Hello, and thanks for joining us for another episode of mid American gardener.

I'm your hosts in Tinisha Spain An joining me today with lots o show and tales and lots to tal about are two of our panelist who are here today with us.

So Jennifer and Jennifer.

S Jennifer Nelson, we'll star with you introduce yourself an tell us a little bit about you Hi, I'm Jennifer Nelson.

I' horticulturalists.

And you ca find me online at grounded an growing calm and I love to tal about all things horticulture But my particular favorit things are vegetable gardenin and house plants, vegetables an house plants.

All right Jennifer Fishburn tell us about you, everyone.

I'm Jennifer Fishburne.

I work for the University of Illinois Extension as a horticulture educator.

And I serve Logan, Menard and sangamon counties.

I can talk about just about anything but if you ask me what I'd like to talk about, it would be vegetables, herbs, and native plants.

And welcome back.

Jennifer Fishburn we haven't seen you in a while And we know you've been craz busy all summer long.

S thank you.

That's a good thing, though.

When you're busy, right?

I mean, drop teaching and doing all that.

Yes.

So awesome.

Okay, so these ladies have teamed up and brought you a gang of things to talk about today's.

Jennifer Nelson, we'll start with you.

And the theme of today's show is is sort of what's flowering now.

Things that are looking lovely in our yard in our garden now.

So what's the first couple of things you're going to talk about?

Well, I have made the decision to switch my planters over to fall annuals.

And sometimes they do it a little earlier in the season like around Labor Day, but all my stuff was looking really good.

So I didn't I let it go a little longer.

And it's starting to get where things are not looking as great and we're starting to see more fall plants out in the nurseries and so I picked up a couple things to show.

There's our pansies probably very familiar to all the viewers available now.

And then these are asters, I think these are one plant that I think is really underutilized in Fall gardens that we see everyone wants to plant moms and everyone asks us if we've been asked once we've been asked with 1000 times how to get moms to survive in the garden.

But asters have really great flowering in and past the first frost and they will look great into November in most cases, and a lot of them even the ones that are sold as annuals, a lot of them still come back.

They may not be really long lived perennial, but there are some that are very long lived but even the annual ones around here I've had good luck overwintering them a time or two.

And so when you're selecting them just like with moms, you would select ones that have some bugs that are unopened so that you can enjoy it longer.

Okay, and what was the tell us about the pansies How long will you get to enjoy those with these cooler temperatures last year last year mind went well into December the panties can withstand some light frost and barring you know a polar vortex out of left field but we should probably be okay into December with these and you'll see them get frosty and frozen and then as the weather warms up during the day they just miraculously come back to life and sometimes you can find ones that are called bounceback pansies or icicle pansies.

There's a number of different names out there that are actually bred to bloom in the fall in overwinter and then blooming in the spring.

And they're generally only guaranteed to do that if they're planted in the ground and so minor in planters and so I don't expect that to happen because if they three solid in a pot, they're gardeners, but if you see those bounceback types ahead and try them they can be really a nice thing to have popping up first thing in the spring.

And both of those are really pretty colors.

I like that deep plum.

Gorgeous.

Okay.

All right, Miss Fishburne What did you bring us so I think we'll start with the yellows.

I have two yellow native flowers.

So the first one I'm going to talk about is Canada gold or this one here is Canada golden rod but just talk about golden rod in general.

So Canada golden rod is the one that we're seeing right now and all the fields are along the roadsides pretty common.

It can grow anywhere from two to six feet tall.

Most of the ones in my area of my ground are about my height, so about five feet tall or so.

They do this one here is kind of a weedy it is a native but it's a very weedy native as we call it you you see it in a large patches.

So really recommend that if people are want to put this in a native flower bed or in their garden that they pick a different selection.

The stiff golden rocks And then they want to get into cultivars.

One of my favorite is called fireworks.

It's a very manageable plant and it is just absolutely loaded with yellow Lilo blooms.

It's a very, very gorgeous plant.

So there's, there are a lot of different cultivars out there.

And I think what our mind folks have at this time is this is not the source of your hay fever or sneezing issues.

This always gets blamed for people's allergies.

But it is in fact is not.

Typically at this time of year it would be ragweed that people are having issues with.

So don't blame the pretty flowers just because you see them we blame it because we don't see ragweed and flower it just is a green flower.

So not very conspicuous.

So we're always blaming the goldenrod.

So this is definitely one Not, not the Canada but the cultivars and some of the other species, I would highly recommend this, it's a really beautiful bright yellow color to add to your garden.

So keep that in mind likes full sun will bloom anywhere, your golden rods will bloom from August through September.

So another one, I think it's got kind of a fun name.

And no, it doesn't cause you to sneeze kind of name, but this is called sneezeweed.

See here, it has a really pretty yellow petals with a big little ball here in the center.

So it's very, actually very attractive.

And this is just one stem.

And if you can see that how many blossoms blooms we see just on one stem.

I think it's absolutely gorgeous.

Again, something that pops nicely in the landscape.

Again, this one likes full sun could grow in part shade, gets about four feet tall.

probably best if you put it behind something that will kind of prop it up a little bit.

Mine got smashed over my back Tz that got a little carried away.

So it's trying to eke out from underneath of it.

But this one again will bloom August to September another beautiful yellow flower makes a great addition to your native beds or your regular flower beds.

Those are gorgeous and they would look really pretty along the the golden rod.

Yes.

I think it's hilarious that we're working on the reputation rod because it's unfairly blamed.

I'm a ragweed suffer.

So I know what it looks like.

But you're right, a lot of people don't see it.

And but it's funny, it's we got to set the record straight.

So golden rod can have a better reputation on the streets.

Thank you.

Okay, we're going to go back to Jennifer Nelson with your your next batch.

Okay, my next batch is kind of in the vegetable garden turned into an ornamental garden.

So one thing that I have had really great luck with is planting kale in the fall garden.

And this is an ornamental kale.

And so this one is called Yokohama red and it doesn't look all that red now.

But once the cooler nights set in, especially those white frosty nights, the center leaves will turn a bright as they call it, red was more like purple to me.

And it will really color up really nicely.

And this is I'm planning on putting this in about a 14 inch pot, it'll soak the pot easily and it'll be people will stop and ask me what it is because it will be very eye catching.

And Jennifer and I were talking about this, and this is actually edible, it's beautiful, but you could eat it too if you wanted to.

So like I picked up.

This is another version that's going to be white in the center.

So once we get the cooler temperatures, the center of the leaves will be a white creamy color.

And I also shopped in the just the regular vegetable section and I found this is another kind of kale, they call it Lance nado.

And it can see one of the problems with late season vegetables, like the kales and things like broccoli and all related are insect damage.

So clearly they were growing these out for fall sale, but the late season.

Insects got to it but we'll come we'll spray it with some insecticidal soap and I'll plan it out in my containers and within a few weeks you won't notice it.

But this is also called dinosaur kale because it's got kind of this lumpy texture like dinosaur skin.

And this is one that is actually a totally an edible plant but I found it in the ornamental section.

So this is swiss chard bright lights.

And you can see that there's multiple colors within the same pot, different plants, but there's like the the petiole this is part of the leaf.

So some of them are this bright pink, we've got some orange and a bright yellow and a bright white.

And so this is going to look really great in a pot on my porch and I'll be able to eat it too.

So it'll serve form a form and function.

Very cool.

I like how you're incorporating the food into the decor.

Now with the kale Will you kind of just snack on that throughout the season is that like is that a cut and come again but it would be one that instead of like cutting off the whole thing because that will just remove my colorful display I would maybe take some outer leaves still cut and come again but a little bit modified version just cutting along the edges just to keep it you know pretty but also Yeah, yeah, those will go well into December I've got I I had never grown those until about 10 years ago and I I grew up you and it's pretty impressive how long they'll go in the season.

So what flowers have you taken out to make way for your your new fall things?

What did you guys take out all I'm gonna take out all of my summer flowers at least Oh my I've got the caliber COA and the geraniums I may try to overwinter the geraniums in the garage.

But I'm gonna just clear it out and start fresh.

Because they're they're so overgrown right now and they their roots have totally filled the pots.

I'm to a point where I have to walk.

The water is just it's hard to keep up with the watering at this point.

Mine just look tired.

Yeah.

And they just tired.

I think we're all kind of tired.

So we are awesome.

Okay, thank you.

Alright.

Jennifer Fishburne, we're back to you.

I think one thing I'll add to this swiss chard conversation is swiss chard is a great one actually to plant early spring, and it will actually grow all summer long.

And it makes a, I think, a great vegetable plant that combines very nicely into an ornamental landscape you can plant at just about anywhere because of those bright colors.

Just keep those leaves picked off, even if you're not going to eat them, the older leaves and then it'll just keep going all summer long in the fall.

So it's one of those very few plants that tolerate a couple vegetables that can tolerate, tolerate warm and cool.

So what do I have next?

I have this is pineapple sage.

This is actually this is actually an annual in our area, it is something you can try to overwinter maybe indoors.

It does.

It's not real, a cold tolerant here.

But this one is just now coming into bloom for me.

So it's one of those sit and wait kind of annuals where you buy it and you just sit and wait at the plants getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

But it usually takes it a while for the for the flowers to come on.

So mine are actually just now coming on.

And I had to fight with the hummingbirds to pick this flower because they dearly love this plant the bright red colors and then the long throated flowers are very attractive to hummingbirds in a lot of our pollinating insects.

So where does this get its name pineapple sage, you actually can use this in cooking the leaves.

But it gets its name from the fragrance so you can smell it, it would have a pineapple in fragrance.

This is when I grow it in a container but you could grow it in the ground, it'll grow every bit of two, two and a half feet and the same type of a spread.

So very, very colorful.

But again, you got to kind of sit and wait a little bit.

But the leaves are very attractive as well.

And then this is one of those plants as Jennifer mentioned, it's an IT container and yes, it needs water every single day because it's even though it's a really big pot, it's getting pretty rootbound so are the flowers fragrant for us.

They're not actually at least I can't smell anything.

No, but the foliage is.

So if you brush the foliage, you'll get a nice nice fragrance.

So not necessarily to go along with it.

Maybe it's just the same color color hue.

I don't know this is a blue sage.

This isn't native, as mentioned before with the sneezeweed and the goldenrod.

Those are awesome native and they're also great pollinator plants.

So all of the ones I'm going to show are are very pollinator friendly.

And last night, or yesterday when I was out looking at this plant, I saw butterflies on it and all kinds of assorted bees.

And then last night when I went out to pick the flowers, they're actually mods on it.

So you'll see pollinators on it day and night almost.

This is one of the plants though that you got to kind of have the right spot for it because it'll grow about five feet tall.

But you can see from the foliage, it's what I call kind of a wispy airy plant.

So it's not a very dense plan.

It looks really good combined with grasses and grasses will actually help this plant stand up it can tend to flop a little bit.

So putting it near grass will help keep it a little bit more upright.

But there are very few plants that are going to give us this this flower color.

So this is a really pretty August through October blooming plan and you can see this one's about spent so I would say it's going to be an August September bloomer, it's going to be spent by that time.

And what I did notice that doesn't matter.

In the flower bed I have it in.

But this one, I did notice a few volunteers coming up and blooming in my flower bed.

So with some of your natives, maybe you don't want volunteer plants, make sure that when they're finished blooming to cut those seed heads off so those seeds don't shatter to the ground.

So this one is coming up.

But again, it doesn't bother me.

It's just what I call a free plan.

So I'll just move it to new and give it a new home.

That's right.

We love those free plants.

Play it right out and put it where you want.

It is right.

Thank you.

All right.

Jennifer, do you have more shoutouts?

Yeah, I've got one more.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Let's see.

This is a Japanese anemone that I actually got from Jennifer some years ago.

So any of those free plants have that Sage you were just showing you any of them can come over to my house, Jennifer, I won't mind.

But I got this from Jennifer some years ago.

And it's one of those plants that I dearly love, because it blooms so late in the season.

It started it doesn't start blooming until like State Fair time.

So about August.

And it looks really great right now while everything else is kind of petering out.

And like Jennifer said, so many pollinators enjoy flowers that are coming up now.

Because there's so few things that are blooming now.

So this is the one that I would highly recommend.

It took a little while to get established.

But once it's established, it's just in it's got this nice airy, sort of flower structure.

I love how it looks.

That's really pretty everything you guys have shown so far would look really pretty in like a cut arrangement.

It all looks like it kind of goes together.

Okay, Jennifer, did you have any other show in town?

Do you have another one and actually, before this show started all my were in a base with a range of it.

So not really well organized.

But prairie dropseed This is a grass and believe it or not, this is the most fragrant flower that I've shown you today.

This one actually has a fragrance Believe it or not, it's kind of a lot of people don't think of grasses as being fragrant.

But this one is and you they're like really like the smell or you don't I really enjoy it.

This to me smells a little bit by boat like buttered popcorn.

Some people smells more like cilantro.

But it is very fragrant.

And when it's in bloom, particularly here at our office, it's not very far from the door.

You get that wave of smell with a breeze and I just think it's very nice.

But this is a plant that I get about two feet by it says two to three feet tall ours right now around three feet tall with the with the flower.

The grass itself is actually a very thin grass blade of grass.

So it's more like a two feet two foot mount but it stays pretty much in its place.

And it just looks wonderful all season long.

But particularly now when it's in bloom, very pretty.

And I wouldn't mind the buttered popcorn smell at all.

Not one bit.

You start Alright, you start craving butter popcorn when I am right now hungry.

So yeah.

So how did Jennifer knows and we'll start with you How did now that we're in, you know, mid to late September.

How did your garden do this summer, we had some wacky weather we had wet we had dry rot.

I ended up drowning in cucumbers for a while we did get a healthy amount of tomatoes.

Some of my tomatoes didn't do very well.

And I'm not entirely sure why I think I'm gonna blame the weather.

Because there I've put them in containers, which I have used for years at this point and really loved how my tomatoes have done and they just never really took off.

And I'm not exactly sure what was happening there.

And I don't know it's probably some user error too.

But my stuff in the my tomatoes in the ground did a lot better.

But they were a lot later than what was what would be usual and I didn't get them in particularly late so not exactly sure they're my son flowers did fantastic once they got going.

Cool.

All right.

Jennifer Fishman, what about you?

How did things perform at your house?

Well, they could have done a lot better Actually, my tomatoes did better this year than they have the last couple of years.

I do have a few and containers on my deck but I also have some in the ground and both have done done really well.

For me.

Even though we've had all this, you know, a lot of moisture typically lends to more disease problems might have been doing fairly well.

So I've been pleased with that.

Other plants though my squash plants, my cucumber plants and my green beans to come to insect damage.

So vegetables are one of those things honestly, wherever you're going to grow them to get really good crops, you do have to use some insecticide and I just did not get it on at the right times and just didn't get to it.

So they want the next one but you know, you got to feed everybody I suppose.

But I'll just mention at this This time as people are out in their gardens do assess what worked and what didn't and log that somewhere, maybe on a calendar, maybe it can put an app on your phone.

But do pay attention to that.

Because next April, you're not going to remember what you saw today.

That's, that's pretty critical.

The other thing would be I know that my garden didn't do well and hasn't done well for a few years because I have low fertility.

So fall would be a great time to get some aged manure on there, some compost, chop up those leaves that you're going to rake up or mow, chop those up really fine and put those on your garden for some added nutrients.

All of that can be really helpful.

And that's something you can do yet this fall.

That would be be great.

Great advice.

Great advice.

And that kind of leads into the question I'm going to ask you, Jennifer, this is number 78.

Julie Walters writes in, do any of your master gardeners have information about using cover crops on vegetable garden, I'm entertaining the thought for this fall.

And I don't know if it's a good or a bad idea, I would really appreciate their input, by the way, especially loved the show on identifying leads.

That was a that was a fun show earlier this summer.

So Jennifer Nelson.

And both of you can weigh in here we've got about five minutes left, cover crop ideas, and whether or not you think it's a good idea.

I will say it's an excellent idea.

And we have done this.

Some years ago, when I worked with extension, we had a garden who do the cater and we used two different winter cover crops winter wheat and winter rye.

And those were both things that we planted, usually around November, even as late as Thanksgiving.

And they will grow in the cool weather and you don't want them to grow a ton before winter sets.

And you want them to just sprout and kind of establish.

And then in the spring, when they start to start to grow again, you want to tell them under when they're a few inches tall.

If they get really tall, they'll get tangled up in the tiller, so you would want to mow them off first.

But it's basically what you call a green manure.

So you're going to turn it over in the spring and then let that decompose for a while before you plant and it did phenomenal things for what we started out with was almost straight sandy soil.

And it took five or six years to build it up.

But we really added the organic to the organic matter in the soil and improved it tremendously when we were following it with soil tests all along.

Okay, wonderful.

Jennifer Fishburne Anything to add there.

Now I would agree, I have tried the winter rye on my garden.

And again, you want it to come up, but you don't want it to get very tall, just as Jennifer said, the other thing would be is just in a normal cover crop situation normal being a farm situation, they have crimpers, where it's able to like break the plant, lay it over, and then they plant right into it.

It's kind of difficult to do that on a home garden situation because you don't have necessarily the tools to do that.

So as Jennifer mentioned, mowing and then maybe lightly tilling it in or mowing it super short.

So it ceases that growth, then you could plant into it as well.

Awesome.

Okay, we got time for one more question.

Let's do number 88.

This is from Jen Baker.

She writes in, we noticed a couple of weeks ago that are green and white hostas were looking very be wrangled, or other green and blue hostas seem to be doing fine.

And they're right next to them.

Also, I've noticed in some of our neighbors yards, that the green and white ones look bad.

Also, they're not in the sun and get the same amount of water as a solid one, but this be a virus.

Do they want to ignore the problem?

Cut them to the ground or dig them out?

So what are your thoughts here on what's going on with their hostess?

So at this time of year, we do see a lot of hostas starting to look very tired.

It's okay for the plant.

They've done all their photosynthesis through the summer, so the plant normally will be just fine.

One of the photos that I did see, showed that the ground was very dry and pastas do a little bit of moisture, they like to be on that little bit damper side maybe, but they do not like to be bone dry.

When they get that way.

They tend to shed their leaves because they're trying to keep that root system growing.

So they they may lose a few leaves that way.

It's possible it could be other issues as well.

But moisture does play a good part on pastas, particularly at this time of year.

And particularly if you haven't planted in your tree roots.

They'll not be able to retain as much moisture for the plant.

And this late in the season.

Like you said things are starting to look sort of tired, so it's probably not out of the ordinary, nothing to maybe worry about.

Yeah.

All right.

Last question.

This is number 83.

This is from Mary Dickinson and she writes in I have several succulent plants that are showing brown spots on the leaves.

Some are flat, others are a bit raised.

What do you think is causing this I usually err on the side of underwatering and both of you can feel free on this one what your thoughts are go ahead I think there's a couple different potential problems here.

She doesn't say where she has these.

And if they've been inside and then she put them outside, it can be a symptom of sunburn to have the brown spots on the leaves.

They can also be a symptom of having something having injured that leaf at some point.

So whether it was an insect or if you're outside at all, all bets are off.

If you're outside, there can be all sorts of sources of injuries, slugs and snails and even rabbits or all your usual houseplant pets.

pests.

So anytime there's an injury if she is happening to overwater, she says she's under watering, but you can also get some fungal spots that look like brown spots on succulents.

But those are just some ideas I had, she'd have to really look at how they've been, where they've been and what the the conditions they've been subject to.

Okay, that's it.

We're out of time.

Thank you guys so much for bringing all those shondells that was a really great show.

Lots of the theme today was what's blooming currently.

And I really like that you guys did a great job collaborating.

So thanks for you.

And thanks to you for joining us.

If you have a question, you can send it into your garden@gmail.com or just look us up on Facebook, just search mid American gardener and we'll see you next time tonight.