(intro music) Hello and thanks for joining us for another episode of Mid American gardener.

I'm your host, Tinisha Spain, and I'm joined in the studio today by my friend and longtime panelist to the show, John BODENSTEINER, so John, before we jump in, because you always bring so many cool things to talk about, tell us a little bit about you, and then off we go.

I'm a vermillion County Master Gardener, and I enjoy just about all kinds of plants.

Especially I've gotten into a lot of succulents, which I'm going to show some succulents today.

But if it's green and growing, I usually have I tried to have one, at least one, at least one.

Okay, wonderful.

So I love that you brought all three of these, because it's the age old question.

How do you tell the difference between the Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving and Easter?

Now they're calling sometimes they're not even calling Easter.

They're calling it the spring cactus.

Spring cactus.

Okay, so school, I brought this just to to show the Thanksgiving cactus is the one with the little horns.

I'll show it.

I'll model it for you.

There we go.

Okay, so the Thanksgiving one's got the little horns on top.

The Christmas cactus has got little, a little somewhat still defined bumps.

And then the spring cactus is almost smooth, so that's, you know, the Thanksgiving one is easy to point out, but these two can get a little those are very difficult to tell apart.

They blossom on the on the Easter cactus is completely different compared to the Christmas and Christmas and Thanksgiving cactus, and it's got a whole different species name.

So care wise, is it pretty similar?

Why it's exactly the same?

That's why I wanted to that's why I especially wanted to talk about today is you see this lovely little pot here the foil.

Whenever you water these you're going to want to take this off, take it to your sink water, let it sit in the sink for about a half hour to make sure all the water drains, these things do not have holes in it.

And I'm surprised there isn't water in there, a little bit of dripping.

But we always talk about people on the show talk about taking your poinsettias out of here too, anything from a nursery pot that has this foil wrap that does not have a hole in it, you want to take it out and let it drain or water it very sparingly.

But you can see this.

This is the Thanksgiving.

You can see the flowers are pretty much spent.

They're all controlled by light, the number of hours of light.

You know, the Christmas and the Thanksgiving cactus are in the fall, fall time zone.

You know the days are getting shorter.

The Easter cactus, or spring cactus, is just over the other side of the winter Equinox, and you can always have one blooming.

Let's talk about this poinsettia, the poinsettia.

This is gorgeous.

This is a new one I found, and it almost reminded me of little roses.

And you can see there, I don't think I've ever seen a poinsettia with that shape, the Brax, Brax, the bracts are this, the red leaves.

The flower is actually the little yellow.in the inside.

So again, with this, you want to take it out being this doesn't have a hole in it.

You're going to take this to the the sink and water it, let it sit for a half hour, and then put it back in.

If this had a foil pack, you're going to do the same thing.

Now, a lot of folks, when the holidays are over, just take these and pitch them.

But you what are your plans for this?

I'm going to take, I'm going to let it grow until after Christmas, and as as it starts to fade, I will cut the flower off, or the head off, and and then I'll make some cuttings, about, you know, four inch, whatever I can get, and put it into some wet sand and start propagated.

Okay?

And I should be able, just out of this, I should be able to get seven plants.

Oh my gosh.

Now, will that be true to this, or do you Yes, it's a clone.

Being I've got, if I was taking seeds, it wouldn't be but being I'm taking actual cuttings, it is going to be a clone the Christmas cactus, Thanksgiving cactus, Easter cactus.

They like warm days, but they like cool nights, down into the low 50s.

Even to the high, I'm sorry, low low 60s, high 50s, they'll, they'll, they like that at night that actually stimulates them to to to flower sometime.

And very nice.

But do not put them in direct sunlight.

They will burn a little bit.

They tend to burn if you put them into direct, direct sunlight.

If you can feel moisture on the soil, I wouldn't water.

A lot of times, people will see their poinsettias wilt, and they think that it needs moisture.

It's actually because they've got too much moisture and the roots have started to rot, and they can't absorb the moisture anymore.

So now Amaryllis is another one of my favorite winter projects.

I actually just got mine out a few weeks ago, and they're starting to, you know, sprout up a little bit above the bulb there.

So you can buy these, and this is the soil they give I'm not a real fan of this.

You want put this in water and expands to fill this whole pot.

Now, the size of pot for Amaryllis is important, as you can see, and it's got lots of holes in it.

You got some good drainage, good drainage, which is really important.

And you can see it's got about an inch to two inches around the bulb to the pot, and that's about perfect.

Too big, you can't get the water right.

Too little again, then it gets you can't water it right.

So that's why it's important to have about an inch around the bulb.

You're not going to bury the bulb all the way, only about half halfway.

So the bulb would be sitting about like this.

And they kind of like tight shoes, right?

They like, they like to be, I guess, not root bound.

But they do another thing you can see this is I'm going to, when I get home, I'm going to have to turn this say the window is on this side.

I'm going to have to turn it so, because you can see how it's, how it's it'll straighten itself.

It's going to straighten itself out.

So each day, if you start to notice it's starting to bend towards the light again, just turn it a half to a quarter turn, and it'll stay straight.

This one here should have about four blossoms, so pretty.

Now, after yours flowers, do you do you water and keep it alive throughout the winter?

Or do you let it go dormant immediately?

I let it go.

I do keep it going because these leaves will get bigger, and what you can do, as soon as the flowers are done, what you want to do is cut this off as close without injuring the leaves, as close to the bulb as you can, because this is just going to take nutrients away from the bulb.

The leaves are going to put the nutrients back in the photosynthesis is going to cause the take and put more nutrients back in, so that come next year, you'll have a good bulb.

You can put them outside, keep them going about early August, I would lay it on its side and not water it for a while and let it go dormant.

That's going to let the leaves dry up.

If the leaves are yellow, you can cut those off.

If they're green, leave those on.

And that's what I usually do.

I take mine out and put it in the flower bed after, you know, the frost and everything, and just kind of let the bulb get fat and happy all summer and then start the whole process all over again.

Yeah, the amaryllis likes it warm during the day, but it likes it cool at night, so in the low 60s, high 50s, it's going to appreciate that.

Okay, all right, we've got one.

The last one I have here is a calancho, and this is a white one.

The reason I got this, I have orange ones and I have red ones, but I didn't have a white one.

Again, it's a succulent, so it's it likes to have to dry out in between.

Again, it's got this lovely, nice decorative foil on it, no holes in it, so it's going to hold moisture.

So take it to the sink before you take it to the sink and water it, test it.

Just get your finger in there.

This feels damp.

I can see it's damp because I got soil.

I would not water this.

And I don't think you need to water this more than once every two weeks.

And it's really a very nice again, and it does like the short days, long nights, for it to for it to bloom, and they'll get to be very big again, the the.

Yeah, you can propagate off that.

Well, one thing I forgot sure on this the Christmas cactus, if you would happen to break a leaf off, don't throw it away.

Lay it down on the soil.

And those things will root anywhere.

And you can even let it dry out, to Cal to callous off and let it dry off and then lay it on and I would give it a little bit of a mist, don't water it in heavily, and it's going to force the roots to come out and search for water.

Okay, so, all right, John, well, thank you so much.

I just want to appreciate, oh, I wanted to give you this.

My wife made this.

Thank you.

Thank you, Bonnie.

I appreciate it.

This is definitely going in the collection.

Yes, all right, and now we're going to go back out to Prairie fruits farm, where the team and I visited a few weeks ago and had a really great time eating goat cheese and hanging out with the goats.

And that can't be baaaad.

Thanks for watching.

We're here at prairie fruits farm and Creamery, and I'm with the owner, Lauren.

First of all, you have the coolest job.

I thought I had a cool job.

You have the coolest job.

Thank you.

So tell us a little bit about what we're going to get into today, sure.

So we are a fully integrated, diversified farm and goat dairy and Creamery, so we have a little bit of everything.

Honestly, out here, we are open to the public, so we also have a lot of fun agritourism activities.

So we raise perennial fruits, hence prairie fruit swarm.

So we have orchards.

We also do some diversified veg that we use in our restaurant.

But the real star of the show is our goats.

And so we do have over 100 goats on our farm, and they're part of they enjoy our rotational pasture, and then we milk those goats and we make award winning goat cheese.

So we are one of the very few farmstead creameries left in the country.

We were Illinois' first farmstead Creamery, actually.

So we've been doing this for over 20 years, and there were, there's still not a ton of dairies left in Illinois.

There's about four of us, so definitely not too many of us out there, and we are the only one in Champaign County.

So we definitely love to have guests come out, and we love when the public comes out to visit us, just so we can really, you know, we feel like we serve a unique role to really connect people to their food in a really meaningful way, just being able to see the grass that the goats see, and then the goats that then give us the milk that then make this amazing cheese that then culminates in some pretty spectacular farm to table dining out here.

We always say we have probably the best shark and cheese board in town, and it's kind of a nice closed system, right with the farm and the goats and how it all ties in together, and you've got an Airbnb the restaurant.

I mean, this is a real destination.

Thank you.

Really can't get any more local eating, because when you're sitting at Caprara eating, you know that that cheese that is on your plate was made five feet away from where the kid where it was repaired in the kitchen, and then that milk that that cheese was made of was raised five feet away from that so we're about as tightly integrated as you can as you can get.

Okay, super excited.

All right, let's go check it out.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you for coming.

You now we're going to be meeting the stars of the show.

Here we are with the herd manager, rose so rose, these guys are your responsibility.

Yes, these are my babies.

These are eight month old junior dolings that will be going to the milking herd next year now, while they're here with you.

So these, these are not, they have not had babies, and they're, they're not milked yet.

While they're here with you, what, tell us a little bit about their daily care and what goes on here.

So while they're juniors, their main goal in life is just to have fun and eat and grow.

So they'll hang out in their barn.

We give them a lot of different things to play with in their yards.

A busy goat is a good goat.

When goats get bored, they like to find ways to entertain themselves.

So anytime you come to the farm and there's a goat running around, they certainly find ways to do that.

So we give them a lot of different enrichment items.

They like tree stumps, and they walk in their own little feeders.

Tables are good.

They have tree branches and stumps out in their yard, and wood spools that they can climb on and fight each other on.

Nice when people come out here today, are they surprised at how I mean, these are almost puppy like, Are people surprised at how friendly they are?

Yes, I've been told multiple times that these are some of the friendliest goats people have ever met, and it is entirely because they're all bottle raised from the moment they're born.

I was there when most of these kids were born, and then.

Yeah, they spend the first week of life in the nursery getting bottle fed, and then they come out into these kid barns and get taken care of by our volunteers.

Wow, wow.

And I'm sure they're a big part of the draw that folks, when they come out here, they want to, they want to hang out with these guys.

Absolutely.

We take about 200 volunteers each season that come and help with three daily feeding shifts for bottle feeding these kids.

Now the babies will start being born not not necessarily from this bunch, but the babies start coming on in February, March, yeah, late February through early May is our kidding season, and we're expecting to have around 160 to 180 kids born.

Wow.

And they'll all stay here on the farm.

For the most part.

They'll stay here until they're eight to 12 weeks old, when they're weaned, and then they'll get sold off to other farms and other people who want goats.

This guy wants attention.

Hello there.

What's your name?

Sabrina.

Sabrina has been pawing at me the whole time we were talking this past year's naming theme was house plants, so our peace lily and Monstera and Fern and string of turtles and pelea.

Very nice.

Okay, thank you so much rose for showing us around and for taking care of these guys.

Yeah, absolutely you.

All right, I've got my jacket and my hair net on.

We're gonna go check out the creamery.

This is the creamery manager, Lisa Little, and she is going to show us, literally, how the cheese is made.

So absolutely, follow me.

Let's go check it out.

Our make room is in here, and this is where we make the cheese.

So we have two vats right now.

What you see in the middle of the floor is our Chevre.

It will drain overnight, and tomorrow we'll be salting it and packing it.

This is the basis of all of our chevs.

The Chev has won multiple metals from the American Cheese Society.

The last three years, we've won 11 medals, best in North America.

And there's four of us that work in here.

We a teeny, tiny little Creamery.

So right now, this is getting the what's called whey, which is the water or the the liquid product that comes out of all cheeses drains into the buckets.

We even sell it.

You can use that.

So, yeah, local costs lettuce uses our whey, and they put it on their hydroponics.

Wow.

So during the summer, I get some for my tomatoes at home.

Very nice.

Yeah.

Now what's in the crates, the buckets themselves are the is the curd for the whey, the curd for the chef.

So what that looks like right now is we put them in these little shopping baskets.

They're wrapped up with cheesecloth.

They start out completely full.

By tomorrow, they'll be about down to here.

Wow.

And that's the liquid that drains off, we'll probably get two or three more full buckets of that by tomorrow morning.

So this is what it looks like real early in the process.

So what you've got is very wet curtain, because we're still waiting for the whey to come out of it tomorrow.

Like I said, we'll have about a third of that amount, and then that's what's packed as the actual chef that you see in stores and our farmers markets.

So the cheese is made in here.

We have two vats.

One's 100 gallons, the other is 50.

And all of the cheeses come through this room when they're being made, the milk comes through these pipes.

And there is a pipe that's put in here that transfers the milk.

And then whatever magic make we're going to be doing happens in these vats.

We're very, very, very unique dairy.

There are very few goat dairies in the United States, and there's even fewer that pasture their goats.

So our girls get beautiful browsing.

They can go out and eat grass.

They can eat leaves, which gives us gorgeous milk, which is why our cheese is so good.

Happy goats.

Happy Happy cheese.

Absolutely, and it does.

It makes a huge difference.

We do find a lot of people who have had bad experience with goat milk and goat cheese, and they're like, oh, I don't like goat and I'm like, wait, just try it.

And probably 99% of them are pleasantly surprised.

They're like, my god, this is so good.

Wow.

What do you think makes the difference?

It's pasture.

It's the type of goats we have.

We have Nubians and we have la manchas, and both of those have a sweeter type of milk.

And the very last one that's really important is we don't keep the boys on the farm outside of breeding season.

So there's not a lot of stress and there's not a lot of hormones, which all gets dumped into the milk.

So those three components together give us beautiful milk, which makes gorgeous cheese.

And we are a seasonal so we have seasonal cheeses because we don't homogenize and add stuff to our milk and our cheese to keep it on the shelf forever, or to keep it the same all year long.

So the Chev you get in the spring will taste a little different than the Chev you get in the fall because of what they're eating.

And all year long, we can make different cheeses because of breeding the milk solids, what's in their milk, the hormones station they are.

Are they just had babies?

Are they done having babies?

Are they getting ready to have babies?

All has an all that factors in the taste.

Everything does, wow.

So this, as the whey drains out, we're going to end up with what's considered the curd.

It doesn't have a structure to it.

It's soft and creamy.

Other cheeses, like cheddars and other types of things, end up with a curd structure our hard cheeses do.

And then we stack things on top of them and smush them down and over the aging process, you lose that curd structure, and they all kind of form up together.

Gotcha.

This comes out as a soft, spreadable consistency when we're done with the cheese.

So from the time they milk the ghost to the time we take it out there is three days.

It's about 72 hours.

Oh, wow.

So this is what it looks like our Chev is little bit of tang to it this time of year, you might have a little bit of a kind of an herbal taste to it because of the fall foliage, so it tastes a little different than it does in the spring.

It's spreadable, obviously, but you could also when it's really super cold, you can also crumble it on top of a salad, or mix it in with roasted veggies.

I you know it's really good.

That is really good.

You weren't kidding.

Nope, it's really easy to talk about something you truly believe in.

Wow, that is good.

Yeah.

So this is our spiced cranberry.

The cranberry is apple pie spices.

The basis of all the flavors is this guy.

And then you go here, which one of these is the most popular right now?

These two are pretty much the most popular seasonals.

Are always my most popular because they're one and done.

I do people probably look forward to that they're farmers market availability, and you can't get them anywhere else, and that's like the sage and mushroom, very nice.

So this is what the spice cranberry looks like.

Now think of this one, especially with a beautiful salad and a gorgeous lemon vinaigrette.

Oh my god, so good, smooth, yeah.

And I can the seasonal, yeah, it's all it's also in the summertime, you'll end up with things like jalapeno, crunch, fresh jalapenos, roasted garlic, things that you can get on the garden and zest.

And as the season goes on, we make different ones depending on what's available.

Very nice.

So this is the mushroom.

Do you have any issues with mushroom?

I don't.

Okay.

This is the mushroom and sage, and this would be a great addition to your traditional green bean casserole.

Oh, very timely.

So you can find us at the farmers market.

We're there all year long.

Right now, we're indoors, but summer, we're outside, rain or shine, no matter what, we are at martinellis.

We're at harvest market, the Co Op, in places in Bloomington green top grocery.

We're up in Chicago at fresh time, in St Louis and a lot of other places.

Wow.

So if you're looking for us that you can usually find our chefs there.

Now, for someone who may be hesitant to try goat cheese or had that bad experience or something, what do you tell them when they come I usually suggest that they try one of the flavored chefs, because the plain may be too cheesy for them, gotcha.

And if they've got something with a little bit of flavor to it, they're really blown away at how good it tastes.

The comments we get from the judges are constantly incredible blend of flavors, but you can still taste the cheese.

Yes, because with each one of these, you can taste the cheese.

Oh, yeah, it's not the flavor.

And that way, when they come back, I can always tell them, you know, try this, then try the Camembert or the brie style.

The moon glow also is one that's a good one for folks to try, which is a semi hard to hard cheese.

So that one's one for people who like cheddars or Colbys.

That'd be a nice charcuterie.

Yeah, and it melts well, so you can grate it.

Oh, very nice.

Okay, like on chili.

Or part of a grilled cheese sandwich.

Wow.

Really great.

Thank you so much for letting us come in and sample these and see the creamery.

Really appreciate it.

You're welcome, and that is the show for this week.

Thanks so much to Lauren and her team here at Prairie fruits farm and Creamery in Champaign.

We had a blast out here today, and big thanks to the goats for that delicious cheese that we got to try.

If you've got questions for our panelists, you can send them in to us at yourgarden@gmail.com, or you can send us a message on Facebook, and we'll get those answered for you and me and peace Lily are going to go Hang Out Happy Holidays.

You (music) (credits)