 Welcome. My name is Julie Garden Robinson and I'm your host for today's second Field to Fork webinar for the season. This is brought to you by North Dakota State University Extension and it's the ninth year that we've done this series and we're really glad you've chosen to join us. We have archived all of the webinars from the previous years and the link is on our Field to Fork webinar page. The next slide shows the upcoming webinars and we hope you join us for these as well. The following slide shows the webinar controls. Because we have a lot of people joining us we invite you to post your questions and comments in the chat. This program is sponsored in part with grant funding from the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service and I'll ask all of you to complete the short survey that will be emailed right after today's webinar. So I have some special instructions. We are combining the two years of data so you will see 2023 dates but if you scroll down you will see the 2024 dates. So just scroll down the page to 228-2024 and you can enter your information at that point. Again I welcome you to today's webinar and the next slide has the name of our speaker and the topic. Dr. Esther McGinnis is our speaker. She is an extension horticulturalist and director of the NDSU Extension Master Gardener program and also an associate professor within the Department of Plant Sciences. She and her grad students research pollinator attraction, plants that take cyclical saturation and drought and also native plants. So I thank Esther for joining us and I think we will all learn a lot from her talk Gardening with Arthritis and Pain. Thank you Julie. So I'm just thrilled to be part of Field DeFork again this year. Always enjoy interacting with your audience. Well before we dive into the meat of this talk you know we first have our non-discrimination statement and I wish I had a little bit more elegant way of saying it but the best I can do is say that we at NDSU practice the golden rule and we do not discriminate against anybody. If there any issues please contact our provost office. All right so now back to our talk on Gardening with Arthritis. We all know that gardening is good for our health and it's for every age group. We know this is true of young people. We know this is true of people in middle age and senior citizens. Now if we look at children it's so important to teach them how to garden. You know they learn about science but on the other hand they also get the joy of growing vegetables and they're more likely to try vegetables and have more adventurous diets if in fact they do garden. Now these benefits continue as we get older and there have been lots of papers talking about you know the physical, mental and spiritual benefits of gardening and also being in nature but this becomes even more important as we age. So we've got some studies here showing that gardeners score higher in all major health indices and they have more hand strength so this is very important. Now I see this in my own mother you know she has troubles opening jars and such because she doesn't have the hand strength that she used to but gardeners that stay active, that dig in the soil, that use pruners are more likely to maintain that hand strength. You know there are social benefits we find that lots of you know independent living facilities, assisted living, skilled nursing, they're all starting to integrate gardening into their landscapes because it's really a social issue. The nursing home nursing home and assisted living residents are more engaged in the life of the community than those that don't garden and this makes sense. I mean gardeners are kind of a chatty group we're a friendly group we like to share our knowledge with one another and we like to talk and make friends. So this is this is very important I mean you've been probably seeing in the news that we've got an epidemic of loneliness but if you're gardening you know at the the nursing home you're more likely to be social and to be making friends and this continues as we get even older so individuals with cognitive decline so think dementia and Alzheimer's we find that they have increased functioning if they garden and when I say garden I mean very basic tasks or maybe just even walking in the garden. So I'm reminded of a story that a master gardener told me so a lot of our master gardeners do work with nursing homes and assisted living facilities and this one individual did a really spectacular job of maintaining the ornamental gardens around the nursing home. One day this individual with Alzheimer's got out without anybody noticing so you can imagine there was a lot of alarm you know because somebody could have gotten hurt you know particularly when you have somebody with cognitive difficulties leaving the facility so they mounted a big search and they found this individual and she was in the garden and she noticed that they were a little upset and she said to them why are you so upset you should have known I would have been here this is the only place I want to go so I thought that was really poignant that here we had somebody with Alzheimer's and she knew that she needed to get to the garden for comfort so I found that was really really touching that gardens continue to have a major impact on our lives from from birth until our oldest years but we've got challenges so I can imagine there are some of you online that have arthritis in your hands so that can make things very difficult my own father has arthritis in his back and in his knee so he's in a wheelchair I have back issues I've actually had back issues since I was in my late 20s but I've managed to keep them pretty much at bay but these are things that can make it challenging to garden and in fact they can cause a barrier to gardening you know probably one of the major issues that prevents people from gardening is arthritis and that's a collective term for over a hundred conditions that involve joint inflammation and anytime you have a joint that's inflamed you're going to have swelling and inflammation of the surrounding tissue I was shocked to see that close to 50 million people in the U.S. have arthritis I mean that's a huge huge proportion of individuals so this makes this talk very relevant but we may have other individuals that are on this webinar today and you may not have arthritis but you may have pain you may have pain when you bend over you may have pain when you kneel to garden or if you're pushing or pulling something lifting or carrying things or using tools you may find that it's hard to grasp the tool so regardless of whether you have arthritis or not if you have some form of pain this talk will be for you we're going to introduce the term of adaptive gardening so adaptive gardening is making gardening accessible for everybody you know regardless of your abilities and regardless of how mobile you are with adaptive gardening we want to not just remove barriers we want to smash those barriers so you can continue to garden and continue to reap all those health benefits from gardening one of the most important goals of adaptive gardening is to work smarter not harder and we're going to have a lot of tips about that in today's talk and to minimize pain and strain on the body so here's my outline for the talk the first third of the talk we're going to talk about customizing your garden area to work for you and taking it into account your special needs in the second third i'm going to introduce some warm-up exercises there's some there specific for arthritis but i also have some more general exercises so i'm hoping that you're going to move today i'm hoping that this will be one of the more interactive webinars that you've participated in and that you're moving and trying out these exercises these exercises are quite simple and then in the final third we're going to talk about tools what gardener doesn't like talking about tools i wish i had more money so i could buy more tools because i just love them but these are special ergonomic tools that help minimize strain on your body so does your garden look like this do you have an in-ground garden is it large enough to feed a family of 15 you know maybe this is the point where you start reevaluating so if that in-ground garden is no longer working for you you know start asking yourself as you listen to this presentation what type of garden would work for you and as you continue to age what is the right size of garden for you you know you probably don't have to feed 20 people maybe you only have a couple people at home so consider what's the right size is the garden in a convenient location i like to have my garden fairly close to the house i've got kind of a kitchen garden that's right on my deck so i can just step outside and grab a handful of rosemary or basil and and then a little bit further away i've got my raised garden bed where i can go grab tomatoes so having that garden closer to your home making it more of a kitchen garden may work better for you and then you got to think about proximity to water you're not going to want to be carrying a bucket of water to your garden if you can you know have a longer hose or even consider having an automated irrigation system for your garden so all of this is about working smarter not harder raised beds will be a topic that we cover in great detail here and this helps us to minimize kneeling and bending and reaching this allows us to be a little bit more accessible this happens to be a raised bed that we have on campus at NDSU it was designed 20 years ago to facilitate gardening by those in wheelchairs so you'll see that we've got we've got these u-shaped bays people can wheel their wheelchair in and start gardening it should be at at the right height or you know somebody with a walker can get in there and they can lean on the wall and you know just go around the u-shape and pull weeds or or deadhead flowers and such but i have to admit that the volunteers that volunteer in the garden our master gardeners like to garden here too and and none of them are in wheelchairs or in walkers it's still just a nice place to garden because you don't have to bend over so the previous photo was of a garden that was designed 20 years ago for wheelchairs we're starting to you know think a little bit more strategically we're starting to think more ergonomically i like the garden that you see in this photo as you look at it you'll see that on the right hand side we've got kind of a tabletop garden and it's got a cutout for for people's feet and their knees so somebody can go over there in a wheelchair and get really close to the table so they don't have to reach as far um so i absolutely just love this but it's it's not just for people confined to wheelchairs you know you could you could sit there in a regular chair and garden um here's another one for individuals in wheelchairs this is from the chicago botanic garden and i love how the two little tabletops here are set at different heights so individuals that are shorter could go on the left and then you've got on the right allows more space if somebody's taller so having having space like this having it be adjustable is just absolutely terrific and i'm hoping that maybe we have potentially like a an assisted living a director that's on or or individuals that even volunteer at nursing homes so these are great ideas to bring back you can garden while sitting in and this applies to more than just individuals in wheelchairs so i'm thinking you know individuals that um that may may need to just rest a little bit it's wonderful to have a little stool and i love the stool on the left hand side but you don't have to buy a specially made stool you can just bring a chair out there or you can bring a bucket buckets are surprisingly versatile so i'm talking about those buckets that you would find at the hardware store or at a home improvement store they're about i think about five gallons just you can turn them upside down and sit on them so various ways that you can sit in garden you'll notice that we do have kind of a limited space here so this is really good for growing greens and for growing herbs if you can have a wide ledge on your garden that's helpful because you can just sit on the ledge and then you know deadhead your plants in such here's another photo from the chicago botanic garden they had a really nice area for adaptive gardening or accessible gardening and you know having this wide ledge means that you can sit and garden the only concern i have here is that you're going to have to sit kind of sideways and twist your body a little bit so in that situation that still can cause some strain because you're having to twist to garden because you're kind of sitting sideways this is my own raised garden bed and this is one that my husband constructed for me out of corrugated metal and to make it a little bit stronger you know we do have wood framing you know four by fours two by fours and there's just enough space that that i could perch on the edge and garden if i wanted to now this is the right height for me so it's about i think it's about three just under three feet tall so as the plants get a little bit bigger you know they're just at the right level for me but you know you can consider this i mean you may be really tall you or you may be really short you can certainly customize that but but think about you know how far can you reach and this is particularly true for senior citizens we want to be careful that they're not overreaching so the the rule of thumb is that when you're sitting or sitting or standing the average person can reach two feet comfortably and garden now obviously there's some people that could probably reach two and a half feet but the average person two feet is fairly comfortable now if you only have access to your raised garden bed from one side you would make your bed two feet wide if you can access it from from both sides then you would make it four feet across so that's why you typically see raised garden beds that are four by four or four by eight or four by 12 feet is keeping in mind how far can you reach across now i like this i like this garden idea that came to us from Dr. Hans Kendall uh Dr. Kendall um used to office right next to me so we would talk gardening from time to time so he shared this photo with me and i i love this garden because it doesn't require a whole lot of work so he bought some water troughs and drilled some holes in the bottom so keep in mind we do need to allow water to drain out the bottom so we can't have an impermeable surface we need to have drainage holes and then my friend Hans was quite a bit taller than me so you'll notice that he placed these water troughs on landscape blocks to make it a little bit taller which was more appropriate for his height so once again customizing the garden to fit your needs and your size um one thing to keep in mind if you are doing raised garden gardens is what sort of soil mix we generally recommend one third you know like regular mineral soil so this is the soil you would find in the ground and then mixing it with one third sand and one third peat moss so that's kind of the standard recommendation you don't have to buy the expensive raised garden mixes that you see at the hardware store so please notice here that we have hoops going around the garden and if you look in the back you'll see that there's a little bit of poly plastic polyethylene plastic that's peeking out so my friend Hans is very familiar with growing plants and as a faculty member so he has converted these into many green houses so he's able to warm up the soil by capturing the solar energy of the sun and then plant early season crops you know such as greens and beets and whatnot and then as the temperature warms he takes off the plastic so the plants won't overheat you can think you know going vertically doing towers now there are all sorts of towers out there there are hydroponic towers that i've seen this is one that's a little bit more like a bookcase and then it's got these these shelves these shelves which will allow you to place you know a potting mix in there i hope you notice that there is a water line so the water line you can rig it so that each shelf there gets watered now with this you'll notice the shelves are not very deep you'll have to choose plant material that's shallow-rooted no strawberries would be fantastic in this radishes greens spinach you know lettuce those sorts of things would be wonderful in this but once again if you don't have to bend over it's just so much better next up you're going to see trellises and with our trellises that we've got all different types i'm going to show you here we've got one for growing tomatoes so you have to give some thought as to which crops are vining and that allows you to grow upward and you can train them here here the tomatoes were trained to have i believe one liter and then they would twist around the stem and you can do this outdoors you can do this in a high tunnel but make sure that the type of tomato that you're growing is an indeterminate tomato so we've got two kinds of tomatoes we have bush tomatoes which usually top off at like three feet or so and then we've got the vining or indeterminate tomatoes so you would look for that on the label whether it's the seed label or a plant label and that's what you would use and then you would train them to go up the trellis and you can have you can have more than one liter you know you can have a couple leaders it just depends everybody's got a little different philosophy on training their tomatoes if you see photos from commercial greenhouses you would be shocked they grow them for a long period of time you're usually about eight months or so maybe even up to a year and they just keep growing they'll be like eight feet tall which is wonderful you know because you can certainly be picking those tomatoes you know without having to bend over but you know obviously if they're getting to be eight or ten feet tall in a greenhouse you might need a ladder which brings its its own challenges to it but you don't have to worry about that in your own garden it's not going to grow to be eight ten feet tall over the course of the summer showing you other examples of the trellis system and this is the traditional square foot garden system you'll see that we've got one foot squares that are marked off which helps you in deciding how many plants to put in a square with respect to trellises you need to consider shadows you wouldn't want the trellis on the south side of your raised garden bed or your your regular in-ground garden the trellises need to be on the north side and the reason is you don't think about the sun angle you don't want you don't want the trellis shading the rest of the garden if you put it on the north side you know you'll have the sun come through from the south during the summer and shadows won't be an issue aren't these cute we've got tunnels here and these are just modest raised garden beds that are only a foot tall but they are using them as support for the tunnel here you can certainly grow vining crops over it i've seen all sorts of vining crops grown over the tunnels and then you know you can pick the fruit or vegetables as they hang down i've seen this at the chingapa zoo i believe with grapes you could certainly do this with squash and cucumbers and how nice because your squash and cucumbers are not touching the soil they're being held high which keeps the fruit cleaner and it might actually prevent some of the disease pathogens from from taking hold other vining crops your pole beans and pole beans if you see in the background we've got some fun little tinted structures so it's taking these bamboo sticks and putting three or four of them together tying them at the top and that's a perfect structure for which you can grow pole beans and for pole peas so how wonderful not to have to bend over you can imagine how much effort it takes to pick bush beans you know and you do a hundred foot roll of them if you can do pole beans that's so much less effort same is true of cucumbers now i don't have a whole lot to say that's different here other than i love this trellis i remember going on a garden tour and taking pictures of this very unique trellis the colors are just fun i have never seen another set of them i don't know if this was homemade or not but it's just fun with this trellis we've got cucumbers growing up and take a look at the foliage the foliage is absolutely pristine so we find that if you trellis cucumbers and squash and other cucurbits a lot of times you'll have less powdery mildew just because we've got more air movement here so other ways that you can garden without bending over use a wheelchair so if you are if you've got limited mobility you could have somebody bring the garden to you and this is a fun one because we've got a wheelbarrow here it looks like an old-fashioned wheelbarrow and it's filled with all these brightly colored flowers i would be remiss if i didn't mention container gardening and i'm sure there have been numerous talks on field de fork over the last nine years on container gardening so i'm not going to go too in depth but i just wanted to remind you that this is a good way to garden that you can in fact you know take your you know take your container put it on your picnic table or a table outdoors and fill it up with soil there and and certainly you could keep them you can keep them elevated wonderful choices for containers would include a lot of our herbs you see some strawberries in the right hand side flowers now if you have a larger container you could certainly grow tomatoes peppers now eggplants love being grown in containers because containers tend to retain the heat and our eggplants are very much warm season crops and tend to grow better in a container than in the ground our final garden to show you here is a hydroponic salad table and this is from a talk that Dr. Tom Michaels gave for my master gardener conference many years ago this is my former boss so a really a good friend to me and he likes to dabble in things so he's one of those that just started roasting coffee beans you know so he could have his own coffee he got into hydroponic salad tables without having to do the expensive aeroponic system he used rubber made containers and then on top of that he put styrofoam within the styrofoam he cut out circles and then he has embedded these little nets to to contain the plant and then the root system hangs down into the hydroponic solution so absolutely love this idea but he has created a table to to make sure that the hydroponic salad table is at a level that would be you know waste level so you could harvest you could harvest a salad from there and I think if you had you know three of these rubber made containers you could certainly grow enough to have salads for two people without any problems but you know you could certainly customize the table if you didn't want to see the the rubber made or plastic container all right so we've designed our garden so little planning goes a long way to minimize stress now we're ready to garden so before we we go outside you know we make sure we've got our hat we want to make sure that we don't sunburn you know we've got our sunscreen on let's do some warm-up exercises so it's all about loosening up those joints lubricating them the first four slides or so are arthritis warm-ups that come via the arthritis foundation and then the next set of exercises are some that I learned from my former chiropractor slash physical therapist so I'm hoping that you'll move around a little bit here as we get into this next portion and and these are exercises that most individuals can do these are arthritis hand warm-ups you know so keep in mind you know many individuals have arthritis in their hands or in their fingers my mother's fingers are very much gnarly because she was a woman that loved to do crafts she did a ton of sewing she did quilts crocheting knitting you name it so her hands kind of show the effects of all of that but it's very important to lubricate the fingers and what I mean by that is just you know allowing your fingers to warm up so you start off you know by having your hand spread out and then you bring your thumb and your your index finger together and then spread apart you do this again with your thumb and your third finger and then you just keep going you know do four reps and then you know change hands and then do another rep on this so four reps for each finger and and that helps just loosen them up one I didn't include would be you know doing wrist circles so getting your wrist mobilized and warmed up so hopefully you can see that the next up is our trunk rotation so we're warming up our midsection our core you know cross your or you don't have to cross your arms but you're holding on to your arms and we've got the elbows at chest level and then when you turn to the side look over your shoulder come back to the central position and then turn to your left side so do this at least four times so we're just warming up the midsection and then of course look over your shoulder shoulders can be problematic so arthritis can can get into those shoulders and make them painful so I've got two sets of exercises here they're separate in the first exercise you put your your hands on your shoulder and then you stick your elbows out and then start doing some small circles and then you can do larger circles and then go backwards so do as many reps as you're comfortable with but I would I would try and do a minimum of four now if you're experiencing any pain here I would stop and of course when it comes to doing exercises it's always good to run these past your medical doctor or your chiropractor or your physical therapist I'm none of those so make sure that you run those past past somebody that has a medical background to make sure that they're appropriate for you in the second exercise we have more arm circles but we are extending our arms outwards and then we're just making small circles and then we enlarge the circles and then I'm about to hit my desk so I can't do the giant circles but then go back go back the arthritis hip walk you're not going to be able to see my legs here but you know sit up straight in your chair here and you can raise one hip start walking forward on your chair raise the other hip so now now you're kind of on the edge of your chair now you can hold your chair and start doing the same thing you're walking back so you'll be moving a different set of muscles here and you know warming up some different droids you know once again we're working some in the core but also we're working our thighs and our hips our final arthritis exercise is the ankle circle you can do the standing up or you can do it sitting down so you extend one leg at a time and then you make ankle circles and I'm not talking you're not moving your leg you're only moving your ankles and you're going round in circles you know four times to the right now reverse direction and go four times to the left so those are some exercises for the joints and these exercises came from a pamphlet called Arthritis and Gardening a guide for home gardeners and small scale producers this was published by Agra Ability and the Arthritis Foundation so I feel pretty confident sharing these exercises with you but once again run them past your doctor I have my own set of exercises that I do I mentioned that I hurt my back when I was in my late 20s you know I really wish that I could take some things back I mean you don't appreciate the good health that you have when you're young I jumped off a retaining wall that we were building and I wrenched my back which you know then spiraled into having to go to the chiropractor I was very fortunate because I loved my chiropractor in the twin cities he wasn't just a chiropractor he was also a physical therapist so he brought both sets of skills and he did wonderful gentle adjustments but over time I started doing the exercises he provided if if people did these exercises on a daily basis I don't think many people would have to go to the chiropractor so I'm having to push it so I'm middle age now I hate to think about that but I am and I look at my parents I've been through quite a bit the last year with my parents you know watching them go downhill and the one thing that I am certain of is it's it's really important to have a long period where you have quality of life I don't want to necessarily live a long time if I don't have that quality of life if my mind isn't working and if I don't have good mobility so the longer that I can have a period where where I have that high quality of life the better so I do a lot of exercises I probably do 20 to 25 exercises every morning now these are some you can do every day or maybe you may want to try and do them to warm up before you go outside and garden I would suggest starting now I mean I know it's February but it doesn't hurt it doesn't hurt to be doing these to be increasing your flexibility so once garden season comes you're in good shape now I have to admit I feel really self-conscious showing pictures of myself exercising I mean I don't have a gym quality body I mean I'm not an aerobics instructor or anything I was trying to convince my 17 year old to be photographed for this and she's like mom it's it's you're talking about arthritis you're talking about pain it it's more authentic if it comes from me so I'm sharing these photos of myself I don't have I don't have the perfect body but you know it's more realistic how many people do have the perfect body so on the left I am you know first stretching out my lower back which is very important so I hug my knees to my chest for three or five seconds and I I repeat that three times now if you do this and you experience pain you know you could discontinue it or you can try just doing one leg at a time so hugging your knee to your chest one leg at a time and then alternating and maybe over time you can do both knees to your chest the second exercise is probably the most important one for my lower back if I could only do one exercise in the morning it would be that one so I lie on my back with my knees up and then I do an exercise called bridging where I lift my pelvis up and you'll see that I've got a straight line from my chest all the way up to my knees and you can hold that anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds and it's it's really helpful I do I do three reps of this and for some reason that particular exercise resets my back if I do this exercise regularly it's very helpful for gardening some other just stretches to show you before you go out to the garden you've all seen the calf stretch so you lean against the wall you've got your front leg bent now make sure that you don't over flex your knee here you want to make sure you're not sending your knee too far forward and then with your your leg in the back you've got it extending behind you so once again you're trying to get that straight leg and you're stretching it out this is also quite helpful for plantar fasciitis so I try and do this stretch quite often stretching your hamstrings is helpful if you're going to be bending over in the garden so you know there I am on my yoga mat and I'm just you know I've got one leg tucked in and then I'm trying to stretch over that other leg I've gotten so much more flexible since I've started you know doing all these stretches every morning and then I've included a side stretch now I do lots of other things too I do a lot of you know different crunches and sit-ups I you know leg lifts I do all sorts of things but I wanted to show you some easy exercises here which wouldn't take you a lot of time and that you could do as a warm-up before you go outside to garden but also you know consider maybe doing some stretching when you come back from gardening so that could be helpful as a cool-down for our final third we are discussing ergonomic tools so what does it mean to be ergonomic it means it's designed for efficiency of use and for comfort it's trying to minimize stress on your body so keeping your body in a neutral position that doesn't over-flex certain joints so very important so this is a term that has become quite commonplace whether you're at the office or you're in the garden it's all about working smarter rather than harder so this this one I guess I don't necessarily think of this one as being more ergonomic this is one where you're harnessing the power of a drill this is a bulb auger and I use this to plant bulbs but you could certainly use this to dig transplanting holes so as your transplanting small plugs into your garden this could work you just pre-drill the holes how this works is this is an attachment that's quite long I'd say it's about two and a half feet long and it fastens onto a drill so you can use a rechargeable drill and that's what powers the auger here so this is a good one here we've got a video that I'm going to try and play so we'll see here if this works and I don't know if the sound is going to play so this is a stand and plant transplanter and you'll see that it's got a sharp edge on the end of it and they use that to poke a hole not just in the plastic but in the ground and you'll see there's that there's a little trigger that he pulls and that expands the base of it so it actually spreads and opens up a hole and then the other individual is just dropping a plant down the middle of that so I thought that was just a really really cool gadget I'm going to buy a similar one for the master gardener program we have a trunk of ergonomic tools but I thought that was absolutely fabulous and that comes to us from shared legacy farms so transplanting without having to bend over fantastic ergonomics also means using long handled tools so we are in fact using elements of physics so laws of physics so we're thinking about using the shovel as a lever so when you have those long handles we're transferring energy to the shovel and it can do more work a couple of shovels that I've worked with I wanted to test the root slayer the root slayer is on the left and I probably should have blown up the photo more on one side we've got just a sharp straight edge and then on the other side it looks a little bit like a saw so you could use it to cut roots you know that could be helpful if you're trying to dig something up so I wanted to see how the root slayer did versus a well sharpened shovel so this was just an ordinary shovel that had been sharpened using a grinder and boy oh boy that's that well sharpened shovel did a whole lot better than the root slayer when I was trying to dig up daylilies in the NDSU campus garden so we frequently dig up the daylilies to divide them when the clumps get too big or if we've had frost heaving but I'll tell you you don't need to necessarily buy the most expensive tool instead take care of the shovels you have a lot of people don't realize that you can sharpen your shovel and then it just slips into the ground so much easier with a lot less force that's just very helpful information to have and and there's lots of information you can certainly google online and see how to sharpen a shovel I'm sure there's youtube videos I'm sure there are articles out there they're different ways of doing it but it's really nice to know that you know this can be done and you can keep that blade sharp so going back to ergonomics so I think about ergonomics a lot because I injured my hand during the pandemic so I I play piano I play flute and I used to do a lot of that when I was a teenager and all the way through college but you know during during my working years I really didn't play piano as much and then all of a sudden my daughter had to have a virtual recital from our home during the pandemic so I had to accompany her we had no other accompanist that could do that so I had to learn this really complex Italian piece and I dove into it practiced for a month and did it but lo and behold my hands don't work the same way that they did when I was 18 I really hurt I really had a major hand injury and had to be more conscious of using all sorts of ergonomic things so I now use an ergonomic keypad which is split in the middle and then instead of having to hold my hands straight I'm able to hold them at an angle which is more natural and then take a look at that mouse I don't know if you can see it oh goodness I'm trying to hold this up to the camera I've got a really tall mouse and then I hold it sideways so it's a little bit more of like a pistol grip and that just makes more sense for my hands and I my hands have now healed fortunately since then but I'm just more aware that I need to have an ergonomic grip on my tools and we you can certainly put handles on your tools you can have a d handle and there are more ergonomic ones that are out there so this has got a nice handle that you can grip but on the right hand side you'll see that it's tilted at an angle so the angle allows it so that you can actually grip it a little bit better and keep your wrist at a more neutral position rather than having it cranked like that stand up when you weed I know there are a lot of individuals out there that hand weed because you're like oh I got to get that whole root and yes that is a more efficient way of weeding you know to get the whole root but frankly you know if you're having pain it might be time to give that up and use a hole and stand up straight the stirrup hole is one of my favorite holes I learned it as hula hole growing up I don't know why I suppose it reminded people of hula dancers in that circular I don't know I didn't name the thing I call it a stirrup hole and you'll notice that it has a trapezoid type shape and then it's hollow in the center and then the blade on the bottom is fairly sharp what's nice about the stirrup hole is that you can hoe going both forward and back so you on the push stroke and then on the pole stroke you get an action and can work more efficiently so really love that I also love my little hand hoe that's on the the right hand side so if you do like to kneel down and and weed this works very nicely and you can get a little bit more reach because of the handle on that particular hole pruners pruners can be difficult if you have hand pain fortunately there are lots of new models on the market there are ratcheting pruners which supposedly use less hand force felco has come out with a number of new pruner models you'll see I've got the felco five on the left that's my old pruners I'm thinking about upgrading to one of the newer models that we have now they're they're quite expensive and I'm not recommending one pruner over another but I just happened to notice that they've got all sorts of new pruners and they're cognizant that we've got people of different you know hand sizes so you actually take a little quiz so you can have either small medium or large hand are you right handed or are you left handed we have ignored our left-handed friends for too long it's really wonderful that they are now building tools to accommodate those individuals that are left-handed you know how much weight can you hold in your hand do you want a pruners as they're kind of substantial or one that's a little lighter weight what sort of branches are you going to be pruning are they going to be really thin branches are they going to be a little bit thicker so that's obviously going to play into it brand new is they've got this revolving handle which is supposed to reduce the necessary force I have not seen the newer model of this that's got the revolving handle but it's supposed to be better the one piece of advice that I have in picking out a pruner you don't have to buy Felco there's there's others that are out there just make sure that you're buying a bypass pruner and with the bypass pruners it's more like a scissors so the blades slide past one another you don't want to have an anvil pruner an anvil pruner is one that has a flat part on the bottom and then you've got the cutting blade on the top and and and with that the cutting blade lands on the anvil and unfortunately that tends to crush the stem rather than cut it ergonomic handles look at these tools they're beautiful and we've got that curved handle on them so I'll show you a close-up of that as you'll see that we've got that curved handle and the nice thing with this curved handle is that it keeps your wrist I don't know if you can see that very well it keeps your wrist at a neutral angle particularly when you're digging in the ground now if you're trying to dig in the ground with a regular straight handled pruner you're going to be cranking your wrist a little bit which puts strain on it so that's the theory of why they came up with these curved handle tools we've got pistol grip tools and with our pistol grips you'll see that that these are for individuals that don't have a whole lot of hand strength a whole lot of grip strength and this just puts less pressure on it and it's just just nicely nicely designed now if you don't have a whole lot of wrist strength you can buy this little appendage here which is a cuff that goes around your arm and then you can harness the power of your arm as you are digging so not just using using the power of your lower muscles but also your arm muscles so that helps stiffen it and give you a little bit more support if you're in a wheelchair you can certainly have long handled tools so I can imagine you know you're sitting in the garden in a wheelchair you've got these long handles and it's amazing what you can do with this but as you plan your garden if you've got a wheelchair so plan for wide aisles which will allow you to get in there with that wheelchair so we're starting to come towards the end here this is probably one of my favorite tools I can imagine there's some of you out there you don't have a problem kneeling it's getting back up so this is fabulous we've got a pad on the bottom and then we've got those raised arms and with that you can push yourself back up and it's multi-use so it's important to take breaks as we garden you know that can help us with injury so turn it over and you've got this nice little bench for sitting there taking a break and admiring your handiwork what's wonderful about this device is that it does fold so that it stores nicely other things for gardening while sitting we've got this device here and this is wonderful so say you've got a hundred foot row in-ground garden and you're picking things you can just sit on this you'll notice it's got a swivel seat and you can just push yourself down the roll or pull yourself down the roll and continue sitting and and picking things or harvesting or whatever it is that you're doing finally you need a cart so instead of you know lugging things around that are heavy put it in this cart now I've got a cart at home too and it's wonderful because it just folds up and I can just put it right in my car but it's got nice big wheels so you can roll that over your lawn or into your garden so it's all about working smart working smarter rather than harder so I'm hoping that you enjoyed this I'm hoping that you will take something away from this and maybe there'll be some questions here so hopefully we've got a little bit of time here so besides questions if you've got any suggestions for gardening smarter rather than harder we'd love to see those too well thank you this was great thank you and by the way I have the same mouse on my computer it's the best thing I ever got some questions for you where do you get some of these tools yes yes where do we get some of these tools I have noticed them in some of the independent garden centers I've noticed them in Bismarck I haven't seen them as much here in Fargo but I have I ordered them online so Radius Garden was the one that had the ergonomic handle to it so this would be Radius Garden so I believe they're online there's the there's another website called the right stuff WRIGHT I mean Amazon carries some of these now I'd love to send you to your garden center because I would love to keep the money locally because because of the multiplier effect but if you can't find it there there's certainly all sorts of stuff on the internet very good and you got some props some kudos for being a good exercise role model and especially the bridge exercise so there you go one thing I wanted to let everyone know is that we did post a stretching toward better health guide with the field to fork information so you can check that out print it out and you have a couple of subject questions one is about peat moss peat moss is getting harder to get do you have an alternative you would recommend all right so peat moss peat moss is harder to get particularly for this year I'm I'm trying to remember what weather conditions they had up in Canada I can't remember if it was they might have had a rainy season where the peat bogs are so it's definitely more expensive and a little harder to get this year as far as alternatives if you're adding this to your raised garden bed you can substitute compost you would want to make sure there's no herbicide residue in the compost so that's certainly a nice substitute or you can use QUAR COIR and that is a waste product from coconut production you're going to start seeing more substitutes for peat moss going into the future there's been you know some controversy as to how sustainable it is to continue using peat moss particularly since it is harvested from peat bogs we have another pest question I have a lot of slugs and snails that attack my garden how can I eliminate them without harming my garden there are many different many different things you can try you can try diatomaceous earth so you sprinkle diatomaceous earth around the plants that you're trying to protect the slugs are soft-bodied so they don't like to crawl over it that's one possibility I'm starting to see copper products on the market so you actually have copper strips you can put around your plants and supposedly the slug gets an electrical charge as they go over it there are chemicals you can use I don't recommend metalldehyde because metalldehyde is really toxic there is another product made out of iron phosphate brand names would be sluggo or escargo which works I would still keep your pets away from that iron phosphate product but it is supposed to be a little it's supposed to be less toxic than the metalldehyde very good this question just popped in and we've gotten something similar I'm looking at ways to make large containers lighter any ideas oh yes yes now you could certainly put like packing peanuts on the bottom you could put I sometimes just do like plastic old plastic bottles like leader bottles so I'm talking you know really big pots and you're trying to make them light but you still need to have enough soil that the plant is going to be healthy so you can't if you've got a really deep container yes you can put stuff on the bottom but keep in mind that you're raising up the soil the soil line you still want to make sure that the depth of the soil is sufficient for the root system and a couple other questions we're almost out of time most of the handled tools I found are too short and I'm definitely not tall and you end up having to bend them to use them if you ever run into that issue okay so these are the long handle having to bend them to use them um I guess I haven't I mean I one thing you could do so you're saying the handle is too long there is a new product on the market where it's it's essentially another one of those d-shaped handles and it straps onto the shovel um and you put it like kind of midway through so instead of having to bend so much to shovel to bend to use the tool you know you're holding onto the top of the tool and then you've got this other handle that's sticking out of the middle of the shovel and it's allowing you to use it a little bit better so it's like an ergonomic second handle and I'm seeing these on snow shovels I haven't tried it yet but I was looking at that maybe that could help a little bit you don't have to bend as much I mean you're just kind of holding it more tired towards the top and you could install that second handle which allows you to control it I'm sorry it's it's hard to envision this without a picture oh actually the person who asked the question came back in the chat handles are too short and you have to bend yourself to use them I was missing who you have to bend all right they're too short you can replace the handles there we go you can go to any hardware store and they've got different links of handles on them so that's certainly easy to do that's a little bit easier than trying to shorten them it's easier to buy a longer handle and just just keep in mind that you can substitute that longer handle okay thanks for the clarification one last question uh after moving I have several rubber made types of containers if I drill holes in the bottom are they safe for raised beds hey now yes yes they are safe for raised beds there shouldn't be an issue I know there are some individuals that are starting to worry about nano particles from plastic and such but we don't really have enough research saying that it's not safe I I don't have an issue using those rubber made or similar brands of containers um there really shouldn't be a toxicity issue to them at this stage now there's going to be more more research into nano particles and all of that but right now I think it's okay particularly if they are fairly clean now if you've been storing used oil in there or chemicals then no then then the deal is off as long as they were used in a manner which was fairly clean and you're not storing chemicals or toxins in them I think they should be just fine all right well with that it's 302 and I just want to thank all of you for joining us and especially ester for assembling a really great talk we really appreciate your time and expertise and inspiring us to do more exercise too so thank you everyone I hope to see you next week we're going to learn more about food storage so we're going to continue our way through field of fork thanks again everyone