- Welcome to Oklahoma Gardening.

Join us as we learn about Bluebird research.

Then we head to the OSU Student Farm to learn about produce washing equipment and food safety.

Finally, we share about a new garden being added at the Botanic Garden At OSU.

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.

Today I'm joined by Elizabeth Cochran, who is a PhD student here at OSU in integrative biology.

And Elizabeth is studying bluebirds, right?

Yes.

Which OSU's done a lot of bluebird research, but you've got something unique.

Can you tell us a little bit about your research?

- Yeah, so I look at the health and disease of our Eastern Bluebird, and specifically a look at how parents can affect their offspring.

So essentially, you know, how are the parents bettering their babies for, you know, a later life adulthood?

- We hear about this in humans.

Right, exactly.

So it makes sense that we're seeing this maybe in Blue Birds as well.

Yeah.

So how do you go about evaluating that relationship between a parent and the baby?

- Yeah, so Eastern bluebirds are what we call altricial Nestlings, which means that they are fully reliant on their parents for everything from, you know, making sure that they're warm enough and also through feeding.

So I check up on the nestlings a few times during the two weeks that they're in the nest.

- And you've got a lot of boxes around city, right?

Yes.

So mainly around Stillwater here?

- Yes.

I have over 200 nest boxes here in Stillwater.

- Okay.

So you're watching those nests.

You finally see the eggs.

How do you know?

Because I feel like sometimes I'm looking and then all of a sudden they're just gone.

- Exactly.

Yeah.

So I check those nest boxes twice a week, so I make sure I don't miss anything.

And as soon as the first egg is laid, I come back every day until there's two consecutive days of the same number of eggs.

Bluebirds typically lay about four to six eggs in one clutch.

- Okay.

- And then from there, I let the mom incubate her eggs for about two weeks or so.

And once those babies hatch, I come back on day five, 11 and 14 just to monitor them and also collect a blood sample and measure them.

- Okay.

So you're collecting a blood sample, not harmful to the babies - Or anything like - That.

You taking that Not very small blood.

You're taking that from the babies.

Okay.

And then tell us a little bit about some of the other aspects that you're of data collection that you're taking as well.

- Yeah, so I'm very busy with data collection and I like to take a whole nest approach to make sure that, you know, I'm not missing anything.

And what I do is I look at them on day five and I take a small blood sample to see if the mother is possibly giving her babies any antibodies, which is just a protein essentially that is really beneficial for the offspring to make sure that they're primed and can fight off an infection.

- So how do you know that maybe is coming from the mother?

Do you take samples from the mother as well, or?

- Yes.

- Okay.

- I get samples from both the mother and the father.

- Okay.

- And I'm able to collect a blood sample from them as well.

And I identify them using metal bands as well as color bands that are used to help identify them in the field.

- Okay.

All right.

So when you've collected this from the babies, you're then analyzing the data.

Is there any other collections that you're doing, like swabs or anything else?

- Yeah, so I also, I take a swab to their clonal cleft, which is just, what is that?

Yeah, that's just the roof of their mouth essentially.

And from there I'm looking for an active infection of mycoplasma, gallasepticum.

Okay.

It's a really big scary word.

I'll refer to it as MG from here on out.

But it's a bacterial pathogen that affects mostly chickens and house finches.

Okay.

Conjunctivitis is the swelling of the eyes and through nasal discharge.

And those two species typically get those disease symptoms, but over 50 species of birds also get mg.

But we're unsure on how they're being affected by the disease.

So what I'm doing in particular with my blue birds is I'm looking to see whether or not this disease is taking any toll on their plumage coloration.

You know, island, like much of the rest of the population love birds for all their plumage.

- Right, right.

- You know, - Which is important for them for breeding and everything else later on.

- Yeah.

Birds also love plumage, you know, plays a really big role in sexual selection.

Right.

So, you know, a bird is diseased and has duller plumage, they might not be able to successfully reproduce that following year.

- Okay.

All right.

So you've got a few samples of some other data collection things here.

Yes.

Tell me about - This.

Yes.

So I take feathers from nestlings and adults in order to test for that plumage coloration.

And I take one tail feather, eight feathers from their chestnut breast region, as well as eight feathers from their blue rump region.

- Okay.

- And I use this really fancy technology called a spectrophotometer that is able to measure the wavelengths of all of these segments.

Oh.

And from there I can get a pretty good picture of the quality of the individual.

- Oh, interesting.

So these are off of the babies, the - Yes, - The that are in there.

And you, and so as one, these look a little different.

Can you tell me about that?

- Yes.

So Bluebird are sexually dimorphic, which means that the males look different than the females.

And we can see that as soon as day 14, you know, when they start growing in their feathers.

So over here I have a male nestling.

You can really see the really distinct blue on this feather right here.

- And that's a tail feather, is that?

- Yes.

And this is a tail feather.

And then for the tail feather of the female, it'll still be blue, but you can see that it's a lot duller.

- Yeah.

It almost looks a little black towards the end there.

- Yeah.

- So this is interesting.

So you've been doing this for how many years have of data do you have?

- Yeah, so in Oklahoma I have two years of data.

Okay.

But I've been doing this since 2021.

- Okay.

All right.

And so you're doing one more year of data collection after this?

- Yes.

- Okay.

And then what's, what's ultimately, obviously it's gonna help us learn a little bit more about their immune and system and how they're passing on those potential antibodies or pathogens.

Right?

- Yes.

- How is that going to help us later on with other birds as well?

- Yeah, so there's this approach to health that I like to really use.

It's called one Health.

And it's the fact that in order to have healthy humans, we also have to have healthy environment and animals.

'cause everything is ultimately connected.

So being able to see how pathogens are affecting our wildlife can really give us a broader picture of how to really help our humans and our environment.

- Very good.

Very good.

Interesting work.

And I guess you've gotten a lot of data also.

'cause we heard a few years ago that the population had kind of declined after our deep freeze that we have here.

- Yes.

- Are you seeing that still as evidence in the, in your nest boxes or, - Yeah.

So thankfully we've seen a really big boom in our bluebird population back in 2021.

Over 90% of the bluebirds died in due to the freeze.

But in 2025, I have so many blue birds in the past month that they have been breeding.

I have 47 active nests.

Wow.

Which is really awesome to see.

- So at least here in Stillwater, the population seems to have recovered.

- Yes.

- Fantastic.

Well thank you Elizabeth, for sharing your research with us.

- Of course.

Thank you.

- We're at the OSU Student Farm today and we just harvested some lettuce.

And so Parker Lastovica is gonna show us how we would take this lettuce from the field to the market.

So Parker, what do we have going on here?

What is this device we're getting in front of?

- Yeah, you bet.

This is our greens, bubbler greens washer.

So that's what we use to clean all the dirt and debris off of our lettuce.

- Okay.

So what does this thing do?

Is this like a jacuzzi for lettuce or what is it?

- Well, basically, yeah.

So the way we use it, it's just a stock tank with some PVC, that's our air supply pipe.

And it just bubbles.

And as it bubbles, it agitates the lettuce, agitates the debris off the leaves of the lettuce and they kind of sink to the bottom.

And then we're able to just grab 'em out and dry 'em off and send 'em on their way.

- That's great.

So you just went to the farm store, bought a stock tank.

Did you have to modify it or do anything to it?

- We did, we modified it a little bit.

So this is your standard 110 gallon stock tank plastic stock tank.

We got it from Tractor Supply, but you can, you know, get, get 'em from anywhere that, and, - And I see a hole at the bottom or a couple of holes at the bottom.

What happened?

Couple - Holes?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they come with a drain hole installed, but we got to looking at it and it's not quite on the very bottom of the tank, - So it'd hold a little water.

So it'd hold - A little water.

Okay.

And we don't want that.

We want it to drain completely clean whenever we - So what'd you do for that?

- So for that, we just retrofitted a bathtub drain in there.

You got that from Lowe's.

Just cut a hole, plugged it in there.

And so that's, that's pretty much all that we had to do to the stock tank itself.

So now you can get all the water out.

- So yeah, we can get all the water out.

- So what about this water is, is, do you put any chemicals or anything in it to wash the lettuce?

- A little bit.

We have to put sanitizer in it.

So we use a food grade bleach.

You want to get that somewhere between 50 and 200 parts per million.

- Okay.

In the water.

Really?

Just like a, a teaspoon per gallon to a tablespoon per gallon.

So not a whole lot.

- It doesn't take much.

Yeah.

No sir.

Yeah.

You don't want to just nuke the plants or anything, but, - And then, so you're basically giving them, giving them a nice bath, giving the bubbler and that bubbler that action.

What's it do for like, you know, there maybe there's insects and things here.

- It's, it knocks knocks 'em all off.

Yeah.

It, it just tosses the leaves around.

It really is.

You said jacuzzi, it really is like a jacuzzi.

Yeah.

It just bounces the leaves around and that loosens up the dirt and the bubbles - And the debris.

So how do, how do you get the bubbles?

- The bubbles, right?

Yeah.

So you could actually use a jacuzzi pump.

Yeah.

But what we did is we bought a shop vac that's got a blower function on it.

- Yeah.

- And it's cheaper, it's more portable, it's more accessible.

So we plugged the hose from the blower up into the PVC pipes that we've got fitted in here.

And then we took it and we drilled holes in the PVC every so often and have that submerged and weighed down.

And so that way when we turn the shop back on the air gets forced through the PVC out the bubbles.

And that's where you get your, your jacuzzi.

- Okay, well let's see it in action.

- Yeah, you bet.

Okay.

So it's, it's easy.

Just take the lettuce, toss it in there.

It's gonna float at first, but it gets tossed around in the sink as you operate - It.

I guess I could help you.

- Yeah, that's all right.

That's my job.

Right?

You don't wanna fill it too full.

'cause then the, the greens won't move around, but yeah, you just toss 'em in there.

Okay.

And then once all your greens are in, you just flip the on switch.

You may have to kind of twist the lettuce down a little bit.

Help it agitate, take them out and look at 'em every once in a while.

See, it's looking, looking pretty good already.

We've got a lot of the dirt knocked off a lot of the bugs.

Still a little bit.

Sometimes with the head lettuce, you kind of gotta really shake it around and get in the inner leaves.

Get those spread apart.

Yeah.

I said we're looking pretty good now.

Next we dry it, we gotta get the water off the leaves.

Gotta get the water out.

Okay.

Yes sir.

Yep.

- Okay.

Parker, we got 'em all bubbled - Washed, all bubbled, all clean.

What's next?

All right, next we gotta dry 'em.

So with the greens in particular, you really want to get the water off the leaves as soon as possible because that, that just makes them wilt faster.

Makes 'em go bad faster.

- Sure.

- So the way we do that, we've got this a, it's basically a giant salad spinner but uses centrifugal force to pull water off of the leaves and, and drain it out.

- So this one, not a, not necessarily a farm scale or commercial size one.

Right.

But a good one for our small batch here.

Right?

- That's right.

You just load it with lettuce.

There's a basket on the inside that's kind of, that's set on a spindle that, that spins and you got a hand crank here and you just turn the hand crank and that it's got a gear mechanism so it actually spins, the basket spins faster than the crank does.

- Sure.

- And so it, it spins and pulls all the water off.

- So well, so where does the water go?

- Alright, it goes out to the outside.

Take the lid off here.

So it goes to the outside bucket pretty much.

And then out a drain and just - Pulling the bottom for it to drain out.

- Yes sir.

Yep.

- How long do we have to spin these things?

- About a minute.

That's something you can look at too.

You know, if you let us, if you didn't shake it off enough coming outta the bubble, you may have to spin it a little bit longer, but you want to give it a good spinning, you know, 30 seconds to a minute.

- How would a consumer still wanna be careful And once they get this home, wash it at home and everything too, - Too, right?

Wash it.

That's correct.

That's right.

I mean, it's grown in the soil.

You know this, the bubble does really good, but it doesn't get everything.

That's also partially why we put a sanitizing agent in there.

'cause that, you know, life is dirty, little bit of dirt, never hurt anybody.

Right.

But you want to get the germs off.

- But we wanna be safe with our food.

Right.

- Safe with our food.

Yeah.

So, - So we sanitize it, bubble wash it, spin it, dry it, ready for the market.

Ready for the market.

Still wash it once you get home.

- It's good idea.

Yes sir.

Yep.

- All well thanks Parker.

- Yeah, you bet.

- I am here at the OSU Student Farm with Dr. Ravi Jadeja, and we're gonna talk about produce and food safety.

Okay.

So what are some of the things we have to consider?

We're at a working farm here.

We have produce vegetables coming off the field.

What do we have to be concerned about?

- First of all, thank you Dr. Mos for inviting me for this presentation.

This talk produce is a leading cause of foodborne illnesses.

Unfortunately, in fact, last year alone in the US, between all of the outbreaks we had, we had more than thousand illnesses associated with fresh produce.

There are multiple factors we need to consider.

Anything that can introduce foodborne pathogen to produce, that can include worker hygiene, soil amendments, irrigation water, and also sanitation of equipment and utensils that we are utilizing to harvest and pack our produce.

And most importantly, we need to keep good records of documentation.

So just in case if we ever get get into trouble, then we can show that we have done the right thing.

- So this is important.

We have to be safe from beginning, beginning to the end.

- Yeah.

Yes.

- Until it leaves the farm, - Right?

Yeah.

Yes.

- So what - Are the, some of the things that we would do in practice?

So in practice, we need to provide enough training to our employees that they do not pick up a produce that is contaminated with feces.

If you're using compost or any type of biological soil amendment, we want to make sure that we apply it right?

So it cannot become source of contamination.

We need to know our water.

If we are using surface water like pond water, if it is contaminated, it can directly contaminate our fresh produce, especially if you are using that water right at the harvest time.

So we need to be careful about that.

In cleaning and sanitation.

Sky is the limit because depending on what practices we are employing, if we are using certain equipment, how we clean those equipments, can we use certain equipments?

We can, we have seen lots of people like to retrofit equipments to make it work for produce processing.

- Yeah.

- But some of them may or may not be a good choice for cleaning and sanitizing fresh produce.

- So we have some equipment by us.

So this, this is equipment that's made for produce washing, but still, can we just hook it up, turn it on and go?

Or what do we have to do for - This?

So this is a a, a great example.

This is a very good quality equipment.

I'm not concerned about safety related issue with this equipment.

As long as we can clean and sanitize this equipment, things like brushes that you see here, if we do not clean, it can actually accumulate microorganism.

Those microorganisms are going to start multiplying and they can produce biofilm.

And those biofilm can transfer to fresh produce that we are washing and that can become a big source of contamination.

So using right chemicals to sanitize our equipment after we use it, or even when we are using it with fresh produce and wash our fresh produce with certain type of anti-microbials, can not only extend the shelf life, but make our produce safer from contamination from equipment.

- What are some of the microbials we want to use so that we don't have this issue?

So can we use food grade bleach?

Are there other things?

- Yeah, food grade bleach is an excellent sanitizer.

There are multiple ways that we can use depending on the, the variety of fresh produce.

For example, if you are trying to wash cantaloupe that has a rupture phase, typically much higher microbial load because it's on the ground, you want to use about 200 parts per million chlorine solution.

And you can achieve that by taking one tablespoon of bleach and put it in one gallon of water and you get yourself an excellent sanitizer.

But if you are trying to wash leafy greens, then I wouldn't go to a 200 parts per million.

I would like to keep my concentration of bleach to about 70 parts per million so that I don't have any adverse impact on the pro produce quality.

There are other antimicrobials, such as tsunami is one of the very common antimicrobial used by organic producers.

So I also want to burst the myth that if you are buying or growing organic produce, we cannot use any type of antimicrobials.

No, we can, as long as it is approved for organic application.

- That's great.

Yeah.

So what about the equipment?

When we're sanitizing the equipment, what type of concentration should we be looking at?

- So typically I would recommend using 200 parts per million chlorine solution.

But for equipment cleaning, the most important step is a cleaning.

- Yeah.

- We want to remove all of the visible dust, dirt and pieces of produce from that equipment using detergent.

And then after that we want to sanitize with 200 parts per million chlorine.

If you think that equipment is extremely dirty, needed to be cleaned more effectively, need deep sanitation, then you can go up to a thousand parts per million chlorine.

I see, I see.

But that requires portable water RINs of that equipment.

- So if we take some, let's say lettuce leafy greens off the field and, and we take 'em to the bubbler here, get everything washed up, sanitized, and then we wanna get the water out.

And we've seen where farms will retrofit equipment to do that.

And we have one over here to take a look at.

So let's go take a look.

So Dr. Jadeja, we have a washing machine, right?

And this one's kind of been retrofit or reprogrammed to just do the spin cycle.

Yeah.

So we could put lettuce in - There, - Close it, spin it, get that water off.

Yeah, it might work, right?

Yeah.

And then again we might have some issues.

Yeah.

So tell me about this.

- Yeah, so this is a great example that this can work, but there are some potential challenges.

Your washing machine is not designed to clean and sanitize, especially sanitize.

And so there are so many spaces where microorganism can hide.

So when you are trying to wash your produce inside the washing machine, there are some microorganism from that produce is going to go inside between the tub and the the rear wall, and then also at the bottom of your washing plate, those microorganism can start building biofilm.

Biofilm is a multi-layer community of microorganism and they're not going to die very quickly and it can become a source of contamination.

When we take a fresh batch of fresh produce, put it in the washing machine and try to rinse it off.

So the key is identify a simple equipment that you can clean and sanitize.

If you have to use this equipment, I strongly recommend using, add this equipment in your cleaning regimen where you clean and sanitize and make sure that equipment is not going to become a source of contamination.

- So we can buy specialized equipment or we can retrofit, but it it might create more work for - Us.

Yes, for sure.

And for more information, always reach out to our extension website to get trips and tricks associated with cleaning and sanitation.

- Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

- Here at the Botanic Garden, we are developing a new garden here on the edge of the prairie.

This is the Native American cultural garden and it's in collaboration with the Center for Sovereign Nations on campus.

The plants that are going into this garden are those that are culturally significant and have traditional uses for the tribes and sovereign nations of Oklahoma.

So as we developed this garden, signage will be added explaining all of those different uses and kind of what the different elements that they can be used for.

So things like crafting or if it's a food product or if it's something that is used medicinally.

There's all various types of plants that are going into this garden.

So as you can see behind me, there are some empty garden beds.

We've just recently built those and we are starting to plant up some dormant root plants.

So it doesn't look like much right now, but these dormant root plants are a great option for getting native plants in the ground.

A little bit more economical than buying a fully grown plant.

So here in the next few weeks and next few months, these plants will grow up and we will have some great signage explaining all of the different uses of these plants and how they're important to different Native American tribes.

I'll be checking back in with updates on the development of the garden.

So be sure to follow along to see all of the great plants that we'll be putting in in this garden.

- 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 on Oklahoma Gardening.

As we're talking about lawns, - We got a bluebird that's sitting on the power line right there - 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 Oklahoma gardening dot OK state.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 gardens and we encourage you to come visit this beautiful Stillwater G. 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.