Heritage and Pass-Along Plants

Master Gardener Host Mark Oertel sat down with fellow Master Gardener Teena Spindler and discussed Heritage and Pass-Along Plants.  We call them that because these are plants that have been given or taken another person, and that person is often someone close to us.  This is a plant or a descendant of a plant that has been lovingly cared for or admired from afar.  You know what I’m talking about.  That blue iris that blooms “out of the blue” telling you that someone is looking down and smiling upon you today!  You may have inherited your family home and would never, ever consider digging up any of the beautiful plants your parents or even your grandparents tended for years.  You know the feeling, right? On the other hand, think about what you have in your garden that you cherish and would like to share with someone! They will remember you forever! But also remember this. Be aware of the regulations and common sense around sharing plants that may be either invasive or simply unclean in terms of pests and diseases. Share with love!  Listen in and smile! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

The opinions and reviews expressed in this program do not reflect those of KDCI in its management or the UC Board of Regents.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Hello, I'm Mark Ortell, a University of California Master Gardener, and I'm here today with Tina Spindler, who is also a UC Master Gardener. Many of you may know Tina from her work here on In the Garden. But did you know Tina is also a writer, blogger, YouTuber, and significantly president of the Great Park Garden Coalition, which is working to establish a world-class botanical garden in the Great Park in the city of Irvine. Good morning, Tina.

SPEAKER_03 0:56

Hey, good morning, Mark. Thanks so much for the kind words. Basically, I'm just a crazy gardener and will do anything I can to share my love and excitement for gardening. So thanks for today.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Tina is overly modest because I absolutely loved her YouTube video on her garden and her favorite flowers. But today we're going to talk about heritage plants and pass-along plants and share some stories and tips with you. Tina, what is a heritage plant?

SPEAKER_03 1:32

A heritage plant is actually a term that I think is used more frequently in the UK in England. They call their heirloom tomatoes heritage tomatoes. Here in the US, we probably use heirloom more frequently as a terminology. And it basically means that these are plants that have been around a long time, and they're what's called open pollinated. So as opposed to being a hybrid plant where you take the qualities from one plant, from a couple of plants, and you breed them together, not GMO, it's just a naturally occurring breeding through pollination. But open pollination means that the pollination just occurs in nature. There's no human attempt to take the qualities from one plant and the qualities from another plant and create a better plant, more disease-resistant. So a lot of the tomatoes, for instance, that we plant are hybrid tomatoes. And that's because they have been bred to be more disease-resistant or more uniform in the way the fruit looks and is produced. And those are often the qualities that are chosen by commercial growers because they need to pick the tomatoes that are going to ripen, you know, more at the same time, that are going to be more sturdy when they pack them. And so what people have discovered is that oftentimes those breeding programs lose some of the qualities of the plant, like in the case of tomatoes, taste perhaps.

SPEAKER_01 3:19

Oh, heaven forbid a tomato with no flavor. Right.

SPEAKER_03 3:22

Or uh, you know, the lack of packability. You gotta go out and an heirloom, you know, you may have to go out and pick and eat that day because it's not going to store very well. So that is basically how you can think of um a heritage plant or an heirloom plant is one that's been around for a long time and one that is open pollinated.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

I was just going to ask you because even the use of when we talk about heirloom plants, heirloom plants, there's such a broad definition of that. Everybody that wants to sell something for a little extra money suddenly it becomes an heirloom, even though it it truly may not be very old or open pollinated or of any significance, but you tack on that heirloom name and it becomes something. So, really, what what makes an heirloom an heirloom other than it is open pollinated? Probably we're talking today though more about some historical significance to some of these plants, aren't we?

SPEAKER_03 4:28

Sure. Um, so I don't know the statistics, but um before the mid-20th century, before before the second world war, we had um many plants that were grown for food, very, very many varieties, a lot more than we have today. And that's because uh agriculture became more mechanized in the middle of the 20th century. Okay, but food farmers grew their own food crops, home gardeners grew their own food crops and flower crops, and the way they grew them the next year is they saved the seed. And so that happened for you know hundreds, thousands of years. And uh what happened then in in the middle of the 20th century is farms became more mechanized and uh we started to ship longer distances. We weren't just growing from the neighborhood farmer, and so the farmers needed produce that would ship, you know, that would mature well, was disease resistant, uh, mature kind of at the same time to facilitate harvesting, and then be able to be shipped. And so that resulted in an uptick in hybridization to develop plants that had those qualities in the food arena. And so we have pretty much ended up recent times there's been a throwback to getting more heirlooms available in farmers' markets and and some specialty markets. But, you know, for for pretty much my whole life, um, you know, you you had just a few varieties of tomatoes and it think of the apples, you know, that we saw in the store. More recently, there are more varieties, but as a kid, you know, you you pretty much saw Red Delicious and Granny Smith, and that was kind of it, right? Um historically, oh my gosh, people in their particular geographic areas had their specific apples that were, you know, for that area and that they could get fresh from local growers, and uh that just declined as our food culture became more mechanized and modern. So that that's you know, basically when we refer to heirlooms now, we're talking about going back to some of that diversity.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Okay, now the other term we heard that we're gonna talk about is pass-along plant. What's a pass-along plant?

SPEAKER_03 6:51

Oh, pass-along plants are my favorite plants. Um, because there's an emotional component of pass-along plants. And uh if you have a pass-along plant, it's it's a super simple definition. It means that someone gave it to you, uh, and hopefully you pay it forward by giving it to someone else. So we've probably all had uh something that you know grew in our mom's garden or an aunt's garden, and they dug it up, saved seeds, took a cutting if they were you know gardening types that knew how to start plants from cuttings. Um, I had my first pass-along plant was from an ant that loved African violets.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

And uh Well, I'm not gonna let you off that and tell me all. Let's find out more about this on and this pass-along plant.

SPEAKER_03 7:47

Sure. That's just the first example. Um, as you know, as a master gardener, you can start new African violet plants from a leaf. And so she took a leaf cutting and started my first African violet plant that she gave me when I was probably nine or ten, you know, old enough to remember to water it, right? And so that was my and it was just the very basic traditional African violet. It was just the purple flower, but I was so excited that it it was a baby from her plant, and I kept it alive for a very long time. And uh it's one of the things that got me into gardening. The other thing that got me into gardening is a heritage plant, uh, excuse me, um, or heirloom plant. So cosmos, the flowers, right? Yeah, uh, many varieties are considered heirloom varieties because they're open pollinated. There are some hybrids also. But my first uh plant that I ever planted from seed was a packet of heirloom cosmos, although I didn't know they were heirlooms at the time. But I was eight years old, and my mom decided to give my sister and I each a packet of seeds. I got the cosmos, sister got the sweet peas, which also can be heirloom uh varieties. And we each planted those. I was eight, she was seven, and uh I was hooked. I was a gardener from then on, uh, which is why I admired my aunt's African violet. She accommodated me by creating a plant um for me. So these things can start and take hold at very young ages.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Well, I brought today with me, and I don't know where you tucked it away. Is it over there on the side?

SPEAKER_03 9:31

I I actually put it out in the hallway.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

Good, good choice. It's today I brought an amaryllis bulb for Tina, and it would it's the size of a large grapefruit, would you say?

SPEAKER_03 9:45

Oh, it's bigger than any of the amaryllis bulbs I have. It's huge.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

It's a it's huge, it's a giant amaryllis, and I have probably two or three dozen of those scattered around my yard. And my mother, when she retired, had an amaryllis, giant amaryllis in a pot that she gave to me because she was moving to Utah and was didn't couldn't take it with her. And I at that time was not a master gardener, and I did what most people do. I kind of discarded it in the front yard by the hose bib, and then I took it out of the pot and I just put it in the ground, not having no idea whether an amaryllis grew in the ground or not at that time, and uh it grew and it thrived and eventually became a huge clump of amaryllis. And this plant, the strappy leaves are probably two and a half feet long, and the giant bright red bloom is probably the size of a volleyball, if you can imagine that. It's just huge blooms, and they're bright, bright red. And like I say, I've probably got two or three dozen of them scattered around the yard because every few years I'll divide them and I'm not gonna throw any of them away, so I just plant them someplace, or the gardener puts them on the I have them growing on the hillside now.

SPEAKER_02 11:15

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

The gardener just found spots to put them and has taken them to other houses where he gardens.

SPEAKER_02 11:22

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

And I have lots of friends and neighbors that have this beautiful red amaryllis, but whenever it blooms with that bright red bloom, it reminds me of my mom who's been dead for almost 20 years now. And the reason it does is because my mom was, when I think of her when I was young, she was this fiery northern Italian lady with red hair, blue eyes, and freckles, and she would put on this red lipstick that was the color of the amaryllis. It was the brightest red lipstick I can ever imagine. And as a kid, she would give me a kiss, and it would take a good five minutes to scrub that red lipstick off your cheek. But that's my memory of my mom, and this red amaryllis flower brings that to me. So today I've I've passed that along. I don't think it's an heirloom or a heritage plant. It may be at this point, but I've passed it on to Tina. So we'll see how it does in her yard, and maybe we'll revisit this issue in a year or two and and see how that plant's doing.

SPEAKER_03 12:35

And I am so grateful. Uh, anyone who knows me knows that that's the best present you can give me. Um, so I, you know, I just love when I receive um a favorite plant from someone who thinks that I might enjoy it. Because then, you know, I a year from now, or the first time it blooms, when I see it, I will think of you. I'll think of your mom's story, and it will remind me of my mom because she too wore that bright red lipstick when I was growing up. I think that must have been a 60s thing.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

Maybe with white shoulders perfumed.

SPEAKER_03 13:08

Exactly, exactly. Um, so uh that's why I love them. I mean, I I love plants and I love the beauty and I and I love the um the scientific aspects of plants to some degree. But what I really love about plants is is the emotions and the uh comfort that they give. And I think pass-down plants do that for everyone. It it doesn't matter if you're a big-time gardener, if you just grow an African violet that came from the leaf of an African violet plant that your friends have, you know, you're enjoying that. Um, the beauty, the friendship, the memories that the pass-down plants give you.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

That's great. Now, let me tell you what I was concerned about as I was digging up the bulb this morning was oh my gosh, I can't bring any infected earth or bugs in this bulb to Tina. That's what I don't want to be remembered for, is that I infected her garden with some new pest that she didn't have yet.

SPEAKER_03 14:10

Sure. And and that is something that you need to be concerned about when you're sharing plants or receiving plants from someone. Um, as master gardeners, uh, we have an annual event most years of a plant exchange. And so we practice pack around plants, I guess, because we pass them around. And we always have a little uh talk and also information in the email that gets sent around prior to that event about how to do that safely. And we won't get into a lot of details, but but there's a couple of things that that you can do. First of all, if your plant looks like it has any diseases, don't share it. If it has any bug damage on it, don't share it. But if it looks okay and you want to share a bulb, for instance, like the amaryllis, uh one of the things that you can do when you dig up a bulb, uh, because bulbs are really hardy and you don't have to worry that much about disturbing their roots. And so the bulb that Mark brought me is bare, it doesn't have soil around it. So he's rinsed the soil off. So that in and of itself assures to some degree that he's not passing along any soil burn issues.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Uh-oh, I better take a step back. I didn't actually rinse it off. I whacked it with my garden glove and made sure I got all the dirt off. And so maybe it would be a good idea to isolate it, put it in quarantine for a little while.

SPEAKER_03 15:39

Well, here's what I will do because the tips we were given before taking plants to share is that you submerge it in water. So you just get a bucket of water. And um, I even did this with plants that I was taking to the plant exchange that were in uh one gallon or four-inch pots, just got a big bucket of water and just submerge that thing. And if you submerge it, it's you know, you don't want to leave a plant in standing water, obviously. But if you submerge it for five minutes, that will often flush any, you know, bugs, insects, particularly, that might have been on the surface of that plant or its soil. So if you just submerge it in water, um, you'll you might see some stuff float to the surface and you leave it in there for a few minutes, then you can take it out and you can be fairly assured that you've gotten rid of a lot of stuff. The other thing that I have done before too is uh insecticidal soap is a pretty gentle uh pesticide, and so if you want to spray the leaves of any plant that you're sharing with insecticidal soap, that may also help uh prevent any lingering small pests from being transported to someone else's garden.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

I think uh as master gardeners, we tend to be more conscientious of this because at the plant exchange, if you bring a plant that has a hitchhiker on board, there is a public shaming that takes place. And of course, everyone uh suddenly uh a big uh over here, over here, everybody come look and see. Right. And uh one of the this past year or a couple years ago, it was a pot actually had some spider eggs on the bottom of it. So it's not only looking at the plant and the soil, but also the the pot or how you're transporting it as well, I think.

SPEAKER_03 17:39

Good good point. Um when whenever I share a plant and I'm digging it up and repotting it, I make sure I start with a clean pot. And if you're not in the habit of um transplanting things into pots, I do save you know nursery pots from plants that I buy, either six packs or four inch or one gallon or five gallons. And before I use them for another pot, uh for the small ones, I I literally bathe them or wash them in a sink full of um one part bleach to ten parts water, and I let them soak for a little bit, and then I have a little, you know, dish scrub brush thing that I scrub around edges, and then I just let them air dry. Um, for the bigger pots that I don't have a, you know, I don't want to bring them into the bathtub in the house. So what I do for those is I actually make that solution, you know, I squirt them out with the hose and scrub them really well, and then I take a solution in a spray bottle, the one part bleach to two parts water, and I just spray the inside of it and let it sit there and then rinse it out before I plant. But by just letting that bleach solution, you know, be in the uh pot for a little while, hopefully you've killed off most things.

SPEAKER_01 18:56

And I hope with my this amaryllis bulb that I've brought that it won't uh bring any infectious soil. But my my garden is pretty healthy. I use a lot of organic matter and the worms love the soil.

SPEAKER_03 19:09

So hopefully I'm sure it will be fine, and I'll give it a good rinse before I before I plant it.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

So please, please do. Oh my gosh. Well, and and I think you addressed the other thing, is not everybody that's going to share a plant with you is a master gardener and has gone to those lengths to protect you from this. So, what can you do when you get a plant? I guess take the same steps. Do you think that's a good thing?

SPEAKER_03 19:35

You can take you can take similar steps, yes. Um, if someone gives you a plant and it's a smallish plant and you can submerge the plant in a bucket of water, I think that's a really super simple thing to do. Just, you know, while you're digging the hole to plant the plant, put it in a buck of water for, you know, the 10 minutes that it's going to take you to dig the hole, and then you know, remove it, and hopefully that will uh suffice to to flush out anything that's crawling around. Um and then also if you have some insecticidal soap, you can spray the the leaves of that plant before you plant it. Um and if you don't have insecticidal soap, you you can use a couple of drops of common dish soap in uh you know bottle spray bottle of water and that it performs a similar function. Basically, what it does is the soapy water coats the outside of an insect's body and uh you know kind of smothers them to prevent them from continuing to live in your plant.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

Or and and that's a great idea that keeps I think the the memory alive without it being a bad memory, a cherished memory. Because you don't always know where the plants come from. Now, I have some irises in my yard, and I got the bulbs from a master gardener, and I don't I think it was at a plant exchange. I don't know who gave them to me, but I'm suspecting that it might have been from uh one of our master gardeners, Sandy Barr.

SPEAKER_03 21:12

Oh, Sandy was wonderful, just a wonderful lady.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

I I don't remember Sandy.

SPEAKER_03 21:17

Oh, I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

But uh recently, as we were preparing for this version of our radio show, Mary Still, one of our master gardeners, shared a story. And I'm gonna read it to you all. So it's early February, and I just realized that one of Sandy Barr's blue iris is in full bloom in my front yard. There are no other iris blooms in sight anywhere. One of many good things about being a gardener is that a shared plant brings the plant share readily to mind. Hard to imagine a better memorial.

SPEAKER_03 21:57

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 21:59

And so Well, guy, that that chokes me up and brings a tear to my eye to think that what a great way to be remembered for sharing something of that nature. And of course, as as I was telling you this morning earlier, I have a a friend that has long since passed away. And Lee was the father of my friend. And I at this time, which is almost 35 years ago, I was starting to do triathlons. And he was a bike rider back 35 years ago. That would have been hardcore. You know, we didn't have helmets at that time. I don't remember it. But he was a cyclist, and he offered to take me to the Santa Ana River Trail riding, and we did. We rode our bikes down to the beach. And here I thought I was this young, strapping young man, and I was going to show this old guy how to ride a bike. And he rode me in the ground. I was exhausted when we got to the beach. And I was hungry. I was thirsty. He shared some water with me. He pulled a banana out of his back pocket and broke it in half and gave me half a banana, which was food, the best banana I ever ate in my life. You know how that is. And I managed to struggle to make my way home, and that introduced me into cycling, which is one of my passions and loves. And one of the things that Lee did is every year he would layer some of his plants and or uh his fig tree, a brown fig tree in his backyard, and get a few little pups going. A few little trees that were usually about a foot or two tall in an old, if you remember the uh milk cartons. Uh-huh. He would cut a milk carton in half and and bring the and he brought one over and I planted this little stick down at the bottom of my hill. And now that little stick has probably got a trunk I would say a couple feet in diameter.

SPEAKER_03 24:09

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

And we get loads and loads and loads of brown figs that we dry, that we make fig preserves out of that I and I sell the fig preserves to raise money for MS because we have so much fig preserves.

SPEAKER_02 24:26

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

We eat fig with proscuto and goat cheese, and and every year I trim the fig tree down and prune it back to stumps. And every year it produces loads of figs. And every year I think about my friend and what a great guy he was. I can picture him in his cycling shoes. And what like a lot of these plants, it's just a fabulous memory. And so Tina, I'll have to bring you a jar of our fig preserves.

SPEAKER_03 25:04

I would love a jar of the fig preserves. And and that's that's what the beauty is of uh pass down plants. It's it's that it gives you plants, which are always nice to get for free, but more importantly, it gives you memories that that last and keep on going and going and going. And you then also are a conduit to share your own memories and those plants with others. And so I'll tell you a little story about my current favorite pass-down plant, which I think I've spread um over a lot of Orange County.

SPEAKER_01 25:41

And somehow. Is this intentionally or unintentionally?

SPEAKER_03 25:45

Intentionally. So I was given uh some seeds of a peony poppy plant from a lady that I worked with who is of Scottish ancestry. Well, and she is Scottish, she was born in Scotland, and she and I worked together and we were both garden, avid garden lovers. And so she told me that she would save me some seeds because she thought that I would love this plant because she hadn't seen one anywhere in the United States. And if and it was a passed down plant to her, a Scottish friend of hers had given it to her. So I have no idea where the origin of these seeds are, whether they came from Scotland or someone just, you know, got them here in the US and grew them. But in any event, she gave me some of these seeds, and this is probably 30 years ago. And uh I sow them and get these peony poppies, which I have now been able to find on the internet, you know, once once the internet came to pass. But I've never seen them exactly the color of mine. Mine are a very pale pink, and what I do is I just let the peony the poppies bloom. They're very short-lived. The whole bloom time is probably four weeks of these plants. And uh when the plants, the flower is done, it leaves the typical poppy head, uh, which is a round uh seed pod, and then there are little holes around the top of the seed pod. And basically uh you can just use it once it's dried. As a salt and pepper shaker, it you literally shake these poppy seeds out, and so I just leave them to dry in place in my garden, and then I just break off the seed heads and I go around and I s salt and pepper the garden and just let them grow wherever they want. Well, my my garden has been on sorted garden tours for the last eight, ten years, and so I always have these things, and it blew and they happen to bloom because the garden tours are in May and they happen to bloom right then, and they are by far the hit of the garden tour. People who are going to other houses on whatever garden tour it is will say, You have to go to this house in Irvine because it has this thing you've never seen before. It looks like a peony, but it's a poppy, and they're just spectacular because the flower heads are probably five inches across. And they're just this, they're just this round, big rounded, they have what look like millions of petals. They're they're just really cool.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

Um they look almost like a peony then.

SPEAKER_03 28:20

They do look like a peony, and that's why they're called peony poppies, obviously. And so um after the first year or two when people continually raved about those, I thought, you know what? I'm gonna start. I used to only save a few of the poppy heads for me, you know, to put out in my garden. And I thought, you know, I'm just gonna save all of them, put them in a uh Ziploc bag and give them to people who who visit. So now I have uh the word has gotten out, and the last couple of years, people will come and up to me and say, Do you have those, do you have those seeds? I heard you had seeds. I heard you would sit, you would share a seed. And then I've had people who I have shared the seeds with who have grown them, you know, come up to me and say, Thank you so much. Now I have them. And I remember you told me that I should pass them on, and so I pass them to my friends. So I don't know how many people in Orange County have these peony poppies, but um, I hope a lot because it just gives me joy whenever I hear people excited about starting that tradition in their own garden.

SPEAKER_01 29:27

Well, I'm gonna put that on my calendar and may come back and visit Tina Spindler and get some of those peony poppy seeds for my I'll actually give you some today. Since you brought me a present, I'll give you a gosh, oh gosh, this is the payoff is great. And we are in the garden with UC Master Gardeners, and today we're talking about heritage plants and pass-along plants with Tina Spindler. And I am Mark Ortell. The peony poppies sound exciting. I can't wait to get those going on the hillside with my nasturtiums and other poppies that that you just let reseed year after year and they come back and they end up being shared with people as you see them. That's a great way to pass along seeds.

SPEAKER_03 30:17

Sure. And let's maybe talk about that a little bit. About um, I'll I'll use because I think it for me it's more I can remember things better if I have specific examples of you know what it is you're doing. And so to start with the uh peony poppy as a plant that you might want to collect seeds from, uh, for uh many plants that are you're going to collect seeds, you have to make sure you do it at the right time. And so for these peony poppies, uh, I can't share the seeds when I have the garden tour because even though there may be some seed pods there already, they're green and the seeds are not ripe. And so I leave those plants in place until they turn brown, and then I know that those seeds are ready for collecting. So when you're collecting seeds, make sure you're doing it at the appropriate time. Uh, you know, I also collect seeds from a dill plant that I have, and so you want to make sure that you know the dill plant flowers and then the flower part turns brown, and then you can on the dill particularly, because dill seeds are you know big enough to see readily. You can kind of see, you know, when the seeds are ready. Same thing with a zinia, you know, when the zinnia loses its leaves and that center gets kind of dry, and you you can kind of pick at the center and it will flake out, the seed will flake out easily. If it's still attached really tightly to the plant, then it's not ready to harvest. Um, probably one of the easiest ones, examples to tell folks about is sunflowers, because we've probably all seen a sunflower head that has been left so that the birds could come eat the seeds when they were ripe. And of course, when you're looking at a sunflower, you go, whoa, those are sunflower seeds because they look like the sunflower seeds that we eat for a snack. So uh do if you're going to try and save seeds, make sure that you've allowed the seeds to ripen. Another way that you can tell is if you see, using the sunflower as an example, if you see some of those, the center part actually falling off on the ground, that's that's a pretty good indication that those seeds are ripe and you can cut the whole head and then store it in a paper bag or some container to use.

SPEAKER_01 32:44

And if the seeds aren't ripe, they won't germinate.

SPEAKER_03 32:48

They won't germinate, correct, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:50

And I found that out with pumpkin seeds. I had someone share giant giant pumpkin seeds, and they these seeds were huge, but apparently the pumpkin wasn't ripe because the seeds I shared with four other gardeners, and we were going to have a pumpkin growing contest.

SPEAKER_03 33:12

Oh fun.

SPEAKER_01 33:13

None of the seeds germinated. No one won that year. And we were all disappointed, and we realized that maybe the seeds were old or maybe they weren't ripe, or they just hadn't reached that stage where you know you would hope out of a half dozen seeds, at least a couple of them would germinate, but nothing. And these were all excellent gardeners. And so it wasn't the gardeners. Yeah. It was it was the seed. And so that was unfortunate. But I I think that's very significant. I'm a tomato guy, you know that.

SPEAKER_02 33:48

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:49

And tomatoes need to go through a certain process. And one variety of tomatoes I'm going to share with you, which is a I would call it an heirloom pass-along that I came upon in a weird way. I travel quite a bit for work, and I had to drive from Sioux Falls, South Dakota to Des Moines, Iowa. And it's a lot of farm country. And I pulled off at my favorite restaurant with the golden arches where they where you can get a warm beverage and something to eat quick and get back in the car. And as I went in, there was a group of people sitting around drinking coffee, and they had on the table these beautiful tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes. And I, you know, I as a master gardener, I couldn't. I thought I I've stumbled across the local garden club of this small town in Iowa, and I asked them, I said, what do you guys have there? And they said, Well, these are Billy's tomatoes that he's been growing for years. We've as long as we can remember, we all get plants from Billy and his tomato plants, and we save the seeds, and I thought, well, gosh, I have no idea what kind it is. It looked kind of like a brandy wine, but the flavor was incredible. And so I asked them if I could have a tomato. And they they smiled and laughed and said, absolutely, and I stashed it in a, you know, with the traveling restrictions you have now. I stashed it in a plastic bag, tucked it into some clothes inside my suitcase, and I brought it home. And you go through the process of tomato seeds, which is you need to let the tomato rot. There's a gelatinous covering on the seed, and you put the tomato in a jar with some water, it'll form some mold, and you rinse those seeds off, and that mold actually eats away at the gelatin and it leaves the seeds. And then once you rinse that away, you can spread the seeds out and let them dry, and then once they've dried, they're ready to be planted. And so I was able to snag some seeds from this uh Iowa, I call it my Iowa tomato plant.

SPEAKER_03 36:22

And I'm Then have you had good luck with it?

SPEAKER_01 36:24

I the first year I had excellent luck, but it is an open-pollinated plant, and so my next seeds were not as good. And I'm thinking that maybe it got cross-pollinated with some lesser varieties from our wild Southern California climate, that as opposed to those purebred Iowa tomato seeds from Billy's garden.

SPEAKER_03 36:49

Right. And that that is something that that folks need to be aware of is when it's open pollinated, that means pollen from another plant that's in the same, you know, family can uh pollinate your heirloom plant, and then the babies from that plant may not be the heirloom plant anymore. So that is something to be aware of. Now, I think for my poppies, it's not an issue because those are the only poppies I grow. Um, so it isn't an issue there. And then one other thing I should mention because we are master gardeners, um, do be sure that when you are going to take a plant from one place to another, that um you know the restrictions on taking a plant from one place to another. Uh, what comes to mind to me right now, because we have a terrible citrus disease, is that we we are under quarantine for moving citrus uh from our backyards uh because we don't want to risk this um, and I can never say it, long, long citrus greening disease. Um, but in any event, do be careful when you share plants that you are following um whatever regulations are in place.

SPEAKER_01 38:03

And that's true pretty much for a lot of seeds, especially if you travel. I I thought at one point I was gonna bring some seeds back from Bouchart Garden in Victoria, British Columbia. And so, but I didn't want to buy them there. I saw that there was a nursery just down the street that had open bins of seeds, and so I picked out lots and lots of varieties. And as I was driving back into the United States, they asked me if I had any plants or seeds. And of course, you know, being a master gardener, part of me said, I'm not gonna tell them the truth, but then the other part came forward. Your conscience and my conscience, and you know, that's being a lawyer as well. Sometimes we we don't always have those as much, right? That's what people say. But oh, I did. I did, and and I told them, yeah, I think I have some seeds.

SPEAKER_03 38:58

Yeah. Well, I I too went to Bouchard Gardens last September, but the seeds they sell on site, they will seal up and say that they're ready to be taken into the U.S. So that's right. You just have to be careful.

SPEAKER_01 39:12

They'll be USDA inspected and approved. And they do actually do the inspections in Canada. So I I learned that the hard way.

SPEAKER_03 39:22

I was not able to bring back my seeds and yeah, because what I bought there uh were heirloom plants or heritage plants. So I I bought some bachelor buttons, some Queen Anne's lace because they had the non-hybrid, you know, the open pollinated varieties there, which I'm sure you could find here too, but a lot of the the seed packets that you can find readily here are the hybrids. And um, I have a partiality to the open pollinated varieties. And and here is why. One of the reasons I like the open pollinated varieties is they often self-sow. And the older I get, the lazier I become. And so I love a garden that plants itself, and that's what my little peony poppies do. You've probably if you've listened to In the Garden, uh, What to Do in the Garden This Month show, uh, the first um Thursday of every month, you've probably heard me talk about some of my other favorite plants, one of which is Shasta Daisies. Uh, shasta daisy is also a pass-down plant. I have passed it along to many friends and master gardeners. And that self-sows. If I don't deadhead those shasta daisies on a timely basis, uh, and I have scads of them, so there's always some that have not been deadheaded, uh, they will produce seed and they'll self-sow, which means I have a constant supply of baby plants in places that I maybe don't want them. And so I dig them up and I share the plants with other friends. I don't bother to collect the seeds uh because that's work. And like I said, I'm getting to be a lazy gardener. And because I know that they'll just self-sow, that's an easy way for me to get new plants. I I do that with Rudbeckia, Black-Eyed Susan, it's more commonly known for our folks who aren't super uh gardeners. Um, but love to have the rudbeckia and it it self-sews, and I, you know, just dig them up and plant them where I want them, or I give them to friends. Um, another um, you know, there's there's scads that self-sew, right? I mean, simple, simple ones that we all have self-sew, elyssum self-sows, calendula self-sows, but I find that the hybrid calendulas don't aren't as hardy when they self-sew as the um heirloom calendula. If those things self-sew, sure enough, they're gonna live, go through their bloom cycle and be nice and strong and and welcome additions to the garden. So it's one way to get more pass-down plants is to choose these heirlooms. So this is where our heirloom or heritage and our pass-down plants kind of interconnect. They merge because the heirloomslash heritage plants often will self-sow easily, which gives you a lot of babies that you can share with with friends.

SPEAKER_01 42:27

What a great idea. That that makes a lot of sense. Uh and I'm thinking of the elyssum scattered all over my yard that as it was pulled out, the the seeds are everywhere. Um that's an easy one.

SPEAKER_03 42:41

Yeah, and then there's there's some that you know you may not like self-sowing. I, you know, made the mistake of planting forget me knots once, and I and and they will basically crowd out everything else. And so now as soon as I see them, because there's I haven't planted them actively in probably 10 years, but they still the seeds are self-sowing. And if I miss a plant and they self-sow, then I've got new babies I need to pull out. Um, but you know, if if you if you have a lot of space and you don't care, they they're a beautiful little plant. There's nothing wrong with them. I just get mad at them because they're growing where I don't want them. So I pull them out. And I don't pass those along because I don't want to have uh someone else be irritated about that. But um the the plants, the uh I want to talk about a couple of other ways to to have past now plants. So we talked about seeds. Yes. So seeds where you collect the seed as I do with the peony poppy and you did with the tomato. Uh, there are also just letting the seeds mature on the plant and self sow, like I just talked about, and then you end up having little baby plants that you can dig up and pass on. One way that you mentioned the way you got your fig tree was layering. So I'll talk a second about that because some of our listeners may not know what layering is. So layering is where you take a branch, a young branch, a bendable branch of a plant, and it can be all different, any kind of perennial, many kinds of perennial plants. I've done it with azaleas. Um, your friend did it with uh seed tree, blind fig brown fig. And what you do is you bend that plant down to the ground, and you can either dig a little hole in the native soil, and then I use uh two bent coat hanger pieces to pin that little branch down and cover it up with soil. It sounds like your friend took a milk carton container and filled it with soil and pinned it down in that milk carton.

SPEAKER_01 44:53

Exactly. That's he had a whole series of these little milk carton around his tree.

SPEAKER_03 44:59

And that's another way to do it. Basically, you just need to provide soil and a young branch, and when you put that branch under soil, it's going to send roots out into that soil, and that's what creates the new plant. So it sends the roots out, then it sends a new shoot-up, and then you can um dig it up and give it to someone or transplant it somewhere else. So that's called layering, and that's uh super easy, obviously cheap way to do it. Um another way is cuttings. Do you do much from cuttings?

SPEAKER_01 45:33

Uh I've started some lemongrass from and it's technically not a cutting. It was a lemongrass that uh a friend of mine at work, I told her that I could not find the really good lemongrass like I could at the Asian markets. And she said, Oh, I have this Korean market I go to. So she brought me six shoots, really thick lemongrass, a variety different than I think we get normally. And um I just took the I guess that would be a cutting and I put it in some soil, some seed mixture, which is just some peat moss and some perlite. It kept it moist and it rooted, and now I have six or seven uh lemongrass clumps that I can transplant around the yard with a very flavorable lemongrass.

SPEAKER_03 46:30

Very cool. Um you can do many perennials. Um, there are two kinds of cuttings, softwood and hardwood cutting. I personally only do softwood cutting because it's easy and I'm the lazy gardener. Um, and for the softwood cutting, uh, you basically just take a uh chunk of the soft bendable part of the perennial and you take it off, and I get I purchase rooting hormone powder because if you dip a stem of a perennial in this rooting hormone powder, it facilitates the rooting. And you want to make sure when you take this clipping, you know, usually there'll be leaves that are coming up periodically on this stem that you have uh picked. And what you do is you take off the bottommost leaves because those nodes that you're gonna then put in the soil are what is going to form roots, because when those nodes are below ground, just like the layering, they'll they'll form the roots. And then I find it advisable to cut off the remaining leaves if you leave like two or three sets of the remaining leaves, to cut those in half because those leaves need a lot of water nutrients to support them. So you don't want to burden this little brand new plant with having to support too much leaves. So I usually cut them in half so that they're big enough to still do photosynthesis, but not so big that they're requiring a lot of nutrients and water. And then, as you said, you put it in a perlite peat moss mixture and you just keep it, keep the soil moist, not soggy wet, otherwise it'll rot. But you keep it moist, and then I personally have a greenhouse, so I keep it in the greenhouse because that keeps the humidity up. But before I had a greenhouse, I would just make a tent out of old dry cleaning plastic and just make like a little mini greenhouse because you don't want that plant to dry out, because if it dries out, it's not going to root and it's not going to grow. And then it takes a number of weeks, depending on the plant, how long it takes. But um, the reason I did that is uh the same lady who gave me the peony poppy seeds uh was house sitting for someone who had an amazing garden, and she took me to this garden that had this beautiful plant that I don't even know the name of, never have seen it anywhere else. But it had it was a shrub and it had these panicles, these draping panicles of this violet blue flower just covering this plant. And I loved it. And I said, Oh, do you know where she got it? And she said, Oh no. She said, but because she uh had grown up with a gardening family that took cuttings, she says, Oh, let's just take you some cuttings and we'll put them in a Ziploc bag with a wet paper towel. This was before I was a master gardener, and you can take them home and start them. And I said, Well, what do you mean? I can get new plants, and so she explained to me the process. And to this day, I have two of those shrubs. Don't know what the name is, but I remember my friend and um have this beautiful plant, and every time it blooms, I remember her and our experience of visiting this other woman's garden. So it's if if you aren't intimidated, it's a it's a great, and believe me, it's not hard. It's a great way to start new plants. And you don't even have to know the name, you can just like the plants.

SPEAKER_01 50:06

Well, and I've done that with geraniums for years and years and years. Lots of different varieties of scented geraniums, and of course, people do that all the time with different flowers that and and plants from all over the world.

SPEAKER_03 50:22

If if you want to practice, as you said, Mark, geraniums are super easy. My grandpa did it, but never passed it on to me because we moved away. Um, but yeah, every year he, because it he lived in Ohio and the geraniums wouldn't overwinter. So every year he just broke off pieces from that year's geraniums, stuck them in pots, and he had a little um uh stairway to his cellar that he put glass over, and it acted as a mini greenhouse.

SPEAKER_01 50:54

A little greenhouse inside inside, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:56

So so I knew you could do it, but I had never tried it till this friend. Uh and I also have a heliotrope that you actually can find, but it's not the typical heliotrope you find in the nurseries. It's um a large bush, it's probably five feet tall, and it has pale lavender flowers instead of the dark marine blue flowers. Same thing. I I saw that somewhere and asked for cuttings, and I've had that plant for years and have started many others from it. So it's just so much fun to get unusual plants and uh to share them with friends.

SPEAKER_01 51:34

Well, that was always the old story when I first became a master gardener. You can always tell a gardener because they wear a hat and they have a pocket knife, and that's so that they can take cuttings. And and I heard a story of a bit a large extreme of somebody in Fullerton that had brought home an Italian fig tree from Italy.

SPEAKER_02 51:59

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 51:59

And I thought, well, how are you ever gonna bring a tree home? And what he'd done is he'd cut a a stick, he put a rubber bottom on it, and he put a handle on the top, and it was his walking stick that he walked through customs with.

SPEAKER_02 52:16

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_01 52:17

He also was smuggling. He was smuggling a fig tree, and they were the they're the best tasting figs. This, you know, obviously, this is decades ago that he must have done this. Sure. But that's always the the joke about gardeners. You can tell if they're wearing a hat and they have a pocket knife, your plants aren't safe. But maybe taking cuttings, but I think it's always better if you ask people, they're usually flattered. Um, I've come across some great plumeria varieties just by asking if I might cut a small branch off. And plumeria are another softwood type plant that readily root.

SPEAKER_03 52:58

They do. Yeah, it's it's fun. And and uh whenever I've asked someone if I could have a cutting, I've never been told no. So I think that people, as you said, are flattered, and uh, you know, we just we want to share joy. So if something gives us joy, we want to share it with other people. Um another time I've gotten some amazing plants is when friends move. And so if you hear of a friend moving and you've been lusting after something in the garden, uh the first time I did it, I was a little, you know, was I being a little too bold, but um, they were actually so grateful because they were sad to be leaving, you know, some of theirs their things. Um uh one of our master gardener friends, Kay Havens, when she moved, gave me a number of of plants, you know, from her yard that she wasn't gonna have room for in her new yard. And now um one of them is geranium matarins, uh, which I had never seen until I had seen it blooming in her yard. And it's not the typical geranium. This thing gets a seed head on it that's what 12 inches across or something. Really? Yeah, and it's this bright magenta color. Is it an ivy type geranium? No, it's not, it's not the I don't know. Yeah, it's not the kind of geraniums we're thinking of.

SPEAKER_01 54:19

It's um uh I don't even know botanically why it's more of a compact plant.

SPEAKER_03 54:25

Uh no, it's big. So these things um these things probably get uh three feet across. Uh and I now have it all over my garden because uh the ones that Kay gave me, I just let the seed heads go to seed, like I do for the Shasta daisies and others. And um they're just they're just uh stunning.

SPEAKER_01 54:48

I'm I'm just and they're not one of those invasive varieties that's gonna take over your entire garden.

SPEAKER_03 54:53

No, when they when they self-sow, they they're very uh definite leaf type, and if you don't want there, you can just pull it out. They don't transplant that well, although the first ones I had, Kay had planted up for me, but she's an amazing gardener. So um yeah, I've just looked it up.

SPEAKER_01 55:10

And as you mentioned, as they root, uh there's a lot of plants that you can get the the rhizomes, they spread. And uh if you know you have some friends, you can always share mint with them and tell them to plant that in their planner without any borders.

SPEAKER_03 55:26

If you hate them, yes.

SPEAKER_02 55:28

If you don't like them, tell them that. Otherwise, tell them put this in a pot on cement, don't let it touch soil anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 55:35

Oh, isn't that the truth?

SPEAKER_03 55:37

Yeah, yeah. Um uh yeah, the but the geranium madarins, I felt kind of bad because I didn't know the details, um, is called Madeira Cranesville. Uh, and it is a plant in the Gerinaceae family, and it's native to the island of Madeira.

SPEAKER_01 55:53

So it's not like the other geraniums that so you can look at uh the flower and drink a glass of wine with it.

SPEAKER_03 56:01

Exactly, and feel pretend you're in the Mediterranean someplace. Yeah, but you can see uh you guys can't on the show, but I'm I'm gonna show Mark what it looks like.

SPEAKER_01 56:10

That's amazing. It's lots and lots of blooms, and it and it's a rather large plant, three three feet.

SPEAKER_03 56:15

It is, it's about three feet in diameter, and when it blooms, about three feet tall. Um, but the foliage is very beautiful, uh kind of almost fern-like. Um, kind of looks like leatherly fern, although it's a softer leaf, it's not as stiff as that. But I love it and I let itself so because it fills in empty spaces in the yard. And it is um one that uh tolerates uh some shade, which you know it's hard to find blooming things that will tolerate some shade. Um so anyway, I just encourage everyone to share plants, maybe collect a little seed, divide your rhizomes or your bulbs, and make make others happy.

SPEAKER_01 57:00

Thank you so much. It's been a wonderful uh day today speaking with you about this, Tina.

SPEAKER_03 57:06

Thanks, Mark.