Ep. 218 Midsummer Lessons: What’s Growing (and Dying) in Our Yards | #GoodGrowing
Welcome to the Good Growing podcast. I am Chris Enroth, horticulture educator with the University of Illinois Extension, coming at you from Macomb, Illinois, and we have got a great show for you today. It's time to check-in with what's going on in our yards and gardens. Usually, we do this maybe once, maybe twice a year to just sort of see like, hey, this is what we're growing this year. This is what's working.
Chris:Or in my case, a lot of what's not working. But you know I'm not doing this by myself. I am joined as always every single week by horticulture educator Ken Johnson in Jacksonville. Hey, Ken.
Ken:Hello, Chris. Yeah. There's a lot of not working or don't do this in my yard. It's
Chris:gonna be a good episode today then. Lots of lessons learned for folks listening and watching. Yeah. We're gonna have pictures today of what's not working. We'll do our best to describe what we're showing folks for those listening.
Chris:So, yeah, it's going to be it's gonna be a telling show for us. I guess should we set the stage though in terms of, you know, why have things maybe been a little bit more difficult this year for us? Ken, do you have I guess, were you around at all this summer to take care of the yard?
Ken:Yes. I think it was I don't know. In a previous episode, yes, we mentioned that. I was gone for a while, several weeks. So that Mhmm.
Ken:I played a I played a role in that. Came back. Got got it pretty well cleaned up, but lately it's been ridiculously hot and humid. So there has not been a whole lot of of yard work going on, plan on doing something this weekend. Went out, lasted about 10:30, eleven, and said, that's enough of this.
Ken:And that was it. So it'll wait till next weekend.
Chris:Yeah. You mentioned the humidity too. Like, I it gets humid in Illinois, especially in the western part of the state where we're at. But, boy, this has been really, really humid. The heat has definitely not helped.
Chris:I think currently, what did I look at the the weather? It was, like, 77% humidity or something. It's pretty high. Every morning when I or sorry. Every night when I go to bed, the windows start to steam up on the outside.
Chris:You wake up, and it's just like everything's there's just a fog on everything. And that is something I think that has affected our garden plants. I've been going through our, pest management for the home landscape book and spending a lot more time on the diseases section, you know, saying a lot of those fungicide names lately to folks that are calling in. So, yeah, that that high humidity has definitely been playing a role in in the impact of plant health along with the heat and then all the rain that we've had. I mean, we've had tons of rain at least in Macomb.
Ken:Yeah. Same thing down here in the end. I will say in migrant, I am surprised I haven't seen more, like, major disease issues. A lot of leaf spots here and there, but nothing nothing of, you know, epidemic proportions yet. That may all change, but yeah, definitely more disease, than normal.
Ken:So and then even, I mean, even we've gotten rain when I was out in the garden last night taking pictures for this. And there we'd still have some spots in the garden that are getting dry. So
Chris:Yeah. You know, we we spent two years in a in a drought, like a pretty decent drought in the Western Part Of Illinois. And I suppose two months of maybe slightly above normal rainfall is is maybe not enough to fill that hole that we're in. So that's another thing to be mindful of. You know, we're we're feeling good right now.
Chris:I have I haven't had the water much for several weeks, but still, you know, are we out of the drought deficit? Well, we'll we'll see what happens this fall. It seems like we really get hit hard late summer in the fall lately and stretches out into winter. Well, Ken, I guess let us talk about what is going on in our gardens and landscapes right now. And do you care if I kick us off this week with my bad news?
Chris:I'm gonna start with my bad news first.
Ken:Yeah. Go for it. You've you've blamed this out much better than I have.
Chris:Okay. Well, so I last week, I got some garden related bad news. I had a Norway maple in my front yard, which if you've listened to the show, I think on a couple occasions I've cursed and and told the tree to die. Well, it did on its own actually, but not without help. So the the pattern in death, I said, that seems a lot like Ferticillium wilt, which is a soil borne disease that affects a lot of different species of trees and shrubs.
Chris:And and as the tree was dying over very rapidly over this last year, I said, maybe it's due to the droughts that we just talked about, or maybe there's some girdling root that's strangling it. I'm in denial about the fact that it's probably going to be verticillium will. So the last remaining limb on the tree about two months ago, I I cut that off. It would already started to wilt the leaves on it, and I took that into the, U of I Plant Clinic in Champaign Urbana. And then just a few weeks ago, I got the lab report that confirmed verticillium wilt, a soil borne disease that you can't really get rid of.
Chris:Not without a lot of time and maybe fumigation, but I'm not doing that part. That I mentioned that verticillium malt is is can infect other species of plants. It just so happens flanking this Norway maple. One side, there is a black gum tree, and on the other side, there is a white ash tree, both of which are susceptible to verticillium wilt. So I'm kind of just waiting.
Chris:I don't think there's really much I can do at this point other than just wait and see if these trees also get infected, other than trying to promote their overall health. Ken, I think were we chatting before or was that someone else where I talked about using the the wood chips? And I think we both, in some articles, found that that is not a good idea. Very often on this podcast, you will probably hear us talk about, oh, yeah. You know, chip up a tree, use that as mulch.
Chris:It's free mulch. Keep it thick and chunky. That's why we love wood chips. Especially in this case, even though I think I don't know how conclusive the research is. I think they're saying that the risk is still pretty high that if we would use wood chips from a tree infected and killed by verticillium wilt, it could possibly spread over into other trees that are susceptible.
Chris:So don't do that. So what do I have to do? Basically, it is call a tree company, have them cut it down, and get it off-site. More than likely, they will burn it, or I'll at least suggest that they burn it, or or or bury it in some way. Just do not reuse it.
Chris:Do not go to the neighbor's house and dump my wood chips off there. So they needs to be handled somewhere off-site.
Ken:I got a Norway maple. Maybe you can send me some some chips to me. I'll I'll
Chris:save a bucket for you. Yeah. Yeah. So that that's definitely something that I was I'm not disappointed in the tree dying, but I am disappointed in how it died. Careful what you wish for.
Chris:Exactly. Blasting repercussions. So, yeah, whatever goes in that spot is going to have to be resistant to verticillium will, especially with the thought that I might lose the two trees on either side. So I definitely have to make sure I'm I'm careful of my species selection next time.
Ken:Yeah. That's unfortunate. It's got a pretty wide host range, so you're gonna be kinda limited.
Chris:Yeah. When when you go look this up, folks, on on the old, you know, Google, the list of susceptible trees is long. So I think oaks might be okay. So that's kinda what I was looking at possibly, but an oak out there. Welkin, there's one piece of bad news.
Chris:I got another, but I need to take a break. What you got anything got anything for us?
Ken:Sure. So we can go through some of the pictures I have here. Like I said, I went around our our yard and gardens last night and took pictures. Some of these are a little blurry, probably because I had so much sweat in my eyes. I couldn't tell if it was the camera not focusing or just getting blinded.
Ken:But here's our, our backyard. So I think we've mentioned on the podcast in the past, Now when we first moved into this house, we've been there almost nine years now. The fir one of the first things we did was put a pollinator, bed next to our garage here. So there can see these, we've got some redbuds here that have volunteered, that need to be cut down. I've let them go for four or five years now, they're getting rather large, growing into the garage.
Ken:But there used to be a stump there, that's now completely rotted out. But here, we've got, like I had Susan's and stuff, put some zinnias in there. We've got some celosia that volunteered from last year, some blanking flower in there, so this is the front. And then on the side, for the back. So again, we got another red bud growing up into our garage that I need to cut down.
Ken:I've I've actually kind of cut it down and it just keeps resprouting, so I'm going to have to get some herbicide out and and cut it and paint the stump. Here we've got cone flowers, we have obedient plant in there, some milkweed. The goldenrods and asters are starting to really shoot up. Usually, for those, I'll go through and pinch them back so they don't get quite so tall and they get a little more bushy. But with being gone for so long this summer, that didn't really happen like I normally do.
Ken:Same thing with like our, Autumn Joycedum, which you can kind of see on the lower right there. That didn't get pinched back, so a lot of that stuff's going to be flopping quite a bit this year more than likely. So so it looks a little it's a little more wild than it normally does because I didn't get get around to pinching stuff. Did find some conflowers of aster yellows, in here in this bed last year, I have not seen any this year, back here. So I think we got lucky and and got those pulled quick enough, even though I did leave them for a while so I could take lots of pictures, probably longer than I should have.
Ken:But, and then just a little kind of in between shot there. See again, we got blanket flower and we do have a little pond liner we put in there and make a little bog. I had some pitcher plants and stuff in there and I put some equisetum scouring rush or stale, whatever you want to call it. And it is quickly taking that entire thing over. But it's not spread outside of that yet.
Ken:So that's just kind of become our little equisetum pop, more or less. And then, you know, depending on how well people can see, we do have some, the honey vine milkweed, growing up in there. So I'm debating whether I'm gonna just kinda pull it or if I'm gonna get some get some glyphosate or something, kinda paint that on some of the leaves so I don't affect the other plants. But yeah. And and kind of the foreground, can see our our grass.
Ken:We've got a lot of bare spots, dead spots. I think that's some of that's probably some disease, we've had in there. And we also, cutting the grass. Piles didn't get raked and has now smothered and killed everything. So we may be doing some some seeding this fall.
Ken:So don't Stop there for now.
Chris:Well, excellent. I like your sculpture there, Ken. It looks really nice.
Ken:All the little wind wind thingy that usually the mill honey vine grows up and it can't spin anymore.
Chris:Yep. Yeah. I I will say, I think we talked about honey vine milkweed a few episodes ago, but if you wanna pull it, just remember, I've been pulling the same one for five years.
Ken:Yes. That's why that's why I'm leaning towards the painting on some some glyphosate because I I don't want it in there because I did pull some off because it was growing up on those redbuds, man, completely covering it. Nothing I wanna keep all of those there. But
Chris:Mhmm. Yep. So sadly, it they're very aggressive, and it can really come in and and just topple over a lot of plants and sort of it's like the kudzu of the North almost.
Ken:Except it's native.
Chris:Except as native.
Ken:It's it's supposed to be here.
Chris:Still eat your garden. Alright. I guess the the other little piece of not great news. It's not that bad because I think a lot of people are dealing with this exact same thing, is I was pulling a bunch of crabgrass out of one of my beds and I stumbled across a lot of worms and I said, oh, great. I got some good worm action going on here.
Chris:And then I looked at them and they were flipping around like crazy. They were going nuts. And so then I, like, picked one up, and I could see kind of a telltale kind of color, sort of a grayish, more grayish. You know, other earthworms or nightcrawlers, they're more reddish, pinkish colored. These are more grayish in color, definitely a little bit more muscular.
Chris:Definitely feel that thing moving around in my hand. And then it has this kind of milky white slitellum, it's that reproductive band around the the earthworm. And the way to to really correctly identify these things is I think that slitellum occurs on the thirteenth or fourteenth segment from the head, one of those two, and it was a jumping worm. Not just one, multiple jumping worms. And so I now have the invasive jumping worm in my yard, which what does that do?
Chris:Well, they are aggressive top feeders. They eat organic matter voraciously in the soil, and they stay really on that top layer of your soil. They do die in the winter if it gets cold enough, but their eggs do not. So they will lay eggs, and then they will hatch from their eggs next spring, and that cycle continues. I think, you know, where we started seeing this up in the Chicagoland region first up in Illinois, you know, lot of people described what is left of their soil.
Chris:You know, once jumping worms show up is kind of like a dried coffee grounds texture. You know, organic matter does a lot of that glomming together of soil particles, it adheres a lot of your particles together, creates some structure. When that organic matter is gone, you lose some of that soil structure. And so, yeah, fun. And what do you do about jumping worm?
Chris:Nothing. You you can pick them out and throw them on the pavement if you want. That's that's what I did. I just like, ah, no. So I threw them out on the driveway, let them bake.
Chris:But I think there's like a dry mustard solution you can mix up where you pour a gallon of water with so many tablespoons or a cup of like dry mustard powder and on like a square foot, and it will bring the jumping worms up to the surface and pick them out then, but that's not really a very good control method. You go through a lot of mustard.
Ken:Yeah. That's more for for monitoring
Chris:Yep.
Ken:For them. And I've actually we actually had somebody bring in some jumping worms several years ago. So they're they're in Morgan County. I haven't found any in my yard, fortunately. But I did take a video of them thrashing around that we could throw in here.
Chris:Yes. Yes.
Ken:So people can see that.
Chris:Yep. They're also called snake worm because of that thrashing. They're they're just they they move and they're more muscular. They're they're tougher.
Ken:I'll say the the video that I have, they weren't thrashing around as much as they like, you know, as soon as you get the camera out, they stop doing it as much. But you can get an idea of how how much they thrash in it.
Chris:Yep. Mhmm. Yep. Well, jumping worms. Yes.
Chris:They're in my yard. I guess I'll I'll do one more non native thing that I have growing in my yard,
Ken:and this
Chris:is I pulled up a bunch. This is common lespedeza. So not the sericea lespedeza, but common lespedeza. What's the scientific name for this so we don't confuse it with something else is let's see. Because there's a synonym here.
Chris:I think it was originally known as lespedeza striata, which if you would go do an Internet search, you'd probably still find this plant. But the one that I think they use more commonly today is Cumaroia striata. So, again, the common lespedeza. It really just started growing as one patch in my lawn this year and has really kind of blown up. It's considered an annual that can outcompete your turf grass because it it just becomes a very vigorous plant, almost becomes like a woody creeping ground cover by the end of the summer.
Chris:And it it will just kinda outcompete your lawn, especially for that late summer, early fall time frame when a lot of our cool season lawns are already pretty stressed out from the heat and and, you know, if drought, if we went through a dry period of weather, which we have the last two years, has probably would allow this thing to get a good foothold, in my lawn and a few other people's lawns. So, what do you do about it? Since it it is an annual, technically, you could do some type of pre emergent in the springtime, because it's such an aggressive grower. You know, if you catch it early, you could pull it, but that's that's about about it. I already mow high, which you should do.
Chris:Mow as often as you can, which I do. You could core aerate to relieve some compaction for cool season lawns that's in the spring or fall. So other than core aerating to loosen up compaction, I haven't done that one, then you're left with post emergent herbicides. So a lot of things like two four d, dicamba, will work, and, tricholipir, any of the broadleaf stuff that is labeled for lawns, which you don't necessarily wanna be spraying that right now because a lot of that broadleaf herbicides are going to volatilize when it's so hot right now. So we gotta wait for it to cool down before we would spray anything.
Chris:But once you spray or you do whatever control method that you want, you have to be ready with that new turf grass seed later in the season to the to then replant that into lawn if that's what you're growing there. Oh, yeah. Common luspidesa.
Ken:I'll check and see if I have that. We got all kinds of stuff growing in my grass that's not grass.
Chris:Between that and the nimble will, I don't have much lawn left in certain parts of the yard.
Ken:Yes. Creeping Charlie, strawberries. Yeah. Wild strawberry.
Chris:I encourage those. I I don't I don't actively try to kill them. This this particular one and the nimble will is I I'm worried about this one because it's an annual, and if it dies, I'm gonna have bare spots in the winter, and I don't want I don't wanna impact my soil in that in that way to have bare patches in the winter with kids and animals and myself running around the yard.
Ken:Hope for lots of snow.
Chris:I hope. If it ever gets here, I hope. Maybe. It's raining this year, so maybe we'll get snow this winter.
Ken:We're using it all up now. Mhmm.
Chris:Oh, no. Don't say that.
Ken:So I'll share some more pictures. So we'll move on to our our vegetable garden here. And this year, we did cut back on our vegetable garden a little bit again just because we were we're gone for so long. We didn't want to put a bunch of stuff in there that was going to potentially need to be a little more high maintenance, shall we say, than others. So we do have a couple of tomato plants, but we didn't plant as nearly as many as we did.
Ken:We didn't do any cucurbits, which aren't necessarily really high maintenance, but we've had issues with squash bug for a couple of years and didn't wanna didn't wanna plant that and have that stuff move in and just completely wipe everything out and kinda start from from square one all over again. So here's kind of the front of the garden. So we've got, quite a few peppers. Upfront there are Christmas peppers, more Christmas peppers that we planted. We've got jalapenos, stuff like that.
Ken:On the on the right there, the the those really tall plants, those are lettuce that's lettuce that bolted and I have never have not pulled yet. So if you've never seen a lettuce that's bolted and you're listening, go check out the YouTube. But I have for the last couple of years, some of our raised beds, I've just let the lettuce bolt. We have volunteer lettuce all over the place. So maybe I won't have to plant lettuce anymore.
Ken:There you go. You can see that we do have a we do do cereal rye in our garden as a cover crop. So fortunately when we got back, we didn't have to do a whole lot of weeding in here. Some of those smaller plants in the foreground, that is the tillage radish that we planted. Probably put it on a little too heavy.
Ken:Usually get it out a little later than I should, so those seeds will kind of carry over into the spring and I just let them go. Probably not the best thing to do if I wanna grow broccoli and stuff because all of the, cabbage whites and things like that, cabbage loopers will get onto that. So I'm just kinda setting up a smorgasbord for all of those, in my garden year round. Here's our carrots. I thought they looked much better When we got back, I'm not sure what's going on in the middle there.
Ken:You can see a lot of browning out there. I have not pulled any out to see what's going on. But other than that, they're they're kind of declining, last week or two. I don't know if that's temperature related or what's going on there, but I will have to to pull some of those and see what they look like. Here we got some, beans in here.
Ken:So these, for this year, we did not grow green beans. These are all dry beans, shelling beans, whatever you want to call them. My wife and I, we had a little bit of a miscommunication. I thought she bought bush beans. She did not.
Ken:So I did not put that in that. We have two rows here. So the one row by the fence is going fine. I can crawl that. The other row does not have a fence on it.
Ken:We do have a post there where we had tomatoes on last year, but they're kind of all over the place right now. But we do have some beans on there, so again, we'll let those dry down and harvest those this fall. Now our corn, we do have two different types of corn. I have popcorn, which is on left, so the smaller plants and more of an ornamental type on the right. The popcorn we planted probably three weeks before the ornamental, just so we wouldn't get cross pollination.
Ken:The spring, it did not germinate until about the week I planted the ornamental corn, which then germinated rather quickly. So they're kind of you can see the popcorn it's, you know, silking and tasseling right now and the ornamental is sending out its tassels. So I'm hoping that all gets pollinated and we don't get too much cross pollination and don't mess up our popcorn here. But we'll see. We do have a nice healthy patch of purslane.
Ken:Normally, I I would pull that, but I left it because this is our vegetable garden and it's edible. So maybe some night we'll have a purslane salad or something like that. But we'll see that is one around our yard. We we had a lot more of this year than we have in the past, it seems like, for whatever reason. So there's some of the beans in there.
Ken:Ganapi, some more peppers. Here, I think these are the jalapenos. You can see the the pic one in the front is not looking too happy. I think it's a little dry in that part of the garden. We did water that tomato in the background there.
Ken:Did not get staked. I think I think that was one we planted that's not a volunteer, but it's crawling all over the ground. So that's probably going to lead to a lot of, diseased fruit, more than likely. But we'll see that the fruit's just starting to come on. And it's been so hot, it's not going to color up.
Ken:I really want to get up up into the mid eighties, they don't produce that red color. So if it it is supposed to cool off, but if it's it were to stay hot like this, we'd to start picking those once they get that mature green size and ripening them inside if we want to get that nice color on them. Here's our some of our artichokes. I don't know why, but these are probably a quarter of the size they normally are when they start putting out the flowers. Again, I'm not sure.
Ken:You know, we were gone. I think it was kind of dry at times, so it could be playing a role in that. I got these planted much later than I would have liked to. They sat in there, in the seed starting tray for two or three weeks longer than I would have liked them to. But just every time I get a chance to go out, it'd be raining or it'd be really muddy and I couldn't just couldn't get them into the ground.
Ken:So we probably won't harvest these. I'll just let them bloom and and we'll enjoy the flowers and can pop in a picture of what the flower looks like if people aren't sure. But that's basically a giant thistle, more or less. Now here's our asparagus patch. So this is the you can see we've got a lot of flowers in our female flowers.
Ken:So I think we got more female plants than we did male plants. So Uh-oh. Yeah. Going forward, we're gonna have to do a lot of weeding in here more than likely. So we're selectively thin out the females, I won't have much asparagus left after that.
Ken:And this is supposed to be a purple asparagus. I did have some plants that came up green. They never were purple, but others came up purple and they've they've turned green. So not sure why some of those aren't. Here's a yellow striped armyworm feeding on on our asparagus.
Ken:Here's those black with the yellow stripe, gray stripe down the side of it. And you can see how the the flowers are a little blurry. These are cardoons, so related to asparagus. For these, you're eating the more of midrib stuff you blanch it and stuff. We don't eat them.
Ken:I just chrome, the heck of it. They're more of an kind of an ornamental, but they're in the vegetable garden. Nobody ever sees them. So I should probably incorporate these into our our flower beds a little bit more. To me, looks like something you'd find like a dinosaur dinosaur an Asian dinosaur.
Chris:So Old ferny leaves and, yeah, big big leaves. Now they have a flower, you said?
Ken:And when we've grown, we have not gotten a flower off of them yet. I don't know if our our growing season probably isn't long enough for that. Maybe I'll build a greenhouse around them and see if I can get them to flower.
Chris:There you go.
Ken:I got another another close-up of that lettuce. I'm trying to remember what the cultivar was. I can't think of it. In the middle of that, there's an onion that didn't get harvested last year. So that's sunflower, and it's got all kinds of the the bulbils on the top there so we could plant those in theory if we wanted to.
Ken:And then here, this one's for you. This is our blackberry. Our baby cakes, migratory, so the dwarf blackberry that grew through the bottom of the pot and has now rooted into the ground and is kind of going everywhere. We do have some, see some chlorosis in there, so probably need to do some fertilizing in there. But we have had, we had probably a couple dozen blackberries on there before we left.
Ken:And there's a whole lot coming in that I'm sure the birds enjoyed. We've we're still picking some here and there, on there. Looks good.
Chris:That's Baby cake, do those blackberries taste good?
Ken:Yeah. Tastes like tastes like blackberries. They're and they're pretty good size. They're size of my thumb are bigger, a lot of them. So they're they're pretty big.
Chris:Mhmm.
Ken:If we can if we can beat the birds soon. Every once in while gets get out there, there'll be a couple that have been pecked at, just kinda eat around it.
Chris:Well, few more things for me to share that something that I found. I don't I'm not doing this in my yard or my garden, but I help someone identify a melon or a cucumber melon in their garden. They said, I got a bunch of seeds. I don't know what I planted, and they brought me one. So I have not tried cucumber melon yet.
Chris:So they said, hey. I've got tons of these. I'm gonna bring you one. So I have cucumber melon right here. I'm gonna try it.
Chris:But while I take a slice right here, cucumber melon is not a cucumber. It's actually a melon. Now these are all cucurbits, but they are they are melons. They're just unripe melons. So we could let this ripen, and it would develop more sugars and have more of a melon y flavor or texture, but they're not bred for that.
Chris:So they're not as they they don't taste as good as, like, a melon, like a like a honeydew or anything like that. So these have been bred to be tasty as immature fruit, and it smells like a cucumber. The fruit itself, to describe those who are listening, it is kind of cucumber shaped. You would harvest these long ones when they get about an inch and a half to two inches in diameter, and they have, like, these ridges that run the length of the fruit itself. And so I'm going to to try one.
Chris:So I I know that there are some people that have an allergy to melons. I have a friend who does. So this is not something you would eat because remember, it is actually a melon, not a cucumber. It smells just like a cucumber. It tastes just like a cucumber.
Chris:That is very good. It doesn't have any of the bitterness, some of that cucurbisin, that that kind of bitter cucumber y tech flavor. That is very good.
Ken:Is Armenian cucumber? Is that another name for it? Yep. I think that's how I've usually seen it referred to. But
Chris:Mhmm. Armenian cucumber. I think there's another one's called snake melon or snake cucumber. That is excellent. You can make some really good sandwiches out of these.
Chris:Very good. But not a cucumber. Tastes just like one. It's a melon. That's pretty cool.
Ken:Ken, I wish you were here. Grow along next year.
Chris:Mhmm. That's very good. The skin is very tender too. So You don't need to peel it or anything. Excellent.
Chris:Well, one other thing that you don't wanna find in your yard are ticks, and I routinely am pulling ticks off of myself throughout the year. And so we're trying one more strategy in our yard, and that is to use tick tubes. Now these particular tubes, what it is, it's kind of a passive control, where we have these tubes. And now this is a tube. It's like the size of, like, a toilet paper roll or paper towel roll cut in half.
Chris:And inside, there is cotton that is treated with permethrin that has been stuffed in here, and the concentration is 7.4% permethrin. And the idea with this is that you set these out. And because when it comes to certain diseases, I think Lyme is the one they're mainly thinking about here, it has to go through a series of other mammals that might be carriers of that particular pathogen of Lyme disease like mice. And so mice, like, have to they make their nest out of fluffy soft things. If you've ever had your patio furniture torn apart, they're going after that that stuffing in your cushions for their nest.
Chris:So what this is is treated cotton, and they'll take the cotton to their nest. It doesn't necessarily harm the mice. Actually, it might be beneficial to the mice, but they line their nest with it, and it makes it so that any ticks that might be on them are are killed. So I don't know if this is a very effective tool, but I'm trying it this year because I am sick and tired of pulling ticks off of me. As someone who's had Lyme disease in the past, I I am at war with ticks, so they're they're not my friends.
Chris:But we're trying that this year. Pulled a tick off me just last week, so I don't know how well it's working, but it's worth a try.
Ken:Yeah. We don't have any issues with ticks that I know of in our in our yard. Hopefully it stays that way. We do have quite a few mosquitoes. Did several episodes ago we did mosquito ones.
Ken:So I did set up some buckets of death, buckets of doom, whatever you want to call them. I did not take pictures. They're pretty scudsy looking, need to empty them out and refill them, they've got all kinds of algae growth. But when I have, before that algae growth kind of took over, you know, walking by there was nothing in there. Know, just these big buckets of water.
Ken:Before I put the dunks in there were some larvae in there. You know, within a few days they were all gone. No larvae, no pupa, and nothing since then. I've put new dunks in when we got back. I think it is, you know, as far as managing them in our yard, I don't know how much of a dent it's doing, but it is, whatever's getting in there mosquito wise is getting killed.
Ken:So Yeah. I do need to, take some more pictures of that or refill that and I can take pictures, and send them to you.
Chris:Sounds good. Yeah. Ever since our conversation, I've been I've been leaving some containers out. I haven't been managing them like the the buckets that we described on the show, like, you know, filling them with all kinds of things. But, like, my watering can, I have been treating them with mosquito granulars, the same the same thing as the dunx, just in granular form?
Chris:And they're clear, like they're clean in terms of mosquito larvae. I have treated water where I've seen the little larva swimming in the water. And about maybe three hours later, they're all floating on the top. They're all dead. So it works.
Chris:It kills them. And so, yeah, we've got little mosquito traps in our yards now.
Ken:And I think I think we may expand next year and put them out put some more out more further back where we have a lot of our more of our mosquito problems. We've got a lot more tree cover and and brush and stuff. So right. So this is side of house fire driveway. So my wife really likes flowering tobacco.
Ken:I like it too. She just likes it a lot more nighties. We've got a lot of flowering tobacco in our yard that we've planted this year and then we've planted previous years and it has popped up as volunteers all over the place. So they have a really nice fragrance, especially at night. So they're moth pollinated for the most part because they are releasing that scent.
Ken:And leaves are kind of a, it feels they're not sticky, but they're they feel sticky, like you you touch your mirror, like getting glue all over your hands, kind of an interesting feel. To them, here's some tethonia we planted, a bunch of bachelor buttons that looked pretty ragged, but they were really nice earlier this year. We've cut them back and hopefully we'll get a new flush of stuff later this summer and end of the fall. Then our roses are the pink rose we have is still going pretty strong there. And then here is our hydrangeas that we've got, so they're starting to open up these.
Ken:You know, I gotta cut back every year. I think when we got them, they're supposed to get, you know, said four to five feet tall. They get seven, eight feet tall. So every spring I'm out, hacking them back to try to keep them, in that four to five foot tall range because it's right in front of a window, and stuff like that. But you know, very big, very showy flowers, and we've got a decent amount of insects on those when they when they really start opening up.
Chris:Well, Ken, since you talked hydrangeas, let me show some I got some hydrangeas to show here as well. The hydrangeas I wanna share, I I think I know almost all of them. I know this one is little quick fire. It is a dwarf version of quick fire hydrangea. It's a panicle hydrangea that has been in the ground for two years now.
Chris:It it is really likes the spot. And true to what Ken says, it it's growing taller than what it said it would. But I'm it it I I really like this one. It is going to turn a different color, so it starts off as white and then it will transition to a pinkish red throughout the late summer into the fall, which I have a picture of. Just one second.
Chris:But I think this next one is is this mystery hydrangea right here. I thought I knew what it was. I'm pretty sure, I could be wrong, I planted a hydrangea abattoe, which is a it is a mop head type hydrangea or might be lace cap. I I'm not sure, but I always keep the labels, and I can't find any of my hydrangea labels. They're somewhere in my garage.
Chris:I I will find them and and let you know later, though. Out farther in my yard, this is Incrediball hydrangea on the left. It's it's established. It's been in there two years also, but it's kind of struggled in this spot. Maybe it gets a little too much sun.
Chris:And then right next to it, my wife got a hydrangea at Aldi's and brought it home, and it was half dead. And I said, well, I'll just throw this in the ground. It'll be dead by the end of the year. It's lasted two years. Looks great.
Chris:This is one of those, pink, blue, purple flowering, hydrangeas, the macrophyllas, I think. And, yep, it looks great. It's just this little little tiny guy there. Yeah, that's and then in terms of what here these are pictures of the little quick fire right here. This is what that pinkish red color that it's going to transition to as the season progresses.
Chris:So just, you know, multiple weeks worth of worth of interest there. And you can see sort of those larger showier flowers. Those are the sterile flowers. As you go look more to the inside, those are the fertile flowers. And when we look at, like, pollinator attractiveness, that's what they're gonna go for, those smaller flowers beneath those taller ones right there.
Chris:Ken, I think we need to do a hydrangea show sometime where we get someone on here who really knows what they're, like, talking about because I I think we can only scratch the surface when it comes to hydrangeas today.
Ken:Yeah. I think it's on the list of things to do.
Chris:It is. It is.
Ken:If anybody knows about it, we could talk to you.
Chris:I always need that expert. Oh, goodness. Well and the other thing, while I'm here, and now you have my pictures here showing folks, I wanted to do an update how the ginger's growing. So we're doing a couple different types of ginger. What I'm going to show folks right now is our Aggrastart ginger.
Chris:So this is ginger grown from tissue culture, so very sterile conditions in a lab, really helps to reduce disease spread. One flat of ginger here was put in the full sun, and one was put in the mostly shade. And I will cycle through. Here's a different angle. There's the blue flat and the black flat.
Chris:And the blue flat is the one that was in full sun. And these plants you can see they're a little shorter, which is normal. You know, you're in full sun. You don't have to grow as tall. But they're also not as healthy looking.
Chris:The ones on the left in this black flat, they are taller, they're deeper green, which is hard to tell from the image right here, but if we look over top, again, the blue flat, full sun, you can see some discoloration of the leaves, you can see just more sparseness in terms of that density of that foliage. We If look at the flat on the left, which has grown in the mostly shade, much happier ginger. And so I I think transitioning from shade to sun maybe as the season progresses might be the trick, but, that's something that we're finding out here. These are some of our pots I have in my backyard also. These are just randomized of different things that are growing in them.
Chris:You can see some empty pots where they just didn't grow, didn't take. Everything was planted with a live plant. Some of them have died. Just a different angle right here. Again, some empty pots, some healthy pots, but this is all full sun where these are growing.
Chris:So, I think a little bit more, sun stress from these plants.
Ken:Alright. And I can share a picture of the ginger. What do we got going? So this is the ginger we have out at our our Luchman Garden site. So, you can see there's a lot of dead grass in here.
Ken:So we had a bit of an issue, small issue, maybe a little bit bigger than small, with crabgrass, that grew up, and was basically swallowing the plants. So did a lot of work hand weeding in between the plants, the master gardener, some other staff, myself. And then we went in and and sprayed, the rest of that stuff. So we do now have a very nice mulch, but I would not recommend getting your mulch, this way to to cover, your bare areas. Yeah, it looks, I honestly, it looks a lot better than I thought it would given how hot, and and humid it's been.
Ken:We do have the shade cloth. I think it was a 30% shade cloth on there. So we're we're getting some shade, but still just with how hot it's getting, I did not expect it to look as good as it did. I mean, it doesn't look great, but I expected it to look much worse than the the AgriStart stuff. So tissue culture is on the left there.
Ken:That's the smaller stuff. And some of those are struggling quite a bit. I think the, some of the bigger ones, I think there's a whole high energy irrigation, so they're probably getting a little more water than some of the others. But the ginger on the right there, those two rows, those are started from the rhizomes. So I think they're much bigger, a little bit happier looking too.
Chris:Yeah. They look good. I I think they look good. Your rhizome ginger looks good. The agri starts, that's one of those where we think, alright.
Chris:You you get them year one, you you grow them up a little bit, and then the next year, year two, you plant them and hopefully they look like the ginger on the right. That's that's the goal or the plan. We'll see what you pull out of the ground.
Ken:Yeah. So there'll be lots of digging and and stuff here and coming in a few months. I think we mentioned on the show that we're working on converting our our entire front yard, into pollinator, say prairie, because we've got a lot of non native stuff in there, planting. So again, we started with our our hell strip, the boulevard, whatever you want call it, area in between the sidewalk and the street. We've planted that in pollinator plants and native grasses and stuff.
Ken:It's been there for four or five years now. We're kind of slowly transitioning the rest of the front yard. And really what probably started really last year because we had to replace our waterline to the house. We had a good, nice big strip of our yard already torn up. So we instead of putting grass back down, we just started planting plants.
Ken:So, here you can see we've got, we've sunflowers, we have blazing star. We've planted those basically once and they have just self seeded, everywhere in spots there are becoming weeds, because they're so prolific. So now a lot of times we'll come out and and chop off some of those seed heads just so we don't have them spreading everywhere. We're not having to pull quite as much. And we'll set them out in the backyard, more in the lawn.
Ken:So the seeds do so the birds can get them. That way the seeds are out there just getting mowed over, if they do. Now we do have some hardy hibiscus there in the foreground. And that took us in the evenings for those flowers. Like other hibiscus, they last for a day and they start closing up.
Ken:But it's it's kind of mind boggling how many flowers I mean, they're big flowers. Some of them bigger than the palm of my hand. How many flowers they're putting out. And they only last a day. You'd think you'd want to last make them last a little bit longer, but I'm not a hibiscus.
Ken:Now a little further back, I'm going to get some rattlesnake master in the front. Again, we've started with a couple plants and those self seeded throughout the yard, but you can see both sides of the sidewalk there. Again, there's a little more of the the house strips we've got. Again, rattlesnake master, some blazing star, some what grass is that? Is that a little bluestem, I think.
Chris:In the foreground? That lighter colored one, I think so.
Ken:Yeah. We've also got Prairie Drop Seed. I'm trying to get the other one. A third one in there too. There's a celosia.
Ken:Again, volunteer, but kind of a cool orange and pink there. Kinda split in half. Again, some more flowering tobacco, some Joe pye weed. That's looking pretty happy and healthy. And and the plan is we've got some grass plants that we're gonna start we're gonna kill off the grass and then start putting in some native grass.
Ken:We just want to get the the forbs, the flowers a chance to get established before we start putting some of the grasses in. So, again, a little further back, back here, we've got more, some more woody type stuff and bigger plants, gray headed coneflower, some more tethonia back there. There's a lilac or two back there that you can't really see anymore. Some of these other plants have kinda swallowed them up. A But little closer again.
Ken:Usually go through on the asters and stuff, which is in the middle there. We'd pinch those backs. They're not quite as weedy looking. I have to try it again for next year. Tomorrow I'll catch fire.
Ken:I really like this one. Yeah. It's not quite that red in real life. The sensor on the on the camera just, didn't capture that quite quickly. It pops, but not quite as much as in the picture there, but this is kind of a short lived perennial, so it doesn't last unfortunately, in our yard, doesn't last terribly long, a couple of years.
Ken:Then we got to replant. Again, a little wider again, some of those hardy hibiscus. We have three or four different types. Our daughter really likes them, so we've kind of gone crazy with them a little bit. Some of our swamp milkweed are covered in aphids.
Ken:Again, we're not gonna not gonna do anything about it. Eventually, the the ladybugs and lacewings and everything else, surface flies will move in there and take care of them. Forest, we do have, some of the milkweed bugs, in there feeding on, seed pods and all of that. And another angle of the the hell strip there from the others other end of the sidewalk there. So
Chris:It's gorgeous. I love this. Your front yard is a dream. I love it.
Ken:It's a bit bit of a jungle. That's awesome though. Some more sunflowers and whatnot. Have one more picture here for this. There you go.
Ken:So usually we have more sunflowers, the rabbits. So we saw a lot of these sunflowers actually growing our are volunteers from last year. We did plant some in the fall last year, and those are what are growing. The stuff we planted in the spring just kept getting mowed down by rabbits. I think we planted three or four times.
Ken:And not a single one of those. They'd come up, we'd come back out a day or two later, and there'd be left nothing left. So I don't know if it's the the sunflowers that we do have, they just came up. They got big enough that the rabbits didn't bother them. So I think the plan is I think we're gonna do a bigger planting this fall than we normally do, in hopes that we can beat the rabbits.
Ken:And we've really switched over to more of the branching sunflowers. I really like the, you know, the giant ones. You know, they have the flower heads that are a foot wide and stuff, but you only get one flower and then the plants get pretty ugly. They're done. At least with the branching, you've got kind of a a continuous, floral display there on them.
Chris:Well, Ken, I will come over and hang out in your front yard any day of the week.
Ken:You're welcome anytime.
Chris:Yeah. You've you've got the you got kill your lawn vibes going on there.
Ken:Try try to practice what I preach.
Chris:There you go. I love it. I love it. Oh my goodness. Well, we should probably wrap it up because we have boy, we we have been we could go on and on.
Chris:I got so many things I could share, but I think we are we're at our limit, aren't we?
Ken:We probably can people are gonna stop listening.
Chris:Definitely. Yeah. If you've made it past thirty minutes, you're still in it. I bet you are. Well, that was a lot of great information and a peek behind the scenes of what's happening in our yards, what we're dealing with, you know, how we tackle some of those challenges and turn our yards into a beautiful oasis as Ken has showed us today.
Chris:Well, the Good Growing podcast is a production of University of Illinois Extension, edited this week by me, Chris Enroth. Hey, Ken. Thank you for going out, snapping some pictures, and sharing with with me and and everyone else what's happening in the yard, the garden, the landscape. Thanks, Ken.
Ken:Yes. Thank you. And I'll I'll have the cold beverage ready for you whenever you stop
Chris:I will bring the cucumber melons.
Ken:Alright. Let's do it. And let's do this again next week.
Chris:Oh, we shall do this again next week. We're going to be talking with Sarah Vogel all about tree identification. It's a magical power to identify a tree. And it's it's a lot of fun. It's a good party trick.
Chris:So we will cover that next week. Listeners, thank you for doing what you do best and that is listening. Or if you're watching us on YouTube, watching. And as always, keep on growing. It's really hard to do this when you're eating a crunchy crunchy cucumber melon.
Ken:Should've waited. Mhmm.
Chris:They are they are delicious, though. It's like those snacking cucumbers where you can just, like you just take them off the vine and you eat them.
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