 a celebration of learning. Let's have fun tonight. And I think let's talk about soil. I think soil is a key to a garden. In my opinion, if you want to have a quality home, you've got to build it on a quality foundation. If you want a quality yard and garden, you've got to have a quality soil. And so our first figure is going to teach us how to understand our soil and how to improve it. So let's welcome Dave Franson. Okay, Mr. Microphone, we're good? All right, we're good. So Tom took the words right out of my mouth. So we talked about how to make this stuff. So also the foundation. And so here we go. I can't wait to get my hands in the soil. But if I try to get them in the soil right now, I think I break a finger because it's really, really hard out there still. So I want to talk about the basics. And then within the state, we have a number of problem soils. And so I want to give you some ideas about how to deal with those. The best reference, most of you have, or you can certainly download it, is this circular H1325, which Ron Smith and I put together here a few years ago, evaluating, preparing and amending. Mr. Microphone is adjusting me. Okay, thank you. All right, so that's the one. That's the best reference that we have. It's very late. It was just written not too many years ago and still relevant. So this is what a good garden soil needs to do. It needs to be able to be firm enough so it holds the plant up and needs the ability to hold water, but it can't hold too much. It has to have drainage. And this is kind of a conundrum for people. It has to have whole water, but then it needs to drain. How does that work? Well, soils can do that if you put them together correctly. And then also, people don't think about this either, is that the roots need air. There needs to be air exchange. So that's one of the reasons that trees suffer underneath concrete because there's not much air exchange. So we build a soil in order to have all those things happen. Firm enough to hold a plant up, needs to be able to supply water so you don't have to drip, irrigate every second of every day. Good drainage so that you don't have ponding and you don't have problems with root rocks and these kind of things. And then the ability to change air because the roots have to breathe in order for the plants to grow, take up nutrients, everything they need to do. Soil is made up of minerals of all kinds. But it's also made up of organic material. This is particularly important in gardens as well. And then the air, there has to be pore space, which is why drainage is important. It has to have water, which is why the water holding capacity of the soil is important. So these are the minerals and they're sized. Soil sign is for a very long time and I think these are pretty intuitive for you. The sand, which is the gritty stuff that you feel when you feel your soil. The silt is kind of silky and it's an intermediate size. And then the clays are very, very, very small particles. And it gives us sticky quality to the soil, which people in Grand Forks and Waffedon and Fargo have learned to love so well. So this is USDA's textural triangle. It's the only math that you're required to do, I think, today. And just to give you an idea of when people talk about clay, they're really talking about a category of soils that have high amounts of clay, low amounts of sand, low amounts of silt. And this line over here is the percent sands from zero to a hundred percent. And then the clay goes from zero to a hundred percent. And then the silt goes from zero to a hundred percent. Kind of a clever thing that soil conservation service put together, I think, in the thirties. People think that if a soil is a third clay and a third silt and a third sand, that it's a lawn, but it's really not. It's a clay lawn that's more sticky than that. The dominant soil in our Dakota texture and our surface, once you get outside the valley, is more sand than anything with maybe some more than a neighborhood of 20 percent clay, more or less. And maybe some more in the neighborhood of maybe 30, 40 percent silt, something like that. So it's not a third of a third of a third. So most of the soils we have in this state are going to be in this category in here. They lie in here. Some of our soils are glacial or they're residual rocks, West River. But they have those characteristics. But they're soils in all of those categories in the state, and some of them might be in your backyard. So the easiest soil to work with, the one that's going to give you the least trouble, and the one if you're making soil, you kind of want to strive to get there. It is something like a loam to a sandy loam, the sandy loam kind of on a loamy side. It has really good drainage characteristics. It's a loam, soil, a true loam. When you put a little bit of water in it and you knead it with your hands, it feels like breaddill. It has that same consistency and resistance as breaddill. It's really hard to work, then you're probably way on the clay side. And if it feels really, really, really gritty, then you're on the sandy loam loamy sand type side. So that's kind of how you figure out what you do. So those are the minerals, and you can do a few things with the minerals. I'll show you how to do that later on. But the part that's most important, I think, is the organic side, the organic amendments that you put in. Organic, meaning residues, things that are broken down, compost, fattening, peat moss, all those kind of things. Soil is a biological creation, and NASA didn't understand that when they did the moon missions. And they brought moon rocks back to Earth, and they ground them up, and they thought to try to anticipate colonizing the moon. And so they took the moon rocks, ground them up into particle sizes that mimic soil, and they added water to it, and it makes the nicest bricks that you've ever seen. Because it doesn't have any biology at all. You know, these soils that we have all around the Earth are not just physical breaking down the rocks to low rocks. It's also the biology, the mosses and the plants and the animals that are alive within that that make the soil alive. And so you have to make your garden alive, too, by putting things in it that very small things and larger things can feed. Not all the creepy crawly things that crawl around the ground are bad things. You'll probably hear in this series of presentations about some pests. But the huge majority of everything alive in the soil is a helpful thing. And the soil is their home, and so you feed them. And as a result of feeding them, they make intermediate organic compounds that release nutrients over time. They help to grade nutrients and make them available over a long period of time. So soils are alive, and so help them out the best you can. So these are some organic inputs to consider. One is if you have some chickens around or if you have some cows around or something, you can use fresh manure. But it's the highest in nitrogen, but that's a good thing. And it's not such a good thing because it's easy to get the rate high enough that the fresh manure contains free ammonia. And ammonia is harmful to many things. If it's in close proximity, it's really easy to get things hot. People call it hot because the plants kind of look like they're fried. The chicken manure is a really good example. You put too much chicken manure on something, and the ammonia within it is overwhelming, and it can injure seeds and seedlings. So it's not my first choice. It's best for garden to put that into compost pile, for example, and let it age and transform over time. And we have a nice composting part of your handouts that you can go through and read that. So compost in the new room, compost in general. I have a little compost bucket in the backyard, and many of you do too. Anything organic out of the kitchen, especially in the spring and the summer, when it's not frozen and it runs all over the place, you don't want to do that. But any time that it's fit, you can put it out into a structured compost pile. And the organisms within it degrade it. And so after, I don't know, six months or so, the stuff in the bottom really is soil. It acts like soil. It looks like soil. It's very biologically active. So that's a really good source of biology that helps your soil become a very healthy soil. This is another amendment that I use a lot. Ron Smith brought to put me onto this a number of years ago. It's Fagin peat moss. It's a renewable resource. At least I argue what it is. It has excellent water-holding capacity. It doesn't have a lot of nutrient value, but that's not really what you're going for here. It aids aeration. It really doesn't smell. You know, you're not going to have the neighbors upset because you put a bag of peat moss out there because it just doesn't smell. It's a good source of biology. It decomposes over time. You don't have to refresh it because the volume of your bed will go down over time when that rocks. But this is a really good additive, especially in our high-clay soil. So this is what a peat bog looks like. There are peat bogs in Wisconsin. There's a lot of peat bogs in Canada. I invite you to go online. Some of the companies do this, but it's farmed just like we farm. It'll put nutrients and pesticides and all that stuff in it. They drain the land for a period of time. They take about six inches of peat moss off the top, and then they reflutter after they get done, and then leave it until the peat moss gets back up, and then they go in and farm again. It's a long-term process, renewable resource. So that's what I like to use. Some people out there, and you'll find that when you go doing the search shows, they insist that these peat bogs are not renewable resources. I don't know if I did that for her, but if you're on that mind that you don't think it's a renewable resource, I'm not going to die on that hill. But there is an alternative. This is clear. I don't know how available it is locally, but it's shredded coconut shells, and it has the same kinds of properties as peat moss, probably way more expensive. But that's a possibility if you want to work with something that's like peat moss and renewable comes from palm trees. So that's an alternative. So that's kind of the basics of soils, and I'm probably about halfway through my presentation now. So now I want to talk about some problem soils, and the biggest problem of soils I know of are the really high-clay soils that we have in the Red River Valley. There's also the same kinds of soils up near Botno, and they're scattered around, and where your house says you may or may not have these as you go around the state. Really high-clay, 45% or more clay, and foundations, because of the nature of our clays, foundations have to be thicker. You know, we have two kinds of concrete in the Red River Valley. We have concrete that's cracked and concrete that hasn't cracked yet. And so, you know, that's the clay that does this thing. So these things have really nice characteristics. It can draw water through capillary action from deep depths up to the surface. So in a drought, our soils are very protected, but in wet conditions, it's really horrible, and so there are many words that describe it. So one of the ways in order to deal with that is to build raised beds, not to farm right on the floor of the soil, but to build some structures, and they don't have to be necessarily high, although some could be, it's completely up to you. But a raised bed strategy might be something that you consider, and Todd is going to follow me. We'll talk about this a little bit further, but I'm going to talk about it from the soil aspect, I think. So here's a couple I just peel off the net, and there are some good parts of that, and some parts that I'm not really crazy about. One is, you know, the really thick boards, these are, you know, all of them are going to cost a little bit of money to do. But there's not too many places in that soil for it to drain out. If you have, let's just assume that maybe the soil underneath that raised bed is a sandy lawn or a lummy sand, which it very well could be, then you're going to get natural drainage into the soil. But consider a raised bed that's in the Red River Valley. So the raised beds are going to be at a certain height, and if you water it and you don't have places for it to drain below the surface, then it's going to get hung up, and you're going to get, you know, kind of see the ponding, but the ponding will be within the raised bed itself because it can't enter into the original soil nearly as fast. And so that's just something to think about. And so these are mine. These are all the dreams of my wife, and there's a couple of them in the picture, and this will happen when we put one in on the other side, and so we put a porous panel across it to make that trellis for the cucumbers. But see, it's made out of those landscaping timbers, which seem to get smaller every year. So one of these years I'm just going to pick up the load, and it's going to be a little length and long. But for now, anyway, they're like three or four inches or so wide, and a couple of three inches or so high, and I put them together like Lincoln Logs because I just, you know, I love that when I was a kid, and then I'm stabilizing by putting some metal rods in the corner and driving them into the ground. So these are about 30 inches tall, which is really nice, because you don't have to bend over too much in order to hard to go. And then you can make up the soil within them however you want to make to them. So usually what I do in the clay soil is I dig down maybe about close to a foot, and I fluff up that original clay. And then I add a play sand to it from bags from some place and mix that up, and then I put some stagnant peat moss in it to make the total soil. And the soil is, when I know I've made the right soil, I can stick my arm in the soil up to my elbows, and I can work the soil with my hand. If it's like that, I know I have a good soil. So that's what I try to strive for. So you can grow anything in here. Here's some spinach. You know, just to let you salivate for a little bit about what things will look like in about two months. But there's some spinach in there and some lettuce in there. We grow tomatoes in there, all kinds of herbs, anything we want to grow in there, we can grow in there. So it's just a very, very nice soil. And we don't have to bend over too much. But you don't have to make them high. You can make them low, depends on where you are. But in the Red River Valley, I would suggest maybe making them high would be better than making them low. So this is before the cucumbers came in. You can see one in the background here in the back. Here's another raised bed. I've got one, two, three, four. The fourth one's under construction, and I have a raised bed about maybe two feet high by 16 feet long. It's strawberries in it. Now next to the fence, because of course the soil will rot the fence, so I have boards. And then the raised bed goes up against that. I have strawberries back in there. But these are really nice. They hold water really nicely because of the stagnant peat moss. The drainage is excellent because it's off the ground, it's out of play, and our gardening experiences have become hugely better since we started this strategy. So then, if you have a smaller place, or if you have with peppers, if you ever read the description about peppers and what they need, one of the things they really need is warm soil. Never wonder why they grow them in New Mexico. In Mexico, it's because it's hot. They love hot. And so one way to make things hot is to grow them in these self-watering containers. And these didn't start off to be self-watering containers. They started out to be about 10 gallon or so. I don't even know what they call them, but totes or something, 10 gallon totes, they come with a lid. And the lid is nicer. They're all built like this, where they kind of come in at the side, just a little bit about halfway. And so you can cut off the lid, and then that lid comes down right about halfway. And it just sets in there. And you can put some PVC pipe and drill some holes and wire it onto the bottom of the self-water container, fill it with soil, put some starter fertilizer in if you want. Peppers just love the idea. We have pepper trees. They get high feet tall. We have to take them off. We get hundreds of peppers off these things. They're just amazing. So this is taking the lid off. At the top, the layer will show them how to do that. If you go online and do self-watering containers, you'll eventually come up with the design for this thing. So that my wife found this on the internet, and so that's what we use. And then at the intersection where the lid comes down, you drill a little bit of hole here, and that allows for the drainage. And then this is the stand pipe that goes all the way down through the partition to the bottom, and it's cut at an angle at the bottom so it doesn't plug. And that's where you fill. So you just take a watering can and fill the rain barrels. So we take the rain barrel water and we fill up the bottom of these things until it starts coming off the bottom. And that's enough water to hold it for nearly a week, even in the hot of summer. So it's wonderful. Tomatoes like it a lot. Peppers love it more than anything else. They just go crazy. So, self-watering containers. And the soil I put in there is just a high quality soil that you would get from a garden supply store. So this is my mix. It's what I do when I make a raised bed in Fargo. I take about a third of the volume as the high-clay original soil. I take about a third of the volume of kids play sand that you can get in a bag, and about a third of the volume is sphagnum peat moss and then has somebody very energetic mixed that all up. And it's a job, but once you mix it up, it's mixed up. The peat moss, as you go through years, you'll find that your soil will settle. And so you'll have to replenish the peat moss maybe a little bit every year to get it to the original height of where the soil was. And then mix that thoroughly before you go and plant or replant whatever you do. So how about fertilizer? Organic, inorganic. I don't really care. I don't think the plants care. I consider it a personal choice. It's completely up to you what you do. One of the things that you do need to know is that all fertilizer is sold organic or not organic have to have a guaranteed analysis. What they say is in the bag needs to be on the bag. And so they've certified that in some manner, probably in the state that there was manufactured. So here's one that you would use maybe for a garden. That's 10, 10, 10. That means the first number is always the nitrogen. The second number is always the phosphate. And the third one is always the potassium, the potash. And then if it contains sulfur or zinc or anything else of any quality, those nutrients appear afterward. So in North Dakota for like our field crops, there are a few micronutrients that we really need because even though the wind blew a lot of our soil away from the 30s to present, there's still enough nutrition there that we don't have to add a lot of other stuff. But a garden isn't a field crop. It's a very intensive, small-scale agriculture. So we're growing very exotic things. We were getting seeds from everywhere and trying to push, let's try celery this year. Let's try this or let's try that. And so I think you have to be a little bit more proactive with what kinds of fertilizers that you use and what kind of amendments to try to cover all the bases for the odd things that you really don't know the nutrition of. And so something like a multi-nutrient fertilizer, I'm not a miracle-goal salesman, it's something like that that has a whole suite of nutrients in it and not any of high enough percentage that would burn or hurt the crop. Those might fill in the gaps that normal nitrogen phosphate powders 10-10-10 might. So oftentimes, you know, some foliar sprays, you read a garden catalog and spray this, you spray that. And I've been following them all that useful and with the exception of the calcium amendments for the blossom and rot, my colleague Jay Goose in the soils department uses this garden all the time. He mixes up just a dilute solution, the gypsum, which is calcium sulfate. And then when the young fruits are forming, he'll spray that every few days on the plant. It doesn't burn them or anything, but the reason that you get blossom and rot is that calcium moves up through the plant through the transpiration stream. It moves as the water flows through the leaves and out into the air, pulls the calcium with it. If you have humid days or if it's very hot, for example, and you don't have a lot of water, and the plants are shutting down, and the afternoon there's not a lot of water moving through it, calcium is especially important for these big fruits that nature really never intended. And so in order for those skins to form, there has to be a lot of time supplemental calcium in order to make those things whole. So that's a foliar spray, I think, that would be warranted if you're growing tomatoes, because I think all of us have experienced this at one time or another, and the calcium might help. So one other thing I want to talk about is that nature not always is friendly. And so I just want to have a heads up. There's an area of the state from if you draw a triangle with the point down the devil's lake and then going up through the counties up to the Canadian border through Valhalla on the western side through Township. There's a triangle there, and those of you that have gardened for a while know this, that if you take a shovel full of soil, they always get these little gray rocks in it or little pieces of this fine gray rock that's in it, that's shale, that 65 million year old shale when the state used to be an agency bed. And that's okay, because there's good things about that, but there's not so good things about it. It contains quite a bit of cadmium. And so that region up there is kind of susceptible to cadmium accumulation. And so if you're growing things like leafy vegetables, not the fruits, because the cadmium doesn't get in the fruit, but it does get in the leafy vegetables with the spinach, for example, the broccoli cabbage, similar leafy vegetables. If you have that, if you're growing that, probably your best thing to do would be to import your soil into a raised bed, put your broccoli and that kind of stuff in there and grow your corn, grow your tomatoes, grow your other things in your native soil, and you're going to be fine. But just to be on the safe side, I just want to give you a heads up that this is out there. And that certain plants accumulate it. I don't know if they're true or not, but you're not going to fall over from cadmium poisoning, but some people would want to watch that a little bit. I probably would if I lived up there. So with that, questions? All right. Now, the United States of people across the state is asking questions to type them in, and we've got to already give you one start. And if you can choose the questions as I said, I would like to know. The first question is, what is a good manure for compost? And is this person typically connected with a cobblestone or a manningy course? OK, so the question was, what kind of manure is best for composting? And I would say that any manure is best for composting. Just make sure you compost it. The most common one, of course, in the state is the kale manure. And that would make a good composted manure, but the worst manure would be composted manure as well. So I think any manure left in that compost state would be excellent. OK. And how about using fresh manure to try to create a week of waste when you use manure in the garden? Let's say that it was fit enough to kind of tiptoe around the garden here in about two weeks. It's still two, three weeks before you're going to put out anything serious in the garden. Put the manure out there, let it settle for a little bit. But I still wouldn't use high rates because ammonia persists for some time. But within the application, make sure the neighbors are OK with it. And then working in as soon as you can, that's probably the way to do it. The way not to do it certainly would not be, let's say, a lot of salt for tomatoes off when you decide to chuck some fresh manure into the garden. I don't think that would do that. OK. Another question, and keep repeating the question for the audience. How about they're fastened by your peppers? How many of the peppers do you put in toast? And how about branch holes? Or other types of PDC types are used for watering? Yeah, so the question was, people are fascinated with the peppers. And I continue to be fascinated by my peppers also. So you're not alone. It is kind of a miracle. We put two pepper plants, one on each side. We put the layer of soil over the partition. We put about half of it down. And then we put just a narrow band of 10, 10, 10. And then we put more soil. And then we put the peppers in. So they're separated from the starter fertilizer by probably about three inches or so. You don't want to put them right in the fertilizer. And then the drainage hole is the drainage hole. So the water wicks up through the soil. Make sure the soil is padded down into it when you get ready to water. And I usually try to just water from the top the first time just to make sure everything is moist and all the capillary holes are connected. And then from then on, it just waters through the bottom. The standpipe hole is where you water it. And it waters from the bottom. You think about that. It waters from the bottom, not the top. And then the drainage hole you put in the side right at the place where the partition is between the water and the soil. That's your drainage. So the saturated portion of that pot is the hole. That's as high as that water will ever get. So you don't have the ponding issues or anything like that. So again, I invite them to go online. I bet they'll find the plans. And if not, I'll have my wife draw up my hand. Because this is her idea anyway. And we can share them that way. But I think you can find them online. I'm pretty sure you can. Do you have a question? What was your opinion on using municipal compost? OK, so municipal compost. Most of that is usually grass copings that have come down. Hopefully they're not like more heads that are on fire. But if they're managed well, a good compost, especially something that big. If you have big compost, you have to turn it once in a while. You need to keep the air in there. You want the heat, but you don't want it too hot. I think we've had the fire department out to my bosses, a radiant farm once a week for about three weeks until they figured out that they really had to kind of turn that once in a while. And so, you know, you don't want to fire. But the heat is important because it kills weed seeds and things like that. So if the municipal compost is handled correctly and the end product is nice and friable and smells good, then I wouldn't have any trouble using that at all. OK, next question. You briefly commented on soil acidity. Yeah, so soil acidity. There's no range of soil pHs. pH is a measure of whether a soil is acid or whether it's alkaline. So the pHs I run into in the state range from 4.5, which is very acid, to 8.3, which is very, very alkaline. So if possible, the really acid really isn't very good. And so the application of a very fine line of stone to that would be a very good thing. Try to get the pH somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 to 7 is ideal, I think. People that have pHs above 7, which would include many areas in the state, there's no real good or necessary reason for you to move it down. A lot of the plants that we grow are fairly resistant to the pH. If you find that some variety of tomato or a pH of, say, 8.1 just turns yellow in between the veins, it's probably not a variety that you want to put out next year. That's something that's probably tying up the iron in it. I don't know how common that is, but if that does happen, then that's a problem, so you change. The easiest way to deal with it is change varieties. You can mess around and try to put an iron supplement on it. Some of the iron supplements work and others don't. There's products like ironite that contain 22,000 ppm of arsenic. It's probably not something you'd want to use. There's iron chelates that you can use. If you're at the point of no return and see to do something or not have tomatoes, then maybe some iron chelate would be a good plan. But then make a note of that variety and use something that's a little bit more tolerant to the pH next year. Another question about your raised bed. I'm interested about, if you add peat moss every year, would you mix it in your entire bed or just top off the bed? The question was with the peat moss and the raised beds, do I have to do that every year? The answer is yes, I pretty much have to do that every year. I just don't put the peat moss on the top because then you make this bed of, it's like a sponge. And so you don't get water where you need to. So your beds are already to the consistency where they're fairly easy to work up. And so you only need a shovel. If you like getting your hands dirty, just go in there and start mixing stuff around and mix it up to maybe a foot and a half depth or so. And that's how I'll do it. That's how I do it. Another question, if you comment on, if it was sodium, this person has water very high in sodium to avoid using it. Yeah, so the answer, the question was how about sodium, the water that they would use to irrigate is high in sodium. I would strongly recommend that they don't do that, that they don't use that. I would put rain barrels wherever I could put a rain barrel. And I would use the rain barrel water instead of the sodium water. Sodium is really, really harmful for soils. Normal water, even with some hardness, people call it, has some calcium in it. But calcium's not all that bad. It structures the clays, and so it makes fracture planes. The clays are stacked. And they crack easily. Roots can get down below them easily. What sodium does is it randomizes. It causes a randomization of the clays. They don't want to stick together anymore. And so they're sliding like my desk. I've got papers scattered all the way across my desk. And I might spill a cup of coffee to take a week to get down to the desk, right? So that's a sodium soil. So what you want is a very nice early desk. Keep telling myself that. But it makes a great illustration for this class. So the sodium is just a very bad thing. We have soils that farmers have to deal with it. If you have sodium in your water, you definitely don't want to water with that. So can you use your tap water? I mean, you've got an outside-facing salt, and it has been four weeks without rain. You had a rain barrel, but you've used it. Yeah. So if you have a kind of... The question is, if you have a water in the house, it hasn't rained for a long time, like it didn't last summer for a long time, stop raining about the 1st of July, and then rain for about 30 days. And so the rain drill left, and so you're left with a hose. That's okay. If you have a water softener, just make sure that it's a kind of water softener that doesn't spit sodium into the water. If it is, you do what my dad did years ago with a water softener that spit sodium in it, and you bypassed that and used the fresh water to do it. Most of our municipal water systems don't have that issue if used pure. So Fargo gets their water from the red. A lot of places out in the southwest, and the northwest have the Missouri water thing. So that water is fairly clean. It's the people that have the wells that have the sodium. That's the big issue. The last question is, can you address any gypsum and the soil amendments? Yeah, so the question was, how about adding gypsum as a soil amendment? Gypsum is a high calcium. It's calcium sulfate. And so, again, it orders the plays and makes things a little bit easier to tell. But you're going to do even more benefit if you go with the organic amendments. It's much better to use the organic amendment than gypsum is possible. And it will help some, but the organic amendments will help so much more. Okay. All right. Thank you, Dave. And what's up? You're welcome.