201 Garden Basics Greatest Hits, Vol. 2

Show Transcript

GB 201 Garden Basics Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, TRANSCRIPT

Farmer Fred

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

Welcome to Garden Basics Greatest Hits, Volume 2. Time flies when you’re having fun, and we are having a blast, bringing you great gardening advice and information twice a week, since April of 2021. This episode features the  Top 7 most listened to segments of the last 100 episodes, from Episode 100 to  Episode199, as determined by you, the listeners, my garden-loving friends. Thank you so much for hitting the play button week after week. 

Over the last 40 years of doing garden shows on Northern California radio stations as well as the Garden Basics podcast since the great Covid lockdown, I have enjoyed talking to some of the most knowledgeable garden experts in the country, especially my local gardening friends, people like our favorite retired college horticulture professor, Debbie Flower, nursery owners Don Shor, Chris Aycock, Juliet Voightlander, and Julia Oldfield, soils expert Steve Zien, Master Gardeners Pam Bone, Gail Pothour, Lori Ann Asmus and Quentyn Young, fruit tree experts Phil Pursel, Tom Spellman and Ed Laivo, UC Davis Arboretum Superintendent Emeritus Warren Roberts, Master Rosarians Charlotte Owendyk and Debbie Arrington, our favorite rose expert slash bug expert, Baldo Villegas, outdoor power equipment shop owner Brad Gay, fellow garden podcaster Marlene Simon and so many more, friends who I’ve just ticked off because I forgot them. 

(barking dogs) Oh, yeah, let’s not forget the yappy mascots of Barking Dog Studios, the household rescue pups, the brother and sister snack seeking team of Salty and Pepper. And just like on the big award shows, I would like to thank my accountant, who has been with me since the Carter administration, who happens to also be my wife, Jeanne.  

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, as always, by two garden companies who have stuck by me throughout all these gardening broadcast and podcast adventures, Smart Pots and Dave Wilson Nursery. And since this is a rather special episode, featuring very popular chats about tomatoes, berries, garden design, composting, soils, and of course, mulch, we will  attempt to do it all in under 60 minutes. Let’s go!  

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From Ep. 174: Spring Garden Tips, Live!

Farmer Fred

It's Garden Basics, The Greatest Hits Part Two, the most listened to segments between episodes 101 and 199. No surprise that on several of the segments that we'll be playing for you today, they feature America's favorite retired college horticultural Professor, Debbie Flower. Debbie is here to talk a little bit about each of these outstanding episodes that got listened to by you. And thank you so much for listening. And by the way, if you care about statistics, it's all about downloads, unique listeners and time consumed listening. So thank you for that again. Debbie, one of the episodes that got a lot of listeners was the episode that we recorded live at the Folsom Garden Club a few months back. And that was quite the experience. 

Debbie Flower

That was fun. It was fun. It's fun to be in front of a live audience.

Farmer Fred

And they had questions, we answered their questions and we prattled on about spring garden tips. Yes. And I wonder which one stuck with them?

Debbie Flower

We don't know a good question. Yeah.

Farmer Fred

What would you say would be the one spring garden tip that you would want them to remember?

Debbie Flower

I want to say mulch. Mulch to conserve water. Mulch to improve your soil. Mulch to keep your weeds down. It's so useful unless you're growing a cactus garden or Alpine garden. It's so useful. It does so many wonderful things for the garden. In spring, when it's still comfortable outside. Temperature wise, humidity wise, whatever, in your part of the country, is a good time to apply that mulch.

Farmer Fred

Spring garden tips live. Let's give a listen. 

Farmer Fred

All right, that brings up a very good point about a spring garden chore that you all should be doing to preserve more soil moisture because who knows where the next step in water restrictions is going to be. Probably going from two days a week to one day a week would be my guess. But you can train your soil to retain more water and so it will be happy with one irrigation a week, maybe even less. And that's by a combination of adding compost to your soil and then mulching the top with several inches of an organic mulch. What are some of your favorite mulches?

Debbie Flower  

I chase down arborists. I woke up one morning and heard a saw. "Okay, that's a saw." Heard it again. "Yeah, that's a chainsaw." Then I heard the chipper go, I jumped out of bed, made myself presentable, got in the car and drove around the neighborhood till I found the arborist and said, "can I have those chips?" and I have a place in my yard where they're piled. I have a pile right now and I move them around. I've done this for many years, there are certain plants I cannot grow because my soil is so water retentive. So that's something to consider,

Farmer Fred   

You came to brag.

Debbie Flower   

And I lost some things to it's called Phytophthora. It's a disease that builds up in moisture, it's a disease in the soil that enters the plant, when moisture is around like the trunk of the plant, I lost some California, wax Myrtles. To fight off throw because of my mulching practice, mounds would help that if you have things that you want to. I have a Ceanothus, but it's on a mound. So it's doesn't get the mulch around it. So you have to think a little bit differently. But I spread it every year and weeding, take those weeds out, take those things out that are sucking up the water, did a lot of that this weekend, and then put the mulch down. If you are a pre emergent user, this month is the month to use to apply the spring preemergent, I would put that on first and then the mulch on top of it.

Fred 

My neighbors love me, because every fall November, December, I knock on their door and I say can I rake up your oak leaves for you? And they go, why are you crazy? Yeah, go ahead. Sure. Well, I do I gather up all the oak leaves in the neighborhood. I put them in a metal  trashcan. Remember the metal 32 Gallon Trash cans, they're still for sale, and I will fill it halfway. Then I will stick my string trimmer down there and grind up the leaves. Or I'll take my mulching mower and run over those leaves making them more fine particles. And that's my mulch. I will put that six, eight inches deep on top of all my raised beds and let it stay there all winter. It feeds the soil as it breaks down. It keeps the soil warmer, it does a whole host of good.

Debbie Flower   

When rain comes down on bare soil, it's so powerful that it can cause soil compaction. So if you cover it with something, you don't get that soil compaction

Farmer Fred   

and it's building up better soil biology to all the little critters in the soil that are actually feeding your plants. I think this is one reality that more and more people are coming to see, is that you don't feed your plants. You feed the soil. and then the soil feeds the plants. there's a lot of mycorrhizal activity down below the root level where these critters are taking the nutrients from the soil, converting it into a way that the plant roots can assimilate. And by encouraging more mycorrhizal soil activity by feeding your soil on a slow, regular basis with something like a mulch. you're improving your soil 100%.

Debbie Flower   

And then if you go dig in it, if you've done the mulch and you dig in it and you turn it over and there's white stuff. That's the beneficial fungus. Don't freak out. That's good stuff. 

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From Ep. 191: Prune Tomato Flowers?

Farmer Fred

To no one’s surprise, many of the top-listened to segments over the last 100 episodes had to do with tomatoes. In many situations, the tomato questions we get here require us to dispel some popular myths that circulate through social media and the internet every spring. And the myth that seems to circulate the most in the spring regarding tomatoes, has to do with the alleged benefits of pruning tomato plants, soon after planting time. Should you be picking off tomato flowers in spring, should you be pruning back the plant in order to get a bigger crop down the line or to get tomatoes sooner? One of our favorite myth busters on the podcast is Sacramento County Master Gardener and vegetable expert Gail Pothour. Her answer? A rousing, it depends.

Farmer Fred

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   

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  

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    

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   

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  

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  

So George, there you go. Don't cut off those flowers, put those shears away. 

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Farmer Fred

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From Ep. 183: First Garden? A Checklist

Farmer Fred

You're listening to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. And this is Greatest Hits Volume Two, where we take a look at the most listened to segments that occurred on episode 100 through 199. And don't worry, the podcast will be over before you have to go to bed. We hope. One of the segments featured, of course, Debbie Flower, America's favorite retired college horticultural professor. And true to the name Garden Basics, the topic for this conversation, Debbie, was starting your first garden, some pointers on that, right? If I could grab a beginning gardener and tell them anything, it would be: don't let your eyes get bigger than your tummy, right?

Debbie Flower

Start small. Start with a few things and observe the size of the mature plant. I've seen so many people who want a garden and they start a garden they go, they're very enthusiastic, it's wonderful to see and they bring home the tomato and the pepper and the squash and they put them all in about a square foot space. Well, in no time, they're going to overgrow each other. So know how big the plant is going to become when it is mature. And if you only get a height, assuming it will get equally as wide, and then space them so that they can have good airflow. So if they touch each other, it's just barely.

Farmer Fred

The other concept, And this is a radical concept, I realize: read the seed packet, or read the tag that comes with the plant, it'll tell you how far to space them apart.

Debbie Flower

It will it will at least tell you on a seed packet to plant the seeds a certain distance apart and then thin to a bigger distance apart. And that's how far apart they think the plants should be for good growth. Most gardens with summer plants need full sun. And make sure you have a good source of water.

Farmer Fred

The first garden. Let’s give a listen:

Debbie Flower

And if you're looking at landscape plants, rather than annuals, which are things you're going to grow from seed, you need to look at the size the plant is going to be when it's mature, that's typically on the tag. If not, you're gonna have to look the plant up and and find out how tall and wide it's going to become. Sometimes you only learn how tall it's going to become, then you assume it will be equally as wide, and then space them in the garden so that they will, at maturity, not run into each other. Maybe they'll touch. Then you have to decide, where is your path is going to be? Where do you want to be able to walk between the plants? Where can the plants touch, but you need to give them enough space to get big enough. A friend of mine is a landscape architect. And I asked her when I was teaching what, if there was one thing she could say to people when they are planting their gardens or yards, what would it be? And her number one thing was space the plants far enough apart. More problems are created by them being too close together than anything else. And I'm guilty of that as well, planting too close together. Because it's so easy to do. When you buy them they're so small and cute, and they look so pretty together. And having these wide spaces between them doesn't make a lot of sense, but space them for their health and for the future of your garden.

Farmer Fred   

And not only is it healthier for the plant, it also can keep bad pests and diseases away, as well. Because when you cut down air circulation by planting too close together, especially if you live in an area of high humidity, you can have all sorts of disease issues that can be mitigated by allowing air to circulate freely through those plants. 

Debbie Flower  

Absolutely true. Yes. 

Farmer Fred  

And when you're walking around your yard, figuring out what you want to plant and where you want to put it. Go inside the house and look out the windows. And think about where you spend most of your time indoors, and which windows you're going to be looking out. And think about what you want to stare at for the rest of your life out those windows. And especially if you have a kitchen window, the vegetable garden, the fruit trees, the food products should be with an easy view of that kitchen window.

Debbie Flower  

Yes, when I initially laid the hardscape in this landscape we're sitting in right now, the landscaper suggested putting the vegetable garden in a place I would not see it from the patio or any window and I said no, I have to be able to see it on a regular basis. So I tended to keep that in mind, too.

Farmer Fred    

When you're planning the garden, do some sitting inside and look out and think about what you want to see that's out there. And remember that taller plants closer to your window may block the view of whatever's behind it. So if you want a complete view of the yard, if you're going to put in those trees or those shrubs, you may want to stick those further out so you can see the rest of your garden. Or, if you're trying to create some privacy, then you would want those taller plants closer to the window.

Debbie Flower    

Or you can create outdoor garden "rooms". It makes your landscape feel bigger if you create where you can only see a small area, and then you have to walk around a plant to see the next area in your garden. Lots of different ways. I love the looking out the window idea as a way to design the garden. I don't necessarily want to see my neighbor's house when I look outside the window. And so I've done lots of view-blocking by planting trees and evergreen shrubs in places that will block those views.

Farmer Fred   

When you're planning your garden, one thing to keep in mind is: "Where's the water faucet?" How big of a chore is it going to be to water that garden? And this is where planning may require some pencil and paper because you may want to lay out an irrigation system, perhaps even a drip irrigation system.

Debbie Flower  

You may want that and in our dry California climate, that's almost a must. But I've lived in places that get rain year round, and in that case, we just needed to be near a hose bib. We still needed to be near that hose bib, instead of dragging it, you know, 50 feet across from the back of the garage over to the vegetable garden. So having that in place is critical.

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From Episode 182: Growing Raspberries, Blackberries, Boysenberries

Farmer Fred

Looking to grow a naturally sweet treat, a family of fruits that are also one of the healthiest to snack on. It’s berries, such as blackberries, blueberries, boysenberries and raspberries. No wonder that one of the most listened to episodes in the recent past is Episode 182 of the Garden Basics podcast, All About Berries. Sacramento County Master Gardener and long time berry grower Pam Bone took us on a tour of her backyard berry patch, where we lingered among the raspberries.

Farmer Fred  

How adaptable are raspberries to the United States? Are there zone limitations?

Pam Bone  

Well, some people would tell you that they can't grow raspberries in Sacramento that they have a really horrible time.  We've been growing raspberries here at our house for practically the whole time we've lived here, which is nearly 42 years and there are certain varieties for certain locations. So you have to know what will do well here. You also have to know the location they require, how much sun can they take. You have to have sun in order to produce the berry itself. But here in our area, we have been planting Heritage and Oregon 1030. And those are varieties that are adapted to the heat. And the Heritage variety is still available everywhere. My daughter grows Heritage in Washington in Pullman, Washington. So these are what we call the fall bearers or everbearers. And they are a little bit different variety than the kind that you put up on a trellis and all. Actually they're much easier to prune, just go to your local Cooperative Extension or your nursery and find out what varieties are adapted to your area and what are their growth habits. And do you want that kind of growth habit? How much work are you willing to do with training them and pruning them and everything? So we've adapted very well here and produce huge crops of berries.

Farmer Fred    

Raspberries, Harvest time is when? And how do you harvest them? And how long can you store them?

Pam Bone    

Well, the berries, this particular variety, remember,  these are the two-crop variety, and a lot of people may grow raspberries that only produce a spring crop. This one also produces the fall crop, Heritage. Heritage is the one that you can find in the nurseries now. And it's it's pretty much everywhere. I think they sell it all over the United States, that particular variety. Then we'll start bearing a crop in late May, early June. And we'll get a pretty good crop then. In fact, actually, it might even be mid-May this year, it looks like some of the flowers are getting pretty well developed already at the ends. Now this is a flower-fruiting cycle, where these are the old canes from last year that were cut down. And then the new growth that you see here is all from last year, as soon as these bear here in about another month or month and a half or so, then they are going to die back and then all the new canes arising from below that are going to come up. They're going to produce then a fall crop. And I will say that it's kind of unpredictable, but most of the time are, quote fall crop and I should say fall with quotes around it because really the crop starts in August. And it'll go till Thanksgiving easily in our area unless we get a really cold snap.

Farmer Fred   

So when that stem has produced berries, that stem should be removed?

Pam Bone    

We usually wait until it starts to look like it's not productive at all. And then we  cut it out. And the reason is, we used to just leave them but we found out that we had that mite problem when we had a little bit of drought stress. And we found that if it's too crowded, you don't get the air circulation, the leaves get dusty and dry. And mites love that. And we just found that it was easier just to remove it, open it up and get rid of it. And then it left a lot of opportunity for the rest of the canes to come up and grow. And then  those come up, then they fruit and we get a great crop. I say the heaviest crop is mid August to the end of September, a great crop. And I put up a lot of jam. So my husband has to pick, he does all the picking. I do all the putting up. My husband calls himself the gardener. I'm the horticulturist, we used to work together on a lot of this stuff. But now he's got me in the kitchen, you know, putting all this stuff up, he then will harvest about every five days. Because if you don't, two things will happen, the fruit will get soft and mushy, and then they will stop producing. But the soft and mushy attracts a fruit fly that goes to our cherry trees, as well, here, and we haven't had a real problem the last few years if you're really careful with keeping it up. But sometimes if you let that particular fruit fly go wild here, it will infest the fruit with unknown little white maggots until you're making your jam and all of a sudden there they are. Especially the fall crops. So you have to be really careful and really religious about getting rid of any fruit that's too soft or decayed or whatever.

Farmer Fred    

Picking the raspberries. Can you pluck them or do you have to cut them?

Pam Bone   

These you just pull right off. They pull off very easily and are not a problem at all. And in fact when we get down to the boysenberries, it's the same thing, you can just pull them right right off. You don't have to cut anything. They're very easy to pick. They're a little bit thorny,  a little bit of prickles on them, but not too bad.

Farmer Fred   

What does Mike the gardener use to a store the raspberries as he's picking them? Does he have a big bag? Or is he just carrying a bucket?

Pam Bone    

 I like them to be in a colander, and so I have a lot of large metal colandars and some plastic colenders. That way, there's more broad surface area, he brings them into the house then. And I kind of make sure that they are well distributed because I put them in the refrigerator. And actually raspberries have a very, very long refrigerator life, they can easily stay in a refrigerator and without having to put them up or do anything with them for five to seven days, and not see any decay or anything as long as you've picked them without already having a problem with a soft fruit. I try to get to them though and put them up if I can within about two to three days. But if something happens, and I get a little behind, it's really producing heavily, I can leave some of them in there, it works out really well. 

Farmer Fred    

Anything else you want to mention about raspberries?

Pam Bone   

Well, I think raspberries are pretty easy to grow. And they're easy to prune and take care of. They produce a beautiful crop and make fabulous jam, you just have to be careful to attention for making sure you mulch, making sure that they don't ever  suffer any kind of a drought. Keep them irrigated evenly without too much water, they are sensitive to root rot. Our soil is a heavy clay soil. And we do have a type of Phytophthora in our soil that does infect our raspberries occasionally.  I've had it actually identified at a state lab to make sure. So what we do is we just make sure that we pull those out occasionally and then I really watch the irrigation, to make sure that we're not keeping it too wet or whatever. But we're still going to get a little bit of it because it's in our soil, and you've got a heavy clay soil and even just normal spring or winter rains or whatever keeps the soil wet. And as soon as that fungus gets active, then you have to be careful not to keep it too wet. And so it's kind of walking a little bit of a fine line there with the irrigation but otherwise they're pretty carefree. Once a year fertilization is it. And the pruning doesn't take much time and I highly recommend raspberries, they're, they're fabulous, and they taste really good.

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Dave Wilson Nursery

Farmer Fred

You want to start the backyard fruit and nut orchard of your dreams? But you don’t know where to begin? Or, maybe you’re currently growing fruit and nut trees, and you have a million questions… such as what are the tastiest fruits to grow, where can I go to buy some of these delectable fruits and nuts you’ve been reading about…and, how do I care for all these fruit and nut trees, including planting, pruning and harvesting? I have one online stop in mind, where all these questions you might have will get answered: It’s dave wilson dot com, That's Dave Wilson Nursery, the nation's largest wholesale grower of fruit and nut trees for the backyard garden. They have planting tips, taste test results, and links to nurseries in your area that carr