Hello and thanks so much for joining us for another episode of MidAmerican Gardener.

I'm your host, Tinisha Spain, and joining me in the studio today are two of my pals to talk about all things green and growing.

We've got a blast from the past here.

So Kelly, introduce yourself.

Reintroduce yourself.

I guess, for those who may not remember you, hello, everyone.

My name is Kelly Allsup, and I am a horticulturist, and I am passionate about trees, urban agriculture.

I love cut flowers, I love insects gem I love tropical house plants, and I've just one of the things I think that horticulturists were also we love growing plants, but we also kind of love the artistic side of it.

So I've been doing a lot of cocodama This spring, just to get my juices going.

I guess I'm ready to get out there.

Yes, so I did a cocodama ball with an asparagus Fern, and it is using the dried, preserved Spanish moss, but the Spanish moss is quite expensive, so I've been using the burlap as a cheaper alternative, and this one is a bromeliad in the back.

And I would just consider this one sort of like a flower arrangement, because it's not going to last forever in this ball like this.

It's going to be very hard to get it to bloom again.

You know, it's, it's, it's one of those flowers that you get from the grocery store.

These other ones are cuttings from house plants that I took.

I think these are going to actually probably last a year, maybe maybe two years, if we're really good with the watering and the fertilizing.

So when I pick it up, this one's pretty light.

I'm gonna just soak that water, soak that in water, and, you know, hope they do well this summer.

So is the entire root ball, like on the is bromeliad.

The bromeliad.

Bromeliad is that entire thing wrapped in burlap, just a big burlap.

It is wrapped in burlap.

And, you know, I just made a kind of mud ball around the roots, and then I put it in the on the piece of the burlap, and let it dry overnight, because, you know, I'm working with mud, and mud and burlap don't go very good together.

So then I put a newer piece of burlap on the outside of it and start wrapping it with the string, which the burlap is great, because it, you know, matches the burlap twine perfectly.

Very nice, very nice.

And then to water them, you just dunk them.

I just dunk them and let them sit until they're fully, yes, and then take them out.

That's why they're kind of like, look really cool in a dish.

Yes, you know, you have a your grandma's old, you know, tea cup, and, yeah, put it in there.

I don't know.

I think they're lovely.

And Jennifer Nelson has come on and made them, and we did like some copper wiring and hung them, yes, and I've seen them in plant stores, kind of hung up and used as decoration to add desks so that, I mean, that's a really cool, fun craft, introductory craft for people like me who are not really yes and you know, I'm experimenting, you know, these, these are cuttings, you know.

Just have fun.

Yeah, wonderful.

Okay, we'll be back to you.

Introduce yourself, Jim and tell us a little bit about you.

I'm Jim Appleby, retired entomologist with the Illinois natural history survey.

So I deal with the insects and mites attacking trees, shrubs and flowers.

I ended up with two insect lovers.

Yeah, were you on the same show that she brought that giant hissing cockroach?

No, no.

I'll never forget that.

I will never sure he's held one before.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so you're going to be talking about Hollies, right?

Yeah, I'm really interested in Hollies.

I have quite a few on my property, and so if we could show that program made up a program on Hollies that are appropriate for the Midwest.

Now we have the mount American Holly.

Now in the Hollies you have male and female trees.

So a Holly is a tree.

If you go to Washington, DC, they have some beautiful Hollies around the federal buildings, but they're really nice plants.

Then the others are the Missouri Hollies.

Again, you have male and female bushes, and the one that's really popular right now is blue princess.

That's a female and.

Then blue Prince is the male.

Another popular one is China Girl.

And again, you have female and China boys, and they male.

Now with the holiday I get this information here, both male and female plants produce flowers as well as nectar, and male flowers produce pollen, and that's really necessary in fertilizing the female flowers.

When various insect species such as wasps and bees and flies, when they visit the male flower, they get contaminated with the pollen, and then when those same insects visit the female flower, some of that pollen is dusted off on the female parts, and then you get fertilization.

So it's really important that if you want to have red berries in the fall that you have at least one male and at least one female.

You can always have several female plants, but you always have to have that combination.

Now with the American Holly, I really like American Holly.

It's traditional Holly for the holiday season in the winter, it has nice broad leaves, green in color, has those nice red berries.

The problem with American Holly, though, in the Midwest, they just simply do not do very well.

I think it's probably our climate.

If you go to the eastern states or the western states, they have much nicer holly trees.

But I think if you have the space you want to have a American Holly, at least one plant, or two plants.

If you want berries, you have to have two plants.

But they're really neat plants.

Now the problem with American Holly it does have some insect problems, and the worst insect problem is the holly leaf miner.

It's a fly that causes this that slide on the on the left hand side.

When the eggs hatch, fly eggs hatch, the larvae are very tiny.

So if you're going to control this pest, you really need to do when the mines are very, very tiny.

This next slide in the middle, you can see how much damage they can cause to the holly.

And then that third slide to the right, that's when the mines are really extensively big, and they cause a lot of you know, if you have a dinner and you want to put some holly leaves under the candlesticks, you don't want him.

You don't want those.

So if we could go to the next slide.

So I just gave you some aspects of the life history of the holly leaf liner that left hand side.

I took a pen and removed the the skin that's over the larva there, and so the fly larva over winters in the leaf during the winter months, and then in about April, they the larva changes into the pupa, stays, and then in May, the adult fly emerges.

Now they're about the size of a fruit fly, and after mating, the females then deposit their eggs and the leaves, and the eggs hatch, and they start mining the leave.

Now, if you want to control this pest, and it can really cause a lot of damage, you can just prune out the infested leaves and burn them, or put them in a compost pile and put soil over top, and you don't want to use any spray when the flowers are in are on the plant, because you know you want to.

You don't want to destroy the insects.

If you use chemical sprays, there are several that are available.

If you use those sprays, you want to probably do it in late May or very early June, when the mines are very tiny.

There's a couple different sprays that are on the market.

This one called Bio advanced three in one insect disease and and mind control.

The ingredient, that's first ingredient there is in the chloropread, and that's a systemic and so if you look for the any labels, be sure that you get a label that has that.

The next one is Bon eye.

That's a systemic it only contains in the chloroprene.

So any of those would be really good to spray with controlling larvae.

So what I really like, I really like this variety of the Meserve Hollies.

The nice thing about Meserve Hollies are they're leaf minor resistant.

And that one here, called Blue Princess, you can see all the berries on that plant.

I really like that plant.

It does very well in the Midwest.

The other is a China Girl, which is a female and, again, male and female, but it has a little bit lighter leaves and berries are very compact.

I show you this plant because I had a fellow that called me up a couple years ago, and he said, You know, Jim, I have three beautiful Bush Hollies in my property, but he and his wife are so disappointed.

That every fall they get no berries.

I said to him, Well, you got either all male plants or you got all female plants.

You have to have a combination, or you don't have any berries.

So I told him to look at the flowers and the mayor.

And you can see here the male flower, it has the pollen.

Nice, green, I mean, nice yellow pollen, and then in the center of the flower, it's hollow tube.

So that's how you can tell if it's a male flower.

And the next shows the female flower, and you notice the center now is filled, and there's no hollow tube, there's no yellow pollen, and so that's a female flower.

So you, if you will, look at the flowers sometime in in late April and early May, you can tell which sex you have, but it's very important to have both male and female.

If you want the berries, you got to have both.

Have to have both.

Excellent.

Well, thank you, Jim.

Now if, if you want to use those under your your candles for dinner, make sure you get the ones that haven't been pestered by the holly leaf, the holly leaf miner got it Okay, all right, Kelly, we're going to go back to you now.

This.

This question kind of cracked me up, because we've all been there.

This is from Sally Newberry.

My brother planted tomatoes in January.

He brought me some plants to care for because he ran out of room.

I have 29 plants under the lights, and they're getting very tall there.

She's in Danforth, Illinois, and can't plant outdoors until May, obviously.

So she's wondering what she should do with this abundance of very leggy, very I think 29 plants is a lot to take care of.

Over the summer, she's going to give some away, apparent clearly, six weeks, like Tanisha said, six weeks we one of the things that I would do is I would either I would pot it up.

That would be my first thing.

And when you think of a tomato plant, it's a vine, so it's going to root along the entire stem.

So I would even pot it up as hot as planted, as deep as I possibly could, plant it in maybe a gallon pot.

Yes, I understand that's 29 gallons of tomato plants.

But you're really that.

You're really, you know, getting a jump start on the season by planting a gallon tomato plant.

Or you could let them sort of limp along, get them closer to light, because the internode stretching means they're not It's not bright enough.

And then when you plant them in, may you plant them either deep or you plant them in a trench, so you lay them down and, you know, cover up all but the top leaf horizontally.

But I feel like some I understand that tomato is the number one garden plant, and everybody wants tomatoes.

I agree.

I love garden tomatoes, but there's a lot that you can be working on now, instead of nursing your tomato plants along, you can plant things like cilantro.

Which fresh cilantro on a salad or, you know, dinner is amazing, and spinach, and I like to just broadcast the seeds, because, you know, cilantro and spinach and lettuce and all that, I'm going to thin the seedlings and have eat it along the way.

And so I don't really have to worry about that.

Another one is beets that I think is a really cool root crop to grow, perfect time of the year.

The one thing about beets is these are a dried fruit and they're not the actual seeds, so it can be very beneficial to soak your seeds overnight.

I did not know that with your beets, and then you'll get better germination.

Another thing is, I like to pre germinate some stuff.

So I'll just put it in a paper towel, a wet paper towel, put it in a plastic bag, and wait till I actually see it germinated, and then I'll plant it, and then the carrots.

The thing about the carrots is, what do we do?

What's the biggest problem when you plant carrots is, can I answer, yeah, I did not dig deep enough and I did not loosen enough.

And so the carrots were because they couldn't grow straight down.

I mean, definitely you want to think about the roots of any plant is going to go down seven inches.

So, you know, for these carrots, yes, even though these ones that I picked out, I do not think are going to go down seven inches, gotcha.

But that is a great that is.

Great soil is always good.

Preparing your soil is amazing for planting any vegetable crops.

But one of the things that they're really tiny seeds, and so you get them, and you you plant them, and then you have to thin them, and you're like, there with the tweezers trying to thin these.

And so you can mix them with sand, and that can help you thin the seedlings out a little bit more so you don't quite get them all together, because they're not going to produce a carrot if they're all there's a whole bunch of plants together.

You're going to have to go through and pull coal, what we call coal seedlings, and I eat them and make pesto out of them.

So, yeah, just things you can do now while you're waiting that are so easy.

And onions, oh my goodness, plant them and walk away.

I agree that if we don't get a lot of moisture this spring, we're going to have to water a little bit some of this stuff, but, and then when you're germinating seeds, you're going to, you know, make sure you water them consistently.

And then once they've germinated, walk away.

Walk away and forget it.

Yep, love that.

Okay, thank you.

Miss Kelly, all right, Jim, we're back to you and these.

Oh, you want to do the flowers or the cicadas?

I have also, besides Holly, on my land, I grow a lot of daffodils.

The reason I grow daffodils, there are deer resistant.

The deer absolutely will not nor rabbits will feed on daffodils.

Now, at this time of year, these are pretty badly new.

I cut them yesterday, but you see at the back of the flower here this enlargement, once the Bloom is done, you want to cut that below that, that enlarged area here, this is you want to cut it below that, because this is where the seeds are produced, and it does sort of weaken the plant, the bulb.

If you let it go to seed, it's better if you cut this off.

Now, most of mine, I don't I got so many, it would take me forever to do that, but if you just have a few daffodils, cut that off.

So so it'll focus more.

Yeah.

And so, you know, there's these plants, like daffodils.

Snowdrops are another one that the deer don't like those either.

So I have a heck of a deer problem.

I mean, I used to, but not so much anymore.

They chew up everything on now, let's say have great big heavy duty fencing around my plants.

Then you have a problem.

Now, do they eat tulips?

Man, that's just the best.

That's the best snack.

I did not know that.

So Jim says, I'll show you.

I'm going to grow daffodil.

Yeah, daffodils.

That's the secret.

That is just grow something they don't like.

You know, I did that with my bird feeder.

I quick story.

I was having a horrible time with starlings, just just just rough housing and just being so aggressive to all the other birds.

And so I went and got safflower seeds, and immediately all the fighting at the feeder.

Stop.

Now it's just chickadees and juncos and sparrows and yeah, that's really a great Yes.

So for those of you out there who are and the squirrels don't like them either, ah, good tip.

Yeah.

So safflower, yeah.

And I did an experiment.

I left one feeder full of the song bird mix and then one of safflower and all the ruckus is over here.

You're a real scientist.

I try, I try, citizen science.

Citizen science.

Kelly, let's keep on that same vein of what is too early a two and not to do.

There was a question in here about cleaning up the garden.

This was the question was written in the fall about moving everything.

But now that we're in spring, can we start to clean off some of our flower beds, or is it too early?

What are your thoughts?

There's two, there's there's two thoughts to gardening.

You know, traditionally, we've always, yeah, you could start cutting back the dead.

Usually, once I see spring growth and I see something green, I can go ahead and cut it back and get rid of that old growth.

And a lot of gardeners still do that.

And you know, they're getting those that those leaves out of the landscape.

But you know, there is another school of thought that you're thinking about, you know, the pollinators and the beneficial insects, and who is overwintering in your garden?

And there are insects there.

So you know, if you're throwing all your garden refuge on a compost.

Piled and maybe you're not hurting all those insects, but if you're putting them, you know, on the road, then maybe waiting a little bit longer.

Or one of the things that you can do for bees, spring nesting bees, is, if you have, you know, stems like Joe pie, weed or sunflower, you can actually cut those stems open, and spring bees will make their nest in it.

So, yeah, usually, just for the plant's health, look for the new growth.

Once new growth, you can take it away.

You can, you know, keep it as long as you're willing to keep it, if you really love the pollinators and the beneficial insects.

Okay, Jim, anything to add there from your No, I think I totally agree with, Oh, you got a co sign.

Hey, that's a good day.

I'm happy.

I'm happy with that Absolutely.

Now, we had another question about reseeding Zinnias, and there was another one about Mexican sunflowers.

So for those of us and I, there's a patch I left up too.

Can you depend on those to reseed themselves?

If they drop seed there they will, they will reseed, but they're not going to germinate until it gets really, really warm.

Gotcha?

Okay.

Usually you go and you pop the seed heads off when they get dry, and you bring them inside, and then you can, and then you can, you know, seed them out during the warm weather.

But you know, if they do germinate on the ground, it's going to be when it's really warm, when it's warm, so it's going to probably be past when you want to see them, of course.

But hey, that's okay.

Volunteers are great.

Yeah, they're free.

We love them.

They're and, you know, they may not volunteer quite as perfectly as you would plant them, yes, and there may not be as many as you want.

So look all the caveats.

Or, you know, you walk out there and you have sun Mexican sunflowers everywhere.

Either way, you'll get to enjoy them.

Yes.

Okay, we've got about five minutes left.

Jim, did you want to talk about your cicada damage, the cicada that are the gift that just keep on giving.

I want to show you here.

This is on burning bush, my burning bush.

And this person came in and wanted to know.

Another person wanted to know what was causing this damage.

Here you can see, I don't know if you can see that right, but it's very rough looking.

And this is the damage that the female cicada did last two years ago, in 2024 we had a tremendous emergence of the 17 year cicada as well as the 13 year cicada, and when the female inserts her eggs, they cause that kind of roughness here.

These are healing over now, of course, the wound is healed over now, but you see that roughness, and that's caused by a cicada injury that was done two years ago.

Did you have a huge emergence of the 13 in this area.

We have the 13.

You go further north and around the Chicago area, they have the 17.

But last in 2020 24 we had both the 13 as well as the 17.

Year occur.

I mean, that doesn't happen very often.

No, I think the next one is in like, a couple 100 years.

Very unusual to have both of the occurring in the same year.

I went to Chicago during that summer, and they were dripping from the trees everywhere.

Yeah, it was intense.

As a non insect person, it was not a good time for me, really.

I was fascinated.

I'm sure they were like, falling on me and hitting me at track meets.

And I was just like, when is this going to be over?

So I did not enjoy that emergence, but I'm glad you guys did.

I enjoyed it to know it, yes.

Well, thank you guys so much for coming in.

Kelly, thank you.

In a while, don't be a stranger.

Don't be a stranger, and if you have questions for Jim, Kelly or any of our other panelists, please send them in to us at yourgarden@gmail.com or you can look for us on socials.

Just search for MidAmerican Gardener and send your questions in there, because it is go time.

It's time to get outside and get your hands dirty, and we are so excited to help you get your garden and your landscape in order.

So send us your questions and we will see you next time.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Good night.

A quick shout out to the folks who organized the 2026 Vermillion County Garden Day.

The event was held March 14 at Danville Area Community College, and it was such a fun event to be a part of.

Vendors were on hand to sell plants, pots and some of the most unique garden art I've seen.

This was an all day event, and in the afternoon, I had the pleasure of hosting a panel discussion with three amazing pros, Chris Benda, the Illinois botanizer, Dr Jim Angel, former Illinois state climatologist, and Dr Jack McCoy lecturer of horticulture at the University of Illinois.

What is something that you have in your garden every year that's not negotiable?

Well, Tinisha, you know, I move around a lot, so I don't my gardens are changing all the time, but I probably have to say it is a pepper.

It's chili pepper.

Yeah, I know it is.

I know I always will play around with a weird variety of chili pepper, because I really think that there, I spend a lot of time in my career studying chili peppers, and now there's a special place in my heart for just observing a strange new pepper.

Thanks so much for the invitation, and we hope to see you all again next year.

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