Hello and thanks for joining us for another episode of Mid American gardener.

I'm your host, Tinisha Spain, and we are out of the studio this week at Prairie fruits farm and Creamery in Champaign, and I'm joined here with my pals.

I'll have you introduce yourselves, and then we've got a lot to talk about.

So Karen, we'll start with you.

Hi, I'm Karen Ruckle, and I'm in the Peoria area, and I love gardening and perennials and house plants.

Wonderful.

All right.

Miss Ella.

I'm Ella Maxwell.

I'm a master gardener in Tazewell County.

I have a large yard.

I'm an arborist, so I like trees and shrubs, and, of course, perennials.

And I've got all kinds of things to share, all kinds of things.

Okay, well, let's just jump right in, because you guys have brought a lot, and it goes, these go really well with the question.

So right on season, we'll talk about this poinsettia here.

Helen writes in my porn setos rarely make it to Christmas, and I don't want to kill this one.

What tips can you give me to keep this year's plant alive?

We hear this a lot.

Yeah, you know, it's one thing I want to talk about, setting yourself up for not getting to disaster to try to get to Christmas.

So when you're at the store, hopefully they still have the little plastic sleeves, because you'll want to sleeve it up for going out.

Now, when you're choosing it, when I went to the store and was looking, they were all sleeved up.

And I chose this one because it looked fat in inside, there was a fullness to it, so that when I pulled down the sleeve, it was a nice full poinsettia.

And when you choose out your poinsettia, the real flower is actually in the center here.

So if all of these little points here, and there's little pollen, if all of that's gone and missing, and there's just kind of these, like little dark stubs that that plant has already lived a lot of its life, not even with you.

So when you're picking it out, you still want to see some of that, because then it's going to last a little longer.

The other point is, poinsettias don't like to they're finicky.

They don't want to be real wet.

They don't want to be real dry.

And so when I water mine, I take them out of I like the foil sleeve.

I think it's festive, pretty.

I'll take it out, water it, and then set it back in and have another saucer under here, in case this got a little scuffed for leaks.

And the other thing is, is water I typically, I don't have a water softener in my house, but I do let my water sit out, and I just have plastic jugs that I set to the side of my basement and let the water sit there so it's room temperature.

It's not real cold when you're watering the plant, and then, you know, put it where you're going to enjoy it.

But they do like some bright light to stay nicer.

Okay, now you let it completely drain before you put it back in the foil.

Because I know we've talked about before, some people are just dumping, dumping, dumping, and don't realize that it's sitting in a lot of water.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's that's even sometimes you'll go to the store, and if they've tried to take care of their plants, sometimes they even over try, and you'll pick them up, and there's like, this bubble on the bottom that there's water pooling, and you don't want to get that plant because it's already set up for disaster that the roots might be damaged from sitting with so much water.

Okay, all right, now you know how to take care of your poinsettia and how to get it to last you throughout the year.

Okay, now we're going to want to talk about house plants.

Sure.

All right, Randall says, Do I need to water my dormant tropicals during the winter?

And how cold is too cold?

So I'm assuming that's a storage question.

So what are your thoughts?

Sure?

I wasn't quite sure what Randall had, but I have tropicals that grow on my patio.

They're actually house, what I would consider a house plant, so they can be brought in, and I water them all winter long, and I have them in a sun room that is just a three season room, so I do have to supplementally heat it during the coldest part of the winter, possibly I have a thermometer that I can watch the temperatures.

But he was talking about some tropicals that you can overwinter or that can go dormant.

And so I brought a sample of two of those, and these are what would be considered an elephant ear, either an alocasia or a coal Casia.

These are cold caches, but this is one that was growing in the garden, and I let the frost kind of take it, and then I dug them up, and I will be storing these at in my basement, so between 55 and 65 degrees, probably.

And I also have one that was really cute and and still looked.

Really good.

And so instead of letting it go dormant, like this one, I'm continuing to water it on a weekly basis with my house plant collection.

So I have some tropical bananas and they I let them go totally dormant, like this bulb, but you can do it either way.

If they have leaves and you want to continually grow them, you have to water them.

Okay, all right, wonderful.

Okay, Karen, we're going to come back to you.

This is Mallory writes in, is it necessary to pull or otherwise clear everything in the garden after a killing frost, or is it okay to leave the plant material to naturally decompose over the winter?

Great question.

And the thing is, yes, it's okay to leave it, and a lot of people want to leave that for the overwintering insects, for for that cover.

The thing that I got a little bit of a question with is that that she felt that she could leave it there to decompose and it would all be fine.

And I think that that stuff, like hostas, they'll melt down, and the leaves will pretty well disintegrate, and in spring, there might not be much left, but there's a lot of other perennials that you have a lot of rubbish and that will not really decompose or naturally dissipate in a timely season of growing.

So stuff like your black eyed Susans or the day lily stalks and stuff like that, come spring, you will need to clean all that up, and then you can compost it in another spot, but it won't really decompose there with that plant tidally in that area.

And I was thinking, she was talking more like vegetable garden.

Well, we could, why would you leave your tomatoes that might have?

Oh, true.

So yes, or your campers, right?

Clear and clear.

All of that off, right?

But, yeah, I was thinking perennials.

You were thinking, but that's okay.

We got both angles.

So in the garden, the vegetable garden, I clean all of it up, everything up, and then you can use leaf I collect.

And I'm going to talk about these leaves real quickly, but I mulch with my mower and a bagger, and then I put those leaves on my garden just over the top.

Some of them all have to rake off because they won't decompose.

Some of them go in a compost bin that I have, but I like to have the ground covered for winter, but I would not leave tomatoes or peppers or eggplant or anything like that.

Okay, so clean that stuff up.

Gotcha.

Let's talk about those leaves.

Okay, so I want everyone to feel sorry for me, because it's of my own making, but I brought four giant leaves of trees that I have in my yard that I would like for our viewers to post on our Facebook, some of the leaves that they have, especially if they have Giant leaves.

So this is what's called an umbrella Magnolia, and they're all dropping now.

I have another magnolia.

It's a very large tree.

It can get 4050, feet, and it has large leaves.

This is the cucumber Magnolia, and they are all dropping now.

And these, these are big leaves.

They don't go away.

I have a 70 foot Sycamore.

These leaves are huge, and don't go away.

And my biggest leaf, this is a catalpa.

And luckily, I'm pollarding this tree, so that means that I cut the branches back to a nub I started out, but it has huge leaves.

So you're busy, I'm a busy, and we don't burn any leaves.

All our leaves stay on our property.

They're either mulched or they're blown into the timber space or, yeah, they don't stay on the grass.

So send us pictures of your big leaves, because you can post those on our face, send us to send them to us on Facebook, or you can email them in at your garden@gmail.com, and we'll post those and see if anyone can rival your your big leaf collection.

All right, Karen, you brought in a mum, yeah.

Well, I don't know if everybody else has been seeing this, but we had really hot weather early in the fall, and the mums the fall, moms did not enjoy that.

And so if you got mums later on, boy, the cool weather, they have just been lasting very nicely.

And my mom, yeah, it looks pretty raggedy, but it bloomed, and then it kind of did this secondary burst around there.

So I'm like, Well, you're not, you know, you're still doing it.

It's still something.

But at this point, this Mum, you could keep it for next year.

And we found that trying to plant them out in the garden this late in the season, they just don't winter over.

But if you've got an unheated shed or.

An unheated garage, not real warm area.

Go ahead.

And you know, if you've still got this sitting on the front porch and we're supposed to get snow soon, drag it on in.

And you know, see if, see if, maybe about once a month, check it to see if it needs a little bit of moisture with the pot.

And then come next spring, see if it's starting to grow again, and you could have yourself a free mom for next year, several that are sitting, that are sitting around, and they don't look great, but I'm gonna, you know, if you've got space that you could shove up.

Now, what I would do also is I would chop off all the top of this, because, you know, you don't need this extra stuff going all over the garage and making an extra mess.

Yep, I do that too.

It works really well.

I'm definitely going to try that.

If you planted the mums earlier on, they would have made it, but this late in the season there's, there's no way they're going to Gotcha.

Okay, let's get to the Zinnia question.

I want to make sure art says, Should I cut down my zinnias and Mexican sunflowers before winter.

Or will they reseed themselves each year?

And if they do, will they look the same?

Some sunflowers I planted a while back, came back and looked totally different.

Love the show.

Thanks for what you do.

Well, that's the important thing to understand with seed and saving seed, is that if you had a hybrid, like some of the sunflowers, must be a hybrid, and that the second generation will then revert to the two parents that were in that cross now, many plants, you can save the seeds, and they are an heirloom type, where you don't have that that cross pollination to change the genetics.

And one would be the Mexican sunflower, the tithonia.

So this is what's in my garden.

Does it recede?

It might, it can, but the birds have eaten all the seeds out of this.

So some of the seeds will fall down.

You can see that the seed heads have fallen over.

But earlier on, I collected the seeds, so I have seeds ready to go, which I will actually physically seed in the area, and they do grow back.

Really better than trying to see if just receding, and again, the same way with the zinnias.

Here's some heads of Zinnias that were still in my garden this week.

And yes, they can maybe recede, but usually I pick the flowers earlier on, save the seed, dry them, label them, and then I will physically reseed them, so I know that I have plenty of seed in the seed bed to come up.

Okay, so that's, that's what I would recommend him doing.

But you know, if you've waited too long, there's no seed to get, because the birds get them before you, before you do Gotcha.

Okay, we've got just a couple minutes left, and you brought in some evergreens that I would love to hear more about if you want to walk through those.

Sure, sure.

So people like to use evergreens over the holidays, and that's what I love, if you have a source of evergreens, or if your neighbor does and allows you to come over and cut some evergreens.

What's important to understand with evergreens is many of them don't have a lot of buds further back on the stem.

So this is a old spruce, if I cut this off, the new growth has to come around from the edges where there are new buds out here.

So it's important not to just haphazardly trim your evergreens.

Some Evergreens are much easier to trim, like arborvitae, they have a lot of other buds that will come out and fill in.

And of course, I have, I have some Arborvitae.

This was a new one, a new variety that has a lot of yellow in it, and box wood, a broadleaf Evergreen.

And now might be the time to think about will proofing these if they're in an exposed location, but it's also a great time to use these.

I have hemlock.

I have a bunch of different chamasiperases.

Here's a blue one called Boulevard.

Here's a kind of weeping, hinoki, no thread, leaf type.

And these are all at your house.

These are all at my but I have a really big yard.

This is a con color fur Juniper, lots of different junipers.

And.

This was a weeping spruce with cones.

And, of course, your ever popular you, and all of these can be grouped up.

I was just about to say I could see you doing some decorating with I do.

I do.

You can just use what they call paddle wire.

It's just wire on a on a card, and it just, you know, it's a continuous piece.

And you can put this around a form, like a wreath, and just keep adding different, you know, bunches and more, bunches and more bunches.

It can be used to make roping porch pot decorations just wonderful.

Possibilities are endless, that's right.

And you know, I have enough that I can decorate a lot well.

Thank you guys so much for coming in answering those questions.

We really appreciate it, and we will see you guys next time you come in.

And now I'm joined by my friend Jim Appleby, and we're going to be discussing some evergreens in different varieties, so beautiful specimens that you brought in.

Thank you.

So walk us through these and how we tell the difference and just, well, you know, I think people ought to try, if they got the property to grow evergreens.

I mean, it's, you know, it's just such a wonderful plant to have in the wintertime, it's green.

Finally, you get something to look at, yes, and particularly if you go into the winter season.

I really like Hollies.

And I have several different Hollies.

This is the American Holly.

They have these real prickly things here, nice green foliage.

But American Holly really doesn't do too well in the Midwest.

They just, you know, I think it's the winter that's a little bit too harsh, too hard on them.

If you go down to the Washington, DC area, we got some beautiful, beautiful tall around the building, tall American Holly near the federal buildings.

Just absolutely gorgeous.

So in along the east coast, you can grow holly trees really well, but here in the Midwest, like I have the stone here, is American Holly on my own property.

But they just don't do too well.

The one that really does well in the Midwest, the princess the blue the blue princess is the female and the blue Prince is the male.

And in the Hollies, you have the sexes that are different.

It's only the females that have the red berries.

So this is, this is a piece of branch here from my male plant that's really pretty, called Blue prince, and the female is a blue princess.

And I think I told you a story.

Several years ago, a man called me up and he said, My wife and I are so disappointed, because we have these bushes in the front of the house, we have about four bushes, and they never, ever get any red berries on them.

I said, Well, sir, you either got all females or you got all males.

But you have to have pollinating, that's right, you have to have one male, and you can have three or four females, because it's a pollen from the male plant that fertilizes the female flowers.

So you have to have one.

You have to have both sexes present somewhere.

If you don't, you're not going to have any berries.

So he said, I said, Look at the flower.

When you look at the flower, a holly the center of the flower and there's tiny white flowers, if it's completely hollow, it's just like a tube.

That means it's a male flower.

The female flower, that center part has a little projection coming out it looks like, almost like a little green eraser, like on a pencil that is a female so that's how you can tell them apart.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Now as we are starting to talk about our Christmas trees and our holiday decor, you brought in some other specimens here that are in the well, it could be some of these could be Christmas trees.

Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely, in fact, except this one.

This is Texas, and you know, taxis is very common Bush, but look how pretty.

This is gorgeous.

So you can use this on decorations on the outside or very inside.

They'll keep their needles quite well.

So we were talking about ambiance earlier.

You know, just putting these out with your salute holiday decor and a couple of holly branches like this under your candlestick really adds that touch.

But this is taxes, is very common, and it does very well in the Midwest.

Then you have, when I was a kid, I raised a lot of these called this is a branch from Norway spruce, and it does quite well in the Midwest.

I don't know it.

The only problem is a Christmas tree when you.

Bring it in, you really got to put a water in that base, or the needles fall and they fall within.

I mean, they'll last from from Christmas to New Year's, but, boy, you're pressing after that, they start following the needles as a cut tree.

So it's, it's not the most desirable white pine.

I have plenty of white pine on my property, they get very, very large.

The problem with white pine is, though the branches are very brittle.

So if you get ice storms, we had an ice storm quite a few years ago, and all night long, bang, bang, crash, crash.

And, you know, huge numbers and some of the winds are huge, so you should not planting a white pine tree near any kind of building, you know, if you have a garage or shed or something, because these big branches will fall down.

But White Pine is nice for decorative purposes.

You know, you can make a wreath out of these, and they're nice.

The disadvantage too is that they produce a lot of SAP, and so you don't want to have a picnic bench on your white pine because the SAP falls down on the picnic bench and it produces a lot of the SAP, particularly when it's got pine cones like this.

You can see this, white spots on here.

The SAP very sticky, just terrible.

So don't park your car under there, not a park or a picnic bench or anything like that, because there's some disadvantages of white pine.

Another pine I grow, which is really quite nice, is con color.

It has these very long needles, bluish needles, very nice plant does quite well, but it's very slow growing.

But a beautiful tree, con color, fir.

And then here, the ultimate Christmas tree, though, is the best.

For last, the very, very, very best is this.

And this is Fraser fir.

So the firs are really nice, and it's very similar to balsam fir, okay, but it's more, I think it's better at a tree.

It's more beautiful tree than balsam, but it's very characteristic of Balsam.

It keeps the needles just like balsam, and it's just got beautiful foliage, very beautiful shapes.

Give it a sniff.

I love the way these smell.

This is the best.

This is the one.

Yeah, see.

Let's see.

There it is.

Oh, there it is, Frasier.

Oh, yeah, that's really nice.

I really love that plant.

It's just a beautiful, pretty, nice so thank you for bringing all these specimens in.

And you these are all on your property, all on my property.

Like I said, if you got the space, try to grow some evergreens.

All right.

Well, thank you for coming out, meeting us here at the farm, and thank you so much for watching.

If you've got questions, you can send them in to our panelists at yourgarden@gmail.com, and we will see you next Week.

Thanks so much for watching, and happy holidays.

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