Welcome back to Oklahoma Gardening.

We've got a mix of things that are happening today on our show.

We're going to start out by planting our containers out at the Botanic Garden.

Then David Hillock will introduce us to the Oklahoma Proven Perennial Plant of the Year.

We then meet up with Dr.

Tim O'Connell to talk about some of the things that we as humans do that might influence birds.

Then you won't want to miss the next segment as I'm planting something very unique in our garden.

And finally, Christy is mixing up a tasty side dish that will be perfect for any summer picnic.

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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.

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That's what makes Oklahoma Gardening true to Oklahoma and true to gardeners.

If you've been following over the last few seasons, you probably remember when we installed these raised containers on these posts.

And I'm still trying to find the right look that we've been wanting.

We've used a couple of different plant material over the last few seasons.

And I think we've had some issues with our irrigation as far as consistency and the fact that they're elevated.

They're up in that hot ambient air during that summer temperature.

We've got these kind of wicker liners that allow more of that moisture to kind of come out.

So we're kind of changing our approach this year a little bit like all gardening.

So full disclosure, that's what I wanted to share with you.

What we're doing to sort of try to mitigate some of those issues that we've been seeing over the last few seasons.

In the previous years, we've had liners that have had holes in the side so that we could add more plant material to kind of flow out the side.

So this year we went with liners that did not have any holes so that we don't lose any more moisture or any soil out the sides.

The other thing is we're going with plants that are a little bit hardier.

So we've got different cultivars of lantana that we're planting in here.

So let's go over here to one that we're getting started on.

And I'll tell you another thing that we're doing.

So also in one of our previous segments, we really liked the Fox Farm potting soils.

It's a really nice rich soil.

The other thing I've done is I've added soil moist to it.

So soil moist are crystals that hold moisture.

So we're hoping that will kind of help regulate between the wet and the drying out of these.

So I've mixed that up and you'll add those soil moist crystals per the size of your container based off of the back of the label.

So we've got about five gallons of soil we're putting in here.

That was half of it right there.

For this particular one, we're going to put this Bandolista Pineapple Lantana.

We've really gone with cultivars that are in those shades of yellows, reds and oranges and a little bit of pink in some of them.

But this is a nice new one.

It's a sterile variety, so you don't have to worry about it spreading.

It is tropical, so it's not a perennial one.

But this one is going to reach about 15 to 18 inches in height and get to be about two, two and a half foot spread.

So we're just putting one per container in all of these to give us a nice full display.

And my hope is that we have these nice colorful containers on posts out here during the summertime.

But each container is going to be a different cultivar so we can really kind of compare.

I know sometimes when I see cultivars and it's like it's another yellow or another pink.

What is the difference?

And this is going to allow us to see some of that habit and how those differ from one another.

So we've got it in here.

We've got it placed.

I kind of like to put half the soil in it, place our container.

And then now we need to go get a little bit more soil with that soil moist to finish up around here.

So before we go ahead and fill soil in around this, another thing you might want to make sure you do is to kind of tease those roots if they're really root bound.

You can see this one is not too bad.

It's actually really decent.

But we just want to make sure if there are any circling roots that we open those up, kind of tear them.

It's not going to hurt the plant.

And that's just actually going to encourage those roots to go out into that container a bit more.

So now we're going to fill this, the rest of this up with our potting soil.

And again, we want to make sure that we're not completely filling it to the brim.

You can see I got quite a bit of soil there.

We're going to level this out and make sure that you're planting it at the depth that the plant was in its container so that we're not burying that plant.

And again, you can see I've left about a one inch lip around this.

And that's important, especially if you're adding that soil moist, because that will swell in that soil.

And you don't want it to like essentially push your soil out of the container when you water it.

Also, that's going to be nice so that we don't have that soil falling out onto especially our gravel here.

It would be very noticeable.

So really, this is all we need to do to get our containers.

I got a few more to do.

We've got nine here total, but I think it's going to make a really nice display this summer.

And if you're here at the Botanic Gardens, stop by and see which variety you like the best.

The 2026 Oklahoma proven perennial is Baptisia.

Baptisia is a native perennial that grows from central to the Midwestern states and eastward.

There are over 20 species within the genus of Baptisia.

And they typically range in flower colors of blue, yellow and white.

Now, this plant grows about two to four foot high and wide, multiple stems.

It's in the legume family, so it has the ability to fix its own nitrogen, which means it tolerates nutrient poor soils.

And it also develops tap roots, so it's extremely drought tolerant.

Now, its native habitat is typically along the woodland edges or in open woods.

But it's a great landscape plant in full sun.

It will tolerate light shade, but you're going to get a fuller plant with more flowers if you can locate it in full sun areas.

Now, the foliage you see can be anywhere from a light green, yellow green color to bright green to gray green and blue green, depending on the species and the cultivar that you select.

As you can see, this one here, this is one of the hybrids.

So the breeders have done tremendous work with this plant.

They have taken the native species and done lots of hybridization.

And now we have some new colors within this group of plants.

So now we have lavender and light pink and red color.

Not only do we have the blue, the white and the yellow, but now we have a little bit of everything in between.

So it's a great, great plant.

This particular one here is called Brownie Points.

And we have this one planted on campus in our native plant corridor.

You can see it has kind of amber colored flower petals that have bright yellow at the base.

This plant is a great pollinator plant.

The bees love it.

Butterflies love it.

And it's also the seed pods or the seeds are actually good for wildlife.

Now, following the flowers, this will produce a pod.

And as it matures, it will turn a dark brown to black color.

And that seed pod will persist on the plant well into the winter months.

When it fully matures and it's that nice dark brown black color, it's dry.

And you can hear the seeds rattle inside of it as well.

So if you're looking for a really hearty, attractive perennial for your garden, you might consider Baptisia.

Today we are once again joined by Dr.

Tim O 'Connell, one of our favorite who's here to talk to us a little bit about, you know, kind of the built environment and how that affects the birds around us.

I learned recently at a conference, someone was describing migratory birds and they put it in these terms.

It doesn't matter if it's a grassland bird, forest bird.

They're all urban birds sometimes.

So they're passing through our urban environments.

We want to make sure that we're making those environments as safe for them as we can.

Right.

And we don't realize what we're always doing that kind of influences their migration, right?

Yeah, there are a lot of things that that birds are susceptible to, mostly collisions in urban environments and in rural environments, too.

It's just wherever there's a building and where there's glass.

Because birds don't know that glass is solid.

OK.

Yeah.

And we don't know sometimes, too.

I've run into a glass door.

Have you?

And sometimes that reflection especially can cause this mirrored image of the tree being right there or something like that.

There are all sorts of ways that birds get confused around glass.

It could be the reflection.

So they think they're just heading into more good habitat.

Right.

It could be that there's a pass through, like there's a window on one side of a building and then glass on the other side of the building.

And they're looking all the way through the building and think they can get through.

So it's not really reflective.

It's a visual corridor.

It's not.

It's solid.

And we lose, we think, about a billion birds every year in the U.S.

to just colliding with windows.

And is that a certain type of bird or it's really just indiscriminate, like birds flying?

You would be shocked at the birds that have hit windows.

You know, all sorts of things.

Geese, you know, I mean, yeah.

So it can happen to almost anything flying.

I don't think we have any penguins yet that have hit windows.

Yeah, but it's all our little songbirds, sparrows, warblers, thrushes, tanagers, starlings, blackbirds, all of them.

There's a cowbird right now.

And also the predators of them.

So there are hawks that really are adapted to feed on small birds.

And they often will be chasing birds that hit windows and then the hawk hits the window.

So hawks are pretty susceptible as well.

OK, so I know OSU in the last several years has kind of been proactive about reducing that collision impact with the windows here.

Can you talk a little bit about what we've been doing?

I would love to because I'm so proud of us for doing that.

There are movements all over the country and in many parts of the world to try to treat our windows with products that allow birds to see those windows.

And then they recognize there's a barrier.

And OSU has been a real leader in that.

It's been fantastic.

We've been able to treat entire facades on two buildings on campus.

And those were ones that through long term monitoring we had figured out were really dangerous for birds, like hundreds of birds at one of our buildings.

So since they've been treated and that process started in 2023, the official number is around 70 percent reduction of bird kills at those windows.

Really?

So let's talk a little bit about what you actually did on those windows.

Yeah.

So, I mean, you can board them up with plywood, but that's not very useful.

So what we're looking for are products that still allow the window to do what a window does.

You can still see through it.

There's still light coming through.

All of those things that we that we love a big glass space to do for us.

But you want it to be visual to the birds.

Anything you put on the window has to be on the outside surface.

So it actually is a visual barrier to the birds.

We used a product here called Feather Friendly, which are little appliques that go on the outside of the glass and they're just little dots.

OK, you didn't have to do each dot at a time, right?

I didn't have to do it either.

They had a guy come in who like he's a professional who does installations of glass at hockey games.

Big sheets of dots.

So he was like up in the cherry picker and doing all that to reach all the high spots on our buildings.

So thankfully, and if I did it, they wouldn't be level.

They'd be all jumbled up.

But it looks great for us.

If you're, you know, a decent distance from the building, you can't see it at all.

If you come up close and you're on the outside, you'll see all these dots.

Birds will see that, too.

So for homeowners, I know they have kind of the the images of the birds, the appliques that you can put on porch.

Do those help?

Yeah.

Do those help?

Those do nothing.

OK, I mean, if you covered your window with falcon silhouettes, that would work.

But the key is for especially for a lot of little songbirds, sparrows, warblers, things like that.

There's got to be some kind of obstruction that's at least two inches by two inches.

OK, if you leave too much of the area blank, then birds just see that as a little hole that they can dart through.

So it needs to be more evenly distributed.

And then let's also talk about lighting.

Obviously, in urban environments, we have more night lighting.

Can you share a little bit about what that does for birds?

A big part of bird collisions happens during migration, spring and fall.

We're at the peak of spring migration right now.

There are literally thousands of birds probably moving overhead today, this morning.

So a lot of those birds, though, move at night.

And that means that they have evolved to fly at night, to migrate at night.

And they navigate by the stars and sometimes the moon.

So any lights that compete with those natural lights just confuse them.

It could attract them.

More often what it does is it just makes them fly around and they don't really know where they're going and they get exhausted.

And then they're really inefficient in their flight.

But if they get too confused, they might end up smacking into a building.

So now the bird has come.

They're attracted by the lights closer into an urban area with a lot of buildings, a lot of glass.

And then that just makes them more likely to hit the glass.

So people are trying to attack the source of the problem, which is the light, by these lights out programs, community programs.

And they encourage changes to our lighting infrastructure in our built environment.

That could be especially for big skyscrapers in downtown areas, just turning off lights that don't need to be on.

Right.

It could also mean changing the spectral emittance from the bulb itself, from the light source.

Point down rather than up.

Pointing it down as they're up.

You don't want to waste all that light up into the sky.

And also changing the literal wave lights.

So from really cool light to more warm lights, which are ambers and oranges, which are.

A little softer.

Softer and less attractive to the birds.

It's those those whiter lights of that part of the spectrum that really sort of confuses them.

OK.

All right.

So that's it.

Say that national program again.

Lights out is what a lot of a lot of communities call that.

And that's a movement.

It's not just for bird conservation.

It's also for insect conservation because insects, of course, get very confused by lights.

And it's for astronomers, you know.

So they're looking for dark skies, too.

And dark skies are what we all evolved with, both us and the birds.

And we all love them.

We need to have lights where we are, you know, for security reasons and things like that.

But there are smarter ways to do it.

And we're trying to do those retrofits wherever we can.

And it'll save you some money on your electric bill.

Right.

You don't need to be spending money on electricity.

You don't need it.

Exactly.

Thank you, Dr.

O'Connell, for sharing this with us today.

Hey, everyone.

We are talking about soil health today.

And there's a lot of different ways to check your soil.

But today, we've got a very high-tech way of doing it.

That's right.

We are burying some underwear.

Of all the things that I have planted on this garden, I have never planted underwear.

This is part of the NRCS's Soil Health Challenge called Soil Your Undies.

So, what we're going to do, and what you would need to do, is get 100% cotton men's white underwear.

And we are going to dig a hole.

Try not to disturb the soil too much, but dig the hole about three inches down.

We're going to lay these flat into the ground and let them set for 60 days.

Cotton is naturally made out of carbon.

And so, we're going to be able to see how much microbial activity is in the soil based off of how much cotton they eat.

So, we're going to leave it for 60 days, and then we'll come back and check it.

The best time to kind of do this is in late spring, going into the summer months when the temperatures are warming up.

Those microbes are getting really active.

So, we're going to do this in three different places.

You can see we're here at the Botanic Garden in our shade garden.

We're also going to do it up on campus at the GLC in one of their lawn areas.

And then finally, we're going to head over to the student farm and also plant it there in one of our vegetable gardens.

So, once you get your undies buried, while they are tagless that we buried, we want to make sure to tag them so that we can find them in 60 days.

And so, check back with us in 60 days to see what our undies look like and how soiled they might be.

And I would encourage you guys to join us, and we would love to see your pictures of what your undies look like out of your garden as well.

♪ Today, we're going to be making a corn and avocado salad.

Now, we're going to start with fresh corn that I've already boiled for five minutes.

Now, you could also cook your corn on the grill or bake it in the oven.

It's just a really easy way, though, to just stick it in boiling water for five minutes.

Then we're going to take our corn after it's cooled, and we're going to cut it off of the cob by just cutting down the corn all the way around.

Now, corn is going to be the base of this salad.

So, it's going to give it a little bit of crunch, but then also it adds a pretty color.

If you see from all the ingredients, this is going to be a really colorful salad.

Okay, and now our next ingredient, we're going to add tomatoes.

Now, I'm going to use cherry tomatoes that I've already cut in half.

You could also use grape tomatoes or even a chopped Roma tomato would work well.

And then next, we're going to add a red onion.

And if you didn't have red onion, you could also use a shallot.

But I would recommend red onion or shallot because they're going to be a little bit more mild.

You really don't want an overpowering, strong onion for this salad.

Okay, and then next, we're going to add two jalapenos that I've already diced.

I didn't add the seeds to this.

If you really like a spicy flavor, you might want to go with another pepper or even keep some of the seeds in it.

And I'm going to go ahead and add those to our salad.

And then next, we're going to add one orange bell pepper.

Now, it doesn't have to be an orange bell pepper.

You could use yellow or red.

I like the orange, though, because it's going to add an additional color to our salad.

Okay, and then we're going to add two chopped avocados.

Now, I've already cut these avocados, and we're going to add these to the top of the salad.

You want to use ripe avocados but not overripe.

Save the overripe avocados for your guacamole.

And then last, we're going to make our dressing.

And this dressing is really easy to make.

You are going to start with three limes, which we'll just cut those in half and juice those.

Now, if you didn't have fresh limes to use for this, you would just want to measure out one quarter of a cup of lime juice.

Our next ingredient, we're going to add two tablespoons of olive oil.

Then we'll add one teaspoon of minced garlic.

We'll add a quarter of a teaspoon chili powder.

And then we'll add just a small amount, just a dash of salt and pepper.

And you can always add more salt and pepper later.

Okay, and then we will just whisk these ingredients together for our dressing.

Then once it's mixed, we're going to pour it into our salad.

And remember, we want to keep those avocados from browning.

So we'll want to make sure that we coat the avocados with our dressing.

Then we will just mix our salad up.

Once you add the dressing, you can really smell the flavors of all of the ingredients on here.

And it is such a pretty salad.

This makes a great side dish.

If you were going to a barbecue or a potluck dinner, this would be a great dish to take.

It's really colorful and a good mix of vegetables.

Also, if you wanted to add ingredients like black beans, that could also add some protein and fiber to the dish, which would make it a great vegetarian dish as well.

But I hope you give it a try.

It's the corn and avocado salad.

And as always, if you have a question about today's show, feel free to stop by your local county OSU Extension office or leave us a comment on our social media.

There are many 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 take a look at various ways to incorporate gardens into the classroom, right here on Oklahoma Gardening.

Wait for the bell.

Semis.

I kind of leaned over to put it in the bucket.

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.

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

Tune into 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 Garden, and we encourage you to come visit this beautiful Stillwater Gym.

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 the Tulsa Garden Club, Greenleaf Nursery and the Garden Debut Plants, the Tulsa Garden Center, the Oklahoma Horticultural Society, and the Tulsa Herb Society.