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♪
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.
♪
Have you ever wondered how to attract more birds to your yard?
Today we have a tip to bring in the birds using sound.
Maybe you're thinking of removing all or part of your lawn to save water, or you just want to expand your garden area.
Now's the time to take action and we're going to show you how.
How about bringing an end to common tomato problems such as tomato flower drop or blossom and rot?
We've got the answers.
How much should you water your lawn or garden?
We're going to get into that today too.
We would be myself and America's favorite retired college, Horticultural Professor Debbie Flower.
It's all part of a recent conversation recorded live at the California State Garden Club District meeting in Sacramento.
And we have a lot more tips too.
We have audience questions and comments as well.
We're saving you more time, money and water in your spring gardening efforts.
It's all in today's episode 267, More Garden Tips Live.
We may not be podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon Jungle in suburban purgatory today,
but we are brought to you as always by SmartPots and Dave Wilson Nursery.
Let's go.
We are pleased to be at one of the finest garden facilities in Northern California, the Shepherd Garden Art Center,
here in Sacramento, where many, many garden clubs hold their meetings.
It's an excellent facility.
We've been appearing here in one form or another for decades.
I think one of the first things we did together was here and it was a California Association of Nurse Human.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
Event when I was the president.
Lucky you.
All right.
And you became the newsletter guy.
We are pleased to speak, in my case, for the second time to the Sacramento River Valley Garden Association Garden District.
And Ron, I have to hold this microphone next to you in order for everybody to hear.
Ron Bird is the district director for the Sacramento River Valley District of the California Garden Clubs.
What are the clubs that are represented here?
Well, we have 14 clubs that make up the Sacramento River Valley District.
They're all listed on our website.
We have another club coming in this summer from Rancho Murietta.
But we're part of the state organization, California Garden Clubs Incorporated.
There are, I forget how many districts, but we're the district that represents the four counties around Sacramento.
And we have a website.
It's Sacramento River Valley District.org.
And you can go on the website and find out things we're doing.
Very good.
Ron Bird.
Thank you for that information.
Please give a nice welcome to retired, a matter of fact, let's put it correctly.
America's favorite retired college, horticultural professor, Debbie Flower.
Most recently of American River College, along with Sierra College, Folsom Lake College.
Eldorata Center.
Yeah, I taught around.
Yeah, you've taught around.
The Skills and Business Education Center, which is part of Sac City School District.
Yeah.
And she's a big part of the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred Podcast.
I hope some of you have listened to it.
Yeah.
Okay, good.
If you're asking the question, what's a podcast?
I tell you what, go to the website, Garden Basics.net.
Garden Basics.net.
And you can find the podcast there or wherever you get your podcast.
But for those of you that are podcast diverse, I understand it.
I get it.
Technology is moving faster than all of us.
Yep.
And the best way around is just go to Garden Basics.net.
You can listen to it there and they'll send you a weekly reminder of when the latest podcast is posted.
A recent podcast that Debbie and I did, which is all about cucumbers, which I'd never realized was the number two most popular garden vegetable to be grown in America.
Who would have thunk?
They're great vegetables, you know.
They cool you off in summer.
They're full of vitamins and minerals.
I ate one, a full cocoon cumb every day when I was pregnant.
It was wonderful listening to all of you talk about what your clubs have been doing lately and the different presentations.
I heard a bit of a recurring theme about you've got money burning a hole in your pocket and you can't get kids to take it for scholarships.
That can be a big problem and you're absolutely right.
It is the communication factor that lets people know, oh, there's money for our kids.
Let's go.
I remember the old days you could call Farmer Fred on the radio and do it that way.
Well, it's the 21st century Facebook.
Somebody mentioned that Debbie Arrington appeared at one of their meetings.
Debbie Arrington, a fine ex-garden writer for the Sacramento Bee, now does the Sacramento Digs Gardening newsletter, which has thousands and thousands of readers.
So I would suggest that if you have scholarships available for young students to drop a line to Debbie and again, you can find her newsletter at.
Sacramento Digs Gardening.
If you just do a search for Sacramento Digs Gardening, you will find her newsletter.
It's an excellent daily newsletter all about gardening in our area that you should take advantage of.
And when I was teaching, some garden clubs would contact me.
So American River has a program, Cosumeness has a program.
The biology departments in other schools like Folsom Sierra College no longer has a Hort program.
Part of the students angst about it was they didn't understand how to get a letter of recommendation.
So what do you want in that letter of recommendation?
And I would help them figure that part out.
Usually wrote one myself, but some, especially at the community college level, some students need that guidance.
So going directly to that professor, mailing, emailing, phoning was another way to get that information out.
So basically, find out if you have colleges or high schools with Ag or Hort departments.
Find out who the teacher is, if they have a consultant there, or contact that person directly with that information.
And that would be your best bet for spreading the word.
That and posting on Facebook, if anybody here make TikTok videos, that's a great way to do it.
Alright, I guess not. Okay.
Alright, we are here to talk about spring garden tips, how to save time, money, and water.
This isn't the same conversation we had at the Elk Grove Garden Club back in February
because there's just so many ways you can save time, money, and water in the garden
that we're going to be talking about this till the end of the year and never have to repeat ourselves.
I heard some interesting things from the group here while you were coming in, Debbie.
And one of them had to do with attracting birds to the garden.
One thing I discovered about attracting birds to the garden, it's not only having a wide range of flowers and plants
and evergreen shrubs too for the birds, but also the sound of water.
They love the sound of water. If you have a fountain or a recirculating bird bath, something that makes a lot of gurgling noises,
they will hear that and they will make a bee line, even though they're birds.
They will make a bee line for it and love that water. Bird baths, great way to go.
They make a dripper. I have a dripper on my bird bath and it connects right to a hose bib
and it has a regulator on it, a valve that you can open and close. It's barely open and it just drips once every maybe five seconds.
When it's cold, it slows down and it speeds up because of the change in the diameter of the tubing.
So I have to adjust it once in a while, but they come and I have to have it fenced because I have cats that go outside, cats in the neighborhood.
So I have it fenced so that then they sit on that fence and they actually a lot of the little birds stand on the dripper and bend over and get their water that way.
But also a place for them to perch. Power lines, my property happens to be surrounded by power lines and I was watching as a tip mouse flew into a white iris yesterday and grabbed an insect off of that iris and then went back up to the power lines to eat it.
So they watch and listen, even just putting tall poles in the vegetable garden that they can sit on and they will find the tomato hornworm or whatever it is that they're interested in eating.
Was there?
I'm a bird and I'm worried about mosquitoes. I just tell my animals.
Mosquitoes in a bird bath.
It is something you can worry about. You can see them and I have watched and I haven't found them.
But moving water prevents them from using it as a place to lay their eggs.
If it is stagnant water though, there are dunks available at any nursery gardens center or hardware store that are made out of bacillus thuringiensis which will do in the baby mosquitoes that they lay it in.
So if it is stagnant water, yeah, use the BT dunks. They're called mosquito dunks that can just float in the water and they're harmless to any bird that might come by as well.
Or your dog or your cat or the squirrel or anything that's going to come and get water out of that same container.
The BT is harmless to them, but it will kill the mosquito larva.
I heard another thing here this morning that piqued my interest because this is, we're coming up to high time for kill your lawn season here in the Sacramento area.
In fact, all of northern and central California because we're approaching our hot months and the speaker they had was talking about using cardboard and you can certainly do that.
It's called sheet mulching, but there's another way to do it and it's called soil solarization using clear plastic and you do it during the hottest times of the year.
Usually June, July, August pick a six week period in there. Mo your lawn really short, really, really short.
Water it very, very thoroughly and then spread out sheets of thin plastic.
You can find painters plastic and big rolls at Lowe's or Home Depot, spread it out, secure it along the edges so air can't get beneath it.
Come back six weeks later, you have a dead lawn.
I did this with a 2000 square foot area of Bermuda grass and it worked like a charm.
Bermuda grass never popped up again.
That's pretty amazing.
Make sure you bury those edges, dig a little trench and bury the edges. You have to, what you're trying to do is trap the heat of the sun under that plastic and the water helps absorb more heat than air absorbs.
But you got to keep it in there.
So the edges, you have to dig a little trench and bury all four edges of that plastic.
Again, it works only in the hottest times of the year.
If you want to do it during the cool season, that's where you'd use the cardboard and the sheet mulching.
If you go online, you can find some great references with pictures about soil solarization and sheet mulching to help you at least reduce the size of your lawn, save some money and as far as watering goes, even though we all have plenty of water right now.
We don't know about next year. This is just a pause in the storm, so to speak.
Well, over there, we've already saved them some money.
You all right, good for us.
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Let's get back to our conversation at the California State Garden Club, recorded live.
It's garden tips to save you time, money, and water. Part 2.
♪♪
If you ever go, if Debbie ever comes over to your house and you're out working in the yard, and you say,
Oh Debbie's here. Here, let me put my tools away, and I'll come inside and talk with you.
And you don't clean your tools first?
I might get a little rabid.
Yeah.
I get very upset when I go in my garage and there's a tool there with some mud on it.
My husband hasn't washed it off and dunked it in the sand that has oil in it and then hung it up.
Do you make them sharpen it too?
I don't make them. I'll show them. Look, it really helps.
Yeah, sharpening a shovel is a wonderful thing to do.
It makes, obviously, a sharp tip, but it makes digging so much easier.
It's amazing, the difference.
So I try to keep sharpening tools all around.
I don't know about you. I have pruning shears everywhere.
You know, my car, my kitchen, my garage, my back pocket, usually, they're everywhere.
And a little sharpening tool, I have several of those.
And you can get with pruning hand shears, it's not as easy to get the whole blade with the little...
It's a handheld tool with a V in it, and you can slide the V over the blade, but I never can get into the jaw.
So then you get a single bladed one and you work that.
And be sure to only go at about 20 degrees angle.
People want to sharpen, you know, like this.
And they get... I did it with students, and then they get a great angle, and they show me with a piece of paper,
but that angle is so fine and so shallow, it's going to break off immediately
and you're going to have a dull blade all over again.
So you want to go at a really 20 degree angle, which is very low, and work that.
And you go one direction, and over, and over, and over, and over.
Then you go on the back and flatten that blade, and get all the burrs off of it.
And sharp tools, clean, sharp tools make gardening much easier.
It makes, you know, using your hands, I don't know about you, I have arthritis in my thumbs,
makes pruning much easier to do.
I have discovered that using an old barbecue brush, a grill brush, works wonders at getting stuck on mud off of shovel surfaces.
The hard part is when it gets caught in that curved lip that's usually on the back of the head of a shovel.
And for that, I keep an old screwdriver handy, and I can clean it out with that screwdriver.
And of course, the force of water by using the jet spray on a hose nozzle can help clean off a lot of the mud.
But we want to conserve water, so using it physically, removing the mud physically with another tool is very helpful.
Yeah, but, okay.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Just make it part of your routine, that when you're done gardening for the day, clean your tools.
Another tip that you gave us many years ago on the podcast had to do with how to store your tools,
and you talked about what can happen if you just take your shovel and set it inside the garage on the floor.
Okay, well, I bring my shovel and clean it.
I have a bucket of sand with actually crankcase oil in it, used automobile oil in it.
I dip it in there, take it out, and I have that bucket in a aluminum roasting pan that you would buy.
I bought it at the dollar store, you know, you get five for a dollar, so that I can just let the tool sit there for a minute or a day and drip.
And then I hang the tool.
And the reason I hang it rather than let it sit on the concrete is that water comes up through concrete and then can cause the tip of your shovel to rust.
And that's counterproductive.
So you hang the tools upside down with the handle pointed down?
Yeah, I do it both ways.
Yeah, but as long as it's off the floor.
I do it both ways because I get more, yes, I get more of that fit.
You know, if you have all the shovels up here, fewer fit.
If you have one like this and one like this and one like this and one like this, then they all fit better.
And for your hand pruners, especially, which can really build up a lot of gunk, especially during pruning season, have something handy to clean those off before you put them away when you're done with those.
Clean them off with like a grill brush or something that will take the gunk off.
But if you use something with bleach in it, then rinse your tool afterwards because you don't want that bleach sticking to your tool because that can rust the tool.
Right.
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Let's get back to our conversation with Debbie Flower recorded live at a meeting of the California State Garden Club.
And of course, we had to talk about tomatoes.
How many of you have tomatoes planted already? Good for you.
All right. How many of you have tomato flowers?
Good for you. Me too. How many of you have seen some tomato flowers fall off?
You haven't looked lately.
Maybe when after another 90 degree day or so, you'll start seeing flowers fall off.
And oh my, the nursery will say, well, tell you what, let me sell you this can of spray here to keep the blossoms on.
That way you'll get more tomatoes.
Huh? How does that work?
That works to make money for the nursery.
Oh, yeah. Yes. There are products you can buy, but it's not going to be helpful.
There are things you can do to get more tomatoes off of your tomato plants if you're losing flowers that are not pollinating.
And that can be a temperature related thing.
Tomatoes are self pollinating, although you get better, you get more fruit set if you have them visited by pollinate tours.
And it has to do, the self pollination has to do with the rate of growth of the sex parts inside the flower.
And they have to go by each other just at the right time when the female sigmaic surface is receptive and the male pollen is ripe.
And then they brush against each other and the pollination is done.
If the temperatures are above 90 or below 50, forget it. It's not going to happen.
But you can go out and shake the flowers. Typically pollen is the time to do these things in the morning.
So you get up, grab your cup of coffee or tea or whatever, go outside, shake your flowers.
And that will help some of the pollen drop onto the ripe stigmatic surface.
Even if they're not quite in line, they're not going to be able to do it themselves.
You use an electric toothbrush, right?
You can use an old electric toothbrush or whatever you have handy that vibrates.
And the beauty of tomato plants is they are self pollinating.
That flower is a complete flower. And all you need to do is shake it just a little bit to move that pollen around.
The wind does that. And of course the insects will visit it as well.
Hopefully, if you've got insects in the neighborhood.
Yeah.
If you go to a nursery and you're complaining about the brown bottoms of your tomatoes, why are my tomatoes turning brown or squash or peppers?
Yeah. It's blossom and rotten. They'll say, well, you don't have enough calcium in your soil.
Here's some spray with calcium and I just spray it on your tomatoes.
A, that won't do a dime's worth the difference.
You can't spray a tomato to heal it. That tomato is unhealable.
You can certainly cut off the brown part, chop up the rest and put it in the salad.
It's fine. But that calcium spray is not going to work.
It's not so much a matter of a chemical deficiency.
It's more of a matter of operator error for blossom and rot.
Now, there are some tomato varieties that just naturally get blossom and rot.
Like a lot of the Italian paste tomatoes can end up with blossom and rot.
But generally speaking, it's irregular water.
Right. It's the calcium not getting to the plant when the fruit needs it.
And that would be due to lack of water at that moment.
So having regular water. But then there is such thing as watering too much.
So keeping track of your water, watering deeply and infrequently.
You don't ever want to, there are very few things that you would water daily
in a California summer garden.
Containers, maybe one of them.
But not all containers need water every day.
But the vegetable garden, if it's planted in any field soil,
raised bed that has some depth to it, should not need watering daily.
What watering daily does to any plant is,
it keeps the roots at the surface where it gets hot very quickly,
it gets cold very quickly, it gets wet very quickly, it gets dry very quickly.
It's an incredibly stressful environment for the plant to live in.
So it's better to water a lot infrequently.
Let it go all the way down and then don't water for a few days.
I haven't even turned my irrigation on to my vegetable garden yet.
You're bragging now.
I have planted and watered thoroughly when I planted and walked away.
Be aware that water can be cold.
If you're planting from seed, which you would be doing now,
cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, things like that.
Beans, it's a little early for beans, but you might be putting them in.
If you water frequently, you're just chilling those seeds every day.
And they're going to rot, they're not going to germinate.
So watering and walking away from those seeds will help them to germinate.
And then watering deeply and infrequently will put your roots
of your established plants deeper where it's better insulated,
where the moisture levels are more even, the temperature levels are more even.
So then the question is, how do you know?
I'd get a moisture meter.
A moisture meter is a device, they're very inexpensive,
and they're very simple.
Dial goes wet, dry.
If you use one of those, learn how your soil responds to it.
Put it in when it's dry and see where that meter is.
Maybe mark it with a marker or a piece of tape or something.
And then put it in when, then wet, let it drain and put it in again and see the difference.
It depends a lot on your soil and the amount of nutrition in your soil.
It's actually an electrical response to the minerals that are in your soil.
If you put, and I've done it, moisture meter into distilled water, it will redry.
You have to know where your soil lies in that spectrum.
And then you know what's dry for your soil and what's wet for your soil.
How deep do you want to go? At least six inches.
Yeah, or eight or twelve depends on how deep your soil can go.
And you don't even need a moisture meter really if you, uh, abhor technology.
Get yourself a soil probe.
It's also called a soil auger, which is a chrome, usually a chrome device,
that looks like the letter T with a tube that's maybe 24 inches long,
12 to 24 inches long with a T handle.
And you plunge that into the ground, eight inches, give it a quarter turn,
and then bring it up.
One side of the long end of that T soil probe is open.
So you can see the soil. So you're bringing up soil that's down eight inches, 12 inches.
You can feel it so you can see if it's wet, you can feel if it's wet or not.
And the other way to do it, if you really want to be low tech, is use a long screwdriver.
Yeah, I did that when I taught it.
The Skills and Business Education Center was unstocked in boulevard.
And it's property is the old fairgrounds it was then.
Now it's part of UC Davis's Med Center.
But the students maintained the landscape there.
And I checked. I said, I'm going to check if you're irrigating deeply and infrequently.
And I had a very long shank screwdriver, probably 10 to 12 inches long,
and I would just go out and plunge it into the soil.
It's amazing. It stops when it hits the dry stuff.
Pull it out. You're not doing it well enough.
And if you're in love with the feel of soil, well, then use a trowel.
Dig down eight to 10 inches, bring up a handful of that soil.
Grab that soil out of the trowel and squeeze it.
Is water running down your arm? It's too wet. Yes, exactly.
If it breaks up completely as you try to squeeze it, it's too dry.
If on the other hand, you can make a nice dirt clod from it that stays together.
That's probably the correct amount of moisture to have, field level moisture.
Something to be aware of if you're building a raised bed or have a raised bed,
maybe you bought the house and had the raised bed.
When there's a change in soil texture from, let's say, the raised bed was filled with bagged material,
which is primarily organic material.
And the field soil may be live in Land Park on some nice clay.
The water will stop at the clay.
And so you're only wetting the top portion. It will stop and it'll, if it's a raised bed,
it actually comes out underneath whatever's holding the soil up.
So if you're making a new raised bed, put a layer of,
and you're importing soil, put a layer of what you're importing on top,
maybe two inches, and till it in or turn it in with a shovel.
Do another two inches. So mix, make a transition zone, mix that soil together,
so that you get the water will more easily move into the field soil,
and you'll actually extend the root zone for those plants.
Well, this brings up another very interesting scenic bypass that has to do
with container gardening. And there are people who will say,
well, put a layer of gravel at the bottom of your containers.
That will improve drainage or put styrofoam in there and only use half as much dirt.
That way you save money on the soil. In both cases, there are drainage issues.
There are drainage issues. Yes. The technique is used in
commercial interior scaping. So interior scaping is growing plants indoors.
At the mall, at the local office building, at the bank, whatever.
And they'll bring in big beautiful containers, but the plant only needs,
maybe they're three feet deep. The plant only needs at most a foot of root zone.
And they do fill the bottom with something else.
Open, used like soda bottles, two
liter bottles with the lids on, so they stay nice and firm.
But they're leaving enough soil to have a good root zone.
When you're planting into a container and you want the plant to have the entire
container to grow roots, you put nothing in the bottom.
You wet your soil before you put it in and then it won't come out the holes.
Or very little will come out the holes as you're planting it up. Because the reason is you just
shorten the root zone. When the water comes down and
reaches that change in texture, whether it's styrofoam or it's rocks or
it's whatever it is, the water stops. And it builds up
and it saturates what's above it. And it will only enter that
lower area when you add the additional, the whole thing is saturated.
There's no air in it whatsoever. You add the next drop of water and it goes through
it'll push a drop of water into that whatever you put below.
But it stays saturated and roots need water and air to grow.
So that's a bad thing for the roots. Now if you are still concerned about dirt
coming out of the bottom of the container, like Debbie says, pre-moistening the soil
before you add it to your pot is a great idea. I think I have a bucket
full of a good new house plant soil full of water
and the soil setting at home waiting for me to come home and to put it into
a big plant container that has drain holes so I can let it drain
and then I can use that very moist soil to repot
an interior plant in a slightly bigger pot. But
I know for sure that that soil is wet. Because a lot of commercial soils have
peat moss in it and peat moss tends to repel water.
Or forest products. You can flip over any bag of material and by law it has to say
derived from and it'll tell you
manure, cow products, whatever forest products
and I always like to look for the one that's broken and see
what it looks like. See what it looks like, handle it, right?
But they're very difficult to wet. I don't do what Fred does to wet. I use kitty litter
boxes as my potting boxes. Clean ones.
Yes, the cats don't use them. And put the media in there
and I always add a rock component. Peat moss, any organic matter,
as it breaks down it gets closer and closer and closer together.
The particles get smaller and smaller. So the air spaces and water spaces
between get smaller and smaller and smaller over time. So I put in,
I like pumice. You can only buy it in little bags
or you can get a delivery from a delivery service if you want to pile a pumice in your house.
And then, or perlite, which I'm not a fan of very much, and vermiculite, which is
expanded mica. Vermiculite's fine. You can buy the perlite and vermiculite in giant bags.
But I mix in at least one third of the rock component. One of those things are a mix of those things.
And two thirds of the stuff that comes out of the bag.
They say that they have some in the bag and they do. You know, you'll find a piece of pumice or a piece of perlite.
But that helps to keep the media open and keep the poor spaces open and allows the water to travel through much better, much more easily.
Perlite is very good for maintaining those air pockets, but explain your aversion to perlite.
Two things. One is it's very irritating to the respiratory system.
I worked with it a lot with students. We did use it in, especially seed
starting mixes. We made our media on the ground.
You know, a bale of peat moss and three bags of vermiculite and three bags of perlite or whatever.
A one-to-one-to-one mix of those things, peat perlite vermiculite is a classic horticultural mix.
And we use shovels and turned it. And if you breathe in the dust of perlite, it is very, very irritating.
And it isn't just, okay, I'm better now. It's the next day too. You still feel it.
So if you use perlite, wet it down before you start pouring it or have a second person there spray in it as you pour it to keep that dust out of your respiratory system or wear your mask, you know? We all have masks.
We all have masks.
We have plenty of masks and hand cleaner around.
All right. And the other is when you put it in the ground with, if this is a plant that's going into the ground or even if it's a plant in the house and you have it in a pot, it appears to rise to the surface and it is white.
And it doesn't arise to the surface. It's just that all the soil particles around it wash away.
And so you get this white surface and it's just not pretty.
And eventually outdoors, it gets sort of dirty looking and died and it sort of disappears into the environment. But that's my second reason.
I need to erase your own. I'm so young to do the perlite or perlite.
If you're making your own, you can look up a Cornell mix and that's the classic mix for container media.
And it's pete perlite vermiculite and it's one to one to one.
One third, one third, one third.
There's really a lot of rock in that media. And then you need a little bit of lime to counter the acidity of the peat moss.
And you usually use a wetting agent because peat moss is very difficult to wet.
I in the kitty box will use my hand and just work it, work it, work it.
Warm water, maybe a drop of dish soap, soap, not detergent to help do the spreader.
But you don't have to.
How would you adjust that for a second?
Well, I was going to bring that up is that every plant is a little bit different and their soil requirements are a little bit different.
In the case of succulents, you probably would want that pumice.
Right. And you, pumice comes in different sizes. You can get bigger pumice.
And maybe sand too.
Explain the sand that you need for plants as opposed to the sand box outside.
Sand comes in a whole range of sizes. And I, I, I, when teaching, I had a jar that I filled with all kind of pennies, little, little marbles, big marbles, ping pong balls, wiffle balls, all kinds of things.
And shake it up and see how they mix together. And what happens is the pennies and the little balls fill the spaces between the big balls.
So a sand will do that though. The big sand particles will be separated from each other, but the spaces between them will be filled with the smaller sand particles and the tinier sand particles.
Sand silt and clair define strictly by their size, their particle size.
But sand has the widest range within its own class.
And so that is not super helpful if you're trying to open up air spaces in media.
So you buy, you can buy builder sand or horticultural sand. It has been sized to be just the big stuff.
And then it's also been rinsed because sand typically, not always, but typically occurs where there's been salt water.
And so it needs to be rinsed. You don't want that salt in it. So that that's what you look for in sand.
And other plants have different requirements. I'm thinking about blueberries, which I think were about two or three weeks from beginning the harvest of blueberries.
And if you're going to plant blueberries, they like a really acidic mix. They like a pH around 5.5, which is highly acidic.
So if you're filling a water trough or whatever container of half barrel with soil, you want it to be like one third of pathway bark, the small bark.
One third of an RAC soil, what's RAC? Rotodendron azalea chamelea soil because that has an acid base.
And then probably one third petemos or quar. But petemos is lower pH than quar.
Right, quar kind of ranges, quars relatively new to the industry. And it ranges in pH. Initially it came, quar is the outside stuff, brown stuff that comes off a coconut.
So quar originates at saltwater beaches. And if it is not rinsed, the pH can be very high. It can be 9.
The industry has gotten better about prepping it. And quar pellets, is it? Yeah, it has to be pre-wet. Like overnight pre-wet.
So you got to plan ahead, which kind of isn't my thing.
Well, that's important too for removing the salt from it as well. If there's salt in it, right. And so if you want to check that, you can get a pH meter and check your pH as well, the pH of the water, to see if you've got quar that's been rinsed.
Or buy it in a bag that sells you, it's been rinsed. If you look on the back of any bag soil product for specialty plants, there's palm soil, there's succulent soil, there's vegetable soil.
And look at the ingredients. And you look at those, and you say, I could make this at home.
This cactus and succulent soil has typically some rock, larger rocks in it.
And a good quality compost, a vegetable derived compost is also good. So if you have a compost pile or a worm bin, that's an important one-third of whatever soil mix you might be using.
They experienced gardeners have all learned one big lesson the hard way. Thin out your vegetables and fruit while they're still young this time of year using the recommended spacing.
For instance, have you ever been reluctant to snip off five of those six zucchini or pumpkin seedlings that you planted in a circle? And what happened later in the year?
You had a zucchini jungle or a primeval forest of pumpkins. They were crowded plants that were more susceptible to pests and diseases, and you probably had way too many zucchini, as you probably surmised.
The same is true for the unthinned fruits on your peach, nectarine, apple pear or persimmon trees. The end result? Smaller fruit, diseased fruit, falling fruit, and the high possibility of broken branches, the result of way too much fruit on those poor, sagging branches.
Now's the time to get to snipping for a better quality harvest. We talk about that and tell you how. It's in the latest Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast entitled Thin Your Fruits and Vegetables Now.
The newsletter is currently available and it's free. If you're already a newsletter subscriber, it's probably in your email waiting for you right now.
Or you can start a subscription. It's free. Find the link to the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast in today's show notes or at Substack. Or you can sign up at the newsletter link at our homepage, Garden Basics.net.
And we continue our conversation with Debbie Flower at a recent meeting of the California State Garden Club with tips for watering your lawn.
Don't water your lawn every day. Honestly, if you think you have to water your lawn every day, you've got a bigger problem.
It's sort of like the three left turn lanes going from Fair Oaks Boulevard to Wat Avenue. Why do you need three left turn lanes? It's because there's a lack of bridges over the American River.
That's why there's three left turn lanes there. And if you have water pouring off your lawn onto the sidewalk or the gutter because you're watering every day and you think, well, it's not getting the water, so I have to turn it on again and again.
Re-think your sprinkler system.
Right. I was just thinking my son was learning to drive and he, a manual transmission car and he stalled out at that intersection.
And through three lights during rush hour, the police showed up. That's what that brought to mind.
One thing you can do though, if you have a problem with water runoff of your lawn is to switch to a lower flow sprinkler head.
Hunter has the MP rotators which put out thin streams of water. It's very gradual. In fact, some cities even recognize it as an acceptable substitute that's acceptable as a drip irrigation system.
It's water conservation. It comes out so slowly it allows the water time to percolate into the soil.
The other is to use your existing system but do surge irrigation. So turn it on, note the time, watch until it starts to run off, then note the time.
Let's say it ran five minutes, then you take five minutes off and then you do it again and take five minutes off and do it again until you've got an inch a week as a typical lawn irrigation.
So you may have to have some cans out there to measure it. But on and off, on and off, on and off during one application session, we'll get more water on and it'll go deeper.
That's a very good idea and one way to test how efficiently your sprinklers are working is to take a bunch of same size cans like cat food cans, dog food cans, tuna cans, whatever, and spread out about six around each sprinkler head at different distances from the sprinkler head.
And turn on your water for 15 minutes and then measure the amount of water in each can. That total should not be different by 25% or more. They should be within that parameter within 25% of each of the amount of water in each of those cans.
And if you don't, then you need to rethink your sprinkler system or maybe cut back that shrub that's blocking a sprinkler head or fix the one that's broken and looks like old faithful.
Thank you so much for having us here. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
May is tomato planting month for most of the nation. Maybe you've had problems growing tomatoes in the past. Or maybe you're fairly new at planting, raising, and harvesting America's favorite backyard vegetable, the tomato.
In today's flashback episode recommendation, Don, sure, he's a true tomato head and he also runs Redwood Barn Nursery in Davis, California. He has a list of the easiest tomatoes to grow, along with good advice to make sure that they prosper in your garden.
Even if you're planning a long road trip or two this summer, it's a flashback episode worth exploring this time of year, the easiest tomatoes to grow. It's Episode 192 originally aired back in May of 2022. Look it up in the podcast player of your choice or click on the link in today's show notes or at our homepage, Garden Basics.net.
The Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast comes out once a week on Fridays, plus the newsletter podcast that comes with the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter continues and that will also be released on Fridays. Both are free and they're brought to you by SmartPods and Dave Wilson Nursery.
The Garden Basics podcast is available wherever podcasts are handed out and that includes our homepage, Garden Basics.net. And that's where you can also sign up for the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter and podcast. That's Garden Basics.net. Or you can use the links in today's show notes. And thank you so much for listening.
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