169 - Al Shay - Moving your pollinator garden up a notch (in English)

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:00:00] A wonderful side benefit of being a pollinator enthusiast are all the plants. There are so many of them you could never exhaust your curiosity and interest in growing or looking for plants. It can also be a little bit daunting. How do you know how to set up a pollinator garden? And with that question in mind, the daunting and exciting, I thought there's no better person who embodies both of those than Al Shay.

[00:00:24] Al Shay is currently an instructor in the Horticulture Department here at OSU. He has an undergraduate degree in art as well as horticulture. And the nice thing about Al is that he's been working in green industries for 38 years. So he has a big vision of how to make a specific garden really boom with life, but also has a grander vision.

[00:00:46] So in this episode, we're going to go through some books that are his anchors for thinking about pollinator garden design. And then we're going to go through some plants, and then we're going to go through some tips on how to save some money [00:01:00] and get some really weird plants into your garden design. So without further ado, Al Shay weird plants, weird books, all sorts of things this week on PolliNation.

[00:01:15] Al Shay: [00:01:15] Oh, I love it. It's just like Joe Rogan. It's fantastic! I want the big comfy seats those guys sit in.

[00:01:18] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:01:18] Okay. We don't have cushy seats. Welcome to PolliNation again, Al. It's nice to see you although virtually, which sucks.

[00:01:31] Al Shay: [00:01:31] Yeah. We were just discussing what a long, strange trip it's been to a quote, The Grateful Dead. Strangely I showed up, true story, I showed up at my dermatologist yesterday morning for my yearly skin cancer screening and it was the wrong day. So really she says, "Oh, you're the second person this week who did it."

[00:01:56] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:01:56] Everything is upside down these days.

[00:01:58] Al Shay: [00:01:58] It's hard to keep track of things.  What [00:02:00] is the constant amidst all this crisis? And that's nature. If you've been out and about, you can see bulbs coming up, buds swelling. Witch-hazel is already flowering. I've got a beautiful Viburnum x bodnantense in my backyard now feeding the natives, not native bees, but honeybees. So nature keeps moving on and that is a constant that will remain with, or without us. It's hard to think of the world without human beings unless you are into the natural sciences. And then maybe you yearn for a "less of us" apple. Just kidding!

[00:02:34] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:02:34] One of the things we were talking about before was, people are busy and active, especially under Covid. One of the things that I noticed this time of year is people cleaning their gardens up. They're just going through getting the leaf blower, like making it look spotless and ready for their annuals or the perennials to come in. And we were talking about that in terms of pollinator protection and that, this may not be the best approach.

[00:02:58] Al Shay: [00:02:58] No, it's not. [00:03:00] And if you just simply Google, "leaving your garden messy",  you'll come up with a couple of hits that are worthwhile. And in preparation for this little chat, rather than try to memorize everything, I downloaded an awful lot of information. I've spent 27 years in the field in totality. I have 40 years under my belt in horticulture. And I was pretty straight and narrow. And I still do embrace formality, whether it's a vision of Versailles or any other Renaissance garden, that geometric sort of layout is still fascinating to me.

[00:03:32] I just don't think that we can convince something besides the Island of Manhattan into your own backyard. It doesn't always work. So from the design perspective, that's one element to consider. I'll use my own backyard as a reference because having to maintain sites of that nature for so many years, the last thing I wanted to do when I came home was be on a lawnmower, whether it's walking behind it or riding it.

[00:03:57] So I have no turf. Now, [00:04:00] if you have a need for turf, by all means have some turf. Edging, I spent a lot of time edging, delineating a bed for the sidewalk, delineating a bed from a turf area. Again, no turf. No pathways that differ in terms of the surfacing, then my beds. So I used wood chips and  that's my backyard. So we're creatures of geometry, our eyes are always being drawn to a perimeter - to an edge. So I've had that dissolve.

[00:04:31] The third thing, the big thing we're talking about specifically is, I just let everything sit there and that's a hard one to swallow. I really understand that because we've all been programmed to be neat and clean. You should be able to perform minor surgery in your backyard. It's okay, if you can't do that. And leaves and debris, and I'll just read one little paragraph here that talks about how many different things are overwintering. [00:05:00] So many spaces of native bumblebees, mason bees, leafcutters, et cetera use garden space over winter.

[00:05:06] Depending on the species, bees will take winter refuge under a pile of bark or dried leaves or nest in cabins, and hollow cut out stems and decomposing logs. Wow, okay. So a couple of things going on there, one we need to generate our ability to tolerate leaves. Brown is okay, it provides a great insulating blanket. Again, whether it's an assassin bug or a wolf spider or it's native bumblebees - they can all find habitat under leaf litter. Cutting things back in the habit of cutting everything back. As soon as October gets here, leave it overwintering.

[00:05:42] All of those spent flower heads, whether it's Spiraea or Rudbeckia  or Echinacea  or Heliopsis, are the perennial kind I really love. And that is a sunflower by the way. And of course, annual sunflowers as well, they just need it. I know it's tough to look at it sometimes, [00:06:00] we think we're not doing our job. We're not fulfilling the mandate. The agreement with nature, well I'm here to tell you that nature much prefers us to stand back.

[00:06:10] Don't get so excited about it. As soon as we reached 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and why 50 degrees Fahrenheit? Because that's the signal to a lot of insects, "Hey, time to get going, time to get going." In springtime that may not happen in our neck of the woods till the end of March, beginning of April. And then believe me, I'm out there, like everybody else cutting stuff back. I'm tired of looking at it as well, but I leave it all winter long.

[00:06:38] If you look up the benefits of a messy garden, several sites will come up. One of the things I want to talk about real quick, Andony is to sell the books I'm into. One of the points I made to Andony was, I can spout about this plant and that plant, and that's wonderful. But, what do you leave with though? You leave with half a dozen plants. Let's make that a much bigger [00:07:00] picture. I'll just raise them up so you can see them Andony, but our guests can't see. It's Wild Flowers of the Pacific Northwest, by Mark Turner and Phyllis Gustafson.

[00:07:12] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:07:12] When I first got here, you told me to buy that book. Oh, and I did. It's so worth it. It's got everything in it. And we will have these all in the show notes as well for people. What do you use that book for? So what's that book do for you?

[00:07:27] Al Shay: [00:07:27] What that book does and we'll get to exotic versus natives. It's a really great resource for all the natives. And what's really cool about it, if it's found within the our region of the Northwest, Washington to Oregon. It's going to be in the book and they'll say, non-native right. It's looking at Monrovian, one of my favorite Mediterranean plants for drought tolerant gardens. It's like, what are you doing here? And it says non-native.

[00:07:56] So you can determine what is found here and that right off the bat, you'll [00:08:00] see that it may not be native, but it's become naturalized. What does that mean? It means it's adapting to our climatic conditions and can function as well as a native can. But we'll talk more about natives and exotics. I want to just wait on these two books because they're super good. But, The Well-Tended Perennial Garden by Tracy DiSabato-Aust.

[00:08:20] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:08:20] The Well-Tended Perennial Garden?

[00:08:23] Al Shay: [00:08:23] What Tracy does is, there's a lot of overview, how to divide plants, compost, this, that other thing, a wide array of different guardian topics that we're covering. Then it just breaks out into the encyclopedic component. And she goes through all these plants. Now what's the benefit? We're not growing a meadow, a native meadow. And in that the competitive elements would be such that plants would do a lot of things they don't do when we try to cultivate them.

[00:08:55] Because we are fertilizing, usually [00:09:00] over-watering. And creating an environment where, which they can grow with a level of washness and exuberance that wouldn't be found in a natural setting. So what do we do? Tracy tells you how to deal with these plants. If It's a Beebalm for instance. You should pinch that back in the middle of June, if it's a giant seven foot Helianthus, beautiful sunflower smothered with native pollinators.

[00:09:27] They grow two millimeters up to 15 millimeters and Apis mellifera our honeybee loves them. Even at seven feet that falls over, that ruins the appeal to the homeowner. What do I do? The book very clearly tells you, you should cut that in half about all the way through June, and then you'll have a five foot plan rather than seven. So that advice is just invaluable.

[00:09:51] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:09:51] So she goes through and she's just got little tidbits, open the book. I want to see a page. How does she do this? Sounds like I need this [00:10:00] book.

[00:10:00]Al Shay: [00:10:00] You definitely should have it. Let me get to E, F, G, H, -

[00:10:06] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:10:06] Oh it's alphabetically ordered?

[00:10:08]Al Shay: [00:10:08] It is alphabetical. And if you remember the alphabet, that's great. I don't often do that. So here I am. Helianthus salicifolius. So most of them have a picture and then there's a sequence of pro's and here's how it breaks out.  The botanical name Helianthus salicifolius, sunflowers in the Composite family. Tall, golden daisy like flowers, five to six feet in height - right off the bat, that could be challenging. Full sun, blooms late September to October, zones four to nine and that's within our zone.

[00:10:41] Pruning, if plants are grown in full sun, the stems are usually self-supporting. If given shade or overly rich soil plants will be more open, taller, and weaker requiring staking. Pinching or cutting back creates more compact growth, plants in full sun that normally reach four to five feet may grow to only about three feet if they're cut back at the appropriate [00:11:00] time of the year.

[00:11:00] Then she has other maintenance, then related plants. Now she's going through cultivars and I'll talk about cultivars in a minute. Helianthus salicifolius  lowdown is so small that it seems like another species entirely. So it'll broaden your stove in terms of going from species, which I'm very fond of and we'll talk about that in a moment, to maybe I'll try a cultivar.

[00:11:23] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:11:23] This is organized by plants. So you open it up to page, you read and it tells you some tricks about it, and it also says,  "Hey, these are the same plant, but here's some different cultivatars." Ah, gotcha. Sounds good.

[00:11:35] Al Shay: [00:11:35] And again prior to that component, it's all related to,  how do I garden? How do I divide plants? What tools are good? What spading fork to use? What do I cut back? What do I pinch back? It's critical. I use it all the time, it deserves space on anyone's bookshelf. The next one, is a little bit more of a heavy read, Planting in a Post-Wild World. And they really get down to the nitty [00:12:00] gritty of taking an ecosystem approach. Again, you can use native plants or construct your own sort of pallet of plants that are well adapted to your region. And I'm not going to go into that. They've got several principles that I've jotted down. I don't even want to talk about that...

[00:12:15] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:12:15] But wait a sec, "post wild" means how you create something wild after the fact, is that what it is?

[00:12:23] Al Shay: [00:12:23] Right on. And let me just say thank you, if you Google, "Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames", the landscape architect behind all this is Joan Nasauer. It's a great read on how to combine a construct that gives us some sense of that orderliness. It allows us to get a little wild. We cannot tolerate an unmanaged site.  We're like a Border Collie, herding dogs at our heart. And any [00:13:00] more when I'm talking with a private client - it's very important when I'm done with the project, we've got the drought tolerance beds installed and pollinator plants.

[00:13:09] And, one thing after the other I ride out, I no longer say, "do not water." There's no way people are not going to water. Because they look at you and go, "How are they going to live?" "They don't need water." "How are they going to live?" "They don't need water." "How are they going to live?" All right, great. I give up. So now I look for plants that exhibit a level of plasticity where they can tolerate water. Then I make sure I berm and this discussion could go on for hours in a wide range of directions.

[00:13:37] I'll try to keep it rather concise. I berm them up. Sometimes I plant in straight rock. To give you the drainage I need if I'm using a wide array of Eastern Oregon plants. How are they going to make it through our wet winter? Not a problem. It's cold, often snowy over there. So they do get precipitation in the form of snow, but they need impeccable drainage.

[00:13:57] So then when I'm riding out I say, "Hey, here's a proven plan, [00:14:00] do not use synthetic fertilizer, whatever I'm telling them I'll say,  "you must irrigate twice a month. Can you do that?" "Yeah, I can do that." And they're satisfied, they've got a regime. That twice a month versus watering every day is now taking a monthly irrigation cycle that requires two irrigation periods versus 20.

[00:14:28] Is that sustainable? It really is. Not that you can't go crazy and go, "no, I don't want to water it all." Fine. There are plenty of plants that don't need water at all. A lot of people are into meadows right now? What's a grass alternative. If you haven't heard of John Greenlee, he's the American meadow garden guru.

[00:14:44] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:14:44] Oh, what a beautiful cover.

[00:14:46] Al Shay: [00:14:46] It's stunning! Saxton Holt, phenomenal photographer. And I met this guy, we hit it off and he graciously allowed me to use all of the photographs out of the book, for my [00:15:00] class, we teach an entire module just on meadow garden. Now, if you get to a meadow it's more grass edge and rush than it is herbaceous flowering elements. But there's plenty of those in there as well. So it gives you great resources. Like if you said "Hey, I don't know what to do. I don't want turf, I just don't want a bunch of plants out here. What do I do?" And you go from mowing, twice a week to once a year.

[00:15:25] And you have a phenomenal show and it's less input. Our industry revolves around inputs because some people aren't inputting, they're not getting paid for the activity. So it's a whole different mind shift that we need to embrace now. And it's something I continually struggle with. I've got a lot of friends in the industry that are on the straight and narrow. Now they've got a maintenance company, construction company, the maintenance company. I don't care if you need it to be sprayed or mowed or edged, we're doing it every week or I can't pay my staff. So it's a huge challenge that the industry is facing.

[00:15:58] Okay. I don't want to get too caught up in this, but [00:16:00] two more. I'm sure you've seen these Andony, "Pollinators of Native Plants". Spectacular. And of course it covers the whole country, but there are handy dandy maps in there. And they'll show you where the plant is typically found, bearing in mind that we live in the Willamette Valley and other than cotton and peanuts, we can pretty much grow anything. And the one I really got, two weeks ago when we talked about doing this and I just find it fabulous right now, and I can't recommend it highly enough for everybody. It's "100 Plants to Feed the Bees" by the Xerces Society.

[00:16:29] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:16:29] Oh, it's great!

[00:16:31] Al Shay: [00:16:31] Yeah. It's just fantastic and simple is good. We don't need to make things so complex that we can't wrap our head around it. Unless you're a PhD candidate in ecology or entomology or horticulture. If I'm not connecting with the average homeowner, the average citizen and making them a better gardener, I haven't succeeded. It doesn't matter what my yard looks like or all my buddies yards. We're all crazy about plants and ecology and [00:17:00] everything else. I want to bring this to the average homeowner. Okay. I do want to talk just briefly about  natives versus exotics.

[00:17:10] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:17:10] I want to talk to you about that because I was just talking to cherry growers this morning and it came up and there is a way in which native bees do go to exotic plants. The corolla is the same length that has the nectar. When it comes to bee conservation, it strikes me that they can go together.  We did have Linda Hardison on the show the other day, and I totally understand there's a place for people who just love seeing native plants and learning how to grow them. But it seems like it's a heated argument. It can turn into a heated argument. What's the sensible way to go through this native versus exotic controversy?

[00:17:46] Al Shay: [00:17:46] I read Donatelli's books. One I'm reading now is "No Nettles Required" where he refutes all of that. It's out of England, of course and  for the people in the West, like us, they are the [00:18:00] world's leading gardening culture having been at it actively for over a thousand years, a millennium. So it does go both ways. Let's step it back a moment and go. What should I eat?

[00:18:11] For goodness sakes, always start with native plants. Always start with native plants and thinking of this, I'm laughing because I live in the bottomland area. Okay. And I'm looking  "Hmm, don't change the site to fit the plants. Use plants that fit the site." That's being sensible.

[00:18:33] Okay. So here I have a Rubus leucodermis. It's a little trailing dewberry - very pretty plant, wonderful little fruit about the size of maybe your pinky nail. I should've paid more attention to the common name devils shoelaces, right? 25 years ago. It's still not gone, it's not completely gone. I have it under control though. I went [00:19:00] ahead and planted a rush. It tried to take over my backyard. heracleum lanatum, cow parsnip, one of my favorite plants in nature, big umbel, beautiful, attractive to a wide range of pollinators. It's a beast. It'll start to seed and go everywhere.

[00:19:21] What's my point? Many of our native plants are incredible weeds, not so much so the deciduous ones, but certainly the shrubs. If you align them with the appropriate habitat, in my case, relatively moist, oh my gosh. So be cautious, but I always start with native plants. And when I was an undergrad in the eighties here at Oregon State University, where our design teacher was a landscape architect by the name of John Stewart, still at it locally here in town, probably in his late seventies by now and of course it was pre-internet.

[00:19:52] So we had this huge four by eight piece of plywood that John stacked, two or three feet high with [00:20:00] catalogs. And we could not spec a plant because we liked the plant. We could only spec it if we could find it in a catalog. So what do you think of the availability of native plants here in the Willamette Valley in the mid eighties? Big fat next to zero. ODOT was probably the biggest user of native plants. If you wanted Vaccinium ovatum, our evergreen huckleberry. One of my favorites. Everyone should have this native plant in their yard selections along with things like, Ribes, flowering currant, everybody should add that native if you love natives or not.

[00:20:37]You would have to order it three years in advance. Not so much now. Just crazy stuff to think now. And now we look at it and it's "Oh my God, oh, do we have enough native nurseries?" So they're abundant. And of course me, I'm spoiled. I buy wholesale. So it's relatively inexpensive. I always start with the native pallet as the platform. But as a buddy of mine likes to say, "look, if you're a meat eater [00:21:00] and eat steak every night, and now you're on a road trip and you can only get hamburgers, can you survive?" Of course you can. I never remember the exact title of the book, but it's, we are not intelligent enough to determine the intelligence of other fauna.

[00:21:17] And we're not, we're just beginning any ecologist for tell you, we're just beginning to understand the interplay between soil microbes and plants and how that extends beyond that to the aerial faunal components that they interact with. Anyway, I don't want to get going on that. That gets me way excited and crazy. By all means, start with natives, but if you're living in a semi urban space, it's no longer native. The pH has changed, drainage has changed, humillia has changed, microclimate has changed.

[00:21:52] In New York City in Manhattan, that's what we call New York City itself. They use a lot of  trees from the [00:22:00] Southeast. Because the humidity now that's been created by these concrete canyons is not native. You can't use too many natives under those highly altered situations. People in my industry whine to me continually about the city of Portland, demanding x number of natives per square meter if you're doing any sort of project in the city. But we can try and believe me. I've got my own catalog of native plants that I wouldn't plant without, but I have mixed plants that are non-native. The problem is there's never any citation as to an exotic plants, ability to withstand drought that I've seen.

[00:22:39] So things like Pinus mugo, Euonymus fortunei, Calatheas, an old time grandma, grandpa plant duty bush. I have planted all of those in hedgerows with native flora that have received zero water after the second year, my student worker and I would go out there and we'd water. We'd [00:23:00] hand can with Mike Russell, fungi and water them for the first two years. But after that, we are not doing it anymore and everything holds up beautifully. Right along with a whole slew of other,  native, such as Ribes sanguineum, Holodiscus, oceanspray is one of my favorites. Of course, Mahonia aquifolium our native Oregon grape, does a great job in a hedgerow and also supplies a fair amount of floral nectar pollen for plants.

[00:23:26]Another thing I came across, it's not herbaceous perennials, we'll get to those, but the use of dioecious plants. So when we say monecious, in a Latin that means, of one house. So you have male and female on the same plant then sometimes it's actually the same flower. Now, if we say monecious, we need a pollinator. Everybody knows holly. So you're not going to get the berries unless for every six females or so you have a male.

[00:23:55] But here's the thing about males. And I never realized that until I read this article about two [00:24:00] years ago. Is that the males of course are producing pollen and they flower early. They flower early, it's an opportunity to supply much needed protein. Pollen is the protein source for our native bees and honeybees. And then of course, nectar is the ready carbohydrates. And of course it's still also fed to larvae as well.

[00:24:21] So plant more males. We really don't care about males typically because they don't produce the fruit. You have holly, you have sumac, you have spice bush, and several others that are monecious. So when you're doing the planting out if you have six of the fruit bearing females put in three males, you only need one, but put in three males, that's just a side note entirely. Anyhow  I'm looking over my notes here real quick, and I think I've covered most of what we wanted to talk about.

[00:24:53] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:24:53] You know what Al I think this is a great moment to take a quick break. Let's regroup. Because I [00:25:00] know I could keep you going for as long as you have time for which I think our listeners would like, so let's take a quick break. We'll be back in just a second.

[00:25:07] Al Shay: [00:25:07] Sounds great. Okay.

[00:25:10] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:25:10] We are back. So we wanted to talk a little bit about some of the annuals, but one of the things that we were talking about before we even got started was you were saying, a lot of these plants, the plants that you can't really get at the nurseries, or if you can, they're expensive. You can typically get a seed. But seeds are complicated. So how can you get some of these cool plants without having to sink all this money or travel to the high end, to someone's plant sale?

[00:25:41]Al Shay: [00:25:41] I'm a plant nut. Like anybody else .

[00:25:44]Andony Melathopoulos: [00:25:44] No. You're not a plant nut like anybody else.

[00:25:48] Al Shay: [00:25:48] No,

[00:25:49] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:25:49] I am extreme

[00:25:50] Al Shay: [00:25:50] to the max. I received my little catalog from Bluestone Perennial. So I'm looking through it. I saw a wonderful Veronica I have to have, and certainly there are a lot of things [00:26:00] that are cultivars. You can't really duplicate very easily. But when I think of pollinators, I think of what. You have Coreopsis, you have Gaillardia, you have Echinacea, blazing star. Those are four big hitters and you know what? $2.79 cents will easily get you enough seed to do an entire flat. And we do our flats in what we call a 10-20 flat holds 18 four inch containers.

[00:26:27] "Oh wow, I don't have a greenhouse Al." Exactly, so here's what you do. You don't try to do this in February. You do it in the middle of June when things have warmed up, find a spot in your yard. And if it gets automatic irrigation, even better and at least some partial shade, so things don't dry out too quickly. And then buy your packets of seed, it'll be under 15 bucks for the seed. For a packet of the big four, I just listed.

[00:26:54] You'll have to pay a little bit more to get your large pots, your flats and your media. [00:27:00] But after year one, you will never pay again for the flats or the pots. Okay. Just your media. You get your media in there. You can pack it down a little bit. What I like to do is I'll fill one forage container first, and then I use that to compact the other containers. Just to get the air out of that. Lay them out and broadcast  your seed.

[00:27:21] And for these four elements, they do not need to go through a winter chilling period. That can be a challenge. I'll talk more about that in a minute, but not an issue here. Maybe you want to do two flats of each. So you'll have 36 of each. For $2 or $3 or $4.79. Holy cow, that doesn't come out to much for you, does it? With hardware costs. Again, you'll have to pay upfront for year one, but then you have it. The hardware cost is meant to keep out the blue jays, all of our other avian fauna and rodents. They love seed and we'll go through that [00:28:00] in nothing flat. So make sure you protect it and you can just lay it out. You could wrap it around the flats if you like.

[00:28:06] What we do is we buy a finer screen. What you'd use metal not nylon, but metal screen replacement. If you want to redo a screen and then we can bring it down to the size of the flats, we put steel pipe on top of that, maybe some bricks in the corners and you're done. You're done! As soon as things germinate and they start the bust up to the point where you need to take it off. They're not going to be prey to the predation we just talked about. Once they are foliated green and growing.

[00:28:37] And then you need to be really cautious as you get into August because that container is going to get filled with roots pretty quick, really quick. And it's going to pull that moisture out of that, the plant is. More rapidly at the end of August than it did in the end of June. September, October comes around, you're ready to plant. Fall is a great time to [00:29:00] plant with perennials because the soil temperatures are still in that 50 degree range and they will put on a lot of root growth by next spring, knock your socks off.

[00:29:10] If you're doing a meadow, even it's a great way to do the meadow. Why you may ask, let's talk about that. We'll move on to the next list. And right here is the list of products I use that comes from the eminent biologist,  Lynda Boyer, who runs the seed component of Heritage Seedlings.

[00:29:29] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:29:29] And don't miss the episode with her. We have an episode back with Lynda, she was talking with us and we planted her seed all the time, her "Rough and Ready pollinator Mix."

[00:29:39]Al Shay: [00:29:39] Mine is "Tough and Tenacious" you really have to go through them. I'll talk about that in a moment too. So we get that from Lynda and I buy a pound and that'll get us to almost 20 flats. So that's 364 inch containers. They need to be vernalized. Okay. And what that means [00:30:00] is they need to be chilled through the winter to stimulate germination, come spring. Not all the components, but a portion of them do, those that don't they germinate immediately in September when we first lay out and it's cool.

[00:30:12] So we can look at it and see a little green carpet. And then we know by March or I'll be planning it out probably in the middle of February. And just a mindblower. But yeah, anyway, we'll get those out in February. Everything that needed a little bit more time to germinate has germinated or is still in that forage pot and then I'll plant it out. So you may ask, it's a lot of workout why don't you broadcast seed in fall? It's a great question. And Linda is selling these to individuals who are doing restoration work well by golly, that's what they're doing, they're doing acres and acres. I'm doing 500 to a thousand square foot plots.

[00:30:50] Here's the reason why, one there's usually a barrier between the seed and the soil and to get good germination, you have to have seed to soil contact. So on the OSU [00:31:00] campus, for instance, it's all wood chips,it is not going to work. The other is predation. Mice, rats, right? Rodents in general. And then avian fauna will just strip an area clean. They need to survive all winter long, and there's not a lot out there and seeds are just a protein packed resource that they're not going to pass up.

[00:31:22] So we short circuit all of those negative probabilities by, I'm just envisioning my little yard at my research facility, everything is neat. Fully protected from predation, looking great. Another two or three weeks, we're going to start planting it out. So that is a great homeowner way to do things. And you of course can do the same thing. "How do I buy seed?" I bet if you contacted Lynda Boyer and made the minimum purchase, it's about $140, $150 for a pound of seed and got together with your neighbors because you probably don't need 20 flats. Away [00:32:00] you go.

[00:32:00] Also, interestingly enough, local nurseries, I'm thinking of one right near me. Because I live in Philomath, Shinra sells native seed. So I have Plectritis congesta, sea blush, which I need to get out very soon. And I just bought a couple of little packets of it and away you go. So it couldn't be easier to do that.  Right now, compared to the way it was again, when I was a student, not really,  that available. What I get in Lynda's mix, "Tough and Tenacious", we have Achillea, which is yarrow, Amsinckia, I don't know the common name for that off hand.

[00:32:35] Aquilegia, which is Columbine, Clarkia common name is also clarkia. A couple of different Clarkias, amoena, bottae, are two beautiful plants. Blue-eyed Mary is what Collinsia verna is. And Chinese lanterns I think is a common name. Both are annuals, but re-seed, they're perennial by seeding [00:33:00] is what we say.

[00:33:01] Oregon sunshine, beautiful plant perennial and it'll make it through season to season. Geum macrophyllum our native Geum, absolute weed, but I love it to death. So I just continually pick it out where I don't want it. And I try not to let it go seed, but manageable in a backyard. Gustacome Epiphyllum it's in the carrot family, beautiful plant, really attracts pollinators. I unfortunately have never seen it germinate successfully out of this mix, but we keep trying. A couple of Lomatiums, lotus,  Phacelia nemoralis is our native  Phacelia. It puts on a beautiful blue flower, Phacelia tanacetifolia is one that's used as a pollinator crop in Europe.

[00:33:48] And you can get that seed on Amazon, I've done it. So that's just great to have around Prunella or Potentilla again is just beautiful it's a little bit  woodier [00:34:00] but definitely is perennial. Prunella vulgaris is also perennial; it's a weed. We don't pay much attention to it. It's common name is heal-all. It's a beautiful square stem and a cluster of flowers on top of that square stem that pollinators just go crazy for. Ranunculus buttercup, well-worth it.

[00:34:20] Rumex salicifolius is a little bit of a weed. My wife detests it. I kinda think it's cool. Salicifolius refers to the fact that the leaf resembles that of a willow in the Salix genera. Sanguisorba, Sidalcea is wonderful, campestris. Sidalcea malvaflora ssp. virgata is supposed to be what we're growing for Fendler's Blue  here in Benton County. So I got chewed out for not growing that one. And it's in the mix now you need to be cautious. Or initially in our mix, we had a couple of other elements.

[00:34:54] One was tarweed which puts on a great show, but unfortunately it is an ugly [00:35:00] plant. So again, we come back to, how do we take this messiness and create an orderly frame that I can market to the hipsters in Portland. And we're going to talk more about that in a moment too, because it's another aspect of natives versus exotics.

[00:35:18] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:35:18] The one thing I was going to mention is also for those of you who are in Southern Oregon, we did have Susie Savoie on from Klamath-Siskiyou Native Seeds. That is another great source of seeds. If you're  down in the Southern part of the state, Okay, keep going.

[00:35:30] Al Shay: [00:35:30] Yeah. We're so spoiled here in the Willamette Valley and in the Applegate Valley as well, down South lots of great seed houses, selling a wide array of well adapted vegetables to to wildflowers. So we really are lucky from that end. Madia elegans is what tarweed is. And it has this habit that's referred to as vespertine referring to evening vespers. So they Latinized that and what I mean simply is the cooler the evening and the cooler the morning, the [00:36:00] flowers are open, but they're not in the heat of the day.

[00:36:04] And again, yeah I love that shrub because you're right Andony, if you're doing a bigger area, it's not right outside your back window, who cares? Use it. But if you're doing an area where you want to make sure every single element kind of shines and I don't care about things turning brown so much, but this thing was about four feet tall and brown.

[00:36:25] And I guess what tipped the balance for me is my wife was picking me up for lunch one day. And when you could drive into the Cordley Hall parking lot, you can't now because they're redoing the entire hall. They tore out the entire garden, but we had a little plot of native elements there and Maddy said, "What is that piece of garbage growing over there? You don't really want that in there." I, of course, had to defend it, it's a wonderful plant. But she was right. In that context, it made no sense. It was literally right in your face, brown four feet tall.

[00:36:58] So going back to, just [00:37:00] for a moment with the exotic versus natives. All of our natives, as you could imagine, come on early, just like my matrix does in those four-inch pots and comes on early. Why? Because we live in a summer dry region. We used to call it Mediterranean now to be more generic, we refer to it simply as summer dry so-called Mediterranean. Nobody's going to arrest you. So what do you think our native flowering elements look like by the 1st of August? They're all Brown. They're all done. Maybe you've got a little bit of beat up Gaillardia or Coreopsis laying around  whose leaves are torched. So again, how do I sell this to the general public? That's where our mix of natives and regionally adapted non-native plants really pay off.

[00:37:44] And indeed, I'm looking at this book "100 Plants to Feed the Bees", and they go on, in the beginning about the benefit of native plants. And then they get into an encyclopedia where maybe only a third of the plants are natives. You can't keep a [00:38:00] well-stocked buffet for native pollinators from, April through October, you just can't. Then if you want to use some of our native since Xanthium trigum our native Aster they changed the name from Aster to Synthiotryum for me, so I had to memorize that and I finally did.

[00:38:17] Glaglolossia and some of these other species are absolute thugs. Thugs! They take over part of your garden space. If you're ready for that and have a big enough space. Fine. If you've got smaller, more concise areas like where my wife gets out of her minivan - that thing has to go. But then speaking of Asters yeah I'll talk about them in a minute. I don't want to go on forever.

[00:38:44] Just one quick nod to annuals. I was given a presentation by a graduate student from Penn State by Andony and Gail yesterday. And it covered, they did some trials and wanted to see which was more effective than another. [00:39:00] A list I just got off the internet, Salvia guaranitica, anise-scented sage, any Aster but this is not the Aster you're thinking of. This is Callistephus chinensis, Chinese Aster, black eyed susan, Rudbeckia. Salvia in general is just a great plant for pollinators. Borage drives bumblebees crazy. It is a little bit of a weed, so you gotta be able to tolerate that.

[00:39:28] Clary sage is great, common Lantana, that's a real East coast annual that's finally making its way out here along with Pentas. East coast annuals that are used for decades have finally made it out there within the last five years or so. Cornflower, Centaurea be cautious, you can get weedy. And then when you're looking at the more evolved or hybridized cultivars that don't spread from seed, do they have the pollen and nectar for the natives?

[00:39:58] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:39:58] I've been in [00:40:00] so many natural areas in Eastern Oregon where it just gets away. I just don't want to recommend it anymore. Just don't do it, it's too weedy.

[00:40:08] Al Shay: [00:40:08] Thank you for that because it's a regional thing. Everybody loves it. But It gets out there and then it just takes a meadow and dominates it.

[00:40:17] Yeah. And I see alerts about things like Berberis (Barberry), don't use it. It's a weed . Norway maple whether you like Norway maple or not, flowering pairs are taking over entire forests back East. We don't have that problem in the Valley. Elaeagnus it's an olive of sorts,  I had a naturalist say, "Oh my God, you plant that stuff out here it doesn't take over?" And no, I've never seen it escape. Also, Barberry never seemed to stick. Things like tony Aster, firethorn, yeah. They can get into our native ecosystem Hedera helix, ivy is a great source of nectar for pollinators, but it's absolutely dominating in an ecosystem.

[00:40:57] So exercise caution and [00:41:00] pineapple sage, popcorn plant, Cassia, not even familiar with this one, didymobotrya. Snapdragon one of my favorites Anthurium. I don't go for the mix. I go for black prints, beautiful deep maroon foliage and flowers. Just stunning plants. Spider flower, Cleome, sweet William, sweet alyssum, Tithonia, I'm glad that made it on the list. Mexican sunflower, Tithonia rotundifolia.

[00:41:27]Andony Melathopoulos: [00:41:27] We have that new publication. We're looking for a plant,  Amy Jo Detweiler was looking for a good plant for late summer Aster and that came up and I was researching at the time and it looks like a great plant.

[00:41:40] Al Shay: [00:41:40] Stunning plant. I use that as part of my collection. So for instance, I use Zinnia elegans a lot because that's the old species I'll use with marigold. And I try to hunt down ones that are comfortable or appealing to [00:42:00] our pollinators. And then Helianthus all of those plants, our annual  sunflower are typically found South of the border. And they hold up and they don't need a whole lot of water. The pollinators go berserk for them. And that was the last one on the list after Verbena bonariensis.

[00:42:18] And I don't know where you think of Verbena bonariensis as an annual. It's a herbaceous perennial in my book, but it's neither here nor there. So don't give up on annuals. Again, Google, "annuals for pollinators." Okay. I've got a list of just a few plants, if you want to. I can go through those and then see what other thoughts you have. So again, I'm focusing mostly on herbaceous perennials.

[00:42:41]Andony Melathopoulos: [00:42:41] What are these plants?

[00:42:42] Al Shay: [00:42:42] They are super special plants . Highly cultivated that have no appeal for pollinators highly cultivated.

[00:42:54]Andony Melathopoulos: [00:42:54] This is Al's list.

[00:42:57]Al Shay: [00:42:57] It's a quick list, but again, I'm looking at this Bluestone [00:43:00] catalog. It's $14.50 for a little half container. Now how many ordinary people are going to pay that ton of money.

[00:43:07] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:43:07] We're near the end of the interview. So we can go to the weird ones.

[00:43:10] Al Shay: [00:43:10] Oh, there you go. Okay. So listen, I picked somewhat unusual ones and some common ones. Asters, New England Aster, New York Aster, are great. They went from Aster again to trigum. The beauty of them is, late flowering.  If you look at Tracy's book sheet, it instructs you to go ahead and cut them back by half in June. Otherwise you'll have a four foot plant that's going to flop over, come September and we don't want it. Boltonia asteroides is another plant and I'm not sure what the common name is for that -  Snowbank is cultivar. And I think that cultivar is pretty close to the species. So I wouldn't hesitate to plant that either again, a bushy, more woody perennial with daisy like flowers, way late in the season. Don't expect to see that until  [00:44:00] August.

[00:44:02]August. Oh yeah. It's late. On that annuals list, they had a pineapple sage, Salvia elegans, and if you've ever grown it, it's a marvelous plant. But it doesn't start to flower until September. So if you do use that. Put it against the wall that the South is facing, a lot of heat. They'll probably come out a little earlier than that.

[00:44:21]Beebalm, everybody wants to have it. If you Google mildew resistant beebalms, you'll get the same list that came out of the Chicago Botanical Garden that raced them to their resistance, to mildew, which is a big issue. The other aspect is they too can get lax and pulled apart. We can go to Tracy's book because I know you're all gonna buy it and she'll advise you how to pinch those back or just shear them back again in June before things have begun to flower and away you go. This is a nice Anise hyssop, smells like licorice, a phenomenal [00:45:00] plant. You can cut back in spring, it gets about waist high. Marvelous, it is a crazy looking plant.

[00:45:08] She's talking about maintenance and I think the picture in a book is like, oh my God looks like about 500 square feet of this plant. We would be doing too much to that plant. It just gets a little bit out of hand, but if you have one or two plants, you can whack them back to six inches early in the spring and they'll take off. One of my favorites is Heliopsis helianthoides.

[00:45:28] Now, most people are familiar with our annual sunflower Helianthus annuus. This is a perennial version, and indeed it can get to be six to seven feet tall. And as soon as you see that, don't think it's going to stay up on its own. This is not nature. This is not the wilderness. Which doesn't care if the plant is on its side, we do care. So I've got mine growing on the North side of a fully dwarfed growing apple tree. So [00:46:00] this year I've been trying to step it down little by little, and this year I'm going to take it down by 50% in. June. It'll come on. It'll flower again, but I'm hoping the one with a five foot plant that's rigid.

[00:46:15] We try to stay away from the bamboo stakes and the green string ties and all that stuff. That's really a little bit amateurish. I've done it. We've all done it. When it's time to say, "whoops, I should have done something else in June." It's now August, you got to keep the plant upright? Fine. But if you have a little bit of plant savvy behind you and Tracy and her book, the Well-Tended Perennial Garden, will supply all of that for you. Just follow her instructions. You're going to look a whole lot better.

[00:46:43]Gaillardia aristata, blanket flower, just threw that in because it's a gimme,  it's sort of our native out here it's found East of the Hills and into the Rocky Mountains. But this is a durable plant, blanket flower. It does a great job. And again, if you remember, it's one of those ones you could raise from seed for very little money. Liatris spicata, [00:47:00] blazing star if you do raise this from seed - it's also very surprisingly in the Aster family. And you'd never guess it looking at the flower, it grows as a spike. The spike is cymose, which means it flowers from the top and works its way down that stem, stunning plant. Don't be scared. It won't flower for about three year if raised from seed, but that's okay. Just get it out into the mix.

[00:47:30] And again, you've cut the basal foliage down to the ground, once the flowers are spent and very well-made flower, Inula ensifolia, elecampane is the common name. Dramatically large plant definitely a back of the border sort of thing, but looking for something dramatic with, eight, 10, 12 inch long leaves. And then flowers are probably about four to six inches in diameter. Really cool plant. And I made note here, there is a cultivar called Compacta. [00:48:00] So I'm assuming that is hopefully half its size.

[00:48:04] Silphium laciniatum, this is one of those Midwestern plants, it's the cup plant or I can't recall the other versions name off the top of my head. Compass plant, because the leaves orient themselves North to South. Again, this is one of the ones that caught my attention. This is seven feet tall, and you really want to break up those garden patches a little bit with something really dramatic. And if you don't have something really dramatic, I don't have the time to grow something that's woody.

[00:48:34] My goodness. There are a wide array of annuals. This is just a perennial that will get that tall. Maybe not the first year, definitely the second one. Seven foot tall yellow flowers, the summer . Once it gets going it's like, oh, maybe I can cut that back. And if it's not in Tracy's book, try it. The worst is going to happen is that something may not flower that season at [00:49:00] all, but then you'll know. Rudbeckia 'Herbstsonne', we all familiar with Rudbeckia gloriosa there's annual varieties. There are perennial ones, this is a seven foot tall element and we are growing one on campus.

[00:49:16] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:49:16] I saw. Yeah, it's huge.

[00:49:19]Rudbeckia maxima. Al Shay: [00:49:23] It's just a big version of it. Leathery strapped, shaped leaves, and it puts out a cone. You get to understand why they call it a coneflower. It's really a huge pronounced cone on the top with the right pedal surrounding it. A beautiful plant. Again, you cut it back by half in June for a five foot plant. So it doesn't flop over the Maxima we've been using. No flopping. So  try it without doing anything the first year. If it doesn't do what you needed to do, because we are looking for an orderly frame for our messy construct. Then try putting it back a little bit.

[00:49:56] The last one I have is Helenium autumnalem, this is [00:50:00] sneezeweed and it's late flowering. This is why I love it. And you can make it flower later. That's another advantage of pruning things back. So it can be pinched to control height, remove four to six inches when in tight buds. Wait till it buds up, take  4-6 inches because Tracy, tells you, if you cut it back by half in June, before it's tight buds, it just may not flower that season. And if you cut it back by four to six inches, at that point, flower two weeks later, and this opens up a whole raft of other culturally appreciated phenomena.

[00:50:38]Maybe I've got two plants that flower seeds, synchronously. There's some synchronicity in terms of the flowering time, but I hate the color combination. You just prune one back and the delay the flowering of it by two or three weeks, and then you've gotten your pink without your orange. Not that that's the most horrible combination in the world, but it [00:51:00] is one people are told to stay away from. I'm here to tell you, mix and match any color combination you want, but there's a lot to be learned by understanding how to manage plants. And again, that "Well-Tended to Perennial Garden" book is worth its weight in gold. Well, that is all I have in terms of the presentation.

[00:51:17] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:51:17] That's great Al. Thanks so much for covering all of this. I'm going to have to listen to this episode maybe four times and I am pitying the transcriber who's going to have to pull all those names out. But thank you so much for setting us up for a great year. I'm looking forward to starting my seeds. And getting some cool plants in my garden without spending a whole lot of money. I like that.

[00:51:42] Al Shay: [00:51:42] I think that with the seed craze that's going on now, people are grabbing everything they can. I don't think they realize how easy it is and just wait until mid June and do it outside. I'm glad you're having a wide array of different speakers on there. I think that's critical. Just, as an admonition to homeowners, do your [00:52:00] homework, don't listen to one or two people. Listen to 10 people. And distill from those 10 people. What strikes you as meaningful? Get online, look things up and just do your own homework. It is so easy to be professional in this day and age. Just the resources are out there. They're abundant.

[00:52:18] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:52:18] And it's good because I think we have a show coming up with Dancing Oaks. They're going to be on the show.

[00:52:23] Al Shay: [00:52:23] Leonard and Fred are absolutely phenomenal and it's been horrible I didn't get to visit with them. Leonard is usually at work, his day job is a doctor, a medical doctor, and Fred is running the nursery, but definitely looking forward to getting out there. This season and the beauty of that, for those of you listening, who are within, range of Corvallis and OSU, these guys are, outside of Monmouth.

[00:52:46] They're about a 30 minute drive. So you have a Portland quality high-end super selective nursery, 30 minutes away from us in Corvallis. It's worth its weight in gold. It really is. So that's super, yeah. [00:53:00] Listen to people like this because they planted and they've grown and they know what makes it out here. So that's just great, Andony, I'm looking forward to hearing that one myself.

[00:53:09] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:53:09] Stay tuned everybody. And thanks so much for your time, Al. And I can't wait to see you in the hallway again, hopefully sooner rather than later.

[00:53:17] Al Shay: [00:53:17] Yeah. You bet. Same here. Take care of yourself, Andony. Thanks a lot for the opportunity to share.