- Welcome back to Oklahoma Gardening.

As we kick off our 2025 season today, I'll share some of the exciting plans we have for our 50th anniversary and reveal a special collaborative t-shirt that you'll wanna get your hands on.

It still feels like winter outside, so we're going to head into the greenhouses to take a tour of what's growing.

Christie is back to share a simple side dish.

And finally, I'll walk you through the essential equipment you'll need to start your transplants this season.

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 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.

Welcome back to the 2025 season of Oklahoma Gardening.

I am so excited to get started this year and I know I probably say that every spring just 'cause I'm excited to get back out into the garden with you.

But 2025 is going to be one to remember and that's because we are celebrating Oklahoma Gardening's 50th anniversary.

It's hard to believe in 1975.

This show began by filming live down at OETA in Oklahoma City and how far we have come with the show over the past 50 years.

I'm so excited to be entering my 10th season as the 11th host of Oklahoma Gardening and to have the privilege of being at the helm during this time.

This season, we're gonna be showcasing some of the popular shows and you're also gonna see some familiar faces from the past as well.

But we're not just gonna be looking back, we're gonna be looking towards the future.

We're gonna be showcasing some of the technology and horticulture and how it's changing the industry as well as highlighting some of the youth that's already cultivating a brighter future for horticulture.

This season is going to be one to remember and we're gonna really continue to unveil different things that we have planned for this year.

But to start us off, we're excited to announce that the famous Eskimo Joes has decided to collaborate with us to create our 50th anniversary Oklahoma gardening t-shirt.

Recently, I had the privilege to sit down with owner Stan Clark to talk with him about this collaboration.

You guys, I am so excited.

We are here at Eskimo Joes the original right here in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and joining me is none other than Stan Clark himself, who is the owner and founder of Eskimo Joes.

And I mean, it's iconic.

I grew up with Eskimo Joes and let's say 1975 was a good year, right?

- Oh my gosh, very, very good year.

I was blessed to graduate from OSU in May of 75 and opened Eskimo Joe's July 21st, 1975.

- So 50 years ago, you guys are celebrating your 50th anniversary and I'm so excited because we are also celebrating Oklahoma Gardening's 50th anniversary and you have been gracious enough to co-brand a shirt with us.

Voila.

I was like, we've gotta get a a 50th anniversary T-shirt and when you're talking t-shirts, there's no other place to go than Eskimo Joe's.

So thank you so much for this.

Let's talk a little bit about, I kind of approached you because Eat Fresh, eat Local is a marketing campaign you guys have and it's important to you as a restaurant, right?

- Absolutely.

Well, the idea of Fresh is everything we do is fresh from scratch every single day.

So of course that makes sense.

Eat local, eat with us, you know, not with a national chain.

That's kind of really the underlying pitch there.

But you know, eat fresh.

Everything we do fresh from scratch, we're so proud of that.

We source as much as we can, as nearby as we can.

For example, the fresh lean ground beef we use at Joe's comes from Ralph packing right down in Perkins, Oklahoma.

So just love those local partnerships to the extent that we can do that.

So thanks for mentioning that.

How cool, you know, you all being a part of OSU extension and us being right here in the shadows of Oklahoma State University.

I mean shocks, if it weren't for OSU, I would've never come to Stillwater in my life.

You know, I came here to go to school in 71, so I just think it's a, a perfectly natural partnership and I just couldn't be more proud of the design and hopefully it reflects the spirit of Oklahoma gardening.

- Well, you know, it does.

And in fact, when we first saw the design, I was looking at it and there's so many, like I call 'em Easter eggs, things that you start finding the more you look at it, you know, and I really think that's reminiscent of a garden because when you walk through a garden you start to discover different things.

And so Darren Maine, right, is the artist.

That's correct.

Did a wonderful job on this.

So we're so excited, and I know you guys work a lot with different philanthropic efforts.

So some of the proceeds from this shirt are, we're excited, are going to go to Oklahoma gardening as well as the OSU Student Farm.

So again, supporting that eat fresh, eat local concept.

- Well, we're very proud to, to share a, a portion of the proceeds.

This was your idea frankly, and your marketing reach and you know, the, the number of you out there that hopefully are, are viewing this and are passionate about this program for 50 years, you know, we will be interested in this and just know that if you do decide to buy this shirt that you are helping Oklahoma gardening.

- So that's great.

Yeah, absolutely.

We know there's a lot of gardeners out there and so people can get these here at the Stillwater location.

- That's correct.

- Also, you've got your Tulsa location, right?

- Yeah, we have a store at Woodland Hills Mall, been there since the early nineties, and so if you're in that vicinity, that's handy.

But of course you can always call 1-800-256-JOES 5 6 3 7 or go online to eskimo joes.com and, and we're there 24 7 I, I'll tell I I'm gonna, I'll boast a little.

We set the, the standard of ship same day that, you know, everybody talks about the Amazon effect.

We've been doing that since the eighties.

We ship same day, so you know, at any rate, great services there.

Oh my gosh, look's here.

We're Joe Buffy are here.

I love it.

Well, thank you all for coming.

Absolutely.

That just shows the enthusiasm that we have for this project.

- So get your gardening clothes at Eskimo Joes.

- Oh, I like that.

It's got a little ring to - Thank you so - Much.

You bet.

- To get your very own Eskimo Joe's, Oklahoma Gardening Collaborative t-shirt scan here.

The weather's still cold outside, but I wanted to give you a little bit of a sneak peek about what we have going and growing here in our greenhouses at the Botanic Garden.

So just thought I'd give you a little bit of highlights of some of the new plants and some of the annuals that we have growing that we'll be placing out in April.

So to start us off here, we've got a Joseph's coat and this particular Joseph's coat, we're actually growing for a special garden that's gonna help us celebrate our 50th anniversary.

So we're actually gonna do some topiary stuff with this a little bit later on in the season.

And then I wanna show you this other plant here.

This was one that we grew last year in one of hanging baskets and it is Cora Cascade strawberries.

So strawberries the pink one, there are a couple other different varieties, but it's actually kind of a weeping or trailing periwinkle.

So a really cool plant for hanging baskets in particular.

You can see we have a lot of open space still that we are planning on taking some cuttings and rooting some of those back in the day.

You might remember some of our greenhouses when we did this in the winter time, they'd be completely full and overgrown Right now what we've decided to start doing is taking a couple of cuttings and really making those mother plants.

And then we don't really take all the cuttings we need until later in the season because what we were finding is we were having to pinch and prune 'em back so much.

It was more maintenance than we really needed.

So you can see we're still pretty minimal, but we're gonna be taking a lot more cuttings and have those to place out into our garden later.

You can see some of the plants you probably recognize if you've ever been up here to the botanic garden.

Got a lot of different coals and herbs.

Of course, we love our sweet potato vines.

Now this is a fun one.

This is a red rooster, leather leaf s here.

It's funny because we have some new workers here and they're like, you ready for me to toss that plant?

It's a fun plant, not for everyone, I will admit.

So it has this bronze color to it, but it will become this nice sedge out in the garden.

And again, this is the look it's supposed to have.

It's not going to get green.

So be aware of that.

It is getting plenty of water and love here and it's doing just fine.

Now you also see we've got several different vines growing here.

One of my favorites is the Snell vine.

And if you look, we've got some flowers that are just starting to come on here and it's kind of got this like corkscrew, but it'll turn to a purple flower once it starts blooming.

And then of course, down the road we have, or down the way a little bit, we have our upside sweet potatoes.

So those are the ones that actually climb for us.

We've got black coffee, which is the dark one.

And then key lime is that sort of chartreuse colored one.

So again, unlike the other sweet potatoes, that tend to trail, those will actually climb up.

So you can see we've got those staked.

We've got some hearty passion vine down there below, which always is a favorite as well.

Dichondra, right?

Silver Falls dichonndra.

We just have these fun baskets that we're growing those in.

Of course we've got herbs here.

And now the next thing.

So we're gonna getting up to the front of our greenhouse, which really serves more as a head house for us and maybe isn't so pretty.

But this is where a lot of our production and propagation actually happens.

And so we have our mist bench here, our hot mats or our heat mats over to the side there.

And you can see we've got a few seedlings that we're starting to germinate.

Now, if you take a look here, we've got a lot of different transplants started already.

So we've got some cool seasons, some onions, we've got some broccoli and kohlrabi that started here.

Now one thing that we've had to encounter here is the fact that we sometimes have mice that will sneak in here.

And so we've kind of got a little sticky trap here that we put a pot over so that we don't get caught ourselves.

But a lot of times those mice will like to get in there and just kind of nibble on the fresh greens.

Obviously it's like a microgreen for them.

So you have to be cautious of that.

And once you lose that very early stem of a transplant, you're lost your plant there.

So there is no coming back if you've lost that stem on those new transplants.

So we wanna make sure that we're giving them plenty of light, which we have that here.

And then also you'll notice the fans.

So you'll notice we've got a little movement air movement on these, and that's to get them so that they have a heartier stem, a little bit sturdier stem and growth.

If they were just growing in a perfect environment that was completely still, you take those out into our Oklahoma winds and they're gonna snap off.

So this is just gonna make them more resilient once we get out on the garden.

Now we have one more greenhouse next door that's got some bigger plants that I'm gonna take you into.

So here we are in our other greenhouse and you can see we don't have the rolling tables in here because we have a lot larger potted plants, a lot of our tropicals that we put out on our patio.

So we just need more open space in order to house all of them.

This is one of my favorite plants.

It maybe doesn't look the best right now.

Everything's more just kind of a holdover period until we can get it out in the warmer climate later on in the summertime.

But that is that popcorn plant, which if you've never smelled it, just rub the foliage and it literally takes you to a movie theater with the smell of popcorn, butter popcorn too.

So we have a lot of different succulents.

That's I think one of the biggest questions that we get asked about is our succulent garden.

And do we take those succulents in?

While there are some that are hearty, there are definitely a lot that we do bring in.

So this is the pencil plant you can see, and it's getting quite large.

Some of these were actually kind of outgrowing our space here.

And then we have a lot of our containers, so our different disks that we actually mount out into the garden on the posts, we have those here.

And then again, a lot of our tropical plants that we like to put in our big containers.

Now I got a little surprise for you.

So in celebration of our 50th anniversary, it's a little bit of a sneak peek of what we are building to go into our 50th garden.

And so we had biosystems actually constructed these for us and we've got some golden jasmine that we're working on growing up.

It had a little bit of a mil bug problem, so it kind of took a little hit, but we're actually, it's growing back out.

It's got some good foliage on it.

We've got a few months before we get it out into the garden.

So hopefully it will really cover this and we're excited to have it out there.

So check back with us this summer out in the garden.

Once we get these placed - Today, we're gonna be making one of the easiest and healthiest side dishes that you could possibly make.

We're making sauteed spinach for this recipe.

You'll start with about 10 to 12 ounces of spinach, which can come from the garden or can be bought from the store.

In addition to the spinach, we'll use olive oil, some garlic salt, and grated Parmesan cheese.

Now to start this recipe, we're gonna preheat about one tablespoon of olive oil in a large pan.

Okay?

And now that we've added the olive oil, we can go ahead and add our spinach.

And now you wanna make sure that you're using a pan that's large enough for for this large amount of spinach.

Okay, we're just gonna add a lid to our pan to allow the spinach to cook down for about five minutes.

And then we'll add our other two ingredients.

Now that our spinach is cooked down a little bit, we're gonna add one and a half teaspoons of garlic salt.

Now you could use garlic powder or you could use, if you have fresh garlic, you could use fresh or minced garlic as well.

And then we'll add one quarter of a cup of grated Parmesan cheese.

Okay.

And then we wanna make sure that we mix in the garlic salt and the grated Parmesan so that we get a good combination through through all of the, all the spinach.

And we'll just let that cook for a couple of minutes.

Okay?

And now that our spinach is done, we will go ahead and serve it on our plate.

It's amazing to how much spinach cooks down.

We started with that big overflowing pan, so it does cook down quite a bit.

So that's something to think about if you're serving a a large family.

But this is it.

Simple, easy, and really healthy side dish.

It's our sauteed spinach.

I hope you try it - For this recipe and more like it.

Scan this QR code.

- For the past few weeks we've been raising some transplants in the greenhouse here at OSU.

- It is seed starting time.

I know a lot of people were anxious to get out into the garden, but one thing you can do is start those transplants and we can start our cool season crops right now.

Might hold off a little bit on getting those warm season crops, but it's always nice to kind of remember what we might need to do that successfully indoors.

Obviously we're here in the greenhouse at the botanic gardens, but a lot of times you don't necessarily have to have a greenhouse.

You can just have a small little setup in your own living room or something like that.

But there are a few essential things that you might need to do in order to be successful.

So I wanna kind of show you some of these products that we have that are kind of fun on the market and really kind of useful too.

So one of these is a new kit.

This is obviously it's a plastic cell.

You can see here's one that's not planted yet.

So you have all your cells to start.

But what we really liked about this particular product is that the bottom of it is silicone.

So you can easily squeeze those so that you can get your transplants out.

So you can see here we've got some cool season crops already growing.

They kind of hold it up in this reservoir so you don't have to worry about any of your water leaking as you're watering your plants.

But then you just kind of give that a squeeze a little bit and it pushes your plant right up.

So it can easily be pulled out once you are ready to pop that up into a larger thing.

So this is kind of a neat product.

There's a lot of different products on the market for something like that, but I like the silicone bottom on those.

Now another thing you wanna think about is your light.

You wanna make sure that you've got plenty of light.

A sunny window is not gonna be enough light, especially in our winter months.

Today it's really cloudy outside and those transplants need a good amount of light.

Now when you're starting seeds, some seeds like light in order to germinate, some do not.

So make sure you're reading your seed package carefully.

Now, a couple of the different light options we have here, these are all LED lights, which are nice because they're not gonna really emit any heat or anything like that.

When you use traditional fluorescent grow lights a lot of time there can be some heat.

So you're gonna have some maybe different irregular watering based off of where that light is on your transplants.

So one of the ones that I like that's on the market is this sort of like Medusa looking one.

You can buy these where they're just a single or they've got maybe four and I've even seen 'em up to eight.

You can see that this is red and blue wavelengths, which is the optimum color that plants actually like to receive.

So you can kind of bend these.

What's nice is it's got a clamp here so it can hook onto your shelf or whatever it is you're growing on.

If you just have houseplant and they need a little supplemental light in our kind of winter time right now, this also works for that as well.

So the thing too about this is it actually you can change the light.

So if you look, we can change it to just blue or we can also just change it to red if you like.

And then the other thing too is you can actually reduce how the intensity of that light so you can kind of make it a little bit more dimmer.

And then in fact, you can change it from four to eight to 12 hours that it stays on.

So again, that's kind of a nice feature about this particular one.

There's also other ones such as this that's kind of a two strand light bar here.

And then of course like this, it's just a single one that we have that we just lay over on top of these.

Now the thing about light is you wanna make sure that it's very close, as close as possible to your transplants.

Obviously not touching, but as those transplants begin to grow, you're going to raise that light up a little bit more.

Now you might notice this mat we have here in front, this is a heating mat that you can put your plants on.

Now, not so much for cool season crops, but definitely for warm season crops, a lot of times you'll need to supplement that heat and really increase that soil temperature.

'cause if you think about it, warm season crops like to go out in the ground when the ground is warmer.

And so we're gonna kind of mimic that by creating this heat mat for 'em.

Now, one thing you might consider getting, whether it comes with your heat mat or you buy it separately, is a soil thermostat probe.

And so this heat mat will actually plug into this, which allows us to put a thermostat probe down into our seeds that we're germinating here so that it's regulating and fluctuating the heat mat temperature based off of the temperature of that soil.

'cause it's like you could set this heat, Matt, but you know you've got ambient air that's gonna affect that temperature of the soil.

So this way you're really regulating that based off of that soil temperature, which is what's most critical in order to get your seeds to germinate and also your transplants to continue growing.

Now we've got a lot of different things happening here, and another important component that might make it a little bit easier is just to get a timer so you don't have to necessarily worry about, oh, I gotta turn off my light, or is my heat mat still running?

So setting a timer so that you can regulate specifically how much light or how much heat your plants need during that daytime is a nice addition.

And of course, this has two plugins, so you can plug in multiple lights or different components to your growing system here.

Now let's move over a little bit more.

I got a couple of things.

So one of the critical things about growing seeds or even starting your transplants is the fact that you are starting with a plant that like has no roots.

Basically it is just starting those roots, or it has a very small amount of roots after it starts germinating.

And so it has no capacity to really take up a lot of moisture and to really regulate itself.

So one of the things is, is we want to really baby these plants and give 'em a high humidity environment so that they don't have to really search for moisture with those roots.

So these like humidity domes, help do that.

There's a lot of different types on the market, different sizes.

So this obviously allows you to grow your plants a little bit taller than what this does.

This is also a lot heavier, right?

And so we actually set these lights just right on top of here because they don't get hot, and so it really can handle that.

Whereas this kind of will slide off a little bit more, it's a little bit more flimsy.

You might just get a couple of seasons out of this, whereas this will last a little bit longer.

And this is just one of those simple kind of cheap trays.

You could put your pots in here because again, there's no holes in this one, but having a spray bottle is important.

So you're always gonna wanna see some condensation on that dome that tells you that there is moisture in there available to those seeds as they're germinating.

So make sure you just keep a a spray bottle of water on your growing bench so that you can just kind of spray that in there and keep that humidity high.

So having some of these different components is what's going to lead you to success this season as you start your transplants.

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 as we prepare our garden for another season right here on Oklahoma gardening.

These plants are growing in, so that's kind of a nice thing.

So make sure you're looking for that.

Sorry.

Welcome back to the 2025 season.

Okay, 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.

You join in on Facebook and Instagram.

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

Tune into 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.