- Welcome to Oklahoma Gardening.

Today we head to campus to see why a tree risk assessment is critical to keeping people safe.

Brenda Sanders catches up with Bear Creek Cut Flower Farm.

We learn more about some of the pest problems they faced at the OSU Student Farm.

And finally, we are joined by Doug Talami during his recent visit to Oklahoma.

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.

- Hi, I'm Caitlin Gibson.

I'm the university arborist at Oklahoma State University, and we are standing here on our Stillwater campus on the east side of Gunderson underneath a beautiful shumar tree, which unfortunately will need to be removed.

We've been monitoring it very closely over the last few weeks and months, and we've noticed an increased lean.

And because this area is so highly trafficked, especially with the upcoming football season approaching, it's unfortunately we must take it down.

We first noticed it was a little bit stressed in this in during the spring and fall, the transition from spring to fall and started monitoring it very closely using certain tools.

We noticed that the lean was increasing.

After that, we reached out to additional arborists in the community just to get second opinions.

This is a very, it's a historic area on campus.

It's a beautiful area on campus that a lot of people care about.

And so we don't make any of these decisions lightly in our campus forest.

And with the additional consultations of the other arborists, it was decided we needed to take them out.

- So they called in some professionals, they called us at Oklahoma Forestry Services.

We called a couple other certified arborists here locally.

And we all came out and did a level one risk assessment.

Trees respond to stress in different ways, different species, different surroundings, the way they grew up, their history.

All of that comes into play.

So we take all the science that we've learned through a process called tree risk assessment that enables us to collect all this scientific data over history and research and apply that to these trees that we're looking at.

In this case, we performed a level one tree risk assessment.

That's just a visual assessment.

And we walked around this tree, we measured it, we hung a plumb bob on the tree.

And what this does is it allows us to see how far that tree has moved in a short period of time.

So when we look at this plumb bob, we've got a mark on the tree right over here, and we compare that.

We can see that it's off about an eighth of an inch from when this plumb, Bob was first inserted here about four weeks ago.

So an eighth of an inch of movement within four weeks is really dramatic for a tree of this size.

Now you expect a little sway with wind and things of that nature, but it should always come back and this one has not come back.

So this plumb bob, is a way for us to measure that lean over time.

- So again, most people might look at this tree and think it's healthy.

Why are we removing it?

And I just wanna come back to the fact that even though it's been growing with this lean, its entire life, that lean has been increasing at an unsafe rate recently.

And that's why we have to remove it.

- So the first thing we'll do is mobilize the equipment to the site and the crew will start to get set up and they'll cordon off the area protecting the pedestrian traffic and sectioning off these sidewalks.

And we'll have a guy on the ground too, while the work's happening.

That's just watching for pedestrians and making sure they're respecting those barricades.

And then we'll bring in a track lift that goes up to about 74 feet.

And that operator will start to piece the tree out and selectively removing limbs and lowering them or dropping them in a clear work zone while watching for workers on the ground and things of that nature.

And then we'll just take the tree out in pieces and the guys will be taking the limbs and and running them through a wood chipper.

The light pole that's behind you right now, that's very delicate.

And that part of the tree will be removed very carefully over any obstacles like that.

We also wanna make sure we take into consideration the amount of weight that's on the existing supports and remove, you know, remove weight from this side of the tree first because it is out of balance to make sure we don't cause the tree to collapse while we're working on it, which could endanger our workers.

And then when we get down to the larger wood, we'll bring in a track skid loader that's got a grapple bucket on it, and it'll, it'll grab those bigger pieces and help take those to a, to a dump trailer to haul away.

But they are going to do some wood utilization, either milling and or carving of the trunk, depending on how it looks when we get into it, how much, how bad the decay is in the trunk.

They'll decide if they're gonna carve it or just save some of the larger wood to, to mill for benches or something like that and do something special with it.

- Landscape services take those decisions very seriously and we try to mitigate any other resources and opportunity to not remove trees, but to invest in our urban forest.

And unfortunately, this one's got to be removed and they gotta leave campus and it's for safety concerns.

And it's a painful decision because it's a generational decision.

And at landscape services, we think about that in our campus forests, in that urban environment.

We think that these big decisions we make affect generations.

Is that awesome.

It's - My turn.

Your turn - This tree have to go.

And that's an opportunity for us to plant another tree in its place and start a whole new generation of tailgate under this tree.

- Even though it may be a somber removal of this tree, we're gonna replant and grow the c, the campus forest, and we're gonna create spaces for everyone to enjoy, including myself and my tailgate.

- Well today we're actually in a field of cut flowers grown right here in Oklahoma.

We're at Bear Creek Farms and we're talking with the owner.

Vicki, stand back.

And Vicki, thank you for having us out here.

- Well, hey Vicki, it's been a while since I've been here 28 years.

I think a lot's changed.

- A lot has changed.

Welcome back.

First of all, and like in life, the one thing you can count on is things to change.

And so what we've done over the years, we still grow specialty cut flowers, a lot of them.

But we diversified in many ways because of our customers.

Our customers have asked us to bring things in that we can't grow.

And so we have started shipping things in from California family farms and also product in from Florida as well.

So now we kind of, instead of just a flower grower, we consider ourselves a grower slash wholesaler.

- Okay.

- And since we sell wholesale only that fits in.

Perfect.

The other thing that we have added over the years is we now do wedding garlands for our customers.

Any link made out of anything we've done, done it all.

And we also in recent years have added Christmas garlands with fresh Christmas greenery and Christmas wreaths as well.

Very - Nice.

So the garlands, you were telling us it's the materials that you have.

Even if you don't grow them here, there's still so much fresher, - They're very, very fresh.

- And that's, you kind of vet your, your suppliers for - That?

Yes.

Yes.

Our main green supplier out of California, we give them our order on Monday.

They cut it on Wednesday, it gets on the refrigerated truck on Wednesday, and we get it on Saturday.

Oh wow.

That's, - That's really fresh.

- Very - Fresh.

And so the specialty cut flowers that you grow, I think when we visited before you had four acres going.

How much space do you dedicate to that now?

What do you have going?

- Well, we have, I would say a grand total of about 15 acres.

Wow.

But some of the things are woody cuts and they take up a lot of space.

And so as far as cut flowers, you know, particularly perennials and annuals, I would say probably closer to six to eight acres.

- Oh wow.

So that's a lot.

Now you mostly did annuals before, but you've kind of expanded that.

You said you did woody plant materials that you cut.

Right.

And, and then also you've been leaning on maybe more perennials than you used to.

- We're trying to do incorporate more perennials because those do come back every year and don't require quite as much care.

And we can do some really different things.

And so all of that together gives us a lot of diversity.

The woody cuts, we have some bulbs, daffodils primarily.

And, and then the perennials too.

- This is a lot to keep watered Most years.

Yes.

Yes.

Now this year was different, right.

'cause we had a lot of rain, but Right.

Do you still use drip irrigation?

Is that - All?

We still use drip irrigation on everything greenhouses and in the field, but we use city water and so we pay for our water.

Right.

So this year with all the rain has been an added bonus.

We haven't had gigantic water bills.

That's - Always nice.

Yes.

- Yes.

- What is some of your main flowers that you have right now?

- Well, this time of year it's the heat loving things.

So cox comb, solocia, sunflowers and zinnias are the primary things.

We just finished up with thistle, which also likes the heat too.

That is one of our perennials.

Very - Good.

The specialty cut flowers, they have a little bit of a different care.

Yes.

After they're cut.

What's different about - Those?

Well, for all of the flowers that we grow, they just go into plain water.

Unlike maybe some flowers that get shipped in, they, they perform the best in plain water.

No flower food at all.

- No flower food at all.

No.

But then you recut the stems and change the water daily?

- Yes.

Okay.

Well that's what the customer should do.

Yeah.

Or the florist should do.

And then we try to pick and, and then sell those flowers the next day.

- Okay.

So - They're So they're really, really fresh.

Yeah.

And then if the, if our customer is holding onto them for any length of time, they need to recut and replenish the water.

Okay.

- Well, very good.

Well, a lot of things have changed.

Yes.

One of them being you actually have more help than you used to.

Yes.

You've added added people here.

- Yes.

- And, and also you've added services that you didn't used to have - Besides the garlands and the wreaths.

And then we also do bouquets and we primarily do bouquets for Whole Foods.

- And - We sell to all the Whole Foods in Oklahoma, Tulsa, and Oklahoma City.

But we also do bouquets for our florist customers too, that re request them.

And we have quite a few of them that get 'em weekly.

Oh, great.

Because they're good chop and drop, basically.

And so around holidays is when we're really, really busy.

It helps our, our florist customers a lot with say Valentine's where somebody walks in last minute and instead of them having to design something, they can take one of our bouquets, maybe add a couple of roses or something.

And then they've got a great bouquet.

- Oh, great.

One of your specialties now flower preservation, is - That right?

Right.

We've recently added flower preservation to our whole mix.

And Preston Griffith is primarily in charge of that and does that, he puts a little bit of himself in every single one.

And we do flower preservation for wedding bouquets or funeral work, anything that people might want preserved.

- Oh, very cool.

Well, I would like to see that.

And I think our viewers would too.

I'm gonna go talk to Preston about that.

Great.

Well, hi Preston.

Hi Brenda.

How are you?

I'm doing well.

Good.

It's nice to - Meet you.

It's nice to meet you.

- This is amazing.

These flowers.

Flowers are so beautiful.

- Thank you very much.

- And, and you're preserving them.

- Yes, yes.

Yes.

So, - So the process, how does the process work?

- So typically what happens is, like all of these that you see here right now, I'm working on one right now.

Oh my gosh.

Typically these will be like bridal bouquets from - Weddings.

- And what they'll do is they will get them back to their florist that they've done their wedding through, and they'll get the bouquets to s and then we will put them in silica.

And that's a kind of a time consuming process.

We have to go through each different pedal and make sure that everything's perfectly the shape that we want it.

And then we cover it with the silica sand.

And we leave that for a couple of weeks for everything to dry.

And it preserves the color beautifully as you can see.

Wow.

And so then we take those out and then we make beautiful boxes that they can hang on the wall or cloches that they can use as coffee table things.

We also do preservation from like funeral mementos, flowers and things and things like that.

Yeah.

Okay.

Anything that's, that's special that people want to keep.

- Well, very nice.

Well, so someone wanted to preserve their wedding bouquet.

They should ask their florist about that.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

That's, that's They'll direct, that's, that's the best way.

Okay.

Is you could ask your local florist that you've done your wedding through or, or anyone like that.

And then they can get with us and we'll work something out.

For - Sure.

This is great.

And just extends the life and the use of the fresh cut flowers.

- Absolutely.

It's beautiful.

And it's something that's, that's really special that people can keep.

Yeah.

Because you know, if you just hang your flowers up to dry, sometimes they kind of curl in on themselves and turn brown.

Yes.

And aren't as beautiful as they could be.

Okay.

Where we like to preserve memories for - People.

Very nice.

Well, we really appreciate you and Vicki - Yes.

- Inviting us back out.

And thank you so much for showing us your operation.

- Thank you for coming.

We really enjoyed having you out here.

- Good morning.

We're here again at the student farm, CNG plots.

Back to touch on the cantaloupes that we discussed with Dr.

Moss last time we were out here.

I've got some examples to show you of the Sierra Gold plants that we have.

We did lose quite a bit of the crops of the Rocky Ford Green because they couldn't quite stay in the heat of Oklahoma in the summertime.

But before I show you those, I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about the pest treatments we've been doing in our c and g field.

I'd like to first touch on some of the ones that you might be able to find at your local co-op.

First, we've got spinosum.

This guy is a nervous system dysregulater.

We used it on a few of the pests we had out here, including some potato beetles and some of the other flea beetles we saw in some of the crops.

Next, we'll see some bt.

Now we've talked about this before with the student farm with treating vine bores.

And we used it the same out here.

We also used it to treat some of the moths and caterpillars like cutworms and things out here that are pretty detrimental to our crop's health.

The next treatment we have here is a azaguard.

It's one that you can get online.

It's a pretty heavy hitter, but still fairly low in concentration due to our organic and CNG setting.

The primary ingredient here is asadactrin.

It's a primary derivative of the neem tree, and it is a growth regulator that we use on some of the juvenile and nymph squash bugs that we had out here.

It stops their growth, so they can't quite get up to that stage where we can have more squash bugs running around our key curbits.

The next is pyganic.

This one we know for certified naturally grown, but as well we know it for conventional.

Pyganic is the organic pyrethrin that you'll see out here.

It's a kill on contact that we use for our adult squash bugs.

That was fairly effective for what we wanted to do.

We only did one application on the melons that you see behind me, and at the time did a really great job.

All of these pesticides that I've shown you today are organic.

They're OMRI listed, so it's part of the regulations within certified naturally grown that you use in OMRI listed or OMRI certified pesticide or soil additive.

Next, we'll touch on some of the cantalopes that we have out here.

These are all Sierra gold.

Now you know what slipping is from some of the things you might've seen before, but this right here is one of the Sierra gold melons that I grabbed today to show you just what slipping looks like for me when I harvest.

So you can see right here we've got a bit of lifting from where that vine attaches directly to the cantaloupe.

You can see lifting, peeling, some cracking at the base.

And whenever you're ready to harvest your crop when it's on the vine, you might be able to just pop it right off and you have your clean harvested cantaloupe ready to go.

We've got one open for you to see.

It's pretty orange on the inside and we were pretty happy with the result.

So you can see it's got a bright orange inside.

It smells really sweet and it looks like a really nice cantaloupe.

These are all Sierra gold.

And from what you can tell from just these, they look great.

They performed well and we've had a fairly significant harvest throughout the season.

Hopefully we'll have more data to show you with the sweetness and how those treatments that we talked about might impact the quality of these fruits.

But for now, I think they've performed really nicely and I'm happy to have shared what we've known with you - Today.

We wanted to take advantage of the speakers here at the Sustainability Conference.

And joining me is Dr.

Doug Tallamy, who is an entomologist and an ecologist.

And Dr.

Tallamy, you started a revolution with a few of your books that you wrote about bringing nature home.

What does that mean to bring nature home?

- My request is that people landscape in a way that shares their little space of the earth with other living things.

So that every place humans go, it's not a deadscape.

We need to, we need to have functioning ecosystems and we need the life that moves those ecosystems and we need it everywhere.

- And why is that so critical right now?

- Well, we have a, we have a biodiversity crisis.

We're losing the plants and animals that keep us alive on this planet.

And we're doing that with parks and preservers, which means we gotta start to practice conservation outside of parks and preserves.

And that's right where we live, where we work.

Alright.

- And you talk a lot about like the homeowner and their role in this.

What is the role of the plant that you see in the landscape?

- Plants are the organisms capturing energy from the sun.

They turn it into food, simple sugars and carbohydrates.

And if you don't pass that food onto animals, you don't have any animals.

But all plants don't do that.

So you have to choose the right plants that will share the food that they make.

And that's where native plants come in.

They do it much better plants from other other countries.

- Okay.

And what's one of those primary consumers that you talk a little bit the insects, right?

- Yeah.

Most, most vertebrates don't eat plants directly.

They eat insects at eight plants.

So for example, if you have a breeding bird in your yard, they're feeding their babies caterpillars, thousands, 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to make one clutch of a bird.

And those caterpillars come from plants if you have the right plants.

- All right.

So you've mentioned kind of the role of the plant.

Let's talk a little bit, what do you see as the specific role of a plant in the landscape?

- It's, it's really to generate that food that drives life on, on planet earth.

- Yeah.

- Now we also, you know, we love plants as decorations.

They're beautiful.

So we wanna choose plants that are beautiful and ecologically functional.

That's the challenge.

- Okay.

And in your book, you talk a lot about alien plants.

Can you define what that means?

- Well plant from outside of our, our local ecosystems, the ones that don't have a co-evolve relationship with the local insects.

So our insects can't eat those plants.

Then there's no insects and the birds can't feed.

They're young and it all falls apart.

So when we, we landscape with plants from China, for example, and most of our ornamentals are from Asia.

That system breaks down 'cause our insects can't eat those plants.

- You know, I know there's a big concept of what is native and that sort of stuff.

And I, I won't get into that discussion necessarily, but there are different ecologies, right.

Even in our United States.

Yeah.

How do we talk about that and deal with that with in native plants in the us?

- Yeah.

It's that one ecosystem.

It's it's ecosystems in particular geographic areas.

We call them eco regions.

And you wanna choose plants that have evolved within that eco region.

Okay.

And eco regions move around over immense amounts of time.

But you know, for the last 10,000 years, it's been pretty much in place.

And you wanna use plants that have interacted with the plants and, and insects around them in that space.

Okay.

If it's from China hasn't done that.

- And how do you convince the homeowner that like insects are good?

'cause I know a lot of times there are insects we like, we talk about pollinators and butterflies and all this, but I mean, there's the grasshopper too.

- Yeah.

Wilson told us way back in 1987 that insects are the little things that run the world.

And if they go, so do we.

So whether you like 'em or not, they're absolutely necessary to pollinate all those plants to drive that food web to, to recycle nutrients.

Okay.

Life depends on insects.

I'm sorry.

- Absolutely.

No.

And you're no stranger to Oklahoma.

You've been here several times before.

Oh, thank you.

And our region is a little bit different than Southern Pennsylvania over there.

Tell us a little bit about like, what that means for us here in Oklahoma.

- You know, as you move farther west, there's, there's less and less rain, although you wouldn't know it from last night.

So you move more into a prairie system, and that means the grasses are gonna dominate more than, than the woody plants, than the, the trees.

We have more trees here now because of course we got rid of the, the bison and we don't burn.

And, and so they're, they're doing better.

But that's, it's that transition.

It's really based on the amount of rainfall you get.

- Okay.

And of course, as we go, especially east in Oklahoma, we have a lot more oak trees.

Yes.

You wrote a whole book about the oak and how critical it is.

Tell us a little bit about the value of the oak tree.

- You know, if we're talking about making insects for the birds, oaks make more insects than any other plant.

That's their primary value.

They're also, they live a long time, so they sequester a lot of carbon.

They're huge.

So they sequester a lot of carbon.

They manage the watershed.

Even pollinators use their, their pollen, even though they're wind pollinated.

So they do everything that we want a plant to do.

- Okay.

And so if we have, a lot of us have moved into a landscape that's already existing, it has that kind of alien plant landscape.

Yeah.

And we're trying to balance the aesthetics with possibly the ecology of it all.

How do I go about making that transition?

- You, you need to know what the plants are in your, your landscape.

If you have invasive ornamentals, and there's a number of them, pivot and calorie repair and other things, you wanna get rid of those as fast as you can because they're ecological tumors.

They just escape and go everywhere.

The others, you know, landscape by attrition.

If they die, replace it with a, a productive native plant.

Okay.

You probably have more lawn than than you should.

I, I always talk about cutting the area of lawn in half because lawn doesn't do any of the things we need them to do.

- Okay.

Well, you've given us a lot to think about and it's good to know that we don't have to go rip up our landscapes completely.

- Right.

- But maybe just think about a new sort of way of thinking.

- Yeah, it's, it's a process.

- Yeah.

- It could take you 30 years, but - Like all good gardens, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for sharing this information with us.

Thanks - For the chance.

- 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 celebrate 50 years of gardening in Oklahoma, both on television and beyond.

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 in to our okay 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 OS U 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.