278 Hot Summer Garden Tips LIVE!

Show Transcript

GB 278 TRANSCRIPT HOT SUMMER GARDEN TIPS, LIVE AT HARVEST DAY
 

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

Wherever you garden, you have had to endure days and days of sizzling summer temperatures. Your garden is trying to survive those heat waves, as well. Today, we have tips for getting your garden through triple digit heatwaves and a lot more.

America’s favorite retired college horticulture professor, Debbie Flower and myself recently shared our advice with a standing room only crowd at the Harvest Day event at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center in Sacramento.

Among our tips, you’ll find out:

• Why you don’t want to use garden soil in containers. (7:02)

• The best potting mix to use for a container plant. (8:48)

• What’s happening to the roots of plants in containers on a 100-degree day. (15:24)

• How to better protect your outdoor potted plants in a heatwave.(16:47)

• The differences in shade cloth, and how to use it. (22:30)

• How to reuse old potting soil. (27:30)

• Are you watering your container plants effectively? Probably not. (31:11)

• What do you put in the bottom of a plant container to aid drainage? Nothing! We tell you why. (32:40)

• Did you get fooled this year when you purchased an alleged jalapeño pepper plant? A lot of people did, and it wasn’t just jalapeños in that mixup.(38:10)

• Are there garden seeds you shouldn’t save? Yes. (39:08)

• How to save garden seeds to last for years. (43:17)

• And, how to get pepper seeds to germinate in half the time. (49:59)

That’s a lot, and it’s all in today’s episode, number 278, Hot Summer Garden Tips, Live!

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, Dave Wilson Nursery and Heirloom Roses. Let’s go!

HOT SUMMER GARDEN TIPS, LIVE AT HARVEST DAY!

Lorraine  2:21

is the speaker working? sounds louder to me. Okay, great. My name is Lorraine Van Kekerix. I am a Sacramento County Master Gardener and it is my pleasure to welcome you to Harvest Day 2023. We are so glad to be back.

I hope you're going to enjoy the speakers, all the demonstration gardens. The Master Gardeners are here to answer your questions, you can meet reps from other garden groups and visit the educational table and area as well as all our garden vendors. And we got great food vendors this year. We have two speakers today. Fred Hoffman and Debbie Flower.

They have tips for saving time, money and water in the garden. Things we all need to know about given our limited time and budgets and California's changing climates. Fred Hoffman is a Sacramento County Master Gardener also known as Farmer Fred, he is wearing his badge today. He produces and hosts the podcast Garden Basics with Farmer Fred, which can be found wherever you get your podcasts or at GardenBasics.net. And our second speaker is Debbie Flower. She is a horticulture professor who is currently retired, or as Fred likes to call her, America's favorite retired college horticulture professor.

Farmer Fred  4:06

Another page?

Lorraine  4:09

Debbie Flower worked many years in many aspects of horticulture, including 25 years as a horticulture professor at Sacramento area community colleges. Now she's enjoying her own garden. And I think she enjoys being a frequent guest on the podcast Garden Basics with Farmer Fred. So take it away.

Debbie Flower  4:34

I'm still doing it, Fred, I'm still showing up, that says something.

Farmer Fred 4:37

Thank you. I appreciate that very much. Good morning! We beat the heat. Isn't that nice? It's so good to have a somewhat cool morning to do this. And there are going to be three speakers here. There'll here be later on, there's going to be doing more talks, after we're done here. We're going to hold all questions until the end because we have to move out of here to make room for the next speaker. So if you have questions, hold them to the very end. And we'll be over at that white tent over there to answer your questions. So we'll do it that way because we get sidetracked a lot into scenic bypasses. And it's very possible that it's going to happen again. We are here theoretically to talk about saving time, money and water in your garden. We'll call it summer garden tips.

Debbie Flower  5:27

I'll go with that.

Farmer Fred  5:29

Debbie Flower, of course, is America's favorite retired college horticultural professor. I've learned amazing amounts of gardening information and horticulture information in the three years that she's been sitting in on the podcast. It's almost like a private education. But I've discovered the secret to absorbing all the information. What you need to do is listen to the podcast episode more than once. It's amazing what you can learn by listening to it twice or three times. And every week, I learn something new. For instance, she told us last week that the soil that you have in your garden is basically mostly rocks and air.

Debbie Flower  3:49

Yeah. Yep. Little bit of organic matter.  2% 2%. Yeah. Yeah.

Farmer Fred  3:55

True, but the rocks would be sand, silt and clay.

Debbie Flower  6:19

That's right. So based on their size, sand being the biggest silt medium and clay the smallest.

Farmer Fred  6:25

But I never realized that organic matter was such a small percentage.  But that brings us to container gardening. And we all like to do container gardening. And we've talked about this on the program too, as far as why you don't want to use your garden soil in a container because… well, you tell them.

Debbie Flower  6:50

Hi. He stopped talking so I can talk now. Isn't this a wonderful event? I just have to say it's all put on by volunteers completely put on by volunteers. Heads up to them. Yeah. Yeah.

Farmer Fred  7:02

We’re volunteering too. But why don't you want to use garden soil in a container garden?

Debbie Flower  7:10

Garden soil in a container has a couple of problems. The number one problem is poor drainage. Because it consists of sand, silt and clay particles of different sizes. They fit together too tightly. So where the sand will make big pores, but then the clay can get into the those big pores and clog them up. And so you don't get good drainage. The water in soil travels around the edges of all those sand, silt, clay, and a little bit of organic particles, the closer those particles are to each other, the less space there is for that water to travel and it takes much less ability to go through that soil. So we want to use bigger particles and anything you buy in a container has been grown in soilless mix, you'll find people who will say I like to put some soil in because it adds some some life to the soil. That's okay. But sometimes that life needs to be only a little bit, I'd say less than 20%. If you want to do that, I don't do it. I don't advocate it, but some people really want to do it. But it has to be sterilized. they think it adds life. But some of that life it adds is bad life. There's good fungus and bad fungus. There's good bacteria and bad bacteria. There's good seeds and bad seeds, meaning weed seeds and the seeds you want to grow. And you can introduce all of those bad things in by adding any of the soil out of your garden. So we don't do it in production, where you know, money counts in a commercial greenhouse. You can't have failure due to those bad diseases getting around or weeds in your greenhouse. So we use soil less mix. And soil less mix is basically three parts. You look up any recipe, you break it down. The Cornell University recipe is probably the most commonly used as a basis. It's three parts. It's organic matter that’s One part. that can be peat moss, where I worked in Oregon, it was shredded wood. that can be compost, it can be coir, which is coconut . Yeah, the stuff outside of coconut comes in pellets.  I don't use coir much. we did when I was teaching and it was a pain in the butt. Because you have to soak for 24 hours beforehand. and then we only use part of it. And then we have this bucket of soaking coir and now we're going to have to do something with that. So it became sort of a pain in the butt. So anything that's organic, 1/3. That one part. You might recognize this if you've ever been in the hospital (it’s a urinal bottle) I use this as my sizing part. One part  I use actually, I buy container media in a bag because it's mostly organic matter. One part of that into my  kitty litter box. Okay, this is my little one. I have a big one too.

Farmer Fred  10:02

We're saving money here. Yeah,

Debbie Flower  10:03

yeah, I buy regular stuff. Don't do anything special. You know, this could be a cottage cheese container, or a salsa container or something like that. But it's a part that you're using it to measure. So one part of that organic matter. One part pumice.  I like pumice , it comes in this bag. It's lava rock. If you buy some a pass it around. Well, you can't everybody can't see it from here. All right.

Farmer Fred 10:29

But Pumice is small.

Debbie Flower 10:31

Pumice comes in sizes. Yeah, and this is horticultural pumice, and so it has a certain size. Pumice is good for holding moisture, but also creating open spaces in your media. And so I would do one part of pumice. Put that in and then perlite is an option. I don't have any perlite with me. perlite has been expanded, heated. expanded rocks that are white. And the reason I don't like it, I have some around for very special situations but is it's very, very dusty. To the point where I've inhaled it and coughed for days afterwards. It's not just I have to get it out of my system right now. It goes on and on. The dust is really irritating. And so I would have students water it down when we worked with it, but that didn't seem to work well enough. So I tried to get away from it. So I use vermiculite which is a different expanded rock. This expanded mica mined is wet. It holds moisture as well. So we've got one part of the organic matter, one part of the pumice and one part of the vermiculite. I could use sand I could use instead of any of these. What else would you use? the perlite we talked about. and mix that together and that's a good planting mix. You're going to need some nutrition at some point but that's a good basic planting mix.

Farmer Fred  11:47

I've always been intrigued by what you see on a label of potting mix if you go to any nursery or hardware store and you see bags of potting soil, potting mix, raised bed mix. and you'll look at the ingredients and one of the lead ingredients in most of those is Forest byproducts. What the heck is Forest byproducts?

Debbie Flower  12:07

This takes me back to when I worked at an Ag Experiment Station  outside of Portland Oregon. It's  wood products that have been chopped up. and we grew that. It was our organic component for our mix, but we use It only as an organic component, and then we added the other rock products to it and the rock products open that up, allowing for good drainage, allow places for roots to grow.

SMART POTS

Farmer Fred 12:33

I’m pretty picky about who I allow to advertise on this podcast. My criteria, though, is pretty simple: it has to be a product I like, a product I use, and a product I would buy again. Smart Pots checks all those boxes.

Smart Pots is the oldest, and still the best, of all the fabric plant containers that you might find. Smart Pots are sold around the world and are proudly made, 100%, here in the USA.

Smart Pots come in a wide array of sizes and colors, and can be reused year after year. Some models even have handles, to make them easier to move around the yard.

Because the fabric breathes, Smart Pots are better suited than plastic pots, especially for hot environments.  That breathable fabric has other benefits, too. Water drainage issues? Not with Smart Pots. Roots that go round and round, chocking the rootball, like they do in plastic pots? Doesn’t happen with Smart Pots.

These benefits will help you get a bigger better plant than what you have gotten in the past with the same size plastic or other hard container.

Smart Pots are available at independent garden centers and select Ace and True Value hardware stores nationwide.

To find a store near you, or to buy online, visit smart pots dot com slash fred. And don’t forget that slash Fred part. On that page are details about how, for a limited time, you can get 10 percent off your Smart Pot order by using the coupon code, fred. f-r-e-d, at checkout from the Smart Pot Store.

Visit smartpots.com slash fred for more information about the complete line of Smart pots lightweight, colorful, award winning fabric containers and don’t forget that special Farmer Fred 10 percent discount. Smart Pots - the original, award winning fabric planter. Go to smart pots dot com slash fred.

BEYOND THE GARDEN BASICS NEWSLETTER/PODCAST: MORE HOT WEATHER GARDEN TIPS

Farmer Fred 14:25

Triple-digit temperatures are occurring in bursts both short and long this summer, across the entire country. However, even for short periods, the combination of too much bright sun, too much heat and not enough water are enough to vex the most experienced weekend gardener when they encounter sickly-looking plants this time of year. This week’s Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter has tips for

protecting your plants from the onslaught of summer; and, how to take care of yourself in the heat, as well.

It’s How Weather Garden Tips.

If you are 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 on the Substack app. Or, you can sign up at the newsletter link at our homepage, gardenbasics dot net.

HOT SUMMER GARDEN TIPS, LIVE AT HARVEST DAY! PART 2

Farmer Fred  15:45

It's hot. The week before last on a 100 degree day, I took my soil thermometer out to my potted roses. I'm doing a rose test, where I'm growing the same variety of rose in different style of pots. There's a black plastic pot, there's a ceramic pot, there's a fiber pot, and then there's a fabric pot, a Smart Pot, as if you would not think I wouldn't use a Smart Pot. Of course I would. And I stuck my soil thermometer in each of those when the temperature in the air was exactly 100 degrees. The Smart Pot had a soil temperature of 80 degrees. That's great, that's great. That's a perfect temperature for growing plants. In the black plastic pot, the temperature was 110 degrees, there go your roots. The University of Kentucky did a study that discovered that when temperatures in the soil get over 104, root damage can occur. When it gets over 110, roots start dying and when your roots die, the plant dies. And you might be looking at the top of that plant on a hot day and you see the leaves drooping. So you think, “oh I better add water”. Well, actually water on a hot day is a good idea for soil, it will bring down the temperature a little bit. But it only takes about 30 minutes of high temperatures to start killing roots off, right. And if that black pot is in the full sun all day long, that plant is a goner, because you've killed off most of the feeder roots.

Debbie Flower  16:47

So Fred, do you have any cache pots to put around that black plastic pot?

Farmer Fred  16:51

I don't have any cash! What you are about to describe will save you time and money because your plants are gonna live and you won't have to go back to the nursery to buy another plant.

Debbie Flower  17:02

The cache pot is spelled c-a-c-h-e. i guess it's French, but it sounds like  the spelling. it's the pretty pot. I didn't bring the prettiest because I didn't want to break them. But I brought examples of things you could use as a cache pot. First of all, I would never grow anything outdoors in a pot this small. you're gonna go big in outdoor pots and it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to find something in a cache pot to fit a number five, which is maybe a foot across, or a 15 which is about 18 inches, perhaps 15 to 18 inches, across. Those are big pots and equally as tall. So to find something, what you want is a cache pot, a pot to put the grow pot in. And you'd ideally like some space between your grow pot and your cache pot. And that produces an insulative layer of air, that stops the sun from hitting the grow pot itself.

Farmer Fred  17:58

I said we were going to talk about drainage here. Yeah, this cache pot does not have drainage. And if you use a pot, a bigger pot, like this, to protect a smaller pot on a hot day, where's the water gonna go? It's just gonna sit in the bottom. And if it's sitting in the bottom, the roots are gonna drown.

Debbie Flower  18:17

Right.  I reuse everything  I find. So you know, you get Styrofoam packing. When it comes in a box, and I've broken those up, put them in a Ziploc bag, and then put that underneath this to raise this interior pot off the bottom, then the water can come out the holes in the cache pot and be under the pot, not in it. But you still have to check it because you could have put a whole lot of water in there. And it could sit there for days and days and days and you could still rot your plant, so you always have to be looking.

Farmer Fred  18:49

The nice thing about using a larger pot as well is when you put a much larger pot around the smaller pot, you've got all this airspace between the bigger pot and the smaller pot. And you can insulate that inside pot even more by putting mulch between the large pot and the small pot. That's going to bring the temperature down in the soil even more. People should have a soil thermometer. You should get one and use it. You'd be surprised. The other thing people should get to save time and money and water in the garden is get a soil moisture meter. Because when you're hot, your plant isn't necessarily hot in the soil at eight inches down. So it's always a good habit to get into, before you turn on your irrigation in the summertime or water plants by hand: stick that moisture meter into the ground and just see how moist it is. And you'd be surprised at how moist it might be at the root level, eight inches down. It might be so moist that you may not even have to water. You could use that water to go take a shower to cool off.

Debbie Flower  19:48

But you have to calibrate your moisture meter. How it works is based on electricity and conduction of electrons through ions. Okay, I won't go there. How much fertilizer you have in the media might affect the reading. And so if you put a moisture meter in distilled water, it will read “dry”. So you need to check your  pot when it's full of dry media. See where the moisture meter reads. So that when you then put moisture in it, you can see where it changes. Sometimes it'll read very high if you have too much fertilizer in there.

Farmer Fred  20:28

I thought you brought a shade cloth with you. Oh, you got it right there, right? Hey,  you gotta talk about your other tips for protecting the outside of a pot.

Debbie Flower  20:37

right. So if you have that 15 gallon container, That's big. 18 inch across 18 inch tall container full of media and a plant, it's difficult to find the cache pot that's bigger and affordable to put around it. So there are other options. This is floating row cover, the kind you put on to protect the plant from flying insects. It's many layers, but I just use clothespins, which I got at the dollar store and wrapped it around the container. And that's enough to stop the sun from hitting it. They were doing 15 gallon pots, they got to design it and grow stuff in it and it was in full sun. We used spray paint, we took those big 15 pots and put them out on the grass. They were cleaned down so that they didn't have dirt on him. And then they spray painted I got them yellow and gold and silver and white and pink. light colors. And they could make any design they wanted. The point was to lighten up the outside of that container, and it worked. Everything grew just fine. So it's another way.

Farmer Fred  21:44

Don't forget aluminum foil.

Debbie Flower  21:47

right I didn't bring aluminum foil. you can wrap that around. It's kind of obnoxious. Wrap it around a pot. it's going to look distracting. a pot with aluminum foil on it is going to do that . But it's also going to protect the roots of your plant.

Farmer Fred  22:15

it'll also signal the UFOs where to land, as well.  This row cover is also known as shade cloth.

Debbie Flower  22:29

it can be.

Farmer Fred  22:30

Shade cloth is also a great idea for protecting your in-ground plants from excessive heat. How many of you have sunburned tomatoes or peppers? a lot of that is because maybe you pruned the foliage from the plant away. you took away some of the leaf cover, so the fruit wasn't protected. or it's facing due south or due west and the fruit was exposed and you’ll get that sunburn

Debbie Flower  22:54

or you were out of town and it got really hot and your irrigation died. Well the battery died in your irrigation timer. Yeah, who knows what happened.

Farmer Fred  23:03

But you can buy shade cloth in different thicknesses to protect your plants. and usually for shade cloth if you choose a 30% shade cloth or a 40%, that's good for your outdoor full sun vegetables. If you go up to 50% or 60% shade cloth, that's good for your shade loving plants. If you have 80%, that's good for you.  Now the difference between using a shade cloth or a tarp or an umbrella is that shade cloth allows air and water to pass through and also eliminates the arrival of insects. If that shade cloth is too thin, this is very thin, in the wintertime you could use it as a very thin frost cloth for about two degrees of protection. works it does work. So it has double duty: you can use the shade cloth as a shade or as frost protection.

Debbie Flower  24:00

Ar as as insect protection.

Farmer Fred  24:03

insect protection too. That's another tip. If you want to save time, money or water in the garden if you don't want to buy insecticides. This is what we call integrated pest management. Shadecloth or frost cloth can be considered a physical control that keeps out aphids and whiteflies, if you just drape it loosely over your plants to allow the plants to grow.

Debbie Flower  24:22

and it lasts a while. this has been used over and over and over again. So it's a one time investment. Last time I was here at the garden, the blueberries were under 50% shade cloth, if you want to see what that looks like

Farmer Fred  24:32

you're gonna find all sorts of great shade cloth there. You can buy shade cloth in just about in any garden center, nursery, or online. It depends. If you need yards and yards and yards of it, then you probably would go to the internet.

Debbie Flower  24:47

Or go to a greenhouse supply, such as Charley’s Greenhouse or Peaceful Valley.

HEIRLOOM ROSES

Farmer Fred 24:59

Looking for a hard to find rose plant? Looking for a rose that’s grown on its own vigorous root system, insuring you a healthier plant? Want to avoid the problems that might come with grafted roses from the big box store? Heirloom roses dot com has that rose for you. They carry over 900 rose varieties. And as a special offer for our listeners, Heirloom Roses is offering 20% off all roses with the checkout code FRED20. Use this code at checkout now through October 31, 2023. It's time to experience growing roses the way nature intended - on their own roots. Visit them at Heirloom Roses.com to find your next rose today. And be sure to take advantage of that 20% off at checkout with code FRED20, that’s Fred two zero. It’s Heirloom Roses.com.

HOT SUMMER GARDEN TIPS, LIVE AT HARVEST DAY! PART 3

Farmer Fred  25:30

Protection from sun can be compounded in several different ways. And the one basic thing we didn't talk about : if you have container plants, and it’s a hot day,  move them to the north side of the house, move them to the shade. You like to use rollers.

Debbie Flower  26:21

Yeah, I have a whole collection. It's not my goal to have a whole collection of plants and pots outside my kitchen door, but they never seem to go away. So I've succumbed to the fact that they're going to be there. And I tried to get these are a little expensive, I buy a couple at a time, put rollers for underneath them. I don't like the solid ones. I like the ones that allow water to drain out, and they're on rollers. The bigger the pot, the harder it is to find one that works well. And Fred's suggestion was furniture dollies. Or you can make your own if you're handy with some wood and some you can buy wheels and put them in that way. Having them on wheels, I can put them in the sun conditions I want them to be in, and I can move them and clean all the crap that collects underneath, primarily spiderwebs and, and leaves periodically, and then put them back. I can rearrange them if I so choose. And having them close together helps one plant shade another plant. Also the water lost out the leaves of one plant is there available for another plant to slow down its loss of water. So it increases the humidity around the whole collection of plants.

Farmer Fred  27:30

I think we should move to the piece de resistance of this presentation for saving money. And that's reusing old potting soil. How many of you have old pots scattered around behind the garage, behind the greenhouse, wherever? And they still got the old soil in it, there's no plant in it, but there's soil in it. Did you know you can use that soil again? But how?

Debbie Flower  27:51

it's pretty easy. Okay, first  I go back to my trusty kitty litter box, bring the pot with the soil, dump it out, there's going to be roots and stems and old parts of the old plant. So get those out, put them in the GreenWaste can. What happens to media over time is that the organic component breaks down, just like a compost pile. Or organisms get in there to eat it up, it gets to be smaller and smaller and smaller. And the water movement through that media gets worse and worse and worse. And in fact, it'll shrink from the sides of the container and you'll think you've watered that plant really well, because it's water coming out the bottom. But what the water is actually doing is traveling across the top down the sides and out the holes. And if you were to put that moisture meter inside the media itself, it's dry. Often that's the reason plants die. Either they're not getting any water because it's going down and around, or they're sitting in water, which is a way to rehydrate a plant that isn't absorbing water from the top. But it gets too wet. And it can't drain because the pore sizes have disappeared. So if you're using what's right out of the container,  by the bag that you buy for container media, it's primarily organic matter. There's a few pieces of some rock product in it, but it's primarily organic matter. So that has broken down and that's what you have now in your kitty litter box. And so you're going to consider that your organic component. So I measure it, here’s my trusty measurer. One, two, and then I'll add pumice, vermiculite, the same amount one, two, pumice, one two vermiculite, mix it all together and reuse it.

Farmer Fred  29:33

Well wait a minute here. Yeah, I bet it needs water.

Debbie Flower  29:37

Yes, I always. I know not everyone who instructs  horticulture advocates for this, but I always wet the media before I put it in the container. A couple of reasons. One, the container you're gonna grow in has drain holes. If the moisture if the media is moist, it will not fall out the drain holes when you put it in. Number two is if the if the container is deep, and this is even, it's not a very big container, but it's it's deep enough you put dry media in here and water it, it may never get wet. Because if a lot of container media contains hydrophobic particles, peat moss is hydrophobic, meaning it'll it will not absorb water readily. Some wood products are hydrophobic, and most everything you buy in bags is wood products. And so you have to manipulate it with your hands to get it wet. Once it's wet. If it doesn't dry out, totally, it will continue to be able to be re-wet. So I wet it first in my kitty litter box and then I put it into my containers

Farmer Fred  30:41

And the kitty litter box has no drain holes. So it's sitting there for hours in water. And then you can get to the fun part of grabbing a handful of that wet soil and putting it into a pot with holes and let it drain out.

Debbie Flower  30:53

Then you have to go wash your hair to clean your fingernails. It’s a process, you know.

Farmer Fred  31:00

Dirty fingernails for a gardener is a badge of honor. Let's face it. ,

Debbie Flower  31:06

Yeah, dirty and broken.

Farmer Fred  31:08

Let’s do a little scenic bypass here.

Debbie Flower

Of course, we're best at that.

Farmer Fred

Watering containers. A lot of people don't water containers enough. They go down there row of containers with their garden hose, maybe it's oon a shower setting. and they apply a little bit here and there.

Debbie Flower  31:05

I've seen students do that.

Farmer Fred  31:11

Repeat that sometime when your soil needs water, and then dig down, go down four inches or six inches. And you will be amazed that that water level has only penetrated maybe an inch or two. And then everything below that is dry. The tip I have and the tip we use is, when you're watering container plants, water that container until the water flows out the bottom. If it flows out immediately, that means it's too dry that the soil ball has contracted, and the water is rolling down the sides. If it never comes out, you got a bigger problem, you've got a container with either clogged drainage or no drainage.

Debbie Flower  32:09

And when you do fill the container with new media, you want half an inch or an inch of what's called headroom or space between the top of your media and the top of the container. And that gives you space to fill it up with water. The media is so easy to drain, that if you just water in one place, it'll only get wet in one, carrot-shaped wetting pattern. So if you want the whole thing wet, you need the whole top wet. And you do that by having space up on top of the media to fill up with water to allow the whole thing to get wet.

Farmer Fred  32:40

Let's make Debbie mad. So what would you put in the bottom of that container for better drainage?

Debbie Flower  32:43

NOTHING!  There are lots of there's one instance where I would put something in the bottom of the container. And that's if I got really inspired I guess, and bought one of those tall containers like five feet tall, and I'm gonna grow something in it, the feeder roots are only in the top 30 or 36  inches. Most of any soil out in the field the roots will go deeper. Everything you learned in horticulture, there are exceptions. So there are exceptions. But if I don't need, I don't have the money, the media to fill the container, I can get 30 inches deep, I've got enough space inside for that plant to survive, then I might put something in the bottom and this I learned from professional interiorscapers.  So the people who do the pots in the mall, and the lawyer's office and the bank and wherever else, okay, I'm friends with a couple of them. They use Milk jugs with the lids on, in the bottom, just to fill up space. That's the only time if this was a really huge container. And that's what they're dealing with. Look at those pots when you go to the mall next time. If you ever do that, you'll see that those containers are really, really big and really deep in some cases. And so they have to save money. They use the the milk jugs in the bottom.

Farmer Fred  34:02

But they're also swapping out those plants on a regular basis.

Debbie Flower  34:05

Yes, seasonally, often. Yeah.

Farmer Fred  34:08

So when you do it at home, though, you're creating a whole host of problems. If you decided and heavens knows we've heard for years, oh, put some pot shards in the bottom of the container, put some gravel in the bottom of the container, put some Styrofoam in the bottom of the container.

Debbie Flower  34:22

And it will improve drainage. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No water moves down through the media. I always think of it as music. I don't know if that works for anybody else. The water attaches to the sides of the particles and moves down through the texture, whatever texture your media is. when it comes to a drastic change in texture, it stops. And then the water builds up above that. And so the media becomes totally saturated with water. And there's nothing in the styrofoam peanuts, the rocks, the pot shards, whatever that are below that. The next drop of water you put in will push water from the top down into that lower level. But it doesn't naturally flow there. It's very counter intuitive. engineers don't even understand it. My husband is a hydrologist who worked with engineers on ponds that were used to dry out the crap that came out of coal burning smokestacks. And they thought they were doing really, really well because they weren't getting any moisture in the sand below. The  soil below these concrete containers wasn't working, they had a crack in the concrete container, the media was going out and not sticking to the concrete container. And so they were actually, ultimately, polluting the area.

Farmer Fred  35:37

I always like to think of flowing water as being on the freeway, there's no problems, you're going down 80 or 50 at 65 miles an hour, everything's fine. All of a sudden, you see taillights ahead, and all of a sudden, everything's backing up and you're down to 20-30 miles an hour. And you wonder, okay, where's the accident? What's going on? Turns out, when you pass it, it was just a Tesla on fire on the side of the road. So it wasn’t an obstacle, it was off to the side. It wasn't blocking the lanes or anything but people slow down. Water slows down when it sees that Tesla on fire in the bottom of the pot, which could be styrofoam by the way. You know those lighter pots that look like real fancy clay pots but  are plastic and they can be rather tall. Don't ever make the mistake of filling that half full of styrofoam and then planting maybe a tree on top. Because the first 15 mile an hour wind that comes along, the whole thing falls over. So there are a lot of good reasons for not using it.

Debbie Flower  36:27

It needs some weight.

Farmer Fred  36:30

How about saving seeds?

Debbie Flower  36:35

Yeah, I do that all the time.

DAVE WILSON NURSERY

Farmer Fred 36:39

You have a small yard and you think you don't have the room for fruit trees? Well, maybe you better think again. Because Dave Wilson Nursery wants to show you how to grow great tasting fruits: peaches, apples, pluots, and nut trees. Plus, they have potted fruits, such as blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, boysenberries, figs, grapes, hops, kiwifruit, olives and pomegranates. All plants, that you can grow in small areas. You could even grow many of them in containers on patios, as well. It's called backyard orchard culture. And you can get step by step information via their You Tube videos. Where do you find those? Just go to dave wilson dot com, click on the Home Garden tab at the top of the page. Also in that home garden tab, you’ll find a link to their fruit and nut harvest chart, so you can be picking delicious, healthy fruits from your own yard from May to December here in USDA Zone 9.  Also in that home garden tab? You're going to find the closest nursery to you that carries Dave Wilson's quality fruit trees. They are in nurseries from coast to coast. So start the backyard orchard of your dreams at DaveWilson.com.

HOT SUMMER GARDEN TIPS, LIVE AT HARVEST DAY! PART 4

Farmer Fred

Let's get back to our conversation with Debbie flower are recorded live at harvest day at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center back on August 5. We're bringing down the temperature and your hot summer garden.

Farmer Fred  38:00

How many of you are familiar with jalapenogate? I think it hit most nurseries in the area where some of the jalapeno plants they were selling turned out not to be jalapeno plants. They were a sweet yellow banana. But even more, if you're growing  sweet peppers, if you're growing the Chocolate Beauty or the Purple Beauty sweet pepper, those could turn out to be jalapenos, which is more of a shock to the system than getting a sweet jalapeno. So a lot of people who are responding to jalapenogate are saying because of the seed industry consolidating, and a lot of the seed that is being grown for plants, or that you're getting as a home gardener, may be coming out of only four major industries in the entire world, there is a bigger chance for mix ups in the future. And the way around that is to save your own seed. How do you save your own seed? What seeds should you save? What she seeds should you not save? What what seed would not you save?

Debbie Flower  39:16

You would not save the seed from a plant that is called a hybrid or an F1. It would say it on the package. If you're not sure, then you would Google the name as well as the cultivar. So it wouldn't just be Googling the word, tomato, it'd be Googling “tomato, Early Girl,” which I think is  not a hybrid. But Tasti-Lee. That's one that is a hybrid, you can buy it in a grocery store and I can grow it, but it's not great to grow here. It doesn't like the heat. But if I save the seeds from my Tasti-Lee tomato, I'm going to get one quarter of the plants I grow from that will be look alikes. They will taste like Tasti-Lee’s. The other three quarters will look like the parents of Tasti-Lee and have potentially different flavor, different sizes, maybe even different colors. If you want to do it for fun, great. But you don't know what you're gonna get.

Farmer Fred  40:06

In the case of Early Girl, which was introduced as a hybrid back in the 1950s, or 1960s. It has pretty much settled down. You could almost call Early Girl an heirloom at this point. Because if as long as that plant has a little bit of isolation and not that much, maybe five, six feet of isolation, you could save the seeds of an Early Girl. It’s an old hybrid. it takes about seven or eight years for a hybrid to settle down, if indeed, they are using the seed of the hybrids that they grew the year before. But when you see the letters F1 next to a seed packet, that means that  is the first generation for that plant, and it's not going to come back true.

Debbie Flower  40:49

Right. It's going to come back as its parents. The other thing to be careful about is, if you're saving your own seed, what parents did that seed have? Tomatoes are pretty much self pollinating if temperatures are right, which means 86 degrees. That is the temperature to keep in mind. For plants, all plants above 86 degrees, all they're doing is keeping themselves cool. So why did I say that?

Farmer Fred  41:17

Because of cross pollination?

Debbie Flower  41:19

Cross pollination, right, so if they're above that, above the 86 degrees or so, the tomato isn't doing much of anything, but if it's pollinated and night temperatures count, too. Temperatures at night counts as pollinating itself, which means that the boy parts and the girl parts grew at the correct rate to cross each other and touch each other inside the flower and no other pollinator was involved. Then you're gonna get it true to type. However, something like a squash, a melon is different. Very typically I go out and check mine in the morning to see if they need to be pollinated and I have found the bees have been sleeping in the male flowers. So if you got the bees in there, then the pollen is coming from who knows where. And a melon can cross with a pumpkin, which can cross with a squash, and what you get if you save those seeds, what you grow next, can be anything.

Farmer Fred  42:07

Yeah, we should point out, too, that it won't affect what you're growing this year. It's the  seeds you save, that'll come up slightly different. The Cucurbitaceae family, it is a little iffy to be saving those seeds, right?

Debbie Flower  42:21

Right. So if you want to produce your own and save your own then you have to be in control of pollination. So you have to be out there very early in the morning when the flowers first open, kick the bees out, do the pollination yourself and then bag the fruit so that no other pollen gets in there and changes what the offspring will be. As Fred said, the fruit produced this year will be the actual labeled fruit of the plant. But the fruit produced by the offspring, the seed in that fruit, will produce the next generation. And that's where you're going to see the difference.

Farmer Fred  42:56

So the seeds you bought this year and planted of zucchini, squash, melons, watermelons, cantaloupes,  pumpkins, unless they've been affected by jalapeno gate, they will not give you something different. It will be what that seed packet said it would be. But as we've said before, there's exceptions to everything. Right?  So let's say you've saved some seeds of carrots, maybe.

Debbie Flower  43:22

Carrots. Okay,  I let a carrot go to flower. I did that because it's a good pollinator attractor.

Farmer Fred  43:27

Well, that's the other thing to mention, too. To let some of your vegetable plants go to flower. Yes, that doesn't mean they're bad. That means actually, you're in for a world of fun because you're gonna attract beneficial insects to all those flowering onions or flowering herbs that you've planted.

Debbie Flower  43:41

Arugula, lettuce, chard. It's producing seed, right. So you have to let them dry. And then get them out of their flower heads. And that's mostly irritating the flower and letting things fall out. And then you winnow them. I went to a native seed business. Native Seed is the brand. It is a seed production facility in New Mexico. They would not allow me to take any pictures. It was very simple though. they'd have a table like this, a container not not as deep as this, much shallower. They were full of seed detritus from the flowers. They had a fan here and then they sit there and go like this (jerks pot in the air). Yeah, that's it. And what would come up is the light parts from the flower and that would blow away. And what would stay in the container is the seed. So  the seed must be dry, and put it in a container. I save my seeds. I keep trying to cover this up packet of seeds here that are in  plastic, sitting in the sun, they will get fried really fast. But these are commercial seeds, just in a ziplock bag. I've closed each seed packet with a paper clip, put it in the refrigerator because seeds want to be cool and dry. Refrigerators are  a very dry place. You know you got that pan underneath it to collect the water that drips out of it. Ziploc bags are not airtight. They allow some air movement, but they keep moisture from getting into the seed pack. They also keep it together you know one whole shelf in the refrigerator contains seeds packs, it gets messy and ziplock bags  make it easier to find

Farmer Fred  45:11

I'm even lazier when it comes to saving seed. I will wait for the plant flowers to attract all the pollinators and beneficials,  like the onion flower, which is a beautiful flower. And when the pollinators start dwindling in numbers, what I will then do is snip off the entire flower, and let it drop into a big paper bag. I put all those onion flowers in one paper bag. As long as it's all the same variety. As long as I know what variety it is. And I'll just close up that paper bag, put it in a cool spot, usually in my office-  as Debbie could attest to - and wait. That's all. Let the seed  fall to the bottom of the bag. And then come fall, you can plant those seeds.

Debbie Flower  45:52

That's true. You can also plant the seeds with the flower parts, but your spacing becomes difficult. There are gonna be a lot of seeds in one flower head. But if you have a few pieces of the flower with it, it's not gonna hurt anything.

Farmer Fred  46:04

You brought up a scenic bypass for me about cleaning popcorn. I like to grow popcorn. And popcorn is a fun crop to grow. And it turns out most people think popcorn comes in a bag. No,  there's a plant called popcorn that you grow. And it's much tastier than the styrofoam-like pieces that you buy or get at a theater. There are heirloom varieties of popcorn that are so tasty and crunchy. You will think you're not eating popcorn, but that is the real popcorn. It needs to be cleaned first. You strip the husk off the cob. Then shell the cob with a little tool that they sell for cleaning popcorn. It’s called “The Little Stripper” and I let the kernels - the seeds -  fall into something like a kitty litter tray. However,  what I usually use though, is my wife's turkey roasting pan and let the kernels fall into that. And then to clean it because there is all that frass around the kernels, I will put it - again, don't tell her  - in her nylon bag and the popcorn doesn't fall out and you can go outside and shake the bag around and watch all the frass fly away.

Debbie Flower  46:55

Similar to the fan idea.

Farmer Fred  47:00

Where is the best place to store seed?

Debbie Flower  47:17

Well, it needs to be cool and dry. And for me the refrigerator is the only secure place. The garage is  cool in winter, but is it dry? And in summer it's not cool. In the house, the house stays pretty even temperature but not always so dry. To me the refrigerator is the easiest, because I know that I have climate control over that.

Farmer Fred  47:38

I share my living space with seed. It's  in a cool dry place if I'm cool and dry. Inside, the seed is going to be happy there, too.

Debbie Flower  47:47

All right, the rule of thumb is that you can grow seeds for two years, they're good for two years. So when you buy seeds in a packet it's going to say on it packed for if you bought them today for full price at a store, it should say, “packed for 2023”, which means that it's guaranteed to germinate through December of 2023. So, in 2024, if you store it correctly, you should be able to get a crop out of it and maybe even 2025. If you're not sure, you do a germination test.  I've done it with paper towels, Fred uses coffee filters. I didn't bring one. Okay, this is my paper towel (hold up a piece of paper). I fold the paper in half, the long way, lay the seeds in the fold…

Farmer Fred  48:24

you're gonna make an airplane.

Debbie Flower  48:27

Lay the seeds on the fold. I do 10 Because it's really makes the math easy. Fold it up, make a cigar, make a cigar out of it (rolls it closed along the short side of the paper, with the seed-filled fold at the top).

Farmer Fred  48:36

You're talented to do that with a microphone in your hand there.

Debbie Flower  48:40

I got skills, man. I moisten it, make sure it's wet all the way through, put a rubber band or something around it and stand it up. So the fold is up in the air, in a container. A glass container, a mug, your hospital implement, whatever. And cover the top. You want it to stay moist. And then you check it every day. If it says it's gonna germinate in seven days, you know, you can maybe let it go two days, but you want to make sure it does not dry out. A seed that has gotten wet. Once it dries, it's dead. So you do not want it to dry out. That's why it needs to be covered with plastic and checked daily for moisture. And then you start checking it and you open it up this way. And the beauty of standing it up in the container is the roots are going to grow down. They grow toward gravity. And so you can tell which seed has germinated and so after the seven days have gone by, you open it up and see how many have germinated. If all 10 germinated, you got 100% germination, go ahead and plant them. And you can use the paper towel it was wrapped in, you can just cut them apart and plant them in the ground. There'll be stuck to the paper towel or the coffee filter, but they will still work.

Farmer Fred  49:46

I liked the way how you point to the woman holding the sign “zero minutes left” and you keep talking.

Debbie Flower 49:54

Of course. Talk Now, apologize later.

Farmer Fred  49:58

All right. We're gonna  finish up with one tip and that is how to get your pepper seeds to germinate quicker. When you start pepper seeds in February or January, you know how long it takes pepper seeds to germinate. It's like three weeks. That's a long time. Cut that in half for us.

Debbie Flower  50:14

So, soak pepper seeds in hydrogen peroxide for 10 minutes. Hydrogen peroxide is H2O2. It's a water with an extra oxygen. I don't know the science behind it. I was just frustrated. My students were frustrated. I went to  Google and said how do I fix this? And we're in school. we can experiment. So we did and it worked.

Farmer Fred  50:38

Ladies and gentlemen, Debbie Flower, America's favorite retired college horticulture professor!

Debbie Flower  50:44

We're gonna clean up and we'll be at that first tent right there.

Farmer Fred

Just to wrap this up, Harvest Day, despite the afternoon heat, was a big success at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center, put on by the Sacramento County Master Gardeners. It was a great turnout, especially for our little talk, bright and early in the cool of the morning. And big thanks to all of you who came up afterwards and told us how much you enjoyed the podcast and how much you were enjoying Harvest Day. Some people traveled quite the distance to be with us that Saturday morning. And again, a big thank you to those who made the effort, just to say hi. And maybe snap a selfie with us. That made us feel good all day. And if you were one of those that have a picture of you and me together, please forward it to me. Email it to fred at farmerfred.com. Thank you.

FLASHBACK EPISODE OF THE WEEK, Ep. 195 “THE BEST ROSES FOR CUT FLOWERS”

Farmer FredWhen it’s too hot to garden, why not bring in some roses for a bit of outdoor beauty and aroma for your bedroom, dining room table or kitchen counter? Today’s Garden Basics Flashback episode is from May of 2022. It’s number 195, “The Best Rose Varieties for Cut Flowers”. It is one of our most listened-to episodes.

Find a link to it in today’s show notes, or at the podcast player of your choice. Also you can search for The Best Rose Varieties for Cut Flowers at our home page, garden basics dot 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, also released on Fridays. Both are free and are brought to you by Smart Pots and Dave Wilson Nursery. The Garden Basics podcast is available wherever podcasts are handed out, and that includes our home page, Garden Basics dot net. , where you can also sign up for the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast. That’s Garden Basics dot net. or use the links in today’s show notes.  And thank you so much for listening.