Hey, it's Tinisha, Spain, host of Mid American gardener.

And this week, we are at the Idea garden in Urbana, Illinois.

And guess what?

It's officially summer, and everything here is green and growing and beautiful, and our friend Jennifer Nelson has agreed to meet us here to walk us through the gardens, to show you all what you can grow in your landscape.

Talk about maintenance and just really get a feel for what's growing here at the idea garden this year, you right?

And we found Jen here at the idea garden in Urbana, and its name is appropriate, right?

Because you come here to get ideas, definitely their own space.

This is the place to come if you're thinking about planting something, and you're not sure, like, what's that really look like?

Because catalogs tend to, you know, gloss it up and make it look its best at all times.

And you want to see it when things are when it's like 98 degrees, like it is today, things like that.

You want to come out and see what it looks like in real life.

How big is it?

Can it really fit in your garden?

They have a lot of really nice, mature size plants here, and lots of different ideas that you may not have thought of on your own.

And when we were with rusty at Lake of the Woods, we talked about how to plant things in the space as far as height goes.

And you were saying before we started rolling, how they do such an incredible job with color here?

Yes, so just in this little corner here, what are we looking at?

Because this is lovely.

This is an arborvitae here with a nice kind of call it fire chief.

It's called, I don't know a lot of these plants, but you can see where it gets it.

I don't know all of them off the top of my head, but you're supposed to, because you're a gardener, I'm supposed to, no, we have to cheat and use the but they have the signs, and that's what's so nice, because you can see be like, I'm not exactly sure what this is over here, but that is very helpful, very helpful.

Those are straw.

I mean, those are striking.

Yeah, says it's heliopsis Sunflower.

Very nice, very nice.

But what a great way to just come here and sort of like you said, see what it looks like once it's mature, once it's established, and then you can really get an idea of what it would look like in your space.

And you said that they get plants here before they even come to market.

They are part of a trial program with Proven Winners, so they are able to get things before they come to market.

So you might see things here, and you're gonna have a hard time finding them in the store, so they're probably up and coming soon.

The other thing they do really well in this garden is Look how they use stuff that is just foliage, or like has flowers, like the coral bells has some flowers, but they're not much to it, but you're growing it for the foliage.

And look how the colors work with all the other flowering plants in here, it all just plays off of each other.

So well, what is this?

This is gigantic, the catalpa.

Catalpa.

Usually those are much bigger trees, but that one's been topped so it stays small, very nice.

And everything is in tip top shape.

It's officially summer.

Yes, it is fresh off the garden walk with the Champaign County Master Gardener.

So everything is just beautiful, pristine, perfect.

So what they've they've been keeping up the wheat with the weeds marvelously, as they always do.

But also, I mean things like deadheading, which is removing the flowers as they fade.

That's going to encourage on ant.

Things like annuals, you're going to get more flowers coming on, the more you remove those FADING FLOWERS, because if they're going to spend energy on making seed, they're not going to be producing more flowers.

So you want to remove those unless it's something you're saving seed from.

But now, when you're dead heading, is that with any type of perennial or annual that you have in your garden, will they flower faster if you if you deadhead, yes and no, it depends, like every garden, every gardening question we get, right?

Some perennials are not going to produce much more than what they naturally got, but with annuals, you're generally going to encourage more and more flowering, the more you can keep up with the deadheading.

And you know, sometimes you can just do it with your thumbnail.

Sometimes you need a scissors or some pruners to do it, but it's definitely good practice.

Also makes sense in terms of keeping control of certain diseases, getting that plant material out.

You can spot that stuff when you're out deadheading.

Speaking of diseases, I wanted to ask a little bit about spacing.

I know this garden is for show, so we're wanting people to be able to see each different variety here.

But if you were at home and this was your actual landscape, would you plant a little closer?

Is this spacing?

Okay?

What are your thoughts on that?

Like, what do I what do I actually do?

Yeah, I cream, ice cream version.

I. I am very guilty of violating all the rules and cramming way too much in space, and I've paid the price for that, depending on the plant, sometimes they just can't handle being too close together.

Zinnias are a good example.

A lot of varieties are not resistant to powdery mildew.

These look great.

It's still early in the season, but these are newer varieties, so they've probably got some resistance in them.

If things are too crowded together and you get something like powdery mildew, a fungal disease, it doesn't have enough air circulation, so that disease gets a hold, and you kind of regret your choices.

In the end.

It's full but you regret something happens.

Yeah, and I know that they they measure and put the ideal spacing in here, but keep that in mind if you may have some disappointments, if you cram things in too full, too tightly.

I was just talking about with a friend about hurt.

She lost all her snapdragons to rust, and is like, well, there's nothing you can do now.

She wanted to spray something now.

And well, fungicides are always preventative, so you can keep that in mind for next year, but right now, get all of the dead and dying stuff out of there, physically out of the garden.

And she was going to turn it over and start with something fresh.

And I said, that's fine, and you don't have to worry about the rest infesting a new crop, as long as you're not planting snapdragons again.

You know, at first blush, I didn't even realize that this was a vegetable garden until we walked over here.

It's kind of hidden.

It's tucked in, right?

It is, and it, yeah, and it, at first glance, doesn't look like vegetable garden, which I think is just wonderful that they're showing taking notes, yeah, they're showing how beautiful vegetable gardening can be.

It doesn't have to be relegated to the back, yeah, corner of the yard.

And just like rows or squares, have you right?

I love what they did here with the these sort of borders, they have planted leeks in.

And among there's basil and lettuce and loving the mist flowers, and this is dill and peas growing up a trellis in the back.

So you may right, and lots of different color and texture.

And it's definitely beautiful.

And what I love about sticking the leaks in here.

Leeks have a really long time to grow.

They they need like, 120 days.

So, yeah, so instead of just having like, weeks you have, they're growing in and among other things, that you're going to be harvesting and using in the meantime.

So you don't have to feel like you're just, well, this spot just has to be leaks forever in a day.

Yeah, yes, that is so cool.

And it's a good space saver, too, for folks who probably don't have right, you know, a lot of land to do that great big spread.

Even here, I like the chamomile.

You've got some herbs kind of mixed in with some lettuce that I can see here, yeah, just mix it all in and put it.

Put it where you're going to use it.

This kind of stuff is great to plant, like near your back door, near a patio.

Put it where you're going to see it, so you don't forget it.

Everyone tends to want to put vegetable gardens at the back corner of the yard, but this is a great example of how it could be really pretty and have it close to where you're living and working.

Now, putting on your scientist hat.

What's the benefit of having your flowers interspersed with your vegetables or your fruit or your herbs a couple of different things.

Instead of having, like, one whole big row of leeks, for instance, or peas or what have you, if you spread those plants out among the garden, it's harder for pests to find them.

Talk about, in my class, we talk about there being insect highways, if they can just infect one plant and not have to look too far to go to the next one, just right down the roads, right down.

So if you spread things out, it makes a little harder for pests to find a good idea.

There's some evidence that of companion planting can be beneficial, where one plant maybe helps out another plant.

There's a lot of, I don't want to say controversy, but there's a lot of debate about whether that's for real or not.

But it can't hurt, you know, you hear about planting marigolds to keep, yes, rabbits away or what have you.

But then the year I tried it, the rabbits were eating the marigolds.

So, you know, go figure.

But it's certainly not going to hurt anything.

There's also certain plants, like alyssum, the flowering annual will will bring in beneficial insects.

So some of these ornamentals look great, and they're also attracting insects that are beneficial to keeping pest pest insects under control.

So it all works together.

Okay, let's check out some other things.

Point out some things that you see here, because I to me, you know, so they got some purple basil that's flowering.

Flowers look really nice.

If you were wanting to, really wanting to harvest this for use, you would want to be plucking these flowers off as they show up.

But if you're just using it for an ornamental border, let them go.

Let them go to town.

Um.

They're gonna, they're not gonna produce any more leaves or after they flower.

So that's just one drawback there.

And this is another kind of basil.

There's so many different kinds of basil I'm learning that so fun.

And the lettuces, look at all the different texture you get from lettuce.

And there's alyssum that white flower.

So that's gonna be one example of something that would bring in some beneficial insects to the area.

They've got tomatoes here on the other side.

So these peas are not going to last all summer.

They might not last the week.

With the weather we're having, they tend to be a spring crop.

So it looks like they're set to have the tomatoes maybe take over, gotcha.

So you can think about succession planting, where you want to, like you're going to have your spring crops, and then as those fade, what's going to take good points?

So the lettuce is a similar one that's not going to last all summer, that's probably going to that's probably going to be done by the Fourth of July.

Mine is starting to go to seed at home.

So bolting where it's producing flour, yeah, and then seed, it's going to start to taste bad at that point, yes, kind of gets bitter.

Yes, yes, yeah.

Timed Up, and I'm sure that this planting style helps tremendously with weeds.

Oh my gosh, yes, yes.

Vegetable Gardening, when you are doing this intensive planting, you're shading out most of the weeds.

This kind of reminiscent of square foot gardening.

That's a term that you see in vegetable gardening, where you're planting things very close together, closer than what it says on the packet or in the catalog, but it's not so close that it's going to get interfere with harvesting.

When we plant with my students in the greenhouse, we plant in this sort of style to get maximum harvest out of a small footprint.

I've heard a new term because we were speaking about buzzwords chaos gardening.

Have you heard of that?

People just take the seeds and just let them go?

Tiktoks with that?

I don't know if I could do it either.

And I've also was watching someone was taking, like, the 13 bean soup next, yes, and that's part of chaos, and just toss it up.

Yeah.

And like, it might work, might not.

It'd be fun if, especially with kids, just to see what comes up.

But this is so cool because the weeding, for me is the biggest thing I'm looking to there's not a whole lot of space for weeds to creep in, and I absolutely love that.

And what's nice is that they have it small enough.

When you have these sort of it's not a super tall raised bed, but look, it's not too wide.

You don't have to step in there.

You can just reach across, like they say, no more than four feet or so across is about your maximum, because you don't want to step in it.

That will compact your soil and create problems for you with that.

But yeah, the weed factor is huge in planting this place together, so you don't have to, don't have to worry about it.

Carrot.

This is a radish that seeds.

So even radishes that you forget about will look nice ornamentally.

I have, I had forgotten some broccoli one year and Mom's getting big, yeah, and my neighbors are like, what is that?

Gorgeous yellow flower?

Like, it's broccoli.

I forgot just the broccoli.

Never mind.

Carry on.

They thought you had the tip on.

I was like, our expert, no, just super busy.

This one that is interesting they do.

This is a high tunnel, essentially, not high tunnel, but a low tone, because you can't stand it.

But this whole thing raises up.

They they will cover this over in the winter time.

And do we've been out here with my class in like, March, and there's greens in here that have overwintered.

So they put a plastic cover over it.

Nice.

Oh, look at these.

I love how they've done the kale in the cabbage.

And again, you look at the difference different textures.

They've got some damage on the leaves.

You can see the holes.

Now, let's talk about those.

Because any time I have tried to grow broccoli or cabbage here, it ends up looking just like this.

Yeah, there's the cabbage worms.

There's like three major species that you'll see around here, but the white butterflies.

See the white butterflies cruising around.

That is a bad sign that you're gonna they just go to town eating the leaves at this point with the cabbage this is kind of kind of gonna affect the harvest, because it hasn't made a head yet.

So it's getting they're getting down in there.

If the cabbage loopers, cabbage worms move in when the head is already formed, it tends to only damage those outer leaves that you throw out anyway.

Gotcha.

So a couple of different there's a couple different control measures.

Most common one I've seen is using seven or carbo people use BT is more?

Is the organic control for it?

Gotcha.

But I just actually stopped growing it in my house because it they would literally, I mean, it looked like Swiss cheese, yeah, almost overnight we did at my house growing up too.

Was my mom would cook the broccoli and then have worms floating in the pot, but they affect all members of the cabbage family.

So cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, all of the above.

And one other way, if you don't want to spray anything you're like that is too much.

You can do a row cover and exclude, keep the butterflies from landing and laying eggs on the crop.

Mm, hmm.

God, look at that color.

That lettuce.

That's beautiful.

You almost don't even want to eat it, right?

Then there they've got the marigolds, your marigolds at the corners there too.

That's my practice.

But like you, sometimes the rabbits just decide to eat those.

Yeah, the rabbits are only eating anything new that I've planted, that I actually like spent some money, of course, yeah, of course, none of the things I divided and planted, no, they only want the new, expensive, exactly, delicious stuff from the greenhouse.

Let's see.

What are the Oh, asparagus.

Okay, yeah, this asparagus looks like we used to have some next to our patio, and it was kind of a natural privacy fence after we let because you don't pick all of it.

You never, you never pick all the asparagus.

You're going to leave some behind to grow, like with bulbs.

You not.

You have to have some fluids to produce energy for energy for next year.

I finally did put asparagus in this year.

Now, the big waiting, now the big weight begins.

But so these, right here, these little flowers, will these go to seed?

Can you grow?

Okay, I was gonna grow asparagus from berries from seed.

The newer varieties tend to be all male, and so they will not produce seed.

The older varieties, you'll see a mixture of flowers, and then you'll end up with these little red berries.

And that has the seeds I did find at a local garden center.

You could buy the seeds here locally, if you were ambitious, and it has an extra year production.

Nevermind.

It's already like three years when you buy crowns.

So usually what you do is you buy, like the dormant plant, and you plant it at which you've done, I put them back behind the garage so I don't even have to think about it, because next spring I'm going to be Yeah, the good, the problem that people run into with asparagus is grassy weeds are hard to control in them, but the time to control It is before the before the fronds emerge.

And if you, if you mulch them in really well, as soon as they start to come up, I'm sure that helps that, yeah, that helps.

There was a secret hack for weeds.

I would pay big money for it, right?

The bane of my existence.

There's an old wives tale that circulates with asparagus about using rock salt to control the weeds, because asparagus evolved near the seashore, so it's salt tolerant.

And the problem with that is, it's true, but you can overshoot the mark and then have nothing can grow there.

Thanks.

So keep that in mind if you do try something like that, and then they've got some nice sunflowers.

That is probably the largest sunflower stalk I've ever seen.

Oh, we like them around our patio at home for, again, kind of a natural privacy, at least suggestion of privacy.

And these are my favorite, because in the fall, the birds come and, you know, it's just that nice lasting sort of hanging on to summer while the birds are picking at those seeds, they look really nice and like they do, I guess they really do.

The squirrels get in ours, and that's entertaining, because they hang on.

They can hang on for dear life and send it down.

Very nice, very nice.

Everything here looks so good.

I wish this was how my garden looked at home.

Yeah.

So there's more, more things that looks like it's a radish from the seed.

And no one picks and eats from this garden, right?

This is all just for look.

It's all just for show.

If they, if they pick anything, they probably donate it.

I don't know for for sure on that look at that idea.

Yeah, the garbage can.

Isn't that cool.

Well, yeah, use what you have, what you've got space for.

I've always wanted to do a toilet in our front yard.

Absolutely not.

But if I find a toilet somewhere like I'll keep an eye out for you.

Okay?

He's just gonna come home one day and it's gonna be there with lovely petunias overflowing out of it.

And if you've got some fruit in your yard, this is a great example of a very, very mature, yeah.

Raspberry is a great example of raspberries that have got some fruit on it.

Raspberries can be confusing, because there's a couple different kinds that are out there in terms of when they fruit and how they fruit, and some of them have the first year, I don't know, I didn't find the tag on this one in there, somewhere in there, and I'm kind of scared to look for it, but some of them will come up with a cane.

First Year that doesn't have any fruit on it, and then the second year is when they produce perfect Andrew found it our lovely assistant, heritage, I don't know that one off the top of my head, so thanks our lovely assistant, yes.

But at any rate, sometimes, if you have ones that are fall bearing, they will produce.

They will produce on the in the spring and in the fall.

The spring will be the second year canes, the first year canes will produce in the fall.

Gotcha so, it gets kind of confusing, but you should just how I manage it is whatever's green, keep it in the spring.

And they have a really nice trellis system here, just using some like, metal T posts.

You can see it's heavy.

So they're not, they're not messing around here.

The idea garden, they got cable.

I've got, like, twine at home, they've got metal cable.

So the idea is that you're going to keep the fruit, the canes are going to grow kind of arched over the that cable is going to keep it off the ground.

You don't want the fruits to be laying on the ground.

It makes it they're more likely to rot, they're more likely to step down any, any number of things.

Gotcha, other things can reach.

It makes it easier to pick if you keep it off the ground.

Okay, so just lifting this up will completely bring all of the plant up and all right, gotcha, you may have to adjust it.

Sometimes they get slack over the years and such.

But this is very nice, very nice.

When you're picking berries, how do you know which ones are ripe and ready to eat?

Is it the color?

Do they twist off easy color and they're soft and they come off easy with raspberries, you kind of leave a little stump behind.

There is a particular fruit fly, Spotted Wing Drosophila that sometimes takes up residence on overripe berries.

So this is another one that you want to keep up with the harvest so you don't have that nobody likes fly larvae in there.

No fruit.

No we inherited a black raspberry bush at our house, and the fruit has been delicious.

We've been eating some of those, but I wasn't really sure about how to take care of it.

And so now I'm glad we bumped into this one, because there are a few, I don't want to say branches or vines, that were on the ground, so I will be picking those up.

Getting them off the ground is a great idea I have when I've been ambitious about actually taking care of them, versus letting them do their own thing, which is a lot of times what happens fertilizing them in the really early spring, that sort of thing you can get, you can get do a deep dive on all sorts of maintenance on berries, for sure, awesome.

And there's a blackberries over here on the fence that we wanted to go check out too.

Just look at the lovely grapes on the way, just part of the scenery.

Okay, so now we're gonna go check out the blackberries.

Yeah, they've got a really nice trellis for their blackberries, and this is absolutely, if you're gonna, if you've got raspberries and blackberries, and you've got to decide to trellis one or one versus the other, you absolutely should trellis your blackberries, because these vines, wherever they touch, they're going to root in, into the ground.

And that might be a great thing initially, but at some point you're going to be like, you're going to want to get control in that area of the situation.

This is also a thornless variety, which is really worth investing in.

There's lots of thorny ones out there.

If you've ever tried to pick blackberries in the thorny patch, you will understand why thornless is such a wonderful, wonderful development for blackberries.

I completely destroyed my Blackberry patch one year by mistake, because this first year you get these primocanes that don't have any flowers on them.

They're just greenery.

And I got mixed up with my I have fall bearing raspberries that will form on both the primocane and the fruiting floricane, floricane and the primocane both first and second ear canes.

So I cut everything off, and I had no blackberries for two.

So leave that, leave that, leave that.

And then the second year you'll get the canes that have flowers on them that this will develop into fruit.

So these are loaded, yeah, later in the summer, that's going to be delicious.

They will be all right, guys, well, thank you so much for coming.

Andrew and Margaret, thank you for letting me borrow your mom on this lovely summer morning.

And Jen, it's always a pleasure.

Thank you so much for coming in and thank you so much for watching.

If you've got questions for us, you can send them in to yourgarden@gmail.com and we will see you next time.

Good night.

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