375 Cool Season Pea Planting. Tulip Tips.

Show Transcript

375 TRANSCRIPT Peas, Tulips

Farmer Fred:

[0:00] Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by SmartPots,  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 slash 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

A favorite cool season edible to grow around the country are peas, especially the edible pod peas, sometimes called sugar snap or snow peas. What are the good varieties? What are some tricks to get those peas to germinate? How do you support them as they grow? Master gardener Gail Pathauer has the answers to those questions. America's favorite retired college horticultural professor, Debbie Flower, tackles tulips today. It all starts from a listener question about tulip bulbs sitting in a box in her shed that have already sprouted. What should she do? What conditions do tulips need to have for storage? What conditions do tulips need in your garden for best success? It's all in today's episode, number 375, Growing Cool Season Peas and Tulip Planting Tips. We're podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutalon jungle in suburban purgatory. It's the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you today by SmartPots and Dave Wilson Nursery. Let's go.

COOL SEASON PEA PLANTING ADVICE

Farmer Fred:

[1:37] We're here at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center. It's a January work day. There is plenty you can be doing in the garden if you're in USDA Zone 9. Cool season crops can be going in the ground from seed. Some, though, require maybe a little trick. Peas are very popular. Cool season peas. Peas like sugar snap peas. One of my favorites is the Oregon II sugar pod pea. They are delicious, eating them raw. They're very prolific and they will last until it gets too hot. But a general rule of thumb is you can plant them up to about a month, maybe a month and a half before your last expected frost, wherever you may live. And for us here in USDA Zone 9, you can actually get away with planting peas in California here in January and February and even towards the end of the year come September, October, November, December. I mean, what I do is I usually plant the cool season peas in succession and start new ones about once a month or so from September all the way through February or so. You have plenty of time to plant peas from seed. We're talking with our favorite vegetable expert, Master Gardener, Gail Pothour, here at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center. What are some of your favorite peas to grow?

Gail Pothour:

[2:52] They're not the shelling peas. I'm not a big fan of the old-fashioned English peas, but I do love the sugar snaps, the snap peas. My favorite variety currently is called Snak Hero. It's a short 18 to 24 inch tall plant that has four inch long peas that actually look like green beans. They don't look like a pea. They look more like a green bean. And we found that hardly any of them ever made it home! We were eating them here in the garden. They were so good. We have some growing on a short trellis here at the Hort Center. And then we also have the Oregon one that you like, the snow pea. That's growing on an old umbrella frame. And then we were trying some new varieties, Sugar Magnolia, Magnolia Blossom, a few ones that we haven't tried before that are taller. So they're growing on tall trellises. So we'll see if they're going to become favorites or not.

Farmer Fred:

[3:45] Speaking of growing snow peas or sugar pod peas, a trellis is a good idea because many of those varieties can get rather tall and prolific, which is a good thing. The Snak Hero. I tried starting it this year and we talked about that you need a little trick when planting snow peas from seed. And I know what that trick is. It's basically just to soak them, soak them in tepid water for a few hours and then plant them. But I found with the Snak Hero, I probably soaked them for about five or six hours, and yet they were still very slow to germinate when I stuck them in the half barrel.

Gail Pothour:

[4:18] Yeah, we had an issue this year. We've grown it the last several years and I've grown it at home and I've done that where I've soaked them. And at home, I had no trouble. I actually grew them in a hanging basket last year, which worked great. We've grown them out here without any issue. We've tried them this year at two separate sections. We're growing them up short little trellises we made out of bicycle wheels. One of the plantings came up. They're doing fine. The other one, nothing germinated. I haven't a clue. We soaked them overnight. And so then we replanted,  probably early November, which might not have been the optimum time. And we have one little one just coming up. So I don't know if it's a weather related thing this year. I do know that I'm going to try next year to pre-germinate them, I think. One of our Master Gardeners gave me that tip, and I've done it with other seeds, so I thought I'd try pre-germinating the peas. I thought about it out here, but we have six different varieties and so many plants that I couldn't keep track of them,  trying to pre-soak them in a paper towel in a plastic bag, and so I just soaked them overnight. And we had trouble only with the Snak Hero. All the others came up great. So, I don't know.

Farmer Fred:

[5:32] One thing about the Snak Hero I liked is it's a compact plant. It's supposed to only get three feet tall.

Gail Pothour:

[5:38] Oh, not even that tall. It says 18 to 24 inches. Yeah. So, it's a short one. So, it's really good for a hanging basket or a container. But even the short ones, I find, need to have some kind of support. Often, you'll read in an article that, oh, the dwarf varieties don't need to have a trellis. I think they do. They need to have something to climb. Even if you've just put in some old prunings from a tree or something, something for it to climb up because otherwise they'll flop onto the ground and then you can get some damage to the pods themselves or maybe insect damage, that sort of thing. Get them up off the ground for better air circulation.

Farmer Fred:

[6:12] I have another pack of the Snak Hero peas ready for me to plant. But I want them to be successful. I want them to grow. So walk me through your soaking process. Maybe I didn't soak them long enough. They're fresh seed,  this year's seed, so I'm not worried about them being older seeds. Do peas have a limited lifespan?

Gail Pothour:

[6:33] I think about three years or so if they're stored in an optimal condition, you know, cool and dry. The only thing I can suggest is when you soak them, soak them maybe six hours, no longer than 12 hours. I don't know if soaking them too long is detrimental or not. So I usually soak them about six or eight hours. But to say this tip that one of our Master Gardeners just gave me this morning, he said he always pre-germinates his seeds. He said they generally will start that little sprout, the little radical, within three or four days. Whereas if you just plant them out in the garden, soil might be too cool, too wet, you know, whatever the issue could be. And they may not come up. And that's the issue we had this year. So, you might try pre-soaking. I mean, not just pre-soaking, but pre-germinating. Or do one of each and see if...

Farmer Fred:

[7:27] Or do both. 

Gail Pothour:

[7:28] Yeah. See if there's a comparison which works better. All right.

Farmer Fred:

[7:32] Well, walk us through the process of germinating a pea seed. What do you use? Paper towels? Coffee filters? Do you have to maintain high humidity? Do you have to keep it in a warm, dark place?

Gail Pothour:

[7:42] We don't drink coffee in my house, so I don't have coffee filters. So, I use a paper towel. and just dampen it. I'll put it in a Ziploc plastic bag. And I typically would, it depends on what I'm germinating, but I typically would put it on a heating mat or some warm place in the house. I do have germination mats, so I'll put it on that. And it makes them come up, makes them germinate quicker. But then if you just soak them I just soak them in just room temperature water and just in a little jar.

Farmer Fred:

[8:14] Do you keep them between two paper towels or is the top open so you can easily gauge when it sprouts?

Gail Pothour:

[8:20] No, usually I fold it over so it's a paper towel on the bottom and on the top.

Farmer Fred:

[8:25] It's a moist towel.

Gail Pothour:

[8:25] Yeah, it's moist and you can see the seed through it. Generally, if it's wet, if it's moist, you can see through it. If it's dry, it's a little tougher. But you can always take it out of the plastic bag, open it up, fold it back and see what it's doing. But I'm going to try that next year because we did have some issues this year.

Farmer Fred:

[8:44] So when you see that sprout coming out, should you immediately plant it in the soil? Or how much leeway do you have in the time it sprouts and the time you should plant it?

Gail Pothour:

[8:53] I would say as soon as you see that sprout starting, the little radical root starting, take the seed out and immediately plant it. Be very careful. You don't want to break that off. So if you plant them about an inch or so deep, I would make the hole ahead of time. Typically, if I'm just planting the pea seed, I'll set it on the soil and push it in up to my first knuckle. That's an inch. But I wouldn't do that with this because you could break off that little root when you make the hole. Get a dowel or something. I use a lot of dowels or chopsticks. Make the hole, drop it in carefully, cover it up.

Farmer Fred:

[9:29] I use old Sharpies.

Gail Pothour:

[9:31] Oh, old sharpies, really? Yeah. Oh, yeah, I use a lot of chopsticks.

Farmer Fred:

[9:36] After you've planted it an inch, I imagine you would, if you could, point the sprout downward?

Gail Pothour:

[9:41] Yeah, be very careful. So you don't want to break it off. But, yeah, try to get the root down and then just lightly cover it. I'd sprinkle some potting soil or something over the top, a little compost, just to fill in the hole.

Farmer Fred:

[9:54] Or seed starting mix or vermiculite.

Gail Pothour:

[9:56] Right, any kind of a potting media, anything like that, anything that's not too heavy. And so that it can push up through that easily.

Farmer Fred:

[10:04] And you'll find out soon enough if it's successful or not. What's nice about planting the cool season peas is you can plant them fairly close together. What, two inches apart?

Gail Pothour:

[10:14] Yeah, I was doing some reading. Apparently, we didn't plant ours close enough together this year. We were putting them around the strings that we had for them to climb up. But it says you can plant them two inches apart real thickly. And, you know, maybe that was part of our problem is we didn't plant enough seeds and we didn't get good germination. So nothing came up. If we had done it thickly, maybe we would have, you know, had a few more come up. Who knows?

Farmer Fred:

[10:42] We'll have some links in the show notes to the cool season pea varieties we've been talking about to help you glean more information about them. But that's a lot of good tips there about growing cool season peas. Did we leave anything out?

Gail Pothour:

[10:55] Only just be sure that you put in some kind of a structure when you plant or before you plant. Any of them that are pole peas that are going to get five, six, seven feet tall, you need to have something in place for them to climb. And you don't want to do it after the plants have come up because then you can injure the plants. So we put, whether it's an old umbrella, we have a lot of trellises out here this year using old bicycle wheels where we've cable tied them together and put stakes. And so they're about five or six feet tall. Get those in place first because those tall plants definitely need to have some kind of support. And we had an issue this year. Some of our plants got so big, about seven feet tall, and they got top heavy. They don't want to hang on to the twine all that easily. They don't twine quite like beans that really will adhere to them. So we've had to run sisal twine all around it and stakes to kind of keep them upright. Otherwise, they'll fall over. And today's windy. And so we expect to have a little bit of damage on some of the upper shoots because they're brittle.

Farmer Fred:

[12:02] Yeah, I like to put my old tomato cages to good use this time of year by planting the peas inside the perimeter of those. And you've got six inch spaces there, so it's easy to reach in and harvest the peas. But like you say, some varieties can get so tall that cage might fall over. So you may have to support it with a T-post or something else.

Gail Pothour:

[12:24] Right. And one of the varieties that we're growing, it's called Sugar Magnolia, and it has bright, deep purple pods, which we don't have on there yet. So I'm anxious to see them. But the picture that I saw shows that they're deep purple. So we're waiting for those. But they're six to eight feet tall and it's growing on… Well, I like to repurpose everything. And so my father was a licensed land surveyor. And when he moved away, I inherited all of his survey equipment. So I have an old sight pole and it's growing. We've taken the sight pole and it's adjustable, the height. And so we've got it up about eight feet tall. We put a bicycle wheel on top and then we have twine coming down for the peas to climb up. Well, all the peas on one side germinated, but not on the other. So it kind of wanted to pull the sight pole over. So we've had to concoct some sort of way to upright it. So we have twine, you know, they're like guy wires trying to keep it upright. So, yeah, it's a challenge, but those plants do get very heavy. So you need to have a pretty strong support.

Farmer Fred:

[13:30] I like the idea of using a trellis system like you might see in some gardens that might go from one bed to the next and you can walk under it.

Gail Pothour:

[13:38] An archway, kind of an archway.

Farmer Fred:

[13:40] And that would be good for snow peas. 

Gail Pothour:

[13:42] It would. That would be probably like a cattle panel. They come in about a 16 foot length, I think, and It's pretty rigid, but you could bend it into a U-shape and have it go from one bed to another. That'd be perfect. In fact, we have something similar as kind of our gateway into the vegetable garden here. But yeah, you could grow that up. It's real substantial. And so it would be able to...

Farmer Fred:

[14:04] It looks to be almost like about a 10-gauge. It's pretty thick.

Gail Pothour:

[14:09] Yeah, this is one that we actually bought that was an archway. But you could concoct something out of a cattle panel or maybe even concrete reinforcing wire, I would think.

Farmer Fred:

[14:19] Yeah. As long as you leave room to walk under it. Have you ever tried trellising a plant on that? We have.

Gail Pothour:

[14:25] We've grown beans, runner beans, and I think we had morning glories on it one year. So we usually do some kind of a vining plant.

Farmer Fred:

[14:32] Sugar peas, snap peas, edible peas, a great cool season crop that you can grow in just about any state at the right time of the year here in USDA Zone 9s. This is the time of the year to be getting your pea seeds in. And for a lot of the rest of the country, you can be doing it a little bit later in February, March, and April.

Gail Pothour:

[14:51] And you can pretty much eat the whole plant. I'm not sure I'd want to eat roots or stems, but the leaves, especially the tender new growth, the leaves are very tasty. You can eat the flowers. If you eat the flowers, you won't get pods. So you got to kind of figure that, but you can taste them, it might put them in a salad or something like that. And some of the varieties have a lot of tendrils. They're called super tendrils. And we have one variety that's that way. And you can cut those off and stir fry them, put them in a salad, put them in a pasta dish. So pretty much the whole plant's edible.

Farmer Fred:

[15:23] Come for the garden advice, stay for the cooking lesson from Master Gardener Gail Pothour. We're here at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center on a January workday.  I guess we got to get back to work.

Gail Pothour:

[15:33] I guess you're right. Thanks, Fred.

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TULIP PLANTING TIPS

Farmer Fred:

[16:49] We like to answer your garden questions here on the Garden Basics podcast. Debbie Flower, America's favorite retired college horticultural professor, is here. And we get a question from Tanya here in the Sacramento area, who's having a problem with her spring bulbs that she planted or wants to plant. She says, “squirrels were digging up my spring bulbs up in the front yard last summer, and they unearthed other bulbs in the process. I picked the bulbs up and put them in a dry box in the shed to plant this month. I thought the shed was all dark, but it turns out some light gets through there. Are these bulbs kaput? I'm hoping not, but I'm ready for the worst. Thank you, and Debbie, if she's helping, for the great garden expertise.” Thank you for that, Tanya. We appreciate that. Explain the light part.

Debbie Flower:

[17:37] Well, actually, looking at her picture, which I didn't see in color, I just saw it in black and white. But it looks to me like they sprouted without light. That the other, they were ready to grow and they rot very easily. They have quite a bit of moisture in them. If you've ever had an onion rot in your kitchen, you've had a bulb rot. So the sprouts are very light in color. Just from this picture, I would say it's not due to light, it's due to temperatures and the fact that the bulb has moisture in it.

Farmer Fred:

[18:10] That's what I was thinking too, is that the temperature of that shed, especially since she rescued them in the summertime, is going to be warm. 

Debbie Flower:

[18:20] Yes. Bulbs in general just need the right conditions to grow. And that's what's happened here. But she can save them. She can plant them at the correct depth, which is two to three times as deep as the bulb is tall. We're not talking about the shoot that's coming out of the bulb, just the bulb itself.

Farmer Fred:

[18:41] You want to keep the sprouts though.

Debbie Flower:

[18:43] Right. You want to keep the sprouts and you're going to have to handle it gently because the sprouts might be very stiff. We call it turgid in the plant world and they might break off, but hopefully there will be more buds. There is a stem piece in the bottom of a bulb. If you've cut an onion, you usually cut out that hard part at the bottom. That is actually the stem of the bulb. And there can be multiple buds on that stem. And so if the stuff that has come out and the growth is what we call etiolated, means it's expanded, it's grown very long, the cells are very big because it's not in the sun. And so if it breaks off, you probably will get another set of leaves that will come up. So plant them. So if the bulb is two inches tall, plant them four to six inches deep. Cover them over, plant them in bunches. It always looks nicer in a place that has very well-drained soil. As I said, bulbs have a lot of water in them and they easily rot.

Farmer Fred:

[19:45] I was just looking at a story about pre-sprouted bulbs.

Debbie Flower:

[19:48] Right.

Farmer Fred:

[19:49] The nurseries that sell them talk about that as being an excellent way to get bulbs that have had the proper dormancy period and the correct storage into the ground without waiting a whole year for them to basically sprout and flower.

Debbie Flower:

[20:05] Right. Well, right now I have tulips in my tulip bulbs in my refrigerator. A friend gave them to me for my recent birthday. And we don't get cold enough, reliably cold enough, long enough for the tulip bulbs to create a flower. That's a separate process from growing its leaves. Hyacinths are another one that need to be, in our climate, chilled in the refrigerator. If you get snow, then you don't have to worry about it. You can leave your bulbs in the ground and they will regrow, your tulips and hyacinths in the ground, and they will regrow and flower. The process of forming the flower due to cooler temperatures is called vernalization.

Farmer Fred:

[20:48] I knew that.

Debbie Flower:

[20:50] Yay, Fred! And so, these pre-sprouted ones look to me to be hyacinths and tulips. And so, for places like us that are not cold enough, then you could buy them from pre-sprouted bulbs. So, they've been treated in the cold room. I, for Christmas, get my uncle a bulb garden and it comes to him, just looks like a container with media in it. There are bulbs in there, and once they have been chilled, and once they receive moisture and warm air, they grow into a flower and leaves. So, this pre-chilling of bulbs is a big business in horticulture.

Farmer Fred:

[21:38] Are the bulbs that you find at the big box stores here in California in early fall, have those bulbs been pre-chilled?

Debbie Flower:

[21:48] In general, no. 

Farmer Fred:

Oh, really? 

Debbie Flower:

Yes. There are bulbs that don't need to be pre-chilled. The daffodils in general, the  paperwhites, which are a type of daffodil. Crocuses. They don't need the amount of chilling that a tulip does. And there are species tulips. My house that I live in now came with species tulips that bloom reliably every year and I never touch them.

Farmer Fred:

[22:09] Congratulations.

Debbie Flower:

[22:10] Yes. So there are some, if you get an industry bulb catalog, it will tell you the number of chilling hours it needs to produce flowers. And so there are different ones that, and then they'll tell you what zones, the USDA zones, they will flower in. And there are tulips that will work in a warm place like our USDA zone 9B. There are some tulips. The daffodils do fine. The crocuses do fine. The paperweights do fine. But going back to your comment that, no, they're not, they don't usually come chilled.

Farmer Fred:

[22:36]  Most of the displays you see, I know, at the local garden centers, they're tulips because tulips make for pretty pictures. So, most of those bins with bulbs are tulips. And they're the prettiest tulips you've ever seen. But are they species tulips? 

Debbie Flower:

No. 

Farmer Fred:

Okay. So, that means they need to be refrigerated.

Debbie Flower:

[22:59] Right.

Farmer Fred:

[23:00] Do the directions state that? 

Debbie Flower:

No. 

Farmer Fred:

Jeez. Thank you.

Debbie Flower:

[23:05] And what I learned was refrigerate them for six weeks, six to eight weeks. But when I read more about it recently, they talked about 12 weeks of chilling. So the tulips came in a net bag, and I ripped off the label, and I put the net bag in a paper bag because I don't want them – refrigerators are dry. I don't want them drying up, so that hopefully will slow their loss of moisture. I also don't want to put them in my crisper drawer, what I call the crisper drawer, the two drawers at the bottom of the refrigerator, because that's where I keep my fruit. And fruit gives off a gas called ethylene, and that will mess up the bulbs totally. So I just put them in the paper bag, rolled it tight, clipped it with a clip, and put the label on the outside so I knew what it was. I didn't reach for it and try to make dinner out of it. and wrote on it the day I put it in, the date, so that I can bring it out at the correct time to plant.

Farmer Fred:

[24:02] Bring it out of where?

Debbie Flower:

[24:03] Out of the bottom of my refrigerator.

Farmer Fred:

[24:05] But not the drawers?

Debbie Flower:

[24:06] No, I'm keeping it above the drawers. The drawers are underneath. I keep them on the bottom shelf on top of the drawers in the back corner where it won't be disturbed.

Farmer Fred:

[24:13] How do you get around the idea that it's so dry in the refrigerator?

Debbie Flower:

[24:18] Well, that's a problem. I should check them regularly to see. And I'm hoping that by putting them in a paper bag, they will get airflow as needed and it will slow down water loss.

Farmer Fred:

[24:30] So not only do you put the date, I would imagine, of when you put it in the refrigerator, you're probably also write on it because it makes it easier on you when to bring them out of the bag.

Debbie Flower:

[24:39] When to take it out, right. And I only put, I think, eight weeks. I may have to go longer than that. And there's no way to tell. The bulb isn't going to look at me and say, yeah, I'm ready to flower.

Farmer Fred:

[24:50] Someday.

Debbie Flower:

[24:51] Yeah. Well, and we will plant them all with a chip or something. So, I'll probably see their condition at eight weeks and decide if I can leave them for two or four more weeks in the refrigerator and still have a viable bulb, or if I need to plant them just to keep them alive.

Farmer Fred:

[25:08] This is where the colder USDA zones have the advantage over the warmer USDA zones. Tulips especially. If you're in eight or nine and 10, definitely, you need to pull those tulip bulbs every year after they've gone totally brown. How do you treat bulbs before you put them away for storage?

Debbie Flower:

[25:27] Well, you want to clean all the soil off of them because they need to be dry. This is to prevent mold from growing. So, clean all this. Use a mushroom brush or something kind of soft, but that will take the soil off of them and then put them in a flat where they're not touching so that the exterior can dry. That shouldn't take very long. Depends on your climate and how humid it is, but it's very dry around here. So you don't have good airflow. The flat has good airflow through it. You can keep them in a bed of peat moss, not moist peat moss, but just, well, it can be barely moist.

Farmer Fred:

[26:07] Can it be factory moist peat moss?

Debbie Flower:

[26:10] Yes, it can be factory moist, but I don't want you to put it in a bin in water like we do for making media and come back later. So yes, it can be factory moist. Peat moss has a very low pH, meaning it's quite acidic, and that prevents many funguses from growing. One of the dangers for bulbs is fungus, and fungus will grow on them in a wet place, in a humid place, and it will eat the bulb. There's lots of good sugars in that bulb. And then put it in a dark, cool place.

Farmer Fred:

[26:40] So getting back to Tanya's question, if she's got all these bulbs that have sprouted, can she plant them?

Debbie Flower:

[26:46] Absolutely.

Farmer Fred:

[26:46] All right. And does she need to treat it any differently than she normally would?

Debbie Flower:

[26:50] No, just same depth, same kind of soil. She can put them in containers if she wanted to. and then she's going to have to start watering them. 

Farmer Fred:

Yeah, if it doesn't rain. 

Debbie Flower:

Right, right, because they're alive and the roots will come out of the base, which is called the basal plate on the outside. So you plant them pointed part up. It'll be pretty obvious since these have all germinated what the top is, but if you're just getting tulip bulbs at the nursery, you plant them with the pointed part up and the flat part down. If you don't, if you mess up, doing it with your kids, the plant will actually figure it out. And it'll just, if you ever dig it up in the future, you'll see that the leaves have grown around the bulb and come up and the roots have grown around and gone down. They react to gravity. So, but generally put the tips up, put it at the correct depth. The depth will vary by your climate. The colder you are, the deeper they will go.

Farmer Fred:

[27:49] What was the old rule of thumb about the depth of planting bulbs? Is it one and a half times their diameter?

Debbie Flower:

[27:57] Two to three times their height.

Farmer Fred:

[27:59] Two to three times their height. Okay. And I don't think Tanya is going to have a problem figuring out which way is up because these sprouts that are coming out of her tulips are about a foot long.  And would you bury those or keep them above ground, the sprout?

Debbie Flower:

[28:14] The only part I would bury is whatever was in that two to three times soil. And they'll flop over. They won't be pretty, but they'll green up and that will help start feeding the bulb.

Farmer Fred:

[28:26] Really? So, they'll green up as opposed to dying off and new sprouts appear? 

Debbie Flower:

[28:30] Correct. New sprouts hopefully will appear too, but these sprouts will green up.

Farmer Fred:

[28:35] Yeah, they look like they're pliable, so they may still be alive. They're looking for light, obviously.

Debbie Flower:

[28:39] Yes, they're trying to grow toward light.

Farmer Fred:

[28:41] Yeah. And Tanya, I think if you just get them in your garden as soon as possible, you should be just fine.

Debbie Flower:

[28:47] Yeah, enjoy.

Farmer Fred:

[28:48] Thank you, Debbie. 

Debbie Flower:

You're welcome, Fred. 

DAVE WILSON NURSERY

Farmer Fred:

Now's the time to plan the what and the where of what you want to plant for the future and to help you along it pays to visit your favorite independently owned nursery on a regular basis throughout the fall and winter just to see what's new and coming soon to that nursery near you is dave wilson nursery's excellent lineup of farmers market favorites great tasting healthy fruit and nut varieties. They'll already be potted up and ready to be planted. And we're also talking about a great selection of antioxidant-rich fruits, such as blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, goji berries, grapes, kiwi, mulberries, gooseberries, figs, and pomegranates. Wholesale grower Dave Wilson Nursery has probably the best lineup of great-tasting fruit and nut trees of any grower in the United States. Find out more at their website, DaveWilson.com. And while you're there, check out all the videos they have on how to plant and grow all their delicious varieties of fruit and nut trees. Plus, at DaveWilson.com, you can find the nursery nearest you that carries Dave Wilson's plants. Your harvest to better health begins at DaveWilson.com.

WANT TO LEAVE US A GARDEN QUESTION?

Farmer Fred:

[30:10] Want to leave us a garden question? You'll find a link at GardenBasics.net. Also, when you click on any episode at GardenBasics.net, you're going to find a link to SpeakPipe. You'll find it in the show notes. And when you bring up SpeakPipe on your computer or smartphone, you can leave us an audio question without making a phone call. Or you can go to SpeakPipe directly. That's SpeakPipe.com slash GardenBasics. You want to call or text us? We have that number posted at GardenBasics.net. It's 916-292-8964. 916-292-8964. Email? Sure, we like email. Send it along with your pictures to Fred at FarmerFred.com. Or again, go to GardenBasics.net and get that link. And if you send us a question, be sure to tell us where you're gardening, because all gardening is local. Find it all at GardenBasics.net. 

Farmer Fred:

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred comes out every Friday. It's brought to you by SmartPots and Dave Wilson Nursery. Garden Basics, it's available wherever podcasts are handed out. For more information about the podcast, as well as an accurate transcript, visit our website, GardenBasics.net. And thank you so much for listening and your support.