Perennials for Beginners with Freya Wellin

[Music Playing] Eric: So we are here again at the chalet nursery and they are having their garden fair which is a really neat thing. And we are here with Jennifer who is—now are you like the plant expert? Jennifer: I am the horticulture information specialist. Is that not a fun title? Eric: Sorry. Jennifer: Is it not a fun title? Eric: What I really like is that you know a lot about how to deal with problems with their plants. Jennifer has this really cool microscope that allows people that come in here and they can diagnose what is wrong with their plants because I really do not know a lot of times what is going on. And it gave me this light bulb idea that you do have a very fancy—it is not a super—it is, okay. Let me just start all over again. Jennifer: You can think about it. Eric: What I really was inspired by here is the fact that you have this really nice microscope set up with a video adapter to the screen but people could do this at home. You could probably get a microscope at a tag sale or something. Jennifer: Actually and even new, these only cost $125.00. Eric: Wow. Jennifer: And it is what we call the dissecting scope because we work with large things. And so we do not use the glass slides, sometimes we put tree branches around here. Eric: You want to have a large object in there.. Jennifer: Exactly. Exactly, exactly. So it is just dissecting scope and then for what we are looking at insects and we want to tell difference between insects and diseases and the microscope never lies. It never lies. Eric: I bet you could find this on eBay, dissecting scope on eBay. Jennifer: Absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely. And then this wonderful adapter is called Avervision and you could get this at—I get it from a place that supplies things for schools. Eric: So that takes the image and puts up onto the screen. Jennifer: Exactly. Eric: It is very neat so, it is like school or someone would want to do it. Jennifer: Oh, it is wonderful. My kids love this. Kids of all ages will love this. Eric: Yes, I am big kid. Jennifer: It is a cool too. We can use this and as we said, it never lies. And these guys were outside so, they taking awhile to warm up. Once they warm up and the light is going to warm them up, they will start crawling around and that is what makes it fun. When people bring a sample in and we throw it under the scope and they can see things crawling. It teaches scientific attachment. Lot of people are really grossed out by that, this is science. I mean it is fun science. It is really fun science. Eric: I think this is also nice because it shows the earth in a way and it is a neat tool and it gets kids away from the video games. Jennifer: Oh, exactly. Eric: And it just a very hands on thing but it has some technology to it so, you can learn. Jennifer: And it uses technology that was out there before video games were invented. And am I giving my age away, Oh, my gosh. Yes I did. I just gave my age away.. Eric: We will let that out. We went outside and brought in a leaf that had some bugs on it, this is typically what you and I run into is some thing is wrong with our plant and we see these bugs on it. We do not know what it is and now we can figure out what it is. So what do we have here? Jennifer: These are aphids and the fun thing about aphids and people, when they look at them. They see these little green—these little green dots on the back and sometimes they move around and they move around and but they do not know exactly what they are. So we put them on the microscope and you can see how they have—see this little point right there and there, those are called cornicles. The heads here, those are the eyes and those are antennas but if you can those two little cornicles that they are like tails, they have a double tail. Only aphids have those. So whenever we get it under the microscope we know exactly, those are aphids. And the fun thing about aphids is they do not move too much. So you can take care of them with all kinds of like an organic actually insecticidal soaps. And it just a contact killer th