 and they've always been on the main roads. People have driven by and comment, and they think they know me, and they tell me I'm out there all the time, which I'm not, I'm just there when they go by, you know? So, but one of the more famous ones was in Moortown Village, which is in Gorge, which is eight miles from here. And it was a very unique spot, or it is a unique spot, there's a red house. I think it was a mill worker's manager's place. I think they're talking about, yeah. And my husband and I went on this long strip, it was very narrow strip between the road and the river. There was a tiny piece of land, but it was very long, and I terraced and guarded every inch of it. And I planted 75 roses, different classifications. And people told me all my life, you can't grow roses in the moonlight. They also said, you can't grow anything next to the road because the salt is gonna kill everything. And all the sand that the dump trucks, you know, they pile over in the winter, that's the top soil. So I just have never listened to all this talk. You know, you can't do this, you can't do that, especially if it's so inexpensive and exciting to sort of prove people wrong. And you know what, it's not criminal. It doesn't cost a lot unless you get into a really rare place, which I did for a while. And then a flood came and 98 walked all my expensive plants and I saw, I don't do that anymore. But I'm gonna pass around these pictures and the red house here you can see and the road is right here on the right margin. And then down here is what it looks like in spring before, if you look at the other pictures, before everything grows up. There's just the guardrail and a lot of sand. And before it gets to this point, there's this kind of gray crust on it and nothing living on it. It looks like after whatever, harm again or something. But now it's amazing how this just comes to life. Even wherever you are, you can take a piece, you can take between that yellow post over there and that little tree. You could grow the most amazing plants that are on this earth if you just know a few simple things. So that's what we're, today's simple things are gonna have to do with the weather. And because we are living in days of climate change, maybe probably more than we used to encounter 50 years ago. I can say that as a witness, but before that I don't really know, maybe 60 anyway. So here are the pictures. Just a lot of the terraces I did. You can get a sense. All of this is area that's in this long strip between the guardrails and the water and the stones. Okay, so just not really in order. But I just thought of passing around, if you want to look. Okay, the first thing I want to talk about is the obvious weather patterns that we're dealing with right now. All this rain. Now, people are walking around talking like it's never happened before, I'm just saying. You know, it's happened like this 19 years out of 20 in the past 20 years. I keep a record in here because I get so excited when there's a spring where it's 70, 80 degrees for six weeks. The last time that happened was in 1995 because we bought this place and that's why I remember it. You connect growing all these things with the weather patterns. You have to get that immersed in it and it's fun. So the last time we had another six week warm spell or even more was last year. So since 1995 and last year we have not had, I'm sorry to say this, if you're newcomers or maybe this lady from California didn't want to hear this. But what we can do is we can make the most of it. We have a perfect 90 days here in Vermont of growing. Even if it's rainy and awful for us in terms of sports and cookouts or whatever, we can gear our gardening around that. Okay, so one of your best friend, that's why I was talking about this, is weather.com has a 10, it's almost two weeks, printable forecast. I'll show it to you. Maybe these pictures are beautiful. Oh my God, and I know what you're talking about. Yeah, I'm a specialist in roses. And the thing is, like you say, all the you can't, you can't, you can't, you sure did prove them wrong. I did. Those copies are growing on pavement. I love doing that too, you know? One season, you know, just threw them in the ground. And, you know, there's just a few little things that you need to know how to do, and you can do that. This spring actually would have been a perfect spring and is for poppies. But we needed to have planted them a month ago because it's now, it's too warm. Because what we've had the past couple of months is really kind of like winter in California, which is where all these poppies are indigenous to. And that's another thing you can get excited about. You need to write that down. It's like, knowing where things are from, you know, in the world, where did they originate? One that tells you a lot about their needs, you know, light, heat, but specifically the pH. I talk a lot about pH because it's key, it's everything. And especially to year like this, where we are having extremes, you know, from the get go. Sometimes we'll just have it in the middle or at the end or at the beginning, to me, I think, if this is gonna break, this pattern we've had of all the rain, it's gonna break to me. It's not gonna happen until July, like early July. There's something about the change of seasons and solstice. I don't know, you know, I haven't studied it all, but I won't be surprised if that's what happened. So as gardeners, we have to get ready for that. We can't sort of dilute ourselves into thinking and planting a lot of things that are not going to succeed if we keep having this kind of way. Okay, so weather.com has a feature you can find. It's 10 day, 10 day, you can hit up here, you can enter in your town. 10 day printable forecast, you hit the print and you can print it out if you want to. But the printable forecast gives you everything in a glance what's gonna happen in the past, in the next two weeks. What I can see right away here, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, it's gonna be in the lower 60s, like 60 if we're lucky is what it says here, with 50% chance of precipitation on two out of three days. Okay, does that say anything to you, Jack? It says my soil is gonna stay wet. And cold. And cool. Cool, okay, so you're gonna run out and plant your squash or beads? No, you're right. Things that are 70 degree germinators won't germinate. But the plant world is sort of divided up into two groups. 40 degree, 40 degree germinators and 70 degree germinators. So it's a perfect time to keep pushing those 40 degree germinators because it's cool and wet. It's a perfect time to plant bushes and shrubs. A perfect year to do that. If you put that off and you think, oh no, I'll wait till next year. We could have a drought next year. So if you have a home place and you wanna add things, this is a perfect year to do it, okay? Or at least right now. Because you don't have to water every day. But I put in five roses because they're getting watered all the time. So make this pattern work for you. Okay, these three cool days? No, I wouldn't plant green beans. Anything that says wait till warm after frost, that sort of thing on your packets or whatever, squashes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants. You can wait and wait until next weekend. Or it's changing like on Thursday up to the 70s. And then we're gonna get one sunny day and it's gonna be cloudy for four. Perfect germinating weather. It's gonna be in the mid 70s. So if anybody tells you to plant everything this weekend, say no, I'm waiting till next week when it's warmer, okay? So it's these kinds of things you can steer around the weather patterns. If there are things that you know that love a lot of moisture, like I said, this is another year to go for them. Things that love drought, dry sort of deserty plants, I wouldn't bother. I would just forsake those because it's not gonna happen here. You're not gonna get the weather that you need. And I would just stay away from sort of gimmicky kind of, a lot of people get, you know, I used to do this here, planting peaches or kiwis or, you know, things that serve marginal that you might get with watermelons. Sure, you get the watermelon, but you'll get it in mid-September or late September. When people don't want watermelons, they want apples. So, you know, watermelons might be something not to grow here because they mature so late. And then when you get them, if you get a cold or cool evening, it zaps the flavor right out of the whistle. So, yes, probably can grow them here, but, you know, if you want more success than that than to say, oh, I grew a watermelon or I grew a kiwi or a peach and it's inedible, but I grew it, you know, stay away from that. You know, go for the tried and true. Another way is to sort of protect yourself against these weather extremes is to look for varieties of seeds that are geared for the north. I know high-mowing seeds has really captured the market up here. They, you never used to see a local seed company and now that's all you can find everywhere else, but they're sort of tried and true up here and they come back. They reproduce themselves and you can save the seeds. Okay. What would be one drawback from saving seeds? Anybody? Like, harvesting the seeds from my plant and then planting it? Yes, yes. You're not gonna get as good a quality necessarily as the company, so a lower germination rate. Could be. Mm-hmm. Certain plants don't reproduce the same quality seed. Okay. I'm leaving you here. There's one thing that's gonna really be recalculating in gardens with all this rain now and that is disease, both subterrainiously and above the ground. Underground, there are a lot of fungal things. If you want to grow pot outside this year, do not put it in the ground because the funguses will infect it so much so that it won't show until later in the season. If you notice tomato plants, everybody's tomato loses, they'll turn brown and fall off at the end of the, except when they're not supposed to be like that, that is not supposed to happen. That is a disease that's underground. It's already there. It's always there. And in seasons like this, when we get this rain constantly, it just flourishes and takes over. So you will be seeing a lot more disease, but there are things you can do. So we're moving into sort of shifting from the weather to disease here. One, pH, pH is everything. I know one of the students I had in the last group that I gave, she went and had her raise, she made raised beds and she had tested because everything that she'd put in there, she'd bought, came out of bags and she had no clue what the pH was. And it was actually a lot higher than I thought it'd be. It was like seven, four, but it's because there was a lot of compost in there. And that's kind of perfect. Vermont soils are acidic. In some places, it's very acidic, severely acidic. The pH has been, on average, has been dropping, dropping, dropping. That's why we see so much not lead along the rivers and that Bishop suite, they've both taken over because they prefer pH from like four to seven. And that, in those conditions, they just take right over. Whereas Vermont, the indigenous plants have been replaced by these because the pH has gotten too low for them. And it's, a lot has to do with the acid rain. The rain that comes from all the industrialization in the Midwest of the country that comes east and dumps in Vermont is usually very acidic. So the combination of those two things, plus we're east of the continental divide. The continental divide divides the country and the soil is at two different groups, acidic or alkaline pH. So, except for, there's pockets. Like here in Vermont, around the lake, it's alkaline because of all the limestone. I think that's kind of cool. So making sure your pH is up there. If you know, you haven't lied and your ground is just regular Vermont soil, you cannot go wrong by lying. That's one of the things that I've always been told. Oh, you'll over-live and you'll kill your plants. That has never happened to me and I've never seen a garden for which that is true. I have seen a lot, most gardens that are really poor and not living up to their potential, not doing what their planters had hoped because they didn't bother to raise the pH, they didn't bother to line. Not only does the line contribute, well, the ions, it's a hydrogen-ion ratio that enters in with the molecules in the soil and calcium, you know, human beings are needing calcium. So does the soil and some of the things that you grow in it. If your pH is fine, you know, if you're up there around neutral, like this student I have was, what you would do if you found that you didn't have enough calcium, if you get a soil test, or if you just suspect that you don't and you want to add calcium, gypsum, which I think there are mines right here in Vermont, which is kind of cool. You know, everything we need is right here. You got the limestone from the shelter of limestone or more of the gypsum because gypsum does not raise the pH, it doesn't play with the pH, which just contributes to calcium. Like there are a lot of plants that lime haters, you know, and like blueberries, azaleas, rhododendrons, Japanese irises, those are the main ones that people tend to grow around here, that you would never ever lime or you want fir trees, you know, evergreens. You keep all those things separate and they're on separate gardens, but the rest of the places, especially if you like Mediterranean plants, which I do, I like a lot of the herbs, they'll kind of grow anywhere, but if you give them what they come from, like sort of rocky, poor soil that heats up fast and has a high pH, they will do things like you will never, like you sort of expected but never got, especially with the flavor, the flavor, the fragrance, everything will be a lot stronger and the plants will be healthier and they'll withstand the weather pattern changes. Potash, you know, you have the NPK on a bag of fertilizer, you know, nitrogen, phosphorus, potash, those are the three, it's kind of like in Wonder Bread, you have bleached out everything and isolated three key nutrients that you might need and then put them back in. Well, that's kind of like, you know, the fertilizer formula, NPKs on a bag of fertilizer is that sort of simplistic, this is all that's really necessary approach, but a better approach is to think about your soil as a living thing, a living fill of the blank. Soil wants to be alive, it wants to have, you know, activity going on there that resembles life, that's what the worms start and to get the worms you've got to have air and you've got to have organic matter and you've got to have all these things for them to move about and their castings and if you don't compact it all and drive heavy, huge, heavy equipment or everything, you create this medium that can be as deep as you want. I like to go like a couple of feet, especially if you like to do biodynamics double digging. Root compaction is a terrible thing for plants. This is one more thing that you can do to minimize the stress of climate change is to give them as much freedom to move. Don't ever walk on your growing spaces. Just don't, don't put any heavy machinery. I always do mine by hand. I do huge territories by hand. If you don't want to, you can use a tiller, but don't walk on the growing spaces. Leave them to be loose and free, minimal compaction. You don't even have to till them. You don't have to turn them over. You can sort of loosen them up, add more organic matter, add your rock powders like lime, which I've talked about. Okay, another one that is very influential against disease is the K, the third number, which is potash. One of my favorite amendments is granite dust. I read about it in Rodeo 50 years ago and never thought I could find it, but I did. I mean, it's very easy to find around here. Anyway, it's a place that I've gone for a long time is a sculptor's quarry, I mean, a sculptor's place and buried from a sculptor's studio. They have a huge hopper outside and there's a big pile and they love to have people come and take it and they take buckets full, and they fill up the truck buckets. It's heavy. But it's potash and it's very important for the health, especially underground, the roots and the disease resistance that you plants need. Another source that's commonly available are wood ashes. Wood ashes from your stove. And if you're, my husband told me to do this a long time ago, 25 years ago, and I thought he was a cannibal. But I put my meat scraps in the wood stove. You have a hot fire. It's just like being out on the campfire. You've got a really hot fire. If you had some chicken or whatever, fish, throw them in the wood stove, they burn to a white ash. And you can power it, I've always pummeled it and broadcasted it's secret to my perfect tomatoes. I have better tomatoes than anybody you know. And it's not cannibalistic. I read about it in Rodeo, the phosphorus content is off the charts. It's like higher than super phosphate, which was triple phosphate, which is what farmers used to use 50 years ago. It was horrible because it killed all the life in your soil. That combination of compaction and all these intense chemical fertilizers, what disrupted and won for some farmers their livelihood because they didn't manage their soils properly. I was married to a dairy farm for 12 years. That's my reference. But pot ash, wood ashes, cook your, if you have a wood stove, cook all those bones, powder them, put them on your plants. I always guard it because it's kind of concentrated and I don't broadcast it because I need it and use it for specific areas. Rock powders, all these amendments, they give you superior health to your plants, above ground and below ground. Okay, back to planting. It's the first of June. It's sort of the traditional, May 31st is the traditional Memorial Day. And growing up, I've seen snow recently, it's 20 years ago, on May 31st. 30, 40, 50 years ago, we would commonly get frosts up until that day, up until that very day. It wasn't invented, I have nowhere to serve. This happens often, therefore, wait. It's almost generally better to wait in a year like this for things that are 70 degree germinators. If we still got three days of 60 degrees of rain coming, wait. Okay, talked about the rock powder amendments, keeping your pH high. Don't plant too closely. This is more for vegetable gardens or even perennial gardens. Thin them out, light's gonna be at a premium. Close packed plants, leaves together. Encourages mold and disease if they're wet all the time. They can't dry out. So if they're further apart, and you just automatically include more space than is required on your instructions, I think in a year like this, they'll be better off. Much better off, less disease. Disease is gonna be the real clincher. Okay, so note that you can do, let me see, I think I've covered planting things later and further apart. And the amendments, let's see, you can also implement what they call an IPDS, a spray program. Now spray has become this horrible word. You talk to an organic person or, oh yeah, I never use, I never use chemical sprays. I gardener organically, I never use any sprays. Well, first of all, everybody, she asked me if they gardener organically there. I'm at least sort of talking about all the things that they don't do. You never hear somebody say, I really rely heavily on amendments, rock powders, on compost, keeping the soil free, tilt wise, not compacting, no, it's always, I don't use this and I don't use that. A lot of people approach garden that way. I don't do this, I don't do that, but they don't replace those don'ts with do's. They don't say, I do do this and I do do that. And that's kind of something I've been kind of trying to point out to people that more importantly is what you do do, not what you don't do. So I have over the years come to rely on two products or two, one's just an element. It's not a product that I get from any one company, but Elemental Copper is a real saver. And it's encouraged or sold by Johnny's. Johnny's seeds, I use them. You can get the information for like 10 gardening books in their catalog. It's amazing. And they're from Maine. And the first one was just a little two or three pages stapled over in 1973. And now it's a huge catalog, like a serious catalog. But the information is there and they really get into pH. They give you the exact, because they know, you know, they're pros. pH is just as important to them as I've found it to be. Copper, they use copper. It's for some reason, it really does deter, fungal growth on things. You could also use it as a, what do you call that, a drench in the ground before you plant your tomatoes. Drench the whole area with copper, Elemental Copper, soak the soak, because that will kill all the fungus that's there now. Because those plants are getting infected now as soon as you put them in there. It's not gonna show for three months. So that includes your pot, that includes your tomatoes, your squashes, cucumbers, all kinds of plants that are susceptible to these diseases, especially blights that hit later on. Okay, so I'll tell you, there's another product that I use, and it's called Neem. It's a tree oil from India. I've heard various discussion, you know, the sort of pros and cons about using it because people are exploiting the trees and exploiting the people who farm and whatever. But I think it's still, it's a super, super broad spectrum, fungicide and insecticide. And it's as natural as we're gonna get. I don't know that it's been used extensively enough and long enough for people to determine whether it causes disease. I mean, in humans are not like, wrote known, I used to use wrote known that, was safe now, now they've decided that it causes MS or other neurological diseases or autoimmune diseases is what I meant. I don't know, I'm willing to take the risk. I use it seldom, you know, I don't overuse it. I'm careful, you know, I don't lick my fingers after touching a wear a mask or whatever. I haven't found it to be a problem, but I would, what I do is alter. And if we continue to have this kind of a, you know, rain every two, three, four days, you're gonna have to spray something every two, three, four days on these plants that are really disease prone. And if you do that, you won't have the diseases that everybody else has. I can't promise you that you won't have any, but I think I can promise you that you'll have far less. I've seen what it does is it buys you time at the other end of the season too. And it also protects your tomatoes from, well, from the underground fungal diseases. And then these other two products, when you all alternate them, they protect you against early and late blight. And they'll hit like you would not believe. I've heard it had an early blight come just one day in June, just came with the wind. I swear I was standing there watching it. It's like, came out of the Northwest and then all of a sudden it was a path, right straight diagonally through my garden. And I could see all the tomatoes that were in that path. They all had this blight and it just kind of went, it just came and went. So that's an early blight. That's the habit that all of a sudden you can't eat them. They're destroyed. So you have to protect against that because you never know when that's gonna hit. And then the late blight, same thing. You can get disease variety plants. There's some that are claiming to be more disease resistant than others. That's another thing to look for as you shop for seeds and plants. Disease resistance, like Johnny's, they have a whole list of all the disease resistance properties of the tomatoes that they smell, sell. And you can go through and say, oh, late blight. I need that. I had horrible late blight. Late blight would just render your whole crop inedible in like seconds. I've had that happen in 1998 when I was living in this place on the Gorge. It rained every single day of the month of June, every single day. There was one afternoon it did not rain and I took pictures of the roses in town, the ones that were there, the antiques that had been left from people. Because that's why, that's why and however I remember all these things that I associate, things that I've done or what I saw and tried to keep up memory of what happened, but it rained every day. And when my tomatoes were perfect, they looked amazing. They were like six, seven feet tall. They were huge like this. And they were, hey, you couldn't even see any leaves. There's so many tomatoes and all of a sudden one day they all had this like leprosy all over them, top to bottom, every single one of them. You could not eat them, can't even look at them. And it just happened just like that. And that's late blight. So, neem and elemental copper, thank you. So those are some real good tools. I think it's gonna stay like this. I really do. If it doesn't, if it changes, those diseases are still gonna be there and they're still gaining hold on your plants from now on. So, if the weather cooperates and lessens the threat of diseases later on, good. But for now, we need to protect them as much as we can until that happens. That could happen, because I know 100-year-old people have a lot of friends who unfortunately die, but who are like 100 and they've said they've never seen a year that things didn't even out. So, no matter if we get all this horrible stuff, it evens out. So, I've been talking a lot. I just want to know if I've raised any questions for either of you that I could touch on before we go on. Thank you. So, it sounds like it's not too late to put bees in. This is gonna stay. Okay, so, okay, no, interesting, you're right. You're right, it's a great idea. Oh, sweet peas, oh, sweet peas. Um, it's not a bad idea, you know, what have you got to lose, you know, a pack of seeds or two? Definitely, especially if you have a cool spot, you know, it's a little wetter than the normal. Yeah, very good, you're getting it. I tried to till yesterday and I just, it didn't feel like I was accomplishing anything. In fact, it felt like I was probably doing more damage. You're a smart man. And I just, okay, what do I do? I wanna put my garden in. It's gotta wait. Unless you, can you use a shovel? Are you, do I get back injuries or? I can't, but I don't wanna. You can make mounds, you know, you can raise beds. Raise everything up as much as you can above that wet place. Later on in the season, that could really work for you, but now it's, yeah, it's not working for you, it's working against you, so. You might have to do a lot more by hand. It's funny, I live on Wienewski Street and I have a little art gallery, I'm a painter, and I wanted to have a tiny little garden there and I put in some roses. And I forgot what I was gonna say, sorry. I forgot what I was gonna say, I forgot what I was gonna say. The camera. As soon as I double dug the whole area, which I do, keep that ground loose, don't step on it. You know, all that compaction, what it does is it interferes with the water being able to trickle, you know, percolate the way it needs to. It either runs off and then the roots have to grow sideways and they're always sitting in the water, you don't want that. Don't ever walk on your, all of a sudden a new tenant moved in next door and the tenant wanted to have the space that I had just double dug with my shovel door. Oh, it's, you know, like twice the size of the table here. And I don't like to share it, but I did, because she wants to learn. But what got me is she told me she just got a degree in sustainability from UVM and she wanted to know where the tiller was. And I said, you know, you don't use a tiller with a degree in sustainability, come on, you know. Space that's 10 by three, you know, you use your shovel. You know, she's young and healthy, I think. I don't think she had any back issues. So I think she sort of got the gist of it. But we did it and I made, you know, mounds and raised things up. So that's something you could do. It seems like raised beds are in our future. We mean our future. Well, I mean. Do not need past. I mean, right, I mean, last year I was struggling with, you know, do I put raised beds in or not? I was thinking I wanted to and anyway, today, I wish I'd done it that way. Okay, why did you want to last year? Well, I'm trying to get a community garden going. It just seems like the people in general seem to feel who are starting out feel more comfortable with raised beds. It's sort of like the mark of a community garden. You know it's a community garden because of all that. The raised beds? Of course the raised beds are all lined up. I don't know what the pluses of my dishes are, what do you think? I don't think most people do either. They're just doing it because they see other people doing it and they know it's sort of being talked about. And it's the same thing with that red bark mulch. You know, anyway, don't get me going on that. Anything that color, you know, can't be that great. You know, it's like all those dyes. I'm horribly affected by dyes. If I touch dyes, they go to my kidneys and I get the killer backpaints. I hate that stuff and it smells really bad, but everybody uses it because everybody uses it, you know. Raised beds are good for what you just described. If you have a wet surface and it's not drying out, what you need to do is raise everything above that surface and everything above will drop down, you know, will trickle down to that level. So you've just given yourself your roots another foot to grow in if you do a raised bed. That's moist but not soft and wet or compacted. Plus a lot of people like the fact that it's a little higher. You don't have to bend down as far, you know, if you have bad problems. Sure, don't make it easy. Don't make it hard. Hello. Are you the lady from California? Hi. Hi to see. I'm Mimi. Mimi and... Andy. Andy. And Jack. And Jack. I'm Tonya. I'm Tonya. And Jerome. So we've covered a lot. Maybe Andy and Jack could just recapture some of things that just brought up and helped Bill and Tonya. I had raised beds so you talked about water tables. Yeah, I was just whining about it. One of the takeaways for me today was the idea of watching the 10 day weather forecast and really trying to make decisions on the basis of what we know is gonna happen as opposed to my, for instance, just wishful thinking. I want my soil to be dry and it isn't. And so I'm getting impatient and go out and tilt it anyway. But if I'd looked at the weather report, it would have told me it's gonna rain for another week anyway. So don't do that. But in the name of trying to be more conscious of the fact that our weather patterns aren't changing, what can I do to make choices that reflect the reality of the weather as opposed to it's May 31st, so it must be time for me to put all plants on the ground. So that was one of my takeaways. Very good, that's excellent. It's weather.com. They have a 10 day forecast that I love. It's on my homepage and because it gives you at a glance what's gonna be happening. 50 years ago, this didn't exist and I'd have to guess and there'd be, what would most often happen would the last 10 days of May, you'd get 78 degrees for 10 days. The neighbor called it Bermuda High. He was another dairy farmer and he wouldn't hay until Bermuda High was coming. But we had no idea when it was coming, whereas now, and I was telling you about the temperature drop, they've already gloved at lower than what was forecast. So we're gonna get, this is the pattern. This would be a fun exercise if you guys like studying weather patterns, if you really like it. Go to an archive, I think, I don't know, I've never checked out the archive on weather.com but you can go to the Burlington Airport and maybe check their archives. Look at the weather patterns for the past six months. You'll see there's a 10, there's all winter long, people just said it was cold, it was miserable. What we actually went through was this repeat. It was this constant repeat of like a five day thing where it would freeze, it would snow one day, dump snow, then it would rain the next day, then it would freeze to ice and be brutally cold and then it would start all over again and it would just sort of repeat over. We've got that same kind of thing going. And we'd have that dip, which was what called the freezing. We'd have that brutal dip in the temperature, the cold. That is still happening in the 10 day forecast. We're getting all this moisture and then we're getting that dip two, three days where it's really cold and then we're going back up to another 15, 20 degrees. I don't think we've seen the end of that. I think we're gonna see that until maybe like July, for some reason I've noticed around July 10th, that's when all the poppies bloom. This is another thing you'll notice about plants is that some of them are keyed into responding to temperatures. When it's warm enough, they'll come up in spring. Others, it's the length of day, triggers them, they'll only come up when the length of day, poppies all with bloom on July 10th. It's like you'd set your watch by it, or at least where I was in the gorge. The days were shorter, they have a sunlight, days were shorter than where I was the other end. More townen, they bloomed a week earlier. But pay attention, that was a really great thing to take away. If that's all you take away, you'll be grateful, seriously. Yes, because after these three cold days, we've got 10 days of 75, 70 to 75, partly clouds, showers, not only one sunny day, so. Don't plant a lot of real heat lovers this year. Don't, you know, yeah. No watermelons, or honeydews. Buy them at the store. Okay, so we've talked, oh, what else have we talked about? Go ahead, Indy. We talked quite a bit about pH of your soil, thinking about what that is, and then using some amendment like the lime or granite dust to adjust that. Granite dust doesn't, it's not pH, that is just potash. But, no, that was good, you remember that much. Yes, and then I talked about gypsum, if you need calcium, but you don't need to haul to your pH. That's, you would only know that if you got a very sophisticated soil test, you know. Which some people like to do, and it's good, but it's not necessary, I never have. Well, when I was 20 years old, I got a soil test, and I sent it to the extension agents. I had subsoil, I didn't have topsoil, they had bulldozed back then, they bulldozed to build a house, and it was blue clay, and it would've been a test court. And they didn't put anything back, you know, they didn't bulldoze back any topsoil to heaven. It was just left like that, so I transformed it by adding tons and tons and tons and tons of organic matter, but I had a soil test. And it came back, I needed lime, no surprise there. But they recommend the same amount for a sandy soil as they did for a heavy clay soil. And do you know what the particle difference is? There are 20,000 particles per one in a clay soil to a sandy soil. Now that just didn't make any sense to me, you're giving me the same prescription for a soil that had 20,000 more particles than this one. So after that, I just chugged it, and I did get a very good brochure from the New York Lime Association. If you wanna read about this, it's in, I wrote for the Valerie Porter, had a gargling column, and it was July 20th, they printed this article about the, actually it was about invasive, controlling invasive plants. It's in the opinion page. July 20th, 2017. But after that, yeah, I learned in the brochure put out by the Lime Association in New York that the lime particle is the only particle that can get in between the clay particles, clay particles sheets, they're platelets like this and they compress, and there's no, absolutely no space between them, no air space at all. So it can't sustain life. The worms can't get down there and they can't do the thing and have organic matter break it down and that's what makes a lot of vital living soil. That won't happen. But the lime particle, for some reason, I think it's like tetra, I would say that tetrapoidal, like a four-sided pyramid. Like the pyramids, you know, I love geometry but I can't remember the name, the lime particles are like that. So they get in between those platelets and they force them to come apart and they open everything up and the air gets in and the worms get in, the water trickles out and all of a sudden you have this living medium. And I was, fortunately, I was smart enough at 20 to know that, you know, 50, I mean, 20,000 particles to one and you're recommending the same amount, you know, for each and I thought they really haven't done their homework. So I did mine. So you guys can, too, on your own places. So go ahead, did you have anything more to add? We talked also about the wet soil's gonna lead to a lot more disease than fungus. So to be prepared for that, thinking about using elemental copper or a ningetree oil as an antifungal. Yes, neem, N-E-E-M. Yes, because neem is both a broad spectrum insecticide and fungicide, so you can use it for critters, I mean, bugs, too. And it seems to be very selective. It only kills bad bugs, those kill bugs, which is really amazing. But yes, excellent. And Jack? Another takeaway on that same subject for me was air, moving plants apart. I've always had, I thought, not enough land. And so I'm always, you know, if they tell me it should be 18 inch rosa, what the hell, 12 inch, you know, pushing things together. And last year in particular, I remember realizing that my herb garden was suffering from things just being way too close. And... How was it suffering? Well, it was brown, I mean, the plant, the lower third of the plants just died, I think, because they were just bumping into the next plant. But I think that the core issue looking back was that they weren't getting any air in there. So they stayed damp and diseased. And I think, how do you measure this, but it seems like my herbs last year didn't have as much flavor. And I don't know whether that was just that they, you know, weren't out there in light. You know, they needed air around them. They were just too... All right, let's talk about that. Okay. What was last summer like? Does anybody remember what the weather was last year? The growing season? Dry. Dry? Pretty warm. Pretty warm and dry. He's right. It was. I loved every minute of it. But I didn't have a garden last year. That's probably why, because you had to grow up. Okay. Definitely, you know, that we were talking about the space in a year when you have less light, you know, than we do here in Vermont ordinarily, which is only like one sunny day per week. Places raided, that's what they say. That's not a whole lot of light. So, but we do get these freak days when they say it's cloudy and we'll end up getting a few hours after the sun and stuff, and you know, that's enough. You have to make up the difference in space. You write, you know, because they need, all the leaves need the light, you know, above and below, you're right. And if it's at a premium, then you gotta sort of accommodate that. There's some things you can crowd. It's okay, you know, like lettuce and things, you know. But if you spread them out, you get a head. If you keep them crammed together, you get a lot of salads that you just snip, you know. So you can play with the closeness. One, if you have a raised bed and you've got 18 inches down and your plant isn't gonna spread out, it's a vertical grower, you can crowd them a lot more easily. The one thing that's important is that you're thinking about that now, you know, you're aware of it. So you're gonna see things that you didn't see before. You're gonna get hooked, this is good. Okay, pH, acidity, you know, if you have all that hot, sunny weather, those herbs should have been amazing last year and have a ton of flavor. So my guess is that your pH is too low because where do most herbs come from, do we know? Mediterranean. You're right. Which ones in particular? Oregano. Rosemary, thyme, basil, all the ones we like. Yes, they're all from the Mediterranean. What's it like around the Mediterranean? Rocky and dry. Rocky and dry, and what's the pH? It's high because it's alkaline. Lime stone from, you know, from the sea, you know, the ocean, it's limestone. I guess that isn't a foregone. I mean, as you can beat by the ocean, have something like me, you know, it's by the ocean and acidic. But the Mediterranean just happens to be alkaline. West of the continent who divide in the U.S. is alkaline. So those people don't have to, what they have to worry about is lowering the pH, you know, with things like coffee grounds and pine needles and, you know, whatever organic materials you can find to do that. You just gave me a clue. You've been mulching with pine needles. Guess what I mulched with. Okay, there you go. If you have blueberries, azaleas, rhododendron, Japanese irises, that would be perfect. But for Mediterranean herbs, you constantly lower the pH and then every time it rains. So this would be fun, this year. Try linement right now. It's not too late. A lot of, you know, they used to say, oh, it takes a year before you realize any difference. That's not true. You can realize the difference almost immediately. I have, I've proved them wrong on that score, too. I love proving people wrong, especially when it comes to gardening and somebody says, I can't do that. And it's so easy. If you just know the, you know, pH, we've talked a lot about that. That's really important around here, especially from California. Out there, everything's alkaline. Things that just pop up that grow naturally. A lot of the wildflowers that I like to grow are California wildflowers. What we've been having here for spring has been winter in California, typical winter weather. So this spring, like, was ideal spring to have planted. It's too late now, actually. Poppies, like, as soon as the ground is bare, throw, you can throw California poppies, Shirley poppies. There's this plant called Facilia Campanularia, which is a California bluebell. The gypsophila, baby's breath, lark's spur, all these things, you know, you throw the seeds in but early because they are 40 degree germinators and they need like 30 days of 40 degrees to germinate. So if you put them in now, they won't germinate. They might next year, if you don't move them and don't change anything, they will next year, actually, because I've proved that, too. But that's very exciting that you've picked up on the pH, compaction, raised beds, lift and give air above ground and below ground. It's almost as important, not more so below ground than it is above ground. And they need air down at the base of their roots. You think they just need water? No, if they've got a ton of water down there, they just rot and die. They need air, so you're on the right track. Okay, so we're trying to help Tanya catch up. Oh, I just wanted to show you, these are pictures of a place I had on the river in Moortown. The house is still there. The gardens, one thing about gardens is they disappear a year or two if you're not there to do them. But I had a very long sliver of land along the road and there's the guardrail. Here's my long sliver of land and then there are rocks, giant rocks down to Gorge, it was amazing. And so I planted every square inch and that's what these pictures are. There's not really any order, but if you just get the sense of, there's a house and this long strip and some of them are from May and some of them are from June. There's a yellow, I loved alpine plants. I love alpine plants, I love Mediterranean. The first thing I do is dump a ton of lime on them. So there I had tons of Mediterranean plants. Roses, that's the reason why people can't grow roses in Vermont. It's not because it's too cold. It's because they don't lime. They don't raise the pH high enough and there's another trick. You have to plant the graft ball. There's a ball on the rose where the species, the hybrid has been grafted on to a species stalk. Like they're wild roses all over the world, okay? Some of them are so rampages that they've been used to graft like a hybrid tea because the combination of the two of them make them much harder in the sense of able to take up a lot of stresses. Hardiness doesn't mean just cold. It means all kinds of plant stresses like tons of water or no water. Okay, so plant that root ball one inch below the ground for every 10 degrees below zero that we go in the winter. Oh, why? So historically we've always gone 30 below. It has not been unusual to see a few days of 30 below. We didn't have any of that this year. The nights were really warm. All winter long, all spring long. We haven't had a frost in two months. People are walking around complaining about how cold it was. They don't know what cold is. They don't even tell the difference. You know, they're on their phones so much they can't tell when it's really cold. This year was brutal because of the pattern that went up and down and up and down. Ice and rain and snow and ice and rain and snow. It was treacherous at what? But it wasn't really cold anyway. Put that root ball two to three inches below the ground. Line the shit out of it. Put some in the bottom, put some on the top. Really fertilize it. If you put those bones in your wood stove like I told you, use that bone meal. Get granite dust, wood actions. My favorite fertilizer is from Agway. Well, I could actually get it at Guy's because it's so expensive. But it's composted poultry manure, which is a huge waste problem in this country. And it's the best. And it smells good and they're little pellets. You get them in 50-pound bags. And that's all I use. I use that in line. So this stuff, just pour it on, mix it in. You can't hurt your plants unless you had real little seedlings, I think, and you don't fresh manure on them. So this stuff, I've never burned anything. I've never had called chlorotic plants, which chlorotic you can get from too much lining. It locks iron in and it's bad. But I've never seen that. So don't, if people say, no, no, no, you shouldn't use lime because it'll get chlorotic. Don't listen to them. Can I ask you one thing about these photos? Sure. You're right here on the road. Yeah. I've been wondering about planting things right by the road because of the salt. Don't worry. Don't worry. All that stuff, it gets a steady diet of salt. I didn't lift off the salt every spring. I'm right on the road. All of that, yeah, that's called ralbritter. It's a German, it's only blooms once and it's not fragrant, but I just love it. It has a bazillion flowers. Yeah. The salt trucks go by all the time, all the time long. They dump salt and sand. It never bothered anything I grew. You can't grow conifers, you know. But salt didn't hurt them. I didn't find anything that hurt the salt, you know. Maybe, actually maybe asparagus. All these things die back all the way. Yes, see there's picture where there's nothing, you see the guard rail and there's nothing growing below it. That's May. And then it fills in by, the other pictures were taken I think in July. So by early July, it goes from nothing to spectacular, we have 90 perfect days here as a growing season and a lot of things can happen. So, 90 days. Kind of, June, July, August. The season sort of has extended itself because of the climate variations, you know. Like now we won't get a frost later until it used to be end of August, sometimes our middle August. Now it's then September, sometimes end of October. The reason why we can't extend our growing season is because the diseases are still there and they still run their course. And by the time that the frost used to come, the diseases end up affecting the plants to the point where you can't really extend the season unless you've protected them against disease or grown them in a greenhouse or they're naturally resistant. So, you can't really expect that either. Anybody else? Okay, so let's see, what else can we cover? Did we talk, oh, we haven't talked about lighting, you know, light, where to place things. In a year like this, you really don't want to place another stress on your plants. Things that need full sun, you know. Don't put them in a part sun place unless it's like noon to six, you know, Southwest exposure. Yes, you do, you get 25% more sun and heat if you place slopes Southwest, isn't that amazing? Of course, every place I've almost had is all the slope Northwest. But if you do have a place that slopes Southwest, you do, you get 25% more heat and light just because of the incline, I mean the pitch. The place where all the poppies are, I have another shot of that, I might take me to, I'll find it. But that house is across the street from the red one and it is on the north side of the cliff. It built into the cliff. So it was just dark, but on the edge of the road, sun would clear and it would get from the west, it would get like two hours at the end in the afternoon of intense sun. I didn't know what I could do there. I, for a while, was just planting plants that just shade, right? Because two hours of sun in the afternoon is called part shade. It's not enough to call it part sun and that's the difference. If you have four hours of sun in the afternoon, it's called part sun. Because the ideal times are from like 10 to four is your intense, if you have noon to four, you have part sun. If you only have 10 to noon, you have part shade. So I had never tried anything in this space. I was trying, you know, shirt, fire, jack and the pulpits. This one that I called the candy jack, it's pink and white, so I lotted, thrived there. But I decided one year of the last year I was there, I wanna see what it'll do, you know? Pack seeds, I had seeds, sweet William, which one looks like really high pH, you have to dump the lime on it. But I did, I just dumped the lime on this, it was heavy clay in the shade. One, maybe two hours of sun at the end of the day. I understand, people were stopping to take pictures of it. Seriously, they were sending much, it was famous. The whole thing just, they were like three feet high, they couldn't have more, they weren't, you know, unnaturally lengthy, you know, because of the lack of sun. It was so amazing, and the catalogue, you know, they bought the seeds from them, full sun, you have to have full sun. So I had to write to them and say, no, you don't. You can do it up here in Vermont, on the shady side of a cliff, if you have two hours at the end of the day. So don't be afraid, you know, especially, you know, one of these trying times of weather to try things like that, you know? Pay attention to how much light your spaces get, and when they get it. Try to maximize what you can do about that. Like, there's certain vegetables, you know, that will do really well in sort of a part sun, you know, maybe they shade all morning, and get a few hours in the afternoon. They're like green beans, and zucchini, and I think beads, you know, you can play around, but there are some things that will, and you can find the list, you know, look in books, go to used bookstores. That's really fun. That's where you find really great gardening books, especially the Rodeo ones. I put them to memory when I was young, pretty much. And especially memorizing pH requirements and light requirements of plants. Make mental notes. Where is the sun? Where are the shady parts of the building? What time of day? What month? You know, what happens? Um, what you're gonna need to maximize the light. Like I said, I just planted, I love planting roses, and I just planted five next to the door of my gallery on Winooski Street. And I'm curious to see what's gonna happen, because there's three climbers, and two floor bundles. And like I said, this plot was where the dogs eliminated the neighborhood dogs from the meeting last year. So I figured if I put roses in, I'd peg them down. That's another trick where you can maximize light if you have rows. This is a technique that I love. Usually you let the canes get to their full height, but they must have more reach more than six to eight feet here, you know, in our perfect 90 days. And you can peg them down by using like croquet hoops or something a little heavier. You can use a pencil rod and cut it, you know, and make these hoops. And actually bend the canes down and hold them down with these hoops. And they will form a new shoot in each one of the plant nodes all along the branch. So you'll increase your flowers by 10%, I mean, 10 fold, 100% seriously. If you peg them down like that, that's what I did in so many of those pictures. And they won't root all the time? No, they won't root. Most of them, at least in those circumstances on the edge of the road, a lot of the snow and piles and stuff that was dumped broke a lot of the canes. And usually I would only have half as many as I started with the following year. But I don't know, they never lasted more than two or three years without getting broken or just expending their life expectancy. You sort of want to keep pruning ones that bloomed a couple of times. It depends on the rows because there's 16 classifications and they all have different little idiosyncrasies. Can I ask you to go back a second? Sher, you were saying about the roses. Yes. That the node between the rootstock and the topstock. The ball graph. If you wanted to bury it one inch for each degree of freeze. Not each 10, each 10 degrees. Each 10 degrees. So it's traditionally been three or four inches. Yeah, three. I think three would be about perfect. I wouldn't go any deeper than that because if you go deeper, what happens is it might grow a shoot off of the rows that was grafted onto. And when the one that's grafted on top, oftentimes it dies in Vermont because people haven't planted it deeply enough. And the top dies. And what happens is the understock keeps growing and usually it'll be like 25 feet and it'll grow everywhere and have these pale sort of cup-like maroon things that aren't really what you had in mind. That is a species rose that was used specifically to graft onto. It's not the one that you use. Yes, for the rootstock because it's indestructible. Whereas the hybrids, teas that come from China originally they're a little fussier and they're the date tea and they need, they're not as indestructible. So when you combine those two, it's a ball. You can actually see where the two of them, it looks like a ball. Make sure that's a, you know, two or three inches below the ground. Now if you live in Florida it's the opposite which is funny or in warmer places they have to have that root ball above the ground or they automatically lose the graft. But up here, keep it below and you'll be, you can tell those people who say you can't grow roses in Vermont to get lost. I bought a bunch from Evergreen Gardens. They stopped buying and selling them because people couldn't grow them. I had them for 20 years. No, the reason I don't have them anymore is because I had to sell the house and anyway, the David Austin collection, I don't know if any of you are planting roses but the David Austin roses for some reason are particularly very sturdy up here. You know, they really do well. I had, I don't know, six or eight of those. Here's an English. Where do you like to get them? Well, there aren't that many places unless I go online. I used to go, you know, I had a huge collection of antiques. That was at 75 actually and all along with sand and the salt and the guardrail. And 20, 30 years ago, there were several places that I went to that I don't think exist anymore. You buy them bare root and they send them in the fall or in the spring. And that's actually ideal. Get them real early and put them in real early. I waited too long this year. They're not selling anymore online for bare root. Okay, I got some really great ones at Abway. I just got five that I'm real happy about. So they probably still have some. Yeah, most places online, it's the end of the season. Up here, you know, we're so far behind it. But there's a lot actually that I got. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you sort of have to start in the fall. You know, when the catalog first comes. So, but I would try Abway if they have anything left. Another place of the well flower farm in Cholot. I'm not sure about the roses, but they have a really good inventory online. They ship and they have a really good inventory of seeds to plant in shade, flowering seeds. I'm really getting into shady areas. Roses are really amazing because they really love growing on the edge of a forest, on the edge of a woodland. In nature, that's where you see them. Here in Vermont, you'll see them because there are ones that see themselves and that you'll find. They'll be on the edge of a woodland. They like a lot of some, but they don't like intense heat and, you know, to be out there, you know, dead of the heat of the day. So in the gorge, I was on the edge of the woodland both sides and I got, the maximum was three quarters of a day of sunlight, but it was enough. I didn't get as many flowers as people get, you know, somewhere where they have a lot more light, but I got enough to make me happy and enough to keep them alive, you know, so I thought it was enough. Anything else? I mean, we can keep going. Yeah. What, this year, are there some plants thinking of my bed full garden? Maybe I should be thinking about buying starts instead of starting from seed. Oh, I would go to the Cape Farm, Cape Farm truck sales. They have, I think it's tomorrow. I don't know, maybe it might be the last one. Yes. If you don't meet their truck sales, they might have, I mean, go to their site and see if they still have them, because they'll put in a peat pack, 50 or 100 beets and spinach and you just take these little things that have their second leaves. Oh, this is another tip. The ideal time to transplant things, you know, seedlings, is when they have their first set of true leaves. Every plant gets baby leaves, you know, like we get baby teeth and then we get, they're called cotyledons, the first one. They don't look like the leaves are gonna look like they're just first leaves. As soon as the plant emits the second, but first true leaf, that is sort of like the ideal time to transplant it. You can transplant many things at that point that you cannot any further along. I'm thinking of seedlings like carrots, beets, spinach, all those things. If it's raining like this, it's optimal transplant weather. This is the year to get your bushes and trees and that's what I was talking about here. Plant roses, plant, flowering shrubs and fruit trees and all kinds of things that need a lot of water. Asparagus, put an asparagus bed in. Buy a pack of asparagus seeds. They'll love this weather and they'll all sprout. And by the end of the season, you will have, you save yourself 40 bucks buying the plants, you know. If you bought the plants, if you just sow the seeds, they'll do really well right now. There's 70 degree deer faders. They'll just pop the pop up and all of them. So there's good things and bad things, you know. Anything else? I go on all day, you can tell. This is not rehearsed. Two. We're rehearsed. I'm not used to having somebody who listened to me one and really like hearing what I'm trying to say. Anyway, I'm still as excited as I was. Like I said, I didn't grow up gardening. I mean, I got sort of dragged to all these famous gardens in Europe and all. I mean, I'm not bragging here. I'm just saying this is what it was. But then my grandma had this amazing garden in Cannes, you know, right above the movie festival, a few blocks, that's where my grandmother's house was and that's where we had to go because she was her grandmother and she had an amazing garden. But I wasn't allowed to go in it. I wasn't allowed to touch anything. I wasn't allowed to do this. She had a gardener and stay away and go play with yourself somewhere. You know, it's like never any sort of instruction or encouragement to sort of do anything. So there was this vacant chicken coop that was just dirt, dust. It was powder dry. And I used to go sit in there for hours and just play with dirt. It's kind of pathetic now. I mean, I think about it, but, but I guess the, you know, the desire was, it was a starting point, but I didn't know what it was, you know, until I married a dairy farm here in Morton. But it's never too late. And then you just get obsessed and you'll be amazed at how much the natural world will open up for you. Things you've never seen before, never noticed before and insects, you know, and plants, diseases, you know, things that they'll do, not do, that you can work around and beat them at their own game, kind of. Chris, as I said earlier, you're encouraging me to think about trying to adjust my expectations and what I'm gonna do with my gardening to the realities of the weather that I'm confronting as opposed to trying to force my preconceptions about what I'm gonna do, what. I'm just, I'm gonna ground no matter what. But I was thinking about, I don't have much detail about this at all, but my father told me stories about how in, where he grew up in Poland, they had communal space for gardening. And the way they dealt with it was they mounted, they made mounds and each family got a mound or X number of mounds. And I don't remember how tall they were, but I remember just talking about how they planted, sort of in such, you know, working down the mountain. And the mounds were big enough that they could get in with a long trowel and work all that, but they didn't walk on the soil. And I'm thinking, oh, maybe that's why they were doing that. I mean, obviously it controlled things. You get one raised bed, you get one mound. But also it meant that they could adjust. If it was a particularly wet season, then they could plant that mound differently. And the amount of wetness down at the bottom is going to be different than the top. Anyway, maybe I'll give that a try. That's exciting. You just had a flash of that. Well, and the other obvious is that you have a lot more area when you have a big mound. And if you had a flat circle on the ground, you know. Yeah, yeah. What is it, the pi squared? No, I said pi times the radius is, no, anyway. You have the area of a circle, flat area on the ground. It's going to be a lot less than the dome. And so it's a way to maximize space, which Europeans had to do a lot more than we have, obviously, and are still having to do. That's pretty interesting. I want you to have an active planting class at the historical society. And it was really interesting. They talked about these mound systems and they would use it to increase the corn, you know, the three sisters, but they would, some of those ground cherries, they replicated it recently. They would repel some of the pests that the other plants on the side would get. So inter-planting them in a different way. Really interesting. Very good point that I completely left out, companion planting is another way that you can protect your plants. I used to know every companion plant, pear, you know, that was out there, but it's not in my memory to tell you this morning. But I can tell you where the books are, which my dad told me, you know, you don't have to know everything to be a genius, you just have to know where to look it up. And Ruth Stout was a gardener who really promoted a lot of companion planting. And she's very, she's kind of popular today. With planters because she advocated a no-till system. She didn't tiller soil. Just add stuff and just keep adding it on top and it breaks down and feeds everything and breaks down. And you just don't disturb that, you know, layer, layered system, which most of the world operates that way. I mean, the natural world, the ground, the woods, that's what's going on. So companion planting, that's another way to minimize predators that are attracted to weakened plants because they're not getting enough sun, got too much water, they're too close together, the pH is too low. All those stresses, you know, compound and then make your plants more attractive to, that's something that really never ceases to amaze me is that insect pests will not be attracted to plants that are having all the needs met. They just simply do not find them attractive. It must be a scent. I don't know, you know, I've studied the plant world on a molecular level that much, but they must give off something, emit something that maybe a might, but I don't, do these insects, can they smell? I don't know, but somehow they do and they go for plants that are in distress. So if you see insects going after plants, figure out why is this plant in distress, if you can, to the best of your ability. I've noticed, I mean, I used to grow a couple of different faces in this red house before the guardrail was put there. Actually, the guardrail was not there when it bought place. It happened five or six years later and I like to grow this Scottish thistle. It's outlawed most of the west of the United States because it's rampages, you know, and it's self-seeds, it's a thistle. And especially in the states where they have a lot of grazing, animals grazing and stuff, it's really a menace. So then they grow eight feet tall. So I have pictures of them, but what I notice is we're plants have a lot where they weren't getting enough space. The locusts, the cicadas, the grasshoppers devoured them, devoured them, they loved it because they would get kind of limp. And they didn't have those razor-edged, you know, picks. Those things got soft, you couldn't feel them when the plant was not getting its life. And the locusts just chewed them up for breakfast and I thought, isn't that something? I've noticed slugs. Slugs would devour your plants if the pH isn't right. You got a really line, especially if you want to grow Brussels sprouts or the broccoli family, you've got a really line. Or if you see the slugs on them because it's raining every day, wood ashes. Just keep wood ashes every day. And wood ashes will quick line for you. They will raise the pH, it doesn't last very long. That's why you need to add, you know, line two. But they do deter the slugs. One because they're gritty, two because they raise, at the same time, they're improving your situation. You know, you want that duality there. You don't want to just kill something and go use, you know, like name friends, it's just you want to get rid of the bug. You want to figure out why is it in distress? What could I do? What are the possibilities? Go through your head. What could it possibly be? You know, it's like you've got a baby and there's only a few things that really, you could turn to that they need. And it's kind of like the plants. They're not that many things that they need. So try and, you know, and read and, you know, find books that delve with the things that, you know, we brought up today. I feel like I'm winding down. We don't have to. I mean, if anybody wants to leave, just ask me more questions. I'm trying to, I'm trying to get any more pictures. Talk if you will about weeds. Okay. Ooh, I love talking about weeds. Um... I've got a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a garden plot that we, uh, was for 25 years of Turks. Not grass, but just random field, but it was plowed, and we nilled it for the first time last year and, um, God, the weeds were just invading little ships perennial. Okay. Let's stop it go right there. Go ahead. What were the weeds? That's the king right there. You've got to find out what were those weeds. One, it tells you a lot about your soil. It tells you a lot about your micro climate. How do you find out what those weeds are? Well, there are books again that show there's a super one called weeds and what they tell you that was published here in Vermont. I think it was published by the University of Vermont. I might be wrong. But the key is to have the pictures of them as seedlings. I've won parks, I've had for 30, 40 years, parks guide to seed sowing or whatever that I use primarily now just to look at the picture of the seedling. What happens when you, if you familiarize yourself with cultivated seedlings, flowers that you plant, vegetables that you plant, you'll recognize if the flowers that you grow or the vegetables that you grow from other places, brought back seeds and maybe they were grown I don't know, in the south or the west or somewhere else, there another cultivar of a family that might grow wild here. Inpatients, everybody, a lot of people grow inpatients in the shade. Jewelweed, jewelweed is in the inpatients family. If you don't know what jewelweed is, it's a tall, it grows about this tall, it's translucent stem, has a little orange flowers at the top. It grows everywhere, especially where poison ivy is, which is something I love. It's an antidote for poison ivy. You can actually take it, it's like the Owl of the North, and you take it and you make a poultice and you can smash it around and put it on if you have been exposed to poison ivy. You know, look around, if you, oh shoot, just find some jewelweed, rub it on there and it renders the oil useless or it doesn't, you don't get the infection. Try and learn to recognize seedlings, especially when you plant things in your garden. Try and say, okay, here's a poppy and here's a marigold and here's a green bean. How are they different? What do they look like when they come up? Look at the pictures. I'm trying to think, wildflower seeds farm from Texas. I use them a lot because there again, they have little pictures of all of their seedlings. And so if you see something that looks like that, you can say, oh, you know, I'm out in a field and I'm getting Roed Beckia, you know, which is, you know, the black-eyed citizens, they're popping up everywhere, mallows will pop up. You know, and if you want them, you can use them in your design, you know, all the wildflowers. But it's really exciting to learn to recognize because you'll see, you'll learn so much about what your little micro climate is like by what falls there and grows naturally. So what you can do is take that information and plant other memories of the same family. Plants are in big families and that's why the Latin was developed to identify the ball. And so impatience, I think it's imperialis, it's jewelweed, but you might plant impatience, I don't know what the flowers that we buy, the impatience are called, I don't know what their species name is, but let's see, I'm trying to think. I discovered this wind poppy, it's a California poppy from Baja, that's where it's indigenous to. It seeded in this wall, this north-facing wall that I had on the river here that was below the road. Had it get there? Had no idea. A car from California maybe passing by? A bird that had migrated east? I don't know. Or a combination of the above, a car that was passing, maybe it landed on somebody in California, made it to Vermont and the wind blew it. Gorgeous flower. But when I saw it, I said, that looks like a poppy, because I knew what poppies look like when they start coming up. You can do that too. One, if it's too late this year to plant poppies, you can look at books and look at the pictures and see what a seedling looks like. That's how I knew this one. It's copper, it's gorgeous. It loves the shade. That was a total gift. There's plenty of them out there, each one of your places. I get excited. It's fun. One of my favorite garden books is called Garden Lilies. It was written and published in 1946 in South London, Derry, Vermont. A couple named Esther and I think it's Tom. I don't remember his name. Esther, that's my daughter's name. I remember her name, McNeil. They published a book called Garden Lilies in Vermont 75 years ago, when we were having those 35 below-degree periods every winter, on all the Garden Lilies that you can grow in Vermont, and it's expensive. You can't even buy most of these Lilies in cultivation. You go to the stores and you get one or two things that are popular and easy, or you get Casablanca, white, and everybody likes the name. But there's this whole world of Lilies from around the world that plant hunters went and found and discovered and brought back like in the 17th century, and the 19th centuries that are out there, especially if we have the capability online to contact these people and buy them. I got really obsessed with this Japanese woodland Lilie that I saw in this book. It was black and white. It was a bad picture. But I read about it and I thought, oh, I've got to have that. I've got the perfect place for it. And I got it from a doctor out in Michigan. I got it from somebody who knew somebody. And they were beautiful bulbs, monsters. And I planted them in the perfect place. The moles like them too. They were like, nobody told me. I like the most delicious food for them. It was like caviar or something like that. I learned how to, you know, I had to put them in a cage. You put them in like a wired cage. And then by the time they've grown up through the cage, they're no longer attracted to the rodents. But, you know, the world is out there, the plants. And there's a lot we can do up here. A lot we can't. Don't focus on what we can't have or things that are marginal to here or pushing the limits, you know, that you had when you were in California or something, you know. Don't do that. It's kind of productive. Anybody else? Anything else? Kind of think of something I might have forgotten. I have, in my house, I have a, I bought it a couple of years ago. Apparently they had some strawberries, but they didn't really maintain this bed very well. They're kind of looking through it, and it hasn't been needed well the last couple of years. The plants aren't in great condition and I was thinking about transplanting them into an organized fashion and mulching it. Am I still in a time frame that will work? Yes, it's perfect this year to do that. That's a perfect thing. And you've waved long enough, I mean it's late enough in the season. You can tell which are the mother plants, the bigger ones. You might not want to transplant those. They sort of have a, you know, they get exhausted after a few years. If you have a lot of runners, snip off the runners and make a whole row of the runners. Raise your pH or they won't be sweet. Line, you know, lighten it up. They don't like heavy soil. They like sandy soil. Do you know what your soil type is like where you want to put them? Not in that exact location. Okay, so you would want to check that. If it's wet and standing water, they won't like that. Don't do it. Mounds, you can mount it up. They might. If it's really heavy, I would get some sand. That fertilizer I was telling you, lime it. I stood extremely well. This is really good weather. Not when they're ripening, but for developing the berries, this is ideal. I have just a random question about if you want to, we have a lot of lawn right now or it's used as lawn, but we were thinking of letting at least part of it go to Meadow and seeding it with wild flowers. I'm curious, it's thick like you were talking about your sod that had been there all the time. You wouldn't seed on top of that would you break it up? You'd have to probably till it or remove it by hand. It's awful. Not everybody does this, but you'd have to remove the sod and then you can broadcast it. But you have problems when you just till it. Yeah, tilling wasn't enough. It kept coming back. Oh yeah, you'd have to plow it. Tilling you just get 8 million pieces when you only had 15 before and they're all over the place. Plowing. I don't know how impatient you are but something that was recommended to be after the struggle was if you're willing to donate you could put black plastic down and just leave it for a whole year and then you can work with it because it's all it's all done. But I have actually done that on Crabgrass in California and I don't use plastic, I use cardboard. But it's drying up there didn't decompose too fast What's the land what's the land like do you know? It's actually very fortunate I would plow it get it plowed don't get a monster tractor but some of you has a small medium sized tractor plow it because that just turns it all down and down here you'll have little compost and you'll have a little compost fertilizer down there eventually when the roots get down there you might even want to plow it and plow it again and then broadcast it like I said it's too late for the 40 degree Germanators but it's perfect timing for the 70 degree Germanators Wildflower seeds in Sherlock would if you told them that information they would probably have a mix for you that would give you the most flowers that you could do around here in June What do you do in that case? You just broadcast? Yeah, that's what I do Well, I broadcast some actually you'll get to see them behind the blue green part of the there's a blue green building across from the main entrance to the library I've put a little garden in there I would not believe the trouble I had neighbors and the landlady and the lord anyway it's very little but I did broadcast five blue things I just was in this blue thing annuals one forget-me-not and another thing about plants there's a lot of members to every plant family forget-me-nots have annual members bi-annual members and perennial members so if you have all those you can have forget-me-nots all year long the whole season until November-December if you know that and plant the different forms the same true with other plants but I did the forget-me-nots two forms, the Chinese forget-me-nots and cyanoglycem and mysotis anyway the california bluebells and there's one more and these are all very simple annuals that pop up and do magic in very short period of time by early mid-July but I made sure the ground was clean I cleared off all the sod I pulled it out by hand and then I lined it and fertilized it and lightly raked it and you can tell, you read the packages because a lot of plants are germinators darkness, something like light that too and I wanted to talk about the weeds a little more because you had asked about the weeds one thing that's really amazing about weeds is, well I've always thought that they sort of groutate towards each other they have this like homing device because you'll find that the weeds will resemble the plants that you've planted in a certain spot a weed that looks like identical to the plant that you've planted and I was working for somebody I was doing a job weeding and there was like bergamot, the bee balm but there was a weed that looks identical to the bergamot growing right up with the bee balm so you need to learn because they're going to mimic they're going to grow in the places that are ideal for them these are just going to pop up and if you've given them solutions to grow we're going to do it and so your particular site has a certain amount of light and has a certain like orientation and has a certain slope and has all these little certain things that is going to attract or cause seedlings pop up good bad and indifferent so you want to learn what those are and this is the way to get rid of them there are techniques to weeding I'll take energy it's true I do I was working for this guy just for a couple of days because he wanted somebody to come and I said I think what you're really looking for is a hacker, like a teenage hacker here at college because I'll do it for you but I'm not doing it for cheap I'm really fast I can accomplish a lot and you think you're paying out a lot more now we'll wait till you get the hacker but okay oh really what if you I use paper I use cardboard newspaper, landscape cloth and then mulching on top of it and then you can only you wouldn't be able to broadcast that way but if you have a more formal I mean you just break through all of that you stick plants in what kind of plants did you use I've different trees fruit trees grasses ground cover is hard but after a period of time the mulch will break down and you can grow on top of it but you don't have all this solid grassy kind of stuff I did just discriminate I planted everything and was that elsewhere? California I'd be curious it sounds like you have some really good techniques along those lines and it would be really interesting to see what you discover here what happens I have more space here so that's why that was a smaller heath of an acre so I was just using landscape but I do have a larger space that I want to do something with I'm daunted by the weeds that are there now they're invasive those dam weeds and they I think the plants that we're trying to force are not necessarily native to the situation so they're struggling and the weeds they just take advantage of it I just turn my back and they come back that's true well, there's a time for everything I removed this sod that was over there from my little rose strip there and I broadcast the blue mix with these roses and I planted some lilies and dahlias and I noticed that the seeds from the sod it was weed grass they're all tiny that's the time to get them you can't wait but your gardens cannot fit into your plants like you were saying you've been trying to do that no you have to fit into the gardens you have to obey natural law natural laws are dictating what happened here if you have a struggle with that I would suggest you don't garden because it's just find something else find it somewhere else but if you get them right now like I'm going to go home and hoe that area because I want to mulch it but it's been too wet to mulch wait until it dries out a little bit and so I see those bazillion of those things but if I take a hoe a little landing hoe right now it won't grow so yeah the trick is not to let them get ahead of you when you do weed make sure you go down far enough and get the entire root system and you can actually minimize you can minimize your weeds to be manageable you can I get to the point in those rose gardens I didn't have any weeds very few so I used plants as a mulch that's another thing to consider I hate this red bark stuff it's so awful it's just like raised beds everybody uses it because everybody uses it and everybody puts it around their trees it's the worst thing to make a mound around your tree it makes the water run off and then it makes it that mulch actually soaks up and absorbs all the water which in a year like this might be a good thing but I would find something else grass clippings or any kind of composted stuff I used leaves I defied I tried to defy I used leaves for years my husband told me I would use leaves and everybody says no you can't use leaves they're diseased well when I use these other techniques the rock powders that I talked about before you came in the two disease sprays that are certified organic elemental copper and neem now, here's nothing elemental copper this is huge, significant you've got to you've got to put it in water that's acidic and I think it is, isn't it? anyway you need to match you need to use rain water with the copper if you use tap water that is coming from a deep well that has a ton of limestone in it which most wells do calcium carbonate is down there it cancels out the effectiveness of the copper you have to use it with an acidic water which is easy to come by just use rain water, don't use tap water if you're mixing this elemental copper stuff I would really deter using chemical fertilizers in a year like this you have to do it almost every other day because the real miracle of them it gives you a real punch a two shot espresso with three sugars it just gives you this real blast of energy and nutrients that the plants respond to but it doesn't last long and if it rains it leaches out really quickly so unless you're there every other day and the chances are that you'll over fertilize with the nitrogen which is there one could encourage more disease by the plants being wet and weakened and two it kills your plant life it doesn't encourage plant life that's why these other things building up your soil, making it alive encouraging these relationships underground in the end you'll have a much better product and you'll be a lot happier and you'll see things that happen that you wouldn't use this sort of warfare anyway do people have these vermicompost here like in California it's warm enough we can have warm boxes but here since they're above ground all of them die this is like in Alaska they put them in the garage I've heard that people do that they take their worms out of the ground and put them in the garage the heated garage I think to keep them otherwise they die there too the worms make it but I mean making compost from the worms like we had box and then we would put our our food scraps in there oh yeah and then you can make a tea out of it yeah but in the winter they'll die you know they'll yeah that won't happen so I wonder does anyone do that here no but you could I'm assuming you could if you just maybe buried the worms you know in the winter give them like 8 or 10 inches or you know whatever soil over them especially if they're from around here they should make it yeah but there's actually a certain type and then they use color red to make it wear oh yeah it's voracious and you can harvest the compost pretty crap I think that you're going to find the worms plentiful naturally here and that might be different than in California they don't know what I mean they are already doing in effect what you're looking for in the compost they're busy at work in the soils here whereas in California it might be too dry and they might be too deep you know way down deep in order to stay alive unless you make those homes for them well it's a way of compost but no I get that I want you to try it see it well no seriously try that and your sheet your mulching techniques too it'd be interesting to see with the cardboard and the paper or you know what you've tried try it here yeah now there's much more water here so it's easier to control certain things there but then there's less water so it's a lot more laborious and water consuming so I'm curious to see how much watering of the vegetable there do you have to do or if it just gets rained on we don't know anymore like I said before you came in we've only had two hot and dry summers in the past 25 years one was in 1995 and the other was last year the rest of them have been rainy, temperate on the cool side you don't get many 80 degree days I hate that I want months full of 80 degrees 90 even I love 90 what kind of irrigation do people use usually you haven't needed irrigation you don't need it we have typically a perfect 90 day growing season where you don't have to augment water really yes and 20 years ago I decided to see if that was true and I stopped watering I actually had a hole in that garden there on those pictures I had buried soaker hose all the way down those raised beds zigzagged it all the way down to the end it was practically down to the water and it worked it really worked well but one in the season where it was really dry well ran out when I watered everything so I had to just decide not to do that again and I just mulched deeply and waited for the rain and it's been sufficient I've never lost plants or had plants that have suffered because I haven't watered for vegetables too yeah put a deep mulch on I like to use grass clippings and leaves and then just compost by the end of the summer it's all broken down I put yesterday I harvested rebar and I put the rebar leaves down cover the weeds I like to do natural no it's great that's root stout have you read root stout check her out she's a wise old garden lady that has sort of experienced a comeback I watered down so cool thanks for your time chat can I ask do you paint poppies I do paint poppies I thought you had poppies and poppy paintings on the wall of the gallery what gallery behind the books oh I've seen those no those are mine but you can see mine if you want I'm working on one where's your gallery it's number one Winozki street do you know where it is as the crop flies it's 200 feet Winozki street is a side street it's second right after you come out of the library drive a drive for the building next door Winozki street I'm in this blue building on the right but I'm doing a series of poppies right now because I couldn't grow any and I write about them you might be able to access from the gallery reporter I wrote a really excellent article on poppies poppies and tuberosis that's the name of it I think it was last year maybe in March all the latin names of all the poppies that you can grow here in spite of what people say and I tell you the different needs of each one excuse me yeah there's a lot of them big family and I do like paying them I've been curious I never was able to grow Hungarian bread poppies blue it's supposed to be big blue I know a lot of blue poppies they're not Hungarian usually from Tibet or from that part of the world that might just be someone's common name yeah I like growing those blues I got hooked on those I mean wanting to grow I read about in horde culture I used to wear a lot to read horde culture I don't know what it's like now actually I stopped reading a few years ago because I thought they kind of dumbed it down too much used bookstores have super collections books because people don't read them anymore but gardening books especially from the 30s that was a real super time 40s, 50s, early 60s chemical fertilizers chemical this, chemical that it was prosperity, the new age everything's bigger and better than everything we used to know just dump it on ching ching ching all the way to the bank books especially from the 30s a lot of the Brits are really super worth having in a collection just general primers things that you can find all the rodeo books there's one Beth Chateau C-H-A-T-T-O it's very technical all the names are in latin there aren't a lot of pictures but she's got two that are I find indispensable the wet garden and the dry garden and the wet garden I love lists if I write a garden garden it's all gonna be just lists lists and lists of plants that are suitable for certain conditions hers is really great because she has a whole couple of pages on wet plants plants that like wet circumstances and full sun which is totally crazy it's very natural but there are and a lot of people around here need those names cause the fields are so wet yes I'm not familiar with anything else that's easier like I know there's one called the water wise garden it's by springer Laurel springer and she's in California and she's put together that burpee published American series that's super water wise gardens and it tells you there again all these lists part shade part sun really dry totally dry maybe not so dry all the lists there that tell you what you can try using road cover or if you just do your vegetables plastic road cover plastic or the hoops you know it's like woven that helps one for insects and the other is for extending planting out earlier if that's I was thinking of using it for like what we would have planted our tomatoes a month and a half ago and so I get nervous I'm not going to get any so I'm just curious because I like to plant my seed and I get the tomatoes well I started them already but rather than lines I don't have a set of mine has less life than this so I'm curious how if anyone does you know, planting under a road cover or something like that or cold frame to extend the seeds and be able to plant earlier outside or is that what you're talking about trying to go against what's going on here No, not necessarily, I mean to me I find it kind of boring as you move all those things out and you're going to take them in and in the end it doesn't really accomplish that much if I was to make a mistake I probably would because if you can get something to the market a week ahead of time you know, yeah I think it is to your advantage to explore all those things what I've kind of found out especially at the other end and you miss this is that the disease factor the disease is underground and above ground take over even if you've got that road cover especially on tomatoes you won't even know that it's happening now and the fungus underneath the ground So they just have a certain lifespan Well, if you want to extend the season here even if the weather has self extended because of the climate change to be sure we don't get a frost it's a month later than it used to be typically sometimes two months later that's what's crippled the foliage colors those freezing temperatures when they have to have been and we don't get the colors the vivid colors anymore because the frost was what really determined the brilliancy even though you're not getting those freezes in the fall and you think wow I can have tomatoes until November you can't because the diseases have taken over and they take over all nature and you see all around you everything's dying because it's sort of a natural way of getting all the leaves off so if we have this freak ice storm the leaves don't all die and freeze and break it's actually a natural part of the process for the disease to come late in the season and kind of take care of everything so if you want to extend your season at the other end for your tomatoes you have to protect them against disease now that you put them in every three, four, five days in this kind of weather if it gets sunny you might be able to extend your spray program for a week to ten days but especially the elemental copper and put a drench drench the ground when you plant them all of it just drench it because that will kill what's there and then you might want to do that every week to ten days and then you have to do your plants too with both I rotate with both one week or every five days I'll do the copper and the next time I'll do the neem because I've never successfully determined whether or not if I put them together and blend them if they work as well I haven't explored that so Andy anything? I'm losing your interest here it's two hours right nobody's paid for anything anyway anything else? thanks for sharing all this information I'd rather do I'd love to see people get excited about growing things and knowing what they're doing and having the wherewithal to find out more answers into research and look up what they need that's been provided for a lot of people like me who've left books and written ideas that's a question how do you prefer to trellis tomatoes? that's a good question save the best for last well there's two types of tomatoes determinant or indeterminate varieties they all break down into this determinant varieties set everything at once a very short period of time and that's it, that's their crop so they make it to a certain point they develop and the maximum potential, set all the tomatoes boom indeterminates start setting maybe earlier than, I don't know earlier than the determinates but they just keep going it's not all at once so given what we've just learned this morning what would make sense for tomatoes here in Vermont would you have I wouldn't know, right well not being inclined to say indeterminate and hope that the plant is there when the weather is cooperative no actually I'm leaning now I think determinant ones are actually better because we have such a short period of time when we can get them like I've said if you do this optimal spray program and this is organically approved, Johnny's and the whole crowd if you do this you can guarantee against certain things but if you don't there's probably a week at best when your tomatoes will be amazing and after that week they'll be horrible they'll just taste horrible and what it is is that it's that fungus that I've told you about that's in the ground, it's there now when you plant them and it's infecting your plants now and it's systemic and it works its way all the way but you won't be able to tell that it's there until you're trying to harvest those tomatoes and you'll have a few good ones for a week and they'll be amazing and then all of a sudden the flavor's gone the texture's different that disease has infected the tomatoes and you're done so which plant, a determinant or indeterminate would give you the best results given that situation you're a smart man you hit me over the head it was fun though so yes, I think he's right he's right if you're somebody that really manages you know, knows how to do this and you do apply what I've told you you could feasibly start getting tomatoes in July, early July or no, I'm sorry, late July and you could have them until early September and the quality won't change if we get some sun so and if you're driven by guilt and I'm driven by guilt if you get one solid tomato crop you could pick it all and go in the kitchen and can it all but if it just keeps coming sooner or later and you get bored with the can and then I feel guilty about the tomatoes that are rotting on the pot so go determine knowing what you know now makes sense doesn't it and they'll be in peak flavor, everything you want that one batch and then after that I have three plants I have two that are indeterminate I've always planted big beef I just love big beef it's my favorite, has been my favorite I find it matures just as early as a lot of the other early maturing ones here's a couple, I'll give you some tomato I should show off my tomatoes before I tell you all my secrets but put the whole plant below the ground up until the top like two sets of leaves what I do is I bury it in the sort of, not a shallow grave but almost like four to six inches then you put the ball in a root ball with a pot and we'll sort of gently bend it up and then have your plant stake right here you know, fertilize lime it, the tomato plant can grow roots on the entire length of its plant and will and like you said before it could layer itself, if it's in the ground if you could have a stem down in the ground you'll look it'll have all these little things on it and presume those would be roots so if you place your whole plant, don't leave it sticking up over the ground hoping it's going to fill out put it below the ground that entire stem will become roots and you'll have a stem like this on your main plant what I've always like to do is keep four or five main shoots and I've taken the suckers out so that I don't have 20 20 stems to a plant to answer your question that I had half an hour ago and I tie them to an 8 foot stake and put it in 2 feet deep and I've done that for a long time they grow 6 feet or more so 6 or 7 feet and I just want to have a picture I've made my husband experimented a frame out of wood of stakes like you're talking about and then across would have a stake and then the plant itself would wind up a string if you have to have the right kind of string art would deteriorate before the season was over it's interesting he seemed to like doing it he'd done it for a few years I can't find it I can't isolate this picture at this minute here's what you'll get for tomatoes you'll pick all those in one time and then the sweet one I was telling about under the cliff one and a half hours of sunlight a day the catalogs they'll say it needs full sun all day especially in the north that isn't true and I found that out get ready to find things out like that and write it down I'd be rich and famous if I'd written everything I'd know down seriously I knew that and I didn't I still didn't do it because I think so much of the time I like the spontaneity of how things happen so Mimi it is time and the library is closed now oh it is that's alright thank you all for coming thank you Mimi for this wonderful presentation thank you Jerome for coming and filming you're welcome