Gardening Influences

Coming to you from Studio A here at Proven Winners Color Choice Shrubs. It's time for the Gardening Simplified Show with Stacy Hervella me, Rick weisst and our engineer and producer Adrianna Robinson. All Right, Stacy, so you know we could be considered as garden influencers with what we do on a weekly basis, and we had an individual reach out to us and ask us, well, Stacy and Rick, let's turn the tables on you who are influencers in your

life? And I think this will be fun to talk about. I think it's a great topic because you know, even if you don't have necessarily like a big gardening support system, like your family doesn't garden, you're not surrounded by gardeners, you do find yourself influenced by gardens that you've visited, things that you've read, maybe social media accounts that you follow, and that is how you grow as a gardener. There's a lot of things you can figure

out on your own as you're cobbling your way through the garden. But most of the things that I think that you learn from people that you respect and admire and look up to as horticulturists. You know, those people really stick with you and they are part of your journey. Absolutely, I've had many influences in my life. I'd have to start off with my dad. My dad immigrated to the US in the mid nineteen fifties from Europe, and my dad was a big time gardener. He loved to garden, and he instilled

that love in me both. He instilled in me a love of taking hikes, gardening, and birds, those three things that's lovely. And my dad is ninety four years old. He has a great sense of humor. But I remember distinctly as a little kid, he gave each of us kids a little garden plot to get us growing plants and interested in plants. So we each grew our vegetable plot. One morning, to my horror, I walked into the backyard and all of my plants were uprooted, laying on their side,

dying and withering. Now I immediately knew who the culprit was. My sister, my older sister, Jane, and I think she was just so curious as to what was going on underground that she decided to have a look see. But of course she didn't pull her plans out. She pulled mine out and I will never forget it as long as I live, and we laugh about this to this day, my sister. So basically I tattled on my sister to my parents, which upset her, but what did she expect.

So that night when I went to bed on my pillow, there was a little note from her and it said, dear Rick, I hate you, love Jane. I'll never forget that. So aveiled confession. Other influences owners of a garden center in West Michigan, Flowerland, who essentially never let me get comfortable. Every year they had a new project, a new position, whatever it may be, and challenge the daylights out of me. That was a huge influence to me. I think that that is a really important

part of why we interact with other people. It's much harder to challenge yourself. I mean, you can kind of challenge yourself, but you know, when you have other people who are really encouraging you and pushing you to get better and to find out the reasons why and to think about things a little bit more deeply, that's you know, that's where that influence comes from.

Yeah. Absolutely, I was influenced by a drama director. I was always in drama, and I loved, you know, one of the things I loved was the fact when you're on stage the lights are so bright you cannot see the audience. It's dark out there, but you can feel their energy, you can feel their support, you can feel their laughter. It's kind of like putting bulbs in the ground and then you know they're in the dark earth. You know that potential's there, but you just can't see it.

Is a huge influence on my life. Alan Armitage he's a professor of horticulture at the University of Georgia and Alan he's famous for wearing a tilly hat. Yep. But he was really influential to me, and I'd recommend you read his books. I've read his books cover to cover. He's a guy who puts humor into gardening. He's a guy who is like, Okay, enjoy the garden, but we don't have to be that serious about it. There's joy in gardening, there's also humor. You have to have a sense of

humor. If you haven't killed any plants, you're not trying hard enough, that's for sure. And so Alan was a huge influence on me well. And Alan Armitage, of course is a giant in our industry. If you haven't heard of him before and you are a perennial gardener, you really owe it to yourself. He is a perennial expert. I mean, he's a horticultural expert in general, but perennials are his specialty. Of his books, he wrote the book on perennials basically, and yeah, just so knowledgeable,

you know. And I love when you meet those people, and it's very common in our industry, I think, to find these people who just have this incredible base of knowledge and just this wonderful personality where you just want to be with them because you learn and you get inspired, and it's just a great energy to engage with. It is, and he influenced me significantly. And then Hank Prince. Hank Prince was my closest friend and he passed away

twenty eight years ago this June of brain cancer. But Hank was very involved in the horticulture industry, in the garden center industry, especially conifers and West Coast conifers. Loved and it's been fun to watch his three sons grow and his eldest son, Henry, also involved in the industry. Loves photography, loves conifers, evergreens, that sort of thing, and Hank was one of these people that would always push me. Now, Hank and I started doing

live radio in nineteen ninety three. We did a call in radio show. We knew nothing about radio. They just rolled us into the studio, put a microphone in front of our face and said start taking calls from people. And we did. And I did the Flowerland Show for thirty years. But Hank Prins was a huge influence on me. And when you lose someone like that at a young age, it really has a huge impact on your life because I look at what he's done in the industry, how he loved gardening,

and the influence he had on me and other people. And so then in your walk in life you pay attention to how you treat others and how you approach your career professionally. It was a huge influence for me, Stacy, and I think it sounds too like someone like that, and with Ellen Armitage, who is very giving of their knowledge, that really influences you to

be that same way and to share your knowledge. And the interesting thing about gardening is that there are some hard and fast facts that are just true about the way plants grow, but there's also so much of a personal perspective that you get from what you grow and where you grow at and your decisions that we really need people like that who are willing to come out and share that experience and pass that on to you so then you have some context for the

decisions and everything that you want to make in your garden. And it sounds like both Hank and Allen have been that person to you absolutely. And then of course for me, a third person in my life lead in life as a baby boomer, as a baby boomer now and an aging person in rewirement, So I fill out medicare forms during the week and garden. That's basically what I do. But a key person in my life was a gentleman by the name of Virgil Westdale. Virgil Westdale passed away two years ago at the

age of one hundred and four years old. Wow, this is an amazing, amazing man. And Virgil Westdale is a person who served in the four hundred and forty second Regimental Combat Team in World War Two. He overcame discrimination and was one of the most His unit was one of the most decorated units

in American military history. He had a Congressional Gold Medal. He had the French Legion of Honor award for extreme bravery, which was founded in May of eighteen o two by Napoleon Bonaparte. Twenty five US patents to his name. Wow. I'd visit him in the rest home and there's pictures of him with US presidents on the wall, twenty five US patents, the Congressional and you stand there and you're amazed. And you wouldn't know it if you did not

know this gentleman and the story behind him. Now. I wrote about Virgil Westdale in my book Operation Rumination, Turning Back the Clock, and if you want more information on that, you can go to a link to the book. You can go to my website. Thank you very mulch dot com. But Virgil was an amazing gentleman and really influenced my life, especially in the past few years, and how I conduct myself moving forward. Fabulous swing dancer. I think at the age of like eighty seven or whatever, he got

bored, so he went to work for the TSA at the airport. Just an unre and his story is so unreal and I don't have the time to get into it. But I did write about him in my book, and a real defining moment for me. Virgil liked coffee at McDonald's, and I'd take him to McDonald's and we'd sit there, and it always blew me away. Here's one hundred and two year old, decorated US military veteran, and I'm sitting across the table from him, and we both get the senior discount

on our coffee. I thought that was really cool. But you know, I looked across the table at this amazing man and I said to him, I said, Virgil, how did you accomplish what you did in life? And he did the same thing other veterans would say to me. They shrugged their shoulders and they say, well, you just do what you gotta do. And I said, Virgil, that's not good enough, and and so

I never forget it. He put that senior coffee down, he and he sat there for a moment, and then he looked at me and he said, Rick, somebody said it couldn't be done, but he, with a chuckle, replied that maybe it couldn't, but he wouldn't be one to say so until he tried. So he buckled in with a trace of a grin on his face if he worried he hit it. He started to sing as he tackled the thing that could not be done, and he did it. Well, that's lovely and I love that. So I'll just end with saying

that these influences. Like I was watching an interview of Jerry Seinfeld recently, Jerry said, one of the best things you can accomplish in your life is to develop a skill, and you carry that with you. Skill much more important than money. Yeah, So those were influences in my life, and that's the approach I take to gardening too. If you haven't killed any plants, you're not trying hard enough. That's for sure. In there and give

it the old college try. We're gonna hear Stacy's influences coming up next here on the Gardening Simplified Show. Proven Winner's Colored Choice Shrubs cares about your success in the garden. That's why we trial and test all of our shrubs for eight to ten years, making they outperform everything else on the market. Look for them and the distinctive white container at your local garden center. Greeting's gardening

friends, and welcome back to the Gardening Simplified show. You know, normally at this time of the show, we would be putting a plant on trial, one of the proven winner's colored choice shrubs. We tell you all about it and you decide if you're going to add it to your garden. And I will attempt to bring this around to plants on trial by the end of

it, but we'll see how it goes. But I did want the opportunity to talk about my influences as well, and I think, you know, I hope that this show, this episode really helps people think about, you know, who are the people who influence them as gardeners, as people, especially as we come up onto Mother's Day and all of that. Now, I kept my influences much more to the gardening side of things. And my

first influence was my grandmother. So, you know, a lot of people, I think when you are a horticulturist, people assume that you grew up in this like you know, garden wonderland, and I did not. I most certainly did not. My mom was not a gardener. I'll get to my mom in a moment. And my maternal grandmother, Glenna Webb, was a huge influence on me because she didn't really garden garden like she had plants.

You know, she had a rose garden. She used to plant these huge sunflowers always every year on the side of her garage, and you know, she had like little things like that. But one of my earliest memories related to plants is that when I was about three years old, she had a large patch of Lily of the Valley on the side of her garage. I can see it clear as day right now. And she was telling me about them, and you know, she told me to smell them, and

that was sort of like where everything. I was just like, this is amazing. And then she told me that I could pick as many flowers as I wanted, and that was like, I mean, you know, you're three years old, you want to pick flowers. You're always being told you can't pick flowers, and so for her to just say to me, like, you can take as many of these as you want was life changing.

And if you've ever picked a Lily of the Valley, I don't think there is any more satisfying flower to pick because the stem, the flower stem just comes right out of that leaf sheath sure perfectly. It just slides right out like it was meant to do it, and I just remember that feeling of like being in that patch and pulling them out and just like I'm good at this. Of course I didn't realize it was the plants just being inherently,

you know, amenable to cutting. And so that really to me was like I think one of my first experiences where plants were not just like a thing that I saw around me, but something that I engaged with and something that you know, I that were like a part of life. Now to this day, I always keep some Lily of the Valley around because of this. I don't particularly like the plant. I mean, as any gardener can tell

you, it's not the most attractive plant. It's fabulous when it's you know that weak or two when it's in bloom, but you know, the foliage starts to go dormant early, looks super crummy. It's way way too aggressive. The only way I'm able to keep it and check is because my garden is so dry, so that helps to keep it from spreading too too much. But you know, I always will have Lily in the Valley in my life to honor my grandma's influence. And I've talked on the show too about

my mom. I mean, so many people when you ask them about what their gardening influences are going to say a parent, and my mom is a gardening influence on me, but not in the way most people think. Not in the way that a lot of the other people I'm going to talk about her are the people you talked about was because you've heard me talk about it before. My mom is a scared gardener. Sorry, Mom, you know it's true. I don't think she would deny this. She's an uncertain gardener.

And you know I grew up she always did the exact same plantings every year. So we had whiskey barrels in the backyard. They had a spike in the center, red geraniums and a ring of white alyssa on the outside every year. And you know, it didn't. It wasn't until I became a professional horticulturist and she was still living in New York. I wasn't living in Michigan where she was, and she would call me. There would be a Saturday morning in May where she would call me and she'd be like,

I'm at the garden center and I don't know what to do. I see this thing it says, it's this, is it good will? I like this? You know she was. She didn't want to take the risk of, you know, spending that money and spending that time on things that weren't going to do well for her, and she had been burned. Of course. You know, back then, plants didn't, especially annuals, didn't perform

like they did now. You'd get lobilia and that thing would peter out, you know, the second it got over like seventy five degrees or something. And so her you know, fear and hesitation really influenced me, I think in the way that I talk about gardening. And as I was learning about plants and gardening and horticulture school, it influenced me to think more about, like, how can I share this information in a way that gives people the

same aha moment that I'm having right now. So when I'm explaining things, I often have my mom in mind, whether it's you know, I'm talking about a shrub or whatever I think about. You know, that same people approaching those problems with that same kind of fear that my mom had. So I couldn't, of course, forget horticulture school. I went to the New York Botanical Garden, School of Professional Horticulture, and met so many wonderful horticulturists

in that time. But one person who really sticks out in my mind is Francesca Couelo. She was the director of the amazing Helped Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden. I mean truly one of the world class conservatories in our country and in the world, and it had She's a native of Brazil, and I think she was native to Guyana, so she was trapped. She was from tropical areas, and you know, compared to a lot of the

other people that I encountered in my time at NYBG. When I was at the conservatory, fran I think did more to help me understand, you know, digging into where plants are from, what that means for how they grow, how to combine plants, looking seeing plants, you know, not just looking at plants and saying, Okay, it's this, it's this tall, the flowers are yellow, blah blah blah. Like she was real tuned into all of the details and took the time to sort of point those out and

what they meant from a horticultural perspective. So I think she really took a lot a much more of a mentoring kind of approach where she was legitimately teaching. And you know, when I was in those rotations in horticulture school, a lot of people were just like free labor, get out there, and Fran really took the time to show me things that I would not have otherwise noticed, and I think that really helped me see plants in a different way.

My former boss at Martha Stewart Living, Andrew Beckman, amazing horticulturist, just a wonderful guy. And it is from him who he actually learned this saying from a friend of his, so it wasn't his, and I forget the person who actually originally said this, but Andrew often repeated it and it has become a defining mantra for my garden. And that is the measure of a good garden is how many places it has where you want to sit down

and have a drink That is awesome. So it doesn't matter what you're drinking, water, coffee, anything else, but at you know, idea behind the garden and having places that it's not just plants that you just look at, it's gardens are places that you are in that you spend time in and you're surrounded by and that's something that I have, you know, used to kind of I mean design my garden such that it is, but thinking really

about what are these spaces and when you incorporate seating areas, and it can be a small area just it can be two stumps in a little clearing, or it can be something much fancier that encourages you again to engage with your garden and get out in it and not just think of it as something that you look at. So Andrew taught me so so much about plants, but that one thing. And he is now the editorial director at Timber Press,

so you can still partake in his work. I don't know that that quote has gotten out much beyond our department when I worked at Martha Stewart Living, but Andrew definitely was a big influence and I learned so much from him, and he gave me so many opportunities. And you know, that's another thing

when people give you opportunities like you were talking about flower land. When when someone takes the time to give you that opportunity and sees your potential, that's you know, just a huge, huge influence in your life, and then to bring things more up to date. I did want to talk, of course, about my boss, Tim would Tim is someone who I have learned

so much from. You know, he is a plant breader himself, and there's a lot of times where I especially when I first started here thirteen years ago, there was things I didn't know and he was such an expert and there were things that I could always ask him. And I always found that when I came to him with a plant problem I was helping someone with, he always gave me a new perspective. He saw something that I didn't see in there, and that really helped me to, you know, give the

person a better answer and better advice. So it really helped me get to where I am and able to answer things like all the questions that we get in the mailbag. He's yeah, he's so knowledgeable. And of course plant breader Megan the tie, she's my friend, she's my colleague, and it's

just it's so awesome. She's awesome too, And it's just so great to have friends who have the same interest as you and who you're always able to talk about and grow with and just learn more from each other's unique perspective. It's just a huge thing. So briefly, I did want to talk about some famous influences in my life, so you can explore these more if you'd

like. William Robinson, author of the book The Wild Garden. The Wild Garden at Wave Hill one of my favorite public gardens, favorite spaces in any public gardens in the world. He wrote the book on that type of design and that is what I aspire to today. You can get it for free as an ebook if you are interested. It's a little bit old old style writing, I think it was written in like the eighteen hundreds, but absolutely

worth reading and fascinating. Christopher Lloyd is my all time favorite garden author. I love reading him. He has this way of incorporating personality with knowledge and

he's just a wonderful, wonderful read. And then Beth Chattow. I don't know if you read Beth Chadow. Beth Chadow is well known for her two books, The Damp Garden and The Dry Garden, and so there are different approaches that she took to her incredible garden in the UK, and The Dry Garden is definitely a handbook for me living in essentially a very very dry garden. And then finally I do have to just give a shout out to Pete

Udolf. Pete Audolf, I don't know how you pronounce it, but you know, when I was in New York City and he had just designed the high Line, you know, New York City's hottest park, I realized that all of these people who when I was a horticulturist at Tavern on the Green, who never paid any attention to our plants, never paid any attention to the plants in Central Park. They were just ho home regular plants. The way that Pete Audolf combines plants makes people sea plants. It makes people pay

attention. And even though I worked in Central Park for three years, I never heard anybody ask what's that? But when I was on the high Line, I repeatedly heard what's that? I wonder what that plan is, I

wonder what that plant is? And it's just, you know, there's something about his design that really I think makes people like it helped to mitigate plant blindness, and I really admire that in him, and influenced of course by his plant choices, because he is a fantastic plantsman as well as designer. So I'm out of time to wind this into a plant on trial or going to take a break. Maybe I'll be able to do that before we answer

questions in the garden mail bag. At proven Winner's Color Choice, we've got a shrub for every taste and every space. Whether you're looking for an easy care rose and unforgettable hydrangea, or something new and unique, you can be confident that the shrubs and the white containers have been trialed and tested for your success. Look for them at your local garden center. Greetings, gardening friends, and welcome back to the Gardening Simplified Show. We've just been telling you

about the people who have influenced our horticultural careers and our lives. And I did say I was going to try to bring it back to a plants on Trial, and I do want to do that because I do think that if you have these influences in your life, one of the best ways that you

can honor them is by planting something that you shared. So I talked a bit about how I will always have Lilia the Valley, even though I think it's kind of a crummy plant, because because we're going to get cards and letters and comments on that right, and I you know, I get that, But there's so many things I think you know that that you can take the time to think about and if it, you know, if that influence you know was a parent, is there, for example, an old fashioned

shrub like Whigela. I think I hear from so many people who say that Whygela always reminds them of their grandparents? Or lilacs, lilacks. I mean, you cannot go wrong with lilox, and we're going to do a show in Lilacs coming up soon. But you know, of course, any time there is a scent, scent is of course the closest to your brain. So those memories are much more, uh, you know, vivid when you

smell that. So I would encourage you, instead of having today's plant on trial, to think about, you know, what are the plants that the people who influence you in gardening to garden that made you love gardening or taught you something. What are the plants that you can have in your yard to not only enjoy in their honor, but so that you can pass on that same knowledge just like that person did for you. So I encourage you to think about what that looks like for you obviously for me, it looks like

Lily of the Valley, even though it's not a great plant. But I have lots of other plants to throw out my garden that remind me of of different people. Now, I do not plant my mom's red geraniums, though, just to put that out there right now, I'm not going to see one of those in your ears, not in my yard. They're okay, They're just not for me. Your mom is a wonderful lady, and I have the privilege of meeting her, and that's that's a great story, you

know, part of your story to Stacy, a fascinating story. What an unbelievable education you have and experiences. And Adriana and I like to joke around that Stacy's the most intelligent person we've ever met in our life, and I still feel that way. I don't want to embarrass you, but it's definitely not true. And every week on this show, you as well as myself and Adriana, we get to learn a new word. Because you were also a linguistics major, How did you get into that? It's a good question.

Yeah, I was. I did get my bachelor's in linguistics from the University of Michigan, and it is amazing. It is one of those things where, yeah, people and we know it's even weirder. My uncle has his PhD in linguistics. Wow, so two linguistics people and one family, what are the chances Thanksgiving must be interesting around your place. I was just really interested in language and the phenomenon of language. And I loved reading and

I loved writing. But you know, I grew up in the Detroit area, so we used to get a lot of TV from Canada and they would have commercials in English and French. Not commercial commercials, but like the station identification and that kind of thing. And so I was aware from a pretty young age that there was this other language out there. And you know, growing up in the suburbs of Detroit, it's not like I was exposed to

all sorts of different languages. But I started getting a little exposed to French. And my mother had taken French in high school, and so she would like say things like, oh, well, this is how you say,

you know, apple and French or whatever. And I just was so fascinated from a young age at this idea that there's like this whole other, you know, set of words that are are describing the same things that I am, and so I just I loved that and wanted to study the phenomenon of language and realized that linguistics was the study of that, and so I went

into it. It was a really interesting study. I knew I did not want to be a linguistics researcher or professor, but when people tell me that I've explained something to them, clearly I can thank linguistics because it does. It's writing a lot of long papers, it's doing a lot of research and

parsing that research. So even though it's not directly related to what I do, it does have a huge influence on the way I explain things to people, which is really important to me to help them understand I think so too, and we all benefit from it. Stacey, And that's fantastic. You know. I didn't go to linguistics school, but my parents spoke Dutch in the house when I was a little kid, so I'll never forget. In elementary school, one day I was sent home from school with a note because

I was mixing Dutch with my English. Oh couldn't understand me. So yeah, that was interesting. But hey, to celebrate last week you mentioned that maybe I should rhyme or do a limerick about a new word. You taught us a botanical word, ediolated, And I've been working on that all week long, thinking about ediolated. Now stacy for our viewers, our listeners, ediolated means what so edulated et io l a t ed before Rick pollutes your

brain with his version of diolated. It means when a plant gets really thin and skinny and pale because it's reaching for the light. So that's ediolation. I always said stretched, Well that works too, yes, But now from this day forward to the end of my life, I'm always going to say, Eddieolated, how you influenced people. But see, the thing about linguistics is like it's not about hey, there's all these rules. It's about being understood. So if you're understood, you can say stretched. If you say

eddiolated, you might not be understood. So just something to keep in mind, Well, understand how my brain works. I heard that and I wrote the ode to Eddie olated. His plants are stretched and faded. Poor Eddie, Eddie olated, try as he might, he lacks good daylight. His daisies are barely foliated. His garden has him irritated. Poor Eddie Eddie elated. His goals are far fetched with plants that are stretched and sadly incapacitated.

His home turf is undomesticated. Poor Eddie Eddie olated. He needs some support. He's battling mugwart. He's humiliated and frustrated. Good will needs to be cultivated to keep our friend motivated. Send letters, notes and cards of encouragement. Best regards to Eddie. Poor Eddie Eddie elated. Wow, Rick I challenged you to rhyme ediolated and you went above and beyond the call there. That was wonderful. That's simply how my brain works. That's how my brain.

I think we're going to have to put that into an AI to get an image of what eddiolated actually looks like, So look for that on the YouTube version of the show. So unless you have your own version of ediolated in your head, you want to keep that. I love that. I love it too, of course, Stacy. On our show, we get questions from folks and pictures and we love that too. As part of our

mail bag set. Yes, and we heard from a listener Carrie. Carrie is in her first years of gardening in central Florida, and gardening there has brought her to tears many times, she says, even though she was a heart major in the seventies and her dad built her a greenhouse for her horticulture graduation, but now she is in this totally different climate learning a whole and it is like language. When you have to go in garden in a new

climate like that, it is like learning a new language. Learning new plants. It's like new words, new ways to combine them. But Carrie has a massive success to share, and she said, even though she had many varieties in the greenhouse, she's now overjoyed to be able to plant these same plants in her yard and keep on her outdoor lunai, which is of course a beautiful shaded patio that are very popular in Florida. I wanted to share with you my discovery of my first papaya tree in my front garden. I

watches it flowered like crazy, and I waited for fruit. I was amazed to see with my own eyes how white the stephanotis like flower tips that's a kind of jasmine. Eventually closed up to create the papaya fruit, and she enclosed some pics of her very first home grown papayas. She says she loves the show, she appreciates the warm zone ideas that we do include, and

she he's a grateful gardener in the Sunshine State. So we will put Carry's pictures of her first papias on our show notes at Gardening Simplified on Air dot Com, and of course they will be in the YouTube version of the show as well. I love that and you know, it makes me think of a famous person I met, Steve Miller or the Steve Miller band. I love that group and his song Jungle Love. I left a creative papayas by your front door, right yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah, So

thanks Carrie. And if you don't have if you want to celebrate your gardening successes with us, you can always reach us at help HLP. At Gardening Simplified on Air dot com, you can leave a comment on a YouTube video, you can leave a comment on Instagram, or you can just write a visit Gardening Simplified on air dot com and click on the contact tab because yeah, I mean, it's frustrating when you don't have someone who shares your enthusiasm

for gardening. And you're like, but this is really cool, trust me, and they're like, okay, you know. But along that line, Stacey, we got a note from Sandy I placed in order with proven winners for my very favorite hosta. It's the Shadowland we Whee. I first saw this beauty at the Michigan State University Extension Garden and Grand Rapids and absolutely fell in love with it. I dore the name we and have named mine Maxwell, after the little piggy with the pinwheel on the Geico commercial. His name

was Maxwell. I'm going to place a pinwheel next to mine in the garden. I thought you'd get a chucklate. Oh, that's so cute. That is such a neat hostess. If you're not familiar with it. It has super duper undulating leaf margins, so they're really wavy and not just like a little bit wavy, like very very strong wavy. And it just gives it a really unique textural look in the garden. And when I could grow hostas

in my old house, I did have that one. But hostas are definitely a no go for me now between the hot, the dry, the deer, not a chance, you know exactly. Well, we got to take a little break. When we come back, we're going to answer a couple more garden questions, so please stay tuned. The Gardening Simplified Show is brought to you by Proven Winners Color Choice Shrubs. Our award winning flowering shrubs and evergreens have been trialed and tested for your success so you enjoy more beauty and

less work. Look for Proven Winners Color Choice Shrubs in the distinctive white container at your local garden center. Welcome back to the Gardening Simplified Show and extended version of the mail Bag this week. And Stacy, I've got a question for you. Actually it's a question from Cindy Banana water madness. You've probably seen this in social media. I compost bananas in my garden, but to soak them in stinky water won't it cause fruit flies? I want to hear

what Stacy thinks of this. You know, it's I'm gonna call it a hack or a trend in social media to soak banana peels in water and then water your plants with them, right, And the claim is that it's a magical in concoction that you could just make from something you'd otherwise throw away.

And it's gonna do all these wonderful things for your plants. So on the topic of influencers, there are many positive influences on social media for gardening that you can engage with, and there are many negative influences yes, as well. Now this one, I guess it might be kind of a stretch to call it negative because there's probably no harm aside from the gross, smelly, slimy banana water. And if you've listened to the show before, you know

neither Rick nor I are fans of bananas. But even if we were, we would still be opposed to this phenomenon of banana water because of what the claim is is that the banana full of potassium, and if you soak it in water and fuse it in water, that potassium is just going to like come right out of the peel and infuse the water full of potassium and it's going to be some sort of super potion and it's not Potassium is not water

soluble. So when you're soaking that banana peel in water, yeah, it's going to look like something's happening, But all that's happening is like the flesh is like coming off in the water and getting like slimy, and it's not actually adding any potassium to the water. Now, there are definitely gonna be people out there who say, well, I watered with banana water and my

plants did great. Now, there is a saying in horticulture that you may be familiar with, and that is the best fertilizer is the gardener's shadow. And that basically means that the more you are engaging with your plants, the better they're gonna do, because you're not like, oh, I forgot about that thing in the back forty and it's not getting any water, and it's just like dying in the sun. If you're watering it, you're looking at

it closely, you're picking up on all those changes. And certainly watering with banana water is the same as watering. It's still going to get the plant water and keep it healthy. But let's not pretend that it's some sort of magical concoction. It's not. It's just a gross, slimy banana peel in water. Absolutely, we compost those banana peels instead of infusing them in water.

They will do far better in the compost when the microbes and everything are able to break them down and turn them into organic matter, which does have nutrients, so your banana pil doesn't have to go to waste. You also don't need to sit around with a disgusting picture of banana water in your house for who knows how long. Yellow Yeah, tell you. You know. There's also a saying don't follow the crowd, or in this case, don't follow the bunch. Yeah, that's a good one. Yes, Sue,

someone should someone should put that other. But you know, it's true that a lot of things, so called hacks or whatever on social media feel like they could be true. So it's very tempting to share them and to say what's the harm in it? And again, there's probably not any harm in banana water. Yes, you are likely to get fungus nuts, but you're likely to get fungus nuts if you are overwatering with regular non banana water as

well. So I think it's important that we, whatever it is, that we fact check and into it and say, you know, is this really the best way? Is this doing what it's claiming to do. It goes back to our IPM thing, which is like you want to do the least harm with the most benefit. Well said Stacy, Let's stick with slimy subjects here and a note and pictures from Lisa. By the way, we do

our show on radio, podcast and YouTube. Adriana drops wonderful pictures into YouTube that you can see, including the pictures that Lisa sent us of some worms. Speaking of a slimy subject, she says, these are the biggest night crawlers I've ever seen during the mornings last week. They were out in the dogs area. When I was out with the dogs, I counted four or five of them stretched out in the yard like this. Gonna have a bumper

crop of nightcrawlers. And yes, these are very very long worms. But I would remind people that worms have circular muscles and they have longitudinal muscles. The circular muscles, when they contract those, that's when an earthworm gets really, really long. And she put this earthworm up against a ruler ruler stick, so you can see that picture, or you can go to our website Gardening Simplified on air dot com. The longitudinal muscles, when they contract those,

then the worm gets shorter. So it's not unusual to see worms really long in the garden. And it could be a matter of age, it could be a matter of different species of worms because there are a number of different species, you know, that we have. It could be that like umulched and that created an environment that was more friendly to these bigger worms. So there's a lot of reasons why that could happen. But yeah, it sounds like someone needs to get a fishing pole. There you go, dip

into that mail bag. Do you have over there? Oh my gosh, we have. We have so much stuff. We have a lot of different questions and oh, Tina writes, this was an interesting She's also in Florida, and she was surprised to see that one of the supertunias she planted last year returned this spring, and she was wondering if it's possible to move it.

So when we had Adam Mosley, who's one of the breeders of super tunias, on the show a couple of weeks ago, he talked about we talked a lot about how they can live in hot climates, and he says usually they kind of peter out in Texas at least by summer when it's getting really hot and really dry, and that's when he loses his But in Florida, of course, it tends to be more humid, and so when you live in these more mild climates, you don't have any frost or cold that

would normally kill the supertunias, and so hers probably just got real small and kind of went like, you know, a little bit dormant, conserved its resources, and then when spring came and it was warm and sunny and everything again, it's a supertunia lemon slice or super Bell's lemon slice, and it's looking great. So by all means, yes, you can absolutely move it, Tina to someplace else. Looks like you just got a little bonus.

Soyah. It's kind of one of those things that an annual when we use when we talked about this a couple weeks ago as well, when we talk about the term annual, we use it to mean a plant that we're just growing for one season. But there is difference between a true annual one that goes from seed to seed within one season. So that would be like cilantro or dill. If you've ever tried to grow those, you know, you plant the seed, you get the plant, and then it goes to seed

and it's gone. Whereas petunias and caliber Coa's superbells and supertunias are potentially perennial if they are living in an area. So it's an annual is a horticultural term, it's not necessarily a botanical term that actually describes the behavior of your plant if all conditions are right. And it's important to note Proven Winters tests its plants all over the world in different conditions, Stacey, to test the

genetics. And when we're talking about annuals. In chatting with Kevin Hurd from Proven Winters, he said to me, part of the reason they do some of their trialing in Florida is to put some of these annuals under winter conditions and see how they perform after a hot, sticky, humid summer, again testing those genetics. Yeah, there's so many different factors that are worth exploring. From Chris, and his question is about new raised garden beds. He

has four of them. They're four by eight feet long and twenty seven inches tall. That's a deep bed. Is it okay to fill the bottom of the raised bed with topsoil and the other half with a special mix from the garden center. I don't want to fill it with logs and such. And he says thanks. He enjoys the show, so you know I have. I have very many strong feelings about a mending soil and also with filling garden

beds, so I get that now. Generally speaking, as I've said on the show, many times, plant roots are concentrated in the top eighteen inches of soil, So you want to give all of your plants a good solid eighteen inches of consistent growing media, whether that means topsoil or like a raised bed soil which you don't need. I mean, you can just fill those things with topsoil you don't need if it's a lot more expensive to get something

else. I think topsoil is likely to be the most cost effective choice in most areas. Top soil. But I was going to mention to you some greenhouses, and including one that I currently help out part time, will sell something called recycled greenhouse soil. In other words, they're going to have plants that they don't or plants at the end of the season or whatever, and instead of just wasting that soil, they put it in a pile and people

can buy it really cheap. So that's something to check out at your local green That's a great idea. I didn't know about that, So I would not recommend Chris having two different substrates within the bed. One thing that can happen when you have those different layers. It is better to have the heavier layer below. But as I've talked about on the show, this bathtub effect, so that light, fluffier soil on the top has big pores, it

can hold a lot of water. The top soil below it is going to have smaller pores because it's true soil, so it's going to be more of a clay or sand based soil. It's going to have much smaller pores. So you're able to apply a ton of water to that top layer, and then gravity starts to take its toll. It starts to drain down and all of a sudden, it's like trying to like jam a huge crowd through a little tiny door and it doesn't work, So the water ends up sitting in

that top layer. So I would not recommend using two different things. If you have, you know, cost effective I would cost effective pricing on one, I would try to mix them. But otherwise I would say, unless you can get the recycled greenhouse soil, all topsoil is gonna be your best bet for filling that raised bed. So if you have any questions for us, you can always reach us at Help HLP at Gardening Simplified on air dot com, or just visit Gardenings Simplified on air dot com and click the contact

tab. Or of course, if you leave us a comment on YouTube, Adriana will always pass those on to us so we'll get you an answer. There's so many ways to reach us, especially as we go into gardening season and people have a lot of different questions about what's going on. But that's all the time we have for this week. We want to thank you all so much for listening. Thank you Rick, thank you Adriana, and again,

thank you all so much for listening. We appreciate you and help you have a wonderful week ahead.