Iowa This Week -- Steven Eilers + Gary Kelley Program -- Aug. 22-23, 2026

Welcome to Iowa This Week, I'm Tim Harwood.

Coming up, a program that commemorates a renowned Cedar Falls artist by supporting active and up and coming artists.

First, Garden Harvest Time is well underway for many people who are enjoying tomatoes, cucumbers and more, and it's a good time to connect with Steven Eilers, Horticulture and Natural Resources Coordinator at Blackhawk County's Iowa State University Extension.

Thanks for being back with us, Steven.

Thanks for having me and good morning.

This is payoff time.

All that work now is coming to fruition, and maybe depending on what you're growing, maybe literally coming to fruition.

Yeah, and vegetable-ish, too.

All depends what you planted, I guess, right?

It's that season.

It's, you know, get those canners warmed up, all that work you've done.

It was so much fun to plant in May, and then, of course, we suffered through, you know, the July and the August of the...

crab grass and the wet grass and the bugs and the whatnot.

Just to get those tomatoes and you know hope that the potatoes are growing and everything is growing great underground and we can pick the stuff that's above ground.

I can say I grew a few jalapenos and they're lovely this year.

So what do you get the most questions about when it comes to this time of year?

Is there a particular garden crop that people want to know more about or have more trouble with?

Well, I will say the biggest question, and again, I don't do food preservation specifically.

I'm the before that, so I'm the growing, so salsa.

Salsa is king.

Tomatoes and peppers are in onions.

They're some of the biggest grown things.

People can't get enough.

Either you're a beginner or you're a really expert, but everybody loves the salsa.

So growing the tomatoes, growing the peppers, growing the onions, growing the jalapenos, growing the stuff with the salsa is huge.

And then how do you can it?

How do you preserve it?

How do you do it the right way?

becomes a big question.

And how do you do that safely, I think is probably the point of that story is how do you do it safely?

We're talking with Steven Eilers of Iowa State University Extension, Horticulture and Natural Resources Coordinator about harvest time for backyard produce.

And what's top of mind then when you make sure that that is stored canned, whatever it is that you're going to do with it in the best way possible?

I will say that during

that awful 2020 year, people really, you know, we saw supply chain issues and people realized, hey, maybe I should kind of grow and preserve my own food.

And they did.

And people learned.

And the, the want and the desire to learn went way up, way up for I would say, which is fantastic.

You know, it's not a new thing.

People have been canning before there was, you know, Uber Eats, before there was delivery, before there was Isles online, there was canning.

Before there was freezer space, there was canning.

Grandma, great-grandma, great-great-grandma, grew it all summer, and you put up your preserves.

My mother was a huge canner.

Everything from applesauce, we had a whole fruit room.

The house I moved into a number of years ago, the lady was a big canner, and there's a whole room that was her fruit room that she had all of her canned goods in, which I love.

Now, it's storage where I live now, but this is a very old practice.

It's nothing new, however, some things have changed.

just because great-grandma did it in such a way doesn't mean you should do it in that same way.

So, take grandma's recipe, but do some research.

Things have changed.

Science has changed, you know, because they might have been doing it with an old piece of equipment on an old stove that was lit by wood.

So, appreciate grandma's recipes.

Trust but research.

And Iowa State has the answer line, you know, ISU Extension answer line.

is something you can go to every day, almost every day, and find the right answers.

It deals with acidity.

So your tomatoes are going to can differently than your carrots, than your green beans.

So we want people to grow it.

We want people to pick it.

We want people to share what they have left over.

But back in the day, there was no leftovers.

I mean, everything you got, you can't.

And if you had a little bit of this, a little bit of that, then it became a soup stock.

So again, we love that it's come back.

We love that people are doing it.

We just want to make sure that people are doing it correctly, whether that's canning, whether that's dehydrating, whether that's freezing, whether that's whatever, to make sure people do all that wonderful produce that is coming.

You know, sweet corn is here, tomatoes, peppers, there's so many things that we're ready.

We've had a lot of rain this summer.

Amazing amount of rain for, you know, where's that drought?

I was promised.

I wouldn't have to mow my lawn so much.

And the heat.

So things have really been a bumper crop.

Apple's not so much.

Last year was an Apple year.

We had people that literally had trees breaking from apples and even peaches.

But they're kind of an every year, other year.

And so this year we'll have less apples than we would have.

So you might get a pie or two, but you're probably not going to get, you know, all the quarts of applesauce you would have got maybe last year.

But you probably have enough from last year to last you at least a year.

Are there some things that you prefer to freeze

compared to canning?

Yeah.

And, you know, there there's no

Write a wrong answer.

You can freeze a lot of things Like I said my mom can but she also froze sweet corn Carrots you can do green beans almost anything now.

Obviously, you're not gonna freeze your lettuce You're not gonna can your lettuce or things that I'm sure people have tried But freezing is a great way.

I'm a freezer if I do preserve stuff I Grew some tomatoes because you know, that's kind of what I do a couple years ago I tell you what I had more tomatoes and I knew what to do with and I froze them and then

froze them solid, which is tremendous, and froze them all and then you pull the skin off when you need them.

I had more tomatoes.

I must have assumed I was a family of six who is going to have goulash and chili every week because I had more tomatoes in my freezer than I knew what to do with.

So it's easy to overdo and I planted like three plants.

I know people that, oh yeah, I put my tomatoes in.

How many to do?

About 25 hills.

Wow.

Wow, what are you going to do with that many tomatoes?

So you're going to be canning, you're going to be freezing.

You know, I hope your deep freeze is empty.

There's a reason, you know, grandma had, you know, two big freezers in the basement because they were full of food.

They were full of food that was going to carry you from summer all the way through next summer or beyond.

We're talking with Steven Eilers, Horticulture and Natural Resources Coordinator at Iowa State University Extension's Blackwok County office.

Let me just take up a couple of individual garden or backyard items one at a time.

You mentioned apples maybe being a down year.

I know that on my apple tree, a lot of them have been really chewed into by something.

Is it too late?

Is the ship sailed?

Is there anything I can do about that at this

point?

I've always said just because it doesn't look good doesn't mean it doesn't taste good.

So even if your apples aren't perfect, you know, when they become applesauce, they don't need to look perfect.

You're not selling them at a farmer's market.

So go ahead and harvest them.

You know, most of us came from the school of if you had a bruise, you cut it off.

If it had something you took, that's what a paring knife is for.

So harvest it.

It doesn't need to be perfect.

If you use half an apple, that's half an apple you didn't have before.

Same with pears, same with peaches.

So unless they're truly gross.

Back when food was more scarce, you used everything you had.

That's still a good philosophy.

Make sure it's safe.

Make sure your procedures are safe.

Make sure whatever you're doing is tested.

Don't just trust, like, again, an old recipe, handwritten.

That's precious.

That's great.

Put it in a frame.

It's nostalgia.

But if you're making applesauce from your half-eaten apple, make sure you do it right.

Make sure you're doing it in a good, solid way.

We've had a lot of stuff in the news lately.

the diarrhea lettuce and all the now the jalapenos and there's always something that's coming up that's causing people to get sick.

You know you don't want to blame yourself when your whole family gets a really bad case of food poisoning because you uh you did something wrong with food for that you so proudly grew in your own garden.

Stephen Eilers is horticulture and natural resources coordinator for Iowa State University Extension.

In Cedar Falls artist Gary Kelly

died earlier in 2026, but Kelly is being remembered through the Gary Kelly Artist in Residence program in Cedar Falls.

Corey Hurlis directs the Hearst Center for the Arts there, and this week she talked about developing the program, which gets underway this fall, just a matter of months after Kelly's passing.

Oh, I'm so proud that this spark of an idea is now an actual thing, a program.

Gary was so important to the Hearst Center and the whole community.

He was so generous with everyone, but he had a working relationship with the Hearst Center for over 20 years, especially working with our...

curator on exhibits many times over the years.

And so when an opportunity came to acquire his studio equipment, he had a printing press, he had a work table, easel, his furniture.

Just the idea came to me that could we use this for an artist in residency program, something where along the similar lines of Gary helping us and collaborating with us and being such an inspiration.

inspiration to local artists, where maybe somebody could serve in a capacity of collaborating with the Hearst again, very much like he did, work in the same mediums that he did, be inspired by working on his equipment, and then be able, for us at the Hearst, be able to foster new talent, to be able to partner with somebody, provide an exhibition, continue to collect local artwork much like the Hearst has collected.

Gary Kelly's artwork over the years.

And so from that spark came together, hey, let's do a program.

And so we went talk through the logistics of how this might work.

And so what it came down to with the Gary Kelly artist and residency program is an excellent opportunity for an artist to have a full year of working in a studio space within the Hearst Center for the Arts.

So this person would be in close collaboration with staff.

and you have room and space to work, you have great equipment to work on with Gary's press and his furniture and equipment, and to be able to have a stipend to get your own materials and be able to come up with a body of work, to have that full year of being able to produce a body of work, and then there's also a framing allotment that comes with it.

So not only does the artist get $2,500 for the year to work for materials, but we're also working with a great local company, Vandoren's Framing out of Waterloo, to provide a framing allotment so that the artist can have their work professionally framed.

And at the end of the residency period, they get a solo show at the Hearst with fully framed artwork.

So if you can imagine from an artist's perspective how hard it is to get your work out there and how expensive it is to put it together professionally so that you can be marketable to galleries or other museums.

And so this Gary Kelly artist in residency not only gives you space to work but you will also come away with the experience with the full series ready framed, ready to go on to your next opportunity.

And the only thing that we're really asking back from the artist is to work with our curator and donate one piece of art to our permanent collection.

So that the other part of this great opportunity for the Hearst is just as we've been able to collect great works from local artists, and Gary Kelly is included as one of those, we'll be able to build off that opportunity and to continue to collect local artist work.

in perpetuity for future generations to enjoy.

I'm just so excited about it.

Hearing from Corey Hurlis of the Hearst Center for the Arts about the new Gary Kelly Artist in Residence program and applications opened up for this just a few days ago and the application period runs through September 18th.

How many people are you expecting and do you have some indication of how the submissions are going to be judged and this artist in residence will be determined?

Sure.

Being that this is our first go around with this, I'm going to be really positive and say that it's going to be very hard for our selection committee that they might have to look through.

more than a dozen artist applications.

It's open to people in the Blackcock County area, people that are in within driving distance to the Hearst Center.

And so I think this is such a great opportunity.

I'm expecting that this is going to be a very hard decision.

And so the decision is not up to me, actually, of who is selected.

We have put together a committee.

of people that represent our board that also represent contemporary artists of Gary Kelly.

So we're one of those artists being Dwayne Slick of someone who

a new Gary who might be working in slightly different mediums, but an established professional artist will also be judging the submissions and helping us choose this artist.

And so when the applications close, it will take some time a few weeks to review everything before a decision is made and announced in October.

But as far as for the artist, I'm speaking to the artist, if you're interested in applying, the process is easy.

There is no fee to apply, so it's free.

And what the artist needs to give to us is a resume or CV, and then just write us a few paragraphs about why they're applying for the opportunity and what they hope to get out of it.

And then we want a curated selection of 10 to 12 images of what the artist is making, rather than just sending us a

link to your Instagram, we want you as the artist to curate or put together your best representative work to show the selection committee.

And so that is the process.

Corey Hurlis is the cultural program's supervisor for the City of Cedar Falls and directs the Hearst Center for the Arts, which will have a Gary Kelly artist in residence for the first time this fall.

And that's it for today's edition of Iowa This Week.

Thank you for listening.

I'm Tim Harwood.