- [Casey] "Oklahoma Gardening" is a production of the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service as part of the land grant mission of the Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at Oklahoma State University, dedicated to improving the quality of life of the citizens of Oklahoma through research-based information.

Underwriting assistance for our program is provided by the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, helping to keep Oklahoma green and growing.

Welcome to "Oklahoma Gardening."

Today, we are looking at an ornate pest on our cool-season brassicas.

Bailey Lockhart constructs a simple hose hanger that can be installed in any garden.

I'm planting a Scoville scale pepper garden.

Finally, Jessica Riggin is back with a fabulous poblano pepper recipe.

(lighthearted music) Almost like an ombre of sunset color.

Not the flowers, right?

- No, no, no.

(indistinct chatter) (lighthearted music) - The word "harlequin" means to be fancifully dressed or ornate, and it's no wonder that this bug that I wanna introduce you to is called the harlequin bug, because it is definitely ornate in its decoration.

You can see that it's got an orange and black pattern to it.

So don't confuse it with the ladybug, because this one is not a good insect to have in your garden.

Unfortunately, this insect will overwinter in some of your plant debris.

So this is one of the reasons why it's often good to go ahead and clean out your garden in the fall and get rid of that plant debris so that you don't overwinter pests.

However, sometimes people like to do that because it overwinters good insects, but it also can overwinter bad insects.

So as you can see, the numbers of bugs that we have on our mustard greens here and also our pok choi behind us are increasing.

In fact, they're headed over towards our broccoli, our kale, and our Swiss chard, so we wanna make sure we get some control on this pretty soon.

One of the things about the harlequin bugs...

It's almost as bad as the squash bugs as far as the numbers can get outta control so quickly.

And that's because after two weeks, after the harlequin bugs begin to emerge out of that plant debris after the overwintering, you'll find that those females can start laying eggs already.

So you might recognize those eggs because they have a uniform pattern, where they create this double barreled... And the barrels, the eggs look like a barrel shape, but they're white and black striped.

But they're in double rows, typically.

So you'll find those often on the underneath side of the leaves.

So you'll wanna be looking for those.

Usually, there's anywhere from 10 to 12 eggs in a cluster there.

And so after two weeks of emerging, those females are gonna start laying those eggs.

And in the early spring, when the temperatures are cooler, those eggs will hatch within about 20 days.

But as those temperatures warm up through the summer, those eggs can hatch within five days.

So you can see how your numbers of bugs can really increase over that season.

Now, it does take a little while for those small larvae or nymphs to actually develop into a mature adult.

However, you will get about three to four generations of harlequin bugs each season.

Now, we still wanna treat these.

I know our mustards are starting to age out now at this point.

And then obviously, our pok choi behind us, you can see, is starting to bolt.

So it's kind of past its prime.

You might think, "I don't wanna spray or do anything with this.

"I'm just gonna rip them out."

However, while brassicas are the preferred choice, they will go after your warm-season crops if they don't have anything else to eat.

So you still wanna make sure, even if you're taking these out, that you might be vigilant about watching them on your tomatoes, your okra, your squash, your corn.

They will go after those warm-season crops later in the season if they don't have anything else to eat.

So how do we control these harlequin bugs?

Well, if you just have a few numbers, one of the things to do is to look at your plants.

And if you see a few of these, just go ahead and pick 'em off and destroy 'em somehow.

Get rid of 'em.

And also make sure to be checking the underside of the leaf, again, for that double row of the black and white striped barrel eggs.

And you can either smash those with your fingers.

They're not very big, actually.

They're very tiny.

So you can smash those with your fingers or simply pull off that leaf, and again, dispose of that.

Make sure you do destroy those eggs so that they don't actually hatch somewhere else and cause a problem later on.

If you have larger numbers, like we do, there's two options to spray.

An organic option that you can use is something that has either neem oil or pyrethrins in it.

Both of those are labeled and organic.

The nice thing about using an organic spray is the fact that there is no preharvest interval date.

And that is the number of days that you need to wait before applying this chemical until you can actually harvest your crop.

So the PHI, as it's known, is zero.

So you can apply this up till the time you are actually harvesting.

Now, the one thing you wanna be cautious of with neem oil, as the name implies, is it is an oil.

So you wanna make sure to spray this and apply this on your plants either early in the morning or later in the day, because putting an oil on your plants... - When the sun is at its brightest and hot, it can actually do some damage to the leaf itself.

It's sort of like putting baby oil on your skin, and then going, laying out in the sun.

It can really affect those plants and cause them to burn.

So be cautious if you're using neem oil in the heat of the day.

You really wanna do that early morning or in the evening.

So that's one option is to use neem oil or pyrethrins.

Another more synthetic option is to use either carbaryl or malathion.

And those are also options.

Now, they do have a pre-harvest interval that you wanna be aware of.

Again, depending on what crop you're applying it to, whether it's a mustard or your broccoli or your kale, you wanna be aware of that as well.

So you can see the damage that they do cause to your plants and why you wanna treat these because of their piercing, sucking mouth parts.

So what they actually do is stick their tiny little straw into these plants, and basically help themselves to a kale smoothie by sucking out the plant juices out of there.

And each time they pierce those plants, it's causing that damage onto that leaf.

And that damage is what you really see.

So either be looking for the bug itself, or if you start to see kind of this cloudy effect, and this damage on your leaves, then that's a telltale sign that you might have the harlequin bug.

So be on the lookout and make sure to manage those before your numbers get out of control.

(bright music) - Water is an important part of any gardening.

How you get your water to your plants can happen in many different ways.

You can use buckets, you can use water hoses, or you can use irrigation systems as well.

So a lot of people use water hoses just because it's really simple and convenient.

You wanna make sure to take care of your water hoses though.

If you have your water hose just laid in your garden, it could cause several different issues, such as it could be a tripping hazard and cause injury to you or someone else who would be walking through your yard.

Or every time you mow, you could run over it and damage the hose.

So you'd either have to repair your hose or you would have to buy a new hose every time you mow.

So it's very important to take care of the hose.

Today, I wanna show you an easy way to store your garden hose.

There are a few different items that you'll need before you start your project.

The first one is a T-post.

You'll need some two-by-fours, a saw to cut your two-by-fours, a drill, and a hose holder of some kind.

As you can see, we have already driven this T-post into the ground.

You need to make sure you know where your water and electric lines are, and anything else that might be under the ground.

So that way, you don't hit it whenever you're driving your T-post.

We're using a T-post today because it's fairly easy to install, and if we needed to move it out of the way later down the road, it's not too difficult to take out of the ground.

You could use a four-by-four post instead, and it'd be a lot less work to put it into the ground, but you'd have to put concrete and it would make it a lot more permanent and more difficult to remove if you needed to pull it out of the way later down the road.

After driving your T-post in the ground, the next step is to measure and cut your two-by-fours.

(saw whirring) So whenever you have four pieces cut to length, you will assemble a box and drill those together.

After you have all of your two-by-fours drilled together, slide your two-by-four box on top of your T-post.

From there, you can decide how high you want your hose holder to be.

Once you've decided about how tall you want it, you can mark it and drill some screws into the two-by-four box.

And with that, your project is complete.

All you have to do is add your water hose, hook it up to some water.

Your hose holder is ready to go.

I'm gonna go a couple extra steps just to help preserve the life of this hose holder.

The first thing I'm gonna do is install this solar light cap.

You can use a plain post cap if you want to, but this will help keep the water from going inside of the two-by-four box that we just built.

That helps it to not rot from the inside out.

I'm gonna add another step, and put a water sealant on the post just to help repel any water or any other inclement weather we might have out here.

Also keeps the water hose water from hitting the post and causing it to age a lot faster than it should.

You could add another step to make it more personalized, and add some paint or a wood stain of your choice to make it fit in better with the design of your outdoor space.

(upbeat music) - Today, we are planting peppers in our garden, but it's not just any particular one type of pepper that we're planting.

We're actually planting several peppers because we are making a Scoville scale pepper garden.

If you're not familiar with the Scoville scale, that is the measurement.

- To know how spicy a pepper might be.

That's the ranking system, our Scoville units.

And so we've got peppers laid out here to kind of highlight that Scoville scale.

Now the Scoville scale was actually developed by a pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville in 1912.

And the way they identify how many Scoville units each pepper has is by extracting the capsaicinoids out of the pepper.

And they do that by taking a dried weight amount of the pepper, a specific amount of weight, and then putting that in alcohol.

And then they're able to extract those capsaicinoids.

Now the primary component of those capsaicinoids that gives the pepper its heat is capsaicin.

You might have heard of that word before.

So a lot of capsaicin is taken out of that.

And eventually through that extraction process they then have that heat, which is then dissolved into sugar water.

So you have a taste test panel, and this taste test panel is then given a diluted solution of that extracted heat component.

And so as they taste test basically the concentration of those capsaicinoids gets lower and lower until they can't identify any heat in that solution anymore by simply tasting it.

Now, the heat of a pepper is not only determined by the genetics.

Obviously we know a jalapeno is more hot than a bell pepper, but it's also determined by the environment in which it's been grown.

So for example, a lot of times we see ranges of Scoville units on our peppers.

And that's not only because it's a subjective test, right?

Something that might taste hot to you might taste less hot to me because we have different sensory organs.

However, a pepper, a jalapeno pepper that's grown under stressed environments with reduced water, reduced fertility, it actually will be hotter than a jalapeno that's grown under optimal environmental conditions.

So for a jalapeno typically that range is 2,500 Scoville units anywhere up to 8,000 Scoville units.

So that's why you see a range of heat a lot of times on different peppers.

Now, genetics can also play into that.

Like I said, a jalapeno's always gonna be hotter than a bell.

However, there are some jalapenos that are no heat jalapenos.

So this particular one I have next to me is called fooled you, and it is a cultivar of a jalapeno.

So it is a true jalapeno, however, through traditional breeding practices that capsaicinoids have actually been bred out of the pepper.

So it has a Scoville ranking of zero.

So while it genetically is a jalapeno, it has been bred out of it.

So that allows you to still enjoy your jalapeno poppers without concern of really truly how hot that jalapeno might be.

There also are no heat habaneros as well that you might wanna try.

So getting back to our garden here, we've got several peppers laid out, as you can see.

Again, so we've got one bed that's gonna be more sweet to mild.

And then we've got a bed that's gonna be a little hotter and go from mild to hot.

So the first three we've got here actually have zero Scoville units on them.

Meaning that they have no heat at all.

Of course, we've got our fooled you jalapeno followed by our sweet banana pepper that a lot of times comes with salads.

And then finally our bell pepper.

And we've got a big Bertha bell that we're planting here in our garden.

So these first three have zero Scoville units and they're not gonna pack any heat to them when you bite into them.

Following that up we've got our pimento sweet pepper and our pepperoncini.

Both of these have a rating of 100 to 500 Scoville units.

Then, next we've got an Anaheim that's gonna be 500 to 1000 units, followed by our poblano which is 1000 to 2000 Scoville units.

And then finishing off our bed here we've got a traditional jalapeno that again comes in around 2,500 to 8,000 Scoville units.

Now, as we skip over to our hot pepper bed over here, we're gonna start with a serrano pepper.

And our particular cultivar that we have is called flaming jade, and it's around 3000 Scoville units.

So again, keep in mind what I said about environment.

Sometimes if you notice that 3000 level is in that same range as a traditional jalapeno.

So it might be at times you've had a jalapeno that's tasted hotter than a serrano and sometimes a serrano might have tasted hotter than a jalapeno.

And that's a lot of times because of that environmental factor.

Following our serrano pepper, we've got a Hungarian yellow pepper, and we're gonna bump up the heat on this one to 5,000 to 10,000 Scoville units.

After that we've got a tabasco pepper, and that's often used in hot sauces because it's got a rating of 30,000 to 50,000 Scoville units.

50,000 is also typically where we rate the cayenne pepper.

So a lot of times we hear those in hot sauces as well.

- Followed by a traditional habanero pepper.

And that's definitely going to be on the hotter side however it has a much larger range, from 100,000 to 350,000 Scoville units.

So we're getting much hotter, compared to zero units at all.

Now before we get to our three hottest peppers that we have here on our Scoville pepper garden, I wanna take a look at the genus species of all of the peppers that we've discussed so far going back to that genetics aspect of it.

So all peppers are in the genus Capsicum, okay?

And so actually capsicum, it's come from the Greek word, Kapto, which means to capture or to bite.

So you truly can say, as a pepper has more Capsicin in it.

It's definitely gonna have more bite that it offers to your tongue as you try it.

Now, the most of the ones that we've talked about at this point are Capsicum annuum, with the exception of the Tabasco pepper, which is actually Capsicum frutescens.

And then as we just mentioned, the habanero is a different one called Capsicum chinense.

Now, you'll notice in our top three, they are also all Capsicum chinense.

This particular species has resulted in a lot of breeding, trying to get even hotter peppers.

So that's the one that really is getting a lot of attention right now.

Now, the name might make you think that it is from China but actually all peppers are native to the new world.

So you'll find them in central and south America.

So our top three spiciest peppers are all of that species chinense.

And we start that off with the Ghost Pepper.

In 2007, it was recognized by the Guinness World Record holders as being the hottest pepper with around a million Scoville units.

Quickly, it was surpassed in 2011 by the Trinidad Scorpion, which comes in around 1.2-2 million Scoville units.

Currently, that has even been surpassed.

And our hottest pepper that we now have is called the Carolina Reaper that tops the scale around 2.2 million Scoville units.

Now, the Carolina Reaper is said to actually have a little bit of a fruity sweet flavor initially when you bite into it.

And that's probably prior to it melting your face off.

So I think I'm just gonna take their word for it on that.

As you can see however, there is a wide range of peppers to try.

In fact, all of these peppers, we just got at a local garden center.

So they're not anything that you have to special order if you're curious about trying your own Scoville units or taste testing and seeing how hot you can handle those.

However, I think for my particular pallet, somewhere in this bed about midway, it went from edible to ornamental.

(chill upbeat music) - Hi everybody.

This is a quick weeknight dinner that you can do.

It is a poblano stuffed pepper.

I know you've all had stuffed bell peppers before but I wanted to try it with a poblano pepper just to give it something new and different.

So a poblano pepper if you are not familiar, it's the type of pepper that they use in Mexican restaurants to make chili rellenos.

It is not a very spicy pepper, but it is a little spicier than the bell pepper.

On the Scoville scale, which ranges from zero to a million, a bell pepper is zero, ghost pepper can be as high as a million.

And the poblano pepper typically lands somewhere between 1000-2000 Scoville heat units.

So we're gonna start by spraying a cookie sheet with some non-stick spray.

And then we're gonna prep these peppers.

Normally when I do a stuffed bell pepper, I will chop the top off, pull the seeds out, and then fill it that way.

But of course, the poblano pepper doesn't stand on the bottom like that.

Lay it down on your cutting board.

And however it lays, nice and flat, that's gonna be your bottom.

We're just gonna take a lengthwise strip off of the top just like this.

And that's how we'll fill the pepper.

This one didn't slice evenly so I'll just kind of cut that open.

This how we'll fill our pepper, pull it open, and then just use your fingers to pull out the membrane and the seeds.

Again, this is not a very hot pepper, so you don't need to worry about it getting on your hands the way you would with the jalapeno or hotter, and just set it on the pan there.

I've got my peppers in a 350 degree oven just to soften up a bit.

It'll probably take 10-15 minutes.

And in the meantime, I'm gonna start on my ground beef, my filling mixture.

I've got some 93% lean ground beef here and I'm just gonna put it in my skillet and brown it.

(pan sizzling) Once your beef is totally cooked through and you're seeing no more pink, if you've got any excess fat in the pan you can drain it off at this point.

And to it, I'm gonna add about a cup of cooked white rice.

I used basmati rice 'cause it's what I had.

If you really wanted to amp up the fiber, then brown rice would be really delicious in this.

I'm also gonna add a can of black beans that I have drained and rinsed, and a can of corn that I've also drained.

- Frozen corn would work really well, but I just had canned.

And I'm also gonna add a can of diced tomatoes, a packet of taco seasoning, and I'm gonna stir this all together very carefully.

Once your meat and corn and beans are all incorporated, we're gonna add some shredded cheese.

I just bought the pre-shredded, Mexican blend at the grocery store.

You could just use cheddar or Monterey Jack or whatever kind of cheese you like and shred it yourself, if you want.

I'm gonna put about a cup in there and stir that together.

And then this filling is ready to go in the peppers.

All right.

After about 10 minutes in the oven my peppers are a little soft.

They're not totally done and they're not supposed to be at this point.

And now that they're out, I'm gonna fill them as carefully as I can with this filling, just dividing it as evenly as possible.

This filling is probably gonna be more than we can fit in these peppers, and that's okay.

It will make a great taco filling left over or a taco salad or you could just eat it plain.

All right, once they're stuffed, I'm gonna top them with just a little bit more of my shredded cheese and then I'll pop 'em back in the oven for another 15 minutes or so, to let the pepper finish cooking and melt the cheese and then they're ready to serve.

All right, my peppers are cooked all the way through, my cheese is nice and melty and golden brown on the top.

And all that's left to do is garnish these.

So, I've got a little bit of cilantro here that I have rinsed, and I just kind of twisted and pulled some of the leaves off the stems.

And I'm gonna give 'em a rough chop.

There are still some stems in here, that's okay.

Those stems aren't gonna hurt anything at all.

Just sprinkle a little cilantro on there.

You are gonna love this.

(gentle music) - There are a lot of great horticulture activities this time of year.

Be sure and consider some of these events in the weeks ahead.

(gentle music) Join us next week on Oklahoma Gardening, as we bring you the perfect show, all about flowers.

(gentle music) (indistinct) - You see that look like.

If that look good, we're-- (gentle music) - [Narrator] To find out more information about show topics as well as recipes, videos, articles, fact sheets and other resources, including a directory of local extension offices, be sure to visit our website at Oklahomagardening.okstate.edu.

Join in on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

You can find this entire show and other recent shows as well as individual segments on our Oklahoma gardening YouTube channel.

Tune in to our OK Gardening classics YouTube channel to watch segments from previous hosts.

Oklahoma Gardening is produced by the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service, as part of the division of Agricultural sciences and natural resources at Oklahoma state university.

The Botanic garden at OSU is home to our studio gardens, and we encourage you to come visit this beautiful stillwater gym.

We would like to thank our generous underwriter.

The Oklahoma department of agriculture, food and forestry.

Additional support is also provided by pond pro shop, Greenleaf Nursery and the Garden Debut plans.

The Tulsa Garden Center at Woodward park.

The Oklahoma Horticultural society, Smart Pot, and the Tulsa Garden Club.

(upbeat music)