as we move further into summer we pause this week to ask how does your garden grow?

>> Are your hopes for seasonal flowers and vegetables blooming as well from plants to lawns?

As you know, summer is a good time to take garden questions to the plant.

MEDEK And happily the doctor is in and with us for this edition of PrimeTime.

Good evening, Umbers Haynes and it is a pleasure to welcome back Ricky Cammeray, retired extension educator for horticulture at Allen County Purdue Extension Office.

He is also known as the plant medic.

He has a bi weekly column in the Journal and Ricky is here to answer your gardening questions.

>> So get them cued up.

>> Call now and we'll get you on and get those answers so that the rest of summer continues to harvest well as we widen out and welcome Ricky Cammeray.

>> Pleasure to have you back, sir.

It's good to be back.

You know, we were just talking about all the PBS shows that I love to watch when I'm up late at night, you know, wild harvest, all the travel shows and most people know that I'm pretty outspoken and I wouldn't say that I watch a lot of PBS and it's it's good stuff.

>> Well, and a lot of it is foundational to shows like the Victory Garden was always I remember when we had Roger Swain come here and talk to the master gardeners at BFW.

That was a great, great day.

That was great fun.

>> Yeah.

He seemed baffled by how terrible our soils were which may well be one of your challenges as you are trying to make the original plans from spring look like something about now and then something to talk about as you move into fall.

>> We're all dealing with this change in weather and that's just the typical Hoosier kind.

>> But the forty thousand foot question about the top of most thunderstorm clouds what's going on with the weather this year?

It's crazy.

I have never seen it this way.

You know, so what happened was is that we had about three years in a row of La Nina conditions.

La Nina is a weather event that occurs out in the Pacific, has to do with the temperature of the ocean and generally in La Nina years you're going to have a bit more precipitation, maybe a little milder conditions during the winter months and then all of a sudden very quickly we transition to a very strong El Nino and that changed everything.

If you remember we started out really cold and dreary this year rainy you try to go out and your guardian is covered with mud basically and then very quickly in June it turned from that to hot and dry and that that just threw everything off big time in the sense of how plants were flowering, how quickly they flower.

I still have daylilies in my garden.

I have yet to flower and that is bizarre.

>> Does it create tering in in the soil that some of it's dry up top but there's still a trapped layer with too much moisture underneath?

>> I just think things got off to such a slow start because of the weather and how cool and what it was that it's just taken a while to try to catch up now it hasn't been all bad if you were a pieni for example or a rose you're really happy because you didn't have high enough temperatures to really have some of the disease and insects that would cause problems with those plants.

So peonies were fabulous this year roses, landscape roses if you look around, you know the knockout roses are really knockouts this year because they just didn't have those kind of conditions that would cause them to look bad.

So they look great other things flowering plants taken them while roses are still waiting for that to flower in my garden.

>> Wow.

So the individual clocks depending upon what you have growing with you may well get need to be reset if I could blame it all on the Canadian smoke but I don't think I can get away with that.

>> Well if you want to do a little bit hedging you have a couple of images we'd like to share one of them but precipitation outlook as we sit here today everyone's mileage may vary the next three months.

>> Yes.

And if you looked at that two months ago, that big green swatch of high precipitation would have been right over us and that has changed obviously because we're behind we're sort of half way drought here in this area because of the way the El Nino El Nino conditions are always usually associated in summers with hotter weather, drier weather in general.

The last El Nino was two thousand and twelve and that was a nasty one.

The worst one is nineteen eighty eight when it was so dry all you had to do is throw a match on the ground.

Each set of fire that would travel for decades.

>> Yeah.

And to that point the temperature forecast for the next 90 days we are not Phenix we are not southern Florida but we're out of out of it now and there's no telling if the weather that we see out West eventually moves to this area or not.

It El Ninos conditions have been associated with some of the hottest seasons ever and you're seeing that out west with the conditions that they're seeing and I don't know about you.

I like it cool.

I like a little less humid.

It's not a bad way to be out in the garden but if it's really hot and really humid it's miserable for people both.

And we are talking with Ricky Cammeray, the plant medic and open for your questions and Carolyn has one to get the conversation started.

>> She says I was told to put banana peels on my tomato plants.

>> Is that a good idea?

It is OK idea the banana has a lot of potassium so a lot of gardeners read a lot of stuff on the Internet and they'll want to use food scraps in and around their plants.

It's not a terrible idea but you need to realize that sometimes that those food items can bring in critters and so that's the only thing, Carolyn, that you have to look out for .

So if you're going to put them around, bury them so the critter can't easily get to it and it can help.

It's not a bad thing to recycle nutrients from your kitchen into the garden.

>> You just have to be careful not to draw critters and any extra peels can be part of your composting if you're so sure.

>> OK, Jim has one as a follow up now for something different Jim wants to know how do you get rid of English IVI?

Well, it's the dreaded English I tell you what you were mentioning.

Yeah.

Boxwood in your garden.

Yes, sir.

And that is a landscaping trend that you see from England.

We do that a lot in our gardens at home we want to recreate that English landscape with boxwoods and nicely trimmed shrubs and English IVI.

It's interesting because it can really take over a landscape as he knows I'm sure so you could try to dig some of it out depending on where it's at.

Is it growing up a wall?

We don't know that.

But then you have the other thing you have to decide do I want to use a herbicide on the English IVI?

It's very sensitive to glyphosate which is Roundup.

So you could use that very specifically around a non English IVI if it was growing up a wall I would cut it back, let the English I would dine and take it off and then just treat the bottom of the plant.

We'll talk a little bit more about that later with mulberries my least favorite plants in existence it goes from decorative to dangerous as far as how it then latches on into your your home the outside that was Boston.

>> Ivy is another one I can remember at Purdue that thing covered the windows of the horticulture building.

That's how vigorous it was and it tended to damage the brick a little bit so they can do damage and it's not a terrible thing to want to try to get rid of it.

But there's your choices are take it or treat it or both.

>> All right, Jim, we hope that helps in your efforts and as we're thinking about what we have now, one lead question might be what are some basic things about keeping a garden going in the summer with the shifting temperatures and water conditions?

>> Yeah, well, the first thing to remember is you know, it's interesting in drought years people water more and caused more disease than if it was a dry a wet here.

And this is because you tend to try to overcompensate for the lack of moisture in the soil.

Every garden is different, rich soil is different but in general water in the morning don't water in the late afternoon.

I'm an eye doctor that contacted me about the article.

He wants me to write an article about you know, it's OK to water really early in the morning or in the morning but when you water later either midday or later on in the afternoon either waste water or you spread disease.

So the early morning is the best and then water plants deeply if he can rather than every single day.

>> I've been hearing some concepts that might require some definition.

One of them is called Deadheading which is apparently a way of hitting a reset button for some plants to encourage another bloom to come forward.

What's good for the gander was just that having flowers, he said it's her favorite activity in the garden and I to do that every day when I worked in the horticulture gardens I would that had everything and then I would save the flowers and use potpourri.

>> So it was fun but it's certainly does help rejuvenate plants and have them not put in energy on a dying flower that it could be putting in just to keeping the house the plant healthy and producing more flowers.

So deadheading is a great concept.

Some folks don't have the time for it but it's kind of fun to go around and pop off the old flowers and use them or encourage the plants to be healthier.

I like that a lot.

I like the popery idea and it seems that you have summer then part one and so are part two .

It's going into some of the others that are hardy enough particularly in the vegetable side where after those are harvested in the summer your some of your fall ones like kale, beets, carrots and so forth can hang in there through the first frost and behind it can you know I just wrote an article about kale good for you .

>> I'm going to take some heat but kale is not one of my most favorite vegetables and gets a bad rap.

>> It's a trendy people mix it up and make smoothies out of it.

I like other stuff but it grows really well like you said it grows really well and cool weather.

Yeah.

So let's go back to questions from viewers like you and you can do that with the phone number you see before you we can put you on the air or we can take your questions just like we did from Shelly.

>> She would like to know how do I get my golden torch cactus to stop leaning over and I'm wondering if she has it outside now and still inside usually when things start to lean over a little bit it means they're a bit laggy and they need more sun so she might want to put it in an area where it gets a little bit more sun and even during the winter months you got to really put them in a place where they're going to get enough sun to keep them going.

You can get them to flower.

That's cool enough.

But I think the reason is is probably because it's not enough light could over fertilizing also that could cause that problem.

I hope that helps.

Shelly, thank you for calling Sylvia right behind Shelvey wanting to know how to get rid of Thistle's if I could give a special word for the most asked questions from people that still contact me it would be that one Sylvia so you should receive some sort of special citation from the mayor maybe an excellent question or at least from here anyway.

Thistle's I write sometimes about how everyone's into organic and not using chemicals in their landscape.

Thistle is the one instance where that cannot occur.

There is no way to get rid of thistles without using a herbicide and there's a really good one out there Sylvia.

It's kind of expensive but it's called Thistle Down and you can find that at specialty places that smell like the Allen County Co-op in New Haven.

It's like not cheap stuff but it really, really works on thistles and it is labeled for landscape planning.

So if you use it at the right rate it shouldn't damage any plants around it except for the thistle and usually it takes a couple of applications.

I would have it cut the thistle back a little bit and treat what's left usually going to take cover a couple times and it's a very effective herbicide for Canadian thistle.

We're live in studio with Ricky Cammeray and we're talking about plants, lawns, gardens, magic mixtures that can help your cause and you brought a little container of something that yes, this is what I use to help rescue plants that aren't doing they're feeling a little they're feeling a little iffy or if I transplant something that needs a lot of help.

So this is a root stimulator.

There are several different brands.

This is one of them and if you look on the active ingredient has a little bit of higher phosphorus potassium in fertilizer not much but the active ingredient I'm going to read it for you.

Sure.

Because it's extensive it's endo three butyric acid or IBSA.

It's the same stuff that's in the fruiting powder that you do to root cuttings if the cutting of an indoor plant it's the same stuff except it's in solution.

So if you mix this up and treat it around newly transplanted plants you use so much per gallon or a plant it's a little bit in trouble.

It's not doing as well as you think it should or for whatever reason it can really help revive the plant.

And I transplanted a Berquist Viburnum that had very little if any roots on it earlier this spring and most people said that plant is a goner and used a couple of applications that root stimulator and all of a sudden bare areas on the plant started to sprout and now it looks pretty healthy so it can be a very useful tool to use in the garden.

>> Don't use it on vegetables but use it on landscape plants.

OK, and with those landscape plants you did bring a few images with you to the show to discuss what kinds of interesting and reliable maybe that's the bigger keep plants there are to work with in summer.

>> Yeah first of all you know in redesigning a garden I tried to do now is when I plant plants I plant them in groupings.

In other words I don't just put one or two little plants out like a kind of a Martha Stewart garden.

I greatly admire Martha Stewart but her perennial garden would be a nightmare to try to take care of on your own.

So I like to plan in five even ten groupings of plants planted close enough together so that they can cover a lot of the weeds that might appear less work for me happier garden to look at and so there are some plants that I think that have greater merit in this area and sometimes I get a bad rap but the first one is I love Flanders poppies.

Those are the poppies that you see growing wild in England and France.

They commemorate the people that died in World War One and they grow all over the place.

I love them.

They flower for a long period of time.

You can see them in the spring or in the late summer.

They just look great.

They flower for a long time and if you use that in combination with a common herb dill which is Sha Truc I love the color chartreuse in the garden you can get a really interesting effect in plants that grow really well in our landscapes here.

So I love that a lot.

I love that combination.

>> Plus you can put dill on your fish.

Well there you go and you have a couple of flavors of daylilies that you like.

I think daylilies have really gotten a bad rap honestly.

I see posts all over the Internet about how much they supposedly spread.

>> I've been out and around during the pandemic shooting video footage for music videos.

>> I have yet to see a situation where the videos are said we have the orange one up.

>> This is Monterey Jack, I believe and if you're and going to a garden center or a nursery you look on racks towards the back where they have stuff on sale or you wait till later in the season, tell stuff is on sale.

Those Monterey Jacks are awesome daylilies not to your usual orange type two bucks apiece.

You can't find a deal like that anywhere and they look gorgeous in my garden.

>> It looks nice on our screen.

Here's one other to get to before a couple other questions have come in at what's called read volunteer.

>> I love using red in a landscape red daylilies are kind of hard to find the ones that retain their color that grow well.

This is one that's offered from a nursery in Tennessee that specializes in daylilies and those were like nine dollars apiece on sale but they're gorgeous.

>> It's the gift that keeps on giving and subdividing but they grow so well and their foliage covers soil better if you plant them a little closer together so they cover you're never going to get rid of all weeds in a garden but it'll help keep the weeds down by shading them out.

>> Diana has called us.

She says she is confessing she did not trim her mum's on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.

>> Should I now trim them or let them go?

I would Diane.

I'd still go ahead and trim them.

They're still time usually you cut about half of the foliage away on the Memorial Day.

You might not you might not go down quite as far as what you want to do though is encouraging branching in the moms so that you have more flowers later on in the fall.

That's the whole idea behind them and I would go ahead and do that Diana and Greg has a follow up.

This is probably with the English Ivy Moch Wild Strawberry is here taking over my yard.

>> What can I do?

Well, you know, when I was a young lad long ago my mom and our favorite neighbor Rose Thurman who lived in Huntington, they had a cottage on Big Lake where I lived, spent the first part of my years every spring we would go out and hunt wild strawberries.

It was so much fun that while the strawberries produced on those mock strawberries are much smaller but still tasty, there are specialized herbicides that you can use to clean them up out of the yard if there's too many of them you don't like them and again I would check out a specialty source that sells herbicide specific for wild strawberries.

But if you don't have a lot of them, you know strawberry shortcake is a good thing, right?

>> Yeah.

And if the Mac part is a little iffy to bring on more whipped cream.

>> That's right.

It's just a passing thought on my part one thing I don't think that's in his book but if you will let's show the folks at home you've been busy putting some of your wisdom and information together on something called sensible sustainability.

>> Tell me about the book.

Well, I my daughter who's a writer she writes fan of fantasy novels.

>> Mm hmm.

That everything we go she said Dad , you should really write a book and I go I want to write a book and she said no, you need to write a book.

And so she convinced me to compile a lot of material and put it into this particular book which has a a view of being more sustainable in the gardening landscape.

That's the whole idea of the book and it's something that I really was involved with when I worked at an extension and I continue to do that even afterwards to try to create landscapes that were much easier to take care of .

And this book talks about a lot of those methods that you can use.

It talks about arranging mass planting perennials in a way that there's less weeding and maintenance how to grow vegies TIBBLES more sustainably so again less weeding, easier to take care of more productive.

>> All of those things have been hearing things like if you're growing into a lot of tomatoes you put marigolds in and around your garden or something like that where you compliments about companion plants and it makes sense if you think about it because you know, if you have a raised bed and you grow some tomatoes or space underneath and around the potato or the tomatoes that you can use and you can fill that up with herbs or dill or anything, there are certain companions that work better than others and I talk about those in the book that'll help repel past North Carolina.

North Dakota State has a lot of great information about that but I like that idea of growing things together.

It's good to bring pollinators in when you have flowers in and around your vegetables it's a whole system rather than this I'm going to put tomatoes here and that's where they're going to go.

That's where they've always been and I'm going to grow the same tomato that I grew for twenty years and then wonder why you have disease and insect issues so that's what the book talks about.

>> Sensible Sustainability is the name of the book also too in addition to the book and the Journal Gazette column there is a home horticulture newsletter.

>> Let's go out on that.

Tell me about that.

It's a newsletter that I began writing and when I work for Purdue long ago and it was a hard copy thing that I mailed out to different people and neighborhood associations and after I left the people that I that were subscribers to that newsletter still wanted me to continue and so I did.

And so I have about sixteen fifty subscribers to that and so I send out the every month it's free.

>> I don't save your information to sell to somebody else and you could use the contact information we had on the screen there I believe.

Right so you can get a hold of me and say Hey I want your newsletter here's my email address and I'll get you on the list and then every month you get my view on the world of horticulture sometimes which is kind of humorous I think.

>> Well, it's been very helpful.

I know in this past half hour Ricky Cammeray is and will always be a horticulture educator.

>> He is still holding forth and you can find him online.

We're grateful you were with us tonight with us on there and for all of us with prime time, I'm Bruce Haines.

>> Thank you for watching and contacting us.

Take care.

We'll see you soon.

Night