- Hi, thanks for joining us for the Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Too cold for a vegetable garden?

Many herbs can be grown successfully in a window.

Also, fall is the time to plant spring bulbs.

That's just ahead on the Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

- (female announcer) Production funding for the Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South is provided by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

[upbeat country music] - Welcome to the Family Plot.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Joining me today is Dr.

Kelly.

Dr.

Kelly is a retired horticulture professor.

And Lee Sammons will be joining me later.

Dr.

Kelly, always good to have you here.

- Thank you so much, Chris.

It's such a joy and a pleasure to be here, as you know.

[laughs] - Oh, how about that?

This is gonna be fun.

So let's talk about indoor herbs, all right?

- Okay, well, you know it's gonna be getting really cold weather soon.

And to extend your harvest of fresh herbs, it's always good to bring a few pots in before the first killing frost.

And some of the good choices, in my particular idea of it, are these that I have that I brought along here today.

And a few of 'em require a little bit less light than some of the others.

Now, when I say less light, I mean, they still require a good bit of sunlight, preferably in a south-facing window if you have that.

- Mm-hmm.

- But you also can use grow lights.

But let me back up and tell you about those that require a little less light of the ones that I brought.

- Okay, sure.

- Parsley is one that doesn't require just totally full sun all day like most of the herbs do.

It will do okay with a little lower light.

And of course, mint.

Mint can just about be grown anywhere.

So it's a good one to choose for their lower light situations.

And chives also doesn't require- - That one, I didn't know that about chives.

- And rosemary, which is really, really easy to grow indoors, if you don't overwater.

- Yeah.

[laughs] - You cannot overwater this plant.

And that's what kills most indoor plants is overwatering, particularly those that do not like wet feet like rosemary.

And it's, of course, some of these are evergreen throughout the winter for us, or further south, you know?

But basil, I'm telling you, you have to bring it in because if this gets cold weather, it doesn't even like below 50 degrees.

So that's a great choice for an herb to extend the harvest by bringing indoors.

'Cause it's gone, buddy, when it gets cold weather.

It is an annual.

Oregano, let me see where, here's oregano.

Oregano's a good one too to grow indoors because in our climate, it can stay more or less evergreen unless we have really harsh weather.

But it's a good one, you know, for people that live up north or wherever that it gets really, really cold to bring that one in and grow.

'Cause everybody likes oregano, right?

- Yeah, yeah.

- What am I missing?

Oh, yeah, thyme.

- You got the thyme.

- Yeah, the thyme is a good one to bring in too, you know, because it just wants to sorta get really sick looking in our winters.

Or if it's not gonna die out completely like it tends to do in my garden.

- It gets sparse, you know?

- Yeah, it does get very sparse.

Thyme is sparse.

Yes it is.

Okay, so much of that nonsense, we need to move on.

Well, one thing you can, always about vegetables, when we talk about vegetable gardening is those that you don't eat the fruit or the flower or the bloom like broccoli or something, they can have a little less light like parsley and lettuce and, you know, the root crops like carrots and beets.

Anyway, so that's why those, you know, are some that will, you know, do a little better with a little lower light.

But again, low light, not meaning two hours of, you know, a light in the room.

So they need a south-facing window.

And if you don't have that, which a lot of us don't, you can buy, you know, the grow lights.

Which they're all over the internet, you know?

They're very, very popular now for people for seed starting and things like that.

So there's no limit to the combinations and the ways you can get 'em.

And because herbs and succulents require real high light in the wintertime, these are real popular with those kind of people that grow those kind of plants indoors.

And incandescent lights and some of the LEDs just don't have the broad spectrum that plants require for photosynthesis.

- Got it.

- But there are, like I say, grow lights out there that help a great deal.

- Okay.

- So, okay, the ones to not overwater, of course, are all of them, particularly the rosemary, the oregano, the Mediterranean herbs.

You know, rosemary, oregano.

What's that other one down there?

Thyme.

So those, you just have to be really careful about.

So how do we do this?

Or what do you do?

How do you set all this up?

Well, you know, plants require a little bit of humidity.

They like a little air circulation.

How do you do that in an old, dry, winter home?

- Yeah, how do you do that?

- Yeah, kinda hard to do.

So one of the things that you can do is put your herbs in a little pebble tray like I have here.

Chris had to bring this in because it weighs about 40 pounds.

- It is heavy.

- And the reason it does is this is, you know how you had those little tabletop fountains?

Yeah, you had the rocks and stuff around the thing?

You know, worked about a year and got scum in it and you're like, well, what am I gonna do with this now?

So I threw the pump away and a little pyramid and I thought, man, that'd make a really good little plant tray.

So you know, it works really well for that purpose.

And I have my pretty rocks in here.

But the idea is, y'all, that if you water the plant, a little bit of water's gonna stay in here, and that causes some humidity.

- Okay.

- Now, the bad part of that is that if you have moisture and organic matter, it turns out that fungus gnats, the dreaded indoor fungus gnats, and you can't get rid of little buggers and they like organic matter of any kind, soil, whatever, to do their reproduction-type cycle.

So if you water from the base, you're not getting the soil wet and you don't have moisture out here, so you don't have the problem as much 'cause they gotta have some moisture too - Right, right.

- But the other thing is then you can put either really sharp sand like concrete sand, or river sand, which is called sharp sand.

Because it has sharp edges, and it will gut the little critters as they crawl across the top of the soil.

Or you can use the diatomaceous earth, which we were talking about previously that works for slugs and a lot of other things.

And gardeners know of diatomaceous earth.

So that can be used too to prevent the fungus gnats.

Now, once you get 'em, you can get rid of 'em by putting out the little yellow sticky traps or doing insecticidal soap.

But it seems contradictory to say that, oh, you know, always water from the bottom, so you're not, you know, getting the wetness and the fungus and all this mess that can happen with root rot.

You're getting it all to drain out, but then you're, and keep the dirt out of this thing.

'Cause then you have a breeding ground for the gnats.

Right, so but then you say, "Well, I don't wanna cause a big scum mess."

And I thought of this coming over here, and I have done this, but I forgot.

But you got all this water sitting in here and you're thinking, "Well, you know, they don't need to sit in water."

That's never good for a plant that's not like a swamp plant.

So get your turkey baster, ladies, and suck the extra water out and squirt it down the sink.

It works.

I tried it.

- And it works!

[chuckles] - Yeah, you have to move your little rocks around a little bit and get down there and then [vocalizes], and then just squirt it in the sink, yeah, to keep the, you know, keep the funkiness out of your little- [chuckles] - How much water would you put in here, though?

- Well, I would, for it to be taken up from the bottom, you know, to water, I would probably put in this little thing about an inch maybe.

- Okay.

- And then, I'd watch it.

And maybe you do not have to suck any of it out.

Plants suck it all up, so maybe you don't have to do that, but you just don't need 'em setting in water is the key.

And you don't want a breeding ground, you know, for some of the fungus little things.

- So let's take a look at the diatomaceous earth.

So you just kinda- - Yeah, yeah.

- You just sprinkle it in.

- The thing, though, about the diatomaceous earth that I don't like is once it gets wet, it's ineffective.

So you have to put it on dry soil at the top.

So that's another reason to water from the bottom.

So yeah, want me to tilt it over?

- Yeah, tilt it over.

- See the white kinda white powdery stuff?

But anyway, yeah, it works pretty good as long as it stays dry.

- That's right, yeah.

- Which is kinda like, well, doggone, you know, you always have to put out more slug bait and stuff because it's, you know, once the diatomaceous gets wet- - Yeah.

- You gotta reapply it.

- Because it's ineffective, right?

- Yeah, yeah, 'cause it turns to more like talcum powder.

So anyway, well, let's go back to some of the other things we need to think about.

You need to, you know, use a plastic pot because clay can dry out in our indoor environments.

You know, or glazed clay would be okay.

Needs to have holes in the bottom because I don't care how careful you are, you're gonna put too much water if it doesn't have holes in the bottom and it dries, you know, flows on through.

- That's a true statement.

- So, yeah, yeah.

And the light requirement, again, you can use the grow lights, like I said, and I have been growing this now for about a week under my, you know how a lot of people in their kitchens have the under counter lights?

- Oh, yes.

- That are under the cabinets.

Under the cabinets, you know, they got the lights.

So I put this up to get it up close to the light.

I put it on a TV table, but it's just a little table and I think that works pretty good.

- So it actually works pretty good.

- Yeah, it works pretty good.

- Okay.

- I mean, there's better setups if you use the grow lights.

Now, I'm telling you, I'm a believer in the grow lights.

- I see.

I hear you talking about it.

- Actually, yes, actually, way, way back in the midst of time as an early gardener, I got my husband to build a little table with a frame that held two fluorescent light fixtures.

And there was even grow lights back then like 40, fifty years ago.

They had 'em from different companies.

So my daddy bought me several of these lights.

And so I had Jerry then build me this table with this frame, and I had 'em on these little dog chains that I could move the lights up and down, you know, according to how my plants grew.

And so I found that old table when we cleaned out an old building the other day, and I got it all set up.

And one of the, even the old fluorescent thing, you know, the old fluorescent light fixtures, they weigh 50 pounds.

You ever know, pick one of 'em up?

So I set it all up, and the darned if the lights did not still work.

- Wow, so they did?

- Yeah, yeah.

So I think I took a picture and sent it to y'all, and it looks kind of a pink, puts kind of a pink glow on the plants.

But they grow like son-of-a-guns under that light.

- And it's still effective?

- Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, amazing.

- All right.

- So I mean, they work, they work.

- So doc, give us your take-home message for growing the herbs indoors.

- Oh, okay, well, just be vigilant about watching them and making sure you do not overwater.

Try to figure out to get the light requirement right, so they will grow.

And if they're not growing, it's obvious to you because they'll be elongated and spindly.

- Yeah, good point.

- And have weak, you know, stems and yellow leaves.

So you know, they work pretty well.

Now, if you make it all through the winter with 'em, if you hadn't cut 'em all down and used them in cooking and stuff and you've got 'em still in the spring, you have to be careful moving them out because they've been growing indoors under a lot different conditions.

So you have to kinda acclimate 'em, you know, to bringing 'em back outdoors.

But it's a lot of fun to have fresh herbs during the winter.

- A lot of fun, Dr.

Kelly says, couldn't you tell?

Thank you, Dr.

Kelly.

That was fun.

Thank you much.

[chuckling] [upbeat country music] - This is a Swiss chard we grew last winter in our annual bed, and we transplanted it here in the spring.

And it's been doing well ever since.

But now, we have a problem.

If you look at this leaf, and even most of these plants, this thing is chewed.

This is a caterpillar.

I can tell that because if I look down right here, I can see caterpillar droppings.

They look like little grenades, and so I know it's a caterpillar.

Now, I've searched through these plants and I can't find any of them.

It is likely the imported cabbage worm.

They like to hide during the day, so they're hard to find.

You can tell that because of the amount of damage that we have here.

And also, that we have entire stalks that have been cut off.

So it's likely the imported cabbage worm, but it could also be the cabbage looper.

But either way, the treatment is the same for both of them.

All you need to do is spray with some Bt or some Bacillus thuringiensis.

That's an organic caterpillar-icide.

They'll eat that, it'll give them a stomachache, and they'll die.

And then, our chard will, after it has grown new leaves, it won't have this damage anymore, we can enjoy it through the winter and into the spring.

And maybe, we can even get it through next summer as well.

[upbeat country music] - All right, Mr.

Lee.

- Hi, Chris.

This is the fall season.

Time we wanna be thinking about planting our spring bulbs.

- Okay, so what do we need to do to prepare our beds for those bulbs?

- Okay, if you've got a bed, you wanna loosen up, till it some, so that they'd be easier to plant the bulbs.

There are several different ways that you can plant the bulbs with several different tools.

All of 'em work better if the ground has been tilled or loosened.

- Okay, now, what are some of the tools that we need to use?

- Today, we have several different tools that you can use.

We have a hand trowel if the soil is loose that you can pry out the soil and do it.

A lot of stores sell this type of bulb planter that was old-fashioned from some point.

It's very hard to dig a hole if you don't have really loose soil, so if you have three or four bulbs, that might be fine.

If you're planting 100 to 200 bulbs, that's pretty hard work.

- It's gonna be hard, okay.

- Hard work.

The other tool we have today is one that has a drill that goes onto your regular portable drill that you can use in the yard, and that's very easy to drill a hole in loose soil.

- Okay, I've actually used that before.

- Everybody should use this.

- Okay.

All right.

Now, what kind of bulbs will you be planting for us today?

- We're gonna be planting some tulip bulbs today, and we also have some Narcissus that we can, daffodils that we can plant today.

- Okay, okay.

Now, when is the best time to plant those?

- Best time to plant is in late November and first of December.

You want the soil temperature to go down to about 55, 50 degrees.

- Okay.

- And usually, that's when the leaves have already turned.

And we're starting fall and past peak color and season.

- All right, so you want to demonstrate to us how you-- - All right, I'll show you.

- Put the bulbs in the ground?

- Tulip bulb has a top that we wanna make sure that that's up.

- Okay.

- And the roots on the bottom.

The reason we plant in the springtime, I mean fall, is because roots will be growing during the wintertime to grow.

Okay, we wanna plant 'em.

Here, we had dug a hole.

We're planting a multiple group of tulips.

So we'll have a nice cluster in our landscape.

It just won't be one individual planted in a row.

- Now, how deep do we need to plant those?

- You want 'em about five inches deep- - Five inches.

- When you plant 'em.

- Okay.

- Okay, and once you have planted the tulips, you wanna make sure that you cover the soil back over and make sure that you water it well.

- Okay, so we don't have to add, you know, any fertilizer or anything?

- Don't have to add any nutrients.

Most of our tulips or bulbs are not heavy feeders.

So if you haven't done a soil test, then you can do that.

Make sure where your nutrient level is.

- Okay, all right.

So next, you demonstrate using the drill?

- Yes, we can use the drill.

And what that does is just augers down into the soil, makes a nice hole for you, and it comes out.

And then, you have a nice hole to plant your daffodil bulb in this right depth.

And just cover it over.

So it makes it real easy to plant.

- Okay, now, how deep was that just in case- - That was about five inches deep.

- About five inches deep.

- Five inches deep.

- Got you.

- So that's the way you would plant 'em in the fall, but it makes it a lot easier if the soil is tilled up.

- Sure.

- With this type of planter, you can plant in soil that has not been tilled You can go down into your yard in a hard bed.

So if you want to naturalize a lot of bulbs, then this would be the tool that you'd want to use.

- Okay, okay.

All right, so if you just want to use a plain old trowel, though?

- You wanna take a tiller or shovel and loosen it up.

- Just loosen it up.

[chuckles] You still wanna loosen it up, right, so we can get the bulbs in it.

- Right, get your soil loose.

'Cause this will not cut through hard soil unless the bed's been loosened up.

- Okay, and just demonstrate that for us, though, just using that since we have it tilled up.

- If the soil is loose, then what you wanna do is twist and turn.

And it'll pull all the soil out.

- I got you, right.

- And then, you have a nice hole to put it in.

And this is about five inches deep, so that's what you wanna plant in.

Then, you just knock your soil back down.

- Okay.

Yeah, I can see that being pretty tough if the ground is not tilled.

- Yeah, if the ground's not loosened, this is a really hard tool to use.

- Okay, now, can you explain to us about actually storing those bulbs, though?

What's the best way to do that?

- Right, you may be purchasing the bulbs earlier- - Sure.

- Than first of November, so you want to put the bulbs in some type of refrigeration about like your refrigerator, 38 to 50 degrees, to keep 'em cool for about eight weeks before you plant the tulips.

Make sure that you don't have any type of fruit in there because ethylene gas will kill the flower bud in the tulip bulbs on that.

- Okay.

All right, so once you do that then, pull 'em out and you're good to go.

- Pull 'em out and good to go.

And soil's cold, plant 'em and forget about 'em.

- Okay, so the bulbs have to have some type of chilling requirement.

- They have to have a chilling requirements to be able to bloom in properly.

- All right.

- If you don't do that, then we have a warm winter, then they don't bloom well.

- Okay.

Well, Lee, we appreciate that demonstration with the bulbs.

- Glad to do it.

- Okay, thank you much.

[upbeat country music] - It is that time of year, y'all, to be thinking about bringing in your houseplants that have been outside all summer, enjoying the nice, warm weather.

Well, now, it's getting colder.

And tender plants like this Dieffenbachia have to be carried indoors if we want 'em to live through the winter.

And what do you do before you do that?

Well, you need to inspect them really well to get off any little trespassing insects or even frogs.

I've carried in tree frogs before, which are kinda nice, but then again, they're kinda bizarro in the house.

And you also need to probably clean your pot.

Get all the algae off, and you need to tip it over.

And a lot of times, you'll have slugs and pill bugs and other little undesirable critters that will be coming in with the pot.

So I'd clean my pot up real good.

Inspect it to make sure there's no insects or anything like that, and make sure you don't have fire ants because I have actually brought in fire ants and just didn't know it.

So you need to make sure that you inspect the pot for that and take measures to prevent bringing those in.

[upbeat country music] - All right, here's our Q&A segment.

Y'all ready?

- Yep.

- These are some excellent questions.

Here's our first viewer email.

"I have a 4-year-old orange tree I grew from seed.

"It has thorns.

Will it ever have fruit?"

And this is Virginia from Russellville, Arkansas.

So what do you think about that, Dr.

Kelly?

- Well, yeah, I commend them for- - I do.

- Yeah, 4-year-old is a pretty good size, it looks like from the picture.

- From a seed.

- I saw the picture.

But the thing is when you do that, it's like growing a lot of our fruit trees from seed, you are just hit or miss whether you're gonna have it come true to form, true to fruit of what the parent was.

Because, you know, to develop all these really great fruits, we do a lot of crossbreeding and even grafting.

- Yeah.

- You know, so it could be that the root stalk, you know, the the top died, the scion died and the root stalk is coming up from the root, you know, with that.

But if they grew up from a seed, then he's definitely gone back to the original parents.

So he could, you know, he could get fruit, he may not.

- Right.

- You know, but probably he will, but they say from what I have read about orange trees, some from my friends in Florida, they say they gotta be at least 9 or 10 years old anyway before they're even gonna think about having fruit.

So good luck.

Yeah, I mean, if he enjoys having the tree, I'd say just go for it.

See what happens.

- Okay, yeah, Peter?

- The thorns are a natural thing.

Especially with seed-grown trees, you get lots of thorns young.

Young citrus tends to have thorns on it.

As it gets older, you get fewer and fewer thorns.

But if you get a water sprout up in your tree, it will have thorns.

Or if you have a new branch growing from close to the base of your tree, it doesn't have to be off the root stalk, 'cause a lot of 'em are grafted.

But it'll have thorns.

But those thorns will disappear as the tree gets older.

- Right.

- But yeah, probably a lot of times you're gonna end up with a strange fruit.

It will fruit eventually, but it might be, you know, a lot of it might be really bitter.

It might have lots and lots of seeds in it, things like that.

If you're looking for an orange to actually get fruit off of to eat, probably the best thing would be to go to your local nursery and buy an orange tree from them.

- Yeah, I would say go to your local Extension Office there in Arkansas.

They would definitely have publications-- - On citrus?

- On fruit trees, yes, that you can grow in that area for sure.

But yeah, I commend, you know, Virginia for, you know, trying it.

Yeah, I definitely do.

- Yeah, I do too.

- It's a fun experiment.

- It's always fun to try to grow something from a seed fruit tree like that, yeah.

- I think that is good.

So thank you, Ms.

Virginia, appreciate the picture as well.

Good luck.

Here's our next viewer email.

"Every year, my vegetables get leaf spots and wilt in June.

How do I get rid of this sickness from my soil?"

And this is Mike in Zone 7.

He says, "It happens to his green beans, his peppers, onions, eggplant cuces, et cetera."

Can you help him out, Dr.

Kelly?

- Well, I think that, I mean, in our climate where we are in the South in our high humidity and heat, we just have to almost do a preventive fungicidal program with our vegetables because you're just gonna get leaf spot.

Now, the wilt is kinda something else.

I'm not sure what that might be like.

You were saying earlier, Peter, it could be a case of overwatering, whether he's doing that or not.

But there are soil-borne pathogens that cause a wilt.

So if he's growing-- - Yeah, Southern blight being one that just came to mind.

- Exactly, yeah.

And so- - And lots of water encourages that.

- Sure.

It definitely does.

And it's nothing you can do about that.

You about just got to move your plantings because it's there in the soil, you know?

- Yeah, no, there's nothing you can do to treat your soil as a homeowner.

- Yeah.

- But yeah, I'd really watch your watering.

Make sure you're not overwatering.

Make sure you're not overhead watering.

Make sure the water is being applied directly to the soil and not in a violent way.

So don't spray the soil so it all splashes up.

Yeah, you know, if you, you know, just like the hose dripping on the bottom of the plant.

You know, at the soil level would probably be the best way to water it.

Just make sure you don't overwater.

You know, it maybe you're in a low spot, so, you know, kinda look at that.

You know, grow your plants up on a little hill.

Like, you know, raise the area right around them.

That might help, but then, yeah, the fungicide treatments.

- Yeah, I think he really needs to develop a program, and the Extension Office can help him with that, obviously.

What kind of fungicide and insecticides you can use to kinda keep your diseases under control.

'Cause you're gonna have diseases when you grow vegetables, on your beans, the peppers.

- Definitely in a Zone 7.

- Oh, yeah.

- With the humidity, whatever.

So a couple things I like to mention.

I think Peter knows I'm going with this, I love cultural practices, right?

So crop rotation, anytime you're dealing with vegetables.

Yeah, I mean, that's a must.

So mulch, I think, is a must.

You know, straw or a pine needle.

- To keep the splash back.

- Splashing down.

- The impact of the splashing.

I'm always big on resistant varieties 'cause there are some that are out there.

- Good point, Chris.

- So resistant varieties is something else.

And then, lastly, I think adding organic matter to the soil helps, though.

Because those microbes can help suppress diseases, right, at the end of the day.

- Good point.

All good point.

- So those are the things I think about when I think about vegetable gardening and cultural practices.

- Yeah.

That's why you're such a good gardener.

- I don't know about that.

[everyone chuckling] I don't know about that.

So thank you for that question, Mr.

Mike.

Experience, you know, is the best teacher.

Here's our next viewer email.

"When should I bring my poinsettias inside, and do I leave them in a well-lit room?"

And this is Melvin from Tupelo, Mississippi.

Tupelo, so Mr.

Melvin, we're gonna get out the way.

We're gonna let Dr.

Kelly have this.

She knows a little something about poinsettias, right?

- Well, you've giving every one of 'em.

[everyone chuckling] - So what do you think about that?

- Well, yeah, he needs to bring it in probably sooner rather than later because we're getting on in close to the first, you know, killing frost.

And it definitely will kill it.

And it doesn't like even really cool nights, so we've been getting some, you know, pretty cool nights.

So I would say you need to probably go ahead and move it in.

And if he's getting it to flower is gonna be a whole 'nother issue.

And he didn't ask anything about that, so I'm not gonna address that.

He's just saying that in a well-lit room, yes, obviously, because it's a plant and it needs high light to stay vigorous and do well.

So yeah, well-lit room.

And actually, a south-facing window would be ideal during the winter 'cause you're gonna get that low in the sky, southern sun.

And this is a high-light plant, so for it to do well, it's gonna need a really bright window or some artificial light that's, you know, pretty broad spectrum to be like more like sunlight.

- Got it.

Anything you wanna add to that, Peter?

- Watch your watering.

- Ah.

- Oh, sure.

Exactly.

Good point.

Yeah, you kill 'em by overwatering real easy.

- All right, that's a good point.

So hope that helps you out Mr.

Melvin from Tupelo down your neck of the woods, right?

- Yep.

- And so, Dr.

Kelly, Peter, that was fun.

That was fun.

We learn so much, don't we?

- Yeah, sure we do.

- We learned so much, so thank y'all so much.

Remember, we love to hear from you.

Send us an email or letter.

The email address is questions@familyplotgarden.com, and the mailing address is Family Plot 7151 Cherry Farms Road, Cordova, Tennessee 38016.

Or you can go online to familyplotgarden.com.

That's all we have time for today.

Thanks for watching.

If you want to learn more about growing herbs indoors or out, head on over to familyplotgarden.com.

Be sure to join us next week for the Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

Be safe.

[upbeat country music] [acoustic guitar chords]