(minstrel music) (soft music) - "Oklahoma Gardening" is a production of the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service as part of the land grant mission of the Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at Oklahoma State University, dedicated to improving the quality of life of the citizens of Oklahoma through researched-based information.

Underwriting assistance for our program is provided by the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, helping to keep Oklahoma green and growing.

(soft music) Welcome to "Oklahoma Gardening."

Today, I've got an annual I want to share with you that's still going strong in the garden, former host, Steve Owens shares his display gardens at Bustani Plant Farms, we learn about some creepy-crawlers, and finally, we take a look at a few fall fruits down at Perkins.

(soft music) (dirt crunching) (soft music) (music fades) I just love those annuals that really help transition our spring color all the way into our fall color that we'll soon be approaching.

Now today, I wanna show you this Luscious Citron Lantana.

And a yellow Lantana is nothing new to the market but what I really love about this is it's more of a butter yellow versus the bright, gold yellow that you often see on Lantana, which makes it a nice complement to such a variety of colors, whether it's that bright spring color that you want to complement it with, or the softer oranges and reds as we transition into the autumn time.

Lantana's a great addition to the garden because it allows that consistency Now, of course, we know that Lantana is a nice, durable plant and you guys know that I often like to walk through our trial gardens here, at the Botanic Garden, because a lot of times later in the season, you can really start to see which annuals are proving themselves after a tough season.

And, of course, we've been in a drought and so there are plants that are definitely showing some stress, but this Lantana will stop you in your tracks as you're walking through the trials because you can see here, it is a show-stopper.

It's not proving to have any trouble with our drought conditions or the heat of the summer so far.

So this Luscious Citron Lantana is a nice addition to the garden.

Of course, it continues to provide these flowers, numerous flowers throughout the season without any deadheading and maintains a nice two-foot height without any pruning or anything else, so a very low maintenance, drought-tolerant annual to add into your garden.

The other thing to keep in mind while we love the flowers, visually, to be able to see them in our garden, what's nice about this, and we often think about it in the springtime, is providing nectar for our pollinators.

But it's just as important to have those nectar sources available for our pollinators in the fall as a lot of them will be migrating through.

So not only do we appreciate those flowers, but the pollinators do, as well.

Luscious Citron Lantana is a nice annual to add into your landscape to help carry your garden from the spring all the way into fall.

(soft Latin beat music) Today I'm so excited because we are at Bustani Plant Farm and many of you I know come here quite often in the springtime.

And I'm so excited to be joined by Steve Owens.

Obviously, I think a lot of our fans and viewers know you.

After leaving the show "Oklahoma Gardening" know you came out here and started your own nursery at Bustani Plant Farm.

So thanks for having us here.

- Welcome, yeah, yeah.

Thanks for comin' out.

It's good to be back working with "Oklahoma Gardening" a bit.

- Yeah, definitely.

Well and I know how many people come in spring, we all get your plant catalog, we all get Bustani fever to come out here and see and buy in the springtime.

But I think sometimes people miss what there is in the fall and so that's why one of the reasons I wanted to come here, specifically.

- Sure, yeah.

In the springtime, we have a lot of variety of plants for sale.

There's not a whole lot to see in the garden.

But in the fall, it's just the opposite.

There's not a big variety of plants for sale, but it's really a good time to see the display gardens.

And, you know, we always wanna have something for everybody to see.

You know, if it's your first time, if you come several times, we wanna have something new every year.

- And you always have new plants for sale but also, the gardens are always changing and that's one of the things that drew me out here.

I know, well, you can tell us a little bit about some of the projects you've done previously.

- Sure, sure, yeah, yeah.

A few years back, we added a rock garden.

That's kind of a passion of mine, just gardening with rocks and plants, and creating those little mountain top gardens.

But every year, we also try to do like, maybe a new display with different types of foliage or some other artwork.

We did an entryway structure with the old rusty tin with lots - Vines growing up on it, but last year, one of the cool new things we did is the garden you're standing in, - Yes!

- This, we call our wattle fence garden.

W-A-T-T-L-E. - Yeah, so it kind of has a English cottage feel to it for me.

So, can you tell me a little bit about how you constructed this?

- Sure, sure, I've always been fascinated with these.

I saw my first wattle structure at the Chelsea Flower Show several years ago.

And we actually, back in 1996, 25 years ago, the very first time I was on Oklahoma Gardening as garden manager, former host, Sue Gray, and I were constructing a So they've always been kind of special to me.

- Okay.

We might have to find that footage and do a little throwback.

(laughs) - [steve] Absolutely.

That'll be interesting.

We just wanted to do a few wattle structures and basically, with the wattle fence, it's just twigs woven between stakes.

- [woman] Okay, so tell me a little bit about the construction.

Obviously, it looks like your stakes are larger branches that you drove down into the ground?

Is that what you do first?

- Yeah.

We did the design, we strung out string on the corners, and then, actually the corner posts here, you can see they're a little bit larger in diameter than these stakes.

- Smaller, okay.

We dug these holes with post hole diggers, and we got some nice straight sticks, and we set them in place, and we tamped those in.

Now these other smaller stakes, they're like 15, 16 inches apart.

We sharpened those with a hatchet, just kind of like sharpening a big pencil, And then we put our string back up, and we tried to drive those as straight as we could into the ground.

- Okay, and that's before weaving anything, right?

- Absolutely, yeah get all the stakes in place.

- Okay.

- And then you go about searching for the material, and it takes a lot of material.

We're lucky, we have a forested area here on our property.

So we could go out and select different species of young saplings.

- [woman] That's what I was gonna ask.

I know a lot of times, people will use willow or something that has a little more give to it.

Did you find any particular type of wood works better?

And does it need to be like wet wood, greenwood, you know, like?

- Good question.

It's all types of wood.

- Okay.

- The main criteria for us was what was available, and what was - That's important.

- what was narrow and not crooked.

The straighter the saplings, the easier it is to get them to weave into place.

But there's stuff in here, like rough leaf dogwood.

There's Hackberry, there's Elm, there's some native grapevine.

- I was gonna say, it looks a little- - Yeah, just basically whatever we could find.

- [woman] Which all just adds texture, right?

- Yes, yes, the different textures of the bark and things like that.

And we tried to use it within about two days, that way it was still green and pliable, - Okay - because if it sits for a while and gets dry, when you're trying to bend it in between, weaving it, basically, back and forth between the stakes, it could snap.

- Starts to get brittle, okay.

- The straighter, the better.

- Well, it looks great.

It's a nice detail to the garden, and it's sort of a raised bed within a raised bed.

Tell us a little bit, it looks like you might have some landscape fabric holding some soil in there.

- Absolutely.

It is kind of a raised bed on top of a raised bed here, in our garden.

I'm a firm believer in raised beds, creating your own soil, but we did want to raise the soil level inside the wattles, and to keep the soil from spilling through, we did put down, like a double layer of landscape fabric, - Okay - and then we just added some compost and soil behind that.

And the plants are really loving it.

- So, Steve, it's a beautiful addition to your garden, and it sounds like something a homeowner could do.

What is the maintenance, and how long are you going to plan to keep this in the garden?

- [steve] A homeowner could absolutely do this.

Now, we are hoping to get three seasons out of it.

- [woman] Okay - [steve] Anytime you have the soil up against it, you're going to get little wood boring beetles.

So, two or three seasons would be great.

If you treat it with something like linseed oil, you may get a few more years out of it.

- Okay, all right.

Well, let's look at some of the plants, if you- We can't not talk about plants with you.

- Absolutely, yeah.

- Oe of the showstoppers here, let's look at this pink flower here.

- This bright pink thing - Can you tell us a little bit about it?

- here that all the little skipper butterflies are all over.

This is a globe amaranth.

It's a new one called Truffula Pink, and it doesn't make seeds.

- Okay.

- Some people like having a lot of plants that reseed every year.

This one does not, so it's very well behaved.

And then, we got some red False Vervain.

These are one of our specialties.

We breed these here at the nursery.

We have some selections that we've made.

- [woman] And they continue to bloom up this like all season, right?

- Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And the butterflies and hummingbirds - Yeah, well, I want to know about this guy.

Is this a milkweed back here?

- Very good, that is a giant milkweed, yes.

It's not winter hardy, but we love the foliage.

Very dramatic, then those a huge lavender, purple-colored flowers are really something special in the garden.

- Definitely, well, I love, again, you've got such an explosion of color here, and you've oriented everything so nicely.

Any hints as to what you're going to do next year?

- I don't know.

I'll have to think about it, and see what we can come up with.

We always want something new, so people will want to come and see us every year.

- All right, well, thank you for letting us join you, Steve.

- Its been a pleasure.

- We're here at the gardens today because at the Insect Adventure, we get a lot of questions about millipedes and centipedes and what are the difference?

So we've brought them out today to have a little talk.

Centipede, millipede.

So, a lot of times, because things sound the same, folks are sure that means that they're closely related, but a centipede and a millipede, even though they sound similar, are as different as a shrimp and a spider.

So, they're very distantly related, but they're both still arthropods.

The big difference between millipedes and centipedes is just about everything.

Millipedes are very slow because they do not run to catch their food, they're strict vegetarians, they only eat fruits, and vegetables, and wood, and rotten leaves, and that sort of thing.

So, their bodies are very slow and very chubby.

For each segment of the body on a millipede, there are four legs present and absolutely no teeth.

And they come in all shapes and sizes and colors.

There are hot pink millipedes.

There are deepest, darkest jungle millipedes.

This is the largest species of millipede in the world.

They are from Tanzania over in Africa.

And all millipedes are harmless unless you eat them, which makes them poisonous.

They are not venomous.

They do not bite.

They do not have teeth.

They don't sting.

But if you lick or eat a millipede, it has the capacity to make you throw up.

And, on the other side of the world, there are some millipedes that if you lick them, they actually can make you drop dead.

So, don't go licking any millipedes, they On the other hand, a centipede is entirely different.

It's body structure is different.

It's not round and chubby.

It's very flat.

And, instead of having four legs for each body segment, there are only two legs, and those legs are located on the side of the body to enable the centipede to run really, really fast because centipedes don't eat their vegetables.

Centipedes are apex predators.

They only eat meat.

They're strictly carnivores, and they're big enough carnivores to be able to take down things like mice, and lizards, and baby frogs, and even spiders.

They're really capable of eating anything that is a little bit smaller than their body.

Centipedes are considered venomous because they possess venom.

Poisonous means has poison, and if you eat it, makes you sick.

Venomous means has venom, but neither venomous nor poisonous is the same as deadly.

Deadly means it can put you in the hospital.

There's no centipede anywhere in the world that is dangerous enough to a person that it does anything more than hurt.

There's never been a sickness, a sore, or a death, on planet earth to a human caused by a centipede.

They have big bitey fangs, lots of legs, no stingers, and they can bite when they're frightened or disturbed, but they are beneficial animal to have around your house or in the garden because they're gonna eat other bugs and help keep pests out of your house and home.

So, if you find a bug in your garden with a lot of legs, even from far away, you can tell whether it's a centipede or a millipede.

Lot of legs on the ground moving very slowly, that's a millipede, and it's not gonna do any danger to you or your garden, and just let it go, leave it alone, enjoy it.

Centipede, if you see one in your garden, it'll have lots of legs and be lightning fast, 'cause it has to catch its food.

There's no reason to kill it.

Enjoy its beauty and let it go on its way.

(upbeat guitar music) - Today we are here at the Cimarron Valley Research Station to take a look at a few interesting fruits and joining us today is Becky Carol.

Thanks for having us out here, Becky.

- Sure.

- So it looks like we've got some figs that over winter.

Tell us a little bit about the fig in general.

- Well, figs are kind of a, an interesting plant.

These are common figs and they like hot dry conditions, but they'll, the fruit will size better with a little bit of irrigation.

Most of the figs that we grow are only hardy to about 17 degrees.

So we usually have bushes instead of trees where you might see fig trees in other areas that don't get as cold, we're gonna have more of a bush, unless it's been overwintered or protected from the cold - And, and they overwinter in their rootstock, is that correct?

- Yes.

- So you'll see those die back, but regrow.

- Mm hmm, Yes.

In the winter, all of this tissue will die back to the ground.

They'll send up, maybe sometimes double the amount of shoots and they're very slow to come out in the spring.

So you think, oh my fig's dead, but they're just waiting for it to get warm enough to actually start, start growing.

- All right, well it looks like we've got a good crop here.

- Mm hmm.

- Tell us a little bit about how they ripen as they go.

- [becky] All right.

So you can see on, on this one shoot, this one stem.

They start producing a fruit at each one of these leaf nodes.

And so it's pretty neat to see, you know, we have fruit ripening from all the way down to the very top.

They're very tiny and these probably won't make it to ripening because once we get to that hard freeze time, this plant is, is done, but they'll, they'll start ripening in late August, early September.

And you can see they're very erect, they stand straight up on, at these leaf nodes whenever they're ripening.

But once they get to that stage, when they are ripe, they start to droop or hang down.

This one probably has an, another day or so, but this one on, on this other shoot right here is hanging down a lot and this one as well.

And so they pull off very easily.

- That just fell off in your hand.

Yeah.

- Right.

And you can see it's kind of dripping this, this white latex substance.

Some people are allergic to that.

- [casey] Okay.

- [becky] So you need to be careful if you don't know, but it will stop dripping soon, but the leaf tissue and, and where the, the fruit comes off, it will have that latex substance.

- And they're not necessarily red.

Is that true about the ripening?

- Right, yeah, you can't tell by the color.

Some are going to be green when they're ripe.

- Okay.

- And so, some of the different varieties are green, some are brown, some are purple.

So there's it, you can't go by coloring.

- [casey] Okay.

Well with that many on there, I know a lot of times when we're talking fruit trees, we have to kind of thin the crop load.

- [becky] Uh huh.

- [casey] Do you have to do that with these?

- [becky] We don't really thin the fruit on the shoots, but we might go ahead and pinch out the top of these shoots, if we want to send more energy into ripening that fruit, or you might thin out some of the shoots, if they have an abundance of, of new shoots, thin out some of those maybe leave, you know, seven or eight of the most vigorous and have those put all the energy into ripening those fruits.

- Okay.

So tell us a little bit about just the maintenance of the plants throughout the season, The best time to plant them, any disease, pest problems.

- Right.

Now, most of the time I recommend planting fruit trees, either in the fall or in spring, about mid February, early March.

On figs, I like to wait a little bit longer, maybe April, even into May and avoid those late spring freezes that we get.

And so planting is, is pretty simple.

We like to make sure that we have them mulched heavily to keep the weeds and the moisture in and they don't require a lot of irrigation.

They like those hot dry conditions, but with water, the fruit's gonna size a little bit better.

So I think they're pretty adapted.

You don't want to put it in an area that stays too wet, but, but well-drained soil is going to be better than, than something that's gonna hold too much.

- Well, I think a lot of times we used to think figs only needed a certain microclimate, but it's not, I mean, they're very exposed out here.

- Oh yeah.

- And again, they survived the cool temperatures we had- - Right.

- This last winter.

Any pest problems or deer problems that there are to mention?

- Well, you can see the leaves are, are really fairly clean.

There's not any disease on them that I can see right here, but we had a really wet spring.

So you would assume that we were gonna have disease.

We would, it would be showing up.

So in some areas they report having fig rust- - Okay.

- but that's pretty much the only disease that we really have.

Now, if they get too dry, the leaves will start to yellow and they'll drop them as well.

And on some varieties, if they get too dry, they'll drop the fruit.

So irrigation can help that as well.

- Okay.

But not like a regular fruit tree- - No, no.

- that definitely needs spraying or anything like that.

- No, no, no sprays, not anything like you would expect on other fruit trees.

And we had a deer party in here last year about this time, and they ate every other or rubbed every other tree out here and left the figs alone.

- Okay.

- So.

- [casey] Well, I know traditionally when we're talking about figs, we tend to recommend the Brown Turkey Fig, which I think has some other names as well.

- [becky] It does, yeah.

- [casey] You've got a few different varieties out here.

Let's talk about the different varieties.

- [becky] Sure, this one is a, is a Brown Turkey.

It's also called Texas Everbearing.

- Okay.

And then we have a LSU purple, which is the fruit that I've gotten this year, is shaped a little bit different.

It - [becca] So, it's a little bit smaller - Mm hmm.

- and I don't know if this is characteristic or just this season.

And then, we have Violette de Bordeaux, that is a little bit of a, has a different leaf shape, it's more of a palmated leaf, and the fruit on it is not ripening as well, so I don't know that I'm going to recommend it, but it's one that we're looking at.

- [casey] It actually makes a good foliage plant, I think.

- [becca] It does.

It's very pretty.

- All right, so of these that are planted in the ground, out here, could somebody grow this in a container, if they wanted to.

- Yes, and you can keep them alive through the winter.

That way they're not dying back to the ground.

You may be able to get a little bit earlier production on them.

And so, on some figs, they produce a spring fruit that's called a breba crop.

I've never seen those in this area, but you can grow them in containers.

I have some of those big mineral tubs that I've been growing those in and then moved them into my storm shelter over the winter, and they did great, just, kind of, go dormant in there, and then, after the threat of a freeze, I'll bring them back out and they'll start growing.

Some people also will put them, like, maybe on the east side of the house and pile hay or straw or something around them to keep them a little bit warmer, as well.

- So, because their roots are exposed, you want to make sure to protect them a little bit better.

- Yeah, that's true.

- Okay.

Well, and I know, just as a last little thing, this isn't the only kind of fun fruit you're growing out here.

You're kind of being adventurous, - so you've got some pomegranates, also.

Do you want to tell us a little bit about what you're finding with the pomegranates?

- We have the Russian Salavatski pomegranate, and it is a hardy pomegranate.

They're not going to be the big size that you might find in the grocery store, but we planted them in the spring of 2020, and they actually flowered that year.

I went ahead and let them flower thinking they probably wouldn't survive that season, and they flowered, but the fruit dropped off.

This year they had put on two flowers after they went through that minus 14 winter.

- [casey] So, they survived?

- They survived.

They came back out this spring and then they got bit by that late April freeze, and so, there was no green tissue on them, late April, but they've come back and they have a couple of flowers on them this season.

One just aborted this weekend and the other one is developing into a fruit, so we'll see how long it survives.

Not something that I really recommend, just yet, for fruit production, but it's something fun to take a look at.

- [casey] Yeah.

It's a fun little novelty to add to your garden and it's a beautiful flower, too.

- It is, yeah.

- All right.

Well, obviously, fall isn't just for apples.

- That's right.

- We can grow a lot of the other fruit that's here.

- [becca] That's true.

- Thank you so much for sharing this with us, Becca.

(upbeat music) There are a lot of great horticulture activities this time of year, be sure and consider some of these events in the weeks ahead.

(upbeat music) Next week on Oklahoma Gardening, we have another full show lined up, as we take a look at some tropical plants and some wiggly worms.

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 oklahomagardening.okstate.edu.

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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.

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