- Welcome back to Oklahoma Gardening.

Today, David Hillock and I share with you a couple of plants you might consider adding to your landscape.

Also, Riley Coy from the Oklahoma Forestry Services joins us to talk about what this drought means for our trees.

Then I'll also give you a couple of solutions to help your trees endure this heat that they've experienced.

All this and more right here on Oklahoma Gardening.

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We've had some really hot days this summer in Oklahoma, and I want to introduce you to an annual that you might try if you haven't discovered it yet.

This is variegated tapioca.

Now, it comes to us from South America, so it's definitely a tropical to be treated as an annual.

The value of this plant adds into the landscape is this coloration that you can see right here.

So you can push it into part sun, but it really, you get the best color when it is in full sun.

It's going to give you this chartreuse yellow color of irrigation that's in there that kind of blends with the deep green.

Now, as it sort of ages, it turns to more of a creamy white color.

But if you peek inside this plant or when the wind's blowing, as we have here in Oklahoma, you're going to see these almost cranberry-like pedials that are holding up these large palmate leaves here.

So they're almost like eight inches wide.

You can see how large these leaves are, but you're going to get a lot of color.

And the nice thing about having color in your vegetation versus flower is it's going to last all season long.

Now keep in mind, this is just for ornamental purposes.

This is not an edible plant, so you just want to use it for the beautiful variegation.

Now, like I mentioned, we've had some really hot days and because this is tropical, it is going to thrive.

In fact, it really only starts to take off when we start getting those night temperatures over 60 degrees, which we know we have that here in Oklahoma in our summertimes.

And so this plant's going to continue to grow.

You can just plant a small plant and it will get four to five feet tall and wide as you go throughout the season.

Now here we have them planted in the ground.

They really can handle a wide range of pH, so a little bit acidic to a little bit alkaline, but they do need rich, well-drained soil.

So you don't want to make sure not to put them in soggy areas or anything like that, but they do like some moderate moisture.

You can also plant them really well in containers.

So again, might be nice for a patio landscape or something like that, but you're going to get a lot of impact with one plant.

So this is variegated tapioca.

It might be one you want to try in your landscape.

It's been a hot, dry summer.

And joining me today is Riley Coy, who is the urban forestry coordinator with the Oklahoma Department of Forestry.

And Riley, I mean, the trees are not happy at this point, - Right?

Yeah, no, no.

It's hard to be a tree in Oklahoma, especially this time of year.

- Right.

And I know some areas of Oklahoma have gotten a lot of rain, so it can be very localized.

And it probably depends on the type and the health of the tree, right?

- Well, yeah.

I mean, trees are like people.

Every single tree is unique and has its own genetic DNA that may make it more tolerable to different stresses or not.

Species are different.

Sycamore down by the creek is going to have drought stress faster than the post oak that's normally more cactus-like high and dry.

That's - Used to it.

Yeah.

So in general though, we've had a lot of hot, dry days, and so we're probably seeing some effects.

I know right here behind us on the sugar maple we are.

- Yeah, yeah.

So this little dry spell that we've experienced this year is different than normal.

It's longer and hotter and drier than normal overall for most of the state.

Now, Northern Oklahoma has gotten some really saturating rain in the past couple weeks, which is really helpful.

But Oklahoma City area, still not a drop of water.

You can really see it as you drive around the outskirts of town.

- So what are we seeing on the trees, the symptoms?

- So what you're going to start seeing is first you're going to start seeing the leafs change color.

Sometimes it'll look like it's in full fall, right?

What's going on there is the leaves, the little holes on the leaves called Stomaga are closing up to try to conserve water loss.

They're trying to stop that evaporation happening from the leaves.

And when that happens, it stops photosynthesis.

The leaf is no longer doing its job, so the tree can just go ahead and get rid of it.

It's not necessarily a bad thing.

It's the tree's way to protect itself.

- Okay.

It's sort of shutting down to limit resources, - Right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

Okay.

So what really is happening in the tree and do we always see these symptoms?

- No, we don't always see these symptoms.

So what's going on in the tree is the tree is pulling water up from the soil, from the roots up to the tips of the tree, right?

And in order to do that, there's a bunch of essentially little tiny straws.

The vascular - System.

- Right.

Have you ever gotten your finger pricked and they take that little glass tube and just touch it to the drop of blood and it shoots up the tube?

Right.

That's called capillary action.

And that's how trees get water from the ground up to the tops of the trees, right?

Okay.

So you've got the low pressure underground, which is pushing the water up, and then you've got evaporation happening out at the tips, out at the leaves, which is pulling the water up.

In between there, you have this really high pressure in that little straw, right?

What happens when there's not enough water in the ground but the tree is still evaporating is that pops, right?

You get a little air bubble in there.

And once that happened, that tube is no longer ever going to transport water to the top.

Okay.

All right.

Luckily, trees have thousands of these in them, so they can stand to lose some and it's okay.

It's not going to really do too much damage to the tree.

But when they lose a whole bunch of them, then that tree can start going down the spiral of decline.

- So essentially, even if you have water down there, it's not able to take it up as much because - You've lost some of that.

Potentially.

Yeah.

Right, - Right.

All right.

So is there anything we can do to kind of help mitigate this?

- So your yard sprinklers, right?

That's saturating the top three inches of soil.

That's not penetrating deep down into the soil.

So what's going to happen is you're going to get your surface roots.

The roots are going to go towards water no matter what.

They're going to go up into that zone of saturation on the top three inches, right?

They're going to sit in that perpetually saturated soil and they're going to start to decay and rot basically.

The roots that don't decay and rot are now so close to the surface of the soil that they're less resilient, they're less insulated from extreme hot and extreme cold.

So turf irrigation is a big no-no if you love your trees.

Okay.

What you need to do is supplement the trees with a drip irrigation.

You want that water to go all the way down, 18 inches deep into the soil, and then you want to cut the water off.

You want that soil to dry from the top down.

That anchors the roots.

It makes the roots chase that water downward.

It anchors the tree and it insulates the roots.

- So putting out a hose underneath the drip line and letting it kind of just drip out of that hose for a good period of time, - Is - That kind of the best way to do this?

- Absolutely.

Especially right now.

If all you've been doing is just your sprinkler system for your grass, definitely go put the hose on there every couple hours.

Just leave it on a little trickle.

You don't want it to run across the surface of the ground.

You want it to soak in.

So a little trickle, leave it out there for a couple hours and then come out and move it.

Leave it for a couple hours, move it.

And you might do that all day long.

You don't want to do it every day though.

You don't want to leave that soil saturated.

You still want it to dry out.

So depending on the tree, how dry it is, your soil, all that, maybe once every two weeks whenever it's this hot and dry.

- All right.

And I know we're all looking forward to cooler temperatures in the fall, but a lot of times that doesn't necessarily mean it's over for the tree, right?

Like that doesn't mean the stress, the concern is over.

That can sometimes last a little longer.

- Well, trees are a little different than people.

Their lifespan is much longer.

So when they go through a stressful episode, I guess you'd call it, it might be seven years before you start seeing the symptoms of that stress.

So in 2021, we had that Arctic blast that covered most of the state and it was something like 14 days of negative temperatures.

It was wild.

Well, that was five years ago.

We're just now seeing some of the damage from that Arctic blast.

And whenever you stack these stressful events on top of each other over time, that's when a tree can get so far down the spiral of decline that it just can't crawl its way back up.

So you hear people say all the time, "Well, I've never killed a tree."

Well, they haven't come back 10 years after they did whatever they did to the tree because that's how they know they killed a tree.

So it's a series of stressors over time on top of each other that eventually get a tree.

It's almost never one single thing that gets a tree.

It's a series of stresses.

All - Right.

So let's try to reduce that stress by kind of putting some drip irrigation out and letting it really soak - Once a - Week - About?

Yeah, once a week.

Right now when it's this hot and dry outside, once a week is not going to hurt anything.

Okay.

Adding a layer of mulch, keeping the mulch off the stem of the tree, but adding it three to four inches is going to help conserve that water in the soil too, and it's going to help insulate it from the heat.

- All right.

Thank you, Riley.

- Absolutely.

- When we talk about helping a tree thrive through those summer months, one of the important things is to create a good tree well around it.

We came across a product that I wanted to try.

These are weed guard circles and you've probably seen us previously use paper mulch down in the vegetable garden or something like that.

So that's similar product, but it's in a circle to fit around your tree.

You can see it's got a perforated center to kind of punch that out and make it bigger depending on how large your tree is.

You could also take scissors and cut it if you needed to.

But I like these.

It's a heavy, heavy grade cardboard almost.

So here we have a heptocodium that's kind of struggling, but one of the things that we can do to sort of help it along is to make sure that it has a good tree well.

Now I think when it was originally planted, it did because as you dig down in here, there is mulch under there, but so often tree wells can be neglected and then grass grows it back over them.

And one thing that we often see in extension is what we call weed eater blight.

And that's just the weed eater gets a little too close to the tree and actually will do more damage to the bark of that tree as it gets closer.

So make sure that you have kind of a tree well and that will help prevent your weed eater from needing to get up around that tree and prevent some of that grass from growing.

So I'm just going to kind of punch this out here so that I have a bigger center.

And it doesn't have to be pretty or anything because nobody's going to see this.

So then I'm going to place this around the base of that tree right here.

Now there's a lot of options with some of these kind of products.

You probably have seen plastic products and things like that, but the thing about plastic is yes, it won't break down, but that's the problem is it won't break down.

And so you're always going to have that plastic in your landscape.

This will eventually break down, but it's going to be a nice barrier to prevent some of those weeds from growing up.

So what we're going to do now is to kind of bury this.

It's going to occultate that grass, meaning kind of smother it out and prevent it from growing.

And of course, now we're going to go back on with some mulch so that it has a prettier appearance.

Now obviously the Bermuda grass will probably encroach on this, but it gives us a nice mulch to start with yet again.

So we'll need to keep maintaining that barrier from the Bermuda grass.

And the nice thing about this too is it's going to retain some of that moisture underneath there.

Now make sure when you're creating this tree well, that you're not piling that mulch up against the base of that tree.

That is an important thing.

We don't want what they call tree volcanoes where you're mounting that up because that can actually encourage rot on the trunk of the stem and create an area for disease and insects to get into your tree.

So we're making sure that this is back, but we got a nice three to four inches around the base of this on top of that paper mulch.

So if you're wanting to use something to prevent that growth of weeds around the base of your tree, look at this cardboard option.

It'll be something that you will have to maintain still, but a better option than plastic because it'll allow that water to penetrate through.

Now I've got another option to help improve watering on larger trees, so we'll go take a look at that.

So another thing you might consider adding to your tree to help it along this summer is a water bag.

So there's different brands of these and this is probably the most common one you'll see is these taller green ones.

Most of them can hold up to 20 gallons.

So that's a significant amount of water to put on your tree every week and to measure it that way.

But they're nice because what you do is you just simply put them around the trunk of the tree and then zip them up.

And then it's got this nice opening slit right here that you will then fill it up with a garden hose.

So this is sort of a woven plastic and so it's not meant to hold the water completely.

It actually does leak out and sort of allows it to slowly percolate down into that soil profile around the base of a tree.

Now, if you have really large trees, you can also get two of these and zip them together.

So you can get two or more.

I've seen on commercial landscapes where they've zipped five of these around a large bald and burlap tree that was just planted.

And so you can add a lot of water around a tree if you want to.

It will slowly leak out in about an hour or two.

So depending on, again, how big yours are.

They also make some that look a little bit more of a lower profile donut shape.

And so those are great options to put under something that maybe has a canopy that goes all the way to the ground.

So there is that option available too.

So we're just going to zip these around.

You want to make sure though, when you do this, you're just doing it during the summer, those hot months that need supplemental watering or early spring, you don't want to leave these on during the winter because again, having something around the base of that tree can cause problems.

And so if you're not watering it, don't use it.

Go ahead and take it inside into your shed and then bring it back out next season.

- Our Oklahoma proven annual is the ornamental pepper.

These are really fun plants.

I love them.

So they are peppers.

They are in the genus capsicum annulum, which is the genus for many of the peppers that you grow and eat as a vegetable, but there are just so many different varieties of them.

They are native to South America and Southwest North America.

So they are relatively, at least the species is really quite drought tolerant and heat tolerant.

But with our peppers, the ornamental types and the vegetables that we grow, they prefer to have consistent moistures throughout the growing season, but they thrive in our heat.

So they're one of the easier vegetables to grow because they tolerate Oklahoma's heat so well.

They have few pest problems, usually not very, very major.

So you might want to watch out for a few insects and maybe a few diseases, but otherwise give them full sun.

They love the full sun and they do really well.

Now the ornamental peppers are used because of the tiny fruit that they have and the many different colors that they come in as well as the foliage.

So you can see this one here is called black pearl.

This one's been around for a long time.

Beautiful plant, almost black foliage, purple flowers.

The fruits will emerge black or purple, dark, purple, black, and then mature to a bright red.

This one can get larger.

Most of these ornamental peppers can get anywhere from about 10 to 20 inches or so high and wide.

So they're nice compact plants and they work great in a container or in your flower bed.

If you grow them in a container, they can actually be moved indoors come the holidays.

So Thanksgiving, Christmas.

In fact, sometimes some of these peppers are referred to as Christmas peppers and were at one time very popular as a holiday plant indoor plant around especially Christmastime because they still had these beautiful, bright, colorful fruits on them.

So if you look at the fruits, we have again, a wide variety.

There's egg-shaped fruits.

There are round fruits.

They come in yellows and oranges and reds and purples.

And Sedona sun is one that has these upright little tiny kind of egg shaped fruits that develop a light yellow and then they mature to a bright orange.

Now, ornament peppers are technically edible, but generally they're not very palatable and they are very hot, so just be aware of that.

However, the like Sedona sun is supposed to be a little bit sweeter and a little bit more palatable compared to the others.

There's a variety called jigsaw that has beautiful bright white variegations in it.

Again, purple flowers and egg shaped red fruits.

We have this one here called fire and ice.

You can see the fruits are a little bit more elongated and they're tiny and upright again on the branches with multiple colors.

Again, typically with this type, they emerge or develop kind of a light yellow and then mature to a dark bright red or orange.

This is a purple flash.

This one's also been around for a long time because it has variations of white and green and purple on the leaves.

It will also have a black fruit that then turns around black fruit that turns red as it matures.

And then this is another newer one.

This is called Hot Pops Purple.

This is kind of one of my favorites.

Has bright green foliage, fruits that emerge or develop purple, and then they mature to a bright orange color and reddish color.

So now these plants here are a little small.

We had a really weird spring this year and so we kind of got things in late and they haven't really had as long of a summer to get fully mature, but most of these plants here will get at least twice this size.

But again, they're nice compact plants, so they work really well in the flower border, but again, in potted pots on your porch, or eventually you could move them indoors as a house plant.

- Today we're making refrigerator pickled red onions.

Now this will be a great recipe to use some of those onions from your garden.

To start, we'll start by making our brine.

And for the brine, we'll be adding one cup of water, then we'll add one cup of vinegar, and you'll want to make sure that it's 5% acidity vinegar.

Then we'll add one tablespoon of canning or pickling salt.

And now I do recommend that you use canning or pickling salt and not regular table salt.

Regular table salt will make your brine cloudy.

And then we'll add about two to three teaspoons of sugar.

And then we're going to heat this up and let it boil for about two minutes while we get our onions ready.

Okay.

Now we're using red onions and I've cut up about two medium onions and they're thinly sliced and we'll just add those to our container.

Now I'm using a canning jar, but because we're not actually going through the canning process, you can use another food safe container.

Just make sure that it has a, it's a food safe container that has a tight fitting lid.

We'll want these to be tightly packed in the jar.

And you could use another type of an onion or even scallions.

I just think the red onions work really well to give it that a pretty pink color in the end.

And that is probably about all that will fit in this jar.

Now that our brine is boiled for about two minutes, we'll go ahead and add it to our jar of onions.

Now by adding the hot brine, it helps get our onions softened and it'll help draw the flavor or the color out as well, but we'll fill it until we've covered the onions, but then we also want to leave about a half inch head space at the top of the jar.

Okay.

And that looks good.

And then we'll add our lid.

And once you add the lid, it's a good idea to label the jar or the container with the contents and the date that it was made.

Now with refrigerator pickled onions, you want to make sure that you wait about two to three days before you eat them.

For example, this is a jar that was done about two days ago and you can see the differences in the color on how after a couple of days it really draws that color out of the onions.

So you want to make sure you put the date on there and then also eat the onions within about two weeks.

Because these didn't go through the canning process, they will only be good for about two weeks and they're not shelf stable.

And I also recommend that you put a note on the lid or on the container that they are for the refrigerator.

So something like keep refrigerated or refrigerated onions, especially if you give these as a gift because you don't want someone thinking that they were actually canned and that they're shelf stable.

So these are our pickled red onions.

These go great on like sandwiches, tacos, burgers, salads.

They really give your recipe a great color and a tangy flavor.

I hope you give these a try.

- And as always, if you have a question about today's show or any of the other shows, feel free to reach out to your local county OSU extension office or leave us a comment on social media.

There are many great horticulture activities this time of year.

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

Next week we've got more plants coming your way, so join us right here on Oklahoma Gardening.

Welcome back to Oklahoma Gardening.

Today, David Hillock and I join you, share.

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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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