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 here to talk about all things green and growing.

It's spring.

It's April.

It's happening.

Ella, hello, hello, hi.

I'm Ella Maxwell.

I'm a master gardener in Tazewell County.

I work part time at a nursery in the spring.

Got a big yard.

I'm a plant collector, and I love show and tell.

Wonderful.

Okay?

Jen, Hi, I'm Jennifer Nelson.

I teach horticulture at University of Illinois in the Department of Crop sciences, and I, too, love plants and have all the things and then some.

So ask me your questions.

All right, so let's jump in.

You guys have brought a lot of wonderful things.

Ella, we'll start with you.

Wherever you want to jump in.

All right, so I bring in a lot of house plants that spend the summer outside on my north facing patio, and so I do have a sunroom that's attached to my walk out basement.

And I enjoy lots of different house plants and everything, but I also have some house plants that stay inside that I pretty much ignore.

Unfortunately, I need to be better, and one of those is this syngonium, or arrowhead plant, and so I've had this for quite some time, and you can see that I haven't really cleaned it up or anything, but my goal this spring will be to propagate this plant when the temperatures are warmer and when I can maybe take advantage of taking it outside, so probably sometime in May.

So I have this in a in a window, and it's a a bushy plant at the beginning, but then it begins to vine, and at every leaf juncture, there are some nodes that can develop into new shoots or roots.

So it's very easy to propagate, and that's what I did here.

So on this one, it's really kind of hard to see, but I just cut the top of it off and I stuck it back into the pot.

So that's where I used I think I just used the scissors and I cut it off, but now it's sending up some new side shoots.

I've got a new plant here.

Now there is a little trait of scancha wandering in here, but that's what I'm going to do with these.

And so what you can do is, you know, I'm going to clean it up, and, like I said, it can root all along here, so I can actually go and cut different pieces.

So this is what I'm going to put into the dirt.

So I'm going to make a little hole, and I'm taking it home now and going to start it out, keep it watered.

It will be under lights, and so I just stick that end in.

I don't use any rooting powder.

But these pieces here, I started these a while ago, so you can see that we'll tease one out here.

When you lay them in there, do you put them straight up and down, or do you, no, you lay them sideways.

And so we can see in it takes.

This has been a month.

Oh, wow.

And so we've got two little roots, and we've got a new shoot.

So you can, you can do that, but I am not really going to do this until I can do it outside.

I've got, you know, I can just make tons of them.

So I could probably put these in here, cover them up with some soil and keep keep going.

So maybe I'll do that after I get home today with some potting soil.

But do you put a lid on that?

Or I do not, okay.

Well, yes, I put a lid on it to start it just Yeah.

So I'll probably do that, but it is so much fun.

And in the spring is when you want to evaluate your house plants.

You want to wait until the danger of frost is gone before you're moving them outside.

But that's when you can maybe do some pruning, some propagate.

Eating, and then you'll want to also start fertilizing as well.

I don't fertilize during the winter.

So here's my little project.

You can make oodles of them for your friends and family.

I just learned something, though, because when I did this a couple of years ago, I put them in straight up and down, and they all died.

Now I know, right.

And this, this could grow in water.

They can be rooted in water, but it roots pretty easy in soil.

And as long as it's going to get some bright light and I keep it moist, it probably won't really wilt too badly, and would quickly make roots.

It's an easy plant, house plant to grow.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

All right, Jen, we are to you.

Should I continue along the same lines of propagation?

Fascinated about this situation, so this was an example for a class that I set up to show about leaf propagation with begonia.

And so I've got two kinds of begonia here.

The colorful leaf is a REX begonia, and they're grown they have a flower, but they're grown for their pretty foliage.

So I'll take this off, as you can kind of see.

So this one's kind of got, like red and kind of a minty green color.

So what we did, or what I should say, my daughter did, because I'm really proud that she did this herself, after watching me do one on the back side of the leaf, you take a razor blade and you just kind of put a little cut through the major veins of the leaf, and we dusted it with rooting powder, which Ella mentioned, that will help encourage roots to form.

And then we flipped it back over.

And these are just, I had these laying around from another project.

They're just glass globs from the dollar store.

You have to have those cut areas have to be touching the soil.

And so I also have a unfolded paper clip in here, clipping everything down to hold it down, and then I just had it in a humid we did a whole she did a whole flat of them for me.

Wow.

And it's been about six weeks, and I'm finally getting little tiny plantlets, so when they're a little bigger than this, I'll be able to kind of cut them out and give them their own pot, and they should be exactly like the original plant.

That's fascinating.

Yeah, it's been so fun to watch, because for a while we saw, I saw roots, and sometimes some plants will just make roots off of a leaf and never make the shoot.

But these are doing quite well.

And then this other one is this green leaf.

One is a called a dragon wing begonia, and you could do it this flat way too.

But you could also just do it by sticking the leaf in a little rooting powder and then in the soil.

And so we've got little babies.

So the dark colored, excuse me, for is it veins?

We'll just say veins.

So you make the little cuts there just like, you're not going crazy, you're just kind of nicking it.

You're not making a big slit or anything, and then it'll work without the rooting powder.

It'll just take longer.

But we dusted it with a little rooting powder on the cut edges and on the edge of the leaf where we cut it off.

And we're getting like I count.

Last count, I had at least 15 on a flat of eight leaves, and so the original leaf will just die away, yeah?

Eventually, and eventually I'll go in, when they're big enough, you'll be able to kind of dig out individual plants with roots that is giving them their pot.

Shout out to Margaret.

Yeah.

Shout out to Margaret.

Nine years old.

Did this all herself.

She watched me do one, and she said, Mommy, can I do it?

Go for it, check.

So, yeah.

So begonias, you can do leaf cuttings, but you could also do STEM cuts.

Yes, you can definitely do stem cuttings too.

Yeah, pretty versatile.

You can't do leaf cuttings on every plant, not everyone.

Right, right.

For example, this syngonium would like, wouldn't work.

But very cool, very cool.

Okay, Ella, we're back to you.

Oh, okay, well, spring or do you want to?

What do you want to do tomato?

Let's, let's do that tomato question again, all right, because we've got two tomato ladies in the house.

So this is hilarious.

Sally Newberry writes in, my brother planted tomatoes in January.

He bought me some plants to care for because he ran out of room in his house.

So his sister took in 29 tomato plants that were started in January, and she doesn't know what to do with these, so she's asking you guys, what do I do?

I know it's too early to put them out.

I know it's too early to harden them off.

So this question we asked on another show, but I just think it would be fun to get different answers.

So Right?

Well, I was enthralled when I saw I thought they were the most beautiful tomato plants I'd ever seen.

And of course, January is way too soon to start a warm season vegetable that that.

Might have worked for some cabbage or or Brussels sprouts or something, but certainly not for tomatoes.

So she has these beautiful tomatoes, and unfortunately, and they're very well grown, so they've been close to the light.

They seem to look like they've developed very well.

So what she needs to do is she has to slow them down, or that would be my she can't keep them vigorously growing, because then they would be four foot tall.

So what has worked for me is if you have a garage that wouldn't freeze, but is much cooler.

She has them under lights currently.

I'm not sure where in her home, but chances are the temperatures inside are in the 60s, and in the garage, it could go into the 40s or 50s.

So she could set up her light assembly out in the garage, and then that would certainly slow them down, because the temperature would restrict the vigorous growth.

That's the same way as hardening off, like if she would put them in a wagon, pull them outside, and then bring them in at night if the temperature got too cold.

Now the other thing is that I did see this marvelous person that planted his tomatoes in March, and what he did is he dug a pit, and he had taken a five gallon bucket and he had cut the bottom out of it.

So imagine a five gallon bucket down into the ground, and so at the bottom, he planted his tomato, and then what he did was all that soil that he had excavated out, he put around the bucket to create like a volcano.

So the soil now is insulating the plant.

When the sun is over the bucket, it would be getting full sun, and he had a piece of wood that he could put over the top of the bucket if the temperatures were going to go into the freezing categories, but that's what he did to start those tomatoes.

So if she has 27 buckets, you can buy backhoe and all that space, she could potentially plant them out now, and they would be warmed by the earth.

And then what happens is they begin to grow up.

You can put soil in, and they will root out along the stems.

And so eventually, as the plant gets much larger and bigger, and I thought, well, that would kind of work for watering too, you know, it would kind of keep it in that area.

But, wow, wow.

Anything to add there?

Jen, I saw that same video, and I thought it was pretty ingenious.

Yes, a lot of work.

He only did it for like, I think he said five tomatoes or something like that.

I've also seen people use a terracotta drain tile.

Oh, the same idea, and then that terracotta would absorb some of the sun's rays and kind of warm it up.

And there are those heat caps, different things that you can put over the top too.

But you know, for tomato lovers, they will go the extra mile.

Could you imagine having 29 plants?

No, but I know exactly what she's talking about.

When you start stuff inside, and then you don't you're like, Oh, it's just a flat, and some of those flats have like, 72 cells in them, and then you're like, Oh, well, this got out of hand.

Yes.

You're like, Oh, my wonderful opportunity to gift tomato plants to a community garden.

That is true.

I was just going to say I got another 100% germination on the purple tomato.

I started those a week ago.

I planted five, and five are up, so I will be giving four away.

That is such a heavy producer.

I started a bunch too.

I'll be giving them away just because it's fun.

See, that's why I don't start them.

I just wait, wonderful.

Okay, are we back to who?

Thank you I brought, I brought an African Violet, which, growing up, these are just kind of everywhere.

And my mom is the African Violet whisperer.

She could keep them going and flowering.

And I think I've killed my fair share, but there used to be something that she would pick up at the grocery store, and you just saw them all the time.

And I saw one at the grocery store the other day, and here it is.

It didn't have it had a couple of flowers at the time, and noticing that kind of this two.

Color flower.

I thought, I wonder if it's stable, because one of the things in African Violets is they can have unstable genetics, and they So, this is two this is the one plant in this pot.

So we've got two different colors.

So you can see the purples and the white are kind of shifting on which, which one's dominant.

And I was doing some reading on it, and it's, it's a gene that is either off or on, depending on the environment.

So when the genes on, you're seeing purple, and when it's off, it's white, interesting.

And one of the things when you have something like this, where it's unstable, like this, you're not necessarily, you don't know what you're going to get this is another plant that you could propagate from a leaf.

I was just gonna, yeah, it's really easy.

You just take the leaf off and stick the petiole, kind of the stem of the leaf, into soil and keep it humid until a little plantlet forms at the base.

But you kind of don't know what you're gonna get.

And I like that.

Not everybody likes that.

But if you wanted to guarantee it would be exactly like what you started with, you'd have to wait for a little offshoot to develop at the base of the existing plant.

Gotcha.

But just something fun.

I hope that this is a preview of it kind of gaining popularity again.

Come back.

Yeah, they're fun plants.

There's a lot of different, different varieties, but this was an old, moldy, oldie book from the UK on African Violets that I brought into are they hard to care for, or is it me, because I kill them like death by over watering is pretty cool water from the bottom.

Yeah.

You need to take them out of that little foil.

Yeah.

And they do make special African Violet pots, and where it's like, a clay it's a clay pot that the water just seeps through the clay and you fill the bait.

Yeah, that's what it's for.

Found it at the thrift but I didn't know that's what it's for.

I've had moderate success with those pots sometimes, like, over time, it kind of gets, like, clogged up, and you have to kind of refresh the terracotta, and this is an excellent plant to grow under LED lighting, and the lighting now is so fabulous, there's no reason not to be able to make some kind of, you know, accommodations for your plants.

With supplemental lighting, and having supplemental light, you'll have a lot better chance of getting it to bloom again.

And it's just it's very satisfying to have it blooming for you at home, yes, one day, one day, when I grow up, I will successfully raise one.

We all have our Achilles heel.

I can't grow Ivy.

Interesting.

That's my unicorn.

One day, one day, all right.

LA, I see you've got some grass seeds.

Yes, yes.

I was going to say that right around the middle of April is the best time for Central Illinois to be seeding grass because the soil temperatures are warming up and we are getting moisture, hopefully, and so what I wanted to say is, not all grass seed is the same.

They have strict labeling laws that are followed by the different companies that produce grass seed.

It will give the actual type of seed, whether it's a Kentucky Blue Grass, some type of fescue, maybe a tall fescue.

It could have annual rye grass in it.

It could have a perennial rye grass.

They'll say the state of origin, where it's grown.

It gives the testing information for the germination percentages.

So again, you get what you pay for.

I do have some bare spots, so I am going to be seeding in, well, maybe even later today, to take advantage of the rain that's coming through.

It's kind of warmed up.

Usually, they say about tax day, but I think I'm about ready.

So one, one pound, it's usually depending on whether it's 100% bluegrass, that's the smallest of the different seeds, and it's usually a pound per 1000 square feet, but you want to follow the label on what they're recommending.

It can be put down with a starter fertilizer.

You do need to have seed to soil contact so sometimes and truly, fall seeding is best, but this is the second best time is is coming up now, any best practice tips like I just I know when my dad would seed certain sections of the yard, we'd get fussed at if we went over there, because.

It was, you know, we just couldn't play over there.

So any best practices for just making sure it grows in healthy and full and well, of course, it's going to take a moist soil environment to germinate.

But I think sometimes where people have problems is that you have to keep watering after it's up, people think, oh, it's up, it'll be fine.

And that's when it probably is most vulnerable to drying out and dying back.

So I don't know it's, it's pretty easy.

It can.

I'm just going to hand sew it, and it's supposed to look like, you know, new fallen snow is the way that it's been described to me.

Okay, so get your patchy, patchy grass in order, right?

And you can get it in combination with, like a mulch, a soil patch on large areas.

You may want to use some type of of cover, or even straw kinds of things.

So, but I've just got some little bare spots I'm going to use, actually, just a leaf rake and kind of lightly rake it and put it down and see how it does.

I did it last fall.

I did really well, but I kind of ran out, and so I'm going to finish it up this spring.

Okay, all right, so we've got this little darling here, quick back story.

I'll make it really fast.

Taylor.

You know Taylor, at this point, she's one of our producers on the show.

Jennifer gave her this plan on her first show three ish years ago, and so Taylor was kind of worried about some of the yellowing down here on the leaves, and knew Jen was going to be in the studio today, so she brought this into the plant clinic.

Now, what is this again?

I think Taylor, I remember kumquats.

Was seeds from my kumquats, which that tree is dead and gone.

And Taylor, you get the gold star, yeah, because my little seedling didn't make it, and yours is flourishing.

So we were talking about, what is what do we do with these yellow leaves?

Taylor was kind of alarmed by this.

They're older leaves, so I would expect, as the trees kind of maturing, that it's going to lose some of this stuff, and it's not uncommon with citrus, till I've had them lose their leaves, and then they kind of come back into leaf, and she's doing way better than I did.

Yeah, no, it looks really good.

She put this outside has become the exactly, don't you love that?

I do.

I do.

And she's been doing all the great things like putting it outside for the summer, and citrus loves it outside for the summer, so I expect that sometimes she'll get, hopefully get a few blossoms on it, and maybe some kumquats.

Hard to say, Yeah, Ella says, Taylor says, Is this ever going to bear fruit?

Ella was like, never.

It's never going to happen.

Don't even worry about it.

I'm hopeful.

But you know what?

It's Well, I didn't know it was a kumquat.

Kumquats are easier to fruit than lemons or limes, and again, you know, you have to have a large, more mature fruit tree.

We have a lot of people that you know, when is my apple tree going to have fruit?

And it's like, well, it's you just planted before we get out of here, because I know we just have a few minutes left.

Let's go over your spot.

Left.

Let's go over your spring flowers that you brought out.

We haven't even talked about those.

Well, on my property, I plant a lot of daffodils because the animals don't eat daffodil bulbs or the flowers.

So I just every year I'm showing you the same picture, but there is just such variability with the blooms, and, of course, with the size of the blooms.

I love some of the little small ones, because I do love a lot of the small bulbs.

If you know their names, feel free to share, because I'm sure folks will write in and say, oh, please tell me what Ella brought in, right?

Okay, so I can't, I can't tell you the name of all the daffodils, because I don't, don't really know, but I do know.

I think this little guy right here is called Jack snipe.

What a name I don't know.

But I do like the small, minor bulbs and the spring ephemerals.

So right here, just coming up.

So this is a Trillium.

This is has a red flower that will open the middle.

This is a common, native spring ephemeral wildflower in the forest.

And then, of course, this is just coming now, this is the blue, yeah, Virginia bluebells, and it'll have little blue flowers.

You can see them right here in the middle.

So that's another wonderful little Wildflower.

And then they.

Didn't they lost their petals.

I did have a blood root, but it flowers very early before the foliage really comes up.

Had a white flower, and it's kind of and this is a little tiny start of Dutchman's britches.

So those are some of the real wild flowers that you'll find in central Illinois, in The Woodlands, if you're out looking.

And then this is another very interesting one, not really commonly found, I think, in central Illinois.

And it did have white petals, but they have fallen off.

But this is called Twin leaf.

This is jeffersonia.

I don't know its whole botanical name, but it does make, it's been fertilized.

It does make a little pod, and it has like a capsule on the top that opens, and then the seeds are released.

All right, that's it.

We're out of time.

Yeah.

And then the other ones are just some other regular spring Wonderful, great show.

Thank you, ladies, both of you, for flowering bulbs.

coming in.

Always a good time.

Thank you so much for watching.

If you've got questions, send them in to us at yourgarden@gmail.com, or look for us on socials.

Just look for a Mid American Gardener, and we will see you next time.

Goodnight.