- Hi, thanks for joining us for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South, I'm Chris Cooper.

Monarch butterflies attract attention.

Today we are going to be talking about these small garden visitors.

Also, we will be planting blueberries That's just ahead on The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

- (female announcer) Production funding for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South is provided by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

[upbeat country music] - Welcome to The Family Plots, I'm Chris Cooper.

Joining me today is Mary Schmidt.

Mary is the Backyard Wildlife Curator at Lichterman Nature Center, and Mr. D will be joining me later.

All right, Mary's always good to have you here.

- It's great to be back.

- All right, so let's talk about Monarch biology.

- Yes.

- Yeah, I'm looking forward to this, this is gonna be interesting.

- So Monarch butterflies, Danaus plexippus is the scientific name.

- Okay.

- But a really interesting insect that we have learned a lot about just in recent... history.

So what's really interesting about the monarchs is they are long distance migrators.

- Okay.

- We're gonna talk a little bit more about their migration, but we didn't really figure out where they were going in their migration until the late '70s.

So it's rather a new phenomenon that we learned about, relatively recently in history.

- Okay.

- So let's say January, February, wintertime.

- Okay.

- Down in the Central Mexico trans volcanic mountains, there is one type of fir tree, an oyamel fir tree that the monarchs are spending their winter on.

Late January, February, it st arts to warm up a little bit, and all of these monarchs take off from this trans volcanic mountains, and they're headed back to the United States.

- Wow.

- So their migration gets really interesting.

So I think the best way to explain it is by following one butterfly and then her offspring.

- Okay.

- So we have this butterfly that has spent her winter down in central Mexico.

February, early March she reaches the Texas coast, the Gulf Coast.

She finds milkweed, which is the only plant they're go nna be laying eggs on, and she lays her eggs and then she dies.

- Wow.

- Okay, so then we have her daughter is one of those eggs.

- Okay.

- She hatches.

She actually migrates a little bit further north.

She lays her eggs, she feeds, and she ends up dying about four weeks later, okay.

So now the granddaughter, we're following the granddaughter.

She also is going to feed on nectar sources, migrate a little bit further north, find a mate, lay her eggs, she dies after about four weeks.

Now we're at the great-granddaughter, and she probably is somewhere up in Pennsylvania, or maybe even further north ar ound the Canadian border where the limit of milkweed is.

- Okay.

- Okay and this is when it gets really interesting.

- All right.

- Instead of her migrating further north, she's actually gonna start migrating south.

She's not going to find a mate and lay eggs.

She's actually gonna live somewhere between like six and eight months.

She's migrating all the way back to where that original butterfly was in the trans volcanic mountains.

- Wow, how about that?

- So it's only this, what we call super generation, fourth or fifth generation of that original butterfly, that is making that 2000 to 3000 mile journey back to Central Mexico, this multi-generational migration.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- So they don't spend any time in the United States in the summer?

- Well, in the, so usually starting about August through late October is when they're migrating south.

Now, there are a few populations that are overwintering in Florida, and I should mention that when I'm talking about this long distance migration, it is just the Eastern population of monarch.

So just east of the Rockies.

- Okay.

Got it.

- In the Western United States, there are monarchs.

They don't do a long distance migration.

They migrate down to Southern California.

- Oh, okay.

- So two distinct populations.

What we're mainly talking about is the Eastern population, the one that does this long distance migration.

- Long distance.

- Yes.

- Without a car.

- Right.

Yeah.

- How about that, so yeah, insect, how about that?

That's amazing to me.

- Yeah but it's funny that you mentioned a car, because one of the things I tell people they can, you know, if we were driving to Mexico.

- Yeah.

- We would have to stop along the way.

- Yeah.

- Refuel our car.

- Right.

- Eat food ourselves.

- Eat, right.

- That's what monarchs have to do too.

But instead of gas stations, they're stopping at what we call way stations.

- Good.

- This is one of the main ways that people can help monarchs on their migration.

And that's putting in the fuel for the monarchs, and mainly that's going to be nectar sources.

- Got it.

Okay.

- Okay.

So what we wanna be planting is we wanna be planting the spring-blooming stuff for when they're first migrating north.

Things like phlox and blue star are early blooming ones when they're first passing through.

Then on their fall migration, we wanna be planning things like blazing stars and goldenrods that they're gonna be stopping at on their Southern migration.

- Got it, so in order to understand their flight though, their journey, they had to get tagged, right?

- Oh, right, so that, remember I said that it was a recent discovery.

We figured that out.

And how we figured that out was by tagging butterflies and finding those so we would tag them in the United States, and then eventually they found some of those tagged butterflies at that overwintering site, so that's how we figured it out.

- Okay.

- That project is still ongoing.

We still do it at the Nature Center.

- Okay.

- We're tagging southern migrating butterflies in the fall time, and we put a little sticker on them, and it's through a program called Monarch Watch.

That tag has a unique number th at identifies that individual butterfly, so we know things, if it's recovered, we know how long it took to get to wherever it was recovered and the distances that they're traveling, things like that.

So it's a citizen science project too, so you don't have to work at a nature center to do it.

Anybody can go to Monarch Watch and purchase tags and tag monarchs in their area.

- And we actually have a video of tagging monarchs.

I think somebody here might have done that video for us.

- Maybe.

- All right.

- So can we talk a little bit more about that life cycle of the monarchs?

- Sure, so the life cycle is a complete life cycle.

So that means it goes egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, adult.

- Got it.

- And what the only host plat, or the only plant that they're laying on is milkweed.

- Okay.

- The females can lay probably close to 400 eggs.

- Really?

- And they are typically lo oking to just lay one per leaf per milkweed plant, that's not always the case now.

And what we're encountering is we don't have enough milkweeds to support all of that.

- Right.

- So we're seeing multiple eggs on plants and on leaves.

So one of the things we can do to help them when they first are arriving back is planting native milkweeds to your area.

- Okay.

- So there are a variety of milkweeds native across the United States.

So look up what's native in your area and plant those so the monarchs have a place to lay their eggs.

- Yeah.

That's good.

So you have- - So this is a milkweed.

It's still early in the season.

So our milkweeds are just coming up, but there's a variety of native milkweeds.

This one is called butterfly weed.

Some of our favorites in this area are common milkweed.

- Okay.

- We also have one that's called swamp milkweed that does really well, it seems to be a favorite of theirs.

But all across the United States, I think around 70 different milkweeds.

- Wow, I didn't know it was that many.

- So wherever people are, they can find a milkweed that's native to that region.

- Good deal, so what about tropical milkweed?

- So, tropical milkweed is a plant that is gain, has gained some traction, especially here in the Mid-South.

- Sure.

- But we're encountering some issues.

So tropical milkweed is not native to the southeast.

What's happening is it's a great plant to have around.

It blooms a long time into when the monarchs are migrating south.

What's happening is monarchs are stopping and laying eggs instead of continuing their migration south.

We think that the reason that super generation lives so long is because they're not laying eggs until they migrate back.

So if they're encountering tropical milkweed, we think it's stimulating them to start laying instead of continuing to migrate.

So my recommendation, natives, of course.

- Yeah.

- If you really want the tropical, cut the blooms back when the monarchs are migrating south, or move that plant inside if you can.

- Gotta ask you this, so the attraction for the monarchs, why are people interested in monarchs, you think?

- Yeah, so I think part of it is they're big colorful butterflies, but I think it is a lot of their biology.

At least that I find that so interesting, their migration.

- I do too.

- Their host specificity.

So only going to milkweeds.

And they're ones that we can attract to our gardens too.

- So it looks like we need to help out the monarchs.

- Yes, absolutely.

Yeah and we, like I said, we all have a little bit of space.

Or we can contribute time to citizen science projects to help the monarchs.

- That sounds good, Mary, that was great information.

- Yeah.

- Appreciate that.

Yeah, the migration is just so interesting to me.

- It's so interesting.

You're thinking they only weigh a couple paper clips.

They're making this long distance migration and how they know to travel down to that one region is still a mystery that scientists are working on.

- And see, that's what I wonder, how do they know to go there?

- I don't know, it's, you know, they're, we know a few things about, you know, they use their antenna for orientation, but how do they know to go to that one region is still a mystery.

- Wow.

Thank you much.

- You're welcome.

- We appreciate that, Mary, it was great information.

[upbeat country music] The freeze of 2022 here in the Mid-South was devastating.

We planted this rosebush about four years ago.

Look what the freeze did to it, right.

And the question that we're getting now is, how can you tell if my plant material is dead or not?

Well, let's see.

You just try to bend back some of these limbs here, and they just break off like this.

Chances are it's dead.

And as you can see from this rose shrub here, it's pretty dead, right.

But if you look at the bottom of it, you see that it's growing back from the root stock, that's your indicator, right.

So that actually means that you can prune back all of this dead tissue here, all of these dead stems, and just let it come back.

[upbeat country music] All right, Mr. D, we're out in The Family Plot garden.

Blueberries.

- Blueberries, one of my favorite crops.

- I like blueberries.

- They're easy to grow, they grow well in this area, provided you plant the right type.

- All right, okay.

- And they have very little insect and disease pressure.

Just really, really neat fruit to grow.

- What's the right type?

- Right type is a rabbiteye type.

- Rabbiteye.

- And unfortunately, if a lot of the stores sell highbush type, which work well in higher elevation areas of Tennessee, like the Smokey Mountains, but you need a rabbiteye type, and you have a list of those varieties.

- I do.

- At the Extension Office.

- I sure do.

- What we have here, blueberries require cross pollination, so you need at least two varieties.

And we have Tiff Blue and Climax here.

They're two of the more popular blueberry varieties in the southeastern United States, they're proven, they do well, it's what I've got at my house.

- Okay.

- And they really do well.

Time to plant blueberries is, you know, preferably when they're dormant, but November to march.

- Okay.

- So we were barely squeezing in on the late end of the planting season.

- Okay.

- I'm gonna plant 'em in a, I'm gonna dig a hole, pretty wide hole, not much deeper than, you know, I wanna make sure they're not planted any deeper than they're growing in the pot.

But I'm going to add sphagnum or Canadian peat moss to the planting hole.

For a home garden it says two gallons of Canadian or sphagnum peat moss to, and mix it in with a soil at the planting hole.

- Okay.

- If you're a commercial grower, it's two or three shovel fulls of peat moss in the planting hole, the bottom of it.

And then plant 'em, and we're gonna do it the commercial way.

And when it says two or three, three.

That means three.

- That's what, yeah.

- You can't get too much Sphagnum peat moss in a planting hole, and if you have planted blueberries without putting sphagnum peat moss.

- Uh oh.

- And they're just kind of sitting there and they're not growing, dig 'em up.

- Put it in there.

- Put peat moss in the ground and plant 'em on top of it, because the peat moss holds moisture, and it helps this young plant grow because it increases the water holding capacity.

It also is more acidifying and blueberries are, they do best in a very acid soil.

- Acidic.

- 4.8 to 5.2.

- Which is low.

- I prefer 4.8.

- Right.

- So your blueberries kind of need to be off to themselves because they're pretty much the only plant in this garden landscape that needs an acid environment.

- Okay.

- Azaleas and camellias if you know, you can have your blueberries around your azaleas and camellia or azaleas and you'll be okay.

- Yeah, that'd be fine.

- But you need to keep 'em away from our blackberries and our other fruit trees and the figs, peaches.

Almost all the others require a high pH, you know, six, 6.3 or something like that is better.

- How about that?

- But in a commercial planting five to six feet apart is what they recommend planting them in a row.

- Okay.

- With the rows being 10 to 12 feet apart.

Now give yourself some room 'cause this rabbiteye type blueberry can get up to 20 feet tall if you let it.

- Wow.

And you can kind of control that with your pruning sheers.

- Okay.

- But give yourself some room, I know we've got, we're already marked out here, and I think we have 'em 10 feet apart is what we have 'em here and that way you'll be able, there'll be individual shrubs and you can walk completely around them and pick 'em and, and prune 'em and all that and that would be the best way to do it.

If you have room, don't have room, plant 'em five or six feet apart, and you'll have about a 8 or 10 foot shrub.

- Geez.

- You know, long.

It'll be long, you won't be able to go between them.

They'll eventually grow together and intertwine together.

- I think you'd be best going around them.

- Yeah, if you have the room, I prefer to do that.

So we've got our spot marked here, and I guess I'm ready to, let me kind of.

- Let me move this one.

- Get it outta the way.

- Yeah, get that old Bermuda outta there, right?

- Yeah.

- Cut it up a little bit.

- Score the sides.

- Yeah.

- Even though I don't think we got too much clay here, I'm wanna make sure that the roots don't have any trouble penetrating.

- All right.

- Okay, I think that's got it in pretty good shape.

So I'm ready to add my sphagnum peat moss.

- Peat moss.

- Two or three good shovel full.

Watch out, it's a little dusty now.

- Oh yeah.

- Which will help the wet soil we've got, that's one.

- All right.

- Two.

- Two.

There you go.

- Three, we'll go with this Tiff Blue.

Check the roots out.

- Ah.

- It doesn't look too root bound.

I don't think there's any need to do any scoring.

- Not too bad.

- I'm just gonna plant that just like it is.

- Okay.

- Let's see that.

Look about the right depth.

- I wanted the, you know, the same depth that it grew in the nursery.

- All right, let's start adding the soil back.

- Now, do you like to pack it in as you go?

- Nah, not really.

- I know some folks like to do that.

- What I need to do is water it in after we get it set.

Gonna have a, have to fight the Bermuda grass.

- Oh yeah.

- Of course Poast, does a pretty good job.

And it's cleared to use on blueberries.

Be very careful with Roundup.

- Oh, very.

- Around any fruit.

Roundup does strange things to grapes and peaches and things like that so I just kinda, I prefer not to use Roundup around my fruits.

- Now why you doing that, what about fertilizing?

Of course, you know, it already has fertilizer.

- Yeah, don't fertilize the first year, blueberries, you can do more damage over fertilizing than under fertilizing.

- All right.

- So go very light.

Do not use ammonium nitrate.

It's better not to use nitrate forms of fertilizer.

If you, when you add your nitrogen, probably need to use ammonium sulfate that will lower the pH because of the sulfur.

Kind of a rule of thumb with planting blueberries for me, is to take off about a third of the growth.

I'm not gonna worry about a third, but I am gonna take off all the fruit and blooms because this first year, I want all the energy to go to growing and plant, this little blueberry has fruit, quite a bit of fruit on it.

- Yes it does.

- As you can see.

- Yes it does.

- And it really handicaps the plant if you leave it on here, it will make it grow off a lot slower.

All right, time to add a little sulfur.

- Okay.

- Like I said, I think we need to drop it one hole point from about 5.8 to 6 to 4.8 to 5.

And that is three tenths of a pound of elemental sulfur per 10 by 10 foot area.

And so we're gonna fertilize about a 10 by 10 foot area.

Got it, I've got it pre weighed out here.

- Okay.

- I just, that's kind of, I want it to be as uniform.

And I'm gonna stay up wind, I'm sorry camera folks.

That's a few clumps here.

And I'm gonna step on the clumps and break 'em.

It takes a pretty good while for this to change the pH for it to get completely mixed in the soil, but it is water soluble.

So we ought to be okay.

We've got our, we've done two of the most important things.

We've applied sulfur to lower the pH, and we have the sphagnum peat moss in the planting hole.

- Right.

- So this blueberry's well on its way to being successful.

- All right, Mr. D, we appreciate that.

- Good deal.

- Can't wait to see what looks like later.

- All right.

- All right.

- Good deal.

- Thank you.

[upbeat country music] - You notice this plant from the nursery has got some broken branches, and we can prune these out.

And you'll notice this makes this one shorter.

We take all these broken branches off, put 'em, cut 'em at about a quarter of an inch from the stem, and you notice this one here was, I cut about a quarter of inch above a bud, these buds will break and fill out this area.

If half of this plant was gone, I would get an, pick another plant but this one is okay, because it's got a nice radiation of stems coming out.

And we cut off the broken branches and there's still enough branch left to fill in the area that is broken off.

[upbeat country music] - All right, Mary, here's our Q and A segment.

You ready?

- Ready.

- These are great questions.

- Great questions.

- All right, here's our first viewer email, interesting.

"I have a Japanese maple, "which I believe is an Acer palmatum China.

"One of the branches of my Japanese maple appears to have "died during the winter, what should I do?

"It is on the south facing side of the tree.

"The tree is in filtered to full sun year round.

Thanks," and this is Ricky from Corinth, Mississippi.

So you have any suggestions for Ricky?

- Yeah, so give it some time.

- Some time, patience.

- You know, we had a, yes, we had a couple late freezes this year, so give it some time and see if any growth starts appearing on it.

And then we talked about the scratch test.

- Yeah, so I would, you know, peel back the bark if you can, scratch it, if you will.

See if there's any green tissue there.

If there's any green tissue, then you may be in luck.

So I would practice patience at that time, right?

- Yes.

- No green tissue, I would still wait a little bit just to see if they will form some buds on there.

If it does not, then I would prune it off.

- Sure.

- I would do it at that point, Mr. Ricky, but patience, patience, scratch test and I think that'll help you out.

Thank you for that question, all right.

Here's our next viewer email.

"I need some help with my roses.

"It is now winter in Michigan, "but come warm weather in summer, "I get little green worms on my plants.

"Can I use neem oil to eliminate th e green worms on my roses?

This is thanks," Jan from Michigan.

Ms. Jan, I know a little bit about those green worms, right because I grow roses at home.

I have a lot of roses.

And every year I always see the rose slug, or the rose sawfly larva, that's what this is.

They feed on the underside of the leaf.

Most people are looking at the top, they feed on the underside.

They can skeletonize your leafs, right?

- Yeah.

- So they eat in between the veins.

Okay but the thing about this is, if those plants are healthy, they can withstand that damage right, now if you must control them, we are gonna talk about low impact pesticides.

You ask, could you use neem oil.

You can use neem oil, you can use horticulture oil.

You can also use insecticidal soap.

But you have to target the larva stage.

That's why the life cycle is so important, read and follow the label, that'll do the trick.

- Yeah I think so too.

- That will do it.

So thank you for that question, Ms. Jan. Yeah, I know a lot about that.

All right, here's our next viewer email.

Mary, this one is interesting to me.

- It's an interesting question.

- "Are pet dogs and cats a threat to wildlife?"

And this is Sue from Covington, Tennessee.

How do you wanna address that?

- Well, I have dogs and cats, so- - Okay, there you go.

- I'm a fan of them.

- Okay.

- But I'm also a fan of wildlife.

- Okay.

- And they, I think dogs and cats can definitely be a threat to wildlife.

- Okay, so you do, okay.

- The most important thing is with cats is keeping them indoors.

It's, might make a couple people upset, but cats have a natural instinct to go after things that are moving.

- Right.

- You know how a lot of people play with like feather dusters with their cats?

- Yes.

- It's imitating the movement of a bird.

And so it's their natural instinct to go after birds and small mammals.

A lot of times, especially if it's an indoor cat or a cat that comes in and out, they don't need that as food.

So it's just entertainment for them.

US Fish and Wildlife estimates that outdoor cats kill billions, with a B-- - With a B.

- Billions of birds and small mammals every year.

- Every year.

- Yes.

- Wow, how about that?

- So a bell, some people say, I have a bell on my cat so it scares the animals away.

Cats are smart and sly and they can move without, you know, making that bell make noise.

- How about that?

- So keep your cats indoors is the best possible thing.

- Right.

- As far as dogs, you know, dogs on leashes when they're outside, if you're not in a enclosed area or a dog park, don't let your dogs chase geese and other wildlife, those animals are spending energy getting away from your dog when maybe they should be sitting on a nest or feeding or something like that.

So I don't think dogs and cats are a threat to wildlife if they're leashed and kept indoors.

- Leashed and kept indoors, wow.

Not billion though, I'm still on that with a B.

How about that?

- Billions.

Yeah.

- All right, Ms. Sue, yeah, so again, you know, Mary, has cat, dog.

- Sure.

- Right.

- Indoor cats.

- Indoor cats.

- Leashed dog when it's outside.

- All right but you love wildlife at the same time.

- Absolutely.

Yeah.

- All right.

That's good.

Thank you, Mary.

- Thanks Chris.

- Appreciate that.

All right, thanks so much.

Remember we love to hear from you.

Send us an email or letter.

The email address is familyplot@wkno.org, and the the mailing address is Family Plot 7151 Cherry Farms Road, Cordova, Tennessee 38016.

Or you can go online to familyplotgarden.com.

That's all we have time for today, thanks for watching.

If you want to learn more about monarch butterflies or planting blueberries, head on over to familyplotgarden.com.

While you're there, ask us your gardening question.

Be sure to join us next week for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

Be safe.

[upbeat country music] [acoustic guitar chords]