welcome to Prime.

>> I'm Bruce Haines as we move further into fall there are the outdoor seasonal preparations for lawns and gardens such as mulching, prepping the beds, planting maybe some reseeding and meanwhile our indoor gardens are also feeling the onset of fall.

Plants and flowers are calling for some adjustments in light and temperature and humidity and all of this plus for many the discovery of gardening through the pandemic makes tonight's program a perfect opportunity for us to welcome back Ricky Cammeray.

>> Ricky is retired L.A. County horticulture extension educator and he is here to help answer your gardening questions if only you'll put down the gardening trail and then pick up the phone and then call the number that you see on the screen as we widen out.

>> And welcome Ricky back to the program.

>> Good to see you again.

I was saying how do you manage not aging?

I am holding a beat up a little bit and you're you haven't aged at all that it's the special effects that live so for something in the water I think here at this station well and we're keeping it on tap I think to make it available for everybody by graceful Segway I will say as we did before we started gardening is such a natural part of so many who enjoy watching public television listen to public radio and for those who are just wanting to get reconnected in this digital age, the opportunity to get reconnected to something tremendously analog and innovating can keep you young.

>> And the pandemic your contention is this was almost the first opportunity for people to say well what do I do today while I hunker down when we talk about, you know, like victory gardens back in the forties and then this big influence of interest in gardening towards the end of my career and extension it's same way now.

I mean what else are you going to do when you're socially socially isolated and you want to get outside and get some exercise, some sunlight, a little bit of stress relief?

Gardening has always been that way for folks and we saw a real increase in folks that wanted to garden that never did before during the pandemic which is great for me because I still answer lots of questions and write articles excuse me and stuff like that.

It's it's wonderful to work with people and try to help them when they're first time gardeners in the pandemic and you know, they're baby boomers.

They don't they want to do something and they're receptive to that instruction.

>> They are they know it's more than just digging a hole and dropping a seed in there and keeping your fingers crossed.

>> Yeah.

And the other thing that we talked about a little bit before was a reliance on social media to answer lots of problem questions for folks, especially the younger folks who are really interested in, you know, turning their kind of radical sometimes they want to turn to their front lawn into a garden and grow things they want to grow without the use of a lot of chemicals.

They depend on their friends on the Internet to help answer a lot of their questions.

So they're really, really keyed in on information and they want to you know, they want to grow healthy food because during the pandemic we had shortages.

We also had you know, a lot of scares because of shortages in the industry itself as far as inspection of products, there weren't as many folks and so there were a lot of food scares when it came to safety food.

And so when you grow your food at home, you know what you put on the crop you know how you grew it and you know that it's healthy and that has been an issue still is an issue with all the headlines you see in today's world.

>> If folks have the space there is raised beds you can you can grab somebody's tiller.

>> There's always a neighbor with a tiller or you can do container gardening or maybe put a couple of things together even on that windowsill that gets just enough sunlight and the next thing you know, that's where your basal clipping and your sage clippings come from for the spaghetti sauce that night.

>> The other thing that we saw a lot especially with younger cards is turning the garden into an outdoor classroom and living area.

So it was more than just growing some vegetables.

It was being outside teaching your kids how to grow plants and spending some quality time with the entire family of millennials and Gen Xers out in the garden and that was a little different too in the sense that of that.

But yeah.

And of course the other thing is Zoom, you know, you have to have really nice indoor plants if you want to be a zoomer and and you have all these meetings you want some sort of backdoor up and if you're not going to use books or a bookshelf to tell people the great books that you read, you really like to have some nice tropical plants in your zoom background and that the interest in tropical plants increased greatly during the pandemic because of that reason and the mental health effects of plants and the air purification aspects of having plants around your home and we touched on it at the start of the program but not realizing that as seasons change to be sure your indoor environment is as comfortable to your Schefflera as it was last May.

>> Talk about what in fact moving from July to January can do to an indoor plant if you're not careful.

I think that the first thing you have to realize is that the indoor environment isn't the greatest environment oftentimes to grow tropical plants and so I tend to try to grow tropicals that are almost impossible to kill and and still look great.

So you talked about Schefflera Agricola.

That's a great plant mother in law's tongues or snake plants.

It's almost impossible to kill those Chinese evergreen bromeliads.

All those plants are so easy to grow and can handle an indoor environment much better especially if you don't try to over care for them and they make great backgrounds and Swiss Cheese Plant is another one that I really like or the Paphos plant that can can crawl over things.

Other plants can be much more difficult because they require much more humid environments and light and all those things where the plants that I mentioned pretty easy and when I talk about house plants the water source is big.

So when you use Fort Wayne City Water to water house plants that that water is about nine or above and plants don't like it like that they want at about six point zero slightly acidic like rainwater.

>> And to do that I think that folks have to learn how to water like the pros in the greenhouses and to do that you're going to mix very small amounts of fertilizer and with water that has been treated with some vinegar to reduce the and and when you do that you're treating your plants just like the pros do and they'll grow much better for you.

And so water quality is a big thing as far as how you do things.

And then it always amazed me to see people in a green house that could just lift a plant like this cup of water and know if it needs water or not and that's just how the pros they've gotten really good at it.

And so I tell people away their house plants water the plant until it has all the water that it can take, weigh it, record the weight, let it dry out, record that weight and then over time you know exactly when the plant needs to water to do water and then after a while you get really good you can just lift the plant and no well and a lot of the plants in pots in folks homes may also not have that necessity of drainage or at least a way for some excess water to go otherwise that plants filling the pot is heavy.

>> You think oh it's great but you're not really sure if the plants are getting anything positive out of a lot of the greenhouse growers will sell the mixes that they use to grow their plants into consumers if you ask and that professional growers mix is much better than sort of the muck stuff that you can get in bags that some of the hardware stores so the quality of soil and don't you know when the best way to kill a house plant or any plant really is to overwater it either outdoors or indoors?

And so we had trouble with that this year in a sense.

You know, we had the durational.

We had tremendous amount of rain a few periods trial but we have this year was a great year to plant things honestly for the most of the year.

I planted stuff for most of the year because you could get away with it.

You could put a plant out in the middle of summer and still have enough rainfall to keep it alive.

>> And so I did that a lot.

Is it still possible to plant I realize we're now heading to half past November but wondering if the window has now closed for planting things in the falls or that they're whether they're bulbs or other there's a chance that you're making that down payment on spring, you know, while there's still life left.

>> The key is I mean a landscape we're told you could plant pretty well all year.

>> The idea is that you want to be have enough time for the plant to develop some root system before it gets really cold and we're at that transition point now where I think we're going to be moving into winter more than fall.

But I I planted plants three weeks ago and if you can give the plant enough time to get a root system going now right now is the best time to be planting bulbs right now and that something has sort of fallen out of favor a little bit as far as planting spring flowering bulbs.

But folks that want to do that should be doing that around now you want to do it before the ground freezes and there's snow on the ground but when it's cold enough where they don't force the bulbs into growing before they should I it seems at times a little self-defeating because when you're outside planting bulbs up in a tree, two squirrels are out there with maps and they're kind of marking, you know, where it was you you had just been is is there a positive way to sort of confuse the local wildlife so that some of what you've planted actually comes up in April and it is tough because the critters look at our landscapes like the Golden Arches in my neighborhood and I find that excluding creatures is much better than trying to either trap or move them poison.

If whenever I plant a plant a tree, a shrub, a perennial I'm protecting it with a cage that's around the plant so that the critters can't get to it and eat it and if rabbits are really hungry during the winter they're going to go after some young trees that are newly planted and shrubs.

You always have to worry about that and you can never my heart always sinks when I see the first rabbit in the garden because I know there's more and they're very clever and they're all around all year so chipmunks oh my I had an unbelievable amount of trouble with chipmunks and you just see one and then there's tons more they're out there waiting every backyard is a salad bar to is to these to these look also by excluding creatures in various ways I wonder I like raised beds because of that so it's harder for critters to get up in the raised bed and then you can build little cages that go over them.

Yep.

So that you can keep the critters out still grow your plants.

That's the kind of sustainable stuff that I'm interested in where you can control critters without putting poisons out.

Some people throw mothballs out .

That's not a good thing to do.

So excluding critters is really the way to go in my opinion.

>> We are talking with horticulturalist Rikki Cammeray on the program.

We're live in the studio tonight.

If you have a question about what's growing around you or what should have grown around you and didn't or what you'd like to see growing around you if you hope for the best, give us a call.

>> You see the number right there?

We do have a caller with a question offline.

>> This is Clara and it goes like this my rhubarb hasn't been producing enough to make that most Hoosier of pies.

>> How can you obtain a better yield from your rhubarb patch that is aging?

I like the question because it's this idea that the only thing that I can do is to throw fertilizer round the plant and that'll that'll make it grow so the way it's supposed to and that will help oftentime with rhubarb which needs to be fertilized in the early spring when it first starts to emerge from the ground.

The other thing you need to do is make sure the rhubarb is in a place where it's not getting too much water because I've seen it suffer before when there's too much rainfall or water pools in an area.

But I think compost is the way to go with that plant and what you want to do is take some fresh compost if you have a source or if you make your own and go round a plant with about a three inch layer and a circle around that plant in early spring usually that is enough.

I really like to use compost tea in the landscape and you can make that by again if you have a good source if you make your own you need ankle length pantyhose and there are places to get that that are you know I've embarrassed myself buying large amounts of packages before pantyhose but you stuff that pantyhose with with a with compost and then put it in like a five gallon bucket that's almost full and you don't like t do that for several days and then you can use the tea and a sprayer and spray directly on the foliage or your plants.

>> It is awesome stuff really go Clara thank you very much for that and in fact you're referencing raised beds and the layered approach to gardening when taking care of plants like rhubarb you referenced something in the cult is called lasagna gardening and I think we have an image of that if we can show number three and we'll put up the picture and Rikki can fill in the words so I always tell folks that my twenty three and me profile is wrong because they say I'm 70 percent Irish.

I claim based on my lasagna recipe that I make that I'm really Italian.

>> I see but it it is to me the best way to create a raised bed .

I'm a real believer in raised beds especially for our seniors that are that have a little more trouble bending down and grabbing things and pulling things.

It's a better way to create soil that is the best soil you can make and it's it's easy to make.

>> So what you do is build layers you start out with on the bottom of the raised bed.

A lot of people are using roofing material to make raised beds now which is kind of cool but you can use any sort of material that you can scrounge around for .

That's another part of sustainability and you're going to start at the bottom with some hard work hard to keep any critters like chipmunks out of your garden beds and then on top of that you're going to just use layers of leaves Canadian Spagna peat moss compost shredded paper clean straw about six inch layers until you build it up to the top part of the bed you add on about oh ten inches or so of good compost at the top and within a year you're going to have the best soil you ever had to grow plants in and it's not going to cost hardly anything if you're a good scrounger.

And one of the things I do at this time of year on my respects is I'll put it on the top.

I'll put a foot layer of leaves from the trees.

Yeah, so long as they're not walnut leaves but you can top them off with that and by next year you'll have you've created good soil for next to nothing and that's a part of being sustainable is having inputs that cost less totally than what really you get out of things.

>> Speaking of next year, let's put in a little moment here of caution or education about the spotted lantern fly I'm told every year it seems like there's some new invasive pass brought in from another country that is going to create huge problems for all of us and Gypsy Moth, all those past that came in that were introduced to the United States people are getting tired of pests like murder horn for instance in the Northwest, the United States this past is like a flying vampire basically and it was how fast it travels is how far it was on the East Coast last year in Pennsylvania primarily moved over into Ohio towards the end of last year and lo and behold all of a sudden it must have hopped a bus, took a flight to around Huntington, Indiana where we know that there are populations of this past this past distant past with sheer numbers and it's able to attach in almost all phases, all life cycles of that insect it attaches in like an aphid will the sap right out of a tree or shrub or grape or what they really like grapes.

Don't blame them but they can do incredible amounts of damage very quickly and that's in our area and so I expect to see that passed next year around here people trying to figure out how to deal with it.

I did a lot of research.

I really liked the University of Maryland's recommendation which are for at least toxic pesticide control the pest if you have to if you see it and it's very distinctive pest as you could tell from the picture it as these it's really pretty pretty but deadly.

I always tell people I'll say, you know, coral snakes are pretty but they can do a lot of damage.

So this one is going to be a nasty little past when it makes its way around there aren't a lot of really good ways to figure out how to deal with it.

So far there are only natural enemies introduced from the Orient China all those regions because a lot of problems we have to keep our eyes out and especially for those in Hong Kong it's for everybody's concerned we don't want to say it knows no county lines.

>> I'm sure Gary has asked a question of you.

He said I was given and still be I seeing that correctly and planted it near the house.

Will it come back next year and how should I care for it?

>> I planted a couple of us still bees this year in my garden I tended to stay away from them a bit based on my experience because they are a plant that really likes things.

It wants things its own way OK and its own way as is I like a little bit of sun but not too much.

I like things I like soil that's moist and friable.

I can handle heavy clay wet nasty soils so depending on where you planted it, how you planted it and how happy it is, how I've always told people you can always when a plant is happy you just look at it you know it's like knowing a really good person and knowing they're happy or not and after you grow plants for quite a while you can kind of tell sometimes I'll say that plants are not happy there.

We need to move it somewhere else.

I can just tell but that's the conditions that at once likes rich woodland soil sort of protection from the hot afternoon baking sun and it needs to be planted properly so that roots will flourish.

>> One of the things is another thing you don't want to do with it still be is over fertilize it again use compost or other natural materials like that a lot better.

So we'll see how Mindil we'll see how has done.

>> All right Gary, thank you very much.

Before the show this evening we did receive some incoming questions and we have about a minute on this one.

I've heard that some gardeners think it's best to leave perennials alone in the fall while others believe in cutting them back.

>> What is your take?

It's like Ying Yang all over again.

You know I'm right.

You're right.

No, I'm right.

You're wrong.

So the only reason that you cut back perennials in the fall or any other time is to sort of remove any disease or insect problems that might be present on the leaves of the plant.

We do it oftentimes because we want things neat and tidy again we're baby boomers.

We have to do something.

So the thought is is that if you wait until the spring very early in the spring and cut back your perennials, you've left some foliage and seed heads on plants up so that birds or other creatures can enjoy those use those for cover in a garden.

It may provide cover for chipmunks and rabbits you don't know but that's the thought.

So you can wait if you want to to cut back your perennials but not after March.

You know it has to be done.

I don't care if it's twenty degrees below zero and it's March you got to go out and cut those because otherwise disease and insect problems will over winter catch it for a lot of what you have been enjoying today Ricky is being seen on TV.

>> You can also see him in print a new book Sensible Sustainability sounds reasonable doesn't it make it seems to make sense.

>> How about half a minute on on the inspiration for the book?

>> My daughter who's an author convinced me that I should write a book and I said I don't want to write a book.

Well, I think you should well she won out and so I wrote a book based on all the stuff that I've written since I retired from extension five or five and a half years ago because I still write for newspapers.

I still do a lot of that.

And so this is a book that sort of presents a realistic idea of being sustainable which is really there's lots of uses for the term but it really has to do with being environmentally friendly using integrative pest management approaches, doing things that save work and input into a garden so you get the most out of it and that's what that book is all about.

It's something that I really took on when I worked an extension because I believe in it and I think that if we can make it easier on ourselves so that we do less weeding, we grow plants in better soil, we arrange plants in ways so there's less work, it's more enjoyable.

>> That's what the book is about and we'll see how it blooms in spring as well.

And will enjoy Ricky's company again for a chance to prepare for summer of twenty twenty three.

Ricky Cammeray retired Down County Horticulture Extension Educator.

>> Thank you so much.

Been good looking forward to it and thank you as well for taking time to enjoy the show with us.

I'm Bruce Haines for all with Prime Time take care.

We'll see you again soon.

Good night