- Welcome to Oklahoma Gardening.

Although water may be plentiful right now, we show you how oya pots can help your containers later in the hot summer.

Then I'll show you how to build one yourself.

Lou Enella gives us the essential tips for outdoor lighting.

And finally, I'll introduce another spring flowering plant.

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

Oklahoma Gardening is also a proud partner with Shape Your Future, a program of the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust.

Shape Your Future, provides resources for Oklahomans to make the healthy choice, the easy choice.

Oklahoma Gardening 50th anniversary.

I love sharing with you guys the cool things that plants can do.

- People in Oklahoma love their gardens.

- I feel like this is the People's Show.

We all know we're working towards the common goal and that's to produce the best quality television and information for our audience.

So often we hear out of here at the Botanic Garden how great our containers look each season.

And joining me today is Connor Schmitz, who is the garden manager here at the Botanic Garden.

And you've got a little secret that you add into your containers.

Let's talk about what this is.

- Yeah, so this is a terracotta Oya.

It's a watering system that's pretty ancient.

And what it helps us with is making sure that we don't have to be watering our containers every single day.

- Okay.

That's always a concern with containers.

- Yes.

Obviously - You've got a huge container, so it doesn't dry out quite as much, but what does this terracotta Oya pot do for us?

- Yeah, so basically we bury it into the ground, fill it with water, and then terracotta, that's the naturally porous substance.

It will basically dispense the water bit by bit as needed so that the soil volume can stay wet.

- Okay.

All right.

So you, you're starting with kind of pre moistened potting soil because it can sort of be hydrophobic initially, right?

- Yes.

Yeah, exactly.

So whenever you put this in your containers, what you want to do is you wanna, you know, moisten your potting soil a little bit and then you wanna put your oya in first.

- Okay.

- A big concern is kind of deciding where your plants are gonna go, kind of around the, the oya and just making sure that you have enough soil volume and that you're not, you know, kind of restricted by that.

- Okay.

All right.

So we're just gonna simply bury this.

How far And let's show, let's, - Let's do it, shall we?

Yeah, absolutely.

So I'm gonna have you hold that.

Okay.

And then just taking a, a couple of shovelful here of dirt, we're planting it a little bit forward on the container just because I want to have one larger plant in the back and we know that it's gonna take up a bit more space.

- Okay.

- So, you know, instinct may be to plant it in the, in the middle, but you really need to think about what plants you're putting in your container.

So for us, where we have one big plant in the back, we're gonna put it just, you know, cheat it out just a little bit forward and exactly where you've put it, where this neck comes up just a little bit up there is perfect.

Okay.

So when we fill the soil in around, the only thing that you're going to see pop sticking up out of there is just the small neck right - There.

Okay.

And so later on we pull this cork off and then just fill that up with water.

- Absolutely.

So I'd say your order of steps here are going to be to bury your oya and then you're gonna want to pot up the rest of your plants.

And then you should go ahead with a a hose and just water in the entire container.

And then you'll want to fill up your oya with water.

- All right.

Well and this one's nice 'cause it does have a narrow neck.

It's not taking up some of that volume up on the surface, which roots and - Stuff.

Yeah, you'll see a lot of DIY ones, which we've done some of them that have a much larger area on the top that they're kind of taking up.

And so you just have to be conscious about which plants you know you want to do.

You're not necessarily gonna be able to do that thriller in the middle whenever there's a giant oya that's taking up that space.

Gotcha.

- All right.

Do you have some plants?

Can we go ahead and get this one - Up?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So what first we've got a bell of fire Esperanza.

Okay.

And so we're just gonna kind of dig that in here in the back - Oklahoma proven plant right here.

This - Is absolutely, yeah, this container is right next to the Oklahoma proven garden.

And so that's why we like to put those plants in there.

So I'm gonna let you, the - Orange one, - I'm gonna let you situate that a bit while I grab a couple of dichondra.

So this is the Silver Falls Dichondra and that is just simply going to go in the front, in front of that Esperanza there.

And so what we wanna do is just kind of flank the, the oya there.

And this is a nice trailing plant and so it will fill in a little bit over the oya.

So if you do have some trailing plants, just making sure that you manage those so you don't lose the top of your oya.

Right.

So you can have access to it, - But the dichondras are really nice 'cause it'll not only creep along the top here, but it will be that spiller back too.

Right?

- It'll be, yeah, exactly.

It'll spill over the front and then this bells of fire Esperanza it will grow to to quite large.

So it will, you know, fill in and just be a nice display here.

- Okay.

So good color from our dichondra and lots of color all season long from our bells of fire here too.

- So yes, absolutely.

- Easy enough.

It's almost like a, a tree gator a little bit where it just gives you some reassurance of how much you, I think that's one of the things is so often, especially in the summer, you go out and you're like, I've been standing here watering forever now.

You know, a set volume that you've watered at least.

- Yes, exactly.

And so if your soil though does happen to get, you know, really bone dry, you can't just fill up your oya, you do need to water the entire pot and then fill up the oya.

- Okay.

- Just because there needs to be some kind of moisture in the soil for it it to be able to pull that water out of the pot basically.

- Okay.

So, and of course it, it varies how often you need to water with the temperature and the size of your pot and everything, - Right?

Yes, absolutely.

But the Oya is a nice guarantee in case you need to go on vacation for a couple of days, you'll be able to soak your pot, fill up your Oya and be good for hopefully up to a week - Or, or maybe you have that not so green thumb person taking care of your garden.

- Yes, exactly.

This is a nice emergency break to make sure that they don't crash your pot.

- Very good.

Well thank you for sharing this little tip.

- Absolutely.

- Today we're making a DIY oya pot.

If you're not familiar with what Oya pots are, basically they are containers that usually are terracotta something porous and they're a container that you can fill up with water and then actually bury that container down into your containers or into the soil line or something like that.

And so the idea is that it is a reservoir of water that then will permeate out into that soil profile.

So it's kind of a way to irrigate a set amount of water and allow it to really percolate into that soil profile, extending the time between waterings.

And so today we're going to make one ourselves kind of show you how to do one.

You can buy these, there's a lot of different styles that you can buy online, but this is a simple one that we've made out of two terracotta pots.

So this is actually the bottom, that's why I'm flipping it over.

And this is the top.

So you can see there was a drain hole that was already pre-made in this terracotta pot.

So we left that one uncovered and we've got this one where we've turned one pot upside down on the other and basically we've sealed them and then we sealed the other drain hole.

So this would go into your soil like this and you would bury it up to here and then you would fill this up with water right here.

This whole thing would be filled up with water and then it would slowly percolate out into that soil profile.

So let me show you how we're gonna build one of these.

And it doesn't really matter what size pots you get.

So we've got a little bit larger pot here for our demonstration purposes that we're gonna build.

So again, just simple pots that you can buy wherever they're fairly cheap, no big deal.

You wanna make sure it's one that's not glazed because that glaze will prevent that water from actually filtering out of that pot.

So here we go.

So this is one we have you of course, again, make sure it does have a drain hole in the bottom of it 'cause that's important.

Now there's a couple of different ways to actually go about like preventing that water from draining out that drain hole.

And that's what you wanna do on this first one.

So we've got some rubber corks that you can buy.

You can buy a set so you can kind of make sure you get the right size.

Or another option would be, and this is what we used on our smaller one here, is just those rubber protection pads that you can get for your chairs.

This particular one's a little bit too small for the hole that we're working with on this pot.

So we're gonna go ahead with one of these corks and use it.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna get our glue here and this is a good adhesive glue.

And basically what's li nice about it, it's a little bit of an elastic glue even after it dries.

And it's also going to hold up to water.

'cause obviously you want a glue that's going to really hold up to water in this situation.

So we're gonna put a little glue around there and then we're gonna slide that down into that drain hole.

And if just for safety, if you wanted to add a little more glue on the outside, you could do that.

This is why we're wearing rubber gloves.

You can use your finger to kind of help facilitate that glue and get it kind of peanut butter spread around there if you want to.

Now this is going to be the bottom.

So your second container, what we're gonna do is bring that over here.

I'm gonna set that on its side for right now.

And for this situation what we're gonna do is eventually we're gonna wanna put this pot on top of it.

Okay, so we're gonna put our glue, I have seen where some people use caulk, that might be another option, like an all weather caulk you could use.

But we found that this product worked really well.

So you just wanna make sure you have a good bead of that glue or whatever adhesive you're using.

And at this point, we're gonna turn this pot over upside down.

Now keep in mind we did not seal the hole on this one because that's actually the top.

That's where we're gonna be filling it up with water.

We did on this.

This is actually the bottom here.

So, and you gotta do your cork before you actually glue these two products together.

And this glue is a little bit smelly, so make sure you're using a ventilated area to do that in.

Now, just to give it a little bit more reinforcement, what we found that works really well is getting kind of this woven, it's sort of like drywall tape or something like that, and it's got a little bit of adhesive to it.

So we're gonna wrap this around here and you can see that some of that glue is obviously squeezed out from between our pots, but it's not too messy that it's really shifting on us.

So that's good.

So I'm just gonna go ahead and cut that.

Got a little bit of an overlap on there.

That's fine.

And what I'm gonna do is go ahead and add a little bit more glue just on that in some of those areas where maybe I haven't seen some of that glue actually protruding through.

So I feel like this sort of just gives us a little bit more security that our pots are gonna stay melted together and I'm just kind of using the tip of the glue here to kind of do this for right now.

All right, so then again, getting your stick here, what we're gonna do is just sort of spread that like you're making a sandwich here.

We're just spreading that around, gluing that tape to really secure and weld your two pots together.

Basically, you can also use your stick to kind of press it and make sure it stays stuck to the pots.

So now we have our container and our pot.

Obviously it's upside down 'cause this has our cork here in the top.

That is one of the nice things I would say about using one of these cushions inside is that it will sit flat this way, whereas with the cork you have a little bump, so it's hard to sit flat on its actual bottom.

So it doesn't matter when it's in a larger container that you're watering or in the soil, but just for storage purposes, it kind of has that lift there.

So this glue actually will dry fairly quickly.

I think the set period on it is about 24 hours, but it's pretty dry to the touch within just about five or six hours.

So this is what we're gonna do.

We're gonna leave it here, but by tomorrow we could be putting this out in the garden.

One of the hot topics in landscaping today is night lighting and it can be kind of confusing.

- Hi everybody, I'm Lou Anella.

I'm the director of the Botanic Garden in Oklahoma State University.

And I'd like to speak to you today about outdoor lighting.

Some of the concepts that you need to understand some of the materials, you could hire a contractor to do this, but if it's a small project, you might wanna do it yourself.

And so I'd like to show you some of the basics.

First, I'd like to show you what not to do.

The mistake that I first made when I did my first project, I bought a light fixture similar to this.

And the problem with this light fixture is you can see the light source.

And so at night, if you can see the light source, that's gonna cause your pupils to constrict and it's gonna actually make it more difficult to see.

So you really want to use a light fixture that has a shade.

You don't want to be able to see that light source, you don't want to be able to see that bulb.

So a light fixture like this that has a shade will reflect the light down to the ground, onto the path.

And if you're doing your lighting for safety reasons, that's really what you need.

That's really what you want.

So having a shade keeps the light from shining in your eyes and then it reflects it down to the ground where you want the light to be for safety.

Likewise, having a spotlight like this could be great to highlight areas of the house to increase your curb appeal, but you don't want this shining into people's eyes and you don't want it shining into your windows.

So most of these spots have shades on them that are adjustable that can be turned, and so you can do that to block the light so that people walking up to the house do not have light shining into their eyes.

Next we need to think about power and power is going to come from a transformer.

So there are lots of different transformers on the markets.

Some of them are quite simple, some of them are incredibly sophisticated.

You can now zone your lighting system like you can in irrigation system.

You can have the lights around the pool be on a different zone from the lights that are in the front yard.

Some of the controllers are so sophisticated they can change the color of the lights.

And so those are sophisticated systems.

You can also go quite simple.

So this is a simple transformer that is rated for 150 watts.

Here's a larger one that's rated for 300 watts.

This larger controller is a little bit more sophisticated in that it has different ports in inside it to allow higher voltage.

And so that lets us run the wires a longer distance without having too much voltage drop or allowing for extra voltage drop so that the LED light bulbs are still operating in the range that they want to be operating.

So that just gives us a little bit more flexibility having those multiple ports with the different voltages.

So you need to know what the wattages of your light bulb and keep it to within about two thirds of the maximum wattage of your transformer.

So for example, these LED light bulbs that we have here are four watts.

So for this 150 watt transformer, technically we can put 37 light bulbs on it, but we don't wanna max it out.

So let's take about a third off and say we're gonna use 25 light bulbs.

We can have 25 light fixtures on this very simple 150 watt transformer.

This is a 300 watt transformer, so we can double it.

We can have 50 light bulbs or 50 light fixtures using this transformer.

But the other thing that's so great about LEDs and what makes this such a great do it yourself project is that these LED light bulbs have a much broader range of operation than did the old halogen bulbs.

So not only can you fit more of them on a system, you don't have to worry about the voltage drop as much.

All the same rules apply, but it's a lot harder to break them when you have the LED bulbs.

It's lot easier to build a system without worrying about maxing it out without hitting the limits because the wattage is so low and because their operating range is greater.

So they really, really simplify lighting jobs.

So lots of options out there.

Know the size of your project, know how many light bulbs you think you want to use, and then buy the appropriate transformer.

You might choose to use two transformers, one for the backyard, one for the front yard, rather than go with one larger transformer.

It'll probably make wiring the system simpler and might even be more cost effective.

So you can look at those sorts of options.

These transformers are both relatively simple.

They have a light sensor on them.

You can have the timer set to stay on for four hours after it gets dark or six hours after it gets dark.

The other thing that's really important is to make sure that when you're connecting the wires from the transformer out to the light, that you have waterproof connectors.

So these transformers plug in to 110, 120 volt outlet, the normal outlet that you might have hopefully outside of your home.

And then they transform the electricity to low voltage.

So that's why these are great.

Do it yourself projects.

You can't get shocked.

You can't really get harmed from the low voltage wires.

They function at about 12 volts and that is quite safe.

You don't need a licensed electrician to do it as long as you're just plugging it directly into an outlet and then doing the wiring of the low voltage yourself.

So the important thing there is to use waterproof wire nuts.

And there's quite a few different styles.

Here's a typical one.

Looks like a regular wire nut, but it has silicone on the inside and so that keeps the connection waterproof.

But these, the wires can pull out of quite easily.

So it's better to use some other styles that have what's called strain relief.

The wires don't pull out once they're connected.

So you put the wires into this wire nut and then you open this tube of silicone and you stick the wire nut with the wires connected down into the silicone.

And then once you close it, this lid holds onto those wires and doesn't allow them to pull apart.

So this is a little bit more sophisticated waterproof wire nut system.

And then there are others on the market as well.

This one, it's nice because you don't even have to strip the wires, you just stick them in and then you with a pair of pliers, press down on this and it holds the wires tight and has silicone inside to make it waterproof.

Similarly, this one too has silicone that you put the whole apparatus in and then it has these levers.

You open that up, put the wire in, close it down, and it too grabs onto the wire.

So it's good to have it hold onto the wire a little bit.

So we like to do this outdoor lighting for safety, for aesthetics, and it's best to make sure that you can't see that light source that will give you the best light for the best safety.

Choose what size transformer you need to use and make sure all your wire connections are waterproof and you should have great success.

- Today I wanna talk to you about a plant that you might see in the landscape that is an early flowering shrub.

This is known as black jet bead.

You can see it here behind me and you.

In fact, it still has some of the berries on it that are remnants from last fall.

And the reason why they're probably still on there is because they are poisonous.

You do not want to eat these berries.

Now, this plant from a distance, I actually thought it was a white kerria japonica.

Now it is similar and it is related to kerria.

They're both in the Rosee family.

Some of the similarities are that they both have a serrated leaf that is now emerging because they are both deciduous shrubs.

They get to be about three to six feet tall, and they also both have arching branches, but the branches look different.

On Kerria Japonica, you're gonna have a lime green branch, whereas on the black jet bead you can see it has just more of a traditional woody stem to it.

So you're not gonna have that ornamentation that you might have on the carrier.

The other difference is the flower on our J Beed here actually has four petals as opposed to the single flower that has five petals on the Kerria.

Now, typically in the landscape with the kerria japonica, we're gonna see a double flower.

That's the most common cultivar that's on the market.

Plenti flora, that's just a little bit more showy.

So that's kind of the differences.

Now, the one thing that is nice about the black jetbead is that it is very tolerant of a wide range of soils and including heavy clay soils as well.

It also is very well suited for urban environments.

But again, be careful with that because those berries are poisonous and you don't want to eat those.

The other thing that is kind of a little bit part of the reason why it maybe is so tolerant of soils and the thing to be forewarned about is that it can be invasive.

Mainly it's been shown to be invasive up in the Mid-Atlantic area of the United States originally.

It is from Asia, Japan, and parts of China, but it's been here in the US since the late 18 hundreds.

It's primarily used as an understory plant, but it also can handle a wide range of sun exposure as well.

So this plant is kind of a nice flowering plant with a single, almost like a white single rose like flower being in the Rosee family, but one that you might wanna be selective about putting in your landscape.

There are a lot of great horticulture activities this time of year.

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

Join us next week as we talk Bluebirds and bubblers right here on Oklahoma Gardening.

Am I doing?

So that is an early spring bloomer.

This is called B.

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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 Gem.

We would like to thank our generous underwriters, the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, food and Forestry, and Shape Your Future, a program of the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust.

Additional support is also provided by Greenleaf Nursery and the Garden Debut Plants, the Oklahoma Horticulture Society, the Tulsa Garden Club, and the Tulsa Garden Center.