Coming to you from Studio A here at Proven Winners Color Choice Shrubs. It's
time for the Gardening Simplified Show with Stacy Hervella me, Rick weisst and our
engineer and producer Adrianna Robinson. All Right, Stacy, so you know we
could be considered as garden influencers with what we do on a weekly basis,
and we had an individual reach out to us and ask us, well,
Stacy and Rick, let's turn the tables on you who are influencers in your
life? And I think this will be fun to talk about. I think
it's a great topic because you know, even if you don't have necessarily like
a big gardening support system, like your family doesn't garden, you're not surrounded
by gardeners, you do find yourself influenced by gardens that you've visited, things
that you've read, maybe social media accounts that you follow, and that is
how you grow as a gardener. There's a lot of things you can figure
out on your own as you're cobbling your way through the garden. But most
of the things that I think that you learn from people that you respect and
admire and look up to as horticulturists. You know, those people really stick
with you and they are part of your journey. Absolutely, I've had many
influences in my life. I'd have to start off with my dad. My
dad immigrated to the US in the mid nineteen fifties from Europe, and my
dad was a big time gardener. He loved to garden, and he instilled
that love in me both. He instilled in me a love of taking hikes,
gardening, and birds, those three things that's lovely. And my dad
is ninety four years old. He has a great sense of humor. But
I remember distinctly as a little kid, he gave each of us kids a
little garden plot to get us growing plants and interested in plants. So we
each grew our vegetable plot. One morning, to my horror, I walked
into the backyard and all of my plants were uprooted, laying on their side,
dying and withering. Now I immediately knew who the culprit was. My
sister, my older sister, Jane, and I think she was just so
curious as to what was going on underground that she decided to have a look
see. But of course she didn't pull her plans out. She pulled mine
out and I will never forget it as long as I live, and we
laugh about this to this day, my sister. So basically I tattled on
my sister to my parents, which upset her, but what did she expect.
So that night when I went to bed on my pillow, there was
a little note from her and it said, dear Rick, I hate you,
love Jane. I'll never forget that. So aveiled confession. Other influences
owners of a garden center in West Michigan, Flowerland, who essentially never let
me get comfortable. Every year they had a new project, a new position,
whatever it may be, and challenge the daylights out of me. That
was a huge influence to me. I think that that is a really important
part of why we interact with other people. It's much harder to challenge yourself.
I mean, you can kind of challenge yourself, but you know,
when you have other people who are really encouraging you and pushing you to get
better and to find out the reasons why and to think about things a little
bit more deeply, that's you know, that's where that influence comes from.
Yeah. Absolutely, I was influenced by a drama director. I was always
in drama, and I loved, you know, one of the things I
loved was the fact when you're on stage the lights are so bright you cannot
see the audience. It's dark out there, but you can feel their energy,
you can feel their support, you can feel their laughter. It's kind
of like putting bulbs in the ground and then you know they're in the dark
earth. You know that potential's there, but you just can't see it.
Is a huge influence on my life. Alan Armitage he's a professor of horticulture
at the University of Georgia and Alan he's famous for wearing a tilly hat.
Yep. But he was really influential to me, and I'd recommend you read
his books. I've read his books cover to cover. He's a guy who
puts humor into gardening. He's a guy who is like, Okay, enjoy
the garden, but we don't have to be that serious about it. There's
joy in gardening, there's also humor. You have to have a sense of
humor. If you haven't killed any plants, you're not trying hard enough,
that's for sure. And so Alan was a huge influence on me well.
And Alan Armitage, of course is a giant in our industry. If you
haven't heard of him before and you are a perennial gardener, you really owe
it to yourself. He is a perennial expert. I mean, he's a
horticultural expert in general, but perennials are his specialty. Of his books,
he wrote the book on perennials basically, and yeah, just so knowledgeable,
you know. And I love when you meet those people, and it's very
common in our industry, I think, to find these people who just have
this incredible base of knowledge and just this wonderful personality where you just want to
be with them because you learn and you get inspired, and it's just a
great energy to engage with. It is, and he influenced me significantly.
And then Hank Prince. Hank Prince was my closest friend and he passed away
twenty eight years ago this June of brain cancer. But Hank was very involved
in the horticulture industry, in the garden center industry, especially conifers and West
Coast conifers. Loved and it's been fun to watch his three sons grow and
his eldest son, Henry, also involved in the industry. Loves photography,
loves conifers, evergreens, that sort of thing, and Hank was one of
these people that would always push me. Now, Hank and I started doing
live radio in nineteen ninety three. We did a call in radio show.
We knew nothing about radio. They just rolled us into the studio, put
a microphone in front of our face and said start taking calls from people.
And we did. And I did the Flowerland Show for thirty years. But
Hank Prins was a huge influence on me. And when you lose someone like
that at a young age, it really has a huge impact on your life
because I look at what he's done in the industry, how he loved gardening,
and the influence he had on me and other people. And so then
in your walk in life you pay attention to how you treat others and how
you approach your career professionally. It was a huge influence for me, Stacy,
and I think it sounds too like someone like that, and with Ellen
Armitage, who is very giving of their knowledge, that really influences you to
be that same way and to share your knowledge. And the interesting thing about
gardening is that there are some hard and fast facts that are just true about
the way plants grow, but there's also so much of a personal perspective that
you get from what you grow and where you grow at and your decisions that
we really need people like that who are willing to come out and share that
experience and pass that on to you so then you have some context for the
decisions and everything that you want to make in your garden. And it sounds
like both Hank and Allen have been that person to you absolutely. And then
of course for me, a third person in my life lead in life as
a baby boomer, as a baby boomer now and an aging person in rewirement,
So I fill out medicare forms during the week and garden. That's basically
what I do. But a key person in my life was a gentleman by
the name of Virgil Westdale. Virgil Westdale passed away two years ago at the
age of one hundred and four years old. Wow, this is an amazing,
amazing man. And Virgil Westdale is a person who served in the four
hundred and forty second Regimental Combat Team in World War Two. He overcame discrimination
and was one of the most His unit was one of the most decorated units
in American military history. He had a Congressional Gold Medal. He had the
French Legion of Honor award for extreme bravery, which was founded in May of
eighteen o two by Napoleon Bonaparte. Twenty five US patents to his name.
Wow. I'd visit him in the rest home and there's pictures of him with
US presidents on the wall, twenty five US patents, the Congressional and you
stand there and you're amazed. And you wouldn't know it if you did not
know this gentleman and the story behind him. Now. I wrote about Virgil
Westdale in my book Operation Rumination, Turning Back the Clock, and if you
want more information on that, you can go to a link to the book.
You can go to my website. Thank you very mulch dot com.
But Virgil was an amazing gentleman and really influenced my life, especially in the
past few years, and how I conduct myself moving forward. Fabulous swing dancer.
I think at the age of like eighty seven or whatever, he got
bored, so he went to work for the TSA at the airport. Just
an unre and his story is so unreal and I don't have the time to
get into it. But I did write about him in my book, and
a real defining moment for me. Virgil liked coffee at McDonald's, and I'd
take him to McDonald's and we'd sit there, and it always blew me away.
Here's one hundred and two year old, decorated US military veteran, and
I'm sitting across the table from him, and we both get the senior discount
on our coffee. I thought that was really cool. But you know,
I looked across the table at this amazing man and I said to him,
I said, Virgil, how did you accomplish what you did in life?
And he did the same thing other veterans would say to me. They shrugged
their shoulders and they say, well, you just do what you gotta do.
And I said, Virgil, that's not good enough, and and so
I never forget it. He put that senior coffee down, he and he
sat there for a moment, and then he looked at me and he said,
Rick, somebody said it couldn't be done, but he, with a
chuckle, replied that maybe it couldn't, but he wouldn't be one to say
so until he tried. So he buckled in with a trace of a grin
on his face if he worried he hit it. He started to sing as
he tackled the thing that could not be done, and he did it.
Well, that's lovely and I love that. So I'll just end with saying
that these influences. Like I was watching an interview of Jerry Seinfeld recently,
Jerry said, one of the best things you can accomplish in your life is
to develop a skill, and you carry that with you. Skill much more
important than money. Yeah, So those were influences in my life, and
that's the approach I take to gardening too. If you haven't killed any plants,
you're not trying hard enough. That's for sure. In there and give
it the old college try. We're gonna hear Stacy's influences coming up next here
on the Gardening Simplified Show. Proven Winner's Colored Choice Shrubs cares about your success
in the garden. That's why we trial and test all of our shrubs for
eight to ten years, making they outperform everything else on the market. Look
for them and the distinctive white container at your local garden center. Greeting's gardening
friends, and welcome back to the Gardening Simplified show. You know, normally
at this time of the show, we would be putting a plant on trial,
one of the proven winner's colored choice shrubs. We tell you all about
it and you decide if you're going to add it to your garden. And
I will attempt to bring this around to plants on trial by the end of
it, but we'll see how it goes. But I did want the opportunity
to talk about my influences as well, and I think, you know,
I hope that this show, this episode really helps people think about, you
know, who are the people who influence them as gardeners, as people,
especially as we come up onto Mother's Day and all of that. Now,
I kept my influences much more to the gardening side of things. And my
first influence was my grandmother. So, you know, a lot of people,
I think when you are a horticulturist, people assume that you grew up
in this like you know, garden wonderland, and I did not. I
most certainly did not. My mom was not a gardener. I'll get to
my mom in a moment. And my maternal grandmother, Glenna Webb, was
a huge influence on me because she didn't really garden garden like she had plants.
You know, she had a rose garden. She used to plant these
huge sunflowers always every year on the side of her garage, and you know,
she had like little things like that. But one of my earliest memories
related to plants is that when I was about three years old, she had
a large patch of Lily of the Valley on the side of her garage.
I can see it clear as day right now. And she was telling me
about them, and you know, she told me to smell them, and
that was sort of like where everything. I was just like, this is
amazing. And then she told me that I could pick as many flowers as
I wanted, and that was like, I mean, you know, you're
three years old, you want to pick flowers. You're always being told you
can't pick flowers, and so for her to just say to me, like,
you can take as many of these as you want was life changing.
And if you've ever picked a Lily of the Valley, I don't think there
is any more satisfying flower to pick because the stem, the flower stem just
comes right out of that leaf sheath sure perfectly. It just slides right out
like it was meant to do it, and I just remember that feeling of
like being in that patch and pulling them out and just like I'm good at
this. Of course I didn't realize it was the plants just being inherently,
you know, amenable to cutting. And so that really to me was like
I think one of my first experiences where plants were not just like a thing
that I saw around me, but something that I engaged with and something that
you know, I that were like a part of life. Now to this
day, I always keep some Lily of the Valley around because of this.
I don't particularly like the plant. I mean, as any gardener can tell
you, it's not the most attractive plant. It's fabulous when it's you know
that weak or two when it's in bloom, but you know, the foliage
starts to go dormant early, looks super crummy. It's way way too aggressive.
The only way I'm able to keep it and check is because my garden
is so dry, so that helps to keep it from spreading too too much.
But you know, I always will have Lily in the Valley in my
life to honor my grandma's influence. And I've talked on the show too about
my mom. I mean, so many people when you ask them about what
their gardening influences are going to say a parent, and my mom is a
gardening influence on me, but not in the way most people think. Not
in the way that a lot of the other people I'm going to talk about
her are the people you talked about was because you've heard me talk about it
before. My mom is a scared gardener. Sorry, Mom, you know
it's true. I don't think she would deny this. She's an uncertain gardener.
And you know I grew up she always did the exact same plantings every
year. So we had whiskey barrels in the backyard. They had a spike
in the center, red geraniums and a ring of white alyssa on the outside
every year. And you know, it didn't. It wasn't until I became
a professional horticulturist and she was still living in New York. I wasn't living
in Michigan where she was, and she would call me. There would be
a Saturday morning in May where she would call me and she'd be like,
I'm at the garden center and I don't know what to do. I see
this thing it says, it's this, is it good will? I like
this? You know she was. She didn't want to take the risk of,
you know, spending that money and spending that time on things that weren't
going to do well for her, and she had been burned. Of course.
You know, back then, plants didn't, especially annuals, didn't perform
like they did now. You'd get lobilia and that thing would peter out,
you know, the second it got over like seventy five degrees or something.
And so her you know, fear and hesitation really influenced me, I think
in the way that I talk about gardening. And as I was learning about
plants and gardening and horticulture school, it influenced me to think more about,
like, how can I share this information in a way that gives people the
same aha moment that I'm having right now. So when I'm explaining things,
I often have my mom in mind, whether it's you know, I'm talking
about a shrub or whatever I think about. You know, that same people
approaching those problems with that same kind of fear that my mom had. So
I couldn't, of course, forget horticulture school. I went to the New
York Botanical Garden, School of Professional Horticulture, and met so many wonderful horticulturists
in that time. But one person who really sticks out in my mind is
Francesca Couelo. She was the director of the amazing Helped Conservatory at the New
York Botanical Garden. I mean truly one of the world class conservatories in our
country and in the world, and it had She's a native of Brazil,
and I think she was native to Guyana, so she was trapped. She
was from tropical areas, and you know, compared to a lot of the
other people that I encountered in my time at NYBG. When I was at
the conservatory, fran I think did more to help me understand, you know,
digging into where plants are from, what that means for how they grow,
how to combine plants, looking seeing plants, you know, not just
looking at plants and saying, Okay, it's this, it's this tall,
the flowers are yellow, blah blah blah. Like she was real tuned into
all of the details and took the time to sort of point those out and
what they meant from a horticultural perspective. So I think she really took a
lot a much more of a mentoring kind of approach where she was legitimately teaching.
And you know, when I was in those rotations in horticulture school,
a lot of people were just like free labor, get out there, and
Fran really took the time to show me things that I would not have otherwise
noticed, and I think that really helped me see plants in a different way.
My former boss at Martha Stewart Living, Andrew Beckman, amazing horticulturist,
just a wonderful guy. And it is from him who he actually learned this
saying from a friend of his, so it wasn't his, and I forget
the person who actually originally said this, but Andrew often repeated it and it
has become a defining mantra for my garden. And that is the measure of
a good garden is how many places it has where you want to sit down
and have a drink That is awesome. So it doesn't matter what you're drinking,
water, coffee, anything else, but at you know, idea behind
the garden and having places that it's not just plants that you just look at,
it's gardens are places that you are in that you spend time in and
you're surrounded by and that's something that I have, you know, used to
kind of I mean design my garden such that it is, but thinking really
about what are these spaces and when you incorporate seating areas, and it can
be a small area just it can be two stumps in a little clearing,
or it can be something much fancier that encourages you again to engage with your
garden and get out in it and not just think of it as something that
you look at. So Andrew taught me so so much about plants, but
that one thing. And he is now the editorial director at Timber Press,
so you can still partake in his work. I don't know that that quote
has gotten out much beyond our department when I worked at Martha Stewart Living,
but Andrew definitely was a big influence and I learned so much from him,
and he gave me so many opportunities. And you know, that's another thing
when people give you opportunities like you were talking about flower land. When when
someone takes the time to give you that opportunity and sees your potential, that's
you know, just a huge, huge influence in your life, and then
to bring things more up to date. I did want to talk, of
course, about my boss, Tim would Tim is someone who I have learned
so much from. You know, he is a plant breader himself, and
there's a lot of times where I especially when I first started here thirteen years
ago, there was things I didn't know and he was such an expert and
there were things that I could always ask him. And I always found that
when I came to him with a plant problem I was helping someone with,
he always gave me a new perspective. He saw something that I didn't see
in there, and that really helped me to, you know, give the
person a better answer and better advice. So it really helped me get to
where I am and able to answer things like all the questions that we get
in the mailbag. He's yeah, he's so knowledgeable. And of course plant
breader Megan the tie, she's my friend, she's my colleague, and it's
just it's so awesome. She's awesome too, And it's just so great to
have friends who have the same interest as you and who you're always able to
talk about and grow with and just learn more from each other's unique perspective.
It's just a huge thing. So briefly, I did want to talk about
some famous influences in my life, so you can explore these more if you'd
like. William Robinson, author of the book The Wild Garden. The Wild
Garden at Wave Hill one of my favorite public gardens, favorite spaces in any
public gardens in the world. He wrote the book on that type of design
and that is what I aspire to today. You can get it for free
as an ebook if you are interested. It's a little bit old old style
writing, I think it was written in like the eighteen hundreds, but absolutely
worth reading and fascinating. Christopher Lloyd is my all time favorite garden author.
I love reading him. He has this way of incorporating personality with knowledge and
he's just a wonderful, wonderful read. And then Beth Chattow. I don't
know if you read Beth Chadow. Beth Chadow is well known for her two
books, The Damp Garden and The Dry Garden, and so there are different
approaches that she took to her incredible garden in the UK, and The Dry
Garden is definitely a handbook for me living in essentially a very very dry garden.
And then finally I do have to just give a shout out to Pete
Udolf. Pete Audolf, I don't know how you pronounce it, but you
know, when I was in New York City and he had just designed the
high Line, you know, New York City's hottest park, I realized that
all of these people who when I was a horticulturist at Tavern on the Green,
who never paid any attention to our plants, never paid any attention to
the plants in Central Park. They were just ho home regular plants. The
way that Pete Audolf combines plants makes people sea plants. It makes people pay
attention. And even though I worked in Central Park for three years, I
never heard anybody ask what's that? But when I was on the high Line,
I repeatedly heard what's that? I wonder what that plan is, I
wonder what that plant is? And it's just, you know, there's something
about his design that really I think makes people like it helped to mitigate plant
blindness, and I really admire that in him, and influenced of course by
his plant choices, because he is a fantastic plantsman as well as designer.
So I'm out of time to wind this into a plant on trial or going
to take a break. Maybe I'll be able to do that before we answer
questions in the garden mail bag. At proven Winner's Color Choice, we've got
a shrub for every taste and every space. Whether you're looking for an easy
care rose and unforgettable hydrangea, or something new and unique, you can be
confident that the shrubs and the white containers have been trialed and tested for your
success. Look for them at your local garden center. Greetings, gardening friends,
and welcome back to the Gardening Simplified Show. We've just been telling you
about the people who have influenced our horticultural careers and our lives. And I
did say I was going to try to bring it back to a plants on
Trial, and I do want to do that because I do think that if
you have these influences in your life, one of the best ways that you
can honor them is by planting something that you shared. So I talked a
bit about how I will always have Lilia the Valley, even though I think
it's kind of a crummy plant, because because we're going to get cards and
letters and comments on that right, and I you know, I get that,
But there's so many things I think you know that that you can take
the time to think about and if it, you know, if that influence
you know was a parent, is there, for example, an old fashioned
shrub like Whigela. I think I hear from so many people who say that
Whygela always reminds them of their grandparents? Or lilacs, lilacks. I mean,
you cannot go wrong with lilox, and we're going to do a show
in Lilacs coming up soon. But you know, of course, any time
there is a scent, scent is of course the closest to your brain.
So those memories are much more, uh, you know, vivid when you
smell that. So I would encourage you, instead of having today's plant on
trial, to think about, you know, what are the plants that the
people who influence you in gardening to garden that made you love gardening or taught
you something. What are the plants that you can have in your yard to
not only enjoy in their honor, but so that you can pass on that
same knowledge just like that person did for you. So I encourage you to
think about what that looks like for you obviously for me, it looks like
Lily of the Valley, even though it's not a great plant. But I
have lots of other plants to throw out my garden that remind me of of
different people. Now, I do not plant my mom's red geraniums, though,
just to put that out there right now, I'm not going to see
one of those in your ears, not in my yard. They're okay,
They're just not for me. Your mom is a wonderful lady, and I
have the privilege of meeting her, and that's that's a great story, you
know, part of your story to Stacy, a fascinating story. What an
unbelievable education you have and experiences. And Adriana and I like to joke around
that Stacy's the most intelligent person we've ever met in our life, and I
still feel that way. I don't want to embarrass you, but it's definitely
not true. And every week on this show, you as well as myself
and Adriana, we get to learn a new word. Because you were also
a linguistics major, How did you get into that? It's a good question.
Yeah, I was. I did get my bachelor's in linguistics from the
University of Michigan, and it is amazing. It is one of those things
where, yeah, people and we know it's even weirder. My uncle has
his PhD in linguistics. Wow, so two linguistics people and one family,
what are the chances Thanksgiving must be interesting around your place. I was just
really interested in language and the phenomenon of language. And I loved reading and
I loved writing. But you know, I grew up in the Detroit area,
so we used to get a lot of TV from Canada and they would
have commercials in English and French. Not commercial commercials, but like the station
identification and that kind of thing. And so I was aware from a pretty
young age that there was this other language out there. And you know,
growing up in the suburbs of Detroit, it's not like I was exposed to
all sorts of different languages. But I started getting a little exposed to French.
And my mother had taken French in high school, and so she would
like say things like, oh, well, this is how you say,
you know, apple and French or whatever. And I just was so fascinated
from a young age at this idea that there's like this whole other, you
know, set of words that are are describing the same things that I am,
and so I just I loved that and wanted to study the phenomenon of
language and realized that linguistics was the study of that, and so I went
into it. It was a really interesting study. I knew I did not
want to be a linguistics researcher or professor, but when people tell me that
I've explained something to them, clearly I can thank linguistics because it does.
It's writing a lot of long papers, it's doing a lot of research and
parsing that research. So even though it's not directly related to what I do,
it does have a huge influence on the way I explain things to people,
which is really important to me to help them understand I think so too,
and we all benefit from it. Stacey, And that's fantastic. You
know. I didn't go to linguistics school, but my parents spoke Dutch in
the house when I was a little kid, so I'll never forget. In
elementary school, one day I was sent home from school with a note because
I was mixing Dutch with my English. Oh couldn't understand me. So yeah,
that was interesting. But hey, to celebrate last week you mentioned that
maybe I should rhyme or do a limerick about a new word. You taught
us a botanical word, ediolated, And I've been working on that all week
long, thinking about ediolated. Now stacy for our viewers, our listeners,
ediolated means what so edulated et io l a t ed before Rick pollutes your
brain with his version of diolated. It means when a plant gets really thin
and skinny and pale because it's reaching for the light. So that's ediolation.
I always said stretched, Well that works too, yes, But now from
this day forward to the end of my life, I'm always going to say,
Eddieolated, how you influenced people. But see, the thing about linguistics
is like it's not about hey, there's all these rules. It's about being
understood. So if you're understood, you can say stretched. If you say
eddiolated, you might not be understood. So just something to keep in mind,
Well, understand how my brain works. I heard that and I wrote
the ode to Eddie olated. His plants are stretched and faded. Poor Eddie,
Eddie olated, try as he might, he lacks good daylight. His
daisies are barely foliated. His garden has him irritated. Poor Eddie Eddie elated.
His goals are far fetched with plants that are stretched and sadly incapacitated.
His home turf is undomesticated. Poor Eddie Eddie olated. He needs some support.
He's battling mugwart. He's humiliated and frustrated. Good will needs to be
cultivated to keep our friend motivated. Send letters, notes and cards of encouragement.
Best regards to Eddie. Poor Eddie Eddie elated. Wow, Rick I
challenged you to rhyme ediolated and you went above and beyond the call there.
That was wonderful. That's simply how my brain works. That's how my brain.
I think we're going to have to put that into an AI to get
an image of what eddiolated actually looks like, So look for that on the
YouTube version of the show. So unless you have your own version of ediolated
in your head, you want to keep that. I love that. I
love it too, of course, Stacy. On our show, we get
questions from folks and pictures and we love that too. As part of our
mail bag set. Yes, and we heard from a listener Carrie. Carrie
is in her first years of gardening in central Florida, and gardening there has
brought her to tears many times, she says, even though she was a
heart major in the seventies and her dad built her a greenhouse for her horticulture
graduation, but now she is in this totally different climate learning a whole and
it is like language. When you have to go in garden in a new
climate like that, it is like learning a new language. Learning new plants.
It's like new words, new ways to combine them. But Carrie has
a massive success to share, and she said, even though she had many
varieties in the greenhouse, she's now overjoyed to be able to plant these same
plants in her yard and keep on her outdoor lunai, which is of course
a beautiful shaded patio that are very popular in Florida. I wanted to share
with you my discovery of my first papaya tree in my front garden. I
watches it flowered like crazy, and I waited for fruit. I was amazed
to see with my own eyes how white the stephanotis like flower tips that's a
kind of jasmine. Eventually closed up to create the papaya fruit, and she
enclosed some pics of her very first home grown papayas. She says she loves
the show, she appreciates the warm zone ideas that we do include, and
she he's a grateful gardener in the Sunshine State. So we will put Carry's
pictures of her first papias on our show notes at Gardening Simplified on Air dot
Com, and of course they will be in the YouTube version of the show
as well. I love that and you know, it makes me think of
a famous person I met, Steve Miller or the Steve Miller band. I
love that group and his song Jungle Love. I left a creative papayas by
your front door, right yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah, So
thanks Carrie. And if you don't have if you want to celebrate your gardening
successes with us, you can always reach us at help HLP. At Gardening
Simplified on Air dot com, you can leave a comment on a YouTube video,
you can leave a comment on Instagram, or you can just write a
visit Gardening Simplified on air dot com and click on the contact tab because yeah,
I mean, it's frustrating when you don't have someone who shares your enthusiasm
for gardening. And you're like, but this is really cool, trust me,
and they're like, okay, you know. But along that line,
Stacey, we got a note from Sandy I placed in order with proven winners
for my very favorite hosta. It's the Shadowland we Whee. I first saw
this beauty at the Michigan State University Extension Garden and Grand Rapids and absolutely fell
in love with it. I dore the name we and have named mine Maxwell,
after the little piggy with the pinwheel on the Geico commercial. His name
was Maxwell. I'm going to place a pinwheel next to mine in the garden.
I thought you'd get a chucklate. Oh, that's so cute. That
is such a neat hostess. If you're not familiar with it. It has
super duper undulating leaf margins, so they're really wavy and not just like a
little bit wavy, like very very strong wavy. And it just gives it
a really unique textural look in the garden. And when I could grow hostas
in my old house, I did have that one. But hostas are definitely
a no go for me now between the hot, the dry, the deer,
not a chance, you know exactly. Well, we got to take
a little break. When we come back, we're going to answer a couple
more garden questions, so please stay tuned. The Gardening Simplified Show is brought
to you by Proven Winners Color Choice Shrubs. Our award winning flowering shrubs and
evergreens have been trialed and tested for your success so you enjoy more beauty and
less work. Look for Proven Winners Color Choice Shrubs in the distinctive white container
at your local garden center. Welcome back to the Gardening Simplified Show and extended
version of the mail Bag this week. And Stacy, I've got a question
for you. Actually it's a question from Cindy Banana water madness. You've probably
seen this in social media. I compost bananas in my garden, but to
soak them in stinky water won't it cause fruit flies? I want to hear
what Stacy thinks of this. You know, it's I'm gonna call it a
hack or a trend in social media to soak banana peels in water and then
water your plants with them, right, And the claim is that it's a
magical in concoction that you could just make from something you'd otherwise throw away.
And it's gonna do all these wonderful things for your plants. So on the
topic of influencers, there are many positive influences on social media for gardening that
you can engage with, and there are many negative influences yes, as well.
Now this one, I guess it might be kind of a stretch to
call it negative because there's probably no harm aside from the gross, smelly,
slimy banana water. And if you've listened to the show before, you know
neither Rick nor I are fans of bananas. But even if we were,
we would still be opposed to this phenomenon of banana water because of what the
claim is is that the banana full of potassium, and if you soak it
in water and fuse it in water, that potassium is just going to like
come right out of the peel and infuse the water full of potassium and it's
going to be some sort of super potion and it's not Potassium is not water
soluble. So when you're soaking that banana peel in water, yeah, it's
going to look like something's happening, But all that's happening is like the flesh
is like coming off in the water and getting like slimy, and it's not
actually adding any potassium to the water. Now, there are definitely gonna be
people out there who say, well, I watered with banana water and my
plants did great. Now, there is a saying in horticulture that you may
be familiar with, and that is the best fertilizer is the gardener's shadow.
And that basically means that the more you are engaging with your plants, the
better they're gonna do, because you're not like, oh, I forgot about
that thing in the back forty and it's not getting any water, and it's
just like dying in the sun. If you're watering it, you're looking at
it closely, you're picking up on all those changes. And certainly watering with
banana water is the same as watering. It's still going to get the plant
water and keep it healthy. But let's not pretend that it's some sort of
magical concoction. It's not. It's just a gross, slimy banana peel in
water. Absolutely, we compost those banana peels instead of infusing them in water.
They will do far better in the compost when the microbes and everything are
able to break them down and turn them into organic matter, which does have
nutrients, so your banana pil doesn't have to go to waste. You also
don't need to sit around with a disgusting picture of banana water in your house
for who knows how long. Yellow Yeah, tell you. You know.
There's also a saying don't follow the crowd, or in this case, don't
follow the bunch. Yeah, that's a good one. Yes, Sue,
someone should someone should put that other. But you know, it's true that
a lot of things, so called hacks or whatever on social media feel like
they could be true. So it's very tempting to share them and to say
what's the harm in it? And again, there's probably not any harm in
banana water. Yes, you are likely to get fungus nuts, but you're
likely to get fungus nuts if you are overwatering with regular non banana water as
well. So I think it's important that we, whatever it is, that
we fact check and into it and say, you know, is this really
the best way? Is this doing what it's claiming to do. It goes
back to our IPM thing, which is like you want to do the least
harm with the most benefit. Well said Stacy, Let's stick with slimy subjects
here and a note and pictures from Lisa. By the way, we do
our show on radio, podcast and YouTube. Adriana drops wonderful pictures into YouTube
that you can see, including the pictures that Lisa sent us of some worms.
Speaking of a slimy subject, she says, these are the biggest night
crawlers I've ever seen during the mornings last week. They were out in the
dogs area. When I was out with the dogs, I counted four or
five of them stretched out in the yard like this. Gonna have a bumper
crop of nightcrawlers. And yes, these are very very long worms. But
I would remind people that worms have circular muscles and they have longitudinal muscles.
The circular muscles, when they contract those, that's when an earthworm gets really,
really long. And she put this earthworm up against a ruler ruler stick,
so you can see that picture, or you can go to our website
Gardening Simplified on air dot com. The longitudinal muscles, when they contract those,
then the worm gets shorter. So it's not unusual to see worms really
long in the garden. And it could be a matter of age, it
could be a matter of different species of worms because there are a number of
different species, you know, that we have. It could be that like
umulched and that created an environment that was more friendly to these bigger worms.
So there's a lot of reasons why that could happen. But yeah, it
sounds like someone needs to get a fishing pole. There you go, dip
into that mail bag. Do you have over there? Oh my gosh,
we have. We have so much stuff. We have a lot of different
questions and oh, Tina writes, this was an interesting She's also in Florida,
and she was surprised to see that one of the supertunias she planted last
year returned this spring, and she was wondering if it's possible to move it.
So when we had Adam Mosley, who's one of the breeders of super
tunias, on the show a couple of weeks ago, he talked about we
talked a lot about how they can live in hot climates, and he says
usually they kind of peter out in Texas at least by summer when it's getting
really hot and really dry, and that's when he loses his But in Florida,
of course, it tends to be more humid, and so when you
live in these more mild climates, you don't have any frost or cold that
would normally kill the supertunias, and so hers probably just got real small and
kind of went like, you know, a little bit dormant, conserved its
resources, and then when spring came and it was warm and sunny and everything
again, it's a supertunia lemon slice or super Bell's lemon slice, and it's
looking great. So by all means, yes, you can absolutely move it,
Tina to someplace else. Looks like you just got a little bonus.
Soyah. It's kind of one of those things that an annual when we use
when we talked about this a couple weeks ago as well, when we talk
about the term annual, we use it to mean a plant that we're just
growing for one season. But there is difference between a true annual one that
goes from seed to seed within one season. So that would be like cilantro
or dill. If you've ever tried to grow those, you know, you
plant the seed, you get the plant, and then it goes to seed
and it's gone. Whereas petunias and caliber Coa's superbells and supertunias are potentially perennial
if they are living in an area. So it's an annual is a horticultural
term, it's not necessarily a botanical term that actually describes the behavior of your
plant if all conditions are right. And it's important to note Proven Winters tests
its plants all over the world in different conditions, Stacey, to test the
genetics. And when we're talking about annuals. In chatting with Kevin Hurd from
Proven Winters, he said to me, part of the reason they do some
of their trialing in Florida is to put some of these annuals under winter conditions
and see how they perform after a hot, sticky, humid summer, again
testing those genetics. Yeah, there's so many different factors that are worth exploring.
From Chris, and his question is about new raised garden beds. He
has four of them. They're four by eight feet long and twenty seven inches
tall. That's a deep bed. Is it okay to fill the bottom of
the raised bed with topsoil and the other half with a special mix from the
garden center. I don't want to fill it with logs and such. And
he says thanks. He enjoys the show, so you know I have.
I have very many strong feelings about a mending soil and also with filling garden
beds, so I get that now. Generally speaking, as I've said on
the show, many times, plant roots are concentrated in the top eighteen inches
of soil, So you want to give all of your plants a good solid
eighteen inches of consistent growing media, whether that means topsoil or like a raised
bed soil which you don't need. I mean, you can just fill those
things with topsoil you don't need if it's a lot more expensive to get something
else. I think topsoil is likely to be the most cost effective choice in
most areas. Top soil. But I was going to mention to you some
greenhouses, and including one that I currently help out part time, will sell
something called recycled greenhouse soil. In other words, they're going to have plants
that they don't or plants at the end of the season or whatever, and
instead of just wasting that soil, they put it in a pile and people
can buy it really cheap. So that's something to check out at your local
green That's a great idea. I didn't know about that, So I would
not recommend Chris having two different substrates within the bed. One thing that can
happen when you have those different layers. It is better to have the heavier
layer below. But as I've talked about on the show, this bathtub effect,
so that light, fluffier soil on the top has big pores, it
can hold a lot of water. The top soil below it is going to
have smaller pores because it's true soil, so it's going to be more of
a clay or sand based soil. It's going to have much smaller pores.
So you're able to apply a ton of water to that top layer, and
then gravity starts to take its toll. It starts to drain down and all
of a sudden, it's like trying to like jam a huge crowd through a
little tiny door and it doesn't work, So the water ends up sitting in
that top layer. So I would not recommend using two different things. If
you have, you know, cost effective I would cost effective pricing on one,
I would try to mix them. But otherwise I would say, unless
you can get the recycled greenhouse soil, all topsoil is gonna be your best
bet for filling that raised bed. So if you have any questions for us,
you can always reach us at Help HLP at Gardening Simplified on air dot
com, or just visit Gardenings Simplified on air dot com and click the contact
tab. Or of course, if you leave us a comment on YouTube,
Adriana will always pass those on to us so we'll get you an answer.
There's so many ways to reach us, especially as we go into gardening season
and people have a lot of different questions about what's going on. But that's
all the time we have for this week. We want to thank you all
so much for listening. Thank you Rick, thank you Adriana, and again,
thank you all so much for listening. We appreciate you and help you
have a wonderful week ahead.