House Design

Q: Some of our trees and shrubs are covered in dried moss to differing degrees . Should I do anything to the moss to help the hosts?

A: I once took my old pooch into the vet to have some growths checked out. The vet told me she was in the bumpy, lumpy stage of life, and there was nothing to worry about. Your plants are in the mossy licheny stage of life.

As plants age, the bark gets craggy and holds more moisture, creating the perfect environment for moss and lichen. Just as the bumps on my hound were benign, so is the moss and lichen on your plants. Lichen and moss take nothing from your plant, and are only using it for a home with no negative effects.

Scraping it off actually could do more harm than good, and spraying it only turns it a horribly ugly black for a few months until the moss or lichen grows back. The truth is there is no way to rid your plants of these attractive additions, so the best thing you can do is to learn to love them.

Q: I have three 4-feet-by-8-feet planter boxes that I plant veggies in. Last year, the slugs were really bad. Anything I can do to keep them out of the boxes this year?

A: There’s a natural solution that is 100 percent effective and doesn’t require slug bait. Slugs and snails will not cross a 3-inch wide barrier of copper foil. Slugs propel themselves by oscillating muscles in their stomachs. When the slug tries to cross the barrier, the movement of the stomach muscles combined with the slime creates an electrical charge on the copper that gives the slug a shock.

The key is to make sure the copper is located on the side of the box where the slug can’t hump its body over the copper to cross it without touching it. You can buy copper foil at most quality nurseries. It’s expensive, but it remains effective for several years.

Don’t forget to go out at night and remove any slugs that are in the planter box before you attach the barrier. Copper foil will not only keep hungry slugs out, it will also keep them in!

Q: For the last two years, we seem to be getting tough-skinned tomatoes. Do you know why?

A: There are a number of reasons why tomatoes develop thick, tough skins. It could be the variety of tomato you are growing. Roma and plum tomatoes are bred to have thicker, harder skins, easier to remove for pasta sauces and canning. Varieties advertised as crack resistant are also bred for thicker, harder skin, which is what makes them less likely to split. Also avoid uneven watering.

Tomatoes lose water through the skin of the fruit; hence in times of drought the skin becomes thicker to limit moisture loss as a survival mechanism.

Finally, don’t prune off foliage to allow direct sunlight to reach the fruit in order to get it to ripen faster. Tomatoes only need heat to ripen, and suddenly exposing fruit to direct sunlight can cause sunscald. The response within the plant is to produce fruit with thicker skin as a defense against sun damage.

So pick the right variety, water well and avoid drastic pruning, and you won’t have to worry about breaking a tooth when you bite into that delicious homegrown tomato.

Ciscoe Morris: .

“Gardening with Ciscoe” airs at 10 a.m. Saturdays on KING-TV.

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