted in so what's typically done with roses is you take a wild rose that is just tough as nails that's the root system and then just above the level of the ground you cut off the wild rose and you replace it with a scion of the desired rose variety and now you're getting the best of both worlds and that might be the best phrase to describe it with the apple trees and fruit trees I work a lot with again same thing we want the super tasty delicious productive apple or pear or peach but we don't want the roots of that variety because they are weak so we put on different roots there's been hundreds of years of breeding programs to just develop apple and peach and cherry root systems that nobody's ever going to let them fruit we're just putting a very desirable variety on the top so for instance it is probably most commonly used in terms of fruit and you mentioned combining different fruits on a tree there's certain rules we've learned in horticulture and this is kind of the essence of horticulture right is how to understand plants what they give us naturally and then how as humans we can come in and team up with what the plants bring us with our own ingenuity to make even better things and so for instance some of the rules I'm talking about is like you can graft all kinds of apples together you can graft crab apples and apples together you can't graft pears to apples but you can graft asian pears to european pears you can graft peaches and plums and nectarines together because they're all in the prunus genus um and you can graft all citrus together but you couldn't graft a citrus to an apple so some of these rules are things that you know of course there's publications that explain all of this or someone like myself certainly could explain these kinds of rules to you one thing that's just to show you the creative way you could actually use this in an ornamental landscape is let's say somebody said I really like maple trees but I can't decide between a red leaf norway maple and a green leaf norway maple you could have somebody like me come over and make you a custom tree that had alternating branches of red and green leaves if you if you wanted to um so there's lots of fun stuff you can do with grafting um you know cacti are commonly grafted there's there's probably a lot of grafted plants in or around your life you might not be aware of but it's a pretty important thing in the world of horticulture guys get this man onto your property so I could just go on asking you many more questions um bring it you have been such a wealth of knowledge we unfortunately are out of time um can you just quickly tell us I'm gonna I'm gonna put your contact information up but you do work with residential homeowners and you do come over as a consultant one-on-one two people's homes yeah can you just tell us your website really quickly and um yeah yeah of course so um my website is www.rike-hort.com it's REICH is how you spell my last name um you can also just contact me directly by text or phone at 541-602-0283 um you'll also find various videos online that I've done and I absolutely do I mean I mentioned that I work with these multi-million dollar companies but that's fun and it pays the bills but I also get a lot of pleasure about working with homeowners I do things with groups of homeowners sometimes it's more cost effective if a whole bunch of people in the neighborhood have similar issues going on pay me once and everybody comes to the session I don't mind doing that for me it's about getting the information out there we've all got to pay bills but I'm really about the education um so yeah I'd be happy to help anybody with with that kind of thing and if you think something is a little bit odd or you haven't had good success getting clear answers from somebody else that's exactly the place where you might want to call me or someone like me pick up that red phone and call me say Joel I've got a horticulture issue I need it addressed right the first time and I'll just say this too one of my great joys in life is helping people fix problems but even better than that is avoiding problems in the first place with timely good advice so I I I hope there's people out there who can either utilize my services or those of someone like me um to avoid problems with with timely advice hmm I can't think of a single homeowner who would benefit from you thank you so much Joel for being here that's the property