Hello, and thanks for joining us for another episode of Mid-American Gardener.

I'm your host, Tanisha Spain, and joining me in the studio today, our three of my friends, and as you can see, we've got a lot to cover.

So we're going to have them introduce themselves and off we go.

So Jennifer, we're going to start with you.

Hi, Jennifer Fishburne.

I'm a horticulture educator with the University of Illinois extension and I am in the Springfield area, so covering Logan Bernard and Sigman Counties.

And I love to talk plants, anything but today I've got some fun stuff to show you.

You.

Do and we love when you come in for a visit from Springfield, so thank you.

All right, Jennifer?

Hi.

Jennifer Nelson, teach vegetable gardening in the Department of Crop Sciences at University of Illinois, and I too love to talk plants and it's even better when I have my partner Jennifer with me.

Partner in crime.

You bet.

Makes.

It.

A very fun day.

Wonderful.

Alright, and Kay.

I'm Kay Carnes.

I'm Shahe County Master Gardener.

My areas are herbs and flowers.

I spend a lot of time at Allerton Park working with their herb garden.

We visited you there a couple summers ago.

Doing.

The good work there in the garden, so wonderful.

Okay.

Alright, so we're going to go back to you Jennifer Fishburne and whichever one you want to start with.

I think we'll start with the pretty ones for this morning.

So here I have a collection of BIA that I brought with me, so I don't know the blue ones, specific names.

I do have a native blue bia, I have lemon meringue.

The yellow one, the reddish one here is cherries jubilee and the pink, or excuse me, kind of purple-ish and yellow is pink lemonade.

This is a perennial plant that will grow about three feet tall and about three feet wide, so they get pretty substantial.

They make a nice statement in the garden, good backdrop plant because they do bloom early on in the season right now, so it's something you want at the back of your flower bed.

The foliage is very nice throughout the summer.

And then there is a caterpillar that will get on these.

They eat a little bit, but they are a host plant.

So this is, I think just a great addition to the garden and you can see it also comes in an OFFWHITE color.

So it's a great, I love it.

These look.

Gorgeous.

I think it's beautiful.

If.

You grow those from seed, will they flower the first year for you or is those one of the ones you got to wait and be patient?

This is one.

I would personally just buy the actual plant.

Get the.

Plant, and I would not try it from seeds.

Since it's a perennial, it's going to take a little bit longer to get it going.

So most people are going to want, I would buy a smaller plant.

I wouldn't have to buy a big gallon pot, but a four inch would be really nice.

And the blue, there's a blue native one that you could get at a lot of the native plant sales that are being held right now, so you could check that out.

The other thing is this morning when I was out visiting my plants and cutting them early on, there were bumblebees visiting.

So it is one that pollinators will be attracted to.

Nice.

Great addition to the garden, I think.

And it's pretty too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So four different, actually five different plants here, but very.

Nice.

Get.

Really big.

All.

Right.

Alright, Jennifer.

Okay.

Jennifer started with the pretty, I'm going to start with the not so pretty.

We're going right to the dumpster diving special here.

So I was grocery shopping yesterday at a place that I grocery shop all the time and they kind of know me there and they know that I teach horticulture and one of the ladies pulled me aside and said, Hey, I'm going to have to throw these in the dumpster unless you'll take 'em home.

That was the.

Music to your ears.

I'm like, of course I'll take them.

They're free, they're rough.

I was like, well, even my first question was are they even intended for outside?

Because sometimes hydrangeas are what you would call a florist hydrangea.

They'd be intended for, they're not hardy here.

This is according to the tag I found inside Hardy here.

So we're going to try it.

It's called speedy red and it's starting to color up the foliage a little rough.

I took some of the dead off.

I'll probably take more of the dead off later.

Technically, if you put it in the ground, you probably should remove the flowers just to give it more directing its energy towards rooting in.

But I don't know if I can bear to do that.

Yeah.

It's been through a lot.

Yeah, I was looking, the common question we get on the show here is why isn't my hydrangea blooming and what do I do to make it bloom and how do I prune it?

All that stuff.

This is unfortunately, from what I can figure out, one of those hydrangeas that has to bloom on old wood, so you've got to have some part of it survive the winter above ground.

So I don't know, I have a spot in mind kind of up close to the house.

I'm thinking maybe if I throw a little extra mulch over the top after it cools off in the fall, maybe I've got half a shot.

But you know what?

Even if it doesn't bloom again, it will be a nice green something.

I don't know.

And it is free.

And it was free.

This is part of the front of gardening to me to just experiment and try new things.

So here you go, and you saved it from the dumpster, saved it from the dumpster.

Now when you plant that, how far up will you remove leaves?

Because you don't want to take 'em all off.

Will you?

No, no.

I might take the ones that are totally crispy, which seems to be kind of a lot.

But I'll see, like I said, free guys, so have some fun in your garden experiment.

Yeah, it's a shame that that's just that they were going to have to throw it out.

The.

Nature of the.

Business, the nature of the business, they're always getting new stuff.

As one of the other staff pointed out, this is a place where plants come to die, the grocery store, it's not a garden center.

So keep that in mind.

Get 'em when the cart rolls in, get 'em to the get 'em when.

They put 'em on the shelf.

Yes.

Okay, well good luck to that.

Hydrangea.

Set.

This guy aside.

Alright.

Kay.

You brought some spring pretty.

I did.

I brought, these are iris flowers and I love irises because they do really well.

They're very low care, thankfully.

Yes.

Yes.

Set it and.

Forget it.

The plants I've got are probably anywhere from 10 to 15 years old and they just keep going and they come with such gorgeous.

You covered up your face.

That's okay.

She's here to show off the flowers anyway.

They come in such gorgeous colors.

These are especially like this one.

It's the yellow with a little bit of purple on it.

This one's just plain yellow.

This is white actually.

One is pretty, a little bit of.

Are these the bearded, is this the variety?

And I hear people say Lily and Iris.

I've heard people call them bearded lilies and bearded irises interchangeably.

Iris.

Is.

One.

It's a bearded iris, and then there's just one that's purple and I had one at home that was almost brown, but it only had one flower, so I didn't cut it.

You left.

That at home to enjoy it.

Yeah.

There you go.

Is that the one you're trying to get out of it?

Yeah.

So this very pretty.

And so do you thin these out?

I know sometimes that you have to rejuvenate them or you don't do.

Anything with it.

Nice.

Lucky.

I probably should because I mean they've really spread and they're thin, but they're healthy and they're producing stuff.

Good.

I guess ignoring, and it's such a. Great sign of spring too, when you see that flower stock go up, you've turned the corner on some of that cold weather.

Wonderful.

Okay, thank you.

Kay.

All right, Jennifer, we are back to you.

Alright, I think we'll talk veggies next.

So if you're out at your farmer's markets or if you're lucky, lucky enough to have your own space at home to grow asparagus, you'll know that that's been available for picking now for maybe about a month.

My patch, I think has a few more weeks left in it.

We'll see these temperatures, the fluctuation of cold and hot has really played a number on it doesn't really like that.

Too cold, so it slowed down there for a bit.

But what I want to point out is if you are buying this either in the grocery store, hopefully at the farmer's market, if you're purchasing it, keep in mind it should always be in water when you go to buy it.

If it's not, it's dried out and the bottom parts of it'll be Woody probably can't do this at the grocery store, at the farmer's market, but one of the ways to tell if it's woody or not is just to take it and where it snaps, that part is what you discard.

That's going to be woody and that's going to be fresh.

So as long as you keep it in water, a couple of these were in the fridge for several days now.

So that's why that part's woody.

It's actually keeps growing in the refrigerator, but when I pick it, I snap it off the plant.

So I know that everything I snapped at that point is edible and good to eat.

So please, right now is the best time of the year to buy asparagus in Illinois.

Not going to get any fresher.

Yeah, so enjoy it.

Yes.

When you are leaving some in the patch, are you waiting for it to drop the seed or are you waiting for the roots?

How do you get more asparagus.

Or both?

So typically you're planting what we call crowns.

So it's a big root that you're planting way early in the spring and then you're waiting until about the third year to pick it.

My patch now is about nine years old.

The way that you're going to keep producing more is you need to keep adding fertility.

So lots of manure, lots of compost to your patch.

That's a way to keep those plants really growing.

But what's happening is the roots should be sending up more and more stalks.

If you have asparagus that has the berries on it, as we call it, the fruit on it, those are actually female plants like a Martha Washington would be an example.

They're not preferred by most growers because they're putting more energy into that fruit.

Whereas the male versions like New Jersey Knight and Millennium is one.

Those are great for the actual stock production.

What we're seeing here, the STEM production.

So I'm not sure what the original question was, but you need to let it, is.

It the seed or the roots that gives you more.

So it's the roots.

The roots.

The roots, okay.

Yeah, but you need to leave.

So at one point here, my patch is going to start to slow down a little bit, not look as full.

I'm going to stop picking.

I'm going to let these come up and then they're going to produce the Frans.

So they're going to produce the leaves and that's absorbing the energy into the plant for the roots for the next season part of it.

But also they need, we have some high fertility, so let it do that and then cut that off when it yellows in the fall.

Okay.

I knew to do that, but I just didn't know why and I wondered if it was dropping the seed or if that was part of the whole energy.

Now the females will drop the seeds and you will get new ones popping up in your patch.

So for some reason I must have had a female, and so I have several coming up around my patch.

Yes.

Okay, let's do one more veggie while we're hot.

On veggies.

This is a collection, so we're going to wait on this.

All right, let's save that one.

Save that one.

We're going to save.

These.

Okay.

Alright.

Alright.

Jennifer, we go.

Do you.

I'm go for the pretty this time.

This was what I was actually caught my eye at the grocery store.

I had never seen this before.

I wasn't sure what it was and I had to look it up.

It's called a sun star and it's a bulb from South Africa and the flowers are supposed to last for a month or more depending on what you look at.

Some of some sources call this a temporary house plant, meaning that enjoy the pretty and then compost it because it's not worth trying to bloom it.

But I take that as a challenge.

Game.

On.

Well yeah, it said what the big challenge is about this is that it needs a long, dry, cooled dormancy period.

I can handle that of not paying attention to something for the winter.

So it seems to be similar to clivia or clivia, I don't know how you pronounce it, but it's a similar looking plant with an orange flower that needs a cool dry rest period.

So I dunno.

We'll see.

I think it's pretty interesting looking.

It is.

I wonder if you put it in the refrigerator after it bloomed or not back if it would.

Yeah, possibly.

Keep it a cold period.

Yeah, I'll try.

We'll.

See.

Let us know.

I will let us know.

Maybe I'll bring it back next spring blooming again.

We'll.

See.

Okay.

Kay, before we go back down to Jennifer, I wanted to ask, do you have any vegetables, any of your veggies in the ground yet?

I'm working on it.

Yeah.

Good answer.

Good answer.

Are you doing tomato and what else?

This year.

My husband can't eat tomatoes, so I grow one plant for me.

Just.

For you.

Just for you.

But I do sweet peppers.

Oh yeah.

And I love sweet peppers.

Yes.

Me too.

And beans, green beans.

That's a big one.

I actually have cattle panels for formed to grow on.

That's.

Helpful.

And that's a permanent way to do it.

Yes.

Work smarter, not harder, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

And don't move the cattle and.

Don't.

Move those.

Yes, yes.

Okay.

So mid-May is a great time to get most of your warm loving veggies going.

And what better place to go is the garden center and see what we can find to purchase.

Now we highly recommend you start your tomatoes, your peppers, your eggplant, all from plants or start your seeds inside back in late February, march.

But in recent years they've gone a little overboard because people unknowingly don't know what can be started easily from seed versus what should be started from plants.

So now we find in many of our garden centers selections of plant material that Jennifer and I cringe because we say for what you just paid for that one plant, you could have bought a packet of sea of 50 seeds and had all kinds of plants.

So this one here is a krabi, this is an individual krabi.

I think the price was around five bucks.

You can go buy a whole bunch of krabi at a farmer's market, like probably several for five bucks.

So this would not be a great purchase from the garden center.

These are krabi is super easy to grow from seed.

So we highly recommend that you do that.

Corn is another one.

And this is really, really easy to grow from seed.

We can see that in central Illinois and all of our corn fields surrounded by it.

I'm going to refer to my friend Jennifer to tell us about how many you should actually have in order to have Right?

Correct.

Pollination.

What would you say.

You need to plant in a square?

You need more than three plants.

I would say probably at least 16 plants, something like that.

This hurts my heart because I studied, some people know that are watching.

I studied sweet corn in grad school.

Yeah, this is not okay.

We would transplant stuff occasionally to the field for various research reasons, but we were very careful about it because when they get past a certain size, they get stunted from being in the pot.

So this is probably not going to end well.

And if you did want to try it and it did go, you would need to buy, as Jennifer said, probably about five of these if they had three plants a piece in it.

And then you need to tease them apart and plant them at least a foot or two apart in your garden.

This is getting expensive.

If you're.

Buying it like this.

Yeah, no kidding.

And.

What not to.

Do.

This is the what not to do.

So start your sweet corn in your popcorn from seed.

Also, if you are going to try to grow sweet corn and popcorn, make sure that you're planting them so that they're not going to be pollinating at the same time.

So keep that in mind as well.

So.

We'll get the days to maturity on the variety or plant them wait a few weeks before you plant the other.

No.

Did.

Okay.

I don't think I've ever seen corn at a plant sale.

We've seen it before and we decided we were going to talk about it today.

Today was the day we went looking for it.

Yes.

And speaking of them growing anywhere, I had a kernel sprout in my pantry and we thought that was the most hilarious thing.

We came back from a vacation and there was a tiny little popcorn going in the pantry.

Alrighty then.

And then obviously there are many more examples that we didn't bring with us because we couldn't bring ourselves to pay $5 for plants.

So we saw green beans in hots.

That's super easy to grow from seed.

Another one that you might get a little advantage from.

But again, squash, watermelon melons.

You can also buy those in pots as plants.

I think you might get 'em maybe a week, 10 days, maybe two weeks advantage on that.

But those are easy to grow from seed as well.

Lettuce and.

Kale kind of got.

Under.

Our.

Skin too.

Lettuce and kale was Oh, and you said you saw carrots?

Yes, I saw carrots over the weekend.

I'm like, this is so wrong.

You cannot, carrots do not like to be transplanted.

And it was like a six pack of carrot plants.

They also had asparagus that way, which I'm like, this is so at.

A big box store.

And I was like, this is just so wrong and it's just people are going to have big failure and then they're going to be sat, stop gardening.

I can't garden.

I can't do it.

No, you don't know what you don't know.

During the public service one to and no one to get the plants.

Yes.

So speaking of you don't know what you don't know and frustration from people.

I was at a garden center in Springfield twice over the past week and both times in the herbs section I heard people say, I'm not going to buy cilantro.

I can't grow it.

It never grows.

Well for me, cilantro from seed is probably one of the easiest herbs to grow.

But what people don't realize is when they're buying it as a plant, as this one is here, you can see this one's already starting to flower.

And this is an annual.

So the whole point of an annual plant is to grow leaves, produce flowers, and then produce seeds and then they shut down and they're done.

Came over Some plants like basil, you can quote trick it.

So a basil plant, you could grow it, wait for it to flower, let the pollinators visit if you want, cut it back to about half a third of the height and it will flush out new growth and it'll keep coming back.

And you can keep doing that all season long and it'll keep growing.

Cilantro, however, is one that if I were to clip this off right now, it's going to die.

It's not going to come back.

It's already at the point where it says I'm ready to shut down.

So what happens is we're buying these as plants in the garden center is we're buying a plant that's already just a couple weeks away from shutting down, so to speak.

And what causes cilantro to really what we call bolt go to flour and seed is heat.

They don't like heat like a cooler.

So if you're looking to have cilantro at the same time that your tomatoes are ready, you're going to need to be seeding that maybe seed a few in early June and then maybe some mid-June like succession seeding.

So every couple of weeks you're planting more seeds.

So that is why people get frustrated and they don't want to grow.

It is because they didn't have luck with it.

They planted it from a plant and it matured too quickly.

And then interestingly enough, one last thing about cilantro.

When this gets seeds, we call those seeds coriander.

So it's one of the few plants where the seeds have a different name than the actual plant, which I find kind of interesting.

So moral to the story is the three things that we have here.

Please buy seeds of these plants and put them in your garden, not the actual vegetables because it's just not a good utilization of your funds.

You know what?

And you can't blame I guess the garden center or the nurseries because they're trying to make money and right to sell a product.

But it's good to know these things because someone will probably walk up and pick up that very cilantro and take it home and it's going to immediately die.

Yes.

Pretty.

Much It's.

Going to taste.

Taste horrible.

Oh yeah.

And the taste.

Won't be great either.

Yeah, good.

Point.

And then they're going to say, oh, I don't like that.

Now I don't like cilantro on top of everything else.

Yes.

Okay.

We've got about five minutes left and I know you guys have a couple more plants.

Well.

And something I've done with cilantro is just let it go to seed and just have kind of that cycle of new cilantro.

Buy little, let the seed soap they call self.

So to the ground.

That one looks more like parsley than it does cilantro.

I think.

Definitely cilantro.

You can smell it.

Oh yeah.

Cilantro smells good.

So I brought a couple other show and tells this first one is a tuber pogonia.

And just to show that I did literally nothing to keep it over the winter except throw it in the garage in a pot and let it dry out and look at.

It and.

Let it dry out.

And I've had it for maybe five years now this way.

And occasionally I'll take the tuber out and kind of refresh the soil and repo it up.

But it tells me in the spring when it's ready to go back outside and I put it outside and it's already got some flower beds on it and I can't believe this other show and tell I brought, I can't believe I was carefully harvesting it to bring it here.

This is like my worst weed right now.

It's called Cleavers.

Oh.

Yeah, it is like natural Velcro.

You guys can kind of see.

It's all stuck to itself.

It's all, you can even.

Hear it.

Yeah.

So it's got these little tiny hairs that is Velcro.

The seeds that it makes are covered in the same stuff.

So they're going to stick all over you, all over your pets, your pets, everything that comes in contact.

And I was looking it up to find some information about it.

It's a forging plant.

People eat it for various, I'm not sure why reasons, I guess early in the spring they use it in smoothies and stuff, but it's also medicinally used as a diuretic.

But it is a pain in my neck at my house.

It is everywhere.

I didn't used to have it, but it is proliferated and it is one of these that is everywhere in the spring and then it's starting to make seeds.

Once it makes the seeds, it's kind of like the cilantro.

It just is done and it dries up.

It's very easy to pull though.

So that's satisfying.

What is it.

Like?

Is it.

Like it just kind of lays on top of everything?

It kind of like, gotcha.

So yeah, it kind of blankets, does.

It kind.

Yeah.

And so it's easy to pull but it's pain in the neck.

And another old use for it was, I apparently European settlers used to wad this up as a make do mattress.

You'd have to put something over top but is, you can kind see where it would be kind of.

You.

Get enough.

Of it and.

Get enough of it go off in the.

Ground a. Little.

You get it all out of my yard, it would fine come.

And get it.

And does it get, I mean just that section is pretty tall, but does it.

Get.

Really, really tall?

It depends on where it's, it tends.

To flop.

Flop grows up.

This was kind of flopped over a perennial bed.

But just don't let it go to seed.

Then it.

I got to get at it this week.

It'll be very satisfying to just go and it sticks to itself.

Right.

So you'll be able to just kind of.

Get it and one swoop.

Yeah.

Okay.

And what's it called again?

Avers.

Cleavers.

Cleavers.

Got it.

Okay.

I haven't seen it in my yard.

Fingers crossed.

I do have, would you.

Like some?

It'll be stuck to you.

You can take it off.

No.

Thank you.

Be.

Thankful it's not.

Yeah.

I. Am.

Got, I've got some knot weed and whatever that vine is.

Oh, strangle vine.

Yes.

I battle those, but Okay.

Alright guys, well we are out of time.

Did we get through everything?

I, we did.

We did.

We did.

I love that.

Thank you ladies for sharing your time and talents with us.

Really appreciate it.

Always learn so much from you.

And thank you so much for watching.

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

Just look for Mid-American Gardener and we will see you next time.

Good night.