268 Ant Invasion Solutions and Winning Food Preservation Secrets

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TRANSCRIPT 
GB 268 ANT INVASION SOLUTIONS, FOOD PRESERVATION SECRETS
 

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/fred for more information and a special discount. That's smartpots.com/fred. 

Farmer Fred:
Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, well, you've come to the right spot.

Farmer Fred:
Today we tackle a very vexing garden problem plaguing listeners throughout the country. How to get rid of ants that are in your raised beds and plant containers. We, of course, would be myself and America's favorite retired college horticultural professor, Debbie Flower, and she has her own home formula for ridding your household, as well as your containers and raised beds that are infested with ants. 

Plus, we have a conversation with Master Food Preserver and State Fair Food Judge, Wendy Rose, about two topics: 
Number one: How to save an early partial harvest for use later in your various recipes for cooking or canning, because you're waiting for more to ripen this spring and summer before you decide to light up the stove. 
Number two: we ask this very experienced county and state fair food preservation competition judge for tips on how you can have a winning entry for your jams, jellies and other preserves in county and state fair competition. No bribery is involved.

It's all in today's episode 268 dealing with ants and raised beds; and,  how to win at the fair. 

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, and we're brought to you today by Smartpots and Dave Wilson Nursery. Let's go!

ANT INVASION SOLUTIONS
Farmer Fred:
We like to answer your garden questions here on the Garden Basics podcast. Debbie Flower is in the studio with us today, and we're tackling some of your questions that you sent in on SpeakPipe. Just go to speakpipe.com/ garden basics, yell at your computer, and we will get your question. No phone charges will be incurred if you do that. Debbie, let's tackle Brenda's question about raised beds and ants. 

Debbie Flower: 
Okay.

Brenda:
Hi Farmer Fred and Debbie Flower. This is Brenda. I live in Elk Grove, California. I have two large raised beds. They're about two feet off the ground, four by eight each. They are infested with ants. What have I done wrong? How can I get rid of these things? Thanks a lot, Love your show. Bye. 

Farmer Fred: 
Brenda, you haven't done anything wrong.  Ants are part of our yards. They were here first. 

Debbie Flower: 
Yep, yep, you've done absolutely nothing wrong, yeah. 

Farmer Fred: 
Ants, just like raised beds. Yes, it's all that loose soil. 

Debbie Flower:
It's kind of dry there, yes, and there's food to eat too. And there might be plants with aphids on them that the ants can tend, and they collect the honeydew from those aphids, but it is a problem when you get too many in your raised bed. 

Farmer Fred: 
Yeah, and the fact that they are nature's little cowboys, herding those aphids around various parts of your plants, where those aphids then suck on your plant parts and excrete that euphemism known as honeydew, which the ants take back and feed to the queen. But I think ants can be fairly easily controlled with fairly moderate chemicals. I consider boric acid a fairly moderate chemical. 

Debbie Flower:
Right. It's something that if your pet gets into it at the rates it's being used, anything is toxic at some point. Toxicity is all about rates. How strong is that chemical at that moment? But in the rates that it's used in ant baits, commercial or whether you make your own, it is so minimal that your pets can eat it. It can run into your fish pond and it won't hurt them. Birds can come by and eat it, whatever, and it will not harm them.  So you can buy commercial ant baits. 

Debbie Flower: 
I have had this problem not in my raised bed, and my raised bed is also four by eight and about two feet high. They haven't been there, although my raised beds are in one of the wetter parts of my yard, so they probably couldn't get there, they couldn't swim. But I've had that problem in containers on my patio that I go out to tend. It was my cat mint that it happened to last. I was tending  to that plant and it's just ants coming out all over the place. Or, watering it and ants coming out all over the place, climbing up on the plant And in that case I use commercial ant bait. I put several in the top of the 12 to 15 inch diameter pot. I opened them up, left them there, went away, and came back a few days later and all the ants were gone. 

Farmer Fred: 
Yeah, we should point out we're talking about ant bait, not ant traps, because the goal here is for them to take back that boric acid and feed everybody else back at the colony. 

Debbie Flower: 
They have to feed the queen. Ants are like bees in that regard. They have a queen and she does all the baby making. The ants will stick around as long as there's a queen there to serve, and if the queen dies, the ants just take off. And I don't know if they die or what they do, but the colony disperses. So you've got to feed that boric acid ant bait to the queen to kill the colony. 

Farmer Fred: 
There are many formulations of boric acid. In some formulations it's referred to on the label as orthoboric acid. In others there may be some other form of borate in there, but they all basically work the same way. It's a bait that, when used judiciously, not too much and not too little, the ants will find attractive and take back to their nest. Ants in a raised bed are much like ants in a pile of mulch. There have been times in my career of moving and shoveling mulch from one part of the yard to the other that when I stick that shovel into a pile that's been sitting there for a few months, all of a sudden, the ants are very active.  They seem to say, "Hey, get out of our house!" And so I'll go back in the house and I'll get a can of boric acid powder. 

Commercially, one name is Roach-Pruf,  it's sold as a roach-killing product. But it's boric acid and it's like a powder.  I go back to the mulch pile and see where the ants were coming from, and dig a little bit. You can find out pretty quickly. Just throw half a cup or a cup's worth of boric acid into there, cover it back up, go away and then come back two weeks later, start shoveling, and there's no ants. 

Debbie Flower: 
That's pretty cool, because in that's full concentration and somehow you're getting to the queen. Well that's a good thing. 

Farmer Fred: 
Yeah, it's a good thing. But you're right. If you put it on too thickly and you can find boric acid products in squeeze bottles as well. And if you apply it too thickly, they figure out, "we need to walk around this". 

Debbie Flower: 
Right, or if your bait contains too high a concentration of it, they pick it up and start their trek back to the queen and die before they get to her, and so she doesn't get a dose of it and she doesn't die. 

Farmer Fred: 
Yeah, i think in the case of the mulch pile that's where the colony was, so they didn't have far to travel to take it back to the queen. But if you have an ant infestation in your house, for example, you do want that weaker concentration. What's nice too, there are some liquid boric acid products, and you can find liquid boric acid products along with a, shall we say, a dispenser that looks sort of like a pawn in a game of chess that you can just set out in your yard filled with the diluted liquid and just leave it there for a couple of weeks. Wherever they may be, wherever you see an ant trail, and they'll swarm that and start sucking up that liquid and walk away and maybe not come back. 

Debbie Flower: 
Right, be aware that it is a bait. And so it's attractive to the ants and when an ant finds it, he tells his buddy, who tells their buddy, who tells their buddy. And so it's possible that the amount of ants, the quantity of ants that you see around the trap, will be more than you were seeing before. But that's because they've told everybody else in the colony to come get this great food you've just put out for them. Of course, they don't know there's boric acid in it. Boric acid, it dries things out. That's why it's used for other pests to control. Ultimately it kills them. 

Farmer Fred: 
Yeah, there are some other problems with having ants in a raised bed, not the least of which is they're making tunnels underground, and when you go to water your plants, the water may be bypassing the roots of your plants and going straight down to wherever.

Debbie Flower:
Good point, so it behooves you that when you spot an ant problem in your garden bed, especially a raised bed, is to take action quickly. 

Farmer Fred:
Great, and that again would be with a boric acid type product, and you can make your own boric acid bait, and Debbie has been touting this recipe for years. 

Debbie Flower:
I have used it in my kitchen. 

Farmer Fred:
Could you use it outdoors? 

Debbie Flower:
You could use it outdoors. You make a little trap and I'll explain that. So use one part boric acid and nine parts of sugar to make the bait. So what's a part? It's any device you use for measuring. I use things like teaspoons. So it would be one teaspoon boric acid and 9 teaspoons of sugar, and then you can add water to make it whatever consistency you want.  You mix them together really well. And then I would choose as much as I want for my first application and I would wet that thoroughly, because it dries out fairly quickly. You can just leave it  on the kitchen counter or wherever you're having an indoor problem, or you can put it on a piece of wax paper or a piece of aluminum foil. The ants find it and they feed it. The gel. I only put out about half or a quarter teaspoon a day.  And they come all around the edges and feed like pigs at the trough, and then the next day that has dried out and I put out another, wet some more, and put some more out. That's why I suggest you not wet it all at once. It will dry out by the next day. 

Debbie Flower: 
For outdoors you need to make a little trap. Use some sort of a plastic container. I happen to find in the automotive department of a 99 cent or dollar kind of store, a package of 10 little containers that were maybe two and a half inches across and an inch or so deep, with a lid. It has to have a lid, it has to have a tight fitting lid, and so you take the lid off and poke some holes in it that an ant can get through. So they're very small holes. Maybe use a tip of a meat fork or something like that to make the holes. And in the container put cotton balls just up to the top, but not packed tight. 

Debbie Flower: 
There can be space between them. Those are just little islands for the ants to feed on. So when they go in the little holes they have some place to stand. And then pour the wet bait over the top of the cotton balls, put the lid on and then make  a depression in the soil where you want the bait station to go. Lower the station into the hole so that the top that you've put the holes in is flush with the soil. Pack it in there so it fits nicely and the ants can walk from the soil right across the top. They'll find the bait and they'll go in and out of those holes and take the bait, and so you can check it each day. I would check it daily and add more of the wet bait to it. 

Farmer Fred: 
Do the ants leave?

Debbie Flower:
Yes.

Farmer Fred:
Okay, so it's not so much a trap as it is a bait, it's a bait station, right. And again, it has to be a weak concentration of boric acid for this to work, and I think your recipe was one part boric acid, nine parts sugar. 

Debbie Flower: 
Yes, and someone you and I both know, Pete Strasser, who was an entomologist for a local nursery chain here and now has moved out of the state. He uses one to 20. 

Farmer Fred:
Hmm, because he's cheap?

Debbie Flower:
Well, that's a possibility. I have had my container of boric acid for probably decades, at the rate you use it, that's not a concern for me, but yes. So, the point being that you don't want to go stronger than one to nine, you can  go weaker if you want. 

Farmer Fred: 
Well then, one in 20 is much weaker. 

Debbie Flower: 
It is much weaker. You have more sugar, 20 parts sugar and one part boric acid. So Pete is a miser. He's an entomologist. He might just like watching those ants come and go. You never know. I don't know. Maybe we'll hear from him. 

Farmer Fred:
Yeah, really, when he's not staring at the sky at night. 

Debbie Flower:
Right Now he works on dark sky communities. 

Farmer Fred: 
So yes,  this bait is usable indoors and outdoors. 

Debbie Flower: 
Right. And it's something that if you're a dog and were to eat the whole thing, it's such a small amount of boric acid. It would not harm them. If they ate the paper or the cotton, that might be worse, but if they just eat the bait, that is not going to be harmful to your animal. 

Farmer Fred: 
But first, they would have to take the lid off. 

Debbie Flower:
Yes.

Farmer Fred:
And how often do you check those outdoor traps? 

Debbie Flower:
Every day, i check them daily.

Farmer Fred:
That's another tip for controlling ants outdoors. Any other solutions you can think of? 

Debbie Flower: 
For the raised bed, no. But the first time I heard  Brenda's question, I thought, okay, she said two feet tall. I thought maybe it was on legs, and if it was on legs then you can put some 
tanglefoot on the legs. If you see ants going up and down, let's say, a tree trunk, tanglefoot is made as a trap. It's sticky stuff. And as the ants walk up and down the trunk, they will walk through it and they can't get to the other side because they're stuck.  A couple of caveats about that. One is it will leave a permanent stain, shall we say. It looks like a wet spot on that tree trunk. 

Farmer Fred:
Perhaps putting something on the trunk first, like Cellophane or saran wrap, something like that. 

Debbie Flower:
I was thinking maybe even masking tape, if the bark is smooth, that will work. And then put the Tanglefoot on the cellophane or the tape. If it's a rough bark, they'll just go right underneath it. And so then a trap at  ground level, where they are reaching the ground from that tree trunk, would be useful. 

Farmer Fred: 
Yeah, and that's great for that pawn-shaped device I was telling you about. It holds the liquid boric acid. Ants can come in and take it and it can be very effective. I think the other downside to coating the outside of a tree trunk is you may have the Audubon Society picketing outside your house. 

Debbie Flower: 
Yeah, there is a chance that if it's at the right height, a bird could fly into it and get stuck. 

Farmer Fred: 
 And I don't want to harm no bird. 

Debbie Flower:
No, me neither.

Farmer Fred:
Yeah, i guess you could buy a herd of anteaters and try that, but that might be slow. And I don't know what else anteaters eat. Yeah, then what do you do with them? Yes, really, there must be a barbecue book somewhere. 

Debbie Flower: 
I'll bet. Wherever they're native, i'm sure they're food for somebody, all right. 

Farmer Fred: 
Ants in a raised bed. you can solve this problem. Just jump on it when you see them. 

Debbie Flower: 
Yes, Brenda, you didn't do anything wrong.

Farmer Fred
Thank you, Debbie. 

Debbie Flower
Thank you Fred. 

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WINNING FOOD PRESERVATION SECRETS
Farmer Fred: 
We're at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center on a beautiful May day, and we're already thinking about garden food. The Master Food Preservers are here, as well as the Master Gardeners, and one of these days, soon, if not already, you might be looking at your garden thinking,  "oh man, what am I going to do with all these beets or tomatoes or zucchini when they come in?" Or maybe you don't have enough right now. Can you keep those few tomatoes or zucchini or whatever until you get enough to make whatever recipe you want? And maybe you're thinking about entering a county fair or a state fair in the near future. What do judges at fairs look for when you bring in your preserves or your foods? Let's find out. We're talking with Wendy Rose, Master Food Preserver.  I can see that problem of having tomatoes starting to come in around June or July, but not quite enough to maybe make a full recipe, so you have to wait a while, As a food preserver, is there a trick? 

Wendy Rose: 
So last year we had kind of a rough tomato season and we didn't really get a whole lot. And I felt like I was getting dribs and drabs of tomatoes,  a couple here and there. So basically what I did was I put them into gallon ziplock bags in the freezer. As I got them, as they became ripe and I picked them, and I put them in the freezer. And then when I got a full bag or a couple full bags, then I went and made salsa with that or I made tomato sauce, and I did the same thing with tomatillos. You can do that with a lot of things. You can either dehydrate them initially, or freeze them initially, and then make your recipes after you've got enough to do for a full recipe. 

Farmer Fred: 
Do you take the air out of the ziplock bags or do you pre-freeze those tomatoes for like an hour until they're somewhat firm and then put them into a vacuum sealer bag? 

Wendy Rose: 
I usually pre-freeze them on cookie sheets in the freezer overnight. I let them go overnight so that they're frozen, and then I put them in the bags. And I just use the ziplock type bags and I just try to get  most of the air out that I can. Usually those are not in the freezer for more than  a few months, so they're fine that way. 

Farmer Fred: 
With the frozen tomatoes too. If you get the hankering for tomato soup, well, there you go. 

Wendy Rose: 
Yes, exactly, you can. you could. You don't have to either preserve it after that, you can just use them in recipes. 

Farmer Fred: 
You mentioned dehydrator as well. Tell us a little bit about dehydrators. Everybody's got their favorites, but the idea of preserving something temporarily with a dehydrator is kind of interesting. 

Wendy Rose: 
Yes. here in Sacramento we have a manufacturer  locally called Excalibur, and that's the one that I have. And it's my favorite. It's really well built and it's easy to set up and it's easy to use. And I also will do sun drying sometimes too, because Sacramento has such a great climate for drying. 

Farmer Fred: 
Yes, sun drying is great, too. If you've got the spring or summer heat. When you put them outside, would you put them out on screens? 

Wendy Rose: 
I put them out on screens  to make sure that the air can circulate, I also cover them with cheesecloth to make sure I don't get big bugs in there. And then, once the drying is done, i will put them in the freezer. Then, in case there are any little buggies in there, that will take care of them. 

Farmer Fred: 
Double duty of dehydration and freezing. But if you want to bring them back to life, what's the process? 

Wendy Rose: 
So it depends on what it is. With tomatoes, typically I'll just let them thaw and then I'll use them from there. But, like with a zucchini and things like that, you want to rehydrate, so you'll put them in water. Let them soak some water back up. 

Farmer Fred: 
How do you freeze zucchini? Do you have to slice it up first? I mean, they're kind of big or can be kind of big. 

Wendy Rose: 
Yeah, i usually cut them into relatively small pieces. Zucchini in the freezer has a tendency to get a little mushy, so that's the kind of thing I'll put into like soups and stews, where I don't need it to be the nice, firm quality. 

Farmer Fred: 
Another topic that people may be wondering about right now as they proceed with their spring and early summer gardening is hey, there's a fair coming up, a county fair or a state fair, and boy, everybody sure loves my apple pie or apple jelly or cherry preserves or whatever. You are a (I don't know if you get paid for it) but you're a "professional" judge at fairs. What do judges look for in the various categories when it comes to the food competition? 

Wendy Rose:
So each fair typically has its own rules. So the first thing you want to do if you're going to compete is you want to check the rules and read through very carefully to see what's required, and then you want your entry to meet those requirements as closely as possible. 

Farmer Fred: 
All right now, in your own experience as a judge, when you're judging something, let's say it is something in a jar, a preserve, a jelly, a jam. What are you looking for? 

Wendy Rose: 
The technicals are really important. Things like headspace, a clean jar, a clean lid, a clean ring. Those things are really, really important. Those are the first things that judges look at, and so you need to meet those criteria in order to even get the judge to taste what's inside the jar. 

Farmer Fred: 
Read and follow all label directions. Because I imagine, for all these fair competitions, those criteria, those rules are posted and people should follow them. 

Wendy Rose: 
Oh, absolutely, and that's how you do well in fairs is if you're meeting those criteria very, very closely. 

Farmer Fred: 
All right. So it's like entering a sweepstakes, where you have to fill out everything precisely according to the directions. 

Wendy Rose:
Exactly.

Farmer Fred
Do you get bonus points for printing out a label and sticking that on the jar? Where do you stick a label on a jar if you're doing that? 

Wendy Rose: 
So the rules will tell you if you're going to have a label, where to put the label, what kind of label, what information that you put on the label. The rules should tell you exactly what that is. 

Farmer Fred: 
For your own edification and use at home. where are your labels and what information is on those labels? Realizing you're a Master Food Preserver, so there may be more information there than most people want to squeeze into a label, but give us an idea. 

Wendy Rose: 
So I usually don't label now. I did when I started out, but I usually take a Sharpie and write on the lid, the metal lid. I'll write what the food is, absolutely, put the date on there. And then any other information, like if I've made it somewhat spicy, i'll put that on there. So that if I give it as a gift, I make sure that I don't give a spicy thing to somebody who doesn't like spicy. 

Farmer Fred: 
Or you'd write, No sugar,  versus sugar. 

Wendy Rose: 
Exactly. 

Farmer Fred:
Now, this takes us on a very scenic bypass. If you're in the habit of preserving your harvest and putting it in jars, it's not uncommon to give it away as gifts. How do you get people to use it? One thing I found, because I used to grow acres of popcorn and I would give away canned, raw popcorn as gifts. I'd go back to their house a few years later and that popcorn seed is still sitting on their shelf there. It hasn't been popped yet. Then I discovered that people have forgotten how to pop popcorn. So there's that. How do you get people to use it? 

Wendy Rose: 
You can include a little tag that has a recipe on it For me, a lot of the things I make, i have favorite ways of using them and so I could put that on the tag. With my sweet pickle relish, i put that in tuna. That's my favorite thing to use that for. Little recommendations like that,  of ways that you've used it before. 

Farmer Fred: 
And ways that your family and friends have also found very appealing in the past. Tell us more about entering fairs, either county fairs or state fairs. Should you concentrate on one specialty? Or should you enter as many categories as there are? 

Wendy Rose: 
I think it's better to get good at a few things and enter those. One of the things that we see commonly is where there's a family recipe. This happens a lot with spaghetti sauce or marinara. There's a family recipe that somebody's been making for years and then they want to can it. Then it gets into the fair competition and being judged and then the judges will look at the ingredients and say these ingredients are not acidic enough together to be safely canned. The key is to make sure you're using a recipe in which  the chemistry is right. The Master Food Preservers have recipes, Ball has recipes. The National Center for Home Food Preservation has recipes. They've all been tested. You know that when you make that,  the chemistry is going to be right. If it's a low acid product, it's going to be low acid. Just creating a recipe and then canning it is a very tricky thing to do. Most people don't have the expertise to do that. 

Farmer Fred: 
And probably if you're doing tomatoes and a lot of the recipes for canning tomatoes say to put in a tablespoon of lemon juice for the acidity. I discovered fairly recently that a Meyer lemon is not lemon juice. 

Wendy Rose: 
No. So the recipes that have been tested have used bottled lemon juice that has a very specific acidity.  So the recipes will all call for bottled lemon juice. 

Farmer Fred: 
That's a good point to make there. So for newbies who have never entered a fair competition, it could be a local fair. By the way, my Pluot Jam won first prize in 2012, I think, during Herald Day, (a local festival in Herald, CA). But if you're a newbie in entering competition, what are some of the other advantages of entering? 

Wendy Rose: 
So I can talk about my own experience. When I started entering in fairs I had a lot to learn, but doing it over and over and over I learned a lot. And I learned how to do safe canning, i learned to make sure that my head space was correct and get the processing time right. And all those things now are really kind of second nature to me, but it was a really, really good learning experience. Competing was fun because I'm kind of a competitive person, but it was just neat to enter things and then have them be judged and then receive the comments and then have it displayed with the ribbon. And I really, really enjoyed competing in county fairs and at the California State Fair. 

Farmer Fred: 
Is there a camaraderie among the entrants, or is it a grudge match and you don't really talk with them? 

Wendy Rose: 
Well, at the State Fair it's open judging and it's in a theater. And so you can sit and watch the judges judge And you can try to see whether they've got your item up there. But in the audience are these really fun people who really enjoy preserving food. And it's really a big sense of camaraderie. And when somebody wins there's applause. It's just a lot of fun. 

Farmer Fred: 
I imagine there's some recipe trading going on as well. 

Wendy Rose:
No, all the recipes are top secret. 

Farmer Fred: 
Well, maybe if you get them drunk first. Wendy, you've been a University of California Master Food Preserver for 10 years now. Master Food Preserver groups are throughout the country, usually associated with a local university. What do Master Food Preservers do? 

Wendy Rose: 
In California, Master Food Preservers go through a training program and then they are let loose on the public and go out and teach safe food preservation and really function as a resource for the community for questions or guidance and ideas. Across the country, different states have their own Master Food Preserver programs. It's all part of the extension system. And it just depends on the state, but California has over 20 different chapters of Master Food Preservers. 

Farmer Fred: 
And, as you mentioned, their real purpose is volunteerism with education, of teaching the public the correct way to do that. You see Master Food Preservers and Master Gardeners usually sitting at a table at various fairs or home shows or gatherings like this at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center. What are some of the more common questions you get as a Master Food Preserver? 

Wendy Rose: 
I think that the questions that we get most commonly are specific to our area, because folks out here  grow a lot of tomatoes, and so we get a lot of questions about preserving tomatoes and stone fruit. You know, just trees that people have, such as citrus fruit. The questions are typically specific to what we're able to grow here. We don't have a lot of tropical fruits typically. But we have a whole lot of questions about tomatoes, tomatillos, things like that. 

Farmer Fred: 
We're talking with Wendy Rose, University of California Cooperative Extension Master Food Preserver. We got some good information. If you want to enter a fair or you want to preserve tomatoes, either temporarily or long term. Good info. You can find a Master Food Preserver wherever you may live. Just type the words in a search engine, "Master Food Preserver" and the name of your state, and I bet you'll get more information about the Master Food Preservers and maybe even a list about where they're appearing, where you can ask them questions. And, Wendy, thank you for answering our questions. 

Wendy Rose: 
Thank you. 

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Farmer Fred: 
Are you thinking of growing fruit trees? You already are, but you'll want to know more about them. Well, you probably have a million questions like which fruit trees will grow where I live? What are the tastiest fruits? It's harvest time. How do I care for these trees? The good news is the answers are all nearby. Just go to DaveWilson.com, click on the Home Garden tab at the top of the page and in that Home Garden tab you're going to find a link to their fruit and nut harvest chart so you can be picking delicious, healthy fruits from your own yard for a long growing season. Here in USDA Zone 9, that could be May through December. And you're just to click away with the informative YouTube video series at DaveWilson.com. As part of that video series, they'll walk you through the simple process of using the Dave Wilson website to find their trees either at a nearby local nursery or at a mail order source. That's Dave Wilson Nursery, the nation's largest grower of fruit trees for the backyard garden. They've got planting tips, taste test results and information about their revolutionary backyard orchard culture techniques. That'll explain how you can have a cornucopia of different fruit trees in a small backyard. Your harvest to better health begins at DaveWilson.com. 

BEYOND THE GARDEN  BASICS NEWSLETTER
Farmer Fred: 
All gardening is local. Know your soil. Mulch, mulch, mulch. Those are just three of the now infamous list of "11 tips for Garden Success", a Farmer Fred staple for decades. In the latest Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast, we have the first ever audio presentation of this list of pithy garden advice, that was presented as a PowerPoint talk at a recent meeting of the Sun City/ Lincoln Hills Garden Club, and the newsletter will highlight some of those slides. Yeah, i know, they're not called slides, they're pictures. Give me a break, i'm old. Some of those slides are in the newsletter to give you a better idea of what I was talking about, along with all the 11 garden tips for success. This newsletter and special podcast is currently available, and it's free. If you're already a Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter subscriber, it's probably in your email waiting for you right now, or you can start a subscription. It's free. Find the link to the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast in today's show notes or at Substack, and you can sign up at the newsletter link at our homepage, gardenbasics.net. 

FLASHBACK EPISODE OF THE WEEK - 197: COMPOST TEA, EXPLAINED
Farmer Fred:
You're familiar with compost, right? So what do you know about compost tea? Your plants just might appreciate the microbial boost provided by compost tea. Please note that I did not say nutritional boost. There's a lot of opinion and unverified personal experience associated with the compost tea knowledge base, but not that much about it has had a lot of peer-reviewed research, including its alleged nutritional value. There is one Master Gardener, though, who has pursued that topic, delving deep into the academic rabbit holes. He's Ralph Marini, a Piedmont, Virginia Master Gardener and researcher. We talked a while back with Ralph about what he found out about compost tea in those research papers, including how to make it, how to use it and what to expect from compost tea If you fertilize your plants. 
This is a flashback episode worth listening to. It's called "Compost Tea, Explained" originally aired in episode 197. It's from May of 2022. Look up this informative episode on the GardenBasics with Farmer Fred Podcast list from the podcast player of your choice, or click on the link in today's show notes; or go to our homepage, gardenbasics.net. 

Farmer Fred
The Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast comes out once a week on Fridays, plus the newsletter podcast that comes with the Beyond The Garden Basics newsletter continues. And that will also be released on Fridays. Both are free and they're brought to you by SmartPots and Dave Wilson Nursery. The Garden Basics podcast is available wherever podcasts are handed out, and that includes our homepage, GardenBasics.net, and that's where you can also sign up for the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast. That's GardenBasics.net, or you can use the links in today's show notes. And thank you so much for listening.