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 are three of our very capable panelists here to answer your questions and teach us all things gardening.

So let's have them introduce themselves before we jump right into this show, Chuck, we'll start with you.

All right.

I am Chuck Voigt, retired from the Department of Crop Sciences here at the University of Illinois, where I worked in horticulture, vegetable crop, vegetable crops and and herbs were my specialties.

And we're here to talk about a real wild bunch of things today.

Excellent.

All right, Shane, I'm Shane cultura.

I'm retired as well from country harbors nursery in Urbana, and I'm now with a company called botany.com, and and we, for 30 years, I've discussed plants and shrubs and ornamentals and landscaping and gardening, and we'll do more of that today.

We keep threatening to go back and get that 90s footage.

Find the tape.

I did find coming, folks, I don't have a VCR, yeah, we've got one here, I'm sure.

All right.

Jen Nelson, I'm horticulturalist.

You can find me not I'm not retired yet.

I'm at U of I teaching vegetable gardening.

And you can also find me online at grounded and growing.com Excellent.

We visited you not too long ago at work, and had a blast there as well.

So okay, we've got a whole bunch of stuff going on today, so Chuck, we'll jump in with you.

What you got?

Well, I brought in that cup door at least today.

Yes, tickle him because, because it seemed like it was, it was just the word doily.

Like doily is fantastic.

It marked me as being older, but certainly I remember, you know, get togethers where you would have nut cub doily, and you'd have those, those kind of chalky, chalky mints to go with them.

I remember those?

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of those.

So we're having straight nuts today.

And I did check with everybody before I unbagged the nuts.

And we don't have any serious allergies here today.

But the reason we were talking about the doily was in regard to some bargain asparagus crowns that I had got and which surprisingly survived because they were the size of, can you hold yours up there?

Yeah, my doily, just the doily.

Oh, just the doily.

Not the nut.

That's that's about the size of the ones that I got in this bargain pack.

It was, it was 10 each of two different cultivars, and they've done pretty well.

I have 18 plants, one of which is not real strong, but the rest of them are producing.

I think we're going to get a full crop this year, and whatever this is the fourth year.

And so that's fine, but if you're out shopping for these for years, I've said I put down the idea of having two year old crowns, because when I grew my own, they were more this size, and that's the size I see in stores.

But now I find out that this is in stores.

They're mostly two years, two years old when they're when they're that size.

So I'm not saying don't use two years, two years old anymore, because those little guys took extreme care that first year to get them up and thriving.

And certainly the two hybrid varieties took off like crazy after that, but, but that's, that's the Ballad of the nut cut the I want to thank my my cousin Jill, who went out to the dollar store and got this package of different sizes.

Church did that for us.

Unknown to her.

I had also gone out to Wally World and and found the the tiny ones, which, which is what I was really talking about, because none of these in the, in the in the mix package, which is small, plus they were, they were a little bit moldy looking.

It was a huge disappointment.

But in retrospect, not so much, because we had more asparagus than we could use for the duration when we cut it last year.

So and now we have a snack munch on throughout there.

My question to you is, are you going to be able to hold off this year in the second year of your yes, I'm going to be able to do it.

If you remember, I planted asparagus last summer.

And the thing is, I never grew it because I didn't want to wait.

So I'm in this now.

I'm in it.

So hopefully next year, the garden marshmallow test.

Marshmallow test is they use it to judge children.

They put a marsh.

Smell or candy.

And they say, if you wait and don't eat this, you'll get five or six times more.

And they leave the room, and they can tell whether a kid has the mental fortitude to get through it, to give up this, to get more.

And so they use that to judge young children.

Well, we'll see how I do same thing with your asparagus.

You give it up now?

So far so good.

We'll see.

Okay, thank you, Chuck.

Depends how fat and succulents, and I'm gonna be eyeballing them, it's gonna take everything.

I'm gonna keep on walking.

Okay.

Shane, where do you Well, I took advantage of Chuck's doilies.

Really spruce up what I brought today.

These are nice going in.

But now, I mean these next level.

You will probably see these on national news, spectacular.

What I brought today is pretty fun, is I we got some bottles at the nursery.

We had a case of old bottles.

And for fun, I planted succulents in them and did them like a terrarium.

I got sand and peat moss, planted a couple succulents, sealed the cap.

I have not touched them in three years, literally, three years.

I put them in my window, in the basement, in the guest bedroom in the basement, and have never touched them.

And it's amazing, like, I haven't watered them, I haven't done anything, and they seem to just, I mean, you hear about terrariums all the time, but you don't think that there really is an ecosystem going on where it's watering itself and it's getting all the oxygen it needs.

And you can see it's like, kind of peering through the top on one of these bottles.

It's not the cleanest thing, but I'm not going to open it like so just let it go.

That's nature in action, and I think it's amazing.

Now.

I look at them every day and just think, man, that's perfect.

Gardening like that is nothing at all.

And even more perfect than that is the ability to eat as much chocolate pudding as you want.

So these are the Costco pudding cups.

And you think, I don't need to eat these.

I don't deserve it.

Now, when you see them, think that is a gardening absolutely, that is a very important part of gardening, is you have to eat the chocolate cups.

Because once you're done, you can take the same soil, a little sand, and put these in here and just find little cuttings, or even cuttings off your other succulents, throw them in there once a month.

Once a month, you have to water them, perfect for the kitchen window around the house, just little decorations, super low maintenance is perfect.

And you get the chocolate.

It's it's a win, win.

I can't think of anything so never water eat chocolate pudding like my gardening is taken to a new level.

Set it and forget it.

Right now, for the terrariums, did you have to?

Did you just literally drop the pet?

I tried to bring them in.

I have, like, two foot long tweezers.

Okay, so I bought them because I want to start doing bottles and do the same thing for bottles.

And I haven't, but I'm going to, I started looking for them now.

So if anybody who's watching this has really cool terrarium bottles.

Look, you know, hook me up for a couple of those, but yeah, so I used long tweezers to stack them in there, to get them in there, so that they stayed properly.

I don't think I could do with my fingers.

Of course, it's a little bit too far down there.

Even small fingers wouldn't so a pair of I bought them on Amazon.

They're like, 995 and okay, you can get any size.

And it turns out those tweezers are amazing for getting a lint dryer.

Oh, I made my wife pay for that.

We did bottles back in when I was with extension, and we used bamboo sticks, chopsticks that are, that are free.

You kind of got to find plants that can tolerate getting squished bottle.

But we talked to various purveyors of spirits, and, oh, they can save bottles for you.

So that's a great, very nice and a good I could start drinking, although if you want to work my way to a booze pudding.

Yeah, I mean, you can't, but relax.

It's for gardening.

So all for gardening.

Thank you.

Shane, okay, Jennifer, we are to you, and I'm seeing things that make me very happy.

Well, we were talking about your gardening aspirations here, and you're showing me some of the stuff that you were planning the plant, and I noticed artichoke, and I thought, Oh, these take forever to get started.

And I couldn't think how long, because I know that.

I know some people that have tried it, I've seen them growing, and they like never quite did what they wanted them to do.

And I was looking at the catalogs that you brought, and you had Johnny's is a good one.

Burpees is another one that has a pretty good index of how to grow stuff, and it's all alpha ties.

And I know we live in the day an age of just asking Google and all that, but there's a QR code right.

There you go.

That's where we are.

But I kind of like sometimes just having the paper in front of me and I.

The chokes do take anywhere from like 85 to 100 days to actually have something to harvest.

So they're recommending starting the seeds up to 12 weeks before our go time, which will be middle of May here.

So okay, yeah, so you gotta get get I need to get going.

Well, good.

We've got those in house today, yep.

But yeah, this is going to be like, pretty soon.

Go time for this, all of our stuff, and you brought, like, some you were talking garbage garden.

Yes, absolutely happens.

One of my house favorite ways.

I mean, you know, if you've got these just sitting around, why not go throw it away anyway?

Why not just you're paying $4 for them now and tell me about every last bit by the containers now, tear it up and throw it in the comments.

I do warm composting at home, and this is like the perfect consistency for the worm compost, because you throw food craps, food scraps, in with the worms, and if you do all food scraps, it just gets to be kind of a mucky mess.

You need some dry material to kind of make it more so we're taking this all the way to the end user.

No, that's great.

Get your money's worth and Chuck, I pulled up your planting guide that is so popular.

Everyone loves it.

So we're talking now celery, parsley, onion, chives that time, leeks.

To get those things going.

Are we doing them inside?

Outside?

Well, if you get one of one of his LED lamps, do it inside.

Okay, in the season we're in, it's hard to get enough solar radiation on to the anywhere indoors, maybe a south window, but how much can you fit on a south window sill?

I'd do both.

And so my LED lights are on the south window.

Yeah, double power, yeah.

I mean, LED has changed the game.

It's just so it's so much more affordable.

Yeah, it's just so inexpensive to do.

I bought three strips underneath for a rack, and it was $20 Yes, yeah, and I'm not going to sit anything up outside.

I'm just going to do that.

We talked a lot on the show about winter sewing, so I didn't know if any of those you could set out in the old milk jug, or if they really needed to be entrees warm in the house, under lights.

I think they need to be okay, at least modestly warm.

Most of the things we're starting this early are cool season crops, but, but artichokes would not fit in that category.

Gotcha.

No, I've thinking back to I think I read somewhere where they were starting them, even before, where we are now, getting some size on them, indoors, putting them in a cold frame or something to chill them, to make them, to make them think they're vernalized, and then planting them outside.

And then they go ahead and flower.

Well, yeah, but just just your basic artichoke is more likely to grow the first year and flower the second year.

Gotcha on leaks.

You have to be that's another one.

You need a ton of time, like 120 days, for leaks, right, right?

But you don't need the vernalizing, though, if you're not married to the concept of having a leak that's as big as my wrist, right?

You can grow baby links just directly meant to do that.

I mean, those are the two ends of the spectrum, right?

If your English and in a competition, then you want us.

You probably wanted to start them in October, then get them in the in their, you know, long, skinny, growing pot, sure, but yeah, and we were talking about that, some of the things with GART, some gardeners get frustrated because their their produce, or their fruits and vegetables don't look like they get in the store.

That's just how it goes, right there.

Those are professional growers, row crops.

They've done this.

They've got it down to the hour when they plant.

That's what they do for a living.

Like we talked about celery.

It's not gonna look anything like your celery, and I'm not saying you have to go buy it in the store, but just enjoy the process.

And anything you get a bonus.

Like, if you ever got one strawberry, where it's one strawberry and you eat anything I grew the strawberry, just enjoy that.

Yeah, it is humbling to see your your own harvest, because you're used to it looking beautiful.

Tiktok, everybody's garden is perfect, right?

Yes, exactly, yeah.

And with celery, what you grow in an Illinois garden is wonderful for cooking, and it's got strong flavor.

It's, it's, it's, it's good for that, but to get those, those petioles that you stuff with cheese, it's in a lager out of it, let the professional growers do that because, or if you want to prove me wrong, do it in Illinois and send us a picture.

I used to get that.

We the one time we were at a Master Gardener conference, and seemed like it was in September, and I'm saying, Well, it's pretty much too late to plant the snap beans now.

Oh, you threw down the challenge right there about November I get this picture.

I said, Well, fine.

But you're gonna get one picking before they freeze.

But okay, when exactly, okay, Chuck, we're back to you.

Did you have anything else that you wanted to No, I just, I just, let's talk about these.

Okay, what do we have here?

Peppermint meringues.

If you like peppermint.

Supposedly, they're fairly strong peppermint.

I do like peppermint.

They're like melting your mouth or crush it on air, either one.

Either one works.

My grandmother would be so happy with this set back in time.

Well, I feel like I'm kind of at a 1950s wedding reception.

Some of you wouldn't remember.

That's okay.

Well, we've got a question from Debbie Askins.

She writes in she's got a corn plant that has grown to be extremely top heavy, and she did send in a photo the plant was given to her at her mother's funeral about 17 years ago.

So it's very special.

She doesn't want anything to happen to it, but wants to know how to sort of revitalize it and bring it back to its original splendor, because it's got a lot going on, and you guys have seen the picture, so quite tall.

Let's discuss Debbie's corn plant.

So what are your thoughts?

My thoughts are.

It's probably been this way for 17 years, judging by the picture.

It's just it's all the way to the ceiling.

There's no leaves, except right on the top.

I would look at it because it's got sentimental value.

I wouldn't want to you could chop it off and try to root that cutting, but I wouldn't do that because of the sentimental value, and I would want to make sure it had roots before I chopped it.

So I would do air layering, where you kind of notch the around the stem, and then you put rooting powder and damp moss, and usually wrap it like in plastic.

And you can kind of use clear plastic, so you kind of see when the roots are there, and then, when you see enough roots, chop it off and plant it back.

Yeah, and the base, what's left?

Should, once you remove that top, you should get some sort of budding from that base.

So should this be full throughout with leaves?

Usually, usually you have some gaps.

But are there any some florals?

Leaning, yeah, it's leaning.

Oh, I was gonna say, because that's amazing.

Basically skinny to me.

It's a great topic of conversation.

You just don't see, you'll see they all get thin at the bottom right.

We've all but I don't ever think I've seen a seven foot tall.

It looks like a palm tree from California.

Yeah, you usually get, you usually get some, some side shoots coming out along there, but I don't see any there.

But once she roots that top and removes it, I would expect to see something off of what's left.

So she hopefully will get two plants out of it.

In the end, I might, once the top is is rooted, and I would probably cut it down.

Yeah, start start fresh.

Yeah, I've messed around with a friend's corn plant that she had, had propagated some of it and had some of that bear stem.

And being true gardeners, we don't want to throw anything away, right?

So we're like, what might we might be able to root it might take what you're cutting off in the middle should have could be cut in sections.

Would be worth the trial we were trying.

It was taking forever, because the older the stem is going to take longer.

But so John BODENSTEINER, you know, he loves a gadget.

He's brought on those clear bulbs that clip.

Yeah, right.

But you said something about like plastic wrap and just like zip, top, zip.

Same idea.

Okay, okay, you know, because I'm a junk gardener.

John's a gadget gardener, and so I like to know both options.

Yeah, moist, fragmented.

You can you can cut it halfway through on an angle, or you can partially girdle, score it and then put that around plastic around it, like twist tires at the top.

And just keep an eye on it, okay, and if it looks like the sphagnum is drying out, you might try to drizzle a little moisture into it, okay, but definitely not a loss.

Pretty well, it's saveable.

It saves I'll give it a shot.

So as we are getting close to dragging out our siege.

Trays and things of that nature.

We've got about seven, eight minutes or so.

I would love some advice, some tips for people like just good stuff, like washing out your trays.

Is that really an important thing to do?

From last year seed starting Yes, as speaking as somebody who tried to skip that step before, yes, you should wash everything, ideally like a 10% bleach solution can run.

I've run stuff through the dishwasher before.

I hope my mom's not watching to be horrified, but if you have a sanitized cycle, yes, yeah, run it through there.

Okay, all right.

Shane, anything from you?

I'm a planning person.

I as a person that had a garden center for 30 years.

I know impulse buying is like how everybody does everything, but planning your garden on where things are going to go and when they go.

I know we kind of make fun of sometimes people that have a whole calendar and they're obsessive compulsive about it, but it does turn out better.

It really does turn out better when they have where everything is going to go in a color set.

Someone told me the other day, an elegant garden is a planned garden so and I believe that now that because most people just buy a plant and find a spot for it, or they plant a garden, and they go to this thing and they just start picking out seeds.

And there's definitely an art to where things should go and when they should be planted.

And this is the time to do that, these cold days, you know, again, social media is really good for finding great ideas and thoughts and seed savers in the catalogs.

However you get your catalogs, whether they're in print or online, it's a good I just went to a garden show in Manse in Baltimore, and it's the oldest garden, I shouldn't say it's the biggest garden show in the country now, in 4000 booths, I believe, and so trees and shrubs and all the new Ito peonies and just all the newest plants that's good to go to.

So when these people, when they start having the herb shows and the other shows, they're starting to go in in February as well, start planning.

Start getting excited.

Start looking.

Take advantage of this time, and don't wait until Mother's Day to start just grabbing stuff off the sheet, anything that you can get your hands on, right Chuck.

What about you?

Some good tips?

Well, our weather seems to be a little bipolar, frigid today, frigid tomorrow, and it's going to shoot up and be fairly pleasant for a couple of days, and then back into even more frigid.

And I think we're getting to the point where on those days when it it's a little warmer, when it shoots up, you used to go out, start cleaning up, pruning some things, anything that has Deadwood on it, you could certainly take Deadwood out now, but I think we're getting to the point where apples and, you know, other fruit trees I've talked before, I would wait on beaches to see where we are with with winter hardiness before I do too much pruning on those.

But apples, pears, you don't want to do a lot of pruning on pairs, but any that you're doing, I think you could probably do pretty soon.

So try to, I'm telling myself this, try to get out.

You know, it'll, it'll hurt a lot less in in March and April, when you when you're out trying to go at it full speed, if you go out now on the nicer days, and then, you know, take a snow day when it's when it's terrible out some tough lessons I've had to learn is starting seeds too early, because then everybody's outgrown the trays and they're top heavy, and it's not Ready to go.

So patience again.

As you can tell, that's a theme in my gardening life.

But yeah, get get your trays out, get things ready to go, do some planning and clean up what you can I think that's pretty sound advice for getting us to our spring planting time.

So I want to thank you guys for coming in.

Did I forget anything?

Did I miss?

Anything?

Any other tidbits you'd like to share.

Well, you talked about online shopping, yes, and at least for me, that's a problem, because I put things in the cart thinking I'll sort this later, and then I buy it all, and then later, wonder why.

So I think either make a physical list and go through it and call the things that you only want as opposed to the things that you kind of need.

And then, yes, you can give yourself a couple of fun projects, but, but don't check every fun project.

You mean all my little tabs there, I do have a lot going on.

Pictures.

If you've got pictures from last summer, like, sit down and look like what's realistic?

Because it tends, you tend to think you have more space than you do this time of year, when you're sitting in your cozy chair by the fire, wrapped up in a blanket.

I'll grow, you know, eight kinds of green beans this year.

It'll be great.

All right, guys, thank you so much.

That is the show, and thank you so much for joining us.

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

Look for Mid American gardener, and we will see you next week.

Good night.

You