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 is our friends, Karen and Ella.

They are in the studio to talk about all things green and growing.

Today we've got a lot to cover, so let's have you guys introduce yourselves, and off we go.

I'm Ella Maxwell.

I'm a horticulturist.

I'm working part time at a local nursery.

I'm also a master gardener in Tazewell County, and I enjoy perennials and just all things gardening.

Wonderful.

Karen, Hi, I'm Karen Ruckel, and I'm a horticulturist, and I'm based out of the Peoria area.

And I love house plants, gardening with perennials, and I love pruning, pruning.

Okay, we don't talk near enough about pruning.

That's right, all right.

So it looks like things are wonderfully in bloom in your yard.

Oh, it's gorgeous right now.

So the first thing I'm going to show this was Karen's idea, is because I have all of these different kinds of daffodils, and so the reason that I plant daffodils is that no one eats them so and they multiply pretty rapidly, but people just think of yellow daffodils, And there's so many more varieties out there.

And so there are, there is Daffodil societies, and they have Daffodil shows.

And I don't really know that much about it, but it's, it's interesting.

So we're going to say this is the quintessential yellow daffodil.

And when the Daffodil has what they call a it has a kind of a trumpet shaped cup.

And when it's they have a split cup.

It's this one that looks like this.

Now this is kind of a bicolor where these back petals are different than the front, but it is kind of interesting there.

So that has that open face.

And then you can have double daffodils.

And so I have a number of beautiful double daffodils.

And so you can see that they just give so much interest.

And then all the different bi colors, the pure whites, I think I have a pure white, yeah, pure white.

And then these different bi colors.

Where did you plant those specifically, or do they change and just kind of bloom, how they bloom.

Once they're established, they bloom, how they bloom, they do not change.

So these are all different cultivated varieties that over the years, I've picked up either packaged or mail order.

And then there's all kinds of little daffodils.

I think this one's called Jack snipe.

And I pronounce this one Thalia.

It's a little bit later blooming.

I think this little one is poeticus.

This is like a pheasant eye daffodil.

But I mean, there this one might be cheerfulness, like I can't there's never so many, but yeah, and so again, for me, the daffodils are easy care.

Plant in the fall, bloom in the spring.

Allow the foliage to turn brown naturally before you remove it.

Sometimes I do gather it up and put some rubber bands around it, but people are saying that maybe that's not the best way, but it seems to work really well.

So these are some of my favorite beautiful daffodils from the garden.

So question about those, do you have to ever go in and divide them?

What type of maintenance Do they require?

Well, that's the beauty of them, is I do nothing.

We love that answer.

One thing about daffodil bulbs is each year the bulb gets larger and larger, and then it sends off little offsets so they could maybe become too crowded, but it doesn't seem to really reduce the blooming potential, where, if you have tulips, that whole bulb has to be replaced.

And again, I have a few tulips, but they are more favored by rabbits and.

Voles and and deer and wildlife.

Gotcha.

Okay, so beautiful to look at.

Thank you.

All right, Carol.

And one last thing real quick, remember that daffodils don't like to be in a arrangement with other cut flowers.

They secrete a kind of gelatinous sap that can be antagonistic to some other flowers, so it's best to just show them on their own, maybe with some greenery.

Okay, good to know.

All right.

Would you like to do your photos or photos would be fun do that.

Okay, well, Ella and I, we love pruning, and the last couple years, I've been helping her prune in her yard, and she's got a lot of boxwoods.

And so we've brought in the past that we do sheets in our garden, and we do a bed sheet, and we lay it around under the plant so that when we prune it, we can catch all the clipping.

So then this last time, working in her yard and trying to position two sheets around the ones, yeah, I'm like, Oh, certainly, we can have something better.

So I decided to come up with, well, let's take a big sheet, and I cut a hole in the middle of it, and then one cut out of it so that then we can swoop the sheet around the whole shrub.

So then you just have one to lay down and one to pick up.

So I've got pictures here of my little boxwood.

He probably didn't need to be pruned, but I laid the sheet around him.

So then you cover everything.

Just have to be careful stepping around.

And then once you've trimmed it, then it falls onto the sheet, and then we just have one to pick up, rather than two sets of the drop cloth around the plant.

Yeah.

So then I decided, well, with this, I picked up a king sheet, I don't know.

I couldn't conceptualize size, and then I'm like, using out in the yard, like, oh my gosh, this is too big.

So I think my next Thrift item will have to be a full size sheet.

I think that'll be a little bit more manageable, well.

And then I wanted just something fun pattern, because, you know, why not?

Why not.

And then the finished product nice and lightly there.

Yeah.

Now what do you when you are doing this?

What are you going for?

Just kind of removing the stragglers?

Or how do you prune?

Well, my intention with my boxwoods in my yard is they're only there for winter interest, nothing else, because I like flowering plants and the perennials, so they're there just for structure.

So my intention is to keep them as small as I can through the years to not take up the space that I've want for my other plants around it.

So I'm just, I'm trimming them, really, to the point that I can't take them back any further, and then I let them flush their growth through the rest of the year.

Now, if they have kind of odd sprouts through the summer, I'll snip those back, but usually just once a year I give them a haircut, very nice.

And Karen's pruning is just wonderful.

She has a neighbor next door who didn't prune any of his boxwoods, and he's going to have to replace them because they are I showed him last fall.

Yeah.

So, yeah, that, you know, once he pruned him, he just had to scalp him because he couldn't take him down any further right, where mine are, like, 18 inches tall, and they've been there for quite a number of years, 17 years, I think, now, yeah, a long time.

Oh, you know, start some plants you can fix later on if they get too big other plants, like evergreens, you've got to manage them when they're younger to keep the size.

I'm kind of gotchas from getting kind of oversized.

But like I said, I don't want them big.

They're just there for green and winter.

Excellent.

Okay, great technique too.

All right.

Miss Ella, we are back to you.

What do you want to Oh, we've got, we have a question from a gardener.

Do you want to read that from Marla Primrose?

Sure.

Okay, this is Marla and Beth--Marla from Bethany.

A few years ago, I planted a perennial garden with mostly native and Prairie flowers I got from the U of I Extension Service.

Two summers ago, a friend contributed Yarrow and some Primrose.

It was late summer, and they were pretty much done blooming.

And I thought I'd be lucky if they survived.

Last spring, I developed a health problem that kept me out of the garden all season, and the primrose took over.

I didn't realize they were so prolific.

She wants to know if they're invasive.

Loves how they look, but wants to have a little bit more control over them.

So I know you guys talked about this on your drive over, right?

That's what I want to bring up.

Is that our viewer or, I mean, the email question that we got without the picture, which at the time I wasn't able to see, but have since.

Mean is that she is talking about what I would consider an evening primrose.

But when I read the question, I was thinking of the spring blooming Primula, the garden Primrose, much different plants, and I could not, for the life of me, figure out how it could be invasive, because sometimes I have trouble keeping it alive.

So then in the ride down, Karen saying, Oh no, she knew right off the bat, which I didn't know, but it just showed that from reading it and not having a scientific name, we both assign two different plants to it, right?

So common names some kind sometimes can be quite confused.

Well, necessary.

You know, common names can be confusing from where you grew up or what you called it to.

You know, botanical names are, everyone can recognize that.

But for her question is, some of these different plants create communities together, and certain plants are better behaved than others, and this evening primrose will never really take over the cone flower.

The cone flower itself, the plant should come up, but what it might do is, because it spreads more quickly, the seeds from the cone flowers may not be able to germinate to create more of a coneflower community.

So I think her best bet is she needs to be able to recognize the plant early in the spring, so that she can dig and divide or share that wonderful native plant.

That's how she got plants, that's how she can pass along plants to someone else.

And I do know that it can grow from seed.

Now, I've never had it re seed, have you?

I've never had it in my yard.

Oh, okay, well, so if she's concerned that it's coming up from seed, maybe she wants to after it's done flowering, just cut off so that it doesn't set seed and spread even more, but I believe it spreads by underground rhizomes.

So for Marla, I hope that you're feeling better and that you can get out in your garden.

And that's one thing where we find that, you know, flower gardens take work.

They do three years, one season, even prairies, you know, need to be burned or mowed and and there are much more aggressive plants, so you need to understand that.

And now you have information that you can share with others about sharing this plant, saying, you know, it could spread now time wise, is this a good time to dig and divide, or should she wait?

Oh, no, now is a wonderful time.

Now, I think it's a great time.

And there's all these spring community plant sales.

And again, I think, of course, it's always buyer beware, and it's always nice to be able to recognize the plant in the various stages from early spring through summer into fall, so you you know what you're buying.

Excellent.

Okay, great advice.

All right, Karen, we are back to you.

Looks like cannas.

Cannas.

Yeah, my favorite, yeah.

I love the canopy.

So I'm a little late this year doing this, but I try to do this because in the springtime, cannas want to be out when it's warmer.

They don't like a cold soil when you've kept them inside, because in our area, we've got to lift them.

I know my brother, one of the older cannas, he was actually one winter over wintered outside and came back up, but putting them back outside, they don't want to sit in a wet, cold soil, so you have to wait, and then, you know, then it's going to take while for the foliage.

So pre sprouting them at this time of the year is great.

So I just wanted to talk about, sometimes we bring stuff and it's all done up, and it's like, Well, what did they do?

So you don't need much.

What you're just trying to do is introduce a little bit of moisture with the soil for the Canna to sprout it up.

You're not gonna grow it in this.

You're just getting it kind of woken up.

So I just took a pot I had laying around using coffee filters, because then it'll biodegrade, and you don't have to worry about getting that little piece of landscape fabric out.

And then, for ease of showing just putting potting soil, and not not a ton of potting soil, and you want a little bit moist, and then just take your Canna that you've got the root, and knowing that it is alive, it's got a nice eye and a couple spots, and it's still really thick.

To it firm, not firm.

Yeah, it's not dried up and shriveled.

And then at that point, I'm just going to shove it down into the potting soil and not really even have it buried like what you planted outside, but just having it in contact so that we can start developing roots.

This will start sprouting.

And we just wanted a little bit more weight than when we put it outside when it warms up enough.

Now I was gonna have, I had a question in my head the entire time you were talking, and then forgot it.

Oh, are there other plants that you can pre sprout like this?

Yes, dahlias is one.

I follow this Facebook group, Facebook group, and man, like little bit wacky, but they they use a baggy method where they take the plastic zip lock bags I've seen, put soil and then put the tubers in there so that you can watch to see, okay, are they rotting?

Are they okay?

Does it show disease?

So I actually have a couple of mine.

Well, they weren't ones that I overwintered because I killed them, unlike Ella, but the ones I've bought that are alive are sprouting that way.

Yeah, and I pre sprout my dahlias, but I do them all in a large tray crate, yeah, so that it's open, but I line it with newspaper, just like she uses the coffee filter.

I just line it with newspaper, and then I put a very thin layer of potting soil, or soil down, you know, and then I set all my dahlias in this crate, and then cover it and I set it outside.

And I'm going to do that next week after this kind of cool temperature, but the crate then could be brought inside if we get cold temperatures, but they pre sprout, just like Karen's glad or cannas do, and then I can take them out of that loose potting soil and then plant them into the garden, and they do really well.

Two questions, do you need light for pre sprouting?

And do you need to harden off before you plant them out?

Yes and yes, because once they start to form the leaves, if you don't have light for them, then you're going to just get stretchy growth, and that growth is going to be very weak, tend to get powdery mildew, or flop over, or, like with the winds we're having, just torn apart.

And yes, you do need to harden them off and slowly acclimate.

Ella's are pretty easy, because she's already got them outside mine.

I've got in a spot in the garage where they get some sun from a window.

And so when mine start growing, then I would put them outside during the day, bring them in during cooler nights, and slowly get them up to full sun and being out all the time.

Gotcha okay.

And did you have anything else to talk about, which is, I didn't want to Well, it was just with the Canada sometimes even the tiniest little things.

You know, this is still a live bud or live eye, and so this can still grow.

It's not it's not garbage.

So sometimes in amongst what you've overwintered, you would think, Oh, this is worthless, but this will still grow.

Now, are you going to seal that bag and make kind of a greenhouse situation or leave it out?

Just leave it open?

No, because it's not in a bag.

Well, yeah, I just did this for bringing the soil to not know if you were like, tenting it to trap in the moisture.

No, because that that would actually then probably rot the cannon gotcha and the rhizomes like mine, when I checked them, I've got them all open now, because where I had them put to sleep for the winter.

There was enough moisture that now that we're warming up, they could start rotting if they sat there.

Gotcha?

Dark, warm, moist.

Not your friends.

No, not right now, no.

Got it.

Okay, wonderful.

All right, Ella, we're back to you.

Okay.

Well, another beautiful plant in my garden this year are the hellebores.

So this is hellebore Orientalis, and they have lots of different forms.

And sometimes, unfortunately, the flowers don't face up, they face down.

But you can have, you can have double flowers.

So I have a couple varieties here with some double flowers, and I do, I do have a double wide, I didn't bring that.

Or you can have the single flower.

And these are just beautiful, and you can float them in like a dish.

We usually do that your house, yes.

So they they can.

They can just float in water, and they'll last for quite a number of days.

Now, as a cut flower, you can, you can have them last a long time.

Time some in here were actually from last week when I showed them.

So the flowers that last the longest as a cut flower will be the ones that the centers, instead of having the pollen, they've already been pollinated, and the seed capsule is starting to form, but they still have this wonderful colored petals.

So these to be illegal.

Those still look really fresh and really pretty.

Now, some of these are brand new, but some of them are from last week.

So the other trick Karen shared this with me that she had seen is that you can take a knife and you can score, and that's what I did on these that are lasting for a week, is I you can cut in and they can take up water better.

Oh, so they can last pretty well as a cut flower.

So I just, I just think they're so beautiful.

So only bloom in the spring, only bloom in the spring.

The other thing is that they have big, kind of ugly leaves that that during the winter or green, but you broke those in a few times, right, right?

So again, I'm going to just leave some of these beautiful flowers.

And then in the garden, you mentioned that they face down.

Do they do they climb?

Do they spread?

Kind of they can grow seed, but they're just clump formers.

Formers.

So again, they're an early pollen source for pollinators, primarily bees, I think, and so I've had the single ones here make Let's see one of these had, oh yeah, this one has some really beautiful seed pods.

So Wow.

So here's the seed pod.

There's these four capsules here, and then inside of each will be several.

They eventually will turn black, but and they will turn the seed.

This seed will turn brown, and you know it's right, right now.

They're, they're, they're white inside, but the seeds are black.

And then they'll, they'll, because they turn down, they just drop.

And then they'll make more plants.

These don't really spread underground or anything.

They re seed themselves.

Got it, and they are lovely.

All right, Karen, I see you've got some some notes here.

Well, I was, I was just going to mention I wore earrings for for we're getting really close to hummingbirds showing up, so I'm so excited.

So I I always write out every year I have a list for myself of when I first saw the hummingbirds in my yard.

And I was talking to my sister the other day, and I said, Why are lilacs blooming?

Because she's down in Missouri.

And she said, Yeah.

And I said, Well, you know what that means?

And she's like, No.

And I said, you need to get your hummingbird feeder out.

The hummingbirds are going to be there.

So that's usually a good indication of when they've moved into your area more consistently because they need a natural or native stuff blooming is your Columbine blooming and the lilacs blooming.

So once you start seeing those, it's time to get your hummingbird feeder out.

And what I've done now the last couple of years, we've gotten so hot during the summer and the nectar can spoil so quickly and intense heat, I just put very little bit of nectar in my feeder, and I dump it out, usually every day or every other day, so I didn't have any mildew build up on it.

It stayed clean fresh, because I think now more than ever, we're having a lot more trouble with with birds in the wild.

Yo, doing what you can do on your part to keep what you're doing healthy.

Yes, yes.

It's almost time last year, it was April 29 that I saw hummingbirds in my yard.

So we're getting, hopefully they come a little earlier.

Fingers crossed.

We welcome them earlier.

We've got about two and a half minutes left.

Ellen, I see you still have a couple things over there that we didn't get to talk about, if you want to, well, I'll try to sure real quick.

These are called Seed spirals, or seed snails.

And what you do is you take bubble wrap and you lay moist soil on it, and you roll it up so it and then you can seed in here, and then the seed can germinate and grow down.

And then you, you know, you can unroll them and transplant.

So I think I'm going to try it.

Oh, you haven't planted anything in there yet.

I have not, no, I just, I just made these, and I was going to.

Make a couple more so that they could fit into the tray, and then I have, like a dome to put over the top for, like a little mini greenhouse.

But you could do, you know, vegetable seeds, tomatoes.

And we did have a question about saving seeds, and saving tomato seeds specifically, and and I think as long as the tomato is fully ripe, and then, you know, you've got the the membrane kind of and those seeds, and you some people will actually ferment that in water for a little bit to to get loose.

But sometimes I just rub it through paper towels.

And as long as the seed is dry, I store my seed, cool and dry some seed, I look up to find out if it requires chilling or stratification, and that's something that I might do in my refrigerator.

And some things like to be stratified dry, and some things like to be stratified moist.

So you have to know which variety with tomato seeds.

I think if you have the heirloom variety, it's really pretty easy to keep them for a number of years and they'll germinate.

We are out of time, but I'm very curious to see how that turns out.

So keep us posted.

Thank you, ladies, so much for coming in.

Thank you for watching send your questions into us at yourgarden@gmail.com, or look for us on socials.

Just search for Mid-American Gardener, and we will see you next time.

Good night.

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