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 today are three of our panelists ready to tackle your gardening question.

So we'll start down here with John, have everybody introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about your specialty.

Okay, I'm John Bodensteiner.

I'm a vermillion County Master Gardener.

I enjoy shade plants because I plan too many trees in my younger years.

And so I don't have a lot of sunny areas.

So I do enjoy hostas.

I have a little over 300 varieties of hostas, and a lot of other shade plants.

And I'm starting to get a little bit more into sunny areas.

I've got a developing a sunny area cutting down a few of the old old trees that are past their prime.

So getting getting into so I like anything that's green as usually one of my favorites.

I saw a hosta at a nursery and made me think of you as a new I don't know if it was a newer variety but new to me.

very skinny kind of hands up.

I don't know, but it just looked very tropical.

Yes.

And I thought, I wonder if John has this out at his house.

I got to I figured, okay, go ahead and introduce yourself.

My opinion has to be great slugs.

But I'm phil nixon, I'm an entomologist, retired from the University of ilinois and I and so I get into insects and and also live out on three and a half acres where we have where we do some aquatic gardening and some bonds and bonsai and vegetable gardening and planted somewhere around 500 trees and about three and a half acres.

So I still have a lot of sunny area.

So because I've booked my journal.

Anyway, I'm glad to answer both questions.

Excellent.

Okay.

I'm Ella Maxwell.

I'm at Tazwell County Master Gardener as well as a horticulturist at a local local garden center.

And I'm working part time now.

And I enjoy trees, shrubs, perennials, and have a large garden or a large landscape, large yard.

And I have tried all kinds of things and I love learning new things.

And every single show I learned something new as well as some of the Zoom presentations that I've had an opportunity to see.

So can always be learning something.

That's right, that's right regard to this.

Okay, we got Shawn tells the first round, why don't we start with you?

Okay, well, I've got a little bag here.

We can see.

And inside.

I had an old African Violet, it had variegated foliage.

And it had, it was beautiful, but it had multiple crowns.

And I decided that I wanted to propagate it.

And so African Violets are propagated by leaf cuttings.

And so I used this small veggie or meat, you know, lunch, me lunch, we tray here, I poke some holes for drainage right along either side, I use this as the saucer, I use this seed starting mix.

And I used some routing hormone that I just dip the ends of my leaves in and the soil was moist, and I added a little extra water.

And they have been sitting in here for months.

I was just gonna ask how long they'd been it takes a long time.

But you can you can, let's see how can we see there may, I don't know.

But there's a little tiny plants starting.

And so it's about time now for me to take these out and report them.

I believe I can just I'm going to just leave the leaf on but cut it back by two thirds.

And I'm going to just start these little plants again.

And it's an easy way to propagate violets now when you're talking about taking this piece off is that so that the plant can concentrate on the newer growth?

Well, yeah, and also it will give more light penetration down to the base here because it's right at the base where these little new plants I start from, and that's where they'll become the crown of the plant, but it was really attractive and beautiful.

You can you can divide the mother plant, but you can also start them very easily from leaf cuttings, but it just takes a long time.

It takes a long time.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Alright, so we're gonna go to you.

Before we get off of African Violets I have to give a plug and that is Is that many local areas have their own little African Violet clubs or societies.

And you can find those from the African violence of America, there's a website that will have you on the information on that.

And our local club here in the Champaign Urbana area where the University of Illinois located is called the Margaret Scott African about a club, which my wife is very active in.

So that's why if I get home, I will get you Yeah, you missed that opportunity.

At any rate, when you're putting out tomatoes, and we're actually, typically, latter half of May is, in my opinion, the ideal time to plant tomatoes.

It's many times thought that there's a little joke that goes around in a trade and that is that garden centers make money by selling the same people tomatoes, 345 times, because they start them out too early.

And they get and they get frozen off.

Or even worse, when they get frozen off, you know, they're dead.

When they get started, you don't realize it.

But nighttime cold temperatures down into certainly the 30s.

And I think even around 40, or 41 is enough to cause the tomato, to stop growing for a couple three weeks and just sit there.

And so all of a sudden, they realize that, hey, my tomato leave started kind of turning purple, and it's not growing back garden center must have gave me some lousy plants, which of course it wasn't, it was a lousy person, put them in the garden.

But the point is, is that you get to sell them over and over and over again until they finally get some.

But at any rate, and a real problem that we have with with tomatoes are our transplants, we're gonna put out our cutworms and and I have a cut where model created at no lack of expense.

That's essentially a tomato ties, what it is a little piece off is an inch and a half long, which is the size of a full grown Black Cutworm.

And these guys come our night active they work for night shift.

And they will come out after after dusk and crawl across the surface of the of the soil.

And when they come to a tomato plant, they love tomatoes, they will do it to others but mainly tomatoes, what will happen is that the is is that the caterpillar will curl his body around the plant and eat off it off.

And you end up with sometimes a crawl all the way to the top and you start losing foliage from the top down.

Sometimes they just cut it off here in the center and towards the bottom.

And you end up with a one half to one inch long tomato stem that's left and the tomato is too big, the only part of the tomato leaves and leaves the rest of it to wilt and die, which is sometimes even more frustrating to take in all ways that you can, there are several ways that you can stop this.

One is you can use insecticides around it.

But what I tend to use and what I find works best is anything that forms a collar around that plant will protect it.

And what I like to use is old coffee cans which you can't buy coffee cans anymore.

They're all coffee plastics, yeah.

But at any rate, cut out both ends.

And this happens to be a higher warehouse bean container actually.

So it's the same size.

And and you essentially just put them down over the tomato stick, shove it into the soil, about an inch, the Black Cutworm will total into the soil but normally not more than an inch and it will crawl to go over something but usually not more than about an inch to an inch and a half.

That's that kind of some sort.

Yeah, it's not gonna work real hard, comes up to this as doodle along, he's straight at this point comes due to the long hits as it goes, I need to go around and go home to the next tomato.

That's a lot of work and that works really well.

So these things work fabulous.

And really anything you want to put around that tomato, we will do the job.

I saw one lot of people you will cut off the bottoms of five gallon buckets, plastic five gallon buckets and do that.

Another way to do is you make the stem too large for this caterpillar to coil around.

We didn't do a little one like that.

But if you come in and you put a nail right next to the stem like this, all of a sudden you have too big of a stem for the top of a worm to call it to coil around.

He has to coil around in order to eat it off.

That gives him his his you gotta have some some anchorage in order to to.

And so again, you'll say this one's too big and you go on to the next one.

So just a good size nail next to your tomato stem will also do the job, but always done before is to control pass, you have to have more intelligent in the past can be a challenge.

Well, and that is really great advice because I a lot of people just discount some type of physical barrier.

I think we have a question about transplants up here.

They want to protect it and it's rapid damage.

And there are all kinds of insecticides or sent deterrence for larger, larger voles and mice and rabbits and deer.

But a physical barrier is probably the easiest thing to do.

My entire vegetable garden is rounded for the last 15 years by the same three foot high.

Close mess fence.

Yes, exactly.

Once I got a rabid towing 100, but we took care of that with with some soil and a concrete block.

But you're right, right.

And that's what I have around my garden too, is is a right, a larger fence.

And the little baby rabbit got in but if you use chicken wire, we so you know, we just zip tied a little short piece here and and it folds down so they can't really dig under.

But the physical barrier is is the way to go for the transplanting the offshoot to protect it.

And let's go and read that.

This is from Larry Adams.

It's a Facebook question that came in.

When can you transplant a rosebush?

That is an offshoot from the original rose bush, the Bush died?

Is there anything that you can do to keep rabbits from eating the green tops of those plants?

So right?

That that was the whole idea is that the physical barrier is the easiest.

Once it gets going there probably won't be as attractive to the adult rabbit.

It's usually early in the spring.

It's the small baby rabbits that are problematic.

They haven't learned what's good to eat or not good to eat.

They're just biting everything.

And I have I have a little rosebush, in my in my yard.

That right now has an old birdcage sitting over the top of it.

Yeah, bottom was open.

Yeah, just over the top of it.

And it's been there since last fall, protected the protection to rosebush for the entire winter, in the spring, and wire hanging baskets, I turn them up, turn them upside down.

And then I put those over coral bells because I have a problem with the rabbits during the winter eating the coral bells down the crown of the plant and so they just stay on year round.

The leaves come out it hides it.

Well, you know, and someone said, Oh, you can use antique egg baskets.

And I said, Well, where do you get antique eight baskets.

And I'm gonna try to find something in the garage.

Another question about a blackberry bush.

Yes, we can do that, too.

Yeah.

Same thing.

Elise Ramirez.

This is an email question kind of long, so bear with.

Thanks for the program.

We learned so much from the show and your guests, you have a special way of keeping us engaged, including some photos of our thornless blackberries at Jubilee farm located in Jacksonville, near Springfield, can you help us identify what is happening to the canes over the last few years?

I haven't seen them like this.

I did a check on a number of websites.

So they're really trying to figure out what is going on.

I don't know if it's deer or squirrel.

And you guys have had a chance to see the picture.

So what are your thoughts?

We're sure it was that close to the ground.

We're sure it was a rabbit could have been a squirrel, but we're pretty much sure that and again, if your blackberry bushes, you know, maybe you haven't thought about having some kind of fencing around it too.

And it was probably during the winter, right?

I'm sure it was during the winter when that cambium layer in the wintertime when there's not too much else green is very nutritious, and, you know, so they're gonna go after that where the sugars and starches are and all that.

That cambium layer is, like I say is highly nutritious.

That's what they're gonna eat.

And they're gonna say, if they if they go all the way around the the trunk.

If it's an apple tree than your apple tree is better, you're startled.

Yeah.

girdled even cut off completely.

The rabbits which and also their close relatives, rodents are going to have large front teeth.

And when they cut off something, it'll look like you took a pair of pruners and snipped it right off.

It's gonna be a clean cut.

Usually a little bit of an angle yeah can easily tangled at an angle whereas she was concerned about deer.

Deer have I don't think they have any teeth in the front of the other skull.

So what they do is they grab a hold and jerk they're called browsers have tend to go after more what he thinks, but you have you have a very ragged type of end of the shoot.

Typically, extremely ragged.

It's very easy to tell Oh dear browse from from rabbit or squirrel feeding got it got it great information so physical barriers find some junk in the garage or in the yard and use that there you get a bird cage.

John was on your show until you know I brought two things here.

This is a jelly that I made.

I was reading on internet night and I always like to Yeah, this is your thing you'd like to make syrup's and dips in.

And I'm the next thing is I'm going to make some dandelion jelly because I hear that it tastes like honey.

So this this, I was asking everyone if they could guess what this was.

It's got a beautiful color.

And this is Redbud tree jelly.

I know most of the red buds are done blooming right now.

But if you ever got a bunch of red buds at night, I think I used three cups of flowers to make a batch of have you had this book?

No.

And it really is very pretty and nice color and it has a floral citrusy taste Filkins rhubarb, which was a subject that was a good guest and that if you had red rhubarb discs, that would be the color that you would have.

And but anyway, I just thought I'd share that something I enjoy.

I always love when I'm writing that down.

The other thing I brought was a Cana Bulb, and this is what case anybody is not familiar, they are stately, this is a small one yet, they'll get to be quite eight foot tall, easily.

But this is this is what I stored last last winter.

And this is a little bit bigger than what I'd want to plant.

So what I would do is I would when I was ready to plant it, I would start to just pull it apart.

And you can take a knife, and if you're, you know and cut it apart.

And what I usually would do is do this about a day before I'm going to before I'm going to plan it, so it has a tend tend to callus off what they cut that in.

And I could even break this one because there's a couple more nodes here.

And so break that off.

This is break that off.

And here's another one.

And you can see I've already got five, five, and this was just part of a route.

So you end up with, you know, I've got I think six garbage cans full of oh my gosh, okay.

Garbage, that's where they need to stay.

No.

I do I do.

You know, we have our Master Gardener sale and I take a lot of them there.

But we plant a lot in a meditation guard.

We use them as a fence in the meditation of Charmin.

And so a lot of them go there.

But you can grow yours in the ground or do you do container has grown in the ground?

And I do something containers also at home.

But if you don't want to be and you have to dig these up in the fall, yes.

Now.

You don't have to, because I'm sure your neighbors digging your heels up.

Don't watch this show.

Karen Yeah.

You don't have to do it because your neighbors probably got six garbage cans Hold on in the basement.

You can treat them as annuals, right?

Leave some in I plant some and I harvest some but I let a lot of them just freeze out and compost.

Okay, and it's okay.

Because it's okay.

There's some plants that you know like all your your, your your spring flowering bulbs that are full flowering bulbs that if you don't pick up dye, your gladiolas here, you know, your daily isn't daily as you know, people say well I'm not planning those because I don't want to go pick them up, just treat them as annuals go buy some new ones in the spring.

Right and buying new ones in the spring is is really great.

Now because there is a new Canna variety.

It's called Canova, cannas and these are much shorter, they're less than maybe only half the size three foot.

They have some beautiful colors.

They flower very vigorously.

And they're they're also the ones Karen really likes these new Canovas.

Now the one thing to know about the one that John brought in that dark lift one it is the dark leaf ones are more attracted to Japanese beetles.

When you say Do you treat your nose no returns rarely just let nature do its thing.

Usually, it's the bottom leaves because they keep growing after the Japanese beetles are only here for what four to six weeks at the new leaves come up and then they all the new leaves cover up the old ones and you don't notice or you can cut them off.

They get too unsightly after the Japanese builds are done.

They just cut them off and and new leaves and just let it go from there.

Before we go into another question.

I have a question I wanted to ask You guys.

Oh my gosh, I just forgot it.

Well, well, we'll come back to it when I remember.

I just escaped me.

Okay, we've got another one.

This is from grace.

GRUB in Kane County.

This is an email about a Meyer lemon tree, another long one, about a 10 inch Meyer lemon tree in a plastic pot.

It has three orange, green, lemon and blossoms on it.

They put where the plant is at, it's in a south facing window.

And then she goes on to talk about how the leaves were starting to turn colors they, about a month or so ago the tree was ready to harvest but the leaves were less green between the veins wondering if is the pH issue tested for moisture.

So really struggling with this with this lemon tree?

So what are your thoughts here about her successes or?

Right?

Again, I think the most important thing is when you're having issues is the quality of your soil.

But more importantly, what are the roots doing in that soil.

And so this is where I think she should take the time to unpack the the tree to examine the roots and more than likely over watering and underwatering played a part.

And when the root system is reduced, it's less likely to take up nitrogen.

And that's where she sees that chlorosis that she was concerned about with the pH and then she was trying fertilizer, and all of those things are helpful.

But the most limiting factor is the fact that maybe the root system is poor, and also the amount of light, no normally citrus would appreciate going outside for the summer, and then maybe coming back inside I think it would be difficult to grow a citrus in even a south facing window year round without maybe more supplemental light.

And maybe there's something else going on.

You had a suggestion there, Phil.

Well, he indicated that the Middle East started turning turning yellowish and lighter colored and in turn brown.

And and even the the veins traits staying somewhat greenish are all evidences that it could have been to spotted spider mite attack or citrus might win the case of a citrus tree in which typically they will feed on the underside of the leaves.

Typically, spider mites are going to be too small for you to see or barely sees your naked eye.

And so I always like to say you can put 50 on the head of a street pen and they have plenty of space to run around.

So they are very tiny but typically what will happen is leaves that are attacked with spider mites will tend to look dirty on the underside and this is due to the mites themselves their fecal matter and their cast skins as they grow up because they grew up very quickly over the span of a couple of weeks through set through through your pre molds so so they will they will grow up and leave all this dirty looking material.

The humidity that she was adding from the pebble tray would would help reduce that because spider mites don't do well under human situations.

However citrus mites do quite well under human situations to Spider spider mites need dry conditions to do well.

So whatever she does, she could get a mic that would attack the tree.

Normally you would control these if you have a mites and you can use a hand lens to look at it a magnifying glass and determine see the little eight legged mites associated with that.

insecticidal soap works well right on the foliage.

And by insecticidal soap, do not go online and look for a remedy of your own soap.

Because the soaps that you have in your counter are going to be used for for getting getting Reese off of dishes and grime off of clothes.

And they have things that will take the waxy coverings off the leaves, but the insecticidal soaps are soaps just like those other soaps, but they've been selected for ones that don't do that.

They will all soaps will kill the mites, but its external soaps are not as likely to kill the plant.

Thank you, sir.

John, we've got time for one more showing one and while you're grabbing that I remembered my question.

Can I please get rid of the unsightly tulip foliage in my bed now?

No, no.

I knew you guys were gonna say that.

It's cramping my style if you don't, if you don't mind not having tulips next year.

No, I want them right and lots of that.

That is exactly why in a formal garden settings if you're going to botanical gardens are everything, they're replanting every single year.

They dig those up throwing them away and it's like oh, I want to all I want to say so.

Yeah, but there are different kinds of tulips and the best thing to do is just put some annuals by those tulips now right next to him and let him kind of kind of grow up.

Yeah, covered.

Fine, fine.

Okay.

All right, we've got about a minute and 30 left John, one of the things I brought was a one of my ostrich ferns that I have, I got three or four of these from another master gardener.

And now I have hundreds of them.

I kind of brought this one because if you can look down here in a little this is this is an ostrich Fern or it's also called a fiddlehead.

And you have to be if you're going to, like forage these fiddleheads because that they are edible, you have to make sure the type of affirm you are have you there are some of them are somewhat toxic.

So just don't go out and if you don't need it, you know fiddlehead and think that it's okay to eat unless you know specifically that is an ostrich, but this will get to be another two feet tall.

They're just huge.

And this year has been a wonderful year for you know, for this this to be this big already.

Is is really nice.

Okay, that's it, guys.

The show is over.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you guys for coming in and sharing your expertise with us.

If you've got questions, send them to your garden@gmail.com or you can find us on Facebook.

Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.