this be bomb is literally crawling with bees wow i just thought a pink onion why not try it our hostas do well in Minnesota they like our temperatures we have things blooming from early spring to late fall it's fun to imagine what this place will be like in a few years we've just gotten started hello and welcome to Great Gardening i'm your host Sharon Young and thank you for joining us for our summer special tonight we have an hourlong episode and it's finally gardening season we've got a lot of great gardening in store just for you as usual we have our garden experts with us they are garden professionals Deb Burns Ericson and horiculturist and educator Bob Olen we want to hear from gardeners across our region who have questions for our experts we have phone volunteers standing by so call locally at 218788-2844 or simply email us at askpbsnorth.org we're taking questions throughout the show so call or email us now while we begin tonight's show with a look at the weather in our region nice oh hey there we go canadian our favorite Canadian little fertility there oh that pink basket looks just like the one I'm going to really showing its beauty right now in bloom there we go there's our high that was a no oh nice honeysuckle honeysuckle that is a big honeysuckle now talk to me about K and its weather compared to the rest of the region well it's kind of interesting farther south in Duth from where we are right now but down in the river valley there so sometimes they can actually be cold cooler in that right if the wind isn't blowing then that is going to be cooler where it settles cold absolutely absolutely and then the seeds few seeds hi Mo let's get some mowing oh ctails and and it is all coins wonderful little town small town by that but great people it's just wonderful and some great gardeners in that area too very keep calling in your questions so before we get to those questions Deb wants to talk about hanging baskets okay so um I brought a giant hanging basket now this here is a Deco Pink um patunia basket with verbina and it's similar to the pink basket that you saw in the video um this was a cutting in February so it has grown this much since February so what we recommend um for these and this is vegetative not a seed patunia so the difference between a vegetative it's a cutting that comes in very early and we stick it in and it roots it's different than what a lot of people put in hanging baskets are seed variety patunias that will go to seed those you must dead head if they if you let a seed patunia an inexpensive pack patunia um go to seed then it will stop blooming but obviously this we have not deadheaded we have not done anything to this other than fertilize and water and so um with this variety you can on the 5th of July this will be super long i mean it's already um quite long and so on the 5th of July is when we recommend that you're going to cut this way back and a lot of people won't do it but um but what we recommend and this people will go crazy don't be scared right right don't be scared you want to cut your patunias any patuna that you have you want to cut it back to wow at least the bottom of the pot if not the top of the pot because once you do that sometimes a patunia if you miss a watering it can get it's kind of like a bald man head in here and it can get really sparse and so then once you cut it like that and then give it some time releaseleas fertilizer we like to use um a multi- coat or osmma coat and then you you put that in the top you just kind of work it in i mean there's nothing to it it breaks down at 70° and then you hit it with a good water and that will make it all just fresh again and this is something that you again can do with a vegetative patunia um bubble gum is a very good example that we do this too also but once you cut it like that it'll all every leader tries to fight and become bigger and better and the lead so it just thickens way up it just the blooms become much more floriferous and it's just a great thing now this is a verbina that is mixed in here and so you could dead head the verbena once it's spent because sometimes verbina can do that but honestly we don't dead head patunias ever we don't have time to dead head these giant baskets um we just cut them back and there are people that like to pick at patunias but um you must pick at a patunia that is either from seed or a giant head one like um there's a super tuna called giant pink that must be deadheaded but if your if your flower is a quarter size or smaller you do not have to dead hood those when they are vegetative and trailing and the really great um patunia um products and production that they're now making it's fantastic and it will look better than ever and it has to be the 5th of July because if you do it later than that the day lengths start to get shorter and it just doesn't work but if you do it on the 5th of July it works every time and you will just be having that patunia through fall and it's a great extension of the season that's really nice easy peasy well what do you do with the cutings afterwards well you could root them but the days are getting shorter i mean they start to get shorter you could cut them we just root them in soil we can't root that one because it's propagation protected but um yeah you could you could start more it's beautiful it's easy well thank you so much Deb now we're going to take a look at some beautiful bonsai with David Severson let's take a look i've got about 70 trees what they've got in common is they're called bonesai bonesai means tree in a pot tree in a tree that's part of what is my backyard that's come about over the last 25 plus years of collecting wild or going to auctions or just having friends that also do this passion i was at the Minnesota State Fair a bonesai master comes into Minnesota and they come and they look at all the trees that anybody who wants to exhibit a bonesai tree for the public as well as to be judged by this master i happened on that weekend having had a bit of an interest in in uh shaping trees but had never encountered a display i was literally overwhelmed with their uniqueness and I took a course took that home i was living in an apartment at the time and that uh that tree did not survive and that's one of the things I learned about bonesai and that's why with my 70 trees it's helpful to have so many trees because they don't all make it as you see their their setting right now is out where they belong all summer long what do they need to stay alive they need sunshine they need the constant watering if you as we look around together today you'll see a lot of wetness and what's surprising to many people is that well what do you do with them in the winter well some of them that are quote zone hardy they'll stay outside under a blanket of snow hopefully which we didn't get this last winter but that was tough on them they've got to go into that sleep cycle but they don't get to that 20 below kind of stuff so I've got this variety of some being tougher more resilient and some needing some special protection trees that are the most compelling to people are the ones that have a story that elicits a level of what happened why does it look that way this particular tree is what's called a phoenix graft it is where I have married a living juniper onto a very very old piece of deadwood and and I counted the rings on this and this is over 500 years old this piece of deadwood and so this is probably 8 n years later that all these pads these clouds of growth have now grown out and the configuration of this juniper to this piece of deadwood is now beginning to look realistic what a beautiful garden David we'll check back for the rest of the tour later in the show deb you have some tips on celery okay right celery is a challenge to grow and some grow some gardeners grow it just because it is a challenge and to try to figure out how to grow it um our family's been growing celery since they grew for Gino Paluchi um and his Chung King up in Zim on the in the in the fence in the bog so we've been growing it a long time we enjoy celery um and we seated this was seated this giant fourack was seated back on February 6th um and it takes that long to get big enough to transplant um and this one is tango but this is a really nice big transplant um and so it would go in really easy you could tease the roots out on this one you don't have to tease the roots out but you could when you plant it and when you plant it you want to kind of um birm it up a little bit because that's what keeps it soft and um keeps it white there's also a trick that we learned that is you if you take a 4 inch PVC piece that's 6 in long and you put it around your celery because celery can get kind of rangy and kind of more like a house plant that's like crazy and you push this into the soil you don't then have to bm up as much like my grandpa used to have to burm around it with a hoe and you know walk the fields and do that but this will keep it soft it will keep it in control and it will keep it really healthy and it it protects it a bit too um from drying out because that's a big issue with celery is it needs to stay moist um but a good reason another good reason to grow celery is there's so many health benefits and the stuff that you can buy in the stores a lot of times has been treated with a lot of different things so it's not as healthy as growing your own so growing your own celery is a great source of antioxidants um and it's a great source of magnesium which I am loving magnesium right now in my life i can't live without it not nobody can right um and celery also reduces inflammation um it's great because it's a cleanser and it's really good for the um for the water every all the water and filtering in your body it's wonderful it supports the digestion um in in your gut which we know everything comes from the gut so um celery can be really good for your gut again really rich in vi in vitamins minerals and a low glycemic of course everybody knows that because the snack for everybody when you're trying to be healthy is peanut butter and celery or doing cream cheese with ranch dressing in celery oh yum and also it can be alkalizing for um the blood and the body so it's a great it's a great challenge celery is not exactly easy but it's always good to give it a try sometime to grow your own celery and this big celery so that's great you're so right all the fiber and the both soluble and insolubles in celery and when you grow your own you know what you got so that's just great exactly yeah it smells I know the viewers can't smell it it smells so fresh summertime well thanks Deb next up we're going to check in with the director of the Virginia Community Gardens about their organization and the impact they are making in the community well here you got something oh you got something there what is it that's the lemon cucumbers here it's dirt therapy if we're having a bad day we can be outside scratch a little dirt spray a little water and you might get something good to eat i started gardening when I was three i mean I started gardening to trick myself into eating vegetables and I've had the tastiest veggies I've ever had in my life from this garden so now I won't stop gardening this is Bailey's Lake in Virginia Minnesota and this is my garden we have three community gardens in town currently and each one is unique in serving its surrounding community even in our small town where food deserts would be and where access to healthy fresh food was limited but it does bring people together to see what everyone else is growing and um how things are going with other gardens and new friendships are being made at the gardens i love sharing the experience with other people and growing stuff it's very relaxing kind of calms you down and just It's a place where you can just be you know and what do you love most about gardening i'll have to try to figure that out i came to this garden without ever having gardened ever they gave us wonderful sheets reference sheets and said "These plants work best from seed these plants work best from transplant here's some tips."

And I believe the end of the sign up document said gardening should be easy and fun so it was a really really nice introduction to gardening anywhere i don't know there's just something satisfying it's almost maybe primal you know you're growing your food and you're eating it and you know it's healthy and it's good for you there's just something about that and many times I've thought it's it's a lot of work and we're off and gone and it's hard to maintain the garden so I think about quitting but when spring comes I'm back up here i I can't stop those are some incredible thank you gifts for your support now let's get to some of your questions we have a viewer in the Twin Cities uh my uncle who actually has a similar question to uh a viewer's question where he has an apple tree that hadn't had it took years to bloom it's a single tree um but now it's starting to get flowers and he wants to know why only like parts of it are getting flowers and will it continue to bloom and bear fruit we have another viewer who had a tree for 10 years um it flowered once since they got it and there's two apple trees beside it that do flower do you have any suggestions well the one that's up here I'm the depth i'm concerned with the one that bloomed once could could be a number of things yeah but 10 years and one of our favorite varieties sweet 16 on a standard rootstock that's the difference as well if you've got it on a standard rootstock it could take uh 12 15 years so it takes a long time once they're here so I think it's just patience more than anything unless we could take a little look and if it was planted too deep or other things but oftentimes that varietal in 10 years is not really that unusual for some of these on standard rootstocks if you want something to uh produce faster go to a dwarf or go to a semi- dwarf woodstock by restricting the roots it forces the vegetative and the reproductive phase faster but they're not not as hearty so they're not as hearty and they're not going to be as large and they're not going to live as long so there are trade-offs but you have to wait a long while with standard redstock apples okay well Tom in Washburn wants to know where he should put a new raspberry bush in the ground or in a raised bed i'd go ground i would too and far away from any natives far away from any natives unfortunately a lot of the native raspberries carry virus so eliminate all those first if you possibly can and then in the ground unless you really have a large bed that's well insulated because raspberries are pretty hardy okay keith in Aurora wants to know how closely he can use weed killer inside a perimeter of a garden where you would walk without damaging the wanted plants boy that's I have no idea well that's a question where you really have to be careful there's weed killers all over the place and if he's talking about some kind of a killer that would use for controlling broad leaves in his lawn I would not be anywhere near the vegetable garden so there are some pre-emerge herbicides that are sold over the counter that can be used in the vegetable garden as a pre-emerge in other words to restrict emerging germination of emerging seedlings but just general weed killers you want to be very very careful there so I'd keep them away okay karen wants to know other than a fence what's the best way to deter deer from one's garden ex especially uh a backyard size okay so I heard something really interesting from a customer because we grow digitalis every spring um fox club and we ran out early this year and a customer said "What do you mean I depend on you?"

because she plants it and the deer give it a three-foot birth around it because it is so poisonous to them and they they they cannot stand it and they know it which I had never heard that before i know that it's deer resistant but that was very interesting to me as a deer deterrent okay Fox Club huh another option are these automated sprinkler systems which they don't like and I'll use the name brand the Scarecrow during the summer they really work effectively but uh they're not going to give you obviously any control in the winter then we're going back to fencing right right there's no easy solution it doesn't sound like so Jean um has a lot of clay and has added lots of compost and w wood mulch over the years but the wood mulch only lasts one to two years which is better wood or rubber mulch oh I don't like rubber mulch i don't either i don't like synthetics in the garden and the breaking down and the forever plastics and everything else that goes right let's keep that all out of the garden but I I especially in the eating garden edibles absolutely but I I do think that uh wood mulch with a heavy clay compost you're going to have to just add it and make sure there's some nitrogen every year a good application and oftentimes tree trimming services will provide that for you looking for a place to dispose of it but adding annually to clays is just a fact of life okay we have a viewer with a lilac tree where there's some of the bunches are dead and lots of dead branches although there are some lilacs what should they do well they could cut those out now you're going to know where you have actual live um stem and tissue so you could cut those back to where you hit green true anything that's dead uh we'll talk maybe a little bit later in the show about pruning lilacs and eliminating and keeping them a little more more compact right and this is perfect timing so So you've got some advice about shrubs to share um I mean I know we're going to talk about like the shrubs you So like take a look at that some of the spring flowering shrubs yeah yeah so all right so um I mean specifically does it apply to the lilacs like what we were talking about certainly and we'll show you some slides of that i wonder if we have the opportunity to to u show a few of those slides at this particular point yeah all right and I know a lot of people I mean is the timing of it was just right with the lilacs because I know a lot of people have questions about their lilacs absolutely now you know we've got this beautiful progression of woody flowering shrubs they're different in herbaceous shrubs we prune them differently back to the viewer's question for Cythia so many good for cyas so many of these were not native to the area but now we got new winter hearty introductions and there's the first example here's our PJMs which you're familiar PGM rodendrrons uh they they come in next and this is one that's been properly pruned the whole key is really to prune moderately right after the flower because they bloom on old wood so you prune them right now at this time they're just stopping their bloom and then that'll give the plant an opportunity to set up flowers for next year moderately on the upper portion our northern lights ailas this is mine i just sat and admired that this morning absolutely beautiful you talk you want to know why people garden you just have to look at a northern light ailia this was the original introduced in by Al Johnson in 1978 it's the hardiest it's great down to 40 below so there have been so many additional varieties that have come along but they will get woody well here's mandarin mandarin uh lights which is a one of the light series these are never quite as hardy these are zone four where northern lights is zone three and it grows certainly in zone two and then I want to just show you some of the stems they get woody these are woody shrubs so if you don't prune them this is what the base of that northern lights is going to look like uh which will give you an an idea of how tall that shrub can get it can get 8 10 feet 12 feet in in height but every year after the bloom this is when you're going to be blooming on the upper or you're going to be pruning on the upper portion of the plant now if you've got any one of these flowering woody shrubs that gets overgrown and you want to renovate that's a little different process then you can take out about onethird of these woody stems each year and you're reminded of me that I guess I've been saying that for for a few years 23 years 23 years uh you the rule of thirds so you never cut off more than a third of the upper portion of the plant and never renovate by removing more than a third of the stems here's classic liac drive through our our boulevards right now city of Deloo Superior there's lilocks blooming everywhere they're fragrant they're wonderful most have never been pruned so this is what the result is and one of our questions came about and you can see the beautiful blooms now is the time particularly if that that lilac is established prune it when they're small prune it when they're young so they they don't get long and leggy with those woody stems underneath so right now as soon as the bloom is uh begins to fade you want to prune that off so it has an opportunity to stay compact and set up the blossoms for next year so again we want to take a little look you know we had a very unique weather series for sure and so many of the perennials had to be replaced we learned a little bit about this u last fall we came into the fall remember it was wet until about Labor Day and all of a sudden that they turned the spigot off it got really really dry and then we came in there wasn't any early snowfall it got cold we lost a lot of what I thought were very t tender perennials even the people selling perennials found so many people coming in and replacing them so remember coming into the fall let's make sure we have plenty of moisture let's protect from the wind and then let's get some mulch on there if at all possible anything on the soil surface compost is going to work well wood chips like our other viewer these are all going to decompose decompose and be a part of a a real rich lomy uh soil eventually so um I think that uh this was the downfall of last year's fall this year the the real benefit was it also destroyed a lot of the insects that spend their winter down in the soil including the Colorado potato beetle typically they jump out very early so we delay planting our potatoes because of that but this year I haven't seen any and I think they were really uh victim to this very very challenging type of a fall and then open winter that we had earlier in the season so what's coming up um month of June supposedly going to be moist we're getting some showers right now as we speak uh really collect that water make sure you save all of it because the forecast from the Climate Prediction Center for our area you can see it it's going to be warmer than normal it's going to be drier than normal so I think you want to do all those things you possibly can to again get through a very dry winter and here's some ideas let's get the organic letter we talked about a mulch that you can work in we don't want the rubber mulches out there because they're never going to go away we want the organics every year you're going to add a little bit more that's going to uh by increasing the organic level that's going to increase the water holding capacity of your soil so you want organics in you want organic mulches up on the soil surface you want to water thoroughly so you actually drive those roots down but infrequently i see a lot of people out there just spritzing every morning we really don't want to do that you want to perhaps set that sprinkler out get one to two inches of water per week if you don't know how much your uh irrigation system or your overhead sprinkler is is generating just put an open can out there and when you get two inches of water an inch of water in the can then you've watered very thoroughly do that once a week drive those roots down and then of course we want to keep the plants dry so we're going to be watering early in the morning and then uh use of a lot of trickle irrigation uh to conserve water conserve moisture uh certainly I think we're going to experience which much something which the rest of the country has experienced meaning a very warm and dry summer should be good though should be good for the tomatoes should be good for the sweet corn the melons the squash but you're going to have to have some water for them thank you Bob we have to control that water uh sprinkling right so let's answer a few more questions roger in Birch Lake uh wants to know is there a screen of redwood shrub or tree that can survive in zone three redwoods i don't know of anything for zone three what do you recommend well if he doesn't if he can control the deers certainly we we obviously love cedar uh northern native white cedar uh certainly there are other uh some of the junipers I think would be good choices as well which are the deer don't particularly like so I think uh those two species I'd be looking at for sure for year round okay barriers harry in Superior Wisconsin wants to know if there's a seedless table grape that can actually grow in Superior seedless seedless i don't that I know i don't know any that are in production no you know that you can get for sale i don't we've got three big ones you know we've got Blue Bell and we've got Valiant Valiant which is one of the one of the good ones and Beta they they've all got heritage as our native river grapes so they're all good and winter hearty i would stay with those three varieties and probably Val Valiant because it's so aggressive in its growth habit okay Judy wants us to discuss how to propagate cutings from geraniums easy peasy okay so geraniums are one of the easiest things to propagate and they're wonderful they're easy um they're kind of like a succulent honestly geraniums are so um if I had a deranium it'd be great uh well these we could kind of look at them so the top nodes um are going to be the freshest growth and they're going to be the softest so you really want to take the softest growth and you just take like the top um you just pinch out the top and they would be tough like this geraniums are going to be and you're going to take out a cutting kind of similar to this cut um and um they're going to actually look like this even though it's a deranium not the synchio um and then you would use rodin hormone and then you would um put it in a really nice light soil if I had my other soil up here you could see but a really nice good amount of perlite um and then you could use rooting hormone and you just put it in now the thing with a geranium is you do not want to overwater it you they really like it dry um and they will root it will take them though it takes them a good three to four weeks to root and I don't like them in full sun i like them in a filtered um light and um and uh warm but honestly a geranium can handle down to 45 up to 75 not much over 80 and um just the really soft tips um growth tips and you could take off some of the extra leaves um so it's mostly the tip of it but they are easy just give them time and you'll know when they're ready you'll give it a tug it's called the tug test give it a little tug test and then when it resists then it's rooted but then just leave it in there and did you know this is interesting that if you do root them they um next to the mother plant they will root better yes interesting you know another quick tip you mentioned rooting hormones something like homodin we've got any number of commercial products but you can also take any one of the willows grind it up that's kind of a natural stimulant for the inside bark of it like a weeping willow a weeping willow would work [ __ ] willow would work and uh that's a natural rooting hormone that you just dip it in there and uh that'll be helpful to establishing the look right yeah that would be a fun experiment uh how and when do you divide hustas this is from Dorothy they're tough just about anytime yeah exactly we wish everything would divide as easily as hostas you know obviously they like shady they don't like the full sun because they tend to bleach out but other than that and they're dear favorites but otherwise well and when you're ready to take care of them when you're ready to water and pay attention to them that's most important i don't care when you do it in the summer it's just when you'll take care of them okay thank you so let's get back to David and his beautiful bonsai this is a cyprress um and I would suspect I've had this tree for somewhere between 15 and 20 years as you can see stones are a really a significant important part of display of trees this particular tree is sitting on top of a rock and one of its roots actually penetrates right through the rock there's a crack in the rock that I threaded that root through it kept growing to the point that now it just looks like it's just sitting on sitting high on this rock bonesai is part horiculture and part art this tree has been with me I would say 23 24 years it's a boxwood boxwoods are eminently suited to bonesai because they've got small leaves because the their bark texture is is very rough almost like an oak or certainly an old tree they've got wonderful root systems that spray out i mentioned earlier that sometimes I collect up near floodwoods in ditches this is an example and it's over it's been with me over 20 years one of and it would naturally grow to 30 feet or so so my opportunity or task as a bonesai practitioner is that I want to keep it small this is a juniper the the cultivar is actually from Japan again one of the things I'm always trying to replicate is what happens with age things sag things begin to fall down um and so I'm pulling branches down creating these clouds what I want to do is create the air in between so that you'd have this this ability to see all of the the the the pads intact and have a depth a bonesai tree always has a front this is the front so on this tree what's important is that your eye would naturally follow the line of the trunk uh creating stability from a wide trunk base and then moving up but that's an example about just being with these trees that things are just so often just discovered what how did that come about this one has got a lot of story it's got deadwood in it it's got branches that have died off that's called a gin you'll see parts here that are are crevices where a branch is literally broken free i stabilized it and now have a wire back here holding bringing its top towards us again what a great collection of thank you gifts for your support let's take a look at more viewer questions judy gets rose chasers on her rose buds best steel in some hydrangeia they're especially bad on roses and eat all the petals do you know of anything to control or get rid of these rose chasers they're rose chafers right and they they can be difficult uh surgical control i really think she's going to have to go to one of the uh insecticides that are labeled and she has a number of different options there really okay christine in Duth wants to grow her own tomatoes this summer and would like to buy a tomato plant that actually tastes like a tomato what variety do you suggest that's a great question there's a lot of good ones though there are a lot of good ones but we got to go back to some of the heirlooms if you really want good flavors I mean Brandy wine stands out you know the black creme there so many of the if she really wants flavor you go back to some of those heirlooms which we've lost a little bit but there are so many other really good varieties and a homegrown tomato even some of the new hybrids is going to taste so much better than anything that's been raised in a greenhouse or anything like that so she's got so many options but consider some of the air levels don't you there's some really good ones yep great well hello Monica uh she's wondering what to do with her blueberry plants that the rabbits have chewed the ends off of they're still about two feet tall should she cut them back you could clean them up i mean if they're beat up by the rabbits and they're torn you want to really clean up those ends so that because the plant wants to repair all that so tighten that up clean that up and then you might not get disease in there but you could get disease in there if you don't tidy that up and what she wants to do is not overp prune because any green leafy tissue now we want on that plant because that's the factory produces the sugars we've got to get that storage down in the roots so we get through the winter so prune but careful just clean it up yeah cheryl from Duth has pees that keep getting a white milky film on them after they bloom it happens every year and it spread to other plants what can she do to get rid of it and what is causing it sounds like powdery mildew to me and I think they're too tight i think that if they don't have good air flow through um then they and once they get it then they're more prone to get it it can be in the soil she really has to do a really good cleanup i think that's good advice better air circulation the uh the only good thing about it is it's a relatively benign fungi it's not going to destroy it but it certainly makes them hideous and and it cuts down on the health of the plant so and the bigger if they're moving them uh more sunlight better air circulation move them apart sure it's too much moisture yeah different area so Kate in Two Harbors asks "When's the best time to transplant honey berries?"

Uh hers are out growing their beds and they already have small leaves so she's guessing it might be too late is it okay in the fall pretty tough this is our June berry in Saskatoon so I I think that uh she could go now oh it's going to be this moisture issue that we have to be concerned about so you can take care of it do it that's right i would do it right now the ideal time would be very early spring before they break bud even better in the fall particular if it's going to be dry so I would do it right now but I'd have water available that's the thing when you can take care of them that's when you do it don't just go all the time by the calendar sure uh Julie in Superior wants to know "When can you plant radishes and how long until you can harvest them?"

Oh they grow very quickly they do they do too quickly sometimes they do get big and woody some hot and dry so uh plant them right now and then plant them in succession uh every week even i I would go ahead and seed in some radishes awesome well thank you so much for joining us this evening for our summer special of Great Gardening we hope tonight's episode has inspired you whether you're attending your summer garden trying out new techniques or simply enjoying the beauty of gardens across the Northland and of course a special thank you to our gardening experts Bob Olen and Deb Burns Ericson for sharing their time and expertise we'll see you in September with even more tips to help you grow a beautiful and successful garden and to see what you've grown this year from all of us here at Great Gardening and PBS North we thank you for watching and have a wonderful evening good