Unknown: (Mid-American Gardener theme music) Hello, and thanks for joining us for another episode of Mid-American Gardener.

I'm your host, Tinisha Spain.

It's June, it's warm, and we are out of the studio this week.

We're at panelist, Shane Cultra's house, he's going to show us all around his yard and talk about a couple of his favorite plants and answer some of your questions.

So let's go find Shane and get started.

Well, we found Shane and so thank you for inviting us to your backyard.

Thank you for coming out here.

Yeah, yeah.

So for those who may not recognize you from 96 tell us a little bit about you and who you are and what you're into.

Yeah, I'm Shane Cultra.

I'm from the culture family here in central Illinois, our family's been growing trees and shrubs since 1865 Wow.

We started five generations ago.

And so the last 30 years, I've been actively participating in growing plants and shrubs, and we have Country Arbors Nursery in Urbana that my family owns.

And so I've retired, and now I just get to travel around, and that's why you haven't found me lately.

I went to Chelsea Garden Show last week, took my mom.

My mom had always wanted to go.

And those when your mom wants to go somewhere, and it's gardening, you put them together, you take her absolutely but I did my yard that we're gonna go through a little bit later.

I did it 22 years ago.

And as a person that works in gardening, the cobbler son has no shoes, so you're gonna see what a garden looks like, of heavy install early and then low maintenance after that.

And that's what we like, that's what we'll talk about.

So yeah, I'm here a lot more than I've ever been, and it's wonderful.

And you know, they say you plant a tree knowing that you'll never get to enjoy the shade, right?

I get to enjoy it.

You get to enjoy it.

Just gotta stay long enough.

Very nice.

Very nice.

Okay, so to start, you went through the yard and cut some lovely flowers for us.

Yeah, so talk a little bit about those.

So there's two things I have here in the in the garden, we always have larger flowers.

You always see the vases and the larger flowers and you cut them, but you really don't ever have a little tiny pot for smaller buds.

And at the Chelsea Garden Show, we were walking down the vendor booth, and that's the thing they get you.

So they have all these beautiful plants, all these gardens, these tents of flowers, and then they have 500 places along in a row of where you can buy stuff.

Yes, and you would buy everything.

But I knew I had to come all the way across the pond there I found this little bud set that I thought was just adorable.

This is not me.

Like I'm not a bud set pottery.

That's not my thing.

But I thought it was really resistant, and it takes maybe 30 seconds to fill it up.

So right before you came, I went out and I just filled it with water and took a little bit of flour around the garden.

It's so nice.

It'll last a day or two, and then you have to do it again.

But that's fine.

It's still lovely to look at.

I think I have some Sweet William on my breakfast bar.

And I can't remember what else, but it's just fun to look at beautiful flowers.

I have peonies on the flowers are wonderful, right?

I mean, my wife bringing her home flowers isn't the same impact as anybody else.

Like, oh, great flowers again.

It's like if you had a shoe store and you brought her a pair of shoes every day.

It's not quite the same effect, but she does love this.

She does love this, and she's growing to love some of the flowers, I would say, because they don't come as often as they used to with me being retired.

The other one, I brought this one I bought 10 years ago, and it's actually kind of opened up, but you don't see as much.

This one's called Raven.

It's a Bearded Iris, and when the bud set is tight, it is black.

It's so dark.

And at the time, 10 or 12 years ago, it was the darkest Iris they had.

And of course, there's no such thing as black.

All Blacks are dark purple, but it was, the buds are absolutely stunning.

And I took, I took a couple pictures of it that will get on the video that I send you.

But as it opens up, it certainly turns to purple.

And you know, it's purple, but it's a really pretty flower, and it contrasts.

Well, against other flowers.

This one is one that I bought at the same time, and I don't know the name, and this is one of the worst things you can do for a nice flower, is when people ask you what the flower is, because it's so pretty, and you have no idea.

And on Iris, it's not like you can use chat, GPT and other ones, because on most flowers, you use the AI or an expert, and they can tell you Iris, there's 10s of 1000s.

Oh, and they look very similar.

So you might not ever know.

I might not ever know.

I think if an iris expert came by, they'd get me in the range of it, yeah, but it really does make a great contrast.

And we're on the tail end of Iris season in central Illinois, but this will probably be my last cut.

But they're just really nice plants in lots of color, very pretty.

Now let's talk about some of the varieties that you have in here.

These are all blooming in your yard right now, blooming, right?

So what?

What do you have here?

So straw flower, which I think is, yeah, we can.

I love one.

I love those.

Yeah.

It's just a great texture, a great look.

This is obviously a trailing Petunia, just plain old Petunia, but it contrasts well against that Dahlia.

Or, yeah, no zinnias.

This is two different colors of Zinnia right here.

This is Nepeta, so that you see all over the place, just a little cut of Nepeta.

And this is a shrub rose.

Very pretty, very pretty.

And this is, well, sorry, I forgot to add two little smaller flower shrub roses.

We have, you know, we grow lots of knockout roses and larger roses.

You don't see a lot of smaller ones too much anymore.

So I like the smaller flowered roses, just to mix into the Yeah.

So it's a nice combination.

Up front.

Has lots of perennials, lots of pots mixed in with all these other types.

And then then shrubs are flowering all season as well.

So it's always in bloom all year round.

Pretty low maintenance.

Just a couple.

Just about to ask you, let's talk about the maintenance, because we always talk about low maintenance gardening.

Yeah, so you just have to remember, my mom and I argue about this all the time, Mom, I'm sorry I yell at you all the time, but she doesn't remember that.

After the first month, it gets hard.

So the first month, yes, they're separated.

There's lots of gaps, and you don't have to water it very often.

But come June, July, if you over pack your plants, you're gonna be watering every day, even twice a day.

That also means you can't go anywhere, because who's gonna water your plants?

Johnny next door might do it, but he's probably not like you, not like you're gonna get a little spray and just become a dairy farmer, essentially never able to leave the farm if you over pack it.

So what I say is keep it thin in the beginning, like you'll see.

My pots don't look that great now, but it's June 1.

By July 1, they'll be beautiful.

And then the rest of the season, all the way until October, they'll look really good.

They won't be overcrowded, they won't have too many roots to water.

And people always say, Oh, well, I'm gonna plant in the fall.

Fall's a long way away.

Fall's a long way away.

So low maintenance is proper spacing, proper planting, proper soil.

You can add things like sphagnum moss to the soil to add a little bit of water, but you also have to be careful that it doesn't take too much water that they rot.

That they rot out, because things do like to dry out and then be watered and dry out.

And they like that, that process, that sweet spot, sweet spot, if it always stays wet, they don't grow and a lot of times you'll rot out.

So Maine, it's just proper planning for the most part, and patience letting that fill in and letting that become you know, it will be.

I see that in landscaping all the time too, where they'll you'll do a landscaping, and everything is properly placed, but it doesn't look like the AI picture that they gave with everything in bloom and everything full because it needs to grow, and nothing stops growing.

They say, Well, I want it to grow super fast, and I only want to get six feet tall.

That's not how life works.

That's not how plants work.

So, but we customize a lot of things in our lives, and we feel like, Yeah, and you can put a pot in there.

If you have two shrubs, they're gonna get bigger larger, put a pot in the middle, let some flowers grow, and then eventually you can take the pot away, and the plants will be fine.

That's a good idea.

You fill the holes with Yes.

Now, speaking of blooms, I'm kind of jealous, because my Zinnias are not flowering yet, and neither is my straw flower.

So what's your secret?

You just have to go to a garden center.

That's what the country average does.

A good job.

Julie's in the back for a month before you think about it and getting everything going ahead of time.

So it's you don't want people to force things a little too quick.

So if there's a timely season, you'll see things that are in full bloom, like you'll see mums.

You'll see mums in July 30.

Yes, well, those are gonna last so long.

Things are gonna bloom all season.

Yeah, you can get those earlier.

So if it's a smaller window of bloom time, you don't want to get those too soon.

But most like a straw flower is gonna bloom all season.

Continues to bloom.

So if those are already blooming, those are great.

And the other thing I say, and nobody likes to hear that I cut all the flowers off.

Ooh.

Because dagger, do you want the plant to be nice and big and then flower Gotcha?

If you all the energy is going into the flower when you plant that you you're not getting the roots growing, you're getting flowers.

So I cut all the flowers off.

It'll flower.

I promise it will.

But man, more along that theme of patience, it is just like that hurts, cutting the balloon sacrifice earlier for greater gains later.

That's what we teach our kids, right?

That's right.

That's the lesson.

We've got some folks who sent in some questions.

So let's tackle this one from Melissa Richardson.

She's got a dogwood, and she says that it is small and the top is looking very thin.

She wants to know what she can do to save this tree.

So a lot of times, when you see a thinning dogwood, what kind of problems are folks running into?

It's a it's a huge issue.

And dogwoods are a shade plant, and we are in central Illinois, and there's not a lot of shade.

So most of the problem, I find that we have customers that have really clay soil, and dogwoods love rich, you know, dry soil.

I should say not dry, but really rich soil.

They don't want clay where it just holds water.

They don't want open sun.

They don't want to be in the middle of a corn field.

They want they're an understory tree, okay?

So they get burnt very easily.

So often, I'll take a tree and I'll plant it in a new.

Yard where the basement has been dug up and thrown into the front yard.

We'll plant it in clay.

We'll try and amend the soil.

But it's only so much it can do, and the homeowner cannot keep up on the watering.

It needs to be watered every couple days, or at least the soil needs to get moist, and so it burns out.

And the first to burn out, it's the top and we get and you'll see a tree up front, I had the tree up front is from somebody who was struggling to grow that tree, and it just turned out to be a bad location, and I moved it into a location that wasn't too much better, but I knew how to maintain it.

It became a challenge.

Yes, I was trying to prove a point that it could be done and once established, are better.

But you'll notice, if people send us pictures, they look poor.

It's almost always a hot, dry summer that they look bad, or it's a younger tree that's not quite established.

Okay, I was gonna ask that.

So it's not throughout the life of the dogwood that you have to go out and baby it.

This is until it gets established.

And how long, typically, usually, five or six years, is what I find.

And they are heavy feeders to get that rich green color.

They love fertilizer, slow release fertilizers, very helpful for dogwood.

Obviously, plenty of water, plenty of mulch, is good.

And you have to remember, all the buds are set up in September.

So it's really important to keep July and August with good fertilization and good water in August, because you're setting up all those beautiful flowers for next year for the next year?

Yeah.

So if you don't get that good fall, you're gonna have a bad spring.

Interesting.

So you really want to put all that effort into the summer now, with the thinning that she's seeing, should she do any pruning now, or have someone on the scratch test so she can scratch and see if it's dead?

So you'll get a lime green a tree all trees have you scratched underneath, and there's a bright green, and that lets you know that it's healthy and doing fine.

If it's brown, then it's probably dead and you need to trim it off.

And that does happen, you'll get some tips that die back, but that's best in the spring, you'll see when it leaves out, you'll see those tips come by, and then I take those down.

But even if she has a bad spring where things look really rough, she can fertilize, do everything properly this year and then next year will be gangbusters.

Okay, so she has another shot.

You got another shot?

So do the scratch test, see where you are and then go from there.

Yeah.

Okay.

We have a couple other questions, but they kind of coincide with plants that you have growing in your yard.

So let's switch locations and go talk about some peppers and lemons.

All right, okay.

All right.

Little location change here.

I love when our viewers have the same problems as our experts, because it just makes it that more personal for all of us.

So let's talk about pepper plant problems.

Karen Benner writes in, can anyone tell me what is wrong with this pepper plant?

It was started from seed and grown under grow lights in my garage, so it's just not looking good.

So what kind of exhibit a Yeah, so what kind of things can you run into with pepper Yeah?

As soon as I saw the photo, I thought, I can show you exactly what happens.

So it's the same thing for myself.

If you look these peppers like almost bleached yellow, they look a little rough right now.

And what happens is, when you're growing under grow lights, you have a certain light spectrum, and it's used to that.

And a lot of times it's actually not that good.

They get a little lanky.

They're not actually very colorful.

The other thing that happens is what you see on these.

So the smaller ones are from the Grow lights inside.

They've barely moved.

The ones here were from a greenhouse grower, and they grew it under perfect conditions.

So they had it in a greenhouse with a little bit of shade, and they looked amazing when I got them, but then I brought them into this patio, and they're not getting perfect water.

They're probably getting too much water.

They're getting blasted by the sun.

They're on a patio of heat, and it just burns them.

It's they've really suffered, but they will be fine.

This has happened many, many times.

The one thing that I did is I did add fertilizer.

I as the slow release fertilizer, which I had somewhere here, but we don't have it in chop.

But it's just a slow release fertilizer.

I put it on once.

It lasts three or four months, and that will really help add some color and some growth to the plants.

It's a general fertilizer gets the roots, the blooms and the leaves, and it makes it really easy.

You can water with fertilizer through the hose.

I just find myself forgetting to hook that up every time.

So I put the slow release and then add a little fertilizer through the hose.

But you will come back from this.

It will, you know, if you really worry about it, you can always pinch off the top, like if you've got the yellow, you can always pinch it off, and it'll branch off and put on more growth.

So they're very hardy plants.

Peppers are one of the easier ones to grow.

You just don't want to overdo it.

And then if you're going to blast it with full sun out of the gate, it's going to take some transition, and that might look ugly in the beginning.

Now I'm having the opposite problem my pepper plants are still very small.

Is that maybe because of the cold snap that we had, peppers need hot?

Yeah?

So we need, we do?

We need that 80 degree temperature?

Yeah?

Really get going, and you'll see these little, tiny ones in there.

You can't barely see them.

They're the size of my those are the ones I grew from seed.

Started those, like, six weeks ago.

They did barely anything in the seed.

I brought them out here, and now they're in too big of a container.

Like, there's a reason you move up in size and then eventually plant it.

I just planted them straight into here because I these are my protectors.

Like, if those don't work, these two the backup.

Yeah.

So now I've over planted.

Remember, we talked about earlier of over planting.

This is way too many plants, but I'm gonna cull them out and but they are very small.

I honestly think when it's all said and done, the seeded ones will outgrow these once they get going, yeah, just because they've they didn't go through the stunt phase.

They're just gradually coming up.

And these are hot.

These are Carolina reefers.

Yikes.

So these are for my hot honey.

I put those in the honey just to give it a little kick or a lot of kick.

Do you know where they fall on the scale?

They're the hot.

There's a new one.

The the breeder of this is the has a hot, the hottest pepper in the world.

But prior to that, this is the hottest, the most skull will in the world.

Makes your nose run and your eyes run and you'll be nauseous.

You most people who eat one, unfortunately vomit.

But there's, it's so hot, but I just put a little in there.

And that's something about the honey, is people see it and they're scared to death that it's just enough to give you spice, but not enough to take away from the flavor.

And, you know, hot honey, like Mike is revolutionized.

Yes, they're putting on pizza.

Oh yes.

And I like to control my own peppers that go into it, into the honey.

So, yeah, I think it's great.

I grow it every year.

I used to keep them in my basement and grow them.

My last plant was three years old, and wife, Nick's the basement planting.

She's like, you can grow them outside every take your toys outside.

Anyway, exactly, you're having a disposable item that you're trying to keep.

So if they do take a beating when they go from the nursery to your patio to your garden, they'll bounce back.

Just give them a little time.

And this is the beauty, although I have not done this, the beauty of the bag planting is, if you have those problems, you can pull them into the shade.

You know, if you have a party, I can pull these away.

This is a portable garden.

I can put them in the ideal spot anywhere I want, and then at the end of the year, I can take the soil and I can put the bags away.

So I love this container gardening.

It's just ideal for people that don't want a full garden but you still want select vegetables.

We've visited Jennifer Nelson's house a couple of times, and she does a lot in these bags.

I've seen people have great success with potatoes.

Potatoes are perfect.

Yes, really good, ladies.

There's really nothing you can't there's all these can grow.

There's different size bags that are better than others.

And I've experimented with this poly versus the cloth.

And I do like the cloth.

It's, you know, we all want to be a little bit more sustainable when it comes to product as well.

So, I see some drainage holes.

Did you put those?

No, they all come with drain holes.

You'll see this is the future of tree growing as well.

So if you go to your local garden center, they are growing two inch trees in bags.

They Tran you can, you don't have to, you know, you can only dig in the spring.

But if they're in bags, you can do that anytime.

They're just ready to go.

So you're seeing a lot more giant trees in these bags and smaller trees.

All our fruit trees are now grown in bagged Okay, so Angela B sent in another question.

This is a sapling issue.

She says she has a young lemon tree.

You have a lemon tree, and she says her leaves are getting pale.

At first, she thought the plant needed some iron.

Gave it some iron, and it helped a little bit, but the leaves are still turning yellow and white, and she wants to know how she can save her living tree.

Yeah, that's the most.

So she did the right thing.

The most common problem with yellowing leaves is iron.

I did not know, yeah, so chelated iron on these a liquid iron, and she probably still needs to add more to it.

It's people think when you add iron that, that you only add a little.

You actually have to keep adding sure water they're iron deficient, and these are heavy iron feeders, like one of the most heavy iron plants in the world, I had a little different issue and that I went away for a month, and it didn't get watered, and it developed all kinds of problems once you do that.

But it lost every single leaf.

And then when I got it back, it started turning yellow, because not only did I dry it up, but it started getting nutrient deficient, so it got new leaves.

But one of the first things I noticed, if it's truly stressing, if a lime tree is really, really stressing, it puts out flowers.

It thinks it's going to die, so it wants to reproduce.

It's like, please, I want to put out children to save me.

So, you know, it's really going bad when the flowers come out.

When I came home, it was in full bloom.

Oh, wow.

So I added slow release fertilizer.

So similar to what I did the pepper, is that overall fertilizer and then a chelated iron.

So I kept my watering cycle with iron for the whole month, I added iron to it and just kept through and I water deeply and drain because I don't want everything to sit in the bottom.

Because I was a little heavier than fertilizers.

I'd like to be little heavier on iron than I like to be, but I want to work it through the system and let it take it in.

And you can see the colors come around a lot, really well.

You can still see a little bit of modeling.

In in here, and you can see the burn of me bringing it out onto the patio, because this was inside in a West southern window.

Okay, so I started it Western, or, sorry, southern window, then underneath the porch, then out, and it's moved to here, so I've kind of gradually introduced it, so it still got burnt a little bit.

But lime trees definitely can be a little temperamental, but you'll see water is so important, fertilization is so important, and trimming you just they can get really long and lanky.

So if her branches are really bring it back, and it'll let the energy and the iron concentrate within, instead of trying to come all the way out here, this thing has been broken three times.

Me bringing it inside.

Every single time I bring it through the doors, I break it.

But I'm 56 years old, and this is 200 pounds.

Well, you do the best you can.

So what I do now is I take it out and I put it in a bag, and then I have another pot that matches this on the other side, back to the bag.

Yeah.

So that's the thing, and bring it.

That's the other thing I would say.

If she can bring it outside.

Bring it outside.

Let it get some natural air.

Let it get some natural rain.

Don't burn it too bad.

But obviously these trees are Southern, and they grow outside, and they do really well.

So introduce it to that as well.

But this is the leaf color.

It should look like this, beautiful, rich, and the smell is smells just like lime.

It is so good.

So she mentioned that she did the iron treatment one time.

Yeah.

How often do you recommend doing it?

Is this something that you should do with every water?

Or I did it every water for a month.

So once indoors was once a week for a month.

Outdoors, that would probably be every four days, okay, for a month.

And again, you just, you can the color will tell you, right?

You just look at it and see how it's coming along.

You're probably not going to kill it with iron at this point.

And you have to remember, here Illinois, our pH is very acidic by nature.

Our aquifers, if you're on well water, it's incredibly low.

Matter of fact, you can't, barely grow petunias.

Petunias are the other annual that need iron.

You'll see petunias are the first to go white or light green, if you're on well water, like U of I, they struggled mightily because they were on well water and their plants looked horrible the nursery.

We add acid, or we add, yeah, we add acid to our our our mixture to try and get the iron levels.

Because what happens is, if the pH, if the pH goes bad, then it won't take an iron and that, that will happen quite a bit.

So if you have well water that probably added to her problem, you got some things to try, yeah, so Okay, well, you've got a large, beautiful yard.

We've got so much other stuff to go see.

So give us the grand tour.

Yeah, we'll show you a couple things, the good and the bad.

All right.

Now this is really, really peaceful.

I've been wanting to get over here since we got here.

So tell us a little bit about this water feature.

Yeah, this is my favorite part.

You know, one of the things when you have a garden is you want to sit either on the back porch or even at your own kitchen table and hear movement of water.

And a lot of people, they go to water fountains because the pond is so much work.

And that is true, but the reality is, if you put a lot of work in early then it won't be as much work later.

That being said, there is some maintenance every once in a while, but I've had this pond 23 years, wow.

And I've only had to fix it one time, and that was literally last week.

Yeah, it was, it was, you know, it was losing water, and we couldn't figure out it turned out to be under that big rock.

And I had to use some Egyptian movement, because, again, I can't lift a rock that size, so I had to lift it up and fix the pipe underneath.

But for 22 years of no maintenance, not literally have done nothing, but every once a couple years empty it out, and the key was good quality pumps, good quality fountain in parts, and just spend a little bit more work or money on the initial install.

But other than that, it is lovely an hour tonight.

How has it evolved for you over those 20 years?

So the only thing this, this plant here, which is Angelina Sedum.

So in the in the beginning, there was a bonsai.

There a bonsai that was several $1,000 and the centerpiece of everything.

And it turns out it got a little too wet in there, so the liner covers it, but I had planned it in dirt there it died.

But I planted this Angelina Sedum to fill the cracks, and it absolutely has thrived.

Other than that, I put one water lily that you see, and it fell out of the pot.

And now you have many.

It's taken over.

So every year I have to dig that up and bring it down to the size of a pizza.

And then every year it gets that, oh my god, it grows very you literally have to get in there and dig it up.

It's rooted.

I don't have to, but yes, if I didn't, I think it would take up the entire Yeah, it's rooted.

So when you plant your water leak, try and keep it in the pot.

Don't goof around All over.

The blooms are beautiful.

Though it's stunning.

and let it.

It's, it's covered in they'll be 13, 14, blooms at a time.

It's really pretty.

There's frogs sitting on it, just like a stereotype.

The birds come here all day.

We get ducks every year.

Squirrels all drink for it is, it is the best piece of heaven back here.

The animals absolutely love it, especially with the tree, very nice, and it is very peaceful, I have to admit.

I mean, this is farm.

When I moved here, this was a farm.

This was literally just open ground, so it has been really nice.

And it's, it's, you know, it's breaking down a little bit.

Things are falling a little bit.

But 22 years, we're all falling down a little bit.

We're all breaking down exactly.

What a great lesson.

Yeah, what a great lesson there.

Well, Shane, thank you so much for letting us come to your house.

Thanks for coming out.

We had a blast, learned a lot, and this is just absolutely beautiful.

I'm gonna have to put this on my honey do list.

So, yeah, wonderful, wonderful.

If you've got questions, send them in to us at yourgarden@gmail.com Make sure you attach a picture so Shane and the rest of our panelists can answer those questions for you, and we will see you next time.

Thanks so much for watching.

Good night.

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