Unknown: Hello, thanks for joining us for another episode of Mid American gardener.

I'm your host Tinisha Spain and Joining me in studio today is a longtime friend of the show Kay Carnes is joining us here today if you've forgotten because it's been a while since we've seen Kay, she's our herbs lady right in the summertime.

She's always teaching us how to grow our herbs.

And now that we are moving in the direction of spring, she's got some other things to talk about today seats, which we've been discussing a lot lately.

So exciting.

So Okay, before we get into all of that, introduce yourself, please and tell us a little bit about you.

Okay, I'm Kay Karns.

I'm Champaign County Master Gardener.

And I live up Monticello a little bit of acreage and gives me lots of time base to fly around with everything.

As a true gardener, right, space and time.

That's all we need.

Yeah, not even space a lot of the time.

Yeah, so now we can grow up.

So anywho Welcome back to the studio.

Thank you.

So what you bring us to talk about today, well is in the mood for planting.

Okay, so we still are thinking about seeds and ordering seeds.

And this is a seed that I from being I grew last year.

It's called Brinker carrier, and it's an old heirloom.

And it's called that because the Brinker family originally grew the seed.

And at some point in the 50s the offspring of the man, John Brinker, who originally started this gave the seed to their neighbors, the carriers and the carriers thought that the seed had been lost.

And so they grew it out and is now available commercially.

And it's a I love it because it's a pole bean.

But you can use it like a snap bean as well.

So if you pick them when they're young, in the seat is just starting deform, you can use them like like you would regular Bushby.

But these did really well for me this year.

The pots are about five, six inches long.

And they have about seven or eight seeds in them.

And flavor wise, can you describe what they what they taste like?

They taste pretty much like a green bean like a green.

Okay.

And then if you let them grow, of course the seeds will dry up and the pods dry off.

And then it's a very good soup be Hmm.

So it's kind of a dual purpose.

And I picked the I was still picking beans in October this year was crazy.

Yeah.

So you got a nice full harvest.

Yeah, so and the reason I talked about this because this is a good thing to do during the winter winter when you're don't have it.

Yes.

This is the pod when it's dried, I don't know if I can see that.

So you just split it open.

So that's something you can sit around doing.

And I brought a couple of other seeds from beans.

Because there's so many different varieties of beans and they're the they have a lot of different stories to and one of them a tea.

See, when you when you harvest these, they can stay in the pods until till you get dried I harvest them when they're dry.

Okay, like this, I let them dry on the on the plant.

And then when they're once they're dry, then I pick the pods and just put them in a bag and keep them cut usually you know what?

You're still busy in the garden and you don't have time to sit around with Sharpie and pot.

Okay, okay, I just wondered how long they keep.

That's awesome.

They keep forever.

So I brought a couple seeds.

I don't know, hopefully they can see these.

This little, the pretty colors.

It's kind of like it's white with kind of a rose or reddish color.

And it's called Mayflower and it's called that because the seeds came over on the Mayflower.

Wow, original seeds.

So that's kind of the fun that why I say everything, all the seeds have story too.

So you know, if you look into it, you can learn a little bit about history as well as about seeds and You're a big seed saver.

Yes, I am.

I think I have a spreadsheet where I have listed all like all the tomatoes and all the beans and, and I looked at it the other day, and I have about 50 varieties of bean.

Wow.

But I also wanted to talk about the one of the important things.

For me with feed saving.

There's a group called seed savers exchange.

They're located in decor, Iowa, and they have a big farm there.

And they have set up a seed exchange.

And I brought there this year, everybody who that offers seeds in this exchange gets this book.

And I brought this, this is their listing of all the seeds that they have.

And this year, there were over 400 people that listed seed.

And there were over 16,000 varieties of seed listed.

Now who's who can join, anybody can join, you can go online to seed savers exchange, and you can join, and anybody could order out of this book, okay, I would have to be a member to order see, and you're actually ordering the seed from the individual, that crew.

That's just what I was going to ask.

So they're the seats that you save will be buyer or potential buyers contact you is your name.

And yeah, my name is in there and what I have to offer my address and all my information and there's forms in the back that you fill out to order and you send that to the person and then the person sends you the seed.

And there's a small fee for the seed, I think it depends on the side size of the seed.

But you know, that help just helps the founder, or the person that's sending you the seed to pay for postage and thing, they're not making a lot of money on it, just trying to keep those varieties out there.

But it's a really amazing organization and on their farm course they raise all these heritage varieties.

And that it's not just vegetable seeds, they have trees, fruit trees, and, you know, potatoes and garlic.

All you name it, they grow it there.

And once a year they have like a convention there.

My dream is to someday go someday.

Convention, and how did they get the seeds?

Like for example, some of the ones you offer?

How do they grow those on the farm?

Do you send them to it?

You can?

Yeah, they might.

What a neat thing.

I've never heard of this.

Yeah.

It takes what we all do, you know, on a small person to person scale and really just blows it up?

Yes, it does.

It turns out there's going to be a small seed exchange in Monticello this this Saturday, I think, but this is just you know, this and it's a worldwide there's several, in addition to people from the United States offering.

There's offerings from three or four countries, Belgium, I think was one and some of the other European countries.

That's fascinating.

It is very cool.

It is it preserves these amazing, because you're looking to heirloom I am and that's what these all are Yes.

Can you explain what heirloom means?

For those who may not be familiar with the well, it's just a seed that's been around for a long time.

Like I said, That's it.

And they often have stories.

A lot of them come from Native American sources.

They've been founded caves that the Native American lives and and a lot of them came when people emigrated, that from other countries, the women in particular would sow the seeds into the hands of their skirts, so that when they got to customs, nobody.

That was how they brought their seeds to this country.

Awesome.

That is really cool.

Really cool.

Thank you so much for bringing that in.

Before we let you go.

We've got a question that was sent in by Stephen Casper.

And he wants to know, when it's okay to start tomato seeds indoors in the Chicago area.

So what's your tip there?

Hmm.

I would start probably April late, maybe even late April because they're colder.

It's, you know, colder zone.

But yeah, I would I should start maybe in late April, late April.

Okay.

Great advice.

Kay, thanks so much for coming in.

Great to see you back in the studio.

Good to see you.

Come back and see us.

Okay.

Thank you.

Alright, thanks so much.

Okay, and now we're going to our Skype guests.

Lauren Quinn is on the line today.

And Lauren, before we get into what you're going to talk about, tell us a little bit about you and what your favorite thing to do is as it relates to gardening.

Sure.

So I'm Lauren Quinn, I am a sort of retired botanist, and current mega house plant lady.

I started the group, the Facebook group cu plant people, which now has about 4000 members, people in the Champaign Urbana Urbana area who are meeting up virtually and in person to talk plants and swap plants and do everything plants.

Really cool.

Group two thing I think to answer your question, sorry, hopefully that can be edited.

But my favorite thing to do gardening wise is of course, be in my garden during the spring and summer months, but also be inside my house and do indoor gardening all year long.

Best of both worlds, right?

I like that in the office.

I call it the offseason, in the winter months, you've got the inside work to do and vice versa.

So always a good time.

Okay, so today, we're going to be talking propagation, which is a big buzzword, especially among the new plant folks who have taken up gardening and indoor gardening during the pandemic.

You know, we want more.

And so propagation is a way to do that right?

A little maybe easier on the wallet.

So what were you going to share with us today as it relates to propagation?

Yeah, I didn't end up with 150 Plus houseplants without doing quite a bit of propagation myself.

So basically, yeah, everything that you almost everything that you see as a house plant, in someone else's house or in a public area, can be propagated and brought home into your home house.

Of course, if you're in a public area, and you don't know the person whose plants you're trying to propagate, you always want to get permission, but you can certainly get take little snips of plants and bring them home and add them to your collection.

So one of the easiest ways to do that is to just snip off a piece of STEM and plunk it into some water.

So this is a little bit of an a very dated umbrella plant.

And you can see I've had it growing in water for several months now.

So I got to try to line it up.

And you can see it's got some nice roots growing.

I'll let those go a little bit longer, probably an inch or two at least, and then pop that up into some potting soil.

And then I'll have myself a brand new plant.

Same thing easy to propagate spider plants, they make these little offshoots.

And once you see them growing, you can pop them off the mother plant and stick them into water, and then make little roots for you.

So that's a really easy way to propagate plants, just by water propagation.

Is there a rule of thumb that you follow?

You mentioned, the root being you wanted it to be an inch or so are an inch longer?

Is there a general rule of thumb or does it vary from plant to plant?

I think generally people say an inch or two a little bit longer is better.

But and then often, I like to see a little bit of branching in the root structure before I plant them.

That doesn't always happen.

But it indicates that that there's going to be a little bit more structure in the roots.

And that they might be a little more ready to transition to soil.

So you want to avoid keeping them in the water too long, because then the roots kind of get too used to just the water medium.

And when you try to transition them to soil, it can cause a little bit of stress on the on the new propagations.

And when you are going to make those cuttings, can you give us a little bit of guidance on perhaps where to make the cut or how to do that how to go about getting a nice clean cut.

Yeah, so most plants that you see as houseplants grab one from behind me here.

This is my neon cocoas and you can see that each leaf comes off a system I'll get a little bit closer up here.

Oh, we got a live cut right on TV.

So not all plants grow in this in this fashion but a lot of them do.

So you'll see a long runner and where the leaves come off.

That's called a node.

So at each node, you'll see a leaf on one side and a little stubby root structure on the other side.

So that's called an aerial route.

And you won't always see them fully, you know, poking out like that sometimes they're kind of nubby.

and they don't look like much, but you want to get that underwater.

So what I would do with this cutting is I would cut two or three nodes worth, like that.

And I would clip off the bottom a leaf or two, so that when I put it in water, you know, the bottom leaf isn't stuck in the water, you know.

So that's kind of how I would do that.

And so that's that that kind of plant, some plants don't need to have that node in order to make the root structure.

And I can talk about that if you're interested.

Absolutely.

Yes, please.

Two days long with it.

Okay, so I think I've talked in the past about oil as being my favorite plants to grow.

And they don't require that node Exactly.

They need one node above the, above the soil, but other than that, they can grow roots from any point on the stem.

And here I have, this is a mega Wow.

You can see I play I put this pot, this little net pot, it's got a lot of holes on the sides and soil.

And I just usually clip a Hoya and stick it down into the soil moisture in the soil and then put it inside of my propagation box, which is a large Tupperware container filled with spagna moss that's kind of moist, and it keeps the humidity super high in here.

So over time, you'll see a lot of root growth out of the bottom of these net pots and it sticks to the stagnant so these aren't all the roots.

This is Spagna mixed with the roots, but that's incredible.

So that this Magnum is in in the bottom that serves is kind of I don't want to say the medium, but well kind of it well, the medium is the soil which is inside this plot.

But then outside, I kind of keep a layer of second loss.

Gotcha.

Very cool.

And practical.

I love that.

That's something that you can just run and go pick up.

Yes, duty calls, always duty calls.

That's all right.

Um, so tell us a little bit more about what's inside your, your bin there.

Well, it's pretty much all boys at this point.

This is a Hoya plaatse I Chiang Mai.

That's this guy.

Um, this is one that I've had.

I've had to reroute this a number of times.

This is a jolla Rotunda flora.

It's got extremely cute leaves.

I feel like very proud.

And growing a million roots as well.

That got several others.

This is a they call it crony Ana silver, but it's it's been reclassified as Lacrimosa, silver slash or silver, something super silver.

So there's just a lot of variation in the Hoyas as we've talked about before, do you keep that in?

Where do you keep it?

Do you keep it somewhere warm?

Do you keep I'm really interested in this.

I feel like I can get more bang for my buck.

If I've got a large container.

Definitely yes.

And I do I, I have a germination mat that I send the whole club on top of.

And then I have it growing, I have it sitting underneath the desk actually.

And under the desk, I have put a grow light, the sort of underneath so it's kind of out of the way.

But it has light and it has the warmth from the germination mat.

But you don't have to go to that extent, you can just put a tub like this in a sunny window, and that should do the trick.

Very cool.

Very cool.

Okay.

I've got a question for you.

This one came in from our email.

And let's see here.

All right, this is from Harlan and Vivian.

And if you're a plant parent, you've dealt with this before.

So here's the question.

My wife has several house plants in a south bay window.

We noticed several small NAT type insects flying around that area.

Could they be coming from the house plants?

And if so, how do we get rid of them the million dollar question.

So if you want to tell them what they're perhaps seeing, and maybe some tips, yes, so they're most likely seeing fungus gnats.

They're very common plant pest in house plants.

They don't do much damage to the plants themselves.

So I hesitate a little bit calling them a plant pest.

They do feed on I think the larvae feed on sort of decomposing material in the soil substrate.

And then they adults come out and fly around and mate and and the cycle continues.

They are very pesky indeed.

They just fly in in your face and they become very annoying, but again, they don't do much damage to your plants.

To get rid of them.

There are a number of you know you said the multi million dollar question because there's a million different sort of homeless remedies for these things.

But I think some of the best advice is to use one of these, or multiple of these yellow sticky cards, you can get these on Amazon or any place like that, you would peel off the white part here.

And this is a very sticky surface, you just stick it down into your pot and it collects the the adult house, the adult fungus gnats, and they just stick to this so they can't go on with their cycle.

But in addition to this, you also want to take other steps.

The main thing is to let your plants dry down more than you are probably the biggest issue is over watering your plants, because that creates the exact right environment for these fungus gnats.

So let them get a little drier perhaps.

And that'll help.

But then another product you could use is something called mosquito bits.

This is material that has a bio control agent in infused into these little nuggets.

And you can either sort of spread them on the soil surface and the material gets watered in when you water the plants.

Or you can put these in your watering can and kind of make a tea and let it and use that to water your plants.

And eventually the bacteria that's in there will kill the fungus snap Marvin, one more possibility if they're really out of control, and you just can't stand it anymore.

This is a systemic house plant, catch what I use, I had to bring out the big guns a couple years ago.

But, but of course with this, you want to avoid putting those plants outside during the growing season.

Because they will kill any beneficial insects that come come their way.

And we don't want to do that.

For inside, they're fine.

It's fine.

I love that you said that they're not they're not a real plant past.

It is a people past because I tell you they fly up your nose.

And if you get over there when you're watering or doing anything.

And I I got it when I moved my plants in over the summer and they were too wet.

And I watered I learned my lesson and let them dry down let them dry down.

Because that once you start that they're kind of hard to get a handle on.

Yes, once they're once they're established.

And I want to add what did help me as well.

I don't know if you've seen these I'm sure you have the little tabletop machines.

Oh yeah, it's kind of I don't know how to explain it looks like a canister but it kind of sucks them out of the out of the air and pulls them right into the canister.

Yeah, I wanted to mention one more thing, which is a little bit outside the box like that.

This is a carnivorous plant called a butter wart and it has very sticky leaves and so it's it kind of serves the same purpose as these guys but it's a living thing.

And so if you plant a bunch of these around your the plants that have the worst issue with that your fungus gnats will stick to these leaves and get digested by this.

Now that's cool.

Are there any other plants in that family that are similar that you could be?

Well there's a bunch of carnivorous plants I'm I'm I know about these for fungus gnats, but I'm guessing things like Sundews and stuff would probably do the same job.

I haven't grown though, so I'm not as familiar but probably a lot of Yeah, very cool.

And what about so we're coming into spring?

Just to put you on the spot a little bit.

What are you looking forward to growing I did a little poll on Facebook on See you plant people and I'm an American gardener and overwhelmingly tomatoes one as the number one can't wait to get my hands on fruit or vegetable.

So what is it for you?

What are you waiting for?

Cherry Tomatoes, cherry tomatoes.

Now what is it about cherry tomatoes.

They're just so sweet and scrumptious.

And just picking them off the vine and eating them by the handful is he's great.

Last year I planted two in buckets in in my backyard.

I don't have a lot of I have a flower garden but I don't have a great space for veggies.

And so I planted them in buckets and I just didn't have enough I need more.

More cherry tomatoes.

Okay, wonderful.

Well, Lauren, thank you so much for coming on the show.

I really appreciate your time.

And we'll have to check in on your propagated plants as they're growing and and see how things are going.

So thank you for stopping in.

Thanks, Lauren.

And you may remember last string we went to Ellis house was just about this time last year and she taught us how to make maple syrup using the sugar maples that she had on her property.

Well I've got some sugar maples at my house as well.

So we decided to give it a shot.

And so we ordered some taps and tapped a few of the trees added our place.

So I put together a quick video to show you how that went one weekend.

So here you see my husband.

We've already drilled the hole in and he is putting the taps in the tree and it immediately started to run which was great because we knew we had done it properly.

In just a few hours, you'll see here in the next one that we had already collected a I mean, that's a good 1/3, maybe almost a half gallon there of SAP.

As time went on throughout the day just kept collecting more and more and more the trees were running really good.

This one was from the next morning, I emptied it about five in the evening.

And that was the next morning when I went out.

So that tree ran really well all day.

Ella had the two roaster pans, I just have one because we're going to this is our experimental year.

So dumping those in a roaster pan, just letting that water cook off of there.

There you can see I'm emptying another one and that one was totally, totally full.

And now we wait.

So when that finishes up, and we'd get that nice caramel color and the consistency that we're looking for, I'll know it's ready, and I'll have to bring in a sample.

show you guys how it all turned out.

So wish us luck.

That's it for today.

Thanks so much for watching, and sticking with us throughout each iteration of the show.

Thank you so much to today's guests, Kay and Lauren for appearing on today.

And thank you for sending in your questions.

And keep that up.

If you've got a question for us send it in to yourgarden@gmail.com you can also look for us on Facebook, just search for Mid American gardener and send us a message there.

And thank you so much for watching.

I'm your host Tinisha Spain and we will see you next time.

Good night