[Music] hello and thanks so much for joining us for another episode of mid-american gardener i'm your host tanisha spain and joining me today are panelists who are here to answer your questions and help get your garden off to a good start so before we jump in with shawntels and answering your questions let's have them introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about more more about where you can find them in the garden so jen we'll start with you hi i'm jen nelson and you can find me online at grounded and growing.com i am a general horticulturalist i can cover just about anything but my favorite things if i had to pick would be vegetable gardening house plants and gardening with kids is one of my favorites as well so hit me up with your questions okay all right marty hello my name is marty alanya and i'm a retired landscaper i focus more on perennials and shrubs and trees for the uh landscape privately for people i had a couple commercial jobs but you know really it's about the same you dig a hole you water it that's i i prefer that too i mean i've done house plants i do vegetable gardening but you don't want to ask me jen is like she's that's who you should wait i'm going backwards okay all right and again we've got another new face it's been a great month for new panelists uh chris enrouth is joining us so chris tell us a little bit about you your specialty and where we can find you outside well tanisha i am so excited to be on mid-america gardener i've watched the show for many years and hey now here i am so kids you can do it too um but i'm i'm a horticulture educator with university of illinois extension and i am based in macomb illinois and i serve four counties so mcdonough warren henderson and knox counties and i would say uh my specialty would be uh landscaping for the most part um but you know at extension we get asked all kinds of questions and so i'm not really afraid to tackle anything if you want to find me online uh me and my colleagues out here in west central illinois we have the good growing blog and podcast so you can find us just by searching for good growing and you can listen or read all about it awesome so we've got yours we've got grounded and growing and then marty's retired and living on the beach so yeah nice crosstalk that was the garden garden of eden there you go okay uh show and tells are always the first go around so jen you've got a couple things to show us uh what's your first one um well i went to the the nursery looking for um some more potting soil and i came home with plants which happens right it happens what i found a jade called uh crassula sporalis black curl and i don't know if i can get it in there the way it grows the way that you come out if you look at it from up above it's in a spiral and it's so different from other jays i've got this is crashlove ovada which is kind of the jade that everyone thinks of when they um hear jade plant but there's lots of different uh shapes and sizes of jade and i just found that in a random uh shelf of assorted succulents and so if you look closely fine you know when i looked at it the first time yesterday i immediately thought it was hin and chicks um from far away because it kind of has that same sort of look to it now will you keep that inside or will you move it outside i'll keep it inside and i put it with the other precious babies that are lining the walls of my kitchen so i'll sneak it in no one will notice right right now the million dollar question is did you get potted soil i did i did okay just making sure just making sure okay so marty we're gonna move to you your uh show and tell sort of goes with a question that we've got so i'll read that it is number 20. uh julia writes in and says i have an overgrown pot of multiple aloe plants how do i divide them and what soil do i use so julia it is your lucky day because marty's got one too so take it away marty okay i loosen this but it's been in here for a while i'm just gonna i wish i could be there to help you you look like you could use an assistant [Music] i had no idea it was so attached to its home oh my gosh should we should we join you back in progress this isn't yeah why don't you go all right we're gonna move to chris and we're gonna come back to you so maybe um all right chris we're gonna go ahead and move to your show-and-tell that's fine okay so you brought one and it's got photos uh accompanying it so why don't you go ahead and walk us through yours certainly and marty i am mailing you a hammer and chainsaw as we speak to get that out um so for my show and tell today what i have brought is actually a considered a lawn weed and um so pictured here is what's called nimble will now nimble will in my yard if it's green i can mow it hey i don't really care but nimble will's one of those things that really affects kind of that texture with the lawn uh you can see here we have our it's in the spring this picture was just taken last week the lawn's greening up the cool season grasses but because nimble will is a warm season grass this one is actually stained brown and straw brown color and it will green up it's starting to green up right now uh there's just a closer up look to it it has kind of like sort of a broom type top to it kind of a brushy top and there you can really see it there just a nice patch of nimble will and again you know if if you this doesn't bother you that's okay nimble will is actually a native north american grass and so hey what's not to love about that and there are some ecological benefits to this but it is also easy to control for the most part so i mean here's my sample right here i just pulled it out of the ground it comes out of the ground pretty easy roots and all um so it is easy to pull out of the ground right now but some folks you know once you do that you have to fill that void with something or it or another weed will just come back so seed put down some sod there are some chemical controls that you can uh apply to these and actually most folks they might just go with say a straight up glyphosate which is broad spectrum once again once you apply that oversee it or re-sod that patch and but there is a new post-emergent type herbicide you can't apply to the lawn which you can spray on these things while it's green and actively growing and that active ingredient is called misotrium most common product name i think is tenacity it's an expensive product and you don't need much of it so it might just make more sense to hire someone to come out and spray it for you if you really do want to control it uh but otherwise again if it's green you can mow it it's not that big of a deal it's still grass still grass but you know you've got that certain sect of people who want the perfect manicured look so great information for that i am not those people but great information for them okay so marty uh we've got you back you've got it divided now let's get you unmuted and back into the conversation because we have to hear how that wrestling match uh ended just a few minutes ago all right i didn't mute me in the first going off i don't know how that happened um anyway uh yeah okay um there's a lot of roots in this pot you may recognize the pot just a few moments ago so the biggest things the biggest growth style tore off cracked up or i cut them off so this is actually ready to go ahead and grow again i really didn't honestly got it right out of there i thought i have a great root mass on i don't know if you can hear let me move my camera a little bit and i have a little jungle here in front of me and uh i have another pot now you can i like this it's kind of a southwestern feel aloe's a you know kind of a succulent so i'll just run through a little bit of planting you can plant any of these some of them have a little bit of fruit you see there okay a little bit like that you can you can plant those would do this i would clean these if this aloe had come out of the pot in one piece like i figured it would but it didn't um live television get what you pay for on public tv um this is what happens so you can take a knife and you can just saw down through that soil ball and you can you can just cut it in sections and then you shake off the old soil and you can see what you have and this is what you're going to wind up with okay so i can repot this all the way down to guys like this those have roots on them i don't know if you can those roots are not very well these little little dudes take off any branches that are broken um if if you burn yourself smear it on there it works really great okay now i have this little pot i'm going to scooch everybody over i like to use coffee filters in the bottom of my pots do a couple of layers so i got two here but for a bigger pot with a great big like especially something going outside on your deck cover the hole with coffee filters make sure the soil is on it really nicely and then it won't leak out onto your deck you know you want to cut out same thing works in the house so i got a bowl of potting soil here i've got my coffee filter in there and with aloe you know you just kill the whole thing okay and then you take your little guy or a little guy and you put them in there now i'm not gonna do one in a pot like this that's not enough this pot is too big for one little guy like this so i'd have this guy and this little girl here and and this little fellow and maybe you know i i probably three or four this size and about like maybe even five and they're all about i don't know seven inches long eight at the most and they have a nice little full pot because when you repot things they can't go into a you know like oh the whole room they will not like that that's they need house plants do better with tight shoes container plants do better with tight shoes so if you repot go up one hot size and then it'll fit in there really nicely it won't get overwhelmed when you water it because there won't be too much water in the soil ball all right thanks marty and now we're gonna go back to jen for another show and tell jen what do you got okay i brought another succulent to show and i brought the more commonly seen one and then a more unusual one i found that jumped into my cart uh so this is more commonly seen it's called the common name is a string of pearls and it kind of looks like a bunch of green peas on a stem and it looks really nice when it's hanging down i will tell you though it's not the easiest succulent even though succulents have a reputation of being super easy i've killed this one at least half a dozen times but this one's doing really well so i hope i didn't jinx it so there's been all sorts of other ones coming coming out in stores that are following the succulent craze and i've spotted this one the other day and it's called string of watermelons and it looks like the string of pearls but a lot bigger and a lot more oval they have kind of a stripe on it supposedly if you get them in good light we're going to see if i can kill this one but um i want to point out that i've got it just in a regular plastic nursery pot and i found this pot that i thought was so pretty and it has no drainage hole you absolutely need to have drainage holes even if the pot's pretty even if you swear on those bibles that you're not gonna over water it you will eventually so tuck that tuck that drained pot inside and then when you empty water make sure you dump this out so it's not sitting in water especially succulents and especially these particular this particular group of succulents will die very quickly if they're too wet yes yes they are very difficult i haven't gotten brave enough to get one yet because i know i will kill it immediately so i'm gonna wait and mature a little bit more right into my planned parenthood sure and i only bought like i've only bought them small because you can see these great big beautiful planters of them that are you know 30 40 50 or more and there is no way i'm gonna just get my training wheels and get my little bingo bingo same here same here all right chris we're going to you with a bug id question this is number 21. this is from susan chapman and she writes in i want to follow up with you folks on what this bug is and what i should do about it to protect my flowers bees butterflies and hummingbirds i know this bug is not a japanese beetle and i don't wish to use the powder eight i've attached a couple of pictures to show what they look like um so she did send in a couple if we could show that um but what are your thoughts here on these flowers you know as we're our cone flowers are starting to come up and she um wants to protect them this growing season so what are your thoughts so just looking at that photograph there the color is a little bit washed out but i believe that is some type of a green type beetle uh sort of based on what i'm seeing there in our location in the midwest um and i i contacted a colleague ken johnson and he thinks this is a guess but we're sort of thinking this is a northern corn rootworm uh so this is pretty common when you live in my neck of the woods west central illinois uh and then depending where this collar was at you know if they're next to a corn field yeah they kind of show up at late part of the season they can be everywhere and they can feast on say the coneflower petals that's what they like to eat um in terms of control there's not much you can do for the northern corn rootworm now the picture that we just saw right there i think that's something different it looks a little bit more like a fungal issue something called botrytis blight um you can use uh registered fungicides so like let's see captain copper sulfate um maybe potassium bicarbonate uh our recommendations for like a fungicide spray when you you start maybe see some of that coloration show up on that that flower head there uh but really the key thing for most gardens is going to be sanitation so making sure that debris is taken out of the ground whenever you see that type of effect happening onto the flower head that those dark spots occurring on the cone um and just get rid of them put them in the trash can don't even compost them and then clean up the garden in the fall okay get them out of the mix completely yeah okay all right marty we're going to you number 16. this is about birds and the corn is from matthew what is a good way to keep birds from eating my corn plants this summer and you have a really unique idea that i liked about something we've all got sitting around the house so yeah it seems to work pretty well um birds don't like uh shiny stuff and um owls sometimes like fake owls if you have real owls well good but fake owls are fine but you have to keep moving them because the birds get used to them and they realize that they're just a statue or the same way with like uh scarecrows things like that but if you have old cds or dvds they're very shiny and you can string them on a string between some pegs i mean it this is as simple as like you know a piece of bamboo two feet long stick it in the ground every four feet put a piece of twine out string your string your cds on there and tie around so they'll and they will move and dangle and they they're shiny and iridescent and the birds are worried about them they're not sure what they are and then you only have to do that until the corn gets you know a little bit more when it's real tiny they'll pull them out but once they get a foot tall or something they'll be fine [Music] yeah yeah here's the aloe in the pot i've got about five little pieces in there um you arrange them around the edge and then you i poured the dirt in the middle put your other rest of my potting soil right down the middle i just and then i kind of shook them to get them in there they're very top-heavy just water it good be fine and they'll take right they're very resilient awesome and it's a good plant dish to have around the house for a host of different reasons so thank you oh yeah okay they're great let's see number 31 ammonia in the garden this is from jubal he writes my name is jubal underwood a second generation viewer so thank you very much um wants to know let's see here i'm going to skip through some of this would it be practical to use common household ammonia as a nitrogen source diluted perhaps and applied directly to the soil similar to agricultural applications of anhydrous ammonia the main purpose would be a sustainable source of nitrogen rather than store-bought fertilizer in addition to garden compost so first of all he is way more advanced than your average you know you're well i can't say you guys because you're the pros but he's put some thought into this so what are your uh what's your thought here what's your answer well my my thought on it is it's possible but it's probably not a good idea uh even the rate that he's suggesting is too concentrated what i was i was looking up to directly spray it on your yard or on your plants the recommendation is a half an ounce to a gallon so ten to one is still too too strong i wouldn't recommend it though because there's no time release factor in there you're just giving it a big push of nitrogen and that's not necessarily good for the plants i can also say from experience with a client back when i was with extension i had a client that very reluctantly admitted to me when we were looking at his tree and trying to figure out what was wrong with his tree that appeared to have fire bite and if those of you watching have heard us talk about fire blight before it looks like a a crook the new growth kind of curves over and it's dead and we thought he had fire bite but he was slowly giving us information and one of the things he admitted was that he had uh poured straight uh ammonia on his tree and that was why um the plant clinic could never find evidence of fire bite and they admit yeah it looks like fire blight but you know we got it it kind of looks like chemical burn too so yeah and i commend the viewer for asking us before he went ahead with it because it's one of those things that oh it's natural it must be somehow better but you can do a whole lot of to your yard just with the stuff in your kitchen so either one of you guys want to weigh in on that i saw you both very enthusiastically agreeing with jen so anything to add there for either of you well i was thinking um you know black nightshade's natural too but i wouldn't cultivate it eat those pretty purple berries you know yeah there's a lot of well all of our all of our products are natural at one point but yeah all right from you i would completely agree um you know i have had clients call the extension office that have inadvertently set chemical fires on their lawns because they mixed up the wrong chemicals from underneath their kitchen sink so please only use labeled products on your landscape that are meant to be used on your landscapes i hate hearing when people say they don't bleach on the ground or that they're putting ammonia all over the place just go to the garden center buy that you know he's talking about sustainable sustainability i mean really the sustainable thing if he's looking at a nitrogen source is organic matter as that decomposes it releases that nitrogen back from the soil that's all your plants are going to need great information thank you guys um and coming off of this cold snap marty we'll go to you for this one coming off of those few nights where the temperatures dipped we had a lot of people on facebook on instagram and in our email asking what do i do if i've got damage to my foliage um one particular question came in from let's find it this is christopher baxter writes in and says following the cold snap um if the ends of my hostas were damaged should i trim them off also well he says bulbs but that's okay also um can we can i transplant them so twofold what do you do if there was damage and then is it okay to transplant now uh transplant now um someone i i didn't kind of outside of town so i didn't have a lot of hosta poking through but some did and they got a little nipped you can you can turn that off if you want to but what i do is leave them i just leave them when has to grow they send up a leaf and then another leaf comes inside from the from the middle of the crown and they keep sending out leaves like that from the center okay and the one that comes early will still grow but the tip might be bad so once you get another leaf or two you can trim the old one off if you want to um they're hard to get canada so i'm not worried about no they're just they're not they're hard to kill you know i mean you feel like a horse you know so okay uh you if you see what they're coming up and you want to divide this a perfect time of year to divide them before things are completely unfold because they don't require as much it's the planche shock the transplant shock is less because the the leaves aren't out yet so um yeah just this um if you want a piece of a clump there take a sharp spade slice down here straight down get part of the roof take it plant it water well um you were talking about cultural practices at the beginning of the show and please mulch when you plant something um that's a it's it's a habit i'm trying to cultivate all i mean and mulching is so beneficial to your plant material it just is so much better than just the bare ground i mean unless you're planting unless you're planting sedum but even then i mean it just helps them a lot okay so all right speaking of best practices we've got about two minutes left um so jen what tips do you have for folks as we're moving outside to uh get things in the ground and ready to go what's what's the best best practice tip from you oh well i can say from experience as when i was a new homeowner and had a completely empty yard um i planted way too much in the space so pay attention to what mature sizes actually look like like get a tape measure out and as much as you can it does help to visualize that and anticipate that and if you really have to fill in that empty space because your brain won't let you um with some annuals in between those perennials don't cram them all in because i have spent a lot of time spreading them apart now so all right all right 30 seconds chris what about you best practices oh you got to learn how to clean those tools off every time after you're done with them not only does it help your tools but now with the new invasive jumping worm that is spreading around the state it could possibly save your garden uh from that new invasive creature that we have popping up around the state okay so mulch mulch don't overcrowd and clean your tools and on that note we're out of time so thank you all of you for helping out chris welcome to the crazy train uh well we hope to have you on more shows and thank you so much for watching if you have any questions for our pros please send them in to yourgarden gmail.com or you can look us up on facebook and instagram and we'll see you next time good night [Music] you