397 Garden Lessons Learned (the hard way)

Show Transcript

397 TRANSCRIPT GARDEN LESSONS LEARNED

Farmer Fred:

[0:05] Ask any gardener and they'll tell you gardening is a long educational process. Well, we've all made mistakes gardening, and most of us emerged from that experience much wiser. Even Master Gardeners. Today we talk with several Master Gardeners about “Garden Lessons Learned The Hard Way”. That's the title of episode 397 of the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. We're podcasting from the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center as well as at Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon jungle in suburban purgatory. Let's go!

LESSON LEARNED - FRUIT THINNING

Farmer Fred:

[0:39] Every gardener has a sad story to tell about a garden lesson learned the hard way. But it has stuck with them for years and years and years. And as a result, they've changed the way they've done something and they are now doing it correctly. But every gardener has had that lesson learned the hard way. And we're here at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center on a work day. And we're talking in the orchard section with Vickiee Marie Parker Ward.

Farmer Fred:

[1:03] And Vickie, you've had a few years of gardening under your belt of these garden. I don't call them horror stories. It's like just a lesson learned.

Vickie Marie

[1:12] Well, it sure was. Back in the day, before I was a Master Gardener and about my second home, and the first one that, well, I guess both of my first two homes, I put in orchard-type trees. But the first one, I wasn't there long enough to see them come to fruition, literally. The second one, I had plums, and I don't remember what else, but I had this plum tree, and I had it at the back of my property, which had previously been a filbert orchard, so it had very good soil. And it was the first year that it produced, it was probably about three years old, which is the right age, covered, just covered with plums. I was just thrilled. And everything was wonderful. I was looking forward to that crop. They were getting larger, and all of a sudden I heard a crack.

Vickie Marie

[2:05] And I thought, that's not right. There was no reason for something to crack. It wasn't raining. Nobody's making noises or anything. And I turned around, and my tree had split right down the middle, the whole tree. The weight of those plums was way too much for that little tree. I didn't know at that time about thinning fruit. Had I known about thinning fruit, I probably wouldn't have liked doing it, because nobody does. You feel like you're throwing away good fruit. But it would have saved the tree, and I would have actually had a crop. As it was, nothing could ripen fully, and I lost the whole thing and the tree. So lesson learned, and I bring that up to people nowadays who visit here and want to know, well, why do we have to thin the fruit? Well, that's why.

Farmer Fred:

[2:57] There's a lot of great reasons for thinning fruit so that there's maybe a fist’s difference in between each piece of fruit, five, six inches, because you get better air circulation, diseases don't travel as well, and the fruit gets bigger as well. If you have a lot of fruit crowded together, it's going to stay small, and it can develop problems like what you just talked about, branch go boom.

Vickie Marie

[3:20] It surely did. And I was heartbroken. I really was, because it was something that would have been really nice for my family at the time. And it looked beautiful in my yard. And then all of a sudden, I've got this hole in the ground. So, yeah, lots of things happen like that. Meantime, as I became a Master Gardener, I learned better. I have really learned a lot, but I actually grew up in an orchard. And the orchard that my parents had was one that belonged to a farmer. And the trees were all somewhere in the vicinity of 75 to 100 years old. So they'd already been well taken care of for many, many years. The ones that survived, that is. Some didn't last as well as others. So they were trees that didn't produce the same way because they were old enough and they had really hit their better years for the most part. So I didn't realize that you had to do things like that, especially with young trees.

Farmer Fred:

[4:23] Down in Louisiana, the Cooperative Extension there had a good piece of advice about thinning fruit. It says, just keep looking in the tree. Don't look down. That way, you'll keep on thinning the fruit. Because if you start looking at the fruit that you've taken out, you start feeling sorry for it.

Vickie Marie

[4:39] I can imagine that. During COVID, we were not allowed to come into the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center for about six weeks. And during that time a bunch of our pluots came into being and when we finally were allowed to show up we had  the underneath of the one of our grafted trees was just covered with fruit rotting. It had fallen off. Wind, rain, whatever had knocked it down and it at least in doing that It kind of thinned itself, but it also, a lot of fruit that would have been good got missing entirely. And it was really hard to have to pick all of that up and realize what we had missed just because we couldn't be here to take care of it.

Farmer Fred:

[5:29] Yeah, the only fruit I know that really does a good job of thinning itself are usually citrus trees. And that's why they call it June drop, is it'll drop a certain amount of fruit. And that's fairly normal. But in this case, you were dealing with a plum tree, and a plum tree is just loaded with fruit. So to go in there and thin it out could be an all-day job.

Vickie Marie

[5:50] We have a Laroda plum here, and it seems to be extremely prolific. And we will go in there and thin it out, and we think we're all done. And two weeks later, we'll come back, and we'll look at it and think, oh, my God. And we have to get to do it again. And sometimes it's two or three or four times more before we finally get it. And it still puts out a lot of fruit. It's just larger fruit, healthier fruit, and the tree is not bending its branches all the way to the ground because of it.

Farmer Fred:

[6:21] That's a very good piece of advice, and you'll see that in anything you read about fruit thinning. After the first pass, you're not done. Come back a week later, and you'll find out what you missed. And like you say, do it three or four times.

Vickie Marie

[6:32] That's true. And it's not just plums or pluots or stone fruit, it's apples, it's anything. We do it with anything that looks like it's overburdened with fruit.

Farmer Fred:

[6:46] Because nobody wants a broken branch.

Vickie Marie

[6:48] The only one we probably don't really worry about is the fig. You don't worry about figs very much because they're pretty stout. They're self-sufficient. They don't really do damage to themselves like others do. So I'm sitting here looking at our three-in-a-hole fig trees over there, and it's pretty laden with fruit, but if you look at it, everything's spaced already on its own.

Farmer Fred:

[7:13] There are some fruit trees that don't produce very big fruit. And I think I've read where if you have cherry trees, you don't necessarily have to go in there and thin out that fruit.

Vickie Marie

[7:23] No, we don't thin cherries at all because there's just no need to. They grow in a little group, just like grapes in their own way. And so they just can't grow that close together that it creates that kind of weight.

Farmer Fred:

[7:39] However, since you mentioned grapes, probably we should mention that you need to thin the grapes so that the bunches are usually six to eight inches apart. Some people will prune out the tails of that bunch, too, to have bigger fruit. And you need good air circulation around grapes, too, and that's the other reason for thinning out entire bunches.

Vickie Marie

[7:59] Yes, you do. Yeah, but of all of the tree fruits, the ones that you don't really worry about much is  citrus or cherry.

Farmer Fred:

[8:08] There you go. Lesson learned the hard way. Thin your fruit. She ought to know. Vickie Marie Parker Ward, Master Gardener in Sacramento. Thank you so much.

Vickie Marie

[8:17] You're welcome. Anytime, Fred.

LESSON LEARNED: TOMATO 6-PACKS

Farmer Fred:

[8:24] We're soliciting stories from the Master Gardeners here in Sacramento County at a work day and open garden day here at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center. We're talking with Kathy Morrison. She works here in the herb section. A fine herbalist she is, a fine gardener she is too, with a fine newsletter called “Sacramento Digs Gardening” that is released every day. Sacramento Digs Gardening. Find it on the internet. She'll give us more information about it, I'm sure.

Farmer Fred:

[8:49] And I'm finding out stories of lessons learned the hard way about gardening. And Kathy, you have a good one about tomatoes, and I feel your pain.

Kathy:

[9:00] Yeah, tomatoes. I've been growing tomatoes for a long, long time, but my very first tomato garden, I bought a six-pack of Early Girl tomatoes.

Farmer Fred:

[9:08] A six-pack?

Kathy:

[9:09] A six-pack and planted them all, and they all did quite nicely, and they produced a whole lot of tomatoes, and then they just quit. And I didn't have anything else.

Kathy:

[9:20] I mean, newbies, yeah, it's a hard lesson. But I am very good at varying my tomatoes this year in terms of length of season, in terms of type of tomato. And actually, as it turned out, I don't really like Early Girls very much.

Farmer Fred:

[9:37] Early Girl is a determinate variety, so it tends to set most of its fruit at one time with a smattering of fruit later on. But when you buy tomatoes in a six-pack, which was the way they used to be packed, they were in fairly small little containers, you needed to transplant those quickly or have death on your hands.

Kathy

[9:54] Absolutely. Those little pony packs were a nightmare. It was barely any roots at all. And so I've learned a lot since then, you can tell.

Farmer Fred

[10:02] And you're teaching a lot, too, with your newsletter that comes out every day, you and Debbie Arrington, the Sacramento Digs Gardening Newsletter. And there's just good advice there for everybody across the country.

Kathy

[10:13] Thank you very much. We've been trying, this year we have a series called FIMBY for Food in My Backyard on Tuesdays. And we've been telling people about different elements of edible gardening so they could produce their own food. And this week was tomato pests. So very important to know at this time of year what to watch for and be on guard against her. You're not going to have many tomatoes either by the end of August.

Farmer Fred:

[10:38] You can do an internet search for Sacramento Digs Gardening. I'll have a link to it in today's show notes as well,  it's an excellent newsletter. And I take it that you're now buying tomatoes probably in four-inch pots.

Kathy

[10:49] I don't buy tomatoes very much, actually, anymore. I raise them from seed myself. So, yeah, I have a better selection that way, I think. The nurseries are catching up with some of the interesting varieties. But I have, I think, 12 planted this year. I have Rugby and Big Beef and Chef's Choice Orange, which is a fabulous tomato, things like that.

Farmer Fred

[11:09] And I bet there will be recipes for it showing up in Sacramento Digs Gardening.

Kathy

[11:13] Next month, I'm sure. Yes, it will.

Farmer Fred

[11:16] All right. Kathy Morrison, thank you for sharing your lesson learned the hard way with us.

Kathy

[11:20] Oh, you're quite welcome, Fred.

BEYOND THE GARDEN BASICS NEWSLETTER

Farmer Fred:

[11:24] Gardening. It's good for what ails you. It improves your body, your mind, your soul. You're outdoors. You're in your happy place. Why is that? It's all in the June 20th, 2025 edition of the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter. It's entitled Gardening and Gratitude. This newsletter edition, each Friday, is available now in its entirety for both free and paid subscribers. Paid subscribers have added perks. We have a new Monday edition that's just for paid subscribers. Last week, it was all about a summertime disease of many plants called verticillium wilt, and we had some advice on how to thwart it. Another benefit of being a paid subscriber to the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter, paid subscribers also have complete access to all the previous posts of the newsletter. There's now over 200 editions. By the way, your paid subscription to the newsletter supports not only the ongoing efforts to produce the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter, It also helps to keep this podcast alive, Garden Basics with Farmer Fred, and freely available to you each week. Find out more information about the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter in several places, including in today's show notes, at our homepage, GardenBasics.net, at FarmerFred.com, or at Substack. And thank you for your ongoing support and encouragement to keep the good gardening conversation going.

LESSON LEARNED: SOWING SEED

Farmer Fred

[12:52] Lessons learned the hard way. We're finding out from Master Gardeners here at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center about garden mistakes, garden faux pas that they may have committed because they didn't know any better a long time ago, and they never repeated that mistake because it was a lesson learned the hard way. We're getting some really good stories today. Curtis Parnell is part of the vegetable squad here at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center, and you're the jack of all trades here with construction and planting and maintenance and all that. So I bet you have some interesting stories in that regard.

Curtis:

[13:26] Well, I have one, even though it doesn't, I don't think it impacts my intelligence, but it might. In my first year here, I was asked to plant some of the beds and there's really no need to read the labels about all these seeds and things like that. And so I proceeded to do what I thought was highly efficient, which was plant in density. So you can really get a lot of stuff. And as soon as all of our stuff started coming up, Chuck Ingels, who expired some time ago,  he came over and asked me one time, well, did you ever read the instructions? I planted lots of stuff, Chuck. And he goes, you know, these plants are supposed to be, not in a big giant bundle. They actually need some air so they can breathe, and, you know, they've got to get the water down there. I got a very pleasant, very pleasant lecture from my boss who informed me that reading the label and actually thinking about things before you start could be highly beneficial to the end product.

Farmer Fred:

[14:30] It is like, it's a mantra of Master Gardeners everywhere. Read and follow all label directions. 

Curtis:

[14:37] Yeah, I should have learned that in class, I think.

Farmer Fred:

[14:40] So did you pick up some pruners and go to work?

Curtis:

[14:43] I did. That took quite some time. But, yeah, we actually had to pull some out and get some spacing in there. And I have to admit, I may have slacked off a little bit the next year, and they weren't quite as thin as Chuck wanted them, but, hey.

Farmer Fred:

[14:58] Maybe you read the label, too.

Curtis:

[15:03] I was actually capable of reading the label, so I did so at that time.

Farmer Fred:

[15:08] That's a great lesson to learn. That label that's in a plant that you buy usually has planting instructions on it that will tell you how far apart to space them, how deep to plant them, and whether it needs sun or shade. A lot of good things on those labels.

Curtis:

[15:22] That's a true statement.

Farmer Fred:

[15:26] Well, Curtis Parnell, thank you for your sad story.

Curtis:

[15:30]  Okay. Thank you, sir.

LESSON LEARNED: PLANTING CILANTRO

Farmer Fred

[15:40] Lessons learned the hard way. Oh, we've all made gardening mistakes,  And a lot of us remember those mistakes and have never, ever, ever repeated it. What are some lessons learned the hard way among the Master Gardeners here in Sacramento County? We're at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center talking with Master Gardener Michelle Cahall. Michelle, do you have one of those lessons learned the hard way?

Michelle:

[16:00] I sure do. I'm a very enthusiastic vegetable gardener. So every year I pick up my vegetables that I'm going to plant because I haven't ever been successful with seeds, starting from seeds. So one year, two years ago, I went and I purchased all of the ingredients that I needed to make salsa. I bought the tomatoes and the peppers and the cilantro for summer gardening. They actually sold cilantro in the herb section. So I purchased some thinking, this is going to be a wonderful thing. Tomatoes came up great. Peppers came up great. And I fought the cilantro the whole time. And I never really did any research to see that cilantro actually grows better in the fall season when it cools down.

Farmer Fred:

[16:49] Cilantro is a cool season crop. Most nurseries do a good job of shifting their crops by the season. For instance, if you went into a nursery now looking for, say, Swiss chard, you'd be very pressed to find any chard. However, Swiss chard, if you plant it in the shade here in the summertime, can over-summer and can produce greens throughout. Cilantro, though, is it's going to bolt and flower and attract all sorts of beneficial insects. So it had that going for it.

Michelle:

[17:18] Exactly. And that's what I definitely noticed. So when I took the Master Gardener class and I graduated in 2023, I learned from our fearless leader, Gail, who's a part of the veggie department here, about cilantro and when to grow it. What I should have done back when I did this was to do research beforehand.

Farmer Fred:

[17:38] Doing research, yeah, look it up.

Michelle:

[17:41] Before planting, look it up.

Farmer Fred:

[17:42] But was there anything on the label of the plant, the cilantro plant, that indicated it was a cool season crop?

Michelle:

[17:48] I probably didn't even read that. Probably because I assumed that because it was there that it was going to be a part of my process of preparing to be able to make this salsa.

Farmer Fred:

[17:59] So here's a tip I learned from a professional cilantro grower, about how to have cilantro in the summertime so you can make the salsa. And that's basically to, in a shady spot, get yourself a flat, put a sheet of newspaper inside the flat, put some good seed-starting soil mix on the top, and then buy cilantro seed in bulk, like you're going to make a cover crop. And scatter the seed on that flat with the soil in the shade, keep it watered, and when it gets about an inch or two inches high, what you do is you cut it off.

Michelle:

[18:31] Just like the lettuces. Just like microgreens.

Farmer Fred:

[18:34] Microgreens, yes. And so it's ready probably in a week to 10 days at that size. So when you plan on the day where you're going to be making salsa, you'll have that flat of microgreen cilantro ready to go. Awesome.

Michelle:

[18:46] Great. Thank you. I'll definitely do that.

Farmer Fred:

[18:49] Michelle Cahall, Master Gardener here in Sacramento County. Thanks for your cilantro story.

Michelle:

[18:53] Thank you for your tip.

LESSON LEARNED: PLANTING GARLIC

Farmer Fred:

[18:58] We're getting lessons learned the hard way. Gardeners who had an experience in their previous gardening life and made some sort of faux pas.  And they've never forgotten it,  And they're doing it correctly from then on out. It's a lesson learned the hard way. Master Gardeners have a lot of those stories. We all do. And we're talking with Master Gardener Larry Speth. We're here at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center on a June Open Garden Day. And Larry Speth, Larry, you had a problem with garlic? 

Larry Speth

So garlic is something I've grown for probably the past seven years, and I've always used a small patch. And the nice thing about garlic is it always produces enough bulbs where you can use some of those cloves from the bulbs to seed your garden for next year. This past year, I kind of got overextended in garlic and planted a whole bed of garlic. And the problem with garlic is garlic is a really long season crop. So I had planted my garlic in where I wanted to put my peppers. And the garlic isn't ready to pull yet. So my peppers are waiting in their little four-inch pots drying out. So I learned.

Farmer Fred:

[20:12] So this is ongoing. I've learned to keep your garlic crop small if you have a limited amount of space that you can garden in. And choose a variety of garlic that'll produce multiple cloves as opposed to, say, elephant garlic, which you'll get only one. Not even really a garlic. Yeah, right. Exactly. It's a leek. But yeah, I have had that problem in the past too, where I'm rooting for the garlic and the onions to, “come on, come on, fall over so I can harvest you. I need this bed.” And I finally discovered the way around it is to dedicate one bed on its own separate irrigation line to onion and garlic. Because one of the best ways to get it to mature a little quicker or to get harvestable a little quicker is to turn off the water to that bed about two weeks before you intend to harvest it. and it works. And so this year, I've just finished harvesting all the garlic. It was ready. I'm about to pull the onions out as well. It's ready. And then I can put in a crop of popcorn in that bed. 

Larry Speth

Sounds good. Here, we've used some fabric pots to grow garlic. So my contribution to do garlic for Fair Oaks Horticulture Center is to grow a set of garlic in the pot. And you only get about, I think maybe  20 bulbs.

Farmer Fred:

[21:30] Yeah, if you plant them two inches apart. Well, it depends on the size of the fabric pot, of course. 

Larry Speth

It's slightly bigger than normal, but it's the right size. So at home, I have some fabric pots. So I think my garlic next year is going to go into fabric pots. 

Farmer Fred

Not only garlic, but I'm growing potatoes in the Smart Pots, the fabric pots. And it's an easy way to harvest them too, because all you have to do, you won't leave any behind, which is always a problem with potatoes. And if you grow them in a container, especially a fabric pot, when they're ready, when the tops are dying, you just dump it all out, harvest the potatoes, and put in fresh soil and plant something else. But if you do it in a bed, you're probably going to leave one or two potatoes behind. And then all of a sudden you've got a potato jungle. yes. You have too much. But, yeah, the Smart Pots here are fine, and you've got peppers in them, and, yeah, that would be a good solution for you.

Larry Speth

[22:25] Yes. 

Farmer Fred

Larry Speth, Master Gardener, thanks for your tale of woe. 

Larry Speth

Thank you.

LESSON LEARNED: INTERNET MYTHS

Farmer Fred:

[22:40] We are talking with Master Gardener Colette Armeo, and every gardener has a story about something they did way back when and soon realized that, uh-oh, I shouldn't have done that in the garden and have never forgotten that lesson and are now doing it correctly. Colette, your story involves roses.

Collette:

[22:58] Yes, it does. One year, I had 12 or 13 rose bushes at the time, and they all got multiple mildews. So I went online, I found a blog, this blog said, get milk, preferably organic, and it's got to be full fat organic, dilute it 50-50 with water, foil or spray till it drips off the plants, and then pour the rest on the ground. So I did that. And oh my gosh, you know, 13 gallons of milk, organic and water. Okay. Easy enough to do. Did it work? Absolutely not. I think the mildew enjoyed the bath, you know? Yeah. As a Master Gardener, one of the things we're taught is make sure your sources are credible, that they come from the UC system, other universities, state and federal ag agencies. So lesson learned the hard way. Milk does not work at getting rid of mildew on roses.

Farmer Fred:

[24:08] Was this here in the Sacramento area?

Collette

[24:10] Yes, it was. Citrus Heights.

Farmer Fred:

[24:12] All right. So usually that happens, what happened to you, would be very prevalent in a climate where there's higher humidity. But to have it here, do you think the roses were packed in too tight in an area? Was it too shady of an area?

Collette

[24:26] For some, I think the area was too shady. Some I think I was over-watering. Some I think was in the ground and, you know, just the plants got it. When they're stressed, they are susceptible to stuff that otherwise they wouldn't have a problem with.

Farmer Fred:

[24:43] Another culprit leading to fungal diseases on roses are people who let their lawn sprinklers hit the rose bushes, and they're doing it late in the day. And that can cause more of a breakout.

Collette

[24:56] And that might have been at the time we had a lawn, and we had the old-fashioned big spray sprinklers. So, yep, I probably did everything wrong possible.

Farmer Fred:

[25:06] Still, you did the right thing, though, by telling everybody to look for some veracity when dealing with the internet and tips on how to garden. Make sure that there is a link involved that will take you to a university or some sort of research when somebody says, yeah, cover your roses in milk, that was backed by some study. But I feel sorry for everybody to have to deal with the internet and take gardening advice from it because everybody's making the same mistake.

Collette

[25:36] Yes, definitely. Sometimes there is good information out there, but check your resources.

Farmer Fred:

[25:45] One of the best ways to conduct a good internet search for a garden problem is, whatever the problem is, let's say it is powdery mildew on roses. So you write in “powdery mildew on roses” in the search box and then put in “.edu.” And the first references that are going to come up are going to be from university sources, which generally have peer-reviewed studies if they have it published on the internet. Not always, but most of the time.

Collette

[26:10] I should have done that, I didn't know that.

Farmer Fred:

[26:12] There we go, .edu. It really helps narrow down the searches. Colette Armeo, Master Gardener here in Sacramento County. The dairy industry thanks you.

Collette

[26:21] Yes.

LESSON LEARNED: FLEA CONTROL

Farmer Fred:

[26:26] I guess it's time to talk about my own garden lesson learned the hard way. A lesson that led me to becoming a University of California Master Gardener here in Sacramento County back in 1982. A few years before that, my wife and I purchased our first home. It was a duplex in Sacramento County. We lived in one unit, rented out the other. And, you know, that turned out to be a great way to build up equity in the property, allowing us to refinance at a lower rate a few years later. I would recommend that course of action for anyone looking at making their first home purchase. Start with owning a duplex.

Farmer Fred:

[27:01] But as usual, I digress.

Farmer Fred:

[27:03] Back then, we acquired a rescue dog, Argus the Wonder Dog. He was sort of an unknown terrier mix. He was a good dog. But who, the following spring and summer, was itching up a storm because of fleas. Now, the thinking at the time was to control fleas, you had to shampoo the dog with a product that contained a flea killer. Then you had to vacuum and launder thoroughly the house, especially wherever the dog tended to hang out. And thirdly, you had to kill the fleas in the yard. Back then, there was no internet. There were no cell phones. Back then, you took the advice of knowledgeable people in your life. So we did what the veterinarian told us to do, and also took the advice of a local nurseryman who answered the question, “hey, how do you kill fleas in the yard?” At that time, because nurseries always like to sell stuff, they sold us on using granular Diazinon, a formerly widely used non-selective pesticide. But it was a product that listed fleas on the label as one of the many yard and garden pests that it controlled. By the way, Diazinon was banned for residential use here in California a couple of decades later because Diazinon pollution from runoff led to water quality problems, including the death of aquatic creatures in the Sacramento River watershed, as well as in the San Francisco Bay Area urban creeks. But in the early 1980s, there wasn't much publicity about the dangers of Diazinon,  So I dutifully took the nurseryman's advice and spread those diazinon granules throughout the lawn in the backyard. But in just a few minutes after spreading those diazinon granules on the lawn, something was very different. There was a silence coming from the soil, where before the area was buzzing, almost vibrating with activity. It was a deathly silence. I immediately thought to myself, what the hell did I just do? Who all did I just kill? How many innocent soil-dwelling creatures just died due to my use of a product that is marketed as non-selective, which means it can kill anything that comes in contact with the product? So basically, what I had just done was not unlike blowing up an entire apartment house to do in one terrorist.

Farmer Fred:

[29:23] Well, I thought there must be a better way, a safer way, to kill fleas outdoors. So I went to the library. Remember, there was no Google back then, and the home computer was still in its infancy, and that really had minimal interconnectivity with the outside world, which usually then consisted of text bulletin boards. At the library, I started reading about integrated pest management, controlling pests beginning with the least toxic methods, and that included mechanical, physical, and cultural controls.

Farmer Fred:

[29:52] About that same time, I read a garden article in the local newspaper about a new program being started by the University of California Cooperative Extension. It was a Master Gardener program in Sacramento County. And the purpose was to build a small volunteer army of gardeners with little or a lot of experience with gardening. But they all had to be people who had the willingness and desire to share what they would learn about gardening with others. Part of the Master Gardener training was attending classes, and that would go on for five months or so, held each week, where various gardening experts connected with the University of California would instruct these volunteer gardeners with most of the aspects connected with gardening, including classes about soil, plants, water, and pest control. And again, the emphasis they taught was on integrated pest management techniques. You had to pass a final written test. You had to pledge to volunteer a certain number of hours each year answering garden questions from the public or speak to local garden club groups. And you had to complete a certain number of hours on continuing education projects to learn about the latest garden problems as well as improved gardening techniques that came along.

Farmer Fred:

[31:05] I was accepted into the Master Gardener training program. I passed the final test and then immediately started offering garden tips on local radio because I was a local radio disc jockey at the time, playing country music at the late, great KRAK in Sacramento.

Farmer Fred:

[31:23] Yes, it really was called KRAK. I managed to finagle a taped five-minute gardening segment outside of my regular show, and it would air during the station's early morning, very early morning farm show, which was hosted by Walt Shaw. He said, “sure, kid, go ahead”. And the rest is history. It was a long, strange trip through all sorts of different radio stations and formats, including disc jockeying on country and rock stations, and then jabbering about everything on various news talk stations, which eventually led to dedicated garden shows on the radio every weekend for 25 years or more. I think it's 25. It's probably more. And that led into what you hear now, a podcast or two, every week about gardening. So yes, it was fleas that put me on a very interesting career track. Okay, let's get back to fleas. What is the recommended control now in the 21st century for flea control on your pets?

Farmer Fred:

[32:22] Here's the online advice of the University of California's Ag and Natural Resources IPM page about how to manage fleas. On the pet, you want to use a spot-on or a systemic oral treatment, which you can purchase from veterinarians or online. Gone are the days of bathing the animal using a product that may have contained carbaryl, which is now also off the market. Inside the home, it's basically the same advice as before, but in greater detail. You want to locate heavily infested areas, concentrate efforts on those areas, wash any throw rugs, wash the pet's bedding, vacuum upholstered furniture, remove and vacuum beneath cushions and in the cracks and crevices, vacuum carpets, especially beneath furniture and in areas where fleas might be residing. Use a hand sprayer to treat all carpets with an insecticides that contain an insect growth regulator. Allow carpets to dry and then vacuum a second time to remove any additional fleas that that spray might have caused to emerge. Continue to vacuum for 10 days to two weeks to kill adult fleas that continue to emerge from cocoons. And then, how do you control fleas outside the home? You remember my original question. It's a big difference. The advice from the University of California now, If you treat your pets with spot-on or oral treatments, you'll rarely need to spray outdoors. So there.

Farmer Fred:

[33:55] Garden Basics with Farmer Fred comes out every Friday. Garden Basics is available wherever podcasts are handed out. For more information about the podcast, as well as an accurate transcript of the podcast, visit our website, GardenBasics.net. And thank you so much for listening and your support.