 So welcome to our Wednesday weekly webinar and today's guest speaker is going to be Tom Kelb. He's located out in Bismarck and he's a horticulture specialist in plant science. And before we get started officially I'm going to do a quick advertisement. Please join us for upcoming webinars every week, same time, same link. Next week it's going to be actually actually Todd Weidman is going to fill in for Kim Hallway because she's taking or she's left the state for another state. And then we have Esther coming up and Glenn Muskie and several others. So please join us. A few logistics in case some of you are new to this system while we've been using the chat pod of course. If you have a question and we'll try to take all the questions for sure at the end there's a little pod and you see number five has a place where you can type in your question. And of course you can always follow up with any of us afterwards. There will be a short survey at the very end and I believe Bob is going to also send those out as part of our system that we do. It's very short. We really need your input because this was funded by a grant. And you also have the opportunity to win a prize and print out a certificate. We tried to make it with your while. It will take you two minutes. And visit our field of work website. It's a work in progress and new resources continue to be added. So check that out. We're adding new things all the time. And now I'm going to turn it over to Tom. Thanks Tom. I'm glad you made it. Yeah, thanks Julie. Like you said, you never know with computers. And my computer wanted to do a series of updates here at the last second. And so I was scrambling around trying to make it stop updating so I can get on with you guys. But it's great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. And today we're going to talk about 10 Steps to a Fantastic Vegetable Garden. We've got the spring fever now. It's warm. And there's a lot of interest now in getting the garden going. Today I'm going to talk about how we can have a productive garden. And the other thing that we're going to emphasize is how we can work smart in the garden. Not work hard, but work smart. And our goal is to have lots of delicious vegetables that are healthy, nutritious, and we will talk about minimizing the use of toxic pesticides in our garden because we just don't want to be eating toxic vegetables. Also, I want to say that I like informal talks. And so I welcome your questions at any time. And so don't be shy. And I'll pause a couple of times during the talk. And some of the steps, there's 10 steps. Some steps will take a few minutes. Some will take a few more. But we're going to have a good time this afternoon. So let's get started. Here we go with our vegetable garden. And the first step to a great garden is you've got to put your garden in the right location. And I think there's three important elements here. One is we want a sunny site to have a great garden. We've got to have full sun at least eight hours of the day. We need lots of sun, especially with any of the flowering vegetables. And most are, we're talking about tomatoes and peppers, eggplant, beans and peas, corn. They all have flowers and they all need lots of sun. If you have a more shady spot in a garden, you can put your leafy or your root vegetables in that area of the garden. But we want lots of sun to have a productive garden. The other thing I want to talk about is water. Watering is the most limiting factor as far as yields in North Dakota. We are in a semi-arid state. It is dry here. All of us who aren't raised in North Dakota, I appreciate how dry it can be here some of the summers. So if we want to have a productive garden, we have to have access to water. That's important. But as far as drainage goes, we don't want too much water, right? So we want to make sure everything is well drained. And a garden like this will maximize drainage, being here in a square foot type of garden. Today, I was asked to talk a little bit about square foot gardens. And so let's do it right now. Does anybody know who this garden god is? Just type it in if you want. Wow. Okay. This is a lot of shy people out there. You can't remember. You read his book. There you go. Where you go, Todd? Todd, you win the special prize. Mel Bartholomew, he's got the number one best-selling book for years. No, that's not Esther. No. Mel Bartholomew, and he's got a book about square foot gardens, and he talks about how it's a revolutionary way to grow, to maximize, and yield in a small space. You know, there's nothing like a square foot garden. There's nothing like a square foot garden. People have been growing their vegetables in raised beds since prehistoric times. But nevertheless, he put the spin on, put in some lumber around the bed, divide everything in the square foot area, and then sell a blower. And so, he's got a lot of, he's got a lot of, he's got a lot of, he's got a lot of, he's got a lot of, he's got a lot of, he's got a lot of area, and then sell a book on it. And I do, a lot of people here like the book, me too. When I put in my first square foot garden, I use this as my resource, and I recommend this as one of the resources for us. I always kid about Mel that he has, he's the only gardener I know who has white pants. So he never gets dirty in his garden. And Mel's idea talks about how you can divide your garden into square feet. So you can have a square foot plot, and it kind of makes sense, like if you look on the right, you can grow 16 radishes in a square foot. But on the left, you can see like, he thinks you can grow a watermelon in a two square foot plot. I don't know how true, or a pumpkin. I don't know about that. I've never saw a pumpkin vine grow only about two feet. But I guess you can let it just trail over the edge of the plot and or trellis it up. It is make every square inch count in the garden. Okay, raised bed gardens do have a couple of a few benefits here. The first one is it's clean and aesthetic, and that's why how Mel can have white pants and still have a great garden. It's also easy on the back, a raised bed garden because you don't have to bend down as far, right? So that's really a benefit, especially for those of us who are over the hill, and we don't quite bend as easily as we used to. Another nice benefit about raised bed gardens is it has no compaction, and that's because we don't step on the ground, okay? We can just reach across the garden. You don't have to step over the garden. Raised bed gardens have great drainage and being raised, they warm up quickly. And usually we have fewer weed problems in square foot gardens because one thing is that every inch is covered by a plant, so the weeds, the emerging weeds can be smothered out. And I also find that just if the young weeds plowed very easily, okay? And also weeds won't be creeping in from the turf. They didn't have to climb over the raised bed. So we have fewer weed problems. So I highly recommend raised beds for gardens. It's a great technique. Okay, now let's talk about some of the major issues with raised bed or square foot gardens, and one of them has to do with the use of pressure-treated lumber. There's a lot of misinformation about pressure-treated lumber. The pressure-treated lumber used in the past is chromated copper arsenate, CCA, okay? CCA was safe to use in a square foot garden or a raised bed garden. It was a reasonable use of it. There's no instances where anybody got poisoned by the use of pressure-treated lumber. Nevertheless, the manufacturers decided that it wasn't worth the grief because the word arsenic in vegetables is just a bad combination, right? Arsenic and food, you don't like to put that together. So in 2002, the manufacturers started pulling this off the shelves, and you'll have a hard time finding CCA-treated lumber for residential use. It's pretty much limited now to the use of, like, using it on marine docks or maybe on a deck, but you can have a hard time finding CCA-treated lumber for residential use. And on the label, it says, avoid intimate human contact with the wood, okay? So I don't know how you feel about that. I love gardening, but I would never make love to my lumber in the garden, but I guess what they're talking about there is when you use this type of lumber, sometimes it's used for like a handrail, so people keep rubbing it when they walk down the steps, so don't use it for a handrail. But this is the problem of the past. It wasn't even a problem to begin with, but it's a problem of the past. Today, the type of lumber you're going to see if you go to a lumber store for residential use is ACQ lumber. Alkaline copper, a quaternary lumber, and what they did is they just boosted up the copper. So it's recommended as an alternative material for vegetable gardens, and it contains no chemicals that are considered toxic by the EPA, okay? So this is non-toxic wood. There's nothing to be scared about with pressure-treated lumber. Just make sure it's the modern lumber, and that'd be likely ACQ lumber. Okay, so I highly recommend the use of pressure-treated lumber in vegetable gardens. Other choices, you can use cedar. Cedar is natural, and it lasts a long time, but it's very expensive, several times more expensive than pressure-treated lumber. And, you know, unless you're really rich, it's just not... I just don't think it's that cost-effective, frankly. And I think we want to make our garden affordable. You hear about these people who put all these gadgets in their garden and they end up, when they harvest their ultimate crop, you have like a $64 tomato that they grew. Okay, we don't want that. We want our gardens to save us money, not cost money. Untreated pine is another option, and that's perfectly natural, perfectly safe, but it does have a short life. You know, maybe you'll get a few years out of it. Then lastly, railroad ties are the other common use for raised beds. Common with railroad ties is they are treated with a toxic material, tree-assault, typically, and you just, you know, they say you can use it if it's aged railroad ties, but it's really hard to determine how... at what age is the railroad tie safe now. So in general, I do not recommend using railroad ties for vegetable gardens. I recommend them for use in... use of landscape flowers or in shrubs, but not in a vegetable garden. If you are at all concerned about any of these toxic materials, you can always line the inside of your raised bed with plastic, you know, some black plastic, and that will serve as a barrier to prevent any possible toxins from getting into your plant, into your vegetable garden. Okay, here's an example. I saw Michelle Effort was on, and here's Michelle in one of her Junior Master Garden. Garden's a nice raised bed garden, and if you see that boy on the left with a green shirt there, that's one of our target audience, you know, the boy who's eating upside down bag of Doritos there and kind of confused looking at a broccoli plant for the first time in his life. Doesn't know what a vegetable is, and so this is a really salute Michelle and all our county agents who are putting up these Junior Master Garden gardens out there and making a difference, getting our kids to eat vegetables, and that's a big problem we have here in North Dakota. This guy in the green shirt, he's a typical North Dakotan. 92%, 92% of our kids do not eat enough vegetables for a healthy diet. That's just, wow, that's just amazing, that's unacceptable. And the problem is they take after their parents, and it's about 75% of adults in our state do not eat enough vegetables for a healthy diet. So anything we can do to encourage raised bed gardeners to raise bed gardening in a healthy diet, it's a good thing. Here's just another example of raised bed garden. I did this one several years ago, and you could see how it's just very simple. All you have to do is get some lumber and some deck screws. You're ready to rock and roll. And usually what we do is we use 8-foot boards and cut them in half, so it's 4-foot with 8-foot long. And here's a bed I did in Wisconsin and put a fence out to keep the deer out and the dogs in the park out. And it was a great garden for kids. I had over 100 kids in this garden. The problem is the first year we didn't use raised beds, and they were just stepping all over the onions and everything. So we decided to put in these raised beds so we have nice rows. And again, this is really a nice successfully to have gardens including youth gardens. A few questions that I often get for this is how deep should the garden be? And 6 to 8 inches is deep enough for a raised bed garden. You don't have to go deeper than that. You're not really getting much benefit. How wide should the square-foot garden be? It should be no more than 4 feet wide, because most people can reach 2 feet. So you can get on one side of the garden, reach 2 feet, get on the other side of the garden and find 2 feet. Then the other thing you can do is, as far as spacing goes, we'd like to have at least 3 feet of ground between the square-foot beds to allow for people to walk or wheelbarrows to get through. And as far as landscape fabric, landscape fabric is not necessary at the bottom of the raised bed. In fact, I usually do not use landscape fabric because I don't want a barrier between the native soil and my normal soil for the square-foot garden. As far as the soil itself, potting soil is the perfect mix for this, but you can make up your own home blend. I typically talk to professional landscaper or a landscape contractor, and I get a bulk amount of soil brought to the site, and I mix about 75% of topsoil with about 25% of peat moss. So that's what I use. How about I just pause right here and does anybody have any questions about square-foot gardening or about what I've covered so far in the past? Okay. Hearing none, we're going to march on. Next thing. Another key to a great, fantastic garden is soil. And we're from a rural state. We know from farms that if you want to have a great farm, you've got to have great soil. Same with the garden. If we want to have a productive garden, we've got to have great soil. So we want at least four inches of topsoil. That's what we've got to have. Should we do a soil test? That's a good question. And my general belief on this is that if there's anything mysterious going on in your garden and you're not having optimal growth, it's worth the investment to get a soil test. It costs $18 to get a soil test. And that can unlock the secrets and find out how we can make our garden even more fertile. So I highly recommend it. So think about it. A good garden can produce hundreds of dollars of produce. So an $18 soil test is definitely worthwhile. And then I think one of the best things you can add to your soil is organic matter. Then comes the question, what organic matter? I think if I just had to take one type of organic matter, I would highly recommend sphagnum peat moss from North Dakota Gardens. And like other organic materials, it will improve the structure of the soil. It will improve the fertility of the soil. It will help the soil to hold on to water when water is limited, but also it will improve drainage to allow water to flow out in case there's too much water. So it's just a great material. And I like sphagnum peat moss because it also will acidify the soil. And most of our soils in North Dakota are alkaline. So a little bit of extra acid will help bring it right to the sweet spot where we can have optimal plant growth. So I can recommend one inch of sphagnum peat moss to a garden or two inches and mix it in. Or for a raised bed, maybe up to 25%. And mix that in and you'll have a beautiful quality soil. Another material that people often use is manure. And I just want to say that one thing to be concerned about with manure nowadays is you've got to know the source of the manure because a lot of pastures now are being sprayed with herbicides and some of these are persistent herbicides. And so if a horse like this eats grass from a herbicide-treated pasture or if it eats herbicide-treated hay, then that herbicide, the animal will consume it. The herbicide will go right, will pass right through the animal without breaking down. And then when it poops it out, it'll have the herbicide in the poop. And so there you go. When you spread that manure out, you'll be spreading manure that's just laced with herbicide. And it's the pyridine herbicides that are concerned. And I'll get the question again this year. I'll have some callers come in and talk about how their tomatoes have some unusual curling or their beans and peas. They're very sensitive to these pyridine herbicides. And they can persist in gardens for years. So that's really a sad situation. So know where your manure is coming from and be wary of herbicide-treated pastures. Tony, you have a couple of questions in the chat. OK. Here we go. Michelle, if you build a tall raised bed 20 inches high, right. OK. As far as, yes. Michelle, the answer is yes. That's still a good way to go. Or if you wanted to, I mean, one question is, why you want to build a 28 inches high? OK. If you're just trying to save your back, sometimes you could fill in anything underneath it. Let's say the top, the bottom, 16 inches. I can't say any reason why you would put anything expensive all the way 28 inches down. So I've heard that people put styrofoam peanuts in it. I've heard people put rocks in it, you know, anything. Or that's another thing, Mary, a good comment. Sometimes people actually have it on legs. But as far as that key area where the vegetables are growing, a mixture like that, let's say 75% topsoil and then 25% organic matter, you'll have good success with that. OK. And that key, let's say, again, 8 inches. But really, 6-8 inches is all you need of good quality soil. Good question. Do you still need, Alice has a question, do we still need a gas tiller? Or is it a gas tiller? I think you mean like a rotor tiller for a square foot garden? No. You don't need to use a rotor tiller for a square foot garden. You're just going to be, a lot of people don't do anything. But if you want to just, you know, gently loosen the soil, then that'll just work just fine. The ground, nobody's stepping on it. It's not going to be compacted ground. Any other questions about anything else going on? And of course, OK, I guess, Julie, we've shut off their microphones, I guess. So that's, OK, here's another thing. I was seeing deep beds like that using branches. Yeah, any type of bulky material, good. I like any. I appreciate that comment. Anything to fill up the deep beds? Yeah, the whole key is that, that upper layer, upper 8 inches. OK, I'm going to keep moving. Now, let me just throw in a little philosophy in here also, is that the best thing you can give your garden doesn't come out of a bag, like a fertilizer bag. It doesn't come out of the rear end of an animal. The best thing you can give your garden is your shadow. That's the best thing you can give your garden, because the best gardeners will have a relationship with their garden. They're going to be out there in their garden. They're going to cast their shadow on their plants. They're going to see when their plants are thirsty. They're going to see when their plants look a little pale and might need some fertilizer. Or they're going to see that first outbreak of aphids on the plants. So the Native Americans effort, they have a saying, the best thing you can give your garden are your footprints. That's the best thing. So it's the same philosophy. It's spend time out in your garden and enjoy it. And you have a better garden. And you can do what you want. You can sing to it. You can pray to it. You can talk to it, whatever you want. Just have a relationship with your garden. Okay. That's all the philosophy I have for today, though. Okay. Now let's keep moving here. The next thing is if you want to have a great garden, you've got to have great cultivars, great cultivated varieties. And because if you have bad seeds, it's got bad varieties. It doesn't matter how much, how good the soil is or how good you are at watering. If you've got bad seeds, then you're going to be limiting the production of your garden. So when I look for cultivars in North Dakota, I look for something that's early. That's the most important word in North Dakota. Our growing season is so short. It's anything that says more than 100 days in a catalog, I flip the page. Forget about it. We want a cultivar that's high yielding. We want a cultivar that resist diseases so we don't have to be spraying fungicides. And we want something with outstanding flavor, maybe something distinct that we can't buy at the grocery store, but it's got to have great flavor. Otherwise, what's the point? And I can think of only one exception to this and that is Swiss chard. Swiss chard is disgusting. It's the worst tasting vegetable there is. I know there's probably one or two of you out there who will argue about this and then I find out about how you cook it. Yeah, you probably fry it with about five pounds of bacon, add some garlic, and then it's tolerable. First, I think this clover looks more appetizing than Swiss chard, but still, it's beautiful in a garden. This is part of my... Yeah, there you go. Here's part of my research team testing out different cultivars, one of my boys and girls. And they're doing what I call a snowflake test and that is a cultivar has to ripen before the snow falls and that's around... and this time it was mid-September in Bismarck. I want to give you a heads up that we do test cultivars in backyards and we've worked with over 800 households across North Dakota testing promising varieties and you've got this handout available, I think. These are the proven performers in North Dakota and if you'd like to join our research team, it's a fun project. We hope to launch this next week and every year we'll work with over 200 families to test and out all kinds of vegetables, herbs, and flowers in their backyards. Simple experiments, usually we compare a new variety with a new promising variety versus one that's reliable and we currently recommend. So we want to discover the new varieties. Okay. I'll just go over a few varieties here. One is, well, I think, who knows what this is? What type of vegetable this is? Any courageous people out there? The most common guess I get is current tomatoes or cherry tomatoes. But the answer is no. This is asparagus. This is asparagus and you may not know this but there are male asparagus and female asparagus plants and this is a female because it produces osprey and it produces seeds and the females live a balanced life. They produce seeds and they also produce spears but the seeds take a lot of energy out of those plants and so that's why if we want to have just spears, we want all male varieties. I want to call them the Jersey boys from New Jersey, like Jersey Giant, Jersey Knight, Jersey Supreme. So if you want to maximize yield and asparagus, we've got all male varieties now available to you. Another thing is there's all kinds of beans out there this year. There's magic purple beans that will turn green when you cook them and that kids love that see that magic and it's a good way to trick kids to like beans. If I had to recommend a type of bean for you to try, I'd encourage you to try fillet beans. These are long, slender beans of optimal quality. I would say the variety Crockett is really outstanding but just explore a little bit. Likewise with corn, there's super sweet varieties of corn now that are three times sweeter than what we had when we were kids. I remember this when I was a kid on our farm. I picked corn the night before and then I'd drive down to the Minneapolis farmers market and sell the corn the next morning. I had one day to sell that corn. After one day, that corn was cow feed. It wasn't any good. But nowadays we have corn that's much sweeter and that will stay sweet longer. So explore those super sweet types. And specific calls of our names are listed in the handout you have. Cucumbers. Wow, there's just so many amazing burpless cucumbers that are much more productive, much more higher quality than the standard, let's say straight eights that are commonly grown here in North Dakota and tasty greens are great. This question about GMO corn, and I appreciate that question. I want to make, that's a great topic. Let's be clear that it's going to be, it's almost impossible for a gardener to grow a GMO variety if they don't want to, because for you to grow a GMO, well first of all, it's rare for a seed cattle out to offer a GMO. It's very rare. It has to be one that's, it's most likely going to be in sweet corn if it is. But for you to grow a GMO, you have to sign a contract ahead of time and it talks about how you can grow the corn, how you have to isolate the planting, how you have to cultivate the planting after you're done producing the corn. So don't worry about GMO corn. I mean unless you have to make a special effort that yes, I want to grow GMO corn for you to grow GMO corn. You can't grow GMO corn accidentally. Okay, it's, it's just, it's just can't be, it's just, you're not allowed to, even if you aren't. You have to sign, you have to sign an agreement ahead of time. Okay, so don't worry about GMOs in the garden. That's a whole, not necessarily that they're bad or not, but I just say you don't have to worry about it. Green lettuce. Most of our trials, the gardeners love romaine lettuce. Give that a shot. You'll really be pleased. Green forest is a great variety. Canola. Pats say our growing season is cool here and it's hard to grow any type of melon. Athena is the most reliable variety. If you want to grow a honeydew, forget it. You're most likely going to fail. But there are galea melons that are very flavorful and you can make, you can grow successfully here in North Dakota. Try it. Even if you are a remedial gardener who can grow almost nothing, you can grow an Asian or a Korean Sun Jewel melon. This is the easiest melon to grow, super early, super productive, and it's white inside. It kind of tastes, it reminds you of pears when you eat it. So I'm kind of just throwing out ideas here of ways that you can explore your garden. Not away from just stuff you buy at the grocery store, but explore some of these varieties or cultivars that are out there that you can successfully grow in our harsh North Dakota climate. Watermelons, again, in our trials, when I hand out watermelon seed, I know half the trials are going to be a failure. But if I had to pick one cultivar for North Dakota, it would be Sweet Dakota Rose. It's developed in North Dakota. It's bread North Dakota. It's the most flavorful watermelon we can grow in our state, Sweet Dakota Rose. But again, I tell you to explore. I would try a yellow watermelon. It has some fun. Yellow watermelons are even easier to grow than red ones. So a yellow-fleshed watermelon, like early moon dean, you'll have success with that and something special out of your garden. For winter squash, most people who love winter squash will tell you that buttercup winter squash is the best tasting winter squash. Ian, buttercup winter squash, originated in North Dakota. My Lord, we're famous for our buttercup squash. And Burgess is the most widely grown variety. So if I could tell you to grow one winter squash, grow a buttercup. Okay, I see Ian has a comment of cream. A Saskatchewan watermelon. Great. A white-fleshed watermelon. So something different. I've never grown it, but I heard you got to be really careful with that one. It's got a very thin rind and breaks easily. But again, that's a great one to try. Thank you, Ian, for that comment. Tomatoes. There's all kinds of tomato cultivars. And there's a lot of interest in heirlooms. And I have to say, I'm not a fan of heirlooms. I think there's a reason why an heirloom is an heirloom. And that's because we've made progress. I didn't come to work today in a horse and buggy. I drove a car. It's called progress. And same with heirloom tomatoes. Heirlooms are very susceptible to disease. Almost all require extensive pruning, trellising. Almost all are low-yielding, very hard to grow. So I would say, if you want to grow an heirloom, do it, but expect to fail. So that means if you expect to fail, then that means if you get anything, any of these cracked tomatoes, you'll like it. Now, the good thing about heirlooms is that they do have amazing flavor. So the few tomatoes you get will be very flavorful. But again, there's definitely not reliable. And if we're looking for reliable, I recommend a determinate cultivar. And there's several out there, let's say like celebrity. And there's semi-determinates out there like Mountain Fresh Plus. But a determinate cultivar has a short, compact vine. You don't have to prune them. You don't prune them. And you don't even have to trellis them if you don't want to. This is Roma. Again, one of the easiest to grow of all tomatoes. And the nice thing about a determinate cultivar is generally it's early. And also besides being early, it has a concentrated fruit set. So this is different than indeterminate types, which are popular in other parts of the United States because they have an extended harvest season. But there's no need for an extended harvest season for us because we have snow in September. So we're not going to benefit from most indeterminate types. So if I just had to give a general recommendation, I'd look for a determinate cultivar. And yes, Gina, I am a pessimist. Thank you for that comment. I am many, many years of frustration trying to explore all these new varieties. And yes, some are utter failures. Every year is a joy, though. Let me just throw one on thinking about tomatoes. And that is, if you do grow tomatoes on a big scale, I want you to at least get introduced to the spring weave system. This is a system of trellising that most gardeners aren't aware of. But it's a nice, easy way to develop a wall of tomato vine and keep the tomato vine off the ground. You pound a stake about every two plants, and then you wrap twine, nylon twine around the plants, supporting the plants. Okay, question from the United Tribes. Yes, on a seed tag of tomatoes, it will definitely say if the cultivar is determinate or indeterminate. Also, if you look at a seed catalog, it will state determinate or indeterminate types. And there are some good indeterminates, too. But if I just had to give you a general recommendation or just a most likely successful approach, I would use a determinate type. Okay, any other questions about varieties, cultivars, or anything before we move on? Okay, let's keep going here. A lot of these steps are going to go quicker now. We want to maximize space in a great garden. One way to maximize space is to have a multi-crop, grow more than one crop in the spot. So let's say in spring, we can plant our spinach, and then harvest the spinach in the early spring, and then we plant our tomatoes afterwards, you know, in late May, early June, or that's when we can sow our cucumber seeds. Or on the other hand, we could have an early crop, let's say, or like peas. And then when that's all fried from the summer sun, we can plant our spinach for the fall in that area. Another way is to inter-crop, and that is put plants within other plants, and radishes and onions are good for that. So for example, let's say in our garden, we'll plant our cucumbers about five feet apart. Our rows are five feet apart. What we can do is we can take advantage of that extra space between the vines by putting in a quick planting of radishes or onions. Then we'll harvest that in the early summer, just when the cucumber vines start to fill in. So that's inter-cropping, planting between the rows. And then also, we talked about growing vertical, and that's a great way to have long, straight cucumbers is grow vertically. Another step that's important is proper watering. We want to avoid overhead irrigation. Oh, this is terrible to see this. I hate to see this because what's happening here is the leaves are going to get wet and they're going to be subject to diseases. We want to avoid overhead irrigation. Plants drink through their roots. So let's water the roots. Let's water in the morning. That's the best time because we water in the morning after the sun comes up or while the sun's rising. The plants are active. They'll suck up the water they need. And then any excess water will have a chance to dry before the nighttime comes, which is when a lot of diseases get active in moist foliage. We want to water deeply. We don't want to water frequently. The roots will grow where the water is. If we water deep, the roots grow deep. If we water, let's say, every night or every other day and just shallowly, the roots will stay near the surface. They won't grow deep and they'll be subject to drought stress. Also, mulching is a great tool for us in North Dakota. I'll talk about that more later. We want to prevent pests, OK? One way we can prevent pests and any type of pests, whether it's an insect or a bunny rabbit or a deer, the best way to control a pest is a physical barrier. Here we've got a floating robe cover over our planting shielding our plants from insects, a physical barrier. Another way we can control pests is by controlling weeds because insect pests like to live in weeds. And last, remove crop residue, because that also will attract insect pests. Last step is to avoid routine spraying. Don't decide, OK, I spray after church every Sunday. Don't do that. OK, it's good to go to church every Sunday, but don't spray after church. Because what happens is that most of the insects in our backyard garden are good for us or neutral. So when you spray every Sunday or whatever, you spray on a routine basis, you're killing more good insects than bad insects. So who has an idea what insect pest this is? Anybody want to type in a guess? OK, these are stages of ladybugs. OK, it's a larval and a nymphal stage of a ladybug. And so when you see this pest, actually, there are friends. There you go, Diana, great. And so what about ladybugs? I was taught ladybugs are the gardener's best friend. So should I go ahead and should I, like, buy boxes of ladybugs? No, you do not buy ladybugs. It's a crazy idea. Well, ladybugs are your best friend, but you cannot buy friendship. It does not work. Sorry, it doesn't work. I learned that a long time ago. OK, not that it was any money. That's the problem. But when you buy a box of ladybugs, the ladybugs you bought were hibernating. They were hibernating in huge clusters and they were harvested. When these ladybugs are released in your garden, they're not hungry. Instead, they want to burn off their fat layer before they start eating. So when you put ladybugs in your garden, they want to burn off their fat layer before they start eating any other pest. So what the studies have shown that after 24 hours of releasing a box of ladybugs, this is how many remain. One, that's right. They're all gone. And the only reason why this ladybug's still there is because it has broken wings. It can't fly. So don't buy ladybugs. It's a total waste of money. Nevertheless, we still have insect problems. And so we need to address these. And like some insects like this, like you look at this cabbage worm, like some other types of larvae, they have amazing appetites. They can eat like two times their weight every day. That's like if you're a teenager, a teenage boy, that's like going to McDonald's and saying, okay, I'll have 200 Big Macs and 200 large orders of fries and maybe throwing about 50 salads for my good nutrition. They've got amazing appetites. And so you need to take action to defend your planting. And there are natural insecticides out there. Like insecticidal soap, for example. The limitation with soap, though, is that you have to physically spray the pest itself to work. There's products like BT, this natural bacterium and dipel and thyracide are common insecticides with this. BT, spinosad, neem, these natural insecticides are all effective against these types of caterpillars. But the problem is they're slow acting. It can take a couple days for the insect to die. Now, maybe that appeals to you, okay, that you want to punish this ladybug and you believe this is cabbage worm and you want to suffer for a couple days before it dies. So maybe that's a good thing. But on the other hand, a lot of us, we like what I call dirty hairy gardeners, Clint Eastwood types, that, you know, you mess around with my garden, you catapillar, you worm, you're going down, you're going down now. And so that's why I'm going to get out that old carb drill, the number one insecticide in garden sevens, trade name, or pyrethrin. And you can shoot that on that cabbage worm and you can just sit back and enjoy. You can watch that cabbage worm drop to the ground. And if you're lucky, you can see a few nervous convulsions and watch it suffer before it croaks before your eyes. So that's, you know, that's a very powerful feeling of revenge here. And that can be very appealing to gardeners, including myself. But again, this is a powerful weapon and you've got to use it judiciously, okay? And you've got to follow label carefully because they're toxic, okay? So that's a loaded weapon. They use it judiciously. How about our friend, the bunny rabbit? You know, I was a kid, I thought bunny rabbit. I was taught they're friendly and they're nice. You know, the Easter bunny came, gave me candy. Bunnies are good, they're gentle. But then I became a full-fledged gardener and I saw the true personality, the true heart of a bunny rabbit is evil. Bunny rabbits are the enemy because they will destroy your garden overnight. So, you know, some of us think, oh, let's put some marigolds around the garden. They'll do it. That doesn't stop rabbits at all. There's only one surefire way to control bunny rabbits. There you go. There you go. You can use your imagination. That could be lead poisoning, as some people call it, blood meal may have some limited benefit. Or you can use a fence, like you see here. And the eastern cotton tails we got out in the eastern part of the state, you need at least a three-foot tall fence and jack rabbits, which we had throughout the state, and especially the west, more like a four-foot fence is what we need. Okay, or a couple. Wow, okay, Julie, I like your attitude there. Get some dogs out here to protect your garden. Does anybody have any questions about insects or bunny rabbits, or for a move on? Okay, I'm going to go through the rest quickly here. We want to control weeds, and the key is control weeds when they're young. There are chemical weeds, herbicides, and triforilin, also known as preen, is a widely veiled product, and there's natural products like corn and gluten meal. And then, of course, there's mulch. Talk about that. Todd talked about mulch a little bit earlier. There's all kinds of mulch out there, clear, black, red. There's IRT, infrared transmitting mulch, there's silver mulch, strong mulch. Clear mulch will generate the most heat, and it uses like the greenhouse effect. So if we want to get our plants off to a quick start, clear mulch will generate the most heat. So you can see these cucumber rows side by side on campus in Fargo. You can see the row under the mulch is already blooming, and much more established than the row right next to it. That's not under mulch. The problem, as like Todd mentioned this earlier last week, was that sometimes, you know, if you have a weed-infested garden, mulch, you can have weeds grow underneath the mulch, and so that can be a concern. And that's the reason why black plastic, the second one there, is more commonly used. It will generate heat, and also any weeds that do emerge underneath the mulch will die because they don't get any sunlight. But the key about black mulch, to get the good heat transmission, is you have to have it smooth and taut against the ground to come into contact with the ground, because if there's gaps there between the mulch and the ground, you're going to lose a lot of heat there. There are studies that show like red plastic mulch is best for members of the tomato family, just because of the special wavelength that's reflected. And again, there's all kinds of mulches out there, and so investigate that. Let me just throw a couple. The IRT looks promising. That means an IRT mulch allows the infrared to go through so you get that nice greenhouse effect going. But since it's brown or dark green, the weeds won't have a chance to get going, because they'll be smothered, they won't get the light that they need to grow. So the IRT mulches are getting popular now. Okay, silver mulching is mainly good, is more used in warmer climates, and straw too. Straw does not generate heat, so we're going to put that on later in the year. Okay, as we wrap it up here, prevent diseases. We want to use disease-resistant cultivars, space plants properly. If you see diseased laser plants, we can get them out of the garden, and there are fungicides available to protect against the spread of the disease. But again, I really like using disease-resistant cultivars. It's your best offense. There's powdery mildew. We have varieties that resist this naturally. Harvest regularly. You know, we talk about zucchini, you know, one zucchini, two zucchini. That's great. But we want more zucchini, right? I know this is where I'm supposed to insert the joke here about too much zucchini, how we got to lock our car doors in the summertime, otherwise our neighbor's going to put zucchini in it and all that. But I have to say that zucchini deserves more respect from us gardeners, okay? It needs more respect, because why don't we respect a vegetable that's so productive? We should honor zucchini. The problem is not the zucchini plant. The problem is us. We just don't know what to do with it. And it's such a multi-use vegetable. Zucchini, we can cook it, but also we can use it like, when I was a kid, we used it as a baseball bat, our big zucchinis. You can carve a zucchini out and make it into a canoe. Zucchini float. We can have boat races down the Missouri River with zucchini. And then also, there's another strategy. We talk about the legend of Montana Maggie. Montana Maggie once, she had, this is a true story. Maggie was a gardener and she was in her house and all of a sudden, a bear came to her property and started eating seed out of the bird feeder box. Her dog got so mad about that. Her dog started barking, barking, barking, barking, barking, trying to defend the bird seed box. Well, Maggie heard the dog bark and so Maggie went out to the deck there looking out at the backyard and saw the bear and he goes, shoo, bear, shoo, you get out of here, bear, you get out of here. And all of a sudden, the bear didn't like Maggie. Didn't like that. So the bear started coming, charging right at Maggie. So there's Maggie on her deck racing through the door and here's the bear's face right there, halfway through the door. Maggie's there, you know, she's trying to reach on the kitchen counter. Is there a knife or something she used to defend herself? No, there wasn't a knife. She just grabbed something. She grabbed a zucchini. She bought the bear and the bear ran away. So zucchini, what a great crop. You can even defend yourself with zucchini. But if you want to have lots of zucchini, you've got to keep harvesting regularly. The last point is you want to extend the season. Okay. And frost can come early. So a blanket of protection or even a double layer is even better, just like with us. When my mom taught me, you know, put on two coats or put on a sweater and a coat, use layers, they'll give you even more protection or take advantage of cool season vegetables. And, you know, for example, kale, it's getting very popular now and this can grow in temperatures in low 20s. I've seen it even survive snow. So take advantage of that. So I want to thank the people who took the photos for this presentation and asked, does anybody have any questions before you wrap it up for today? Actually, Michelle has a question, putting straw around fruit trees. Keep the ground colder? Okay. That's yes, Michelle. A straw around trees will keep the ground cooler and help to reduce premature blooming. But instead of putting straw, I would recommend that you use shredded bark mulching. And then you can keep it there. Because, you know, one problem if you use straw, is straw can attract rodents. And rodents will be drawn to those fruit trees and especially they can gnaw on the bark. So use shredded bark mulch instead to do this and have it minimal bark near the trunk and build it out to about three inches or so. I've got a lot of questions about slugs. Yeah, there's two ways. The most commonly used way is that iron phosphate or iron phosphide, I want to say iron phosphate. And one product is called sluggo. It's a natural way to control slugs, especially in a place where we're going to grow vegetables. The more toxic slug-asides or mawask-asides like meteldehyde, and I'll just type that in real quick, meteldehyde, that's used in more ornamental plantings. Okay, sluggo, there you go. I think sluggo is one of those iron phosphate products. Get away, of course, there's that old beer trick, right? You can, slugs are attracted to yeast. And so you can put out a pine tin, a shallow pine tin, and maybe bury it in the ground a little bit, and then put some steel beer in there, and then the slugs will come in there and they'll die from that overnight. Another strategy, diatomaceous earth is sometimes used, and that is spread along the perimeter of the garden. That can help. Even like put out a one-by-eighth board, and then at night the slugs will go, after they're done feeding, they will go under the board because they'll be cool and moist here. Then in the morning, you just pick up the board and you can scoop up the slugs that way. Good questions. Any other questions? I will hop in, and I'm going to save time for the entertaining and very educational session today. I've popped in the survey link, so please take a minute or two to fill out the survey. And don't forget to show up next week. We should have another entertaining and educational session featuring Todd Weinman. I have a fun job. I get to work with a lot of cool people. Thank you, Julie. Thank you, everybody out there. I really appreciated it.