Hi, and thanks for joining us for another episode of Mid American gardener.

I'm your host Tinsha Spain.

And as always J ining me are two of our p nelists who are here to answer y ur question and show you some t ings that they have been t oling around with in their g rden.

And it's chilly out t ere guys, right?

Like fall is d finitely here.

Time change d finitely in effect.

So we are i a different phase of our g rdening lives this part of the y ar.

So, Chris, tell us a l ttle bit about you and what y u've been up to outside.

Certainly Tanisha thanks so much for having me today.

So I'm Chris Enoth.

I'm a Horticulture ducator with University of llinois Extension.

And I am ased in Macomb, Illinois.

And f you want to follow me around, ou can just search the internet or good growing Illinois xtension.

And you will find me log podcasts, all kinds of good tuff.

And I feel like Tanisha his time of year, we finally ot a fall frost, it seemed like t took forever.

But yeah, first art of November, it arrived.

nd I feel like that triggers omething in the landscape.

And ll the things start moving real uick.

And we started getting eady for winter.

And because it as such a delayed fall, we were lso dealing with shipping elays.

And our bulbs just now rrived yesterday actually that hat we ordered for my own home.

nd so it's kind of a good hing.

We had a delayed fall ecause of the shipping delays, t all kind of worked out.

So eah.

So this year, I am lanting three different types f folds.

And we're planting hem this fall for blooming.

Two f them for next spring and the ther for next fall actually.

So he first one I'll show is this lobe, Master Allium.

This is a assive bulb.

And so one of the ules when planting bulbs is to emember to plant them anywhere rom two to three times the eight of the bulb.

So this is oing to go in probably about ix inches deep into the ground.

o this is one of those big iant alliums, you're going to ind that next spring.

And then he other one is something new.

'm going to try this is a ulip, and the cultivar name is orld peace.

I just I saw that nd I'm like I need to plant ome world peace right now.

So let's have it in your own yard a little plot of real peace.

I wonder if I could do a peace sign or something and have that going in our yard.

So this will be blooming next spring.

And then finally, I will be planting this is actually a saffron crocus, which blooms in the fall.

It is the very saffron that is so expensive.

If you want to buy that spice, you actually harvest the anthers off the flour.

We'll see if I can grow it.

So it's a fun little experiment.

And those will all be going in.

Now ish.

If I can do it tonight.

I'm going to try so sometime here in mid November, I'm going to try to get these in the ground to hopefully before the ground freezes.

Okay.

All right.

And Ella, tell us a little bit about you and you brought some bulbs as well.

I did.

I'm Ella Maxwell.

I'm h re in Tazwell County.

I'm a Tazwell County Master Gardene and I'm also a horticulturis part time working now at hai nursery, and I plant mostl daffodils in my yard becaus they are the ball that is leas attractive to other like voles rabbits, deer, all of thos kinds of things.

So I plant an there's lots of varieties o tulips.

This is a large cup tulip and you can see th little, I mean daffodil, little offshoot here.

And so yo don't really want to break thi apart.

You're going to plan this and then this will probabl not be a flowering ball unti the following year.

But I lik some of the really little shor early daffodils like Valia an Jetstar and and there's, well guess thali is a white on that's a little later.

Bu there's lots of great varieties And I'm planting them no because they're on sale.

So I kind of choose them.

I do hav some of the saffron crocus tha he was showing and just a rea quick story.

I was in St. Loui visiting my son, and we wer driving and I saw this yard tha had fall crocus, the saffro crocus naturalized now, it was patch about Oh 10 by 10 and a first I wasn't sure what it wa so I made my son go around th block and draw a picture of i that's indeed what it was.

I has grass like foliage, and i blooms in the fall.

Now I'v seen I've seen kroku naturalized in the spring an people's yards, but I had neve seen it in the fall and and thi must have been, you know, thi was a very old neighborhood.

S maybe it's a very kind o unusual ball but and I thought Oh, wow, too bad.

It was kind o a overcast, cloudy day.

And s they weren't really open, bu they were up with the littl lavender like flowers.

And thought, Oh, this would b spectacular.

Sun came ou now did you go up and knock on the door because that's the ultimate garden creep is when you go and knock on a stranger's door and talk to them about their their landscape.

By the, the the I shouldn't judge but by the other plants in the landscape.

Currently, I did not think that they were a gardener.

And I don't think that they would have even realized that they had saffron issues in their yard.

Good story.

I love that you made your son go around the block, right?

The things we do to get a picture right if you didn't get a picture, right, it didn't happen.

So Right.

Chris, I want to go back to you because everyone's got their their tips or their, their their ideas, what do you do when planting in the fall to set your bulbs up for success for the spring, anything that you can add in there for gardeners any tips or tricks, I'd say first off, make it easy on yourself.

I do also have a bowl auger that I hook into a drill.

Now as you saw with that that Allium bowl, it's pretty massive.

And so I always when I go to buy one of these because you can have you know, half a dozen and you're still okay, that's a gardeners thing, you can have as many as you need.

By by the bigger one.

I think it tried to have the as big a hole as you can get for some of these balls.

Sometimes you try to squeeze them in too small of a hole.

And again, making sure you're getting them in that correct depth.

And knowing what side is up in what site is down is really important, as I just planted garlic with my four year old and we had the lesson of here's the basal plate.

This is this is the bottom Oh, you went to call you Tacna call him off young that's starting off young with the right terms.

And so just knowing which way is up and down, making life easier on yourself with the bull blogger, and then as Ella had mentioned, wildlife, squirrels, all kinds of deer whatever it is that attack your bulbs for my tulips, I can't wait to see what digs them up and goes to town on them.

I'm going to be using probably a hardware cloth or some type of physical barrier to keep that from happening.

Interesting.

Okay, lol, what about you tips and tricks for folks when they're planting their balls do you got do you use fertilizer, we'll start with that?

Well, I don't use fertilizer because I have a pretty good quality soil but you can certainly use bone meal and again, you want to place that below the ball.

So the auger is probably a good idea because you can drill a little bit deeper and then maybe put in following the labeled instructions, the amount of bone meal and then put some soil back and then put your balls on top of that and then cover it up and it is important to get it to the right depth.

Also, for those augers to really work you have to have a pretty loose soil if you have a heavy clay soil, and you can't use an auger when the soil is wet it you know you you see them using those augers and they always have just beautiful soil because so I'm sure Chris must have beautiful soil.

Yes, we have some some really good Illinois topsoil, but I will say I have felt the need for wrist and elbow braces when you hit like a root or a rock and the drill jerks out of your hands.

So having a drill that has an extra handle on it actually is recommended.

Yeah.

Oh, nice.

Great advice.

Okay.

I've got a show and tell it's not actually mine.

But you guys remember our old friend of the show Chuck Boyd.

We visited him earlier this summer.

And he walked us through his garden and he sent us I guess we'll call it a fruit of his labor.

I got this last night beautiful picture.

This is a champion purple sweet potato.

And he called it a seven pound monster so he was very proud of that sweet potato and sent us that picture now are they I mean questions about the size of that.

Is that going to taste different?

Is it bitter?

did he grow this for fun?

Can you eat a sweet potato that that is grown this big.

Talk to me about this guy's why?

I think you can eat a sweet potato that big.

I think he better invite everyone Yes, yeah, Bing.

You know that's, that's a whole casserole, maybe two, maybe two, a seven pound sweet potato.

Wow, have you Do you guys ever grow any massive vegetables in your yard just for fun or to see how big they can get?

I have not.

I have done sweet potatoes before and kind of to what Chuck saw there.

A lot of times with sweet potatoes you will get that massive that route down there that tubers storage Oregon there.

And a lot of times in off of that one, you're going to get your smaller, more normal sweet potatoes that you find in the grocery store.

Now, commercially, when they harvest this stuff, they pull up all these different sizes and then they grade those sweet potatoes and those big massive ones.

Not as big as what Chuck has but big.

Those usually go to the processing plant for sweet potato fries or something.

Because Can you imagine how long like something like Chuck was holding to put that in the oven?

That'd be there.

Oh my gosh, telcos are just killing it.

You'd have to just take these long broad strokes just to get the skin off of that so I thought that was really fun.

Thank you Chuck for sending that in.

Yeah, pretty cool for the end like illicit invite all of your friends over for all things sweet potato that night.

So okay, well, you've got another show in town.

This is more like a decorative ideas.

We're kind of switching gears on seasons here and trying to figure out what to do on our yards and still visual.

So you've got some great ideas.

Well, right now with the cold temperatures, most of the annuals have not well will not hold up.

But your pots, you know, you want four seasons of interest.

And with thanks that Thanksgiving motif, I decided that I would do my pots with greens from my garden.

So I have some greens to show.

And then I also instead of using the Jack O' Lantern, which is you know, Halloween, I have some other decorative squash and then I grew some small gourds to show and so I'm going to green in my pots with the evergreens and then just set the squash on top and add the gourds for just a different look for maybe the next month.

And then I'll take those out and then transition for the holidays with some balls and and ribbons and glitter and pics and all kinds of things like that.

So now it's still kind of natural.

Also, I do have some the ornamental kales are still pretty nice.

And you know that that's kale, cabbage, it stores really well in the refrigerator, so it does go through these cold temperatures.

As long as it kind of warms up, it takes quite a bit to turn that to freeze it solid a little bit later.

So that's what I'm going to show you.

So I have plants here.

And they're gonna do I love how the kale also comes in different color varieties to Yes, yes.

So here's all the evergreens I have Juniper, box wood, pine, spruce, I have Camus Tsipras at my house too, so that's a little bit different.

But all of these have textural elements.

And some of them like white pine really draped nicely but I'm just kind of almost laying these on their sides because I don't really need to make a taller arrangement because I have the squash.

So again, I'm going to save some of the seeds from these because you can get you know all different kinds.

I think I got oh yeah, I love the little white ones.

And most of the time you know these these can go through and look good for you know, until early December so that's what I'm I'm kind of counting on and then I do have some you know bigger squats oh nice very nice.

Did you grow these?

No, no, I didn't I grew the little gourds but the big ones we we grow a lot of squash and pumpkins at at the farm at the nursery.

Gotcha.

Oh, these are some that I got there.

And then here's my Cabot.

Oh very pretty.

That's gorgeous.

I think I think that's going to make a really nice arrangement for the next couple of weeks and and really try inflation well with thanksgiving, and then you're using stuff that you already had around and it's, it looks very nice.

Yes.

Wonderful.

That that would be the way to go because the moms are pretty much finishing up.

I still have a couple of those.

But I want my pots to be, you know, to reflect that the season.

Yes, yes.

Awesome.

Thank you, Ella.

All right, Chris, we're gonna go to you.

This is question number eight, sent in from a viewer.

I have a black ant nest in the garden.

I'm sure this was from the summer months.

I'm an organic gardener and can't grow anything in that area.

They wiped out all the beets last year, how can I get them to go away so when you've got an established ant colony, is it hard to kind of get them to, to move along?

It can be and also, just with the addition here that ants typically are not pests in the garden.

Ants usually are beneficial insect for us.

They do a great job in aerating the soil and recycling nutrients.

I called them nature's housekeeper, they clean things up around the garden.

Now, one thing that they might do that could make them a pest is they can attack seedlings.

And so if these beets were seedlings at the time, sometimes they will go after young seedlings, young tender plants.

However, if the beets were a bit more established, they can also go after a very common pest of beets, which is the aphid now they don't attack the aphid they actually farm the aphid, which I think is a fascinating thing for insects to do.

The aphids have a very sweet excrement or frass, known as honeydew.

It's full of sugars because they suck the plant sugars right out.

And the ants love this.

And they will actually farm aphids by taking all of the other predator insects and fighting them off.

It's it's pretty neat to watch.

So if you're having an ant issue, I would also investigate Do you have an actual initial pest possibly aphids that you could just control with sharp sprays of water?

If you do find the need to control the ants, something like a boric acid trap would probably work.

Make sure that you're keeping that contained so no other critters can get to it, though.

Interesting.

So they're, in essence protecting their food source by making the environment really hospitable.

Wow, that is fascinating.

So cool.

Yeah, there's always so much stuff going on out there that you just never see, you know, beyond the surface.

Okay, Ella, we're gonna go to you.

This is from Eva Kingston.

This is a perennial grass question.

She's asking about pink muhly and how to make it Hardy in our area.

It is harder and what are some of the warmer zones?

Can she get it to last year throughout the winter?

What are your thoughts?

Okay, actually, the pink nearly grass that you see in the Southern climates is not going to be hardy.

It does have a really large seed head that pinks up.

I saw it in North Carolina at one of the Botanic Gardens, fell in love and then found out it really wasn't going to work.

But they are breeding some hardier varieties that may not have quite as large as seed head.

But it does have that beautiful kind of pink shimmer, and it's called undaunted.

So undaunted, is a cultivated variety of the newly grass that will do well in northern climates.

And given the right light conditions, it sparkles pink.

We've had it for four years at the nursery.

So that could be something that she could maybe Google and see if anyone's offering that variety.

But we found that it's been especially Hardy, and I also had a question for Chris.

Going back to the ants.

Someone told me that if you wanted to get rid of ants, you dig up one ant hill of ants and move it next to another ant hill of ants and that they would fight each other war and your award for a bra for and all Yeah, I get it but I don't I don't know if that's true.

Yes.

The life of ants is fascinating.

Not only will they farm aphids, but yes they are what would you call it like almost like this tribalistic?

They will go to war with other ant species picturing like these empires it's like that the reason why I like ants and I want ants to win is because one of their natural enemies is termites, a subterranean termites and so I know that if I am seeing ants along my home I at least can you know think that at least they're fighting off any termites that might be around so there but yes, they will literally I guess for lack of a better term go to war with other colonies of different species.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Do you see people a lot this time of year calling about wing dance and worried that they are termites?

Yeah, that is a pretty common phone call.

I would say if folks are seeing that, please feel free to give the extension office a call.

If you can take pictures of them.

That works best.

Usually we can identify just based on his description over the phone, but a picture's worth 1000 words.

And so it's we can talk about the differences between winged ants and winged termites over the over the phone and help usually put people at ease that usually it's a winged ant that accidentally flew into your home and does not want to be there.

Well, then the only reason I know that is because we had to do that there were I mean, 1000s You know how you just look at the ground, and it sort of looks like it's pulsating, because there are so many.

And I thought, Oh, this is the this is the end, we have termites and you know, through the series of questions about the body shape, we were able to find out that it was thankfully the wing there.

So, but the lady that we talked to said it was a very common question.

So I thought, Well, that makes me feel good that we weren't the only ones panicking about those little guys.

Okay, Chris, we're going to go back to you.

This is number 15.

From Darlene and Crown Point, Indiana.

She says this is the first summer that I grew sunflowers, they blossom huge and beautifully.

The flowers seem ready to harvest since they're full and white, I have no idea what to do next.

Any advice would be helpful.

So obviously, we're past this.

But for folks who aren't going to grow sunflowers next year, and who are interested in harvesting those seeds, what advice do you have for them?

Certainly, I love growing sunflowers.

It's something I've done with my kids since they since my first one was very little.

And then they can grow sunflowers that like tower over their head.

So a great activity to have in anyone's yard.

There are a lot of indicators that can point to when sunflower seed could be ready to harvest.

Some things that you would might want to look for, of course, the yellow petals, if it's a yellow yellow type will die back.

But that's not necessarily the indicator that the seeds are ready.

So the sequels which is actually the green, we'll call them petals, for lack of a better word, but the sequels that cover the flower, and they actually open up to reveal the flower itself.

Those are green, and when those start to brown and died back, that can be an indicator, hey, I should probably start checking the seed head for when the sunflowers are ready.

But usually what I do is I will reach up and run by thumb on the seed head and when I start feeling I'm loose like a loose tooth, that's when we can snip them off.

And I can call my kids over and we just have a fun little harvest party of sunflower seeds.

We just put them in a bowl.

Sometimes we roast them, sometimes we save them because they want to see if they can grow next year.

Nice.

That is fun.

We actually I grew a variety that had really pretty reds and browns and blacks.

Very, and they were so tall.

So there's there's so many of them these days that you can grow at your house, and they are strikingly beautiful.

So great.

I love Wait.

Oh, go ahead.

One thing about the sunflowers is that sometimes, you know the Finch and some of the other birds are going to get them before you get them.

So I have on occasion put like a nylon sock or you know, like a knee high, pulled it over the sunflower to let them just finish ripening, but to keep the birds out of them.

That's a good idea.

That's a good idea.

And you guys remember I talked about battling the rabbits all summer.

Um, they actually snipped off a couple of the stalks before they were able to bloom and I was kind of devastated about that.

But yeah, the rabbits were heavy, heavy over here this year.

So okay, Ella, we're going to go to you.

This is a question about hibiscus and hydrangea from Jane and Jane is in Chicago.

She wants to know why some of the stems dive back on the midnight Marvel hibiscus and OakLeaf hydrangea while others are fine.

She wants to know if there's anything that she needs to stop doing or or begin doing to keep that from happening.

So what are your thoughts?

Okay, well, I did look at her pictures.

And unfortunately, when you have stems collapse like that, there's probably some kind of damage right at ground level or maybe something that's damaging the root system that can be from maybe in the hydrangea of bore or more likely, with both the hibiscus and the hydrangea.

It's some type of fungal disease that has caused that die back of the stem tissue and then that part dies so she's going to have to cut that off and maybe do a little bit more investigating to see if that As the case, if she cuts the stem off, and it seems almost a dark, dark, brownish blackish kind of water soaked, then that could be like a fight top thread some type of water, it's um, why I think it's a water mold fungus that is problematic on maybe poorly drained soils.

So again, knowing the quality of the soil, and how long it's maybe been there, but she can dig down right down around the base of the plant and maybe get some more answers.

For those of us who have dragged our big pots in of things to store until next year, what's a good watering schedule while they're being stored dormant for the winter?

What do you suggest so having just hauled in a lemon tree for head is almost reaching my ceiling in my basement.

One of the things that I do is I really do pull back on some of that watering and it does depend on the species now the the lemon tree it actually is kind of more of a heavy water user.

So I do kind of have to keep a close eye on that and water it a bit more frequently than some of my other pots.

Were sometimes the plants I just let those gourd go dormant and they get stored back by the washing machine and and I don't see them for until next spring.

Great advice.

Guys.

Thank you so much for coming on today.

And thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time.

Good night.