Welcome to Oklahoma Gardening.

Today, we head down to Edmond to visit with a beginning farmer who has a unique operation that includes both vegetables and cut flowers.

We then look at all the thistles that are blooming and determine the good guys from the bad guys.

We then visit with the OSU Turfgrass Research Team as they have some exciting announcements to share with us.

And finally, Shelley Mitchell is back to share some resources for school and community gardening.

So let's get started.

Underwriting assistance for our program is provided by the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, helping to keep Oklahoma green and growing.

Oklahoma Gardening is a proud partner with Shape Your Future, a program of the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust.

Shape Your Future provides resources for Oklahomans to make the healthy choice the easy choice.

For generations, Oklahoma Gardening has been welcomed into your homes.

It's a place to learn, to grow and be inspired.

It's where Oklahoma State University bridges research, education and passion.

We share one goal, to serve the gardeners who inspire us.

That's what makes Oklahoma Gardening true to Oklahoma and true to gardeners.

Today we are at Rouse Ranch on the northeast side of Oklahoma City and joining me is Ben Birdwell.

Ben, you are the farmer, owner, operator, do it all, right?

Yeah, out here at Rouse.

So it's a beautiful place that you have here.

Let's talk a little bit.

You're getting involved in agritourism, obviously.

What is kind of your business model here?

Yeah, so we started about three years ago.

Initially started growing vegetables through a collaboration with the Food Hub and a federal grant, and that really kicked us off.

And then we have evolved from there to growing flowers, cut flowers.

We host small community events out here as well.

And everything has just kind of started to work together into one symbiotic farm that we never really set out to do, but the community has gotten involved and seems to love what we're doing, and so we continue to add on to it.

So you're a few years into this now.

Let's talk a little bit about that learning curve as you kind of grew into it.

Can you share that with us?

Yeah, I do not have a farming background.

I was in product development.

I worked behind a computer.

And I think the biggest piece of all of that has just been the amount of support and help I've had from friends and family and the community.

I set out to grow some vegetables for myself, and it just snowballed.

And friends started to get involved, and we started thinking, oh, we could grow a little bit more here.

We could open up a new plot here, and it has been a lot of YouTube and a lot of friends teaching me and helping me and a lot of partnerships with local nonprofits as well.

And then obviously the universities here in town.

Yeah, and so now you are sort of the mentor in this program with the OSU grant.

Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, so we partnered with OSU on this beginning farmer grant.

It's been really helpful for us in a couple different facets, one of them being getting employees out here.

Our largest cost by far is labor.

Because we are a regenerative farm, we do everything by hand.

We don't have giant tractors out here, and we're not spraying pesticides and killing weeds.

So every weed that gets pulled is by hand or with a tool.

By partnering with OSU in this grant, they help fund half our labor costs essentially for these employees.

And then we get to put them through a program that teaches them how to start a farm.

And they're learning, yes, they are pulling weeds, but they're also learning how to seed plants and transplant plants and trellis our flowers and our tomatoes and keep things alive in the heat of the summer.

And the seasonality of that too.

My day usually looks like coming in, doing a walk around the farm, seeing how everything is looking with the weather and prepping for the week, and then figuring out what we need to do for the farmer's market that week and working backwards from there.

So harvesting, pruning, seeding, planting, and repeat.

Being in this apprenticeship program is amazing.

It is really important.

I think it's keeping local hands in the Oklahoma soil.

It's healthy.

It's offered me job security and also encouragement.

I got into horticulture in a kind of roundabout way.

I have always had a passion for plants and growing plants.

I think it started pretty typically, like with tropical indoor plants, stuff like that, and I'd always kept a garden.

And I just kind of grew, pardon the pun, that interest in soil health.

And that developed into an interest in, I guess, what Oklahoma has to offer in that field.

So I started in cannabis, when it kind of boomed, and then went to work in plant nurseries and just was way more interested in soil than I think growing in pots had to offer, and also more interested in bringing produce to the community and helping in any way I could to nurture the local earth.

I think this apprenticeship is giving us a foothold here at the farm.

Funding like this can be the difference between a farm skating by and being viewed as a passion project versus really being able to dig into the community and provide for the community and have that breathing room.

It's literally our roots.

It's starting from the ground up.

Getting that funding to be able to dream and think about the future is huge.

It's the difference between making it or breaking it.

We have a small farm stand here where we sell our cut flowers and farm bouquets and our vegetables and some baked goods and coffee.

And really the idea is just to create a space, because we are so close to the city, create a safe space for all Oklahomans can come out and see nature and see beauty and experience community and buy some really yummy food and beautiful flowers.

Yeah, you just have people sitting out at your cafe up here enjoying the morning.

It's a beautiful morning.

It is.

We got pretty lucky today.

And you have a couple of other goat yoga and things like that?

Yeah, we do goat yoga once a month, and then we open up the farm on a Saturday and bring in friends from the community and encourage people to come hang out for the day and bring their families and walk around and see our native prairie that we're restoring.

For the most part, the community is so supportive of us.

I know this place is a safe haven and a dream for a lot of people, not only for the flowers and the produce and all the fun cottage goods and the coffee and stuff like that, but also just something that is set aside from the city and something you see in a lot of other states that you don't quite see here, like farming in this style, but also with a lot of diversity.

And also, you know, there are a bunch of women employed here, which is great.

So it's encouraging for the community.

And I know a lot of women feel safe, like, reaching out and wanting to work here.

We're out in the pasture with Dr.

Laura Goodman again, and today we're talking about thistles.

You can see these both in pastures and in urban environments, and I thought it's important for us to know there are good ones and bad ones, right?

Definitely.

So this is a bad guy.

Yes, definitely.

Yeah, so this is a musk thistle.

Another common name for musk thistle is nodding thistle.

You can see the big flowers on this one, and they're so heavy that as they start to mature, they start to kind of flop over.

And so, yeah, if you see a thistle that has big purple flowers that are kind of flopping, there's a pretty good chance that it's a musk thistle.

Okay, so they're starting to bloom in June, in May, June, July even a little bit?

Yeah, they're usually done by July, so they'll usually kind of be dried up like this where the seeds have these long hairs on them and they're ready to fly around and grow other places.

And that's what causes the problem, right?

Yeah, for sure.

So let's talk a little bit about, you know, this is one of the bad ones.

How do we get rid of it?

Yeah, so the easiest thing if it's growing like in a flower bed or in your yard is just to dig it out.

I have a sharpshooter shovel, one of those really pointy shovels, and those work fantastic to go ahead and dig it out.

If you just clip it off, it will regrow, and sometimes it'll put the flowers back on even just short.

Okay.

And so, you know, that's not going to be 100 % control option.

But if you dig it out, that's great.

You can also use herbicide if that's something that you're comfortable with, particularly when the plant is still in a rosette.

So these are biennials, and so, you know, when they start growing in the fall, they're just going to be the leaves that are real low to the ground, and so that's how they'll be through the winter into the early spring.

And so you can go ahead and treat them with herbicide at that time of year.

Okay.

And so that would be something like something with 2 ,4-D in it, or picoram, or aminopyralid.

There's lots of different product options.

Okay.

And we also have another one.

We have a few that are the invasive type, and they're so invasive because of all of these dandelion-like flowers that can spread everywhere, the bull thistle.

Yes.

So tell us a little bit about the difference, and those are the two probably most common.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah, so bull thistle isn't listed as an invasive legally in our state, but it's 100% an invasive in our state as far as how it's acting.

So bull thistle and musk thistle, definitely the most widely distributed across the state.

And musk thistle here has this really prominent white midrib that goes up the leaf.

Yeah, you can see it just running up the middle of the leaves.

It's really, really wide and really obvious on the leaves.

And then another good characteristic to be able to tell a musk thistle from some of our other thistles is that the leaves are typically pretty smooth and shiny, so there's not hairs on the leaves of a musk thistle, on either the top portion of the leaf or the bottom portion.

You can see how shiny and smooth the bottom of that leaf is.

And that, to me, is the most helpful characteristic to tell it apart from almost all of the other thistles in our state.

Okay.

Let's talk about some of those native thistles.

Yeah.

Do they tend to be a little bit smaller than maybe the musk thistle or the bull thistle?

So some of them.

Yeah, we have quite a few that do stay smaller.

We have a wavy leaf thistle that's kind of like a gray-green.

Okay.

And then the pink is a little bit softer pink.

It's not quite as bright.

And those definitely stay smaller.

They're usually like maybe knee high.

And they're also really common.

There's another native called tall thistle that is very tall.

Yeah.

And that one would be more similar to the size of this thistle here.

But again, if you look on the bottom side of the leaf on tall thistle, you're going to see a lot of that kind of white hair on the bottom.

And so you can tell that tall thistle from the musk thistle that way.

Are they as prolific with their seeding and reproduction?

They're just native, right?

Yeah.

You typically don't see quite as many of them.

You're going to see them kind of scattered here and there.

Tall thistle can spread a fair amount, but it's still not going to be to the same extent as a musk thistle or a bull thistle.

These thistles, particularly the musk and bull, really like areas that have soil disturbance.

So the area we're in right now had the wildfire a year ago in March.

And so there's a lot of open ground in here that these thistles were taking advantage of and growing prolifically.

But you also see them, you know, sometimes even in garden beds where you don't have, if there's open soil that these plants will pop up.

And even sometimes in yards, in pastures, we see it often in kind of corners of pastures or areas that there's a lot of truck traffic that were around stock water.

Okay.

And a lot of times with, you know, musk thistle, I know you'll see big swaths of it even.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can get a lot.

We have a musk thistle weevil roundups where we're collecting the insects that eat on this and moving them to new locations.

And we typically do that in locations that have quite a bit of musk thistle, but luckily the populations are in decline because of those weevils.

Very good.

Well, thank you so much, Dr.

Goodman, for sharing this with us today.

No problem.

Today we are joined by Dr.

Wu, one of our turf grass researchers here on campus, and we're excited about a new turf grass that's being released by the program.

Let's talk about Indira 81.

Okay.

Indira 81 is a inter-specific hybrid variety.

Okay.

This grass is for improvement, several important traits.

First important significant improvement is drought resistance.

Okay.

So we won't have to water our yards as much.

Oh, yes, absolutely.

Like this nursery, we established 2023, 2024, 2025.

This is 26, already three years old.

We didn't give any irrigation.

Really?

Yeah.

Even we had drought.

Like last year, we have 40 days, no rainfall.

Okay.

And before 2024, we have a real drought summer.

Okay.

And so it's held up.

But tell us a little bit about how you prove that this is more drought resistant.

Okay.

We improve drought resistance, majorly improve the root systems.

Okay.

Okay.

Bermudagrass roots, normally they have fibrous roots.

But we build, we find germplasm, they produce fatter roots.

These fatter roots, a lot of these grow into the deep soil.

You know, normally grasses, probably the roots just this deep.

This probably double the depths of the roots, so tap more water.

Okay.

In the soil.

We hear about that all the time, water less frequently in deeper.

Yes, yes, yes.

Because roots are able to tap into that.

Exactly, same principle.

Okay.

In Oklahoma or many places in the United States, on this land, we have rainfall.

But rainfall is a seasonal pattern.

In the hot summers, we don't have much.

But in spring, like in April and May, we have rains.

And in September and August, October.

So the moisture is still in the soil.

If you have deep roots, a lot of it grow into deep soil, take up water from there.

Okay.

And this is a homeowner grass, correct?

Because I know you guys grow sports grass as well.

This is, we recommend it primarily for home lawns.

Okay.

The reason is because this grass, you can see dark green.

This grass does not produce a whole lot of seed heads.

Compared with the national standard, this is too tough.

Okay.

You can see, seed head is an undesirable trait.

It looks like you need to mow your lawn.

Yes.

Consumers, they don't like seed heads.

We know that.

With this Indira 81, you can see dark green color, almost no seed head, a few small seed heads.

If it looks very detailed, seed head is very small, very tiny and few.

And they grow very good root system.

You just need to mow the grass once a week.

Okay.

So this hasn't been watered.

This is the Indira 81.

Yeah.

That's the national comparison TIFTA.

Yeah, national.

Well, we call it a standard variety in national test.

And so the biggest difference is the fact that it is more drought tolerant.

It's still got more green, darker green, but you have seed heads on it.

Yeah, exactly.

Also, this grass is drought resistant slightly better than this grass.

Okay.

Especially, we tested Texas, we tested Oklahoma, we tested in California.

This grass performed better.

Okay.

So this isn't just tested here in Stillwater.

Nationally, you've tested this.

Yeah.

Tested at seven locations.

Okay.

You include Florida, Southeast.

In the Southeast, this grass produced, performed very well.

Okay.

So let's talk a little bit about the specifics of this hardiness zone.

I know we're kind of in that intermediate transition zone.

Oh, that's a good question.

That's a good question.

You know, one important thing for the transition zone is winter hardness.

You know, some winters, we have very cold and low temperatures.

If we don't have a hardness, they will get winter killed.

That's a big loss.

We started testing in 2020.

By now, the six years, six winters a year, and even in Kansas, no winter kills.

Okay.

So no winter kills.

Yeah, no winter kills.

We recommend it here.

Spring growing up early.

Okay.

And also, this grass is stick green color in the fall.

Late fall, Oklahoma State University exclusively licensed this grass to a company.

They're called Soft Production Services.

Soft Production Services already licensed the sod producers like Griffin Farms in Oklahoma and several other farms in Oklahoma have interest in this grass, also in California, in Texas, in Virginia, and Georgia.

So you're going to buy it as a sod grass or sprigs?

Sod, sprigs, plaques, like this.

These are plaques.

Okay.

Well, I know this was a big project.

They released from a nationally known program here at Oklahoma State University, and you've got a couple of other exciting things coming up.

We feel very excited this year because 2026 FIFA World Cup, Soccer World Cup, and six stadiums going to grow Bermuda grass.

And five among these six, our varieties, Tacoma 31 and North Bridge.

It's only fitting that a nationally recognized turf research program has great facilities also, and we're excited about a grand opening that's coming up.

Oh, yes.

Bunzler Turf Research Center have a grand opening on June 27.

That's Saturday at 10 o'clock in the morning.

Okay, and so what are the facilities going to do for your program?

Yeah, this facility is very important.

You know, we do the research, we do the education, we do the extension activities with the scientists, faculties, professors, technicians, graduate students, undergraduate students, all work together in this facility.

Today, we will go a long way with this facility.

It's going to be fantastic.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much for all of this information, Dr.

Wu.

Oh, thank you.

I'd like to show you a new resource we made in collaboration with the Department of Ag and the Farm to School Program.

We made a Oklahoma school garden quick start guide.

A lot of times when you want to start a school garden, you get overwhelmed by all the information, and it's just too much to take in.

So we made like the bare necessities.

It's very thin.

It's got lots of pictures.

It's got bulleted lists on the bare things you need to know.

It's got lots of drawings.

It's also got the fact sheets that we have already written that you can go to to get more information if you want more than just the bulleted necessities.

It's got lots of checklists, like what kind of tools you need.

Here's an illustration of why a seed planted too deeply or too shallowly won't grow.

It's even got what you can grow at the first of the school year, before the first frost or after the last frost, and still harvest it before school ends.

And then what to look for when you go to harvest it.

So this resource is completely free.

You can get an online copy at the website below.

You can also go to that website and order a free hard copy.

So hopefully this is a resource that would get more people confident to do school gardens in Oklahoma.

Another resource available for those starting school or community gardens is our third annual School and Community Gardening Conference, which will be held in Oklahoma City July 24th and 25th.

For the low cost of $25, you'll get a smart pot filled with plants, you'll get lunch, and you'll get instructions from a lot of different people, and we'll have a panel discussion on people who have successful school gardens and how they use them in the classroom.

So I hope to see you there.

And as always, if you have a question about today's show, feel free to stop by your local county OSU Extension office or leave us a comment on our social media.

There are many great horticulture activities this time of year.

Be sure and consider some of these events in the weeks ahead.

Join us next week as we're talking about those pesky moles and pocket gophers that might be popping up in your landscape right here on Oklahoma Gardening.

We love it.

We love it.

To find out more information about show topics as well as recipes, videos, articles, fact sheets, and other resources, including a directory of local Extension offices, be sure to visit our website at oklahomagardening.okstate.edu.

Join in on Facebook and Instagram.

You can find this entire show and other recent shows as well as individual segments on our Oklahoma Gardening YouTube channel.

Tune into our OK Gardening Classics YouTube channel to watch segments from previous hosts.

Oklahoma Gardening is produced by the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service as part of the Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at Oklahoma State University.

The Botanic Garden at OSU is home to our studio garden, and we encourage you to come visit this beautiful Stillwater Gym.

We would like to thank our generous underwriters, the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food, and Forestry, and Shape Your Future, a program of the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust.

Additional support is also provided by the Tulsa Garden Club, Greenleaf Nursery and the Garden Debut Plants, the Tulsa Garden Center, the Oklahoma Horticultural Society, and the Tulsa Herb Society.

Thank you.