- Good evening, everyone.
Tonight's speaker is Jerry Nelson.
He is a professional horticulturalist.
In the 1980s and 1990s,
he co-owned the Town & Country Garden Center
and currently owns Classic Gardens Landscape and Design.
Jerry's hobbies include growing lilies and grapevines
and teaching his granddaughter, Izzy, to garden.
Here's tonight's speaker, Jerry Nelson.
(applause)
- Thank you.
It's been a while since I've been here.
Izzy wasn't around the last time I was here.
And we were up there this weekend, and we did pumpkins.
So Izzy took all the seeds out,
and we baked a few but most of them
we planted around the yard.
(laughter)
So we'll see what happens with pumpkins up there next year.
She's in the Twin Cities.
I'm going to talk tonight,
I got the email on Thursday,
and it was on doing things, getting ready for winter.
And I thought we were doing season extenders.
(laughter)
So I put in something.
We'll do some things at the end,
and we'll talk then about putting your garden to winter,
or what I do,
everybody, I think, is unique.
Everybody had a different way to do it.
If you're successful with what you do,
then I would tell you don't listen to me;
do what you've done.
It's if you've had problems
or if something hasn't worked well
and you think you need some things to change
and do some things different,
maybe I can add some insight for some of that.
So we're going to talk first about kind of season extenders.
For sure we have had the season extended with what?
Growing degree days in September and October.
September, I think, we were up over last year.
We were up almost 150.
And in October now, so far, we've been up.
And I think we're up 30 or 40 in October.
So September and October for the season.
Without the radio show,
I've got a tough time now,
except for on Saturday mornings now when I get up,
I still do my observation page or my observation notes.
I still do my "What's in bloom?"
because that's how I put a lot of combinations together.
Some of the season extender things have come from that.
And so I still put those together,
and I still look at growing degree days.
And growing degrees days you know
are the measure of our heat units.
And so September has been much warmer,
October has been a little bit warmer,
and we haven't had any rain.
Since I've planted mums the end of September,
I think we've had like 15 hundredths.
So we really haven't, for a whole month now,
we really haven't had much rain.
Maybe it's coming tomorrow night.
So we'll see on that.
So on season extenders...
Can we get a light or no?
- Is that better? - [Group] Yes.
- Some of the season extenders we'll talk,
like in your handout,
we'll talk about some of the traditional things.
Things that have been, things that we do every year,
or things that you see every year,
some of the accessories,
and then I had a hard time with bulbs and I'll show you one.
I'm not sure it's a season extender.
But it's a season extender if you look at it from summer.
So a different way to look at it.
We'll look at all the different grasses
and then some shrubs and some perennials there,
and maybe even a few other things that maybe
you don't think about.
And so, this is from last weekend.
This picture I took at
the Chicago Botanic Garden last weekend.
And this...
Yes, this changes.
So this is kind of like, you know,
our third season now because this would be,
you have the spring season and you've got summer season
and then you got fall season, which is mums.
Mums-- which is probably the biggest part of it.
But then you see a lot of the grasses.
You see the Asters and some different Salvias.
A lot of different Salvias.
The yellow to the background there is a Salvia.
And there's some of the blue Salvia leucanthum.
Leucantha. I think.
It's either leucantha or leucanthum.
And there's some things there that are really
some really strong season extenders.
Here you got mums.
One nice thing at Chicago Botanic Garden
is everything's labeled.
So at least you can find out what things are.
Sometimes I'm going, I'm not sure,
I don't know where I'd ever find them,
but you can go to their plant directories,
and sometimes they'll be able to tell you
where things come from.
Last year there were some mums that for sure
I wanted to use or I thought I might want to try to.
They were very different.
And when I looked and found out where they came from,
they came from Kings Mums, which is now in Kansas.
But they were six dollars for the cuttings.
For the little plants.
So figure out that one, okay?
How deep is your pocketbook?
So we'll talk about all the different season extenders
and probably maybe what I would consider a season extender
is something that shows interest still
late after our first frost.
So, have we had our first frost?
Depending on where you were two weeks ago,
maybe we've had it then.
It was a what? A Saturday night?
A Friday night and a Saturday night.
Two nights in a row.
But if you were right on the lake.
And still, at the airport, they've had 33.
So they still haven't recorded a frost.
And typically we see our first frost somewhere
between the 15th and the 20th of October.
So there's season extenders.
When I think of them, I think of not only flowers
but I think of a lot of foliage.
You'll see some pictures of some of that.
And then some fruits.
And I,
last Thursday I bought 30 pots of winterberry,
Ilex verticillata, and I had it
and I was figuring I'm going to use it for holiday.
Okay? So we went to the Twin Cities.
I come back, I looked at them this morning,
and there's not a fruit to be found.
(laughter)
They were just loaded with fruits on Thursday.
So I don't know what.
If the squirrels or the birds or what.
But I have no fruit on 30 Ilex verticillata.
But the crabapples, definitely another extension.
And then fall color.
Some fall color is very early.
The ash trees drop so very early.
And I have another one of those,
the Korean Sun, a pear,
which is much earlier than the Callery pear.
And that is done.
Now, as I drive up the driveway,
when I drove up tonight, what did I have in fall color?
The gingko were that brilliant gold,
and the Sargent Cherry was a real orange.
The serviceberry was kind of an orangey-red.
The Acer griseum, the Acer truncatum,
and the Acer triflorum, all in the oranges
and the very deep reds, maroons.
So that's some of our tree fall color.
I'm probably getting ahead of myself but
and then all the different accessories.
And we're seeing Halloween as being one
of those holidays now.
And how much decorating do we do for Halloween?
I'm doing almost as much decorating for Halloween
as we do for holiday.
But I don't do much holiday.
And then all of our landscapes and containers,
that's where we're putting all of these season extenders.
Traditional things, we'll talk about those.
The annuals, the accessories, the perennials,
the grasses, shrubs, trees.
Okay, and that's the question there.
Do you do any season extenders?
Maybe you have them all in your landscape
and you don't do any of the extras.
So, where's your budget for that?
When I think of
what made me put this in was,
as I was at the Chicago Botanic Garden,
I thought of the mums I had last year,
and then I'll show you a picture of a plant
that's from Africa that I'd love to use.
And I have no idea where I can find it,
and if I can find it, how expensive is it?
So, you know, maybe you only do,
maybe you only do the season extenders
and things if you've got special occasions coming
or if you're doing something.
We did one of those for a 1st of November kind of
the weekend, the first weekend in November now,
and so everything is mums and kale and cabbages
and I don't know.
To me we spent a lot of money.
And then, again, you know,
in all of this season extenders,
if you're private, it's going to be different
than if you're public.
Because when I think of Boerner,
I think of the Chicago Botanic Garden,
I think of Olbrich, all of those kinds of places,
I mean, you know, they're destinations.
And now, as we see in all the apple orchards
and pumpkin farms and all of that,
and so we're seeing, I think, a little bit more,
and is it, you know, is it these private places
that are doing it?
Or is it public?
Or what's the draw, is maybe the question.
And then it's just the personal enjoyment that you do
because you're not sick and tired of gardening yet.
A little hard to see.
This is probably my favorite annual combination
from this season.
Okay?
And in here, the foliage in the middle is the Plectranthus,
Silver Shield, which is now from seed.
And if anyone knows the trailer form of this, Nicoletta,
there's a seed form now coming out, Silver Crest.
That is out for 2016.
So now we're not
things are getting a little bit cheaper
because things are from seed.
A little bit cheaper than things from cuttings.
But Plectranthus there works well as a season extender.
So, as we pull our annuals to do some of our fall displays,
we'll leave these in.
And then the purple is Verbena, Santos Purple,
and Santos Purple, I see it out this year
in the catalogs as being new.
Okay? It... I don't know.
I've been using it seven, eight years now.
And it came out as a seed item, and then they had seed failures
and crops failures and everything else.
It does real easy from cuttings,
and so I think they lost favor in it because of that.
But I see it back this year again now as new for 2016.
But Verbena, that's the purple.
And then we had the yellow in Dakota Gold.
Okay, that one slips my mind.
Then there's begonias in there in red,
and Celosia Fresh Look Orange.
So that's kind of a combination.
I always use at least three or four plants in a combination.
As I was talking to Jean before, the sunflower,
Suntastic, the All-America selection winner,
in places where I had it, by the middle of July it was dead
and it was gone and I couldn't figure out what I did wrong
with an All-America selection winner.
But when I looked and talked at Boerner,
they didn't seed it and they direct seeded it
and they didn't do it until the middle of June
to the end of June.
Well, by the middle and end of June,
I was in secondary bloom already.
So I don't know what happened there.
Jean said hers, you know, they were a little later.
So she was a little later, but they looked good in August.
But when I put two or three or four different plants
together in a combination, like, for me,
my sunflowers the second or third week of July
were always turning brown.
But there was enough other stuff in the zinnias
and the grasses and Celosias and begonias
and everything else I put in that I didn't have to worry.
In about three weeks, everything was covered
and my mistake was covered and nobody knew.
So, anyway, now we've got,
in the blue in the front, you see the Asters.
A lot of different Asters.
And there's a lot of different Asters
because some of them are early.
It seems like the ones that you'll buy that you'll
find will do really well with your garden mums,
they don't seem to, once we get that really,
really first hard freeze the petals kind of turn brown
and you're left with brown buttons, kind of.
But some of the other Asters I got a picture
at the one in the end, the Aster,
as we walked into the building, the Aster tataricus, I think.
Is that Aster tataricus? The big, tall, blue one?
I thought it was here.
But anyway, there's, you know,
some Asters that are up this five, six feet.
Okay? Yes, aggressive.
If you don't throw anything away,
you can't plant Aster tataricus because it'll
be the only Aster you have
or the only plant in your garden at the end.
But the ornamental grasses,
the annual red Pennisetums, and then again,
in here, there's also the Cannas to the back.
And, actually, I have found begonias
to be a fairly good season extender.
Another shot of the Chicago Botanic Garden.
They just, you know, do things in big masses.
And so, as you see them and those big masses,
they just look expansive, and it's like of like wow.
It's the wow factor.
But then you also take a look here.
What else do we have?
We've also got the Japanese maples there.
And there's some fall color.
Fall color there.
And then you've got green,
and there's nothing wrong with green.
We've got the boxwoods. You've got all the evergreens.
You got the rhododendrons.
And so in all that different foliage
that you can add to all your different colors.
Here's a container which, again,
the Chicago Botanic Garden,
but probably a lot of maybe our traditional season extenders
with the kale and the cabbages mixed in with all the mums,
but how much color do you see here?
Or maybe I should say flower color.
Because you don't see a lot, but the foliage characteristics
and the differences in the patterns and the differences in
the colors to that give you
what you need for a season extender.
In the very middle, just above the sign,
is probably the color that's in there,
and that's with a Kalanchoe.
And Kalanchoes, I mean, you're going to buy
those as potted, you know, as little potted,
and I guess I would say at point now,
where you going to find them?
This is just like some of the real annuals
that we see as season extenders.
Maybe we don't see them now.
We see them in the spring, and we don't see
as many of them now.
You're going to have to really find my thinking
of the Nemesias, the Diascias,
the snapdragons are some of those.
You'll find pansies now, but how many other annuals do we
really see and do we really find?
But the Heucheras, you know,
how many different Heucheras do we have?
Heucheras now were finding more and more and more of them.
So you got all those different colors.
I'm starting,
I'm going to use one next season called watermelon.
And some of those different Heucheras that I found in some
of those kind of rose and reds kind of shades.
And watermelon was one that I even seen it this weekend
coming home at Down to Earth garden center in Eau Claire.
And it was just that,
that watermelon color just stuck out
at this point in the season.
But I'm not sure which one is here,
but, anyway, you got a Heuchera here.
The annual that's here is Wire Vine.
The green vine that you see hanging.
And that's an annual.
It's called Wire Vine.
Don't ask me the botanical name.
I'm not sure I know it.
But, anyway, there's the trailers there, you know, for your
spill or fill or trail or for containers.
Okay, maybe a traditional planting done
with mums ornamental peppers.
And how many different ornamental peppers do we have now?
I used a new series called Acapulcos this year,
and I really liked,
I really liked them.
But, again, some of the grasses, that's probably the Carex
red rooster, which you don't ever know if it's dead
or not because it's always brown.
(laughter)
But they're a bit more traditional.
Here, the use of the grasses, the accessories,
and the accessories I guess maybe I'm calling all the
pumpkins and gourds and squash and cornstalks and soybean
stalks that we've got to be able to use.
But you see here, the containers of mums
and grasses in those.
Swiss chard, another good one.
And then the kales, the cabbages in that.
The grass, the non-hardy one, the pampas grass.
I don't know.
I typically use Miscanthus in its place, but if you've got a
nice, big budget, you certainly can use pampas grass.
Then a couple of others.
Now, as we get into some of those maybe foliage things that
I think of as some of the Alternantheras.
And now Alternanthera Red Ruby
is the red foliaged plant here.
It's like that all summer.
So that's what I have mixed with begonias,
and the other plant in there is Juncus.
That's the round one.
The round-leafed one is Juncus,
which is like some of the ornamental grasses.
But the Juncus,
so the Juncus and the Alternanthera stayed here,
and then we just ripped everything else out
and we put our mums in between.
And so it kind of saves us a little bit.
I don't know if it saves us a lot, but every little bit when
you start doing that, you know, helps as you do things that
you can save from what you planted in the summer.
Another planting from annuals.
You see the Plectranthus and the Juncus.
Okay, and those stayed now when we did our mum plantings.
You can see how much
different things, okay, as I mixed together.
So as you do your annual plantings,
if something were to not perform in here,
you would never know.
And even sometimes there was Salvia in here too,
and the Salvia looked good early.
And then the Salvia just gets overtaken
and it disappears and nobody knows but me.
But here's our mum planting after we took everything out,
all the annuals out.
And there was also Dichondra, Silver Falls.
Right there.
Okay, and that we left in in some places.
Sometimes, as you pull everything else out
and you work to put everything in, it all comes out too.
But Dichondra is another good one
that'll actually extend through the season.
The foliage plant, Helichrysum.
Okay, and there's a lot of different ones.
Again, I don't know who's got,
this is a picture of another one from Chicago Botanic Garden
and a container of just, I think it's probably Silver Star.
But one of those little Helichrysums.
We typically use them as trailers in our containers.
So they may fit.
It's, you know,
if you're looking for something all silver and foliage in a
container like that, it certainly will fill the boat.
And another one with just foliage.
As you see, artichoke.
That's the spiny looking plant there.
And then we've got
across the front are some of the herbs.
I think it's sage across that, and then
"Oh, what was in the middle?"
Trollius.
I think there was a Trollius in the middle.
So that had flowers in spring
or late spring, very early summer.
So it's all and then geranium.
The scented geranium to the right.
So that's just some things with foliage, and if you had
maybe just a, you know, whether you did just pumpkins or
gourds mixed into all of this or whether you had some mums
for some color in it, that's what you need, and I guess
that's what I call and that's what I would say would be some
of our season extenders.
Geraniums, the perennial geraniums,
some of them turn some really nice fall color.
Some of them have that bluish-purple leaves all summer too.
So Rosanne, one of those that's got those real blue flowers,
turns that real red fall color.
It hasn't even
I don't know, for the most part they haven't turned yet.
But it will be.
Some more foliage.
Things that, again, as we had with annuals
and then we leave those as we do our mums around.
Okay, the accessory mountain.
(laughter)
It's all
there's a lot of straw bales in the middle.
So it's not just a big whole pile of gourds.
But you can just see the variety and, you know,
all the different sizes and things that
we have to be able to use.
So, as you just allow your imagination to go as to what you
want to use and where you're going to put it and how you're
going to wrap them around the cornstalks or whatever, you
could take some of those gourds
and make a bow tie out of it around cornstalks.
So it's, you know, kind of just however you decide and what
you can do and how you put them,
how you're going to put them together.
But how many really, when you look at that,
how many pumpkins are there?
You know, the traditional pumpkin.
I mean, there's not too many there.
It's all the different and weird now pumpkins
and gourds and things that all
the plant breeders are bringing us,
and I don't know how many more we got coming.
I know that Harris has got five new pumpkins out for 2016.
And I'm sure they're not pie pumpkins.
(laughter)
Then we add to this mix now all the ornamental grasses
and the perennial things.
Some things here,
different things going on our annual beds.
Our annual beds are on the left side.
Okay, and mixed in there, as we mix some of the grasses
there to give some continuity to things
is the Pennisetum White Lancer.
I'm not sure if White Lancer actually is available
anymore because of it being aggressive.
So that one you might not
I don't know if you'll find it or not.
I'm still collecting seed
and we seed a little bit of it to be able to have it to use.
But it's really, it's really big.
It's six, seven feet when it's in flower.
So that's the Pennisetum White Lancer.
It's annual.
So then we've got, to the right-hand side here,
you've got Sporobolus, or the Prairie Dropseed.
And you've also got the Calamagrostis,
the fall feather reed grass.
Everybody uses which one?
Karl Foerster.
Okay?
But there's a fall bloomer that I like much, much better.
The Calamagrostis, I think-- I pronounce it brachytricha,
but it's the fall blooming feather reed grass.
And that's the one right smack in the middle.
And then kind of behind it is the goldenrod fireworks.
So there's some things going on,
and then Russian sage and geranium in here.
And so, actually, you know, our mum planting here extends
right into this bed, and then the tree
there is a serviceberry.
So we do have some fall color from that as well.
Another one, a combination that, oh, I don't know,
I came across and now I've kind of been,
as I look at it and see it, I use it all the time.
It's the witch hazel mixed with monkshood because you know
the witch hazels, the fall blooming one is really late.
But how late is monkshood?
Okay, monkshood is just coming into flower at this point.
And so monkshood and witch hazel, and it happens every year.
It's in my notes that this is, you know,
a combination that works every year.
And I think I have about 10 years of all of that,
to decipher all of that stuff.
But from the radio show, I kept that bloom page,
and so all of those combinations as to what works together
and that it don't just happen one season
but it happens every year.
Okay, then we mix all the different roses.
Now how many different perennial,
how many different shrub roses have we got?
You know, and there's more and more
of them coming out all the time.
So they're shrub roses, and they bloom,
they'll bloom right up through Thanksgiving.
Maybe not a lot of flowers, but they're still, you know
as we get into that late,
we really got to stretch to imagine
what we got for color and extenders.
Sedums, in all the different Sedums,
Autumn Joy is the hat in the bucket.
The one that we've always used.
The one that's always available.
It's just like in daylilies,
you know what's the one you've always got to have?
Yeah. It's always got to be Stella.
Then there's a couple of others in the
there's an annual statice
and also a perennial statice, Sea Lavender.
This is the perennial one,
but if you can find the annual one
you probably got to seed that yourself, if you're going to
use it, because I don't know the garden centers, anybody
that's going to grow the annual statice for fall sales.
It's a great season extender, though, for sure.
Bugbane, another one.
There's the white bottle brush-like flowers
to it from the one that flowers in the fall.
Still in bloom.
And then the different Asters again.
I took this because,
I took this again at the Chicago Botanic Garden,
but the Asters mixed with dahlias
and still the dahlias bloom.
So, roses, not only knock-outs but nearly wild.
Another one of my favorites.
Shrubs.
Hard to see, maybe a little bit picked out of this picture,
but this is hydrangeas.
And now in a world of hydrangeas, how many do we have again?
You know? We've got them two feet high.
We've got them six feet high.
The biggest thing, I think,
is pruning with all of those panicle-like hydrangeas.
As you prune them, remember, I guess, a couple of things.
Dormant pruning will come on the to-do things
for getting ready to winter.
You know, do you prune now or do you prune in the spring?
I wait until spring, but with the hydrangeas, again,
I think pruning is the key to those.
Remember they flower on current season's growth.
So I always tend to say cut everything off but leave about
six sets of buds with those so that you can keep
them where you want them.
Otherwise, people plant them, they look so nice for three or
four years when they're here,
and then all the sudden they're up here.
And then they don't know what to do with them anymore.
But pruning with the, again, with the hydrangeas.
But a great season extender.
We've got pink forms now.
We've got things that go red.
Quick Fire turns a little bit more red.
Some of them come really early.
So, you know, are they season extender?
Yeah, they're a summer extender.
Again, a White Lancer,
the big ornamental grass in the middle.
But probably the reason the slide is in here is
for the castorbean that's in the middle.
So I don't know if we extend much with the flowers,
but for sure with the foliage.
They are in it for height for whatever with that.
So it's something different, and that's castorbean.
Again, here I mentioned all the different Salvias early
and leucantha is that purplish-blue
one that's there in the middle.
Real butterfly magnets in the summer.
And there's a lot of them
that other big, tall, yellow one is also at the,
I seen at the garden.
And then we go to all of the ornamental grasses.
And how many ornamental grasses?
I mentioned Calamagrostis, brachytricha,
the fall feather reed grass.
But here's moor grass, M-O-O-R.
Molinia. Okay?
I mean, they're real see through.
Your foliage is only up about maybe waist high.
And then you've got the plumes,
and they're up, you know, they're up in your face.
So, some real height,
and you can even see through some of those.
So, moor grass is another one of those big ones
that's up there.
Panicum, the Panicum virgatum
or the switchgrass is another one.
Sometimes I find switchgrass to be a little bit aggressive
for my taste because I don't have time
to do all the division with it.
But some of the, Cloud Nine and Heavy Metal and North Winds
are three that probably maybe stay in place
a little bit better.
But switchgrass and then Karl Foerster
is the grass in the lower right.
And then we got the ornamental millets.
The ornamental millets are the annuals.
And you got Purple Majesty was one of the first to come out.
And now, I don't know, now there's eight
or 10 of them, I think, anyway.
So you got the ornamental millets,
and you can watch the birds with those.
Okay, I kind of showed those before,
but the brachytricha in the middle,
and to the very right is that Prairie Dropseed.
And then, I hope I got
little bluestem is the other one that I would say that we
use a little bit as a season extender
that's a little shorter.
Okay?
So Little bluestem is another one of the ornamental grasses.
And then all the different Miscanthus.
A little high for me, but they're there.
And they're season extenders late.
Another one is the Euphorbia, Diamond Frost.
We all know Diamond Frost.
I think that was one of the first ones to come out.
I don't know if it's an all-America winner for next season,
but there's a seed form now called Glamor.
And Glamor you're going to see next season,
and it will be a great annual.
It will be,
it may come up almost knee-high,
and as you plant one plant, it may be 2-2.5 feet around.
So the seed form of Euphorbia called Glamor
is going to be a good annual.
We've also got crabgrass down in the front too.
(laughter)
Herbs. Okay?
Think of all those parsleys.
The flat leaf, the curly leaf.
So we've got parsley that we can add.
As I mentioned, the Plectranthus and Dusty Miller.
I'm not a Dusty Miller fan, but we've had a couple of people
that have requested it so we've used it.
There's that Aster tataricus, that big, tall,
four or five footer.
Just remember, it's aggressive.
The tree on the very right, it's hard to see.
I think I took this slide about two weeks ago because now I
have an Acer truncatum behind that Aster, and that's fully
deep red in flower, in leaf now.
So...
Fruits, okay.
That's my picture for crabapples.
No, that's not crabapple.
That's Cotoneaster, the many flowered Cotoneaster.
Cotoneaster multiflorus.
Small scale tree.
But a great white flower in the spring.
And if you get the fruits in the sun.
I happen to--
When I seen this, it was in the late fall and the sun was to
the back through it and it was just a big glow of red,
and so I had to have one.
Cotoneaster multiflorus.
I don't see it around and used much, but, again,
it's a great fruit season extender.
Some of the other Cotoneasters, you know the really tiny
short ones have good pretty good flowers and fruit too.
Crabapple and now, I don't know, is it,
I would question, is it an extender?
Mine's bare of fruit now.
The birds have got is stripped clean.
Between that and my Ilex, I don't have many fruits left.
Hawthorne.
This is the bulb that I included.
Is it an extender? It's a summer extender maybe.
It's the Colchicums, the fall crocus.
And those--
And so, you know, it as beautiful three weeks ago
when I was taking pictures and putting all this together.
I got a great season extender,
and then we had that Saturday night frost,
and the next morning it was flatter than a pancake.
(laughter)
Oh, fall color one.
Okay, this is the Korean pear, Korean Sun, Pyrus fauriei.
Korean Sun I think is the
anyway, Korean Sun is the cultivar selection.
And it's got that orangish-red fall color,
but it's much earlier than all the rest of the Callery pear
or of all the pears because, you know,
most of them are now just beginning to turn,
if they're turning yet.
Most of them are glossy green yet.
And then Acer triflorum is a little bit earlier than Acer
japonicum and Acer griseum, the paperbark maple
and the full moon maple.
And Acer truncatum, all of those got that
really deep maroon red fall color.
But this is Acer triflorum, the three-leafed maple,
and it's again kind of that orangey-red,
but again another one of my favorites.
Maybe tolerates a little bit more salt than sugar maple.
Okay, this is the plant that came from Africa.
And couldn't you see all of those
from fall going into winter?
We'll get winter ornaments there.
But let's try to find it.
Okay, there it is. The hairy balloon plant.
Anybody ever heard of it?
Anybody ever seen it?
You've seen it? Okay.
- In DC?
In Washington, DC? Okay.
Well, that's not zone four.
Zone three, zone four.
And, you know, in the Chicago Botanic Garden
they do everything like that, and they may treat
I would imagine they treat it as an annual.
But it looked really good, and those fruits,
if I can back up, those fruits,
they look like little ornaments.
I could just see those with frost on them in the morning
or with a little bit of light snow on them.
I mean, boy, that's an extender into winter,
and we really need some of that.
There's one of those mums that was a reddish,
a reddish to the outside and then yellow to the inside.
We'll see if we can't find this one.
That's the name of it. Saga Nashiki.
So we'll see if we can,
we'll see what we can do with that one.
But, you know, they do things in a big way there.
Again, a public place.
Mums in baskets and hangers.
That's the atrium as you walk through.
And then they're hanging baskets that hang from all
the different, a lot of the different areas in the garden.
And, again, you know, things maybe all the same
so that there's a lot of continuity to planting
and things as you go through and as you see them.
So just again, you know,
what maybe I would say are some of our season extenders,
at least until Halloween and a couple of weeks beyond.
So we're always a step ahead.
Or at least try to be a step ahead.
And there's a lot of materials to use,
and so with all of that you don't ever have
to do the same thing twice.
Again, we've got foliage, we've flowers, you know grasses.
You got all the different things to think about to add
and to put together.
And so there's endless combinations.
And, again, all the different things depending
on what you want to do.
So you got to let your imagination go,
and then try to find the things that fit what you're doing
because you don't ever do the same thing twice.
(laughter)
And I've had people tell me to do the same thing because you
can't do it as good as you did it this year,
and it ends up that, yes, it's always better
than it was the year before.
So, with that, we'll go into some of our,
this getting ready for winter.
Okay, things that I talked about.
And on your handout, I kind of went through.
I went through my to-do thing, list,
and I went through from beginning to end.
And so maybe it doesn't fit exactly right or maybe some
things that you do early you can also do late or flip flop
back and forth, but, for the most part, I think I started
with early winter or early, late fall first and ended with
kind of like Christmas kind of things toward the end.
Okay, so we extend color as long as we can.
And again, this season, I would say more than,
well, maybe not more than any other
but at least as any other is that we water well.
And we don't water well in November.
We water well in August and September and October.
Now, that's hard sometimes to, you know, to get across,
the point to get across,
but with all your evergreens and trees
and all your shrubs and all your perennials,
remember your perennials.
You know, buds for next season are all there.
Whether they're up on top like the coneflowers
and the Rudbeckias and those that go the foliage on top now
or all of those that got buds underneath, the Coreopsis,
the peonies, hostas, all of those with buds underground.
And so remember that all of those things, you know,
they're already ready for winter.
So if we water in late November, you know,
we're not helping them.
We're helping them, but we're not helping them
as much as maybe we should, if we do it earlier.
Okay? So water earlier.
Leaf and debris cleanup.
I'll just tell you that as far as
when I was putting this as getting ready for winter,
getting ready for winter for me is making sure
that I've got fall things done.
And winter is an extension of fall.
For a lot of it.
We still do--
I've planted trees with frost in the ground two feet deep.
You know?
We piled up some firewood and we burned the whole thing
of frost out of the ground, planted the trees, put everything back.
We did that in January and February.
And we did that because we didn't want to rut up the lawns.
And bringing in some big four-inch and five-inch trees,
you know, that's how we could do it.
You plowed the snow to keep the paths open
and let the frost go in.
Then you went in and you burnt holes.
So there's always a way to do something
that's not in season,
or when maybe you would think about it.
And as gardeners we're always innovative,
and we're always doing that.
So leaf and debris cleanup.
You know, how clean do you have it?
Some customers it's got to be spick and span,
I don't want to see hardly anything.
And then the next one we can leave it go until spring,
can't we?
So, you know, you do it when you can.
Maybe one is how much time you have.
Time is a big factor now, you know, these days.
Time, we don't have enough time to do much of anything.
We definitely don't have time to put
all our containers together and do all of that.
So, time is very, very important.
So when you've got time and got the window of opportunity,
you know, that's when you do it.
Rose bushes and rose bush protection,
now with all the shrub rose.
The only protection I can say that I do is for hybrid teas.
And we'll come through as we do leaf cleanup now,
and we do the soil mounding over top of the graphed union
and the bud unions and those,
and then they sit until they freeze.
And then we come back in with evergreen boughs,
and that's kind of phase two.
So, you know, some years it's Christmas.
Some years it's been, like last year,
we froze up right around Halloween.
Had a hard time doing containers and greens
and containers for holiday because they were frozen solid.
I don't know if you remember that,
but I remember that the week before Thanksgiving already.
So we play the weather game there.
And so that protection for the rose bushes,
you know, again that second wave of protection because
once you get them frozen, you want them to stay frozen.
You don't want this freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw.
That's why maybe El Nino, is it good for us or not?
It's good if we get a good snow cover
and then we don't lose it.
But who knows, you know?
And we deal with it every year.
So, again, bait for mice.
Again, I think that's pretty important because,
you know, you may not have some crowns left
of some plants if you don't.
Siberian iris and catnip are a couple of those
that for sure we see every year that the mice are
in if we don't either bait or cleanup.
And typically to bait I use the little bait packets,
and I cut like PVC pipe, inch and a half,
and I make it about like toilet roll thingies.
And then we put it right in the runways and
right under the plants.
Then the cats won't get in.
The dogs and cats won't get in it.
So that's one way.
And in the hybrid teas, typically we'll put it
I put it, again, right at the bud union before we put our
compost over the top so that there's bait there, if they get
there, because if they make a home there, they got winter
food all winter long with your rose bushes.
Then we got bulb planting.
How many got their bulbs in the ground already?
How many are done? A few.
How many haven't started yet?
So, bulb planting, the big thing is
that they root before they freeze.
It doesn't matter,
it doesn't matter as many times as I've made some little
studies whether you plant them point side up, do you plant
them, you know, point side down?
Do you get them in, however.
I was told it doesn't matter how I put them in,
as long as I get them in the ground.
And we did that last year because of it being so frozen.
And when we were bulb planting we kind of dug a hole,
we threw five bulbs in it, and covered it up.
And you think I could tell what happened this spring?
No.
At least with tulips.
So that was my, that was my--
Where that's worked for me.
Okay?
Winterizing.
Again, water features and pumps,
if you've got any of that kind of stuff,
you know that's probably pretty early.
Water lines probably can wait a little bit longer,
but if you've got pumps up out of the ground
and those kinds of things,
those kinds of things you probably want
to make sure you take care of those earlier
rather than later.
And then I typically, we do compost in flower beds
in the fall every year.
Again, as we're bulb planting,
that's when we add our compost to them.
And now this year I'm adding our white mold
treatments to fall because I've seen some
We've had, at least where we do annual
season after season after season,
is I'm beginning to see some white mold,
especially as we use zinnias.
And so we're kind of trying to cycle out of zinnias
in some of those beds,
and then we're treating for white mold.
And now I think the recommendation
I had was to do it in the fall.
So that's happening now.
Turning in a vegetable garden.
I think that's important in the fall
rather than waiting until spring.
And all your, you know, again, all the grass clippings
that go into that or the leaf mold or whatever,
as you turn all of that into your garden.
The rose bush protection phase two again
are the evergreen boughs, and I only do it on hybrid teas.
If anything on the shrub roses,
some of them I may dump a pile of compost in the
middle of it, but I don't do much more than that.
Dormant pruning, I put it here because you can do
it if you want in the fall.
As soon as everything's dropped their leaves
or we've got all the fall color now and everything,
you can probably prune.
Spirea potentilla, hydrangeas, all of that stuff.
Anything that flowers on new wood in the summer
you can prune dormant.
So I just tend to do it spring
rather than fall because I'm doing summer and fall
catch-up rather than, at that point, rather than spring.
And then, again, you've got holiday decorating later.
And then whatever containers,
if you got those ceramic containers and things,
you probably can't leave them out.
I at least tip them upside down.
And then, from there, you know, for me at least,
it goes to spring orders and everything for the next season.
And, in fact, that's late because I think
now I probably got 80% of it already done.
But that's then and then our leaf piles.
And I always pile leaves by my vegetable garden
because I use them all summer there.
So I make my leaf piles late.
With that, I'll open it to questions.
(applause)