(theme music) Hello and thanks for joining us for another episode of Mid American Gardener.

I'm your host, Tinisha Spain, and joining me in the studio today are two of my pals who are here to talk about all things green and growing, we've got Shane and Kay, so let's have them introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about them before we get started.

So Kay, we'll start with you.

Okay, I'm a Champaign County Master Gardener, and my area specialty is herbs and vegetables and things like that.

And boy, do we have some questions for you today, because people are wanting to know what the heck is going on out there.

Shane, Hi, I'm Shane Cultra.

I'm one of the family owners of Country Arbors nursery.

And for the past 27 years, I had worked in the nursery and answered plants and grew plants.

And now I'm retired, and I travel the world looking at plants and doing all the things that you guys were coming in.

And now I have a little honey company that I that's kind of my hobby now is bottling honey and eating honey all day.

So gardening, honey traveling, hey, I mean, not bad talking about plants.

Yes, it's in the blood honey hive for a while, and I still, and that's been years since we've had it, and I've still got like, 12 quarts that would last at my house.

You're just not using enough Exactly, exactly.

Okay, so we've had some Actually, let's do your show and tell items before we get to the questions.

Okay, which one would you like to start with?

The basil?

Well, I'll start with the basil.

The basil, it'll grow, and then it'll start flowering.

And when it does, the flavor changes.

So you don't want these flowers on it.

So what I do is I go through the plant and I just pinch off those flowers, and then it'll keep going.

You know, I did do that, but I just thought it was so that the plant didn't go to seed and it would continue to put out leaves.

I didn't know it changed the actual flavor.

Yeah, interesting in a negative way.

Or, yeah, yeah, it doesn't taste like basil.

Like basil, should?

I did not know that so, and sometimes they're really tiny.

This one I brought the bigger one just, you know, so people can see it.

But they get real little ones.

So I just go through, you know, we every week or so when, okay, and was this year easier or harder with the hot and dry with basil, because I know a lot of times I'll drown out my basil because I'm watering other stuff too much.

Yeah, I haven't watered it much.

I give it some, because it's, you're right, it's been terribly dry, yeah, in the ground or in pots?

No, it's in the ground.

It's in the ground.

Gotcha, mine's in pots, so I have to constantly be out there.

Yes, okay, but interesting to know that it changes the flavor.

And then, can you do anything with this?

Because, you know, I'm always wondering, okay, and I, like I said, I usually do when they're smaller.

Yeah, so you want to get those off.

Okay, to purl them.

Noted, if you've got flowers on your basil, pinch it.

Get it out of there.

All right, Shane, we're going to come to you.

Yeah, I'm going to start with the cosmopolitan grass.

So you can see, it kind of looks like corn, almost.

It is.

It is a variegated Miscanthus sinensis.

So it's your maiden grass, but it has there's two kinds.

There's one called cabaret and one called cosmopolitan.

Cabaret is literally the opposite of this.

So cabaret has the white in the middle and the green on the outside.

And cosmopolitan is this form.

It's about six feet tall, probably six or eight feet as wide as well, and it comes up a little later.

So people get worried that it died over the winter, but it's a warmer season grass, and it's going full bore right now.

And one of the reasons I brought it in because it's just really beautiful.

It's clumping.

It makes a great visual barrier between things, but this is a good time to start dividing it.

And the reason I say this is, I know it's hot and dry, but they're kind of going dormant in a way.

If you were to divide this, you would cut it off like it did at the ground.

This isn't the ground, but I take it all the way to maybe a foot tall, and take out a little section and replant that section because it needs to root up before winter.

The mistake people make often is they plant them later in the season, like October, and on a shrub or a perennial, that works great.

But on a grass, it needs more root system, and this one's a little bit more tender than a common ornamental grass, so getting them in the ground sooner and rooted up going into winter is very important.

Gotcha Okay, how much maintenance is required here?

Is this the one that you're you know, if this the center?

Die out and you get so I haven't had problem with this center dying out on this variety.

Maintenance wise, it's kind of an established early thing.

We're gonna get a little late in the show talking about plants that you get in and let them go.

This is definitely one of those.

I have not watered this plant in 15 years.

This plant's 23 years old, and there's no dead center to it so and it's again, and the only reason I brought it in is I was leaving, and my wife said that plants looking great for something to talk about, beautiful.

It's a really good plant.

It's a backdrop.

It's towards the back of my yard.

And so these are the kind of plants you're looking for.

I call them pieces of furniture, right?

Big plants, not expensive.

Take up space.

Yes, it's like those furniture plants are easy to maintain.

What about winter appeal?

Do you leave yours up?

I leave mine up again.

The mistake people make on grasses is they cut them down to keep them looking nice.

I like to keep the top so it catches snow, catches leaves, and protects the crown of the plant.

So I leave them up, and then I cut them off in spring.

And this is not a grass that breaks off and then gets all over the yard.

There's some grasses that tend to be a little more brittle.

This one stays, does not make a mess.

It turns just a brown color.

But in the snow, you need that.

You need some accents.

And it stays seven feet tall.

So I was going to ask, so in one growing season, you can get seven feet.

Yeah, if you were to plant a one gallon pot the first year, it might be two to three.

So it might take three years to get to six to seven, but you'll have three, two to three to four feet that first year, even out of a one gallon plant.

Yeah, it's a great a little harder to find country Harper's.

We've had them over the years.

I'm not sure what we have them, not quite up through the inventory now, but in general, we try and carry grasses like this that are low maintenance and really more variegated and pretty.

That is pretty, very pretty.

Okay.

Thank you.

All right.

Kay, so we have had a dry, hot, wacky summer.

We did an event.

We did an outdoor event at the Virginia theater a couple weeks ago, and people were just coming up back to back, saying, What the heck is going on with my tomatoes?

They're not looking good.

The plants themselves are not thriving, and they just can't get enough to drink.

I don't know if the sun's too hot, so with you being our resident tomato expert, are you having problems this year?

Because if you are, then we'll all feel better about ourselves.

Well, I am.

My plants are doing really well, but I water I have to water them.

Water all the time, yeah, because we just haven't been getting enough rain.

But they're not like this.

This is a pineapple tomato, and it should be about that big around, and it's not there are some on the plant that are bigger than this, but they haven't gotten ripe yet, so it's been a bit of a struggle.

But it's just water.

Water, water.

Just Can't Get Enough water.

You can you overdo it?

Can you over water?

Oh, yeah, you can always over water any plant when it's this hot, though, but when it's this hot and dry, it's it's gonna be hard to do, yeah, and some years, you're just not going to get the big, huge harvest of tomatoes that you're that you normally do.

And this might be one of those.

Yeah, you can see this.

This is called it anyway, and it's got, you know, these cracks on the top, and it's just not the color, quite the size that it should be.

So it just might not be a great terracotta, terra cotta, and it's a nice tomato.

But is there anything you can do as far as adding compost or fertilizer?

Is there anything to revitalize or help them along in this well, I what I do is I we mow two acres.

So we originally, my husband's been mowing a lot, so I rake up the grass clippings and I use them as mulch on both sides.

My tomato plants are on cattle panels, which are huge and heavy duty, and so I put them on both sides.

That probably helps with the moisture.

It does.

It keeps the moisture, it keeps the weeds down.

You know, you can use your grass clippings, use what you've got, yep, it's cheap.

One more question.

This is from Cindy strijo.

She wrote in and said, I heard that you should remove some blossoms from your tomato plants to encourage larger fruit.

We might be a little late in the season on this one.

But is this a practice that you use?

No, no, you don't want to.

It's really not a good practice.

They're not going to help you.

Only want to do that when.

The plant is growing, remove the so there is a time, yeah, and I think it probably comes from other fruit, right?

So that's a common practice in peach trees and other peaches, because the thought is, there's only so much energy to grow fruit, and so you will on a peach tree, you always thin a peach tree, if you you see a lot of Illinois peaches that are this big.

That are this big.

That tends to because of Illinois.

But the peaches you see large, most our peach growers will then take out half the blooms, or half the little peaches, so that the rest of the peaches are good size, because there's enough energy to put all big peaches.

Tomatoes have lots of energy.

It's not like removing a couple is going to get you big they're going to produce that's a holdover from other most likely, that's what they're probably thinking.

On apple trees, they do that all the fruits.

They do that to produce larger fruit.

Because again, if we were to put these in the grocery store, they wouldn't move super fast.

So they're trying to maximize the size when it comes to the other fruits, but tomatoes, yeah, I think they're going to get to size, whether they're supposed to or not.

They're going to get the size and get the size.

If they're not, they're not.

So if you want a big tomato, get a variety.

That's a big tomato, like I said, like, this one should be in a normal year and be like that.

Yeah.

Okay, well, you're not alone, folks.

If Kay's tomatoes are struggling, we're all in.

That's right, that's right.

All right.

Shane, do you want to do your show and tell?

Or do you want to tackle a question?

I'll do the show and tell?

Yeah.

So this one is, this one always fascinates people.

So this is a variegated Monstera plant, and you can see there's no variegation, so it's white.

So the first thing people that are plant experts will tell me, well, that's never gonna live, or that leaf is only going to live for a week or so, and that, yes, that would be the case if this plant was getting sun, a good amount of sun.

So anything more than morning sun, this will start burning on the edges, like this has a little dot.

But what I do is, I, mine is almost in morning.

I bring it outside, and it's just a couple hours of morning sun and then shade the rest of the afternoon, so that helps the leaves hold longer.

The other thing is the chlorophyll is needed to live, but it doesn't have to be in this particular leaf.

Chlorophyll has to be in the plant.

So half the plant is this, and half the plant is variegated, so it has the chlorophyll to produce a wonderful, healthy plant.

It just doesn't in these.

So I have these all over the place, and they'll last over a month.

You know, they'll eventually burn because I'll put it'll get a little bit too much sun, but I've had them last four months, five months, and there's always white leaves on it, always.

And I bought it because the owner said, hey, it does this.

So I spent $500 on a cutting.

It was maybe 10 leaves at the time, and now it's way over 100 leaves.

So that cutting there can or cannot survive.

If you were to plant this, it would probably survive, but this is going to burn off.

Yeah, I should have brought a burnt one, because I do have one that kind of creeps over because it is six feet tall and six feet wide.

Wow, and, and the funny thing is, I took a cutting for this green one that my wife put on.

We have an over study upstairs, and it hangs over the balcony and goes all the way downstairs, so it's like 14 feet about, and it hasn't hit the ground floor yet, but it'll grow forever so you can get this to go.

You do need to find a plant that tends to produce this, because it is kind of a genetic thing, but I love them.

But if I were to sell you a cutting or give a cutting, I would, I would probably give you a green one, just to make it easier, yeah, because this probably is going to die back, and then you'll get a new shoot that'll probably live but I would probably do put it in a low to no light situation.

I can make this my wheels.

You're going to get this and let us know I'm giving this away.

But I would put it in almost no sun, in no sunlight, and again, I would put it in a house, in water, and let it root up first.

So I'd leave it in water for a month, and then you'll then you'll know that it's going to live.

Then you'll know, would you put it right in the water?

Yeah, so when I do cuttings, I will put this, because it's got the nub kind of sticking through here.

I will put this in there, and this will just root up, and then I'll plant it.

Okay, one more question, yeah, you said it'll have, like, a little off shoot or a little, yeah, will that be green, or will that be white?

Probably green.

Wow, probably be green.

Nature's so cool.

It's amazing, but it's such a I mean, this is just doesn't look real.

It doesn't and are those particularly rare?

Yeah, so they, I mean, another expensive, but they'll put them.

There are plants that put these off pretty regularly, but die back.

But I would say maybe 10% ratio.

Mine is probably a 50% ratio.

Wow.

Of these.

And I think the cuttings alone are decorations.

So you take cut flowers and put them in there.

I'll just take the leaves and put them in there.

It looks pretty fancy.

Yeah, that does look pretty fancy, pretty fancy when you put it in there.

So it's one of my favorite plants in covid was, as I was kind of telling you guys before we aired, I was really good to me.

I.

Cutting sold very well.

House plants were so hot.

And rare plants were super hot, yeah?

And a plant like this with three or four more leaves was 500 to $1,000 Holy smokes, yeah, and that's something, but we were all cooped up looking for something to do.

I know plants became the hot looking for I mean, a nursery owner is always looking to sell plants, that's true.

That's true.

Okay, we've got a question.

This is kind of a this is a big one.

This is a three parter.

Everyone.

Wells sent this email in, so Shane's gonna knock out all three of these.

So the first one is she got a Petunia for Mother's Day, and it has seen better days.

And so I just was saying right before this, one of my baskets looks exactly like this.

So as we're nearing the end of the summer, it's been brutal when you get these baskets and they begin to look like this.

Can you snap them back or what?

What's the what's the fix here?

Yeah, I mean, mine is I'm cutting the three hangers so I can get the plant out and throw it away.

That's the first I'm looking for pruners, but it's only the pruner.

So I can cut those two things and get at the plant to get it out.

So at that point, it's gone.

And she shouldn't feel bad, but what she should learn is a Petunia in full sun becomes impossible on years like this, it's just there's no way.

You would have to quit your job and come out at lunchtime like you'd have to come and let the dog out and water the plants like every day.

It just is you can't do it.

And that's why I always surprise that people, when I tell them, petunias, those hanging baskets in the shade under the porch, are perfect.

They love the shade, because that's what they turn into saying earlier, it gives me nightmares, because people would bring that basket back and say, Hey, I'd like to return this.

I'd say it's August and like, well, it didn't look very good when I got it No.

Like, better than that.

So, yeah, I would just to me, if I were going to do that, I would know that you can August is going to be it for that there's no way to keep that water, because if that was another three or four feet, or six feet, like it should be as a Petunia hanging, you can't keep that water, not in that basket.

So there, there are ways to keep them, to keep them living longer, and the key is a huge basket.

So I just talked about, I did a newsletter the other day where I talked about when I went to Aspen, which was pretty dry, but their baskets were all amazing.

But there was one key thing, they were giant moss baskets.

So they were lined with moss.

They were three foot long, two foot wide, tons of dirt, so that watering was much easier.

So that is what eight inches by four inches.

And you can tell where she's watered and knocked out half the water the soil to.

So she's taking a hose and she's spraying it like that, and it's spraying all the dirt out.

So now it's even harder.

So it's a combination of things.

Mine would say bigger basket.

Okay, and know what you're getting into?

You know what those I always notice this time of year, if they're not looking like that, they're very leggy and straggly look, because one watering turns them crispy and they never really pop back.

Yes, they get new little leaves, but the old crispy ones are still there, yeah, so yeah, and there's not much you can do about it.

I I have some on a hanging I did a porch rack with moss, and that moss helped it.

They look really good still, because again, a lot more moisture, holding moisture, these kind of things, those you just buy from the garden center, and they're disposable.

They're disposable razors of the plant world.

Next year I'm going to try that in a in a less harsh area, yeah.

Oh, you put them in the shade, you put them on the front porch.

They can be amazing, but again, you can't miss a watering.

It really is unforgiving when it comes to petunias.

Okay?

All right.

Next, part of her question is, how important is it to dead dead head plants?

So she throws bee balm out there as an example.

But is dead heading a rule, a hard rule, when you're gardening to get more blooms, more beautiful blooms, 100% like we talked about the peach flowers, and everything energy, right?

And you can answer this, Kay, but I'll just start off by saying it's if you want to re bloom, it's one of the most important things you can do.

And you're going to read, and the magazine says it self deadheading.

That's true, but you can even help out more, right?

So by taking off flowers after they're spent, it encourages more blooms.

I've been the worst Dahlia grower you'll ever see again.

I'm gonna write an article this week.

I was just thinking, I am so bad.

I did everything wrong when it came to growing dahlias.

And one of the most important things you do is you take those flowers immediately, because when you take 'em, they immediately start putting out more flowers.

And we're gonna see a picture here of a spirea and a lilac.

All those, if you trim the blooms, as soon as they're done blooming, they're going to bloom again.

Not only going to be better shape, but they're going to come right back with more flowers, because they're thinking, hey, I don't have to concentrate on these old flowers and trying to take care of these.

I'm going to fill out some new flowers.

So it's dead heading is one of the most rewarding things you can do.

It comes to new plants, or new flowers, new growth.

All right, last one from Evelyn.

She wants to know if you can ID this bush and then give her some maintenance tips.

She wants to know if you need to dead head it and best time to thin and divide.

Well, it's a spirea, so dividing is really out.

It's kind of a woody shrub.

It's not the kind of plant you would divide.

You could take a cutting off of it.

You could certainly take one of the cuttings from the flowers.

You really as soon as those are done blooming, you want to trim those as hard as you want.

One of the great things this reminded me, in my old house, I got golden spirea, a yellow spirea.

I trimmed it to two inches, and I planted it a whole table like this size, and I kept it trimmed, and it would just bloom and then flush out, and I'd trim it and it'd bloom and flush out.

And it looked like the coolest ground cover you had ever seen, but it was a spirea just like that.

Trimmed really hard and kept consistently trimmed.

So that is ready to be trimmed really hard.

So go for it.

Yeah, even this late, if she trims it hard, it'll flush right back out.

There's still enough season.

But that's a spirea.

It's a great plant.

You can see all the blooms she had at the time.

It was just covered in blooms.

And the other thing is on that variety, and I can't remember the variety, but when she trims it, you get little yellow, golden tips on some of them.

So it has a little variegation that makes it really pretty.

It's a very common variety back from the 70s and 80s.

You saw those spires all the time.

Frobili, I think it was, but I can't remember exactly, very pretty.

Okay.

Okay, question for you, yes, when do you usually bring your house plants in, the ones that come outside?

When do you bring yours in?

Well, when it's getting really cold, before it freezes.

So not you think it's too early.

Now, is it too early to bring them in?

No.

I mean, you can bring them in any time if you want to take care of them.

That's true.

That's true.

But is it time to start thinking about that?

Well, you might, you know, make sure you've got a spot for them in the house, and, you know, sufficient lighting and things like that.

Do you do any treatments for insects or anything like that?

Just bring them on in.

I use a little bit of that bone, eye, the granule, just as an insurance because, you know, once everybody comes in and gets shoulder to shoulder, we were talking about mealy bugs in a previous show.

So I do use a little bit of those granules.

But what about you when you plant so mine won't be till September, because September can be super hot as well.

The key for right now is the heat in the sun is move them to where they're not getting so much sun.

Because, as we know, during this time of year, the sun starts settling to the to the south, and starts getting lower.

So sometimes, where you think it was, you know, protected because you have that part sun plant, maybe it's getting full sun now, so you just kind of have to go out there.

It's like my mom was doing her sprinklers, and she said, I have a bad spot.

I go.

Did you check your sprinklers?

Like you have to go through them and watch how they work.

You have to go stand out there when the sun on your plants, you come back and your plants are burnt.

You didn't realize that you need to come out at noon and see what the sunlight is.

So I think it's probably a little early they you know, the tropicals enjoy this heat.

This is a August is great.

Beginning of September is great.

And then we'll start thinking about it.

But it is a good, really good time to divide hostas, Iris, daylilies, this heat has just made them dormant, so now it's time to start digging them all up, and it's starting time to buy peonies.

Order your peonies now, bare root, super cheap.

They're going to deliver them in September to you, and it's a really good time to get all those right.

There's more varieties of peonies now than there will be in the spring.

So if you want dailies, Iris, peonies, any of those tuberous plants, and not dahlias, but everything else that's perennial tuberous now is your time to divide.

It's okay to throw them away or compost them.

Not everybody wants your blue Iris.

That's fine.

Do that.

No, I know so many people I see I'm giving away like the green hosta, is it a little early to cut the iris back?

I thought, yeah.

So, so normally they say, Hey, I want it to the it to die back and do that.

We are dormant, like we've been so hot, we're probably two weeks ahead of time.

So you'll be you'll be fine.

Okay, absolutely fine.

And I know this because they are starting to ship iris in September, so they've already dug them.

Yeah, a lot of places.

So everybody else has dug them.

If they can do it by a million, I can do it with 20.

Okay, all right, we have a plant ID question.

Someone wants to know if we can identify this weed on the screen.

Any idea what that is?

I don't know, but I got a lot of, I don't know, but it's an annual grass.

I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know which grass I should probably know it better, but that's a that's pulling or spraying type, but I've got a couple patches like that.

It's not that hard to pull, honestly, when it gets a little, yeah, it's really not you can just, yeah, make some gloves and, yeah, very weak.

Rooted.

So it's especially if it's a little bit moist.

I think this weekend coming up, it's a good weekend to do.

We got a little rain, yeah, it's going to be a little cooler.

Get a little kneeling pad and you got that looked hatch right on down.

Okay.

Well, we are out of time.

Thank you guys so much for coming in.

I know it goes fast, doesn't it.

Thank you guys so much for watching.

If you've got questions, you can send them in to us at yourgarden@gmail.com, or you can just look for us on socials.

Just search for Mid American Gardener.

Keep those questions coming in, and we will get those answered for you.

And thanks so much for joining us.

We'll see you next time.

Good night.

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