EPISODE 55 : Transcript
TRANSCRIPT:
Episode: Clivia. Raffaele Di Lallo. Boxwood Pruning
Length: 46:25 minutes
Leslie: Welcome to Into the Garden with Leslie on News Radio WINA. This show is sponsored by Dos Amigos Landscaping. I'm Leslie Harris and my fingernails are taking on a certain look, not conventionally attractive, but the look tells me how much I have been digging in the dirt cause spring is coming. Our plant of the week is a house plant, and that's in honor of our guest who is Raffaele Di Lallo of Ohio Tropics, the author of Houseplant Warrior, and the playlist is about what to do in your garden this week.
Have you been getting outside? Not only did I get outside a bit more, but also some of my seedlings did. I thinned out arugula and lettuce babies. That is always such a tough job. Who wants to waste a perfectly good seedling? You just feel so terrible and the little thing germinated for you and now you're going to cut short its life. My strategy is to be just a little bit rough as I do it. So, if one gets ripped apart, well he has validated my callous Darwinian agenda, hasn't he? I putted up the survivors and they're now in my cold frame outdoors so I have more room indoors to start some new seeds. My husband is a very patient man, but I try to keep the plastic takeout food container count to 4 for our warmest, sunniest window in the kitchen.
And here's proof that some seeds like tomato seeds really do need the warm temperatures that the seed packet proclaims. I took out a container of tomato seeds from the 60 degrees, only an hour or two of sunlight in the morning glass porch that I had sewn a couple weeks before, and they had done nothing. Nothing for a couple weeks. Then two days later in the 70-degree house in that very, very sunny window and up they came.
As I mentioned last week, I am but an indifferent seed starter. None of the luxuries such as grow lights nor heating pads, and of course, this is precisely why I get such indifferent results. But there's no getting around the fact that there are nurseries available to me, and that fact is what makes me a lackadaisical and careless seed starter. I know I have a plan B.
The plant of the week is the Clivia. I know many people call it the Clivia, but it was named for Lady Charlotte Clive, so yeah, Clivia. Some people call it the kaffir lily or the bush lily or the natal Lily. There are a few different species in this genus, but the one that you see most often as a house plant is Clivia miniata. This is a flowering plant native to South Africa. It has attractive dark green, strappy leaves. It loves to be root bound and it's extremely difficult to kill. I've done it, of course. Once when the ancient doors of my sunroom of our house in Connecticut decided to blow open on a seven-degree night and the other, when I accidentally switched off the power to the heater in our glass porch here in Charlottesville during a polar vortex. So, killing a Clivia can be done, but it takes special superpowers to do it, and apparently, I have them.
Making a Clivia bloom is actually quite easy, as will be demonstrated shortly by my fun interview with Raffaele Di Lallo. If you actually put a little interest, time and research into these things, you can learn about house plants and improve your game. Clivias have the most beautiful flowers. You have to picture a circle of like one third scale, amaryllis blooms like six or eight of them per stem. They are the most beautiful orange and I can't say that I'm a huge fan of orange in general, but it's the kind of orange, it's like a gentle leaning toward tangerine orange. Yes, the attractive University of Tennessee Vols orange and a pleasant lemon-yellow center, sort of reminiscent of the colors of the tulip poplar flower, which is so pretty.
My mother-in-law gave me my first Clivia as a young bride, and I thought for years that its ability to flower was based on kismet or perhaps sorcery. Sometimes it did, but I was too ignorant and disinterested to understand how or why it did. Upon leafing through one of those really highbrow books like Houseplants for Dummies or the like, I realized that if I simply kept the plant cold but not freezing for a few weeks in the fall, and if I didn't let it have very much water, then I would be sending that plant the signal to flower, because plants, like all living things, have a strong desire to procreate. It's just what we want to do. And one of the ways it does that is by setting seed. And of course, the seeds come with a flower. Elementary, not sorcery and easy to execute. Just put your Clivia out for summer vacation in the shade. They will burn if you put them in sun and as the nights start getting cool in the fall, put it undercover so you don't have to care for it. It's in the shade and it won't get mother nature's rain and it's getting cool at night, but not freezing. This should stress it out enough to produce some lovely flowers for you a few months later.
As I mentioned, the Clivia loves to be pot bound with a tangle of thick fleshy roots, the very roots that allow it to withstand quite a dry spell or an inattentive plant parent. No hurry, but if you can untangle those roots and pull out a new plant, you could give it to your daughter-in-law and she might keep it for ... like 40 years or so and it will make her happy.
This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA. Coming up, we'll be talking with Raffaele Di Lallo about lots of other house plants.
Welcome back to Into the Garden with Leslie. I am very happy to have Raffaele Di Lallo for our interview today, and he is all about something that you know if you listen to me, I'm not very good at. And so that's why it's great to have him on, besides his sparkling personality and his fun way to deal with this topic. It is house plants and he is the author of Houseplant Warrior: 7 Keys to Unlocking the Mysteries of Houseplant Care. He has a fantastic Instagram feed, which is making me chuckle over these last couple days as I stalk him, like what's he up to now? We're going to get into you throwing plants into bathtubs, by the way. I'm not letting you get away without chatting about that.
Raffaele: I just did that this morning, actually. I have a funny story about that, yes.
Leslie: I just feel so clean watching, so thank you. Thank you for coming to chat with me, and I'm excited about your book. It's coming out in March. Tell us a little.
Raffaele: Thank you so much for having me. Yes, it's coming out. The launch date is March 15th.
Leslie: Good, good, good. I'm going to put a link in the show notes about it, and I know that you can also access it on your Instagram. And so, when did you start writing? Was this a COVID project?
Raffaele: It was definitely a COVID project, so some good things came out of COVID for sure. wrote it, so I got the book deal. It became official in I believe it was September of 2020. And so, from September of 2020 up until now, it takes a while so it'll be published in in a couple months.
Leslie: Oh, I'm so excited for you. I mean, it looks beautiful. I love all the greens that you chose and it's...
Raffaele: Thank you.
Leslie: It's got very good curb appeal, if that's what books can have. In it, you really deal with ...your schtick, your thing that you like to do is helping people - dummies like me - with oh, the leaves are falling off and how much do I water and fertilization. You really break it down beautifully for people to have better success. What are some of the things that you touch on in your book that make it very accessible for people?
Raffaele: The whole basis of the book and the reason I wrote the book is because I've been on Instagram for a while and I've had my blog for a while and I get a lot of the same struggles and questions from people. They are constant reoccurring themes, and so I really wanted to break it down to the simplest level so that someone that doesn't have that much experience with growing house plants, or maybe they've been growing house plants for a while, but they've been struggling, I wanted to break it down to the simplest way of explaining things as possible so that they can say, oh, I get it now. Because there's just so many myths, there's so many misconceptions out there and it can become extremely confusing, especially if you Google and this is what most of us do.
Leslie: Sure.
Raffaele: We go on Google and Google is supposed to solve all of life's problems and there isn't always the best information on Google. You have to be careful of your sources. I'll give the one thing that comes up the most, and it comes up so many times that I talk about this in my book, and I have a dedicated section in my book about this. So let's say someone says, oh my philodendron has all these yellow leaves or brown leaves and they reach out to me on my Instagram or they comment on my blog and in the end they say, I probably overwatered. And that is a trigger point for me, and I'll tell you why. Because you go on Google and you say, why does my philodendron have a yellow leaf? And something will pop up, an article will pop up and it says, you probably overwatered.
What we have to remember is we can't just blindly trust. We have to verify. Most of the time and 99% of people are shocked when I ask them, go ahead and feel your soil. Stick your finger in the soil. Tell me how it. Most of the time they'll say, oh my gosh, it's bone dry. And so all of our plant woes can be caused by so many different things and you have to verify. You have to observe, you have to make an observation. And so that's what I teach people how to do in the book.
And it might seem so elementary and simple, but that's what it is. We have to observe with our eyes. We have to observe with our touch, and make observations about our environment, about our potting mix. And that is the most important thing that'll help us. All of these plant problems can be caused in fact, many times by completely opposite conditions, but we have to use our senses to determine that.
Leslie: I mean, I know so little, but isn't it true that yellow leaves can be caused, can be a signal of overwatering and underwatering too?
Raffaele: Absolutely! They could be caused by both of those. They can be also caused by a drop in light. Let's say if we have our house plants outside. We put them outside for the summer, and I like to do that as well. When we bring them back inside, there's so much less light indoors compared to outdoors, even outdoors in the shade. There's so much less light indoors. And so oftentimes our house plants will react by shedding a few leaves and getting a few yellow leaves and dropping them in the wintertime, especially. So that's perfectly normal, so they can be caused by, like you mentioned, bone dry soil. A lot of times you'll notice the lower leaves or the oldest leaves on the plant will turn yellow and fall off. They can also be caused by overwatering. I mentioned that in my book. I have a dedicated section and yellow leaves can be caused by soil staying too wet.
I prefer to say soil staying too wet instead of overwatering because there's a lot that goes into that term. It's a very misleading term, and I I'll tell you why. Because most people, when they say overwatering or they think of overwatering, they get scared to water properly, and so they don't thoroughly moisten the potting mix or the soil. And so, what they end up doing ironically, is that they end up underwatering their plants and they end up dehydrating their plants because they're afraid of thoroughly moistening their soil. And so ironically, they end up doing the opposite. And in most cases, they're actually struggling with not enough light. If you put your house plant in a dark corner of your house, it's not going to use as much water as it should, and so everything gets thrown off. Everything gets thrown off; nothing works the way it should.
Probably the top downfall in people growing house plants indoors is that they're not providing enough light for their house plants. That's one of the things. There's a lot more that I talk about on the book, but that's definitely one of them. If you shove a house plant in a dark corner in your living room and it's 20 feet away from a window, and then people are wondering why isn't it growing. Well, what I like to tell people is if you have a child, if you adopt a baby, or if you have a baby and you're not feeding your baby, you're starving your baby. Plants photosynthesize, right?
Leslie: That's the food.
Raffaele: That's how they make their food. If you shove your plant in a dark corner, you're starving your baby.
Leslie: No good.
Raffaele: No good. That's the top thing that you need to be concerned about. We can't just shove a plant wherever we want in the house. We have to cater to our plant's needs. We can't put them where we want them. We have to put them where they want to be placed, and where they'll thrive in our house, not the other way around. Otherwise, it'll just open up a whole can of worms and we'll just be frustrated.
Leslie: Yeah, and that's not fun. I mean, you want to be a happy plant parent with happy plants.
This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA, sponsored by Dos Amigos Landscaping. We're talking with Raffaele Di Lallo who has written a book called Houseplant Warrior, which sounds aggressive and strong. and he's going to in this book give all kinds of people all kinds of advice. But just so you know, he already does on Instagram, his blog and YouTube, Pinterest, and Facebook also a little bit, so if you want to check those out. All those links will be in the show notes for this episode. So, let's step back a little bit from the book and talk about how you got started with plants.
Raffaele: My family is from Italy. I grew up in an Italian family and I've been around plants literally for as long as I can remember. I was exposed to outdoor gardening even before house plants, but I've been around all of it all of the time since I was a child. My family had a gigantic vegetable garden outdoors, huge vegetable garden. We grew everything. We did a lot of flower gardening as well. I started growing things from seed when I was a child.
Leslie: Wow.
Raffaele: I know it's not a typical thing. I was in grade school, growing stuff from seed and planting things and starting to grow house plants. I think I started to grow house plants probably middle school, I would say. And the reason it started - it's kind of a funny story - was because my father actually smoked a lot. He probably smoked a couple packs of cigarettes a day and I hated it. I absolutely hated it. And I remember reading online somewhere that house plants or that plants purified your air. And so, then I started collecting all these house plants, and before I knew it, we had fortunately a beautiful, large Southern facing window with tons of sun and I just started hoarding house plants. I filled it up and no one said anything. No one complained about it. I just kept collecting more and more plants. And that's really where it started and it hasn't stopped since.
Leslie: Some people just have a green thumb. Did you have instant success with these things? You're young enough so that you might have gotten some information online and we just talked about the dangers of that. I'm sorry. When I started gardening, it was all books. There was no online thing, but anyway, were you instantly successful? Were there some failures and how did you learn?
Raffaele: Yeah, I mean, I think just like anybody else and... I think I might be older than you think
Leslie: You look very youthful.
Raffaele: Thank you. Thank you. I'm actually going to turn 44 in February.
Leslie: Oh, you're well preserved.
Raffaele: Thank you. I guess at the beginning of my journey, just like you mentioned, I read a lot of books. I got a lot of books out at the library and read voraciously about gardening and plants, so I got most of my early information there. And then as the internet became more popular, I think probably when I started to go to college is when the internet actually started to grow and exploded. I still prefer a good book, holding a book, but I do online as well. And like you mentioned, trial and error. No one knows what they're doing when they're starting to grow plants and just by trial and error, we all learn that way and then by reading a lot. As you gain more knowledge and you gain more experience, you really learn what you're doing. No one is born with a green thumb. Really, no one is born with a green thumb.
Leslie: Well, it's the interest that makes you be more successful, even if you make those boo boos, right?
Raffaele: Absolutely. I totally 100% agree with that. We all learn from experience and knowledge, and you can develop a green thumb, and I really foster that in my book and in my approach with helping people with growing house plants or any type of plant, really for that matter.
Leslie: You mentioned this pitfall that a lot of people would come across in all walks of life. I just downloaded something on my phone yesterday. How did I download something on my phone, and how do I go find it, and I immediately find it? Google is very useful, but what are some of the biggest dangers that you see out there that you could just miss that are constantly popping up for house plant owners? I wonder why these things happen, but of course let's not go into that, because we might quickly spiral into politics or vaccines or something awful. Too distasteful. But tell me what you see are the worst of these out there.
Raffaele: Sure. One of the things, like I mentioned earlier, the biggest thing that I see is the topic of over watering, and we already talked about the pitfalls of that one. Another topic that I do want to bring up also is humidity. Humidity of course it's important. It is important, but I think as a plant owner, we need to make sure that we're prioritizing certain topics over others. I think a lot of people that are starting to grow house plants, a lot of them are concerned about I need to raise my humidity, and yes, we do. We do want to try and recreate the environment, the natural environment, that plants actually grow in. And unless we're talking about succulents, a lot of the plants that we grow indoors are from tropical rainforest environments where they're very humid. A large amount of the house plants that we grow are from that environment.
But I do have to say that proper watering - light is number one. We have to make sure we have enough light. Once you have that, proper watering is way more important than trying to increase the humidity. We all have crispy edges on our leaves. It's inevitable. We forget to water for a while or we go on vacation and then we find crispy tips on our leaves or more. Maybe all of our bottom leaves fall off and become brown and crispy. Crispy edges on the tips of our leaves is a common issue and low humidity can cause that. But I will have to say if you pay attention to watering, that is so much more important than increasing your humidity.
If you have both wonderful, wonderful. And this goes even for ferns. Even for ferns, water loving ferns, if you can maintain an evenly moist potting mix, it's going to go so much further than just increasing your humidity. And if you're maintaining a really human environment, but then you forget to water your fern, you let it go bone dry. It's going to suffer a lot more.
Leslie: Oh wow!
Raffaele: So proper watering is so much more important than just increasing your humidity. All of these topics work together and we have to think about plant care holistically, instead of just focusing on one topic
Leslie: Such as the water and the humidity, but also it would also be nice to know if you're going to mess up, you can mess up a little faster on the humidity thing than on the light and watering thing. It's good to know the basic steps. What about the mister? Does the mister solve some evils if you don't want to have your house as humid so that you're going to have bad hair days all the time and stuff?
Raffaele: I'm glad you mentioned misting because that is another huge myth and misconception, if you will. Misting does not increase humidity.
Leslie: I thought it did.
Raffaele: It just does not. No, it does not. You're just wetting your plant's leaves. I mean, humidity is a measure of moisture in the air. You can mist all you want. You can mist all day; you're going to end up giving yourself carpal tunnel. So, in order to increase humidity, I would recommend getting a humidifier. That is the absolute best way and the easiest way to increase humidity in your growing location. I'm not going to say that you should stop misting unless you overdo it. Some people overdo it. You can have fungal issues if you're constantly misting your plans, especially if you have poor air circulation in your growing space, especially indoors, because we don't have wind indoors like we do outdoors. So, I will say misting, there are some benefits to it. In the wintertime especially, house plants can be prone to spider mites because they like dry and warm conditions as you know, for outdoor gardening too so it can help deter that, but it will not increase the humidity of your air. You're just wetting the leaves. It can help deter pest to some point, but it will not increase humidity so I would recommend a humidifier.
Leslie: And then you hear people talk about the trays with the pebbles and the water rising up slowly. That helps a lot.
Raffaele: Yeah. And that works. Absolutely. That does help a little bit and I have that with one of my plants. So, if I were to rank the ways to increase humidity, I would say get a humidifier and get one really that's rated for the size of your room. It will tell you it's good for up to 600 square feet, or something like that. And if you're not sure, get one that's rated, let's say if you have a 200 square foot room, get one that's rated for over that, just to be safe because you'll raise your humidity a lot quicker. I would say get a humidifier and next best, I would say the plants on moist pebbles. Absolutely that will help to increase humidity as well, and then misting, I would not consider that a way to increase humidity.
There's one other way. If you have a ton of house plants. If you have a hundred or 200 house plants all piled up in a room, they actually will create their own micro climate because they'll transpire moisture, and so they will increase their own humidity to some extent. And so actually in my sunroom, I have a ton of plants. The humidity can be, depending on how many plants you have, a few percentage points, I guess if you want to call it that, higher than the rest of your house, because plants transpire water and release water vapor into the air.
Leslie: Yeah. I shove all mine on my glass porch and I walk in there in the winter. It kept at 60 and I'm like, this is definitely … I mean, it's not a jungle, but it's definitely different than the rest of the house. I do something that probably is a big waste of time, but let me ask you. I actually put my little succulents that want dry, that don't want moist off in one corner as if to protect it. It's like the non-smoking section back on the airplane. Really, does it make any difference at all to put the humid-loving ones together in the same room as the dry ones?
Raffaele: That's a great question. And I would say, I think your thought process...
Leslie: At least I'm thinking
Raffaele: You're thinking about it. I would say if you're in the same room, your humidity might vary a tiny bit from one corner to the other, but probably not that much.
Leslie: Okay. Just wishful thing.
Raffaele: Unless you have a gigantic room, but you bring up a good point in that if you have certain rooms that provide better conditions for your succulents, definitely segregate them and put them there. So, if you have a room that maybe has drier air and a lot brighter light, a lot more sun, put your succulents there. And if you have a room where you are trying to increase humidity and you have a lot of plants that are native to rainforest environments, put all those plants all in the same room, because they'll like the same conditions.
Leslie: And they'll help each other out with the transpiration.
Raffaele: Absolutely.
Leslie: Okay, cool. This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA, brought to you by Dos Amigos Landscaping, and we're talking with Raffaele Di Lallo about house plants. He has the book Houseplant Warrior coming out in March and there will be links to that in the show notes. So you also garden outside, right?
Raffaele: I do. I'm a huge outdoor gardener. I like to grow a lot of tropical stuff outside. Vegetable gardening as well, so I grow a little bit of everything and I'm also excited. I'm getting a greenhouse this spring.
Leslie: That is going to be great. Oh my gosh! It's like huge, wonderful thing, but big problem, because here comes the shopping that goes along with that, right?
Raffaele: Yes. There goes my bank account.
Leslie: That's awesome. Congratulations. How big will it be?
Raffaele: Thank you. It's going to be 12 feet by 24 feet long.
Leslie: Oh, my goodness. Not a small item.
Raffaele: Yeah. No one ever said darn, I should have gotten a smaller greenhouse.
Leslie: No. No one ever said that. In Ohio, I don't have very much experience with greenhouses, but because I live in Virginia, I think that I don't know what I could keep in a greenhouse. It would probably cook in Virginia in the summer. Will you empty it out or will you keep some things that really love heat and humidity in summer?
Raffaele: That's a great question. And honestly, for me, it's going to be a learning experience too, because I've never had a greenhouse in my life. It's been a lifelong dream ever since I was little honestly. I do plan on using the greenhouse year-round and I do want to grow a little bit of everything. But to answer your question about in the summertime, so obviously I'm in Ohio. We got two feet of snow. I can't even go in our backyard now, so obviously my greenhouse is going to need to be heated. I'll have a natural gas heater. In the winter, it's actually in an area where it's going to get quite a bit of sun.
Leslie: Oh, good.
Raffaele: So that'll be obviously great for the winter time. In the summer, there's actually quite a few trees around the greenhouse, so the trees will help protect the greenhouse a little bit from overheating, but the greenhouse that I'll be getting will also have an evaporative cooler that will help bring the temperature down in the summer as well, because you don't want to overheat, like you mentioned. You don't want to cook your plants. I don't want wilted spinach in the summertime for my plants as well, so it is a little bit of both, and like I said, it'll be a learning experience also for me as well.
Leslie: And that's what all gardeners do. Do you generally advocate for a normal house plant person, not as successful as some I'm much more interested in gardening, outdoors? At home, I have wonderful things indoors. They generally, most of them live and by the time for me in Virginia March or April comes along, they're like, please get me out of your care and get me back outside so that I can get away from you. Even though you're very good at caring for house plants, do you do that with a lot of your house plans and get them outside?
Raffaele: Yes. And I'm really glad you brought that up because there's another very, very, very common issue that people come to me with concerning placing plants outside and also bringing plants back in. To answer your question, I don't put all of my house plants outside. I have too many to do that with, but certain ones that looks kind of sad in the wintertime. I have an Alocasia that I've had years and years and years, and in the wintertime, it's kind of a ticking time bomb. Get me back outside and then it just throws out tons of new growth. I do like to put orchids outside. All house plans will love it outside. The ones that look like they're suffering or that are declining just because of the lack of light in the wintertime and we get really dark winters here in Ohio. You're probably luckier being in Virginia.
Leslie: We have more light where I am. Yeah.
Raffaele: A lot more light. I do use grow lights in my sunroom, but I don't have them in any other areas of my house. But the one thing to remember - this is so important - when you move a house plant or a plant that you've had inside to the outdoors, you have to be really careful and you have to follow this one step so that you don't burn your house plants. And this goes even for plants that love the sun. I talk about this in the light chapter in my Houseplant Warrior book. The light outdoors is so much stronger than the light that we have indoors, so we have to acclimate our plants very slowly. So anytime I move a house plant from indoors to outdoors, I put them in the shade, complete shade for a few days for even up to a week, and then I slowly increase the amount. If it is a sun loving plant, I'll gradually increase the amount of direct sun that it receives. I might put it in an area maybe that gets maybe an hour of direct sun a day for a couple days, and then I'll slowly increase it. Otherwise, if you move a house plant from inside directly into full blazing sun, you're going to roast your plant really quickly within a matter of hours.
Leslie: Even if it was getting direct light through the window, it's different.
Raffaele: Yes. Absolutely. The direct sun that we get indoors is a lot weaker than direct sun that we have outdoors. By far. By orders of magnitude.
Leslie: Okay. That's really good to know. Couple of quick things before I let you go. Can we talk about your very, very, very, very large coleuses?
Raffaele: Yes.
Leslie: How old are those plants? You have to look on Instagram. I'll put photographs.
Raffaele: Oh my gosh. I don't have those plants anymore because I just grow them as annuals. The one you're probably thinking of the one that I was standing next to in this giant pot. I planted them, I think in May and they just grew.
Leslie: They did that all in one season?
Raffaele: All in one season.
Leslie: Ah! Do you ever keep coleus through the winter?
Raffaele: That's a funny story because I took some cuttings and they rooted indoors and we just went on vacation last week. I had propagated them in water, so they had their roots in water and the water dried out and they wilted and they died.
Leslie: Oh darn! They are easy to propagate.
Raffaele: I neglected them. Yeah, they're super easy to propagate. Those were all in one season and I use Osmocote® Time-Release fertilizer in the pot. Tons of water. I think I made a second application of Osmocote® maybe a month after I planted them, and they even took a lot of sun.
Leslie: Oh, wow.
Raffaele: A lot of people think coleus are strictly shade plans, but there's a lot of cultivars that can grow in sun or shade. And the one that you saw that was growing in full sun. And of course, that means ...
Leslie: That was a ColorBlaze® Golden Dreams, and those can take the sun.
Raffaele: Yes, from Proven Winners.
Leslie: That's nice.
Raffaele: Yeah, absolutely great.
Leslie: Quickly, can we talk about the bathing of the plants in the bathtub?
Raffaele: Yes. We have this one giant bathtub and - I don't do this all the time - but in order to really thoroughly water my plants and not make a mess, I'll take them to the bathtub, water them, let everything drain out and bring them back. You might find this story humorous. I have a Hoya. I don't know if you have any Hoya plants.
Leslie: I think I do. Well, I was taking care of somebody's all summer and I didn't kill it so I claim ownership.
Raffaele: So, I have one Hoya plant, a Hoya Carnosa plant that I've had for probably almost 20 years, and it's been in the same pot. I never, never repotted it and as you can imagine, it is all roots. I am a major procrastinator and I keep saying, oh, I'm going to repot this. I'm going to repot this and then I never do. So, as you can imagine, all the soil's gone. You touch the inside of the pot, it is a hard mat of roots and as you can imagine, it dries out super quickly and so it needs very frequent watering. What I do is, and I did this yesterday, I put my Hoya and it's probably six feet long. I took the entire plant. I put it in the bathtub. I filled it with fairly tepid or warmish water and I let it soak overnight and it loves it. They're epiphytes so they also get moisture from the air rainfall and nature, and so it loves it. And so that's how I'm managing to keep that plant in good condition until I get my act together and repot it.
Leslie: And repot it. So, the bathtub! Who knew?
Raffaele: I'm not advocating this. If you have a plant that has loose soil, don't stick it in there, because ...
Leslie: You're going to make a mud pie.
Raffaele: You're going to make a huge mess. There's no soil left; it's all roots so I did not make a mess.
Leslie: I saw you on Instagram this morning where you had a plant where you're like, okay, I need action now. You got the hammer, you got the glove, you got rid of the pot.
Raffaele: Yes. Yes.
Leslie: Because you just have to let those roots go free.
Raffaele: That's right.
Leslie: This is such a pleasure, and I've always got a chip on my shoulder about house plans. I'm not really good at this. However, I think I could be with just a little bit more interest and honestly, after owning a Clivia... Do you call them Clivia or Clivia?
Raffaele: I say Clivia
Leslie: I do too, because it was named after Sir Clive Something Something. but my mother-in-law gave me those years ago and somebody could always make them bloom and I'm like, oh, I get it. You have to let them be cold and dry for about six weeks and then they bloom.
Raffaele: Yeah. A lot of times, and that actually works for Hoyas as well.
Leslie: Does it?
Raffaele: Absolutely.
Leslie: It's interesting in executing this information that you have, and that you've so nicely shared in your book, Houseplant Warrior. Thank you so much, Raffaele, for coming to talk to me today.
Raffaele: Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Leslie: Good, good. This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA, and coming up, we'll talk about what to do in your garden this week.
Welcome back to Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA. I really enjoyed learning from Raffaele and it's so true with house plants and really anything that if you just put your mind to it and learn from others or books or the internet, sometimes - be careful - you can really improve your game. Certainly, learning from Raffaele online could work. He does have a very good blog and YouTube and Instagram, et cetera, and he's the real deal. Just stick with him. House plants are like the simple pleasures of life, but much more pleasurable, if we can keep them alive and looking good. I thought that this was a good episode to schedule right around now because my house plants are beginning to question the person in charge. And if they could hold off for just a few more weeks without expiring or falling apart, I can get them outside for their summer holiday, which is just where they belong.
Questions from listeners. Somebody named Loves OES rated the podcast on Apple and also left me a question there. This is not the real name of the person in question, but it is certainly easier to pronounce than [unclear] or whatever that one was from last week. This is an inside joke for those of you who listened to the entire episode last week.
Any who, Loves OES asked me to spill the beans about the brand of secateurs that I use. I spill those beans thoughtlessly and habitually. I even sell them on my Amazon storefront. The name is OKATSUNE. I'll put a link in the show notes. They're lovely, little hand pruners - small and sharp and lightweight - and they were even smart enough to make them bright red and white so they're much harder to lose in the garden than most.
If you remember several weeks ago, I was chatting with Tanya Anderson of Lovely Greens and I inquired as to her favorites and they are also Japanese. But she hinted that they did not start with an O, but instead with an N. Little do I know about the rules of mentioning brand names on podcasts, so I will simply prattle on and later ask forgiveness if I have broken one, but the N stands for NIWACKI and they are not widely sold here in the United States. But, but, but I have inquired about them and I am getting my first Niwacki tool in the mail soon.
I chose snips instead of secateurs. I don't own any snips, and I think they're great for just little things and cutting flowers and fine pruning. Not because either company sponsors me, but oh my God, I would love it if they wanted to - get the word out- but because I can't see how I can do better than the Okatsune secateurs that I already have. Stay tuned to the sharp edged, Japanese hand tool drama. I will keep you updated.
There was another question about the pruning of fall flowering shrubs, and the answer is yes if the question is more specifically, is it a good time to do that? Here are some examples of shrubs that you can scalp now. In the spring, they will grow the buds that will bring you flowers later in the summer or in the fall. There's Abelia, Caryopteris or Blue Beard, Hydrangea paniculata like the Limelight or the Little Lime, Camellias like the sasanqua type that blooms in the fall. The japonicas are blooming now, so I think you should just sit back and enjoy them, but you can prune them later in a few weeks when they're all done, then they'll have all summer and fall to form new buds for you. Itea or Virginia sweetspire, you can go with those now. And of course, Beautyberry or the Callicarpa. Oh, and Vitex the chaste tree and Buddleia, the Butterfly Bush, I can't think of any others, but if you have more to add to that list, please let me know.
And the last question that I got, and if you're curious, these last two questions, all of these questions this week were from real people, instead of making them up. I just forgot to keep track of their names, but I didn't have to make them up this week. Glory be! The last question is about oakleaf hydrangeas. The writer wanted to plant some but needed them to stay at around four feet tall, and some types of oakleaf hydrangeas can get to 10 feet tall, but I recommended some dwarf varieties like Ruby Slippers, Munchkin, Pee Wee. Those will all do. Little Honey is even smaller, I think. Mine's only a couple feet tall, but it's very unique because of its lime green foliage. It fades to a normal green at the end of the summer, but it makes quite a strong limey showing in the spring.
If you do have oakleaf hydrangeas that are too big for your space, they're pretty easy to prune each year. They bloom on old wood, so in order to get yearly flowers, you would want to prune them toward the end of summer. They already flowered, but they still have time to form their new buds before frost. But maybe it's easier to start with something that's going to fit your space for a while to come.
This week I promised to talk about boxwood pruning more. Thanks for being patient. Last week, I briefly touched on how much they like air and that technique of reaching inside the bush is great, punching a hole. So, you grab a branch and reach in about halfway or a third of the way and just cut. You don't even have to look for a node or a crotch or anything, and you'll get some air and light into the interior of the plant.
When I had my crew, we got hired by an amazing gardener. She knew so much, but she was in her mid or late eighties so she wasn't going to be doing all of it herself. Anyway, she literally said to me, hey, I need you to Swiss cheese my boxwoods.
They were huge old specimens, but she knew that every few years, every three years, every five years, they need a really good hacking back to keep them looking good. If you go at it hard, don't be scared. You're going to create a hole. And one hole will look like you've made a mistake, but your mission is to create a series of holes so the look will be much more intentional and patterned. So just keep going.
Another strategy is to create skylights in your very large boxwoods. This is particularly affectual if the plants are taller than you are. You can saw away some of the top branches and the look you leave would be pretty darn ugly, but you can get away with it unless a person with way too much time on their hands is standing and staring from a second story window down at the top of the boxwood. Shouldn't they be folding laundry or something?
In other words, you can totally get away with removing great hunks of the tops of tall boxwood plants, and the plant will get light and air and your sense of decorum and aesthetics will in no way be impacted because from where you stand on the ground, you can't see what you did.
Cloud pruning. Oh, I did mention that, but it's really not important to the health of any boxwood. It's that crazy look that will conjure up the visual images of a Westminster dog show, the poodle class and talk about having time on your hands. I mean, if making your poodle or your boxwood look like that makes you happy, then you should do it. But just be aware that there are those of us who cannot relate.
Interesting side note - I just Googled cloud pruning to see what they had to say about it, and cloud pruning is also known as Niwacki, which is the name of Tanya Anderson's favorite secateurs and the name of the little tool that's coming to me in the mail. Go figure!
So, what did I do in my garden this week? Well, as I mentioned, I potted on some baby seedlings and I assassinated others. I cut back my black Mondo grass in my Zen Garden and I just started doing it without thinking, because I'm like, well, I only want to see the fresh growth and it's a great time of year to do that. You certainly should be doing it with Liriope (Monkey Grass), because if you don't, then what grows fresh will be mixed in with last year's brown, so it's a much better look if you just hack it back. You could even use a string trimer at this time of year if you want to. Halfway through doing my black Mondo grass, I was like what I'm cutting away looks just fine so why am I doing this? I literally stopped halfway through that chore, which means I should have a pretty good idea of which way to go next year. And meanwhile, my Zen Garden is not quite Zen because it looks like an unfinished chore, but that's okay.
I dethatched my lawn, which is a great upper body workout, raking the whole thing, and it's so satisfying to pull up all the sticks and leaves with your rake. But I don't even know if you have to do that. Surely little bits of leaves are good for the top level of the soil. There is so much conflicting information about this on the internet. And what I don't know about lawns would fill great books. So, if anybody knows better than I do about often dethatching should be done, I'd love to know, and I'll put it on my list. I'll look into it for next week.
And what is my needy ask of the week? Could you please go to my website if you haven't? lhgardens.com. Have a look at the blog that accompanies this podcast. Oh, and by the way, no, I did not put up all those fancy flower names that Carl Gercens of Longwood Gardens mentioned last week. Sorry. I was outside instead of figuring out getting images of each of those. Sorry, but if you would consider buying me a cup of coffee, then maybe I could get somebody else to do things like that someday. The ability to sponsor the podcast is right there on the blog at lhgardens.com.
This week, I would like to kindly thank Mary Wright Baylor for her feedback on Apple. She wrote back in December: I am a longtime fan of Leslie's Instagram account, and we look forward to this podcast every week. We're pretty experienced gardeners, but we learn new things each week. LH is hilarious, practical and hosts fascinating guests. Countless times we have listened to her show and gone outside to tackle a new project. Thank you, Mary Wright. That is very, very sweet. Makes me want to go out and tackle more projects myself.
Oh, just another note. I was on another podcast this week. It's called DC Gardener and Kathy Jentz is the hostess and it was all about pruning. So, if you want to have a listen, I will put a link to that in the show notes also. If you have any questions or comments or corrections, please reach out to me at Instagram @leslieharrislh, or my website, lhgardens.com. I think I've mentioned that four times. Let's move on.
I named this show Into the Garden with Leslie, because I'm really into my garden and I want to get you into yours and I'll see you next week.
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