Hello and thanks for joining us for another episode of Mid-American Gardener.

I'm your host, Tinisha Spain.

And joining me in the studio today are two of my pals who are ready to talk about all things green and growing.

So we're going to have them introduce themselves and then off we go.

So ladies first, we'll start with you.

Hi, I'm Jennifer Nelson.

You can find me on campus teaching undergrads about vegetable gardening in Hort 105.

And some of my articles are online at groundwindgrowing.com, but I talk about all things plant related and I'll give it a shot.

Okay, wonderful.

All right.

Chuck.

Hi, I'm Chuck Voigt.

I was in the crop sciences department at the University of Illinois until about 10 years ago.

And since then I've been retired and finding that time is gone, but I still enjoy gardening.

Still enjoy.

Gardening, yes.

Chuck, you like some of the more unique flowers and vegetables and things like that.

Was my calling card through my 27 plus year career.

The more weird and wonderful, the more I liked it.

Yes, yes.

We've got to see some of that on the show throughout the years.

Okay, let's get started.

Jen, we'll start with you.

Okay.

We have a, looks like a crime scene here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just decided and my daughter Margaret helped me figure out what to bring today because we were out of town over the 4th of July holiday and sometimes things don't go as planned at home.

And we apparently had some sort of major windy storm come through and a big giant hanging basket fell down and took this jade plant with it that was sitting unfortunately underneath it.

So fixing the hanging basket is a whole other project, but I was left with this and so I thought, probably not the only one this has happened to, but what do you do now?

So this is a jade.

Some people call this one the Shrek jade because it's got like the, or the ogre.

Yeah.

Because it looks like little ears.

And there's kind of a stump in the pot with a couple of sprouts coming off the base.

I'm just going to maybe kind of readjust this in the pot so it's more centered, but I'm going to just leave this because it will likely have some buds here that'll come awaken and we'll get one plant there.

Some of these little random branches that broke off.

I may break this down further, but you can even see some of this already has some roots.

Roots on it.

Jade's super easy to root.

So unfortunately for my husband who says there's too many plants in our house, there's going to be multiple more coming off of this.

And one of the things with succulents, you want to make sure that it has calloused over or dried out.

And this must have happened pretty early on when we were gone because this is already dried pretty well.

So again, I might break this up a little bit and let those ends callous over before stick, just sticking them in soil and this time of year they'll root really quickly.

You don't even really need rooting powder on it, but I might stick some on just for... Now that larger piece that you just had, would you root that whole thing or would you break that one down?

I'll.

Probably break this one down because the older the stems are, the longer they take to root.

Oh.

Okay.

And you probably could get it to do something that's going to take a while.

And maybe I don't like the structurally that looks kind of lame, but -.

Yes.

We've talked.

About tree pruning.

A lot.

This is a poorly balanced tree if you're going for the jade tree look, but maybe top it, chop it off.

It's just more opportunity to grow more plants.

And I also had several leaves left behind and this was a jade that was next to it that got a little bit got grazed.

Yeah, it was a tragic crime scene, like you said.

Jade can be propagated just from the leaves too.

So same thing, make sure it's dry and these would just barely, barely bury that end of the leaf in the soil and you'll get a little plantlet at the base.

Eventually the leaf will dry up, so you'll get more.

And I've had this jade tray for years and years and years and there's many progeny from it.

So about to get some more.

Now I have had terrible luck trying to plant the... Are they leaves?

Is that a leaf?

Yeah, this is a. Leaf.

I've had trouble when I do it upright.

Should you lay it flat?

Yeah, I lay them flat.

Or do you bury the tip?

I lay them flat and these will fall off in the greenhouse and one of the staff members was just collecting them and laying them.

He'll do just like a little shallow tray.

And just.

Kind of line them up and lay them on there with no rooting powder, no nothing, just water whenever you remember.

And sometimes they're growing little plantlets just laying in the gravel in the greenhouse.

So I think maybe -.

They're tough.

Yeah.

But maybe it's one of those things like too much attention.

I think.

I think.

Yeah.

I'm a cereal over waterer.

Yeah.

Cereal.

Overwater.

I will set it and forget it and it'll be.

Great.

So it's a meat thing.

It's a meat thing.

Got it.

Noted.

Okay.

Chuck, let's see what you've got.

Okay.

Last time I was here, I was talking about starting sweet potatoes.

Yes.

And we established that a potato is a modified stem.

So it has eyes which are buds.

So the distribution of those eyes is where sprouts will come from a potato.

A sweet potato is a root.

And so most of the sprouts will come from the proximal end, the end that's closer to the plant.

And then I kind of blithely said, well then I'm going to start my slips.

And Kelly rightly called me on that because I didn't really explain what the slips were.

So I thought I would bring in slips.

This is what I did for years.

You start them, plant them fairly deeply in a container.

They come up, you pull them from the root and plant them.

Commercially, they're a little shy about that because you might get something from the mother root.

I didn't have problems over all my years at the U of I doing 80 varieties, but what they do, and I found this out when I got a bunch of trial material from Louisiana State.

One of our grad students was a doctor down there and sent me that.

And they just cut them, send them out.

Yo dig a hole in the ridge where you're going to plant them, probably take off the bottom leaves.

And then they would recommend that you put them in a slight angle so that all these nodes will start sending down roots.

These form from zero where this one has some little ones that might get distorted when you plant them.

And so ideally, commercially, that's the way that they do it.

But these are the slips that I was talking about the last time.

And so hopefully Kelly sees this.

You've redeemed yourself.

Yeah, that would be my fondest hope.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Well, do you want to do anything else out of there or do you want to come back to you?

Come back to me.

All right.

We'll come back.

You hang right there.

Okay.

You've got some veggies.

Yes.

Well, I brought some squash that were ready while we were out of town and this is a- As they always are.

As they always are.

Yeah.

Some of them my friend harvested for herself, but I brought kind of a misshapen one and a less misshapen one.

It's not perfect.

But we've had some really brutal weather, some really hot weather.

And I think it affected how things were pollinating in this zucchini.

This is an heirloom variety of zucchini called Cocozelle.

Zucchini's brought to us from Italy by Italian immigrants.

So this is an Italian heirloom.

And this one is kind of... There's like only half a zucchini and then there's kind of a hole.

It had blossom end rot.This one didn't form quite right and it pollinated a little bit and then the rest of the squash died and fell off.

Interesting.

Yeah.

I'm going to have to cut into it and see if it's - See what's.

Going on in there.

See what's going.

On in there, but it feels like what's left of it looks to be a little bit past where I would normally pick it.

It's got kind of a heavier rind and you really want to pick zucchini a little earlier when it's got a rind that you could put your thumbnail through.

You don't want it to be so thick and it'd probably be good for zucchini bread or something shredded up or stuffed or what have you.

It's.

About that time.

It is.

And we were looking it up before the show on August 8th is the annual sneak some zucchini onto your neighbor's porch day because once these get going, I've got some pictures where you're looking at a zucchini and it's like, oh, I'll pick it tomorrow.

And.

Then two days later it's -.

A mile long.

Yes.

It's the size of a newborn baby.

They go incredibly fast.

I need to dig out the picture of when I was about eight, we had so much zucchini and cucumbers and my mom's trying to give it away to the neighbors and she sent me and my two sisters out with the wagon.

Oh my gosh.

To give it away.

She said that neighbors would find it harder to turn us down than her.

Send the cute kids.

Send the kids out.

But we had pictures.

Our biggest one we weighed it that year was like nine pounds.

Wow.

So with me and my two younger sisters with big middle size of... Yeah.

It was something.

You were always going to be in hoard, weren't you?

It.

Was destiny.

It was.

It really was.

It was destiny.

Now the one that's shaped crazy, is that water uptake?

What causes that?

I think it's poor pollination when the flower was open.

What do you think, Chuck?

That comes to mind.

Yeah.

Stuff like that.

It's been such weird hot.

If it's hot, dry, pollen's not going to live very long and it's just not going to get where it needs to get before it dies.

Bees might get lethargic.

Yeah.

The bees maybe aren't coming around like they should.

And blossom and rot is caused by a calcium deficiency, but yes and no because it's also in dry weather because calcium has to travel in water.

So if things got too dry at a time when the plant is growing and cells are replicating, they need calcium for that process.

And if they don't have it, then that tissue dies.

So if you have a tomato that has the brown bomb on it.

Some cultivars are really terrible no matter how much water you put on them.

They have blossom and rot, but a lot of times you can trace it back to inconsistent moisture levels.

So if it's cycling between being appropriately wet and then bone dry, you can have worse problems with that.

Still okay to eat, right?

Oh yes.

Won't taste any different.

Yeah.

Cut the bad part off.

I'm concerned with how open this end is, whether the inside is good or not.

There.

Might be somebody in there.

There might.

Be somebody to say hi inside.

We shall see.

But I think these will probably be better for zucchini bread.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

All right, Chuck, we're back to.

You.

Okay.

Well, I was looking around and I may have brought these guys in before, but they've kind of taken over a lot of that space where I've cut back how much I garden.

So it's kind of abandoned garden.

And I had one of these that I bought, I think maybe from the prairie plant people down here or something.

And it has spread itself to hither and yan through that area.

And it was just near perfection today.

It's the wild native.

Menarda fistulosa, F-I-S-T-U-L-O-S-A, has these purple flowers.

Used to be even more common I think before farmers got so anal with their bat wing mowers and keeping everything buzzed down like the gruff at the golf course.

But still you can find this in little corners where the bat wing won't reach and certainly in my abandoned area it's good.

It's very nice, spicy kind of an aroma.

There's a whole bunch of Menardas.

One is a lemon kind of a place.

And then there's the B-balm, the red, pink, white one.

But this is the native one and it was just looking so good.

I thought I would bring it in.

It's really pretty.

It's very.

Whimsical.

The.

Flowers.

Are very whimsical.

I. Almost brought mine in that I've got the red flowered B-balm and it looks like fireworks the way it... It's a little more exaggerated.

It is in the mid family.

And apparently this spreads by seeds and by rhizomes are stolen.

Bonus.

Yeah.

Oh pretty.

Last year I didn't do a really good job with my leeks and they were kind of tiny and so I just left them and they over wintered.

I was going to harvest them this spring before they made seeds dogs.

Didn't do that either.

So now I've got this row of seven of these nice... All the alliums that we grow and the spring bulb carry, it's easily as atractive as those are.

That is really pretty.

It is really pretty how it's purple on the... Yeah.

Can you.

Eat it?

Can you eat it?

Probably.

Yeah.

You want to take it home and try.

It?

Saute it.

Just wondering.

You would want to snip them off as individuals and maybe dot them around on a potato salad or something or you need a little bit of a leakish flavor.

But leak is a biennial.

And so if it over winters, which often it does, they'll come up and kind of reestablish themselves depending on how hard the winter was on them.

And then you get to about June and these flowers appear and then some but maybe not all will then form little bulblets down around the base of the old plant because this plant is going to die as the flower matures and the seeds mature.

But sometimes they'll make little offsets.

Kind of like- Like.

Pups on a Bermeliad.

Sort of.

Or a lily.

Yeah.

I'm thinking specifically of elephant garlic if you've ever grown that.

Oh, I've never grown that.

It makes little pups.

And elephant garlic is a largeheaded leak.

The science of it all.

That's fascinating.

Yeah.

Did you see the question that came in that mentioned you, ladies' bed straw?

No.

So we talked about that on a other show.

It says, "I first noticed ladies bed straw in my ground cover.

And she said I was charmed with it and I didn't do anything.

Before long it was everywhere just as Jen said.

And she says it's easy to pull.

The roots are fine.

It's nothing to pull."

So there's eight million.

Seeds that.

It's shedding.

So she wanted to know if you had any advice.

She said she had tried a weed killer once, but -.

I would hesitate trying a weed killer because it's usually, for me at my house, that stuff is within the beds.

And so a weed killer is probably going to kill your flowers too.

I would just pull it as soon as I see it.

Yeah.

It's been pain in the neck to put it -.

I love what she said.

In G. Rated terms.

I was charmed and I did nothing.

That was just read so poetically.

I've heard people say that about different things and they're like, "Oh, I just didn't want to pull it.

It's so beautiful."

I'm like, "Oh...".

Pull it.

Yeah.

Pull it.

Other plants too.

Yeah, just pull it.

I had not seen... I wasn't familiar with this so I looked it up and looked up the pictures of it.

Kind of looks like Goldenrod.

Is that - Kind of sort of.

Maybe it's just the color.

Yeah.

I didn't know that it was used for mattresses and it's got a whole story.

When you get in there and you can... I literally one day just put my whole hand in there and just went like this and I jumped it off.

And just gathered it all.

It pulls really easily.

She's right.

But if you get it too late, there's just eight million seeds and you'll come in and it's stuck to your gloves.

It's stuck to your shoes and you know how it's getting around then.

Anything that's running through there is bringing it to you.

Isn't that the one that supposedly came in the bedding of the Hessian soldiers during the revolution?

I don't know about that, but I've heard that it was used as stuffing for.

Mattresses.

I don't know if we can blame the.

Hessians or not.

Susqueh quincentennial moment.

I should know this.

I should know this.

We just came from.

Colonial Williamsburg.

Interesting.

Yes.

That's who Washington crossed the Delaware and surprised and drented.

Interesting.

See?

I love that.

Okay.

Do you have any other items in your bucket of surprises?

Okay.

Then let's talk about planting because it's not over.

It's not quitting time.

It's never over.

So as we move into summer, mid-summer, late summer, what things can we be planting or thinking about planting?

Well, things that like to be cool weather crops and the irony is we need to starve some of them in the hottest part of the summer and then kind of make allowances to try to get them through that and go from there.

What I told you was like rutabagas around the 4th of July, that's a good time to sow the seeds.

You can sow them earlier, but then they get kind of strange and elongated and if you want the big round ones, start them about the 4th of July, thin them mercilessly, which is plain for me.

And then keep them well watered because for that first six weeks or so, it's going to be kind of trying conditions.

But get them through that.

They are closely related to cabbages and things, so the cabbage larvae are going to try to eat them.

So you're going to have to keep bacillus syringe ansis or something on them to keep that problem down a bit.

But if you successfully get them to - If they make.

It through that.

If you get them through that and have them spaced maybe at least four inches apart so that they can grow to four inches in diameter, then in September as things cool off, as typically we start to get a litle better rainfall, although nothing's typical anymore.

And they usually size up really quickly through September.

And then as you get into October, the chillier nights, the sugars start to build up in them and it's good.

Also like a gill feather turnip, which is a cross between a ritabaga and a turnip, you would start those at the same time.

Ordinary turnips can wait a good bit later because they grow much faster.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

And then we can start thinking about peas and not right now, but peas, kale, broccoli, all that good stuff too.

Yeah.

We used to plant broccoli back when I was in grad school.

It'd always be the hottest day of summer.

It seemed like.

We were out there planting it.

Yeah.

Is there anything to starting your cool season in trays and then transplanting them out?

Yeah.

That's.

What we would do.

That's what you would have to do.

The transplants would be started sometime in June.

And then.

They would be put out late July.

Gotcha.

So don't start them in the ground?

The cool season crops?

Well.

It depends on them.

If you're going to grow a root crop, you have to pretty much have to do them in the ground.

But if you're going to do cabbages and broccolis and fall cauliflower is really - The only kind of cauliflower you can get around here.

They're really the only dependable time to grow it.

But yeah, those are fine.

Direct.

Sow those.

Okay.

No.

Oh.

Cauliflower you would start ahead.

Okay.

All of those things you start ahead and while it's in a flat, you can protect it.

They're easier to spray with the BT and all those things.

And then kind of at the last possible moment, put them in the field so that they can put on that growth spurt that they're going to need so that they finish the cycle at an appropriate time in October.

Gotcha.

Okay.

I had it backwards.

Yeah.

But your group and I had some spectacular results, particularly with cauliflower out there.

Yeah.

I never saw them bring in cauliflower in the spring.

It just jumps from 60 degrees to 90 too quickly and cauliflower -.

And then it.

Doesn't grow well?

Or you get just a little tiny bit of cauliflower.

Yeah.

Cauliflower is kind of the most persnickety of that continuum of cabbagey things.

Very diva-like.

Very diva-like.

Okay.

If it's too cold, I'll freeze.

If it's too hot, I won't perform.

You got to be.

Right.

It's.

Written in the contract.

That's right.

And only blue M&Ms in my dressing.

Room.

Yes, yes.

Sparkling, not still.

As we're out in the garden and we're seeing things that are beginning to ripen, for first time gardeners, I just kind of threw this question out there of when do I pick it?

So just because something is red, just because the tomato is red, does that mean it's ready to be picked?

How do we know for first time folks when the green beans are ready to be harvested?

How do you know?

Depends on the crop.

Is there just a quiet whisper that says -.

Depends on the crop.

Green beans, you want to pick them before they're getting all bumpy and the seeds are really getting.

Formed.

Because most people don't want - They get.

A little stringy.

They get a. Litle stringy, they get a little tough.

If you miss them and they're bumpy like that, you can shell them out and just eat the beans inside.

A lot of it just comes with trial and error and that's like the joy of gardening or the headache of gardening depending on your point of view.

Because I've definitely been guilty of taking a melon off the vine too early or grabbing the cucumber and cutting it and it's like, whoops.

It's right of summer to pick the first watermelon too soon because you're so eager.

Yes.

My son Andrew did that when he was about three.

We actually had several watermelons and we go check them every morning.

And we talk about how they're not ready yet.

And my daughter Margaret was just newborn and I'm doing something with her and he's like, "Mommy.".

Before you knew it.

He picked malt.

He was so proud.

Every one.

Of them.

Heartbreak.

Oh, they're good, mommy.

They're good.

The.

Heartbreak.

And well, we caught them up and said, "No, they're not good."

They're not good at all.

And I had a student this past year, we grew cucumbers in the greenhouse and cucumbers, if they're turning yellow, they're way, way past their pink.

And somebody left their cucumbers.

They were actually kind of going from yellow into almost white.

And.

They're like.

"Should I pick this?

Yes, a while ago.

Is it still edible?

Probably not.

Can I try anyway?

Sure.

Go for it.

Try it.

Go for it. "

They.

Said it was so bitter they couldn't even... So trial and error.

Trial and error and figuring out in your own backyard and stuff like tomatoes.

Sometimes you want to pick those a little bit early if there's a big rain coming because then if you leave them out and there's a big deluge of rain, then you end up with split skins and that sort of thing.

So you kind of... There's no nuance.

I get.

It.

This is where the art part comes in, in.

Horticulture.

All.

Right.

Well, we are out of time.

We could just sit here and gab all day, but according to them, we have 26 minutes.

So anyhow, thank you guys so much for coming in.

Thank you so much for watching.

If you have questions, you can send them into us at yourgarden@gmail.com or just look us up on socials.

Look for Mid-American Gardener and we will see you next week.

Good night.