Hello.

It's Tinisha, Spain, host of Mid American gardener.

Thanks so much for joining us for another episode.

I'm joined today by my friend John Bodensteiner so and we've got a lot to cover.

We're going to talk some fall planting and ways to save things.

So John, first introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you.

I'm a Veran County Master Gardener and live up by Bismarck.

I volunteer at schlarman High School.

I take care of the greenhouse and teach botany, little bit of the biology and eighth grade science and just enjoy all plants.

I've been in the program now for about 30 years.

So you're the plant guy, yeah, and you love hosta.

I do love hosta.

Yes, we have between two and 300 varieties and counting.

Okay, so we're moving into the fall, right?

It's officially there, and I understand you brought some peonies with you to kind of talk about how to transition those now, I cut mine off because the leaves were brown and everything was dead, so I cut mine back.

That's fine.

That's that's one of the things, you know.

And peonies, September, early October, is the time to move peonies.

Anytime of the year.

This is the best time.

So what do you do?

Like you said, first thing you do is you prepare the plant.

You cut them so that they're the stems are no longer than two or three inches.

And after you're done moving them, you can even cut them closer, if you want, and then clean up any especially if you had disease, powdery mildew, black spot, you want to get every leaf and every stem, and even possibly, if you're not moving it, re mulch the area with some fresh mulch, because come next spring, when it rains, as the rain hits that soil, a lot of those diseases will overwinter in the soil, and when it splashes up, it's going to hit those real low leaves, and it's going to reinfect the plant right away.

But I wanted to talk a little bit about moving a peony, and because now is the time to do that.

About every five to seven years, peonies usually benefit from a move mine.

Are gonna I need to move mine, not because they've been there so long they have been but because the trees that I had planted when, when they were, the peonies, were in full sun.

Now they're in quite a bit of shape.

So they're not they're not doing as well.

They're more they're more prone to the powdery mildew, the diseases, and they don't flower as much, so I am going to dig them up.

And now you're not talking about just separating them.

You're talking about a whole literal transplant, the whole plant, okay?

And some people will go down and just slice it in half.

I don't do that.

What I found best is to go around the plant and go straight, and you'll kind of know where to dig, because what you call the drip line of the plant, where the outside leaves, that's where the outside roots are going to be.

So you're going to want to go kind of there and go down and underneath the plant and kind of raise it up.

Do not pull on those short stems that you left there, that are there?

You don't want to pull those up.

And you want to be careful not to damage the roots.

As you're get the shovel underneath enough to push up and and once you get it out of the ground, look at it.

If it's a huge plant, you may want to divide it.

And I just happen to bring, bring one.

This has been, it's in some peat moss, so can't really see the the little eyes, but there are three or four eyes on this.

You want a minimum of three to four or five eyes on on your cuttings.

So what you need to do is take a sharp knife.

Once you've once you've cleaned all the old soil off and you can assess what you've got, you can take a sharp knife and cut them.

Make sure that you clean the knife in between each cut, so that you're not going to transfer some disease.

So once you get these divided what you're going to do then is you want to prepare the soil.

Figure out where you're going to put them.

Prepare the soil, dig your hole to the point where, when you plant this, the top of the eyes are going to be about an inch to no more than two inches below the surface of the ground.

Once you've got that, then you can put the soil back on, being careful not to stomp on it, or anything you don't want to destroy the eyes, or anything like that.

Once you get the soil back on, you know, and it's you know, and what you want to do is water it.

Then.

It deeply.

Just don't give it a you want to water it so that it's those roots.

The top is going to dry off, and you're going to want those roots to search for the water deep.

And you'll want to do that once a week, probably until the ground freezes.

You may want to give it a little bit of depending on your soil.

If it's clay and bad soil, you may want to give it a little bone meal, a little organic fertilizer.

Don't give it the lawn fertilizer.

That's all high nitrogen.

You want a 1010, 10, something like that.

Okay, the next thing, it's hard for us, we have to be patient.

That's the one thing a lot of gardeners last it's not going to probably bloom.

The next year, you're going to get a lot of the growth and and, and it's it's going to be establishing itself.

The next year is when you can expect quite a few flowers, and each year up to five, six years, that's when you're going to have the nicest flowers.

And like, you know, and we talked about, I think maybe last time we were on air, if you get the little marshmallow type flowers before they open, you can cut those off, wrap them in newspaper, put them in your refrigerator and save them for up to six weeks.

And you can have pull them out and enjoy it, and pull them out and enjoy them all the way through.

So, Okay, excellent.

That's my little tutorial on peonies.

These striking, beautiful berries kept catching my eye.

Okay, they're so bright.

This is a shrub that I've had, was given to me by one of our other master gardeners, Pat Sollers, and she This is called beautyberry, and it's native to North America.

It's also there are some others that are native to China, and you kind of have to watch.

You want to make sure that you get the American one, the native one.

This is calicarpia americana.

One nice thing, and a lot of people will be interested, is deer resistant.

Does it mean that if the deer are totally, really hungry, they're not going to come and munch on it?

The birds and and other mammals like the these magentas, little seeds.

Can people eat these?

Or just, I do not there.

There's not enough.

They're all seed.

I've heard people that make jams out of it.

They'll, they'll, they'll pick them and and make a like a sauce out of them.

They have to crush them a little bit, and I have heard that.

But the leaves, which I find to find you interesting, if you take this and you crush it like this, and then rub it on your skin, repel mosquitoes.

So, so get some jewel weed, beauty berry.

Beauty berry.

And it, there's 40 species of birds and mammals that will use this very pretty, gorgeous to look at.

Now, how tall does it get?

Okay, six to eight feet high, okay, six to eight feet wide, and again, it's it likes, it will do well in sun.

It'll do well in partial sun, and it'll do okay in shade.

In shade, especially deep shade, you probably won't get near the number of berries.

The more sun you give it, the better it is.

It likes full sun.

It gets a little bit bigger every year.

And you know, if you can a hedge of this is just beautiful.

I bet it's native, so very resilient, and very few diseases problems with it.

And the magenta The berries are just, yes, that's done.

And once the leaves drop, then you just, that's stunning.

They will stay on after it freezes.

Once it after, oh, you get a hard heart freeze.

After a month, you probably notice them start to discolor a little bit.

Okay, so as we're talking about fall and moving things around and what it's time to do.

I have two questions.

One, I love sweet potato vine as a nice whatever the ornamental sweet Yes, yes.

And I was pulling them out of my flower boxes, and they have little tubers on the bottom, so I saved them, but I didn't know for sure if I could plant those and get the same purple true vine next year, you will.

And what you can actually do is like sweet potatoes sometime in sweet potatoes are very, very sensitive to frost above the ground.

Okay, so you never want them to freeze.

So, but what you.

Into is your little tubers, is get them going mid March, early April, and they'll put up little shoots.

And what you do is, it's awfully hard, but you break them off, and then you put them in a glass of water, and then they will root.

And that is what you can plant also.

And you can get 2030, plants out of that one tuber, then you can also plant the tuber.

Okay, so it's something new.

So it's, it's, it's, you know, and that's how with sweet potatoes, if you go to the store, you can buy a, you know, there's, there's about hundreds of different types of sweet potatoes, but certain types are more Bulba less, and don't they're not as sharp.

They're they're more stocky and just nicer for us to eat.

You can do the same thing with them.

Start your little shoots, and the hardest thing is to break them off.

Break it off, and you want them about eight inches to 10 inches tall, and you can just keep doing that.

Just keep snapping them as each of those little eyes something to do in March, yeah, when I'm just wanting to get my hands, your hands dirty.

Something Yes, yes.

Second question I have is tulips.

So I pulled them up once they were spent in the spring and they're in the garage, fridge in a paper bag.

Is now the time?

Or are we in that range of when I can put them back in the ground?

You can put them in any time you got that's a spring flowering bulb.

And now is the time really that you want?

Is the better time is right now a lot of people forget, and they wait till sales are on.

By that time, the ground is already really cold.

And the tulips, the daffodils, you want them to get them, get them established.

You want those little roots to get down and hold them in the ground otherwise.

And another thing, all those little skins that are there do not leave those around the ground, because that's kind of like a flag to squirrels, saying, hey, come just planted some tulips here.

Come dig them.

Dig them up.

And so make sure that you and if you have really bad squirrel problem, you may want to just take some chicken wire and lay your bulbs, dig your hole.

Dig up a bed, because it mass.

Beddings are much nicer, layer bulbs, lace and chicken wire over it, and then put the soil on top of that, put some rocks down to hold it so that the chicken wire doesn't pop up.

And then, with squirrels, they can't get to them.

You know what I found, pine cones.

Pine cones.

They don't like pine cones.

They do not because they're sharp.

Cats are the same.

And those they Oh, what is it?

The one, the one tree that has all the little bulbs flowers, or the No, is it the bubble gum?

It's like gum drop or something like, yeah, it's sweet gum.

Sweet gum.

Cats and squirrels.

They hate those, because those have got, actually, if you hold them, they're sharp, interesting.

So, yeah, I've noticed ever since I put the pine cones on my pots, they have not dug in those particular ones.

So now is the time to plant your daffodils.

Now's the time to dig your Canis, your Gladiolus, your your dahlias, all the ones that we are tender bulbs, gotcha.

So now's the time to dig them, but plant all your your spring flowers.

Okay, there's always something to be there's always something Yes, all right, John, thank you so much.

So we popped in with our friend Rusty maulding A couple times this year.

Went in the spring to talk about the flower bed that they had put in, and then we went back towards the end of summer for an update on how things are growing.

Check it out.

Well, Rusty.

Thanks so much for letting us come back.

It's a beautiful morning.

So far.

It's going to be a hot one.

Today, it's going to be a hot one.

That's why we scheduled this shoot in the morning.

So we came out earlier in the spring and we looked at this exact bed that you guys put in native plants.

And now I thought it would be a cool idea to come back towards the end of the summer and see how it did, what lessons you learned, what did well, what didn't do so well, and just kind of show people the progression of a new flower bed and how it kind of grows in and what it looks like.

Sure.

Sure, absolutely.

Well, we have lots of things that we can talk about here today.

Okay, so let's start in on what's sort of underneath our feet right now.

Yeah, I noticed the crunching we walked up.

So every time you do a new installation and under an existing tree is you're oftentimes going to be damaging the roots.

So this particular hackberry above us did suffer some root injury.

We had some mechanical removal of some soil that also kind of added that.

And we're in a dry period right now.

And so what's happening is we're getting some early senescence, some early leaf drop.

That's a stress response.

We're.

Interesting.

We have not watered this at all this year until yesterday.

So in response to this, one of the best things that you can do is go out and water, don't focus on fertilization, just strictly water and mulch and doing some of those cultural practices that are sort of in best, best practices for plant care.

Gotcha, I noticed that.

And I noticed that they weren't like autumn color.

They were just fallen leaves.

They just straight up fell off because the trees said, hey, you know what?

I don't have enough water to keep and support these leaves.

And so the benefit of the food product production they're doing out was outweighed by the lack of water too.

Gotcha, keep it viable.

So if you are putting in beds or installing things under a tree, expect this is what you're saying if you disturb the root system.

So this happened to one well, I guess it did happen a little bit to the other two as well.

This went a little bit more acutely.

So you can anticipate a little bit.

We also did a lot of plugging.

Here we were plugging about once every 15 inches, or maybe maybe 12 inches, gotcha.

And we did some soil removal.

So there was definitely it was invasive.

Gotcha.

Normal planting, you won't see quite this response, but you can expect a little bit of leaf loss early.

And does that create competition, I'm assuming, between everyone trying to vie for a drink here.

You know, it's actually a little bit more resembles what would happen in nature, because typically you go out into the woods and you don't see trees with just nothing around them.

So it's actually kind of restoring a balance gotcha so that it's a native planting under a tree is way better than turf.

Got it noted, yeah.

Okay.

And speaking of natives, this was intentional.

This, this median bed here are mostly, almost all native plants, correct?

Which ties into what we've been talking about.

You've got the native plants of the Midwest book, yeah, and that's got 500 native species in it, and I are all 500 in this media.

You said you did a lot of plugging.

We did a lot of plugging in there.

And some people would say there's, this is species rich.

We didn't get 500 in nice No.

One of the things I really like about this book is he, he does a nice job of setting it up by sort of ecosystem.

So there's a woodland area which is going to speak to kind of the plants in this space, and then there's a prairie area which is going to speak to the air, to the plants in the full sun area here, right next to us.

Okay, so let's talk about some of the progress that you've seen this summer.

Yeah.

So one of the things that most gardeners are after is, what, what do I plant in dry shade?

And so you know, the native Illinois plantscape, if you will, has some solutions.

We ended up finding or using this zigzag golden rod.

Zigzag is kind of in reference to the nature of how the stem will oscillate back and forth.

Or does it create a zigzag?

It's a great ID feature.

This is a zigzag golden rod.

And unlike sort of it gets a bad rap, occasionally as being aggressive and also causing hay fever.

It can be aggressive with certain species.

This one is not this one is very tame.

It does a great job in shade.

Only gets to be about two to three feet tall, and stays put fairly well.

So one of the chief benefits of Goldenrod is it's a late season nectar and pollen feeder for all of the pollinators and insects that come through that rely on that.

And this is, this is really the thing that kind of helps get them through the winter, or get them to their final destination.

If they're a migratory like the like the monarchs, one of the last food sources that they'll have, right, exactly, too, yeah, dainty little flowers.

So that's another one.

It's shorty eyes Aster or shorts Aster does really, really well in in a shady and dry location.

This guy is going to do a little bit better, probably, if it has a little bit more moisture.

But the the shorts Aster straight up, dry shade.

It's going to do well.

These are one year plugs, so we installed these almost a year ago, well, in like, a couple of weeks.

So what you're seeing next year will be a lot more robust.

We're just a little early on the on the flowering time we're, you know, sort of late August, early September, is whenever they just start to get going, and then they'll flower reliably for the next month.

And, you know, everything we plant doesn't always take off.

You know, that's just the way it goes.

Is there anything that you put in this shady bed that perhaps didn't work?

And maybe you'll try something different next year?

Or, you know, I just, I think it's important for people to know that everything you plant is not always going to make it Sure, sure, no, absolutely.

There was a species of Aster.

It was a longifolium.

And I apologize I'm not going to remember the common name, but we planted that in sort of this area over here to our left.

And upon my inspection today, we only found two that happened.

So that's part.

Of the reason why, whenever you're planting native spaces, getting a right mix, sometimes things do really well, and sometimes things maybe get out competed or just aren't as happy in those spaces.

And so you plan a broad spectrum, and it's survival to fit us a little bit.

Okay, so now we move into this one of the sunny sections.

Sure, this has filled in a lot in the past few months.

It has, it has, this has really done well.

This, the whole thing is, this exceeded my expectations.

Nice.

This is, this was planted last May, or a year ago, last May, so just it's had two summers now.

And this showy Black Eyed Susan has really is doing what it says it's showing.

And we've got some nice liatris behind here.

There are in and amongst all of this, some various sedges and grasses.

So there's some little bluestem.

There is some spiralis or prairie drop seed that's in here.

It's all kind of helping hold everything up.

And so it not.

It's not all showy right now, and that's part of that's part of the goal, right?

When we visited and talked this spring or early summer, we had quite a bit that was showing Yes, three, four months later, we still have lots of great things that are in color.

It's just different.

And that's the idea, right?

To keep something in bloom absolutely all time, to have something to look at.

Would you consider this established?

Is this bed?

Or would you add more to it?

No, this, this bed right now is what I would consider established.

I am.

I was considering trying to plug in a few additional things in the in the shady areas, but I think I'm just going to let that go.

It really the plant per square foot is about right?

It just, just need a little time to grow.

Just need some time to fill in that the patients we talked about of letting the beds develop.

What worked really well in here?

Is there anything besides the black eye Susan?

Sure.

What else worked really well in this bed, early season, we had a lot of pins tongue that did really well.

The the liatris has done, well, there's another plant.

It's back up in here.

I'm going to try to get find one, as I'm on the move, try to find one that's in flower.

Well, I'm not finding one, all right, this is the stiff goldenrod, and this is going to have kind of a flat flower.

It's not quite there just yet.

There's just a few peeking up here and there another Goldenrod family this one.

One of the things that branigan said in his book is that this should not be planted in fertile garden soil, because it will self sow so it does like competition that will help keep it at bay, and also don't amend your soils, or if you've got a clay patch or a sandy vein, this is a very adaptable goldenrod, and that will also help kind of keep it at bay.

So this is another great one, that it's not as aggressive as some of the goldenrod is that people fear don't make the environment too hospice.

That's right, that's right, the Echinacea.

One of the things that we saw earlier, these were the seed heads from the Purple coneflower.

We saw some gold finches feeding on those before we were getting ready for this shoot.

So that's that's always a welcome addition to anybody's garden.

I think very nice.

And then so as far as maintenance goes, when a frost comes through, or when will you cut this down?

Will you leave it?

How do you maintain a native flower bed?

Sure?

If this is in at my house, I'm going to wait until spring, and then I'm going to go through I'm going to cut most things back to about a foot.

And some of these stems you can see are rather large.

And what that's going to do is, if there, if it's if it's a has a hold on the center, if the pith is hollow, that will create a natural nesting spot for some of our native bees for next fall.

So if you leave those that then becomes some, some an overwintering spot for some of our native insects.

That's bringing it totally full circle, right?

Because we're attracting the pollinators, creating that environment for them, and now they've got a place to overwinter.

Yeah, absolutely.

If this is at the front of your house, and maybe you've got some shorter version of this, you can do it like in November or December.

You know that that's perfectly acceptable.

It really becomes down to an esthetic taste.

I would prefer that you try to cut back again about a foot high, and that again, you're creating some some ground.

You're leaving the material on the ground, creating some overwintering space.

Leave the foliage, though.

Okay, now, I asked Alan this on our interview, and I'll ask you as well.

Yeah, when people say, Oh, natives are they're just, they're not real showy.

They don't do it for me.

What is your response to that?

I mean, come on, not all natives are showing not all ornamentals are showing.

They all have their own unique niche and at different times of year, and it really is a matter a matter of finding something that's going to fit your esthetic preference.

I. I think any of these could be showy, for sure, better in context than all alone.

A lot of times.

I think one of the departures from native landscaping, I should say, from ornamental strictly like traditional gardening, is that in there you tend to have more sweeps and large masses natives, certain ones will lend themselves to that others do not all right, Rusty, always a pleasure.

Thank you so much for letting us come out, and I hope that you got some use out of that book.

You said that you were familiar with it before I even brought it up.

I was some of my staff have us in a personal collection, and I'm looking at getting a copy for our staff collection there at the office.

Wow.

You might just have to call in.

Yeah.

There you go.

Become a pleasure.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.