 If you have to be smart on the machine, and today I am that, I'm Todd Lehmann from the Capstone Extension Office, and thank you for not leaving before I started. Many people say, why do we, why do, why have a container gardener, you know, it's just a little tiny thing, why do it? Many people do not have the option of having a garden. If you've ever rented before or have a property where you can't dig into, I'm yet to find a land owner, land, a person that owns the land that will not let you put a container in the corner of the house or by the steps or somewhere, and it's not a problem at all. But to dig up their lawn, that might be something that they really don't want you to do. So that's one reason. Also, you might not want to have a half acre of garden. Many people, I also have the community, youth gardens north of town here, some of them, and many people say, well, I'd like to have a half acre garden, and I'm like, wow, I'd like to have a small 20 by 20 garden. I think that having something small and taking care of it is much better than having a large weed identification taught as mine gets in the fall type of a thing. Also relaxation. I know that sometimes, not with this job, but with other jobs, sometimes I have stress. And just to get away and to work in the garden and have a sense of accomplishment after you're done really goes a long way. So you grow what you like. You don't have to do vegetables. You can. You can do flowers. It's just your type of a little environment where you have some control. And so that's one thing with that. Advantages. This is actually a nice way of looking at it. This is container gardening, just too much, I think, personally for me. I would never do this, but if you wanted to, you could do this and have your little containers up there. Many times they do this type of container gardening, though, when they're testing plants in containers to see how they'll do and go with that. Also, one thing with these, they're very easy to take care of. For example, let's say you have a very nice, whatever, tomato plant growing in there and suddenly you get a red root pigweed growing right next to it. What do you do? Do you spray it? No. You just take it, pull it out, throw it on the lawn and hit it with the lawn more later or throw it in the garbage. It's up to you. Another thing is if you get an infestation of aphids and you try treating it, you can't and it just keeps getting worse and worse, you can bag up the whole thing, throw it away and start over. Well, I spend a lot of money saving something that, thanks for coming back to me, for that type of the thing. Creating beauty, like Tom has mentioned earlier and I'd like to thank Tom for helping me with this presentation. You create a lot of beauty in just a small space so you have a very boring or gray area. No real color or anything. You can put some flowers in there and make it just fantastic in a matter of minutes. Supplement your food. It depends. I would never be able to do this with my family unless I did this type of container because we obviously eat a lot but if you wanted to, let's say, yeah, I really would just wish I had some cherry tomatoes once in a while. Just for a salad, you can grow a cherry tomato plant in there, you can grow herbs in there. These are actually quite, grow quite well in container gardens and I'd highly recommend it. Disadvantages. Somebody had asked me earlier about growing in metal pots. They look very nice but when you get a very, just an average okay day and the sun heats up that pot, soon what you have is sick looking, wilting, dying plants. They just get too hot in a sunny location. They can be done if you have a shady area but most places, your pot will just actually cook the roots of your plant and they'll die. Also with that, size. Some of the nurseries, I notice, have these giant containers and that's fine if you decide to leave it there but if you have a container that has 300 pounds of soil in it and decide what I like, usually, and not stereotypically, but this is how it goes. Todd, would you move that over about four feet that way? I said, sure. I'll have a rupture. Sure, that'd be fine but you have to make it realistic. You want to make it in a container that you like. I'm very frugal or sometimes as people might say cheap but I think they don't understand the word frugal. I always have the cheap plastic pots or the clay pots but you can get these beautiful ceramic pots and what have you. One reason to have a clay pot is, I usually ask questions to people I know but I don't think that would work tonight. One reason for having a clay pot is that it will pull some of the salts through the clay out to the outside of the pot and that's sometimes why you see you have these pots and they're like, oh, that's kind of a white, salty look to it and that's what they're supposed to be doing. However, if you glaze those or paint those, that stops the process and it doesn't do that. Another disadvantage or one thing I want to talk about, just briefly, I'll get into it more later, is watering and we'll talk about that later, I guess. When you plant in these containers, the plants you get or the seeds you get are very small. Keep in mind how large they'll actually get. Now this container looks like it's adequately full but if you were just to fill it full of little tiny plants, for example, let's say this is in a garden and you might notice that I really like tomatoes that in my masters on it and I have nightmares about tomatoes but let's say, well, I think I can get eight tomato plants in there. They'll fit nicely. They'll look beautiful and people say, wow, look at that. However, I would say maybe one. Maybe two, one would fit in a container like this. Reason is they grow. It's almost like the spruce tree. You get this cute little spruce tree to either win it or buy it or whatever. It's only three feet tall. You put it right next to your house and a few years later, it's actually destroying part of your house because it gets too big. So keep that in mind. Also when you're planting, let's say you're doing seeds, plant the seeds according to the package directions. If it says to put them nine inches apart in the roll and do nine inches apart in the roll, don't say, well, I think I'm going to do seven. Now we all get more in there. The problem of doing seven when you do that type of thing is you start to make a weed out of the plants that you're putting in there. Too much is not a good thing when you're planting in these containers. Sunlight, the more the better. I like if you can get eight hours of sunlight. However, it doesn't seem to be realistic anywhere I've ever been. So I go from between six to eight. Many times people say, well, I get really good morning sun. And I don't really know what that means because the sun, I think, is the same for everybody in a way here. So if you have sunlight in the morning, that's great. But still, two hours of sunlight in the morning is not equal to eight hours of sunlight throughout the day. So keep that in mind. Also with these containers, what you can do as far as they might get too hot in the sun, look where you have them on. If they're like, wow, these plants are really cooking. I have them on concrete. I have them on rock, on brick, whatever, next to a white fence or a white thing that's reflecting off light. You can cheat a little bit and stick a piece of wood underneath them. Concrete likes to absorb heat. And when it cools down at night, it just generates that heat right back out. And many times the plants will stay warm during the day. And at night, they'll get a little extra boost. I have a cheat sheet up here, by the way. Many of you have probably never seen this creature. It's called a rabbit. I swear there's three or four per person in Fargo, at the very minimum, at all times. Roses eaters, the container gardens are nice though, because you can put these high enough so these little rabbits can't get in there. If you do have them low enough, there are some things you can try. However, they kind of defeat the purpose of having a container garden. For example, chicken wire works really good. But having a chicken wire kind of little prison for your lettuce or whatever begonia growing in there is kind of not really as safely as you might like. Plants skid, sometimes is a nice thing. However, the smell on occasion can be a little bit overpowering with that. Insects, I talked about that earlier. One thing with insects, for example, one time I was looking at a ladies garden and she had a tomato horn worm on there. She had one on her whole row of plants. I just squished it and said, you're done. It's a little bit easier to look at when you have them in a container versus half an acre of garden. Another type of creature that's a pest, flugs? Wow, voracious eaters. I think they eat more than rabbits. I want to keep that in mind when you have your container down on the ground or even on a piece of wood, maybe check it. Just not okay, especially if it's been wet. If you find flugs underneath there, you can put on a glove or use your hand, scoop them out and throw them away. They're not something you want to tolerate in your garden. I wanted to tell just a quick story on how I made a nice container garden for my mom when I was living on the farm. She goes, Todd, I really love these container gardens and I'm also going to, and this is a nice segue into my square foot presentation. I'm going to jump in too quick if I keep talking fast enough here. I said, well, let's get you on. She goes, well, I was in college at the time and I was about ready to leave and we lived on a dairy farm. And anyway, we lived on a dairy farm. You always have a lot of water tanks, stock tanks around. So dad was gone and I said to my brother, go out and get the best soil you can and bring it back, and so he did with a tractor. And I took an axe and chopped holes in eight of the water tanks, stuck them in a nice row, filled them with soil, and I went off to college. And my mom was very happy and my dad eventually forgave me, but it took a while. It's just so you can be as creative as you want with these. You can buy them or you can make them yourself. At the time, it seemed like the right thing to do. We need to do stock tanks anyways. Fertilizer, one of the biggest problems with fertilizer, I think in container gardens, is too much. A lot of times you like to, oh, yeah, you know, I really want to do well and you'll put in way too much. One thing that I like to use in a container garden is slow release fertilizer. Simple, easy. You put in once and you're done. You kind of work in with your soil and it's just a fantastic product. Whether you want to do the organic route or not organic, I guess it's up to you. I use whatever's the cheapest and I don't have a problem with that at all. Water, obviously this is not the correct type. This is an exception to the rule. This is a water garden in a container, so it's an exception. But one day is worth of water. This is like a half a year's worth of water. One day is worth of water is, it should hold that. It should have enough capacity to hold that, enough organic matter in there to hold that. One rule of thumb with container gardening is water it every day. And you water so the water comes out the bottom. The reason is that when the water comes out the bottom it pulls some of the salt with it and helps to keep that a little bit less salty, I guess. Some people I've talked with say, well, I always water so it only goes down four inches and I use all the water. I never waste any water. And then we'll dig in there and it'll just be almost like a whitish layer in there. And they said, what's that for? And I said, well, after several years of having this and never really changing it or anything, you've created a slight salt layer. And when you add water and it gets down there, you know, I'll create a salty type of environment that's hard on the plant. I'm going to refer the questions to later because I want to get into this next handout, which is not on PowerPoint. Can everyone see this, Scott, I'm assuming? It's the H1597, the facts of square foot gardening talk. And the square foot gardening method, one thing I really enjoy about that is it doesn't really waste a lot of resources. For example, when you water a garden, say it was 20 by 20, the walk paths get water. The walk paths get fertilizer. The walk paths get sunlight. There's weeds growing up. There's a lot of extra things you seem to be wasting. Now, when you use a square foot method, and if you do it correctly, don't overplant it. You have no walk paths, and you don't waste the water or fertilizer that you might in other gardening situations. Another thing that I like about raised beds and square foot gardening type of project is that you can make them to basically work for anyone. For example, if you have someone like my mom who is not able to really bend over very well, I made them at table height. That's how tall the stock tanks were because the cattle could drink that high. So I didn't really make them that high. It just happened to be that way. And so she would just stand there, walk by, and pull weeds, and it's great. She still uses those today, and it's wonderful. If you have somebody that's in a wheelchair, you can tailor it to them. You can work with them and get it so that it works well with them. I chose at home to use them at 68 inches high because I like a lot of back pain. I don't know why I didn't follow my own directions, but that's what I did. As far as what type of soil to put in these and in the containers, it's basically up to you. If you have the option, I'd like to try different types of soil. You can make your own mixes, talk to other people. You'll make mistakes, but that's all right. It's a small area. Just talk to other people, find out what worked for them, and go with that. Another thing with raised bed and square foot gardening is rotating. It's easy to rotate because last year I remember I had little cucumbers along the fence here, and then I got peas right next to the fence and other things. It's easy to rotate, especially if you keep records. Do I have more time, Tom? Okay. Thank you. Sometimes I don't know where to stop, so I have to pace myself a little bit. All right. I can always buy more time. Some things to keep in mind that probably wouldn't work well with you, sweet corn. Sweet corn in a little 4x4 garden really is a difficult thing. It needs wind pollination, takes up a lot of resources. I wouldn't recommend that type of thing. People always ask me, why do you always say 4 foot? Why 4 foot? Most people can reach out 2 feet adults. Now, people will say, well, we do 5 feet. It's like, well, that's great. Maybe you're taller, I don't know, but most people can do 4 feet or 2 feet reach out. If you have a raised bed or a container garden, I'm not a container garden, but a raised bed garden, have it 4 feet wide and it's a lot easier to work with than if it's 5 or greater. And then have it as long as you want. In California a few years back, they used a lot of these for the lettuce industry and they did quite well with these types of raised bed gardens. Okay. How about we start some questions and then probably we can remember that the life others cannot hear the questions, will you repeat them? When I was in South Dakota, I had a, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, the question was raised beds and railroad ties. When I was in South Dakota, I had a beautiful rose garden and I used railroad ties. It was fantastic. I'd challenge anyone to find a better thing for roses. However, vegetables, I'm not a big fan. For the raised beds, especially the vegetables, I prefer pine, very cheap and expensive, block or brick, cedar if you have extra money. There's some plastic ones that you can now get. However, the pressure treated lumber is nice, but anything that has maybe arsenic or some kind of chemical preaselt, I don't like. I have concerns that there might be potential long-term or short-term cancers with those, so I would never use those. A question about this person's already growing stuff, they're growing rashes in the container. Oh, great. It's not so great. Oh. Does that mean to green, grow life in good soil? But the plant are two inches tall and spindly. I'm assuming it's in the state here. So the question is, the person's growing radishes now in their home, I'm assuming are someplace 70 degrees with grow lights in containers and they're tall and spindly. I would say they're not getting the right light spectrum, the color infrared or red. I always forget which one it is. They're not getting the full spectrum of light like they should. If you have the older fluorescent bulbs, you want a cool bulb and a warm bulb, right. Right, but they need the correct spectrum. So I don't think they're getting their correct spectrum with that and they need to improve that by adding some more of the color spectrum. And I'm assuming you can still get them like the warm bulbs, they used to call them. You can get those and try those. Otherwise, I've been told, but I don't know if it's true or not, that the LEDs have the full color spectrum. So they need to change their lighting if they want to change that. Can you give a recommendation on a good variety of tomatoes for container gardening? Can I give, I got the question this time. It takes me a little while. Can I give a good recommendation for tomatoes with container gardening? What I would do if you want to be successful with container gardening in tomatoes, I would grow some of the cherry tomatoes and I grow hybrid cherries, things of that nature. You can maybe try like the heirloom yellow plum, little tiny plum ones. But I would try to grow the hybrid tomatoes because they are very successful, prolific. And even if you got half the crop that you would in the garden, you wouldn't even notice. Some of these bigger ones, like I've tried beef steak and such and you might get them and they're not really going to be as many as you want. You might even say to get like six versus in a garden and you get 20 or 40 or what have you. I would stay with the smaller varieties and go with hybrid to be successful. Okay, next question. Can you plant asparagus in containers? I would not plant asparagus in containers. Asparagus likes a cool, dormant season and container and plus the rips get quite large. I made a mistake. Somebody said, hey, when I was younger, would you like an asparagus plant? Come on over and I did. And the few stocks that came up, the rip system was at least this big and they take two full grown men to lift it. The rips will get so big after a while in a container unless you have a giant one and you know, I still wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it. I don't think they would survive more than one season. I'm not going to hear a card or any questions. It's like a tough crowd. So I'm near the door and I'm ready to blow out. I have no fear of running out the door. Don't run. Okay, I've got some more for you. Okay. How about vine weed in raised beds? What can we do about that? Vine weed? Vine weed problem in raised beds. Well, what I would do is just pull it out and throw it away. Thank you for that. Well, some of these raised beds, if they're that big and you can't control them and you get such a high weed pressure, sometimes you have to start over. I agree. I agree. That's, you know. Okay. I mean, nobody can hear you, but it's one of the benefits of raised beds. Yeah. It's also lose the weed problem. Okay. How about kind of talking about strawberries over winter in raised beds? I've been proven wrong on that for years. I said you couldn't. Oh, sorry. I should have a sock puppet with me. The question was, how about strawberries in a raised bed? And I've been proven wrong with that. A friend of mine built a raised bed, got some of the insulation, and I think it's called pink. It's just a hard thick stuff that they put around the outside of their raised bed and they put strawberries in the middle and fill it with soil. It's three feet high. They said, next year you'll have great strawberries. They said they'll all be dead. And sure enough, they all lived and looked wonderful. And I think if you're going to do that, you have to have enough soil or enough insulation protection to keep them alive. When it's on the ground like that, the roots tend to freeze and have a hard time. But if there's adequate enough soil for a buffer from the snow or from the cold, then I think you could do it. Okay. That's a question about growing geraniums in containers. Do you talk about overwintering them from one year to the next? Geraniums are pretty easy. It seems you can almost do everything with them and they stay tender over winter. They get pretty unsightly. One thing that I do, I just cut them down and let them kind of go dormant. And I put them in a cool, somewhat dark area. And I'll check them on soil and I'll water them. Next spring, I'll really give them a good dose of water and they seem to come back nice. It's one of those plants that I like because even I can keep it going. I don't play around. I play around with it too much. Most things die. But a geranium is fairly forgiving. So I think that you'd be fine almost with anything that you did. As long as you brought it in the house. If you left it outside, I think you would have nothing. Next question is, do you have a general recommendation on the depth of a container? Do I have a general recommendation on the depth of the container? I had a lot of people just staring at me, so I knew to ask the question that as far as the depth, the deeper the better. If you can have a tomato growing in a container that's as high as this table, that's great. It's maybe a little bit overkill for a container. Maybe half that size would be tolerable, but the deeper the better. A lot of times I'll see containers and they're beautiful. They're long and wide. There's like two inches for soil in there and you really can't grow much of anything. I would say the deeper the better. So as far as how deep at a minimum, if you just done a general for most plants, I would say eight inches. But if you wanted to actually grow something like that's for some annual flowers and such, but if you want to grow something larger or vegetables, I would try a couple feet deep easily. How about the comment about growing perennials in the way you said? If you have it wide enough. I'm sorry. I'm not easily trained. Ask anyone. I'm all flustered about growing perennials in a raised bed. The problem is that you have to keep it warm enough. I think if you had like a berm type of a thing or maybe it's eight feet wide and the perennials were down the middle, you'd have no problem. But if you had a four by four, maybe down the middle you could grow some perennials. The problem is the roots get so cold they can't handle it and they break. So it's not ideal. You could try insulating it like my friend did to prove me wrong. A lot of people like to do that. You can try that, but it's an extra expense. I don't know. Anybody here? There's a lot of practice in here. Go ahead. How do you keep rabbits out of your garden? How do you keep rabbits out of your garden? We moved into our new place, Chain Lake Fence. They put a chicken wire around it and they jump right through the chain lake. I don't think they have bones. They just boom. And so then a year after that I had to put chicken wire. I use chicken wire to keep them out of the garden here. I can't grow anything without chicken wire. Sometimes I grow flowers. Rabbits versus a garden. How do you keep them out? Chicken wire. I don't think dogs have any real value with rabbit control. I've seen the dogs sleeping. Rabbits come up and lay on them. This is terrible. You bought some flower pots in the spring and they have no holes in the water. Should drainage holes be drilled? He said there are some... He bought some flower pots in anticipation in the spring and there's no drainage holes. I would definitely drill some holes in there if you can. You might have to take the plant out first or if you just take a chance and break them. Otherwise you're going to have some problems. So is it him or you that bought it? We'll talk about it. Kind of wondering. Yes. It's a great... Not that the question isn't great, but do we have to dig down chicken wire around your plant, your vegetable garden? Yes. Otherwise they'll just wiggle their way underneath. Three inches maybe. It depends if you're in West Park or if you have jack rabbits. I don't think you can get it tall enough. You also have to encase it in wire. We have the little cotton tails here. I go about maybe waist high. If you get larger than that, they'll jump right in. Then they get trapped in there and they just eat. Nothing bothers them and they get really big and you have to lift them all up. Any last questions? I don't know if they hooked them. That's not my next one. I'm out of here. I gotta go over here. Okay. Thank you, Todd. Okay, it's buddy 30. So we're shutting down the formal part, but we are going into overtime as promised. And we will address some questions that we didn't get to address earlier. And so we're going to first get our first speaker, Dave. We have a few questions on soil. Can you handle that? Maybe if you just hold the microphone like this. I'll make sure you get it clear. I'll do that. Am I good? Also, please repeat the question. I'll do my best. I can't do worse than Todd. I can't connect the rabbit. And I got the wire underneath the fence. I'm good. Okay. First question, Dave. How often do you love your garden? How often do you have to replace your Lincoln Logs? Yeah, that's a good question. They don't last forever. You start... They don't last forever. Yeah, that's a yes to an answer question. Maybe it really isn't that easy. No, it's not. It's great to have an audience, but then when you have an audience, you just figure everybody can hear you. So the question was, how often do you have to replace the Lincoln Logs? They last for about 10 years. I have the pressure-treated non-Arsenic Lincoln Logs, and they last about 10 years, and you have to start replacing them. How about a question about garden soil that's next to an evergreen tree? The garden is covered with needles, so maybe worry? Yeah, so the question was, if you have a garden next to an evergreen tree, you have needles. What I would do would periodically, like every three, four years or so, I would have a soil test done with pH. And if you started out, like you would say in the minor area down through this mark where you're already working on the soil that maybe has a 6, 6, 5 pH or so, over time, lots of needles, you create some acidity, and you might have to add some line over time. That's the only issue I can think of. Okay. They might know they love your soil, man, and they're working on one of the best percentages of clay filled in sand. Okay, so the ideal would be something in... What? Dang. I'm only about 33% now. Okay, so the question was, okay, the soil triangle, what's the ideal soil? So an ideal soil would be down into the loam and the higher clay part of the sandy loam. That would be my ideal soil. If I was granted that to start a garden, I would be really happy. Probably wouldn't even think about raised beds, except for my back. That's really nice. So the percentage of sand, silt, and clay in that is roughly somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 50% sand, around 20, 25% clay, around 20, 25%. So somewhere in that neighborhood of sand, silt, and clay. Next question, let's do it. What do you feel about any wood ashes in compost? Okay, so the question was, how about wood ashes in compost? Well, that's how the term potash came to be. So potash is what was left after they got done burning, which is a lot of potassium. So you would think that maybe it would be an organic amendment, but it's really not. I mean, those ashes are all burned up. The microbes aren't going to do anything to them at all. It tends to be a little bit alkaline. So if you already have an alkaline soil, you're going to have some alkalinity, more alkalinity to deal with. It might be helpful maybe in that needle situation, or it's neutralizing the ashes a little bit, then it will contain some potassium in very, really small amounts of things like phosphate, but not anything to even consider. So it would be kind of a neutral factor. I'm not maybe a way to get rid of them without setting your garbage can on fire, which some people do. But as far as being real helpful to the compost, it's neutral, just kind of neutral. What do you feel about buying soil testing kits? Okay, so the question was soil testing kits. It kind of gets you in the ballpark, but you don't know where your seed is. You know what I mean? So we kind of have an idea that maybe it's high-ish, or maybe it's really low-ish, but you're really not sure about where. There's really no calibration that goes along with those things at all. Having a soil test down to NDSU or Advice, or whoever your local person is that has soil testing in your region is probably a better way to go because they have some general recommendations in order to go along with the numbers. How about composting to airwish or mix it every year? Or is that just a list? Okay, so the compost pile, the question was best to turn it once a year, or every few years, or what would you do? I would probably turn it two, three times a season. You have to think about what the little critters are doing on the side of there, and they have to breathe too. So mixing them with some air increases the rate of the composting and makes it better compost when you get done. Do you want to talk about milestone, or does that represent what you said, or are you comfortable with that? I don't know what milestone is. The question was, am I comfortable with milestone herbicide? I'm talking about the degradation of that, and I had no idea. Thank you. Okay, we've still got more over time here. I've got a few more questions, and since we have a lot of these questions, I'm getting a lot of questions that aren't really, some of them aren't really targeted at the topic, so these are kind of more general questions, and that's why we're so fortunate tonight to have a generalist like Todd Weiman here to answer some of these questions. Todd, so I'm going to put you on the spot. I've got a few questions for you, buddy. I've never been a general before. This is kind of good. The generalists have to repeat questions. I thought someone else had to. The comment was, the question was, for saving carryover seeds, yeah, it can be done, and there's a right way and a wrong way, of course, and other than everything in between. What I would say is if, for example, if you were going to save seeds, let's just take tomatoes, if you're going to do that, I would only save them from heirloom or pure strain varieties. The reason being is, and that is if they were not growing in near proximity and no bees or anything or wind or whatever pollinated them, so that they now have crossbred genetics in their tomato seeds. For example, if you grow a hybrid tomato, and it's beautiful, you just love the best tomatoes you've ever had, and they're just perfect and everything else, and you save the seeds from that, and you plant those hybrid seeds, next year you will not get that. You will not get that at all. You'll get a tomato, but it might be small, they might be big, you really don't know. Now that the heirloom varieties are ones that can be saved, and then you spread them out, and they dry out, and probably do it someplace. There's ways of doing it with water too. If you're just saving a few, though it's kind of disgusting with the water method, but if you're just saving a few, dry them off, let them sit, and then I would take, and once they're, they look dry and stick them in a Ziploc bag, and I'd throw them in the freezer, and then next spring I'd use them. The freezer's a nice way of saving the seed because it slows down their respiration and their germination. It will go down a little bit, but not as much as if you kept them in your house over winter, and then maybe two years later, you left them in the garage, and then now they've been cooking, and it just wouldn't be as good. So I hope that answers the question that's on. Yeah, that does. Yeah, that does. Very good. How can you protect trees and their precious bark from deer damage? Trees versus deer damage. Very difficult. I know that in town, someplace along the river, first moved here, people would come, come look at a beautiful little deer in the backyard. You know, we just love them, and my father like, oh, what can we do to keep these out of here? Deer are very, very good at eating the bark and many other things. You can try plants, kid. You can try chicken wire. Just try to keep them out of it. It's not an easy thing, especially if you have more than three or four, and there's deer around. They'll climb up on the snow. They spend their back legs. They can just graze on it. So it's very, very difficult. I don't have a great, perfect answer for that. Okay, let's try this one. Tom made these up, dang it. If you have a porcupine and... I think you're sewer, man. Yeah, okay, I'm sorry. Should we stake a young tree or not? Should we stake a young tree or not? Actually, I'm not a big fan of staking young trees. I like to grow them kind of tough. Now, if you have a larger tree and you just touch it or look at it, it tips over. I'd stake some stakes on there. But what I would do is I would stake it so that I wouldn't use wire on it or something else. I'd take like a t-shirt and I'd put just a t-shirt on one side. A t-shirt on the side, snug but not tight. And I'd put it on the stake and there would be the reason I use a t-shirt because it'll rot. And so next year, when you forget about it and you're at a wedding, instead of a tight wire being pulled on the bark and fully ripping the tree apart, the t-shirt will rot and fall apart. And three years later, you say, oh, I should have took that off and it's already off. So if you don't have to help it, that'd be the best. But if you have to, because you're in a wind tunnel or whatever, no more than a year should be adequate. If it's larger than that, then you might have to reconsider something else, I guess. OK. Can you just say there's just a few more questions? A few more questions. Very good. Thank you. This one is, would you take out an old tree can you plant a new one in the same spot? If you take out an old tree, can you plant a new one in the same spot? I always call before you dig, just to throw that out there. So you don't get electrocuted or cut somebody's phone line and they come over and talk to you. Not that I've done that, but I've heard stories. A gas line, everything you could think it was buried on the ground. I don't even know if there's soil in some spots. But call before you dig. So you got a tree cut down. There's nothing there. Can you plant another tree there? You have to grind out the root, probably. Give it a mushroom factor later, which are probably poisonous. You get rid of that. You add new soil. I don't see a problem with it. Sometimes, however, if you're growing a tree in one spot, say you had an apple tree there and it's been there for 30 years. I would put them right next to where it was. It might be a little on nutrients that an apple would care for. I'd add some fresh soil around there just to give it a little boost. I move a lot when I talk. I didn't realize that. Go ahead. The next question is, they had an old tree and it was flooded. The leaves are very yellow. What can they do about it? They have an old tree and it's been flooded and the leaves are yellow. Well, I would check this spring to see if it's alive yet. Your first step. Now, there really isn't anything I can think of that you can do to work with that. Check and see if the buds swell or if they break bud. And if they're yellow, I would take some of your local extension office and describe what happened. It might not be anything to do with the flooding. It might be something else more likely it is, but not necessarily. Just because a tree leaves are yellow, doesn't mean it's exactly what you think it is. There's a number of different things that can cause that. There's nothing really to do for it right now at this time. Are you comfortable with that in my other question? No. Can you just say over to microphone if there's a question about my own stone if you have a five-year or if you have a five-year and in a way that situation they can claim being as a... Maybe I'll have you do that. Okay. All right. Am I on? You are on. The question was on milestone and with some help from Tom. Five-year residual, I was told. Up to five years. And then you can plant beans. Is that correct? Beans are a bioassay-sensitive crop. Beans is a bioassay-sensitive crop. You just dump the soil and start over. Just dump the soil and start over. How about broccoli questions? I love broccoli. How about the broccoli plants bloated with flowers that didn't form the florets? The question was on the broccoli it sounded like it bolted. It went right into flowers very few florets. Sometimes that can happen with different environmental stresses. Not enough water. Maybe way too hot. I do know one thing though. It's a very underutilized garden plant. If you plant broccoli here, it will do very well. I'm always amazed at how well broccoli does and how few people grow it. I imagine a lot of people don't like the flavor. I always throw out two broccoli plants and it's a great plenty for the fall. You harvest it off. You clip off the heads. And then you wait and you get another second crop on it. It's a wonderful plant to grow. And if it bolted, last year I tried to remember what kind you had and maybe try a different variety and see if that improves it or not. The person has a flower bed near an ash tree and it is full of ash seedlings. What can we do about it? The person has a flower bed next to an ash tree and it's full of ash seedlings. Basically, you can just pull and pull and pull until they're all gone. It might take a couple hundred years I think, but what you can do is remove the soil. The thing with seeds is an interesting thing. Not all seeds will germinate the next year in different things. For example, and this will get off the topic a little bit, but maybe I could put in perspective, I'll maybe use some amaranth or basically what we know as redwood or pigweed. And beautiful ornamental, fantastic wine burgundy color and it produces one million seeds per plant. The good thing is only 500,000 are available in most herbages. So you only have 500,000. They all drop because you didn't harvest it in time and now you have 500,000 potential seeds for next year. Not all of them will germinate next year. Some will germinate later. Some will germinate later after that. You now have amaranth basically forever because you'll forget it again. So, same thing with these seeds. Not all of them are, I don't know about specifically with ash, but in most cases when you have a large seed in the soil, the only thing that I can say would be to either replace it or try to sterilize it maybe with plastic, dark plastic, I don't know, pull them up by hands. You know, it's labor law. A lot of work. Move. Move to another location. So you're home and move. You can tell the problem. Should they put rocks under or crushed cans that can tip under the soil and rain into the container? Should they use rocks or crushed cans under the soil? Should they use rock or crushed cans in a container for good drainage? In the past, a lot of people, there was a time when that was the big thing to do that. I don't know if it was just to hide cans or what or make it heavy so they would tip over. I prefer soil when the plant hits that rock. It doesn't really get any nutrients out of that with the roots. Now, if there's soil there, I still can utilize that and such. If your container is that light or is always windy, you can maybe throw in something to kind of keep it down. But preferably I would use soil. I wouldn't use the other if your container doesn't flip over. Some of these large containers, you know, as tall as me and one plant growing out of the top, maybe you want to fill it up with large empty pop models or something halfway just so you don't have so much soil. But still, it would be better to have the soil in there than not. I prefer the soil over the other ones. Okay, last question. That's a third last question. That's very pervious across time. I pay a lot of these people. Using the positive and negative of bearing tree leaves for use as an organic amendment to garden soil. Using tree leaves as an amendment to garden soil. Okay, pros and cons. I like using tree leaves. There are some exceptions. I don't like using black walnut. It has alliochemical properties and you try to grow something next year, let's say, tomatoes. They die. They just can't handle it. The plant has to time produce this chemical to kill other plants. It's a competitive type of thing. So also sometimes people, I've got this poplar and you know, we put in, you know, 17 inches of leaves in the garden. It's too much. If you're going to do leaves, maybe just a few inches, rototilamin, or work them in. Better to compost them, but if you don't and you just work them in, the thing with it is the carbon to nitrogen ratio is too high. And the first year you do that, it's like, see, this is horrible. Nothing's really doing anything. My neighbors is great. Look at that, blah, blah, blah. But after a while, and I did this, I was growing up to another experiment. I dumped tree leaves on our garden for five years. The first four years was quite horrible. The fifth year you couldn't find better soil. What happened is the floor of the father microbes in there finally broke down a lot of that leaf matter, died themselves, and were able to use by the plant as food. So it takes a while. You might be able to add nitrogen to that to kind of speed that up, but I guess how much time you want to do with that, I guess. Thank you. I'm so fortunate to have a general purpose where a culture is here. I'll give you a general. You've got at least five more minutes. Okay. That's it for everybody tonight. Thank you so much.