Susann, welcome to "You Bet Your Garden."

-Thank you.

-Well, thank you, Susann.

How are you?

-I'm good.

How are you?

-I'm just ducky.

Thanks for asking.

And where is Susann good?

-LaGrange, Georgia.

-All right, what can we do for Susann in Georgia?

-Well, I have this ongoing problem.

It's like 30 years ongoing, really.

My husband gave me this gift, and he planted it.

It's a trumpet vine.

-Oh, good, good, good.

-Yeah.

Oh, it's not a gift 'cause it just keeps giving me trumpet babies, and they're all over my yard.

-Yep, that's trumpet vine, all right, and you say it's been growing for 30 years?

-At least, yes.

-Oh, man.

That's like the military saying they want an easy answer to Godzilla.

Okay, so you've taken down the main plant?

-I did.

I cut that sucker down to the very ground.

I dug up its roots, but no.

It just shot up more.

-So the first thing I'm gonna say is my friend Lee Reich, who is an expert on pruning -- he wrote "The Pruning Book" -- says that when you've got the suckers, these shoots coming up out of the ground, it is better to snap them off if you can than to try to pull them up or cut them.

-Okay.

-Lee says that the act of cutting releases a hormone down into the roots that urges the creation of more of them, but when you snap them, that hormone does not get produced, and it limits the number of new shoots that will come up.

How many suckers, not counting your husband for buying this thing -- -That's right.

-How many suckers do you have in your yard?

-I'm estimating about 200.

-Oh, good Lord.

Have you considered just mowing them to the ground and putting the place up for sale quickly, you know?

-You know, that crossed my mind.

It did.

-Yeah.

The mowing to the ground, by the way, is an option, even though cutting will produce that hormone.

I would have the blades sharpened first.

-Okay.

-And I would go down as low as you can without ruining anything else.

And starting as soon as possible, you're gonna do this once every two to three weeks.

You want to give the shoots time to come up and achieve some size but then cut them down, and what you're doing is you're exhausting all the energy from the root system with no reward.

It will take a year or two, but then you'll see them turn into what's more like a blade of grass, and then they'll be gone.

-Well, that sounds promising.

Now I'm getting optimistic.

-All right.

Good luck, Susann.

-Thank you so much, and you have a good day.

-Oh, you too.

My pleasure.

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

Bye-bye.

-Bye-bye.

-833-727-9588.

John, welcome to "You Bet Your Garden."

-Hi, Mike.

How are you?

-I am just ducky, John.

Thanks for asking.

How are you, sir?

-I'm doing great.

-And where is John doing great?

-I'm in Mullica Hill, New Jersey.

-Okay, very good.

What can we do for John in Mullica Hill?

-Well, I picked up a new blueberry bush, bought it online at one of the retail places.

They delivered it about a month and a half ago.

-Right.

-Like, right as the fall was starting.

I potted it right up, and now I have it in the sun-room of my house.

-Okay.

-All my other blueberry bushes have lost all their leaves and kind of gone to sleep for the winter.

-Right.

-And I don't know whether I should put this thing outside or if I keep it in.

-If you keep it inside, it's going to get radically, radically confused.

-Okay.

-All blueberries have what's called a chilling requirement, a certain number of nights that drop into the 40s, and the more traditional blueberries, like the standard highbush, they have a fairly high chilling requirement.

There are special varieties of blueberry that are bred to do better down south.

So what did you get?

-I think it was called a pink bluebe-- I'm sorry, pink lemonade.

-And do you know why it's called that?

-From kind of what intrigued me to buy it, I picked it as one of the first blueberries, I think it actually has bright pink berries.

-So it should not stay indoors one minute longer.

On the next kind of medium-level day -- You know, don't put it outside if it's 20.

-Right.

-But if you get a day that's in the 50s, and then things are "graduically" -- Graduically?

I like that.

Things are graduically going to cool down again.

That's the day to put it out.

Leave it out in the pot for like a week of days and nights and get it in the ground as soon as you can after that, and, of course, as with any blueberry, make sure the ground -- make sure the planting hole is amended with a lot of peat moss, and then mulch it with more peat moss on the surface and an inch of compost.

Now, you say you have other blueberries, right?

How many?

-I think I have two other ones.

-Okay.

They're in the ground, aren't they?

-No, I have them in big whiskey barrel planters.

-Oh, okay.

You know, traditionally I warn people that they can't, in the Northeast, leave plants out in pots over the winter 'cause the roots will freeze above ground, but one of the ways to cheat around that is to use a humongous container, and the half whiskey barrels are about as big as you get.

Keep them as close to the middle of the half whiskey barrels as possible, 'cause as you can imagine, the outside near the wooden slats, that gets colder than the interior.

So keep things close to the interior.

I got three half whiskey barrels out on my patio.

I absolutely love them.

They're a great height for us gardeners as we get older, and, boy, you can fill them with a lot of stuff.

-Oh, sure.

-Yeah, so you're -- -Yeah, I love them.

-Yeah, your plant is pretty winter-hardy.

I tell you, I've heard about this plant, and I've seen it in catalogs, so if you remember next summer when it's coloring up and we can see these berries, please send us a picture, and we'll put it up.

-Oh, absolutely.

-All right, John, thank you.

-All right, thank you, Mike.

-Bye-bye.

Welcome back to "You Bet Your Garden," from the studios of Rodale Institute Radio at WLVR in Bethlehem, PA.

I am your host, Mike McGrath.

Coming up later in the show, I will recommend three of my favorite books that also make great holiday gifts for gardeners, three different ones than last week, cats and kittens.

But now it's time to welcome my special guest, Sonja Michaluk -- I had to look down to make sure I was getting that name correct -- a young lady who has won a plethora of science prizes and, as part of her reward, got to go to Sweden on somebody else's dime and meet the king and queen.

Sonja, welcome to "You Bet Your Garden."

-Thank you.

It's an honor to be here today.

-Well, it's an honor to have you here.

Now, tell us what school you're going to, what grade you're in.

-Sure.

I'm a senior in high school, 12th grade, and I attend Hopewell Valley Central High School in Pennington, New Jersey.

-Now, how long have you been a rocket scientist, doing these incredible experiments and winning awards?

-I have been active in freshwater biology and bioassessment studies for nearly a decade now.

-Nearly a decade.

How old are you?

-16.

-Okay, so at 6 years old, I was also floundering around in streams trying to catch salamanders, but I think you've been doing a little bit different work.

-Well, it's actually quite similar.

I still catch salamanders.

-They're cool.

-They're wonderful.

But I began doing bioassessment, assessing waterway health using invertebrates.

I started doing chemical assessment, looking at nonpoint source pollution.

It was something I was really passionate about.

And let's see, when I was about 8 years old, someone suggested I start teaching, and so I started teaching bioassessment training courses.

I teach malacology, herpetology, geology, a lot of freshwater biology.

I like to write my own curriculums.

-I feel like such a loser.

8 years old?

-Well, it was a hobby.

It was a passion.

-Now, let's talk about this most recent award, because you were in Sweden... -Yes, I was.

-...for some week-long conference on the health of the world's water.

-Yep, so I was in Stockholm, Sweden, for World Water Week in the end of this past August.

I was chosen to be the U.S. representative as a student to attend World Water Week and to meet fellow researchers, to attend a climate-change symposium, and to attend a royal gala with the king, queen.

In addition, I got to meet student representatives from 34 other countries.

-And what's the award you got for the experiment?

-So I won the U.S.

Junior Water Prize.

-And what was -- You gave a name to your experiment, right?

So what did you call it?

-So my experiment was looking at the larval chironomid.

Chironomidae are a type of macroinvertebrate in family Diptera, and in my years of waterway health assessment, I noticed that they were a common denominator across 13 sites that I had been looking at.

And this really interested me, so at one point, I actually laid them out on my lab bench.

I have a small lab I built in my basement with my sister.

-Of course you do.

[ Laughs ] Okay, now, of the scientific name of the creatures you were just mentioning, I was struggling till you got to Diptera, and that means a fly-like creature.

-Yes, mm-hmm.

These are -- -[ Laughs ] -These are non-biting midges.

They don't bite.

However, they are everywhere.

They are a very ubiquitous creature.

They are found on every continent.

There actually are an estimated over 10,000 species in this family.

-Tell us the life cycle of the family you studied in a typical backyard stream.

-Okay, so the chironomids are whole metabolists, which means that they have four stages.

They start out as an egg, larva, pupa, adult.

It varies depending on how long they spend on each stage from chironomid to chironomid.

The ones I'm studying here are -- I'm looking at the larval form because that is the time that they spend in water.

-Right.

-And natural selection really plays a role here because if an adult chironomid lays her eggs into a body of water, if the water is too acidic or if the water is too turbid, then they will not survive to become larva.

The eggs will not hatch, and I actually found that really interesting because across the sites I studied, the ones that -- I created a statistical sampling plan, and I looked at land use around these streams.

I looked at historical health data, some of which I collected, some of which had been in databases dating many years back.

I looked at also the land use, the geology, and I tried to get a good variety in all of my sampling sites.

And I found that the most healthy and pristine streams were -- the most dominant species of chironomid was the most sensitive species of chironomid, which I found very interesting.

The streams with the highest nutrient pollution were most populated by a type of chironomid called the clinotanypus, which is red in color.

This hemoglobin that is in this chironomid allows it to more readily absorb oxygen from the water.

Plus, this chironomid has adapted to live in areas with very low dissolved oxygen, which goes hand in hand with very high nutrient pollution.

-So in some sense, we're talking Darwin here and adaptability and evolution, but in another sense, and I think why you won the award, is you discovered a way to monitor the health of the waterway almost by just seeing what species of these midges are predominant.

-Mm-hmm.

Well, there's a technology called DNA barcoding, and that is when you extract the DNA from an organism, and from there you can amplify it, and you can sequence it, and by looking at that and matching it up to databases, you can actually figure out what it is down to species level.

Not only that, you can detect mutations and compare it to other specimens.

What I found is the biological health of a stream is a reflection of all other factors thrusted upon it, so any ecological factors, geological factors, chemical factors, like, weather, it's all going to be a reflection of that.

-How was your work received in Sweden?

-I feel like it was received pretty well.

I got to talk to many CEOs of various companies, including an idol of mine, Dr. Malin Falkenmark, who I actually used as a reference for the Falkenmark water stress indicator for my research.

-Mm-hmm.

That's amazing.

So what's -- You're a senior now.

-Yes.

-And do you have a project that you'll be doing during your senior year?

-I do, but it's a surprise.

-Oh, okay.

I can see that.

We'll have to have you back in a year, then.

-I'd love that.

-All right.

Well, I have to go back to school now for about 12 years so that I can only feel 50% inferior.

You're a remarkable young woman.

-Thank you.

-And the way you roll these names off your tongue, you have an impossibly bright future in front of you.

-Thank you.

-My guest has been Sonja Michaluk.

It has been a delight to have you on the show.

We will put links to your work up on our website, youbetyourgarden.org, and please continue to have fun, do research.

Keep saving the world.

Your generation is the key to our future, and you're obviously taking it very seriously, but there's a lot of joy in you for what you do, and that's the perfect combination.

-Well, I'm very passionate about this.

This is one of my favorite things ever.

-Okay.

-Yeah.

-You're one of our favorite guests ever.

-Oh, thank you.

-All right.

Thank you so much for being on "You Bet Your Garden."

-Thank you for having me.

-Well, it's time for the question of the week.

Tulips, great gardeners, and definitive designs, three books that any plant lover will treasure.

Books given as holiday gifts should have two things in common.

They should be wonderful to look at and helpful to read.

Here are three that were remarkably easy for me to choose.

Let's begin with "Lessons from the Great Gardeners" by Matthew Biggs, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016.

The cover price was 30 bucks.

I love books that are divided into lots of tidy little sections so that you can pick the book up, read a complete section in 10 minutes, and then get back to whatever you were doing, like imploring your rosemary plants to stay alive.

This book contains 40 such sections, each devoted to the biography and wisdom of a gardening pioneer, including Thomas Jefferson, who advocated succession planting, the value of curved pathways -- "They slow progress, encouraging visitors to slow down and look at what is growing around them" -- and the value of native plants, which he explained are more suited to the environment, less prone to pests and diseases, and generally more robust.

We move our bound-in book ribbon, perfect touch for a gift book, to the section on Claude Monet, who although better known for his impressions of ornamental plants, was rightly proud of the vegetable garden he built to feed his family.

"My salon was the barn," he wrote.

And he's also said to have dug potatoes with Renoir.

I'd love to have seen that.

Among his valuable advice was to plant densely to prevent weeds, to have something in flower at all times, and to visit flower shows for inspiration.

Of course, we have the great Gertrude Jekyll, who many consider to be the best garden designer of all time.

"There is no spot of ground, however bare or ugly," she wrote, "that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight."

My favorite piece in the book may be the one on Jacques Majorelle, who created both a famous shade of blue and a paradise of a garden in Marrakech, which he wisely built on an oasis.

Although the frogs sometimes drove him to distraction, he wrote, "Never underestimate the importance of sound in the garden.

Frogs croaking, birds singing, the rustle of leaves, the hum of insects, and the trickle of water all add another dimension that soothes the senses."

We move on to "The Tulip," a massive 400-page landmark work by the wonderful Anna Pavord, published by Bloomsbury St. Martin's Press in 1999.

Cover price is 40 bucks.

With the subtitle "The Story of a Flower that Has Made Men Mad," this one will never leave my personal library.

Highlighted by beautiful period prints, one of which, from 1590, shows a yellow tulip with the curious companions of larkspur, a scorpion, and an earwig.

Anna reveals how the trade in tulip began in the 1500 and 1600s and how a tulip colorfully "adorned" by a virus became so popular, it inspired tulip mania, where single specimens traded hands for the price of a house.

Trade in tulips was so frenzied, she explains, it inspired the modern stock market, including the first crash, when people realized that maybe a house was a better investment.

We follow the first bulbs along the route of the spice trade to Europe and then eventually to America.

Anna was a guest on this show two decades ago.

Her words of wisdom included the great advice not to plant annual flowers over top of a tulip bed because "watering and feeding of the flowers will rot the bulbs below."

Is that why you can't get your tulips to reliably return?

Anna's personal answer was to dig her bulbs up after they were done blooming and store them inside for replanting in the fall.

Finally, we have "The Essential Garden Design Notebook" by Rosemary Alexander, published by Timber Press in 2004, cover price $14.95.

Another oldie but goody.

This book answers all the questions I generally dodge, like how to make a site survey of your land before you install the garden, designing useful patterns and grids, understanding the space you're gonna work with, how to have a realistic idea of how much light the space will get, horizontal elements, vertical elements, and the periodic table of elements.

Okay, that last one's not in the book.

There are literally hundreds of pages on garden design here, from rough sketches and ideas to the final install.

Perplexing ideas are explained, like mood boards and axonometric projections.

Thank God spell-check knew what that word meant.

That makes one of us.

All seriousness aside, this book consists of what many of you tell me you want an app for.

Think of this book as an app that's on paper because it covers every topic app-propriately.

One of the most frequent questions we get on the show is, how do I accurately measure the amount of sun my space gets?

Don't ask me, because I don't know, but Rosemary does and tells you exactly how to measure both the amount of summer and winter sun and how to gauge the amount of winds your plants will have to deal with and how to modify it if it's too much.

There must be over 1,000 brilliant ideas about garden design here, from the overall layout to structures and beyond.

I'm exhausted just thinking about it.