- Welcome to Oklahoma Gardening.

Today we're announcing our garden contest.

It's also time to start planting warm season crops.

Then we head south to learn about an OSU horticulture student's blooming business.

Then we learn how to hook up an irrigation system.

And finally, the Oklahoma Department of Forestry has an exciting opportunity for the youth this summer.

Underwriting assistance for our program is provided by the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, food and Forestry, helping to keep Oklahoma Green and growing Oklahoma Gardening is also a proud partner with Shape Your Future, a program of the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust shape your future provides resources for Oklahomans to make the healthy choice the easy choice.

Oklahoma gardening's 50th anniversary.

I love sharing with you guys the cool things that plants can do.

- People in Oklahoma love their gardens.

- I feel like this is the People's show.

We all know we're working towards the common goal and that's to produce the best quality television and information for our audience.

It's one of our favorite times of year and it's time for us to announce our home garden contest.

Now, over the years, we've done a lot of different home garden contests, you name it.

As far as themes go, we've done a traditional garden, we've done school gardens, we've done garden sheds, water garden contests.

So this year as we celebrate our 50th anniversary, we're not only looking back at the past 50 years, but we're also looking towards the future.

And so we thought, what better way to celebrate that than to host a youth garden contest?

Now I know I got my start gardening at an early age and I know there's a lot of other kids that are out there doing the same thing right now.

And we wanna hear from you.

So if you're interested in our Youth garden contest or maybe you know somebody who would be a great candidate, we encourage you to apply by simply sending us your name, your age, also your city, and a little bit about your garden interest.

And if you could include a few photos, that would be great.

Whether it's photos from last year's garden or this year's garden that you've already got started, just send it to our email address.

And at that point, we're gonna select a few of the top winners to come visit.

So I know that gardening can sometimes not be the most glamorous thing in the summertime, but this summer it might be your opportunity to be on tv.

It is that time of year where we've all been waiting for and it's time to plant our warm season crops.

Now I know our Oklahoma springs are never typical and many people saw snow even just as recently as last week.

So hopefully we're in the clear.

Usually mid-April is kind of the last average freeze date.

So we still need to kind of be vigilant and watch the forecast.

But hopefully we're in the clear to start planting our warm season crop.

So that includes, of course, the tomatoes, the squash, the peppers, things like that.

And so today we're gonna plant some of these here in our raised beds.

And some of the plants that we're planting are kind of on the smaller side.

So if you have a patio or a container or if you're just new to gardening, these are some cultivars that might be really good for that application.

So the one here I have in front of me, this is actually a lemon squash, so it is a yellow squash.

But what I like about it is, you know, we plant squash and a lot of times we end up getting these massive fruits 'cause we miss 'em in there.

And then we're like, we've gotta make some sort of bread or something out of 'em or make some big casserole.

So this lemon squash, it's gonna produce a small yellow squash fruit that actually looks like a lemon.

So it's gonna be kind of a bush squash here.

So I'm just gonna plant one right here in the middle.

But it's pretty neat little plant that I'm looking forward to seeing how it does here in our landscape.

Now next to us here we have some eggplant, and this is a patio baby eggplant.

So again, a smaller egg plant and really it's gonna stay smaller as far as the plant, but also the fruit is smaller.

So again, it's gonna have more of that egg shaped purple fruit to it, but it's gonna produce a lot of 'em.

So anywhere from 25 to 50 fruit we're gonna get on this.

Now of course when you're doing this, you wanna make sure check your roots and if they're kind of you're seeing the roots really twisted around, maybe tease those a little bit.

Ours here aren't too bad, so we're gonna pop these in the ground and then we're also going to plant one next to it here as well.

So now one of the things is I'm gonna kind of top dress and you can do this before here, just with a little bit of slow release fertilizer.

I probably should have done this before so that it kind of works in as I'm kind of manipulating the soil.

So we'll do that on the next ones here, next to us here we have some peppers.

So this is pick and pop.

It is an all America selection pepper.

And you guys know we use a lot of all America selection.

So one that's done really well here it is favorable because it is a yellow sort of snackable pepper, kind of one of those like lunchbox peppers that you're just gonna wanna snack on while you're out in the garden.

Now it's gonna get a little bit taller, it's gonna reach 24 inches, but when you compare that to most pepper plants that get anywhere from three to four feet tall, this is actually gonna stay relatively small just at 24 inches.

So again, gonna throw some fertilizer down here to work that in a little bit.

And you wanna make sure that when you're planting these, you're planting them at kind of the height that they were when you pull 'em out of the container so you don't wanna plant them too deep.

So we're gonna move on down to the famous tomatoes.

Of course, we've gotta incorporate some tomatoes here.

And you might remember last year we did plant a smaller tomato here called orange hat.

And we have that again right here.

This is our orange hat tomato.

It only gets 10 inches tall at max and it was quite a producer last year for us.

So we're planting it again.

It is an orange tomato as the name implies orange hat.

So I'm looking forward to growing this one again this year.

And you might think, well, how much smaller can you get than a 10 inch tomato?

But in fact, we have a new one this year called micro tom, and this is going to reach eight inches in height.

It is a red tomato, so a little small cherry tomato.

But again, if you're, you can see that one didn't have quite as many roots on it, but it should take off or it's fine.

Now once we get it established.

So I'm not too worried about it.

It's already got flowers that are growing on there.

So hopefully in no time we're gonna have some fruit coming on that plant.

Now this one behind us, so we have an orange or red, and this one's going to be yellow.

This is gourmandise tomato, it's a yellow tomato, little bit taller at 15 inches.

So we're putting it in the back here.

But again, a very small tomato.

So what's gonna be fun about this is we're gonna have quite the color of cherry tomatoes to add to our salads or just to pick while we're out here in the garden.

Now, just to give you a glimpse of what a typical tomato looks like, this is a tomato called tonico, and it is a cherry tomato also, but it is an indeterminate.

So these were actually planted the same times as this was.

So you can see how much difference the height is.

This is gonna get to be about 60 inches tall.

So we're gonna need to trellis this for this one.

Gonna put it in a different location.

So for this larger tomato, again it's called tonitico tomato and it's gonna get to be about 60 inches tall.

So something that we wanted to put.

So we have plenty of room for it to grow and we'll trellis it as it gets a little bit bigger.

Now you can see our like transplants got a little leggy and because of the recent cold winters or cold weather days, we haven't been able to really harden it off like it should.

So one thing about tomatoes that you can do is that you can actually plant them deeper.

Now in some of the other plants I was talking about putting them at that same soil level that they come outta the container.

But with tomatoes they will grow adventitious roots along the stems.

So they are gonna root themselves in the ground along that.

So again, we're gonna go ahead and put some slow release fertilizer in.

Just kind of sprinkle that around in the garden a little bit so that when I'm planting here, it will work it in as well.

So for this, I'm gonna do what we call a trench layer where we actually lay it kind of on its side a little bit.

So I'm gonna plant this down here.

Now you gotta be careful that you're not breaking your stem, but we're gonna go ahead and take off some of these lower leaves and then just kind of bend that stem upward a little bit.

So we still want our plant to kind of come out at the center of our container here, but you can see that now it's not gonna break off because it doesn't have all of that stem to flop around.

So, and along that stem that's buried, it's actually gonna grow roots.

So it's gonna be a healthier root stock for this tomato as it continues to grow.

Now the more it's exposed the sunlight, it's gonna straighten itself up so we don't have to worry about that.

So it's kind of buying itself a little bit of time before we have to worry about trellising it.

Now the reason why we picked this particular plant to grow it is a cherry tomato.

And one of the problems about cherry tomatoes is themore tomatoes, the more you have to then actually harvest them.

So it might sound like more work, but this particular cherry tomato is one that's recognized as with the trusses.

All of the bunches of tomatoes will actually ripen more uniformly.

So the idea is that we can actually come in here and be able to harvest like a whole tress of tomatoes instead of individual fruits.

So that's something that we're looking forward to on this particular cherry tomato.

So now that we've got our warm season plants, all we can hope for is warmer days ahead.

This season as we begin to take a look at the next generation in horticulture, we follow one of Os U'S undergraduate student Barrett Allen, as he heads home over spring break.

Now this might not sound like much of a story, but Barrett Allen is committed to heading back each spring break and as often as he can, as to work on his you pick flower farm.

While many graduates often wait to see what their future holds after graduation, Barrett is taking his future into his own hands and building his horticulture business.

Right now, - My family, we ha we do a bunch of different things.

So with the turf grass side, we do that and then we do pecans.

And then on top of that we've decided to move into cut flowers because we need something else on the farm.

I really fell in love with it because at the time I was not a fan of what I was doing with my career.

And so I was, I called mom and dad said, we're starting this today, and this is history.

In 2023, we started with 20,000 flowers, tulip bulbs to be exact.

And that was kind of, we're gonna test the markets and see what happens.

And once we got from there as anything in my family, it gets blown up to way too big and way too fast.

So that's the reason why we opened into other parts of horticulture with the cut flowers and as we're, we spent the last two years trying to perfect which flowers actually do the best in our region.

So I got into hydroponics my actually my second semester of freshman year because of Dr. Kathy.

And she really inspired me with her coursework.

And so I took to her and I said, Hey, how do you think I can do this?

And we kind of talked about it a little bit.

And then I built the hydroponic system with my father's help and kind of his ideas and Dr. Kathy's based information.

And we built what we have today.

- Bear's business I think is a great example of what you could do with what you've been able to learn at OSU.

He, he really took on interest while he was there and then he put that into practice.

So when I teach future semester, it's a great example to show what can be achieved with what you're learning here.

- So the flower process starts by roto-tilling the ground with to make sure we can break up all the hard pack clay because this ground is really bad right here.

And then we will go in and lightly pack it.

So therefore there's a nice seed bed for the tulips followed by placing the tulips as tight as about an egg carton.

So therefore we have premier cut flowers for people to pick.

We'll cover them with sand that we get from a local sand pit that we have access to, and we do that process with a skid steer and a rake.

So therefore it's nice even and level and once they start blooming, that is kind of my mom's specialty of we have to market like no other.

- We have been pretty heavily social media.

We've also done some emailing campaigns with people who've bought tickets from us previously advertising both the tulips and our mercantile.

We've done some radio spots, but word of mouth is been our biggest and our own social media.

- I've learned as a person that this, this business is not for the faint of heart.

There's some days you'll wake up and you're hoping that the wind didn't cart off your greenhouse in the middle of the night.

There's also times that we have to deal with the snow, the ice, the wind.

They all bring a new challenge.

So I've learned to take challenges head on and to problem solve on the fly.

That is, that's been the biggest thing I've learned.

- He's has the entrepreneurial spirit and always has, I mean, we said he could sell ice to an Eskimo and he probably could, so, but we're super proud of him and you know, he, he is a good kid.

- And tell me about when you see people coming down here, what does it mean to you to see them experiencing your work?

- It was, it's actually probably one of the coolest things is whenever I get to do it, I always like to bring the best out in people and try to try to help them see things better.

So like when they have the flowers, you never know what they're going through.

As Linda Vader taught me one time in Dr. Needham's class, you never know what somebody's going through when they're looking at your flowers.

It could bring 'em the best memories or the worst memories, but a lot of times it brings a smile to their face.

- That's pretty impressive.

Well, it's great work that you're doing here and congratulations on launching this entrepreneurial project and best wishes for you as you continue on in your career.

- Today I am going to explain how to set up a fertilizer injector and timer on a frost free hydrant.

I work out at the student farm, and so everything we have here is set up on hydrants and timers.

And what we do out here is on your frosts free hydrant.

First we get a timer.

These timers are readily available at any of your big box stores and online.

The timers are really efficient because you can leave your hydrant on all summer long and these timers will be able to come on at whatever time you want 'em to and however long you want 'em to.

I will say that some of these timers, you do have to check 'em regularly.

They run off of batteries and sometimes the filters get clogged in 'em and they stay on and they won't work properly.

So do be sure and check them after you put the timer on.

The next thing we like to have is what we call a pressure regulator.

Out here we have over a hundred pounds of pressure on our water line.

So if you have a high pressure, you definitely wanna get something to lower that pressure.

And it also depends on how many lines you're running in your garden.

If you're running on well water, you may not have a high pressure where you may not have to have this.

It all just kind of depends on how much pressure you have on your water line.

After we put that on, we put on a backflow preventer.

The backflow preventer is really useful for if you're concerned about putting fertilizers or anything in your injectors, and it may go back into your groundwater or into your water lines depending on it, whether you have well water or rural water.

We have a large backflow preventer here at the student farm and our hydrants are uphill.

And that's something to keep in mind.

If you're putting an hydrants at home, you don't want 'em to be down in the bottom of it where stuff does back up.

So try to put your hydrants on the top of the hill rather on the bottom.

Then once we have that on, we'll hook up a, just a regular hose.

We use some heavy duty ones, but you can buy just regular hoses.

And then this hooks just directly into here.

And from there we go to our fertilizer injector.

This particular fertilizer injector is actually a swimming pool chlorinator.

It has an inch and a half size fittings on it.

These are available online mostly if you're trying to fertilize your plants, you can put anything water soluble in these.

This holds about two and a half pounds of fertilizer.

So we'll fill these up depending on our plants.

And certain plants require a lot more fertilizer than others.

We usually fill 'em up about once a week.

Something to note on, this is the flow meter, you need to know we're working this direction, our water source would be here and we're working that way.

So your flow would be that direction.

Another thing there are, instead of using swimming pool chlorinators, there is readily available mostly online, just garden type ones where you can hook it directly up to a three-quarter inch hose and you do not have to do the fittings.

And those are probably good for home gardens.

So for us, we do this, we'll usually use tape or some put type of putty to make our connection.

So we don't have any leaks.

We've got a little barb here that goes on our hose, we'll put that in and then that connects to this one that goes up to inch and a half.

And then from there, we're going out and we're just using a threaded barb.

And then we'll put that it's an inch and a half size, we'll put that in using some putty and so forth.

And then we go to a filter.

This filter's purpose is to keep us from, if like after the fertilizer goes through, if there was some contaminants or some chunks of something, it will get it out and block it into this strainer.

And that way you don't have it going into your irrigation system and blocking up your drip tape.

So from there we go over to here and another part, it's an inch and a half barb threaded into there.

And once again, we're using putty air tape and we go to, what we have is lay flat.

We use this out here because we usually have about 10 to 15 rows on each system.

Usually what I do is I get the clamp put on the lay flat first and then connect it to this barb, and then obviously tighten up your clamp real good so it doesn't leak.

And after you've done that and you've got it laying out and your drip lines are all in place, and then you're going to poke holes into this lay flat to put your emitter valves on.

And then our drip tape goes from there.

And if you're at a home scale, you can always do this just with the drip tape and not with the, the header row.

The lay flat is good for driving over with a tractor a lot of times, and that's what we're doing out here.

So if you're not on a larger scale and you wanna use just home garden type stuff, this works great.

I strongly recommend that you use drip irrigation in your gardens.

It's a huge time saver and it makes life a whole lot easier.

- Joining me today is Tony Pascal, who is the education coordinator for the Oklahoma Forestry Services, and the Red Buds are blooming, which means spring is here and soon summer we'll be following.

I know you guys always have a lot of different resources, but we've got a camp we wanna talk about first.

- Yeah, we're going into our 67th year of Forestry Youth camp.

This is gonna be a week long camp going from June 16th through 21st for anybody ages 13 to 15.

- Okay.

So what is a forestry camp all about?

What do you guys do there?

- Yeah, so it's actually in beaver's bend and the kids are gonna be learning from foresters and professors.

They're gonna be learning a lot about what does it mean to be a forestry, what does it mean to work in the forest?

Maybe learn a little bit about ecology, water, soil, wildlife, ecology.

They get to do archery, canoeing, they get to do hiking.

You know, they're part of a team that that they're working with for the entire week.

So you're with the same group of kids for for the entire week and and that's your team.

That's, that's who you're gonna be hanging out with all week.

Wow.

And so there's a lot of team building as well.

- So again, how much does it cost and where can people register for this camp?

- You can register on our website and it costs $100.

You can also find a link to a scholarship link on there.

- Oh, okay.

So that covers the full camp, food, housing, all of that stuff while they're down there as well.

- Yep.

They're in cabins.

They, they eat really well.

We have a wonderful cook down there.

- Excellent.

Well also, I just know that you guys offer a lot of other resources.

So even if there's kids that aren't going to the camp, there's other ways to learn about the forestry industry here in Oklahoma and just the interest of trees around us.

- Tell - Us a little bit about some of those other opportunities.

- So especially for teachers, we have trunks that you can check out that talk about DRO chronology, which is the study of trees through time using tree rings.

Those can be checked out at several different places around the state from our website.

And also we have Project Learning Tree, which is a curriculum that we use in order to have outdoor education about the environment, about trees.

And teachers can sign up for workshops also on our website.

- So just because summer or the school semester's coming to an end doesn't mean learning has to stop.

Now's the time to really get outside and do some hands-on learning.

Thank you so much, Tony, for joining us - Today.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

- There are a lot of great horticulture activities this time of year.

Be sure and consider some of these events in the weeks ahead.

Join us next week on Oklahoma Gardening as we have another announcement you won't wanna miss.

So today we're talking about a plant called - Toko - Tomato.

If you or someone you know is to find out more information about show topics as well as recipes, videos, articles, fact sheets, and other resources, including a directory of local extension offices, be sure to visit our website at Oklahoma gardening dot OK state.edu.

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You can find this entire show and other recent shows as well as individual segments on our Oklahoma Gardening YouTube channel.

Tune in to our okay gardening classics YouTube channel to watch segments from previous hosts.

Oklahoma Gardening is produced by the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service as part of the division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at Oklahoma State University.

The Botanic Garden at OSU is home to our studio gardens and we encourage you to come visit this beautiful Stillwater Gem.

We would like to thank our generous underwriters, the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, food and Forestry, and Shape Your Future, a program of the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust.

Additional support is also provided by Greenleaf Nursery and the Garden Debut Plants, the Oklahoma Horticulture Society, the Tulsa Garden Club, and the Tulsa Garden Center.