191 Prune Tomato Flowers? Tips for a Sustainable Food Garden.

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GB 191 TRANSCRIPT Tomato Flowers, Sustainable Food Gardens

Farmer Fred  0:00  

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by Smart Pots, the original lightweight, long lasting fabric plant container. it's made in the USA. Visit SmartPots.com slash Fred for more information and a special discount, that's SmartPots.com/Fred. Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, you've come to the right spot. 

Farmer Fred  0:31  

Ahh, yes….Springtime….when the prevailing question among some backyard tomato growers is: should I prune off the first tomato flowers I see in order to get more tomatoes later on? The answer is either no, it depends, or perhaps. Master Gardener Gail Pothour will tell us why that answer is it depends. I still say no. Also, we talk with garden book author Robert Kourik, his latest is Sustainable Food Gardens: Myths and Solutions. He has a lot of great common sense advice for maximizing your backyard food production. We’re podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon Jungle in Suburban Purgatory. It’s the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you today by Smart Pots and Dave Wilson Nursery. And we will do it all in just a bit over 30 minutes. Let’s go!  
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Prune Off Early Tomato Flowers?

Farmer Fred  1:28  

We like to answer your garden questions here on the Garden Basics podcast. We are at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center in Sacramento County, talking with Master Gardener and vegetable expert, Gail Pothour. And Gail, we've got some vegetable questions that are right up your alley. And I always know when it's spring, when these questions come in. George writes in to Fred at farmerfred.com and asks, "Does picking off the immature flowers encourage or discourage future crop production of tomatoes? The tomato plants are six inches tall."  We get this question every spring. People read somewhere, usually it's online, that picking off the early flowers on a tomato plant will give you more tomatoes later on. True or false?

Gail Pothour  2:17  

It depends. If you're growing a determinate tomato and you start picking off the flowers, you're going to be reducing your yield because determinate tomato varieties only have a certain number of flowers that they produce. It depends. I personally would pick off flowers on a small plant like that. But once they're transplanted in the garden, I would not pick off flowers at all. Indeterminate varieties are going to grow until frost kills them or disease kills them. And so you're going to have a plethora of flowers and fruit anyway, so I don't think there's any reason to pick them off. If the plant is small, like if you started from seed, and it's now in a four inch pot, in order to encourage the root system to really grow, and it has flowers on it, I would take them off. But generally a plant that small won't have flowers yet, and they're going to have to be a little bit taller before they start getting to the flower production stage.

Farmer Fred  3:11  

For those who don't know, explain the difference between a determinate tomato and an indeterminate tomato.

Gail Pothour  3:17  

Determinate tomatoes typically are your paste tomatoes, the ones you'd cook with. They are commercial varieties that they grow out in agriculture, they want to be able to harvest them at one time. So determinate plants grow to a certain size, they're generally shorter three to five feet, they will set their flowers typically at one time or kind of in the same same time period set fruit and then that's it, they harvest all at once. So they're good if you want to can  a lot of tomatoes at one time from out in the fields. They want to be able to come through and harvest the whole plant at one time. So they are programmed genetically to grow to a certain size, produce flowers, fruit, then stop. Some of them would continue to grow a little bit, continue to produce a little more. Indeterminate plants are ones that are seven or eight feet tall that will flower and produce all season until frost or disease kills them. So determinate plants may or may not need to have some support when you grow them, depends on the variety. We typically grow them in some kind of a cage. We don't want any fruit on the ground. Indeterminates absolutely need to have some structure, because they're going to be 6, 8, or 10 feet tall. You need a big sturdy cage or stake or something to grow them on.

Farmer Fred  4:30  

 I love using cages. Get a sheet of what's called Concrete reinforcement wire, six inch mesh wire, and the sheets are usually four feet by five feet. You can bend that into a nice, tall cylinder and secure it with zip ties. And you have yourself a tomato cage that'll last for years.

Gail Pothour  4:47  

Absolutely. I'm still using tomato cages that were built after my house was built in 1974. They were leftover from the construction project. So I'm still using those cages and what that's 40 some odd years ago, So the cages lasts a long time, they will rust. But yeah, they last forever.

Farmer Fred  5:03  

I have heard and seen on the internet, people who talk about pruning the flowers off tomatoes, for staking purposes, if they're tying it to a single stake, but everything I've read about that seems to imply that way you'll get earlier tomatoes, not necessarily more tomatoes, and you look at the research from places like Cornell University, and they just say, Well, if you cut off the flowers, you're gonna have fewer tomatoes.

Gail Pothour  5:28  

Right. Typically what I have read on the internet about pruning tomato plants is more of pruning the foliage. If you're growing on a stake or something like that, you don't want to have this huge, robust indeterminate plant that would take over your yard supported by a single stake. And so you start pruning some of the branches. We have not done that out here, we prefer to grow them in a tomato cage, and let them just grow rampant. The only time we do any pruning of foliage is anything that's touching the ground. So we'll prune off any leaves or branches that are down touching the ground. And if we have a variety that is super dense, and you can hardly get inside to get the fruit, we might do a little bit of pruning that way. Towards the end of the season, in August or so, we'll start pruning the tops of the plants. We don't want it to set more fruit, if it's August pushing into September. We want all the energy going into ripening the fruit that's already on there. So we'll give them a hair cut along the top. Our plants won't stay in much past September, early October anyway.

Farmer Fred  6:35  

Again, that's pruning off stems in order to halt new production in late summer. The other thing about removing foliage too, you don't want your tomatoes exposed to the full sun, especially here in California, especially if they are South facing or west facing sides of the tomato. They can take a beating if there's no foliage to protect them.

Gail Pothour  6:55  

That's absolutely correct. A lot of the information that I find on the internet even if it's from university sites, are based on the East Coast where they don't have the intense sun that we have. So in the Sacramento area, because our summer afternoon sun is so intense and we have a lot of heat, we need as much foliage as we can to protect the fruit. A lot of the fruit will be outside the cages, so it's good to have the extra foliage. I have even provided  shade cloth occasionally.

Farmer Fred  7:21  

So George, there you go. Don't cut off those flowers, put those shears away. Gail Pothour, Sacramento County Master Gardener is with us. We're here at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center, where Harvest Day is the first Saturday in August. Come on out here. If you're in Northern California. It is one of the greatest garden events in Northern California for learning about gardening. It's a beautiful demonstration garden here in Fair Oaks Park. It's the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center's Harvest Day. You can look it up on the internet. Hope to see you here. Thank you Gail. 

Gail Pothour  7:53  

You're welcome Fred. 
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Sustainable Food Gardens

Farmer Fred  11:02  

If you're thinking about cultivating your first garden, maybe a victory garden I have a book for you that will help you out. It's called "Sustainable Food Gardens" by Robert Kourik, a noted author of such tomes as "Demystifying Roots", and one of my favorite books about drip irrigation as well. It's called "Drip Irrigation for Every Landscape and All Climates". He's also famous for his other books, including "Lazy-Ass Gardening". And his new book, "Sustainable Food Gardens" has great information for you about how you can avoid backbreaking tillage, how you can work with clay soils, improve your yields, maybe fix that ugly garden, deal with drought, dealing with pests, dealing with low fertility, dealing with tedious watering and dealing with weeds. It's all in "Sustainable Food Gardens", a 436 page monumental book by Robert Kourik. Robert, always a pleasure to talk with you. I like to refer to you as the garden contrarian, just because of some of the stances you've taken in the past which, in time, have turned out to be right.

Robert Kourik  12:13  

Yeah, Hi, Fred. Good to be here. Yeah, I tend to be ahead of the curve, a lot of times. My first book on drip irrigation, came out in 1993. And I proposed inline emitter tubing on parallel lines to water the whole root system. And now after all those years, it's starting to happen.

Farmer Fred  12:36  

And the one thing I think we've learned from all of that is, especially with raised beds, it's important that you have those parallel lines even closer together, just because the water footprint is very narrow. And  if you really want to cover the entire root zone thoroughly with moisture, you need to have those parallel drip lines, maybe eight to 10 inches apart instead of 18 inches.

Robert Kourik  13:02  

For a four foot wide box, I do recommend 4 parallel lines. On a three foot wide box, I've gotten away with two parallel lines, no problem.

Farmer Fred  13:12  

And of course, it all depends on the consistency of your soil. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. So let's get back to sustainable food gardens, the book. One of the premises of the book is sort of mimicking permaculture. Explain what Permaculture is for those who may not know.

Robert Kourik  13:31  

Permaculture is a  type of gardening that basically originally was a combination of permanence and agriculture. And it was meant to be an alternative to farming. But it's has since morphed into a word that's used in home gardening. And it's basically the same goal that I've had for 40 years:  to integrate closed loop gardening, where you have the least amount of input and the maximum output. And you do that in a natural way using ecological methods.

Farmer Fred  14:05  

And also easier methods. I'd like to add it's sort of reminiscent of your book, Lazy-Ass Gardening. But just think about what we've done over the last 20 years. If I was starting a garden 20 years ago, I would be piling on compost on top of my raised beds, putting out the ramp, getting out my big five horsepower rear tine rototiller and maneuvering it up the ramp, onto the raised bed and digging as deep as possible and mixing in that compost and then reassembling all the drip lines. And it turns out that tilling is actually not that good for your soil, is it?

Robert Kourik  14:43  

It can be really bad for your soil. So how you approach it basically, if you look in my book, you'll see over and over again how important the top four inches of soil is. Both biological activity and fungal activity. The mychorrazal association, in the top four inches, it's like 75% more activity than the next four inches. So even hoeing can be a problem if you do it too vigorously. So when you incorporate the biological activity in the top four inches down to eight inches deep, like you would with a shovel, the aerobic loving bacteria in the top four inches start to die off because any lower it's an anaerobic environment, relatively speaking, and any bacteria that likes the four to eight inch depth, if you bring it up to the surface, it starts to oxidize from too much air, so that when you're tilling too much or too deeply, you kill things off at both ends of the spectrum, bringing the good stuff from deep, up to the top, and taking the good stuff from the top and putting it down too deep.

Farmer Fred  15:54  

Fast forward 20 years later, the rototiller has actually been sold. I  bought a chipper-shredder, not a bad trade, I must say. 

Robert Kourik  16:05  

Yeah, that's a good one. 

Farmer Fred  16:06  

What I'm doing now to improve my garden every spring is I put down a couple of inches of worm castings along the top of the raised bed; and then I top that with another three inches of compost, a green waste compost; and then top that with my shredded oak leaves from last fall. And  there you go.

Robert Kourik  16:28  

That's it. Just as if nature layered it on.

Farmer Fred  16:31  

Yeah, exactly. And it's a lot easier and it really does improve the soil because you're increasing the microbial activity as you mentioned, it also helps preserve soil moisture which is very important, especially here in California these days. And, you know, it keeps the weeds down, too.

Robert Kourik  16:49  

Yep, good way to go. And there's lots of history to that. There's a famous woman, Ruth Stout, who kind of originated no-till for America. But there was a woman in Australia at the same time that originated layered gardening in Australia, so two continents in the same period, two women we're proposing no-till gardening.

Farmer Fred  17:14  

And I'm hearing more and more from people who are employing what's called composting in place. The "chop and drop" and "clip and flip" method of taking your garden waste and just leaving it on the soil. 

Robert Kourik  17:28  

Have you tried that? 

Farmer Fred  17:30  

I have weeds such as hairy bittercress that are my sworn enemies. And I fear Bermuda grass. So I do it very limited.

Robert Kourik  17:39  

"Chop and drop" is a famous proposal from the permaculture people. And I have a real hard time with it here inn California. Many of the permaculture gardening books are written by people gardening in New England, and some in the Midwest, less so from the west coast of California. And one of the things they like to chop and drop is to grow comfrey and then cut the foliage periodically, a couple inches above the soil, and just use it as a mulch in place. Well, I don't know if you've ever tried that. But in California, at least, the summer sun just dessicates it, just completely fries that. And so all the nitrogen goes out as a gas. And you're left with a real kind of fragile, almost like exoskeleton that is not friable, it's not moist, it doesn't compost in California, at least. I think it might in places where it rains in the summer. But that's, to me, it's an idea about how you need to be very reasonable with your gardening and not get everything from gardening books from New England, if you live in California.

Farmer Fred  18:49  

Let me make a note of that: "all gardening is local". Alright, got it. And it is, though it's one reason why I cover my compost with three inches of shredded oak leaves. It's to keep that layer of compost from drying out under the hot summer sun. 

Robert Kourik  19:06  

Yes. So one of the proposals in my book is to look at the myth of gardening which can be very regional. I wrote the book for the whole country. So I cover a lot of myths that may not apply to California. And I cover a lot of myths that may not apply to New England. What you said about basically mulching your compost is very important in California.

Farmer Fred  19:30  

Yeah, we have heat and we would like some more rain. That's an issue too. And that's another benefit of layering your garden bed with all those different layers. It does a great job of not only preserving soil moisture, but improving the soil to allow more moisture to remain.

Robert Kourik  19:53  

The mulching is another addition to that. And in my book I talked about a woman who did research for a thesis on mulching. And she found that anything beyond three inches is probably a waste of material if you're buying it, certainly, but if you're going to the trouble to make it, going four inches deep doesn't get you proportionately more benefits than three inches. So, there's diminishing returns once you get past three inches.

Farmer Fred  20:23  

 We came here to talk about some golden rules for edible landscaping that you talked about in your book, "Sustainable Food Gardens". So let's dive into that. And your first rule is certainly one I agree with. If you've just purchased a home or got a new garden area, one thing you need to do is live with it for a while, and then plan it out on paper.

Robert Kourik  20:47  

That's one of the golden rules, that's actually not my book, I should have put it in there. And that is to live with your landscape for up to a year before you do a whole lot of planting. Because you need to evaluate where the wind comes from, where the sunlight comes from, how the sun is in the winter compared to the summer, watch your plants grow. And like in our garden, you can tell where to plant the vegetables is where the weeds, the grasses got the tallest. Some areas of my yard, the grasses that were there got a foot high. In other areas of the garden, they got three, four feet high. So that's where the soil is better. That's where I would put my vegetables. At the same time, you can plant cover crops. In other words, take large areas your garden and plant things like nitrogen fixing plants and plants that improve the soil structure, independent of what the garden might do. You can get a jump on soil health, but not filling your beds permanently in the first year.

Farmer Fred  21:49  

Exactly. And then plan it out on paper. And another thing to watch in that first year of monitoring your yard is, where does the water go when it rains, especially after a heavy downpour. And if you've got some really, really wet areas that don't seem to dry out for a few days after a rainstorm, you might want to put a stake in that area and mark it to let you know that that is a slow draining area. And you may want to make alternate plans for that area.

Robert Kourik  22:17  

Yes. Now, you could also use plants to tell you, but that's in my first book, "Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally", I have a two or three page list of those plants and what they indicate. So like, Dock is very tolerant of flooding in the winter. You can see where flooding happens sometimes, because there's a little field of dock growing in the landscape.

Farmer Fred  22:42  

Another thing that is a mistake that people make is, their eyes are bigger than their tummy and they plant too big a garden the first time around. I remember when we bought our acreage in southern Sacramento County, there were no fences there. It was bare acreage, so we had to mark off an area that would become the immediate garden. And so I figured well, 100 feet by 100 feet. (laughs) That's fine. Yeah, that's a quarter acre.

Robert Kourik  23:13  

Start small, you can always expand, but it gets your quality going in a small area. And sometimes that area includes the pots of herbs on the front porch.

Farmer Fred  23:26  

You could do that while you're monitoring the situation. You can have containerized plants scattered about, and grow yourself food for your first year at that new home.

Robert Kourik  23:37  

Yep, that takes us to the third golden rule. Plant your annual vegetables, no further from the kitchen than you can throw the kitchen sink.

Farmer Fred  23:49  

That hurts my shoulder to think about. 

Robert Kourik  23:53  

Yeah. Well, when I first did the book in 86, I was visualizing you know the metal things with porcelain lining, but now we got these aluminum sinks. You can probably throw them too far. So you got to think of keeping that even closer.

Farmer Fred  24:08  

Yeah, basically keep it within sight of the kitchen window or the dining room window. Yes. And that's important. And it because that is going to be a visual reminder of what's out there and the healthiest food you can eat is the food you grow yourself.

Robert Kourik  24:21  

You know, back in the 70s there was a big craze for growing vegetables. I had a landscape business. And I had clients that put their vegetable garden behind the dog run. So that was  not visible because they considered it ugly. I put part of the garden so she could see it directly from the kitchen sink where she did her prep. And that was the only garden that got harvested. All the others behind the dog run, I ate the garden for lunch.

Farmer Fred  24:54  

Yeah, I can see that happening. One of your other golden rules for edible landscaping is work with nature. Let nature work with you. We were talking to a famous Master Rosarian, just a few days ago, and he noticed as he was about to leave for a trip back east,  he noticed all these aphids on his rosebuds. And he looked at them and he looked around, and he saw a lady beetle, and a soldier beetle, and he thought, "I'll just leave them, I'll come back, the aphids will be gone." And sure enough, he came back two weeks later, there wasn't an aphid to be found.

Robert Kourik  25:28  

Yeah, like with me most years, my fava beans get black aphids early in the season. And I let them go. And then all of a sudden, the ladybugs show up and then it gets a little bit warmer and a beneficial wasps show up. And most years, that takes care of the situation.

Farmer Fred  25:48  

Well, one of the keys for attracting beneficial insects, of course, is to put in those plants that attract the beneficials. And they're not necessarily plants that get infested with the bad bugs. They're plants that the beneficials need as housing and also as another source of food.

Robert Kourik  26:05  

Yeah, habitat. One of the big myths for organic gardeners and permaculture people is they think that for those beneficial insects, the plants have to be planted right amongst the vegetables, or right below the fruit tree. And I find that that's not necessary. So in my book, I have quite a bit of scientific data, showing that beneficial insects can travel 50 feet, 100 feet, 200 feet, and still be effective. So that means your beneficial insects plants can be at the border of that garden and still have a beneficial effect on your pests. They don't need to be totally mixed and jumbled away. So like I tend to try to put my beneficial insect plants in the cut flower garden. So a client wants a cut flower garden. And they don't even know I put plants in there that help bring in beneficial insects. They're just happy to have the cut flowers.

Farmer Fred  27:14  

Another trick to attract the beneficial insects when they're flying around: They're sort of like drivers on the 101 or I-5 here in California and you see these big billboards, advertising something. If you plant your crops, and your flowers that attract the beneficials en masse, say, in a three by three foot square, they can see that from a long ways away and they'll aim right for it.

Robert Kourik  27:43  

Yes, you got it. Now the list of beneficial attractants is pretty long. And sometimes it includes cultivated plants, they're used for food. Like with coriander, you can eat the cilantro leaves in the beginning of the season. And if you let the plant go to seed, you get coriander. The flowers are very good at attracting beneficial insects. And if you let them go further, you get coriander seed.

Farmer Fred  28:15  

Exactly. And that's true with both cool season crops and warm season crops. Think of all your cool season crops like broccoli, cauliflower, bok choi,  they tend to bolt, they tend to flower this time of year. And if you still have the room, let them flower because they will attract the beneficials.

Robert Kourik  28:33  

Yes, you don't have to kill everything off or eat everything.

Farmer Fred  28:37  

You know, we should point out that at your website, RobertKourik.com. , you can find a connection to that list of plants that attract beneficial insects. 

Robert Kourik  28:49  

Yes, I have 141 plants that are known to attract beneficial insects based on science. And I list the citation in the paperwork you get along with the spreadsheet. And in the spreadsheet, I show the bloom period, because it's very easy to find beneficial insect plants that bloom in June or July. The  trick is getting  beneficial insects plants that bloom in March or April or September, October, or in California, even into November. So when you look down the column in October, you'll see where a bar crosses the spreadsheet. That's a plant that bloomed in October. So you can use the color insectary chart to pick out the best plants and pick them out based on when they bloom.

Farmer Fred  29:40  

And what you have as a sample of that at your website, it looks like I would want to plant sweet alyssum, because it can bloom 12 months a year here in California.

Robert Kourik  29:51  

Yeah, and it's one of the most studied plants for beneficial insects. I think there's seven or eight citations just for alyssum alone.

Farmer Fred  30:02  

And now there are more and more farmers in California that are ringing their fields with alyssum, to bring in the beneficials to help cut their pesticide costs.

Robert Kourik  30:12  

Yeah, they're either using strips within the field, or borders around the edge of the field. And that all depends upon how far apart you put them so that they migrate effectively into the crop area.

Farmer Fred  30:26  

And again, you can find all of this at Robert's website, RobertKourik.com, RobertKourik.com, and a list of all his books and publications, including that insectary plant list. There was one more of your golden rules for sustainable food production that we should bring up. And it goes back to planning your garden. And you point out that time and money spent early, means time and money saved later. And boy oh boy, that's like lessons learned the hard way. When we moved to our new place a few years ago, I wanted all the walkways to be four feet wide. So I could get the wheelbarrow in. I wanted an irrigation system installed where I could control the water in each of the raised beds, and so on and so forth. All to make gardening easier.

Robert Kourik  31:18  

Yeah, good example for many parts of the country people have hose bibs in the garden, but they put one hose bib near the planted area. And that's it. And then they have to drag their 100 foot hose all over creation and knock down plants and start to cuss because it's so hard to drag the hose around. So spending the extra money to have quite a few hose bibs means you can have a shorter hose and easier time using it.

Farmer Fred  31:46  

I concur wholeheartedly. When we moved to this house, there was exactly one hose bib in the backyard. Now there are 10.

Robert Kourik  31:56  

So you can maintain things much, much more easily.

Farmer Fred  31:59  

Yeah, correct. Yes. And and if you decide to expand your garden area, but perhaps you've already got your permanent irrigation system in, you can use one of those hose bibs, to set up a battery operated timer to water the new area.

Robert Kourik  32:14  

Yeah. And sometimes, it's more cost effective to have individual battery control timers out in the garden than one large system in the garage. Because of the cost of the large system but also it can get to be very difficult to run all the wires to all the different valves out in the garden. So in my front yard, I have a battery operated timer, because I don't want to try to figure out how to crawl into the small crawlspace under the house to get the wires to the controller in the garage. But there is an easy way of getting the wires out to the backyard. So I use the controller for that part of the yard.

Farmer Fred  33:02  

yeah, and most of the battery operated irrigation timers that hook up to a faucet now are designed for use with drip irrigation systems, which mean that they can run for longer periods of time. And there's more customization as far as how often they come on. 

Robert Kourik  33:20  

Yeah. In one area in my garden, we're trying to keep a pine tree alive. During the drought, we have a huge spiral of drip tubing over the root system. But it's so far away from the house, that instead of putting in a solid PVC pipe, I do drag a hose to the beginning of that system and have a type of timer that I really liked where you twist the knob to 50 minutes or 100 minutes or whatever number of minutes, up to 120 minutes. And then it ticks back and turns off the water. It's based on the time, not on the flow. But you have to experiment a little bit to determine how long you need to do it, to get the amount of water you want. But it's it doesn't even need batteries.

Farmer Fred  34:10  

Right. I have one of those installed. It's right outside my garage side door, and I see it everytime I walk out. So it reminds me, oh yeah, let's turn this on today. And like you say, you can set it for whatever time you want. And it doesn't need batteries, and it does a good job of turning off too.

Robert Kourik  34:27  

Yeah. But I find that it's hard to do it  if you just want to run it a couple minutes or less. So that's where you need a timer that allows you to turn the system on and off for a minute or two. My container plants are on five minutes or less. And during the early spring, it's only one or two minutes. So you need a good timer for that, not that twist-on type thing.

Farmer Fred  34:54  

 Exactly. There's a lot of material we don't have time to go into. I would recommend that you Get Robert Kourik's book, "Sustainable Food Gardens" and visit his website, RobertKourik.com, where you can find all his publications and links to purchasing them. And  it's a wealth of knowledge. I mean, we could easily get into demystifying roots and more on drip irrigation for which he has, shall we say, some contrarian thoughts? Maybe we'll do that sometime in the future.

Robert Kourik  35:24  

And we can also talk about the multi purpose plants. If you plant something that does more than one thing in your garden, you get better use of space.

Farmer Fred  35:34  

Exactly. I mean, a plant that you can eat and a plant that attracts beneficial insects for example.

Robert Kourik  35:40  

Yeah, one of my favorite examples is fava beans. People grow it because it's a legume and fixes nitrogen to improve the soil. But you can eat the flowers in the spring. You can eat the young foliage, you can eat the greens, and then you can let it dry out and have dry shell beans for the winter. So you get, what is that, five things from a one plant. And so you get very good use of space.

Farmer Fred  36:10  

There you go. There's a lot of information you can find at RobertKourik.com. His latest publication available now is called, "Sustainable Food Gardens". Robert Kourik, always a pleasure. Thanks for the great information.

Robert Kourik  36:24  

Thanks, Fred. I really enjoyed it.

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The Garden Basics "Beyond the Basics" Newsletter

Farmer Fred  36:32  

You might recall that back in Garden Basics Episode 188 from late April that organic advocate Steve Zien was singing the praises of compost tea. Setting aside his advocacy stance for a minute, let’s take a look at any benefits or drawbacks of using compost tea from a research perspective. In today’s Beyond the Basics newsletter, we talk with a Virginia Cooperative Extension Master Gardener who has delved into a lot of the literature that’s out there concerning compost tea studies. And he found mixed results, but are those mixed results because of, shall we say, garbage in, garbage out. It’s a sober, thorough look at the pros and cons of using compost tea in your garden. Plus we’ll have more information about this mega study as well as the links to the research so you can draw your own conclusions.   It’s in the newsletter that goes beyond the basics, the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred, Beyond the Basics newsletter. Find it via the link in today’s show notes, or visit our new, improved website, Garden Basics dot net. There, you can find a link to the newsletter in one of the tabs on the top of the page. Or, subscribe to the Garden Basics, Beyond the Basics newsletter at garden basics dot substack dot com.

Farmer Fred  37:57  

Garden Basics With Farmer Fred comes out every Tuesday and Friday and is brought to you by Smart Pots and Dave Wilson Nursery. Garden Basics is available wherever podcasts are handed out. For more information about the podcast, visit our website, GardenBasics dot net. That’s where you can find out about the free, Garden Basics newsletter, Beyond the Basics. And thank you so much for listening.