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cc >> My name is Samantha Peckham and I'm a horticulturist at Olbrich Botanical Gardens here in Madison. Just to see, have any of you folks been to Olbrich? Do you wanna just-- Oh! A lot of folks. That's fantastic. I've been a horticulturist there for about, I think, eight years now, seven or eight years. One of the gardens I take care of is the herb garden. I use a lot of the principles that I'll be talking about today in the herb garden, combining herbs and veggies and ornamental plants all together in a great combination. With that I think we'll get going. I'll try and save some time at the end if any folks have questions, I'll also hang out for a while if we don't have time. If anybody has questions. I think we went through all the handouts that I had, but if anybody that didn't get one wants one, I've got some cards of mine up here. You can always send me an e-mail and I can send it to you if anyone is interested in that but didn't get one. All right, so first of all, just getting started, I'm going to talk a little bit about the history of the idea of, sort of, the edible landscape. We'll talk about some different ways to get some inspiration for your own edible landscape at home. Then we'll talk a little about design ideas. Then we'll go into the plants themselves. Historically, the idea of edible landscaping and cultivated plants has been around for centuries. Since folks started having permanent civilizations, we've been doing this. But the idea of the potager garden, and the both ornamental and functional landscape, really came about in the Middle Ages in Europe. They really got into this. The majority of the gardens they were doing at that time were usually walled gardens connected directly to the home or to monasteries, castles really, whatever you lived in, that had a walled garden to go along with them. In this garden they would primarily grow herbs, vegetables, really anything for fresh produce for the house, but they would also grow flowers, as I said, herbs, medicinal plants, really anything you can grow that you would need for the home. In addition to being a very functional space, this also turned into an ornamental space and a space for the folks that lived in the home of in the monastery to come and to relax and to do meditation. It was just sort of a nice little place to escape from the stresses of the world, and things like that. Over time, as we get into the Renaissance and even into the Americas, it really has taken off and gotten into the kitchen garden and more of an ornamental space. Essentially, it's morphed into this idea of beauty and utility and functionality coming together in a beautiful, wonderful, space that you can do almost anything in. Again, this is a shot from Allen Centennial Gardens which is on the UW campus. A few years ago ornamental edibles was the theme for their gardens. So they had these ornamental, edible plantings throughout the gardens. You can see in this one, they've got all sorts of different things. They've got nasturtiums, cabbages, kale, Swiss chard, all sorts of things. They've made molded them into this beautiful, very ornamental, and yet very functional, planting. All right, so now into inspiration. I like to start, since we're talking about edible plants, I wanna start with food. Think about, if you're looking for inspiration and ideas on what to grow, first of all, think about what you like to eat. I'm a huge fan of kale. I've really gotten into it over the last years. I really like to eat it. And it's super easy to grow. It's also a very beautiful plant. That may be something you want to think about doing, also cauliflower. If you like to bake, this just has, essentially just decorated with mint sprigs along with rose hips and then a culinary variety of crabapples. This is very simple, pumpkin pie. You can grow pie pumpkins. They're super easy to grow. Then there's just a few violas on the top there to top it off and make it look pretty. Other places for inspiration, you can really find it anywhere. This is at an orchard up by my house. I live north of Madison. This is outside of Poynette. This is Lapacek's Orchard. I was there last fall. This is just a little raised bed that they have along their main barn. All these beautiful ornamental kales, which you can eat. They're very good edibly. A real simple planting. They just packed it full of these kale and really just let them go nuts throughout the summer. Then this is all the way into late fall and it's still very beautiful. You could go through and throughout the season just be harvesting leaves off of that. This is a shot from Rotary Gardens in Janesville. If any of you haven't been there, I highly recommend it. It's really an fantastic little garden. Last year they started a new area. They re-did it. It was all, primarily edible and herbal plants, but they did it as sort of a home demonstration garden and did all these different creative ways to grow these sorts of plants in various size spaces. You can see towards the back here, they've got these hanging planters. This is just made out of PVC pipe. They cut part of the top off to make a planting area, and capped the ends, filled it up with soil and they had some drain holes in there. Then they just hung them off this little structure they make. But you can see, even if you don't have very much space in your yard, or potentially if you're in a condo, if your condo laws will allow you to do that, you could put that on a deck or on a patio, or really anywhere. There's a lot of different ways to do this even if you don't have a lot of space in your garden. This is again from Allen Centennial Gardens. I think this is a great example of how to use spaces you may not always think of being productive spaces. This is an area of turf that they dug up right in between their outside fence and the sidewalk. They just took the turf out and started planting vegetables in there. You can see, they've got tomatoes and zucchinis and squash growing in there. They're getting tons of produce out of that. They've actually started producing enough produce that they donate it to one of the cafeterias on campus that's right close to the garden. The cafeteria actually using it for their own sales for the students. I think that's pretty cool. I think this is a great example of how to use a space you may not otherwise think of as being a good spot for that. And of course, this is the First Garden, at the White House. This is a shot of the plan for that garden, on the South Lawn. This is a shot of the folks working in it with Michelle Obama. I think very inspiring to see that even the president and the First Lady are getting into doing this. Okay, so a little bit about design. My background is actually in design. It's not so much in horticulture, which some folks are surprised about since I'm a horticulturist. I always like to talk a little bit about design, and just ask a few questions before we even get going. First of all, before you start doing a lot of changes or redesigning in your garden, think about what you actually have to work with. Sort of do an inventory of the positives and the negatives in your landscape. You know, maybe you don't have a lot of space. Think about spots that you can use. Maybe you have a lot of shade. Unfortunately, if you have a lot of shade, you may have a little trouble with this. Maybe you want to think about using a community garden or renting a space like that. Or maybe go in on something with your neighbors if they have a lot of sun. You could share a spot in their yard if you want to do this. So think about really what you're working with, what your soil's like, what your sunlight is like and what kind of spaces you have in your garden that you have to work with. Then once you think about that, think about what you want to get out of this garden space. If you really want to focus purely on production and producing a lot of produce, or if you want to get into more of the ornamental side. Think of, you know, what's your overall goal with this. Then once you think about those things, then I always like to think about how you can actually unify your garden spaces, and especially your garden spaces with the home. Think about how you can tie all these things together in your yard? Can you pull something off your home and get that into your garden, whether it be material that's on the outside of your home, if you have a certain kind of stone or wood, anything like that, or it could be even as simple as a color. You can see in here in this photo, this is from the herb garden at Olbrich in the springtime. You can see in this shot, there's a lot of different plants, but we've just used color to really meld them all together. We've got the nice purple that you can see in the chives, and then also in the lilacs, and then even some of the little veggies and herbs that we've got growing in there have that same purple color. So you can see how just one little color can really tie everything together. When your talking about design, think about layout. So if you have a very formal looking house, maybe you want a slightly more formal looking garden. But if you have a more informal or prairie style garden you could get a little less formal. I think one of the fun things about being in a climate like we have in Wisconsin where you have spring and summer and fall and winter, is the garden changes a lot throughout the season. So this is herb garden at Olbrich, and you can see, you know, it's fairly formal in its layout. We have boxwood hedges and a lot of rectilinear shapes and lines. But then if you look at it in the summertime, once we fill all those beds up, it really sort of loosens it up and it looks much more, I guess sort of cottage gardeny, and a little less formal. You can kind of play around with the formal versus informal, depending on your plantings. Another thing you can use as materials-- You'll notice as you're walking around the gardens at Olbrich, you'll see on our visitors' center, we've got a lot of limestone on the outside of the building, and then when you walk through the gardens, you'll notice we've used that same limestone in other areas throughout the gardens. This is a shot of our rose tower. It has that same natural limestone on the outside. So even though the styles of the gardens may not be the same, you're still repeating that same material, so it makes it feel like a nice cohesive space. This is a shot from Chicago Botanic Gardens. They actually have an entire fruit and vegetable island in their gardens. It's really cool. If you haven't been there I highly recommend it. But what they've done is they've used bricks, both on their columns and on some of their built features, but then they've used that same brick as the edging for their raised beds just to give that idea of continuity. Then finally with plants. This is a shot of the entrance to our rose garden at Olbrich. You can see how we've repeated the different colors as well as the different plants. So we've got chives repeating throughout these beds. We've got salvias, the allium flowers, and amsonias in there, as well as the boxwood, to give that nice cohesive feeling with just a few different repetitions of different plants. All right, now into the plants. I've grouped the plants in sort of three different general categories just to make it a little easier. So start with edgers, then fillers, and then accents. Edgers will be, usually are smallest. They're things you want to keep on the edges of the beds, and then fillers and accents. Within those I'll talk about care and maintenance and how to grow the various plants. For the most part all the plants I'm talking about in here, I've got on your handouts as well for the names and everything. As I was saying, edgers tend to be fairly compact, pretty tidy in form. They're really nice plants to use along the side of a pathway or the edge of a bed. Also you can use these if you want to make patterns in side beds, if you want to get fancy and do different patterns in your beds. These are the kind of plants that you would use for doing that sort of thing. All right, I'll start with chives. Chives are one of my favorites. They're super easy to grow. They have beautiful pink flowers in the spring time. And one thing a lot of folks don't always think about is that those flowers are edible. They taste sort of like a lighter version of the leaves, but they still have that slight chivey flavor, but really fun to use in salads and soups and really anything you want to decorate. The trick with the chives is, once they're done blooming, if anyone has grown these before, they tend to kind of flop over. They get ratty and kind of ugly. Just go through and cut them all the way back to the ground. They'll flesh out and they'll be nice and fresh looking for the rest of the summer. Swiss chard, a really fun one to grow. This one you can prepare similar to spinach. You eat the leaves, and you can also eat the stems on them. You can saute it, really anything like that. This variety is one of my favorites. This is called Bright Lights. If you buy a package of seeds of Bright Lights Swiss chard, you will get every color under the rainbow out of those. It's really fun to grow. Great for kids. These make fantastic edging along pathways. They're even big enough that you can put them back into a bed as well. This is the kind of plant that you can harvest leaves off of throughout the season. They will hold up to the heat fairly well. So even throughout the summer you can grow them. You don't have to worry about them bolting or things like that. This is one, when they're little, the rabbits tend to like to chew on these. When they're small you may want to put a little fence around them or something like that to keep the rabbits away. This is another shot of Allen Centennial Gardens from a couple summers ago. You can see they've got this really cool, sort of meandering, bed. In the center of that they've got Swiss chard. This is a red-stemmed Swiss chard. They've combined that with beets and basil, all sorts of different things. There's some annual flowers in there. To do this beautiful combination, if you did that in your garden, you would be able to harvest pieces off of that all throughout the season, as well as it being very beautiful in your garden. Another one is cabbage, one of my favorites in the garden. Cabbages don't always do that well in the middle of the summer, but they're great for spring and fall. Purple cabbages, I think, are one of the best. There's a lot of different varieties. The Super Red 80 is a really nice one. It doesn't tend to crack and it holds up to the heat pretty well. This is a shot form last fall in the herb garden. You can see this little tree frog was hiding. We were working in those beds and doing some weeding. We looked down in one of the cabbages and this little tree frog was just sort of hiding out in one of the leaves. He was warming up in the morning, waiting for the sun to come out. Calamint, this is one of our absolute favorites in the gardens, throughout the gardens at Olbrich. This is a plant you may not be familiar with, but it's a great little edging plant for, really, any use. I've got this all over my gardens at home and at Olbrich. It's got these beautiful little, whitish, lavender flowers. These will come into bloom usually sometime mid-May, early June, and they will actually bloom all throughout the season, all the way up until it frosts. They have beautiful little, tiny flowers. The bees just love them. And they're very nicely mint scented as well. The leaves have that really nice mint scent. So these are really fun to use really for anything, but they're wonderful as an edging plant.

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No, the nice thing with the calamint-- That's a great question, is if they're going to spread like a mint. They don't. They're really a mounding in habit, and they're almost a little bit woody. They don't spread. They just gradually, the mound gets a little bit bigger.

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They are, the flowers and the foliage are edible on that one. >> Annual or -- >> It's a perennial for us. You'll see that it's starting to get a little bit more popular. We always sell it at our plant sale, and I know they have it at, like, the Flower Factory, and places like that. Another great one, coneflowers. I know there's a million different cone flowers on the market now. It seems like every year they're coming out with tons more varieties, different colors, shapes, sizes. But this one I really like. This is called Pixie Meadowbright. It's a fun name. It's a little bit smaller in stature. This one tops out around 12" to 18" tall. It also re-blooms throughout the season. You get the nice, big flush of flowers in June, but then if you stay on top of dead-heading it, it'll keep pushing out flowers throughout the season. It's really a nice size and stature for a smaller garden space. You can see, this is a cake that I did a couple of years ago for a friend of mine. It's very simple. I just went out in the yard and, I had coneflowers, and this is the calamint that's on there. We have black raspberries in our backyard growing, so then it's just lemon curd on the top. But you can see how, if you've got these sort of things out in your garden, it's really easy to use them for different applications. And it looks a lot fancier than it actually is. It's very impressive for people. Going into a different direction, peppers. The great thing is there is a lot of different peppers on the market and a lot of folks are maybe a little bit nervous about using these, especially if you've got kids. These three varieties are great because they're small, so you can use them either in containers, or along the edge of a path. They're also non-pungent, which means they're not spicy. You can use them around kids, or if you don't really care for hot and spicy peppers, they're great to use. You're not going to have to worry about burning your hands, or your eyes, or your mouth or anything like that. The other thing is these are nice and ornamental. The little peppers actually stand up above the foliage instead of hanging down. So you really see them. Another great one, this is Sweet Woodruff. They're very delicate and yet very tough little perennial. This is a great ground cover. It can handle full shade to part-sun, sometimes they'll get kind of burnt in full sun. But this is really a great little plant, incredibly tough. This one will grow under evergreens. It does very, very well. It has beautiful little white flowers in late spring, and it can tend to go dormant in mid-summer, especially if we have a summer like we did last year where it was really hot and dry, they'll tend to go dormant. Don't worry if they do that. They'll come back next year. You can just throw a little mulch over the top and they'll be just fine. This one also has edible flowers. Lavender, one of my-- a great plant to have in the herb garden. This variety is called Elegance Purple. This is my new favorite. This one has only been out on the market for a few years, but really great, very floriferous. You get a nice, big push of flowers in probably May to June. Then if you stay on top of removing the spent flowers, you'll get flowers all throughout the rest of the season. It's really pretty, very hardy. I haven't had any trouble with this one coming through the winters, and I think I've had it in the garden for three years now. We've had a lot of varieties in our winters over these last three years. It's really done well for us. The one big thing with the lavenders is they want really good drainage. I've got these primarily in raised beds, and they seem to do a little bit better since we have clay soil. Other than that they really do well. One thing you want to make sure of in looking at lavenders is that you want to get English lavender. That's the only variety, that's lavandula angustifolia, that's the only one that's going to be hardy for us. There's several different varieties, there's Elegance Purple, hidcoat munstead, things like that. Those are the ones that are going to do the best for us. A few others, marjoram, a really great one as an ornamental plant. The oreganos can get kind of confusing and this is in the oregano genus. The trick with marjoram is that it is an annual for us. If you see marjorum being sold as a perennial it's probably some sort of oregano and it's going to have a totally different flavor. Then this really cool little guy. This is called Kent's Beauty oregano. Unfortunately not so much of a culinary plant, but it's really a beautiful little plant for the garden. It has sort of a trailing habit and really pretty, you can see, sort of hop-like flowers that trail down from it. It's a beautiful little plant to have in the garden. It's sort of fairly hardy, I would say. I usually get about half of them to come back every year, but really definitely worth it to grow. Then of course, Greek oregano. It can be a bit aggressive in the garden. >> How can you tell when buying oregano if it's a culinary or an ornamental? >> That's a great question. How can you tell the different varieties of oregano. There are more ornamental varieties than there are the really good culinary ones. I work a lot with the folks from the Madison Herb Society and one of those ladies gave me a great tip when I first started working at Olbrich. She said, just try them. When you're in the greenhouse, just go in there and just put a leaf in your mouth. You'll instantly be able to tell. A lot of time you can't tell from looking at them whether or not they're good. They're so closely related that even the growers get them mixed up as far as what's what. Don't be afraid to try 'em before you buy 'em. That's what I always do. Parsley is a great little annual for us, and a beautiful, beautiful plant for the garden. Unfortunately it is an annual, but it's a very long lasting annual. You can put this out very early in the spring and many times, depending on our winter, this guy will keep going all the way almost until Christmas, especially if you've got it in kind of a protected place near the house. It's a really nice one to have in the garden. This is curly parsley, and there also is the flat leaf parsley. That one tends to be a little bit better for flavor for culinary varieties. But I like to use them both, because I think they're really attractive plants as well. And you also will get lots of great beneficial insects like the swallow-tail caterpillar. This is blood sorrel. This is kind of an unusual one, but is really beautiful to have in the garden. You get really cool green leaves with a nice deep maroon veins. Those will keep that color all year which is really nice to have in the garden. This is edible, but I would say, you want to harvest these leaves when they're really small. Once they get any size to them they get bitter really fast. You want to get those new little baby leaves. If you want use this for production and for edible uses, you can just keep harvesting leaves off the plant to keep the baby leaves coming off. Once they get big in the middle of summer it really doesn't taste very good anymore. But this guy, is also a different kind of sorrel. This is more the culinary variety of sorrel. This one you can harvest off of throughout the season, and I would say the flavor is absolutely amazing. I'd never had sorrel before until I started working at Olbrich, and it has very quickly become one of my favorites. It's has a really fresh, very lemony, amazing flavor to it. These are both hardy. They'll come back as perennials every year. Tangerine Gem Marigolds are a really fun little marigolds. They're smaller in stature. These ones top out at about a foot tall with these little button-like flowers. They come in a sort of tangerine orange. They also come in yellow and red, as well as some by-colored varieties. It's really fun to use out in the garden, and the flowers are edible as well. I've heard folks say that they keep rabbits out of beds. I haven't seen that personally. Every little bit counts. These also do a lot to really help the soil as well, and the critters that are growing in the soil. You can see how we've used it here in containers in combinations with other fall annuals. The nice thing with marigolds is they tend to hold up really well throughout the season. They'll even tolerate a few light frosts into the fall. Then there's thyme. This variegated lemon is one of my favorites, with slight gold edge on the leaves. Thyme is usually a pretty good garden performer. It is very sensitive to wet feet. I primarily grow it in raised beds because our soils are clay that they don't really-- I had a terrible time getting them to survive in our regular beds. If you get them up off the ground and a little bit into a raised bed they tend to do a lot better. I think the Flower Factory is a great resource. They have a lot of different thyme. They primarily focus on the ones that are really hardy. Because there's a lot of different varieties of thyme and some are much less hardy than others. If you go to a reputable nursery they'll have the ones that will survive for us. And nasturtiums, one of the best little garden performers out there. These you'll want to make sure you plant them as seed. They're notoriously touchy for being transplanted. They really prefer to come from seed. These will grow in your most difficult place out in the garden, if they have sun. If you've got some really awful area next to your driveway or the sidewalk that's really dry and hot, throw some nasturtium seeds in there and they will do fantastic all summer. One of the really cool things about nasturtiums is the flowers are edible but they're very-- It's a surprising flavor. You would think flowers would be sort of sweet, but these are really spicy and peppery. They're really a cool flavor and surprising for a flower. And you can see how you can use them in salads. We just combined them with grapes, these are actually chive flowers that are in there, goat cheese, spinach. It really is a fun thing to add into salads. I had one of our interns try these this summer. She'd never had them before, and she was just blown away. It's really fun to have people that have never tried them before eat them, because it's the flavor is so surprising. Now into the fillers. These will tend to be a little bit bigger and have a slightly more sprawling or spreading habit, to just kind of fill in in the garden in between the other your other plants. These tend to be the kind of things that I like to repeat around to give that continuity in the garden beds. First of all, another allium. This is called Summer Beauty allium. This one is a little bigger than the chives and it blooms a little bit later. On this one the foliage is sort of flat which is a different look for the garden, but really nice. The flowers come up, I would say on this one they're about 18" tall. They come up a good six inches above the foliage, so it gives a much lighter, airier look. They flower in usually June to July. So later than the chives. These are really beautiful, little flowers, and again, edible. You can use this like a chive, but since it's a more ornamental variety it doesn't tend to have quite as good of a flavor. It's really a nice one to use out in the garden. This is in the entrance to the rose garden. You can see how we've combined this with Prairie Drops, and there's salvia in the background. It really makes a beautiful combination of different textures and colors. Another great filler plant is beets. This variety is called Bull's Blood. It has beautiful, deep maroon leaves, and they'll keep that color all throughout the season, and then the beet itself is that really deep maroon color. It's really a great one to grow for ornamental and culinary uses out in the garden. I'll have to warn you, with this one and with beets in general, these are plants that you're going to want to keep protected. Rabbits love, love beet greens. These are the kind of plant that you'll put out in the garden one day and the next day you'll come out and it'll be absolutely gone. You'd think someone came and stole it. This is one you really want to make sure you have a fence around to keep the rabbits away from them. One thing a lot of folks don't know is that the greens are also edible on beets. You can prepare them like spinach. You can eat both the tuber and the greens. Another one, kale, I was talking about. You'll hear a lot about kale in this one, because I like it so much. This is a fall planting of kales. We've got Redbor kale which is the purply leaves, and Winterbor, and then this Toscano kale just towards the top. Sometimes it's called Dinosaur kale. These are all edible varieties of kale, but really fun to use in landscaping. You can get a lot of different textures and different colors, and things like that just from using different varieties of kale. These are ones that, you know, we use these for our fall planting, but you can plant these out in the springtime and they will perform throughout the summer in your garden. You can see in this picture, that's me. That is a Redbor kale that we planted in the springtime, left it in the garden, and they actually got taller than I am. One season in the garden! It really can make a cool structural element in your garden as well. And then again with the kale. This is a Winterbor kale. You can see we've done a salad here with the kales. Kale really holds up well to salads. This is one that you actually marinate it for a few hours in the dressing before you serve it just to soften up the kale leaves. They tend to be kind of tough. Calandula is another great one for the garden. These flowers are edible. You can use them to decorate cakes, put in salads, really anything you want to do with the flowers. You notice, if you look at natural beauty products, you'll see Calandula is in a lot of skin ointments, lotions, creams, things like that. It's really a nice plant for your skin. Here's another one. They come in a lot of different colors. These are unfortunately aren't very hardy for us, but they come in every colors between yellow, pink, orange, maroon, all sorts of different colors in there. Here we've got them combines with borage. Borage is beautiful! It's a beautiful little sky-blue, star-shaped flowers, which is really kind of a hard color to find in the garden. The only drawback with borage is that it tends to have kind of a rangy, weird habit to it. It just sort of flops over and kind of twines around on other things. It's nice to combine it with something like a Calandula or the Summer Beauty alliums, that are kind of going to have a little bit of structure and kind of cover up the more unsightly base of the borage plant. But it's a really a beautiful one to have in the garden. Borage is neat because it will re-seed. I wouldn't say it's invasive at all but it will just re-seed, and you'll just see them popping up in your garden. The flowers of borage are edible. They have a really nice, sort of a light cucumbery flavor. In the Victorian times the ladies like to use them a lot to put in their ice water and ice teas and thing like that when they would have tea parties. They're really wonderful in ice water and ice tea. And this is a cool thing I found a magazine I had where they actually took the flowers and froze them into ice cubes, then you can use those ice cubes in your drinks in the summertime. Peppers. These guys are hot peppers, but really fun ones to grow in the garden. I did all three of these last year and they were really cool to grow. I got a lot of comments on them. This larger photo off to my left, you're right, those are Nepalese bell peppers. They really are that beautiful bell shape, and they dry perfect, that nice deep red. They really have an unusual shape and a very ornamental shape. We used them for a wreath workshop that we did at the garden before the holidays and people just went crazy for them. They looked like, sort of, little flowers or little bells on the wreath. These guys up here with the stripes are called Fish peppers. They're really a cool one. They are hot, but not super hot. I'm kind of a wimp about spiciness and I really like those. The neat thing with these Fish peppers is both the foliage and the fruit are variegated. The foliage on the Fish pepper plant is green and white variegated, and then the peppers themselves, as they ripen, they start out variegated and they'll ripen to a solid red. These guys down on the bottom are the super hot ones. These are the Habanero mustard peppers. But they're really good, and actually a nice flavor if you wanted to use them for hot sauce and things like that. But a beautiful golden sort of a mustard color to them.

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What was that? >> When you made the wreaths did you have to use gloves? >> That's a good question. When we made the wreaths we did use gloves. Yes, because even the-- And that's a good thing to mention with these. Even when they're dried they're still just as hot. They still have all those oils on the outside. If you are going to do craft projects with them or culinary projects, you may want to use some gloves just to protect your hands. This is another one. This is probably one of the most asked about plants that we had in the garden last summer. This is a pepper, and it's called Purple Flash. A beautiful deep purple foliage and all of the new growth on the tips come out white and purple variegated. It's really a beautiful plant to have in the garden. It's not a real heavy fruiter. When we harvested these in probably mid-September, there was a little bit of fruit on them, but not much. But the plant is so beautiful itself that it doesn't really matter to me. They are just so beautiful and great in combinations with other annuals and perennials. Another one of my favorites, chamomile. This is the Roman chamomile. So this is not the variety you would tend to see used in teas or in culinary purposes, though you can. It is culinary. But this is the one that will be hardy for us. It makes this really pretty, sort of a ferny mat of foliage, then the flowers come up above that. It has beautiful sort of a citrusy chamomile scent. It's great as a ground cover. It works really well in between flagstones or along the edges of paths. Another coneflower, these are getting a little bigger. This one, towards the side, Pica Bella, is about, I would say, 2' to 2-1/2' tall. But really pretty spiky, pink flowers, and dark stems, which is really nice. They're very sturdy. This one really stands up nicely. It's not going to flop over or anything like that. And then this one here is one that's a little bit more unusual. This is called Tennessee coneflower and it's one that's native a little bit further south from us in Tennessee. We have pretty good luck with it in the garden. Beautiful, beautiful very light, airy flowers with these petals that curve up. It's definitely worth it to grow in the garden just because the flowers are so beautiful. Eucalyptus, unfortunately this is an annual for us, but one of my favorites for the garden. It's a really strong performer for an annual, I think. You can leave it out throughout the season. I leave these up in the garden through the winter and they just sort of dry right in place and are very ornamental throughout the year. You can see, this is a planting that we had last summer where we had used it as a filler in between other annuals in the beds. It really did beautifully. Bronze fennel is another great one. This is really similar to the regular green fennel that you might see in a grocery store, with these sort of smoky, bronze foliage. It's really pretty to have as a backdrop behind other plants. One thing to note with the bronze fennel, it is a fairly prolific seeder. This I did not realize when I first planted it in the gardens at Olbrich and I left the seed heads on for the winter. They are nice ornamental seed heads top have on there. Then the next spring when we were cleaning up the beds there was literally a carpet of little, tiny fennel plants coming up everywhere. I mean, they're easy to just cultivate under, but a little intimidating when you weren't expecting to have them everywhere. If you want to prevent that, just make sure and clip off any of the spent flower heads before you go into winter. That will eliminate most of that reseeding problem. It's really a great garden plant and great for beneficial insects. They both use the pollen from the flowers and they'll eat the foliage. What was that?

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Yes, the bulbing fennel is actually a slightly different variety. So if you grow the purple fennel, or just your typical herbal fennel, you won't necessarily get a bulb. This is a slightly different variety that you get the bulb from, but a really neat one to grow in the garden, and another really pretty one. These bulbs can be harvested throughout the season and eaten fresh or cooked. They're really, really good. This is a planting from Chicago Botanic Garden. You can see how they used, this is bulbing fennel toward the bottom, and they've actually used it kind of like an edger along this bed. But you can see this bed is maybe, I'd say three or four feet deep, and they've planted the fennel. They've got sunflowers, and there's amaranth coming in behind that. This would be something you could easily do at home along the side of a driveway, or maybe right along the side of your sidewalk, if you've got a nice little narrow bed that you don't really know what else to do with. Of course, lettuces. Every spring in the herb garden I have one bed, it's called the specialty bed, that we fill up with lettuces every year. Every year, we pick different varieties and just do all different colors and textures. Lettuces, I think, are really fun, because there's so much variety. You can get everything from, you know, bright sort of chartreuse lime-green that's very curly leaves, to something with, you know, romaine, with very deep red leaves, to even speckled varieties. They're really fun to play around with and use in the garden. You can grow them either in the beds or they do really well in containers, as well, if you don't have space. Yep? >> Will the fennel bulb over-winter? >> Oh, that's a good question. She asked if the fennel bulb will over-winter. They don't. That variety isn't hardy. Though the regular, the other variety is winter hardy for us. Then into the basils. Lots of different kinds of basils. This is another fun one to experiment with, because there is so much flavor variety in the basils, which you may not realize. This guy here is more of our typical genovese basil that you would see people make pestos out of, put on pizzas, things like that. Then this one here is a new one. It's been on the market for a few years. It's called Cardinal Basil. It's got these beautiful deep maroon flower heads. The flower heads are easily, I would say about the size of my fist, so it's really an ornamental one. Then the leaves on it have a nice genovese typical basil taste, so you can use it for culinary purposes, as well. But this, when I had it in the herb garden a few years ago, and it was another one that everybody was asking about and wanted to know what it was, and didn't want to believe me when I told them it was a basil, because it looks so different from a regular basil. Then the other varieties, Thai basil is really cool. Another one with really pretty flowers, but again with a different sort of almost an anise flavor to it, something really sort of unusual and unique. We have our purple basil. Very nice flavor, but really cool purple leaves. It's fun to use in salads and use fresh. Then this on the bottom is a variegated one. It's called Pesto Perpetuo. It's a fairly new one on the market. Unfortunately, this is one that you have to get as plants. You can't buy that one as seeds. But it has a really, really cool look. It's very upright, tight in its form. It has beautiful variegated leaves that will hold that color all throughout the season. It does have a really nice genovese basil flavor, so you can use it for culinary purposes, as well. Then, of course, what's more fun than making pizza with basil? So you can see there's lots of different ways to use your fresh basil from the garden. Another one that folks don't always think about is sage. This would be your typical garden sage that you would use for flavoring meats, soups, stews, and things like that. This is a variety called Berggarten. It tends to have slightly bigger leaves, very silver, very ornamental, but you can still use it for culinary purposes. This one, if you've got a site that's got good drainage, it usually comes back, I'd say about 75% of mine come back every season. It can be a little touchy, depending on our winter, but it's definitely worth growing. Then I think my absolute favorite I think are violas, pansies and violas. A lot of folks ask what the difference is between pansies and violas. Pansies tend to be the ones you see in the nurseries with the really big flower heads that can be an inch or two wide. Pansies aren't usually hardy for us. They don't usually come back. Whereas violas, if you allow them to go to seed during the season, they will pop up and come back. But this is a variety called Black Duet. You can see it's got the blue and the almost black petals on it. This is a really fun way to use pansies. I like to put them on everything. This, you know, you can dress up anything, like little regular cupcakes. Just throw a few flowers on the top and people will be very impressed. Yep, the pansy flowers are edible. Both pansies and violas are edible. This is our kaleidoscope at Olbrich, which actually it is a real kaleidoscope, and we do different plantings throughout the season. This is our spring planting from last year, where we combined violas along with little, mini lettuce sprouts in there for the springtime planting. Now, into accents. These tend to be bigger, a little bit flashier, so things you may need a lot of in the garden. They just give a little extra wow factor to your beds. These are hollyhocks. I know hollyhocks tend to get a bad name, because they can be disease and insect riddled, and sometimes they can look really bad. But the flowers are so beautiful, I think they're definitely worth growing. This is another one where it's nice to grow them in a spot where you can kind of cover up the base of them, because they can get a little bit ratty toward the end of the season, but they're beautiful in the landscape. This is one of my personal favorite varieties. It's called Indian Spring, with these beautiful, sort of two-tone rosy coral flowers. Really a beautiful one to have in the landscape, great to grow against the side of a building, especially if you've got some support to hold them up. Another allium. This is called Ozawa. This is kind of an unusual allium. This one blooms very, very late in the fall. I have that in accents, because it blooms at an odd time of year. This one blooms in sort of, I would say, late September to early October, when very, very little else is blooming. This is the kind of plant to have in the garden that has sort of grassy foliage. During the summer, it just sort of blends in and disappears, and you'll forget about it. Then in the fall when it comes into bloom, it's like oh, my god, where did that come from. So it's really, really a beautiful plant to have in the garden. Oftentimes, you can see in this shot up here, it blooms late enough that, you now, the flowers sort of freeze in place once we go into fall.

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This one does not reseed. That's a great question. This is just a clumping variety, so it won't be popping up everywhere, like some alliums can tend to do. Two other ones. These are both non-seeders, as well. This guy on the one side is Purple Sensation. This is the variety that I showed in pictures earlier of the Rose Garden entrance. It gets about, I would say, maybe three or four feet tall, beautiful drumstick flowers. This one does not reseed. This is one that you would plant as a bulb in the fall. This guy here is Allium schubertii. This is another one that you plant as a bulb in the fall. It gets, I'd say about two feet tall, with these really cool sort of fireworks shaped flowers, which can be, once they're established, they can be the size of a basketball, really cool flowers to have out in the garden. This is one that does not reseed. There are some varieties that are similar to this that will reseed everywhere. But when you're buying them, make sure you're getting Allium schubertii, and you won't have issues with it reseeding. But these both dry beautifully. I like to actually leave these, the Allium schubertii ones, up in the garden, because the spent flower heads are so ornamental, as well. You can see here. So, this is the Purple Sensation combined with Globemaster. Globemaster is just a little bit taller, and they've got the sort of more lavender flowers on them. Again, with more cabbages.

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I have to keep throwing them in. They can be wonderful accent plants in your bed.

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That's a really fun thing to do. For folks who didn't hear that, you can actually take the dried allium seed head, and you can either leave them in the bed and spray paint them, or you can pull them out and spray paint them and use them in the fall and the winter, or again in the summer for garden displays. They're really fun to use. This cabbage is called Deadon. It's a green cabbage, but it tends to get some pinkish, red highlights as we go into the fall. Very sturdy. You can see this one is from last fall. I got this picture early in the morning after we'd had a really hard frost, and these guys came through it just fine. I know a lot of folks say when you're harvesting cabbages, if you let them go through a freeze, sometimes it improves the flavor and makes them a little bit sweeter. You can see here's another example of how to use these. This is purple cabbage, combined with Redbor kale in a fall planting. It's just beautiful, where the colors really combine wonderfully. This is all edible and really easy to grow in the garden. Another one, brussel sprouts. I know a lot of brussel sprouts tend to get a bad name. But they are really good, and this is a fun one to grow. This is called Falstaff. It's a purple variety of brussel sprouts. Even the brussel sprouts themselves have that nice sort of a purple color. Unfortunately, when you cook them, they do tend to get kind of green and lose that purple color. But really a fun one to grow out in the garden. It's another one that can get to be a very structural plant, when these guys top out, they'll be, I'd say, a good maybe four, almost five feet tall. It's one that can really make a nice sort of exclamation point in the garden. This is kind of an unusual one that I wasn't familiar with until I started working at Olbrich. This is Inula. This is a perennial for us. This is one, it's a medicinal plant, but you can also eat the leaves. You can prepare them like you would spinach. But it is a beautiful structural plant out in the garden. This one blooms in mid-summer in July with these lovely little sunflower shaped flowers all over the stems. It's really a great structural plant to have in the garden, very easy to take care of. You can see the flower heads we get about at least as tall as I am, but this sort of neat sprawling, very structural habit, really beautiful flowers, great for beneficial insects. Of course, with the bee balms, they're going to be kind of like echinaceas, where's there's lots of different varieties coming out. This is one of my favorites. This is Colrain Red, which has really pretty, sort of raspberry red flowers, good disease resistance. This is a larger one. This one will get, say, about two to three feet tall out in the garden, but really nice beautiful color on it. It's very attractive for hummingbirds, bees, things like that. I would not call this one invasive. It does spread a bit. I've got it, in the bed that I have it in, it's lined with arbor vitaes. There's evergreens along the back, so I think that's shady enough that they don't tend to wander. I've had it in the same bed for gosh, since I've been at Olbrich, and I don't find it wandering around too much. It doesn't reseed, but it can tend, you know, these are related to mint, so they will spread a bit. But in the springtime, you can just go through and pull the runners out and usually keep it fairly under control. That's a great question. This one is quite mildew resistant. It usually doesn't get it unless we have a really rough summer, you know, a very stressful summer. For the most part, this one is really very mildew resistant.

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That's a good question. What do you eat on bee balm? You can eat the flowers, they're edible. Also, you can harvest the leaves and prepare them like a tea, if you want to add sort of a minty, almost a little bit of an anise flavor to teas. Eggplants, I really have a fun one to grow in the garden. This is a slightly smaller variety. This is called Barbarella. This one is great for growing in containers. It tops out around two to two and a half feet tall. Nice, sort of softball to slightly bigger fruit, so they're not going to be too gigantic. Really a fun one to grow in the garden. I found this recipe in one of my magazines, where they actually made sandwiches out of the eggplant. They just sliced the eggplant, breaded them and just pan fried the slices and made little sandwiches out of this. I thought it was a fun idea for something to do with eggplant, because I know that's one of those vegetables that I often struggle with what to do with them. I love the vine, because they're beautiful, but then I don't always know how to prepare them. This is kind of an unusual one. This is called Pineapple Sage. This variety here is called Golden Delicious. There's also another species of pineapple sage that just has green leaves, but I love to use this one, because it's got these really bright chartreuse leaves, and it will have a beautiful chartreuse color all throughout the summer. This plant will look like a little shrub, even though it's an annual. It will get two to three feet tall, and just be covered with these beautiful chartreuse leaves. They actually do smell like pineapples. This is one that you can harvest the leaves and use them to make either fresh or dried teas with the leaves. Then this is one that it doesn't always flower for us. It blooms very, very late in the season. Usually, it'll come into bloom right as we're starting to get our first few frosts. But they have bright red flowers on them when they do bloom. It's unfortunately an annual for us, but it's a really good performer for annuals. This is serviceberry, a hardy sort of an ornamental size tree or large shrub for our area. What a lot of folks don't usually know about the serviceberry is that the fruit is edible, and it's really, really good. I would say it tastes similar to a cross between a raspberry and a mango, really good fruit. It blooms quite early in the spring. Usually, it blooms a little bit before the crabapples come into bloom for us in the garden. One thing to watch out for.

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The animals know about the fruit, too, and birds. This is one that you'll actually find chipmunks crawling up into the trees to get to the fruit. I had no idea that chipmunks were such good climbers, until we had these out in the garden. But everything seems to love these fruit. If you want to get out there and harvest, make sure and stay on top of it, otherwise the birds and the chippies will steal them off of you. But really, really a delicious fruit. Another one, now morning glories unfortunately are not edible. But they're just such a beautiful plant to have in the garden, I like to include them. They just seem to go so well with sort of the cottage garden, or you know, an ornamental garden. I really like to use them. This is one, I think, of the best varieties. This is called Grandpa Ott, with beautiful deep, almost a royal blue flowers with a purple star in the middle. This one, also can be a little bit problematic, but this one will reseed. The plants themselves aren't hardy, but the seeds tend to be hardy for us. Just a few ideas. This is from Chicago Botanic Garden. There's another shot from Allen Centennial Garden. Just some ideas on different ways to stake up vegetables. You can see this one on the far side. It's from Chicago Botanic. They used, I think that's actually concrete reinforcing mesh.

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Yes, a cattle panel. That would be it. Very good! Cattle panel. You can buy these at Menards, Home Depot, or Farm and Fleet, really anywhere. You can either stand them up on their sides and stake them, and have things grow vertically. Or, what I really like what they did, where they just made these half domes with them, and had, these are squash, I think it's actually zucchinis that are growing. They trained the zucchinis to grow up over them. The fruit will actually hang down. It makes it much easier to harvest, and the fruit itself tends to stay a lot better, because it's not sitting in the dirt. You won't have as many issues with the rotting. This is just sort of a smaller version of the same thing, with little panels. They just staked them up to have them growing up on side.

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Remesh, okay. Remesh or cattle panels. Another great one, scarlet runner beans. This is an annual vine for us. But it is a fairly vigorous one. If anyone has grown scarlet runner beans, beautiful scarlet flowers on it and edible beans. This one comes in both the green variety, which is the smaller picture, and then there's another variety that has chartreuse foliage, which is a really fun one to use out in the garden. Then there's one more variety. This is a red and white variety, called Painted Lady, a really much more ornamental one for the garden, one of my favorites. I've found that on this guy, the vines aren't quite as vigorous, so if you wanted to grow them on something a little bit smaller, this might be a better variety than the straight species. Malabar spinach. They're kind of an oddball. This is the red-stemmed malabar spinach. It also comes in a green stem. But this, you can actually harvest the leaves right off the vines, and prepare them just as you would regular spinach. It's not related to spinach, but you can prepare it the same way. It does have sort of a similar flavor. Golden Hops, another beautiful vine, but if anyone has grown hops, it's very vigorous.

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A very vigorous vine. I can see quite a few people nodding their heads. I love this gold-leafed variety. It holds that gold foliage all summer, really a beautiful vine, but it's one that you'll want to cut. I usually cut it back two or three times during the season to sort of keep it in check. If you want to grow a variety for actual hops production, I would go with one of the cultivated varieties instead of this golden. This one doesn't tend to flower quite as much. Then a few other ideas. These are a couple of pictures from Janesville Rotary Gardens from last summer. You can see here,I thought this was clever. They took two pallets and actually put them back to back, connected them together and filled the inside with soil. They're growing plants. Just like that, it's sort of a mini vertical garden. Grapes, of course. UW-Extension has some fantastic fact sheets about growing grapes in Wisconsin, and about what varieties to grow, what are the most hardy, and what are best for juice or wine, whatever you want to do with them. Then one more oddball. This is a kiwi vine. I know a lot of folks think of kiwi as tropical plants. But this is the hardy variety of kiwi, that grows in our area. You do need both a male and female plant. This grows as a woody vine, but you get these little, I'd say the fruit are about that big. They're bright green, and they are absolutely delicious. They come into fruit very late summer, early fall, really good. They taste a lot like a regular kiwi, but I think they're almost a little bit better. Just delicious. You don't have to peel these, you can just eat them as is. They're not fuzzy on the outside. Then this one shot of our children's garden with espalier plantings. This is what an espalier would look like. It's just training fruit trees to make, eventually, something like this. This is from Chicago Botanic. They have a beautiful espalier garden with all different shapes. These, they've done with apples. We're doing pears. It's really not terribly difficult, just a little time intensive to get them to start to train. But once they get going, you can really keep it up fairly easily. That's about it. I just want to say thank you all for coming. I'll be up here if anybody has any questions.

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