Great Garden Questions - Dogs in the RV, Seeding, Wood Chips, Canada Wildflowers, Invasive Plants

Welcome to HortTube. My name is Jim Putnam. This is the garden question and answer video that I do pretty much every Sunday. You can ask gardening questions down in the comments below the video and that's where we pick from each week. I've got enough about half of these are from two weeks ago and half of them are from this past week and we probably have enough to do an extra video at some point here coming up as well and I've talked about a live Q&A and as soon as we have we're in southern Ontario right this minute and we're staying in Bronte Provincial Park. That's where I'm filming this and it's not the best internet in the world so I didn't want to try to do a live Q&A here. I'm going to wait till I get to some place where we have good enough internet to reliable internet that we can do a live Q&A and have you guys ask questions during that. Videos from this past week that went up. The second video from North Creek that we shot on some perennials that are like season extending perennials. This is a perfect example of that. The Saladago canadensis that's in front of me right now that's blooming. Canadensis and we are in Canada. There are lots of species of Saladago but this one is the most common one here. Great looking plant even before it flowers and it has such a long flower period and I've actually been making a joke of this as we've been traveling. If you follow me over on Instagram I've been kind of shooting photos all over the place of what you know the Saladago that comes up in just absolutely crazy places in you know very popular areas as we're traveling around Niagara Falls and other places. It's just all over the place this time of year. It's kind of it's kind of hidden in the background you know all season and then boom September comes and here it is everywhere in the garden or on roadsides and everywhere. What was I saying? Okay the North Creek video that was in that video the Saladago and then there's a tour the 16th tour video went up on Thursday as you're watching this on Sunday and then hopefully Saturday because I'm shooting this a little earlier in the week will be the white flower farm visit that we made a couple of weeks ago maybe three weeks ago now as as we're traveling and I haven't gotten that video. I just got that video edited so it should have been up before you're seeing this or I didn't have good enough internet to do so. Let's see so let's get to some gardening questions. Oh thank you very much for those of you who bought the Learn to Garden video series last month on the $50 discount. There are continuing discounts below the videos for the weekly garden planner and the Learn to Garden video series which are over on the website HortTube.com. Gardening questions let's see I'm going to go back into some of them from the from last week that I didn't answer. So somebody had bought a Dwarf Burford Holly that had red berries on them but then none have developed since. Do they need a male female and how do you know between a male and a female? Well the if you buy a holly and it's and you look up the latin name for it if it says Ilex X okay whatever it is so Ilex X Dwarf Burford it was it it's it's an interspecies hybrid and they're typically self-pollinating and so you'll get that with Dwarf Burford, Nellie Stevens, lots of them. You can end up if you only have one plant you know even though they're self-fruiting that may not be the absolute best way. When I typically see Dwarf Burford and Nellie Stevens and a lot of the older crosses that are really full of berries I see them at like a multi like a bigger row of them a bigger grouping of them and it tends to maybe draw in more pollinators to get those to get them pollinated. Again on the same plant they have to be pollinated but one may not be bringing them in or number two you've got it in too much shade it's under some sort of stress you know it's not it's not located in the in the proper space so there could be a lot of reasons but I really think that even self-fruiting plants tend to you know as examples blueberries and other things you can get self-fruiting blueberry varieties but if you put one in I just tend to see less fruit than if I put in three of them. I think you're drawing in more pollinators number one just because you have more flowers available and then I think they just like to cross between the plants more so there it's not like they're choosing self-fruiting number one they would rather have another one to do it. There you go there's that but it should be self-fruiting. Let's see if you harvest echinacea seeds should they be seeded into the ground now or stored and then do they need to be cold any cold stratification yes so you can collect your echinacea seed and then after a frost or freeze in your area you can actually just go ahead and plant the seed directly in the ground at that point and then lightly cover it so hopefully the birds don't take the seed from you so that leaves for me from being a nurseryman for all those years that leaves too much that leaves that that leaves too much room for error right for something to go wrong for them to wash away for the the bed to become weedy before they actually germinate the following spring and then I can't tell weeds from echinacea when they're first germinating or the birds eat them so what I would rather do is collect them store them for the winter and then stratify stratify them in their refrigerator so you could you know put them in the refrigerator for about 30 days they need about you'll read different things but if they're in the ground if you've seeded them directly in the ground they probably need 60 80 days of stratification something like that but in the refrigerator you could speed that up and they need about 30 days which is less than other things but it still requires some stratification this means it needs to spend some time cold basically not frozen but cold in order to it it's nature's way of plants not being tricked right it doesn't want to germinate unless it's already been cold through the winter so if you get like a fault spring in the middle of winter it won't germinate the plants won't leaf out things don't start growing they have to stay dormant for a certain period of time so basically and then basically we're coming back around and tricking them into germinating so I'd rather store them put them in the refrigerator for 30 days and germinate them in the house and then put them in the garden that way I know I'm going to get exactly what I'm after which is new echinacea in the garden another thing here at Bronte Provisional Park that's beautiful right now is the staghorn sumac but you can see the fall color is a little premature it's a little dry up here there's been we've noticed as we've traveled further north that it's been dry in this area as well which is this really beautiful red on in this time of year and then of course as you know the next few weeks it'll develop more and more of the red and the leaves as well most of these stands of sumac in here probably between six and eight feet tall something like that very healthy very vigorous native we don't get much of this in our area but from about our area north more and more and more and up here in southern Ontario just tons of this staghorn sumac and it's of course you know again I'm gonna get the uh I'm gonna get the uh salad I go in almost every shot right this uh right this second but uh we're gonna we're gonna bounce around as we go I meant to say that right at the beginning we're gonna bounce around in the park here and show you some of the things that are blooming right here at the uh late summer and early fall and I definitely want to make this more and more of an emphasis of the channel is that we're watching birds in here eating some berries on a couple things that we'll show you and uh you know watching pollinators take advantage of these late season late season things uh somebody um purchased a beauty berry it's just an 18 inch stalk um it flowered and buried of course if you get any new growth on a beauty berry you're going to get berries and you're going to get flowers and then berries as that growth happens during the summer uh should they cut the single stalk down in the late winter to encourage more stalks or will more emerge if it's not cut back definitely more are going to emerge on it but I think you're going to want to slow down that main stalk no matter what so I'd probably cut I wouldn't cut it all the way down but any cutting you do on it will encourage some other um some other suckering to occur down at the base of it um or branching for sure but maybe cut it in half um I don't want to tell somebody to cut something all the way to the ground and then nothing happened but just cut it in half in the late winter while it's dormant and you'll have no problem uh getting those to uh to uh become shrubbier uh in in the future but when we root something sometimes if we don't cut that terminal growth at the top on the rooted cutting that piece just continues to go I really like to take a piece on something like that and actually cut that top you know when I was actually rooting it and that would have already produced kind of a multi-trunked uh shrub uh immediately but if I just take if I just take the terminal growth on something like this sometimes that growth will just continue on that one piece rather than branching we'll start with this up close to these seeds on the jack-in-the-pulpit uh here we are uh usually by mid-summer so they've kind of died back to the uh ground uh completely but you can still see the uh this cluster of seeds quite beautiful when you're walking by and and see this and you know that this was a jack-in-the-pulpit earlier in the season they're actually pollinated by like gnats and flies and uh interesting things there was a question uh last week about um the stellar ruby magnolia uh and since it's fragrant in the evening uh is it uh the moths and bats and things potentially uh pollinate them I actually I actually don't know magnolias magnolias there's some interesting magnolias that actually capture bees in them they have the bees land in them and then they close the flower up on them and they leave trap them in there for some period of time and then open uh so they have different strategies um each of them probably depending on where the where they evolved you know on uh but we think again definitely want to expand our thoughts on what a pollinator can be because it can be a hummingbird or a bat or um a gnat which is I got a lot of gnats around me right this second give you all kinds of things uh pollinate pollinating plants uh out there in the world and they're all probably they're all they're all definitely important uh one other uh plant that I'll point out before I do the next question this is Eliagnus umbelata we have three different species of invasive uh Eliagnus in our area in Raleigh but umbelata seems to be the most cold tolerant because it's up here in southern Ontario it's going to be it's got a little red fruit on it this one doesn't have any I wish we'd stopped at one that did have the red fruit on them right now but you can see this thing's capable of making a tremendous amount of seed and uh you know when I see umbelata in the you know again they're invasive uh for sure but when I see it growing typically it's not like colonizing a big giant space it's one plant here and one plant there Eliagnus pungens on the other hand when we see it uh invading a spot it can just absolutely take an entire half acre uh and it has this like two-part ability to climb uh and also be shrubby so we've seen it like climb up basically climb up through trees supporting itself to get light so that it can feed itself down in the understory of the trees but again invasive uh probably the birds are taking the fruit off of it it's probably made itself you know right at home here you know with the native you know with the native birds and that kind of thing but it's uh interesting to see it all the way up here in southern Ontario because this is one that's in my neighborhood in Raleigh you know in the in the in the wooden spaces as well uh next uh let's see next question somebody wants to know our um wood chip uh process um in the garden this is a pretty complex one and this is the type of thing in learn the learn to garden video series that I went through was a soil building uh with the uh wood chips and I got another wood chip um question coming up a little bit later uh as well this is like I said I should rename the channel um wood chips with Jim Putnam because I get so many wood chips or red buds with Jim Putnam or Laura Petalum with Jim Putnam there's a lot of things that are recurring themes on the channel for sure process for us was just we cut our grass down to almost nothing and then we buried it in wood chips we actually had the benefit of putting down a little bit of compost from soil cube first and then put the wood chips on top and then we let them break down they're going to break down at different rates depending on where you are if you're in a dry climate in the southwest um it's going to take a while for you to have enough moisture probably in it for it to break down if you're in the southeast it's probably going to break down a little quicker uh just a lot of that's going to depend on where you are so to say I put down wood chips and then I started planting six months later that was me and what I can do in Raleigh it's going to break it just once the engine gets started the beneficial microbes start breaking it down really quickly because we have the humidity we have regular rainfall it doesn't go through periods of drought and you know ups and downs and valleys so this part of it's going to depend on where you live as to how where you're going to be in six months or 12 months you know in terms of planting but once you've gotten to the point where you know 80 percent of the chunkiness is kind of gone from it it's time to plant in it um and and it's really a very effective technique for building rebuilding soil quickly I would point out that in here obviously none of these plants in this forest are being fertilized right and they're all growing well uh what's happening here is that we're having chunky material from all this stuff fall off we're having limbs and sticks and you know leaves and chunkier material fall onto the forest floor below that layer of chunkiness is the things that fell like last year that are now broken down a little bit into kind of a humus layer and then below that the native soil which may be rocky or clay or sand or whatever it is it's down there that's all we're trying to do with the wood chip process is recreate the forest floor basically a developer came in and stripped all all of this that had happened all of the decades of falling trees and pine cones and sticks and limbs and dead animals and everything else that ever hit the forest floor that was building soil they took it and just stripped it off and so the wood chips are allowing us just to rebuild that restart it and basically jump ahead a little bit of what just regular mulching would do because that takes 20 years probably to build an inch or two of tops you know of compost whereas the wood chip the deep wood chip method just jumps that way ahead lots of queen anne's lace blooming uh throughout bronte provisional park and everywhere up and down the roads and the uh that we've we've been seeing in our travels and it becomes this really interesting seed head here that is almost as attractive as the flower cluster was and it kind of leads me into you know we of course collect these seeds once they dry out to you know this you know the seed the seed is collectible you know once they're fully fully dried out on on the plant and that'll lead me to the next question which is could you do a video on our seed starting process we have lots of seed starting videos and remember everything on this channel if you go to my main uh page on youtube the hort tube with john putnam just the main page there's a little bar at the top that says a playlist and other other things uh that that are on their reels and other things that playlist button is important because i do have the videos divided into playlist and when i start to move the videos from the garden plants with john putnam channel over we'll have all those playlists from that but if you want shade plants there's a there's a playlist for it uh there's uh the new house has all the videos that have been shot at the at the last four years of that project everything's divided into different things and seed starting is one of those things and i'm going back to my how i built my seed starting rack and all the seed starting that we've ever done probably i mean hours and hours and hours of content on seed starting and we'll do that next year as well i'm sure we'll um spend some time talking about that uh next question before we move on here um do better boxwoods do better in shade or part sun you know boxwoods are actually native understory plants and so whether we're talking about american boxwoods or japanese boxwoods or english boxwoods doesn't really matter they're all um good understory plants and i think undervalued for that we tend to just value them for full sun foundation plantings and containers and and interesting shapes that we can do with them and that kind of thing in the sun but they're great understory plants in the shade so don't discount that at all um whether it's you know better boxwoods or whatever boxwoods that you're buying variegated ones will probably not you know be quite as variegated if you put them in too deep of shade but the others really great shade plants tons of purple loosestrife or lithrum this entire trip basically this is you know just a eurasian native that was brought here a long time ago and is well established pollinators love it it's no it it's it's a native at this point there's nothing we could ever do to get rid of this plant i don't want to you know i know people people don't like to hear that but you would it would take the 340 million americans pulling this constantly to get rid of it we'd still wouldn't get rid of it it's everywhere but there is less of it up here in southern ontario i'm noticing you know this is the part the spot where it's starting to thin out a little harder to find it new york was just in every field you passed um but this this combination though with the goldenrod the yellow and the purple together it's quite striking uh somebody wanted to uh wanted to know about planting a blue spruce in zone 8a in tennessee should they do it in the fall or the spring fall is fine um you're talking about a zone 3 hardy plant so you're not going to have any problem uh fall planting uh fall planting that someone asked if we'd ever grown pentas uh from seed we don't we typically buy our pentas uh down at big bloomers because they normally have them in like four or six packs and so the the deal's pretty good but they're not hard to grow from seeds so if you want to do your pentas from seed it's not a problem uh some of the newer varieties sometimes aren't always available from seed and some of the newer varieties of pentas are really really good uh you know but but they're definitely worth trying and again we have seed starting playlist on the channel if you want to learn about uh starting your own seed the chicory really has a beautiful uh flower on it this time of year another um european uh another european plant brought here a long time ago uh but beautiful flowers we typically will just see this here and there you know just just spotty never big um never uh you know big clusters this common buckthorn on the other hand this is another european plant that was brought here you know 150 years ago or more this one is definitely problematic the berries on it are probably beneficial i mean probably good for the i mean imagine the birds are what spreading this thing around uh pretty quickly so they're taking advantage of it but it's a very uh very big a big time invasive um in this part in this in this part of the world um in southern ontario the niagara falls area upper new york um area and other areas as well let's see um so many um i was talking about the beehoo uh in one of the uh tour videos the beehoo japanese maple at the house i've got a holly um a holly planted directly behind it because i want something green behind that the the the winter bark on that beehoo uh japanese maple is like almost is a yellowish orange color it's really really bright and vivid and so in the winter time if i don't have a backdrop behind it you're just kind of gonna look right through it and not really pick up on it the one at the ralston is backed by a big screen of hollies very very large uh evergreen holly screen right behind it and so in the winter time that yellow is just sitting that yellow orangey color is just sitting right in front of that green and it just pops they just wanted to know some other plants literally anything anything that's evergreen evergreen's important in this particular case because the time of year we're talking about when the beehoo is really showing that japanese maple is really showing off is the winter bark uh and so any evergreen that gets larger than it so it needs to be something that'll get 15 or 20 feet tall uh in order to put that wall behind it uh that will allow it to show off but any anything um somebody has an elysium they bought for a north facing foundation uh they want to know when to uh should they plant it now or in the spring in zone 8a definitely now there's another zone 6 hardy uh plant a lot some elysium is and some isn't um so to check check with that but some of them are 6b hardy so if you're in zone 8a any kind of woody shrub i'm going to plant it for sure um in the fall period of time rather than waiting till spring because when it's above the ground in the container it's going to be much more vulnerable to freezing solid and actually causing damage than it is in the ground uh in zone 8a the ground's going to rarely ever freeze at all so it's going to be much more protected in the ground rather than the container we'll show a native cornice here uh this is the gray gray dogwood these are native in the northeastern united states southeastern uh canada of course we're end of season and there's a ton of leaf spot on this and you know it's about to lose its leaves anyway but these are incredibly beneficial to the birds we've seen uh lots of birds uh what was the one bird you said was uh uh what's that uh black cap chickadee stuff is great with the birds uh we're uh we're out here with the uh with the plants and uh she she'll see a bird and uh sometimes uh it's it's amazing to me um how many birds she actually knows because it is um one of her favorite things is observing birds and us uh going to places where we can observe observe observe birds um somebody said would you ever do a multi or would you ever do multi-season videos at biltmore is it difficult to arrange to film at gardens because of restrictions there is restrictions at a lot of the gardens for filming for profit in any way so we don't ever go into any garden and just start filming um you know no matter what even if there are no restrictions i really rarely ever i don't think we've ever done that we i'm lucky enough to have been in this business for now 40 years coming up this spring i think will be 40 years that i've been uh in horticulture in some way or another 39 or 40 um and uh i've met a lot of people in all those years very very fortunate for that to have happened and a lot of times i just um i knew that mark weathington had worked at the norfolk botanic garden and so i knew we were going to norfolk and so i just texted him and he put us in contact with less uh parks and if you haven't seen that video with less in the rain we were in a tropical storm filming a video at the norfolk botanic garden if you haven't watched that video i love that botanic garden but it was that's the way in which we get into gardens so biltmore would be that same way if we were going to do it or approach them in some way i would you know either hit them with an email or find somebody that knew somebody there um and that's the process that we use and then hopefully they see of some benefit to us coming and filming in the garden that promotes the garden in some way uh and it's beneficial to both parties uh involved but i don't want that to ever be a one-way street where i'm getting content out of it without asking permission uh first before we're doing that and we're making new friends i mean every one of these places we get to go if we didn't know the person beforehand usually we have a new friend um as we're leaving the garden and typically that makes another contact because a lot of times they go oh if you haven't seen this garden you have to go to it you know you have to see this garden and when i contacted mark that's when mark mark told me other things in the norfolk area this wild teasel this is another european european native has the thorniest stems uh on it and uh these brushes on the top after the flowers have finished uh i don't know if you can hear that or not it's really really wild um how and these little seeds pop out when this happens but the dogs have picked up a couple of these uh since we've been in this park and then they walk around with them spreading the seed this thing will actually attach to an animal uh and then and break off but it's super super thorny and again another eurasian native that was brought here and everywhere apparently this one's in new zealand and all over the planet uh at this point again this is a great example like steph just said of talking about that beehive uh maple in front of something green because you see this you know how striking this is part of that is because that white pine is directly uh behind it uh back there and so that you know it's contrasting off of it it's good about creating contrast uh between one thing and another we have a lot of that in the garden and that part 16 of the video of the video tour of the of the garden tour uh this week was i spent a lot of time talking about that because the area of the garden that video that area of the garden is very got a lot of contrasting colors uh in it let's see um somebody asked if hicks you would be a good topiary uh and i kind of don't think so because it's the very fastidious one and what's going to happen i think you'll be able to topiary it but it's constantly going to have these vertical spikes coming on it uh that may look a little odd i think you'd be better off uh with a more of a spreading you okay and then as you topiary it up you can create a more of a weeping habit or a round ball habit a little easier than you would with hicks the answer to your question is yes it can be topiary i don't think that it's really fastidious plants that grow very vertical like that are great candidates for it because they will they'll you're gonna be pruning a lot to keep it in the shape uh the top of it that the way you want to keep it who selects the perennial plant of the year because that was in the video at north creek this week um that a um a mountain mint species is the perennial plant of the year normally it's it's some sort of highly manipulated perennial in the past that you know is very floriferous and compact and tame in the garden and easy for gardeners to work with but this year uh the perennial plants association went with something that was just a straight species native plant probably one of the best plants in the world for pollinators not the most floriferous thing for us it's kind of interesting change up i mean a really stark change up and you can go back and look at all the perennial plants for the year but it's the perennial plant association decides it they met in charlotte this year and it's the funniest thing this year we had the ipps meeting the international plant propagator society meeting was in raleigh this year and i missed it it was in raleigh of all places and i missed it and then the perennial plant association meeting was in charlotte and i didn't go to that either two big meetings were in my own state this year but we were doing other things uh at the time that these two meetings happened so it's really kind of funny that i could have taken advantage of two of the two bigger horticulture meetings uh that were in my own state and would have been easy to get to and i did not uh go to either one of them there's common milkweed uh everywhere um out here and if you put you know just we see it coming up in the cracks you know and you know we're over in toronto yesterday and you see it coming up in the cracks in the sidewalk in the unmowed grass uh you know once you have common milkweed you're definitely going to have uh lots and lots of common milkweed let's see let's do one more in this location um someone just asked how does touch a gold holly compared to sunshine ligustrum sunshine ligustrum is going to get big uh and the touch of gold holly is more of a mounding small growing holly uh the entire plant on sunshine ligustrum is gold every leaf is gold from the middle of the plant all the way out to the outside of the plant touch of gold has a touch of gold on the outside of it so the interior of the plants kind of green and the outside and the sunlight uh is kind of yellow they both have a place one is going to be more for you know if you're looking for a small meatball shaped plant that's low maintenance that can kind of have that gold color but really kind of live in the background through the summer while your perennials and other things are blooming and then come the star of the winter garden you know that's a good use for it sunshine ligustrum can be used as a screen or it could be used in any shape or size you want to kind of keep it but they're very different very different growth habits and one is all yellow and one is part yellow we've moved over to Darlington Provisional Park which is a little east of Toronto and this plant will be very familiar to lots of people it's throughout the northeast and up into Canada here this is a orange jewelweed it's an impatience capensis uh there are like a thousand species of impatience so there this is a this is a big um there are a lot of species in this genus this uh orange uh orange flower super super showy these are a little tall because they're in some shade uh same thing with the goldenrod that's out there behind it um normally what we'll see in sunnier areas is this plant will only be about two to three feet in height but it does take a lot of space this is this is be one of those uh this is one of those natives that's definitely extremely happy wherever it is and in fact looks to me like they had mowed this down earlier in the season there's wheat straw down here in the ditch i think they had seeded this and then there's so much so many seed here that this just came right roaring right back uh in that same space again stretching a bit for the light but it was a good place to kind of film it over here but i love these really super complex flowers that we get on impatience hang down and uh just a lot going on in that very interesting flower okay i think six more questions uh we'll do here at darlington uh and again ask gardening questions down below in the comment section and we pick from those uh each week um somebody wanted to know do we shred our leaves first because i know we leave the leaves in our garden uh do we actually shred them or do we just leave them whole i'll leave that up to you some of that depends on the size of the leaves and how thick they are probably uh if you just had small maple leaves and just had a thin veneer of them i'd probably just leave those whole if you've got a bit large leaves that won't break down very easily or just giant piles of leaves it might be best to bring them out to the driveway run the mower over them a few times and then redistribute them in the garden or suck them up in something that shreds them and throws them right back on the ground they make machines like that or any kind of leaf shredder that you can use the more edges you put on those leaves the more kind of jaggedy ragged edges that are on the leaves the faster they're going to break down and start to feed your plants uh the next season i will say that a lot of our don't if you're going to shred them uh and you have a big pollinator garden uh don't shred them all there are there are a lot of there are a lot of things that overwinter on these leaves that drop down to the ground and so some of our beneficials probably some non-beneficial things are going to be on the back sides of those leaves so definitely understand if you got this much you know this much leaf pressure in your garden you're going to take some of those out you're going to use them in some other way or shred them or whatever but maybe it's best for our oak drops all the leaves in the back we don't shred them we just kind of redistribute them a little thinner around the garden and that way hopefully we're allowing some of the things that are overwintering on those oak leaves to survive the winter a lot of words in that answer several different ways to think about that though somebody asked if mulching containers helps um the one thing with containers is we tend to over water things more than underwater somebody's probably going to laugh out loud that i just said that because they forget to water their containers all the time but we do tend to overdo especially early on when things go in containers or especially if they're slowing down in the fall it's easy to over water it's always easy to over water late fall or as the days are getting shorter and the sun's on a little bit of a lower angle to start to over water containers as well so we have to be careful mulching is going to increase that moisture content in that container or that you know the it's not going to evaporate out of there as quickly for sure so it's really about what you mulch with you'll see on container plants you're buying now they'll have rice holes or walnut holes or pecan holes that they're using on top of it to do some weed prevention in the container but those things breathe pretty well they're chunkier materials that breathe pretty well if we used hardwood mulch in there it's going to put a cap down on top which will help some with any weeds you have coming up in there but i think it may end up keeping things over wet so you know i'm just cautious with that i'd rather take a handful of compost and use that as my cap on the containers weed free compost weed seed free compost for sure but that would be the best way i think to put a little cap on your container without keeping it too wet here's another introduced and a very common flowering plant we see in this area quite a bit this is bird vetch is the common name for it it's in the pea family sometimes the pea family members can be either you can you know take a look at the flower which typically has a keel down at the bottom if you look at things like wisteria or red buds you can see or peas or beans you can see the flower has a keel on it it's very unique then there's also another way is this kind of opposite pinnate foliage that we see foliage on a lot of these pea family members is can be a giveaway as well and just think about wisteria with a slightly larger much larger version of this but that can be a giveaway as well we can just ride along and go that's in the fabacia for sure without even seeing this flower this flower is kind of small to be able to pick up on you know the actual shape of the uh the actual shape of the individual flowers but another common one european or asian introduced plant and good at producing seed that's all of these pea family members make great seed and of course we all love beans and know how many beans one little bean can make right when we're when we're growing different types of peas and beans next question somebody asked about the dogs in the rv so what are they doing while we're taking a hike uh at last week's q a we were hiking up through that uh canyon uh what's going on with the dogs while that's happening while we're we have a um a class b uh van that we travel in and it can actually run the air conditioning without being plugged in it actually has a backup plan to that to uh alert us and to turn on the motor if that if it runs down we have a backup to a backup to a backup we get back from one of those hikes uh a lot of times they go with us like yesterday this this this path that we're on right now uh the dogs walked this path in the evening last night with us and they'll go on a lot of things we just didn't know it that other park um whether or not they could have done it or not griffin could definitely have done it holly probably couldn't have done that one but she's perfectly capable of doing this one so a lot of times the vast majority of the time they're with us but then we went into toronto the other day and we were in a park and we were plugged in with the rv and we get back and we're hot and sweaty 30 000 steps we did in toronto plus a 10 mile bike ride round trip was 10 miles on the bikes to start our journey and we get back and they're in the air conditioning asleep and then we exercise them so they're very comfortable uh along the uh along the trail we are up here some of the reason that i wanted to come to the northeast this year uh and travel and do this some of the video content we've done has been so holly could this morning she is it's 11 o'clock as we're filming this right now 11 a.m 11 30 a.m and she has been outside since six this morning uh and just absolutely loving it had to put her back in to ride over here to shoot this video back over there she'll be out again she this is her perfect weather we found for this part husky that's almost 16 years old so um they're having a blast on the and if they're not with us they're in an ice box basically because i got to keep holly pretty cool anything above about 74 now and she's panting so you know that that's where we are with she'll be 16 in three months now here's the aromatic asters that were in the north creek video from earlier in the week not blooming down in philadelphia a few weeks ago or two weeks ago now we've made our way over to the other side uh to into canada and uh they're still uh now they're opening up here imagine even down even down there they may be showing a little bit of color at this point uh somebody said i got a plane we got a plane just keep circling above us i don't know if you can hear i doubt you may not be able to hear it but it's uh it's pretty it's pretty loud up there uh let's see uh somebody has been adding wood chips to their garden to the point where it's become hydrophobic this is pretty easy to do okay uh what will what can happen if you over mulch in time you can create a what almost a dry socket in the mulch even after it rains it'll seem like the top of the mulch is a little moist but you can dig down in it and find kind of a dry area in the middle of it and at that point the wood chips the hardwood mulch the pine straw it doesn't matter what you're using for mulch is no longer really working for you anymore it's once you get it too thick like that that five part landscape job that we did was that last year or the year before stuff i don't know maybe the year before maybe two years ago now uh that place had been mulched and mulched and mulched and mulched like the guy's gonna get paid twice a year and he's dumping four inches of mulch on it every time and he's gonna get paid for it and he did it to the point where it was this thick and we were you know out there digging in it and it's just really super dry material uh down in it and what we did was we just had to bite the bullet a little bit and we pulled that stuff back we planted and then we let it break down and we ended up kind of weedy over there a little bit um while we waited for some more of that stuff to break down before we remulched it we just reached a tipping point where it wasn't breaking down uh readily so what you what we want to do with our mulch is put a thin enough layer down each time that it's almost done but it's still pretty effective before we put another layer on top of it it's really the you know you gotta you gotta be careful with that you don't want to end up with six inches of mulch down um you know and what will happen you know this wood chip thing they've just done it over and over and over again so we can do that deep wood chip thing because they're so chunky but imagine if i did the deep wood chips and they broke down but they didn't quite finish breaking down then i did the deep wood chips on top of that and it broke down but almost it you know almost broke down eventually you're going to get it so deep that there's just no air no water can penetrate it it just starts running off the top of it um doesn't happen for everybody but it will happen for some and if you're in a particularly wet area like florida or something like that uh it can really then make benefit um bad bacteria and bad bad guys in the soil rather than good guys in the soil so i become anaerobic um in time so there's a delicate definite balancing act in ornamental landscaping you know just letting it break down don't let it break down so much that you're getting weed crazy amounts of weed what pressure uh but let it break down enough that that next layer doesn't prevent air to getting down to that wood that's down there lower and preventing it from breaking down properly i said there were a thousand species of impatiens here and the first one we showed with that uh was a native this one is a non-native this is a himalayan balsam uh it's what this one's called you see it has white and pink flowers and you can kind of tell by that foliage on this one uh that it's an impatient it all has it also has that low hanging flower uh but you can also tell a little bit on this um some of our ornamental annual impatience that we use in the garden have similar foliage uh to this one uh highly floriferous i'm sure great at making seed uh like most inpatients i see a bee there's a native bee in one right down below where steph is filming right now he's going all the way in there uh you can see him backing out so native bee is definitely taking advantage of this himalayan native inpatient here and right up on the shore of lake ontario which is kind of fun uh we are right on lake ontario here uh and this park is next to darlington provincial park i don't know if it's got a different name it's got all these trails through here we walked the dogs on yesterday grassy mowed trails but in a big giant meadow they've turned what looks like whatever disturbed space this was in the past has been converted uh back to a uh to a to a meadow i want to say a native meadow because there's lots of non-native things in here but they you know nobody's getting nobody's going to come in here and get rid of these we also have this prickly cucumber very pretty flowers on this and it climbs and some of our some of our cucumber plants in this plant family the curcubits are really good at making seed and we talked about this last year we had a mexican cucumber at the house that just seeded itself everywhere this one has its seeds hidden in a spiny spiny little cucumber right there see why they call this a prickly cucumber right uh this is a native uh to north america so um it's got uh it was here before the before the impatient it was climbing on right here and taking advantage of but you can see that we see these flowers uh pretty frequently in our uh in our travels here we're going to two more provincial parks before this is over with so we'll show you some more of the things that are in flower because we've skipped skipped several things so we could spread them out over a couple of the q a videos forgot my question stay right there last question for this week and again ask questions down in the comment section below the video uh there are t-shirts and other things on our website hortube.com if you're interested in um in uh going over there and uh and shopping with us uh let's somebody said from last week's video that it was interesting that we all have these very highly amended soils in our gardens but that all of those trees and everything were just growing in rock uh in that wooded space along the edge of that gorge uh in the middle of new york there um and uh and they were doing just fine but keep in mind all that stuff's being allowed to drop onto the ground it's self-mulching itself those and those rocks have a lot of the things that those plants need a lot of the nutrients that those plants need are locked in that rock uh and this in the dirt that's holding those rocks together so a lot of what those plants need plus the fact that the organic material that they're dropping on there you know when they shed their leaves in the fall or shed their needles during the season or shed whatever all that stuff staying on the ground so it is in fact similar to our ornamental gardens in a way i know it's more rocky and nobody would want to probably be in there digging uh and the plants are able to figure out ways to go between the rocks and do their thing they're also breaking the rocks apart you know and they're making nutrients available uh in time by breaking those rocks apart and releasing the salts and other things that are in those rocks that end up in the water out there you know that get carried down to the sea and the sea that all those things are working together but that this meadow when it dies back to the ground everything is going to basically turn into humus over the winter and the next spring and all these things are going to come back up right through the middle of it it's very similar to our ornamental gardens our ornamental gardens are just neater uh we have the neater version of this because most of the time we're keeping them cleaner we're not allowing all this grassy weed material to come up in the middle of them you know we're mulching in between that but it's not that dissimilar okay and what we're really doing and what i'm trying to teach about our ornamental gardens is to come back and duplicate what's actually happening in our wild lands which is their protect these plants are protecting the soil they're growing really close together they're dying back to the ground or losing their leaves or losing their needles and feeding themselves in a cycle plus the rock dust that's down there below them and that cycle plus the rain plus the sun is all they need and that's what we do hopefully do in our ornamental gardens and stop thinking about less about having full control uh all the time of every little detail so thank you guys so much for following along and watching and uh we'll uh have another one of these q and a's uh next week two more provincial parks to go