 All right. Good morning, everyone. And thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Kendra Sakamoto. I'm one of the librarians here at Western Cougar Memorial Library. Well, I recognize that we're all in different places this morning. I would like to acknowledge that for those of us on the North Shore, we're on the traditional ancestral and unfeeded territories of the Squamish, Slewa Tooth, and Musqueam Nations. Today, as we learn about how to maintain a beautiful garden amidst the climate changing around us, I'm especially grateful to the Coast Salish peoples who have been the careful caretakers of these lands and waters since time immemorial. I am incredibly grateful to be able to live in this unbelievably beautiful place. I am delighted to welcome with us today Linda Gilkison. Linda has a PhD in entomology. She worked for the provincial government promoting programs to reduce and eliminate pesticide use. She was head of the provincial state of environment reporting unit and the executive director of the Salt Spring Islands Conservancy. She now devotes her time to writing, teaching, and consulting. Linda is the author of the fantastic book, Lockyard Bounty, the complete guide to year-round organic gardening in the Pacific Northwest. She has co-authored pest management training manuals for the provincial government and organic gardening books. Now focuses on publishing books for local gardeners. Linda has served as the president of the Entomological Society of Canada, the Professional Pest Management Association of BC, the Entomological Society of BC, and the Salt Spring Islands Garden Club. She was awarded a Queen's Jubilee Medal and an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Professional Pest Management Association of BC. I am so delighted to welcome Linda to join us today. Well, hi everyone. It's good to see all everyone is coming in to be on our on our talk this morning. I'm sure the temptation to be out in your garden was very strong, but you've got to get out of the sun at lunchtime so we will. This will fit into our day. I'm going to just share my screen here. And I think that looks looks good for me so. We're good to go. I'm, I'm talking today about adapting our food gardens and our landscapes to how the climate is changing. And first I'm going to talk about how some of the changes and how they affect plants, then how to, you know, sort of climate proof our gardens and I'm also going to talk about how our gardens can help capture carbon. That's the other piece. It's one thing to adapt but we've got to be working to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. So the climate emergency is here if you've lived in BC in the last year you certainly didn't miss it. It's been coming for a while. It's having very serious impacts on our ecosystems and our landscapes but human and animal health how many people died in the heat wave last summer. How many growers and all infrastructure was destroyed in the flooding last fall. So agricultural productivity the economy, everything is taking a hit. And it's happening sooner than the climate models originally predicted the modeling was showing this was coming but it wasn't quite coming so fast. And it's here. So it's an in, it's an increasing challenge for gardeners, obviously within the context of what's happening in our wider region. We're embracing for extended periods of anything the jet stream is slowing. It's slowed substantially since the 1980s that is a combination of effects but it comes back to the changing climate in that the, the, the, the polar parts of the, the north pole of the planet is warming faster. So there's less and less of a difference in temperature between the north pole, polar regions and the equatorial zone. And so the client the jet stream is, is beginning to die. It's still functions but it is slowly moving storm so it's like a weakened elastic band when a storm front or a high pressure system or a low pressure system or a polar outbreak. Around the jet stream isn't moving these storms along so they sit in the same place for longer so when it gets hot it stays hot longer. When it rains it rains a lot more in the same place. And that's what we've seen just in the last year. Now the modeling has always lined us up for more rain in the winter, less in the summer. But the distribution of how it rains is changing so that we get more rain coming in intense heavy rainfall events. So over the year it's not that much of a difference in the total rainfall. But it's how it's being delivered is making a big difference. And then of course increasing storm intensity higher winds. So from the right down to drilling down to our garden point of view stress plants that can be stressed because of extreme weather poor drainage water logging drought all these things are much more susceptible to diseases and to sucking insects, boring insects, boring insects in a tree are usually assigned that tree has already been failing for quite a while. And to dictate what we can grow is not the average temperature. I know that years ago when people started hearing about global warming as it was then called instead of climate change. The idea was oh well we live in Canada is going to get warmer how could how could that be a bad thing we could grow bananas. But that's not what's happened. It is climate change is a more appropriate term because the weather is becoming more extreme. So the average is the average temperature has been slightly rising. It's about, you know, around a degree on the coast now since, you know, in the last 50 years but that's not the story. The fact is that the winters are getting colder lows and the summers are getting hotter highs. So the averages don't determine what we can grow. I was shocked in 2018 before the big storm that ripped up on was historic. BC hydro at that point had already reported that the number of storms that they were having to send out crews had tripled in five years. But just to show you February to a 2019 was the coldest on record in the lower mainland but the year was the warmest on record. And last year in six months we had the heat dome, and we had a drought summer, and we had historic rainfall that broke all records in the fall, and we had winter cold after Christmas that set many records. And then this spring, which yes has been cold and rainy and often we used to get weather like that. It's still set records for low temperatures and amount of precipitation. And just to show you the what's going on here the average winter temperatures have been going up but the winter minimums have been decreasing now this is local information. It's for Victoria and Qualicum Beach, the interior parts of the continent don't aren't showing this they're showing winter temperatures winter minimums are also rising but the coast that's not happening. So we have a trend line here downwards in the extremes of the winter that's not the average that's just how cold it gets when we really get a cold snap. So how is this client how is there are the changes in the climate affecting plants. Well, plants adapted to seasons the seasonal pattern in this latitude, it can really disrupt their adaptations. If it's been unusually warm or just warmer than average in the spring, buds are going to break earlier flowers are going to come out sooner on our fruit trees. And in some parts of the continents, it's a month earlier that fruit trees are booming. However, with the climate variability, increasing late spring fall frosts remain a thing they are just as prevalent if not more so. So you have trees blooming sooner and frost continuing and that is a recipe for some, some total crop losses in some years or loss of flowers. At the other end of the season if it's been unusually warm all fall, the trees are not hardened off in time for winter, or if it's just been an average winter, but we get unusually early cold. They're, they're not hardened off and that means that the trees haven't had time to absorb nutrients from those leaves and back into the tree to store in the roots and then the bar under the bark for next year's crop. So, you know, I, you know, effects of extreme temperatures living where we do a lot of people have been really aware of what happens when it gets too cold in the winter, or, you know, we've been worried about the cold end of the equation, but high temperatures also slow and stop growth. It can be too cold to grow, it can be too hot to grow. So if you've got broccoli plants in the garden and we're having a 35 degree heat wave, they're not growing at all. It's just taken right out of your growing season, they are sitting there just trying to stay alive. The growth gets slower as it gets hotter and then completely stops depending on the plant above 25 to 35. If it's hot enough, the leaf cells are killed and fruit cells as well. Plant stress disorders increase, that's calcium deficiencies, it's bitter pit and apples, blossom, end rot and tomatoes, all of these things increase the higher the temperatures go. There's an effect on our food crops, which is that flavors are poor, plants use up, plants store sugar that they're making from photosynthesis, they store it in the roots like carrots, they store it in the fruit. And when it's really warm, they use the sugar up as fast as they're making it so they don't store as much into our, the part of the plant that we eat and it's very noticeable about people complaining about poor flavors in their tomatoes when it's really hot. Because everybody expects tomatoes to taste better when it's really hot. Now at the other end of this thermometer, we also have if it's too cold growth slows but we know about this, we know about frost damage. Plants can get used to anything if it's gradual enough the temperatures, the temperatures that would kill something in in October wouldn't bother that plant at all in January, because by January plants have done their, their seasonal adaptation to the cold. So it's the rapid and unexpected and unusual changes that are the problem. So heat waves can ruin pollen, tomato pollen is sterilized above 30 to 32 degrees. And this is a this, what happens is flowers just fall off you don't even really miss it except you realize you didn't have much of a crop. You can see that this tomato formed when it was cooler but this is a blossom that was forming when it was hot enough to sterilize the pollen. So the same thing happens to peppers even at lower temperatures and cucumbers a number of our really what we consider warm season plants can, they can't take super hot conditions they just like warm conditions. When you get heat and drought together, you really have a devastating scenario. Plants have these pores on their leaves that that are open so that you know carbon dioxide gets into the plants and oxygen gets out in the photosynthesis process, but also moisture is evaporating through that and it sets up that flow the production flow of getting nutrients from the soil. Well when it gets too hot plants have to close those pores to avoid losing a disastrous amount of water, but that means they can't get any food from the soil either. It also means they're not photosynthesizing so they they're basically sitting there, not getting any food and not making any food and not moving any food around the plant so they just have to go into a mode of just being just absolutely sitting there. And as soon as they stop having evaporation from those pores with the moisture evaporation that's like turning off the air conditioning. Immediately the cooling effect on the leaves is is compromised and leaf temperatures can jump up another five degrees so you get a lot of leaf cells killed. So when there's heat and drought together, it's really devastating, no food, no photosynthesis, no, no nutrients from the soil, no cooling. So we're seeing a lot more sunscald. These have been I've been collecting photos as people send them we saw a lot of this and raspberries last year for the heat dome. These are all this is not a disease they're just heat killed droplets in the berries but this is all typical kind of injury that you see fruit burns. This I love this picture because you can actually see the shadow of the leaf here that protected the rest of this leaf from frying. The fruit damage quite common could be heat or cold in the case of distorted tomatoes that ruins the pollen, but all of these other pictures are too much heat too much bright light on these tomatoes. These cells will never ripen in the fruit. This is just simply been burned, been burned, and this is heat damage as well. Other growth abnormalities that can happen in last summer. For the first time I actually saw one that I'd read about which was that squash flowers which should be separate sexes there's a male flowers and female flowers. When they are developing at conditions that are too hot. The flower development gets completely wonky and they end up with these kind of intersex flowers that can't function at all here we have a sort of a female ovary with a male pistols in the same flower, or the squash fruit forms and the flower never opens and so it can't be pollinated. So you get some very strange things. This is not unusual anytime you're growing cauliflower and hot weather and always does this. You get corn, drought and, and, and heat together on a sweet corn. So you get quite a mismatch or a miss function inside plants. We also went with warmer average temperatures will get more generations of the pests that have several generations of season. And it's been so cool until now that we probably won't see extra generations will probably see the normal number of generations for things like codling moth, carrot rust fly cabbage root mega mostly they have two generations. Sometimes a partial third generation in the fall but on a long hot summer, they will have three full generations, and that third generation is a massive number of insects because each generation so much bigger. And I do credit the recent long warm summers that we've had with much wider spread of codling moth in this part of BC. It's just been around but never been that much of a problem on the coast, it's just, it's quite severe now. And I think what we had was a number of years with that big third generation and so suddenly we've just got a lot more codling moth. The effects of extreme precipitation whether it's drought or water logging is to injure kill roots and it could happen in the summer could happen in the winter. If you injure roots that are compromised that plants can't take up nutrients and water like they should so if you get water logging in the winter that basically root prunes your tree. Then it can't, it has even less of a chance of getting sufficient water in the summer because it's now missing roots, and then it will die back further so it sets up a cycle in trees, such that after a few seasons like this of water logging and drought. It's a big city tree can just blow down and everyone is really surprised but the roots have been compromised through a few cycles of basically root pruning from precipitation extremes. But not only does it make it more vulnerable to the next kind of weather but also root diseases. So, and you know plants you know if they have any kind of compromise roots they can't take up nutrients they can't grow to be resistant to pests and diseases like they would if they were completely healthy. And you don't, you know, just look around the landscape tree stress. I've been watching the cedars disappear over the last decade or so. Maybe 15 years ago an Olympic Peninsula over in Washington you saw cedars beginning to wink out. And I mean they turn orange and you suddenly realize there was a cedar tree there and then the next year there's nothing because somebody's taken down the dead tree. Well, it's been up Vancouver Island, you know maybe five or seven years ago, really getting bad and now, even on South spring here I'm just, I'm amazed where cedar is dying not because there were places I didn't think there was cedar in the middle until they start to die and turn orange. And it's the most well known of the species that is disappearing and modeling is showing that by mid century. We're just talking, you know, less than 30 years. Really there's not expected to be any cedars surviving south of the middle of Vancouver Island, unless it's a very, very wet site. The rocky dry sites are dying now but even, even trees, I'm noticing trees that are in gullies that have better water or water later into the season are also going down now. Maples are suffering. If you heard about the coastal salal dieback problem over the last few years. There was a lot of concern about whether it might be a disease but I think the researchers are pretty well settled on the fact that it's just climate stress. It's not going to dry too hot, too wet. And as I said earlier that opens the way for insect attack so borers really avoid, you get a weakened tree and that's where the borers show up. You get a tree that's just drought stress that's when the aphids show up you know all those boulevard trees in the city that have honeydew dripping onto cars. Those are all drought stress by the end of the summer and they've got roots under pavement. They're not in any sense, being fed the kind of water they would have in a natural ecosystem. And of course pathogens can overcome the defense of any plant that is weak. This is some examples of the kind of metabolic disorders that I mentioned are getting common and these are an interaction it's how a plant grows its own metabolism, you know so there's some varieties that are a lot more susceptible to these problems than others. And what the weather is doing and what you're doing as a gardener how you're irrigating and providing nutrients, how you're pruning your fruit trees, it all influences the nutrient levels that are in the leaves and the flowers and the fruit. And a lot of these are related to how much calcium is in your fruit or your leaves if it's lettuce or something like that. It doesn't move very quickly in plant plants have a hard time moving calcium around. It's a slow nutrient it's an essential nutrient and it's in the soil, it's got to come from the soil into the roots up the plant and be distributed to fruit. And when there's an interruption like dry soil like these tomatoes here grower on salt spring here lost $3,000 worth of tomatoes and peppers in the greenhouse because his irrigation system packed it in for about a week. And without realizing we weren't getting watered so they they spent a week not taking up calcium is basically what it amounted to. There was enough in the soil but they can't get it if it soils dry and that happens to tomatoes and pots a lot. And this is an equivalent sort of problem in apples it's called bitter pit and some varieties are quite prone to this because the apple fruit tissue grows so quickly that the calcium just doesn't keep up and these are essentially cells that have died of calcium deficiency in the fruit. So extreme weather and drought really make these problems much more common. So what can we do. Well, one, one thing is choose, choose plants that are more resilient there are plants that are far more fragile and there are plants that can put up with a lot. So plants likely to survive unusual winter cold is really going to be more important on the coast here. I know everybody gardeners love to push their zones and zones make no sense at all in this region. I mean a nursery might tell you you're in zone eight but you know what if you're up in a higher elevation or cold value or if you're down along the seashore. Our geography is so complicated that you really have no idea what zone you're in and the weather's changing now such that even if you think you're in a milder zone on average, you've got to account for these more extreme winter lows that will happen and are happening and extreme highs. I keep telling people when a pegs coming for us, you know we sit here and the weather keeps changing. This is not the climate it was when I moved here in 1986 that's for sure. So try don't grow things that are on the edge of their range unless I mean we all do it, obviously but I'm just warning you that's not a good plan. Grow more perennials if you're used to putting a lot of annual flower beds in maybe start establishing perennials because they are more resilient to any kind of weather conditions. Once they're established they don't usually need as much water and they're just usually less vulnerable all around and of course always focusing on plants with low summer water requirements. In some years, some of our municipalities have just really, really already been short on water and when you can't water, you've got to have plants that can take it. There are a lot of native plants that are really resilient, putting up with quite a lot or don't really need hardly any water once established. So for sure it amazes me how beautifully that flowers for over a month every spring spectacular, and it just hangs in there it doesn't need water at all, but asters and golden rod and these sedums. Not only are they really quite lovely plants in a landscape and really resilient but they're also super good food for pollinators and other beneficial insects. So landscaping trees that are going to have a future with can't we have to be very careful and choosing choosing trees. You know and improving drainage and being alert to fat fact that drainage may change over the very long lifespan of a tree. I don't ever want trees sitting in waterlogged soil, I guess unless I suppose an exception would be a willow, but they're not real popular trees and landscapes because of their roots getting into everything. But, you know cedars maples birch hemlock are suffering most right now. When trees are less affected, Vancouver actually has an urban tree list that they're suggesting is a good place to start when you're choosing landscape material. And we don't want breakable plants trees because with higher winds we're having even more problems with trees breaking. When it comes to your fruit trees, the later flowering varieties whatever there's a there's there's a quite a range I mean I have a plum that blooms over a month earlier than my latest the plum that blooms the latest I have three varieties, and sort of an early middle and late. The later anything blooms, the less likely it is going to be subject to a late spring frost disaster. There are varieties that are self fertile and you can't really do that with apples and pears because there's only one or two varieties of those that are self fertile. But when it comes to plums and cherries there are you know it's about half and half so if you just choose trees that are self fertile it does give a better chance of pollination. Because trees that require two varieties to be fertilized a be or another insect or you and your paintbrush have to go back and forth between trees. If the flower is self fertile than any insect that visits can can aid in the pollination. It's really important to look at disease resistant varieties. I think everybody that has a gala apple this spring has been pretty much wiped out of crop because of severe apple scab that I love I have a gala myself. I've decided to live with the fact that some years it's not going to work and other years we have a dry spring and then it does really well, but I wouldn't choose to plant that again. I chose in scab resistant pairs when I put in extra pear trees because pear scab is increasing both apple scab and pear scab or fungal diseases that strive absolutely strive in the kind of spring we've just had. So choosing for resistance just means that you know some of my apple trees every apple is perfect doesn't doesn't really matter that it's been raining all spring. There are also plants that are trees that are resistant to powdery mildew and powdery mildew is our fungi that attack when it's drier and humidity may be high on the leaf but there's no water. So looking for disease resistant plant material is going to help a lot because there's not much you can do with some of it when the weather is just this bad there's not really anything you can do. And then there's trees that are that are really likely to get these stress disorders like bitter pit and water core which I didn't show you but it's a really strange thing. So some of these that I've listed here they're they're really top of the list for susceptibility to these disorders so if you want a tree that just can put up with it better still produce a really good crop. Then I would avoid these, although, again, I do love Honeycrisp and I'm, you know, if you take on one of these trees just be aware of the fact that they're not as resilient as some other trees you could grow. I'm bracing for high winds anytime, no matter what it is fruit trees, top heavy vegetables like cabbages and broccoli things that you trellis up like beans it's got to be really sturdy. Once they once this these pole beans get up to the top of this trellis there's a huge wind catching area there and a lot of wind throw. So super strong talent trellis is more than you probably stronger than you probably think you need and dwarf fruit trees should be state three way minimum two way but preferably three way state for their life. They're the root ball is always smaller because it's a dwarfing root stock. So these trees get flipped to sit and they have a load of apples on or other fruit and all their leaves and we get a late summer windstorm. These are the trees that get flipped or tipped or ripped up or broken. You're proving trees generally landscape trees just, you know, you're pruning fruit trees regularly for fruit and for various, you know, for better quality of fruit and for disease management. But even your landscape trees you should be aware of whether there's some pruning needed branches that are weak, or that have been partially broken or that are in the way of another tree so they'll be smacking together and that will then break. Conifers can be spiral prone to reduce their wind load on their upper part of the tree, but don't top them don't be topping, especially conifers all except cedar will just pretty much die. If you do that, and people, you know, cutting branches to stubs most most of our landscape trees will not sprout from those stubs. And if they do, like a cedar tree will. It's usually really poorly attached and it will break. So and in vines, don't be vining things up trees. Ivy I think a lot of people are really aware how invasive it is about climbing trees, but you know, sometimes you'll see gardens and gardeners have intentionally run roses and wisteria, other kinds of climbers up trees, because it looks nice but it's super adds to the store to the wind resistance of that tree. Really and if there's heavy wet snow and all of these things it just puts an enormous strain on that tree structure. Other things to do is I shifted my pruning of climbing roses grapes. So anything wisteria I don't have a wisteria but my neighbor does we've shifted all this pruning the bulk of pruning late in the late fall as the leaves are coming off before. Before the storms hit before the heavy wet snow events can happen, because it's it's just phenomenal how much wind resistance and how much weight there is on your, your fences and your trellises and your plants. So then I finish up and do my proper pruning the fine pruning. At the time I should be doing in late winter for most of these plants but I'll take the bulk off early in the season before I kind of you know we have a storm that will compromise my fences and my plants. And I've also taken to putting a burying steel stakes inside shrubbery, like you can drive it in those ones that are painted green and you drive them in and they're after a few years you can't even see them. But they act like a really secure support for wind and heavy wet snow, which pulls plan can pull plants right over and out of the ground. And if we have an ice storm it really is likely to happen. So designing sheltered gardens anytime you can protect a garden with wind breaks and walls, especially vegetables that things that need to be warm in the spring. They're less exposed to cold and wind this is more important when you're closer to the, the water when you're closer to the ocean these are really important but it does make a difference to cut down the cold winds. When it comes to lawns. But grasses are really adapted to grow dormant in the summer without watering, you really don't have to water your lawn in the summer. You know, honestly, it don't. But the lawns will stay in a lot better shape if their roots are deeper. You cut the mower if you set the mower really really low and cut the grass off really short, then the roots die back to match that short root that short leaf that you've just cut. If you allow if you set your mower so it's like nine centimeters or three and a half inches, which is the maximum a lot of mowers are and more at that. Then you have a much healthier deeper grass plant that is going to be much likely much more likely to survive the summer, even if you do no watering or if there is no rainfall. You know, no matter how dry and brown the lawn gets you'll notice that by September that's starting to come back already with just the do in the overnight do. And as soon as it starts raining again we have green lawns and I always figure we live in a climate where we have green lawns all winter it's not like Toronto, whether it's under snow or something. You know why don't we enjoy our lawns when they're green, and then we won't have to have lead green lawns all through the summer if that means irrigating. So, you know, take good care of the lawn leave the clippings on the lawn to feed it. A lot of people don't line their lawns but our most of our soil is quite acid and the grass will do a lot better if it's lime so spend some some time and energy on getting a really healthy bit of lawn going that will be very resilient. If you mix it, your grasses with clover and micro clovers very short it's a it's a very short cultivar of white clover. Okay, because that feeds the soil, the clover is capturing nitrogen and feeding the grass, but the clover stays greener longer. Or you could replace the lawn. There are lawn mixes West Coast seeds is making quite a, you know, live or a portfolio I guess of interesting alternative lawn mixes flowers of various kinds. Some are grasses mixed with plants and some are just not even having grasses in them. This is one of that Oregon State University devised called. I'm just trying to remember the name of it is. Anyway, it's a, it's a, it's a flowering lawn basically that's very low maintenance, or you can go completely to something else like this is a lawn made out of creeping time. You don't have kids that need to play ball in the lawn. There's lots of other wonderful plants that stay low, look beautiful and need very little water. Now when it comes specifically to our food plants. I think one of my sort of hedging your best strategies that I think is really advisable is don't put all your eggs in one basket grows several cultivars or varieties of each crop. I don't grow that much cabbage, but I still grow sure for kinds of cabbage. So I only have a few plants of each. But, you know, in one year that I had I had three or three varieties of cabbage this year. One of these cabbages one variety every single head didn't make a every single plant didn't make a head. Because it was a late frost and this wasn't as hardy a cabbage is these others who all didn't care at all and made lovely ends, but had I only had this variety I would have had no cabbage. You know there's a lot there's huge differences in how these different varieties of things tolerate heat or drought or frost or whatever's going on. You know I was doing a workshop on soul spring here with people on what we're going to be able to grow and someone said, Well, I guess we can give up on you know cauliflower and we can't grow carrots and we can't do this we can't do that when the climate is really hot and dry in the summer and I said no that's that's not true at all. There's carrots, I mean, there's carrots that can take it there's carrots that can't. You know lettuce, they grow lettuce in Israel and Hawaii is just not the varieties of lettuce we grow so there are plants out there on the planet that grow in other countries in climates that are far more challenging than we are seeing right now it's just that we don't know what they are and so we need to keep trying them and keep trying lots of things don't just stop it one kind of plant. You know this year I think people that are trying to grow brandy wines are absolutely out of luck as far as getting them right this summer unless unless it's a very different summer after this. But you know if you had a brandy wine it didn't make it but you also had all tie or stoopies or some of the ones that are better for the Pacific Northwest, you'll always have tomatoes you just won't necessarily have tomatoes on every plant. And now when we're sowing seeds, whatever's going on with the current day that you're seeding the plant that's how you need to adapt your seeding method. So if it's spring or if it's cool, then we want the we want to wait to listen to the, to the soil warms up, and we might even want to artificially warm up the soil with a sheet of plastic or, or something over it. But the main thing is, is, I mean that's a technique that's been around forever and people that gardener vegetables do these things in the spring and they know about this. What I don't realize is that soil can be too warm for some seeds to germinate. And we grow a lot of vegetables that we start at some point in the summer, so that we can eat them all winter and into the following spring. For example, I will always plan, I plan a big batch of carrots on July 1, that's carrot day at my house as anybody that's on my list will know. It's a carrot some years I'm trying to germinate them and it's 30 outside or 35 and other years it's like 21. So what the years when it's hot, it's too hot to germinate carrots. So cooling the soil knowing that you've got to shade the soil to keep it cool enough to germinate. And incidentally it also keeps the soil moist evenly moist, which is a big challenge when you're trying to start seeds in the summer. So whatever's going on, adapt your methods to whatever's going on, cool it and shade it. If you need to, and just be ready for heat waves anytime I mean it could happen we have had some pretty extremely hot first week of May. Obviously that didn't happen this year, but it could happen anytime we've had some pretty extreme heat in October a few years ago so anytime. Be ready so the priorities to cover are anything small plants that are just coming up or seed beds seedlings there there's no leaves shading that soil and the roots are really close to the surface so they almost immediately fry. So the top priority is to shade seed beds and then cabbage family and lettuce and greens things that really like cool weather will continue to develop if they can be partly shaded. Now, if it's broccoli you're growing, and it gets hot, it quits making broccoli for a while, and it sits there, and then when it cools off it starts making more broccoli it's really a pretty robust plant. If you shade it though partially shaded I'm sort of like this shade cloth here is this is 50% shade, it will keep developing broccoli during the hot weather. That may or may not matter to you, but if it's cauliflower, and it gets hot. It does that weird thing that I showed you in the picture and that's the end of your cauliflower it's like that's it had it not doing anything else. They're a lot more vulnerable or a lot more likely to ruin or lose a crop if they're exposed to heat. Get some mulch around even seedlings as soon as possible. Before it gets hot thicker mulches around bigger plants increase if you can if you're if you're not under water restriction that prevents this keep increasing irrigation if possible but mostly be on top of shading things. They're extremely hot plants are not growing, as I pointed out, I mean if you have to take a bed sheet out there and put it over them, it's fine because they couldn't use the sun anyway it's too hot. So you're basically saving their lives. They're going to survive. Whereas if they weren't covered they might in fact die. So shade cloth 50% shading is ideal that's that's what it looks like close up. You can rig up you can rig up. You can just stick it on sticks in this garden here is just a few sticks holding it up. This one is a lovely little design here that's doing the job. You could build wood covers with British gardeners really excelled at this and I think people need to go back to laugh houses so I mean I'm not comfortable buying all this plastic myself. You can just switch over to other ways to shade you can rig up little foldy things like this for your lettuce or whatever. There's a new people that do basketry can we've we've themselves panels and then proper panel up here a lightweight panel of woven basketry materials and it doesn't matter what you shade plants with they don't care. That's important and shading greenhouses people have plants in greenhouses to keep them warm and then discover that they're frying in a greenhouse. They regularly get too hot in there and that's when we lose the flowers and the fruit and we get these weird disorders like blossom and drought. And so shading greenhouses temporarily is important, make, you know, making it easy to be able to throw shade cloth up there, get windows and vents wide open, maybe installing fans, that's fans to move the air. This is a shade this is a heat injury in a commercial greenhouse here on soul spring this is this is not disease this is sunscald. And always be on top of the fact that late spring frost are going to be with us so you know there's lots of approaches here from, you know, wonderful little Victorian glass cloches I just thought you might like to see that. You know to the milk jug with the bottom out of it or a sheet of plastic or floating row cover or fleece or anything or cold frames, whatever, and do be prepared for colder and longer spells in the winter. And Arctic outbreaks have always happened. You know two or three days here two or three days there and then that's it for the winter. But we've had a whole month couple years ago we had nearly the month we had over three weeks of the month of February that set records day after day after day. The cold that we had in December this year right after Christmas set all kinds of records as well. So be prepared for the fact that it's going to be colder for longer when it is cold. In some ways, it's even worse because recent patterns have been a pretty warm winter, and then a cold spell. So it isn't even been on sort of normal cold, normal winter temperatures. Plans are really unprepared for it and then suddenly we get these really brutal outbreaks. So covering things that are not hardy. There's temporary covers this is just uncovered things after a cold spell in a vegetable garden. Now this just plastic this just stored in the garage some tarps it doesn't have to be transparent. This happens to be transparent because it was left over from building a house years ago. I'm using the same pieces of plastic I had when I built this house 20 years ago. If you use it in the in the winter when it's cold. It's not exposed to bright sun or heat plastic lasts a long long time is folded up and put it away. And then you can have it there and have it available with heavy heavy things to hold it down, because usually an Arctic outbreak, there's pretty high outflow winds Fraser Valley so it's just really ripping ripping along. But whatever you do, it needs to be really well secured for the for the winter. The nice little high plastic to tunnel with plastic clipped on to it usually rips right apart and windstorm. This is very well stapled and when this latches down this has legs on it rebar legs it's really designed for low, low profile super sturdy wind resistance for winter time things. That reduces evaporation loss in the summer and cools the soil, which is very important to plants because roots cannot take the kind of extremes that the tops of plants can take. It also protects your soil from erosion and losing nutrients in the winter time because there's not the pounding rain isn't happening directly onto the soil, and it also keeps the soil warmer in the winter so there's like nothing bad about mulching mulching is fantastic except when it's very cold spring like we've just had you keep the mulch off to the soil warms up but of course, unfortunately, it's meant a little more weeding this spring because mulches are also controlling weeds, but mulching summer mulching winter it's all good be prepared for these heavy rainfall events in the winter so you might have spots that have been getting by in your yard but now you're mulching there actually pretty waterlogged. If you can go out there and go splish splash sploosh through water. 24 hours after the rain has stopped, then it's not a well drained spot. Obviously when it's pouring rain, everything is squish blushy, but if you know you've had a full day and it hasn't drained away, then that's a water lawn place and that's very hard on things a lot of things to drive that. So building raised beds might be important, you might have to change some plantings, but always keep the soil surface covered through the winter. mulching as I just mentioned or living plants or both just keep every surface to protect that soil plan for drier summers even drier than we've had and we've had some real doozies. You know, keep on planning for water conserving irrigation systems, collecting household water, you know there's so much water in a household that isn't even gray water. You know, when you're warming up the shower before you get into it just running that water into a bucket that's not even gray water that's perfectly clean water. Planting trees and shrubs in the fall really does help get let them get their roots well established so that they will need less water next summer and they do need water their first year. Every year they'll need less of it to until they get established for a couple years, but it does help to not have to water very much their first summer. Now that's ways to survive the situation. What can we do to help mitigate the, you know, how can we increase the carbon capture in the soil basically that's what gardens and plants are good at. If the plants can capture the carbon, it removes it from the atmosphere. Carbon is held in roots and in humus and in soil microbes in the soil. The maximum amount, if you can maximize the amount of living roots throughout that soil profile, all year round that's going to hold more carbon than you then it's an amazing how much more carbon there is. In fact, they're discovering now that under organic cropping systems. When they've been looking at the soil organic carbon they've been looking in various farm systems and comparing them they're comparing them in the roots on the plants. But now I've just reading research paper where they went down and we're looking like four or five feet. Deep in the soil and it's there's a big difference is a lot more carbon being stored under organic, organically managed crop systems far deeper than they thought. So it's really important so add more plants. You know, I call this picture who's been looking at the soil organic carbon they've been looking in various farm systems and comparing them they're comparing them in the roots on the plants. But now I've just reading research paper where they went down and we're looking like four or five feet deep in the soil. Add more plants. You know, I call this picture who needs pathways anyway. That's my vegetable garden with grapes and roses and a few other things anyway I know where the path I know where to step, but add more plants and a greater variety, get more dense plantings add climbers and vines to fences. There's a lot of ground covers under you know where you've got shrubs rotted dendrons and things they can have lovely ground covers layered in there under the under the established shrubbery. And deep soil carbon is mainly deposited by the roots of perennial plants. So this is a, this is a food garden. Blueberries, black currants, pears, figs and there's actually you can't see them there's two small apple trees in here to big fig trees that doesn't blueberry plants a whole bunch of stuff in here and ornamentals as well and there's grapes on the fence here and there's lots of roses. And every little bit of the soil here has a ground cover in between it so the rock wall is full of plants. You know, maximizing this is going to capture the most carbon. You can fit a lot into a small space here's somebody with an absolutely postage stamp yard in in on Salt Spring, and they've got plants climbing the entire height of the house. So designing climate friendly gardens, you know some designs produce a lot more food food per square meter. They're cheaper. And they mitigate the effects of climate change better than others. In some cases gardeners have invested in a lot of infrastructure that is expensive. But also, there's a lot of potential here space that could be helping to capture carbon that isn't, you know and everybody likes to garden a different way and you know there's no one right way to garden but, but boy oh boy, this one if I had to choose a climate garden I would go with this. Yikes. So building soil organic matter is another place that carbon is held, and it's held in the humus which is the stage of organic matter, long after it looks like compost. It goes it's completely digested and it's actually a kind of brown sticky goo. And that's very long lasting. It's very important in holding particles of soil together to improve the soil structure creases the water holding capacity in the soil and nutrient availability. So the way you build soil organic matter fastest, believe it or not, is to leave organic material on the surface. It builds surface mulching builds organic matter faster than digging it in. And then plant roots at an enormous amount of organic matter, leave roots in the soil at every opportunity. This is a corn plant at harvest time, you know, massive roots it's a big grass it's a huge amount of organic matter so I pulled that all out of the soil. That is really taking away organic matter but I leave it in the soil over the winter I just cut the corn stalk off at harvest time. This is all it's left in the soil by spring. So all of that massive organic matter has stayed in the soil. Minimizing disturbance to the soil, the more cultivation, the more the ground is cultivated, the more carbon is released, and it also just disrupts the soil micro committee community. It worries our little worms and things too. So no tell methods or infrequent or shallow cultivation, just surface. I just sort of twist in compost and organic fertilizers if I need them. Once a year and then after that I don't disturb the soil anymore than necessary to remove some plants and put in, excuse me put in new plants. Well I had directly without cultivating if you can. This was where peas were peas have been growing, and I had to, you know, open up the bed put the peas and the peas grew. Cut the plant pea plants off and leave the roots in the soil to leave the nitrogen that the peas formed there. And then I just crush the pea vines down on the soil so now I've got soil that has nitrogen added as well as it's already mulched, and I can just take a trowel and make a little hole and put in my cauliflower seedling. And this is the corn stubs. I just scratch up the soil and so fall greens right around the corn plant stubs. Compost with care. You know when you get a stinky compost you know you've got kitchen waste in a big black composter and it smells awful. Well, that is releasing methane and other gases and those are powerful greenhouse gathes. So on a kitchen bucket scale and you may not think that matters much but when people are doing larger scale composting, you've got to maintain well aerated conditions or else you will be forming methane. So, good aeration do not put lime or wood ashes in a compost pile you just put those if you're going if you're going to use them you put them on the soil directly. The alkaline conditions that are in compost when you're using these kinds of you know high alkaline materials like lime or wood ashes in the compost pile what happens is the microbes that like those conditions release nitrogen to the atmosphere and nitrogen is another greenhouse gas it's very potent. And you might consider think about ways to reduce the area of annual gardens, like your vegetable gardens your flower gardens and lawns, and then you could use that extra space to grow trees or native vegetation or perennial plants or wildlife plants, just more perennial flowers. So, cutting back on lawns and annual gardens, and to get that deep rooted deep rooted plant material, if you're growing very intensively it's quite astonishing how much food you can produce in a pretty small garden in a yard in this climate. And then you can take that other space and do other things for it that are more beneficial. You know in capturing carbon and you know feeding wildlife and insects. Maximizing the harvest from a small garden this is another view of, I think it's another year in my garden growing intensively inter planting, never leaving a blank space so when there's a hole in space to get other plant in harvest all winter. It makes the most use of a pretty small garden space and other things we can do is. Well, stop using Pete Moss for example it's still available but there are substitute materials core wood fiber compost there various things that can have the same role in our horticulture. Pete Boggs hold more carbon globally than all of the standing forests on the planet put together. So mining out Pete is not making any sense at all. I'm trying to eliminate plastic plastics and incredibly valuable versatile material. If you've got plastic items just make them last forever. And they will last forever if you can keep them from being out in the direct sun like really hot conditions, like your, you know plastic that you might cover plants with in the wintertime and recycle what you can. All kinds of plastic pots and containers are pretty sturdy and don't buy more, you know, and there's certain things that in horticulture like plastic mulch landscape fabric that we don't need those they didn't work that well anyway they're not necessary and there's really good substitutes for them and they're really good non plastic approaches. There are, it is going to be very hard to replace things like plastic irrigation pipes and shade cloth for example. So there are some plastics that are going to be harder than others to get rid of minimize the use of artificial nitrogen fertilizer if you've been buying plant prod or something that's a, you know if the bag says 1010 10 or 2020 20. It takes a lot of fossil fuel energy to make those nitrogen fertilizers. And in the process they release nitrous oxide to the atmosphere and that is of another powerful greenhouse gas. So using compost and manure and organic materials that are higher in nitrogen. Though that's how we feed the soil. So a resilient gardener has a resilient garden. So this is kind of a summary really design and manage your gardens to protect plants from whatever is going to happen to the weather so you just really do need to be on top of the weather forecast. So know the weather and know what to do and then you're prepared. So plants and kinds of plants and plant material and cultivars that can tolerate the right weather changes. Listen to the weather forecast. Hold carbon in the soil and increase the amount of carbon being held in your soil with more plants. It's wonderful to tell gardeners that they've got to grow more plants this is like they're totally happy with being told to go out there and fit more plants into your landscape deep rooted diverse year round plantings. And then, you know, this is not necessarily easy or it can cost some money so make long term plans to enhance plantings if you need to start cuttings of something it may take a while to get a big shrub but a cutting may not cost anything you can do buying a big shrub already growing in a nursery increasing soil organic matter that's a matter of raking up all those free leaves in the fall and putting them on your garden there's no cost involved. So conserving water reducing plastic site plastic use these are things that we can, you know plan to do in the long term. So just be really prepared for variable weather design resilient gardens and oops, and for the long term. Join the community, the province, the nation and any global efforts that are going to reduce our output of greenhouse gases and adapt to a changing climate. We're all part of the same blue marble in the sky here. So I've got plenty of time for questions. If any are rise. Thank you so much for that incredible presentation. And I will just open up the questions here. So Casey asks, which Apple varieties would you recommend. Well there's a lot of apples that are resistant to scam. There's scab resistant apples and it's easy to find a list. And you know I you know if you're you're on the lower mainland or you know go to the Apple festivals I got a UBC or any of those and try taste test apples that you like, because we're all different. I'm giving up I don't recommend anything to anybody except I recommend how to find out what you want to what you like to plant. And then look those plants up there's a tremendous amount of information on just simply Googling it to discover disease resistance if you don't have a book or reference book or something it's easy to find this information. So I'm quite fond of my Spartan apples and I know people that hate Spartan apples. So, I adore my golden Russets but they're not for everyone because Golden Russets. When you pick them in the fall they're just kind of Oh I don't know not very good. They're a winter storage Apple, and they get better after two months they're very very aromatic and sweet. So you really need to pick pick some things you like, and look them up for and scab resistance is the main thing you're looking for an apples. And nurseries that know what they're doing with apples can give you a list of the flowering times for the varieties, then and what you're looking for is late flowering wherever possible. So just a reminder to attendees if you have any questions please type them into the Q&A. I can't respond to any raise hands so just write your questions into the Q&A. Sally asks, Have you tried using rice holes in place of pearlite and do you use pearlite at all. No, I don't have any access to rice holes so I should think it would work fine I don't use pearlite either. I have used pearlite and vermiculite and things they're frankly expensive now if you've ever tried to buy a recently, and I've kind of shifted depending what I'm using it for I use other materials. A few years ago I used to use vermiculite for was when I dug up daily youtubers in the fall in buckets and I would sprinkle vermiculite all through it but I found that fall leaves work beautifully for that. So I think you'll find substitutes for a lot of these things. Catherine asks, Is it okay to use a liquid fish fertilizer. No, you don't need it. You don't need it. Absolutely. You know, liquid fish fertilizer you can do a homemade version if you can take a shovel full of good compost and put in about a five gallon bucket of water and soak it overnight for not no more than two days, but just one or two days the liquid in there will have the soluble nutrients and very soluble. And so it's phosphorus, or sorry, not phosphorus potassium. So what you'll have in that liquid water is kind of like, you know, just real cheap fish fertilizer may not be as quite as high in nitrogen, but it will do the job. And you can water your vegetables with that. Excellent. How much fan asks wondering about your thoughts replacing a front lawn with a rain garden. for it. I mean, and, but in the rain garden, look for plants that are native plants. I mean, I've seen some lovely rain gardens, but they were kind of all just one plant. I mean, it is functioning to capture water. That's great in allowing water to sink in. But you can kind of go to town with cool and neat plants in there and interesting things and something that might be a little more of a habitat for birds and insects. But you could also grow vegetables probably too. It's a very personal decision, but it's always good to trap as much water onto the landscape as possible. Mary asks, what material can I use instead of landscape fabric? Well, wouldn't laugh works really well or woven any kind of woven things. If you know anybody that, you know, has simple basketry skills, you know, you can just weave onto a frame, you can weave plant, you know, twigs and branches and things. Yeah, it's unfortunately things like cloth, which will work perfectly well if you need to. It's an emergency, a cotton sheet is just fine, but it doesn't let in any light. So if you want to use things that are opaque like that, you can, but it's better to deploy them around 10 in the morning and sort of take them up at like three in the afternoon. So the plants have the morning and the evening sun. And that kind of is, that's the kind of the same difference as 50% shade cloth. The advantage of 50% shading, if it's lattice work or if it's the fabric that you buy, is that you can put it in place for the whole heat wave and then you take it and put it away again. It's just a labor saving thing. But you can use bed sheets and you can use old curtain material, but you'll have to keep taking it up for a little while in the day. So the plants get some sun on the cooler parts of the day. And Marge asks, what is the best way to increase calcium in the soil? Limeing, most of our soil needs lime anyway to raise the pH and it just has so happens that the best tool for us is lime. And so adding lime is going to increase the calcium. Brandy says, my maple trees have black tar spots this year. Do I need to collect them and get rid of them in the fall instead of using them as mulch? And what can I do to prevent this next year? You don't have to do anything at all. It's not hurting the maple trees and it's specific to maple trees. So you could take those leaves and put them on apple trees. It doesn't matter. It won't spread anywhere. And tar spot often we don't really even see it until the fall when the leaves are falling off and the chlorophyll, the leaves aren't green anymore. They're turning pale yellow and then we oh gee they had tar spot all summer and we didn't even know it. It doesn't hurt the maple trees. It's what's strictly a cosmetic effect and it won't spread to anything else. Carolyn asks, is there anything I could over plant an asparagus bed with? You know that's a bit tricky. Asparagus, you know they need every bit of nutrients to replace what you just picked. So compromising that in any way is not a good plan. That would probably be like the one plant that I would not try and interplant much with or do anything because the asparagus are just such heavy feeders I would go out and put an entire you know pile of compost on top of that bed and I wouldn't necessarily try and put anything in and around it. You know maybe a few lettuce depends on how far apart your plants are. You might get away with a little bit of lettuce or something but I don't think it's a good plan to push it too hard. Melanie asks, what are the benefits of straw as a mulch material in veggie beds? Oh it works great. It's just got a big downside which is that it's very expensive and it works really well. It lasts for two seasons. You know I sometimes get a bale of straw in the fall when it's cheaper. Now you have to watch it because straw can come with seeds in it and so what I do is I just if I'm going to get straw I'll put it out in the fall and just let it get rained on all winter. Leave the strings on the bale. Don't take it off because if you've ever used straw you know that fresh straw if you start spreading that around the garden the first wind all the straw is all over your neighborhood. So leave it in the bale and let it get kind of a winter's worth of decomposition going and it sprouts a seed sprout. You can flip the bale over a few times. You may not see many seeds or you may see a huge amount but it's all killed in the bale. Then in the spring when you start taking that bale apart it kind of it kind of sticks together like little little leaves of it's not like cardboard but it's a bit woven together and it's very easy to mulch with and then you'll get another two years of of wear out of that and leaves break down within the year but mulch straw mulch often lasts longer so it really the downside is the cost of it and the and the fact that it blows all over the place when it's fresh so that's an approach. Tina says our six-year-old plum trees have aphids and white fly is this a sign of stress? It can be but every every fruit tree has aphids on them right now and I wouldn't worry a bit about the aphids and it's probably not white flies it's probably leaf hoppers. I wouldn't worry about them either. In fact what I'm telling people right now it was the kind of weather that aphids did thrive in all spring and the predators weren't thriving because they you know it was just so cool but it's flipping over really fast and just like walk away from your fruit trees if there's aphids in them and just promise yourself you're not going to look for two more weeks. No seriously because people are sending me pictures and panics about you know all the aphids on their fruit tree leaves and I'm looking at their pictures and I can see in the photos eggs of proper flies and lady beetles and if I can see one hoverfly egg I know there's ten I can't see and those eggs are hatching now this warm weather they'll be out I mean I'm just you know you've actually got the predators there I can see their eggs in the pictures so just take a deep breath go away enjoy the weekends you know go to the beach have a barbecue don't even think about it the aphids will be taken care of by predators if you leave it alone. Good to know. Okay Katie says she keeps putting lots of compost in her raised bed but still are troubled with soaker hose water flooding out between the boards should I think about adding a bit of clay? No no now I would just check how you're watering what this if water is flooding out you may be using too much water or it's going too fast you know I I've had gardeners in my courses who thought watering once a month was enough and I've had people that watered every single day and clearly that's not neither one of those approaches is right you need to run your irrigation system for a short period of time and then turn it off like like decide to run it for 10 minutes a lot of these systems only run you only need to run them 10 minutes so then turn it off wait for an hour or so so water kind of soaks in and get a trowel and dig down and see where the water is in the root zone the thing about surface soaker hoses and things like that and drip systems is the water is soaking in but rarely does the surface of the soil get wet until you've really been using a phenomenal amount of water so the soil can be perfectly dry on the surface and yet at the root zone there's plenty of water so do not go by how wet your soil is to look at test test your system run it for a little while turn it off and dig down and see what's happening at an equivalent area of a root zone and that's the how you'll calibrate your irrigation system because really you might be watering twice a week 10 minutes each but don't try and put clay in that just as uh just don't do not try and alter clay soil by putting in sand or sandy soil by putting in clay it doesn't work it can make the situation a lot worse organic matter that you're doing is perfect and if there's a problem with your soil texture the organic matter is going to be far more beneficial to it but most soils are just fine you just feed the organic matter but check I think it probably lies in how you're irrigating CJ says I haven't orchard and have been using holistic sprays with a dilute neem oil it's found a tremendous difference in the health and growth of my trees what are your thoughts well what do you mean the health and growth I'm personally really against things like that being sprayed on trees because they have insecticidal effects and that means you're just applying an unnecessary insecticide and that is never a good thing for a couple reasons one you are killing eggs and larvae of beneficial insects that would be there but the other thing that we do not realize and we did not know this until in recent years how incredibly sensitive insects are to the scent of that leaf so a lady beetle looking for aphids to eat and I'm actually I did research on an aphid mid which is a little common insect that is probably our biggest aphid or most effective aphid predator but nobody can really see it because it's so little if they if you've used soap on a leaf or a neem oil or anything like that on a leaf these insects can smell it and even though the aphids are there the insect won't come and lay its eggs on the aphid so you you kind of bugger it up and at a level of subtlety that we do not even know the other thing you do is you change the the flora of the beneficial fungi and bacteria that would be on that leaf everything we have learned about how many beneficial insects are out there and how much microbiome is going on in our digestive system while it applies to the rest of the world so a leaf in the natural ecosystem has a really interesting population of fungi and bacteria and some of those are suppressing diseases from being able to get in soon as we start messing around with that with sprays and soaps and things that we don't need we can make situations worse. Renee says my garden is overrun with buttercups in between plants I've taken some out and now I will have open soil to keep moist over the hot months what might be the best approach leave the buttercups. We'll put something else there if you've got taken the buttercup out there might be some other plant that you would rather have if you don't want any plants there at all then a good thick mulch or putting down some newspaper and putting some wood chips on top so it looks nice or you know it depends what you want in your garden buttercup is very hard to control so if you're trying to remove it and you've successfully removed it from a place then there might be plants that you would like to grow there. Kansy says the leaves in my yard mix with my apple tree leaves my apple tree has scab can I use this as mulch or even add it to my compost file or should I send it off the property? Oh no that's no you can absolutely use it and especially compost it but apple scab over winters on those falling leaves so if you can disintegrate those leaves before spring then it destroys the scab as well so composting is actually an excellent way to get rid of apple scab if you've got a big area of trees and you know raking up all those leaves isn't feasible then running more back and forth and back and forth a few times and liming the soil in the fall will both cause the leaves to break down really fast so as long as those leaves have been digested by spring they're not a source of infection apple scab is one of those things that actually is pretty easy to manage. A pear scab is also in the fallen leaves on pears but it also over winters in the tree buds apple scab does not over winter on the tree it's only in those fallen leaves as long as they're kind of completely dissolved by spring in some composting or mulching that you've done and you can certainly put them on other plants and not the scab won't go on other kinds of plants it'll only go on apples. Melanie asks will climate change lead to changes in the types of pests we should expect? Well it's certainly leading to changes already in the number of pests of some that we already have and it may you know I'm sure that most of us here will remember the great pine beetle disasters mountain pine beetle that was a native insect it wasn't an invasive insect from somewhere else it was native to here but because the winters were warmer it wasn't being there was no drag on its populations from cold weather and it's just basically completely you know it's devastated acres and acres of trees and has skipped over the mountains and it's moving eastern canada all these things that people thought would never happen because this native insect's been here forever so in in terms of climate change there may be some invasive species that will do better but mainly I mean the creatures that are already here are having a bit of a heyday because of the climate has changed to be more favorable now it can also get too hot for insects for different ones so you know and populations are changing you know moving moving to higher elevations and moving more northward so it's it's a very complicated picture but there is no one answer to say that this and this and this will be a problem but we will the pests we do have will have probably more generations of them. Lucia asks what can one use to replace artificial nitrogen fertilizers? Compost blood meal fish fish fish waste like sea soil gosh soybean meal alfalfa meal there's a lot of pretty high nitrogen organic matter in compound you know human urine sounds gross but it's quite sterile and fish waste there's a lots of sources that are quite high in nitrogen that don't involve having to buy anything made through the hyperbush process that uses so much energy. Colleen asks can you use remae or floating row cover for shade? Not really it was designed to keep heat in if you'll I mean that was how that was you know we also use it to keep bugs out of vegetables and stuff but it's basically designed to trap heat now if I only had floating row cover in fact sometimes I do take out my floating row cover when I'm short on it but what I do is I fold it over about four times so it's not actually letting in any light at all it's just that it's nice and lightweight and it's basically not functioning like floating row cover I lay it on top of the plant so there's plenty of ventilation underneath and I folded it so many times that it's not letting in in sunlight so it can't trap light so it's basically not acting like floating row cover at all it's just that I have it and I can put it in my garden it's if you've got carrots for example that you've sown carrots and you've got floating row cover over the carrots to keep out carrot rust fly then you put the shading material over the top of that like if you've got you know shade cloth you can put it over the top or lattice work you can put up on little legs above your carrot bed but leave the floating row cover in place but shade it as well okay and Carolyn asks how do I determine if my compost is good to make compost tea well any compost will work so some of it's just better than others if you get a bag of sea soil or something like that it'll work even better but you know your home compost your home compost will do is absolutely fine it's usually not very high in nitrogen but what there is is soluble and you will um it will be useful you know if you're somewhere and you see a bag of horse manure on a sometimes roadside stands people have bags of horse manure out one bag of horse poopies will last you the whole summer you can just put it shovelful at a time in a five gallon bucket of water soak that use the water dilute it a lot because it'll be quite strong um you can just keep doing that and that'll that'll last a garden the whole summer one if you can just get one um one plastic bag of uh one garbage bag of horse manure right um Jenny says which birds should we try to attract to our veggie gardens to help with potential pests I don't know me and the birds they had a real parting of the ways this spring because we had so much bird damage um no particular birds um and there's not much in a way to not much of a way to um excuse me to attract a particular species over another unless they're ones that nest in certain kinds of nesting materials that you can provide but a lot of birds don't take they don't take bird boxes they build their nests in trees me and the robins have really had a disagreement this spring about just how good they are for my garden and some birds do a fair bit of damage to plants quail um finches they'll eat a lot of plant material finches go through and pick the flowers off of fruit trees so some of them are really annoying but um a lot of them have at least part of their diet if not all of their diet is insects and you'll see little wrens and small sparrows and things just combing through tree branches and plants looking for uh insects so I don't think that I can give you anything that would attract one kind of bird more than another I think an environment that is safe for all organisms and has lots of birds may have some nuisance robins in there but everybody else will probably be doing what you want them to do okay um Linda says I would like to use grass clippings to mulch but wonder if weed seeds are a problem well probably not because most people mow their lawn before the seeds have formed so unless you are mowing a hay field in which case weed seeds you know could be a problem but unless you are mowing it you know it's gotten really really tall and you could see the flowers have matured you should if you had weeds there you should be able to tell whether the the flowers have actually got seeds in them you know just if they're if you've been mowing reasonably regularly there won't be any seeds now the thing about grass clippings is is you really need to leave it on the lawn I mean if you're going to have a nice looking lawn that's the only source of fertilizer you need so you can leave the grass on the lawn and that will fertilize the lawn and it's like no you know it's perfect food for lawns so you can mulch with it though but it disappears very quickly it's very high in nitrogen and water so it's a fantastic component of a compost pile or to to surface mulch to feed the soil if you're not going to leave it on the lawn that's why this is why it's such a fantastic food for lawns so it's just that it also dries up very quickly and disappears if you've ever left your grass clippings on the lawn you'll notice that if you you know three or four hours after you've mowed it's just basically gone it just shrivels up and dries up so it's all good it just doesn't last very long as a as a mulch and we have a question what about mushroom manure I recently heard it's not as good as horse manure is that correct it well it all depends and you know it depends is it from the organic mushroom production facility or is it from one that isn't organic in which case they've been treating that manure because there's little flies that get into the mushrooms so you have to know more about that to know whether you want to use it or not the the bagged up mushroom manure that you see sometimes if fairly cheap it'll there be chicken there's poultry or chicken manure steer manure and mushroom manure they used to be in yellow and white bags and they used to be they'd be the cheapest of the of the products at the garden centers and they were just very poor they're pasteurized so they're safe I mean that the steer manure has been pasteurized so you don't have an issue that you do when you get manure from a farm for human health point of view but they're very low in nutrients and just wasn't you know wasn't really worth buying if you've got to use it up and don't buy anymore because even though it's cheap it's it's cheap for a reason um so really you have to know more about the source if you want to know you know try and compare things um Danica says we have huge numbers of ants around our house and they dig up large areas of sandy soil is there anything we can do to control this or do we just have to live with it you know I get somebody to help you out with that like call a pest control company they don't have to come and just spray pesticides they come and advise and figure out the species of ant and because there are some ant baits that work really well for some ants and there's ants that some ants that are really important to control and others that aren't um so uh you know I I I don't know what kind of ants you have and I think you just if get a get somebody that knows the different ant species to come out and have a look and advise you um Renee says what could be planted in a graveled border I would like to replace a graveled border and open patch between house with some low ground cover well if it's going to stay gravelly or rocky um you know that native sedum that I showed you it's fantastic stuff and there's a native butterfly that depends on that sedum alone and has no other food that it will eat and um when I got that established um I'm on one side of a mountain on the other side of the mountain there are a lot of rock outcrops with that sedum on the rock um and I'm on the other side of the mountain but I actually have what's the kind of the similar rock faces because it's the way my rock walls are built and so I've packed it full of that sedum and now I have a little population a very small population of that incredibly rare native butterfly that was never seen in this neighborhood before but it lives here now so the sedums in general produce lovely flowers for pollinators and a lot of insects really enjoy the flowers and come to them so depending what you if you like the look of that there's a huge variety in the sedums and you can go right from the native little gray one with the yellow flowers it's blooming now to autumn joy which is about a maybe a foot high and has bigger leaves and big pink flowers that you'll see full of bees in the fall right and um charlotte says we are miming our grass annually should we also lime our vegetable gardens as well it's probably more important to even line the vegetable garden but I would do it based on a soil test and get a soil test at a lab not with a little kit from the garden center because the kits are wildly inaccurate um and a lab test will cost you well it depends where it is but between 20 dollars something like that you only need to test maybe once every five years so I wouldn't lime every year without knowing what's going on and at first you may have to lime for the first few years and then after that you back off so um you know lime for a while and then um on the basis of a test you would decide over the to keep liming so I would test and then lime okay um well we have not quite made it through all the questions but we are at the end of our time um so I can pass on any other questions Linda thank you and just so much for that unbelievably informative presentation um anyone who's around the library we have a beautiful garden growing up on our rooftop patio um every year we're sort of expanding in a bit more so this year we'll be putting in well we've got lots of fruits and vegetables growing and this year we'll be adding a native plant garden and composting and um a native bee hotels there's lots lots in the works for our garden we have a bat garden um to hopefully entice them back to come and live in our bat boxes that we have so if you're at the library please come and stop by our garden um and again Linda thank you so much for being here today and thank you everyone for joining us and have a wonderful day go forth and enjoy this lovely weekend but keep your shoes handy that's all even if it's newspaper over the seedlings that'll be good good