 Hi, I'm Ron Smith, NDSU Extension Horticulturist. We're here today at the NDSU Demonstration Research Gardens and we're going to give you a demonstration how to plant some beautiful flowers and enjoy these flowers throughout the short growing season that we have here. It all starts with the soil. So today we're going to do a little bit of soil analysis, a little bit of soil tilling, some soil evaluation and what I have here is a handy dandy little portable tiller two cycle engine and I'll get it started I hope and we can show you how to properly till and then we'll show you how to properly plant and take care of these flowers. Now that we have the soil well tilled, Laura is going to go ahead and pick up the soil and run it through her fingers and she's going to show that the moisture content is just about right because it's not forming any ribbons. If it was too wet then we'd have a ribbon formed right there. Laura is Dr. Laura Overstreet. She's a soil scientist as part of our NDSU Extension presentation here and we now know that the soil is well tilled and we're going to have Barbara Lashkowitz, our horticulturist and manager of the gardens out here, our horticultural garden, she's going to show how to plant. One of the things we want to point out is that we have some plants that are pot bound or root bound we call them and lots of times people get concerned about the roots being so tight that they aren't going to be able to support the growth of the plant. So typically lots of people will go ahead and cut the roots or separate them out. We've done that in the past and we found that it doesn't make any difference with herbaceous plants to do something like that. So Barb is going to go ahead and plant the amaranthus properly, firm it down and then we'll come back and water it once we get them planted and in about 30 days this will be a beautiful plant along with all the others that we have planted here at the garden. Once we have the plants in the ground we want to make sure that the roots are not exposed because exposing the roots will act as a wick effect pulling the moisture away from the root zone and we want to make sure that the roots are completely covered not buried but just completely covered so that we don't have a wicking effect that will cause us to lose moisture. Now you can see in this shot here that the plant was not properly planted the root the top of the root ball is being exposed and that will just actually act as a wick and dry those plants out a lot quicker than if they were properly planted. Notice here that the root is not exposed and if Barb has properly planted this one with proper watering proper care it should take off and grow beautifully for us. Well the soil that we worked up earlier in the spring still has very very good physical characteristics to it and perhaps you can see the little grains of sand in there and high organic matter content. The most important thing that you want to try to have as far as your soil characteristics go is excellent drainage and that's very very important. You can correct just about anything else if you have good drainage but if you don't have good drainage then you're really fighting an uphill battle as far as producing beautiful flowers and vegetables go. Now an inevitable part of gardening is dealing with the weeds that show up in any bare spot that you have. Now we want to get rid of the weeds for a few reasons one is that they're typically unsightly and they just don't look good. Another thing is that they compete with the plants you want for water and sun and oftentimes they'll often carry diseases or insects that you don't want on your plants. So it's best to get in there right away and deal with the weeds as soon as you can if you can just spend a half hour or an hour each week dealing with the weeds it'll be a lot easier than letting it go and then having huge weeds that are a lot harder to deal with later and on in the future. Now some different ways to control the weeds of course we've got the handy hoe here gardener's best friend and as I said it's always best when they're small to deal with them because then you can just hoe right over the top of them chop their little heads off and you eliminate that top part that's feeding the roots and they should die off. So just barely scratch the surface you don't really want to dig into the soil too much because then you're just pulling up more weed seeds and you'll get more weeds later on so just try to just get those tops chopped right off. Now another tool that I like to use for that same purpose is this smaller handheld hoe which again once it's if it's really sharp we'll just get down there and chop those tops right off and then you probably want to take these and get rid of them. Things like purslane tend to re-root if you leave them in the soil so you know if they are big enough that they leave a lot of plant behind go ahead and just pull those off and eliminate them that way. Now if the plants get too big and they have a long tapirate you're probably going to want to use a trowel to get right down in there and get the roots that are a little bit deeper and this is a good example of letting it go a little bit too long. We haven't had a chance to get out here for probably a good month. I did have a pre-emergent chemical on the soil and a pre-emergent chemical will prohibit weed seeds from germinating and hopefully cut down on your weed problem but they do only last a certain amount of time and once they wear off you'll see a lot of weeds starting to germinate. There are products available on the home on the market for home gardeners to use as a pre-emergent and they do work well but again they only last like a month or two and then you'll find you have to either reapply it or come out and do some manual hand-weeding. Now another reason that it's best to get them when they're small is that they won't flower and we do have some weeds in our ornamental grass that are flowering and once they get to that flowering point then they set seed and they add more weed seed to the pool so get them when they're young, easier to control and in the end it'll be a lot less of a headache for you. Now again there are chemicals for more open areas that you can put down that will kill the weeds they work more slowly but they tend to get the roots so it depends on if you're more of an organic gardener or if you think chemicals can help you out or not whether or not you want to choose those. Here at the NDSU horticulture research plots we were able to install a drip irrigation system into our new beds which is very beneficial for the plants in more ways than one. Now this system might be a little more complicated than the average homeowner might need but there are many products on the market today geared for the homeowner that will put water down in the same way as this drip tape does. This is a very thin plastic and there's slits cut about every six inches and we turn the water on and it just slowly drips out right at the root zone which is where the plants need it which is much more beneficial than the overhead sprinklers that most people use to water their plants and this way we're not wasting water and we're not promoting diseases because oftentimes when foliage is wet from the overhead watering you get more things like the mildews and that sort of thing so it's very beneficial. Now if you are going to use overhead watering you know as long as the plants get adequate water that's great but do it in the morning so that over the course of the day the plants will dry off the foliage will dry off so again you have less chance of disease. Now there's no set formula for how much water to put down it really depends on the plants that you're watering and the type of soil that you have plus the environment that's going on if it's you know a dry warm summer you're going to find you're watering more than if it's a cooler wetter cloudy or summer so these are all things you need to take into account as you water your plants. It's always worse to overwater than underwater because when you overwater the roots might rot and then the plants gone there's no replacing it but when you underwater and they wilt because they're not quite wet enough they can always recover plants can wilt quite a bit and still recover when they get adequate amounts of water. Now if you do wonder about your soil type and you know how much water you should put on you can always send a sample to your county extension agent and they should be able to tell you specifically what kind of soil you have and if it's draining well or not.