Getting Your Gardening Going This Spring

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Hi I'm Aaron Steil from Gardening with Steil on Iowa PBS. And like many of you, I've been spending more time at home lately and I'm out here in my garden and I have a tip for you, that you can do in your garden right now. This hosta is very large, and just starting to emerge this is a perfect time to be digging and dividing this plant. Because it's not fully emerged, there's no foliage in the way for when we work and I can dig, split, and replant all of these pieces and the new foliage will be unaffected and the plant won't be lopsided for the rest of the season. Our first step is to remove all of the mulch from around this plant. Then, dig around the perimeter of the plant with a spade. Lift it out of the ground and set it off to the side so we can start working with it. We want to cut this clump into pie shaped pieces. It's not uncommon for the center of a plant to die out and that's exactly what's happened here and so by cutting it into pie shaped pieces we make sure that every division has good healthy plant parts in it. Now we can physically separate the pieces. Sometimes you can just pull them apart with your hands, and there are other times you need to use a nice sharp spade to cut down through the root ball and separate the pieces. I was able to get six, nice size divisions out of this one plant that I'll be able to replant in other areas of my garden, or give to friends to plant in their own garden. To replant the divisions, dig a hole and place the plant in that hole at the same level that it was in the garden and backfill the soil. Then put the mulch back. The final step is to water the plant in. This step is very important no matter what the forecast says in terms of rain, you want to water your plants in. It helps settle the soil in around the root ball, and get everything situated to get this plant off to a great start. I hope this helps you get started on your own garden adventure. Thanks for joining me with this gardening tip on Gardening with Steil.

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Hi I'm Aaron Steil from Gardening with Steil on Iowa PBS. And I'm sitting in my front yard today I want to talk to you about one of my absolute favorite spring blooming bulbs and that's the daffodil. They're bright, cheery flowers that can usually be found in yellow, although you can sometimes get them in white and cream, oranges or pinks and sometimes even red. And they're characterized by that very distinctive cup, or corona in the center of the flower. They are planted in the fall as a bulb and come up relatively early in the spring, although the time of blooms varies depending on the cultivar you might have. I love these flowers because they are just so easy to grow, almost foolproof in fact. They have very few disease or insect problems and the deer and the rabbits and the rodents leave the bulbs alone, allowing them to get better with age growing and naturalizing in your garden. Carob daffodils is really pretty easy. You plant them in the fall, usually October is best. And then water them in, and let them do their thing. They'll come up in the spring and bloom, once the bloom is finished you'll want to cut back or deadhead that flower stalk but leave the foliage. The foliage needs to stay in place to allow it to die back and feed that bulb for the following year. In my garden I like to use daffodils in large drifts, or clumps this allows them to really showcase the blooms and in fact most spring bulbs look best planted in big drifts or large clumps. They have their foliage stick around for quite a while, so you'll want to be sure to have something to hide that foliage later on in the season so planting them with something that comes up later in the season like a hosta or a purple coneflower, phlox, or other plants that can help mass that foliage works really well. They want to be in full sun, well drained soils. But you can plant them in shade gardens if that shade is made from deciduous trees because they do most of their work early enough in the spring the leaves aren't on those deciduous trees. You can force them in containers indoors they need about 12 to 15 weeks in your refrigerator after you pot them up in a container, then you pull them out and they'll bloom about two weeks later. And they also make really nice cut flowers, although, you don't want to pair them with other flowers in the same vase because they tend to shorten the life of other flowers because of a compound that they have in their stems. I hope this inspires you to try daffodils in your own garden. Thanks for joining me with this gardening tip on Gardening with Steil.

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Hi I'm Aaron Steil from Gardening with Steil on Iowa PBS. Today I want to talk to you about a plant that is so popular and enchanting, it caused the first financial bubble and collapse in 17th century Europe. That plant is the tulip. These beautiful bulbs bloom in spring and come in a wide variety of colors everything but true blue and true black. There are dozens of species and thousands of cultivars that range in height from a few inches tall in the species tulips, to hybrid tulips that are over a foot tall. Plant these bulbs in the fall, October is best in Iowa, in full sun. they can be in shade if that shade is cast by deciduous trees, because they bloom before the leaves emerge. Be sure to put them in large clumps or drifts, they look much better in drifts than they do as polka dots or soldier rows in your garden. Tulips are relatively easy to grow. Deer and rabbits can pose some problems because tulips are like pizza to them. You can protect emerging leaves and buds with fencing from the rabbits, and if you have a lot of deer pressure, it may be best just to use a different kind of plant like daffodils. Many species type tulips make nice perennials coming back year after year, but the large colorful hybrid types like these, don't last very many years in the garden. Many times it's best to treat them like annuals to get a good display each year. This is okay, it allows you to try something new every year. Thanks for joining me with this gardening tip on Gardening with Steil.

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