(bright music) - [Narrator] Welcome to Oklahoma Gardening.

Today we start the show off with some highlights from our recent Garden Fest here at TBG.

(bright music) We then go visit the colorful formal gardens on OSU's campus.

(bright music) We will share our 2023 Oklahoma proven annual, (bright music) Bailey demonstrates a thoughtful way to preserve our garden flowers.

(bright music) We'll show you what to do with your loofah gourds.

(bright music) And finally, I'll share a unique way to propagate a succulent.

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

(bright music) - If you're looking for an easy, low maintenance perennial.

(bright music) We have two different types of flowers on one plant.

(bright music) Capsaicin is what gives the pepper its heat.

(bright music) - Today we're here at Garden Fest at the Botanic Garden at OSU.

Welcome to "Oklahoma Gardening."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) So whether it's Garden Fest or another event, there's always plenty of fun for your family at the Botanic Garden at OSU.

(bright music) (bright music continues) We are here at the Formal Gardens on OSU's campus.

And joining me is John Stephens with Landscape Services and John is one of many that help contribute to making this formal garden such a beautiful place to visit.

John, can you tell us a little bit about your secrets?

I mean, it's just phenomenal.

I know a lot of times you focus on orange colors, but this year it's an explosion.

It's like a rainbow here in the garden.

- Yes, Casey, well, this year we wanted to really highlight a lot of different plants that annuals that you can put in a garden, just different colors, all the potential that it could be plants that would attract insects and just really just have a season long interest.

- [Casey] And definitely a lot of insects.

We've got hummingbirds and different pollinators flying around us out here.

- [John] And even a rabbit.

- And even a rabbit.

Yeah, so rabbits kind of helped prune a little bit, right?

So tell us a little bit about some of the ones that have just been phenomenal for you this year.

- Well, my personal favorite has been the Firebush.

It's called Lime Sizzler.

It's this really vibrant color, has some orange in it, some yellow.

It's just really striking and we have it lining the center long beds.

It's really just draws your interest when you, eyesight when you walk into the gardens.

- [Casey] It's got the orange tubular flowers, so definitely great for hummingbirds as well.

- Yeah, hummingbirds love it.

Another favorite of mine is the Salvia, the rockin' the blues, it's the cultivar.

Oh, if you want to attract bees in your garden that's definitely the plant I recommend.

The bees just swarm over and just love it, it's really inviting to, for that insect in your garden.

- Okay.

And it's overflowing with long flowers on it about two to three feet tall it looks like.

So doing quite well for you.

And we can't help but notice these periwinkles or Vincas right here in front of us.

I know you've got a couple of different kinds.

Tell us about this one, first of all.

- Well this one here is one of my favorites that we planted.

It is from the Kawaii series.

There's several different colors in there.

There's blueberry and pink, red.

I think we captured all the colors in the series.

For Vinca, it seems to be one of the more hardier, hardier Vincas can handle the Oklahoma weather, had a lot of rain during the June and July months this year.

As you know, Vinca don't like sitting in wet feet or getting very much overhead watering, so that was a challenge.

But even though they went through all of that in the early summer months, they really bounced back, as you can tell.

- Yeah.

- They're just really tough plant.

- They're looking phenomenal and what I really love about this series is they have a much smaller flower, but so many flowers that still get all that color impact.

But adds a unique texture compared to some of your traditional Vincas.

- Yeah.

Behind me is the Tattoo series Vinca, but this still has the same challenges as the smaller flower.

They don't like the sitting in wet feet, - Right.

- and the overhead watering.

- Definitely.

- And the tattoo has that kind of a darker eye to it, right, yeah.

- Mm-hm.

- [Woman Blond Hair] So, obviously, we've got some celosia.

You mentioned salvias.

We can't help but notice there's also Gomphrena behind us.

And the cannas, talk a little bit about those as well.

- [Man Dark Hair] Well, the cannas, we grew from seed.

As anyone that has ever had any experience with cannas it's very difficult to grow from seed.

Usually come in like a tuber or you just buy it as a plant.

So, we took a lot of pride in our cannas in the garden because we have a lot more vested interest in it from start to finish.

- And they're doing phenomenal; they really are.

- Thank you.

And we also have the Lantana.

It's the Lucky series, and this is Flame.

It's really vibrant, another plant that catches your eye when you walk into the garden.

- [Woman Blond Hair] So I know one thing about Lantana is it comes in a range of sizes.

Have you guys had to prune this Lantana at all?

- No, this one has been really self-sufficient.

We haven't had to do very little trimming on it.

Maybe there's a wild one that comes over the edge, and to be able to keep it out the pathway, but it's been very low maintenance.

- Okay, that's nice.

(laughs) Getting the right plant for the right place definitely helps.

Also, you've just got the whole garden punctuated with some ornamental grasses.

Looks like purple fountain grass.

Adds a lot of texture and and movement into the garden.

Right?

- It does, right.

Today, it's a windy day, and you can hear the wind is cutting through the seed heads through wispy sounding.

Very, very nice.

- Unfortunately, it's an annual.

(laughs) - It is an annual.

- I have to remind people that it's not going to survive our winters here.

- [Man Dark Hair] Definitely won't like the Oklahoma winters, so it's just a summertime plant but really loves Oklahoma.

Does well in our summers, handles the heat.

- So I know this doesn't just happen by accident.

This isn't just a we went through the catalog, pulled some plants, and it just, it worked out for us this way here.

Tell me a little bit about kind of the planning that might happen or how you guys go about that.

- Well, I think many of your viewers will relate.

You visit nurseries throughout the year, maybe the catalog shows up in the mail, and you start going through it, and you just make lists.

And that's kind of the same process with us, but we may take it a little, a step further.

We'll put it on spreadsheets and divide it up into color.

And if you wanna come with me to the garden or a greenhouse garden, I can show you more of that.

- Okay, let's go check it out.

(gentle upbeat music) - Okay, so welcome to Landscape Services Trial Garden.

And it's here where we decide what we are gonna plant on campus.

- It's kind of behind the scenes; this is where y'all grow all of your stuff at your facility greenhouses, right, so.

- Mm-hm.

When we try to decide on what we're gonna plant, I think that your viewers will relate to this process.

It kind of starts out where we just go around town, and we see, maybe go to a nursery or we get a catalog in the mail, and we see a plant that we like, or maybe a color that we like, and we write it down and maybe hope to try it in the garden later.

But I think we take it a step further.

We'll produce spreadsheets and keep track of those plants throughout the year.

- And so you grow 'em here first.

Any ones that you're new with or unfamiliar with you kind of trial 'em here a little bit first?

- Yes, we try that.

Sometimes in the industry, we get sent plants by growers that they want us to try, and we like, and we like them and wanna see how they would do.

Usually, we have, like, a wishlist and maybe a color scheme we wanna do, and from our lists that we have saved, we'll produce little pictures on the screen and on the computer screen and see if we like those color combinations.

And maybe, we'll go out and then find these plants and then that's how they wind up in our trial garden.

- [Woman Blond Hair] Okay, so it's literally kind of like a interior design.

You put a montage of photos together and see if it works out.

- Exactly.

But we have to plan it out years in advance.

So we're already thinking 2025.

And so, it's a year-long process.

When we have the trial garden, then we get a specimen that we want to try.

We always plant a plant in a pot, and then we also will plant it in the ground because we wanna see how it does in Oklahoma's climate, which can be brutal with the heat, drought, and wind.

We wanna see how each plant will respond to what we are going to throw at it 'cause if it fails, we want it to fail in our garden, not out on campus where all the students and everyone can see.

- Absolutely.

And I noticed you've got a fair amount of, like, drought-tolerant native stuff, which is also predominant on campus as well.

- It is.

We're really trending toward, and especially in our Native Plant Corridor, a lot of hardy plants, natives, things that can handle the drought.

Up here in my garden right now, we have gaura growing.

Does really well in Oklahoma.

It's drought-tolerant.

Handles the sun.

- Yeah, and it's kind of past its prime right now, - It is.

- [Woman Blond Hair] but normally it would be covered with white flowers or pink flowers and, yeah.

- In our trial garden, we tend to just let things go.

We wanna see what would happen if it's just, I wouldn't say neglect, but we just let it be free and grow how it wants to, very minimal interference from us.

We just wanna see how it will respond.

- All right, so some of the stuff we are seeing out here might actually be on campus in a year or two.

- Yes.

- Is that right?

- Yes, definitely, and if you.

- Probably, I could honestly say that if you look in this garden, you'll see future formal gardens in this, but it's just not pieced together yet.

- All right, so it's like looking at all of the paint before the artist does its work.

- Exactly.

- Well, thank you so much for sharing this with us, John.

- You're welcome.

(bright music) - Today, we're highlighting our Oklahoma Proven Plant selections for 2023, and this plant here is our annual.

This is cape plumbago, or sometimes called cape leadwort.

This is a native to South Africa where it is actually an evergreen shrub that grows six to seven foot high.

But because of not being cold hardy here to Oklahoma, we treat it as an annual where it more typically grows anywhere from one to three, maybe four foot high, depending on how it's grown or where it's grown.

Now, this is a beautiful plant with clusters of sky blue flowers that bloom all summer long.

And they love the full sun, they are very tolerant of the heat and humidity.

I actually spent some time down in Houston, Texas and worked at a garden center down there years ago, and we sold a lot of this stuff down there.

So you know that it's very tolerant of those types of growing conditions.

So full sun and heat, not a problem for this guy.

It can also have, there are some other cultivars that have some beautiful bright sky blue flowers, deep blue flowers and there's a white flowering variety as well.

The flowers are attractive to butterflies.

Now this plant prefers rich, moist growing conditions but it's pretty tough.

It just needs well-drained soil and even though it can be quite drought tolerant once it gets established or somewhat drought tolerant, it does best with consistent moisture.

Now, this plant, if you want to keep it from year to year, you can actually dig it up or if you're growing it in a pot, you can take it indoors and keep it indoors for the winter and then replant it out in the gardens the next spring after the dangers of frost are gone.

If you keep it indoors through the winter, then you'll want to, in late winter, go ahead and cut it back pretty hard to encourage new growth for the new season.

(gentle music) - As the garden season is coming to an end, that doesn't mean that you can't keep enjoying your flowers throughout the wintertime.

During the winter, we start to get a little antsy because we don't have all the plants outside growing and the flowers blooming, and all we can really do is plan and start seeds.

But there is a way to enjoy your flowers throughout the winter months, and you can also share them with others as well.

So right now is the perfect time to go ahead and start collecting some different plants, collecting different flowers and leaves and different things to start drying them, as you can see behind me.

So there are several different kinds of plants that dry super well and are proven to hold their color and their flower structure as they dry.

So gomphrena, celosia and strawflowers, just to name a few, and that's because of their structure of flower and structure in their stem, it's the reason why they dry super well.

On top of those, a lot of or some ornamental grasses and different herbs also dry super well.

I just learned that apparently this particular marigold that I also just dried, I was trying it out for the first time this season drying it, and it's held its shape so far really well.

And you can hold these flowers for a while but before you get any of your flowers picked and ready to dry, you need to get your structure ready.

So the first thing that I did was I hung up a string and then I got some rope ready to hang up my flowers before I picked any.

So you wanna pick them in the morning right before they open or right after the dew comes off of them.

So you wanna hang them in a cool, dry place, and you wanna keep as much light out of there as possible.

You also wanna make sure there's good air flow and circulation, so that way they don't get stagnant or have any mildew or mold growing on them as well.

So now that you have your flowers hung up in a well air circulated area, you want them to stay there for about two weeks at the very minimum.

The longer that you allow them to dry, the better that their flower structure is going to be true to what you'll have later on on your different projects.

So as they're hanging and drying, you might wanna spray them with some floral spray, even hairspray works as well, just to help them stay and not fall apart as some different plants could.

Besides just hanging it up as decoration, we've gone a step further and we've began making crafts out of it.

So one of the first crafts that we chose to do was making these little floral note cards.

So we went to the craft store and bought different kinds of materials to use for our project.

So we started out by getting this scrapbook paper and these different.

- Brown note cards.

We also got some different colorful note cards as well and different kinds of paper.

This floral tape was really cool and then some different stamps.

So what we initially did was we made little tiny arrangements, as you can see here, and these have held up really well.

I've had them in storage and I made these last year.

So you can see how well dried flowers can hold up.

The initial thing that we did was we made these little arrangements and then we chose what kind of note card paper that we wanted.

So on this particular paper we just made a couple little slits.

We put a sticker on it and then we hot glued it on the back, and you can see that right there.

So if you wanted to hide this hot glue, you could take another piece of paper of the exact same kind.

You could write a fun little note to whoever you're wanting to give this to and glue them to the back.

And you can have an easy front and back sided little note card.

I know whenever I go to the store, I do not wanna pay the outrageous price for all the different cards that it's kind of expected whenever you go and give somebody a gift.

So these are a great substitute and they make 'em that much more special because you put time and effort into each one of these.

So, this is one of my personal favorites.

We just threw some stickers on there.

You could just write on it with a sharpie and we cut it down to be a little square, so you can just place it right on top of a gift or whatever you're wanting to give to the person.

And we bought these wax sticks and a little seal as well.

And so we were able to sample a little butterfly on it to give it a fun little decoration instead of just wax.

So, we can also do different kinds of things.

You can draw on it, like on this mason jar, and we just threw this little sticker inside of it as well.

And on this one we also super glued on the back so the flowers wouldn't go anywhere.

A really simple way to add flowers to these note cards is simply by using this tape.

And it comes in all different colors, all different designs.

You can see we have a rainbow of colors and this little bee right here.

But that was super easy.

We put this paper on top of this card stock and just simply taped the little arrangements.

So after I made all the note cards that I wanted to do, I had a lot of flowers left over.

And so another thing that you can do is make different floral arrangements.

With regular floral arrangements with fresh flowers, they don't last as long as you could want them to.

So with this dried one, this is exactly what it's gonna look like.

It might collect a little dust, so you might get a new one later on.

But this one is going to hold its shape, its color and it's not gonna fall apart as much as a fresh arrangement will as well.

And so after I made the arrangement, I also had an extra jar and I just took a bunch of the different flowers and grasses that I had left over and I put them inside of this jar.

You can add some oil inside of it to help give it a fun different look, but I just put these dried flowers in here.

I made sure the jar was completely dry before adding them, so that way I don't get any surprise mold growing in there as well.

And with that, this is a fun way to help preserve the beauty of your garden, and you can share it with others throughout the seasons.

(relaxed music) - If you grew loofah gourds this summer, you probably noticed that over time as they got older and more mature, they went from a darker green and then they got lighter and lighter, until they finally ended up being a crispy brown.

So at this point is when you wanna harvest them, when they're a crispy brown, unless you were gonna eat 'em, in which case you'd wanna eat 'em when they were like this.

So when it gets to the crunchy part, you're gonna take the skin off.

And the way you're gonna do that is just by literally crunching it and then you can start peeling it.

So when you finish taking the skin off, you'll have something that looks like this.

And you'll also notice that it's filled with seeds that you can give your friends and neighbors.

They come out pretty dark when they first come out of the skin.

So if you want it to look like the ones in the store or you wanna look make him look pretty for giving as gifts, you can soak 'em in bleach water for a while until they get bleached white.

So if you grew loofah gourds this summer, this is how you can turn 'em into gifts for family and friends.

(relaxed music) - I love sharing with you guys the cool things that plants can do.

And propagating plants is one of the funnest things to do in order to see how a plant can create a new plant.

A lot of times when we talk about propagation, we're looking at two different kinds.

There's sexual propagation when we're talking about seeds and then asexual propagation, which is when we take a part of a plant and create a new plant.

Now, a lot of times we're talking about cuttings when we're talking about asexual propagation.

But today I wanted to share something different called.

- Vivipary with you.

Now you probably have heard this if you've ever gotten an apple or a tomato that you've cut open and you've actually seen the seeds that have prematurely germinated in there, a lot of times they kind of say that that's vivipary as well because you truly have another baby plant growing on the mother plant as well.

But it's a little bit kind of different.

So today what we're showing you is true vivipary in the fact that we've got small plantlets actually growing while they're still on the mother plant.

Now as the season's winding down, I happen to be walking by our patio garden here where we have a lot of succulents and cacti, and I notice that our donkey ears, Kalanchoe or Kalanchoe as some people call them, we're actually doing this vivipary.

And so this is a viviparous plant where it is producing these plantlets directly off of the mother plants.

You'll notice that some of them have actually rooted already.

You can see that they do have tiny little roots growing on them.

So it's kind of a cool thing that this plan does.

This is one of the ways that it actually reproduces is by doing this later in the season.

And they sort of add kind of a unique characteristic because they almost look like flowers with these kind of light gray rosette look to them as well on here.

You can see there's a couple of just baby ones that are starting here.

While these baby ones are too small to really do too much with, at this point, what we're gonna do is show you how you can pot these up and take them in the house.

So if you look at these, you've got some that are very small, and what we're gonna do is just go ahead, sometimes they'll break off, but we're just gonna trim them off right here, trim that little bit of the leaf, and take it off.

Now because this is a succulent plant that likes kind of that arid condition, we wanna have good drainage.

You can see that they're planted here in rocky soil that's on a hill.

We've got some sandy potting soil here also and we're just gonna go ahead and tuck those in there and allow them to continue to root.

So the nice thing about this, because this is a tropical succulent, it's actually native to Madagascar, so it's only native or hardy to zone nine.

So otherwise, if we wanted to save this plant, we would have to dig up this whole plant.

But because of this viviparous habit that it has, instead of digging up this whole plant, we can just take a few of these plantlets off of the mother plant and bring those inside.

And this will give us a good start for next spring.

(bright 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.

(bright music continues) - [Announcer] Stay tuned next week on "Oklahoma Gardening" as we bring to you a larger-than-life show.

You won't wanna miss it.

(laughing) - So with that, you might try drying some flowers to help preserve...

I don't know where I was going with that.

- [Announcer] 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 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 gem.

We would like to thank our generous underwriter, the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food, and Forestry.

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.