- Today we head back out to the OSU Student Farm to see what they're harvesting and what they are planning next.

We learn how to utilize a garden favorite in a new way.

David Hillock shares the Oklahoma proven annual for 2025, and Shelly Mitchell has a fun activity to get the most from your produce.

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.

We're back out here at the Student Farm and it is full swing in summer mode here.

Linda, tell us a little bit about what all you've got going on.

- Okay.

Yeah.

First of all, we're in the middle of harvesting all of our summer crops.

Yeah.

We've started on a lot of your tomatoes, okra, peppers, squashes, and then now we're harvesting some more corn today.

Beautiful, beautiful corn today by you.

It is beautiful.

And this is our second planting of it.

And we're gonna start another planting here and just, you know, a day or two.

Okay.

So we'll continue to plant succession, plantings of corn until we know that we can't plant it.

You know, as far as a freeze goes is - Because you might get some secondary ears off of it, but pretty much once you harvest, it's done.

- Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Today we, we decided that the primary ears were the ones that were the best ready.

- Okay.

- And then the secondary years, we're gonna come back in two days and, and probably harvest all of those.

Okay.

So, and then these will be done and we'll go back in with some more later.

- All right.

And I think that's the kind of the craziness of summer is you're not only harvesting what you've planted, but you're also thinking about planting more.

Exactly.

Tell us a little bit about all of that.

- Yeah, yeah.

Well, we gotta start in on fall season.

We've got, you know, just last week, middle of July, we started our broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, lettuces in the greenhouse.

And then we'll start putting those out, you know, as we get into a little bit further into fall.

- Okay.

- And then we'll also direct seed a lot of things as well.

We'll direct seed, carrots, beets, probably some turnips, a few things like that.

- All right.

So cool season crops, right?

Yes.

We, we were wondering when summer was gonna finally show up.

It it is here.

- Yeah, it is here.

And it seems like a wrong time to plant cool season.

But actually you wanna get 'em the ones you're transplanting.

You wanna get 'em started now in the greenhouse.

- Right.

And let's talk a little bit about that because a lot of times we think of spring planting and we're growing into the warmer temperatures.

The, the climate's a little more favorable for those warm season plants, but this is reverse.

Yes.

It's, so what are the benefits of fall gardening?

- Well, actually it's your, your crops will be so much sweeter in the fall because as you get into your cooler nights, cooler night temperatures, all those starches, especially from root crops, will turn into sugars.

So your carrots, your beets, turnips, all of those things get much sweeter in the fall than they do in the spring because you're going the opposite in the spring, where you're going from cooler temperatures to warmer temperatures when they're getting ready - And things start bolting and everything - Else.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So this way you're going the opposite.

You're going into the cooler - Temperatures.

Okay.

But the tricky part is getting 'em established and sort of Exactly.

Yeah.

Thinking to plant cool season crops when it's 90 degrees.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

It seems a little crazy, but yeah.

Yep.

And like you said, we're in the busy, you know, busy season of harvesting everything else in the - Summer.

Yeah.

So, so let's talk a little bit, 'cause we don't ever know when the fall is really gonna arrive, that cool weather and not just cool weather, but that first frost.

Right.

How do we play that game a little bit?

- The first frost will not affect our cool season plants.

Okay.

You know, obviously it'll affect our summer stuff, our peppers, you know, when you get a pretty hard freeze, your, your peppers are done.

But as far as like your cool season stuff, most of that likes a cool, you know, a little, a little freeze is not gonna hurt it at all.

- Okay.

So will you also start bringing out some of your low tunnels potentially to protect some of 'em?

And - It depends.

We hope that we'll have things harvested before that.

Okay.

But we actually harvested last year, actually the beginning of January.

We were still harvesting cauliflower in January after it had had several freezes.

Wow.

And it was beautiful and tastes wonderful because it was so sweet.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- So yeah.

- And so after your warm season crop sort of goes away.

Yeah.

Will you be doing cover crops?

'cause I know you do a lot of crop rotation and cover crops out here.

- Yeah, we just planted last week, we planted our warm season cover crops in the other field as we do our rotations, you know, each year, we'll, we'll go back with cover crops on 'em.

Okay.

So we planted hay grazers, sorghum Sudan, as well as a sun hemp.

And it's already coming up and looking great.

Hopefully we get some rain again.

But yeah, it's doing good.

And then we'll go back in and we've got some rows over there that we're gonna use for our cool season crops and strip till those and, and go in and, and plant our transplants as well as our direct seed fall stuff.

All right.

Probably mid to late August.

- Okay.

All right.

Yeah, and it kind of, you wanna make sure that you're reading your plant package, your seed package to kind of know what that harvest date is in timeline.

Exactly.

So, - Yeah, 'cause you need to know when things are gonna, should be harvesting and ripe, so yeah.

- Alright.

Yeah.

Well thank you so much Linda for that update.

Sure.

You're welcome.

Thanks.

For more information, check out this fact sheet.

- Hi everybody.

I am going to be talking a little bit about Yara today.

I'm sure many of you are familiar with it.

It is scientifically called helium Milli Folia.

Here at Philbrook we have a lot of yaro.

We use it for our foraging workshop.

We use it in cut flower, we use it for our bouquet subscription.

So we use this plant very, very much.

We also just love it orna mentally in the landscape.

But today I am actually going to be talking about what you can do if you forage yarrow.

It is known for its medicinal qualities, but you can also eat it as well.

The leaves and the flowers are both edible, raw or cooked.

But today, for today we are going to focus on making a medicinal infused oil with this yarrow plant.

So we've cut a little bit of it here for you today just for you to look at.

There are many, many different types and varieties of yarrow, different colors.

But the one that we have here today is pink yarrow.

I love it.

I think it is beautiful.

It's a charming little plant and you can use it dry on your skin or, or fresh as a poultice.

And today we're kind of essentially making something that is for minor cuts and, and burns and stings for your skin.

So I'll just kind of give you a little tutorial of, of how I would do that today.

So I have to start, this is one that I made this morning.

And it's best to use dehydrated or dried yarrow.

You can use fresh yaro as well, but it tends to kind of interfere with the spoilage or the preservation, the shelf life of your, of your infused oil.

So I dried some yesterday, I dehydrated it.

But you can also, the most common way to dry herbs is to hang dry them.

So you cut as much yaro as you're going to use and if you just hang it upside down, tie it a loop around it with yarn and hang it in a dry cool place like a closet, a pantry, something like that, and dry it for a few weeks.

A good way to tell if it is already dry or if it's dry enough is if you crack crunch it and it and all the leaves fall off and the stems break.

Nice.

And that means it's dehydrated enough.

Mine still could use a little bit longer, but if you're drying it fresh, you can just leave it hanging for as long as you need.

So I'll start today by showing you how I make my infused oil.

You can use essentially any carrier oil that suits you best.

It's common to use almond oil, avocado oil, jojoba oil.

But I tend to lean towards olive oil just because it's easy and it's a lot of, a lot of uses out of one bottle of oil.

So I'll be using olive oil to show you today.

You can put as much or as little plant material in your tincture as you would like based off potency.

So I usually tend to, I crush it up a little bit, but not too much just 'cause I also like it to look aesthetically pleasing, being a horticulturist.

So I just crush it and cram it in.

And I like to get the flowers in there as well.

The flowers are best and the plant itself is best harvested mostly in the spring, late spring, early spring in the summer when it is freshly growing.

And it is best to use flowers that have just fully opened in bloom as far as potency goes.

So I've crammed them all in here.

And then as you can see, it's kind of bunched up a little bit, but I've put quite a lot of plant material in there.

So I'm gonna leave this out and then I might have a little bit of spillage here, but I'll try not to.

Perfect.

Okay.

And just like that.

And then I'm gonna put my little cork in it.

Sometimes if you have spillage, I'll just use a paper towel to wipe that off and clean it up.

And then what you'll do next is, so this can sit in your window sill in a sunny, warm place for four to six weeks.

So the infusion process can happen if you don't have access to a sunny window or, or a spot like that.

If you use your stove top a lot, you can also leave it on the back of your stove top.

So when you cook, the warmth from the, from the, the burners will help infuse this oil.

I do like to leave mine in the window seal.

And what you'll wanna do is every day, or at least every other day, you'll wanna pick it up and shake it to help, help the potency and help the infusion process fully saturate the oil and, and spread throughout the oil.

And another important thing to do is always, always label your forage things.

I know, especially if you're an avid forage or if that's a hobby that you have, it's always good to label even if you know what it is to label what you're doing and to put the day it was done and the year it was done.

So that way if you keep this for a very long time, you'll know what what to expect.

So as you can see on this one, I've put what the plant is and the day that I jarred this.

And you'll want to do that with, with anything that you're harvesting.

So a little bit more about this too, it's better to use amber colored or cobalt colored glass.

I like to use glass personally because it just, it's, it's easier to deal with if you do want to boil these to get the infusion process over with faster.

It's just safer to do glass rather than other containable materials.

If you do use darker glasses, it will help preserve this.

But once your infusion process is done, once you feel like this oil is fully infused, after four to six weeks you can seive out, strain it and sve out your plant material.

You can just compost your plant material and then just rebottle your oil into a different bottle.

Make sure to label it again and then store it in a cooled dark place.

This will be good for anywhere from six months to a year if it is stored correctly.

And then putting it in the refrigerator can extend that shelf life as well.

So just make sure that you know what you're looking for.

You want it to be fresh, normal smelling oil.

Yaro does have a little bit of a bitter smell, a bitter taste.

So if it's, if it's the normal yarrow smell, that's okay.

But if you have weird color or, or molding or anything happening in your product, just make sure to, to, to not use that to be safe rather than, sorry.

So part of my graduate research from Oklahoma State was forging related.

So I was really, really fortunate enough to get to do this as part of my degree.

And I also participate and lead a bunch of workshops at Philbrook where I work currently as well that pertain to foraging and harvesting plant material.

So I'm really, really passionate about it and we have lots of things to offer for anybody who's interested.

You should check out Philbrook.

- Our annual for the Oklahoma proven program this year is the globe amaranth, or gumfrena is the genus.

There's actually several different species that are used in the trade and of course many cultivars that come with it.

Now in general, the most of the forms that we use for bedding plants here are native to Central America.

Some of 'em are actually native to down in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico regions.

So they're very tough.

They tolerate hot drier conditions even though they, you know, pre would do well or prefer some moderate irrigation through the summer.

They do, they can tolerate some drier conditions pretty well.

They are in the Amaranthus family, thus the common name globe amaranth.

And that may, and the group, the, the plants in the amaranth, they see family are generally pretty tough plants.

So these can be grown from seed, they can be grown from transplants.

They work great in, you know, the be in as mass plantings or mixed plantings.

In this garden here, we actually have a cut garden because they also work very well as a cut flower.

The flowers on these are actually very interesting.

So this is not just one flower.

These are multiple flowers.

So this is an inflorescence a a flower head.

And the flowers themselves are not really showing.

If you, if you look really closely, you can see the little teeny tiny tubular shaped flowers.

But it's the papery bracks that surround the flowers that give us the big show.

And because they're papery and stiff, they make, they make, they work great as a cut flower because they hold their color and they hold their form for a long time.

Now this one here is most likely Gina Hana, which is the one that's native to like Texas, New Mexico, Mexico region in general.

It, it has more of an open, kind of a loose growth habit.

But the more popular cultivar is strawberry fields.

'cause it has this beautiful bright red flowering color.

Many of the other Globosa types have pink colors, but they come in pink and white and reds and a number of different types that are available.

You can see this one here has white, this one here has pink.

Some kind of start white and turn pink.

We have some really hot pink ones.

There's a really, a cool one that came out, I think the first year it came out was 2018 called Truffula.

And it has a, a very large hot pink, flowery structure.

So these are really fun and really tough.

They are relatively pest free.

And like I say, just get 'em established, water 'em occasionally, and I think you'll be very pleased.

- Today I am gonna show you how you can grow some of your own food, even if you do not have your own garden or space for a garden.

So I'm gonna show you some different fruits and vegetables you can grow.

You can just buy most of these from the grocery store and grow more from those.

So the first thing I'm gonna show you is carrots.

So when you grow carrots, all you have to do is chop the top part off and then you can just place it in water or you can place it in soil.

So what you're gonna get, I, I started this in soil.

What you're gonna get is just the tops of the carrots.

You're not gonna get the whole carrot.

If you want to get another set of roots, you have to wait until this grows up, make seeds, and then plant those seeds.

So you're just gonna get carrot tops, but you can use those for cooking.

Another thing you can grow real easily is green onions.

So green onions come with their little roots right here.

So all you have to do is plant them.

You can even keep 'em on your kitchen table if you want.

And then whenever you're wanting a green onion, you just come up and clip it off, leave that in the soil and it will grow another one of these.

So that's pretty fast.

If you wanna grow more lettuce, all you have to do is take the lettuce you get at the store and you're gonna cut it off right here where there's a little bit of roots.

So you're gonna keep a little bit of roots on there.

You're just gonna saw the bottom you inch or half inch off.

And then you're gonna take this with this side down and just put it in water.

If you're really patient, you can grow your own avocados.

So this is an avocado tree, a baby avocado tree.

It's, it's like several months old.

But the way you start an avocado tree is you take an avocado and you get the pit out of the middle.

Now you can either just stick it straight in the soil like this one was, or you can suspend it in water and to suspend it in water, you just take toothpicks, get 'em in there so that you've got enough room underneath for it to sit in water.

And then just put it in like this one.

Just making sure that the bottom part is always touching water.

So as it evaporates, you're gonna have to add more water.

All right, celery.

So if you get celery as a bunch at the store, you'll notice here again where it's cut off.

This is where the roots are gonna come out.

So just like, just like the lettuce, you just take the bottom, you can take like about an inch, you cut that off.

Now you can still eat all this.

And this part, you just put in some soil just like that, and you just wait, you water and wait.

And eventually, like this is a couple months old, you'll get your own celery sprouting back out.

Okay, sweet potatoes.

Some people grow these for their ornamental value.

If you wanna grow your own sweet potatoes, you take a sweet potato, you can get it from the store.

All this came from a store.

And when you look at a sweet potato, it has a pointy end and a blunt end.

So the roots, and some of these are already coming out, the roots are gonna come out from the bottom.

This is where it was attached underground when it was growing.

You're gonna do the same kind of thing you do with the avocado, I mean with, yeah, with the avocado.

And you suspend this in water again, you just need to have the lower half submerged.

So as long as the water is touching the bottom now after about six weeks, you'll get these little guys, and these are called slips.

So this is where you're gonna grow more sweet potatoes.

You're gonna take these slips and we can either break them off, see there's even little roots right there.

Or you can cut them off.

And this is what you're gonna plant.

So for each one of these you plant, you're gonna get a sweet potato.

For onions, it also has a root.

So these are the roots right here.

So you can just take, just like the others, just take the bottom inch or so, you don't even need that much.

You can take the roots and put 'em right on top of the soil, just like you can do with the celery and the lettuce.

All right.

Potatoes have a bunch of these little growing points called eyes, and you can actually see some of them have little sprouts coming out already.

So what you can do with the potato, it's just cut it so that you have at least one little eye, and you can have more if you want.

But you take all these pieces and you let 'em harden over a couple of days, and eventually they're gonna sprout like this.

Now what you do when they've sprouted or when they've dried off enough that they're not gonna rot, you put them in soil.

But here's the key to potatoes.

You don't just put 'em in soil and cover them up like a normal crop.

What you do is you put the potato pieces in and then as they grow, you cover 'em up a little bit as they grow and they get their leaves.

What you're gonna do now is you're gonna take it, and let's say that we're gonna cover up to here.

If you just keep hilling it up as they grow and you just keep adding and adding and adding, all those are gonna make more and more potatoes.

So that's how you get more potatoes.

Now, one of the more fun ones to do is a pineapple.

So pineapples grow on stuff that looks like a yucca.

All right?

And then you're gonna get one stalk coming up from here.

Now if you see all these little flowers, those are actually separate fruits.

So when you look on a pineapple, all these are actually the remnants of the petals from the fruits forming.

So all these are separate fruits.

Now, when you get it from a store, it's usually green or brown.

That's not a ripe pineapple.

But unlike tomatoes, they don't keep ripening after you harvest them.

So what you would wanna do is find one.

This is, this is kind of starting, you know, gold when you do your own, this whole thing will be gold and it'll melt in your mouth.

It won't have any hard crunchiness, like some pineapple chunks when you buy 'em.

So what you're gonna do with the pineapple is you're gonna cut off the top and you're gonna put it in a pot of soil and you're just gonna cover it up to about there.

All right?

So then you're gonna let it grow and you have to be patient because a pineapple can take 18 months to two years to actually start to where you can harvest it.

So it starts off with these little individual fruits that have their own flowers.

And as it gets bigger and bigger, it'll look more like a regular pineapple where it closes up closer.

And then as each one ripens, it'll get more and more yellow till you have yellow with green edges.

And when there's no more green edges and it's all yellow, then it's ready to harvest.

And when it's fully ripe, you just barely touch and it'll come off and it'll be really good and juicy.

So if you wanna grow your own food and you don't even have a garden, it's possible just go to the store, eat what you want, and then regrow your leftovers.

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

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

For the next two weeks, OETA will be conducting fundraising, but we'll be back with a brand new episode of Oklahoma gardening on August 23rd.

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.

Join in on Facebook and Instagram.

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 G. 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.