(upbeat music) - Well, hello, and thanks so much for joining us for another at-home edition of "Mid American Gardener."

I'm your host, Tinisha Spain.

And today we've got a lot of show and tells and a lot of your questions to get to.

So before we do that, let's have our expert panelists, that and love, introduce themselves and tell you a little bit more about their specialty.

So Kelly, we'll start with you.

- Hi everyone.

My name is Kelly Allsup, and I'm a horticulture educator for University of Illinois Extension.

I'm based out of Bloomington.

My expertise within the team is Integrated Pest Management.

And I was a greenhouse grower before I came to this position.

My passion is beneficial insects, pollinators, and I've really been getting into tree health and wanting just to spread the love around and get people to start really taking care of their trees.

That's been my latest passion.

- All right, not a bad passion to have.

Thank you, ma'am.

And John, what is your passion?

- I have lots of 'em.

I'm John Bodensteiner.

I'm a Vermilion County Master Gardener.

I like trees and shrubs.

I've got a couple of things I'm going to show today that I found interesting, some the good and the bad.

And I do like a lot of perennials.

I specialize in hostas and a little bit of everything, really.

- Little bit of everything.

Okay, wonderful.

So as we are now into the fall, and we're starting to see our things go to seed, I know I just lost the last of my plants yesterday.

My inpatiens bit the dust yesterday.

So Kelly, we're talking about things going to seed, sort of returning to nature, and you've got a show and tell that's kind of aligned with that.

So what do you got?

- Yeah, I know all gardeners had to make those tough decisions about what was going to overwinter in their house and what they were going to allow to succumb to, sorry, there's floss around.

But I love milkweed.

I think it's really easy to start from seed.

So milkweed, they kind of, this one is ready to go.

You see how brown it is?

It bursted it open.

And you see all those little seeds in there?

So, we know that we need to plant milkweed in our gardens.

We know that milkweed is really good for monarchs, but not only monarchs.

It is good for a plethora of pollinators and beneficial insects.

And really as a horticulture educator and can't talk in enough milkweed as far as I'm concerned.

So if you have one or two plants, why not have 10?

So this is a really great way to get 10.

So what happens is as it looks like this and every now and then you'll see the floss, you will see the floss that's attached to the seed.

They actually used to make pillows out of this but it's a very clever way for the seed to be carried in the wind or be carried somewhere.

So what is the hardest part when you're - Be careful there with those continents?

- I know I'm gonna have milk, what's the hardest part really is to detach that seed from the floss right?

So sometimes I'll put this in a cup and put a penny in there and it does an okay job of getting some of that floss off and separating that seed.

But what I've lately what I've discovered is that people are putting their seeds like this into a metal bowl and they're burning the floss from the seed and you can YouTube it, it's actually really quite clever.

And so then you get, see a jar of seeds.

Like this is a lot of seeds.

I'm trying to collect seeds because every spring I get tons of people asking me for three milkweed seeds.

And so I decided I would collect this year.

Well, a normal gardener would go ahead and plant now because these seeds need a cold treatment, before they will actually germinate.

I am going to keep my seeds in a refrigerator and then it'll have that cold treatment it needs.

And it'll go ahead and germinate in the spring when I plant it.

So you just go up to those big, they look like, Sickles shell, sickle shaped seed heads.

Once they're Brown, they're Brown.

Now they're ready get them, before they pop open and start spreading in the wind.

And then you can add more, mostly to your garden.

- Awesome.

I took your advice last year with the penny, except I used a plastic bag and put a few pennies in there and shook it.

And then once they all fell down to the corner, I just snipped the corner, off the seeds came out by the bin.

I mean, like you said it wasn't a hundred percent but it did work really well.

And the kids got a kick out of it too.

- Yeah.

I've been looking for a hundred percent something, clearly you're not gonna give your kids a lighter but depending on their age but , once I discovered the lighter trick, I was like, whoa, we're never going to do this any other way!

(laughs) - Wow.

I'll have to check that out.

That's neat.

- Yeah, I will, too.

- Definitely.

Okay!

Thank you so much!

All right, John.

What did you bring us?

- One thing I'd just like add, they might look at when they do plant their milkweed, it has some special requirements, as far as, like Kelly said, you need to fertilize it and keep it in a refrigerator.

It needs a cold treatment, but also, it needs sunlight to germinate, so you don't wanna plant it too deep.

- Okay.

- Thank you for adding that.

- So after the cold treatment in the fridge, First of all, how long should they stay in the fridge, and then let's talk a little bit about that timeline.

Is that all winter?

- You really only have to have them in the refrigerator for probably six to eight weeks.

- Yeah.

I'd say that.

- But I'm going to keep them in the refrigerator all winter, because I am lucky enough to have a refrigerator dedicated to seeds, (laughs) - Oh, wow!

- In my office, so I will keep those in the refrigerator all season long, but six to eight weeks is probably efficient.

- All right, thank you very much!

Okay, John.

- Okay.

Keeping on with, kind of, the pollinator theme, what I brought today was some autumn joy, which is one of those, this is a sedum, and one thing we're finding is that we not only need spring plants for pollination, like the dandelions.

That's one of the very first that we have, and other things dropped here, but this one here is nice in that it's later in the summer that we really got to blossom, 'cause we do have insects that are out late, and autumn joy, the sedum, is one of those that really does do a good job, and if you've got this in your yard, you go out, and there's all kinds of little butterflies, there's bees, there's just all all kinds of insects that are swarming these things 'cause most of the other things have gone past the flowering stage, and there's very few good flowering plants that have nectar and pollen in the fall, so this is one of those that I would encourage people.

It's easy to grow, it has a beautiful color.

There's a number of different varieties.

I've got one up in another corner that's a miniature one, and it doesn't get more than six inches tall.

This one gets, oh, it can get to be two, three feet tall, but some of them are very small and the leaves are smaller, and I love all of the sedums.

These autumn joy type sedums.

- [Host] Okay.

And John, I wanted to ask you, I know you do a lot with the greenhouse, houses at Schlarman Academy.

In the winter are you still pretty active in there?

Is the greenhouse still busy in the winter, or do you take the winter off there?

- Oh, no (indistinct) We're doing succulents.

We're doing starts on succulents.

We break the little leaves off, lay 'em on wet beds, sand wet beds.

I've got air layering that we're going to undo today, actually.

It's election day, and so, we said that we are going to, actually we timed it.

Six weeks to eight weeks that we do an air layering.

We're doing a Japanese lilac just to see if we can do some air layering.

I don't know if it's going to root or not, but we gonna find out today.

We will be dividing our Boston ferns.

We usually take those and divide them into four to six to eight pieces, and then, by spring, we pot those up right away and hang them from all over in the ceiling of the greenhouse.

We're doing stem cuttings, we're doing, later on, after the first year, January, February, March, we'll start seeds.

We're, right now, doing a project for seventh graders where we're starting a Mother of Millions, or Mother of Thousands, and so each, there'll be transplanting those and getting every one of those little plants.

They're very interesting.

- I have hundreds of those if you would like more donations.

Please don't send any home with my seventh grader.

(all laughing) If you would like more donations, I have them.

(laughs) - he is going to bring something home special to mom.

- Oh, great.

(laughs) - The kids' enthusiasm.

We started a compost pile, and most of the kids were very, "This isn't working.

How does this work?"

Well, I vacuumed some grass clippings and some leaves, and we took it and filled up, and we had a nice cubic yard of, We made them out of pallets, the compost bins.

We had a three bin pallet compost arrangement, and filled it up, had the kids mixing it up, and after about, oh, a week to 10 days, one of the kids had the drill and was augering down and pulling it up, and steam came up, and they said, "What's wrong with this?"

And so, we reached we converted 13 kids into believing about composting at that one moment, 'cause they all stuck their hands down and it was about 130 to 40 degrees down there.

- Wow.

- Really, the microbes were working, so they all know to put the green matter, we went in for how much carbon?

like saw that 400 count of carbon where leaf clippings as may be, the lawn clippings may be 19 or 15, 12 and that we want an average.

So they got tested and they all did very well.

- Nice!

- The greenhouse is just packed with stuff and you have to stop by and just, it's always open, so you can always go back there and look at it.

- Okay, all right, thank you.

That's awesome.

No days off for horticulture, not even in the office.

- I know, I go on Saturday and Sunday to make sure everything is wet and watered 'cause it gets pretty warm in there.

- Nice, yeah.

So over the winter, everything we'll keep in there and it'll stay warm and everything will continue to grow?

- Yep, yep.

We have heat in there and water and so everything keeps growing.

Well, right now, we're wondering where we're gonna put everything.

- Wonderful, okay.

Kelly, we're coming back to you and it's hard to believe we're gonna be talking about Poinsettia soon.

We're gonna go to question 933, deejay.

This is from Ruth and she writes in, "This Poinsettia was given to me in March, 2018.

It had red leaves all year until Christmas.

It started blooming again in may.

I have never put it outside and have it in a south window."

So she wants to know what to do with it.

Now, what is this November?

Okay, so what are your thoughts?

Kelly, what's the timeline here?

- I'm not the biggest fan of people trying to overwinter Poinsettias and get them to go into color again just because Poinsettias are really difficult crop in the green house to come out to be as perfect as they have to be for consumers to buy them.

So really, what is happening is, the bract start coloring up when the days shorten and the nights get long.

So as a greenhouse grower, some of my Poinsettias would have to be in those types of conditions from eight to 12 weeks.

So if you think about it, it's October, many greenhouses are right in the middle of growing these Poinsettias because they have, they might wanna be starting Poinsettias out in November all the way through December.

And the Poinsettia also in question for her has never been pinched and it would need to be pinched at least four to eight weeks before I'm starting to put, to lengthen the nights and shorten the days.

So you think about it, it's pretty complex.

I get in a Poinsettia cutting, I grow it, it's very hard for it to get rooted fast and then you have lots of issues with- insects like fungus gnats.

Then four to six weeks after I plant that poinsettia cutting, I pinch it.

And I pinch it to four, five, eight nodes.

what that means?

That means if I pinched it to five nodes, I'm going to have five bracts on my plant.

So at this point, and then I have to go through the whole, of the longer nights.

So for somebody to get a consistent poinsettia, the way that they would find from a greenhouse or a nursery or a garden center, they would have to take that poinsettia and put it inside a closet every night with exactly 11.5 hours of night for eight weeks.

- That's a lot of work.

- Eight to 12 weeks, depending on what kind of poinsettia it is.

Now, why is it coloring up for her?

Maybe she lives in the country.

Maybe she lives, maybe, it's getting really dark in her house at a certain time.

So that's probably why it has colored up already.

it, it probably, if it looks like that now, it's probably still going to be in color, come holiday season.

But there's, there's, it's already past the time that it needs to be for it to look like it would, come out of a garden center.

So you see how complicated it is?

- That's a lot especially to hit that 11.5 mark consistently.

- Yeah and a lot of poinsettia growers, can run into a lot of issues with keeping that night consistent.

So we pull big, huge blackout curtains and we completely blackout those plants.

There's been studies where if you had a greenhouse out in the country where you don't have to worry about light pollution, if you do get some light pollution it'll actually prevent those bracts from coloring up.

- Oh wow!

- So this is what I say.

As a greenhouse grower, throw it away and buy new and support the industry.

This is this, the poinsettias are very important to our industry.

I know, I think that our industry did very well this year but we still want to support them by buying these plants.

I know it's like I'm saying, "Hey buy this plant, now throw it away "and buy a new one next year."

- (laughs) - It's kind of like a flower arrangement with roots.

- Yeah.

- So, to get that perfect look.

key points are, keep going back, keep buying the new ones.

It's never gonna ever look the same way as what I would grow in a greenhouse.

- Okay, good advice.

- For the price that you're gonna pay at the retail level, if you would look at that compared to the number, to get a plant to look like that, if you can, the number of hours you're going to put into getting that plant to look like that, you're gonna be working for a penny or two an hour for all the work that you put into that.

It's not a good, - Return on your investment?

(laughs) - No, no, if you just wanna try it and it's fun to do, that's fine, but if you're trying to just save money, it's not a good investment to try it yourself.

- Okay, all right, thank you, guys.

- John, we're back to you for another show and tell?

- Okay, I told you earlier about the good, this is the bad.

I don't know if you can see this but this is very easy to identify right now.

This is Bush Honeysuckle.

And as you can see the red berries it's still the, it went through 23 degrees, it's still nice and green.

You can see the nice red berries.

And this is a very invasive non-native plant that we have growing and especially in our parks, in our forests.

It's one that you'll wanna go out and identify now and get rid of.

All these little berries, the birds will eat them, they're not real good for the birds, they don't digest them very well.

And they usually go through the bird very quickly, if you know what I mean.

And the problem with that is once the acid in their stomach, the birds will distribute them and almost every one of them will come.

So now is a wonderful time in that they are one of the last trees to lose their leaves in the spring.

They're one of the first to leaf out, so they're quite easy to identify.

One of the other things I wanted to show was if you look at the stem, you can see it's hollow and that's another identifying aspect to this shrub.

And it can get to be very big.

Some of the trunks can get, if you leave them, get very big they can get to three, four inches.

And it's not that they're not nice, but they are like I said, they're one of the last to lose their leaves, in the fall, one of the first to get their leaves.

And so they shade out some of our natives and they are becoming just so invasive, so prolific in some of our forests and even on one of my side hills.

I've worked and worked and worked trying to get rid of them and I just found one that I missed in one of the corners of one of the hillsides.

So that's coming out today before the birds get the, before they get the seeds and distribute so that I have many more, but they're all over.

So if we can get everybody to start to destroy these non native Honeysuckle, the Bush Honeysuckle, it will really help our native plants.

And then that which is what our pollinators need is native plants.

A lot of these non-native, the caterpillars and all the insects, they don't use these (indistinct), so then we don't have the birds eating the insects.

We don't have the insects to feed the rest of the culture.

So it's very important that we do work on getting rid of this in everywhere.

- And isn't it something that the ones that you don't want are the last to leave in the fall and the first to arrive in the spring?

They're just relentless.

(laughs) - And they used to sell these in the greenhouses- - Those, gosh!

- And before we really realized that they were so invasive.

- Okay, all right, thank you, John.

- Hey Tinisha, I wanted to share a resource for people at home.

It's a book that I have, it's called the "Management of Invasive Plants and Pests of Illinois."

And it was put together by Morton Arboretum, University of Illinois extension, SIU, a lot of partners went in to putting to this together.

And what they have is they have a list of all these invasive species how best to get rid of them, because sometimes just cutting them down, the tree of heaven in my backyard, that I keep cutting down.

- (laughs ) - It's never going to go away.

There is a reason why these plants have such invasive qualities.

So, what John said was perfect.

Fall is a great time to get some of these invasive trees out.

Like the Honeysuckle, I know it's a shrub, but in the book, they give you two different suggestions.

For instance, a Basal Bark, if you were to use...

They tell you that fire can help, right?

But John's not gonna prescribe a fire for his backyard, is he?

Well, he might, but most likely he's not, okay?

And if John has a huge growth disease, he's not really gonna go through and mechanically remove them out 'cause that's gonna be a ton of work, but he's gonna use a chemical to get them.

Now I know a lot of people were like But I don't use chemicals.

Okay, when it comes to invasive species, using chemicals as a tool is unnecessary.

You will not get rid of those invasive species, sometimes without using a chemical.

And don't think of it as bad.

Think of it as good, because you're getting rid of an invasive species, and you're allowing native plants to come back and inhabit that area.

So, I love that he brought up this invasive species, trees, and this book there's a PDF on the website.

If you want to learn how to identify some invasive plants, if you have, a large piece of land, if you want some management, these are like tried and true management strategies because, sometimes you know it's like what do I do, what's the exact thing that I do?

Like here, they suggest a Basal bark treatment, which means you treat the bottom 15 inches of the plant, and you also you put in a oil in it.

That way it'll attach to the bark and it'll start killing it from that way.

So, - Interesting.

- I just love this because, as a horticulturist, like John, we know it's bad, we know there's some strategies to get rid of it, but this tells you exactly what to do.

- Can we see the cover of that book Kelly and tell us one more time the title?

- It is Management of Invasive Plants and Pests of Illinois and I shared the PDF with DJ.

- [Tinisha] Okay.

- One thing if you get into spring, when the soil is just frost and they've started to leaf, they pull out two and three year old plants.

You can just walk by and pull them out so easy.

They're shallow rooted yet.

And I do use Roundup.

I cut them off and I paint the cutoff.

(panelist acknowledging) - Awesome.

All right, guys, we're out of time.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate you guys for coming on and we'll see you next time.

Thanks for joining us.

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