 So welcome, everyone, to our new series. We are going to do four Wednesday webinars starting today. And today our speaker will be Tom Kelb. But I have a few little notes before I officially introduce Tom. By the way, my name is Julie Gardner-Robinson and I'm a food and nutrition specialist for NDSU Extension. So next week my colleague Cliff Hall and I will be presenting a seminar on sauerkraut and a little bit on food fermentation since that's becoming quite a popular thing to do. After that we have Todd Weinman talking about fall bulb planting including both garlic and tulips. And then we'll skip a week because that's a holiday week. And Esther McGinnis, who's an assistant professor and also a horticulturalist from NDSU, will be talking about growing microgreens in your home. So we have some interesting topics coming up and I certainly hope that you join us. We also will archive these webinars so they will appear on the website. Just a couple of logistics. Hopefully your screen kind of looks like what is in the picture. There are some icons if you want to give us a smile or raise your hand or comment. There's a comment box. If Tom turns on his camera and makes himself large again, I see him over there. Then you'll see the speaker. And chat of course. Any comments, any questions go ahead. I also have your microphones on so I think at least some of you will be able to ask directly. And we'll kind of maybe hold some of the questions until later because I notice that Tom has quite a few slides to share. We'll be a very short survey and we really appreciate your help in filling out the survey. You'll have a chance for a door prize that will be sent out at a later date. And you also, after you turn in your survey, you can print a certificate. So if you need continuing education as a master gardener, for example, or even for some other groups where this would work, you'll have a certificate to show that you were here. So now I'm going to introduce Tom. And I'm very happy to do so because he's always a very interesting speaker with lots of knowledge to share with us. He's a horticulturalist for NDSU with Dakota State University. And he specializes in vegetable and fruit production, youth gardening, and also pest management. Tom coordinates the NDSU home garden cult of our trials, which is one of the largest agricultural research networks in the U.S. Tom was raised on a family farm in Minnesota and he earned his Ph.D. in horticulture at Virginia Tech. So welcome, Tom, and turning the mic over to you. Okay. Thanks, Julie. And it's a pleasure to be here today to talk about gardening and welcome everybody. And we're going to be talking about extending the growing season and putting the garden to bed. So that's a lot to cover. And we're going to keep this moving at a quick pace. But I love informal presentations. I love questions. And we'll be breaking throughout this talk and inviting your questions. And also, you can type in your questions if you're too shy to speak your question. You can type them in the chat box below and I'll do my best. And would Julie's help find those questions and answer them for you? But let's get started. Here we are. This is our outline for today's talk. We're going to start by talking about the most critical day left in the gardening season, the ultimate day, the day of death, frost. And then after we learn about frost and that ultimate deadline that we have, we're going to talk about what we can do in the fall as far as growing vegetables. So those of you who are more ambitious, we can talk about how we can extend the growing season even beyond the frost. And then we'll finish up by talking about how to clean up the garden in preparation for next year and how to improve our garden soil. So there's a lot to cover. And there's one of my favorite plants there, kale, which is one of the toughest, most cold tolerant of all plants. And pretty much most people would say it tastes terrible until the fall. And then it's one of the most nutritious and delicious vegetables you can have. Okay, I was just to set the scene. How's your garden going right now? And I think for a lot of us across North Dakota, we're in a great period. We've had some consistent rains through the growing season. And crops are looking wonderful. If they haven't been hailed upon, your crops are probably wonderful. The tomatoes are just starting to come on nice now. I can just taste them. It's just so delicious, this photo. And lots of beans. A lot of gardeners have success with all kinds of the beautiful beans. And I know Zucchini is coming on strong right now. One of my colleagues in the office just threatened her Zucchini plant to stop producing or she's going to pull it out. So nobody respects Zucchini, I tell you. That's one of my best friends. And we should almost worship the Zucchini because how productive it is with such little care. But instead, we ridicule that poor vegetable. But anyhow, the garden is going great this year. However, our garden days are numbered and we're going to get frost. Always get frost. It's certainly get frost. And this is our future. So one of the key points right now is to identify when it's going to be the frost. How long can our garden season extend? And to find your frost date, the date of the first killing frost, I think a nice tool is Day's Garden. I know everybody here is online, so you all got the internet. Day's Garden is a nice gardening forum. And if you just type in, if you go to Google and type in Day's Garden frost, frost predictor or frost, you'll get you a frost predictor. And so you just type in your zip code and it'll tell you your first killing frost. But in North Dakota, I'll share with you some information from our North Dakota State Climate Office. And I'll just use that star for Bismarck there just to pick a random town in North Dakota. And this tells us the most likely date, the 50% probability of a killing frost. So vegetables, the tender vegetables can die at 32 degrees. But in most cases, we can provide some protection for the most tender vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers until it hits 28 degrees, the killing frost. And then other vegetables that, let's say like beets and beans are sensitive at 28 degrees. And kids, almost all vegetables, except for the cabbage family, will suffer death at around 28 degrees. So we're going to use that as what we call a hard frost or a killing frost date. So just to use an example, just an idea about how many days we got left in the gardening season. In Bismarck, we're in that light blue zone, so dark blue right around there. So maybe September 30th, we'll just use as a guide for. We got to about September 30th until we get our killing frost. However, this is a 10% probability of frost, and we can get frost as early as September 20th. Well, again, September 30th is normal for us, but September 20th does happen. And then on the other hand, you can look at the 90% probability, which means that there's a 10% chance that we won't get frost until, in this case, October 15th. So you see the variability. We can have frost in September 20th or in Bismarck, we can get frost as late as October 15th. So every year is a little bit different. And so as gardeners, we have to pay attention to that weather report and protect our plants whenever needed. And how are we going to protect our plants? Well, when there's a danger of a hard frost, we need to cover our tender vegetables. And what do we cover them with? And some people use blankets, some people use tarp, some people use plastic. Other people use paper, newspapers. And my feeling is just pretend it's you out there in the garden at night, you know? And with no clothes on if you can imagine that. Here you are, just like a tomato vine naked in the garden. What do you want to wrap around yourself to keep warm? And most people would like a blanket. So a nice, warm, thick blanket is good. And all of us here in the North, we've learned about layering, the benefits of layering to keep warm in our clothes. And so even a double layer of blankets will provide that much more protection. And even a single layer of a blanket will give us about three to four degrees of frost protection. And as you see, if we can just get to that first wave of a hard frost, we could have a couple, three weeks past that and extend our growing season. A lot of people have questions about tomatoes, so we'll just focus on that here for a couple minutes. If a hard frost is expected, or if it's threatening even colder, and we have to just forget about it, we only get a few degrees of protection with a blanket. And tomatoes are very tender. And so if temperatures are expected to drop, let's say 28 or colder, we have to go out and harvest whatever tomatoes we can. And if we want the tomatoes to ripen indoors, we need to harvest the tomatoes that at least are showing a little bit of blush to them. If they don't show any blush, they're not likely to ripen indoors. And here's just a sample of someone who went outside and got a box and picked all the tomatoes in their garden. Ripening indoors, that's a very common sight, is people putting them on the windowsill. But this is not the best way to ripen a tomato indoors because when we set our tomatoes in a bright location, we just get outside the skin portion ripe and the inside will not ripen. So a better technique is to follow this guide. First of all, make sure any tomato that you try to ripen indoors is free of blemishes because if you have disease spots, for example, on a tomato, it will not ripen before it rots. So you got to have blemish-free fruits, keep it out of direct sunlight. Tomatoes ripen best. They develop their fullest flavors under room temperature. And tomatoes naturally give off a ripening gas. We call it ethylene. And if you wrap the tomatoes to trap the ethylene, you'll get a better flavored fruit. And so like some people, if you're really done, you can wrap up every individual tomato in newspaper. What's more commonly done is lay a sheet of newspaper on the ground, put our tomatoes on top of that sheet of newspaper, and then place a sheet of newspaper on top of all the tomatoes. And we usually keep the tomatoes in a single layer when we ripen. We don't want to be too congested there. So that's some information as far as frost and frost protection. Does everybody have any questions about frost before we talk about the fall veggies? Okay, okay, hearing none. I guess nobody wants to talk about that dismal topic of frost. Personally, I love frost because when all the plants are dead, I get fewer gardening questions. I can start relaxing a little bit. So my favorite day of the year is the first hard frost. But for most gardeners, that's not true. Okay, let's talk about fall vegetables. Maybe in your garden right now, like here in this gardener, she has a little spot at the end of the garden that hasn't been planted, or maybe this was planting a peas early in the season, and now we have some opening. Can we grow vegetables in the fall? Absolutely. Radishes. You know, most of us, we grow our radishes at the exact worst time. We sow our seeds in the spring, and then our radishes bulb up as the temperatures get warmer, and warm temperatures for radishes mean more bitterness to the roots. So your best tasting radishes are those that you grow in the fall because they bulb out when the temps are cool. So you get a crisp, mild flavor when you grow radishes, and we still have plenty of time to grow radishes this year. Turnips can be grown in the fall. Again, the mildest, best flavored turnips are those that mature when the temperatures are cool. There's a build up of sugars when temperatures are cool. There's even special varieties. This is a variety from Japan that we're testing this year called Hakurai, which is especially bred for fall production. So we're looking forward to testing that, and I'll share this result for you in the future. There's lots of Asian greens that do wonderfully in the fall. This is one of the easiest to grow of all vegetables in the fall, and one of the best tasting. It's called cat soy, and I've grown in North Dakota. It thrives under our cool fall temperatures, and you see it's like a cabbage family. It tastes like a mild cabbage, and you just harvest the individual leaves. Every leaf looks kind of like a spoon, if you can imagine. It has this rosette that grows at the base of the ground. You just pick them up, pick off, snap off the individual leaves, and these are wonderful for use in stir fries. Cat soy, so take advantage of all the Asian greens out there and just explore all the amazing new vegetables that just experience life, enjoy it. Spinach does very well under the cool temperatures of fall. It won't go to seed, so this is one of the easiest to grow of all vegetables in the fall, and if you sow your spinach right after the talk today, you still have time for it. Some gardeners grow their carrots. They sow their carrots in the fall. Usually we do this in August, and then the carrots get off to a strong start in the fall, and you can harvest a few of them before the hard freeze comes, but then a lot of people will just leave their carrots in the ground and harvest when needed in the winter or then wait until early spring and harvest them at that time. And again, when we have these roots developing in the cold temperatures, that maximizes their sugar content. So the finest flavored carrots are the ones that grow in the fall. Here are some guidelines for us, and we have to use a hard frost just using, for an example, September 30th as a hard frost indicator, which is what we use for Bismarck, for example. This is to harvest the vegetables in fall. Harvest the vegetables in the fall. So we usually like to get the carrots in the ground by mid-July, same with beets and kale. Get them sown in mid-July if we're going to make the harvest before the winter comes. In late July, we'll grow the pat, sowing the other Asian greens, as well as kohlrabi. And early August, we recommend planting the spinach or turnip. And then in late August, radishes. Radishes take about 30 days, so if we have a hard frost, September 30th, if we sow the radish in late August, we'll have that month that we need to make it work. Now, we can still harvest, let's say, I'm sure we can still sow spinach and turnips now and harvest them as a baby grain. They often take about 30 days as a baby grain or a baby root in the case of turnips. So, you know, we still have an opportunity to take advantage of fall as far as sowing. How about, should we open it up? Does anybody have any questions about planting in the fall? If you haven't done it, I encourage, really, the finest radishes and the finest turnips you've ever tasted are going to be those in the fall. Okay, let's keep moving then, and let's talk about ways to extend the gardening season beyond the fall. And I think you've got a couple options if you want to keep gardening after the hard frost. One, just hop on a plane and go to Florida and spend the winter in Florida. Then you can extend the season all winter long. There you go. That's one option. The other way is to use protective cultivation, and this is symbolized, let's say, by a high-tonal situation. And I see there's a, yeah, I see Rachel has a question about garlic, and yeah, Todd will be talking about that next week. That's great. And also, I would recommend for you, fall is definitely the time to plant garlic. That's a, and then you'll harvest it next spring. That's great. Invite you to do that. Order your garlic bulbs now, your cloves now though, because they're usually run out. The garden center's often run out of them. But here we are at the high-tonal. Okay, do I recommend a variety of spinach to seed in the fall? Okay, if I could, you know what? I'm doing research right now on that, Carrie, but the variety that is well-known to be one of the finest for the fall production, and is a standard that's widely available, is called Bloomsdale Longstanding. Bloomsdale Longstanding. And that doesn't do well in the spring, because it can't take the summer heat. So it bolts early, but it's a standard in the fall. Almost every spinach will do well in the fall, because the biggest limitation for spinach production is the summer heat. So we don't worry about that. And also, if you haven't had a good success growing the spinach in the fall, one of the keys is to get good germination. And spinach seed doesn't like a hot soil. And so make sure that your ground is moist at the time that you sow the seed, and keep it moist until the seed germinates. That's a trick for spinach. But I think the standard variety is Bloomsdale Longstanding. It's very affordable and readily available. Good question. Thank you for that. Okay, and now, as far as talking high tunnels, there's a lot of discussion about that, and there is some interest in that. But I think for most gardeners, it's just not that practical to put a high tunnel in their backyard. We don't want to throw down, let's say, $3,000 to $6,000 on a tunnel just to get some more vegetables. So that is definitely one tool, especially for commercial growers. But another option would be a low tunnel. And this gives you an example of a low tunnel. Now, this is using PVC piping for the support hoops who generally do not recommend PVC. This piping is used just to, I think, keep the rabbits away in the summer. It's got a little netting over it and keep the birds out, too. But in the winter, we're more likely to use a metal pipe because it adds more support. So the typical thing we use is a one-half inch electrical conduit pipe, a half-inch electrical conduit pipe, or you can use three-quarter inch. You can buy these at major hardware stores, and it's used to put electrical wires through. But these work really well for support mechanisms for hoops. And I'll show you later about how to bend them to make it work. What you'll also notice here is that we're covering the crop with what we call a floating row cover. This is a spun-bound material, and it kind of has the consistency or the texture of a cheese cloth. And so it allows most of the light to go through. It allows the water to go through the rain. It also allows for good ventilation. And so this is an outstanding material to use in the fall. It can give you a little bit more heat in the fall to accelerate the growth. And like a blanket, it gives you about three, four degrees of protection from frost. So by using this type of system, we can extend our guarding season at least two to three weeks. And also we can use this early in the season, too, in the early spring to get two or three weeks that way, too. So this is a very affordable way. You can get these things, like a 50-foot-long blanket like this for 25 bucks. So we're not talking about thousands of dollars now. We're talking about something very affordable. And another nice thing, it's good for organic gardeners because it shields against insects. Insects can't get in there and cause damage. So these floating row covers, and the most popular type is the agribon type. That's the company, the most common trade name of floating row covers out there. So again, if you're interested in fall vegetables, investigate into using a floating row cover. Okay, now you can grow vegetables. Let's say you can get the spinach started in September. Here we are at the row cover. And then we can keep that crop going all the way through the winter. But what we'll do in the winter is the floating row cover will collapse. We have to have something more sturdy. And so then we'll use a 4-milliliter polyfilm, like a greenhouse polyfilm, a plastic, green plastic to put over to provide support. And you can see the spinach here growing underneath it. And this will survive the winter. I know a gardener in Bismarck who does this successfully. Grow the spinach in September. And the key is we want it to get well-established, heading into what we call the dead zone of the garden season. And the dead zone is when we have 10 hours or less of day length. And in North Dakota, that's about the beginning of November. So we have to have our crop about 75% established before November. And then during the winter, you can harvest as needed, or you can just let it go. And then the crop will just kind of lie there, just half frozen. And then come February, when the days get longer than 10 days after the first, second week of February, then the spinach will get growing again. And so this is one trick the gardeners do to get an early jump on the gardening season. Okay, so you can plant the spinach in the fall, let's survive the winter, and then harvest it in March or early April, a few weeks before the standard spinach is ready to harvest. So that's a nice trick to use. And this is widely used in New England, and that's for commercial production. And that's because there's a lot of people, there's a lot of money out there in a lot of restaurants, gourmet restaurants who demand fresh produce. And so there's a lot of information out there about growing spinach. Spinach is one of the easiest of all crops to grow over winter. And we have gardeners in North Dakota, we even have county agents who've talked to me about how their spinach has survived over winter, and then it came back very quickly early the next spring. We talked about high tunnels, we talked about low tunnels, and I want to introduce you a new concept that's sometimes referred to as caterpillar tunnels. These are similar to a high tunnel, but instead of spending, let's say, $4,000, we'll spend about $1,000. So it's much more affordable and easy to build by yourself. These are what we call caterpillar tunnels. And the types of posts we use here are the types of posts that are used at the top of fencing. You know, the cage fencing that we see. And so it's about an inch and three-quarters in diameter. It's very sturdy fencing. And you can, there's techniques. You can buy these tools, and I've seen the corner I had the source of the photo. Here's Johnny's selected seeds in the corner there. They sell a bender where you can purchase materials again from a fencing or a hardware store to expand the hoops to create your own greenhouse. This is the final product, what it looks like. And then you put the polyfilm. You see, you get two beds of vegetables that you can grow underneath here. This is an affordable high tunnel. Again, it's called a caterpillar tunnel. And the film will support snow and wind. And so you can keep that spinach under there all winter long. For even greater security in your crop, some of the growers out in the east use this double system in which we have a high tunnel, which takes the worst ravages of winter and shields the crop, and then you put a low tunnel inside. And that keeps the conditions as stable as possible because the biggest problem we face is the dramatic changes of temperature when we have, let's say, 20 degrees, one day, and then 40 degrees the next day in the tunnel. So you can stabilize the system to the maximum capacity by using this double layering system, starting with the high tunnel and then having a low tunnel. This is used especially for people who are harvesting on a regular basis in the wintertime for gourmet restaurants, for example. If you're interested in the challenge or the opportunity to grow vegetables in the winter, I encourage two resources for you. On the right is like the gospel of growing vegetables in the winter. This is from Elliot Coleman, who's one of the pioneers in this. They did this out in Maine, which is a similar hardiness zone, zone four as we have here in most of North Dakota. So Johnny's Selected Seeds, which is based in Maine. And Johnny's, I've come to really have a great deal of respect for the products that they serve, that they offer, and also the technologies that they provide to small-scale commercial growers as well as avid gardeners. So, you know, if one thing if I could just give a plug, I encourage everybody to get a Johnny's Selected Seeds catalog because that's just a great, even if you never buy their seeds, it's just a great educational resource because that seed company feels it's in their interest to make you successful as a gardener. So they provide valuable information about how to manage each major vegetable crop. Here's when you sow it. Here's a certain pest to look out for. Here's some recommended safe insecticides to take care of that situation. Here's a good resource. So before we move on, before we talk about cleaning up the garden mess, does anybody have any questions about extending the season or growing vegetables in the fall? Okay, again, I highly recommend if you're interested in this challenge, it can be done. It definitely can be done. We have many success stories here in North Dakota. Take advantage of these resources you have. Okay, I'm going to move on to quickly hear how to clean up the garden because I think personally I think our gardens right now are at their peak. They're starting to put on good production, but some of the vines are getting old and they're starting to get diseased. And here's some early blight, for example, coming on a tomato. And some of us are sowing the impacts of blights on our vines, whether a cucumber vine like this or a lot of our pumpkin and squash vines are starting to show disease as well. And so one of the most important ways to prevent disease in your garden is to clean up your garden. So if we clean up our garden this year, get this fungus out of our garden now, we can reduce the likelihood that we'll have the fungus in our garden next year. So clean up is very important. So after the first harvest, how do you recommend that we bury the old crop debris, especially if it's diseased, and if you don't want to bury the crop vine, if it has diseased, we need to cut it out and get that diseased tissue out of the garden. And in most cases, we can compost that if we have a hot compost pile. We'll talk about that later. But again, I just want to impress upon you one of the keys to having vegetable production. There's a few keys. One of the most important one is good sanitation. The actions we take this fall can make a huge difference in preventing problems next year. And there's other techniques, too. I can think about selecting disease-resistant cultivars. That can make a big difference. Spacing out our plants properly, giving our plants lots of room so that we have good air movement through the planting, less humidity, and so that prevents disease problems. And also avoid overhead sprinkling. That's also a big problem. It causes diseases on our vegetables to get the leaves wet and that leads to more disease, especially watering at night is a shameful thing to do as a gardener. But clean up your garden. Either bury the stuff in or cut it off and get it out of the garden. Another thing, if we clean up our garden, that will expose the soil insects and grubs, for example. It will expose them to the number one insecticide of North Dakota. And the biggest killer is this, our glorious winter. Glorious winter. And the biggest killer of insects and diseases in North Dakota is mother nature. And we have so few insect problems compared to other people in the United States and compared to other people in the world, because insects can't tolerate those grubs. They can't take our winter. And so every time we have like 25 degrees below zero and we're all cursing, I just kind of think about, okay, there is a silver lining to this and that is, you know, I can stay inside and my furnace is working, life's good, but those grubs and other insects outside, they are quick chilled, frozen dead. And so, again, doing a good job cleaning up our garden will expose insects to mother nature and her cold treatment. Okay, Julie has a question about a publication. And again, I think if we're talking about season extension, those publications about the winter harvest, winter growing by Johnny's and Elliot about extending the season, those two resources I talked about are really the publications. That winter harvest handbook is a great resource and that Johnny's winter growing guide. Those are great, those are the best publications I'm aware of because these are situations of where people have done it, they've done it successfully. They're not just writing about it, they've actually done it. The question is, with winter growing, if you use the same soil year round, do you have intense rotation? Yes, this is one of the issues as far as any time, like in a high tonal situation, we're more concerned about rotation and the buildup of diseases. So, first of all, disease management to make sure that we, and also insect test management, is more important in these types of winter growing, intense situations because the diseases and insects can build up in that limited space. And so that's one consideration. And so if anything, that's one of the things about these caterpillar tunnels is that they're movable. You can move them to another area, another plot of soil, and so the rotation becomes less of an issue. So the general rule we recommend that if you can, if it's in a small garden, rotation really just, it just doesn't, just really, you just really can't rotate away from diseases and insects because the disease spores are there. So the whole key is just preventing the disease or minimizing the disease, minimizing the insect pests. In larger gardens area, we talk about can we at least move the planting, the next planting 10 feet away from the previous area. But you're right, you know, anytime we have this intensive production in a small area, there's all kinds of considerations. Of course, the thing about when we're growing crops in the winter, we have very few disease problems and minimal insect problems because they can't take the cold weather anyhow, right? So that's, I hope that does a good job answering your question. Yeah, but crop rotation is important. Okay, here we go. Take out, let's read this question. With winter, you have an annual flower bed that's extremely high in all nutrient levels. Take out some of the soil at a low fertility soil to bring the levels to a tolerable level. Wow. You know, I would really have to see that, that soil test to believe that I need to remove half of the soil because it's too fertile. You know, that just, because the thing you mentioned, flower production, the key, the thing would be of greatest concern with flower production would be too much nitrogen because nitrogen creates leaves, not flowers. And so, but the thing about nitrogen, nitrogen is soluble. Nitrogen leaches out of the soil. So I would just say, if I've got a very fertile soil, the thing I would do is I would just stop fertilizing. That's it. Okay. How about when growing squash and at least some powdery mildew, if you cut out the disease leaves, will the plant, if you cut the diseases, leaves will the plant keep producing? Yes, especially, you know, this time of year, you can cut out the worst, you got it, you can take out the worst infected leaves, you can trim them out. But I just have to be honest with you, once you really get a substantial amount of disease leaves on a squash or a pumpkin or a melon planting, we've kind of lost a battle for this year. But if you're on top of the situation early next year, at the very sign of the first browning, the first mildew, if you can trim off those leaves and then start a preventative program. And the chemicals that we offer for organic growers, we would use copper. And I'll type in chlorothalonil is the chemical that we typically use for conventional gardeners. And chlorothalonil is available as dachlanil and bravo, for example, is common. But a copper can be used for organic growers. And that will help prevent infection. But again, you know, like if we got mildew, we've got disease resistant cultivars available. So I would ask you, I encourage you to stay away from heirlooms and focus more on modern hybrids, which are much more likely to have disease resistance, genetic disease resistance, that will naturally prevent diseases. And again, plenty of space in the garden and avoid overhead irrigation. And that's your success. Also, I can just tell you like for pumpkins, we often, as long as they've set their food, the food that we're going to get this year have already been set now. And so it's very common to start nipping off the vine tips to encourage more of the energy of the plant into the fruit development. But also on the other extreme, I don't want you to be cutting off all your leaves because the leaves are what the plant uses to produce food energy. And we need that food energy to nourish your fruits. So just pick off the worst infected leaves and then just cope with it until the frost. Thank you for that question. Let's keep moving on here. Well, actually, let's talk about how to improve the soil because, you know, I think the whole key to a great garden is great soil. That's the foundation to our garden. You can't have a great garden without great soil. And of course, a great gardener doesn't hurt either. But soil is so important. And to improve your soil, like you talked about earlier about those flowers, one of the keys is to understand the status of your soil today. And so I highly recommend a soil test, especially if you have a situation where you just don't understand why your garden's not producing well. Get a soil test. It's one of the best investments you can make. A garden can produce hundreds of dollars of produce every year. And for an $18 investment, you can find out how to improve your soil to maximize productivity in your garden. It's a great investment. And here's how you take a soil test. Let's say this green box here is our garden. We want to get a good representation of the overall soil. And so what we want to do is we want, we just don't want to take the soil out of one spot. We want to take the garden soil throughout the area, a good representation of the entire garden area. So what we'll do is we'll get out there, I'll get out there with a clean five gallon pail and a small shovel. And I'll start at one end of the garden and my goal, I'll make it a random W. And on every circle of the spot where I'll take a small shovel full, I'll go about four to six inches deep. And I'll throw these five shovel fulls in the bucket, mix it all together, and then put it all together. And that will be my composite sample. And you're going to need about one cup of this composite sample to send. And I recommend the soil testing facilities at NDSU and Fargo. And you can find all this detailed information if you Google NDSU soil testing lab. NDSU soil testing lab. And they'll have the forms for you to download and fill out. They'll have the mailing address. You send your sample along with that form into Fargo and they will give you a precise soil analysis and tell you exactly what you need to have them improve your garden soil. If anybody have any questions about soil testing, now is a great time to do it. There's no need to wait. Let's get it done now. If you can do it now, you'll get the soil test results in time to improve the soil this fall. So come in spring, you're ready to rock and roll. Just as in general, I think the best thing you can add to your garden is organic matter. And we're talking about rotted compost, manure, or sphagnum peat moss. Organic matter is the best thing you can add to most gardens. And for this person with the flowers, one thing I would do to help buffer the extremes of your soil that's too rich is I recommend that you add an inch of organic matter and work that into your garden to buffer and improve the overall structure of the soil. Organic matter adds a few nutrients, but the whole key for organic matter is it helps to hold on to nutrients before they're lost, hold on to water so it doesn't leach out, and then when it holds on to this water and nutrients, it can gently release them to the plant as they're needed. Organic matter improves the structure of the soil, and by improving the structure, it will make greater aeration, which is what the roots need, and also allow better infiltration of water. The water won't run off, it'll percolate through. And organic matter, by adding that to the soil, it reduces erosion, it reduces the runoff of the soil. So organic matter is like black gold, an inch of organic matter to your garden, and working that into your garden will do wonders for 9 out of 10 gardens in North Dakota. One source of organic matter is compost, and you can add your garden debris from this year into the compost bin. And in general, what we want, we want to have a blend of green material and then what we call bulky materials, or brown bulky materials like leaves, dried up leaves. And so a mixture of about, let's say, two parts leaves and one part greens, and that could be your garden debris, or it can be grass clippings, and you mix that in together. That's an ideal mix that can give you a quality compost, and we're just going to work that in together. Now I often get the question, can I use diseased material from our garden into the compost bin? And you can, but only if you have a hot compost pile, one that you turn on a regular basis. Let's say every couple of weeks we're going to be turning this to get some heat inside, because a hot compost pile will generate temperatures around 140 degrees. You need a hot compost pile to break down those diseased spores. So if you've got diseased tissue, you can use it in the compost bin in most cases, but only if you are committed to having a hot compost pile. And it will take approximately, and here you can add some eggshells and bananas, all kinds of types of waste there, and work it into the garden, and then I'm sure they work it into the compost bin, and then after about nine months, in most cases, you'll have a beautiful compost. And one way to tell if your compost is ready is if you just pick it up and you just stick your nose in it and you don't smell anything. It smells earthy but not really smelly. Same with even rotted manure. When's that manure ready? You can just pick it up and smell it, and it doesn't smell like manure, and it has a nice crumbly texture to it. It doesn't look like you can't see the banana peels, or you can't see the leaves, you can't see the old cucumber leaves. That's when your compost is ready. So you do your compost bin this fall, and then by next year, you're ready to add it to your garden next fall, add it into this to your garden next fall, and work it into the soil. Again, organic manure is a wonderful product to improve the overall fertility of your soil. Rotted manure, of course, is another source that we can use. And also, I really like sphagnum peat moss. In most gardens in North Dakota, this is one of the best organic material sources because sphagnum peat moss will acidify the ground. It adds acid to the soil, and we need that in North Dakota. Our soils are a little bit on the alkaline side, so by adding an acidic product like sphagnum peat moss, just again, just about an inch of it, and work it into mixing into the soil, by adding that to the garden this fall, we'll make our soil slightly more acidic, which will release more nutrients, or make more nutrients available to our plants come next year. And fall is the time to do this. Okay, so let's just wrap it up by saying we're going to have a great year. This year so far is a great year in the garden, and unfortunately we will experience the end of the frost, the end of the growing season, the frost will come. Then we'll clean up our garden, and then we improve the soil. Then I think there's nothing wrong with just relaxing and recharging our batteries. I strongly believe that come November, just relax, enjoy the peacefulness, enjoy the beauty of our prairie, and those wonderful, just take a quiet, just pause sometimes, and appreciate some of the beauty of our winter, like wintery mornings when we see ice on the twigs, or maybe we see some frozen crab apples on the trees, and just calm down and appreciate the beauty of the wintertime. Put a log on the fire, and relax, get recharged for next year. Read those seed catalogs so that when next spring comes, we can have our greatest garden ever. So I want to thank you all, and I'm happy to answer your gardening questions like that, get the credits of the photographers that we used in today's talk, and just open it up. Does anybody have any questions that I could answer for you? Do you have a question from Suzanne? Okay. Put that in our chat box here. Here we go. Are there any plants you can bring inside and continue to grow during the winter? Okay. Yeah. You know, the most common thing that people use would be herbs. That's the most common thing that people use, because then you really appreciate the fresh flavor of the herbs. Yeah, there you go. But now the key is in the winter, our indoor light levels are only about 10% of what's outdoors. So you need to put them by your sunniest window in the indoors. But, you know, there's a lot, actually, like tomatoes are a perennial. They'll keep growing and growing. Same with peppers. They'll put on several flushes of fruits if you want to. But lighting is the key issue for most. You've got to have maximum light. Okay. Is a hot compost pile warm enough to kill weed seeds? That's a good question, Alicia. And in many cases, we do not achieve the temperatures needed to adequately kill weed seeds. I recommend you just don't take anything with seed heads, weed seed heads. Just keep them out of the compost pile. A comment from Marlene. Had success with baking soda against powdery mildew on vine crops. That is an old recipe developed by Cornell University, the baking soda mix. So that's one thing. But again, I just want to reinforce a few points. Like you said it on vine crops, we've had a lot of modern hybrid today are naturally resistant. They don't get powdery mildew. Okay. So then we don't have to mess around with anything. Just plant a high quality cultivar and then we're ready to go with that. Excuse me. And again, the other thing is to prevent infection by avoid overhead sprinkling and give your plant proper spacing. All that will make a big difference. See if you have any more comments here. Love the comments. Keep in common. Yeah. And I popped in a publication link. So if you want to look at some of the garden to table resources that we have online free, please do so. Great. Also my emails right there, you can see that. I'm happy to answer any gardening questions you want to have off the air. I'm happy to help anybody with that. Yeah. Any other last comments? You have one more. Finally, pumpkin squash out in the garden and work them in the ground in the spring. Well, yeah, of course. So you just leave them out there and then you look at them all winter. Is that it? And then you just, yeah, you can, in environmental gardens, we recommend composting your jack-o'-lantern. So you can do that. As long as, again, so the pumpkin and squash itself, you can do that. Because it doesn't have disease tissue, OK? So that's OK. So you can just leave them out there. Now, the issue you're going to have is you've got seeds in there. So you're going to have a lot of volunteer plants next year. They'll pump the squash or load it with seeds. And so you'll have a lot of pumpkin and squash plants that you might not want in that area next year. But on the other hand, if you have a vine that's loaded with powdery mildew, for example, it would be valuable to bury that in the ground or get that disease tissue out. But the fruits themselves, again, for Halloween pumpkins, we recommend just grind them up. Just get a knife and carve them out and throw them out there. That's what I do. Again, the healthy leaf tissue, you can leave it out there. But disease, if it's disease, we've got to get that fungus out of there. Otherwise, we're going to have problems next year. Good sanitation. That's better than any type of fungicide. Just get the disease out of there. Yeah, the extra ones you don't use. Good idea. The extra pumpkins that you don't use, you can leave them out there. It's organic matter. You can compost them. That's even another option. Any other questions? Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Tom. I really enjoyed the conversation here today. Good luck with the garden the rest of the year, everybody. Please fill out the survey. It will be coming your way by email. And again, you can print a certificate and also have the chance for a prize. I'm looking at the prize right now in my office, so it's kind of cool. Thanks again, and I hope to see a lot of you next week.